short message service

First in used in pagers that used standarised telephonic protocols as defined, reserved and allocated under the Global System for Mobile Communications in the mid-1980s, the first test missive was sent on this day in 1992 when an engineer named Neil Papworth of the Franco-German SEMA telecommunications group (now defunct) texted from his computer a Christmas greeting to a colleague at Vodafone. Though billions of such SMS circulate daily, it was initially slow to be adopted with rival carriers not allowing cross-communication until 1999―with the uptake exponential and a far more generous character-limit, albeit that these curbs IMHO compelled some real lexicographical creativity.

6x6

ribbit: frogs use their lungs effectively as noise-cancelling devices—via the new Shelton wet/dry  

oculus: architect envisions Rome’s Pantheon as world’s largest camera obscura (previously) with a conceptual installation 

fetish-free commodities: Existential Comics attempts to demystify Marxist marketplaces—via Nag on the Lake and Memo of the Air 

radiant baby: a brief biography of artist Keith Haring told with drawings and song  

ipa: an iconographic dictionary that corresponds to each phoneme of human language 

marshmallow test: cuttlefish demonstrate self-control and delay gratification, passing a cognitive benchmark designed for human children

7x7

dog and ferret sundries, etc: a fantastic hardware catalogue from the 1930s 

the roaring twenties: the Sea Shanty craze of a century before—via Strange Company 

midori: the relatively modern distinction between blue and green in Japan—see previously 

tag yourself: medieval owl alignment chart 

arkaphones: a resounding retrospective to artist Terry Adkins, who created sonic monuments  

for all the latest medical poop, call surgeon general c. everett koop: the fortune and failure of the post executive branch career of the doctor’s branded medical advice website  

ghost signs: self-appointed guardian of fading signage, collecting it before it vanishes altogether—we can all do this

headcase

Collaborators in Berlin and Munich have teamed up to produce a smart safety helmet for cyclists that links to one’s phone and delivers audio content via bone conducting speakers that are less intrusive and help ensure that the rider is also attuned to their surroundings.

Proximity sensors monitor the area immediately behind and give haptic cues if there’s something approaching from behind or the sides. It has directional lights and can understand simple voice commands to interact with one’s smart phone and an electric drive is actuated to adjust to an optimal fit once donned. Called ESUB tracks, the outer surface is a photovoltaic cell powering the helmet. More—including a video demonstration, at designboom at the link above.

6x6

télévision œil de demain: a prescient 1947 short about the future ubiquity of screens

zeus mode: alternative phone casings featuring accessories including a built-in stun gun

harvey wall-banger adjacent: click on grid mode to see how these cocktail ingredients compare—via Nag on the Lake’s always excellent Sunday Links

corona cosplay: understanding Americans’ aversion to wearing masks—via Duck Soup

we’ll celebrate once we have a reason to celebrate: revisiting (see also) Fredrick Douglass’ 5 July 1852 speech

ipertesto: Agostino Ramelli’s sixteenth century bookwheels recreated by modern designers

think different

On this day in 2007, coinciding all those years ago when Steve Wozniak tested the first prototype of the Apple I computer in 1975, the iPhone made its public debut (previously) in the United States. Retronymically dubbed the iPhone 2G to differentiate from the twelve generations and accompanying operating systems that have followed, Steve Jobs (*1955 – †2011) had been experimenting on the technical and user-experience viability of introducing a fully touch interface two years prior to release under the code name Project Purple 2, as the company worked covertly in collaboration with cellular service providers to ensure that networks could handle the demand.

sxs

Anecdotally in order to bypass the intermediary services of a human operator whom the inventor suspected of siphoning off his primary business by diverting calls to her husband, a competing undertaker, tinkerer and mortician Almon Brown Strowger of Kansas City, Missouri patented an electromechanical stepping switch telephone exchange system—a uniselector that allowed subscribers to dial numbers directly, the electric pulses cycling through to the desired number—on this day in 1891.
Due to this set up, the Strowger switch is also known as a step-by-step (SXS) switch and was coincidentally granted exclusive licensing rights on the anniversary of the first convincing public demonstration of telephony fifteen years earlier by Alexander Graham Bell, whose principle was inspired and informed by the water microphone and harmonic telegraph prototype of Elisha Gray who in turn owed his discovery to a long line of innovations. Selling the rights to replicate his engineering, Strowger’s invention saw the proliferation of the many automated exchanges run by independent municipal telephone companies in the US and UK with the decade.

