(13. 534)

synchronoptica 

one year ago: camping opposite Chinon (with synchronoptica) 

two years ago: Ursula K Le Guin’s webpages plus assorted links to revisit

three years ago: the Stars On cover series, promotional marketing for 2001 plus article spinning

four years ago: the Glastonbury festival (1971) plus the formula for streaming series

five years ago: Germany consolidates its capital, wandering lonely as a cloud, the gap in the Watergate tapes, the V2 rocket plus a unique Olympic medal

six years ago: North Korean UNICODE, Cher does West Side Story plus Jaws (1975)

9x9 (13. 533)

biometrics: the after effects of gamification of physical activity—sometimes I want to launch my pedometer and everything else into the Sun 

sovereign wealth fund: Bernie Sanders’ proposal to cede control and profits of AI to the American public  

cinecope: an archive of rare and rarefied films—via Web Curios  

battle of the bit: an authoritative archive of chiptune and MIDI renditions  

otome: the rise of synthetic, choose-your-own-adventure romance  

a privet matter: a farmer hacks down China’s lonely tree—see also here and here  

chromacity: the colours on the spectrum that your screens cannot deliver—via MetaFilter  

a show of hands: designing more finger-friendly haptics for our devices—plus dispelling old myths, via Waxy  

dark flow: how your scrolling addiction was built off casino gambling

disposable memory (13. 532)

Courtesy of Web Curios, we are directed to a global photography project conducted by Matthew Knight between 2008 and 2013 that entailed seeding locations all over the world with a single-use camera, a set of instructions to take a few pictures and pass it on until the film is exhausted and how to return it for developing.
Coinciding with the introduction and adoption of the iPhone and a pre-revolt of sorts of what the pervasive device would do to picture-taking and social media (though there are a lot of selfie and at least one unsolicited dick-pic), these anonymous images from all over—the Geoguessr aspect of it was fun: cameras 160 and 159 seem to be left at the South and North Poles respectively and there’s one roll from Mongolia and another from Austin Texas carry a affecting nostalgia for a time when we were connecting the world, demonstrably so, and online and offline were distinct magisteria.
Only a fifth of the some five hundred cameras were returned (which is a pretty fair response rate and photo quality reflecting the carelessness of a digital camera native in many instances) but we wonder what happened with the rest and if any of these messages in a bottle might yet be answered.

day one-hundred ten (13. 531)

After increasingly deadly clashes in the wake of the US-Iranian truce that threatened to sabotage the peace settlement before talks (postponed with the US vice president delaying his departure to Switzerland, despite proclaiming that the sixty-day period for negotiations had started) could even begin, Hezbollah and the IDF declare a ceasefire. The term made increasingly Orwellian in practise, we will see if it plays out like the ceasefire arrangement in Gaza, the opposite of an armistice that’s seen a thousand Palestinian deaths and the population squeezed into a smaller and smaller area as Israel occupation expands. Ukrainian forces launch a retaliatory drone attack on Moscow, the largest yet during the four year conflict, aim to bring the realities of war to the home-front for the Russian people. Trump, messy drama queen that he is, scripts his own Italian soap-opera, claiming that Giorgia Meloni begged him for a picture together on the sidelines of the G7 summit. The prime minister called out his made up story and cancelled a trip to America scheduled for her foreign minister. Tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz surges, from a trickle to approaching a quarter of pre-war crossings. The MOU stipulates that Iran will keep the waterway open to all for a thirty-day period in order to clear the backlog of ships stranded, but leaves open the possibility to impose tolls or restrict certain vessels flying under the flag of enemies in the future. Quite a few other significant concessions to Tehran are emerging, amplified by Trump’s attempts to defend his grand deal—claiming without him Israel wouldn’t exist and he saved the world economy from sliding into a depression. The Supreme Leader says the settlement was reached out of desperation and panic in Washington.

you made this? (13. 530)

