that's why they call me mister fahrenheit

To celebrate what would have been the artist’s seventy-second birthday, we look through Dangerous Minds’ archives and find footage from Freddie Mercury’s legendary bash held at Old Missus Henderson’s club (closed in August 2008) in München in 1985. Invited guests were instructed to dress for the drag ball in black and white and parts of the party’s proceedings were incorporated into the music video for Mercury’s Living on My Own. At the time, Mercury lived on the nearby Hans-Sachs-Straße in the borough of Ludwigsvorstadt where Oktoberfest is held.

@sweden

Because social media for the most part is a cesspool that brings out the worst in people, Sweden will be shutting down its official Twitter project the “Curators of Sweden,” which turned the country’s media presence over to a different private citizen each week.
Sponsored by the Swedish board of tourism, they cite the lack of geographic reach for discontinuing the programme but the guest hosts were more and more frequently in recent years becoming the targets of hate and vitriol for their posts on Swedish language, destinations and customs. I suppose it’s rather a testimony to Swedish democracy and tolerance that it lasted as long as it did. We guess the handle will revert to the government and with elections up coming and outcomes no longer certain, let’s hope it’s one that continues to reflect those values.

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.

7x7

spomenik database: ten year’s worth of documenting Eastern European monuments from Darmon Richter, via Present /&/ Correct

clip-art: an appreciation of the medium, discontinued from the Microsoft Office suite of programmes in 2014

clean-up operation: Boyan Slat’s system of floats (previously) designed to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is to deploy soon

86ed: a look, in increasing weirdness, that led to the security clearance questionnaire of a politician running for office being leaked to her opposition

globus gömb: a vintage Hungary Rubik’s globe puzzle

balustrade: a series of the spiral staircases of Budapest by Balint Alovits 

may day: a visual lesson on why and how work is celebrated differently in the US (previously)

qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent

It is unhelpful and counter-productive to label anyone and everyone that is against migration and refugee policies who wants to voice their opposition as a Nazi—setting aside for only the briefest of moments what crimes the Nazis carried out, but anyone who marches alongside or in a group infiltrated by Nazis is de facto a Nazi themselves—or a useful idiot thereof, which is arguably an even worse fate, to be a tool without agency of hatred and nihilism.
This applies universally across space and time but Germany has made some very simple guidelines should one find their demonstration impinged upon by Nazis which should prompt one’s hasty retreat and alert the authorities: the Hitler greeting, Swastikas and other symbols of Nazi Germany and denying the Holocaust and extent of their crimes against humanity are illegal and finding oneself in the midst, even marginally and uninvited should signal one to get out and regroup right away. There’s no acceptable common-ground and one’s polite and practical arguments for xenophobia and racism are quickly accelerated to their natural conclusion, institutionalised ostracism and alienation and perhaps even industrialised murder. Are organisers and political figures responsible for the behaviour and outlook of all of their constituents and benighted disciples? In the legal sense, no—lest one prove a calculated neglect, but in the moral sense, leaders should always police for extremism and make the effort to reform their stance and clarify their own position to ensure that there’s truly no place for such views. Anything short of that is dereliction of duty and makes one’s crusade and campaign just another rung in the ladder for the forces of regression and division, no matter how one pleads or equivocates.