ipad evenle

Nineteenth century civil engineer and utopian architect Thomas Stedman Whitwell—best known for his advocacy for model company towns—also wanted to reform toponymy, finding it confounding how there was a profusion of Springfields, Albanys, Clintons and Franklins in the United States, and so though new nomenclature ought to be based on latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.
To that end, Whitwell published this table and accompanying article in 1826 in the gazette for New Harmony (Ipba Veinul located at 38 °11′ N by 87 °55′ W), Indiana (a failed utopian colony). It reminds us of the scheme employed by What-Three-Words though extensive elocution rules—as opposed to the natural language of the latter—had to be laid out to overcome difficulties in pronunciation and recall and in theory would could scale down past minutes and seconds to specific subdivisions, neighbourhoods and addresses with longer and longer garbled names. The idea failed of course to catch on—which is why the capitals aren’t called Lafa Vovutu (London) or Feili Neivul (Washington, DC).

breitling orbiter

After launching three weeks earlier from Chateau-d’Œx in the canton of Vaud, psychiatrist and avid balloonist Bertrand Piccard—hailing from a long-line of adventurers, along with co-captain Brian Jones, became the first team on this day in 1999 to successfully circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air balloon. With the help of a ground-crew of meteorologists, they accomplished this feat by negotiating atmospheric currents and jet-streams and had no means of forward propulsion other than being borne aloft by the winds.

a stroke of genius

Via The Awesomer, we learn that computer powerhouse nVIDIA has developed a generative adversarial network (previously) they’re calling GauGAN, after the post-impressionist Paul Gauguin, which transforms sketches and doodles into convincingly real but wholly fictitious landscapes, scouring billions of images to make a seamless composite scene. The algorithm and subroutine is still being coached but may be available for the general public soon.

mythos: an object lesson

Via Open Culture, we are treated with a series of short vignettes from animator Chris Guyot that communicate the timelessness and universality of Greek myths with no need for exposition but rather through digital geometric abstractions and a bit of resonant, billiard ball physics, recognising that memes are not only an expansive and wide-ranging format but loyal traveling companions as well. In case any of director Stephen Kelleher’s cautionary tales are not immediately familiar, there’s a helpful synopsis of each act at the link above.

alles klar herr kommissar

Accused of deporting himself like the “high commissioner of an occupying power” instead of a member of the diplomatic corps, German politicians are calling for the expulsion of US Chief of Mission to Germany, Mister Grenell (previously), citing his continual interference and barrage of criticism as having grown intolerable.

urheberrechtsreform

In protest to European Union’s rather fraught and problematic Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, to be brought before Parliament, German-speaking Wikipedia—at the consensus of its contributors and users—will shut down for twenty-four hours on March 21.
The most upsetting articles included in the language of the proposal to be debated are the so called “link tax” on news and content aggregators and the requirement that websites and hosting services employ upload filters that would screen out potentially pirated or non-attributed images and video. Media-rights holding clearinghouses initially supported the enforcement measures but have now been less enthusiastic and a consortium of journalists see it as a threat to press freedoms. We all ought to join in, in solidarity.