protocol and perfidy

No wonder Oslo withdrew its candidacy for the 2022 Winter Games, leaving it to Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan to duke it out amongst themselves for the dubious honour of hosting the Olympics, given this rather unappetizing list of demands hurled at them by the steering committee.
Via the always brilliant Boing Boing, we are given a taste—and mind you, this catalogue is not on behalf of the athletes and does not even begin to address larger matters like venues, onerous security and logistics, just the bed and board for the organisers—of what the queen bees had expected, causing Norway to laugh them out of the country:

• The hotel bar at their hotel should extend its hours “extra late” and the minibars must stock Coke products.
• The IOC president shall be welcomed ceremoniously on the runway when he arrives.
• The IOC members should have separate entrances and exits to and from the airport.
• During the opening and closing ceremonies a fully stocked bar shall be available. During competition days, wine and beer will do at the stadium lounge.

two-by-four

The always engaging Everlasting Blört shares a gallery from Popular Mechanics of some of the finest timber structures from around the world—including a couple that only exist as blue-prints so far. We haven’t visited any of these select sites yet (but the Borgund stave church ought to have made the cut, in our humble opinion)—and surely for the modern buildings, we wouldn’t have appreciated that they were made of wood, but I think from now on we’ll be on the lookout. Given the changing tastes for building materials and construction approaches, it’s rather nice that architects are rethinking traditional methods and willing to challenge the assumed limitations of lumber, with a wooden skyscraper slated for London’s skyline to rival the Shard.

vis-à-vis

We thought that this chart illustrating from the perspective of the Americas of what’s across the oceans was pretty nifty, especially considering how our place in the world and our relation to others is easily skewed and sometimes we loom much larger in our heads than is advisable. Click the images to enlarge.  Day-dreaming on the beach is probably a far more effective tool to ground oneself and also to connect across continents, but—curious, I wanted to see if there was an African/Eurasian centered map that might better show what we might be facing on the shores of the Bay of Biscay.
Latitudinally, it’s comforting to know that beyond the horizon (the line dividing sea and sky only pushes out one’s gaze on flat land only about five kilometers before the curvature of the Earth overtakes us, distance≈3.57 x √height) lies Nova Scotia. It’s pretty noteworthy, too, that Chile has an unobstructed view of itself.

twinkle, twinkle

Via Dark Roasted Blend’s latest edition of Biscotti Bits, we discover that the inspiring flickering flame of a candle and the light it gives becomes something even more poetic and romantic through rigorous chemical analysis, from a battery of experiments conducted in the summer of 2011.
The wick burning through the medium of tallow or wax generates different carbon allotropes (the known arrangements of the element: soot, graphite, and the crystalline form) as the flame rises and heats up to eventually bind with the surrounding air as carbon-dioxide—reclaiming the intermediary by-products, but one short-lived but ongoing episode of the chemical history of a candle—as Michael Faraday lucidly presented to the curious public in an 1860 lecture, couched in the same glittering and poetic language that feeds the fire and our imaginations, sees the creation of millions of tiny particles of diamond ash, destined to be consumed at the peak and hottest part of the flame. It is really amazing what fundamental mysteries are just being solved, and how there’s more questions in those answers. I wonder if the soot of the flame is transmogrified into the more exotic forms of carbon as well—like graphene and bucky-balls, and if the tiny diamonds are winked out of existence if there’s no up or down for the candle, were it burning in the micro-gravity of space.

by jove

Launched in August 2011 and crossing a distance of over eight hundred million kilometres, aided by several gravity-assists—sling-shot manoeuvres, the space probe Juno is expected today to enter a polar orbit of the gas giant—more like a star than a planet to our understanding, Jupiter for an eighteen-month mission to survey and study this out-sized world and constellation of attendant phenomenon born out of the extreme conditions fostered by the planet’s mass.
Flying just above the cloud-tops, approaching as close as it can be piloted to the perilous electric storms and crippling radiation that also makes direct communication difficult, researchers hope that Juno will be able to sound the depths of the thick atmosphere and determine the nature of what’s inside. The name of the mission is of course a mythological allusion to Jupiter’s (Zeus’) use of clouds to try to cloak his mischief and infidelities from his wife, Juno (Hera), but the King of the Gods was duping no one—expect maybe those mere mortals he exercised his droit du seigneur on, as Juno had the ability to peer through that misty veil. I wonder what surprises that this exposé will reveal and unveil over the next coming months—not to continue with that domestic drama metaphor too much longer.

fifteen thousand when we get to alderaan: purchasing-power or human capital

I had been ruminating this growing discussion over the question why the Star Trek and the Star Wars universes deliver us to such a starkly different future and past (presumably—but reference points are hard to cement for long ago and far away) for the past couple of days, and the comparison and contrast that space-faring civilisations and how that’s reflected in society. Whilst I believe that the trajectory lies mainly in the story-telling, exploration for its own sake and exploration for self-fulfilment and both franchises can be a reflection of the epic and there’s some cross-over and significant departures from the set course, it’s interesting to ponder the different outcomes and considering how technology either liberates economically or further enslaves.  Do you think either world-view presented will shape how we conduct our own exploration and colonisation? 

maker’s mark

Via Co.Design, we discover what happens when decision-trees and algorithms get to try their hand at logo design and corporate branding.
The robot, called MarkMaker, from Emblemmatic, first generates at random selection around a company’s name and then can deliver more refined and informed choices as it learns from your preference and is nudged in the right direction. PfRC sort of made it seize up but playing with it with simpler one word unicorns did deliver some interesting icons and wordmarks.  Give it a try for yourself and help this apprentice graphic-designer learn the trade.

one day, maybe next week

Days and dates from the year 1983 correspond perfectly to 2016, as Dangerous Minds excitedly points out through the lens of this magical and demonstrably timeless vintage (and official) calendar of Debbie Harry. This is the stuff of oracles, indeed, and maybe time is just an illusion and wonder what other correspondence that that year might hold for the present—but I agree without reservation that secret missive sent across the decades is to just dance!