graveyard of empires

Though whether any of these contracts were acted upon or directly jeopardised ongoing peace-talks and plans for eventual withdrawal, there is an overwhelming cause for concern that the Trump administration not only failed to act on intelligence reports that Russian operatives were placing bounties on foreign troops deployed (including US soldiers) to Afghanistan, Trump publicly reacted in the opposite fashion and instead proposed to gift Russia a restored seat at the G-7 summit and promised to withdraw a significant amount of troops from bases in Germany. Both concessions were offered after the briefing in late March. Incidentally and unironically, many historians cite the expense of being mired in a protracted war in Afghanistan (with Americans materially aiding the same Taliban against a common enemy) as what broke the Soviet Union, leading to its downfall and dissolution.

upsampling

We’ve seen the built-in bias on display of this neural network application that turned a pixelated image of Barack Obama into an avatar that presents as pretty Caucasian, and Janelle Shane (previously) does a really good job at unpacking what’s going on here with our own tendency for pareidolia codified and amplified.
Not only is the algorithm informed by representation (and under representation) which is highly problematic and is something that the industry desperately needs to redress lest machine learning become the next commercialised embodiment of unreliability, the artificial intelligence delivers what it’s rewarded for delivering, be that a human face or a serviceable suspect that complies well enough with a blurry or grainy image. Thankfully most of the leaders in this sector, faults and all, are taking a pause in sharing their technologies with bad actors, including law enforcement agencies. The application cannot recover details that do not exist—only invent them based on what’s been judged plausible.

out of the closet and into the street

A year to the day after the Stonewall uprising—with several other antecedents including systemic workplace discrimination among civil servants and work-camps for Cuba for homosexual men, the last Saturday of the month, the Chicago Gay Liberation organised the first Pride March from Washington Square Park up Michigan Avenue.
What was to become an annual ceremony was seen as a matriculation for younger members coming to terms with their identity to come together and celebrate a chain of tradition and struggle to understand the past and what was overcome. Other parades, put together by chapters of so-called homophile societies, soon followed across the country, including on the very next day in New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia and quickly thereafter proliferated to many places worldwide.

march march

Via Nag on the Lake, we are directed to the powerful protest anthem with accompanying music video that rallies all of us to be agitators and allies from the band The Chicks, who fortunately for everyone DID NOT just shut up and sing. “If your voice held no power, they wouldn’t try to silence you.”

point-of-sale

On this day in 1974 after nearly a decade in development and first conceived as a method for tracking railcars and shipping containers, the first bar coded, marked with a universal product code (redundantly, UPC code) instead of a price tag item (see previously) was sold at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio.
Cashier Sharon Buchanan scanned (we are dismissive of such acts now as routine but Ms. Buchanan was very much from that moment on an engineer wielding the beam of a powerful helium-neon laser that bounced off a rotating mirror and onto the glass-plated register surface so a central computer could match the label against the shop’s programmed inventory—no mean feat that) a value pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum for customer Clyde Dawson (not his only purchase during that visit—just the first one rang up).  Deconstructed, the encoding tables do look a bit like the I Ching, and afterwards the artefact, the (presumably a stand-in unless the purchaser indulged the museum this memento) was acquired by the Smithsonian. I wonder if this first barcode is some sort of talisman, a charm imbued with power over all the scanning to follow.

6x6

morning edition: artist paints sunrises on newspapers as a dawning juxtaposition to the headlines of the day

free parking: aerial views of grounded planes at the Frankfurter Flughafen—see previously

b&b: designs for a horizontal hive with human sleeping compartment

👁️👄👁️:the ubiquitous string of emoji signals a tautology

if it ain’t baroque: another in a growing chain of art restoration failures, via Miss Cellania’s Links

2020: a spa odyssey: a day retreat in Caracas inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s aesthetic

beweinung christi

Having determined that the artwork through an extensive investigation was looted from an institution in Wrocław (Breslau) by the Nazis during World War II, the national museum in Stockholm will repatriate The Lamentation of Christ, executed circa 1538 by the workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder (see previously) whose portfolio—especially in later works like this, reflect the development of theology and religious sensibilities in symbolism and iconography of the Reformation and those countervailing forces. The mourners have a strange tronie-like quality (probably depicting patrons connected to the commission) disconcertingly emotive but Jesus does have some ashy knees.

schmetterlinge

Coincidentally thanks to a post from a fellow blogger, I was able to indirectly identify the butterflies that I encountered in the meadow yesterday gathered around a thistle bloom through his meeting of a Tawny Emperor. These are their European cousins called Apatura metis—that is Freyer’s Purple Emperor (Donau-Schillerfalter), taxonomically classified by entomologist Christian Friedrich Freyer of Ansbach in 1829, and so called as the open wings of the males display blue and purple, if viewed from the right angle but normally appear to have more subdued harvest colours.