brimful of asha

The neighbourhood bodegas (cognate with boutique, Spanish for wine-cellar and ultimately from the Greek ἀποτίθημι for to put away in the sense of a repository) or corner shops (or dépanneurs) are the anchors of communities, and a tech start-up that’s telling consumers to shut-up whilst they’re being disrupted is developing a rather unpopular business model that aims to replace these indispensable institutions with vending machines stocked with whatever honour-bar and tone-deaf line of merchandise vying for dubious product-placement. What do you think? Unicorn-chasing—much like ambulance-chasing, surely fuels the rank-hypocrisy of misguided confidence that assumes that complacence and convenience is paramount.

fluid dynamics or bonzai kittens

A French physicist wins the coveted Ig Noble prize with his thesis that felines exhibit both properties of being both solid and liquid states simultaneously.
It’s sort of like the superposition of Schrödinger’s Cat, studying the creatures’ remarkable limberness and ability to fill any space and assume the shape of its container. Prizes also come with an honorarium of ten trillion (Zimbabwean) dollars. Read more about the other laureates in different categories, including an unconscionable experiment that compared the brain waves of cheese-lovers and cheese-haters (also taking place in France) to see if the source of aversion could be pinpointed, at the link up top.

objets trouvés

Thanks to the forever marvellous Nag on the Lake for directing our attention to the romantic and indulgently thoughtful Parisian institution of the city’s central Lost and Found Bureau.
The repository for mislaid personal items collected from the metro and museum networks or turned in by caring individuals that hope possessor and object can be reunited has a long history, sourced by to the reign of Napoleon I, just a spare two decades after the Revolution that radically redefined the sense of ownership. Whereas under the feudal Ancien Régime, lost property of tenets generally reverted to the landlord—and still is in Anglo-Saxon legal frameworks what with possession being nine-tenths of the law (just consider this place where Hoggel resides), finders were no longer necessarily keepers and the right to ownership was enshrined as a fundamental and inalienable one. The curation of the collection and compassion of the staff is rather incredible. The dignity of an individual is of course greater than the sum of his or her things, but I think the greatness of one’s character comes through with these intimate, emotional reunions and allowing things to shift from expendable to indispensable.

hms semaphore

One automobile manufacturer recently outfitted a test-pilot as an empty driver’s seat in order to gauge public, man-on-the-street reaction to autonomous vehicles, not so much for the rubbernecking effect that driverless car illicit but rather a means to study how such cars might signal their intentions and how quickly traditional vehicles and pedestrians sharing the road might pick up on that newly minted language. Presently drivers get a lot of mileage out of a tap of the horn or flashing high-beams but apparently a more sophisticated system is needed to interact with human controlled traffic. While some useful data was gleaned off of the stunt, the methodology reportedly was not the best.