sensory reparation

Dangerous Minds has a brilliantly curated piece on the psychedelic architects of late 1960s Vienna, Hans-Rucker-Co, who first appeared on the scene and began long quite long and distinguished careers (with installations and buildings in Kassel and Düsseldorf and long-time champions of design as the founding members of the documenta exposition) with their radical Mind Expanding Programme that aimed to place wearers, bearers and inhabitants in altered states of being through transformative environments. Their creations are iconic and certain the architecture that was their later legacy was not mainstream, but it strikes me as wonderfully anachronistic that these individuals came together and developed their art first around this project. In addition to these “fly head” helmets that atomized one’s outlook, be sure to check out the mind-expander loveseat, ball pit for adults and the primogenitor of the voyeuristic fishbowl experience in Oasis Number 7 and more at the link.

jötunheimr or planet nine from outer space

Orbital perturbations of the outer most planets of our Solar System and perhaps the mysterious and unexpected geologically active surface of Pluto suggest to astronomers that a Neptune-sized world sweeping out an elongated path nearly twice as distant as Pluto at its aphelion might exist.
That far away and with such an unimaginably long year would be quite faint and the marauder would only make itself know, possibly with great disruption, only once in epochs, and so is naturally elusive—even if one’s telescope are fixed on the right patch of sky. If such a ninth planet does exist (and that seems to be a pretty big leap as other theoretical place-holders have dematerialised in the past), astronomers propose that it is an ice-giant ejected from the Solar System’s core long ago—or, even more exotically, a captured “rogue” exoplanet. That would really be something if we had been harbouring a galactic hitchhiker all this time. Native or not, maybe the new planet should be named after Thrym, king of the Ice Giant realm of Jötunheimr—which is a nemesis to the realm of men and their gods.

party of one oder telefonzelle

A merry-maker and entrepreneur from Berlin has repurposed old public telephone booths into private discotheques, complete with a jukebox selection of dance music and a light show and even doubles as a photo-booth—delivering some mementos of one’s abbreviated party. This is a pretty keen idea and enhances the list of overhauls that the more or less obsolete telephone booth is receptive to: time machine, miniature library, insect hostel, changing room for super heroes—and it does not even matter if unlike the TARDIS, it’s not bigger on the inside.

6x6

peak curtains: Swedish furniture purveyor concedes that we’ve got enough junk

man on the street: Latin American media giant purchases a controlling share of the Onion

ladders of light: rare phenomenon projects one icy village into the night sky

algorithmic: beautifully elegant approach to filtering out prime numbers

il tempo sepolto: gorgeous art nouveau era daytime hotel below the streets of Milan

rewritten by machine on new technology: the output of presenting sitcom scripts to neural networks