border stories

Always with a weakness for unusual ways of interpreting and expressing territoriality (read more about exclaves, enclaves and such here, here and here), we really enjoyed this brilliant chart by a Reddit contributor courtesy of Nag on the Lake that illustrates the world’s ten shortest national borders and a bit of the geographic, climatic and historic context that went into their creation. Click on the image to zoom in. Rückslag near the German town of Konzen is close enough for a visit and it looks like an away-mission will be organised soon.

carhop

In order to make visiting a charging station less of a chore and more of a treat (though I imagine that such a congregating place might be short-lived with exponential improvements to battery life and duration of recharging times), the entrepreneur behind Tesla electric vehicles and several other enterprises besides will transform one of his service points in the Los Angeles area into a classic bit of Americana, making it into a drive-in restaurant, complete with a (robotic?) waitstaff/pit-crew on roller skates. That’s a pretty clever idea—we think, the set-up is already familiar and seems conducive to powering-up one’s car and we wonder if a resurgence of drive-in theatres might not be in the offering soon.

8x8

mother will protect you: Billy Butcher re-imagines Black Mirror episodes as comic book covers

memory hole: the fickleness of contemporary media and format-shifting could create a digital dark ages for future historians

attitude polarisation: the elusive nature of the backfire effect

gorillas in our midst: despite how plausible it may seem, White House staff did not fall over one another to create a custom entertainment channel for Dear Leader

to tell the truth: ladies and gentlemen, Miss Kitty Carlisle

dammit janet: become an flight attendant for the US’s most secret airline, the one that shuttles employees between Las Vegas, Nevada and Area 51

take two of these and call me in the morning: vintage Bank of America spot for “Instant Money”—caution auto-play

much amaze: a crypto-currency based off an internet meme created in 2013 has a market-capitalisation of over a billion dollars, via Slashdot 

universal favourite

As a spinoff for a project that they did for a particular client, an Australian design studio and local confectionary experts collaborated to create gourmet chocolate stair-step wedges in exotic flavours that are paired with a complementary piece to form a cube, Universal Favourites, that’s not only pleasing to the palette but aesthetically as well, since food ought to be photogenic and look too good to part with casually.

category: athletes with maps

The intrepid team at Lewis & Quark have run some notable experiments with neural networks in the past year (previously here, here, and here) and begins 2018 with an equally insightful drill that invited their AI familiar to come up with plausible Wikipedia articles—based of course on the contributions of human encyclopaedists, and the results were predictably weird though revealing about our own editorial conventions.
Parallel to the headings that the machine will generate, we learn that Wikipedia has curated a collection of submitted articles that humorously failed to adhere to the site’s standards and were consequently never published, which could have been the product of the machine itself but Wikipedia’s rejects could not hold a candle (we think) to some of the ones in the computer-generated sandbox: Monster Diseases, Tire bear (country), Near Dogs and Tree Wars. Be sure and visit Lewis & Quark on Tumblr at the link above for more of computers trying and subscribe so you’ll never miss a post.

duckies

Here is a sample of the kinetic, magical artwork of Seattle-based illustrator Jonathan Stroh. One should browse his entire, extensive portfolio here for more exotic destinations and more multifaceted animations. There are ducks, I believe, somewhere in every composition.