golden thread or tanglewood tales

Named after a stately mansion whose grounds were the venue for outdoors summer concerts—a tradition in the Berkshires, a prime destination for industrialists in the Gilded Age—that the author had a view of from his humble rented cottage, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the book Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls as a sequel to A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys in 1853.
The introduction to Greek mythology’s most celebrated edition was issued in 1921, accompanied with beautiful Art Nouveau illustrations by artist Virginia Frances Sterrett. This image depicts a scene from Circe’s palace—the sorceress who was the sister of Aeetes, keeper of the Golden Fleece, and aunt to the Minotaur—when Odysseus and his crew first enter to investigate, hearing Circe singing sweetly as she worked her handloom, an episode that foreshadows his eventual reunion with his faithful wife Penelope who was forever weaving and unweaving a burial shroud in anticipation of the death of her aged father-in-law Laërtes, offering that she is deferring picking from her many suitors until she is done with that task.

nur bei grün gehen

Boing Boing reports that ahead of the Fifth of May two hundredth anniversary of the birth of native son Karl Marx, the city of Trier has installed special commemorative Ampelmännchen. City officials also plan to unveil a bronze sculpture donated by the government of China on Marx’ birthday.

boardwalk empire

Messy Nessy Chic USA correspondent Luke Spencer explores the mothballed resorts and casinos of Atlantic City, New Jersey—a city (previously) with an economy briefly revived by world-class shyster Donald J Trump, whose spelunking serves as a vital illustration of how an opportunistic, rentier business model enriches no one but the syndicate itself.

national treasure

Things Magazine directs our attention to a special exhibit that showcases the UK National Gallery’s recollection of the evacuation of its collections during World War II to an abandoned slate quarry in Snowdonia for safe-keeping. Paintings, sculpture and other artefacts were stored in the cavernous shafts of the Manod mines near the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales from 1941 to 1945, fulfilling Winston Churchill’s pledge that “not one picture will leave this island.”

zero-player game

Conceived in 1970, the Game of Life is a demonstration of iterative arrays from British polymath and professor John Horton Conway. Categorised as a zero-player game, human involvement or volition only takes place at the initial state, seeding the game’s grid universe, which determines how the board evolves over subsequent generations. Each grid square or cell can be either populated or unpopulated—on or off—and interacts with the eight other cells that frame it according to four basic protocols: an isolated cell perishing from underpopulation, a cell with the right amount of neighbours thrives, a cell with too many neighbours dies from overcrowding, and an unpopulated cell with a precise amount of neighbours becomes populated—as if by reproduction.
Cellular automata such as these have practical applications in encryption and security, owing the unpredictable nature of the outcome though the world and conditions can be fully known, but also produces interesting, stable algorithmic organisms that oscillate and creep across the board. Of course these creatures only evolve by analogy, sort of like how artificial intelligence is an approximation of cognition through pattern-recognition and exploitation, but is a useful tool for visualising how computational routines work and a way to comprehend how machines learn and behave in novel and unexpected ways.