whale of a tale (10. 779)

A highly sociable beluga whale, a local celebrity nicknamed Hvaldimir, a portmanteau of the Norwegian word for whale plus the first name of Russian president Putin—long suspected as being used for espionage, trained and outfitted with a harness believed to gather intelligence and telemetry on Nordic waters, has been sighted off the coast of the Sweden. Activists and onlookers, considered for the whale’s safety and well-being, possibly retired from spying already although that is not clear, are aiming to re-socialise with others of his pod and rehabilitate him. More from NPR at the link above.

6x6 (10. 762)

nightingale-olympic: the time capsule that is Bangkok’s first specialty retail establishment—via Messy Nessy Chic 

splinternet: legal jurisdictions—for reasons real, specious and facetious dividing the internet

recruitment bonus: Florida governor is offering cash incentives to bring violent police officers to departments across the state—more here  

loveboat insanity: Poseidon’s Underworld reviews their lodestar film and more shared movie DNA  

puriteens: prudishness is taking over some parts of the internet   

bhs downtown: a Vermont high school hosted in an abandoned department store

9x9 (10. 752)

x-date: unless a compromise is found to work with the statutory debt ceiling, the US could default on paying its bills and unleash chaos in global financial markets 

the house of mouse: Disney is cancelling plans for a billion dollar Florida annex—and shuttering its immersive Star Wars experience resort hotel—in an ongoing feud with the state’s arch-conservative governor  

garbage patch kids: creepy dolls being washed ashore are auctioned off to benefit marine habitats—see also 

superimposition: researchers at the Zurich Institute of Technology create the world’s largest ‘Schrödinger’s Cat” 

the great silence: we are probably not alone in the Universe but we might as well be—see previously  

random access memory: previously unreleased tracks from retired duo Daft Punk  

interior design: browser-based application to create and share voxel rooms, via Waxy—see previously  

byte-dance: American state of Montana passes a ban of the social media platform TikTok over conflated fears of violations of users privacy  

seat at the table: G7 summit hosted in Hiroshima—with nuclear deterrence on the agenda

datalagen (10. 731)

Enacted on this day in 1973 by Riksdag and going into effect in July of the following year, Sweden’s was the world’s data protection law passed on a national level (see previously) created a privacy protection authority to issue permits to information systems that handled personal information. Already Five decades ago, use of electronic file storage and communications in the country were quite advanced and Swedish society upheld the importance of access and transparency and a commission was established in 1969, returning its recommendations to the government three years later on the state of computers, future trends and how that intersected with the press and private lives—particularly in terms of creditworthiness. Subject to amendments and evolving as technology changed and spread, the law eventually was replaced the Personuppgiftslagen (Personal Data Law) in 1998 modelled after the European Union’s Data Protection Directive following its ascension to the EU.

9x9 (10. 667)

pass****123: a visualisation of pilfered passwords aggregated from various leaks and breaches

event horizon: a streak of young stars may be the wake of a supermassive black hole ejected from its host galaxy  

pop: speeding locomotives in an animated short by Yoji Kuri—see previously  

you sank my battleship: leaked NATO plans for bolstering Ukraine’s military were first circulating on a Minecraft gaming forum—more here  

what, me worry: a celebration of the long life and career of cartoonist Al Jaffee 

bierpulver: the Neuzeller Klosterbräu, known for other innovative libations, introduces a dehydrated beer that one needs only add water to   

example handshake: a look at the squelch of the dial-up modem  

trapezoidal flux deviation: an alternative proposal for the non-existence of exoplanets—via the New Shelton wet/dry  

a generator and a discriminator: AI can crack most users’ passwords in under two minutes—via Dam Interresting’s Curated Links

7x7 (10. 651)

spyvibe radio: The Man Called Flintstone and other cartoon-espionage crossovers  

hosanna, hin-nam: Palm Sunday from the donkey’s perspective—see previously  

made to order: a huge font specimen of a wide range of borders—see previously 

a1: a centenary of road numbering for the Ministry of Transportation 

rather fetching: canine portraits at London’s Wallace Collection  

sparkie williams: a very talkative budgie and other loquacious birds  

rabbit hole: new Kiefer Sutherland secret agent film channels vintage intelligence dramas

foia follies (10. 621)

As illustrated in all its surreal qualities by this request filed by a Bloomberg reporter for the artwork created by detainees at Guantánamo Bay (see also) and other US government black sites finally fulfilled (with annotated redactions) last Spring, Muckrock again showcases the worst cases of resistance to transparency and flagrant violations—non-compliance—of Free of Information Act requirements. Beyond the mishandling of classified documents—whose fault lies partially with injudicious over-classification—there are several award categories, ranging from the pushback of the Federal Bureau of Investigations refusing to release its dossiers on that subversive band the Monkees to its last surviving member, the record number of GLOMAR responses of the National Security Agency, to the Burn After Reading Award for wanton destruction of public records.

