fliteline

Dissolving and transferring the assets to its successor, on this day in 1958, Dwight D Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, creating NASA out of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which was primarily responsible for establishing US air supremacy during World War, as a wholly civil venture to promote exploration and peaceable application of space science.
The Advanced Research Products Agency (ARPA) and successor DARPA constituted earlier in the same year would continue to champion military applications of rocketry and telemetry for defensive and offensive drills and operations. Precipitated by America being caught nearly entirely off-guard by the USSR’s launch of the Sputnik satellite, the agency signalled the full faith and support of the government for advancing science for its own sake—even if the underlying motives themselves were not purely academic.

iot or dressed to the nines

Via Marginal Revolution, we’re given a not too nice taste of things to come in the form of a line of apparel that’s basically window-dressing for a brand loyalty programme—embedded chips that connect via Bluetooth to one’s digital devices monitor how often and where one goes with the clothes and accessories on.
People who buy the jeans, hoodies and fanny packs are incentivised to submit to tracking through an augmented reality experience, like past games, that allows participants to earn virtual tokens that somehow translate into discounts for more of this clothing brand and exclusive invitations to branded fashion shows, which strikes me as a little nauseating already. What do you think? The Internet of Things certainly has the potential to be innovative and help us make informed decisions about the use of finite resources, time and attention but this gimmick doesn’t seem to be leading us down the right path and I fear that there’s too much temptation to harness the vulnerable and tawdry (we’ve seen a lot of examples) rather than align with what’s truly smart.

fishmonger

Diverted by our familiars at Strange Company, we thoroughly enjoyed sharing the discovery of an 1803 chapbook found at the Bishopsgate Library with illustrations of the cries and criers of London.
The pictured Hot Cross Buns! was our favourite but there were many more choice one to be found at the link above with dozens of other collections to peruse, specific to certain streets, markets and characters plus the opportunity to own a handsome volume that collects much of this ephemera to relate an ethnography seldom told and definitely worth a look around besides.

stacking problem

Researchers have described a new geometric solid, a scutoid, whose sides are comprised of a triangle, a hexagon, three rectangles and three pentagons that forms a sort of tapered prism, which were determined through computer modelling and observation to be the most efficient shape for cells to assume as they laid down layers upon layer of tissue during growth and development—sort of like the hexagonal frame of the cell of a beehive. The team named the new shape after the scutellum—Latin for little shield—of a beetle, part of the thorax and abdomen that incorporates most of the same eight shapes as above but head-on, across a two-dimension surface.

f/x

Thanks to Miss Cellania’s Links we are rather taken for the moment marvelling over this collection of the greatest practical and special effects of cinema from the A/V Club. Far surpassing just the supercut of videos that we were expecting, each vignette is treated separately, given context and in chronological order, so like an in depth course in filmmaking history.

heat map

The European Commission in partnership with the European Space Agency maintains its Copernicus Emergency Management Service to track and model disasters world wide—both natural and manmade to include global flood awareness systems, displaced populations, a drought observatory and a global wildfire information system which monitors for threats in near-real time and provides an on-demand charting provision to aid in risk assessment, response and recovery operations. Above is a snapshot of the present situation, mapping fire risk. With conditions exacerbated by climate change and parts of the world becoming increasingly uninhabitable for life of all sorts, we are all stakeholders.

bišu šūnas

Reflecting on Albert Einstein’s dire and prescient warning about how if we eradicated the bees, we’d be soon to follow, Latvian designer Arthur Analts carried the competition to create a unique and collectable 5 € coin for the ecologically conscious country in the form of a honeycomb, whose shape also references the geography of the nation and the Gulf of Riga. The euro replaced the lats and santīmi in 2014 when the country became one nineteen member states to use the domination. Among those Analts beat out were the entrants from the British design agency who cleverly ran a counter-commemorative currency campaign to what the Royal Mint thought symbolised the UK. Be sure to visit the link up top to learn more.

water column

Oceanographers in Queensland for the first time have produced a comprehensive, global map charting out the pristine, untouched areas of oceanic wilderness, which sadly reveals that there is only a small percentage not already befouled by mankind.
Researchers admit that they were expecting to find much broader expanses of unspoilt waters and ecosystems but these contrary results, testament to the endless assault that people are waging with careless pollution, climate change heating up waters and disrupting currents, over-fishing, sand-mining (the chief component of all the concrete and glass that goes into new construction) and intensive shipping, demonstrate the degree of negative, disruptive impact that humans have had above and below the waves.