9x9 (13. 539)

criterion collection: a roundup of dirigible-themed movies, featuring, among others, Fay Wray and Ronald Reagan as secret agent Brass Bancroft  

the camelot of africa: a tour Ethiopia’s Gondar castles 

binomial coefficients: some numbers in Pascal’s triangle make very few cameos and no one is sure why  

lost world: museum docent Louis Gratacap pioneered the genre—see previously  

fast-track enlargement: talks begin for EU accession for Ukraine and Moldova  

ger:gre: Monty Python’s Ancients v Moderns football match  

planetary-mass companion: the famous Pink Planet may be a failed binary star system  

a tisket, a tasket: an update on the headquarters building of Longaberger baskets—see previously  

sac pour mal de l’air: a collection of air sickness bags from a variety of airlines

convention zone (13. 527)

The latest instalment of a multipart series on the Sun and its inner workings addresses in depth a fact briefly touched on in a recent post regarding the surprisingly glacial speed which a photon escapes the solar core to emerge as light and radiative energy. Whilst many of us may be cognisant of the fact that the beams of light reaching us from the Sun are eight minutes old due to the distance that they have to transverse and how looking up into the night sky is looking into the distant past, the fact that the stellar furnace is so dense that it takes a photon over one hundred thousand years to work its way through the crowd of excited particles to the surface strikes one as a strange contrast. Because protons emanate in all directions through the medium of packed plasma, the straightforward journey is impeded by obstacles at every step, the bumping into a fellow traveller and the redirection over and over again increases the time to make it from the core to the corona by a factor of a trillion, a dampening process calculated in a process called a random walk, that sustains the fusion reaction. This delayed makes the light in the sky prehistoric, older than civilisation.

10x10 (13. 523)

nine days in june: landmark US supreme court decisions of years past and upcoming cases during this busy time of the year  

mcmodernslopecore: AI-generated architecture—via Miss Cellania  

photovoltaic: a brief tutorial on how solar panels work—via Kottke  

linguist fingerprints: every AI talks with an accent  

i am not on harry mudd’s client list—stop talking about it, i don’t even know him: the Federation’s war with the Romulans was a total success 

defender of the realm: profiles of medieval warrior women  

dialog society: a trove of leaked documents reveals the activities of Peter Thiel’s secretive cult, prepping for WWIII with a breeding programme—see previously  

spacex: a plan to deploy a million satellites in Earth orbit would ruin the night sky for everyone  

parc güell: Antoni Gaudí’s 1926 failed housing estate has become one of Barcelona’s public spaces  

51st state: rural Illinois citizens petition to eject Chicago and split into two polities—see also 

synchronoptica

one year ago: the G7 in Alberta and the Israeli-Iran war (with synchronoptica) plus the Trump phone 

two years ago: a synthesiser performance piece , OJ Simpson flees police (1994) plus tragic children’s names

three years ago: NASCAR celebrates Pride plus a werewolf exorcism (1983)

four years ago: Star Trek: TAS retcon, the Watergate break-in (1972) plus assorted links to revisit

five years ago: Iceland reforms its naming rules, ASCII standards published (1963), the musical stylings of the Sons of Kemet plus calendrical dating formats

six years ago: US supreme court erodes the Civil Rights Act, the East German uprising of 1953, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls plus Trump sues to stop publication of a tell-all exposé

8x8 (13. 520)

bff: open-source branding for fast foods and convenience stores  

slopaganda: the fake Canadians behind Alberta’s separatist movement  

painting with light: a look back at the pioneering Quantel Paintbox system that debuted in 1981  

it is long since i saw you: the flying monk Eilmer of Malmesbury who witnessed Halley’s Comet twice  

jam handy to the rescue: The Girl on the Magazine Cover (1940)—say do you mind if I take a picture?  

biosphere: the unrealised spherical, utopian architecture of nineteenth century France—via Messy Nessy Chic  

homefront: mapping all Russian casualties in the Ukraine war in order to expose the human costs of the fighting  

at participating locations: a 1977 commercial for the McFeast

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronopticæ) plus photographer Lycien-David Cséry

optotype (13. 517)

