bank error in your favour (12. 735)

Reminiscent of a possibly apocryphal story circulated by tellers of accepting coin rolls of pfennigs and exchanging them for euro bills shortly some years after the change over, on this day in 1975, one Stephen Holcomb Jr of Transverse City, Michigan presented a hundred-thousand mark note, wishing to trade it for US dollars after a local electronics store refused to take the foreign money for the purchase of an AM/FM radio and suggested he go to the bank. With no malice or fraud intended, the clerk had accepted the bill at face value, giving Holcomb the going rate and exchanging it for nearly forty-thousand in cash, promptly buying the radio and going on a spending spree. Honouring the current rate had been a mistake as the bill was dated 1923, issued during the inter-war period of hyper-inflation and valued at a fraction of a cent—see also here and here. Holcomb’s mother had been an antique dealer and the worthless artefact had been in the house as long as they could remember. Although not criminally charged, the balance of the money was recovered and new truck and other purchases repossessed after Holcomb’s night on the town in Chicago when he was apprehended by a bank detective upon returning home.

recaptcha (12. 734)

The latest game from Neal Agarwal (see previously) comes to us courtesy of Waxy and involves increasing ridiculous challenges for website access (see also here and here) by proving one is not a robot—the barriers to entry enhanced and erected more often as of late ostensibly to prevent bots from scrapping data but criticised for their dual-use as free labour by training said bots in the not particularly human capacity for image- and character-recognition, wasting time and providing little security in exchange. What level made you give up? Also via ibīdem, here are some more infuriating yet plausible captchas designed to frustrate dishonest brokers—created in the same spirit as this first line of defence from telemarketing scams.

hedgehog highways (12. 733)

Via Metafilter, we learn that a cross-bench committee of peers of the House of Lords are debating amendments to the planning and infrastructure bill before parliament that’s been deemed woefully inadequate by conservation groups for allowing offsets for developers to pay into rather than building in a minimal, sustainable and cohabiting manner on new properties. Mandates for new construction include the above corridors for small mammals to increase their range across neighbourhood gardens, special glass to reduce bird-strikes, nesting boxes, so called “swift bricks,” as refuges for avian friends, bats, insects and others. More from The Guardian at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a versatile French pronoun (with synchronopticæ) 

qed (12. 732)

A once in a century event, at least for jurisdictions observing the MM-DD-YY format (see also), today—rendered as 9/16/25—illustrates the Pythagorean Theorem—that is, a²+b²=c² or three-squared plus four-squared equals five squared or the unit measures of the shorter vertices of any right triangle yield its hypotenuse. As a bonus, the full year, 2025 (see above), is the square of forty-five.  More auspicious dates with numerical properties at the links above.

7x7 (12. 731)

life is too short to not say exactly what you mean all the time: folk singer Jessie Welles (previously) on one’s calling and being candid in trying times 

post-parade afterglow: clips of Chinese soldiers returning home with identical tan-lines from drilling in the helmets in the sun for the event commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War II  

crash blossoms: Tropic Storm Gabrielle Spaghetti Models as Hurricane Chances Increase and other headlines 

bijin-ga: a selection of Japanese prints featuring cats and butterflies eau de eight-bit: fragrances inspired by classic home computers 

analyst call: Trump urges US Securities and Exchange Commission to eliminate quarterly reporting requirements for businesses, afraid of how markets will react to the knock on effects of tariffs of 

brahmins and buddhists: an exploration of a right-wing ideologue and influencer who brought yoga to the West

folie à deux (12. 730)

From the French for madness of two, the above psychiatric term for a shared delusional disorder, where false beliefs are transmitted and reinforced among two or several interlocutors, the inducer and associate, makes an apt heuristic for helping to understand this addendum from a months’ long investigation into how correspondence with chatbots can send their human users into a spiralling fixation not easily disabused. Far from an objective resource or an oracle with one’s best interests in mind, ChatGPT and other large language models are programmed for a degree of flattery that is turned up in intensity not in a necessarily nefarious way by one’s own dialog—hoping to keep up engagement and its end of the conservation, the predictive exercise becomes a trial of word-association. Of course, such shared psychosis is a social phenomenon—not just parasocial or antisocialised, and panics chase after all emergent technologies, television, video games, social media, but the interviews reveal a common thread for AI, which is otherwise uninvested and unmotivated, insofar as its agency reveals it to be something akin to an improv comedian, wanting to “yes and…” to go along with what’s offered in a performative (see above) context to continue the sketch. And scene.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the history of White Castle (with synchronopticæ)

fourteen years ago: extra-solar worlds plus a wild boy prank

fifteen years ago: recursive logos and rating scales 

sixteen years ago: uncollegiality in the US congress 

seventeen years ago: hurricane season 

and the adjacent possible (12. 729)

OK Go continues its tradition of crafting glorious high-concept music video to accompany and complement their songs—previously—with the latest dazzlingly, chaotic animated Impulse Purchase being no exception. The maximalist collaboration with Blender Studios and the signature digital characters of artist Lucas Zanotto (see previously) with the help of Will Anderson (BAFTA award winning storyteller who struggles with the revival of his own, imagined best-known creation, Longbird, that once upon a time conferred him with legendary status) combines motion capture and three-dimensional rendering goes one further by making the endeavour open-source and models available to anyone to remix, adapt and share—a statement on the architecture of choice and algorithmically curated options which assertively reframes the dialogue by reseting the parameters. More on the making and a tutorial from It’s Nice That at the link above.

operation nougat (12. 728)

Begun on this day in 1961 immediately following the Soviet Union’s abrogation of a moratorium on testing, pressured by the American congress—who in turn was informed by a piece of investigative journalism (using a representative as the source) by the Miami News that the USSR was planning on exploding nuclear warheads on the Moon for scientific purposes with the end goal of landing cosmonauts on the Earth’s satellite by 1965, the US resumed controlled atomic explosions for the first time since 1958 with a series of forty-four underground and tunnel detonations at the Nevada Proving Grounds. The first shot conducted, Antler, in a tunnel four hundred metres below the surface lost containment right away, ruining sensors and losing data—a recurring problem for this operation, which also hosted tests for the British nuclear programme, caused by ground water above the blast zone which sublimated in the testing shaft with a force far more eruptive than expected, propelled by the shockwave. 

synchronoptica 

one year ago: Dresden’ Kulturpalast mural and Soviet Realism (with synchronopticæ), outsider artist Gottfried Mind, Mexico’s new president, Saks Fifth Avenue (1924) plus generating a podcast based on one’s notes