lozenge moquette

Thanks to City Lab, we are invited to revisit the plush and pile of mass-transit upholstery through the industrial textile designs of Enid Marx and other samples archived by the London Transportation Museum. By turns both extravagant and practical, both overlooked and omnipresent, the exhibit offers a retrospective look at the power of the intentionality in design, underscored perfectly by something that often retreats into the background yet (if not itself the subject of passing derision) so much part of a shared ridership experience.

i, robot

Hearing of this experiment—really a thought-experiment put through the paces of reality and practise thanks to advanced computing, via Slashdot, of a robot booted-up without prior knowledge of itself or its programming was able after a period of adjustment was able to imagine itself and deduce its identity reminded us of Avicenna’s concept of the floating man.
Buoyed aloft, blindfolded and deprived of sensation, the philosopher, whose ideas informed the thinking of later luminaries like René Descartes, reasoned that even in this state of sensory deprivation, that the figure would still differentiate himself from the surrounding environment and have a sense of self. What do you think? To my mind, it seems like we are lurching towards self-awareness but there’s always the counter-argument that the machines are not quite pandering to their programmers but we do tend to prefer revelling in outcomes that confirm our own pet-theories—absent any counter-factuals.

minn tími mun koma!

On this day a decade hence, reeling from the economic meltdown of that crescendoed in 2008 and revelation of graft and corruption within the sitting government, the Althing appointed member Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir (previously) as prime minster of Iceland.  The first openly lesbian head of government plus the country’s first woman leader.
Having served in parliament since 1978, she made a bid to head the Social Democratic party (Alþýðuflokkurinn, later merged into the Social Democratic Alliance) in 1994 but was defeated. Never one to concede, Sigurðardóttir’s rallying cry became the above, My time will come!, a popular saying outside of the political sphere as well.  Though this degree of political normalisation has been restricted to European governments thus far and progress is a fragile thing that never ought to be taken for granted, it does seem rather remarkable and even rather old hat that ten years on there are three currently serving gay or lesbian national leaders, the Taoiseach of Ireland and the prime ministers of Serbia and Luxembourg.

division bell

We’d heard the term of course from the Pink Floyd album but hadn’t realised what the eponymous title referred to until encountering this helpful civics lesson from Atlas Obscura.
In parliamentary procedure, a division of the assembly is a more formal way of gauging the consent or non-consent of the house on an item—especially when a issue is contentious or demands a super-majority. By house rules, once a vote is challenged, members have eight minutes and not a moment more to return to their respective lobbies (sides) and cast their ballots or lose their chance to weigh in on the matter. Most of the alarms are within the halls of the Palace of Westminster itself—also signalling the start of the start of the session (the House sits)—but as proceedings, speeches and debate can be a drawn out affair, exterior restaurants, public houses and clubs in the vicinity are also outfitted with division bells to recall members who might be taking a personal recess. Sort of like referring to the Beltway as the figurative boundary separating Washington, DC from the rest of America, the geography of the division bells stakes out the Westminster’s bubble.

15 x 15

Delightfully, some eight decades after it was first prototyped and trialled in the basement of a Methodist church in the neighbourhood of Queens, the board game Scrabble, still enduring and having gone multi-lingual, has earned a semi-official historic marker in the form of this street sign.
In 1938, out of work architect Alfred Mosher Butts (*1899 – †1993) came up with the concept of play and conducted a frequency analysis on letters, assigning values to the tiles. The street sign may not be a high-scoring hand and was originally probably an homage of an enthusiastic Scrabble club but the city’s department of public works have dutifully replaced the modified marker when it was inevitably pilfered.