unit of account

Having recently been informed that the Inca reckoned the passage of time against the duration it took to cook a potato made me reshuffle my own ponderings on how we measure time. Of course, the size of a potato should be taken into consideration as well as the time it would take to boil would vary a lot between the Amazon basin or at the mountain citadel of Machu Picchu—which is a much different form of time-dilation than what Albert Einstein worked with. Since I began wearing this little snitch on my wrist, I’ve noticed that I am becoming quite obsessed with the different metrics that track my rest and wakefulness and hardly ever look at the watch face any more, though always have been an avid walker and flaneur. It’s as if I can tell what time it is by the pedometer count and whether I’m a-pace, ahead or lagging behind the typical day. Are you driven to get your steps in? I am motivated by the little feeling of accomplishment and conditioned message of praise. Living so much of our lives virtually, augmented and in a sense either accelerated or outside of time altogether, it’s strange that we can still find routine and patterns in unmediated data, cues that’s processed and collated echelons above in ways we don’t understand.

6x6

dilithium: four-dimensional “time” crystals are a reality

arboreal: a vertical residential forest tower to be cultivated in China, like this one in Milan

wir sind die roboter: grand tour of the automaton exhibit at the London Science Museum

one-armed bandit: this bit of moral-panic and malfeasance that the casinos can’t counter is an apt metaphor, via Super Punch

utopía: a profile of a rather congested island paradise

worth-1000: Merriam-Webster dictionaries goes animated with a Giphy presence, via the Daily Dot  

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.