quitsies, keepsies

The Local (the German daily in English) has an interesting profile of an engineer from Düsseldorf who proposes to revolutionize exploiting renewable and passive energy by installing giant spherical collectors mounted on brackets to focus heat generated by sunlight so power can be squeezed out of it.

Arguably, these Raw Lemon masts are more aesthetic and less intrusive and intensive than shingling one's entire roof with delicate and resource-demanding solar-panels or putting arrays of photovoltaic cells out to pasture, whose manufacture require several rare compounds to function and are prone to the caprice of the elements and cloudy days. Two or three of these simple massive marbles, that are nothing more than magnifying lenses, can heat a household and because of the shape of the Raw Lemon, the sun is never at the wrong angle. This pretty ingenious project has been exclusively crowd-funded and there are a surplus of enthusiastic investors.

the dandy warhols or the factory method

Before his discovery in the 1960s, Andy Warhol (with the help of the penmanship of his mother) designed book jackets, advertising pieces and album covers, like this gallery of art for jazz records curated by Dangerous Minds. Be sure to check out more of DM's daily onslaught of discoveries on film, literature, artwork and sundries.

telescreens have no off switch or the ballad of max headroom

In more underwhelming news, whose aggressions were probably always buried in some consent boilerplate, comes the revelation (read, natural consequence) that Her Majesty's spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) ran a program under the codename Optic Nerve that captured billions of snapshots from video chat sessions, indiscriminate and warrantless to be sure.

The article focuses on one particular messaging service but I am certain that others were also sampled. Material harvested was not intended to be a record of users' conversations and contacts—though I don't believe that that cache of intelligence was simply atomized, but was rather a platform to test the limits and filters of facial recognition software and sift out villains already posted in the police mugbook. The exercise is proving of dubious value, and in fact they've sequestered a sizable amount of lewd displays (described as undesirable amounts of flesh). The surveyors plead to be at a loss as to what the disposition ought to be for these false-positives, whether they're to be classified as other distinguishing features or put on deposit in a registry somewhere of posing indecents for future use.

carriage-and-four

Gentle readers, I could not even begin to reconstruct the daisy-chain of thoughts that made me think of the tale of Johnny Fedora and Alice Blue-Bonnet, a short animated musical from 1946 produced by Disney animators, but suddenly the lilting and wistful tune was in my head.

The vignette tells of two fancy hats that fall in love in a department store display case, who are sold separately to two different human owners who do not do much to foster their courtship and rather dash it. The fedora's owner eventually tosses Johnny out as old and tattered, but when all seems lost, a coach driver saves Johnny from the dust-bin and paring out two holes along the brim for ears and outfits his horse. The snazzy happy ending happens when a despondent Johnny realises that the nag trotting beside him is proudly wearing Alice. I don't know where exactly the memory came from but it brought a smile to my face the other day and was happy to find that others recall this too.