Wednesday 19 January 2022

sequence of events

Via Waxy, we’re invited to play a fun game sourced from Wikipedia by Tom Watson to order historical occurrences, personages and places in chronological order with some happenings far more distant or contemporary (see also) than one might at first believe. Give it a try and let us know what’s your longest winning-streak.

Monday 17 January 2022

iron triangle

In a farewell address to the people of the United States of America, on this day in 1961, outgoing US president Dwight D Eisenhower (see previously) issued a stark warning about the detriment that vested interest between military contractors, corporations and their lobbyists and the Legislative and the Executive could have for public policy. Admonishing the people that that they must not fail to comprehend the “grave implications” of recursive network and rotating-door politics, Eisenhower went on: “Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved—so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military-Industrial Complex… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Wednesday 12 January 2022

resegregation

In 1995 during a convocation delivered at Howard University, author Toni Morrison, as a preamble to a future when our fears have been serialised, our rights sold and sloganised and our ideas ‘market-placed,’ addressed the creeping, gradual nature of fascism and the inuringness of America’s particular brand of racism and apartheid Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.

Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.

Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power and because it works.

Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit or expel those that challenge or destabilise processes of demonisation and deification.

Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathisers with this constructed enemy.

Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.

Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.

Criminalise the enemy. Then prepare, budget for and rationalise the building of holding arenas for the enemy — especially its males and absolutely its children.

Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions, a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence, a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.

Maintain, at all costs, silence.

Much more to explore at the links above, including the speech in its entireity archived by C-SPAN.

Tuesday 11 January 2022

eeny, meeny, miney milliters

Via our peripatetic friend, Messy Nessy Chic, we are enjoying this 1978 Schoolhouse Rock! style campaign (from the same creative team) to bring the metric system to United States of America (see also) whose success and legacy presently is dubious at best.

Sunday 9 January 2022

rms queen elizabeth

Whilst undergoing renovations to be re-christened as the “Seawise University,” the gargantuan ocean liner launched in 1938 and named in honour of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, caught on fire and was capsized in Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong on this day in 1972. Tycoon and shipping magnate Tung Chao-yung had bought the decommissioned cruise ship with the intention of making her into a float international campus for a semester at sea programme two years earlier and there was some speculation that either insurance fraud or sabotage by Chinese ship-builders played a part in the destruction. The wreck was salvaged to prevent risk to other boats passing through the bay but about half of it remains at the bottom of the harbour and was the setting of a secret annex of MI6 in the 1974 Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun.

Friday 7 January 2022

10^

Courtesy of the always engrossing Kottke, we are directed to an updated version of the Ames’ classic Powers of Ten from the BBC science desk, Open University and presenter and particle physicist Brian Cox that updates the scale to bring in up to par with our current observational powers—about a thousand fold more of the Cosmos than were capable of some forty-five years ago when the original short film was made.

Friday 31 December 2021

pneumonia of unknown etiology

On this day in 2019, the World Health Organisation’s China Country Office received a report of approximately four dozen cases, with a fourth of the patients presenting as severely ill, detected in Wuhan in Hubei province. Original disease vector that introduced the contagion were never identified but the virus SARS-CoV-2 and variants eventually came to be classified as COVID-19. One year later to the day—shortly after the roll-out had already begun in the UK, the WHO’s stringent regulatory authority approved its first eight emergency-use validations for vaccinations undergoing clinical trials, hedging various strategies to stimulate immune responses in the human body to this novel coronavirus we had not been exposed to before, including messenger RNA, fragmented and inactivated virus approaches.

Saturday 25 December 2021

next generation

The culmination of three decades of research and engineering expected to be transformational to science, the James Webb Space Telescope (see previously) launches from the spaceport of French Guiana carried aloft by an ESA Ariane rocket.  The array of mirrors folded and slowly unfurling during (a Korsch telescope—that is, a triple-mirror anti-stigmat) its month-long trip, unlike its predecessor the Hubble which orbited the Earth and made good at an operating temperature of a balmy twenty celsius, the JWST will seek out the second Lagrange point from our planet (one of four foci with gravitation equilibrium) with the flare—the noise and light pollution of the Earth and Sun to its back to see clearer and further in the cold of space, better able to discern non-luminous objects that are more visible along infrared bands. In addition to peering back in time and charting our stellar origins, the unimpeded should allow researchers to glean the chemical composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets and search for biomarkers. The countdown itself is already a white-knuckled event and it will be months before the JWST goes on-line and relays its first images, but it will give us a new perspective on the Cosmos and our place in it.

