crucible or lacrymæ batavicæ

When one drips molten glass into a vessel of water, a little tadpole glass droplet forms that has some amazing physical properties. The bead can withstand blows from a hammer but if the tail is snipped, the whole droplet violently explodes. Previously known as Dutch tears (the Latin name above), there was a paucity of scientific investigation until they were reproduced and experimented on in the ducal court of Mecklenburg.
Prince Rupert gave British King Charles II an exciting demonstration and Prince Rupert Drops as they became known in England (called Bologneser Träne auf Deutsche—Baloney tears, however, owing to the reputation of the Italians as glassmakers) were taken up by the Royal Society for further studies in the mid seventeenth century. Though mostly taken up as a party-favour or a parlour-trick, volcanologists found the laboratory trials valuable as the drops approximated the pyroclastic forces found in eruptions and lava-flows, as did polymath Robert Hooke, whose puzzlement over the store of potential energy led to the development of the idea of elasticity, strain and compression and a scientific, predictable toolkit for ever more intricate mechanisms.

mare incognitum

Beforehand I had heard of how map-makers have historically staved-off others appropriating and copying their survey work by inserting made-up avenues (trap-streets) or frivolous features, knowing that if these decoys were present, their competitors were simply stealing from them.
I never knew that this geographic bait was sometimes preserved with intention and out of a sense of tribute and tradition, as was the case with Hy-Bra∫il (named after the home of the ancestors of one of Ireland’s legendary clans), a phantom island that drifted on charts between Ireland and North America over the course of nearly five centuries. Other spurious islands usually only survived one or two iterations of mapping, the false information quickly dispelled, but Hy-Bra∫il remained from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century in some form or another.  With Atlantis lost, perhaps in this Age of Exploration, navigators needed some immaterial goal to sustain them on their journeys—something elusive, which supposedly only emerged from the mists once every seven years and even when visible for that one fateful day, was forever just beyond the horizon. Maybe the Bermuda Triangle is heir to that tradition.

but brawndo’s got what plants crave—it’s got electrolytes

Via the always brilliant Kottke, we learn that there will be in the US nation-wide screenings of the sadly prescient film Idiocracy from director Mike Judge on 4 October—to mark the movie’s tenth anniversary. Would you go to a show or is it hitting a little too close to home?

coop and coup

Amazingly, pigeons can be taught to read or at least spell-check, an extensive study conducted in Ruhr-University Bochum has concluded.
Building off of the autoshaping, conditioned behaviour developed by psychologist BF Skinner (which incidentally was used to pilot the first smart-bombs), researchers found the best and brightest and had them begin learning to differentiate words and pick out phoney words inserted into otherwise orthographically correct blocks of text. While they may not understand written language, they seem just as adapt as other animals whose ability and intellect is held in higher esteem and seem to pick up new vocabulary (and even conjugation and plural forms) with ease. Maybe we’d ought to look out for eavesdropping pigeons reading over our shoulders as well. They’d probably be just as quick and accurate at texting too.