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.

charta visa

Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing shares an informed and informative little project that is pretty visually stunning as well in the Passport Index. It’s interesting to take a broad survey of these travel and identity documents and then to be able to gain a purchase on the relative value citizenship—rather bearership, has in terms of access and accessibility. Examining the passports by rank under the protocols, some odd pairings—ties come up and reciprocity, diplomacy shows itself in strange ways. The convention of using or dispensing with visas for travel comes from the Latin phrase for “the paper which has been seen.”