connect the dots

Public Domain Review features a brilliant ninth century French manuscript called the Aratea that’s one of the earliest known examples of the calligram—the artful arrangement of text to form an image, whose form is part of the message. There are two parallel poems on astronomy, how to chart the stars, track the seasons and the myths behind the gods and heroes transposed, scattered in the firmament, on each page with the upper verse set in the shape of the constellation under discussion. The red dots correspond to the stars’ positions in each figure.

savannahs and toygers and bengals oh my

Bred with the hopes of inspiring cat fanciers to care more for their domestic pets’ wild cousins, Nag on the Lake introduces us to this world of feline hybrids.
These experimental breeds, recognised by most of the professional cat credentialing associations, and who knew that there was one called the United Feline Organisation (UFO)—and included in most registries, contain widely varying amounts of wild blood, with the toy tiger’s stripes the result of careful husbandry of ordinary tabbies. The savannah, however, is a cross between a house cat and the sleek African serval and the Bengal is a generational mix of domestic familiars and Asian leopards. As striking as they are, we’d be happiest with a foundling or one whom chooses us. Visit the link for an informative video presentation and further information.

down runter

An interesting featured article ostensibly on an army recruitment campaign imploring Australian colonists to fight for metropolitan Britain during World War I re-introduces us to the broader, meticulous and vast curation of unusual maps by Big Think contributor Frank Jacobs.
Like many in the collection, the propaganda illustrated on this broadsheet evokes the it could happen here trope with the continent rebranded as New Germany—with Kaisermania just off the southern coast. Ironically, as this sort of panic was not firmly ensconced in the realm of possibilities with the Great War being one of attrition, the outposts that Imperial Germany had in the vicinity of Australia were immediately taken by New Zealand and Australian forces as soon as war was declared, rebranding Neu-Mecklenburg and Neu-Pommern as New Ireland and New England respectively. The Treaty of Versailles formally stripped Germany of its colonial holdings and with Africa and Asia already unduly apportioned among the other European powers, the only land left up for grabs for a resurgent Nazi Germany was Antarctica.

brick and mortar

Via the Daily Dot, we discover that Lego- compatible adhesive tape is on offer for pre-order and will be ready to ship sometime this summer, having far surpassed their original fund-raising goal multiple times over. Brilliantly any surface can be made Lego-friendly, enhancing building possibilities and seems to us a far better alternative to modifying and replacing components than some boring old 3D printer. Founded in 1934 in Denmark, the company’s name is a play on the Danish phrase leg godt—“play well.”

peripheral

Thinker and inventor of predictive texting, the auto-complete feature (that’s quite different from psychography or automatic writing) Ben Medlock, writing for Æon magazine, poses the question of whether the singularity can transpire so long as artificial intelligence is something disembodied. I wonder if we need physical extensions and limitations to achieve self-awareness.
I guess this is another way to approach the floating man conjecture of Avicenna that suggests that without being able to confirm the fact that we have a body, sensibly, we might not naturally assume that there’s any distinction between internal and external.  Our living and mortal structures are of course a veritable Ship of Theseus, dynamic and continuously in need of upkeep and refurbishment and that to me suggests that intelligence also needs a way to sense time—through aging, with some going so far as theorising that the spark of consciousness arises out of awareness that the intellect and its support-systems is liable to being drug down by the same rules of entropy that causes everything’s consummation. I wonder if the immortal and the incorruptible have, experience intelligence in the same way. Is it a question of kind or degrees? Maybe the gap is always growing narrower but will always be there. Of course we can give a robot any sort of body that we chose but that casing, input/output device is something different than a feeling, corporeal form.

pleistocene park

Having seen the full documentary on German television over the weekend with H, I was pleased to see the coverage of enormous and complex conservation project reproduced by The Atlantic. Reaching back to the dawn of human civilisation and the retreat of the glaciers that spawned the shared myths and memories of the great deluge and Atlantis (we’ve no tales of advancing sheets of ice and winters that span æons) the Pleistocene Age ushers in human society, perhaps developed as a way to cope with the cold and privation.
The success of humans upset the balance of that Nature had cultivated for far longer than the fifty thousand years since the Age of Man, hunting most of the megafauna of the plains to extinction. The grazing of huge beasts adapted to the climate, corralled by predators, ensured that the tundra maintained its character and did not give up its permafrost in an uncontrolled catastrophic fashion. Some determined residents of Siberia have begun a massive land-management project that aims to restore the grasslands and the integrity of their local biome by reintroducing elk, bison, and maybe even mammoths in the near future. Similar conservation efforts are beating back the advance of the desert on the plains of Africa and have even allowed cattle ranchers and elephants to coexist. It seems a bit counter-intuitive at first but if committed and managed correctly could save heath and prairie and keep sequestered carbon out of the atmosphere.

5x5

crate & barrel: a glimpse inside the outfitteries that design and deliver prefabricated Irish Pubs around the world, via Boing Boing

la gioconda: researchers, including a relative of the Bishop of Bling, in Germany conclude Mona Lisa’s smile means she happy

inception: more recursive, panoramic landscapes from Aydın Büyüktaş, via Kottke 

pacific rim: demonstration of robots controlled by the hemispheres of two separate volunteers’ brains

ligature: a clever type face that reacts intuitively to the characters that precede and follow 

rentier economy

Considering Dear Leader’s fondness for non-committal licensing out his word and bond to resorts, vodka diploma-mills and other enterprises that he’s not particularly invested in (but only too happy to put ahead of national interests on a geopolitical arena), we discover that the apples don’t fall from the tree. Dear Leader’s son, Junior—aside from running his father’s business empire in trust, is an avid public-relations consultant for an Oklahoma firm that transmogrified its failed business model (polling via PDAs) into the modus operandi of an unabashed patent-troll, accusing multitudes of infringement.
Thanks to Junior’s influence and family-trademark unrelenting, uncompro- mising attacks that would wear on the stamina and resistance of anyone, most defendants—without owing to being in the wrong—will just settle and pay Junior to go away, since there’s no such provision like having the loser pay court fees in America to discourage frivolous lawsuits. The fact that Junior went on record praising this firm as an innovator is awful enough (betraying a failure to grasp basic contemporary concepts about how the interwebs work) and grows exponentially worse considering that’s Junior’s father, Dear Leader, gets to appoint the agency executives that run the US Patent Office and determine its future direction and what kind of claims it will tolerate and honour.