7x7

condominium: uninhabited islet switches sovereignty on a semi-annual basis

bright lights, big city: breath-taking nocturnal aerial photography from Vincent LaForet

bless this mess: encouraging, compassionate steps to take for better house-keeping

mid-west world: a small Iowa town is a draw for Chinese tourists wanting to experience the authentic American bread-basket, via the always brilliant Super Punch

cosmogram: an assortment of some of NASA’s best photographs of the past year, via the forever marvellous Nag on the Lake

brooding: long incubation periods may have contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs

bodensee: the international borders of Lake Constance mean different things to each nation that shares it

bellwether and bookworm

Boing Boing features the story of a couple of librarians who conspire to fabricate patrons in order to thwart an automated book-culling algorithm that has been deployed to reduce clutter and optimise circulation.
To save important but perhaps low circulating titles from the robot biblioclasm, the pair invented an avid reader to check out the threatened books but were eventually caught and punished for their transgression—not restricted to countermanding the computer but also for the fraudulent act of creating a fake registrant on the public-record and thus opening the floodgates of “check-out fraud” and trust in civic institutions. What do you think?  With finite space and withering resources, space and selection do of course come at a premium and weeding is a sometimes regrettable course of action, but this case really illustrates the limits of unbiased, objective automation foisted upon very human activities—how it can fall prey to the same decision-trees that fell human logic and invites itself to be gamed, employing mechanical Turks, like the article suggests, as a work-around for that which is above our administrative-rights to change.

persistence of vision

Previously we learnt that the comprehensive picture that we hold in our heads of the world around us is fragmentary and somewhat of a figment of our imaginations, but we didn’t have the vocabulary and the stage-directions to really frame this phenomena of inattention until coming upon this interesting article from Æon magazine on how film makers and special-effects artists (knowingly or otherwise) take advantage of the gaps in our perception to enthrall audiences and blind us to other continuity errors.
Saccades and saccadic masking describe the mechanisms that cause the eyes to dart around and follow motion and gather information on what’s changing and emergent—rather than what’s stationary and constant and therefore acceptable to be ignored. Without this ability to focus selectively and reconstruct the peripheral environment from memory and recycled footage, our heads would be clogged not with smooth and sharp transitions but rather blurred and smeared images. We’re only able to resolve, on the fly, three or four elements of a scene. “Smooth pursuits” are also possible in reading or tracing out a visual target, but it’s rarer that as observers we aren’t playing catch-up and are mentally re-building the setting and sequence despite the on-screen polish and our memories of the experience, both cinematic and authentic.

decency is indecency’s conspiracy of silence

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw declaimed that “the reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Although I thought differently at first and was sure that I knew the message, I honestly can’t say what that quote means anymore after a bit of reflection. How would you un-pack it?

forty-winks or inemuri

From BBC Future’s curated best features of this past year comes an interesting investigation into the rather contradictory Japanese art of not sleeping.
A society that cultivated a respect for sleep-deficit and foregoing rest in order to get ahead in business (as evinced by this jingle for an energy drink referenced in the article) at the same time honed a great tolerance for inemuri (居眠り) that is not exactly the same as sleeping on duty but rather “sleeping while present.” While not restricted to commuting or other instances where dozing off might be excused but is also seen as a badge of dedication to one’s job to nod off in classes or in meetings or anywhere in public. Some employees even admit to faking inemuri in order to appear just as devoted as their colleagues. Confronted with this distinction that’s other than the traditional ideas of sleeping or napping, the author was admonished of her own difficulties faced in convincing the academic world that repose and its history was a serious scholarly topic. Could one say that this was a power-nap under a name and where does this fall into the spectrum of sleep-hygiene? It seems granting license for to perhaps be off one’s game, a bit absent for otherwise budgeting one’s time seems very different than any moral failings for indolence and a wholly unfamiliar dispensation for work-life balance.

give me that old time disruptor

Collectors’ Weekly has an interesting review of some of the gimmicky, vintage gadgets of the Industrial Revolution that were touted (at least by the tinkerers who had them on offer) as game-changers for industries yet to be established and plied eagerly on early-adopters.
Some of these inventions and interventions—called revelatory due to the times—or their ideas are still with us, like various punch-clocks and time-verifiers, much like those productivity-boosters and service-tickets built into our infrastructure to make sure our utilities aren’t putting their thumbs to the scales, which is sometimes just as much as a time-thief. What do you think? Some inventions create problems to solve.  Will digital-signatures, encryption, kick-starter campaigns, drones and the formalised sharing-economy (in all senses, models built on gigs and renting out one’s time and property as well as platforms for interaction) look like snake-oil and tonic compared to the real innovations of the age to the next generation (perhaps authentically, 3-D printing, gene-editting and immersive virtual reality for therapy and exploration) and are only capitalising on the excitement of the present? Of course, I suppose the trick is in recognising the hucksters from the brokers and engineers and for most of us, that’s usually only gained in hindsight.