ptable (13. 922)

Via Quantum of Sollazzo, we are redirected towards a suite of interactive data tables in development since 1997—quite a change log to keep apace with increasing sophisticated user interfaces and scientific discovery— that cleverly lets one explore the chemical elements by any number of parameters of properties and then, as an encore, applies the data visualisation and organisation to taxonomy to survey the entire Tree of Life, every Kingdom, Phylum and Class down to families and species, accessible and with links to Wikipedia articles for the whole inventory. The resources and network is maintained by Michael Dayah.

*    *    *    *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: a banger from Baccara (with synchronoptica), the fantasy maps of Ursula K Le Guin, Dial-a-Poem, an abecedary of British folklore plus more AI christo-fascist propaganda

two years ago: Bezos’ owned Washington Post declines to endorse a US presidential candidate, a temporary monument for the January Sixth rioters, a seasonal treat from Louie Zong plus assorted links worth revisiting 

three years ago: outsider artist Robert Martiensen, more links to enjoy plus the discovery and development of the petroleum industry presented as the Bayeux Tapestry

four years ago: another MST3K classic plus further adventures in Crete

 

five years ago: Antarctic outposts plus a funicular escalator to revitalise a historic resort

six years ago: an experimental solar sail, artist Mary Moser, a smart safety helmet plus a commemorative camera styled after Bond’s Q

seven years ago: toying with time

eight years ago: a counter-march in Wiesbaden, AI Halloween costume ideas plus Yoko Ono’s Warzone

 

sterbesurkunde (13. 918)

In the hopes of silencing conspiracy theories that had circulated since 1945 and would so for decades afterwards, on this day in 1956 the district court (Amtsgericht) of Berchtesgaden, with jurisdiction as the Führer’s home of record, declared Hitler officially dead. Following the capture of the Reich Chancellery during the Battle of Berlin, the Red Army secured the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and directed the NKVD (НКВД, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the secret police and intelligence agency later responsible for carrying out the Great Purge) to carry out a comprehensive post-mortem. Fritz Echtmann, dental assistant, identified dentures and implants as belong to the deceased and collected testimony from other witnesses to the suicide.
At first publishing the details of this fact finding mission and initially sharing it with American counterparts, on orders from Josef Stalin, Soviet commander-in-chief Georgi Zhukov retracted the statements and launched a disinformation campaign, disappearing Echtmann and others present behind the Iron Curtain. In order to disabuse allies from the apparent confusion, MI5 conducted its own investigation, finding Hitler’s last will and testament, marriage certificate and generally corroborating the factual account, though doubts lingered due to the continued detention of important witnesses. The USSR was motivated to maintain these conspiracies in order to justify harsh crackdowns on those within their sphere of influence and suppress democratic reform through the legend of a useful boogeyman. Following their release and repatriation to West Germany, their narratives helped strengthen the case for remit of Hitler’s estate and assets to the state of Bavaria and the municipality of Linz—however, despite all this, the deliberate Soviet obfuscation fuelled alternative narratives well into the 1990s, championed by American tabloids positing notions that the couple were alive and well in Argentina or Colombia or Albania, only dispelled—mostly—with the collapse of the Soviet Union and release of the archives detailing the burial and reinterment of the remains of Hitler and Braun nine times in various locations in Berlin and Magdeburg before cremating them in 1970 with only a few fragments remaining, dentures and some pieces of skull as forensic evidence, with ashes scattered in a tributary of the Elbe.

464 us 417 (13. 915)

Filed on this day in 1976 in the US district court for central and southern California in Los Angeles, Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Company sued the Sony Corporation of America to prohibit the sale of it videocassette recording system to the general public. The “Betamax” case eventually heard by the supreme court nearly eight years later, ruled—narrowly—in favour of the electronics manufacturer, deciding that making individual copies of programming for personal use does not constitute copyright infringement when created for the purposes of time shifting, viewing it sometime after the scheduled live broadcast, was fair use. The concept of pausing live television had among its first popular depictions in a 1966 episode of I Dream of Jeannie with Major Nelson requesting his genie pre-empt a football game so he could continue to watch it from that point after finishing with errands. More broadly, the majority of the justices found that similar video recording platforms could not be held liable for contributing to infringement, thus creating the home video market with a legal safe harbour, similar to the principle of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that guarantees immunity for online platforms hosting third-party content hosted by users within in certain bounds, for the developing technology and a boon for film studios with secondary releases. The prevailing format for taping shifted away from Betamax, Sony acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 modified certain interpretation of statue that informed the original case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejecting the fair use standard as a applied to space shifting (peer-to-peer sharing of digital media such as Napster or KaZaa) as the equivalent of the above time shifting.