The second star of the constellation Ursa Major (the Big Dipper or the Plough or in Arabic بَنَاتُ نَعْشٍ الكُبْرَى , the daughters of the bier—those who bear the funeral litter) and it was considered a test of visual acuity for those whose keen eyesight could resolve the second star of its tail or handle, Mizar (ζ Ursae Majoris, meaning apron or wrapping in Arabic) from its fainter companion Alcor (it’s name being literally that) with the eye exam likened to being able to distinguish a horse and rider at distance. Other civilisations had other asterisms used for the same purposes. The Latinised adage, Vidit Alcor, at non lunam plenam—for he saw Alcor yet not the full Moon, came to signify one whom couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Iranian nuclear talks (with synchronopticæ), an Airstream inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, US tech CEOs enlist in the army plus a Simpsons rewatch project

twelve years ago: digitally curating street art plus East Germany strikes down legislation outlawing homosexual relationships (1969)

thirteen years ago: the Italian silk industry plus more fallout from Snowden’s revelations

fourteen years ago: the United States of poverty plus a Fathers’ Day greeting 

fifteen years ago: Iceland crowd-sources its constitution 

sixteen years ago: more on Afghanistan’s mineral resources 

radio bubble (13. 449)

Via tmn, we enjoyed contemplating how much we’ve contributed to the cosmic conversation with the ever expanding shell of signals, every form of broadcast communication that has escaped the ionosphere and into the void of space. Though only a few missives were intentional and the vast scale of galaxy means that despite the impressive sounding volume of the bubble, two-hundred and forty light years across (the radius cubed of radio history multiplied by π times four-thirds, dating back to Marconi’s experiments at the turn of the last century, beamed out at the speed of light) only covers a vanishing small fraction of our own galactic local neighbourhood, still the silence (see above) is humbling and lonely. Our vision far outpaces our voice.  More from the Scientific Drop at the link above.

casemod (13. 436)

An homage to classic LEGO consoles and control panels (previously), we appreciated this workstation from design studio Watt IV for an Apple Mini with the housing palette referencing both the 1979 space line of playsets and the 1984 Macintosh 128K. The sloped brick features a touch-screen display and is meant to be used an extension to one’s desktop for instance as a dedicated interface and monitoring station for the life support systems of one’s smart home. More from DesignBoom at the link above, including instructions on how to make one’s own dashboard.

pearl of great price (13. 420)

Described variously as a star and planet—though to be fair, the distinction from prehistory to pre-modern times has not always been been clear-cut, in the Book of Abraham, we learn courtesy of Dangerous Minds, that the celestial body called Kolob is the seat of the throne of God. Beyond the Seventh Heaven and perhaps astronomically meant to be obscure by the Zone of Avoidance, the planet was sited by the eponymous prophet and Methuselah with the aid of the set of seer-stones Urim and Thummim (see above, see also), and in the Mormon belief system Jesus has his own home world and the righteous get their own planets at the centre of the Universe or near the galactic core (what does God need with a starship?) where a day measures one-thousand terrestrial years. More at the links above.

artemis ii (13. 315)

Any other day, a crewed mission to lunar orbit would be the only news story, but given the world of American hubris and hegemony, with wars in the Middle and Far East, Trump threatening to withdraw from NATO, the climate catastrophe, etc, etc, the awe-inspiring achievement that the world could collectively take pride in is overshadowed in the headlines. Whilst not landing on the Moon for this iteration, the capsule launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, if all goes according to plan, will take four individuals the farthest anyone has been from Earth, tracing a figure-eight around the Moon and back in a ten day journey, the flyby the first foray beyond low Earth orbit since 1972. The Apollo XIII and X missions entered geostationary orbit around the Moon but Artemis will assume a free return trajectory, similar to Apollo XIII. Among the historical firsts in store for the crew include the first woman, person of colour and in Canadian Space Agency astronaut the first non-US citizen to leave low Earth orbit. The landing mission is currently scheduled for 2028. Watch the countdown live at NPR at the link up top.

9x9 (13. 308)

ruina montium: an striking landscape in Spain created by the ancient Romans fracking for gold—via Miss Cellania  

13 ｘ 7 = 28: Abbot and Costello try to meet their sales quota—via MetaFilter 

i’m your hell, i’m your dream—i’m nothing in between: a linguistic and semantic history of the term bitch 

anatoly kolodkin: US waives sanctions to allow Russian tanker to deliver crude oil to Cuba  

coalition of the willing: recalling the legacy Icelandic PM Davíð Oddsson of committing the nation to the unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003, juxtaposed with contemporary Spain  

cocktail nation: Spy Vibe’s regular segment on swank vintage soundtracks  

lip-filler accent: influencers inform the way we speak—via Nag on the Lake, see also  

gigo: AI is an accelerant for academic fraud, selling papers and citations to pad one’s portfolio  

unoosa: a profile of the director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs who alerts the world of impending asteroid impacts

