cue cutlines

After the dismal (ricocheting, perhaps) failure of its last Chat Bot, Microsoft has unveiled a routine that writes captions (cutlines really as the output is a few lines of description) for your photos, Gizmodo reports. The programme seems reliably good, especially in the face of the heaps of obscenity I’m sure the internet is tossing at it, but be forewarned, as the service curates the images submitted to it for training purposes. Although not the first attempt at automated captioning, it does seem like a good approach to organise one’s ever growing archives of pictures.

flights of fancy or project longshot

The announcement coinciding with Space Night, the anniversary marking Yuri Gagarin’s seminal space-walk—as Boing Boing reports, Professor Stephen Hawking is partnering with a consortium of investors (we are all stake-holders in this enterprise) to send a swarm of small space probes, propelled aloft on the beams from an array of lasers—which providing that the focus can hold, could see at least some of the tiny craft (about the size of a pocket calculator with sails unfurled) reach our nearest stellar companions, the group also known as Rigil Kent, the foot of the Centaur, around five-hundred times the distance from the Sun to Pluto, in just two decades. The method makes me think of the Little Prince hitching rides on passing comets. Starshot, as it’s called, has some technical challenges to overcome, and regrettably it seems perhaps sustained public enthusiasm for science projects, and who knows what we’ll discover—but I think that Hawking and associates can push our horizons.

tobacco mosaic

Graphic artist Eleanor Lutz’ latest project is a series of animated viral trading cards, that teach about the infectious agents’ properties and causes one to better appreciate these hauntingly complex structures. Such pathogens, liminal and not easy to distinguish from vegetable and mineral and I think that notion of an autonomous and adaptive poison imparts them with their sinister reputation, but as persistent as these pestilences are, our bodies have become ever more resilient in rebuffing countless and non-stop assaults. This piece comes to us by way of the outstanding Kottke, who has introduced us, to our delight, to Lutz’ works previously.

veranstaltungsraum oder moments at the museum

Last week, I chanced upon the Heimat- (homeland is not really an equivalent phrase—attachment or identity, perhaps) and Industrial-Historical Museum of the Wiesbadner borough of Biebrich and went in for a look.

The formerly independent town on the shores of the Rhein is still an important manufacturing centre in the region, but the focus of the permanent collection mostly had the focus and reach back to the eighteenth century and the creation of the Duchy of Orange-Nassau with a lot of interesting ephemera of the age and spiky hats. One of the more interesting pieces on display was a chest (eine Truhe) with its complicated, artful locking mechanism revealed.

There was also a special exhibit of the works of native painter and relative unknown Friedrich Carl Scheidemantel with many pictures in the Rheinromanik genre, contemplative idylls and castle ruins cast against dramatic skies, and also many, like the ensemble here pictured, of the cartoon-medieval that depicted the expedition (again with a healthy dose of license and anachronism) of Otto the Great to the fields of Lombardy, which helped him consolidate power and assert himself Holy and Roman Emperor of the Germans.