kardashev scale

From Kottke’s Quick Links, we are treated to another lucid and illuminating vignette from Kurzgesagt on anthropic limitations when comes to looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the Cosmos and how energy signatures might be the one common thread of evidence, as it were, when it comes to recognising alien civilisation and looking beyond our limited and biased horizons.
Proposed in 1964 by astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev (*1932 – †2019), the eponymous scale was a way to gauge the technological state of a culture—terrestrial or otherwise—based on the amount of energy that they are able to use efficiently and to what ends. Type I can effectively harness all the light and heat energy that falls on the planet from its home star(s)—which is about four magnitudes greater than what humans generally generate mostly from fossil fuels but possibly attainable if we continue with scientific advancement. Type II would be capable of harvesting the net energy of its solar system, possibly isolating itself and obscuring its existence with a Dyson Sphere. Type III could harness the energetic output of their entire galaxy. Alternatively, mathematician John David Barrow has inverted the scale and finds greater economy in miniaturisation and what he has classified as microdimensional mastery—going from human scale construction and manipulation down to chemistry, nanotechologies, genetic manipulation, atomic tinkering and eventual alternation to the fabric of space-time.

6x6

nestbox: Czech firm designs a modular trunk extension to turn any car into a camper

kintsugi court: a rundown basketball blacktop restored with the ancient Japanese art that cherishes the cracked

your 2020 bingo card: researchers discover a population of sharks thriving in an undersea volcano

earth science: a treasury of minerals mapped out—via Maps Mania

green tea ice cream: Linda Diaz’ soulful rendition wins the NPR Tiny Desk competition

cosmic architechtonics: multipart exploration of Eastern Bloc monolithic housing estates

holy fool

Today [N.S. 15 August] marks the veneration of the Blessed Basil of Moscow (*1469) on the occasion of his death in 1557 and his subsequent glorification (canonisation) the following year.
An adherent of the Russian version of foolishness for Christ is known as yurodivvy (юродивый), Basil went about unclothed in all weather and weighed himself down with chains, though managing to pilfer items from the markets to aid the poor—especially championing those who were ashamed to ask for charity and shaming those who were above sharing their blessings of wealth with the less fortunate. The saint is the namesake of course of the church in Red Square associated with the Kremlin—also known as the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat, commissioned by Ivan the Terrible after Basil’s rebuke to the czar that he was ignoring his spiritual duties.

vita panteleímon

Sharing his feast day with the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and counted among the Fourteen Holy Helpers in Western traditions—as one of the Holy Unmercenary Healers in Orthodox contexts, meaning that he did not expect or accept payment for his services, Saint Pantaleon (from the Greek Παντελεήμων for all-compassionate, *275 - †305) was one of the personal physicians to Roman Emperor Galerius who was won over to the church by a local bishop that taught faith was the better medicine.
Finding himself invested with miraculous healing powers, Pantaleon evangelised and eventually drew out the ire of his chief patient, who ordered him put to death, calling his miracles trickery. His executioners employed various means of torture to him, including nailing his hands to his head, which mostly backfired until giving up the ghost himself. He is venerated across Europe—especially in Italy where he is said to furnish lottery numbers in the dreams of winners and as the target of gentle ridicule San Pantaleone is the origin of the word pantaloons and associated slap-stick. After the mutiny was suppressed, the Russian Imperial battleship Potemkin was reflagged as the Panteleimon—Пантелеи́мон.

9x9

rewritten by machine on new technology: record industry going after a neural network called Weird A.I. Yankovic that generates parody songs in the style of its namesake—via Slashdot

my beautiful laundrette: elderly couple dress up and model the apparel left in their laundromat—via Nag on the Lake

an atmosphere for simple communication and dating: once Russia cinema reopens, the Ministry of Culture is banning drama and dreary movies until at least the spring of 2021

it’s portraits all the way down: an Inception of self-portraiture—see previously 

search history: a New York Times styles reporter documents and annotates everything term she researched online for a week—via Kottke

be the first to like this post: pigeons look for other career options

the tetris effect: a film about the game’s origins is in production but it won’t be another Battleship—via Miss Cellania’s Links 

karen alert: they keep getting worse

good guy: Billie Eilish’s song Bad Guy performed in major key—see also—via Kottke