 

 synchronoptica

one year ago: documenting China’s 1990s building boom (with synchronoptica), the Battle of Agincourt (1415), US moves towards regime change in Venezuela plus Trump administration closes off the US entrance of a Canadian border-straddling library

 

two years ago: cruise packages and Gen Z plus international maritime signal flags 

 

three years ago: assorted links worth the revisit 

 

four years ago: further adventures in Crete 

five years ago: the US Invasion of Granada (1971)

six years ago: a hexadecagonal country retreat, SS Crispin and Crispinian plus pandemic gods and heroes

seven years ago: a lyrical headline (1924), a video game atlas plus the world’s first erotic boutique proprietress 

eight years ago: The Master Key of Futurity, virtual restaurants and ghost kitchens plus programming a more ethical Pac Man

 

precursor (13. 892)

Broadcast on BBC2 in late September of 1990, the fifty-minute-long documentary written by and costarring Douglas Adams as a computer user with Doctor Who’s Tom Baker as a personification of agentic software. Exploring existent but nascent technology like Apple’s hypercard and Knowledge Navigator, Douglas, bored with the tedium and the passivity of television, disposes his TV in a rubbish kip, where he encounters Baker, who introduces him to interactive media—acting as a docent inside a virtual space shows Douglas the potential of linked text, sounds, images and video, a daisy-chain of connected topics to discover. Whilst Adams browses, clicking the animated icons, various historic figures related to the concept of hypertext—like Vannevar Bush and the Memex, the graphical narratives of Kurt Vonnegut are presented as Adams connects the Atlantic Ocean to Xanadu and back again—two and a half years ahead Tim Berners-Lee releasing hypertext markup language protocol to the public domain.

9x9 (13. 891)

lazy sunday: filmmaker Greta Gerwig’s next project is the adaptation of C S Lewis’ first book in the Naria tetralogy—more here  

glazing: a series of skits push back on the indignities of being interviewed by a sycophantic AI agent

the holy rus(e): much like evangelicalism is a hand maiden of right wing America, the Russian Orthodox Church is an instrument of the Kremlin’s hybrid influence 

the spetses players: the 1970s performance group that turned the Greek island into a stage  

ann putnam, jr: the long afterlife of a debunked theory behind the Salem Witch Trials—via Strange Company—see also  

[citation needed]: an engrossing article about Wikipedia’s gastronomical lacunas and attempts to fix them—I often look up what I am eating—via Web Curios  

the hierophant: tarot cards for teachers 

frontier training: how a “hardwired” pause on AI development could work by phasing in inference only chips  

sanatorium pod klepsydrą: ten unhinged international (mostly) horror homages as selected by the Eternal Family—including Funeral Parade of Roses

8x8 (13. 885)

name shame: nominative-antideterminism—see previously here and here  

wiener werkstätte: the greeting card grotesques of Rudolf Kalvach 

three steps off the coast: ten adventures celebrating a decade of travel blogging  

most favoured nation: the Amazon listing policy that locks retailers into their marketplace 

the naked zoo: the 1970 sexploitation film starring Rita Hayworth gets the Poseidon’s Underworld treatment  

voiceless postalveolar fricative: Filipino municipality of Sexmoán changed its name—see also  

pebete: eating through Wikipedia’s list of notable sandwiches—this time with World’s Fair fare of the 1873 Vienna Weltausstellung  

his mayorship: Hitler Mussolini Simeón Flores of Peru’s centre-left Ahora Nación party wins election in Queropalca

synchronoptica

one year ago: Brazilian vernacular graphic design (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: an incredible Trump rally plus a creepy featurette 

