litotes or b-sides

The unseen stacks and storerooms of museums around the world surely hold vast amounts of less interesting specimens and artefacts, not really fit to rotate them for display or loan—notably lacking artistic or scientific merit. It’s as if one could accuse museums of having hoarding-tendencies since these objects are unlikely to ever be disturbed from their slumber.
Thanks to BBC Radio Four’s Inside Science, however, I was introduced to a brilliant, sardonic little project of one curator to try to showcase these hopelessly neglected shelves of items in a blog called Underwhelming Fish Fossil of the Month, wherein keenly dull examples from the museum’s backroom collections are showcased and ridiculed—like in this preservation from August 2015 that’s compared to something as regal and fanciful as the Luck Dragon from The Neverending Story. It’s silly and absurd and sometimes overly generous with its praise. I noticed, however, that by browsing through these featurettes and their deconstruction of each fossil, I was actually learning far more about the evolution of fish and the methodologies of conservation and classification than I ever knew before. It’s really fascinating stuff, and I think one ought to rummage through their wardrobes, attics and junk-drawers to tease out some cultural merit of what’s been relegated to those dark corners.

missing-link or not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin

At first, I was a little sceptical about the claim and the mystery that the subject of the human race’s facial anatomy espouses, however, after reading the first few lines of this essay from The Atlantic, I began to really appreciate this puzzle.
Like those palaeontologists who are able to prestidigitate a complete dinosaur specimen out of a single length of bone, the subtle protrusion on our jaws that forms our chin has been pointing researchers in all sorts of different, wagging directions—and the question has been perplexing evolutionary biologists since the very beginnings. Not even our closest relatives—nor those branches of the family tree that withered away—possess the same sort of jaw-line (though some argue that elephants have a similar feature) and science, and not for a lack of speculation, chin scratching—has so far failed to deliver a plausible explanation. All the suggestions have been refuted—such a configuration would not have made it easier to chew or talk or act as an effective face-guard for cavemen fisticuffs. That last bit about duelling savages strikes me as particularly Victorian—like their unhealthy preoccupation with dinosaur husbandry and mating practises. What do you think? Chins couldn’t have become a dominate trait out of a need to stuff pillowcases or fold fitted-sheets, and the answer probably lies in a convergent constellation of factors that we’ve not yet untangled. It’s also funny how chins (as well with teeth for ducks) are one of those features we immediately anthropomorphise to the point where we’re blind to its absence.

xl

My birthday’s months off yet but Mental Floss gave me an early gift (quite a taboo thing to do in Germany but such superstitions are not universal—but still, no premature greetings please) in nice celebratory list of forty things that also turn forty this year. The compilation includes the debut of the Muppet Show, Rocky Horror cosplay, the meme in its current context, the phasing out of slide rule, anti-piracy and intellectual property, and Queen Elizabeth II’s first official e-mail on the ARPANET from a terminal at the Royal Signals and RADAR Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire. A very merry unbirthday to us.

6x6

bleak house: a gallery of sad, ugly Belgian dwellings, via the Everlasting Blört

magick lantern: Richard Metzger curates a fascinating exhibition on occult works of art

iridescence: giant clams from the Indian Ocean could teach us how to better harness photovoltaic energy and make better displays

public-viewing: thanks to Boing Boing for reminding us about the network of museum open archives, Europeana Collections

fringe and flatland: an apology for outsider science, via Kottke’s Quick Links

wonderment: the entrepreneurial Scotsman who invented the mechanical television was real mad scientist

the encircling game or alphago

The artificial intelligence research division of one internet giant (with other rival concerns not far behind) has developed a tandem neural-network that’s able to best human champions at the ancient strategy game Go.
Meaning the encircling game in Chinese, its goal is to capture more territory on the board than one’s opponent, AI experts once believed that a machine could never excel to human competence as unlike checkers and chess, where computers can use their bullying calculating speeds to forecast out all possible moves and outwit its challengers, the go game-board has more combinations than atoms in the known Universe (incidentally, I’ve started to wonder what that means, really, as I trust it’s more than just some cliché and represents some exponential threshold, but does it take into account the Universe that’s mostly dark energy or the amount of stuff that ought to be there be that cannot be directly observed…) so brute force calculations are not a practical option for even the fastest computers. Human players—and there are grand-masters of go, which is quite sophisticated and challenging despite deceptively simple rules of engagement, began to lose their edge once a dual bit of programming was introduced that asset values and policies in a segregated fashion and apply those judgments in the same way as its competition. What do you think of this enterprise? Does it make for sore-losers?

yankeedom or upper caucasia

Given that the datelines from America betray a strong polarization, it is easy to dismiss and class all demographics into one of two categories—usually along political ideologies.
With a respectful aversion to over- simplification, gerry- mandering and gentrification, author and journalist Colin Woodward presents a really intriguing ethnographic picture of the North American continent divided into eleven nations. The boundaries of these cultural identities cleave sometimes to regional dialects but there’s quite a bit of interesting undercurrent buoying up these geographic divides. Do you agree with how Woodward parses the States? Do you think such rifts remain to make these distinctions relevant? Given that Florida has heaped on disappointment in with elections past (and seems to be classed as an outlier on Woodward’s map), perhaps Bugs has the right campaign strategy for ensuring it’s not contested another toss-up.