Via Things Magazine, we learn that phantom islands and trap streets may be making a resurgence in an awful and insurmountable way with deepfake satellite imagery, with making a Potemkin neighbourhood be it for misrouting traffic, boosting property value, lowering tax liability or for disguising a nuclear refinement plant or concentration camp an easier task that creating a passably convincing human—not to mention undermining useful demographics and economic trends that can be gleaned by such monitoring as well as engendering distrust in what previously was accepted as irrefutable evidence. Artificial intelligence and generative adversarial networks are able to create virtual empires and dystopias to dupe us all.
Thursday, 29 April 2021
Tuesday, 16 March 2021
typhoon class
Though the working-outcome of the navy going into receivership with Pepsi was more improbable than the suggestion to retrofit a fleet of Soviet nuclear submarines as tanker ships to transport oil and natural gas was probably the less technical tenable, advisable alternative to generate capital after the nation’s dissolution. Back in 1995, at the suggestion of the governor of Arkhangelsk oblast, the location of the Russian submarine yards, one experiment was with underwater cargo shipping was undertaken—albeit with a non-strategic vessel and a manifest of foodstuffs—but not explored further due to cost-overruns and lack of funding. The logistics pitch, however, to fill-up directly from off-shore rigs and to travel the globe swiftly and virtually unimpeded (also without burning said fuel) was worth considering. Learn more at Weird Universe at the link above.
catagories: ๐ท๐บ, ๐ก️, transportation
Friday, 11 December 2020
7x7
repetition: an exploration of built-environments as an audio-visual landscape of infinite regression
a pigment of our imagination: the illusory nature of colour
nationally determined contributions: European Union agrees to more than halve its carbon emissions by 2030—via Slashdot
awesome sauce: a safari-pak of canned-meats from 1967
road gritters: track Scotland’s fleet of snow-plows in real time by name
training a generation of future karens: this scholastic kids books series are clearly coding adults as happy and confident with their life choices as monsters and misfits—via Super Punch
a universe of imagination: revisiting a classic and inspiring documentary (previously) on cosmology on its sixtieth anniversary
catagories: ๐จ๐ฆ, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ก️, ๐ฝ, ๐ฌ, ๐ณ️๐, ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ท️, ๐ญ, ๐บ️, ๐ง , transportation
Friday, 25 September 2020
telekino
catagories: ๐จ๐ฆ, ๐ช๐ธ, ๐ก, transportation, ⓦ
Monday, 14 September 2020
leave the driving to us
While not exactly pleased with the idea of after having finished the fraught task of packing house and home to be presented with a record album to bear away and figure out how to transport, we do rather like this novelty arrangement presented to families in the 1960s whom chose Allied Van lines to handle the logistics of their change of address. These orchestral variations on the company’s jingle, a network of independent contractors formed in the 1930s to reduce dead-heading—that is, the movement of empty trucks—in the shipping business, embraces the range of genres popular at the time.
catagories: ๐ถ, transportation
Monday, 31 August 2020
7x7
the trouble shooter: a truly bizarre and blessed vintage cartoon
single-camera setup: more lockdown sitcom episodes from Poseidon’s Underworld
far from the madding crowd: a backyard shed that’s the ultimate weekend, quarantine project—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links
sidebar: the hobby and craft chain Michael’s has a community chatroom that’s become an affirming if not wild forum—via Waxy
kingston’s good ghosts: an Art Deco inspired (see also) custom roadster
rave cave: party-goers in an Olso bunker hospitalised for carbon monoxide poisoning
obscure media: Miss Cellania’s Video of the Day “Robot Love” from a decade ago
Sunday, 7 June 2020
7x7
hello, little friends: Ryoji Akiyama transversed China in 1981 and 1982 capturing images of young people in a rapidly changing country
a class divided: a powerful, pivotal lesson in discrimination revisited
the plot to overthrow america: a round-up of fear-mongering ploys baited by Trump’s declaring an acronym a terrorist group, plus a case of deicide
simrefinery: Chevron commissioned the makers of SimCity to make a training programme for workers at their petroleum plants back in 1992
little green men: investigating the anonymous, unaccountable army policing Washington, DC—via Pluralistic
subjective cityscapes: Natalie Christensen focuses her lens on the intersection of architecture and automobiles in the US Southwest—via Plain Magazine
heavenly palace: more details surface regarding China’s space station, with construction beginning next year
catagories: ⛓️๐ฅ, ๐จ๐ณ, ๐, ๐พ, ๐ท, ๐ญ, 1992, architecture, transportation
Monday, 11 May 2020
7x7
great railway journeys: POV footage of Swiss trains racing through the countryside accompanied by techno music
day-o: a family in lockdown recreates dinner party scene from Beetlejuice
starfish and coffee: Prince is the opening act for the latest Link Pack from Swiss Miss
down to gorky park: an in depth investigation into whether the 1990 Scorpions’ power ballad was a US was soft power ploy by the intelligence services
oslo maps the world: visit dozens of global festival venues virtually, via Maps Mania
novas: a mirror universe mixtape of 1982—one of the 1982s, via Kicks Condor
sun dance: a mesmerising percussion set paired with high resolution footage from the Solar Dynamics Observatory
Monday, 23 March 2020
organisation commune africane et malgache
Founded in 1961 to promote economic and political cooperation among the decolonised and newly independent francophone nations of the continent and its largest island, the African and Malagasy Union was formaly dissolved on this day in 1985 by mutual consent of its member states.
