to serve man or six tablespoon lemon turn beans

One computer science researcher, apparently seeking the answer to the question what might be on the daily menus of the future as alternatives to soylent green, spoon-fed an open-source neural network a bunch of cookbooks and food blogs to see if it could learn what things go together and what things do not. This was not the next you-got-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate break-through yet—perhaps far from it—and the machine’s initial recipes seem to suggest that there’s a bit of a learning curve and that robots might not be welcome in the kitchen, at least not with creative-control:

Beef Soup With Swamp Peef and Cheese
Chocolate Chops & Chocolate Chips
Crimm Grunk Garlic Cleas
Beasy Mist
Export Bean
Spoons In Pie-Shell, Top If Spoon and Whip the Mustard
Chocolate Pickle Sauce
Whole Chicken Cookies
Salmon Beef Style
Chicken Bottom
Star *
Cover Meats
Out Of Meat
Completely Meat Circle
Completely Meat Chocolate Pie
Cabbage Pot Cookies
Artichoke Gelatin Dogs
Crockpot Cold Water

respondeat superiores

For the benefit of those playing along at home and struggling to keep up, Ashley Feinberg and Anna Merlan have compiled a comprehensive menagerie of Dear Leader’s and Fearless Leader’s supporting cast. There’s a brief biography of each member of this network whose twisted little personalities perfectly blend paranoia, persecution and narcissism and of course enable the narrative of their bosses, whom are sadly not the American voting public.

moveable type

Via the Everlasting Blört we’re introduced to the intricate typological handiwork of Florian Schommer and his Das Kreative Haus collection of animated, alphabetic architecture. The artist hails from Hamburg and I could well imagine these multi-storey letters built in certain quarters of that bustling city. The pictures are mesmerising at first glance but then after a moment all the detailed activity begins to come across also.

if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu

Dear Leader’s viceroy is certainly at liberty to conduct his social life as he wishes and if he adheres to the same rules that governed his dining habits fifteen years ago about not eating unchaperoned with a woman that’s not his wife (which is quite a specific Venn diagram)—construed from the quote “if there’s alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room standing next to me”—it’s his business.
It’s fine even if that betrays a strange idea about what goes on in restaurants and a very conservative, traditional view of gender and identity politics. Infidelity shouldn’t be the default. It stops becoming a choice, however, when that attitude prevents him from meeting one-on-one with a female counterpart, lawyer or aide. The boys’ clubs of business and politics never went anywhere and his superior is a sexual predator, granted, but harbouring such stringent rules for dealing with half of the population disengages and takes opportunities away from us all.

payload

SpaceX achieved a potentially stupendous milestone for rocketry and space exploration by successfully and safely recycling the spent stages of a recovered booster rocket, which always seemed like a big waste as they peeled away. If this feat can be repeated—which seems likely, it will significantly reduce the cost of putting people and supplies in orbit and beyond.

bauarbeit oder all in all, you’re just another brick in the wand

Though certainly more palatable than the choice of say the Binladin Group as building partners, two German construction firms are willing to court massive public-relations blowback domestically and abroad and perfectly illustrate how the failure to learn from history dooms us all to repeat it by submitting contract bids to build Dear Leader’s wall, the Local reports. What do you think? The contract is supposed to be awarded in mid-April.  This partition is other than the frontiers that divided post-war Germany and Europe but seems to strongly go against the narrative of integration over nationalism and protectionism and Russia was willing to tear it down once before.

cloud atlas

For the first time in three decades the World Meteorological Organisation, Kottke informs, has added several new formal classifications for cloud formations—called species, and their supplementary features. The gallery of images is quite striking and worth perusing. First published in 1896, these compendia were important training tools for predicting the weather and developing a standard nomenclature to communicate forecasts without always having the pictorial key at hand, much like the complex and exacting language of vexillology.

happy little clouds

Via Nag on the Lake, we learn about a dedicated curator has compiled an unofficial site which features all four hundred and three landscape lessons taught by Bob Ross in thirty-one seasons on PBS’s Joy of Painting.
Formerly a master sergeant in the US Air Force, Ross often found himself in screaming-matches and situations that called on him being anything other than meditative and reflective. One day, however, he caught an episode of the Magic of Painting that inspired him to champion the same cause and vowed never to raise his voice in anger again. Named after the two inch background brush that was the go-to brush in the artist’s quiver, the site is not only a fine nice tribute to those awed by the creative process and his calming demeanour but also a resource for those aspiring to learn to paint.