still-life with roquefort

6x6

the long way home: in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbour, an American seaplane in New Zealand had to find an alternative route across the Pacific

a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at: a trailer for the documentary trailer for the Minnesota Experimental City (previously) and its founder Athelstan Spilhaus

transiting exoplanet survey satellite: a nice primer on NASA’s TESS mission that’s expected to sweep the skies for potentially planets

il fuori salone: highlights from Milan Design Week

funkloch: in contravention of the Rural Call Completion Task Force, a telecom provider is being punished for phantom ring tones

if you don’t love me at my worst: this 1921 comic strip foreshadows those expectation versus reality memes pretty spot-on

ordinance survey

Our thanks to the Londonist for introducing us to an rather stunning and absorbing project called Britain from Above that drew on the extensive archives of the Aerofilms Collection to present to the public and elicit feedback (2010-2014) nearly one hundred thousand aerial photographs and films from between 1919 to 1953.
The varied collection includes urban, industrial and rural scenery and was begun when two veteran flying aces from World War I were granted a charter to launch the first comprehensive land survey by air. Aerofilms also pioneered the discipline known as photogrammetry—the term for producing maps from aerial photography. These vintage images are not only visually captivating but also provide important insights for understanding growth and development and management, conservation of both built and natural environments.

pet project or message in a bottle

Via Slashdot, we learn that building on the 2016 discovery of a strain of bacteria in a dump in Japan that ate plastic, a group of researchers at the University of Portsmouth accidentally prodded the catalyst that allows the bacteria to breakdown and metabolise PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic into overdrive.
Curious to understand the evolutionary mechanism that selected for such appetites in the first place, scientists altered the enzyme inadvertently whilst taking it apart. Though further trials are needed, researchers are confident that the process is scalable and could be a tool (this is a big problem whose solutions take a concerted effort and shifts in behaviours, as well) in combating the problem of plastic waste in the oceans.

view of the world from ninth avenue

The always inspiring Nag on the Lake, through the lens of a special textile exhibit hosted at the visitor’s centre of a historic mill located between Glasgow and Edinburgh helps us to place a name and personality to a diverse portfolio of work by an artist arguably best known for his political cartoons, Saul Steinberg. Though commercial work was not his favourite engagement, Steinberg looked as if he took no mean measure of joy in creating textiles and pattern-work, his ornate design The Wedding pictured, and in the 1950s, being able to cotton onto any medium was definitely to the artist’s advantage.
As a young man in Romania, his caricatures documented and lampooned the rise of fascism under conditions made it intolerable and he fled across the Atlantic and was granted asylum by the Dominican Republic in 1941. While he waited for his immigration application to the United States to be approved, Steinberg carried on a lively correspondence in cartoons with The New Yorker (previously), and this epistolary relationship informed a career that lasted for nearly six decades.

technology, entertainment, design

Via Super Punch, we are invited to consider the presentation that’s the buzz of this year’s TED Talk conference which was held last week in Vancouver. Computer scientist and virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier lamented the “free,” ad-based internet that we’ve created and suggested that these behaviour modification and commodification empires either adopt a subscription model, a utility that one pays for like any other service, or abandon this venture entirely.
“We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third party who wishes to manipulate them.” People of course encouraged to keep up their end of whatever topic of discussion might be circulating out there in the ether, as well. Charging a fee for their services (Marginal Revolution crunched the numbers earlier and determined that globally a membership fee of twenty dollars would cover the advertising revenue it earned per user per year) and it would drive improvement to make the site a service worth paying for. Would you rather have your outlook and opinions meddled with for free or pay a nominal fee and get your money’s worth? One pays for quality. If everyone roundly rejects paying anything for a service that once touted itself as complimentary and always would be, what are we to infer if such a business model fail to attract customers and reach critical, networked mass? Ideas worth spreading, indeed.

silurian hypothesis

Angling from the perspective of an astrobiologist and attempting to give one possible solution to Fermi’s paradox, Atlantic correspondent Adam Frank was about to put to the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies that perhaps alien civilisations advance to the point where they’re either consumed by a climatic catastrophe of their own creation with it being exceedingly rare for a race to muddle through but his proposal was derailed mid-sentence with the rather arresting question why ought one presume that humankind is the Earth’s first advanced civilization.

I’ve wondered about this before and of course it’s the subject of speculative fiction, considering that all of our vaunted history just barely reaches back four thousand years—though from an evolutionary standpoint, we’ve had the mental facilities that we possess today for about sixty-thousand years already and have been anatomically the same for about three hundred thousand years, which all seem to barely register as a blip on a geological timescale. The director, with deference to a Dr Who race of intelligent and industrial reptilians that inhabited the Earth millions of years ago, posits a hypothetical precursor quite off the scale of practitioners of archaeology and a challenge for paleontologists and geologists. The article goes on to explore what traces our civilization might be depositing in the layers of the Earth that might be detectable by scientists tens of millions of years in the future, once our buildings are ground to dust and even our most problematic pollution has finally degraded. Would future scientists even recognise the mark in the strata as telltale? More than the search for a long extinct race of intelligent dinosaurs that were perhaps too clever for their own good, this thought experiment—with actual inference—importantly demonstrates to us in there here and now how we leave an imprint on our planet and what we might do to soften that impact so humans (and the environment that we share with other residents) might be around a bit longer.