xl

My birthday’s months off yet but Mental Floss gave me an early gift (quite a taboo thing to do in Germany but such superstitions are not universal—but still, no premature greetings please) in nice celebratory list of forty things that also turn forty this year. The compilation includes the debut of the Muppet Show, Rocky Horror cosplay, the meme in its current context, the phasing out of slide rule, anti-piracy and intellectual property, and Queen Elizabeth II’s first official e-mail on the ARPANET from a terminal at the Royal Signals and RADAR Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire. A very merry unbirthday to us.

6x6

bleak house: a gallery of sad, ugly Belgian dwellings, via the Everlasting Blört

magick lantern: Richard Metzger curates a fascinating exhibition on occult works of art

iridescence: giant clams from the Indian Ocean could teach us how to better harness photovoltaic energy and make better displays

public-viewing: thanks to Boing Boing for reminding us about the network of museum open archives, Europeana Collections

fringe and flatland: an apology for outsider science, via Kottke’s Quick Links

wonderment: the entrepreneurial Scotsman who invented the mechanical television was real mad scientist

the encircling game or alphago

The artificial intelligence research division of one internet giant (with other rival concerns not far behind) has developed a tandem neural-network that’s able to best human champions at the ancient strategy game Go.
Meaning the encircling game in Chinese, its goal is to capture more territory on the board than one’s opponent, AI experts once believed that a machine could never excel to human competence as unlike checkers and chess, where computers can use their bullying calculating speeds to forecast out all possible moves and outwit its challengers, the go game-board has more combinations than atoms in the known Universe (incidentally, I’ve started to wonder what that means, really, as I trust it’s more than just some cliché and represents some exponential threshold, but does it take into account the Universe that’s mostly dark energy or the amount of stuff that ought to be there be that cannot be directly observed…) so brute force calculations are not a practical option for even the fastest computers. Human players—and there are grand-masters of go, which is quite sophisticated and challenging despite deceptively simple rules of engagement, began to lose their edge once a dual bit of programming was introduced that asset values and policies in a segregated fashion and apply those judgments in the same way as its competition. What do you think of this enterprise? Does it make for sore-losers?

yankeedom or upper caucasia

Given that the datelines from America betray a strong polarization, it is easy to dismiss and class all demographics into one of two categories—usually along political ideologies.
With a respectful aversion to over- simplification, gerry- mandering and gentrification, author and journalist Colin Woodward presents a really intriguing ethnographic picture of the North American continent divided into eleven nations. The boundaries of these cultural identities cleave sometimes to regional dialects but there’s quite a bit of interesting undercurrent buoying up these geographic divides. Do you agree with how Woodward parses the States? Do you think such rifts remain to make these distinctions relevant? Given that Florida has heaped on disappointment in with elections past (and seems to be classed as an outlier on Woodward’s map), perhaps Bugs has the right campaign strategy for ensuring it’s not contested another toss-up.

charta visa

Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing shares an informed and informative little project that is pretty visually stunning as well in the Passport Index. It’s interesting to take a broad survey of these travel and identity documents and then to be able to gain a purchase on the relative value citizenship—rather bearership, has in terms of access and accessibility. Examining the passports by rank under the protocols, some odd pairings—ties come up and reciprocity, diplomacy shows itself in strange ways. The convention of using or dispensing with visas for travel comes from the Latin phrase for “the paper which has been seen.”

moving on up or shabby sheik

6x6

dress the flesh: the rise of the plant-butcher, via Kottke’s quick-links

three is a magic number: the creative talent behind “Schoolhouse Rock!”

linear b: excellent, freshly available image and textual library of the Voynich Manuscript and Codex Seraphinia 

neural handshake: meet the neurosurgeon who tried to hack his brain and nearly lost his mind

the genlteman’s recreation in four parts: seventeenth century common dog names included Ranter and Jollyboy

 chicken dance festival: a creative and award-winning re-imaging of The Shining is classified under the genre of cinegraffiti

rarebit or why do we call them comics

Atlas Obscura presents a really fascinating essay that deconstructs a constellation factors that make up the hallmarks of modernity through the lens of a turn of the century comic strip that centres around midnight-snack, indigestion fuelled nightmares with the blame laid squarely on an “imported” (the focus seems to be mostly from an American perspective as the caricatures were but is surely of a universal character since internationally people were experiencing similar cultural shocks) delicacy called “Welsh Rarebit,” basically cheese-toast soaked in beer as a sort of hair-of-the-dog ballast for late-night revellers.
Assiduously, Winsor McCay, under the consultation of his series “Dream of the Rarebit Fiend,” documents the development of rather Freudian fantasies as carried out in the restive slumber of the indignant, whose psyche and drives might be explained mechanically as an assault by cheese as heartburn. Far from funny, at least to contemporary viewers—much like a lot of the reserve content of the funny pages—McCay portrays secret and vengeful scenes that one would rather not disclose, lest one shows his or her vulnerabilities and suppressed desires. As easily, however, people were willing to adopt a litany of compromise to gain modern conveniences—the electrified dwellings that invited staying up through the night, the logistical coordination that allowed people to live in growing urban-settings (to cultivate such routines and support surplus consumption), I believe that the illustrator though that his readership could recognise that something other was driving this feeling of being unsettled besides just alcohol and cheese, unlike the spectre of Jacob Marley who was initially dismissed as a spot of gravy gone bad. Such fiendish behaviour reflected perhaps made the world more receptive to adopting new customs and paradigms, like the psycho-analysis and other accommodations (and necessary back-lash) that came in its wake. Check out the thesis for further details and panels. Turophiles, what do you think?