7x7

secret garden: Google Earth leads a team of researchers to an untouched mountaintop rainforest in Mozambique

ultima thule: on its encore mission, Pluto probe beams back its first image of its next target

comnenian period: an exploration of Byzantine architecture from draughtsman Antoine Helbert, via Kottke

amos rex: a subterranean museum opens in Helsinki  

seven points of articulation: a visual history of the past four decades of LEGO Minifigs (previously)

drainspotting: a tour of the manhole covers (elsewhere) of Massachusetts  

hyperpolyglot: what the people who’ve mastered dozens of languages can teach us, via Digg

🔣 or extended character set

Thanks to Duck Soup for directing our attention to the first instalment (update: here is part two and part three of the series) of Keith Houston’s investigation into the fascinating history of emoji and its linguistic cachet.
First originating as an unexpected outcome of Japanese teenagers using pervasive pagers (pocket bells, poké beru) in a novel way with messages encoded in numerals, the company that oversaw the country’s largest cellular network conceded to popular pressure and enabled what we would recognise as texting with the number keypad. Eventually the ❤ was added to the vocabulary of possibilities—which is a bit ambiguous in terms of meaning in different contexts. Temporarily abandoned as a frivolity, customers demanded it back and inspired the company to offer more. Be sure to check back with Shady Characters to get the next parts of the story.

a marketplace of ideas

Via Boing Boing, we learn that after satisfying the compulsion to google himself—egosurfing if you will—that insufferable occupant of the White House decided that he did not like the results that were presented him and has directed his goons to look into whether and how internet search engine results should be regulated by the government.
Although this is just another in a long line of pathetic tantrums that even has the Republicans clutching their pearls, such bluster erodes societal norms and our collective expectation of integrity and reliability in our institutions, whose reputations are already bruised by reflecting our implicit biases, being manipulative, judgmental, prejudiced and for jumping to conclusions. Though parts of the internet are both echo-chamber and excoriating Star Chamber, the raw and unmediated (and admittedly finding the latter can take some extra effort) facts are out in the ether as well.  This latest grandstanding (using platforms to attack platforms) combined with the unrelenting howls of fake news may well be dread to hear for most but have had real and dire consequence and sets the United States on a course to dictatorship, which is depressingly seeming a more likely outcome.

great chain of being

Fascinated by the concept for many years and curating outstanding examples of the phenomenon, Jason Kottke has also appended a fitting name to describe the way some individuals can bridge eras and keep generations barely acquainted in fact adjacent: the great span.
Referencing a recollection by the son of Alger Hiss—a US government official implicated as a spy for the Soviet Union by the House Un-American Activities Committee—of the term his father used to describe such lives able to somehow overlap and connect the ages, culturally and technologically as well as in terms of longevity. It’s a far more magical equivalent of those collection of jarring simultaneities of trivia (idem) like Switzerland’s delay in universal suffrage coincided with the first motor vehicle excursion on the Moon or that Star Wars debuted during the same year as the last execution by guillotine.

6x6

subraum: underground photography from Gregor Sailer—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

hängematte: an inviting house of hammocks in Vienna’s museum district

this too shall pass: inspired biodegradable packaging for foodstuffs

audio artefacts: Conserve the Sound curates disappearing noises of obsolete technology

demersal zone: oceanographers discover a hidden deep water reef off the Carolina coast in the Atlantic, via Slashdot

your show of shows: the New York Times shares a nice tribute to academic and playwright Neil Simon 

exergy

Late-stage capitalism with its cloying, insatiate greed is lurching towards its final days, according to research carried out at the behest of the United Nations, we learn via Slashdot, the economics of exploitation no longer sustainable or alluring. Climate change, leveraged indebtedness and the growing gulf of inequality are now being understood as convergent factors and the course of depletion rather than enrichment has been complicit in making the planet a more inhospitable and impoverished place.
We cannot just turn off the compulsion for growth and acquisition—the world’s poor deserve the lifestyle of the well-off just as much as we do—but we can reframe it in a transformative way if government policy supports directing energies to sequestering carbon with as much zeal and abandon as was given to extracting it in the first place, we might not only survive but also thrive going forward. The notion that capitalism always seeks the cheaper alternative over social good is not exactly a false dichotomy but plotted over the landscape of the immediate returns and the fiscal year myopic, mundane short-term thinking rules the moment and casts a seductive net that portrays ruthless cheating and bilking as business acumen.