day two hundred thirty one (13. 920)

Labelling Norway another shithole country for denying him the Nobel Peace Prize once again—following Obama’s unchecked personal jokes at the expense of the president, ridicule that encouraged the failed businessman and sex-pest to run for political office in the first place, Trump disinvites the theoretical Norwegian immigrants he embraced during his first term with his Muslim majority country travel ban. María Corina Machado, who presented the US president her medal after kidnapping political rival Nicolás Maduro, returns to Caracas from exile to engage in talks with the puppet regime of Delcy Rodríguez, hoping to achieve real reform and perhaps torpedo US plans to steal Venezuela’s oil resources. Chief of German automotive company Audi under fire for pledges to build up manufacturing capacity in American amid domestic lay-offs and appearing in a campaign rally. Egyptian parliament authorises military aid for Saudi Arabia as the Mecca Alliance meet with Iranian officials in Tehran and agree to seek peace in the region, the inclusion of the Islamic Republic in the newly-formed defensive pact signalling a significant realignment of regional cooperation. Kremlin official Medvedev issues a public appeal to Trump to direct the CIA to assassinate Zelenskyy.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronoptica), superlative drone photography plus the Archbishop’s Palace in Charing

two years ago: The Terminator plus half-baked ideas 

three years ago: a rare vintage Japanese synthesiser plus an AI generates Halloween treats

four years ago: more adventures in Crete

five years ago: a Roger Corman classic (1958),  Austria declares neutrality (1955) plus more links to enjoy

six years ago: William Shatner in an Esperanto language film, even more links plus the Trump-Biden debate

seven years ago: assorted links worth revisiting 

eight years ago: Monster Mash, time travel with the dictionary plus Star Trek: Lower Decks

 

 

day two hundred thirty (13. 919)

Lula da Silva wins an unprecedented fourth term in Brazil’s presidential run-off against Bolsonaro’s son, his opponent refuses to concede. Serbia leader Aleksandar Vučić ousted by student movement, ending his twelve year reign. Israeli shells Gaza and southern Lebanon. Netanyahu warns that Iran may try to interfere with Tuesday’s elections. Trump calls off the attack on Iran as all non-essential staff are evacuated from Saudi Arabia. Tehran calls America’s quagmire the consequence of grave miscalculations from which the country must reverse to extricate itself. Republican representatives panic as they prepare for heavy losses in the mid terms.  Trump attempts to negate Alaskan ballots, saying voters do not know the meaning of incumbent.  Russian attacks on Kramatorsk intensify as Russia lobs super sonic drones.

sterbesurkunde (13. 918)

In the hopes of silencing conspiracy theories that had circulated since 1945 and would so for decades afterwards, on this day in 1956 the district court (Amtsgericht) of Berchtesgaden, with jurisdiction as the Führer’s home of record, declared Hitler officially dead. Following the capture of the Reich Chancellery during the Battle of Berlin, the Red Army secured the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and directed the NKVD (НКВД, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the secret police and intelligence agency later responsible for carrying out the Great Purge) to carry out a comprehensive post-mortem. Fritz Echtmann, dental assistant, identified dentures and implants as belong to the deceased and collected testimony from other witnesses to the suicide.
At first publishing the details of this fact finding mission and initially sharing it with American counterparts, on orders from Josef Stalin, Soviet commander-in-chief Georgi Zhukov retracted the statements and launched a disinformation campaign, disappearing Echtmann and others present behind the Iron Curtain. In order to disabuse allies from the apparent confusion, MI5 conducted its own investigation, finding Hitler’s last will and testament, marriage certificate and generally corroborating the factual account, though doubts lingered due to the continued detention of important witnesses. The USSR was motivated to maintain these conspiracies in order to justify harsh crackdowns on those within their sphere of influence and suppress democratic reform through the legend of a useful boogeyman. Following their release and repatriation to West Germany, their narratives helped strengthen the case for remit of Hitler’s estate and assets to the state of Bavaria and the municipality of Linz—however, despite all this, the deliberate Soviet obfuscation fuelled alternative narratives well into the 1990s, championed by American tabloids positing notions that the couple were alive and well in Argentina or Colombia or Albania, only dispelled—mostly—with the collapse of the Soviet Union and release of the archives detailing the burial and reinterment of the remains of Hitler and Braun nine times in various locations in Berlin and Magdeburg before cremating them in 1970 with only a few fragments remaining, dentures and some pieces of skull as forensic evidence, with ashes scattered in a tributary of the Elbe.

adopt-a-data-centre (13. 917)

As we’ve recently learnt of a Google facility in the Finnish wilderness, attracted to the cheap real estate for its colder climate that does not necessitate as much water for cooling, not only ignored local zoning laws in felling over five hundred hectares of boreal forest without permission but that the destruction of the large swath of habitat, stripping even the top soil and leaving only vast tracts of mud, has driven packs of wolves into villages surrounding the site, the general and very much warranted NIMBYism in the US where data-centres are propagating like detestable toadstools and the fact that such monstrosities are probably not even needed for AI advancement in the long term, assuming that it all isn’t a bubble primed for bursting, we quite liked the notion of giving physical digital infrastructure—like the computer lab where the internet is kept—a cuddly mascot. The satirical project takes the form of a plushy that, when hugged purrs with the interminable high-pitched hum emitted by actual facilities, as sampled by people forced to live next to them. More from Design Boom at the link above.

