Saturday 16 March 2019

shashimi serology

A restaurateur in Tokyo—having trialled the concept at last year’s SXSW conference—is preparing to welcome diners, pre-screened ones, to the Sushi Singularity, which will print food—gelatine pixels—fortified with the nutrients complimentary or otherwise found to be lacking in biological swabs and samples submitted in advance by guests. While the concept seems intriguing, I don’t think I would like sharing that experience with strangers.

Friday 15 March 2019

6x6

: the Keaton typewriter of musical notation

cryogenics: a covertly filmed movie on the urban legend of Walt Disney’s preserved head shot on location

klimatfรถrรคndring: environmental activist Greta Thunberg nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

jungbauern: a deep dive into the socio-economics and ethnography captured in this 1914 August Sander’s photograph

hecho en mรฉxico: Candida Hรถfer turns her lens towards the faรงades and interiors of the country

clapping music: a performance by Steve Reich that challenges you to keep in sync 

return on investment

In a nod to poor taste and having more wealth and privilege than good sense—not nearly enough of the latter to break into a prestigious institute of higher learning Kool-Aid Man style on one’s own merit and not enough of the former to earn a backdoor point of egress by establishing an endowment and legacy for said institution—we are treated to a tour of their homesteads (previously) as a reflection of their integrity and values. It hurts everyone and just reinforces the truth that cheating and bribery aside, the US educational system (like their idea of healthcare) is essentially a big scam it pulls on everyone.  Those of middling means (also hat-tips all around to Miss Cellania) have turned to side door methods to get around pesky admissions standards in order to get their dullard offspring into the elite schools that will help them preserve their place in the social hierarchy and set their heirs on the right career trajectory.

overcranking

A team of researchers Lausanne Polytech’s Laboratory of Engineering Mechanics of Soft Interfaces are developing a method to reconstruct detailed slow-motion videos from blurry still photographs.
The title references the cinematic term for capturing extra frames, hand-cranking the camera at a faster than normal rate, but playing it back at speed. Whereas formerly blurred photos were chiefly caused by being out of focus, the autofocus speeds of modern cameras have eliminated that and instead the problem is one of shutter speed, with the smeared image captured as an action shot. As of now the method only can reverse-engineer high-contrast vignettes but could one day interpolate and forensically rebuild entire scenes.

a blend of nordic boosterism and fearmongering

Writing for the Atlantic Adam Serwer compels us to take a long and uncomfortable look at the ideology of xenophobia that tragically does not expire with its vocal and violent ideologues. Through the lens of a 1916 screed that promoted the inherently false doctrine of “race suicide” by appealing to concerns about immigration, which in turn informed the addled thinking of Adolf Hitler—who credited US policy in that regard as the template for Nazism, we hit every revolting point that still has traction and tread and speak to a certain audience and perhaps come closer to understanding the durability of such hatred and closer to living in a world where such behaviour is not tolerated.

meet cute

Via Coudal Partner’s Fresh Signals, we are greeted by the disembodied and non-gendered voice of Q, meant to be the identity overlaying the interactions of virtual assistants who’ve been so far unable to distance themselves from a female persona.

Though decidedly feminine if one is looking to assign gender (and with Q, depending on how hard one, I suppose, wants a voice to be either or and it seems to modulate between the two), it reminds us of the ship’s computer on Star Trek, warm and authoritative and voiced by actor and producer Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (*1932 - †2008) who also played Nurse Christine Chapel and Lwaxnan Troi on three series of the franchise.