latch and locker

Hyperallergic features a nice appreciation of the overlooked Pop Art artist Dorothy Grebenak, active from 1950 to 1970.
Though she never quite owed up to being attached to that particular genre, Grebenak’s creations were as iconic as those of Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol. Possibly relegated to a secondary status due to her medium of choice—almost exclusively working in hooked rugs meant to be displayed on the wall like a tapestry—Grebenak’s work made it into some prestigious museums but got no further than the gift shops, until being championed by one collector and gallery owner. Find out more about this forgotten artist at the link up top.

and i would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids

Exactly one month after the addled accusation that the former US president was wire-tapping Dear Leader during the campaign, it is beginning to make sense—although it’s just another diversionary-tacit—how the baselessness was defended by characterising news as fake “but the leaks are real.”
When the intelligence service conduct surveillance on foreign agents—it being well established that America spies on friend and foe alike—sometimes, often American parties in on the conversation are intercepted in the process. In all cases the identities of the speakers of this collaterally collected conversation is duly redacted in the transcription and are anonymised. Requesting to reveal a name—with justification and truly on a need-to-know basis—is called unmasking. The then US national security director—and it’s impossible to find a reporting source that does not couch the interview with editorial—acknowledged the procedural jargon and protocols while denying any political motivation or leaking any of the intelligence over-reach to the press. This refutation seems perfectly plausible since Dear Leader’s paranoia and continuous fugue state had already confirmed everyone’s suspicions without the need for leaking anything.

confederation

To invoke Article V—not to be confused Article L, in the context of the US federal government is to trigger that process whereby the constitution is amended, designed purposefully to be hard to do and reflective of universal values and not subject to the caprices of demagoguery.
Chillingly, as Brendan O’Connor files for Fusion, last summer saw a gathering of legislators and billionaire lobbyists amid the forced atmosphere of Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia for a twisted sort of a model UN that yielded the debate and passage of three trial amendments. In this instance, the convention called for fiscal restraint (the balanced-budget amendment), federal term limits and the end of the estate (death) tax, but it was just an experiment with members attesting to a wide-ranging and ambitious agenda.  This convention was also illustrative of how deeply entrenched influence-peddlers have become and how fragile progressive democracies have become in the face of gerrymandering and ballot-stuffing.

digital foundry or prototype

In the context of debates on the privacy and over-reach of contemporary facial-recognition technologies, Tedium takes a look back to when teaching machines to read—that is recognise text that was also contoured for human eyes (as opposed to bar-codes)—was the hurdle to vaunt. Aptly, it was the offices of Reader’s Digest that first employed optical character recognition (OCR) in 1954—not for skimming the abridged versions for the busy reader—but rather to manager their subscribers’ data.
The prototype was invented two years earlier in the attic workshop of a tinkerer who called it “Gismo.” As the idea spread, a need for industry standards arose and type-face designers had to make a departure from the quiver of fonts that printers used, sourced from medieval scripts, and designed a character set that could be easily interpreted by all eyes and avoided ambiguity. As the visual acuity of machines has greatly increased (although there are still notable hang-ups) along with reading comprehension, we are not restricted to a certain font family and can be expressive with materials fit for consumption by electronic or biological minds, but for legacy hardware, such typefaces are kept around—for instance on the raised digits on a credit card. The inventor, David Hammond Shepard, also designed the latter numeric font called Farrington B and devised the automated telephone answering tree, interactive voice response technology.

science, not silence

Home to one of the largest concentration of experts in the world due to its proximity to the research facilities at CERN and other international institutions that support and promote the sciences, Geneva will be host to a protest rally on 22 April, Earth Day, with the scientific community marching against anti-science rhetoric and “alternative facts,” first gushed by Dear Leader’s majordomo in defence of views antithetical to reality.
With an inclusive message, the organisers are not calling the event a political one (despite the wanton disregard that some are broadcasting) but rather an opportunity for a course-correction in the spreading attitude that rejects science and objective authenticities and to leverage the reputation of learning—which is wholly non-partisan and a demonstration that we can all get behind.  The stakes are too high not to.