invisible hand

In an act of solidarity, drivers who are working a side hustle for the major ride hailing companies exploit the algorithm of supply-and-demand and simultaneously cut off communication to make their dispatchers believe there’s few to no drivers available and thus creating a surge in fares—the drivers’ only means to eke out a profit in what would otherwise be a money-losing errand. This particular union serves travellers at a Washington, DC airport, timing their walk-out to coincide with incoming flights and reconnect after letting dispatch sweat it out for a few minutes and boost the fare price. It is unclear how long such a scheme can continue to take advantage of the tariff model or whether such methods are effective or encourage more grift and graft.

kestää käytössä

We enjoyed watching this early 1970s commercial from Finland for the new Lada 1200 (domestically known as the ВАЗ-2101 or as “Kopeyka,” one one-hundredth of a ruble) but take heed as replaying it may summon a demon.

uncanny cruiser

Via the always intriguing Things magazine, while we are still trying to adapt to and come to terms with the idea of wholly convincing composite people generated by a neural network enforced through machine-learning, we discover a slightly less menacing though disorientating all the same nuance with hypothetical motor vehicles (relatedly) that only exist virtually and are the product of robot day-dreams. At the same time this roadworthy experiment was being conducted, the neural network tried its hand at a dataset of images of hotel, bed-and-breakfast rooms to create the ideal, average guest accommodations—mostly bedspreads and mountains of pillows. The programme is still learning and we are not sure of the parameters but perhaps once this algorithm gets fantastic coaches right, it will be able to engineer concept vehicles that surpass passenger expectations. Much more to consider and to explore at the links above.

no₂

With the season of annual superlatives upon us, we quite enjoyed this curated gallery culled from the submissions to the National Geographic Photography Competition. The grand prize went to Jassen Todorov, violinist, photographer and flight instructor, who snapped this stunningly tragic image of thousands of automotive exiles, mothballed in the Mojave Desert.
An aircraft boneyard is just out of the frame and the assembled field of cars represent just a fraction of the millions that had to be idled. These Volkswagens and Audis from the model years 2009 to 2015 were not only not compliant with US Environmental Protection Agency and EU emissions for nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide standards but the engines were moreover designed to cheat—with so called defeat devices—during trials to pass testing. This is certainly a powerful and iconic reminder on how we all pay dearly for something so cheaply underestimated. See more stirring winners and worthies at the link up top.

7x7

font specimen: a look at the vintage typeface “Choc” that’s come to dominate storefronts all over—via Slashdot

ionic wind: world’s first solid-state aircraft takes flight

southern exposure: the Moon’s orientation flips depending on whether a terrestrial viewer is north or south of the equator

gas, food, lodging: business rules for US interstate next-exit signage—via TYWKIWDBI

wysiwyg: digitally editing reality by Vladimir Tomin

franksgiving: for those of you for whom the holiday snuck up on you, the year of multiple Thanksgiving observances

blue note release: crafting the iconic covers of 1950s and 60s jazz albums 

oldtimers

Previously H and I had enjoyed touring the sister campus in Speyer where a 747 and the Buran, the Soviet version of the Space Shuttle, are on display and recently redeeming one of H’s birthday gifts, we got to take a look at the sprawling museum, amusement park and cinema das Auto- und Technikmuseum Sinsheim, the largest private exhibit in Europe that curates some three hundred classic automobiles (Oldtimers auf Deutsch), forty racing cars, thirty locomotives, one hundred and fifty tractors, dozens of player pianos and calliopes plus over sixty aircraft, including the two supersonic commercial planes built the Anglo-French Concorde and the Russian Tupolev Tu-144, visible when passing by on the Autobahn.

The vast halls contained a really impressive amount of Mercedes (including some infamous ones custom-made for Benito Mussolini and Heinrich Himmler) and some extraordinary Maybachs produced for the anonymously, forgotten well-off, with a significant portion maintained in fully-function condition.

Also on display for inspection were an original model DeLorean and a motorised unicycle from 1894, whose time has come around again. Of course the exhibits are worth marvelling at and pretending to sit in the driver’s seat and quite a few are up for demonstration, but moreover it’s something inspired to think about the level and depth of engineering that went into each of these machines, some three thousand all told.

type 57

Last week, we were taken for a test drive in a porcelain Bugatti called L’Or Blanc (White Gold) and now we are given a demonstration of another fully-functional Bugatti model—a Chiron supercar—that was almost entirely built from LEGO Technics pieces, over a million assembled by hand.
The car is a legacy brand first founded by Ettore Bugatti in the city of Molsheim in 1909 that produced a line of high performance luxury and racing automobiles through the 1950s when the company went bankrupt and the factory acquisitioned for the aviation industry. Bugatti saw a comeback in the 1990s when the name and distinctive chassis style saw a revival, with Volkswagen engineering the Chiron, two-seated sports car, which was revealed for the first time at the Geneva Motor Show in 2016. See footage of both cars in action at the links above.

