ubi et orbi (10. 688)

Mirroring efforts of the United States to disassociate Labor Day celebrations with socialism, on this day in 1923, fascist dictator Benito Mussolini directed the celebration of the founding of Rome, not observed since the times of the Empire, on the traditional anniversary of the city’s establishment in 753 BC—possibly in parallel attempts to suppress a far older fasti that also fell on this day, the Palilia dedicated to the cleansing of sheep and shepherds, to distance its newly attained cosmopolitan character from these rural and pastoral roots. With a military parade of fifty-thousand Black Shirts through the streets on a a route from the Forum to the Baths of Caracalla under the Triumphal Arch of Titus, Mussolini decreed that this holiday would replace International Workers’ Day.

126³ (10. 687)

Via Present /&/ Correct, we are directed to the superb Tiny Voxel Shop series by Shin Oh. Working with three-dimensional pixels—from volume + pixel, which in turn is from pics + element—became therapeutic for the artist working through depressed and dispassionate point and hopes the collection of typical Malaysian shops and stalls will be an inspiration for others to cherish and conserve small local businesses and the distinctive character that they bring to communities, once lost gone forever.  More at the link above.

a rapid unscheduled disassembly (10. 686)

After action reports reveal that the cause of the explosion of the uncrewed test flight from an aerodrome in Texas, Star base on the Gulf of México, of the SpaceX Super Heavy reusable booster rocket was the triggering of a safety mechanism that caused the launch to abort. What was scheduled to be a sub-orbital trial on 4/20 (get it?) was one of the preliminary blast-offs of the largest and most powerful rocket made, surpassing in size and thrust both those designed for the first and return voyages to the Moon, Saturn and Artemis, that its makers believe will one day enable a journey to Mars and back.  The original flight-plan was for the rocket to fly over Florida and make a hard splashdown in the Pacific Ocean just off of the Hawaiian archepalgo, nearly circumnavigating the globe.

elevator operator (10. 685)

In the latest from Neal Agarwal, we are taken on quite a captivating journey from the Earth’s surface through the layers of the atmosphere up to the edge of space on a guided lift that features limits and milestones at all altitudes, like this previous tour at all depths.  Congratulations, you are 1% to the Moon.  Scroll up and see what you learn.

come up off your colour chart (10. 684)

Topping US charts for six consecutive weeks beginning on this day in 1980, the collaboration by Debbie Harry and Giorgio Moroder (originally pitching the number to Stevie Nicks, see previously) was the theme for the neo-noir crime drama starring Richard Gere and Lauren Hutton American Gigolo about an elite male escourt who gets entangled in a high-profile murder.  Presented with an instrumental arrangement provisionally titled “Man Machine,” the lyrics where written from the perspective of Gere’s character as a prostitute and bookended the movie.

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.