eye-spy

The uncanny visual acuity of our friend the Mantis Shrimp (who’ve been blessed with a whole range of super powers including battle claws whose joust can create a sonic boom) could teach scientists how to make more advanced polarised lenses that could discriminate between the signatures of diseased and healthy tissue. Their compound eyes, described as hexnocular, allow the shrimp to communicate and flirt at a spectrum that no other creatures are privy to are inspiring engineers to replicate the optics which may lead to remarkable early detection of cancer and dementia, able to study what goes on in organs and neurons just with a superficial glance.

helen van patterson patton

From Nellie Oleson of Little House on the Prairie fame to Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt, Rebecca Jennings (via Kottke) presents an interesting examination and appreciation in defense of the oft maligned and neglected “Little Fancy Bitch Æsthetic.”
Usually inserted as foils to highlight how good and noble the protagonist is in comparison—without necessarily being a true villain and antagonising the main character—and never as a character to emulate. But there’s certainly more going on than just this surface prissiness or manipulative scheming and one has to wonder how it feels, beyond the fourth wall, to have been created and introduced as a plot device of deflected glory, like a sidekick that embodies the author’s repressed frilliness that’s really anything but frivolous. Can you name any more Little Fancy Bitch role-models?

time and tide

Via Colossal, we are treated to wonderful, modern and almost brutalist at times sandcastles of sculptor Calvin Seibert. Spending part of the summer beachcombing at Rockaway in New York, Seibert reflected on the nature of his temporary edifices and how their construction is a race against time that defies advanced planning and develops rather organically. Explore more of Seibert’s amazing geometric sculptures at the link above.

google doodle or quick draw mcgraw

We learn of another novel mentorship opportunity of machine-learning that we can all interact with the form of the experiment called Quick Draw from the search engine’s labs—thanks to the Presurfer. It’s a challenging few rounds of play with assignments that aren’t quite the easiest concepts to limn with a mouse but you should really give it a try—with the Control Voice shouting out guesses as you sketch like celebrity contestants on that television game show Win, Lose or Draw.
It always strikes me as a little strange to consider how—when engaging in this sort of crowd-sourced science, that we might be ultimately outwitting ourselves, but then again, one wouldn’t withhold wisdom from a fellow human. It’s quite a dilemma that were stumbling into. Relatedly, I noticed recently that the image search of Google has become a bit more literate of late: often I use it to search PfRC for pictures I can vaguely recall but have no idea what I saved them under and found if I typed in a colour—even if that had nothing to do with the filename but remembered that the background was purple, the query would yield what I was looking for. Also, I noticed without nudging that on my mobile device I could set not a temporal but rather a spatial reminder—like a shopping list that would go off when one’s in the supermarket. I wonder if those features, those talents came about all without the intervention of programmers and were the fruits of artificial intelligence. When that does happen, would we even realise it?

4x4

no bueno: a look at the evolution of the logo of a Tex-Mex-ish fast food chain via Super Punch

pleasure capsule: the pimped out Panthermobile, from the creator of KITT and the Bat Mobile, is finally street-legal—via Nag on the Lake

omoshirogara: the private propaganda kimonos en vogue from 1900 to 1945

ur-fascism: an examination of the key features of totalitarianism

scare-quotes

If you’re gullible enough to believe the so-called experts in their Ivory Towers, Oxford dictionaries has pronounced “post-truth” as the international word of the year. 

The formal definition for the adjective that beat out the terms alt-right, Brexiteer, and hygge and the polar opposite of last year’s honouring of an emoji reads “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Though seemingly born of the moment, post-truth has been in parlance since 1992 essay addressing the Iran-Contra Affair and the first Gulf War.

dead letter office or dashing off to the post

Listening to an editor bemoaning the lost art of correspondence whilst trying to turn his readership’s interest to the epistolary novel—or rather the collected letters of a particular personality, I agreed that there’d be little merit in or love for a compendium of tweets or the bulk of emails—although there’s plenty of room for sentiment and composure there that I imagine has as much to do with legacy as the fact that one’s retrospective isn’t immediately served up with each engagement.
I did, however, find myself contending the assertion that the letter is wholly unassailable. Not because there are notable exceptions in our untaxing communications landscape since it’s always a personal choice whether or not to devote more or less energy in sharing a story, but rather due to another format for whom the rumours of death are at least slightly premature strikes me as proof that the art form is not yet moribund, and I’m given to wonder if the lowly blog isn’t somehow the successor to sending out missives. Not quite journalism and not quite a diary, maybe this hybrid, a bit abused and sometimes the subject of ridicule for being outmoded and without the audience shares of other social media, is letter writing transmogrified. The updates and outreach of that the retired format is of course not the exclusive reserve of blogging but I think that maybe the notion behind crafting something—hopefully thoughtful and worthwhile for both author and audience—well compliments the deferred satisfaction of reaching across time in penning a letter, even one that goes undelivered.

don’t know much geology, don’t know much psychology

In Chichibu Japan there is a lovingly curated collection of stones that resemble faces—and not just your usual run-of-the-mill pareidolia either but specific celebrities—amassed over a half a century.
I know that the forces that shape evolution and stuff that looks like things is very different and human agency is limited—though bias is magnified—in both, but taking a brief tour of this museum made me think of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and his particularly convincing though gentle as one arrives at the conclusion all on one’s own of the fishermen and the samurai crabs of the Heike clan. Haunted by superstition and ancient lore, people were compelled to toss back any of their catch whose shell resembled a human face and over the centuries, human intervention helped select for this trait. What do you think? It’s interesting how we will automatically prise out patterns.