канонизация царской семьи

Formally glorified—elevated to sainthood as martyrs and righteous passion-bearers by the Russian Orthodox Church on 1 November 1981 and then in 2000 by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) the murdered last imperial family, the Romanovs (see previously), and the domestics that died along with them are commemorated on this day (Old Style, 4 July), the day after they were assassinated by Bolshevik operatives in 1918 at Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg. Two members of their entourage were not canonised owing to the fact that their professed faith was respectively Roman Catholic and Lutheran, and the whole veneration was certainly not without controversy with opponents pointing out that the Romanovs were not killed for their faith and the flagging leadership of Nicholas II had caused suffering and enabled the revolution in the first place, counting some proponents who advocate the doctrine of tsarebozhiye (Царебожие, Tsar-as-God, deification) and that the last emperor was capable of spiritually redeeming the Russian people.

posse commutatus

In a further signalling of the end of the judicial branch as an independent, meaningful entity for the American polity, Donald Trump announced that he would commute the sentence of his long-time political operative and cartoon villain Roger Stone (previously)—who was convicted for obstruction of justice during a congressional inquiry into foreign meddling in the US electoral process—with Trump’s aside, a stage-whisper confirming that he ordered a cyberattack during the 2018 mid-terms against Russia’s Internet Research Agency, something which was probably not meant for public disclosure but nothing matters and Trump probably felt sharing this offensive maneuver justified freeing his dirty bag friends while undermining the justice system further.
These pro forma courts and show-trials are the underpinnings of a dictatorship and is not just establishing one set of rules for allies and another standard for opponents, but is moreover making law and enforcement arbitrary and subject to petty whims and flattery, not what legal standards are meant to be at all in a functioning and robust society.  While this pardoning does not vacate Stone’s conviction or vindicate his behaviour, it does mean that he will spend no time in prison—ostensibly a dangerous place for one of an advanced age with COVID-19 ravishing the inmate population, though it’s perfectly safe for children to return to schools for the academic year in the fall with no plans in place to make the institutions safe for students. The commissioner really needs to flash the Bat Signal right now.

operation cyclone or charlie wilson’s war

Though exponentially expanded under the Reagan administration, US president Jimmy Carter secretly authorised for the first time on this date in 1979 measures that would aid and underwrite the resistance efforts of the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the occupying Soviet troops and the USSR’s client state, the secular and liberalised Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
The decade-long undertaking is the largest and most expensive known operation of the Central Intelligence Agency (the UK’s MI6 ran a parallel one), budgeted at seven hundred thousand dollars during its first year and upwards of six-hundred million by 1987—to incite insurgency and eventually bankrupting the Soviet Union and precipitating a violent civil war in Afghanistan. Carter reluctantly agreed to lend initially non-lethal support to the Mujahideen in part under pressure from nuclear neighbour Pakistan—believing the US should try to make amends with regional partners especially after its involvement in the unrest in Iran—though arguably, the secondary US motivation was to draw the Soviets into a quagmire, like the one the US had only recently extricated itself from with Vietnam. Ultimately financing jihadists and undoing the social and economic reforms that the country had aspired to effect and then abandoning it as a failed narco-state once it had served its purpose, resulted in consequential, inevitable blowback.

moskvich xrl

Via the always engaging Things Magazine, we are introduced to one commission by the design genius Raymond Loewy (see previously) that failed to take the world by storm as so many of his other innovations and interventions had in the Москвич XРЛ (the model sequence standing for Experimental Raymond Loewy—see more about numbering conventions here), designed and engineered in 1974 as a flagship, global automobile for export markets to demonstrate Soviet talent in the field. Production problems condemned the concept car, however, and only models and mock-ups were ultimately produced.

graveyard of empires

Though whether any of these contracts were acted upon or directly jeopardised ongoing peace-talks and plans for eventual withdrawal, there is an overwhelming cause for concern that the Trump administration not only failed to act on intelligence reports that Russian operatives were placing bounties on foreign troops deployed (including US soldiers) to Afghanistan, Trump publicly reacted in the opposite fashion and instead proposed to gift Russia a restored seat at the G-7 summit and promised to withdraw a significant amount of troops from bases in Germany. Both concessions were offered after the briefing in late March. Incidentally and unironically, many historians cite the expense of being mired in a protracted war in Afghanistan (with Americans materially aiding the same Taliban against a common enemy) as what broke the Soviet Union, leading to its downfall and dissolution.

