five, four, three, two, one

The urban redevelopment council of the large Berkshire city adjacent to Heathrow will help sponsor the creation of a Thunderbirds-themed hotel near the eponymous Slough Trading Estate (industrial park) where the Supermarionation series (Thunderbirds are not Slough—it does not rhyme with go) was filmed and produced. The hotel, which will also be part of a permanent residential hub each of whose five storeys are named after a Thunderbird Machine, is slated to open in 2021. More to explore at the links above, including a dedicated Gerry Anderson (*1929 – †2012), the shows’ co-creator, website.

4f

Via the inestimable Nag on the Lake, we learn that an exemplar of the iconic protest poster that captured a symbolic act of defiance of Bill Greenshields (previously) burning his draft card—though it was suspected that Greenshields at the time was an undercover agent trying to incriminate others, designed and distributed by activist Kiyoshi Kuomiya (*1943, in a Japanese-American internment camp in Heart Mountain, Wyoming – †2000) is being sold at auction. Using the pseudonym Dirty Linen Corporation, Kuromiya got out copies of through mail order, encouraging people to share with mothers and the White House, but was eventually caught by the FBI and charged with for using the postal service for trafficking in lewd materials. Read more about Kuromiya’s life and career dedicated to social justice at the links above.

common ära

Doing some research with some historic church texts in German, I kept running across the abbreviation v. u. Z.—unfamiliar but I quickly surmised its meaning from context clues as “before our era,” a way of BC/AD without a specifically Christian reference point. Ironically—while this term is used in contemporary, secular papers as something synonymous with CE/BCE, it was being used here in a hagiographical and historic milieu to avoid the paradox that Jesus’ birth year did not coincide with the beginning of the era, but rather from three to six vor der Zeitrechnung.

ub iwerks

We enjoyed this interview with the heiress of an immense entertainment conglomerate who has been campaigning that the ultra-wealthy be made to pay their fair burden in taxes so that workers can earn a living wage and that the public institutions and infrastructure that we all rely on and benefit from can be fully-funded.
No progress ever happened by people advocating for their own self-interest alone—as is the natural inclination of lobbies that fight to retain every last cent they’ve made off the efforts and sacrifice of the individuals in their employ, but rather, “Things really change when people are traitors to their class, and my class needs some really good traitors these days.” Read or listen to the whole interview with All Things Considered at the link up top.

buckeye state

Recommended by Digg, we really enjoyed reading this nuanced, thoughtful essay that explores the project to restore North America’s blighted chestnut forests (see also) by creating a genetic hybrid whose DNA contains material from wheat that makes it resistant to the fungus that wiped out the trees.
Given how some of our exuberance to adopt GMOs was misplaced—and conversely fears over it, it is especially vital to get the science right before releasing something synthetic into the wild as trees not thrive outside of our laboratories, fields and plantations, they are also a vital part of the landscape and ecosystem, host to their own particular constellations of Nature. What do you think? Testing is extensive and circumspect and well worth considering all the trials conducted and considered but one in particular stands out: tadpoles fed with either natural or transgenic chestnut leaf litter thrived equally well, but grew at nearly twice the rate of their siblings that had to make due with a diet of maple and beech leaves—their only option since the chestnuts disappeared a century ago, suggesting that the ecosystem is missing these magnificent and useful trees far more than we can appreciate.

saturn vi

Though exploration of the Cronian satellite cannot begin before 2034 (distant-seeming but only fifteen years hence), NASA has committed, choosing among twelve contending proposals, to send a fleet of aerial drones to survey Titan, more planet than moon-like with a dense atmosphere, complex terrain, weather and methane driven precipitation similar to the water cycle on Earth, only sustainable at much lower temperatures, to seek out alien life.

Extra special care and precautions are being factored into the Dragonfly mission so as to not disturb the primordial conditions of the surface as the craft take samples of the moon’s chemistry. Under this frozen substrate (see also), which while having the necessary building blocks for life as we conceive it, scientists believe there is a water-ammonia lies a panthalassic ocean where abiogenesis is suspected to have occurred.

stonewall

During the early hours of this morning fifty years ago, members of the LGBT community in Greenwich Village staged a spontaneous uprising to protest a police raid of the Stonewall Inn.
This stand along Christopher Street, between West 4th Street and Waverly Place, marked the beginning of a long and ongoing struggle for gay rights and equal treatment under the law in the US. Pride parades world wide have occurred around this anniversary. Though the relationship is not causal and to suggest otherwise would dampen rising tensions and dangers faced daily by lesbian and gay people, the night before was the funeral for the iconic Judy Garland who had passed away earlier in the week in London from “an incautious self-overdosage”—held at a chapel on Madison Avenue which remained open through the night so twenty-thousand members of the public could pay their respects. Though no one recalled it being acknowledged during the riots, that sort of turn-out surely helped mobilise at least a few mourners and fans.