late-stage parochialism

Even if Donald Trump is impeached just after a bald two months into his presidency, he’ll still have attained his life-long aspiration of being a bona-fide billionaire (even if the denomination becomes on the level Silvio Berlusconi’s quintillions in lira)—thanks in no small part to the bully-pulpit and the Gordian knot of business connections that he and his cabinet members are incapable of extricating themselves from. By way of loophole, that failing pile of garbage that dares call itself a news outlet is inviting all of us to help triangulate more synapses in the some fifteen hundred side-deals so far identified and what’s anything but transparent and independent.

executive order 9066

Via Bad Ethnography, here is a moving and powerful narrative of the experience of the more than one hundred thousand American citizens of Japanese extraction made to relocate from the Pacific coast to internment camps in the interior of the country under very austere and uncertain conditions as told with the help of the keen lens of Dorthea Lange.
Under contract for the American Farm Security Administration during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression the pioneering photographer is probably best known for those iconic images, but Lange also sought capture this tragic episode when people’s loyalty was conflated with their ancestry and both were held in contempt in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbour. Germans and Italians were also detained but in far fewer numbers. Her photographs were seized however for being obviously critical of the forced evacuation policies and remained censored and unknown to the public until 2006. The whole exhibit is well-curated and makes effective use of the extensive amount of scenes from that time and personal stories. All of it is a chilling reminder of extraordinary times and the responsibility that comes with might but one of Lange’s early photographs of children reciting the pledge of allegiance just before being dispatched to a camp far from home delivers an especially poignant message of prejudice.

taking owls to athens

I knew a lot of the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder were allegorical and depicted the foibles and follies of human conventions and his Nederlandse Spreekwoorden—translated by turns as the Flemish Proverbs or The Blue Cloak (for that shock of colour in the middle of the scene, where a woman is shrouding her cuckolded husband so he doesn’t see her adulterous ways—pulling the wool over one’s eyes) is no exception. I was unfamiliar with the fact, however, that some one hundred ten idioms were represented in the painting, many with near equivalents in English, like swimming against the tide, to be armed to the teeth, killing two birds with one stone or banging one’s head against a brick wall. Some of the bawdier sayings also captured have fortunately become outmoded.

motherboard or decision-tree

Applying the most advanced and universally accepted principles of neuro-science (arising out of the hubris that computational powers could begin to map out every possible neural daisy chain and we’d soon understand how the brain works) to a system that humans (as inventors) understand better by degrees, the microprocessor yielded some fruitfully disappointing results.
The failure of the model of a sophisticated neural network (not a neural network itself but the parameters by which one is made) to understand arcade games—despite the demonstrations that machine-learning was able to give with little to no supervision—illustrates, I think, that despite the mechanical and philosophical differences between brains and circuits perhaps we still don’t have the framework and the context to glean meaningful, correlated results. What do you think?  Perhaps we cannot analyse the system we are in with the quiver of tools arising from the same.

skyfall ranch

BBC Future shares the story of the unassuming retreat called Drumintoul Lodge in the Scottish highlands that during World War II was covert host to an international commando school under the auspices of the Special Operations Executive for resistance fighters from all countries threatened by the Axis powers, defectors and spies.
The campus was particularly a good training ground to its contingent of Norwegian guerrillas that matriculated on this estate in the Cairngorms as the barren, wind-swept plateau was a lot like the native homeland that they sought to protect. The Norwegians trained in sabotage techniques which proved vital in ultimately preventing the Nazis from developing a nuclear bomb. Deuterium (heavy water) is needed to moderate fission reactions (it being less prone to strip away neutrons and enable a run-away reaction) so the detonation could be controlled and only one hydro-electric plant in the world was capable of producing heavy water at the time—in Nazi-occupied Norway. Raids that operatives trained for in Drumintoul were launched against the facilities at the base of the Rjukan waterfall in Telemark, which stopped production capability.

kwyjibo

We discover, through the work of faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari, that among many things, The Simpsons had aired its pilot episode on this day in 1990.
The episode, Bart the Genius, was written before Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire which was considered a special and not to many a canonical instalment, and therefore doesn’t include Santa’s Little Helper, and is the first one to include the opening sequence. Having cheated on an intelligence test, Bart finds himself sent to a school for the gifted and talented, although quickly discovered, he found himself inspired to turn the phrase “eat my shorts” and classify a kwyjibo as a dumb, balding North American ape with no chin.

7x7

cryptolocker: knowing it would face the loss of all its records otherwise, a community college ponied up a hefty ransom to hackers

call me gavin: revolutionary presidential grandson who bridged the gap between Walt Whitman and the Summer of Love, commune-founder and muse Chester A Arthur III was quite an astounding individual

by any memes necessary: chat-bot and desktop assistant that communicates exclusively through GIFs

tilting at windmills: decommissioned, obsolete turbine blades repurposed as architectural elements

hyper-realism: painted portraits that surpass photography

back in the habit: a Dutch fashion designer collaborated with the Dominican order to update their traditional garb

weepuls: the story behind those promotional balls of fuzz with googly eyes from the 1970s and 80s

tranvía

As part of a broader discussion on borders and boundaries, Citylab presents the fascinating semi-legendary story of the streetcar line that used to connect the metropolises of El Paso, Texas with Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua as it evolved from mule to monorail (proposed at least on paper) over seven decades.
The trolley-tracks were finally dismantled in the early 1970s—when many municipalities were abandoning streetcars and in some cases mass-transit altogether—at the urging of shopkeepers on the Mexican side who complained that it was too easy and tempting for their customers to do their shopping across the border, but there were hundreds of intervening stories to gather and tell, which a member of the El Paso city council is trying to do, also hoping to restore if not a transnational trolley (and they’re not giving up on that dream without a fight) at least a corridor of public transport with vintage streetcars.