Ice Lines

In doing this video, yours truly kept thinking, is this the last winter to see ice at any decent level as global warming is impacting CT weather big time with intense rain, global vortexes, little snow and less ice. Think about this, I know I have. Enjoy.

The Future ... looms

An excellent  NTTimes OPEd piece talks about the future and how today's toxic political and social atmosphere, driven mostly by Agent Orange, has impacted this country in ways both astounding and disquieting at the same time. Loss of civility, lack of critical thinking and incoherent anger tops the list along with a distrust of the future where tech is not what it seems to be while the environment unravels at speeds thought impossible until now. 

William Gibson, the writer who coined the term “cyberspace” and whose novel “Neuromancer” heavily influenced the film “The Matrix,” has spent a lifetime imagining surreal and noirish possibilities for human development. But Donald Trump’s victory threw him off balance. “I think it took me about three months to come out of the shock of his actually having been elected,” Gibson told me. And when he finally did come out of it, Gibson still wasn’t quite sure what to do with the manuscript he’d been working on, about a young woman in modern-day San Francisco, since the world he’d situated her in seemed to have suddenly disappeared.

“If I had somehow been able to finish it, by the time it was published, it would have just been this lost thing,” he said, “completely out of time and unconcerned with what I immediately saw as being the beginning of something extraordinary, and almost certainly something extraordinarily bad.”

Seque ...

Much of the new book, “Agency,” takes place in a stub where Hillary Clinton won the election and Brexit never happened. Characters from the future — from Gibson’s extrapolated version of our own dark timeline — try to help people in the alternate past avoid a similarly cataclysmic fate. The question looming over the book is not whether the future will be horrifying but whether there’s even the possibility of a future that isn’t.

BRT has tallied about this dire situation at length as my loyal readers know. Can we survive? To yours truly, the answer is a qualified yes but it will be difficult to say the least. This is why 2020 looms as the most important election this country has ever faced without issue.

Fonts et al :)

The  NYTimes piece These People Really Care About Fonts brings back fond memories when yours truly taught computer graphics at Pratt Institute and did cooperate identity and collateral design back in the day. In doing this, one quickly finds out designing type is an exquisitely difficult process if one wants to create an art form both legible and beautiful at the same time. :)

Typefaces are everywhere. The New York City subway communicates mostly in Helvetica. The lifestyle companies advertising in its cars may use another modern sans-serif font or, increasingly, something more retro. Many large tech companies have designed or commissioned their own house styles, including Netflix Sans, Airbnb Cereal, PayPal Sans, Uber Move and Google’s Product Sans. (You are currently reading this in Imperial, by the way.)

Matthew Rechs, a business coach for type designers, whose arms are covered in ampersand tattoos, argued that a font can be a brand’s most potent signifier. For example, “if you try to imagine a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, or really any bottle, without the type on it, you’re left with very little to differentiate it,” he said.

Ed Bengutat taught an awesome course @ SVA back in the early 80's. Without question, one of the true greats in typography without question.

'Nuff said. 

Coronarovirus - A deadly entity indeed ...

The Wuhan coronavirus has sickened more than 1,100 people in Asia and at least two people in the United States, according to statements from health officials. Other cases have probably gone unreported. 

As of Saturday morning, at least 41 people have died.

A deadly entity indeed. 

Fifteen more people have died in the city of Wuhan, the Hubei provincial capital and epicenter of the outbreak, the health authorities in Hubei said.

The new figures, announced early Saturday, represented a nearly 60 percent jump from the previous death toll of 26.

Just three of the 41 deaths reported over all have taken place outside of Wuhan: one in another city in Hubei Province, one in Hebei Province, and one in Heilongjiang, near the Russian border.

The new victims ranged from 55 to 87 years old. Eleven were male, and four female.

Nationwide, more than 400 new cases of the virus were diagnosed, officials said early Saturday, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in China to nearly 1,300.

A deadly outbreak is growing. 

• Fifteen new deaths were reported in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.
• China restricts travel for 35 million people as the death toll rises, including a 36-year-old man.
• New cases are confirmed in the United States and France.
• Anger and mistrust spill over online
• Anxiety hangs over residents on Lunar New Year’s Eve.
• China reports two deaths outside the center of the outbreak.
• Experts are preparing for an outbreak that could last months.

