tobacco mosaic

Graphic artist Eleanor Lutz’ latest project is a series of animated viral trading cards, that teach about the infectious agents’ properties and causes one to better appreciate these hauntingly complex structures. Such pathogens, liminal and not easy to distinguish from vegetable and mineral and I think that notion of an autonomous and adaptive poison imparts them with their sinister reputation, but as persistent as these pestilences are, our bodies have become ever more resilient in rebuffing countless and non-stop assaults. This piece comes to us by way of the outstanding Kottke, who has introduced us, to our delight, to Lutz’ works previously.

veranstaltungsraum oder moments at the museum

Last week, I chanced upon the Heimat- (homeland is not really an equivalent phrase—attachment or identity, perhaps) and Industrial-Historical Museum of the Wiesbadner borough of Biebrich and went in for a look.

The formerly independent town on the shores of the Rhein is still an important manufacturing centre in the region, but the focus of the permanent collection mostly had the focus and reach back to the eighteenth century and the creation of the Duchy of Orange-Nassau with a lot of interesting ephemera of the age and spiky hats. One of the more interesting pieces on display was a chest (eine Truhe) with its complicated, artful locking mechanism revealed.

There was also a special exhibit of the works of native painter and relative unknown Friedrich Carl Scheidemantel with many pictures in the Rheinromanik genre, contemplative idylls and castle ruins cast against dramatic skies, and also many, like the ensemble here pictured, of the cartoon-medieval that depicted the expedition (again with a healthy dose of license and anachronism) of Otto the Great to the fields of Lombardy, which helped him consolidate power and assert himself Holy and Roman Emperor of the Germans.

prêt-à-porter or this is not even my final form

Via fellow fashionista Nag on the Lake, we were pleased to discover the elegant solutions to some of the most vexing equations of the cat-walk in artist Jonathan Zawada’s inspired gallery of runway models called Fashion plus Maths. Models, heavily-redacted documents and beer-cosies all are on a collision-course to deliver some choice collections of haute-couture. These humorous stylings remind me of how vintage apparel from Peter Max could be described as the offspring of Art Nouveau and Haight-Ashbury.

allthing or all that’s fit to print

Boing Boing’s Iceland correspondent reports on a wonderful and antithetical response to the scourge of off-shoring and out-sourcing (and indeed even proxy-wars) in the plan, having already secured parliamentary endorsement, to make the country a designated safe haven for the freedoms of expression and information.

Advocates, who hope to create a Switzerland of bits, hope that this stance will compel other governments to be more transparent and forth-coming about legislation and its enforcement. Cobbling together some of the best whistle-blower protection and anti-censorship laws from different jurisdictions—for instance, the attorney-client privilege that any conversation with a journalist enjoys in Belgium or the public registry of all government documents (even classified ones) in Estonia, is creating a forum where witness to corruption can come forward without fear of reprisal. As if meaningful reform and mindful democracy weren’t occasion enough, perhaps this new media landscape might be able to attract internet start-ups to recover some of the jobs-prospects lost to Iceland’s former dignities where laws are not biased towards copy-holders and a select few with political heft—besides, surely the land of fire and ice is probably an ideal place to operate with a smart labour pool and totally green geothermal energy to power it all.

wright-on, wright brothers

Dangerous Minds shares nice appreciation of a psychedelic and affirming little vintage activity book from environmentalist and artist Peter Max of paper airplanes to cut out, fold and let soar. The designs feature playful short messages, like Today is Your Day and I can’t talk, I’m laughing. Be certain to check out Dangerous Minds for more groovy curations to explore and inspire.

vulgate

Previously we’ve looked into how emojis are rendered differently across different platforms, a sort of diglossic code-switching between sender and receiver, should they have different devices, but here’s a deeper, academic investigation into the potential for misinterpretation by the differences in emotion, sentiment that they signal. Hannah Miller’s thesis abstract is pretty interesting. Via Kottke’s latest batch of quick links, one supposes that through this study (provided that competition extends into the future and allows the time needed for dialogues and regional accents to foment) the way the symbols are used might fracture from the mother language into increasingly non-mutually intelligible and distinct languages, sort of like the Romance tongues emerging as splintered versions of Latin.

blimey or yet another hierarchically organised oracle

Happy Mutant Rob Beschizza relays the news that the venerable but faded internet pioneer Yahoo! (the backronym above) is being courted by the UK’s broadsheet, the Daily Mail.
At first, I felt the perennial (or ephemeral) disparagement that I always put off having held the same email address the past two decades.  I admit I’m a little protective of my virtual address, although I am recognising that the two tabloids probably are very deserving of one another, running the same sensational, catch-penny content and attendant sponsored content. In the end, the change in management, if it comes through, probably won’t signal a change in mentality that has not already been slipping for some time. What do you think? One ought not expect rewards for loyalty—and lethargy in not wanting the inconvenience is surely its own, but the steadfast have been receiving less and less in return.

rebound or like water for octane

There was a 2001 episode of The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off series from the X-Files, titled as above (after its parent’s flair for headings, though probably even the most dedicated fans could only conjure up “Post-Modern Prometheus”) above the government’s suppression, at the behest of the petroleum industry, an automobile that could run on water. The inventor and the Gunmen, however, ended up destroying the prototype over the realisation that having cars with unlimited mileage on a free and limitless resource would see the entire planet paved over.
This reasoning is a perfect illustration of what’s called the Jevons effect (or Jevons’ paradox)—named after the English economist William Stanley Jevons—positing that while technology might increase the efficiency of using a resource (the steam-engine and coal in the original case), progress in the long run does not lower consumption as growth, facilitated, increases demand. Scholars are still not sure whether these conditions hold or are unsustainable—a sort of moral panic for ecologists, whether the Gunmen were short-sighted in their assessment or whether, prescient, the move towards tele-presence would have been stifled without scarcity—but the warning is certainly a fair one, to be ignored at one’s own peril. No condemnation of progress or pursuit of greater production, similar unintended consequence might be said to arise out of diet (guilt-free) foods or bracketing a motorway with more lanes that only leads to more congestion.  What do you think?  Did Jevons take the right tack or was taken the underprivileged view that progress would always be steam-powered?