ghostwriter, ghostrider

Though not quite a Gobot, this innovative roadster called the Blackbird, having recently won several accolades from international film juries, is a camera carriage whose frame can be adjusted so after some computer-aided rendering, can morph, getting the dimensions exactly right, into any make and model of automobile that one wishes to portray. Not only is it a good understudy for commercials, shooting several different cars at the same time in rugged, dramatic landscapes where their actual drivers will probably never venture without the expense of dispatching a fleet of vehicles (the cars having actually never ventured there either, I suppose), but is also good for filming convincing chase scenes without collateral damage.

audience-share

As the ever-faithful archivist, Doctor Caligari, informs (among other things) on this day back in 1967, the planet was treated to the first global television special via the new medium of satellite broadcasting (invented, proposed by visionary Arthur C. Clark of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame) called simply Our World.
With a viewership of four- to seven-hundred million, the live simulcast was nearly a year in production and included vignettes—much like the time-honoured Eurovision song contest being first proposed to test cross-border communications, from nineteen nations, with the stipulation that all content must be live and that there could be no political undertones. The gala variety show, beamed from NASA intelligence-satellites (the Soviets having withdrawal just days ahead of the broadcast in protest to the West’s stance on the Six-Day Israeli-Arab War). On air, the sequences cut from one feature piece to another, including footage of a cowhand in Canada, the Tokyo subway, the operatic stylings of Maria Callas and the Pablo Picasso experience. The nearly two and a half hour broadcast concluded with the Beatles making their first performance of All You Need is Love, scored especially for this very special episode—a simple message but technically byzantine like the coordination.

frexit, nexit or waiting for the other shoe to fall

It seems that authorities at the European Union would like to hasten the UK out of the bloc and not prolong matters, for fear that lingering would result in extended economic turmoil and that it might cause contagion.
Not only might Oxbridge, Gibraltar, Scotland and County Ulster choose secession from England, votes and sentiments more or less split down these internal borders, there’s a cascade effect already happening and I am not sure how earnest it is—though I think Brexit came as a shock to many, and if lessons imparted from Britain’s going alone will prove discouraging of revolt. The Netherlands, France and Hungary, all championed by emergent right-leaning politicians, are calling for their own plebiscites. If they do materialise, let’s hope they’re awarded better acronyms and portmanteaux, and that in the long run we don’t lose sight, amid business interests or the complaints—and some of them certainly valid ones, about EU-House rules, of the long-range objective of this Union of promoting peace, cooperation and understanding in this war-torn continent and to avoid the jingoistic mistakes of the past.

circadian rhythm

Writing for Æon magazine, Jessa Gamble posits that chronotherapies may be the next leap in healthcare and offer more focused and less intrusive (in terms of spill over and mission-creep) options for healing and preventative medicine. Clearly, judged by personal experience, our biologies resist synchronising with the pace and step of modern worlds and time pressures that mean little to our bodies and psyches but nonetheless exact a great toll on both.
Better coordination can ensure that our bodies and our schedules are not at cross-purposes. The thoroughgoing and lucid essay, with the primary prescription being to know thyself and that we fortunately are not usually able to outsmart our bodies, ought to be appreciated in its entirety, but the idea of internal (and internalised) versus external chronologies is made immediately apparent by Gamble’s opening parable of her mutant hamsters: engineered to have their bodies’ clocks set to days foreshortened by four hours or so, they were dealt a mortal blow by the terminal jet-lag of living in a twenty-four hour a day environment. If the days of these not of this world hamsters—truly aliens whose diurnal journey around some hypothetical star at some middling orbit is different from ours, are set to their altered state, then the experimental hamsters happily thrive.

cat’s cradle

Via Dark Roasted Blend comes a fascinating overview of an assortment of demonstration projects of applied robotics in construction running in various universities from Stuttgart to Barcelona. From self-building bridges and spray-on façades architectural to drones that stack and weave students are exploring what sort of recursive programming could be used to automate and innovate the building process.
Not only could these novel methods, with feedback from the robot-builders about what works and what doesn’t, provide emergency shelters and repairs to existing infrastructure, such techniques could also be applied to space exploration and offworld colonies.