9x9

royal gift: George Washington’s convoluted scheme to set the new Republic (see also) on course through mule breeding, via Miss Cellania

fiddle-free: a functional mobile phone with a rotary dial to cut down on distractions

we’ll fire his identical twin, too: Tom the Dancing Bug takes on Trump’s impeachment acquittal

no man is an island: an exploration into the most isolated individuals through history

bird’s eye view: travel around the globe through some of the superlative telemetry captured by Google Earth, via Maps Mania 

 🈁: the lost and found bureau (see previously) of Japan, via The Morning News

pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun: minimalistic advertising

double helix: a look at the remarkable Bramante Staircase (previously) of the Vatican museum

 💌: a look into how the heart symbol (see also) came to represent love

eleven herbs and spices

A master of self-promotion with its past campaigns to include sun-screen that smelt of fried chicken and Bluetooth enabled dining tray inserts to help patrons keep their phones grease-free, we learn via Miss Cellania’s Quick Links, that the latest marketing ploy from a fast food chain is a dating simulator (I am not quite sure what that even means) called ❤️I Love You❤️ Colonel Sanders!, pursuing a hotter, younger version of the franchise’s founder, Harland Sanders—an honourary title granted by the state’s governor for excellence in restaurateurship. Inexplicably, one of the playable characters is a dog, who is also a professor at the culinary institute that you all attend.  The property will be released later in the month, for those of you who might be interested, on a platform where enthusiasts watch one another play video games.

crypt and call-box

From Public Domain Review comes a retrospective look at the life and times of influential early nineteenth century collector and architect Sir John Soane, who build structures sacred and profane and defined the layout of one particular sort of place of worship and wonder—museums and art galleries. Appointed Clerk of Works with responsibility for renovations of Whitehall, Westminster and Saint James’ Place, Soane also went on to design the Bank of England, the Bank of Ireland and the dining rooms of 10 and 11 Downing Street, respectively the official residences of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Soane also designed the mausoleum where the earthly remains of his wife, himself and one son were entombed, which served as further inspiration decades after his departure.
Located in the churchyard of Old Saint Pancras, Giles Gilbert Scott, apprentice architect who would go on to build the iconic Battersea Power Station, whilst studying his father’s construction of St. Pancras Station, was much impressed with Soane’s grave and the younger Scott would return to that rounded, neoclassic capstone when it came to tendering his entry for what would become another ubiquitous and iconic design, the telephone kiosk.

phubbing or the bowed head tribe

BBC Future magazine has a really fascinating article examining how language invents novel labels to delineate the rules of etiquette and protocol and how to characterise those who are seen as the transgressors. Public and private manners when it comes to engagement with one’s immediate surroundings and interlocutors or recourse to something or someone more interesting to be found at the other end of the telecommunications æther is a topic that perhaps is a little too close for comfort and the inspired terminologies—classifications like the phoney taxia of a cartoon coyote and road-runner, the former never giving up and the latter always evading capturing like some mythological beasts—which can indeed skewer their targets.
In Asia cultures, they recognise tribal and clan affiliation for the distant and distracted, though it’s Germany that’s putting cross-walk warnings on the pavement to reach inattentive pedestrians. Moreover, Germany’s Youth Word of the Year for 2015 was “Smombie,” a portmanteau of smart-phone and zombie. I had heard variations of these names beforehand that range from the self-effacing to the ironic to the cantankerous, something that an old man would shout—possibly not without warrant, but what most interested me was a new word for the very old concept of phubbing from Australia: phone snubbing. We’ve probably all been perpetrators or victims of the phenomena of sitting with some physically present friends or family and ignoring them in favour of one’s on-line ones. There’s probably a modern fairy tale with a nice morale to be found there as well. What’s your favourite label for those constantly networking and what would you choose for yourself?

