fall foilage

Of course, the turning leaves of the trees are delightful but so too can be vines and ivy, like this rather spectacularly vibrant creeper with mixed colours that I saw scaling the side of a building.

hug of death or one ring to rule them all

Quaintly and soberingly, we’re reminded that the internet is controlled by seven individuals (plus their understudies) who are stewards of seven keys, meeting quarterly in a ceremony steeped with ritual to verify and update the underlying architecture of the web and ensure that no one could make changes unanimously.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number (ICANN), which recently absorbed the protective redundancy built into the Domain Name System (DNS) when the US relinquished control earlier in the year, is the unglamourous sounding metonymic monarch that’s accorded all this pomp and circumstance and this level of security. With as de-centralised as the internet is, it’s a little hard to appreciate the role of this obscure office, but it’s akin to the clearing houses that control banking transfers, establishing a naming-conversion and turning strings of numbers into addresses that people can recall and without their oversight, internet sites could experience denial of service attacks where so much traffic is redirected to one site, its servers are overloaded and the site shuts down—the hug of death, or imposter sites could be more easily fabricated to siphon off user data. We owe it to ourselves, I think, to try to understand this strange and inscrutable cabal a little better.

vanity gallery

Recalling once that a professor espoused the opinion that Soviet elements had infiltrated the Peacenik anti-war movements of the Vietnam and this support (both fiduciary and ideologically) was made manifest by the quality and artistry of the protest posters that they carried, I enjoyed this guided tour of the not so secret but still politically covert gallery of the CIA’s art collection. Though the rationale behind the particular patronage of abstract expressionists may be rather tamely selected due to the style of the day of when the headquarters were completed in the late 1950s, we learnt nonetheless that the intelligence agency funded and promoted—unbeknownst to the artists themselves, the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, in additional to the creators of the canvases that adorn the agency corridors.
Who knew? This is leagues better than most patriotic pictures of soaring eagles and flags—with long titles like “Why are there no knock-knock jokes about America? Because Freedom rings, by damnit!” Made available to the viewing public (at last and at least through the power of the internet and thanks to Hyperallergic), there was also an element of propaganda at work, making the statement that America was unbounded by tradition and fostered such licence and even showcased that freedom by loaning artwork out to a sort of travelling exhibition to Iron Curtain countries—despite being inaccessible to the American museum-goers. Be sure to visit this excellent and privileged curation at the link above.

flicker-fusion threshhold

A laboratory at the University of Tokyo is developing some amazing dynamic projection mapping technology that can beam any image onto any surface and adjust to seamlessly match and correspond to any movement at a rate of thousand frames per second. We’ve encountered this sort of presentation in a mostly virtual environment beforehand (or in a purely augmented reality) but never one that quite outstripped the limits of our perception so well. What sort of applications can you imagine? See video demonstrations courtesy of Laughing Squid.