technological antisolutions (10. 683)

Albeit belatedly, enlightened to the fact that I worked in a quite well-connected metropolitan area and that taking public transportation was not merely an option but a generally more pleasant alternative than driving, I had had plenty of thoughts about how the train or bus was always going to be a better course of action that any ostensibly emission-free or driverless fetish that I might take on myself, and more so with the hindsight of leaving that environment to now mostly work remotely and not need to venture far from the home office—the mass-transit commute that wouldn’t allow me to dally being the only thing I sometimes miss of the city and work place, I was quite pleased—via JWZ—to have had that feeling validated and articulated by a short essay deriding the sexier innovations as a symptom of political and civic dereliction that lets infrastructure rot and replaces that onus with an unearned and blind faith in tech that’s inuring and leagues off with its last-mile problems from the sort of public engagement that really can save us. What do you think? Technology has a way of estranging societal problems by lulling us into a belief that we are making an active difference.

7x7 (10. 682)

born to die: on the common fate of beloved social media platforms—they are heart-breakers

the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there: historian Paul Veyne shows that past is not necessarily precedent 

la fée bruin: a tour of nineteenth century opium dens 

bbc100: John Hoare celebrates the broadcasting corporation’s centenary  

joan does dynasty: a stand-up therapist inserts herself into a soap-opera 

athena: Microsoft introduces an AI chip to step ahead of the field in machine-learning  

sixty-nine percent: CBC called by Twitter as government-funded and embraces the label—see previously

truthgpt (10. 681)

Whilst arguments for greater transparency and by extension somehow empathy in algorithmic operations are laudable, it seems unlikely that Elon Musk’s proposal, imperative to create an alternate AI model will be able to find or enshrine the ineffable quality and uniqueness of human cunning and rationale, considering his demonstrated record of being very much pro-robot and pro-rentier. Presenting his plan as a rather negative corollary calling for for a moratorium on training such systems that elude their creators’ understanding, Musk advocates maximising truth-seeking, free of profit-motive, with artificial intelligence that would attempt to grasp the nature of the Cosmos and thus would want to preserve humans, rather than dispatch with them, because we are an interesting part of it.

hofatelier elvira (10. 680)

Fellow internet peripatetic Messy Nessy Chic directs our attention to the former nexus of Germany’s pacifist and feminist movement in the photography studio and artists’ salon in glorious Jugenstil. Ultimately demolished and the address on Von-der-Tann-Strasse now occupied by the US Consulate of Munich after its stylised dragon façade was vandalised during the war years, the property used provisionally as a canteen kitchen, the enterprise spanning from 1898 to 1928 was notable as the first company in Germany founded by women, jurist, suffragist, writer and actress Anita Theodora Johanna Sophie Augsprung partnering with entrepreneur and photographer Sophia N J Goudstikker, and an important meeting place for avant garde artists in parallel with its primary business of taking pictures of celebrities and the aristocracy.

isar 2 (10. 679)

Just hours after Germany took its last remaining three operating nuclear reactors offline after a brief

extension on the moratorium prompted by the spike in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the government of Bavaria pledged to forward legislation to amend the federal monopoly on AKW (Atomkraftwek) and cede to the states control, arguing that the phaseout is premature and naive until renewable alternatives are truly viable. The success of this bid seems unlikely, given coalition support for the draw-down, which has happened gradually over the course of the past decade, already planned but accelerated after the disaster in Fukushima in 2011.

penta-vigesimal (10. 678)

Whilst mathematics is universal, there is no monopoly on notation and alternative numbering systems certainly do yield insight on cognition, computation and reckoning parallels. The Western hemisphere’s first new notational system in over a century was developed in the early 1990s, we learn via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest (previously), by a small class of middle school and high school students as part of maths enrichment project in Katovik, Alaska, noting that they didn’t have the numbers to represent all the numbers in Iñupiaq in Arabic-Hindi numerals alone for their base-twenty counting, scores used in Danish, French and for some other Inuit family languages), devising and refining a method of arithmetically representing all the native values reckoned on all one’s fingers and toes, with positional correspondence derived from native terms—for example, tallimat (5) coming from taliq (arm) for all of one’s five digits, iñuiññaq (20) meaning a whole person or the glyph for zero or null a gesture of negation. A marked increase in scores on standardised mathematics tests for indigenous communities using notational systems that more closely match their ethnographic heritage not only helps with student achievement but demonstrates for all involved that numeracy is embedded within their culture and not something imparted by western hegemony. Learn more at the links above.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (10. 677)

 

Via tmn, we are again directed to the Depths of Wikipedia archivist Annie Rauwerda whose detective works sometimes becomes fixated with those images becomes a caption for illustrating articles (see also)—especially for entries that from a given perspective seem universal and needing no explanation, like the couple demonstrating high-five (up high, down low, too slow) and their subsequent courtship and family—or on this case, The Shrug Guy—the embodiment of the gesture expressing indifference or not knowing, though not always reading the same. It used to be that one said that the word gullible was not listed in the dictionary (or that one’s photo was in there if you looked it up), and finding this iconic individual fifteen years later (see also) it’s not clear if he chose shrug-life or shrug-life chose him. More at the links above.

8x8 (10. 676)

footprint: a sobering visual essay showing the deleterious impacts of cruises from Puget Sound to Alaska—via Things Magazine 

kitakyushu kaku-chi: a look into Japan hidden liquor shop drinking culture 

the wonderful world of tupperware: a vintage celebration of the storage solution’s storage solution as the company goes insolvent 

bea wolf: a re-telling of the epic poem for both kids and grow-ups  

influential flop: deconstructing the Apple Lisa—Locally Integrated Software Architecture 

great firewall: the US state of Montana moves to implement a ban on TikTok 

subcal: an exploration of the best of Tokyo’s fandom nightlife  

greenhouse effect: acknowledging the contributions of the mostly forgotten Eunice Foote, pioneer of climate science