ford at the fair

There are a lot of interesting angles to pursue in this latest ploy for attention from Tedium but what really resonated with us was the mention of the partnership between industrialist Henry Ford and botanist and inventor George Washington Carver to create a “soybean” car—or rather an automobile with a hemp-based body.  Like the factors that led to the production of the plastic Trabant in East Germany, war time austerity and steel and fuel rationing prompted this collaborative effort in 1941.
Designed to also operate on hemp oil, there is some unsettled contentions about the success and abandonment of this bioplastics vehicle. Only one prototype was built and displayed to the public at the Dearborn assembly-line and later at the Michigan State Fair and was subsequently destroyed—along with the exact combination of crops used—and newspaper accounts vary as to the reception. Despite significant investment, safety demonstrations, patent-filings and acres and acres of soy and marijuana, the end of World War II and surplus steel seemed to mothball the idea for the more ecologically-friendly mode of transportation but the initial decision to walk back the first model the remains a bit of mystery.  Tales abound how the petroleum industry conspires to quash innovation that would not be in their self-interest, and perhaps the soy car was one of the earliest casualties and one wonders what trajectory things might have taken otherwise. 

chemin de fer

Messy Nessy Chic captivates our attention with her latest scouting expedition returning with this incredible, extant railway hotel constructed in the 1920s called the Belvédère du Rayon Vert of the French town Cerbère close to the border with Spain.
The art deco gem that once boasted a breath-taking cinema, dining halls and a roof-top tennis court closed down in 1983 but can happily still be engaged on a weekly-basis for those willing to rough it self-catering or toured for an afternoon. Check out the source link above to peruse a gallery of photographs and for more details, including the telephone number to arrange a visit since—in the spirit of being a time-capsule, there’s no website to deliberate over.

blottentot

Informed by the creative dotage of poet Justinus Kerner when he spilt ink in his notebook and was inspired to versify on the intriguing smudges, Hermann Rorschach as a young child was fascinated with this technique and earned the nickname “Klecks”—German for inkblot.
The chain of development of klecksography from poetry to psychological tool to study the subconscious did enjoy an intermediate phase as an international popular pastime, we learn from Atlas Obscura, just a few years after the publication of Kerner’s book of poems with a pamphlet instructing people how to create shadow-pictures or gobolinks for festive occasions and use the resulting image (tellingly, taken as monstrous mostly) as a writing-prompt. Similar to a test in word association or talking therapy but with a visual media, a patient’s interpretation of the stains is a way to access involuntary imagination and probe impulses not yet manifest came about in 1921 when Rorschach was studying Sigmund Freud’s theories on dream symbolism and was reminded of his childhood hobby.

ethernet

Via the intrepid adventurers at Atlas Obscura, we learn that researchers at the University of Zurich have created the largest and most complex virtual universe with the Piz Daint super computer (named after an alpine peak).
The simulation, this meta-cosmos is to be used in conjunction with the Euclid space probe mission, launching in 2020, to scour the skies for signs of dark matter and dark energy. Astrophysicists hope that virtual models seeded with informed guesses as to the composition and arrangement might help them plot out the satellite’s course to maximise the chances of detecting the illusive substance (sort of like using augmented reality as a heuristic tool), which is thought to be the chief component of the Universe and far more prevalent (but weakly interacting) than the matter that we are accustomed to working with.