cliché verre

Boing Boing documents the reaction of an artificial intelligence researcher when he uploaded his holiday snapshots to an new, quick photo processing service.

Depending on the size and quality of the sample, the developer will tweeze over the images as a whole in order to refine poses, lighting, smiles and focus. Further, it can create composite images that never quite happened in reality, as the IA researcher discovered, finding a picture that he as the photographer was never able to frame but achieved the imagined, desired outcome. Cliché verre refers to the rotoscoping effect one produces by adding etches and paint to a photograph. The implications are fantastic, well beyond tweaking and tuning, but also a bit chilling—as even though a photographic perspective is never really a moment committed, frozen and fixed to some media, the notion that the aesthetic sense of a clever algorithm could act as an independent studio shop, having its subjects sit and pose for pictures that never took place.  What do you think?  Would you submit your pictures to this rather surreal service, not quite sure what would come back?

average atmospherocepalic bureaucrat in the act of milking a cranial harp

A jam-maker in Spain in the late 1950s had the idea to expand to the confectionary business, after seeing a child being scolded for sticky hands from eating candy, got the idea to put a bon-bon on a stick. Investors were wary so the entrepreneur got aggressive with marketing, commissioning the renowned artist Salvador Dali to design the package’s logo in 1969. The lollipop’s original slogan was in Catalan, “És rodó i dura molt, Chupa Chups”—that is, it’s round and long-lasting. Chupar itself means to suck.

rebreather

With signature speculation and imagination, BLDGBLOG presents an interesting abstract on the implication of the peculiar properties of a cobalt-salt, which can rather horrifyingly like table-salt to slugs, suck all the oxygen out of a room. The crystal, however, is also capable of the reverse—that is timed-released of the sequestered oxygen. Learning how to harness this little trick could mean big advances it SCUBA operations—culling air from the water—and even for space exploration, as the storage medium is chemistry, rather than bulky, pressurized-containers.

fair-play or venue d’hiver

After having put the matter up to a popular vote, Norway—one of the top contenders to host the Winter Games—withdrew its bid for the 2022 Olympics.
Faced with the enormous costs for security, construction overruns, logistical demands, negative environmental impact and witnessing the hardships that the preceding host-nations have had to deal with, Oslo joined a slew of other candidates, due to public opposition, in pulling out of the competition. Now, instead of watching the Games played out in an enchanted snowy landscape of one of the Nordic countries (Stockholm was also in the running) or Kraków, St. Moritz or München, only two challengers remain: Almaty, Kazakstan and Beijing, China. To one unfortunate city go the spoils. Another major disillusioning factor is in terms of legacy and the boon that’s failed to materialize for local economies afterwards—it seems only oligarchs, cronies in capitalism, are beneficiaries of the sport—with construction, security firms and established sponsors seeing a lucrative profit out of a process that seems a bit tarnished all around. What do you think? Are big events becoming a liability rather than an honour and the stuff of shameless self-promotion and greed, for sale to the highest-bidder?