it looks like you could use a poem

Being a long time fan of Maria Popova’s engaging literary digest, Brain Pickings, I was pleasantly surprised when recently, instead of the usually lures to subscribe to the newsletter or otherwise to disrupt one’s taking leave of the place once it seemed like one’s attention was starting to slake, rather than being badgered (desperate though understandably so) into remaining, the gentle reader is offered an excerpt of poetry to consider and keep as a souvenir.

6x6

mixed media: Basa Funahara’s brilliant masking tape paintings

travelling matte: beautiful vintage postcards displayed on antique luggage

brightest london is best reached by underground: a look at some of the women artists who designed vintage Tube advertisements

a wave of whales: a campaign to inundate Japanese embassies worldwide with art and essays in opposition to their resumption of whaling

the rotten eggs: punk nursey rhymes that are your usual children’s musical fare

chime-in any time: Canadian radio observatory detects more mysterious repeating bursts 

it’s a gif to be simple, it’s a gif to be kind

Twisted Sifter treats to a small gallery of animations that elegantly and immediately illustrate how others might connect the same constellations of dots or interpret their relative motions in completely different and idiosyncratic ways. Though the specimen speaks for itself, there is also a couple nice articles linked at the source explaining what’s going on in terms bias and what’s called statistical underdetermination. Same otherwise.

showboat diplomacy

Keen to prop up and perpetuate its own fracking industry, the US ambassador to Germany (previously) issued threat of sanctions for domestic companies involved in and supporting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.
It is feared that Germany would become too dependent on Moscow and the importance of energy-transit countries, like Ukraine, would have less influence in the region. Existing infrastructure with cosmetic modifications to the pilot-lights can be made to heat homes with hydrogen, rather than drilled natural gas, so I suspect it’s all a last, desperate ploy to hold on to a baronet in the end, sort of like fracking above. The warning of the ambassador, whose been quoted in the media as supportive of “empowering” the ascendancy of right wing governments in Europe and of academies that are “safe-spaces” for fostering hateful, small-mindedness are regarded as rather toothless and the German business sector thanks the ambassador for the public interruption of reading his tweets out loud—delivered in his own voice, like the man who appointed him who happens to be currently under investigation for being a Russian asset.