Once former Belgian-controlled territories were allowed in the group, the governing body gradually realised it was at cross-purposes to more inclusive, pan-continental institutions that were developing in parallel. One lasting legacy of the former organisation’s work, after abandoning defence pacts and a common army that caused the most strife throughout the decades, was the multinational civilian airline Air Afrique and its spinoffs.
catagories: ๐, ๐, 1961, transportation
Friday, 21 February 2020
boฤaziรงi kรถprรผsรผ
Construction finished some three and a half years later and coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the modern Republic of Turkey, work began on spanning the strait separating Europe from Asia, Anatolia from Thrace on this day in 1970. The suspension bridge was the first to cross the Bosporus in some twenty-five hundred years when Persian emperor Darius and later his son Xerxes separately commissioned pontoon bridges to connect the continents.
catagories: ๐น๐ท, 1970, transportation
Saturday, 18 January 2020
railbanked or atchison, topeka and santa fe
At its height, the rail network of the United States was somewhere approaching half a million kilometres, with now over half that infrastructure abandoned, superannuated. Maps Mania takes us on a whistle-stop tour on the extensive out-of-service (that is—railbanked, see also) routes. There are a lot of resources to explore here in addition to the interactive maps that give the history of the lines, accompanying blog with lots of images and other depots for departing on virtual journeys.
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, antiques, transportation
Thursday, 2 January 2020
iata
Via Pasa Bon’s inaugural curated links of the decade, we enjoyed this visual registry of airport codes assigned by the International Air Transport Association, with an explanation of the three letter geo-locater especially helpful for when the decoding the directory designation isn’t always so straightforward.
The –X appended at the end of many aerodromes and a few feeder train stations is a marker for older stations that retained their original US National Weather Service name for consistency with the new naming conventions and many cities have retained their historic call-signs as a flag-of-convenience: SGN for Ho Chi Mihn City (formerly Saigon), TSE for Astana (formerly Tselinograd now named Nur-Sultan) or LED for Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) for example. The Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport serves three Switzerland, France and Germany and has the codes BSL, MLH and EAP.
catagories: ✈️, transportation
Monday, 30 December 2019
smygflyga
We completely understand and empathise with the fact it’s hard to settle on a favourite—especially when one is spoilt for choice, so we are enjoying pouring over this list of notable neologisms that Sweden’s top linguists at the Institutet fรถr sprรฅk och folkminnen have identified that helped define the past year. The gretaeffekten of course looms large having rightly been recognised for their overwhelming importance to the age by no less than two august language authorities and with the derivative title word—flying on the sly, not disclosing one’s travel itinerary because one failed to plan ahead so one could train-brag so as to avoid flight-shaming—plus other well-deserved honours besides, shared amongst all allies. We further enjoyed how the registry included internet terms like deplatformering and ASMR, clarified to readers as a hjรคrnorgasm and not some further Marvel Cinematic Universe appropriation of Norse mythology.
catagories: ๐ธ๐ช, ๐ฑ, ๐ฌ, transportation
Wednesday, 25 December 2019
unwort des jahres
Whilst the jury is still out on the national Unwort of the Year for 2019 (previously), the Landeshauptstadt of Hesse, Wiesbaden the arbiter of the actual Word of the Year—has made a few selections of its own, reflective of state and local culture and politics.
While we’ve encountered all three of the finalists and agree that the signage proclaiming the shopping corridors of the pedestrian mall downtown to be a weapons-free zone irksome and depressing and the winner in the form of an unending major construction project that has had Autobahn traffic in a snarl for years on end a frustrating if not befitting champion, we most enjoyed reconnecting, re-engaging with those awful E-Roller, electro-scooters abandoned, crowding the sidewalks. Do you have a nominee for Unwort of the Year for your area?
catagories: ๐ฌ, Hessen, transportation
Sunday, 20 October 2019
karambolage
From 1942 to 1990, Arnold Odermatt was employed as a forensics photographer for the Swiss canton of Nidwalden whose extensive portfolio documents encroaching modernity into this once isolated area, especially in traffic accidents, taking a second photograph for his own personal collection once the injured had been taken away.
