downspout

Researchers from the City University of Hong Kong are developing a new technique to harness the power of falling rainwater and convert it into electricity for passive applications and battery recharging.
One water drop alone under this novel way of converting and redistributing its kinetic energy can generate enough of a spark to light up a matrix of one LED bulbs. While the rain may not be appropriate for energy-intensive scenarios, the project leader believes that the field effect transistor method could be overlaid with other energy harvesters to multiply their efficacy—on rooftop solar panels, for instance, to ensure a steadier power-supply even when the conditions aren’t so sunny, or even one’s own umbrella whose cane would become a power-wand. Learn more at the link above.

mouthy hamster

Our programmer friend, author and AI-minder Janelle Shane (see previously) took a different approach to the holiday medium that arguably machine-learning could most easily access and influence—the sadly unavailable chalky candy-heart—explicitly not attempting to have her neural network try to caption them but instead only seeding the task with a list of the original (and impressively varied) three-hundred and sixty-six messages to one’s sweetheart and no other context. Here are just some of the results but be sure to visit the links above to see more and learn about the methodologies behind machine learning.

rayleigh scattering

Thirty years ago on this day, having achieved its primary mission of rendezvous with the outer planet, Voyager I—before going into partial hibernation to preserve power and memory for the long, long journey ahead turned its aperture back towards the Sun to take a family portrait of the inner, rocky worlds, with the Earth, recipient of this love letter—some six billion kilometres distant appeared as only a tiny fleck, a tenth of a pixel, “a pale blue dot,” as programme architect Carl Sagan described it. Our home, and where everyone and everything that we’ve ever known, is that bluish-white speck in the centre of the rightmost brown band.

who's who

Courtesy of Nag on the Lake, we learn about a sensation caused when someone found a donate photo album at a thrift shop called Opnieuw & Company in the town of Mortsel outside of Antwerp chocked full of a mystery woman posing with all of Hollywood’s A-List celebrities.
The reaction was astonishment to see such a concentration of film elite spanning several years and prompted some exhaustive research, concluding that the adored individual was called Maria Snoeys-Lagler and member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a veteran organisation that reports on the entertainment industry, credentialed mostly from an outside perspective, funds film preservation and restoration and hosts the Golden Globes among other activities. Learn more and see Snoeys-Lagler’s extensive gallery of close portraits with the stars at the links above.

9x9

royal gift: George Washington’s convoluted scheme to set the new Republic (see also) on course through mule breeding, via Miss Cellania

fiddle-free: a functional mobile phone with a rotary dial to cut down on distractions

we’ll fire his identical twin, too: Tom the Dancing Bug takes on Trump’s impeachment acquittal

no man is an island: an exploration into the most isolated individuals through history

bird’s eye view: travel around the globe through some of the superlative telemetry captured by Google Earth, via Maps Mania 

 🈁: the lost and found bureau (see previously) of Japan, via The Morning News

pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun: minimalistic advertising

double helix: a look at the remarkable Bramante Staircase (previously) of the Vatican museum

 💌: a look into how the heart symbol (see also) came to represent love

eking out an existence or the best of the rest

Definitely a consolation better than the crumbs that these mice are literally, cinematically at each other’s throats over, the people’s choice award for Wildlife Photographer of the Year was captured by dint of good-timing plus a lot of patience by commuter and documentary filmmaker Sam Rowley (previously) was just announced when out of an embarrassment of quality submissions, the sponsoring organization and jury asked fans to look through the images and elevate some of the outstanding pictures that they failed to recognise. Fascinated with urban wildlife, Rowley became absorbed with the lives of the mice that inhabit, invest the London Underground, staking out this shot over the course of a week, wanting to highlight the plight of these opportunists that share our infrastructure.

shutterbug

Via Everlasting Blört, we are referred to an outstanding trove of photographs chronicling village life in Moldova as one of the fifteen Soviet Republics of the Union. The portfolio representing the life’s work of amateur photographer Zaharia Cusnir who died in 1993 were forgotten until stumbled upon by accident by a film student poking around an abandoned farm house in 2016 has been digitized and published in an online gallery.

Though many of the images are posed and the subjects are arranged for the pictures, there is some surpassing personal and personable quality to Cusnir’s compositions that highlights the individuals’ character and spontaneity. Much more to explore at the links above.