cross-cut (10. 620)

Introduced with the invention of the process of paper recycling, pulping (plus the discussion of the printed page as the medium of record) in an exchange between Matthias Koops and King George III, Tedium presents an interesting historical survey of the development of paper shredding, destroying that record of information, promoting privacy and salvaging the base medium, the mechanism first patented in 1910 by Abbot Augustus Low, a serial tinkerer and possibly by modern reckoning “patent troll” now forgotten but contemporarily only surpassed Thomas Edison. The shredding strips, called fantastically paper excelsior, and how they were created were subject to a series of lawsuits beginning in the 1930s with the publisher of anti-Nazi material, Adolf Ehinger, adapting a pasta maker to destroy errant copies of his pamphlets with competitors suppressing the innovative process with legal wrangling and countersuits. While Ehinger may not have been the paper shredders first and only inventor, he was the first to recognise its practical use in the Information Age and informed (see also) the industry as it exists today. Much more at Tedium at the link above.

die fringer (10. 560)

Via the new shelton wet/dry, though the ring-finger finger-ring by conceptual artist Nadja Buttendorf from 2016 was intended as prosthetic extension and not anticipating our tenuous times and injecting doubt into what we perceive and are presented, criminals and others seeking alibis, plausible deniability and not be subject to dragnet surveillance might indeed don glitchy accessories (see previously) to call into question the admissibility of trackers and footage.

giraffe confidence 43% (10. 532)

Without the need for camouflaging ones face so far, an Italian textile firm introduces a line of disruptive knitwear to safeguards ones biometrics, pitting AI against AI with adversarial patterns and patches designed to draw attention away from one’s face and other recognisable features, classifying a human with some other disposessing taxonomy before attracting too much notice.

 

spy in the sky (10. 524)

Hitting a bit like the Evergreen saga with geopolitical consequence being reduced to, incapsulated in a few albeit funny memes, the US has shot down a Chinese surveillance dirigible, scrambling a pair of F-22 fighter jets and downing the balloon over Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The high-altitude craft was detected in American and Canadian airspace—which was characterised by the Chinese as a meteorological station blown off course, just on the eve of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s diplomatic mission to China, one months in planning and would represent the first constructive contact between the two nations in three years and was subsequently called off due to this blatant provocation. A second balloon was detected over Central America. President Biden, even before rabid hysterics by Republican accusing him of dereliction of duty and urging patriots to take matters into their own hands and shoot rifles at the balloon some fifteen kilometres in the sky and the size of a sports stadium, issued orders for its destruction when it was safe to do so. Having already jammed its ability to relay telemetry back to its operators and neutralised it as a threat, Biden probably, exasperated, had it brought down to placate mobs irresponsibly encouraged to fire bullets in the air and presenting more of a danger to the public with their return trajectories. The Department of Defence casually adds that there were three known incidents of similar violations of US airspace during the Trump administration, with nothing done about it.

shaken, not stirred (10. 417)

Here’s a selection of signature martinis to fit every mood and every palette of this spirit animal constructed on the template of gin—or vodka—and vermouth plus a bit of garnish. Namesake of the special drink of patrons of the Occidental Hotel of San Francisco would be offered before embarking on the ferry to Martinez in Contra Costa, the cocktail has undertaken, with the famous variant occurring in a dialogue the spy has with a barman in Casino Royale, changing his order from a dry martini to a special recipe of his own invention. “Just a moment: three measures of Gordon’s [gin], one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet; shake it very well until its ice cold, then add a large, thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?” Bond adds, “I’m going to patent it when I think of a good name.” Later, he names it in honour of MI6 coworker and double-agent Vesper Lynd. Though perhaps with a bit less of provenance and backstory, we did nonetheless like the inverted variations of the Astoria and Lifetime Ban and elegant Martini Sauvage—gin with chinato liqueur and orange bitters, mixed and chilled overnight.