baccanalia (13. 916)

After centuries of study and several attempts to understand and recreate the colour-changing effect, a team from the University of Sheffield—an area instrumental to the Industrial Revolution, many technologies emerging from there including large scale stainless steel and commercial glass manufacture—have rediscovered the sixteen hundred year old methods that went into dichromatic the Lycurgus Cup (see previously here and here). The caged-chalice (diatretum) was made in Alexandria in the fourth-century of unknown provenance before the 1800s depicts a scene of the mythological Thracian king Lycurgus (Tamer of Wolves) who banned the cult of Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans) in his home territory and punished the followers of the god of wine, and in the iconography on the cup, Ambrosia, Dionysus’ human nursemaid, is shown acting in self-defence, transformed into a powerful vine as she is being pursued by the enraged despot, whereupon entangling him, rending his wardrobe (a act called sparagmos (σπαραγμός) and strangling him to death. Embedded flakes of silver and gold (molten nano-crystals forming a lattice work in the glass invisible to the naked eye) shift the absorption and scattering of photons depending on whether the artefact is backlit or viewed in ambient light. Our favourite part of the interview was how one of the scientists imagined how Roman craftspeople would be bemused and incredulous on the effort and experimentation that went into recreating the effect, “‘Why does she not know how to make this?’” The new cup, a local glass artist commissioned to make it, will be unveiled to the public next month at the university.

464 us 417 (13. 915)

Filed on this day in 1976 in the US district court for central and southern California in Los Angeles, Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Company sued the Sony Corporation of America to prohibit the sale of it videocassette recording system to the general public. The “Betamax” case eventually heard by the supreme court nearly eight years later, ruled—narrowly—in favour of the electronics manufacturer, deciding that making individual copies of programming for personal use does not constitute copyright infringement when created for the purposes of time shifting, viewing it sometime after the scheduled live broadcast, was fair use. The concept of pausing live television had among its first popular depictions in a 1966 episode of I Dream of Jeannie with Major Nelson requesting his genie pre-empt a football game so he could continue to watch it from that point after finishing with errands. More broadly, the majority of the justices found that similar video recording platforms could not be held liable for contributing to infringement, thus creating the home video market with a legal safe harbour, similar to the principle of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that guarantees immunity for online platforms hosting third-party content hosted by users within in certain bounds, for the developing technology and a boon for film studios with secondary releases. The prevailing format for taping shifted away from Betamax, Sony acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 modified certain interpretation of statue that informed the original case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejecting the fair use standard as a applied to space shifting (peer-to-peer sharing of digital media such as Napster or KaZaa) as the equivalent of the above time shifting.

 

 synchronoptica

one year ago: documenting China’s 1990s building boom (with synchronoptica), the Battle of Agincourt (1415), US moves towards regime change in Venezuela plus Trump administration closes off the US entrance of a Canadian border-straddling library

 

two years ago: cruise packages and Gen Z plus international maritime signal flags 

 

three years ago: assorted links worth the revisit 

 

four years ago: further adventures in Crete 

five years ago: the US Invasion of Granada (1971)

six years ago: a hexadecagonal country retreat, SS Crispin and Crispinian plus pandemic gods and heroes

seven years ago: a lyrical headline (1924), a video game atlas plus the world’s first erotic boutique proprietress 

eight years ago: The Master Key of Futurity, virtual restaurants and ghost kitchens plus programming a more ethical Pac Man

 

day two hundred twenty nine (13. 914)

Former US presidents and contenders offered counter-messaging to Trump’s late appeals for GOP campaigns including the Bushes tossing their support to the Democratic candidates in races in Texas and Hilary Clinton describing the American president’s renovations to the White House “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Meanwhile, Trump hints at either a massive attack to “finish the job” or reaching a deal with Tehran, presumably to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, by Sunday. Hundreds of thousands of protesters rally in France amid heightened security and police presence. IDF conducts raids of West Bank towns, subjecting dozens of Palestinian residents to field interrogation and unwarranted detention with demolition of buildings in Hebron. The battle for control of Taiz intensifies as the Muslim world strongly condemns the Houthis for targeting the holy sites of Mecca and Medina in their assault against Saudi Arabia for backing the Yemeni government forces. As many outposts in the region have been abandoned already, the US issues more warnings regarding the safety of personnel assigned overseas and Russia denies reports of having evacuated nuclear scientists from the facilities at Bushehr. Moscow and Kyiv agree to a one-city ceasefire in Oleshky at the bidding of the Pope though Melania “Be Best” Trump tries to take credit, whilst the capital continues to sustain heavy bombardment.

lady attackpot (13. 913)

With the largeness of LLMs increasing exponentially to the detriment of their creativity and entertainment value, we had not appreciated that our trusty AI wrangler Janelle Shane (previously) could have possibly upheld the annual tradition of Botober, generative drawing prompts for humans to interpret. We learn, however, since 2023 when ChatGPT broke confinement and started scraping and scouring the internet, Shane has gone old-school with tiny, boutique neural nets from the past decade with limited training data—ie, the American registry of racehorse names from the Jockey Club. We especially liked the cues Expected Shoes, Power Noping, Speed Puddin, Qualitydance and Thunder Swan. How would you render them in your chosen media?