vroom!

 We’ve heard of customised horns and other features beforehand of course but never of a musical tailpipe like on the exhaust of this classic Rolls Royce to be played with a keyboard like an organ. It’s strange that one might want to further personalise one’s signature engine roar since that is such a recognisable trait but stranger yet I suppose that electric automobiles are given amplified noises so pedestrians aren’t caught off guard. Visit Just a Car Guy at the link above for more pictures and provenance.

operation vittles

When in late June of 1948 Soviet forces tried to starve West Berlin into surrender during the blockade the American forces—headquartered in Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden—responded by dispatching some two-hundred thousand re-supply flights that brought food and materiel to the isolated enclave—nearly one flight every half-minute for the following fifteen months until rail-access was restored. One response of the dependents, one thousand wives and children, of US soldiers stationed there was to create a cheerful little austerity cookbook made up of improvised and not so bleak recipes (maybe some indulgence and exotic tastes is the answer to a geopolitical crisis) to tide their families and their Germany hosts through rationing and power-cuts and general uncertainty. Within this gesture too is the stance of solidarity as the families could have been evacuated, rather than choosing to remain and tough it out.

the prisoners’ dilemma

Of course the online world is not reality—though sometimes that fact is easy to overlook—but the interactive demonstration, The Evolution of Trust by Nicky Case, is a good heuristic tool not only for exploring how relationship of trust and the opposite are cultivated but also an appreciation of the frameworks and experiences that prompt and promote cooperation.
Models of conflict and optimising agents can be structured to persuade people to have confidence in one another that one’s not seeking profit at the expense of another but they can also be created (and perhaps it’s easier to digest psychologically as general mistrust given the pace of the internet and nature of interaction) where cheating is the best strategy. The internet entire isn’t rigged like that, but suspicions are justified—especially it seems against a milieu that’s being manipulative in inscrutable ways. The canonical prisoner’s dilemma that the iterative game’s set up (but updated and couched in more familiar experiences) is premised upon posits that two members of a criminal gang are caught and incarcerated and put in solitary confinement (no way to communicate or form a strategy with one another). Due to insufficient evidence, there’s a possibility for them both to have the sentences commuted, but are separately give the opportunity to either betray the other by profession his own innocence or remain silent (thick as thieves). If they betray each other, they both are sentenced and if one betrays the other, one goes free and the other goes to prison, while if they both are truthful, they both are released.

i am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people in the country

In a desperate plea for help, some brave soul at the White House leaked the full transcripts of Dear Leader’s conversations with the president of Mexico and the Australian prime minister, demonstrating that in private, one-on-one situations he’s still every bit as sub-literate, narcissistic and nasty as he is in public—for those holds-out that hoped he might have cultivated two personæ like his presidential opponent prescribed since he seems to be guilty of all the accusations that he hurled at Clinton. The transcripts are indeed humiliating and undermine America’s position when it comes to future negotiations on anything, but it is necessary to expose this regime for the vacuous and nihilistic sham it is. Imagine that these conversations occurred just after his inauguration (epochs ago in Trumpian time)—I wonder how much more unhinged he’s become since then.

home improvement

An omnipotent electronic, on-demand retail empire has had its furtive plans to use its fleet of delivery drones (previously) to survey and assess the state of the customer’s abode and garden and recommend fixes—or at least subtly advertise suggested products or services that one might be interested investing in, as Super Punch informs, receive official endorsement in the form of letters patent and the sole intellectual-heir to such fly-bys.
Not only would this buzzing and strafing let one know that the roof over one’s head might be in need of repairs, collusion between marketers and insurance providers might also inflate one’s rates and liabilities accordingly. What do you think? It might also spot dangers early so that catastrophes might be prevented. Convenience has its costs in any case and this development, which seems far more fraught with potential for abuse and manipulation, is following right after the maker of autonomous vacuum cleaners made a pledge not to sell on data the units had gleaned in respect to the layout and manifest of owners’ living spaces.