second nature

Regardless if you refer to the messy bundle of influences, incidents and accidents that make up one’s inheritance luck or grace—the question of nature versus nurture ought to be flattened out since those factors that inform our trajectories are just as much outside of our agency as winning or losing the genetic lottery—its role in one’s success ought not to be discounted.  Though I’d like to consider myself enlightened and gracious enough to acknowledge—with due humility—that fact, reading this essay from David Roberts writing for Vox confronted me with an important reminder that my relationship to my own legacy and that of my peers, neighbours and strangers isn’t as generous and empathetic as it should be.
The goal post for that is always being set further back—as it should be too. Agency and willpower are not empty concepts and are what elevates us, but they are nonetheless secondary and demand to be formed and reinforced through habit—just as it is that the majority of merit and honour is to be found in overcoming those baser instincts and snap judgments whose pedigree have obviously paid off over the generations but can be ill-suited for most modern settings. What do you think? It was particularly provoking how the reasoning that removes one from the cycle of bad habits is the same one that generally remains quiet and tardy when greed and sloth are making the executive decisions and comes calling after the fact as regret and recrimination. The ability to stare into the middle distance and muddle through reflecting on that receding goal post is of course influenced by those same heirlooms that are beyond our control and the clarity of vision and resolve is determined by our peers and their willingness to not forgive but rather overlook our trespasses.

lucid

Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals, we are dazzled by a brilliant collaboration among a London-based start-up that specialises in making flying screens, choreographer GMUNK and dancer Zakiya. See the full credits and take a peek behind the scenes at Stash magazine.

8x8

contemporary scolds: take this quiz and guess whether writers’ are complaining about e-scooters or new-fangled velocipedes

art house cinema: a look at some of the experimental documentaries that defined Icarus Films

dabangs: South Korean “stress cafés” are a revival of an older tradition supplanted by the invasion of Western chains

anatomy of the ai: a smart speaker depicted as an anatomical chart intersected by natural resources, data and human labour by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler

tunteet: a large Finnish research project to identify, classify and map the range of human feelings

slithery sam: the life and work of printmaker, illustrator and upholsterer Enid Marx

a soft murmur: adjustable background noise for any occasion, via Dave Log 3.0

lenticular lens: this thousand piece jigsaw puzzle changes colours depending on the viewers’ angle—via Kottke’s Quick Links  

finger in every pie

Ernie Smith from Tedium has a thoughtful column that argues the case in favour of reducing rather than trying to expand one’s exposure to the unrelenting barrage of information available at one’s finger tips by closing one’s browser tabs.
Like the cult of Inbox Zero or the compulsion to have everything marked as read, it’s an exercise of course emblematic for the search for tranquillity and quiet in whatever context and any given setting and artefacts are bound to change. I really liked how the introduction referenced the concept of tsundoku (積ん読)—letting unread books like good intentions pile up—with a twist on the aggressive panopticon of happenings and updates in tab-sundoku, and I appreciate such mediations, especially when I catch myself getting irritated or anxious or feeling delinquent over things of my own making. Most (if not all) of these sorts of pressures come from within.

inter alia

While only briefly a signatory to the Treaty of Rome during the final years of the Clinton administration, Bush II withdrawing America along with Israel and the Sudan with the US being only an observer state during the Obama years under contingent provisions that US soldiers were immune from its verdicts or prosecutions, it is still far out of bounds for the US to excoriate the International Criminal Court (ICC) as irrelevant and capricious.
Beyond the gesture of refusal to cooperate (previously here and here), the US government is threatening dire consequences against the ICC should it move forward in investigating allegations against the US for war crimes perpetrated in Afghanistan to include sanctions and criminal charges against the members of the court and any parties cooperating with their case. A parallel inquiry into human rights violations and practising a policy of apartheid on the people of Palestine resulted in the US closing off all diplomatic outlets for the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO)—evicting the group from its offices in Washington, DC—a move also characterised as an assault on sovereignty and a country’s right to self-defence undermined.

pay-for-play

Via Slashdot, we are reminded that while there has already been a rather crass slue of space-related advertising tie-ins and governments are not the only participants in pushing exploration forward, but I’d still rather not see astronauts and rockets covered in corporate logos like NASCAR racers as the NASA administrator is directing his staff to look into.
While nothing is official yet, any change in stance towards allowing sponsorship or endorsement would signal a significant shift in ethics rules that prohibit officials using public office for private gain. I suppose it is a natural consequence of allowing a tabloid tyrant occupy high-office.  What do you think? This does not even get into the value of inspiration and aspiration that would be squandered by staring off into the “moral equivalent of the side of a bus.”

miss simpson, do you find something funny about the word tromboner?

For this year’s International Trombone Festival, the talented Christopher Bill brought together a big ensemble of fellow players to produce an epic brass cover of the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Learn more at Laughing Squid about the organiser, contributors and the fest.

north tower

Hoping to gather some stock footage of a placid skyline to illustrate the juxtaposition between expectations and apprehensions surrounding the hysterical build-up and climax to the Millennial Computer Bug and the quieter, calmer realities of the real world, Stuttgarter artist Wolfgang Staehle, an early adopter of technology in creating art, set up a webcam in New York City on 11 September 2001 and inadvertently captured the first plane’s impact into the World Trade Center and the subsequent collapse.
Because of the state of web-cameras seventeen years ago, the images are granular and advance in spans of four seconds. Though not the first time that the unique recording has been shown in remembrance and commemoration, on this anniversary the Brooklyn Historical Society will be projecting the film onto a custom screen and have synchronised the video so it plays out in precise real time. It is hoped that visitors to the screening will be able to incorporate this digital witness to terror in a resilient and circumspect way that recalls how the virtual world can both inform and contradict the real one.