xристос воскрес! воістину воскрес!

page not found

Referred by the always remarkable Miss Cellania, we find the HTTP 404 (see also here, here and here) response code pages for the United States 2020 presidential candidates’ campaign websites’ up for inspection and ranked.
A lot of them are pretty funny and self-aware, and while we find a strong sense of revulsion leading with anything that narcissistic nihilist and cult leader, the Trump-Pence redirect error page—coming in twenty-third and indeed on the bottom of the heap—does illustrate the textbook definition of a sore-winner (so much winning) and the fact that he’s been unable to move beyond 2016.

cast iron plant

Reputedly pollinated by the same slugs and snails that are the bane of other garden and hot-house cultivars, the resilient houseplant called the Aspidistra elatior (an import from the Far East) became a prop prominently photographed and synonymous with “middle class respectability” for its prevalence in the Victorian Era, all aspirants able to care for a bit of greenery in their homes.
This particularly hardy cultivar’s popularity, however, owed to its ability to weather and withstand neglect and even thrive in the dim and close quarters of city dwellers with the noxious fumes and soot that came from gaslights that otherwise made keeping houseplants a fruitless prospect. This wide-spread obsession even prompted George Orwell to pen a critical commentary with the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying about a character who attempted for defy the usual social conventions of status and acquisition and was thwarted by society at large for his stepping out of line. The 1936 book—which was not a romcom—was adapted into a 1997 film with Helena Bonham Carter and Richard E Grant that was titled “A Merry War” for US audiences.

7x7

imperium: the rise and fall of colonial powers visualised

aggressively, chillingly ahuman: for some inscrutable algorithmic purpose, a bot created a video of a blog post—via Super Punch

wholecloth: these colourful quilts from artist Bisa Butler that tell a story

acanthus leaf: Plants and their Application to Ornament (1896) from Eugène Grasset

totus mundus agit histrionem: for the Bard’s birthday, a Shakespearean version of Trivial Pursuit

law-suuuuuuuu-uuuit: the yodeller behind the Yahoo! campaign was led to believe it was only a regional promotion—via Miss Cellania’s Links

belt and road project: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute conducted a comprehensive study of Chinese technological influence globally—via Maps Mania 

emblematic

Through acknowledging the obsolesce of these artefacts, designer Takuma Yamazaki has created an elegant hanko (判子) that impresses a scannable QR code which can contain and redirect toward the public and private autobiographies of the bearer, nicely spanning the continuum between the past, present and the increasingly connected future.
These seals, also called inkan (印鑑) are used to stamp important documents in lieu of a signature, but modern technology and advances in printing have antiquated much of the security features than these personal devices offered—opening up individuals to fraud and a sort of identity-theft. Hanko, especially government and corporate ones that wield authority, are often kept under lock and key to avoid the potential for counterfeiting—a funny contradiction since this prototype digital cartouche embosses what’s meant to share and inform. More to explore at the link above.

le forêt

As debate continues on how the iconic landmark ought to be rebuilt and restored, true to its former self or romanticised memories or rather a showcase of innovation in building material and technique as it has been over the centuries, Studio NAB puts forward its proposal to replace the ancient wooden roof with a green house that hosts educational and outreach programmes and is reflective of challenges facing contemporary times. What do you think about that?  The burnt oak timbers known colloquially as the Forest would be fashioned into planters and fertilise new growth from the ashes and the spire would be raised again as an apiary, accommodating a number of beehives.

mother of invention

Previously we’ve explored how the Year without a Summer influenced and informed Mary Shelley’s Post-Modern Prometheus and the hardship endured by the population in general, but hadn’t appreciated how the climate disaster helped transform transportation by creating a situation that allowed machine aided propulsion to gain a purchase.
Due to cold weather that precipitated successive failing harvests, people had no fodder to feed their horses and out of desperation, had to eat their horses, which made alternative modes of getting around a necessity, prompting Karl Freiherr von Drais (see also) to invent his Laufmaschine—a dandy-horse and like a bicycle without the pedal mechanism. Innovations such as this speak to human ingenuity and resilience when it comes to surmounting change. Let’s hope we can all keep pace.

completely automated public turing test to tell computers and humans apart

NPR’s Planet Money recently presented a really engrossing episode on CAPTCHA technologies—previously and which is the title initialism—that shows how the counter-measures against spam and subterfuge not only evolved with but also to a big degree informed the developing internet to make it a richer and more connected experience.
It reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story that the suite of games pre-installed in Windows (despite taxing precious system resources) was distributed in order to teach users the manual dexterity needed to operate a computer mouse and while I do remember some times being asked to provide my human credentials by identifying a blurry building number, what I failed to realise was that human we’re just being shown skewed text and images to thwart automated bots but were also being enlisted by comprehensive mapping services and earlier by newspaper archives to perform the optical character recognition that machines were not yet able to decipher when the copy was suboptimal. Later iterations of the test tasked people with identifying cars, boats and buildings and aided in machine-learning by tutoring neural networks in a funny sort of feedback loop that’s enabled computers to beat the original methods of minding the gates.