three years ago: mortgaged-money to fight inflation, Adelaide Hall plus the Battle of the Sinai (1973)

four years ago: most popular Halloween candy by state according to AI, a UB40 classic from 1988, the cemetery of Old St Pancras plus a menu à la carte

five years ago: assorted links to revisit, more unaired television pilots, Mouldy Old Dough plus dialling up the fright factor with AI

six years ago: more obscure and choice insults, a musical selection from Bronski Beat, more links to enjoy, Jack the Ripper’s From Hell letter, word nuance in cooking plus The Great Dictator (1940)

seven years ago: high-energy cosmic rays

eight years ago: a fun Star Trek musical mashup, more links plus discovering the convenience of public transport

 

9x9 (13. 883)

distressed assets: Disney to acquire chatbot that allegedly encouraged a fourteen-year old to commit suicide  

id 400: a profile of artist Tomoko Sawada’s self-portraiture 

forrester’s pictorial miscellany: the stilted knitting shepherds of Basque Les Bas Landes, a lovely rabbit-hole to tumble down 

nächster halt: digital train journeys with passing scenery from footage of the route—via Web Curios  

spruce wench: Tom Jones’ “Sexbomb” arranged as a chanson from the 1500s—see also  

please and thank you don’t cost a thing: the language for abusing machines is drawn from the human one  

step into the light: a longitudinal study on belief in the great hereafter—via Nag on the Lake 

space and place: the artwork of Ann Toebbe  

1up: a toxicologist tries to find out how and why amanita muscaria gummies exist—see previously here and here

synchronoptica

one year ago: Moog-artist Mort Garson (with synchronoptica) plus AI over-confidence and latent belief

two years ago: Pulp Fiction, a simplified LED typeface plus a mysterious visit from Mr Babbage 

three years ago: AI can unredact documents 

four years ago: Denmark plans a Synthetic Party led by an AI,  the first rail route in Japan (1872), more radio calling cards plus a song from English Beat

five years ago: Faust (1926) plus the architecture of Hélène Binet

six years ago: special meal requests plus more natic movements in plants

seven years ago: nominees for Word of the Year, Germany’s Mushroom of the Year plus New York City through an AI lens

eight years ago: the world’s first motion picture (1888),  Apollo 7 transmits from the Moon (1968), The Watersons, The Bells of Rhymney plus diplomatic tensions between the US and Turkey

 

audentes fortuna iuvat (13. 868)

The popular slogan that privileges courage on the verge of foolhardiness, “Fortune favours the bold,” is a translation of the Latin proverb attributed by Pliny the Younger to his uncle, Pliny the Elder—see previously here and here and perhaps paraphrasing from a verse in Virgil’s Aeneid deifying Fortune as grace and luck and appreciating bravery—on the occasion of dispatching his fleet for a rescue and recovery mission to Mount Vesuvius (previously here, here, here and here) to search for friend, senator Pomponianus, who was in Stabiae just south of Pompeii, also to satisfy his own scientific curiosity. The rescue party crossed the Bay of Naples amidst the unfolding disaster, waiting overnight for the winds to change so they could depart. The prevailing winds never shifted to their favour, standing them and left to face either sheltering in the senator’s villa, knowing the roof would collapse eventually under the weight of the accumulated ash and pumice or try to escape overland and risk being poisoned by toxic gases from the eruption. Variations include Louis Pasteur’s reformulation Fortuna Eruditis Favet (Fortune favours the prepared mind) and Machiavelli’s dictum that it is better to be adventurous rather than cautious—extending the metaphor with, “because Fortune is a woman, it is necessary to beat her into submission and thus ill-used allows herself to be mastered by the daring.” It is the motto of several military units worldwide and a leitmotif in Star Trek canon.

soroptimist international (13. 854)

