material sciences or teflon don

The ever brilliant Colossal featured a keen and imaginative report on a research project—illustrated with some very fine visual effects, wherein an optics laboratory has imbued metallic surfaces with the quality of hydrophobia to the degree that water droplets roll and bounce away—in a mesmerising fashion, almost water globules floating away in microgravity.
Unlike the conventional ways of creating this effect with chemical coatings—which can be toxic and wear off over time, the scientists etch nanoscopic landscapes into the surface with precision lasers, which apparently resists degradation. A little speculation quickly leads to all sorts of possible applications, from pipes and plumbing—sanitation stations that don’t need extra water to be kept clean—better rust-proofing and airplanes that won’t require being chemically de-iced. I wonder what other special properties that very fine texturising techniques could awaken in ordinary materials. Maybe tiling and quilting a surface, on a scale otherwise undetectable, might make everyday materials rather supernatural: housings and cases and building materials capable of absorbing and retaining heat, an efficient insulator employed instead of conventional refrigeration, better acoustics, germ free surfaces without antibiotics, made too slippery in microscopic dimensions, or even plain old counter tops and banisters that could channel energy like fibre-optics.

blockchain or turing-complete

Æon Magazine poses a pretty arresting question, siphoned through the spelunking machinery and quarrying activities that underpins the integrity and flow of alternative, shadow currencies: are humans ready to jettison the managers and middle-men for autonomous companies that need minimal human supervision?

Already on the market-place, there are sorts of collaborative commons—and there have been for decades, and while both producers and distributors benefit from these exchanges, there are still hefty franchise-fees. Platforms modelled in the same way as those that handle the transactions of crypto-monies (made sufficiently advanced) could facilitate and decentralise all these sought-after connections. Managers and his or her retainers (bankers, pimps, planters, lawyers, bureaucrats, brokers, auditors, real-estate and travel agents) are generally installed to maintain the integrity of their business—however, what usually results is the exact opposite, consumed with greed and the insecurity of competition, but this hierarchy could be easily flattened out—though I suspect that human nature, being what it is (not content to be a miner forty-niner) might quickly ruffle things again. What do you think? Are we ready for this sort of democracy? It’s not that were facing the prospect of sacrificing our CEOs and COOs to appease machines—it is merely a shift in infrastructure and I doubt we’ll get that choice when the time comes, but abandoning vanities whose time may have past. The article is a very thoughtful one and surely worth investigating.

métal hurlant

Via Neatorama comes the outstanding retro-future visions of Dan McPharlin, which pay a special homage to the science-fiction and fantasy paperback covers, video-game artwork and album covers that he grew up with.
There’s a certain impressionistic grittiness that is somehow more bonding—not just in a nostalgic sense, than the technically refined and regurgitated (so we don’t get too distracted I suppose) with the slap-dash marketing that adorns most things nowadays. The American magazine of fantasy fiction, Heavy Metal whose genre sponsored this particular style, was itself inspired in the mid 1970s by a French publication called Métal Hurlant, howling metal. Be sure to check out the links for an interview with the artist and more sublime studies of the imagination.

bicameral

Wanting to improve my geo-political senses, I put together this map with the legislative chambers represented by the banners, emblems and logos (space permitting) where they are physically placed. There is of course some bi-location in many spots, and it was interesting to find that most national assemblies, from the Alþing to the Duma, do have their own symbols. Where there was a distinction, I chose the lower lower house—the people’s chamber, but for a few countries I could only find the coat-of-arms to use.  Here is a nice peek on the inside of some of these institutions.  A few devolved regional governments are also included, as well as a few peculiars.

adage or open-source

Cunningham’s Law is seemingly one of those pithy, defeatist principles that have been named and carry aloft some sense of proprietorship and savoir, stating that the best way to solicit accurate information (in the Information Age) is by baiting one’s audience with the low-hanging fruit of patently false propositions.
Of course, certain types are better lured by certain honey-pots of howling inaccuracy and I doubt a lot of contentiousness and incivility stem from one wanting to get at an elusive truth and not a sturdy and well-buffeted opinion. Howard Cunningham, however, for whom the law is named is not just some rhetorician but the programmer, computer-scientist and Happy Days father who developed the user-editable platform known as the wiki. This potential for disabusing, edification and promulgation launched thousands of websites including of course Wikipedia, which has proved not only enlightening but also worth protecting. I’m sort of ambivalent about such proverbs—like Murphy’s Law (named for Candice Bergen) or the Sportscasters’ Curse, but I am sure that there’s a grain of truth to be uncovered behind them. Cunningham, at least through his creation that he gave away freely because he could not imagine anybody wanting to pay for something so basic but useful, and his law have become a grand social experiment with plenty of bait and bounty.

precept, percept

Via the indefatigably interesting Mind-Hacks, I found out that American National Public Radio is launching a new, fresh programme called Invisibilia (Latin for all things that can’t be seen) that aims to investigate human behaviour and motives through narratives, interviews and research into realms that may shy away from direct observation. This is certainly a series that I want to tune in to.

appellation

Three of the slain cartoonists in Paris were also famed for designing rather bawdy, irreverent labels for a few select wine-makers in a tradition that covered four decades of vintages.

the adventures of strelka & belka

Collectors’ Weekly has a nice recollection of the canine-persuasion’s contributions to space flight. Laika was certainly not without many, many dogged comrades that participated in the Soviet space programme and their lives, careers and celebrity are being compiled in a new book, whose editor is also the subject of this show-and-tell.