7x7 (13.275)

rocketman: more on the centenary of Robert Goddard’s first launch—via Miss Cellania  

take the q train: a 1987 subway trip to Coney Island captured by pre-internet vlogger Nelson Sullivan  

cabbage architecture: how a bitter shrub became scores of distinct vegetables—via Quantum of Sollazzo  

limehouse: reconstructing Pennyfield’s Chinatown in East London  

outrageous fortune: the 1931 novel Windfall by Robert Andrews line of sight: see how far you can see plus the grandest vistas

twinkle, twinkle: a guide to identifying the planets and stars from xkcd—previously

first flight (13. 271)

From property then belonging to Asa Ward before becoming his Aunt Effie’s farmstead in Auburn, Massachusetts, pioneering jet propulsion engineer and physicist Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket on this day in 1926. With a mixture of gasoline and liquid oxygen, the projectile, christened as Nell, only reached an altitude of sixty metres but in less than three seconds and was a solid demonstration of proof of concept. Reserved and painfully shy since, Goddard was criticised by contemporaries as dabbling in an undignified field not worthy of serious scientific investigation, his contributions only posthumously recognised—thanks in large measure to his habit of keeping a daily diary of experiments and imbued early on with a sense of curiosity and awe, first captivated by the electrification of his hometown at the turn of the century and then a transcendent experience, referred to in his journal as his “cherry tree dream” aged seventeen, when perched in the branches to prune some dead limbs in the autumn all of a sudden, imagining his ascent higher and higher above the Earth and intuited the basic principles of combustion and propulsion, coming down from the tree a changed adolescent. That vision never left Goddard, for the rest of his life keeping the anniversary of that event, 19 October 1899, as a private commemoration of his greatest inspiration.

8x8 (13. 255)

should make you think: the Ig Noble commitee and ceremony (see previously) moves to Zürich permanently out of fear for its international laureates coming to the US  

multisource authentication: the madding task of logging on to any platform, ostensibly for security reasons, also is unpaid labour to train AI  

ʰ-bomb: a typographical mystery surrounding one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most celebrated sacred spaces—via MetaFilter  

asterisms: learn about the night sky by creating one’s own constellations with Neal Agarwal (previously)  

saint-michel d’aiguihe: the chapel of St Michael of the Needle built atop a volcanic plug and has a secret reliquary—via Miss Cellania    

diacritics: kernels, ʻokinas and curly quotes 

short imagined monologues: the void would very much like you to stop screaming into it—see also  

rebel alliance: Minnesota’s badge of resistance to ICE terror

circumplanetary disk (13.253)

Although the suggested existence of a ring-planet dates back to nineteen century observation notes by William Herschel, the definitive discovery of Uranius’ coherent orbital debris fields occurred by fortuitous accident on this day in 1977 by astronomers aboard the Gerard P Kuiper Airborne Observatory, a customised Starlifter jet transporter commissioned by NASA as a platform for research in infrared astronomy. Debuted as the civilian version of defence contractor Lockheed-Martin’s C-141, this high-altitude plane could rise above terrestrial interference equipped with a conventional telescope and spectrometry instruments the programme was also witness to the transmutation of elements through stellar fusion by peering out to the centre of the Milky Way, organic compounds in the great void of space as well as studying the mineral makeup of Mercury. Active for twenty years, the project was eventually retired in 1995 and rests in an airplane graveyard outside of Moffett Field outside of Sunnyvale, California.

7x7 (13. 229)

all modern digital infrastructure: a XKCD panel made interactive 

hell harp: Oxford scholars recreate the musical instruments from the Garden of Earthly Delights and play them—see previously 

≲5×10³: Iranian academics propose that technologically advanced civilisations wipe themselves out and have a constrained lifespan on Earth and throughout the Cosmos—see also here, here and here  

set theory: literary news in Venn diagrams  

tragic mansions: the sadly overlooked life and career of Mrs Philip Lydig  

orrery: a mechanical clock to tell the time in our solar system  

habe mortem præ oculis: perhaps the worst pun ever  

usage clause: AI can rewrite, refactor COBOL language applications, reportedly reducing the risk of moving away from legacy systems—see also, see previously

10x10 (13. 125)

no ordinary venue: disgraced FIFA ex-president Sepp Blatter encourages a World Cup boycott of the US  

slideshow: reconstructing the lecture series of Theosophist and meteorologist Clement Wragge  

margin unit: Persevereance rover discovers evidence of an ancient beach in Mars’ Jezero crater 

jesse garon presley: Scott Walker’s ballad about Elvis’ lost twin 

squaring the circle: a clever workaround to the geometrical conundrum  

optimised for nastiness: Sir Tim Berners-Lee is in a battle for the soul of the web 

the streets of minneapolis: Bruce Springsteen’s tribute to the resistance and its fallen champions  

don’t look up: asteroid 2024 YR4 has a four percent chance of striking the Moon 

tangible data: information that one can hold in one’s hands—via Kottke 

host nation: Italian officials condemn planned presence of US ICE agents for the Winter Games

sts-51-l (13. 124)