Thus far, 2020 is starting off far worse than 2019 ...

Definition ...

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that cause infections in the respiratory system. There are seven known coronaviruses, including the newly identified  2019-nCoV. SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) was the coronavirus behind a deadly outbreak from 2002 to 2003, which infected  8,098 people and killed 774. MERS (also called Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), first identified in 2012, is another recent and ongoing coronavirus outbreak, with cases reported as recently as this week. Of the 2,494 cases and 858 deaths associated with MERS, most occurred  in the Arabian Peninsula. The Wuhan coronavirus is different from these diseases, however, and it has never been seen in people before. 

Addendum ... Scientists Predict Wuhan's Outbreak Will Get Much Worse

Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

As more data on the new coronavirus circulating in China emerges, it’s becoming clear that whatever the country is experiencing now—dozens of deaths, hundreds of people hospitalized, cities of millions quarantined—is just the tip of the outbreak.

On Friday, a team of researchers based in the UK and US reported in a preliminary paper that the number of confirmed cases at the outbreak’s epicenter in Wuhan reflects only 5 percent of people who are actually infected. That would mean that for Tuesday, the last day they included in their analysis, the real number of cases is not 440, as has been reported, but is more like 12,000. The paper, which has not yet undergone peer review, appeared on the Medrxiv preprint server. Already, since Tuesday, the number of diagnosed coronavirus patients in Wuhan has shot up to 729.

And so it goes - K. Vonnegut

A Design fail ...

Yours truly has a Galaxy 8, a great phone that has worked for two years without issue. The 20 looks really good and may be the one this rube chooses when doing the inevitable upgrade but when it comes to the Galaxy Fold, not a chance ...

The Galaxy Fold was supposed to be The Future™. Samsung, the world's leading display manufacturer, invested six years and $130 million to birth its ultimate creation: the flexible OLED display. And with the holy grail of display technology under its belt, Samsung would revolutionize the smartphone industry by introducing the "foldable" smartphone—a device that would be a portable, pocketable smartphone when closed and a multi-pane, multi-tasking, big-screen tablet when open. Samsung might have started the modern smartphone era as "that company that just copies Apple," but after surviving a thousand lawsuits, ushering in the big-screen smartphone, and eventually surpassing Apple in sales, Samsung would finally, indisputably plant its flag atop the smartphone market with the Galaxy Fold, a device that would redefine the modern smartphone.

At least, that was the plan. Things have not gone to plan.

Read the detailed Ars piece to see why the moniker A Design Fail applies to a company that should know better when it comes to tech like this. A folding phone's a really cool concept but not this one IMHO.

Betting pool ... Samsung will get it right as their tech, in the smart phone arena, is really outstanding.

Gotta get this book ...

Animal House comes to mind here with Agent Orange as stand in for John "Bluto" Blutarsky.

An example of large news: They report that in the spring of 2017, Trump implored Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, to help him jettison the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump whines to a group of aides. Nearly every line from Trump, in “A Very Stable Genius,” is this venal.

Another example: While visiting Pearl Harbor, according to John F. Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, Trump seemed to have no idea what had actually happened there. Throughout he is misinformed and confused while at the same time utterly certain of himself.

John "Bluto" Blutarsky

Up close & personal

We're all under surveillance, but now ... we will also be tracked in real time.

His tiny company, Clear View AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

Up close and personal indeed.

RR 2019/Amber Anchor

A blues tune most evocative and powerful in conjunction with a high-speed bluegrass jam delivered with wit and humor defines what Amber Anchor does with consummate style. Check this out as it's the right thing to do. :)

RR 2019/Bone Dry

Think Summer and Redding Rock'n Roots Revival 2019 with a touch of reggae and jam as Bone Dry delivers both with humor and style. Enjoy.

8:15 AM ...

At 8:15AM, August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was vaporized by Little Boy, the first of two atom bombs used against Japan in order to end the war. When reading  John Hershey's extraordinary account of this event from the personal perspectives of people who survived the bombing, one comes away forever shocked and dismayed as to just how quick and devastating this kind of warfare truly is.

Little Boy

I—A Noiseless Flash

As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen. She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children. She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

John Hersey, 1958,

photographed by Carl Van Vechten

Read Hiroshima in its entirety, it's the right thing to do.