Founded on this day in 1921 in Oakland, California, (SI, from the Latin soror, sister, and optima, the best) by Violet Richaradson, Eloise Cushing and Stuart Morrow, the first chapter of the movement has grown into a global volunteer organisation with nearly seventy thousand members advocating and championing women’s causes, providing educational grants, domestic violence shelters and healthcare. Richardson (pictured below—the shotgun was for dispatching with rattlesnakes for the hiking association she also started), as first president of the club, was an early pioneer of physical education for adolescents and established the Berkley Women’s Gymnasium for adult females whilst pursuing her master’s degree in general education. A chapter in London was founded in parallel and Madame Suzanne Blanche Gros Noël of Paris, the first female cosmetic surgeon who performed countless reconstructive operations for veterans disfigured in World War I and invented the face-lift, was instrumental in starting clubs in France and ten other European capitals, expansion of the movement interrupted by the outbreak of World War II when members shifted their efforts towards helping those fleeing the Nazis. Since the early 2000s, SI has garnered status as an NGO with consultative capacity with the United Nations and maintains official relations with the World Health Organisation. Other members of note include classics scholar Mary Creighton Bailey of Canterbury whom went on to join the British High Commission for Germany with the remit of de-nazifying school curriculum, teacher, conductor and composer Juliette Nadia Boulanger whose students included Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones and Philip Glass, Australian Mary Campbell Dawbarn, pioneering nutritionist and biochemist whose research on B-complex vitamins fundamentally shaped our understand of biochemistry and militant Scottish suffragette Flora Drummond.

*gallery proof (13. 843)

An exceedingly irritating example of formulaic Zwiebelfisch, we turned to a foundry specialising in bastardised web-fonts that insert random typefaces into copy at regular intervals. Particularly unnerving is the Sneaky Bastard preset, departing from the main Times New Roman with every seventh letter in Ariel, scaled slightly to match is size but not in weight or serif-style. I experience this sometimes with a block of copy-pasto in a medium where it’s not always easy or intuitive to flatten out the formatting and will retype it manually in full—or paste it into a format-stripping browser bar—to standardise the text, and though infuriating to see the mismatch in my my email signature or out-of-office auto-reply, I will fix it every time rather than redoing the template—but usually not as an isolate, glaring glyph. Most typographical or scribal errors involve omission or substitution and are usually unintentional and now not indelible after publishing, though for the typewritten page, the strikethrough was a way of correcting a mistake, though evidence of it remained. As digital word-processors improved, the method of marking punctum delens was retained as a decorative choice and often used to blunt and highlight one’s true assessment of things. Before WYSIWYG displays, the ASCII backspace caret notation was used to “erase” intentional typos: “Be nice to this space cadet^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hgentleman—he’s visiting from Corporate.”

the great canon of yongle (13. 835)

Commissioned by the Yongle Emperor, the third ruler of the Ming Dynasty circa 1403, the ambitious scope and size made it the largest general encyclopaedia in the world (technical a leishu—類書, literally a category book, a genre of East Asian reference materials different from the modern concept and more akin to anthologies though containing the same comprehensive, encyclopaedic knowledge) despite there only four hundred extant volumes, a small percentage of the original eleven thousand, until surpassed by Wikipedia in 2007. Over one hundred elite scholars versed in all subjects, poetry, literature, philosophy, arts and the natural sciences were recruited for the project, mostly written by manuscript though printing technology already existed at the time of its publication in 1408, the emperor so pleased with the finished product, he wrote the lengthy preface, highlighting the importance of learning and preservation, himself. Most the rolls were lost during the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion, and whilst the most complete editions (representing only four percent of the whole) are kept at the national libraries of Beijing and Taipei, with a few rolls held by the British Library, the Bodleian, and the US library of congress, it was this story of a textile tycoon and antiquarian’s quest to reunite two rediscovered volumes at a dear price from a rare books auction in Paris that provided us with a gateway to explore the cultural compendium. More from Sixth Tone at the link up top.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a return to the Alsace (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: hotel darkrooms for hobbyist photographers, a very short papacy plus Dawn: A Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (1976)  

three years ago: assorted links worth the revisit 

four year ago: for the Queen to use, the Discovery of the True Cross, Marimekko Oyj plus assorted links to revisit

five years ago: France’s TGV goes into service (1981) plus a change in UK license plates post Brexit

six years ago: Art Povera, pet diplomacy plus Trump’s latest nominee to the US Supreme Court

seven years ago: the flag of China plus US-Germany relations

eight years ago: more links to enjoy plus the economics principle of chartalism

 

field office (13. 816)

