course of medication

Via Slashdot, we learn that a novel organic chemical compound has been isolated by an artificial intelligence trained on the corpus of literature of pathology and drug-resistance that potentially has powerful implications for continuing to combat infectious disease and make amends for the systematic abuse of antibiotics (over-prescribing, battery livestock, wastewater, etc.) that threatens to revert medical science to that of the Middle Ages.
The compound, named halcine after HAL 9000 by one member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, seems to put back in our quiver the means to deal with the most pernicious strains of multi-resistant compounds that make environments that ought to be sterile incubators for germs that have become immune to traditional medicine through over-use and over-exposure. Furthermore, given the expense that new drugs trials entail—making their development a pricy trade-off despite the benefit of lives saved, being able to find leads to follow from computer models may usher the best contenders to the laboratory first.

7x7

en nat på bloksbjerg: the incredible art work of Dutch illustrator Kay Nielsen—see previously, whom contributed to Fantasia but Disney let go

band camp: an overlooked and not unlistenable resource: Can This Even Be Called Music?—via Kicks Condor

theire soe admirable herbe: English colonist discover what the natives have been smoking in seventeenth century India

winter stations: interactive installations of Toronto’s beach to encourage outdoor play in the cold months

cabin-crew: the JFK retro TWA terminal hotel (previously) turns the body of a vintage jet into a bar and museum space

salon d’automne: a neural network trained on cubist art produces an infinite stream of paintings, via Waxy 

a parade of earthly delights: scenes from recent annual aquatic celebrations of Jheronimus Bosch (previously) held on the waters of ‘s-Herogenbosch—the next event begins in mid-June

boğaziçi köprüsü

Construction finished some three and a half years later and coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the modern Republic of Turkey, work began on spanning the strait separating Europe from Asia, Anatolia from Thrace on this day in 1970. The suspension bridge was the first to cross the Bosporus in some twenty-five hundred years when Persian emperor Darius and later his son Xerxes separately commissioned pontoon bridges to connect the continents.

hiobsbotschaft

Though many of the doors of diplomacy were already closed to him for his raving support for Trump's foreign policy priorities and business ties seen as some as meddling in internal affairs and was very much isolated in Berlin, to be rid of the US outspoken ambassador in any sense is a bit of a relief-wondering whom might be lurking in the wings to replace him.
Grenell (previously) now becomes the Acting Director of National Intelligence, with oversight of America's seventeen spy agencies, replacing another term-limited appointee to the post, Trump having shown his preference for this management flexibility when it comes to filling vacancies in his cabinet since temporary appointments do not require the confirmation of the Senate. Despite Trump's disdain for his intelligence apparatus, some members of the congressional committees on operational security contend that his lack of intelligence background and organisational leadership is quite alarming (qualifying solely by dint of his loyalty) and signals further erosion in public confidence for these institutions-especially since, reportedly somehow, Grenell will manage both jobs.

quid pro quo-so little time, so much to know

Though the White House vehemently denies the claim and only knows the messager as an ex-congressman from California, a member of Julian Assange’s defence team, during a preliminary hearing at the Magisterial Court of Westminster, intimates that his client was visited by Trump cheerleader and noted Russian apologist Dana Rohrabacher while still given sanctuary at the Ecuadorian Mission to the UK back in 2017 at Trump’s biding to offer ‘a pardon or some other way out’ if Mister Assange goes along with the administration’s counter-narrative and state that Russia had no involvement in breaking into the Democratic National Committee's services during the presidential campaign and releasing compromising emails.
Although the tranche of messages were published on the same WikiLeaks platform, the charges that the US government is levying against Assange predate the DNC hack and exposed systemic war crimes perpetrated evinced by diplomatic cables and communiques, and his attorneys are challenging his extradition to America to face charges and a potential prison term of one hundred and seventy-five years. Assange maintains that he will never reveal a source, neither confirming nor denying Russian participation, and that he would never address the public through a third-party emissary.

‘lil proportional globes import/export map

Musing for Medium, geographer Tim Wallace takes us, courtesy of tmn, on a disorientating windshield tour of superannuated mapping and chart styles. Many of these data visualisations, in the same vein as persuasive, political maps, are sobering reminders that we did not invent obfuscation but are rather heirs to a long tradition of it and many of these representations are rightly consigned as forgotten but also serve to make one appreciate excellence in interpreting and communicating trends, facts and figures. Check out the whole collection including the “air mass potato,” “oversized presidential lollipop” and “swoopy arrow planet” maps at the link up top.

crtl-c

Via Slashdot, we are referred to the obituary of the recently departed computer scientist Larry Gordon Tesler (*1945), whom while possibly not a household name like other pioneers helped make invaluable contributions for human-machine interaction and defines how we interface with computers today.
While working at the Xerox’ Palo Alto Research Centre (also the birthplace of the mouse), Tesler developed the first object-based programming language, the first word processor with a graphical, WYSIWYG display and perhaps most famously and introduced the concept of copy-and-paste functionality. After leaving Xerox, Tesler went on to work for Apple—one of the architects behind the Lisa and the Newton—consulted for Yahoo!, Amazon and the genetics company 23andMe