maintain eye contact

Acknowledging the challenges that autonomous vehicles pose for pedestrians and how to signal intent and yield right-of-way, we learn via Curbed that UK automobile manufacturer Jaguar-Land Rover is testing a concept to engage passers-by with big emotive googly eyes installed on their driverless carriages where the headlights ought to be.
Knowing how I hesitate and shuffle back and forth at the kerb and cross-walk, I’m sure I’ll cause a dread miscalculation one of these days.  What do you think?  Following the idea that it’s second nature to lock eyes with a driver before crossing the street, researchers hope that this exchange of mutual recognition will be enough to instil confidence in the safety of the new technology.

i owe my soul to the company store

Though the market structure could be used to characterise the case for single-payer health insurance and a universal basic income, when misapplied to competitive markets, monopsony (from the Greek μόνος + ὀψωνία, single purchase) removes constraints that would otherwise lure away workers and consumers and encourage them to shop for alternatives.
Different from a cartel that sets prices by consensus, a company with monopsonistic dominance acts like a vertical monopoly (single seller) on the macroeconomic level that’s able to dictate wages and the sales price because of isolation—understood originally in the sense of mobility and motility, as in a mining town that quarters its workers and pay in scrip redeemable at the company-owned outlet but now understood as barriers to entry maintained by industry giants in order to keep their hegemony—and reduces the good that the aggregate surplus does for the employee and seller for sales managed through a big vendor, the cost-per-engagement for a retailor or advertiser. What do you think?  Such is the price of cheap conveniences. 

i’m feeling lucky

Originally developed as a search algorithm provisionally called “BackRub” that ranked websites by the number of other pages backlinking to them in 1996 as a graduate studies project, Sergey Brin and Larry Page filed the paperwork for incorporation on this day in 1998 for their search engine and web crawler, Google. The name was selected as a misspelling of googol, shorthand for imparting the concept of ten duotrigintillon or a one followed by one hundred zeroes, as an illustration of the vast amounts of data circulating on the internet.
Liberal estimates of the mass of the Universe fall short of that by fully ten powers of ten—or in other words just one ten-billionth of a googol of kilogrammes. Google assigns the number in scientific notation “1e100.net” to its array of servers to identify them across the internet. The corporate headquarters “Googleplex” is a much later backronym, homage referencing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy super-computer Googleplex Starthinking (same spelling) that can calculate the trajectory of each mote of dust in a blizzard and contemplates the very vectors of atoms since the Big Bang—which is again a bit of over-engineering seeing that the value, a googolplex being ten to the googol power, something physical impossible to express outside of our imagination, and far outstrips the total number of subatomic particles in the Cosmos, reckoned at 10⁸⁰ or thereabouts.

your friendly neighbourhood draughtsman

Everlasting Blört introduces us to the amazing artwork of illustrator and author Jeffrey Veregge whose portfolio includes figures from popular culture adorned with kinetic references to Native American, specifically of the Pacific Northwest tradition of his ancestral Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, motifs.  I really like his use of negative space. Check out more of Veregge’s works at the links up top.