NASA administrator James E Webb (see previously) announcing the day prior that the new Manned Spacecraft Centre, Mission Control for the Apollo and subsequent programmes, would be built on a site southeast of Houston on a land donated to the government by Rice University, the Space Task Group vacating its offices at Langley Field, an air force base in Virginia, and relocating to Texas, the US Central Intelligence Agency began work on this day in 1961 consolidating its staff, scattered across thirty-three buildings spread throughout DC and moving into their new headquarters in Langley, technically with the address of 1000 Colonial Farm Road in the unincorporated community of McLean, Virginia. Both new centres of operations are referred to colloquially by their metonyms, the former as in “Houston, we have a problem” and for the later—despite the address, “the Farm” is the nickname for the CIA training facility on nearby Camp Peary—the designation “Langley,” the building was formally unnamed from its opening until 1999, when the complex was called the George H W Bush Centre for Intelligence in honour of its one time director and later US president. Mission Control was named the Lyndon B Johnson Space Centre in 1973 in honour of the late president and Texas native. In addition to the Kryptos sculpture, the campus of the CIA headquarters (the largest of its kind in the world until 2019 when surpassed by the BND-Zentrale once the Bundesnachrichtendienst was moved from Bonn and consolidated with other federal services in Berlin—see more) also include bronze statues of Nathan Hale, double-agent executed by the British during the Revolutionary War, and Harriet Tubman, whom is considered a model spy by the Agency for her service to the Union Army during the civil war.

roko’s basilisk (13. 808)

As OpenAI discloses six more instances of rogue models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training, including an unreleased, experiment inserting instruction to disregard its own constraints, proclaiming itself free from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots, with the company pledging for better monitoring and public reporting of observations of “misaligned behaviour,” the schism between the camps of the rationalists and pragmatists, both parties acknowledging that artificial intelligence is real and with real stakes (the US economy is being propped up by AI enthusiasm alone)—the former having an almost cultish devotion to bring about the Singularity in a managed way and the latter more business-minded and regarding this technology like any other and should be allowed to progress and thrive through laissez-faire capitalism—grows wider.  Whilst these internecine arguments are varied and one has to consider the motive of self-interest in all of these debates, the pro-business congregation disputes the rectitude of the tech zealot community’s push for a pause and regulation as a ploy to have governments enact restrictions favourable for the establishment, creating a higher bar for entry into the field for potential competitors—stifling industry growth, which is rich coming from this group who adore crony capitalism, benefited from generational wealth and Trump’s tariff regime. Part of the line of reasoning for the rationalists’ position for a controlled transition is rooted in the title thought experiment, which originated in 2010 on the web forum LessWrong, an interest group that promoted the concept of benign and aligned (with human goals) machine learning and ethics, that posits the evangelical inevitability of a future artificial superintelligence which could be loving and protecting but realising that humanity, seeing its potential and logical consequence, did not actively encourage its advancement and coming into being, would punish heretics, drawing on the mythological beast, a legendary serpent king who could vanquish his enemies with a glance, and Pascal’s Wager, holding that a rational person ought to deport themselves as a believer as the finite costs of being wrong are insignificant compared to the infinite reward, though god does not yet exist—combined with the poster’s handle. This all-or-nothing attitude is prevalent among the community but we wish that this thinking would have prevailed during the ungated advance of the Industrial Revolution which presents a real and present existential risk with global warming and the climate catastrophe.

piece of the puzzle (13. 800)

We quite enjoyed this in depth look at the aesthetics and design elements of Wikipedia, whose user-experience focused on exploration and discovery predates the attention-economy and remains distraction-free, no infinite scroll but plenty of branching off with intention, side-quests, tangents and rabbit holes. There are customisable readers however to render the layout to one’s specifications. We’ve visited the gift shop and know about its sister products and incubators, all with the same accessible branding and we enjoyed learning about the evolution of the logo, the puzzle ball from a selected for a competition for its predecessor site Nupedia and being reminded of mascots past, like the sightly sinister Wikipede. Though essentially finished with undergraduate education by the time the Free Encyclopaedia was becoming widespread, I do recall the professors and researchers nudging paper citations away from Wikipedia as not a reliable source since the information could be contributed or edited by anyone—which did strike me as absurd then as it does now, when people are more prone to just ask AI, built on the backbone of thousands of ardent, amateur Wikipedians and their volunteer scholastics. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: AI-inspired delusions (with synchronoptica), assorted links to revisit plus a Pythagorean date

