mare incognitum

Beforehand I had heard of how map-makers have historically staved-off others appropriating and copying their survey work by inserting made-up avenues (trap-streets) or frivolous features, knowing that if these decoys were present, their competitors were simply stealing from them.
I never knew that this geographic bait was sometimes preserved with intention and out of a sense of tribute and tradition, as was the case with Hy-Bra∫il (named after the home of the ancestors of one of Ireland’s legendary clans), a phantom island that drifted on charts between Ireland and North America over the course of nearly five centuries. Other spurious islands usually only survived one or two iterations of mapping, the false information quickly dispelled, but Hy-Bra∫il remained from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century in some form or another.  With Atlantis lost, perhaps in this Age of Exploration, navigators needed some immaterial goal to sustain them on their journeys—something elusive, which supposedly only emerged from the mists once every seven years and even when visible for that one fateful day, was forever just beyond the horizon. Maybe the Bermuda Triangle is heir to that tradition.

but brawndo’s got what plants crave—it’s got electrolytes

Via the always brilliant Kottke, we learn that there will be in the US nation-wide screenings of the sadly prescient film Idiocracy from director Mike Judge on 4 October—to mark the movie’s tenth anniversary. Would you go to a show or is it hitting a little too close to home?

coop and coup

Amazingly, pigeons can be taught to read or at least spell-check, an extensive study conducted in Ruhr-University Bochum has concluded.
Building off of the autoshaping, conditioned behaviour developed by psychologist BF Skinner (which incidentally was used to pilot the first smart-bombs), researchers found the best and brightest and had them begin learning to differentiate words and pick out phoney words inserted into otherwise orthographically correct blocks of text. While they may not understand written language, they seem just as adapt as other animals whose ability and intellect is held in higher esteem and seem to pick up new vocabulary (and even conjugation and plural forms) with ease. Maybe we’d ought to look out for eavesdropping pigeons reading over our shoulders as well. They’d probably be just as quick and accurate at texting too.

i keep my visions to myself

We really enjoyed this instructive duet courtesy of The Neurocritic from Elon Musk and Stevie Nicks explaining the concept of Neural Lace. Not one of Ms Nicks’ famous shawls, rather this material is a mesh that would allow human brains to interface symbiotically with artificial intelligence and enrich both systems. The fabric that is being developed by chemists and nanotechnologists is supple (and subtle) enough to be an injectable form of electronic enhancement—the stuff of cyborgs.

a murder is announced

In commemoration of the centenary of her work and the fortieth anniversary of the great crime novelist’s death, the British postal service will be issuing a set of stamps from Studio Sutherl& and artist Neil Webb that contain embedded clues (hidden lenticular and microprinting and heat-sensitive ink) to solve Agatha Christie’s mysteries. The artwork is unique but reminds me a little of macabre styling of Edward Gorey, especially his opening animated sequence to the PBS Mystery-hour. 

pavilion or point-of-sale

Though planners pared down the aspirations for Epcot from an actual, functioning city of the future (the utopian Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) down to a theme park with futuristic attractions.
Before the Epcot was demoted to a sort of permanent World’s Fair with any kind of opening delayed until 1982, RCA pitched ideas to Disney on how it would support the city’s infrastructure to make what went on behind the scenes as authentic and state-of-the-art as what it seemed on the surface. Revolutionary for the late 1960s, proposals included the use of debit cards almost exclusively and eschewing cash. Even more interesting was how the notion of electronic money back then already connoted eroding privacy, since the money trail was anything but anonymous and carried a permanence. Around this time, at the height of the Cold War, a Georgetown think-tank, tasked to devise the most insidious yet invisible and voluntary state surveillance were they working for enemy, dreamed up a convenient system for the KGB that essentially mirrors our current network of automated teller machines and cashless registers.

vox humana

As Nag on the Lake informs, a team of researchers in Italy have reconstructed the voice-box, wind-pipe and vocal-cords of the frozen caveman Ötzi, discovered in the Italian-Austrian Alps a quarter of a century hence (this week in 1991 by a pair of German hikers) and subjected to a battery of probing and prodding over the years—and found that, unlike Neanderthals, who were determined by a similar imaging process to be possessed of rather silly falsetto voices, our Iceman had a gravelly, masculine way of speaking. The voce umana is a resonator on a pipe organ so called because of its resemblance to the human voice.