aloha ‘oe or business-casual

No matter how long one has been in the US labour force—or indeed the international one since it seems that the tradition has been widely adopted, relaxing the office’s dress-code on Fridays seems something as firmly ingrained as the desperate compulsion to clean one’s desk of backlog procrastination and pass it off to another on that same day of the week. I know some co-workers just beam at their accomplishments, thinking it took me all week to perfect that problem and now I give it to you.
The former observance, however, is a relatively new practise with rather surprising origins. Purveyors of what is known as Aloha Attire sold, in lieu of conventional business dress as the islands’ hot climate make it far too impractical to expect workers to wear suits and ties, Hawaiian shirts and related apparel, meant to be worn untucked, to make office conditions a little more tolerable. Championed by a consortium of native textile manufacturers called the Hawaiian Fashion Guild to boost sales, the shirt-makers lobbied the US Congress (perhaps a small concession after the territory had been annexed by a fruit magnate) for an Aloha Week to strengthen relations between the islands and the mainland. Changes came about slowly and the garb was still associated in the main with tourists and outsiders’ ideas of what Polynesian culture ought to be, but the stock-market crash of 1987 and the savings-and-loan sector collapse that followed cemented Casual Fridays—whose unofficial uniform is the Hawaiian Shirt. Businesses had sustained significant losses and that translated to several lean years in salary and compensation, and companies hoped to placate the disgruntled without actually spending any money. This tradition of dressing-down for the weekend was born as a way of boosting employee morale—one which the fashion industry probably greatly appreciated as well, forming another nuanced category of clothing

enhanced vegetation index

Recently ecologists endeavoured to take a more accurate census of the number of individual trees, as each comprises an arboreal habitat within its own branches and is also a part of a larger, contiguous network of the forest.
Taking to the woods with clipboards and questionnaires, researchers discovered that their previous estimates on the total, global tree population—relying mostly on satellite images that showed ground cover and calculating the percentages of wild and cultivated land, were off by almost a power of ten: instead of some four hundred billion leafy compatriots, there are some three trillion. The old methods did not take into account the shifting densities that the census-takers encountered in their surveys, and the demographic projections seem to be solid and rigorous—not just another model to be later prised apart. The findings are optimistic (forests are more robust in some parts of the world than they were a century ago) but we humans still are not good stewards of the environment and could prove to be an important point of departure for further sustainability studies and determining how much room is needed to grow and thrive.

4x4

keep britain tidy: brilliant idea to keep smokers from tossing the butts on the street

mind the map: expansive, frenetic hand-drawn landscape of London that took a decade to complete

microcosmos: a visit to Amsterdam’s microbial menagerie, via Superpunch

yes, very like a cloud: via Mindhacks, an explanation of the robotic hallucinations of the Deep Dream project – they’re experiencing pareidolia, seeing dinosaurs in the sky 

palisade-park or load-bearing

This nice little appreciation of the iconic stave church of Borgund in Norway from Twisted Sifter reminded us of our visit there a few years ago. Of course the natural beauty of that country is nonpareil with whatever man-made constructs can frame it. It was truly a wonderful and privileged experience and we are hoping to be back and astounded again one of these days pretty soon.

rebus oder panda, pizza, oselot

There is how PfRC translates into emoji, according to the service Linkmoji.  This demonstration, that comes to us via WIRED!, is a little baffling linguistically, I admit, plus a bit recursive as we are just linking back to this site.  So share with us how your website looks in webdings or however this sequence is generated.  It seems to come out differently each time and there are poo and non-poo versions available.

graphic dynamism or baby bells

Saul Bass gave Ma Bell a crisper corporate logo in 1969 that was in use until 1983 when Bass himself pitched the Death Star design to a dismantled and reorganised AT&T, as Kottke shares with some more background and promotional featurette. That blogger has also noted that lately what goes around, comes around in design and branding.

your princess is in another castle

Via that other intrepid adventuress, Nag on the Lake, we are invited on field-trip with the team of explorers of Atlas Obscura to Saint Petersburg to see the conservation efforts of a group of nostalgic and impassioned group of college students, which has produced a vintage arcade experience.
Visitors are immersed in an ensemble of loving restored and playable games and refreshments that capture the ethos of the Soviet Union during the ‘70s and ‘80s. This unique installation (which is presenting some major maintenance challenges) consists of gaming machines that were not only about fun and fantasy—commissioned in accordance with the wishes of the state, there was little time or tolerance for anthropomorphic mushrooms and damsels in distress and these games rather emphasised hand-eye coordination, strategy and team-work over competition. Although no one can say for certain as the provenance of the games is a classified matter, they were probably designed and programmed in the same facilities and by the same computer scientists that were charged with the maintenance of the Soviets’ nuclear weapons arsenal.

chivalrous or back in the saddle again

The Norman Invasion of England in the year 1066 utilised the same technological advance in order to prosecute the same sort of vast capturing of land as Mongol Horde had used to gain territory on the liminal edge of the known world almost eight hundred years prior (and with latter day iterations as well). Though somewhat taken for granted due to its patent simplicity—particularly among the horsey-set, the stirrup proved probably as significant force in shaping civilisation as the introduction of printed word in the West, enabling mounted warriors to manoeuvre the battle-field with much greater speed and stability than had visited the defeated beforehand.
The stirrup is just a loop of leather that hangs to the side of a saddle, enabling riders to mount their steeds quickly and keep their balance. As just a small detail, it took some people quite a long time to notice and appreciate this modification that imparted significant advantage to the cavalry of the foot-solders. These more agile mercenaries that took up specialised arms and steeds became the professional landed knights under the feudalist system of the Norman conquestors and their Frankish overlords and sought to broaden the pyramid-scheme wherein defenders pledged oaths of fealty to a certain tract of property and to a certain lord. In order to maintain this allegiance, the knights—which were called then chevaliers (from the French term for horse), lived by a certain, defined code of conduct, which was called chivalry. This transformation makes me think of the way one’s portion of meat was translated from the field (grimy old English barnyard words for swine in the sty) to the dinner plate (expressed in refined French words for haute-cuisine, like pork).