free-ride, freifahrt

In the city of Düsseldorf (:D), there is an application that allows mass-transit goers to generate bus and tram fare in exchange for a few moments of inattentiveness and letting a few advertisements play on one’s mobile device. Because of few paying sponsors so far, the new service is finite and can only issue a certain number of free ticket per day and has proven wildly popular but that ought to change as more become involved. What do you think? If fare could be redeemed as cash, passengers could technically earn over one hundred euro an hour, but surely the demographics gleaned is even more valuable to marketers and more effective—despite the potential for ignoring them—than traditional billboards and posters.

ringxiety or push-notification

I don’t often keep my mobile device in such close proximity to my person so as to make it an extension of my senses (say, something akin to an artist’s paint brush or a seeing impaired person’s walking stick), but sometimes when I am marching along with my phone in my bag, I’ll get false alarms that cause me to pause and check, only to find it was in my imagination.
This happens especially I think when I’m anxiously expecting a call, and I always feel a bit silly. I knew I was not quite alone in suffering from this phenomenon but had no idea that it was common enough to earn a forum, clinical studies and even a name: Phantom Vibration Syndrome. Researchers are not quite sure what causes these ghostly cues but most believe they are harmless, tiny muscle spasms that would otherwise go unnoticed (perhaps like a nascent version of Restless Leg Syndrome, which apparently becomes insufferable for some people and dreaming, twitchy dogs) that are at an amplitude sympathetic to the subsonic silent mode of our phones. Such prompts also indulge our sense of separation anxiety as these same calls and responses are our social towropes that connect us to the wider world. What do you think? Have you been haunted by phantom vibrations?

know thy selfie

Writing for Aeon magazine, philosopher Simon Blackburn delivers a thorough and thoughful analysis on the differences among vanity, narcissism and self-esteem and the interplay that too often results from the misapprehension of one for another. Bravery to do the needful is one thing—else we would too easily wither away from those challenges that we ought to confront, but the hubris that comes with never courting any real resistance or dissent is quite another, and particularly treacherous when it comes to assaying those things that are not instantly condemned or applauded, like leadership and relationships. Rather than acknowledging that pride and over-confidence has made us prone for a fall, praise for ourselves and for those kindred—who'll echo that praise, quickly turns into arrogance. If the first few sentences were not scathing enough, the spectres of all the great thinkers of the past become an absolute haunt, hopefully to disabuse us from our vanities—not for accomplishment but for admiration. What do you think? Does the medium rather make something harmless—or even invert them into something of a vulnerable catharsis?

hiobsbotschafter oder i spy

Though the German government and the people of the world had already lower their expectations regarding real reform to the practises of the fledgling police state that America has become—and from those partners duly or unwittingly deputized, the awkward spectacle of defending the indefeasible and saying essentially nothing by anyone in a position of authority was a more than a little revolting.

No stop the spying agreement, as Germany has called for—not instigated by “learning” that vast swaths of its citizens are under surveillance without cause but over the bugging of the Chancellor's cell-phone, which she's relying on even more since she has been out on crutches after a skiing accident, but the fact that the US is carrying on with its role, no longer out of necessity but rather self-appointed, without blush or stint is rather besmirching. Aside from this business as usual, which is ever on the rise, stride never broken, there were empty reassurances that the spying apparatchik was above abuse and has prevented damaged to US interests—neither of which are true, and reform was limited to oversight by committees of confirmed insiders and actual operations will mostly remain in the shadows—until or unless the next slate of unwanton exposures, at least. The term Hiobsbotschaft figuratively means bad news in German—from the string of bad events that happened to the biblical figure Job, but with the reports of the US embassies (auch Botschaften) in Berlin and elsewhere being used as listening posts, the term takes on a double-meaning.

das telefon sagt du

Germany is celebrating the 150th anniversary of the telephone, which predates Alexander Graham Bell's famous transmission, "Mister Watson, come here--I want to see you," by a full fifteen years with Johann Phillip Reis' cryptic and surreal message via switching, galvanic wire, "The horse does not eat cucumber salad," (Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat). Reis made up this phrase on the spot during his demonstration in Friedrichsdorf by Frankfurt am Main in 1861 to prove that his first call was real and not rehearsed. Reis' experiment of course was built on the work of others that came before and in turn, the idea was improved and realized as a two-way communication device by Bell. Reis' other pioneering work included an early prototype of what would become inline roller-skates and theoretical inquiries into the possibility photovoltaic cells.