Thursday 23 December 2021

liber chronicarum

First published as a German language translation on this day in 1493, the well-recognised illustrated, encyclopaedic incunabulum of world history as told through the lens of mythology and biblical accounts, originally printed under the above title (July of the same year) in Latin, English speakers call the work the Nuremberg Chronicle, after the location of the publishing house, is referred to in that native Sprachraum as die Schedelsche Weltchronik after the author Hartmann Schedel, humanist, scholar and cartographer whose work presents some of the first depictions of major cities of Europe and the Holy Roman Empire. The book divides human history into seven parts informed by canon—the first age aligning with the chapters of Genesis, from creation to the Deluge. The sixth age—the largest part—relates events after Jesus Christ up to the present, with the following chapter presenting outlook for the future and the End Times. Godson of the printer Anton Koberger, a young Albrecht Dรผrer likely contributed to some of the woodcuts and prints.

Thursday 16 December 2021

it’s not rocket surgery

Via Miss Cellania, a meta-study of cognition in cohorts of doctors specialising in neurology and aerospace engineers suggest that these rarified experts, not to diminish the value and utility of applied learning and experience, only showed respectively a quicker problem solving response time and the ability to mentally map objects from different angles in comparison to the general population. This narrowing expertise that some might accord a higher prestige does not undermine trust in science but rather that other professions might be deserving of similar esteem.

Tuesday 14 December 2021

good posture is its own reward

One of two shorts before the main film The Unearthly about a crazed scientist in search of eternal youth, the educational, social guidance film from 1952 Posture Pals first received the MST3K treatment on this day in 1991, featuring a foursome of elementary students pledging to help each other improve their bearing. Hey—it’s Whistler’s Mother!

Sunday 12 December 2021

small astronomy satellite a

Launched on this day in 1970, Uhuru (also known by the above designation) embarked on fourteen-month mission to perform a comprehensive scan of the entire sky in a first of its kind demonstration of x-ray astronomy. Scanning space for cosmic x-ray sources, Uhuru, among other achievements, identified the first strong candidate for the then theoretical black hole and triangulated an entire catalogue of extragalactic sources. The satellite was named after the Swahili word for freedom in recognition of the hospitality of Kenya, where the launch took place, from a former Italian operated off-shore oil platform converted into a spaceport near Mombasa and on the equator.

Friday 10 December 2021

nobelfesten

Cancelled for a second year due to the pandemic, normally the Nobel Banquet (previously here and here) is held annually on this day (the anniversary of the death in 1896 of its benefactor, inspired to become a philanthropist after reading a premature obituary of himself that described him as a war profiteer, indeed having amassed his fortune from dynamite), the fรชte hosted in the Blue Hall of the rathaus of Stockholm for 1971 would have included amongst its guests Willy Brandt, chancellor of West Germany, Pavlo Neruda, Chilean poet and diplomat, Simon Kuznets, responsible for turning economics into an empirical, cyclical science, and Gรกbor Dรฉnes, inventory of among other things holography.

Thursday 9 December 2021

sex-postive

Perennially indebted to our faithful chronicler, we are reminded that on this day in 1994, that US Surgeon General under Bill Clinton, VADM Dr. Minnie Joycelyn Elders, was forced to resign for expressing her views frankly on what at the time was considered taboo topics of discussion including drug legalisation, distributing contraception in public schools and most controversially introducing masturbation (on World AIDS Day) to sex-education curricula. Championing control of reproductive rights and decriminalisation of drug offences during her sixteen month tenure, Elders’ ideas for visionary for a stage in American cultural that pivoted particularly in the prudish direction, though rather than being about what’s discussed in polite company was never the issue but instead the societal norms and strictures put in place to uphold and perpetuate the patriarchy and class-structure.

