offworld colonies

Messy Nessy Chic transports us to the Mojave Desert where NASA and visionary artist and Andrea Zettler share the other worldly landscape for the elective and investigative outdoors activities.
While the space agency is field testing accom- modations for the Moon, Mars and beyond, Zettler is expanding on a dream to camp like alien with these fantastic self-contained pods that recede into their surroundings. Zettler’s science-fiction æsthetic is an exploration that certainly has the potential for cross-over into the realm of applied engineering and design, as well as the social needs of people living in isolation. Learn more about the Wagon Station Encampment in the deserts outside of Joshua Tree at the link up top.

cozy bear, fancy bear

US intelligence agencies are lending credence, BoingBoing informs, to the suggestion that the Russian government contracted hackers to leak Democratic National Committee internal emails that would besmirch Clinton’s candidacy and throw the presidential election in Trump’s favour.
Given the mogul’s disdain for institutions like NATO and attested admiration for the Russian leader (not to mention business connections), the conspiracy seems more and more plausible. Yet this development might be a double-bluff to bury an even more diabolical plot. Asked what the bureau’s next move might be in the investigation, experts owed that their scope could be quite restricted and outside of their jurisdiction, as while bypassing computer security is a crime (even white hat hacking) trying to influence the outcome of a vote is not, and, unlike the unabashed media, the government would not want to risk fowling the waters—poisoning their own wells. What do you think? Being frank and forthright is a rare commodity in politics.

montasir

Dangerous Minds has a nice appreciation and curation of the kinetic work of French-Hungarian design pioneer Victor Vasarely, acknowledged as the founder of the op art movement, whose formal apex came some three decades later on the cusps of the Midcentury Modern style—and revival. The panels and the henges of psychedelic monoliths are pretty amazing, and though artistry is maybe lost to the dazzling and dizzying the principles of teasing the perception lives on in optical illusions and Gestalt frameworks.

rikki-tikki-tavi

Primarily referring to weasel or stoat society (from the Greek word for ferrets and minks), galeanthropy can also be used to define the mental delusion that one is becoming a cat, replete with feline mannerisms. Well, what do you know about that? I wonder if there’s a special term specifically for the way cats and kittens are anthropomorphised on the internet.

bell, book and candle

Having just recently made the acquaintance of Marginal Revolution and reading the blog with some regularity, I was intrigued to learn of an upcoming book by its caretaker, Tyler Cowen.
Titled The Complacent Class, the work examines how relentlessness and insistent perseverance (first observed by Alexis de Tocqueville in his travelogue Democracy in America) that once characterised American gumption or at least framed the American Dream—with due caution for the dangers of exceptionalism and appreciating that such phenomena carry with them a Manifest Destiny that does not respect borders, is being eroded into a sort of smugness that’s cushioned by apathy and disengagement by what Tyler identifies as the “matching culture.” Just as there are fewer and fewer of Noah’s Arks of apartment buildings, no menageries from all walks of life housed together, and people self-segregate—much of our thinking, choices, loving is governed by algorithm that while delivering the kindred and the resonant also threatens to isolate and insulate. Of course demagogues, media and marketing have always been instruments of manipulation but we have not been able to so exclusively people our world’s—thus limiting our horizons—with like-minded and reaffirming furniture. I was excited to see the preview of this publication and think it will be a very worth-while read.