7x7

gloomy sunday: a neural network could teach humans a thing or two about art appreciation and seeing beauty in the mundane

civil engineering: experiment with urban transportation and infrastructure planning, via Kottke

orders of magnitude: the quantity of user data scraped by malicious actors grows

tabletop: British Museum Mesopotamian artefacts curator works out the playbook for an ancient board

methuselah-ness: the defining trait of a tree might be in their immortality (lack of senescence) rather than height or woodiness, via Kottke

legend of the overfiend: a nostalgic screening and a look at the spread of anime and manga

thanatosis: a longer version of mongoose horse-play with explanations of their behaviour

and now wonder, ye angels

To launch a new series called Pretty Scientific that looks at some of the most iconic and instructive images in the sciences, Gizmodo chose the 1995 photograph captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of a sector of the Eagle Nebula of interstellar gas and dust referred to as the Pillars of Creation.
The name is in reference to an 1857 sermon by celebrated London pastor Charles Haddon Spurgeon entitled “The Condescension of Christ” which on the birth of Jesus remarked, “And now wonder, ye angels, the infinite has become an infant; He upon whose shoulders the Universe doth hang, hangs at His mother’s breast—He who created all things, and bears up the pillars of creation.” There is—as with a lot astronomical imagery—a lot of fine-tuning going into this composition but, as the article explains, presenting the discovery of this incubator of stars is not about liberty or artistic license, but rather a deliberated and debated pastiche and compromise to highlight the amount of data that the telescope can collect that far surpasses the naked eye and would be much diminished—and nigh invisible—without such aides.

westchester, newport and meadowbrook

Curbed happily reports that a rare 1950 Lustron Steel Home in Detroit, Michigan has found a new owner who is committed to keeping the time-capsule house in pristine condition. These prefabricated, enameled steel tiny houses were produced in the post-World War II era in response to a housing shortage facing soldiers returning from the fronts.
Available in the above three model options and requiring little upkeep and durable, the Lustron corporation hoped that these accom-modations would be attractive to young, modern families with little time for maintenance and repairs. Out of around forty five thousand units constructed, only two thousand remain in thirty-six states and though most owners seem fiercely devoted to their conservation, threats from developers remain.

candles in the rain

Having performed at Woodstock, Strawberry Fields, the Isle of Wight festival and the original Glastonbury Fayre, singer/song-writer Melanie Anne Safka-Schekeryk’s 1970 breakthrough hit “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)” was inspired—reportedly—by audiences lighting candles during the various acts, though most of the flames were actually lighters. Melanie, as the artist goes by, is probably most recognised for her 1976 single “Brand New Key”—otherwise referred to as the Roller Skate song.

alba amicorum

Before social media, the Rolodex and the little black book, mobile medieval scholars would collect mementos of their encounters in “friendship books,” as Hyperallergic informs, whose entries were regaled with anecdotes and personal emblems to denote both private and academic connections.
A really engrossing discussion ensues on the human drive to document the ephemeral and specificity is the soul of narrative insofar as these encounters often, absent the means of taking a selfie, contained a wealth of detail that surpassed the attention of chroniclers—a sort of metadata—illustrating that there’s little new under the sun, at least not without its historic antecedents.

patchwork

Colossal curates a rather poignant and personal autobiographical artefact in the form of the embroidered jacket of seamstress Agnes Richter, who was institutionalised at the behest of her father and brothers in the University of Heidelberg’s (previously) psychiatric clinic in 1893 after suffering a series of delusional episodes.
Life in asylums at the time being highly regimented and patients were expected to produce apparel and accessories as well as other daily chores, Richter used her talents to piece together a linen jacket and embellished it with a colourful and tangled palimpsest of reflections that have only been in part deciphered. “I wish to read.” “I plunge headlong into disaster…” Richter’s jacket, an outlet and a testimony, became part of the endowment of outsider art (Art brut oder rohe Kunst) of the University with the acquisition of the Prinzhorn Sammelung—hidden in the attics of the university buildings for safe-keeping during the Nazi regime so that the collection was not confiscated and destroyed as degenerate art. Today the jacket is on display with many other pieces in the University’s main Assembly Hall (Aula).