bassins de lumiéres

Mid-April in Bordeaux will see the public opening of the world’s largest digital art centre in the bunkers and U-boot berths constructed in the city’s harbour during World War II. The art space’s first exhibition features the work of Gustav Klimt and Paul Klee with many others to follow.  Get more of a preview with Plain Magazine at the link above.

bennifer

Nag on the Lake introduces us to the sometimes frightening canny realm of synthetic celebrities. Each is the product of a generative adversarial network (see previously) and display their dominant and recessive influences. While these chimeric twins are well-matched, most turn out a bit monstrous with uncompromising hairlines though their pre-combination traits show through. The offspring of Jeff Bezos and Eminem isn’t awful and neither is the Emmanuel-Macron-Sandra-Bullock hybrid. Who are your favourites? Much more to explore at the links above.

the princess and the pea

At the risk of alienating potential sponsors (though we all ought to aspire to playing the long-game in all our endeavours and not be enticed with fly-by-night operations), we found this collection of sources deconstructing the mail-order mattress field—a very over-crowded one, and how that bubble may soon burst from Things Magazine to be a fascinating and cautionary one.
The anecdotal expertise is strong in this business, trying to positions oneself above the fray and margins for profit vanishingly small and made worse with returns, refunds and compelling competition. I wonder what other commodities might be stealthily following the same doomed business model that escape our recognition by dint of persuasive cheerleading. Though there’s much appeal to be found in an inject of convenience, discharging our obligations and buyer and seller by closing a transaction as quickly and seamlessly as possible is not the overarching principle of commerce and exchange.

all the president’s sophists

Though eventual acquittal of Trump by the jury of the Senate was a foregone conclusion with a super-majority needed to remove him from office and not by the narrowest of margins by which the high house abrogated its ethical and constitution charge to conduct a fair, complete and impartial trial yet refused to hear any further witness testimony—meaning that Trump will feel vindicated and act with the imperial abandon after the outcome of the Mueller Report feel short of an indictment, which Trump took as a full exoneration and celebrated by asking the newly-elected Ukrainian president to dig up some dirt on his political opponent’s son if he wants to receive military aid—the anti-democratic over-reach that brought us to impeachment in the first place.
Arguments propped up by the cowardice of incumbents wanting to retain their seats at any cost, Trump’s counsel’s latest specious rebuttal amongst a tranche of prevarication, hypocrisy and double-standards has atrophied into essentially that any president believes his re-election is in the best interest of the American people (whether or not it’s the case is not for the office holder to decide but rather the constituency that he or she represents) and it is therefore permissible for the president to pursue his campaign. Perhaps, as some maintain, calling witnesses would only prolong the process and net no change in the end but I suspect that the Republican members’ intransigent loyalty will backfire as the trial exits the well of the Senate and once again returns (those parallel proceedings never stopped) to the court of public opinion where the legal process falls short and America relies on the precious precarity of voting and enfranchisement.

xtrmntr

Exactly twenty years ago on this day, the Scottish band Primal Scream released their titular album in the United Kingdom, as NPR reports, with lyrics and themes that seemed a bit overblown at the time but in hindsight seem eerily prescient to the inheritors of the dystopia that they raged against.
Though in those millennial salad days it would be hard to appreciate the trend despite similarly concordant portrayals across the arts and entertainment spectrum, their predictions of epidemics, endless wars, economic asymmetry, surveillance states and the preponderance of propaganda were ignored at our peril. Find more musical retrospectives with National Public Radio at the link above.

attention to detail

Via the ever keen-eyed Super Punch, we gain a renewed appreciation for the costume department with this very subtle tailoring addition to Captain Picard’s (see also) civilian suit.  The stripe of red thread sewn into the jacket signals his membership as a recipient of the French Legion of Honour (Légion d’Honneur).

The order of merit that recognises those who have made significant contributions to the state was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and the institution was continued by successive governments—and would surely still exist under the Federation. The special thread is in lieu of the medals and sash that the knights, officers and commanders are bestowed for less formal occasions and is stitched in by an exclusive tailor near the Palais Royal in Paris. The honour is not limited to French citizens but Sir Patrick Stewart is not a holder of this particular order.

gmt+1

In accordance with the provisions of Article 50, after forty-seven years of membership and a contentious three-and-half years of vigorous and at times unseemly and embarrassing debate, the UK will leave the European Union at 11:00 pm local time. The UK quits the EU with a standing invitation to rejoin, as Commission President Ursula von der Leyen concluded her speech to assembled MEPs during the last plenary session before Brexit Day with a quote from British poet George Eliot: “‘Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.’ We will always love you and we will never be far. Long live Europe!”

the hungry earth or the gorn hegemony

Inspired by and named for a 1970 Doctor Who story-arc that originally aired from this day until 14 March on BBC1 in weekly installments wherein the Third Doctor tries to broker a peace settlement between the simians, sapiens and the reptilian Silurians who were the dominant intelligent species, the eponymous hypothesis is an interesting and self-critical (though sometimes coopted by fringe elements and regaled with the hallmarks of pseudo-science) thought experiment, a corollary to Fermi’s Paradox in a sense, to gauge those simian successors’ ability to detect evidence of prior (or parallel) advanced civilisations.
Formalised and fleshed out just in 2018 in a paper by astrophysicists Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt, they pondered whether there would be any sort of trace of industry, given sufficient time and distance and divergence from our own manifestly self-destructive and unsustainable technology, a civilisation that produced less enduring waste and had a lower profile in terms of environmental impact would be harder to dig up but would probably be the more successful and longer-lived for it as well.  Any artefacts, direct or indirect, could prove elusive indeed, and we may be incapable of recognising them for what they are. Please be sure to visit Futility Closet at the link up top for an abstract and the full paper.