omoshirogara

Via the always excellent Everlasting Blört, we are directed to the archives of Dangerous Minds and given a lesson in the propaganda kimonos produced in Japan from the turn of the century through the war years. Unlike more visible banners of provocation and hate, the above, 面白柄, denote a private novelty on display in the home only or perhaps as the interior inner lining of apparel—in any case, for a restricted audience and not for public display. This particular garb, celebrating industrial progress and the war-effort and ultra-nationalism alike, has garnered considerable scholarship of late and more excellent specimens are to be found curated at the links above.

wonder galaxy

Messy Nessy Chic directs our attention to the annual Madrid design expo Casa Décor with the fantastic future “childhood revival” aesthetic of interior designer Patricia Bustos de la Torre. Not only is the style informed by the hues of Millennial pink and turquoise to question why we tend to lose our sense of awe for what the future has in store but also reflects an inflection of Ettore Sottsass’ Memphis Group. The suite of Bustos’ instalation (among scores of entrants) includes a kitchen and a dressing room.  More to explore at the links above.

smelting

To the justified and reasoned protests of lawmakers from both political parties, Trump directed the Department of the Treasury to quietly lift sanctions on three Russian firms, originally imposed punish the country for its 2014 annexation of the Crimea and meddling in the US 2016 presidential election and the proxy war in Syria,
citing concern for the global aluminium industry that China has come to monopolies due to broader trade wars as well as the bar to entry for Russia. The business magnate behind the firms is a close ally of Vladimir Putin as well as known business associate of former Trump campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Members of congress strongly objected to relaxing these prohibitions, especially in light of the ongoing investigations into the administration’s ties to the oligarchy. As with Trump, the chief executive officer of the companies has divested himself of business interests, making the companies ostensibly independent of his influence, and the personal sanctions levied against him, including frozen US assets and travel restrictions, remain in place.

les foulards rouges

As a counter-balance—though a mostly politically agnostic one—to the unrest that the gilets jaunes have visited on France, a group of about ten-thousand members and growing, accessorized with red scarfs (EN/FR), to separate them from the yellow, high-visibility vests of the group opposed to the policies of Emmanuel Macron and his En Marche party, has mobilised. Professing no specific agenda, the group’s aim is to restore public order so that the dialogue that affects lasting and meaningful change can prevail.

wi-finder

Via Duck Soup, we discover the really relatable story of a flâneur collecting specimens of service set identifiers (SSIDs, the natural language label of one’s choice) to distinguish their wireless networks. What’s the story behind the name of your home WiFi?
Have you encountered memorable ones in your wanderings? Increasing fascination with the invisible world of call-signs set our walker on the path to more sleuthing, eventually mapping out these locations, categorising them by the nature of the monikers—promotional to passive-aggressive. I wonder how radically the landscape has changed since then and how territories and borders have become unmoored and mutable.

6x6

marenostrum: deconsecrated church in Barcelona houses Catalonia Polytech’s super computer

el helicoide: the dreadful-excellence of Caracas’ space age intelligence services headquarters turned into a sprawling prison complex

ectoplasm: nothing is prepared for the overwhelming slime of the hagfish

love you: we face our first Valentine’s Day bereft of classic Sweethearts candy, the company having folded back in July

accumulus nimbus: a gallery of skies and cloudscapes from arcade games, via Present /&/ Correct

visa-free score: limits of roaming without a passport and other quirks of international travel 

generative adversarial network

We’ve previously explored what we’ve called the electronic brain’s experience of pareidolia and generative adversarial networks synthesising images—things only exist in the mind of a computer—
but we were quite pleased to have our accomplished neural network trainer Janelle Shane (previously) guide us through the methodologies and application of one of the most powerful processors and for sharing some of the chimera conjured up.  Still a bit off-putting but nowhere near as disturbing as some of the nightmares of the early stages of Deep Dreaming, this image is the result of querying bookshop plus radio telescope with a little bit of Boston terrier thrown in. Explore more at AI Weirdness (aka Lewis & Quark) at the link above and learn how to use the application itself here.

logography

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we are referred to a collaboration between the Hochschule Mainz and the Linguistics Department at University of California, Berkley
campus, which represents each of the known world’s historic and extant writing systems, two hundred and ninety-two of them, with a single glyph that opens up an orthographic landscape to explore. Of these scripts, only just over one hundred are easily rendered in computer code—a rather severe imposition to the further study of those that are not, including several syllabaries in current use.