иж 2125

Arms manufacturer Kalashnikov is apparently diversifying its business and has presented its version of an electric automobile capable of speeds upwards of eighty kilometres per hour and a range of three hundred and fifty kilometres per charge called the CV-1.
The chassis is based on the classic IZh 2125 (ИЖ-2125), nicknamed “Kombi,” which was produced in the Soviet Union from 1973 until 1997. Considered the country’s first hatchback, the “Комби” stood for combination but referenced the Combi coupé make and model, which in German signifies a station wagon (an estate car) though the Russian term for that design of body is universal (универса́л).

horseless carriage

Although very much retold from an America perspective, it was nonetheless interesting to consider the etymological journey we embarked on to get to the colloquial term car (from cart)—automobile, a French convention ultimately with Greek roots, being a technical, industry term (similar to the formal German PKW—Personnen Kraftfahrzeuge) that’s only used in North America. Of the early trade names suggested before reaching a critical mass and adopting a standard name, early media coverage referred to prototypes as the Motorig, Buggyaut, Tonneau, the Diamote and the Mocole—among others.  Be sure to visit Jalopnik at the link above to discover more car-related cul-de-sacs and points-of-departure.

signs and symptoms

Though yet to implement as far as we know, back in 2016 an exploitative ride-hailing company (previously) applied for a patent for non-invasive artificial intelligence technology that would be enlisted to distinguish drunk passengers from sober ones. What do you think about that? In theory through the passive screening process, the company would hope to mitigate undesired outcomes.

streamlining

Our gratitude to Nag on the Lake for introducing us to the Franco-American industrial design pioneer Raymond Loewy whose multidisciplinary vision informs a magnitude of iconic brands and defining how form follows function.
Among his contributions are the interior of the Boeing Stratoliner, various locomotives, coaches, the Sears Coldspot refrigerator, the Schick electric razor, the Lincoln Continental, a jukebox, a version of the Coca-Cola bottle and the Coke can, Lucky Strikes cigarette packaging, subway cars plus the interior and living space of Skylab and the Concorde. Additionally, Loewy created logos for TWA, SPAR, Exxon, Shell and many others. Go over to Nag on the Lake at the link up top to see an insightful 1979 CBS television interview with Loewy, dubbed by the press as the Man who Shaped America.

autozam

Writing for Ars Technica, Devin Holody gives us a nice, circumspect primer on the strange and stunning Japanese domestic automotive market that due to administrative embargoes and stringent inspection standards that have no mercy for vintage cars matriculate to the US market after a significant waiting period that lends new-arrivals this fantastic air of nostalgia.
Though used models filter in elsewhere around the world (we’ve encountered some twee and tiny Subarus), Japanese drivers giving up on their older cars earlier than most, motivated by those frequent check-ups, exports to America are subject to a twenty-five year wait due to a 1988 safety compliance act that blocks the importation of foreign cars that weren’t originally meant for American roads. The guide is full of glorious images of the latest class of quarter century-old cars that can now be acquired by people living in the US and has plenty of tips and resources to connect interested-parties.

6x6

never just a car: a supercut of automotive movie cameos

blue state: an exhibit in Los Angles structured around colour examines the many ways of casting shade

india pale ale: find out what which beer you’re partial to says about you, via the ever-brilliant Nag on the Lake

le béton brût: with greyscale Lego bricks, a man and his son create miniature Brutalists architecture, via Present /&/ Correct

paleo-futures: 1926 interview with Nikola Tesla predicting our fraught relationship with our gadgets

midsweden 365: secret tunnels excavated in the granite mountains near the town of Gällö repurposed as a underground, year-round skiing range

7x7

gloomy sunday: a neural network could teach humans a thing or two about art appreciation and seeing beauty in the mundane

civil engineering: experiment with urban transportation and infrastructure planning, via Kottke

orders of magnitude: the quantity of user data scraped by malicious actors grows

tabletop: British Museum Mesopotamian artefacts curator works out the playbook for an ancient board

methuselah-ness: the defining trait of a tree might be in their immortality (lack of senescence) rather than height or woodiness, via Kottke

legend of the overfiend: a nostalgic screening and a look at the spread of anime and manga

thanatosis: a longer version of mongoose horse-play with explanations of their behaviour