Tuesday 7 December 2021

ngc

On the anniversary of the discovery of a pair of barred-spiral galaxies in 1785 by Anglo-German astronomer by William Herschel whilst observing the night sky in Leo Minor, Edwin Powell Hubble, namesake of the space telescope, first found evidence, using Cepheid variables-whose periodic pulsations can be used to measure cosmic distances-that the Universe extends far beyond our own Milky Way and that nebulae were far too distant and were in fact galaxies in their own right. Definitively demonstrating his proof the following year and though contrary to scientific consensus at the time that the Universe was our own galactic skies some researchers-Hubble included, harboured suspicions that the Cosmos was a much bigger place since the conjectures of Immanuel Kant in his 1755 treatise on the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens, positing that the Solar System is a smaller reflection of the fixed stars.

Monday 6 December 2021

schleicher's fable

Dying this day of tuberculosis in Jena in 1868, (*1821, Meiningen), linguist August Schleicher informs our contemporary views on the Indo-European (previously) family of languages and attempts to reconstruct a common ancestor.  Previsioning or at least parallel with the development and advancement of Charles Darwin’s evolution of species, Schleicher's comparative study was grounded in the natural descent and competition and pass through life-cycles as any living being among world language and established a system of classification based on the taxonomy of botanical varieties, modelling a Stammbaumtheorie, a family tree showing trunk, branch and twig.  Working backwards to a common ancestor, the hypothetical and at times conjectural—though malleable and subject to revision, Proto-Indo European (PIE), Schleichter illustrated his concept, vocabulary and its antecedents and what inference can be made about cultural norms and outlook through reconstruction with a brief fable

Using modern spelling conventions, his [The] Sheep and [the] Horses (das Schaf und die Rosse) is rendered: 

H₂รณu̯is h₁รฉแธฑu̯ลs-kสทe h₂รกu̯ei̯ h₁i̯osmรฉi̯ h₂u̯l̥h₁nรกh₂ nรฉ h₁รฉst, sรณ h₁รฉแธฑu̯oms derแธฑt. sรณ gสทr̥hโ‚“รบm u̯รณวตสฐom u̯eวตสฐed; sรณ mรฉวตh₂m̥ bสฐรณrom; sรณ dสฐวตสฐรฉmonm̥ h₂แน“แธฑu bสฐered. h₂รณu̯is h₁รฉkสทoi̯bสฐi̯os u̯eu̯ked: “dสฐวตสฐรฉmonm̥ spรฉแธฑi̯oh₂ h₁รฉแธฑu̯oms-kสทe h₂รกวตeti, แธฑแธ—r moi̯ agสฐnutor”. h₁รฉแธฑu̯ลs tu u̯eu̯kond: “แธฑludสฐรญ, h₂ou̯ei̯! tรณd spรฉแธฑi̯omes, n̥smรฉi̯ agสฐnutรณr แธฑแธ—r: dสฐวตสฐรฉmล, pรณtis, sฤ“ h₂รกu̯i̯es h₂u̯l̥h₁nรกh₂ gสทสฐรฉrmom u̯รฉstrom u̯ept, h₂รกu̯ibสฐi̯os tu h₂u̯l̥h₁nรกh₂ nรฉ h₁esti”. tรณd แธฑeแธฑluu̯แน“s h₂รณu̯is h₂aวตrรณm bสฐuged. 

A sheep without wool saw two horses, one slowly draughting a heavily-laden wagon and the other quickly carrying a man rider.  Addressing the horses, the sheep said, “My heart pains me, seeing man driving horses.  In reply, the horses said, “Listen sheep, our hearts pain us when we witness man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself, leaving the sheep with no wool!”  Having attended to the lesson, the sheep fled into the plains. A version of this allegory appears in the Alien prequel Prometheus in a short exchange between an android and the ship’s computer to prepare for first contact with the “engineers.”

Saturday 4 December 2021

week-by-week

In what’s become an annual treat, Tom Whitwell again shares fifty-two items he has gleaned from the past year. In the compilation, drawn from experiencing editing projects for Fluxx / Medium, Whitwell’s shared new facts learned include that daily over a million images of coffee grinds are uploaded to a fortune reading app (the process of divination called tasseomancy), advice on how to solicit better answers, the MSG hoax, the truth behind the mystery seeds from China hysteria, and a few we’ve previously covered like how cowpox vaccine was transported around the world, traditional Japanese microseasons, how film was formulated to privilege lighter complexions, and how the threshhold effect applies even to a doorway on screen. Many more astonishing correlations at the links above—do let us know your favourites.