Knowing it was ongoing project, I was not completely surprised to see references to John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows circulating on the internet but we did not realise that the revival was not due to a reissue or a follow up edition by the author but rather an act of wholesale plagiarism. Whilst nonsensically including the entire text of the book and all his neologisms for universally felt emotions that we don’t have the words to express (not the best marketing strategy to sell a book), the slick impostor website, which includes blurbs and a biography and links to purchase the dictionary, absent were any of the illustrations to accompany the definitions, instead replaced with unpolished AI-generated images and a feature to gin up a new sorrow with the help of GPT-4—which seemed pretty off-brand for the writer and the attempt to limn lacunas of human experience. Every submitted sorrow is a bit rubbish and unneeded with fussy and overcomplicated etymologies and pronunciation guides (see also). Andy Baio of Waxy got in touch with Koenig and tracks down the mystery of this unauthorised “tribute” site. Vibe coded, I suspected that this might have been a case of spontaneous generation but arguably more tragic, malicious and pervasive, the bootleg site siphoning off profits from another’s creativity is a marketing agency feeling entitled. There ought to be a word for this sad state.

i spy with my little eye (13. 529)

The latest from Neal Agarwal (previously), Wiki Spy, invites one to explore nearly forty-thousand images from Wikipedia (see also) as chaotic collages that reshuffle with every visit. Clicking on the picture brings one to the source article, as in off-centre, William Hogarth and his pugnacious pug, Trump, who has his own entry and category in the Commons. Let us know what pops out for you and piques your curiosity.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a visit to Verdun (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: hair shavings as battery components plus more mysterious monoliths 

three years ago: Rocky Horror Picture Show (1973) plus assorted links to revisit 

four years ago: more links to enjoy, Juneteenth, SS Gervasius and Protasius plus designer Lutz Colani

five years ago: rendered realities plus generative textile patterns

six years ago: unclergyable offenses, more dazzle camouflage, Trump censored on social media plus the dance of the queen bee

day one-hundred nine (13. 528)

Israel cuts diplomatic ties with the EU after a report is published equating Israeli settlement policy with apartheid South Africa over its illegal practise of home building in the West Bank and continued demolition in Gaza and Lebanon. Amid dissatisfaction with Trump’s grand deal with Tehran, secretary of war Hegseth threatens renewed strikes if Iran does not uphold its end of the bargain, which seemingly concedes more than it was asking for, leaving room for negotiation on its arsenal of ballistic missiles and nuclear programmes. According to Pakistani intermediaries, the formal signing ceremony in Lucerne is canceled due to Trump’s and Pezeshkian’s digital accord, the Supreme Leader offering he had authorised the agreement despite reservations after assurances that Iran’s interests would be safeguarded, stating that the position of the enemy were not necessarily acceptable. US vice president Vance, whom my or may not travel to Switzerland over the weekend to begin negotiations, states that the sixty-day ceasefire begins now, defending the settlement as in the best interest of the American people, as Trump calls sceptics either jealous or stupid.

convention zone (13. 527)

The latest instalment of a multipart series on the Sun and its inner workings addresses in depth a fact briefly touched on in a recent post regarding the surprisingly glacial speed which a photon escapes the solar core to emerge as light and radiative energy. Whilst many of us may be cognisant of the fact that the beams of light reaching us from the Sun are eight minutes old due to the distance that they have to transverse and how looking up into the night sky is looking into the distant past, the fact that the stellar furnace is so dense that it takes a photon over one hundred thousand years to work its way through the crowd of excited particles to the surface strikes one as a strange contrast. Because protons emanate in all directions through the medium of packed plasma, the straightforward journey is impeded by obstacles at every step, the bumping into a fellow traveller and the redirection over and over again increases the time to make it from the core to the corona by a factor of a trillion, a dampening process calculated in a process called a random walk, that sustains the fusion reaction. This delayed makes the light in the sky prehistoric, older than civilisation.