canali

Using a sounding technique that revealed the existence of a sub-glacial sea under the Antarctic ice sheet, European Space Agency researchers believe that they may have detected a shallow lake of liquid water beneath the ice-capped Martian south pole. The telemetry gathered by the Mars Express, a satellite laboratory that’s orbited the planet for the past fifteen years is still being interpreted but it’s definitely something and bear the signature of a briny sea, some twenty kilometres across but buried under a kilometre and half of frozen ice.

dingbat

Building on the success of his social medial following, archivist and graphic designer Richard Baird, as Dezeen reports, will be issuing a quarterly magazine to highlight the simple brilliance of Mid-Century Modern (1945-1975) minimalist logos, carefully selected and curated as the best in branding, like this 1974 symbol designed by Patrick Dugast for le Club de la Publicité of Québec, whose mascot is cleverly drawn out of the negative space framed by a “CP.” Visit the links above for more classically timeless and inspired emblems.  

antisocial media or latent response

Duck Soup directs our attention to an engrossing article that prises open the imagination and invites us to consider a counter-factual situation that does not presently seem so difficult to indulge and undo in questioning the way the dominant social media platforms—outside of China—are presented to us.
Was the shape the platform took inevitable and from an economic stance, the only model that made business sense and was sustainable? A personalised newspaper was foisted on users—the public essentially though I think the interlocutors are giving more credit than is due—that nobody asked for and people disliked but one that was pernicious and easily reinforced. Optimised to peddle advertisements with “connection” management or networking as a vehicle—verses a public entity or subscription service—do we necessarily arrive at manipulation and tribalism? The struggle to be omnipresent means that we can’t even be present much of the time. The interview also presents an interesting juxtaposition in how the unrestrained ambitions of the Western market to surpass relaying messages and allowing users to curate a persona and alter how we interact runs parallel to China’s universal interface and smacks of a weirdly monolithic showdown.

assignment baghdad

Geoff Manaugh, author of the always intriguing and philosophically indulgent BLDGBlog, contributes a rather cloak and dagger tale to the Daily Beast about a graduate class of aspiring architects who may have unwittingly enabled the precision and sustained bombing campaign during Operation Desert Storm (the Persian Gulf War)—rather than preserving Iraqi buildings that might fall victim to the imminent invasion.
The students gathered blue-prints and layouts of every structure in the city, granting military planners the details to put a missile down a chimney or fire a rocket through a window. One wonders how often intelligence and academic research might intersect—especially counter to the sentiments and the motivations of the researchers. Manaugh also offers in the accompanying blog post an interesting exploration of the history of keeping building plans out of enemy hands and the lengths one would go to in order to keep them secret. What do you think? One would always trust an architect with one’s potential vulnerabilities without arousing suspicion.