7x7

doxxing: personal details of hundreds of German politicians published online

just dance: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes dances to all the songs

s.s. warrimoo: the ship voyage that bridged seasons and centuries

look at that snowman go: NASA releases first images of Ultima Thule—previously

best intentions: twenty years ago, oil companies proposed massive geo-engineering projects to combat climate change—that all had serious drawbacks, via Digg

anti-deficiency act: prolonged US government shutdown causes the Federal Communications Commission to run out of funds

sw10 0bh: a proposed database would match those facing homelessness with proxy mailing addresses from UK’s over half a million vacant properties to make applying for jobs and services easier

public access

The always engrossing Kottke directs our attention to the untold story of Philadelphia television producer, social justice activist, librarian and prolific hoarder Marion Stokes (*1929 - †2012) whose obsession for preserving the present as it happened for future generations was transmuted into a secret personal campaign to record live news broadcasts and archive them, netting some seventy thousand VHS tapes spanning the years from 1979 to 2012.
The Iranian hostage crisis (previously here and here) which spawned the 24/7 news coverage cycle was Stokes’ initial impetus and she planned her professional and family life around the recording time of a long-play cassette, around six hours so she would be present to exchange tapes and keep the archives—having expanded into CNN and others—going. It was not merely a hobby or a way of taking work home, however, as Stokes knew that television stations were losing their independence and doing a horrendous job at conservation, even given the tools available to them. Her thirty-three years of continuous footage ended with her death that coincided with the taping of the massacre at Sandy Hook. Learn more about the documentary in development at the links up top and peruse the video archives here as well.

₿ i.c.o.

On this day in 2009, the first initial coin offering took place with commencement of the Bitcoin blockchain by the individual or group called Satoshi Nakamoto, creating fifty of the virtual units of account as fiat tender.
As far as sub-divisions go, one-thousandths of a Bitcoin is a millibitcoin and a hundred-millionth is a satoshi.  The peer-to-peer currency exchange (open for business ten days later) independent of central banks and intermediaries featured a public ledger that cryptographically records transactions, but its origins are somewhat murky with a good deal of speculation as to the identity of the inventor, which—antithetically—includes one Elon Musk.

chang'e

Via Slashdot, we learn that the Chinese space agency has successfully landed a probe, Chang’e 4, on the dark side of the Moon. Because of the impossibility to communicate directly with the lander, a relay satellite called Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) is orbiting the Moon and can exchange readings and instructions with mission control on each pass.
The landing site, the Von Kármán lunar crater, was a practical location as well as one with an important symbolic message, as the Hungarian-American astrophysicist and polymath Theodore von Kármán, its namesake, was the academic advisor of Hsue-Shen Tsien (*1911 – †2009), the rocket scientist and cyberneticist who founded the Chinese space programme. Though previously studied and charted, this hemisphere of the Moon that is tidally-locked and always faces away from the Earth has never been the subject on direct exploration and this achievement is in follow-up to the Chang’e 3 mission and its Jade Rabbit Rover (read more about Chinese lunar mythology and its connection with the space missions here)—paving the wave for permanent human colonisation by 2030.

thread and transistor

As a heuristic exhibition to explore the shifting definition and value of craft in modern society and commerce, Dezeen highlights some of the best instalations during the Istanbul Design Biennial that employed stitching and weaving recontextualised in electronics and as a store of value, as in an heirloom quilt to hand down from one generation to the next.
Looms themselves prefiguring mechanical computational relays, we really enjoyed discovering the functional universal computer whose circuitry was embroidered out of gold and the yarn spindle whose spooling action can actually save a spoken yarn as an audio recording. I wonder if future electronic devices will be decentralised and once again a cottage industry. Moreover, given the value assigned to block-chain cryptography—secure and sturdy though mathematically also relatively simple, it struck us as particularly delectable that there is one gaming circle that calls for players to produce their own knitcoin to advance. Check out the link above to learn more about the individual works from Ebru Kurbak and others.

мечта

On this day in 1959, the Soviet space programme launched the first interplanetary probe known as Luna 1—or with the alternate designation “Dream” above—and although due to a miscalculation on the burn-time of the last stage of the booster rocket, it over-shot its target, the Moon, but still in the process became the first spacecraft to escape Earth orbit.
The probe was able to take pioneering measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field (and the cosmic rays it protects the Earth from) and flying-by at a distance of some six-thousand kilometres was able to detect the absence of one on our satellite. In transit, the probe released a trail of sodium gas and scintillated like the tail of a comet and was to ultimately crash land on the lunar surface and release two metallic pennants and coat of arms of the Soviet Union on 4 January but veered off course (Luna 2 accomplished this mission of planting a flag in September of the same year) and remains in heliocentric orbit (along with some later cosmic interlopers) between Earth and Mars, designated according to the minor planet naming-convention, like Ultima Thule, as 1959 Mu 1.