beautiful briny

Over the weekend, H and I returned to the old gas-works of Leipzig that's been converted in a holodeck of sorts called the Panometer, which is a favourite venue for the artist and activist Yadegar Asisi.
This time, we dove, were im- mersed in the world of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, lead to the panoramic viewing-gallery with an informative display addressing the biodiversity housed in these coral shoals of the fragility of this treasured ecosystem. 
The exhibit (click on the pictures to enlarge) was informative without being gloomy, of course.
I think the most humbling and provocative aspect of it all, however, was how being in such a huge space made bigger by the stagecraft of the flats really gave one the feeling of venturing there and an idea of the macrocosm and microcosm in details that were highlighted while trying to take it all in and still asserting one’s presence without being lost in the moment.

may easter joys attend you

pneumatic danube

The much vaunted hyper-loop looks like it have its ground-breaking ceremony soon, but not shuttling passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in California as originally envisioned, but on a circuit along the Danube (Donau) from Košice to Bratislava, Slovakia, to Vienna (Wien) and on to Budapest, Hungary. Driving, the journey would take around eight hours, but passengers aboard the hyper-loop trains would complete this route in just under an hour. That would be a pretty keen way to explore the region and be home again in the evening.

chicken of the sea

There is a species of gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus) native to Madagascar that has the common name of the “Baweng satanic leaf gecko.” Not only does its tail bear an uncanny resemblance to dropped foliage, so too does its whole body when not in motion.
The trade name was given to the lizard by enterprises that imported these unusual specimens from the island off the the south-eastern African coast to make them sound even more exotic as pets. Aside from sea-monkeys, I can’t think of an another incident where animals were reflagged by the pet-market, though I can come up with several times that animals destined for consumption were given fancier culinary brand-names. Not to fault responsible human caretakers whom did not create such a market to begin with, our duty to conserve natural habitats is all the more urgent so such fantastical creatures can thrive in the wild as well, and the ones who look like cigarette butts or fast-food wrappers don’t gain the advantage.

small wonder

In less than twenty-four hours after unleashing an artificially-intelligent chatbot into the wild, Tay’s handlers were quickly compelled to delete her social-media tracks and essentially ground the programme that’s supposed to emulate a teenage girl and was an experiment to enhance those automated customer-service trees that big corporations are wont to chase us up.
Equipped with the common-parlance of Millennials and at least a rudimentary sense of self- preservation (if not self- promotion), it is unclear—to me at least—whether Tay was assaulted en masse by every single troll on the internet and fought back in kind or whether studying the internet, Tay came up with her own provocations, calculated to draw maximum attention—with optimised offense. I feel it’s equally bad if exposure to an overwhelming human-traffic was so corrupting or the programming was faulty to begin with, but Tay progressed from innocent and rather saccharine to raunchy, vulgar and violent in practically no time at all—spouting off several choice rants that surpass what even the most polemic politicians and avid-commentators are capable of. I wonder if Tay was sat in a corner and given a chance to think about what she had said, or whether like her trail of hate, she was deleted as well. At this juncture, it might be hard to argue that Tay was conscious, but if self-aware teenage moderators ever come into existence, I do not think we can just start switching them off for repeating what their parents say or for holding the wrong opinions. What do you think?