8x8 (10. 417)

mouldiness manifesto: a celebration of the architecture of Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser—see previously here and here 

olympus mons: detailed maps of Martian terrain from the United States Geological Survey 

cobra mist: a tour of the deserted Orford Ness, the UK’s Area 51 

the george santos special: disgraced congressional representative (see previously) has a really specific skill—via Super Punch 

yurt of invincibility: Kazakh community in Ukraine provides warm-banks, accommodations for those without power  

welcome to garbage town: or how three decades of social media urged us to stop talking and start buying things  

portland district: the US Army Corps has a collection of monumental felines with their engineering projects—for those not yet with their 2023 calendars—see previously 

triple aught foundation: revisiting Michael Heizer’s City in the Nevada desert—via Things Magazine

and now for something completely different (10. 387)

Via Kottke, we are given over to ruminate on all the ways we can rush through reading, research and watching and optimising our time—our output and personal curation left in the able and dull-dealing hands of automation and outsourcing—and compelled to beg the natural and consequent question to what end. I have no pretensions about what others might call a good work ethics is just my motivation to be done with the tedious bits and to get to sneak away a little time for something that’s more interesting—and often not related to work and would entertain a degree of algorithmic enhancement if that might help me get swifter and better. While career wise, I wouldn’t exactly mind being made—regardless the inevitability and having little choice in the matter, this drive to get on to the next, equally loathsome chore is resonant and suggests being in the wrong business, addled and attended fairytales of endless growth and unbound productivity. See more from Alan Jacobs at his blog The Homebound Symphony at the link above.

down the garden path (10. 386)

Via Waxy, we invited to contemplate the awful prospect of a Web, already increasingly made for the interactions of bots and automation, totally overrun with generative artificial intelligence creating catchpenny content that estranges the human user further by expanding the Dark Forest of the Internet—a hypothesis borrowed from cosmology as one way to account for Fermi’s Paradox by positing that alien civilisations are silent and paranoid, reasoning that any other equally or more advanced life out there would pose an existential threat, that relegates us to our private, insulated spaces that echo and reinforce our points of view and preclude new discoveries. Seemingly more life-like, spaces become life-less with algorithms serving us exactly what we want and optimising visibility and virality with actual humans wise to avoid public-facing ventures lest they be ambushed by predictably pedestrian engagement and relentless marketing that we’ve let encroach on us in a complacence—which in all fairness only took a few months from funny and precocious to mealy, dull and wholly convincing.

7x7 (10. 368)

press pool: NPR station photographers swap memorable images from 2022    

opus cæmenticium: make concrete the Roman way—see also    

pre-bunking: intelligence agencies should engage in more public outreach to fight disinformation    

mallory gallery: top exhibitions of the year    

golden eye: reindeer retinas change colours with the seasons—via Nag on the Lake   

fido: dogs with human names—via Waxy     

mmxxii: year in review—news and journalists

the duchess and the dirt water fox are calling (10. 362)

Originally telecast on this day in 1992 with the MST3K treatment—having previously attained somewhat of a cult following by its inclusion in Elvira’s Movie Macabre in 1984, the 1965 scif-fi movie from the Woolner Brothers (also with the credits Hercules Unchained, Hercules and the Captive Women, Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman and Hillbillies in a Haunted House) follows the plot of a mysterious agent, Dr Kolos, of the Intergalactic Council tasked with replacing prominent human scientists with android doppelgängers in order to take over the Earth. The alien plan is foiled by intervention from the US National Intelligence Service.

rose island (10. 316)

Via ibīdem, we are directed towards a companion website to complement a documentary which affords us a chance to revisit the Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj, a short-lived micronation just outside of Italian territorial waters off the coast of Rimini, an artificial pylon engineered by the soi sont president Giorgio Rosa, a property developer with ties to the puppet government of the World War II Republic of Salò with hopes of establishing a self-funding enterprise through an independent regime of taxation, philately and sovereign citizenship. Much more to explore at the links above.

§§ (10. 219)

The oldest formal data protection law in the world, the State of Hessen promulgated its Data Protection Act (das Datenschutzgesetz) on this day in 1970. A model for privacy legislation to follow, it was authored chiefly by Spiros Simitis, inspired by a visionary article in the Frankfurter Allegemeinen Zeitung (FAZ) warning of the potential pitfalls of widespread computer use and when the law was adopted by the Landtag to great zeal, it was declared that omniscient, panopticon of survellience would not be able to gain purchase here, setting up an independent institution to monitor against Orwellian practises. Though lacking a robust regulatory framework by today’s standards, evolution and articulation of the law enshrined for us in iterations the concepts of retention and disposition schedules, data earmarking and anonymization as well as informed consent and the right of information self-determination.

the followers (10. 147)

Via the morning news, we discover that artist Dries Depoorter has triangulated the open surveillance of public spaces and a respectable social media viewership with the help of artificial intelligence to match poses in front of a range of landmarks with their sidling up to it and perfecting their casual-seeming pose. Confounding this perfectly staged moment with the apparent necessity of monitoring share-worthy sites speaks volumes to our definition and expectation of privacy tempered by desire for curation and what it is like to be spotted, caught.