Though his fascination is morbid and inscrutable as his motivation was never stated and the existence of the images were only disclosed by accident (his filmmaker son discovering the trove in a box in the attic one day and published them in a book that garnered attention in the late 1990s at the Frankfurter Buchmesse), there is, one might conjecture, a restorative property in seeing these husks of vehicles in an austere light, unmoving without drivers and passengers. Much more to explore at the link above including several galleries of Odermatt’s compositions, which includes many candid, happy scenes artfully captured as well.
catagories: ⚠️, ๐จ๐ญ, ๐ท, transportation
Thursday, 3 October 2019
potut pottuina
Overshadowed by his magnificently telling tantrum, the Trump’s White House did manage to open up a second front in his ongoing trade wars with the US Trade Representative, a Trump appointee, announcing that the World Trade Organisation will grant the US the right to levy tariffs on around seven billion euro (one percent of US-EU trade) on European exports—wine and cheese, in retaliation for the EU’s privileging its domestic Airbus over international competition.
We can’t say that the US has been subsidising its native industries in the same way for the past decade and a half of this squabble or whether it’s quite a fair ruling—though it highlights the asymmetry of government support and interventions and how diverting subsidies from staid business models in transport and agriculture would help drive greener and cleaner innovations. Further implication might be the UK becoming even more willing to crash out of the Union with no deal and into an unequal partnership with the States. The EU is expected to respond in kind—though direct countermeasures are not allowed, WTO rules have no jurisdiction on boycotts.
catagories: ๐ช๐บ, ๐ซ๐ฎ, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, transportation
Saturday, 28 September 2019
liften
In order to curb congestion along the capital’s crowded corridors, Brussels’ municipal authorities are encouraging the return of hitchhiking, albeit with the help of a digital intermediary, to match up drivers with spare seats—most ridership as in most of the developed world is a one occupant per vehicle).
At first it struck me as a gimmicky partnership, but the point of putting the scheme behind a mobile application is not to try to rival other ride-hailing and rider-sharing services but to instil a sense of trust, insofar as the person that one’s who is accepting the ride may be a stranger but is not unknown to the network, registration and vetting required and a digital fingerprint is left in case something untoward were to happen. There’s no payment involved for using the service, leaving any exchange up to the driver and passenger, if any, and the chief motivation is to reduce traffic. The app could also, I suppose, become a gauge of reputation for problem riders or problem drivers. What do you think? Would you sign on? Old, traditional solutions are often not the most sexy or exciting but still the most reliable.
catagories: ๐ง๐ช, transportation
Monday, 16 September 2019
ballonflucht
In the early hours of this morning in 1979, eight members of two families, realising the fruition of a plot hatched over a year and a half beforehand with careful planning and patience so as not to arouse suspicion, one attempt that ended in resounding failure that almost led to their capture and detention and brought heavier surveillance plus three hand-stitched balloon membranes, crossed from Pรถรneck in East Germany to Naila just over the border in Bavaria in a hand-engineered hot air balloon with navigation improvised. Read (or listen to) the full story about the harrowing heroics of the families Strelzyk and Wetzel and their determination to secure a future in the West at the link above.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, 1982, Thรผringen, transportation
Friday, 6 September 2019
6x6
cheese whey wine: this proposal does not exact merit the enthusiasm of either turophiles nor ลnologists
nessie: DNA evidence suggest that the monster of Loch Ness might be a colony of giant eels
mensch-maschine: watch limber, articulate but abstract robots mimic human motion
an englishman in new york: a biographical look at the life and times of Quentin Crisp (previously)
cloverleaf: a gallery of freeway interchanges (previously), via Present /&/ Correct
formaggio ubriaco: bringing it full circle, this delicacy from Treviso sounds more palatable
catagories: ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ก, ๐ฅ, ๐ง, lifestyle, myth and monsters, transportation
Wednesday, 26 June 2019
8x8
blood meridian: two animated maps (see also) chart Manifest Destiny from contrasting perspectives
lobby cards: the iconic film posters and title sequences of Saul Bass (previously here and here)
strong to the finich: because of the leafy green’s steroidal qualities, some are calling for it to be banded like other doping agents
scientific method: brilliant vintage middle school text books via Present /&/ Correct
nineteen eighty-four was not meant to be an instruction manual: workers trialled with beacons and bracelets to monitor performance and productivity
best in show: a curated selection of the winners of the National Geographic travel photography competition
lj: going into production in 2021, the Lightyear One represents the industry’s first long-range and untethered electric vehicle, via Design Boom
pomological catalogue: the 1886 US contract for watercolour depictions of all the world’s fruit
catagories: ๐ณ๐ฑ, ๐ผ, ๐, ๐ท, ๐ฅธ, food and drink, sport and games, transportation