Sunday 16 June 2019

a good year for the poppies

I know that superblooms are a highly specific coming together of exceptional growing conditions that lets Nature revel in all her immodesty pertaining to wildflowers growing in arid places but after the droughts of last summer and the dry spring, it was very nice to see the pastures and the verges along the road and between fields bursting with colour.

downstream effects

Never mind the fact that you might be ingesting multiple tiny spiders per night—or conversely that if the spiders of the world teamed up, they could consume all the humans on the face of the Earth (or cocaine prawns or antidepressants in the groundwater), the World Wildlife Foundation launches a new campaign to illustrate the awful non-food pyramid that we’ve created. Via the Drum, we learn that on average a person consumes one hundred thousand micro-plastic particles annually, meaning about five grams (a lot of different factors come into play and you can get a more personalised estimate of your dietary intake here), a credit card’s worth of the stuff each week.

Saturday 15 June 2019

arterial road

Fusing anatomical studies with paper-sculpting, Berlin-based artist Katrin Rodegast has created several organs fashioned out of maps with roadways and watercourses meant to highlight the similarities of civil engineering (Ein – und AusfallstraรŸe) with the network of capillaries and arteries in our bodies as a series of commissions for Eidgenรถssische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zรผrich. The Swiss polytechnic’s 2017 chief research thrust was a big collaboration among twenty institutions to make a viable artificial heart—for which Rodegast’s cartographic anatomy was an important part of the outreach programme and partnership cohesion.

powertrain

Among the items and lots going under the hammer this summer, auction-watcher Messy Nessy Chic reports is this pristine 1964 Peel Trident, a British microcar and a product of Manx engineering, the estimated forty-five to fifty-five models made mostly going to the mainland.
Originally priced at £190 and with fuel efficiencies of just under three litres per one hundred kilometres and touted as nearly cheaper than walking, the smallest car in the world was perhaps a little ahead of its time and interest waned among the driving and dashing public (the car had a detachable shopping basket and was primarily meant for quick city errands). Manufacturing operations resumed in 2011 in Nottingham, creating custom electric and petrol models for individual clients. Learn more and inspect other lots and properties up for auction at the link above.

Friday 14 June 2019

cloud farming or ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

Via the New Shelton Wet/Dry, we learn of a fledging company that hopes to stave off the incidental but increasingly significant problem of cloud storage and energy-intensive data-management by enabling clients to keep their past and prognostications waiting in the wings in the form of crops whose DNA has been encoded (at density with integrity reaching two hundred petapixels per gram) within the plants themselves, and instead of consuming resources to maintain the information at one’s fingertips—we ought to mediate on the meaning of archives, curation and libraries before we decided to make everything at all times ready to summon forward whilst on the go—though the details seem rather sparse, to generate clean air and useful biomass as a by-product of perpetuating these hitchhiker genes.


Perhaps this passive form of storage could also be a substitute for the energy-hungry prospect of prospecting for crypto-currencies as well.  Compare to how restrictions on memory and storage of software was supplemented on the Apollo missions by weaving the programming into a mesh by hand.  Knowledge should be freely accessible but the omnipresence of it might seem to have diminishing value, considering the caprices of capacity and arbitrary limits. I wonder what it means for abstract, errant data to become part of Nature and whether that same information isn’t also party to the rules of evolution and inheritance and what we perceive as degradation, decoding errors that outside our dataset we would call mutations which in fact be taking that triangulation of statistics to the next level.

Thursday 13 June 2019

x marks the spot

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we are treated to a rather endearing review of how educational literature, abecedaries broached the subject of that little-used as a leading letter X before the discovery of x-rays or the introduction of xylophones, mostly ingratiating readers in the personages of the Persian King Xerxes the Great (๐Žง๐๐Žน๐Ž ๐Žผ๐๐Ž , ฮžฮญฯฮพฮทฯ‚) or Xanthippe (ฮžฮฑฮฝฮธฮฏฯ€ฯ€ฮท, meaning Yellow Horse)—Socrates’ supposed scold of a wife—or Xanthus (ฮžฮฌฮฝฮธฮฟฯ‚, a blond stallion), one of Achilles pair of immortal horses whom Hera temporarily granted the power of speech in order to defend himself when Achilles accused him causing Patroclus’ death on the battlefield, retorting that it was a god that had killed Patroclus and that Achilles would soon follow. There’s numerous examples—some lazier than others—and nonetheless an interesting look at the antepenultimate letter and nineteenth century print.

‘cause for twenty-four years i’ve been living next door to alice

Via Miss Cellania’s links, we’re reacquainted with the elusive American middle class re-classified as “asset limited, income constrained, employed,” an acronym that applies to nearly half of US residents, those who cannot afford life’s basics without falling further and further in debt and arrears.
This precarious class, with very little prospect of upward mobility and a viable escape plan, has earned the US the depressing, dystopian honour of being the world’s first poor rich country, chasing after ungainful work for sake of being occupied.  Signs of this impoverishment are not brand new but until recently the more pernicious manifestations of a population were kept in abeyance through civics and civility, expressions of panic and insecurity that props up ideologues and theocracy.