minority report or criterion theatre

Piccadilly Circus is being transformed into an experimental panopticon, Gizmodo reports, with hundreds of cameras embedded in LED billboards to inform the advertising canvas what it suspects the passer-by what might take an interest in.
Algorithms have a reputation for being either judgy or tone-deaf by turns and of course one can ignore the ploys and constant pelting—up to a certain limit—but to be forever mischaracterised in public and in private and to have false assumptions made about oneself would probably quickly grow intolerable. How would omnipresent network of consumer surveillance see you? Though the zealous marketing-managers behind this digital street experience will probably never have to confront the abject horror of a colossal erectile-dysfunction commercial or an exercise-campaign was meant specifically for them and the rest of us are made to adopt and accept this latest form of oppression, perhaps that discomfort for prejudice will resonate with a broader demographic and will engineer empathy for the marginalised who face racism and discrimination all the time.

toponym

Via fellow internet caretaker Messy Nessy Chic, we discover that lexicographer Lars Petrus has undertaken the task of defining the creative names for IKEA furniture and accessories. Many items are named for geographical features in Småland, but many other are quite abstract and poetical, like NUTID (present tense) and ÖDMJUK (humble). What are some of your favourites?

ручной труд

Calvert Journal, through the lens of two individuals directly impacted by the prohibition, outlines the infamous Article 253 from Russia’s labour code that makes it illegal for Russian women to pursue a whole tranche of trades, nearly five hundred professions that are focused around manual labour.
The vestigial and conflicting ordinance—dating from Soviet times when the state took a preternatural interest in the reproductive powers of its female population and wanted to shield them from back-breaking work and indeed contains provisions to protect women from workplace discrimination—broadly spares women from potentially hazardous work and specifically stipulates that women on the job cannot be made to lift objects heavier that ten kilograms more than twice per hour—among other things—but has translated in modern times as way to exclude women acquiring and making a living through practical skills and becoming a member of a well-paying guild, like plumbing or carpentry or coach-driving. Though many seem contently unaware of the law, it still has wide effects beyond the labour-market with many Russian women growing up without practical repair skills.

mon calimari

Having undergone a profound image transformation thanks to science and exploration—though the ocean depths remain a mystery, giant squid and their smaller cousins have gone from the monsters of mythology (consider the trope of the land octopus) to objects of fascination and even adoration, with some advocates suggesting that they replace the giant panda as the World Wildlife Fund’s spokes-animal. Nautilus treats us to tantalising glimpse (for that’s all the headway we’ve made) into behaviour and culture of a group of cephalopods via the way they communicate through incredible control over their pigmentation, and not just for camouflage. Their intellect is so alien from our own it seems in ways unknowable, but it’s as if they wear their neurons on their sleeves and meaning and intent come through mediated by a visual language.

österreich entscheidet

Polls close in Austria mid-afternoon local time today and the some six million eligible voters in a country of nine million seem posed to elevate foreign minister and ÖVP (Österreichische Volkspartei, the Austrian People’s Party) chair Kylo Ren Sebastian Kurz to chancellor and head the coalition of conservative, anti-immigration and anti-EU factions to form a government, dispensing with the need for seeking cooperation and compromise with minority liberal voices in the Bundesversammlung. This snap-election is the conclusion of a series of inconclusive votes that occurred last year and were revisited over the summer but failed to break a statuary threshold needed to validate the outcome. The thirty-one year old Kurz has pledged that his party’s platform reflect his personal crusade and frightening coincides with Vienna taking the helm of the rotating European Union presidency—and just as Brexit arrangement are finalised, associates of a single opinion that Brussels meddles far too much in national affairs and that the UK is better off outside of the customs bloc.

sopwith camel

The municipal airport serving Sonoma county was renamed in 2000 in honour of cartoonist and long-time Santa Rosa resident Charles M Schultz (Sebastopol to be specific whom Schultz created a contemporary of Charlie Brown and Linus van Pelt called Five for short but whose full name was 555 plus the postal code of the town, 95472, which is one of the few restrictions, numbers, on naming children in American) we discover thanks to Just a Car Guy, adorned with the logo of Snoopy outfitted in flying ace attire and piloting his dog house.
The former army airfield is not only a tribute to the creator of Peanuts and his cast of characters but also the chief staging area for California’s forestry protection against and where the firefighting aircraft battling the wildfires ravaging the state deploy from.  Sadly, we learn the Schultz’ homestead was also consumed by the fires along with untold thousands of others.

heat sink

A group of clever researchers have managed to create a pump and containment system out of ceramics—a material capable of withstanding very high temperatures but usually too brittle to take such stresses—that can handle a volume of white hot molten tin and this breakthrough is potentially revolutionary in the arena of renewable energy by allowing solar cells and wind farms the opportunity to off-load its surplus power in times of excess for when its needed.
Storing energy for later use—as sunshine and blustery days are often at cross-purposes and rarer yet correspond to our peak electrical demands—has attracted a raft of creative and novel means for saving power from batteries, to expanding the electrical grid with idle cars as active members, to the potential energy of gravity. All of these are brilliant schemes but a lot is lost in terms of efficiency—which is where the liquid tin (or metal of one’s choice comes in—tin is especially a good candidate because its liquid state lasts over a range of several hundred degrees kelvin before it boils away) because in the exchange of excess energy to keep the metal hot and later withdrawing on that deposit, because of the laws of thermodynamics, very little (relatively) is lost and higher storage temperatures yield higher storage capacity.

charge-parity symmetry

Though the search for non-baryonic “dark matter” that accounts for around thirty percent of the composition of the Cosmos (compared to the around five percent of the familiar luminous matter—all else is radiant or dark energy, astronomers believe) continues unabated, researchers can claim a significant victory in having found the remaining, heretofore undetected “normal” matter of the Universe. Of that conjectured five percent of the total, only an astonishingly small ten percent could be definitively pointed to by star-gazers. That missing matter (or at least a good chuck of it), however, seems to have been found through two independent studies that suggest it is diffusely spread out over immense distances in a network of intergalactic filaments of hot gas. The nature of these strands that link the cosmic web opens yet another mystery to investigate.