mouthy hamster

Our programmer friend, author and AI-minder Janelle Shane (see previously) took a different approach to the holiday medium that arguably machine-learning could most easily access and influence—the sadly unavailable chalky candy-heart—explicitly not attempting to have her neural network try to caption them but instead only seeding the task with a list of the original (and impressively varied) three-hundred and sixty-six messages to one’s sweetheart and no other context. Here are just some of the results but be sure to visit the links above to see more and learn about the methodologies behind machine learning.

rayleigh scattering

Thirty years ago on this day, having achieved its primary mission of rendezvous with the outer planet, Voyager I—before going into partial hibernation to preserve power and memory for the long, long journey ahead turned its aperture back towards the Sun to take a family portrait of the inner, rocky worlds, with the Earth, recipient of this love letter—some six billion kilometres distant appeared as only a tiny fleck, a tenth of a pixel, “a pale blue dot,” as programme architect Carl Sagan described it. Our home, and where everyone and everything that we’ve ever known, is that bluish-white speck in the centre of the rightmost brown band.

who's who

Courtesy of Nag on the Lake, we learn about a sensation caused when someone found a donate photo album at a thrift shop called Opnieuw & Company in the town of Mortsel outside of Antwerp chocked full of a mystery woman posing with all of Hollywood’s A-List celebrities.
The reaction was astonishment to see such a concentration of film elite spanning several years and prompted some exhaustive research, concluding that the adored individual was called Maria Snoeys-Lagler and member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a veteran organisation that reports on the entertainment industry, credentialed mostly from an outside perspective, funds film preservation and restoration and hosts the Golden Globes among other activities. Learn more and see Snoeys-Lagler’s extensive gallery of close portraits with the stars at the links above.

9x9

royal gift: George Washington’s convoluted scheme to set the new Republic (see also) on course through mule breeding, via Miss Cellania

fiddle-free: a functional mobile phone with a rotary dial to cut down on distractions

we’ll fire his identical twin, too: Tom the Dancing Bug takes on Trump’s impeachment acquittal

no man is an island: an exploration into the most isolated individuals through history

bird’s eye view: travel around the globe through some of the superlative telemetry captured by Google Earth, via Maps Mania 

 🈁: the lost and found bureau (see previously) of Japan, via The Morning News

pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun: minimalistic advertising

double helix: a look at the remarkable Bramante Staircase (previously) of the Vatican museum

 💌: a look into how the heart symbol (see also) came to represent love

eking out an existence or the best of the rest

Definitely a consolation better than the crumbs that these mice are literally, cinematically at each other’s throats over, the people’s choice award for Wildlife Photographer of the Year was captured by dint of good-timing plus a lot of patience by commuter and documentary filmmaker Sam Rowley (previously) was just announced when out of an embarrassment of quality submissions, the sponsoring organization and jury asked fans to look through the images and elevate some of the outstanding pictures that they failed to recognise. Fascinated with urban wildlife, Rowley became absorbed with the lives of the mice that inhabit, invest the London Underground, staking out this shot over the course of a week, wanting to highlight the plight of these opportunists that share our infrastructure.

shutterbug

Via Everlasting Blört, we are referred to an outstanding trove of photographs chronicling village life in Moldova as one of the fifteen Soviet Republics of the Union. The portfolio representing the life’s work of amateur photographer Zaharia Cusnir who died in 1993 were forgotten until stumbled upon by accident by a film student poking around an abandoned farm house in 2016 has been digitized and published in an online gallery.

Though many of the images are posed and the subjects are arranged for the pictures, there is some surpassing personal and personable quality to Cusnir’s compositions that highlights the individuals’ character and spontaneity. Much more to explore at the links above.

disinformation war

In order to better understand the media field landscaped by the campaign to reelect Donald Trump and the onslaught of propaganda and targeted messages, Atlantic correspondent McKay Coppins crafted and curated a burner social media account to invite that worldview and narrative, one that’s grown increasingly fraught as more turn towards the subjective that suits them, in and study the amplification and obfuscation. It’s truly disturbing how the predilections we’ve offered up freely can be monetized and weaponized against us, and it’s pure hubris to think any one of us is immune to these effects and above the flattery of psychographics and peerage.

The despots that hold power with these tactics can even claim vindication and virtue since, given their loud-speaker and can out-shout any dissenting voices, they don’t need to resort to censorship and silencing critics—at least not broadly until the purge happens in earnest. What was particularly striking to me—though it should be rather patently obvious since despite the inordinate amounts of money involved in campaigning that’s a bar to entry for most there are still finite resources and finite attention—was how political parties, and not just the Republican National Committee but all election juggernauts in a mad dash to maintain an edge on the competition or at least keep pace, collect highly specific demographics on all the electorate, like any other marketing agency, and connect the dots of a constellation consisting of thousands of data points on each individual to serve advertisements and newsfeeds tailored and targeted for the narrowest of audiences. Rather than billboards or bumper stickers, I’ve realised that each of us has a unique media experience peppered with ads and suggestions that no one else fully shares or is privy to, and perhaps if civics and politics is commercialized in the same fashion—customized and optimized—our doubt, distrust and disinterest are strengthened.

fünf augen

Chillingly and now the subject of an official inquiry by the Swiss government (whose own intelligence service is formidable and nothing to underestimate), the Washington Post and the ZDF reveal that for decades the CIA and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, see previously) in partnership owned and controlled a communications and information security company that manufactured encryption machines and cipher (see also) devices for intelligence agencies and businesses around the world.
While it was known since 2015 that the firm’s founder had been approached by a field operative in 1955 and strongly urged not to sell the technology to governments not aligned with the West, the extent of America and West Germany’s involvement remained a mystery, and from 1970 to 2018 (the BND dropping out in 1988) conducted operations Thesaurus and Rubicon to distribute compromised machines with a backdoor built in to allow US spies to handily intercept and decrypt secret correspondence. Justifiably wary, the Soviets and China did not use the rigged machines but many governments in the Middle East and Central and South America did, informing and fueling American adventurism and proxy warfare in those regions.