Friday 15 February 2019

10 us code § 2808

Despite some probably ill-advised concessions to Trump’s monument to white supremacy that secured continuation of government operations—sparing hundreds of thousands the indignities of being played as political pawns, Trump has decided to make up for the funding short-fall by declaring the lack of a border wall (see also here and here) a national emergency, siphoning funds away from other military construction projects. The onus of proof, enumerating how this crusade constitutes an emergency and what other priorities and obligations are to be cut, lies with the administration and legal challenges could yet throw the whole enterprise into limbo and spell further delays and brinkmanship.

Thursday 14 February 2019

music for airports

Our thanks to the always engrossing and enlightening Open Culture for turning our ears to this special, time-dilated edition of Brian Eno’s electronic music improvisational session from 1978, a collaborative tone poem of meditative incidental music called Ambient 1. Establishing the genre, the artist hoped to produce something as “ignorable as it is interesting” and conducive of reflection amid all the chaos and cacophony of an international terminal. The sound installation was set up in the Marine Air concourse of the LaGuardia airport during the mid-1980s but is not currently soothing anxious passengers—at least not over the public-address system.

sua sponte

Never to be accused of being an old romantic at heart, Pope Paul VI issued on this day in 1969 the Mysterii Pascchalis, reforming the liturgical year and revising the calendar of the saints.
This motu proprio (from the Latin, at one’s own accord) represents an official decree not prompted by another or in response to current developments or findings yet still has the force of law regardless of motivation, among other things struck many figures from the Calendarium Romanum, the cycle of celebrations called the Proper of Saints—to include Saint Valentine, whose feast day coincided with the decree. Only wanting to preserve the rites that were truly of universal importance to the faith, the Pope deleted or transposed nearly fifty solemnities for all our favourites, mostly due to redundancy or their problematic histories, including the saintly family of Maris, Martha, Abachum and Audifax, Canute of Denmark, Dorothy of Caesarea, Faustinus and Jovita, Ursula and her companions, Simeon, the Seven Sleepers and Saint Barbara.

Wednesday 13 February 2019

6x6

art brut: the incredible portfolio of outsider artist (previously here, here and here) Adolf Wรถlfi

gamalost: Norway’s campaign to re-popularise a crumbly and aromatic cheese with reputed libidinous qualities—via Nag on the Lake

call sign: radio station logos of the Soviet Union—via Coudal Partner’s Fresh Signals

hey! wait! I’ve got a new complaint: a brief history of the heart-shaped box and how it became a Valentine’s staple

mirror, mirror: the label on this sun-screen bottle are printed backwards to be more photogenic

word vectors: advanced translators are an endorsement Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories on language

course and wythe

One of the more viable indigenous, constructed scripts (see also here and here), the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets profiles the Mandombe system of writing, revealed to its author by a venerated Congolese religious leader in a dream, recognising the sacred serpentine turns along the familiar backdrop of a brick wall.
Inspired, glyphs were developed whose pronunciation and inflection was determined on direction and orientation and is suited for the national languages of the country, with more efforts underway to transcribe neighbouring languages into Mandombe, and is taught in parochial schools affiliated with the church that conceived it in the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola as well as in France and Belgium.

shortlisted

We enjoyed pouring over this gallery of photographs curated by Plain Magazine that have been nominated to contend for high honours in the annual Sony World Photography Awards (previously) and we were especially intrigued by the symmetry of the scene captured by Eng Chung Tong of an extraction operation in Malaysia entitled Synergy of Humanity. We were also very pleased to see the ethereal submerged choreography of Christy Lee Rogers had made the cut as well for this twelfth iteration of the competition. More to explore at the links above.

alley oop

Though not the first or most famous of its class, learning that the mildly mysterious Coso Artefact was discovered on this date in 1961 by some rock-hounds in California’s Owens Valley did impel us into the strange and contentious realm of out-of-place archaeology. While prospecting for geodes, the group found a spark plug from the 1920s encased in a rock that was estimated to be a half-a-million years old.
Though geological processes could account for the concretion and nodule formation around the clear anachronism, proponents of time-travel, prehistoric alien visitation and lost civilisations of course carried the day—as they do for other anomalous found objects, deemed in the wrong chronological context, that are categorised as OOPArt (Out-of-Place Artefacts). While not all are haunted with the blight of pseudoscience and sometimes there is a honest misinterpretation, wishful-thinking or confirmation-bias over a pet theory, most claims are dubious and tend to be a demerit to human ingenuity and accomplishment, like the Nebra Skydisk or the Antikythera mechanism being the artifice of extra-terrestrials or even gods, pareidolia due to suboptimal inputs and of course outright forgeries and hoaxes meant to embarrass or strengthen an agenda or alternate point-of-view.

Tuesday 12 February 2019

itineraria

Maps Mania directs us to a clever application that helps one create custom, emblematic metropolitan street map posters as a scalable vector format (SVG)—which admittedly has a level of flexibility and versatility in programming and dynamic displays that I did not appreciate until this introductory tutorial.
Admittedly too it’s a bit out of my league as well but the coding is not a necessity to play around with the tool and appreciate the patterns of traffic management and civil engineering, especially where it intersects with olden and ancient places. I encircled the Altstadt of Wiesbaden, around the Rathaus and Stadtschloss that houses the state parliament. Give Maptime a try and show us what you create as an icon of your city.