Seventy-three seconds after launch on this day in 1968, space shuttle Challenger broke apart, disintegrating fourteen kilometres over the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Cape Canaveral, killing the seven crew members and marking the first fatalities in US spaceflight on a craft that had left the launch pad—hence the l for lost on the flight designation. Scheduled to deploy a communications satellite and study the approaching Halley’s comet, astronauts included Christa McAuliffe as part of the Teacher in Space project, an outreach programme founded under the Reagan administration in 1984 to inspire STEM studies—cancelled found the death of its first participant.  Because of McAuliffe’s inclusion as a payload specialist, selected out of over eleven-thousand applicants, there was heightened media attention to the orbiter’s tenth and otherwise routine mission and many students in classrooms across America witnessed the disaster live, myself included recalling that TV cart. The cause of the break up was failure in the primary and backup o-ring seals, allowing hot pressurised gases to vent uncontrolled from the booster rockets and caused the craft, climbing at nearly twice the speed of sound to pitch and spin and was torn apart by aerodynamic stress. The launch continued despite warnings from flight engineers that the seal system would breach in the extreme cold—for Florida—weather that morning, possibly to take place before the president’s state of the union address scheduled to be delivered in the evening. A congressional investigation was launched and the shuttle programme suspended until September of 1988 with Discovery. The shuttle programme was retired in 2005 following the loss of Columbia during deorbiting in February 2003 when a piece of insulation foam that had dislodged during the launch struck the tiles that protect the craft from the heat of reentry, which as with the degredation of the o-rings, NASA did not considered to be a potential risk to the astronauts’ safety. The Soviet Union named two craters newly discovered on Venus in honour of the memory McAuliffe and mission specialist Judith Resnik and five other crew members. The second payload specialist Ronald McNair had brought his saxophone with him to record a track for inclusion for the upcoming album Rendez-Vous by John-Michel Jarre.  

7x7 (13. 105)

helix nebula: JWST captures amazing images of the planetary incubator 

academy cinema two: the linocut posters for movie classics from Peter Strausfeld  

degrassi high: an appeal for Canada television to bring back its weirdness—via MetaFilter  

deus ex machina: a survey of the long history of technology assisted writing  

the attention economy: cybernetic interface and the tolerance of distraction as told through “pursuit tests” on the last century  

public domain revue: an call for submissions to remix properties like Betty Boop, Nancy Drew, Flip the Frog and more—see previously, see also  

galileo let me go: the most challenging mission in the history of NASA

9x9 (13. 032)

christmas day storm: heavy rains and landslides batter Los Angeles area  

vertex summary: holiday reception by renowned fiddler in Nova Scotia cancelled due to AI search erroneous labelling the performer a sex-offender—via Super Punch  

soft cell: astronaut Tibor Kapu debuts geometries that can only exist in microgravity aboard the ISS  

high holidays: an assortment of newspaper clippings on confiscated marijuana Christmas trees of yesteryear  

autocoup: a viral fake video of an overthrow in Paris is throwing the government in turmoil  

daemon est deus inversus: the occult imagination of W B Yeats  

winterval: seasonal breaks and the signal most observed public holiday—maybe not the one you’re thinking of—from Quantum of Sollazzo  

neighbourhood watch: AI powered app issues false crime alerts across US, terrorising residents  

spirit of the season: US launches strikes against ISIS militants in Nigeria—accused of persecuting Christians 

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronopticæ), Wild Strawberries (1957) plus a classic from Goorge Harrison

thirteen years ago: an antique Bible 

fifteen years ago: Boxing Day and Second Christmas 

9x9 (13. 024)

participation, in this context, is a kind of alignment: the Vanity Fair photo shoot of Trump’s cabinet 

escape velocity: a super-massive runaway black hole has been ejected from its home galaxy and is careening through space—via Kottke 

that thoth over there: a guide to the messy divine family of Egyptian mythology  

beyond the last-minute gift guide: the year of Tedium wrapped  

no-one comes to casablanca for the waters—you were misinformed: every drink in the 1942 classic (see previously, oddly no gin)—via MetaFilter  

capital allocation: on the social uselessness of finance, creating winners and losers  

homecoming: a preview of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey—see also 

intraterrestrials: subsurface microbes have geological lifespans 

unreliable narrator: Epstein and company as Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert—see previously