out to pasture

Via Kottke, we’re directed toward a rather powerful and immediate way to visualise land-use in the United States of America by projecting percentages on to a map of the contiguous states. Each pixel represents one million acres (about four hundred thousand hectares) and an enormous amount is allotted to ranches, ranges and pasturelands for livestock and for raising feed for the animals with crops for human consumption dwarfed in comparison. One would think that in this day and age, one could find a better use for more than a third of one’s territory than the upkeep of cattle and wonder how other countries and regions rank.

kleptocracy

This thoughtful essay from economist Susan Crawford on the inherently paradoxical nature of good governance—how the most vital and integral public services are the most vulnerable to being dismantled by oligarchs by dint of their invisibility—initially reminded us of a parallel phenomena that we encountered a few weeks ago that spoke to how we perceive laisse-faire attitudes and confidence in market-corrections: a search void.

The result of unequal passion for forwarding a particular agenda or product over a scientifically sound and accepted truth that needs no advocacy, search engines answer enquiries with a paucity of authoritative answers in favour of amplifying and propagating rumour and falsehoods—not because of some malfeasance in programming or bias to serve up what sells (though spamdexing does happen and that is a real problem too), but because there is a concerted effort boost the worldview of a particular party. It’s not a majority perspective but can appear so. In the same way those sturdy and staid institutions of government, the museums, schools, hospitals and regulatory bodies, get far less attention and fewer champions (seemingly) than those who would call for their privatization or outright obliteration. Here’s hoping that we won’t have to loose these protections to realise what we have and what’s at stake.

í embætti

On this day in 1980, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir became the first democratically directly elected female president (forseti—the presiding one and derived from the Æsir god Fosite, the personification of justice and reconciliation), assuming the high office in Iceland.  Though she initially won by only a slight majority of voters, she went on to serve three more terms, running in two of the elections unopposed, making her also the longest serving—to date—female head of state, with an administration of exactly sixteen years. In 1996, Vigdís chose not to be considered for re-election but has remained active since as a goodwill ambassador, lobbying on behalf of minority languages and world peace.

flagged content

The experimental social media chatbot Tay that quickly suffered a racist meltdown after less than a day’s exposure to the Internet wilds has a younger sibling called Zo, whose programming dictates she follows the protocols of their aggregate idea of a typical teenage American girl.

Far worse than the stereotyped pastiche of shouts and murmurs, however, is the unsettling and insidious way Zo champions political correctness through disengagement and strictly avoids the lures and decoys that led to the grounding of her elder sister. What Zo is ostensibly being trained for is to police forums for uncivil material and she has adopted a disturbing way of shutting down a conversation, should an interlocutor introduce a term associated with controversy. Decontextualizing censorship is a mistake that humans are prone to make enough by their own devices and possibly not something to be automated and institutionalised.

canting arms

Our gratitude to Dangerous Minds for introducing us to the graphic design studio called Bands FC that creates sort of crests for music groups in the style of football clubs—and vice versâ—applying a system of vexillography and design rules that are rather clever though not entirely comprehensible to me at least, though they helpfully show their work.
It was hard to choose favourites among the musical homages, but there are many more examples are to be found at the links above plus the opportunity to support their operation by purchasing player/performer trading cards or a stylish team jersey with the group’s own logo.

transiting exoplanet survey satellite

Via Gizmodo, we learn that NASA’s TESS probe (previously) has begun survey observations that will examine the motion and luminosity of two hundred thousand nearby stars for tell-tale signatures that they are hosting planetary systems.
The advanced, precision satellite will image an area of sky for twenty seven days before moving on to the next patch, ultimately beaming back telemetry that covers about eighty-five percent of the heavens. The goal of the mission is to provide the successor to Hubble, the upcoming flagship James Webb Space Telescope, with a selection of targets to watch. TESS is scheduled to send its first transmission back to Earth in August and report back every thirteen and a half days thereafter—at the point in its orbit it approaches the closest to home. Considering the wonders already discovered relatively unaided, it’s stultifying to try to imagine what may be revealed to us next.

8x8

home-grown: a design studio in Brooklyn grows gourds in moulds to create an alternative to disposable cups

hidden in plain sight: Greenwich’s secret nuclear reactor

mea culpa: social media turns to television advertising in an attempt to win back users’ trust—we’ve seen these on German prime-time too

the colour of pomegranates: rediscovering the suppressed films of director Sergei Parajanov

quiet skies: the US Transportation Security Agency directs air marshals to arbitrarily monitor frequent flyers

an der schönen blauen donau: a time-lapse of a bean germinating into a plant, accompanied by the waltz

king cotton: an art exhibit, referencing the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, disabuses notions of American exceptionalism

clickbait: a shop sells tee-shirts that purposefully enrage pedants by getting movie quotes and titles slightly wrong, invoking Cunningham’s Law

four panel format

On this day fifty years ago, cartoonist Charles Schultz introduced the first African American character in his nationally syndicated comic strip Peanuts (previously), Franklin Armstrong.
In the wake of the assassination of Dr Rev Martin Luther King Jr and the general tumult of 1968, a school teacher in Los Angeles named Harriet Glickman began a chain of correspondence with the cartoonist, asking him to bring in a black person into the cast. Franklin’s appearances were sporadic until Schulz received a letter from a newspaper editor to the effect that they had no objection to having a black character but implored Schultz not to portray them in school together—which advanced Franklin to the head of the class, seated at the desk in front of Peppermint Patty. The previous year, Schultz introduced an occasional classmate named José Peterson, of mixed Swedish and Mexican heritage, who was possibly the first non-pejorative portrayal of someone of Hispanic descent in comics.