Friday 19 November 2021

gdaล„sk



Arriving in the historic city late at night, we took in a quick view of the iconic row of Hanseatic buildings lit up over the Motล‚awa where the Vistula empties into the Baltic before getting an early start the next morning to take in the sites and learn as much as we complex and storied trade and ship-building port, principal entry point of commerce for Pomerania and greater Poland.


Walking the length and breadth of the main city and old town behind the riverfront promenade of granaries, ancient cranes and accounting bureaus and toured among other places the fifteenth century Saint Mary’s Basilica, the one of the largest brick churches in the world and containing priceless works of art (The Last Judgment by Hans Memling) as well as an astrological clock from the early fourteen hundreds by Hans Dรผringer along the Royal Route (Ulica Dล‚uga) between the Golden and Green Gates—the latter originally housing the Gdaล„sk residence of the kings, then presidential office suite of Poland outside the capital.



With mazes of canals and waterways criss-crossing the port and a preponderance of warehouses and retrofitted store fronts, the place reminded us to an extent a combination of Hamburg and Amsterdam. The mannerist Green Gate was designed in the style of Antwerp City Hall.  The chief meeting house for the merchants of the Hanseatic League was in Arthur’s Court (Dwรณr Artusa)  positioned directly behind Neptune’s Fountain, a mastepiece by sculptor Abraham van den Blocke. 

The final image speaks again to the city’s complex history, strategically located on the Polish Baltic Corridor, it was controlled over the centuries by Polish, Prussian and German powers, lately mandated under the League of Nations as the autonomous Free City of Danzig (incorporating Gdynia and Sopot) according to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Poland was to retain access to the sea but as ethnic Germans comprised the majority of the populace at the time, they were able to lobby for this state of quasi-neutrality though largely aligned to Poland for trade and external affairs, reserving the right to maintain a garrison in Westerplattle, use of the seaport and establishing a postal union, the Polish Post Office in the background with the monument to its defenders in front. Through the 1920s and 1930s, efforts were made to keep the city as German as possible, with refusing to teach Polish language in schools and making employment by Poles difficult and by late summer 1939 (see above) had finalised a false-flag operation to legitimise invasion and annexation. The outnumbered garrison holding out against a battleship entering the harbour, the post office (considered extraterritorial and sovereign under Poland) staff resisted for fifteen hours and refused to surrender.

  In August of 1980, the Gdaล„sk shipyard became the birthplace of the Solidarity trade union movement, whose opposition to the Communist regime under leader (and future president) Lech Waล‚ศฉsa sparked and sustained a series of protest movements that eventually destablised the Warsaw Bloc.

Sunday 14 November 2021

inner oort cloud

Co-discovered on this day in 2003 by astronomical teams in Caltech, Yale and the Gemini Observatory, the planetoid, trans-Neptunian object (previously) provisionally nicknamed the Flying Dutchman because of its slow (eleven-thousand plus years) and solitary journey around the Sun that made researchers almost miss it for a fixed star, it was welcomely given the official designation 90377 Sedna in honour of the Inuit sea goddess who dwells at the bottom of the frigid Arctic Ocean, and establishing that future objects found in the same orbital region should be named after polar mythologies.
The astronomical monogram, which matches the ones of ancient astrology quite well, is a combination of the Eastern Canadian Inuktitut characters แ“ดแ“แ“‡, Sanna—the modern version of the name and suggests a leaping seal. Because of the extreme eccentricity of its perihelion—too great to have been caused by the gravitational influence of the known worlds, Sedna’s existence lends credence to either interstellar interlopers or a so called Planet Nine, ten-times the size of Earth but hidden as a cosmic counter-balance.

Friday 12 November 2021

warp and weave

With a significant portion of global power devoted to air-conditioning, the search for ways to shift the burden of keeping cool, passively, has garnered quite a sense of urgency. Researchers in Nanjing and Stanford, harnessing and enhancing the natural properties of silk and sericulture, learn from the New Shelton wet / dry, which deflects most of the radiant energy falling on it rather than absorbing it like other fabrics embedded fibres with nanoparticles to reflect the portion of the spectrum not already covered, thereby creating a sort of high SPF, super-conducting cloth that blocks fully ninety-five percent of heat, remaining cooler than ambient air temperatures by three-and-a-half degrees Celsius and a whopping twelve degrees difference for the skin’s surface, reducing the risk for heat-exhaustion and dehydration.