status non gratis

As cases of COVID-19 again surge in the US after the rush to reopen, the European Union mulls adding America to its no-fly list—along with Brazil and Russia, all countries which have not only spectacularly failed in containing the pandemic within their borders, have through their neglect and mismanagement been net exporters of virus and its deleterious effects.
According to twenty-seven-member block’s epidemiological threshold for designating a country safe zone, all three still exhibit dangerous levels of new infections which threaten to overwhelm the healthcare infrastructure should more be imported. In mid-March, the Trump administration imposed a foreshadowingly reciprocal travel ban (since lifted) covering all of Europe, excepting the UK and Ireland, though that carve-out might get Britain similarly blocked. Talks are ongoing but failure to reach consensus could result in more internal border controls and restrictions on regional travel.

восток-6

The first and still youngest and only woman to pilot a solo-mission into outer space, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (*1947), accomplished engineer and current deputy of the lower house of the federal assembly—one of the few elected representatives to span from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet to the Russian Duma, was launched into orbit on this day in 1963, spending nearly three days circling the Earth forty-eight times.
An amateur skydiver and in training to be a textile-worker, Tereshkova joined the Cosmonaut Corps and was commissioned as an officer with the first cohort of female space explorers and continued to instruct new recruits until 1997, though not going on another mission herself, despite subsequent re-qualifications. Her call-sign for the Vostok 6 mission was her nickname Seagull—Ча́йка, the asteroid 1671 Chaika so designated in her honour.

7x7

but vaderbase? only you would be so bold: the Rebellion Republic names its military bases

cause célèbre: documenting Russia’s historic gay cultural icons and personalities

false-flag: Trump crafts propaganda from stock photos, labelling random protesters as agents of Antifa

undisclosed location: a tour of the White House bunker, from nineteen-year-old documentary photos provided by the US National Archives

vote hillary: an artist’s prophetic 2016 appeal in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s “Vote McGovern” campaign screen-print

crimes against humanity: Belgium comes to terms with its genocidal colonial past with the help of toppling statues

karens’ personal racism valet: a bevvy of resources on defunding the police and reforming law enforcement

the bold knight, the apples of youth and the water of life

Compelled amidst the confusion, conspiracy and urban legends to find and give voice to the archetypal and shared experiences, storyteller and graphic artist Maria Fedorova is soliciting lived anecdotes from life under lockdown to recast in the tradition of Russian folktales, the definitive collected and classified anthology explicitly modeled off of Grimm’s Fairy Stories. The first evening’s entertainment in this modern-day Decameron relates the dilemma of a woman wanting to rescue her neighbour stuck in her apartment building’s lift but is also terrified at the prospect of have to come within too close proximity with others during her intervention. Much more to explore at the links above.

core values

Eventually reaching a depth of over twelve kilometres in 1989 when further drilling was suspended due to higher than expected temperatures, Soviet scientists commenced operations on the Kola Superdeep Borehole (Кольская сверхглубокая скважина) on the far northwestern peninsula on the Barents Sea on this day in 1970. Despite the impressive depth just barely surpassed by petroleum prospectors, the borehole only penetrated a third of the Earth’s crust—the thickness of the continental shelf ranging between thirty and seventy kilometers. Research continued until 1995 when the borewell was sealed and yielded surprising findings through this keyhole spelunking into the underground including the presence of water and fossil plankton some four miles down.

the united states of voronoi

Named after the mathematician who defined their properties, Georgy Feodosevich Voronoy (*1868 – †1908), a Voronoi diagram triangulates and parses cells or regions (previously) by their spatial affinity to a given seed or site.
Redrawing borders of the continental states, as Jason Davies has done, so that each point within those bounds is geographically closer to its own capital city than the capital of any adjacent polity yields an interesting distribution that somehow aligns with the character of the capitol not being necessarily the largest city and representative of the population as a whole and preserves (with notable distortions) to an extent the shape of the states on the map.

