possible, probably and preferable

The always engaging BLDGBlog introduces us to rogue librarian Megan Prelinger—co-founder of the eponymous independent media archive—and author of book that explores how the space race was narrated and to an extent sold by the vintage advertising and promotional materials of ærospace contractors and computer companies to the same degree our aspirations and trepidations were captured by science-fiction. What do you think? Industrial futurists would naturally offer a vision where they were equipped to meet demand but I think it also speaks volumes about contemporary scientific literacy and curiosity.
The steampunk airship depicted in this 1960s back-cover magazine ad by Erik Nitsche is an homage to how the company got its start in a New Jersey shipyard as an electric boat corporation, purveyors of submarines and torpedoes, infamous already at the beginning of the twentieth century for selling armaments to opposing navies at war. Be sure to explore Geoff Manaugh’s blog at the link up top for more architectural conjecture, urban speculation and landscapes of the future.

the new colossus

In 1940, the Council Against Intolerance in America commissioned artist Emma Bourne to produce a map (with no state boundaries) to illustrate how the US was a nation of migrants. The red banners show broadly where various groups of people settled and mark their religious and ethnic backgrounds and there’s a call-out box crediting immigrants in the arts and industry (though telling of attitudes towards Asia and Africa and very euro-centric).
The impetus to publish the map back then was the isolationist stance that the US was taking to the escalating situation in Europe and scapegoating of refugees. The title refers to the poem that Emma Lazarus penned to raise funds to construct the pediment for the Statue of Liberty that was otherwise a gift from France that of course concludes with the stanza:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

inholding

Satellite views of some rural areas of US northwest reveal forested lands that have distinctive chequerboard patterns—almost like the transparent colour tool in digital imagery, whose origins reach back to the mid nineteenth century when federal lands were parcelled to corporations and individuals in such an alternating fashion, beginning with railroad land grants along transportation corridors.
The public retained the spaces in between—these are square mile lots—as wooded refuges buffeted by grazing land managed by homesteaders, and hoped to benefit economically as improved infrastructure increased the value of federal holdings. The government planned to sell the remaining parcels at a profit but this real estate bubble failed to foment as most people motivated to resettle and go West weren’t people of means to begin with and could not afford plots adjacent to the railways and most went unsold or were given away wholesale.

ectoplasm

Via Super Punch, we discover that engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created translucent amœboid robots composed almost solely of hydrogel—a rubbery substance that’s fairly robust, enabling these little gelatine machines to dart around quickly and punch quite above their weight with flagella and pseudopodia.
The video demonstration that includes enveloping and then releasing a fish is a little scary to imagine, given their near invisibility, but the potential is really staggering from cleaning up pollution in the oceans to making surgery a matter of swallowing a pill. Not only are the robots able to evade visual detection, appearing only as a ripple, they also have the same acoustic and fluid dynamic properties of the surrounding medium when relaxed and solid objects would pass through them without realising it—just a ghostly organising principle for water. It makes me think of the undersea aliens encountered in the 1989 James Cameron film The Abyss and wonder if such technological surrogates will be our ambassadors for first contact.

shamrock

My first reaction to this bit of table decoration was shock since I thought four-leaved clovers were lucky due to their rarity—something of an extension to the parable that Saint Patrick used the three-leaved clover to illustrate the Trinity to pagan Ireland, and each single leaf represented faith, hope and love and with a fourth, one could have good fortune as well.  Genetically mutating clover to produce leaves of four without fail seems like it would be rather tempting fate. Rather than outright meddling with Nature or gaming the system on an industrial scale, however, the ornamentation is a cultivar of the sorrel plant from Central America called the “iron cross,” and is technically one leaf with four leaflets. Botanists aren’t even sure whether it’s genetics or environmental factors responsible for the rare occurrence. I suppose our lucky charms are safe and secure after all.

411, 404

As we learn that US government websites are being savaged and historical content is being stripped away and sequestered from public-access—like reports on animal welfare for various commercial research facilities or weather or jobs statistics, so no one might be informed of realities inconveniently counter-factual to the official party lines, there was this one strangely prescient compilation that was a challenge to come by:
a freedom of information act (FOIA) request was filed in December of 2014 and was granted within a few months, delivering a list of all .gov domains that had been terminated for one reason or another over the past decade. There are some horrid examples of early web design brutalism that’s worth conserving for its own sake, and most—until now I suppose, had their content migrated and put under the stewardship of centralised web-masters. A few quietly disappeared, like wmd.gov (weapons of mass destruction, c. 2003-2009) that’s its own punchline, 404 error – not found, and I am sure that in this current political environment, Wokey the Bear and Ranger Smith’s fiddlers’ corner would be summarily embargoed.

daily digest

Via fellow freedom fighter and internet caretaker Madam Jujujive, here’s an annotated resource to bookmark to help one keep up with the current US regime. Who knows what horrors this brave chronicler will collect before the conclusion of this chapter? At the risk of being overloaded and underwhelmed, I am just grateful that we might take one day at a time and still be present in the trenches.

de stijl

Via Nag on the Lake, we learn that in honour of the centenary since the founding of the neo-plastic art movement in Amsterdam, the Dutch is giving its seat of government’s city hall ensemble in Den Haag a makeover inspired by the colourful geometry of leading figure Piet Mondrian.