7x7

cryptolocker: knowing it would face the loss of all its records otherwise, a community college ponied up a hefty ransom to hackers

call me gavin: revolutionary presidential grandson who bridged the gap between Walt Whitman and the Summer of Love, commune-founder and muse Chester A Arthur III was quite an astounding individual

by any memes necessary: chat-bot and desktop assistant that communicates exclusively through GIFs

tilting at windmills: decommissioned, obsolete turbine blades repurposed as architectural elements

hyper-realism: painted portraits that surpass photography

back in the habit: a Dutch fashion designer collaborated with the Dominican order to update their traditional garb

weepuls: the story behind those promotional balls of fuzz with googly eyes from the 1970s and 80s

tranvía

As part of a broader discussion on borders and boundaries, Citylab presents the fascinating semi-legendary story of the streetcar line that used to connect the metropolises of El Paso, Texas with Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua as it evolved from mule to monorail (proposed at least on paper) over seven decades.
The trolley-tracks were finally dismantled in the early 1970s—when many municipalities were abandoning streetcars and in some cases mass-transit altogether—at the urging of shopkeepers on the Mexican side who complained that it was too easy and tempting for their customers to do their shopping across the border, but there were hundreds of intervening stories to gather and tell, which a member of the El Paso city council is trying to do, also hoping to restore if not a transnational trolley (and they’re not giving up on that dream without a fight) at least a corridor of public transport with vintage streetcars.

media circus or cause célèbre

Now that the press has managed to censor its own agency to report on the dirty laundry of the newly installed regime—squandered I suspect even when it becomes vital to do so in the future since the constituency that stands behind him seems unphased no matter what’s the scandal of the day, these words of experience from a Russian reporter, Alexey Kovalev—sometimes contributor to The Guardian, about journalism under a climate of control, disdain for the profession and hampered investigations I think is an important and chilling cautionary-tale.
There are a lot of points made here and of course the parallels aren’t perfect and there’s no one to one corres- pondence—at least he made the trains run on time—but one thing did particularly strike me as something that we can expect to see in future audiences that leadership deigns to grant to the Fourth Estate: favouring those soft-ball sorts of questions lobbed from plants in the gallery, “Mister President, Mister President—there are too many vagrants in our neighbourhood.” “Why are the streets in such bad conditions?” Certainly not matters for the president but as he’s ever only a tweet away and thus infinitely accessible, he’ll get to appear like a hero for directing a clean-up operation regardless of the costs and how it might impact other projects in the community (it coming out of the local budget of course) and he’ll get to shame the municipal authorities for letting this happen. What do you think? It’s early yet but we’ve already been treated to several highly choreographed events and at least one with the floor packed with shills to do the cheering and out-shout the boos and groans.

upscale or lossless

The dominant internet search engine and several other platforms are utilising machine-learning to fetch images on mobile devices and maintain high-resolution quality but only use a quarter of the data volume to do so, thus being less taxing on users’ plans. The technique is an established one of inserting pixels to make up for lost details but instead of following a fixed formula, the routine has fast enough processing-speeds to adapt to each images as it comes and may even be able to re-enhance video in real-time.