if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu

Dear Leader’s viceroy is certainly at liberty to conduct his social life as he wishes and if he adheres to the same rules that governed his dining habits fifteen years ago about not eating unchaperoned with a woman that’s not his wife (which is quite a specific Venn diagram)—construed from the quote “if there’s alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room standing next to me”—it’s his business.
It’s fine even if that betrays a strange idea about what goes on in restaurants and a very conservative, traditional view of gender and identity politics. Infidelity shouldn’t be the default. It stops becoming a choice, however, when that attitude prevents him from meeting one-on-one with a female counterpart, lawyer or aide. The boys’ clubs of business and politics never went anywhere and his superior is a sexual predator, granted, but harbouring such stringent rules for dealing with half of the population disengages and takes opportunities away from us all.

payload

SpaceX achieved a potentially stupendous milestone for rocketry and space exploration by successfully and safely recycling the spent stages of a recovered booster rocket, which always seemed like a big waste as they peeled away. If this feat can be repeated—which seems likely, it will significantly reduce the cost of putting people and supplies in orbit and beyond.

bauarbeit oder all in all, you’re just another brick in the wand

Though certainly more palatable than the choice of say the Binladin Group as building partners, two German construction firms are willing to court massive public-relations blowback domestically and abroad and perfectly illustrate how the failure to learn from history dooms us all to repeat it by submitting contract bids to build Dear Leader’s wall, the Local reports. What do you think? The contract is supposed to be awarded in mid-April.  This partition is other than the frontiers that divided post-war Germany and Europe but seems to strongly go against the narrative of integration over nationalism and protectionism and Russia was willing to tear it down once before.

cloud atlas

For the first time in three decades the World Meteorological Organisation, Kottke informs, has added several new formal classifications for cloud formations—called species, and their supplementary features. The gallery of images is quite striking and worth perusing. First published in 1896, these compendia were important training tools for predicting the weather and developing a standard nomenclature to communicate forecasts without always having the pictorial key at hand, much like the complex and exacting language of vexillology.

happy little clouds

Via Nag on the Lake, we learn about a dedicated curator has compiled an unofficial site which features all four hundred and three landscape lessons taught by Bob Ross in thirty-one seasons on PBS’s Joy of Painting.
Formerly a master sergeant in the US Air Force, Ross often found himself in screaming-matches and situations that called on him being anything other than meditative and reflective. One day, however, he caught an episode of the Magic of Painting that inspired him to champion the same cause and vowed never to raise his voice in anger again. Named after the two inch background brush that was the go-to brush in the artist’s quiver, the site is not only a fine nice tribute to those awed by the creative process and his calming demeanour but also a resource for those aspiring to learn to paint.

reactions

As part of an on-going project that began in 2014 and has evolved parallel to the facial recognition software the artist is exploring, Jillian Mayer has exactingly plotted all the algorithmically significant points on her face to illustrate how she not only can find herself tagged in online images, identified by closed-circuit televisions and objectified as a model herself but moreover how her (our) expressions betray her feelings insofar as they are measurable.
If machines can read our moods and interests so well (or poorly, but it is another thing to convince a much vaunted establishment that its assessments are not on target), the performance-piece asks, why would we expect to asked how we felt? Taking the time seems superfluous and cursory. As large scale credentialing becomes institutionalised and targeted, are we still in control of our physical avatars or solely at the mercy of the interpreter and auger?

jot and tittle oder breath and branded

Futility Closet has a nice send up for one of the longest German compound words found in non-science contexts: das Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, referring to a decree issued by the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in 1999 (repealed to far less celebrity in 2013) governing the labelling of beef products.
I say referring because that was how it was characterised in the press and subsequently by language academies as the long-form title of the law has each of the elements broken up into more manageable units. As intimidating as the pronunciation and elocution looks, there’s even a masterful performance of an Austrian choir at the link up top to show it’s not impossible to pull off.