source code

In deference to aspiring human writers and accomplished robotic ones and since if you’ve procrastinated until now, there isn’t enough time left in National Novel Writing Month to crank out your œuvre, take a look at this parallel call for submissions that calls for awareness on the subject and nature of sentience and autonomy with National Novel Generation Month.
While apparently not self-aware and just following the protocols of their programmers, the output of this observance is at once both sublime and surreal works of literature—the generative code that participants write as throughput is really something apart, a hybrid that we maybe don’t have it yet in our philosophical quivers to address. Check out the link above to learn more about the project and a curation of a few select entries that demonstrate the profundity and creativity that we’ve managed to tease from ourselves and instantly, inexhaustibly commission a story into existence.

dongle or airdrop

I knew that the close-proximity wireless data transfer was the namesake of Viking ruler Harald Bluetooth and even bore his runic initials in the medium’s symbol, but I ought not have just been pleased and satisfied with that bit of trivia and not wondered why.
The person of Bluetooth, to whom that moniker was given for his fondness of blueberries, was interestingly the second king of a uniting Denmark and Norway and father of the first canonical Danish king of England, Sven Forkbeard. An engineer at the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson who was working in 1997 on a way to synchronise devices, mobile phones with computers at the time, at close range was reading a history of Scandinavia at the time and choose “Bluetooth” as the working title for their project—in collaboration with Finnish Nokia. Once the technology had been worked out and they were ready to unveil this new feature, on the advice of marketers they nearly named the ad-hoc networking feature Flirt—close but not touching, but harking back to the original implication behind the name—for the king who brought together diverse tribes into a single united kingdom (and made them all into Christians as well), they wisely and artfully decided to stick with Bluetooth in the end.

7x7

utopia planitia: Mars’ plains of paradise host a frozen lake rivalling Lake Superior, via TYWKIWDBI

let’s go out to the lobby: imagining C-SPAN’s Golden Elevator-cam coverage

the star rover: astral projections with Jack London’s final and uniquely philosophic science-fiction novel

airstrip one: vast expansion of UK domestic surveillance powers were rather overshadowed by Brexit and cadet events

the pearlies: the London subculture for charitable works and social justice with impeccable fashion-sense

rassilon imprimatur: celebrate the fifty-third anniversary of Doctor Who by watching all the reincarnations

good old puritan custom: leading lifestyle maven of the 1850s Sarah Josepha Hale’s petition to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, realised as a time for healing and reconciliation during the US Civil War 

gobble, gobble

We here at PfRC wish you and yours a peaceful and bountiful Thanksgiving. Thanks as always for stopping by.