pneumatic danube

The much vaunted hyper-loop looks like it have its ground-breaking ceremony soon, but not shuttling passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in California as originally envisioned, but on a circuit along the Danube (Donau) from Košice to Bratislava, Slovakia, to Vienna (Wien) and on to Budapest, Hungary. Driving, the journey would take around eight hours, but passengers aboard the hyper-loop trains would complete this route in just under an hour. That would be a pretty keen way to explore the region and be home again in the evening.

chicken of the sea

There is a species of gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus) native to Madagascar that has the common name of the “Baweng satanic leaf gecko.” Not only does its tail bear an uncanny resemblance to dropped foliage, so too does its whole body when not in motion.
The trade name was given to the lizard by enterprises that imported these unusual specimens from the island off the the south-eastern African coast to make them sound even more exotic as pets. Aside from sea-monkeys, I can’t think of an another incident where animals were reflagged by the pet-market, though I can come up with several times that animals destined for consumption were given fancier culinary brand-names. Not to fault responsible human caretakers whom did not create such a market to begin with, our duty to conserve natural habitats is all the more urgent so such fantastical creatures can thrive in the wild as well, and the ones who look like cigarette butts or fast-food wrappers don’t gain the advantage.

small wonder

In less than twenty-four hours after unleashing an artificially-intelligent chatbot into the wild, Tay’s handlers were quickly compelled to delete her social-media tracks and essentially ground the programme that’s supposed to emulate a teenage girl and was an experiment to enhance those automated customer-service trees that big corporations are wont to chase us up.
Equipped with the common-parlance of Millennials and at least a rudimentary sense of self- preservation (if not self- promotion), it is unclear—to me at least—whether Tay was assaulted en masse by every single troll on the internet and fought back in kind or whether studying the internet, Tay came up with her own provocations, calculated to draw maximum attention—with optimised offense. I feel it’s equally bad if exposure to an overwhelming human-traffic was so corrupting or the programming was faulty to begin with, but Tay progressed from innocent and rather saccharine to raunchy, vulgar and violent in practically no time at all—spouting off several choice rants that surpass what even the most polemic politicians and avid-commentators are capable of. I wonder if Tay was sat in a corner and given a chance to think about what she had said, or whether like her trail of hate, she was deleted as well. At this juncture, it might be hard to argue that Tay was conscious, but if self-aware teenage moderators ever come into existence, I do not think we can just start switching them off for repeating what their parents say or for holding the wrong opinions. What do you think?

digital colonialism

Via Superpunch, we learn about the unintended consequences of walled-gardens and the democratic outreach of the internet to places that have the infrastructure but not the monetary means to join the broader online community.
Magnanimously, some social media sites and one public resource have granted Angola (a former Portuguese colony and a place bigger than western Europe but does not seem to register much)—as they have done for other places in the developing world, access to a tier of web pages and applications at no cost to subscribers’ data-plans. Some would argue that this underprivileged glimpse askance of the open internet is not more beneficial than none at all, saying either you have to play by our rules or giving the disadvantaged a manipulative taste that builds brand loyalty.  In order to use the internet as it was intended, pirates in these places have transformed the network into secret coves and hidden harbours to distribute movies, music and television programmes—much to the concern and frustration of those that have extended these free but closed services, which can be mistook as the internet itself.

superposition or quantum of solace

Researchers in Finland may have just triggered a breakthrough in quantum-computing by harnessing  entanglement, the counter-intuitive phenomenon when pairs of atoms or photons become linked and even when separated by light-years act as one unit, a change to one instantaneously imparted to the other (the origin of the sceptical phrase “action at a distance”). As long as the pairs remain bonded, the entangled system can perform all possible permutations that that particular matrix can investigate at once, as opposed to the sequential fashion that traditional computers use—which is always finite no matter how much computational power is in the circuits.
Access to every solution simultaneously would of course be a boon and bane one and the same, since encryption would wither immediately and though perfectly predictive modelling would be possible, I would imagine that things could escalate very quickly. We’ve been spared or denied these consequences so far (so called quantum-computers aren’t really quantum-computers) because, thanks to the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty, these systems fall apart when one measures them. Nothing says that atoms or photons have to be binary—either a zero or a one, however, and could have a whole spectrum of energy levels. And like the non-sequential approach to problem-solving that quantum computers could essay, particles can also skip gears (as it were, shifting from reverse to fourth-gear without going through the intervening stages) and receiving the output by this method does not cause the entangled system to collapse.

masthead

Via Laughing Squid comes an interesting segment showing the evolution of the New Yorker magazine mascot, Eustace Tilley. His profile has graced the publication since its first printing but has changed many times over the decades, the original caricature appearing on the cover generally on the magazine’s anniversary. The raffish figure with a top hat and monocle was inspired by the mid-nineteenth century international man of fashion and social butterfly Alfred Grimod d’Orsay, the comte d’Orsay.

arboreal

This outstanding tubular concept dwelling, first proposed and subsequently dropped by investors back in 2013, may now have a new lease on life after glass and solar panel manufacturers expressed interest in Aibek Almassov’s designs.
I don’t know what the terrain is like in rural Kazakhstan but I would imagine that such retreats in the woods are the bailiwicks of the wealthy and privileged however much forested land was available. I do like the idea that the support column is a living tree that one lives with but not sold on the idea that such arrangements could have a small, hidden footprint on the environment with all the other things people need in their range, like roadways and plumbing at minimum. I suppose, however, such roosts could be logistically supported by delivery drones and be designed to self-sufficient and sustaining. If we could have such a leap-frogging lifestyle, that would be a pretty keen thing indeed.

brigadoon or memory and function (and memory)

All of Collectors’ Weekly show-and-tell sessions are highly recommended reading but I am really intrigued by this new take on nostalgia with a visit to the dystopian town of Scarfolk condemned to cycle forever through the decade of the 1970s, accompanied by council chair himself, Richard Littler.
With a truly twisted but inspired imagination, Littler has crafted endless ephemera and paraphernalia that could pass as authentic vintage posters and pamphlets, drawing on faded memories of growing up. Not that the artist had a traumatic childhood under the cynical, totalitarian regime he showcases, Littler, like us all, is able to distil those odd, incongruous moments—like the very special episodes when parental-guidance was suggested or the peculiar repertory of songs we sang in elementary school music class: Don Gato to be followed by a little number called If I had a Hammer—calling the practise proto-hauntology. Visit Collectors’ Weekly for the full interview and a curated gallery of Scarfolk’s artefacts.