lady driver

Via the sub-reddit of the same name, today we learned about the intrepid Canadian adventurer who gave herself the appropriate travelling credentials as Aloha Wanderwell. Her family devotedly followed her father as he went off to combat in Ypres in World War I and remained there after he was killed in action. The mother, hoping to turn her daughter from her unladylike ways sent Idris (her given name) off to a series of boarding schools in Belgium and then in Nice—but to little avail. Still a teenager, she heard of an around the world endurance automotive race, a stunt to prove the reliability of the Ford line of vehicles, and met with its organizer a “Captain” Walter Wanderwell (an individual of Polish extraction called Valerian Johannes Pieczynski who was imprisoned during the during of the war under suspicion of being a German spy) to say she wanted to join the exposition.
Rather presumptively, she took the name Wanderwell with the stage-name Aloha, despite the fact that the captain was still married to his first wife Nell (no clear indication that she inspired the Perils of Penelope Pitstop) and became part of the crew in 1922. Learning to operate all manner of conveyance including a seaplane and documenting all the adventures across five continents and through over forty countries on sixty canisters of nitrate film, the team spent three years circumnavigating the globe, earning her the title of the “First Female to Drive Around the World,” doubtless an excellent superlative to have and well-earned but it did rather miss out on the other laudable work she performed as a mechanic, a translator, navigator and film-maker, which includes a lot of unique and rare footage. While on the South American leg of their journey in 1931, the Wanderwells travelled to Brazil and became the first Westerners to contact Borobo tribe while on their main, auxillary mission to track down Colonel Percival Fawcett missing on his own hunt for the legendary Lost City of Z. The Wanderwells failed to find that expedition and picked up a mutineer of their own in the process who murdered the captain once they arrived back in Long Beach, California where they had sent up home. Undaunted, Aloha recovered and re-married, eventually touring (under her own power) over eighty countries and driving over a half a million miles, dying surely restlessly at age 89 in 1996.

domino effect

We’ve encountered the commercial artwork of Theodore Geisel (Doctor Seuss) beforehand, including advertising for Exxon/Esso, but we hadn’t seen this series of signature complex contraptions from cartoonists and engineer Rube Goldberg, commissioned by a motor-oil company to promote fuel-efficiency and automotive maintenance during World War II. See more at the link above.

8x8

meltdown: a good primer to the security vulnerability revealed in micro-processors

shorttermism: a look at some of the factors driving factory closures despite long-term, sustained viability

kyngreiðsluskilyrði: the Icelandic government is determined to close the gender pay gap by making it illegal to set wages for women less than men

curb side: a look into America’s valet parking Olympics

investment instrument: a few ideas on how to spend your bitcoin

the insolence of the young: memorandum circulated as a gag to the staff of the Atlantic in 1973 on repulsive topics is weirdly resonant

the blog is dead, long live the blog: a nice reflection on the practise and pursuit with a kind tribute to the Presurfer

border slash: the US expends over a million dollars annually to maintain a deforested boundary between it and Canada—to ensure that the border is more than an imaginary line, via TYWKIWDBI  

voiture populaire

Just a Car Guy introduces us to the concept automobile built by the French company Panhard et Levassor (who are credited with having created the first modern transmission) in 1948, the Dynavia, as a smaller and more affordable people’s car that the company would be more in keeping with post-war realities. The prototype (another voiture here) with an aluminium, aerodynamic chassis and weighing in at only four hundred kilograms, never went into mass production itself but influenced the design and spirit of the subsequent line of  Panhard Dyna Z saloons (sedans), manufactured from the mid- to late-1950s.

wildlife crossing

With our yard overwhelmed once a year with toads creeping to the pond to spawn, this selection of speculative articles on how artificial intelligence and driverless vehicles might be programmed or one day on their own come to hold Nature in deference or reverence really resonated with us.  We will volunteer with others of course to help ferry them across but there is still an awful lot of carnage in the single lane road that separates the woody hills from the valley.
What if autonomous cars and lorries meant not only a sharp decline in the number of human deaths but also meant the end of roadkill? We imagine, given the relatively neat and tame environment of the streets, that learning to recognise erratic and wild animals—and surely this feature is already figured into the algorithms with stray pets as potential hazards—would present a big challenge but perhaps the machines will out-perform their operators. Though dodging deer and boar and livestock won’t necessarily restore the balance of the natural world that we’ve thrown into disarray and there’s even the potential for more suffering with more creatures crowded into less habitat, the idea that cars might respect animal right-of-way by taking different routes to avoid migratory or breeding paths was quite intriguing. Like the trolley problem of computer ethics, future vehicles might need the hint, the protocol that maxmising the number of lives saved outweighs human convenience or profit but once taught this directive, the lesson is not prone to being countermanded by greed or laziness. 

kennzeichen

Once automobiles in Germany attain a certain age (a calculus of year of manufacture and number of vehicles produced) they are classed as Old Timers (what we’d call classic cars) and have an H added to their vehicle registration plates (see more about German and European license plates and tags here, here and here). Fully-electric vehicles have for the past few years earned an E at the end.
I was very happy to find out that in Poland, antique autos are distinguished with an old-fashioned coach. Vehicles registered to Americans stationed in Germany have undergone several different iterations of markings—going from having them really stand out to blending in.