vee-dub

Car guy Jesse Bowers shares a gallery of impressions from the Bob Baker Volkswagen Customer Appreciation Show, that happens every spring in Carlsbad California and is a forum for collectors and dedicated caretakers of vintage VW buses. There are only the older models to be found in the States as an import duty has been levied against Transporters for years, customs classifying the van as a truck. Let’s hope we’re on the right side of any coming trade-war.

late stage prometheus

From the vantage of a quarter of a century, Æon magazine looks back at the publication of one of the more often cited, derided and misunderstood publication that addresses post-moderism—Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.

Of course little-h history rolls on but Fukuyama recognised, presciently some could argue, that History in terms of the way society coalesces politically is exhausted and though we might be concoct something more noble and utopian that liberal democracy, there were few to no other directions to go for society—except to collapse in feudalism and rigid class hierarchies. The philosopher took the longer view than what occupied the geo-political landscape at the time of his book’s release—the collapse of the Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which some naively took as a mandate to ratchet up freedom and free markets. What do you think? While Fukuyama’s prediction is just that and perhaps fails to factor in technological redundancies and natural conclusions (disruptions that might render economics meaningless), it does grasp the shallowness of celebrity culture that embraces nihilism and the triumph of tribalism. The Last Man is a borrowing from Friedrich Nietzche whose insistence on transparency was apparently not deity-friendly but for those at the leading edge of the end of civilisation’s evolution, there are no trappings to adequately fill the void and people will wallow in whatever mediocrity and material awards and recognition that remains.

7x7

teardrop trailer: veteran and prisoner-of-war designs for a camper-caravan realised after eight decades

what wizardry is this: BLDGBlog contemplates spells against autonomy

it’s dangerous to go alone – take this: Zelda fan automates his home controlled by playing the ocarina

no wine before its time: Moldova declares wine to be a food, a status that beer has enjoyed in Germany for centuries

don’t be jimmy: Colorado mass-transit just adopted an awful, crass mascot as an negative example for passengers, very unlike NYC’s good-mannered feline

ronald the grump: Sesame Street characters respond to news that they are being defunded

inter-city express: passenger train passes through residential apartment block in Chongqing 

tissot’s indicatrix

Even including a nod to the West Wing “Big Block of Cheese Day” episode that introduced most of us the Gall-Peters projection that right-sizes Europe and reduces polar flair, the Guardian reports that some Boston schools are dropping maps that have perpetuated this alternative geography for the past five centuries. Developed by a German historian in 1974 after researching a novel equal-area map from a nineteenth century Scottish catographer, some distortion is unavoidable (here is another non-traditional approach) when translating a three-dimensional globe to a flat visualisations but depicts landmasses by their relative size and hopefully eliminates some of the implicit bias of the West, reinforced by the industry-standard Mercator projection.

keystone

An architectural studio called oiio, as Hyperallergic informs, has released design proposal for a skyscraper they’re calling the Big Bend that’s being hailed as the world’s longest structure—at 1,2 kilometres in the form of a long, skinny arch. In an already crowded Manhattan neighbourhood, this innovative proposal occupies a fairly small footprint yet manages to optimise space for working and living. I wonder what it would be like to like the Wonkavator at this address.

red earth

Via Colossal, we are introduced to the detailed ephemeral warp and weave of artist Rena Detrixhe, who uses the sifted red earth from outside her Tulsa, Oklahoma studio to create intricate mandalas of blankets and rugs.
This dirt was collected by hand and is symbolic of the “beauty and pride of this place and also a profound sorrow,” witness to the forcible relocation of Native American populations with the Trail of Tears, further land-grabs and displacement, extreme weather, the hunting to the brink of extinction of the bison and the environmental disaster that the loss of grassland precipitated in the form of the Dust Bowl and presently the land of fracking.  Be sure to visit the links up top to see more of her work and the creative process.

senor and sensibility

Similar in principle to the technique of phreaking to hijack switchboard exchanges, hackers may be finding other outlets to violate the sanctity and security of our phones, drones and other networked, autonomous appliances (and driverless carriages) by targeting them with blasts of very specific acoustic signals.
These sound waves are not necessarily a way of commandeering a device directly but is a way of altering its perceptions, blinding it or throwing it off balance, by skewing its senses—either resulting in paralysis or propelling itself into surrounding obstacles. What do you think?  I do not see the point of creating smart toasters, baby-monitors, refrigerators, umbrellas (that beg to be taken if the weather forecast deems it necessary), and microwave ovens if they open up a path of least resistance to our wired ecosystem and doubt the convenience justifies the risk.  Even changing the reading of a small component could set off a cascade of a catastrophic effects.

burn after reading

To honour the conclusion of Sunshine Week, our intrepid friends at Muckrock—serial freedom of information act (FOIA) filers are kicking back the with the second best disinfectants—provocatively named cocktails to take the edge of redaction and glomarisation, like the Shirley Temple (Herbert Hoover style), Deep State, Intelligence Report, and We Were Never Here. I’d add Mistakes Were Made, and just need to figure out the ingredients.
The infuriating “Glomar response” is when the government declares its refusal to speculate on an ongoing investigation or address matters of national security and comes from the name of a salvage vessel that the Central Intelligence Agency commissioned to recover a sunken Soviet submarine in 1975. The plausibly deniable boilerplate that would go on to preface many more secrets went, “We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed.”