russergrensa

Named after the first two saints canonised after the Kievan Rus adopted Christianity as the state religion Boris and Gleb, Roman and David—sons of Vladimir the Great, the Russian exclave of Borisoglebsky (Борисоглебский) on the Norwegian bank of the of the Pasvik river, beyond the Arctic circle came to our attention through a travelogue from February covering the annual friendship festival filed to the Calvert Journal.
As a celebration in microcosm of the experiment and showcase of open borders (previously) during the Cold War, the Barents Spektakel marks a détente of nearly two months in 1965 of cultural exchange—plus some freer-flowing vodka not subject to Norway’s alcohol monopoly, with the settlement isolated (see also) due to an oversight in negotiating the borders after a peace settlement between Finland and the Russian Empire having become a platform to highlight Soviet technological and industrial prowess. In later years the site of a few tense standoffs, since 2014, border controls are stricter than before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the festival was not held in the off-limits community of Boris Gleb and only observed in the neighbouring Norwegian town Kirkenes. Hopefully one day tensions will dissipate and the communities can once again celebrate together. Learn more about the history of the border at the link up top.

spy-in-the-sky

Having disappeared seven days prior whilst presumably over Soviet airspace and the US government issuing a detailed cover story to the press about a missing NASA research aircraft lost in northern Turkey with the possibility that the auto-pilot had kicked in and led the plane further afield, Nikita Khrushchev made the surprise announcement (previously) on this day in 1960 that CIA espionage operative Francis Gary Powers (*1929 – †1977) had been intercepted and was in Soviet custody, embarrassing the Eisenhower administration who faced a dilemma in either owning up to the act or denying responsibility and blaming inscrutable bureaucracy in the intelligence agencies—both alibis potentially endangering a settlement at the upcoming Paris Peace Summit.
In the summer of 1958, the US government negotiated with Pakistan to establish a base of operations to run secret intelligence-gathering sorties over the USSR, using U-2 spyplanes to photograph missile silos and other infrastructure—aloft in the upper stratosphere and out of range of Soviet countermeasures, or so it was believed. The captured agent and photographic evidence was impossible to deny and Powers acceded his actions. Caught in a lie, the US disclosed the full nature of the U-2 missions and the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency—which was in itself another surprising revelation. Powers, though sentenced to three years in prison with seven additional years of hard labour, was treated very well by his captors and spent most of the time with handicrafts, was freed after two years in a prisoner exchange on the Glienicker Brücke (the Bridge of Spies that connected West Berlin with East German Potsdam) for KGB officer and Soviet spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel (*1903 - †1971). After being repatriated, Powers retiring from the CIA and took a job as a helicopter pilot for a television station in Los Angeles, dying in a crash whilst filming footage of wildfires, reportedly wilfully diverting his descent to avoid children playing near his intended landing spot.

винни-пух и день забот

Born this day in 1917, accomplished Soviet animator Fyodor Khitruk (†2012, see previously) had many outstanding and critically-acclaimed titles to his credit but perhaps the trilogy to leave the biggest impression outside his homeland, since the narrative and visual vernacular runs counter to dominant one, is his adaptation of (1969 – 1972) of A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Woods characters. Here is the final instalment, Winnie the Pooh and a Day of Bothers, running twice as long as its previous two parts. Khitruk’s overall style was a marked detour from the sentimental realism of Disney, which nearly contemporaneously produced its own version of Pooh and his friends, with the latter being truer to the original stories.

courtesy ensign

Via our fellow internet peripatetic Dark Roasted Blend, we are directed to a gallery of the funny and fearsome beasts that grace the regional and municipal (see previously) flags of Russia.
Starting out with a bang with the flag of Zheleznogorsk (Железного́рск), the closed and formerly secret town purpose built for the production of weapons-grade plutonium features a bear ripping apart an atom. Presently the local economy is focused on the manufacture of commercial satellites.
The rest of the flags in the collection (see also) do not disappoint, indeed not flagging in quality and iconographic narrative, like this one for the village of Volchansk (Волча́нск) that features a patriotic squirrel and many other that stylise native fauna as to make them seem like heraldic chimera, double-headed birds, griffins and unicorns, though less rarefied creatures.