Wednesday 11 December 2019
article i, section 2, clause 5
iso-8601 or fifty-two weeks make a year
Kottke once again rings in the season of superlatives with this thoughtful week-by-week catalogue of new things learned in this past year by Tom Whitwell (previously). Aside from being acquainted with the origins of getting one’s steps in, most of these interesting facts and figures were new to us and bare reflection and expanding into posts of their own.
We found especially enlightening and discouraging that the act of finding a clean and safe place to use the restroom for the world’s females takes no less a workforce equivalent equal to the size of Germany’s economy per year and the discovery that some visually impaired individuals can process speech many times faster than sighted people can, suggesting that the visual cortex can be remapped and repurposed. Do give the whole annotated list a look and let us know what you’ve learned that’s really shocking or resonant. What new fact you’ve learned (or remembered) from this past year would you add to the register?
catagories: ⚕️, ๐, networking and blogging
Tuesday 10 December 2019
wkrp
Dangerous Minds showcases an authentically rare and obscure sampling of recordings from Cincinnati’s musical—punk, ska, rockabilly—underground, vintage 1975-1982. Like anything on the internet of course it’s a point of departure for further research and exploration and the featured tracks are barely scratching the surface, but we did quite like the references to Debbie Harry throughout.
ะฐะฑะตัะบะฐ
Though never a serious contended to replace the Cyrillic variant of the Ukrainian alphabet, several times throughout history Latin scripts have enjoyed compelling fashionability and, always politically fraught, prompting studies into ornithological reform (see also) and sometimes the outright Romanization of the language.
A generalized Latin script called ลatynka was proposed and precipitated an intense public debate, the War of the Alphabets, especially along the country’s western frontier regions where there was an abrupt divide between writing traditions in the mid-nineteenth century and again became en vogue during the early years of the Soviet era—at one point some seventy new scripts were adapted for the Uralic, Iranian, Slavonic, Mongolian, Korean and Chinese written languages of the USSR, following the lead of Turkey. Publications, mainly for the benefit of border communities, during that phase—until development was halted and reversed by Joseph Stalin—incorporated letters from Czech and Polish alphabets and was called Abecadลo.
resolution 217
The United Nations’ first major legislative achievement came on this day in 1948 with the General Assembly’s adoption and proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, later each article committed to these stone pillars in Nuremberg, Straรe der Menschenrechte.
catagories: ๐ณ๐ด, ๐ธ๐ช, ๐, holidays and observances