finger lickin’: one casual dining franchise introduces Bluetooth keyboard tray inserts to keep cellular phones less greasy
swissmade 2069: a tribute to the lesser-known work of HR Giger
becomes a flotation device: airline safety video featuring every meme and personality from the internet
crowd-sourced: Swedish Hemnet dream home designed by internet traffic
1up: charity arcade games
Thursday 21 May 2015
five-by-five
Wednesday 20 May 2015
room 237
five-by-five
bellum omnium contra omnes: sobering graphic that charts percentages of US lives spent under war and peace
take-away: interesting look at the history of ๅบๅไธไธ—the culture of Japanese food delivery
nocturne: darker sequel to E.T. that was never made
doctor zaias: simian newsletter back-issues
parallax view: China’s space aspirations to reach the far side of the moon
catagories: ๐ฏ๐ต, ๐ฌ, ๐บ, ๐ญ, food and drink, foreign policy
time-lapse or moraines and drumlins
Tuesday 19 May 2015
fort morgan or unredoubtable
The pentagon layout of Fort Morgan with its high masonry ramparts was really impressive and surprising, evoking images of the Vauban fortifications we’ve encountered along French beaches.
This megalithic discovery—which although seeming perfectly in place and familiar was still very unexpected for us in its cavernous extent and location, there, in Alabama—was constructed originally to bolster seaboard defences in the aftermath of the War of 1812 (not the striking back of the British Empire as usually portrayed but the North American theatre of the much broader Napoleonic crisis) in about twenty years, making extensive use of slave-labour.
Soon the bastion constituted a hotly contested strategic nexus that guarded the waterways and thus the supply-lines of the Confederate armies and the launching pad for attempts to break the Union sea blockade during the US Civil War.
This project was one of the first major endeavours of the US Army Corps of Engineers, buttressing existing earthen redoubts, temporary forts, along navigable rivers. The term national redoubt refers to an area, ideally some place providing protection, where retreating or defeated armies can withdraw and regroup.
This notion of For- tress Amer- ica also con- vokes a metaphorical turning-inward and the US only, unlike many other countries, had to take a last-stand and make a temporary capitol under duress once.
The fort suffered extensive damage but was not long neglected before the citadel was reinforced and batteries added for the conflicts of Filipino and Spanish-American Wars. Fort Morgan was again activated for the twentieth century’s hostilities but did not again experience the tempo of action it saw during the Civil War and is today preserved as a national park.
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐งณ, foreign policy, transportation
bypass or great big convoy
Via the ever-excellent Kottke comes this rather profound study and projection of how self-driving vehicles will alter the economy and particularly the gas-food-lodging infrastructure built to support commercial trucking. While it does not take much boldness to imagine a phalanx of safer, more efficient robot guided convoys taking truckers out of the drivers’ seats as it has already come to pass, but the impact does not of course stop with this last lament of middle-class bread-winners.
The article is written from an American perspective and by analogy compares the seismic changes that could occur to those communities that the interstate freeway system passed by and withered for the sake of expedience, but I think the analysis is completely universal. With manufacturing increasingly retreating into yonder tightfistedness, goods are forever being shuttled back and forth. Consuming merchandise created and delivered by machine, vast swathes of the human workforce (and ultimately, all of it) become redundant and without access to meaningful employment. The untenable situation is accelerating to an important junction, wherein either there is no demand to satisfy the production-capacity because no one has the tender to pay for it or money becomes a rather meaningless trifle and in a utopian society, humans are at last allowed to enjoy the fruit of their labour. I suppose that’s precisely the point of progress but it is hard for me to imagine that the robber-barons might herald this event joyfully—especially if they knowing ushered in their own severance. What do you think? Will those automated cars drive us all off a cliff or make our existence better by abolishing capital?
catagories: ⛓️๐ฅ, ๐ฑ, labour, philosophy, technology and innovation, transportation