grace and favour or alt-nasa

Dear Leader’s unconfirmed boast that he has managed to assemble an advisory cabinet with the highest intelligence-quotients of all time (mind you, that group includes the anointed, Rick Perry and Betsy DeVos so they must be grading on the curve) smacks of the Enron executives calling themselves the smartest guys in the room.
And while he claims to have filled these positions (appointees historically don’t have the stamina to serve for entire terms as it is) with those with the conviction to disagree with him and make sure the government makes informed decisions, at the same time Dear Leader seems unwilling to defer to the true subject matter experts and agency officials, threatening and in some cases acting to censor science and research that is off-message. Already grants are being rescinded and decisions on conservation and land-use being reversed—and even if the administration relents on suppression of subversive and inconvenient truths, it’s quite chilling that it was even suggested and serves to undermine education and literacy further, just as smoke-filled room meeting with the UK’s Brexit care-taker leadership and clubby deals are not particularly well veiled overtures meant to undermine the EU and socially, civically, environmentally sound and responsible governance.

7x7

skycots: vintage photographs show how babies travelled in the 1950s on British Airways

franchissant: artificial intelligence working with composite images creates the illusion of Napoleon Crossing the Alps

fret zeppelin: a tutoring guitar that helps you learn finger placement fast


great railway journeys: tracing the new Silk Road, a train travels from China to London

c: like light, does darkness have a speed?

ЗАТО: vintage retro-future welcome signs of Soviet towns of science and industry, via Messy Nessy Chic

parfocal lens: it’s the Powers of Ten of dentistry 

alt-truths or i love a parade

Amidst all the other excitement we missed this detail that apparently Dear Leader—although the story is not fully corroborated despite respectable circulation, modelling his plans off of the military extravaganzas of Pyongyang and Moscow, had requested that the Army to parade tanks and missile launchers down Pennsylvania Avenue.
So as not to appear insubordinate, military chiefs explained the streets of Washington, DC could not bear the weight of combat vehicles. It would have been rather Red Square indeed. What do you think? It certainly seems like a plausible request and suggests a health precedence for the relationship between the Commander-in-Chief and his armies that the favour might be rebuffed, but believing in things without a tether to objective reality is what got us into this mess to begin with. I am wondering if our friends in the UK are feeling as uncomfortable over their caretaker government’s chumminess with the US regime as the American people do over the apparent closeness with the Russian leader. Another demonstration of might, a fly-over of five jets representing each of the branches of armed service, was scheduled for certain but subsequently cancelled due to poor weather conditions and would have been the first time post-9/11 that the air-space restriction over the capital was lifted. Had these alternate courses of action took place, there is still no accurate projection of how the spectacle would have impacted attendance.

doping or spider-sense

Via Marginal Revolution, we are invited to entertain the notion that we could—and are currently, could tune our bodies not just with exercise or fad diets or self-medication but with more sophisticated forms of gene therapy, whose advocates and early-adopters encourage one to try at home.
One experimental method that smacks a little of Frankenstein involves temporarily stimulating cells to produce certain proteins through electro-currents purported to stimulate longevity and overall health—but not anchored in one’s chromosomes and genetic makeup permanently and the effects only last weeks to months before a re-charge is needed. This sort of gene-regulation is radical enough in itself—especially as a DIY project, but as the technology behind gene and DNA editing called CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), think of the potential for individuals to understand and successful tweak their biochemistry and mutate themselves to attain super-human abilities.