pishtaq, iwan

A Hong Kong based design team has constructed a coiling passageway of arches in Sharjah—one of the capital cities of the United Arab Emirates, that portrays the architectural development of the Islamic arch. Like the more familiar Doric, Ionic and Corinthian progression of the Greek column, the Islamic gateway went from the unadorned to the more elaborate over the ages: round, ogee, tented, parabolic, multifoil. Take a video tour with BLDGBlog at the link up top.

one million b.c.

Like forensics experts working on a case that went cold hundreds of thousands of years ago, archæologists are discovering that equipped with the next generation of genetic sequencers that there able to find bits of ancient hominid DNA when sifting through the sediment of practically any old cave.
No fossil evidence nor artefacts, though surely that’s pretty exciting to uncover, is required to trace how our direct ancestors and Neanderthal cousins spread across the continents and perhaps interacted. Surely this can be expanded to the whole of the plant and animal kingdoms, as well.  I wasn’t expecting that our machines were so finely calibrated to detect biochemical markers as so faint a trace, but this is sure to be revolutionary as palæontologists have already managed to extrapolate and reconstruct whole monstrous dinosaurs and more modest primogenitors of our kind out of just a fragment of a tooth or a little toe bone.

up-cycle/down-cycle

A company called Miniwiz, as The Awesomer informs, has created a mobile, pop-up recycling facility that’s more than just a repository where garbage is sorted but one where waste is actually processed in situ. This first solar-powered station, expected to be deployed to tourist attractions to clean up afterwards but also as a demonstration of the Trashpresso’s potential, coverts plastic and textiles into architectural tiles and other building materials. I can imagine a whole host of other possible applications, digesting a construction site and regenerating it anew.

😱

The theory that Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (Skrik) has its sky coloured by memories of the eruption of Krakatoa, which made the sunsets very dramatic in the whole of the Western Hemisphere for an entire year a decade prior to the work’s painting has been circulating since 2004 (the year it was stolen from an Oslo museum—to be recovered two years later. Now, however, geoscientists and meteorologists (it’s strange to think that the weather reporter is the only scientist that many of us see on regular basis) believe the swirling clouds may represent a recently classified but rarely occurring formation called a polar stratospheric or mother-of-pearl cloud, which become iridescent when the winter sun dips below the horizon.

29 dresses or the tele-screens have no off switch

On offer by invitation only, there’s an electronic eye for the wardrobe, changing stalls and locker rooms that will judge your clothes and sense of style, making recommended changes based on one’s existing catalogue of apparel and surely it could direct the individual receiving the dressing-down to a host of places for retail-therapy. It will also offer advice on which of two outfits might be a better fit for a certain occasion, based on algorithms and perhaps consulting with the panopticon of other web cameras to save us the embarrassment of showing up in the same dress as another.

poker-face or the zeroth law

Via Gizmodo, we learn that a pair of Swiss futurists, realising that technology is advancing to a point where it can essential read human minds by analysing tells and galvanic responses in the background—non-obtrusively but without our submission, have chartered four proposed inalienable rights to give us some safe-guards when it comes to reading and/or planting thoughts.
The neuroethicist and human rights lawyer suggest that we retain the rights to cognitive liberty (opting-out), mental privacy (consent required), mental integrity (mind-hacking or Inception-style inserting the germ of a thought), and psychological continuity (the right of individuals to refuse procedures and enhancements that might impact their personality or sense of self). What do you think? It may seem a little premature to being fretting over a legal framework to vouchsafe our inner thoughts—especially when we haven’t yet codified the rules of engagement for robots or genetic-tinkering—but we absolutely cannot afford further underlap in terms of privacy and volition for inevitable conflicts.

der kuss oder glasnost coast to coast

This kiss that has launched a thousand homages occurred during the fraternal encounter between Soviet statesman Leonid Brezhnev and DDR General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party Erich Honecker in October of 1979—celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of East Germany with pledges of mutual support.

The graffiti version that features prominently on the Berlin Wall (My God, help me to survive this deadly love), however, came much later. Dmitri Vrubel completed his mural on this date in 1990 and has been conserved as a testament to the times since. The photographer who captured the kiss on film, a French free-lancer named Régis Bossu, and the artist Vruble met themselves in March of 2009 when the curators of the East Side Gallery invited back all the still living artists to repaint their works in more durable colours and undo thirty years of vandalism and weathering—and the updated attribution credits them both.

wag the dog

Persuasive maps, as the always marvellous Nag on the Lake informs, is the term used for images such as the one pictured of the run up to the 1896 contested presidential election (William McKinley versus William Jennings Bryan that gets allegorical mention in the Wizard of Oz) meant as a vehicle for propaganda rather than impart geopolitical information.
We’ve encountered such illustrations beforehand but didn’t know that that particular genre had a name—and though it’s obvious that there is an implicit message, sometimes we’re so far removed from events that it’s hard to appreciate a caricature as anything other than silly or bigoted or mean-spirited—much less a dedicated collection and expanding digital archive to peruse at the Cornell University Library. Perhaps in context and well curated we will be able decipher these symbols better, and maybe we’ll do a better job recognising contemporary hoopla presented as skewed statistics and shock-infographics.