Via Waxy, we are introduced to photographer Barbara Iweins through her project to help her come to terms with and couch in language and statistics accessible to us all of cataloguing the over ten thousand artefacts, items that she has acquired and held on to through nearly a dozen household moves and what their acquisition means. Even devoting fifteen hours a day to categorising and framing each object, the undertaking took nearly two-and-half years to complete. If you embarked on a similar project, how would you exhibit all your stuff—even that which is mostly hidden and tucked away unbidden?
Sunday, 28 June 2020
new accessions and permanent collection
nakhlite type
The classification of Martian meteorite (see also) that was the first of its kind to suggest the presence of water and then for a tantalisingly brief time nearly a century later as technology and analysis methods improved microbial life, named for the Egyptian village of El Nakhla El Bahariya were it fell, broken up by the heat of entry into about forty samples raining down, on this day in 1911.
They are ejecta of volcanic rock from the plains Elysium Mons that was able to escape the planet’s gravity through a violent asteroid impact, wandering through space for ten million years before being captured by Earth, occasionally impacting over the past ten thousand years. Though likely apocryphal since there were no remains recovered and no other corroborating witnesses, astronomers still repeat the legend and it’s become a mascot in the field of meteor studies, a local farmer recounts how a fragment landed directly on his canine helper, vaporising the animal without a trace, the so-called Nakhla dog. In 1999, a sample previously unexposed to earthly elements was cleaved off and studied using a powerful scanning electron microscope revealing a matrix of pores very similar—though not conclusively so—to the traces that bacteria would leave in rocky substrate on Earth, leading many researchers to conclude that the Red Planet at least at one point harboured the niche environment that could support life.
a free masculinity simulator video game
Via ibฤซdem, we are directed to a playable application that captures the tension and the drama packed into a memetic phenomenon filmed on a phone—with that same POV—of two hunky young men beating each other with chairs that circulated on the internet in 2015 that speaks to Lad Culture, the strange performative normative of “no homo” and affirming stunts of manliness. These sort of toxic displays (see also) remind it’s no wonder that we are not able to overcome challenges whose only requirement is showing mild consideration for others but maybe by confronting it and dissecting it, we can perhaps disarm it. Game play allows one to play with the sequence and duration of steps and see how the variation affects the outcome. Be sure to check out developer Robert Yang’s website at the link above for the full story and extra food for thought.
goldman sans
From the New Shelton Wet/Dry, we learn that an infamous investment bank has released its own signature family of sans-serif typefaces that is free to use in whatever manner one sees fit so long as one does not use the font to criticise the company or its practises. Statements of facts I suppose are exempt.
Saturday, 27 June 2020
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.
