7x7

pantone 222: Italian designer matches landscapes to colour swatches, via Nag on the Lake

bucket list: an interesting POV piece about the visitors to a watering hole in the desert

love symbol: though the Artist’s scene didn’t make it into the film, he’s still included in the closing credits of Fargo
yertle and mack: a free-loading robot makes us wonder if cybernetic technologies might also become parasitic, via Super Punch

hat-p-26b: water vapour is detected in the atmosphere of Neptune-sized exoplanet

courtesy call: in Japan, one can arrange to have a hale and hearty fisherman act as their morning alarm

papa-oom-mow-mow: an appreciation of the novelty song Surfin’ Bird by the Trashmen, covered by many 

deceptive cadence

The always marvellous Nag on the Lake brings us a pleasant performance of the first digits of the mathematical constant π composed for piano by David Macdonald in the key of A minor.
The music is underscored with a series of factoids about the number, including the supposition that every possible sequence of numbers—a string of perfectly consecutive numbers, lottery winners, one’s past and future cell phone numbers—is contained in the infinite series but it’s never proven until calculated out, many argue. That piece of knowledge made me recall that I’ve encountered this quandary before—formalised as the Kate Bush Conjecture, wherein the singer on a 2005 album sings π to seventy-eight decimal places before skipping ahead to the one hundred thirty-seventh. The theory was advanced, arguing that that sequence would be found somewhere within the number, just not at the beginning. Infinite yet non-random, π is suspected to have that property though it remains unproven.

retronautics institute

First introduced at last year’s Geneva Motor Show, the darling little Microlino electro-auto by Swiss designer Wim Ouboter evokes the bubble chassis of the BWM Isetta of the 1950s. Priced at twelve thousand euros, the company is slated to reach its production goal of five thousand by the year’s end.

optics

Though Dear Leader was more than willing to levy an unfounded claim that the past administration was somehow spying on his activities via microwaves, he seemed to take no expectation with the idea that a cunning Russian agent posing as a journalist, unescorted and given exclusive access to the Oval Office, might have been capable of smuggling in a surveillance device.
Also, please do discount the fact that the photo-op was on the occasion of the Russian foreign minister and ambassador meeting Dear Leader for the first time—just fresh from firing the FBI director spearheading the investigation into Russian interference in the US presidential election and the same ambassador figures large in that network of associations. Stultifyingly, Dear Leader’s next engagement was to appear with the reanimated toad and noted war criminal Henry Kissinger whose superior’s modus operandi was compared to Dear Leader’s recent behaviour by a lot of people in many different forums.