kinder überraschung

Citing serious privacy concerns that not only include the harrowing prospect of potential kidnappers tracking one’s children’s routine and whereabouts but also concerns that parents may be using the devices to monitor their children’s teachers, Germany has banned their sales and wear by young children (EN/DE). The watches were originally marketed to children between the age of five and twelve with the pitch that they’d instil a lifelong commitment obsession with keeping active but as cheap devices saturated the shops many fell short of security safeguards meant to protect the safety of users.

have you considered getting a machine to do that for you?

Ahead of the debut of its Selectric typewriter—which had the revolutionary labour-saving enhancement of a magnetic tape for recording and playback of keystrokes—IBM engaged master Muppeteer Jim Henson and composer Raymond Scott to—rather prematurely, usher in the end of drudgery and tedium with a promotional short-film. Despite the cheerful, liberating message, there is a sinister sense of apprehension just below the surface that reflects how society had as much a tenuous time grappling with automation as they do with machine learning presently. The same reassuring words that “machines should do the work and people should do the thinking” might still apply but we might be hurtling towards a time when our virtuosity might become second fiddle.

sequestration

Soberingly, we are reminded via Slashdot of another dirty little secret underlying climate change and those compacts meant to stave off the sort of run-away changes that would render the Earth a very inhospitable place compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to insofar as the targets and pledges are not only calling for a severe curtailment in carbon emissions but are also contingent on taking that surplus carbon-dioxide out of the atmosphere.
It’s not an impossible feat and we can rise to the occasion (despite ourselves, and maybe cleaning up the past is in some ways easier than the paradigm shift needed for going forward) but the amount to sequester from the environment represents something on par with the industrial output of the past two decades and the technologies to accomplish this feat are only just emerging. The fact that the Paris Agreement was negotiated knowing this rather grim calculus only makes me more hopefully for the audacity of ingenuity.

individual results may vary

Via Dave Log v. 3.0, we are introduced to an algorithm that will calculate one’s heritage based on the composition and pattern detected in user-submitted, candid photographs. One is then invited to participate in a more scientific post-script by submitting DNA swabs into the company to discover and embrace the richness of one’s diverse heritage.
Of course, this is far from a ringing endorsement since there’s junk science all around and it’s the conflation of race and ethnicity with genetics that’s been confounding society both before and after we’ve had the background and literacy to couch it in sensibly and remains a stubborn wedge of contention despite attempts to try to reclaim some maturity in discourse. Is it some harmless fun? Or is it one of myriad routes to capturing a target demographic who are swayed by the false importance and false sense of certitude of such things? I was disappointed at the outset to be told be told that I was a whopping eighty-five percent white (whatever that means) myself. Don’t contribute to the dissolution of culture and civilisation and spread stuff like this uncritically. Internet, we are disappoint.

outpost

In the wake of learning of the huge cache of Pentagon intelligence compromised when it was uploaded to a commercial cloud computing network with one contractor having the oversight to change the classification-level (privacy-settings) of an unconscionably vast amount of documents, another, developing story of how those National Security Agency software and system exploits were intercepted and put to work not just as a backdoor access platforms at will but now at the disposal of the criminally-minded, ransomware and a potent means to disable utilities and infrastructure seemed even more resonant.
It’s unclear whether all those Pentagon files were migrated to the cloud out of convenience sake or what, but a policy change and architectural limitation prompted the change at the NSA that led to these devious secrets to be let out. Aware how pernicious these techniques could be if they weren’t just available to the good guys, the NSA compartmentalized them under the category of ‘exceptionally controlled information,’ not according the files a digital existence, reference material check-out and return to be stored in locked safes overnight. With the profusion of cyber warfare and expanding techniques of keeping tabs on others, the number of strongboxes and vaults needed to store all this printed data grew as well. Eventually, the NSA building where these files were kept began to groan under the weight of the all the safes and structural collapse seemed eminent. Protocols were relaxed and locked, non-segregated filing cabinets were allowed and shortly afterwards, those offensive cyber weapons were not clandestine any longer.

off-grid

Via Inhabitat and as part of Dezeen’s series of good design for a bad world we discover that a Dutch engineer has created a prototype lamp that works symbiotically with a living plant to produce light as a by-product of natural cycle of photosynthesis.
Microbes in the soil of this terrarium breakdown the organic compounds that are the surplus catalysts of plant’s nourishing itself and the lamp harnesses a part of that bacterial fuel cell to power a meagre glow. Such technology does not just yield a novel night-light but rather is infinitely scalable and entire cities could derive a significant portion of their energy from adjacent woods—making the notion of re-forestation not only seem more valuable—as it was prior to the Industrial Revolution as a source of quarry, fuel and building material, but as an absolute mandate, delivering as a bonus all the benefits of having more wooded areas and home to all the species that they shelter. Fields growing food crops could also be conscripted into double duty, providing electricity in a sustainable manner as well as feeding a given population.

büsi kitty

We’re grateful to Dangerous Minds to introducing us to award-winning artistic collaborations of the Swiss duo of Peter Fischli and David Weiss († 2012) by way of their non sequitir hijacking of the Times Square Astrovision screen in 2001 and having it display instead of the usual advertisements and news-crawl a footage of a very sedate cat lapping up milk from a dish—for six and a half minutes.
February of 2016 saw an abbreviated revival with the video—in a sense the original cat video though there are of course antecedents,with a three minute version gracing some sixty screens at once at given intervals. The artists are arguably best-known for their Rube Goldberg-like chain of mechanical causality cinematic deconstructionist performance piece called The Way Things Go (Der Lauf der Dinge), whose usque ad aras telescoping enjoys some physical avatars as permanent exhibits, including one in the Wiesbaden Museum that I will have to examine again with newly found appreciation.

globus cruciger

The curators over at Hyperallergic take a closer look at the rather controversial, record-setting auction of a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and its buyer—unnamed but surely a member of that exclusive set of the highest percentile of wealthy oligarchs—who through the acquisition and trade of such treasure exert pressure on both geopolitics and the art world by inflating the price of such works beyond the endowment of any museum.
Indeed, the provenance of Salvator Mundi (Saviour of the World, a theme in Christian iconography) is uncertain and the attribution to Leonardo is recent and based on only on some signature pentimenti and is perhaps at best a piece from the master’s studio with a touch of his instruction. If the identity of the seller, a Russian billionaire potash-magnate and philanthropist, sounds familiar to anyone, it could be over a real-estate transaction with Donald Trump and a long-standing reputation of using art to shield his monetary wealth from others. Outside of the cost-range of the world’s museums, the painting is probably destined to return to the cavernous bowels of the freeport from whence it briefly emerged until next time it’s swapped among the plutocracy.