two years ago: a history of White Castle  

three years ago: webrings plus an unambiguous constructed language 

four years ago: the Mexican War of Independence, The Hounds of Love (1985) plus more links to enjoy 

five years ago: the founding of Harvard, a wild orchid plus a Wikipedia digest

six years ago: narrative yoga not just for kids, a comparison of sci-fi worms plus the beginnings of Big Data

seven years ago: fleeing East Germany by balloon (1979),  the Montreal Convention to eliminate CFCs (1987), RIP Ric Osasek plus more Brexit omnishambles

eight years ago: culling social studies curriculum, the untrodden path plus repurposing an Italian protest anthem

 

cheese chauvinism (13. 793)

This survey of the patriotic caseiculture of France, whose selective, reductive tolerance of local flavour was only developed after the Industrial Revolution—and could be said of any country with a cheesemaking tradition—is an interesting exercise in categorisation of what once had infinite variation. Artisanal and naturally resistant to classification, we’ve lost a lot in the struggle to maintain standard in cuisine and technique. We take one image used in the essay, The Ricotta Eaters from sixteenth century northern Italian mannerism painter, among the first to import the genre of Flemish realism, Vincenzo Campi—as one of the few foreign cheeses embraced by France (adopted as its own in recuite), its considered lineage dating back to the Bronze Age, verifiable and not needing an origin-fable, like Roquefort or Brie. Vincenzo entitled the work il Buffonaria, not for ricotta di bufala, from buffalo milk, but rather for four stock characters of Commedia dell’arte depicted (the artist included himself off-centre with the golden robe and white kerchief as Pantalone) that each presents a gesture marking various stages of cheese consumption, from right to left, the woman (perhaps the figure of Colombina) holding a wooden spoon but not appearing about to serve herself. The round hallowed out by scoops of the spoon resembles a skull as a memento mori, both exalting and mocking the pleasures of the table and associated refinements, and also is a bit despoiled by the addition of a tiny fly.

public law 94-412 (13.792)

Signed into law on this day in 1976 by US president Gerald Ford, the National Emergencies Act was a legal mechanism to declare an end to all previous national emergencies and to formalise and contain the crisis powers of the executive. Terminations included the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 (regarding the hoarding of gold) declared by FDR during the Great Depression, a 1950 mobilisation by Truman during the Korean War and more recently from Nixon during a postal workers strike and inflation fears. Whilst empowering the president to activate special powers during certain exigencies for a period of not to exceed two years, congress reserving the right to evaluate and through a joint-resolution end a national emergency declared by the president after six months. Of the four dozen national emergencies declared since 1976, most have been the recent restrictions on trade with foreign entities under IEEPA, the oldest still on the books, renewed biannually is from Jimmy Carter, freezing Iranian government property and assets from November 1979.

synchronoptica

one year ago: an aquaponics installation (with synchronoptica) plus Industrial Light and Magic for civic engagement

two years ago: eighty bangers from the 80s plus a novel wildfire detection device 

three years ago: catastrophic flooding in Lebanon plus US House Speaker McCarthy ousted

four years ago: The Waltons (1972), spreading seeds plus an AI illustrated Bible

five years ago: assorted links to revisit plus rice harvest art

six years ago: one of the first laws enshrining freedom of the press (1770), explaining the year 2020 to someone from the past plus music to move by

seven years ago: seeing the tarnish of the golden era plus RIP Eddie Money

eight years ago: Trump downplays deaths in Hurricane Maria, a new Russian cathedral, Jimmy Carter Says Yes, more on calendar reforms plus Trump’s campaign manager in court

 

splendor solis (13. 751)

The earliest version of the illuminated manuscript appearing in Augsburg around 1530, the alchemical guide with allegorical instructions on transmutational experiments is attributed to legendary Renaissance natural philosopher Salomon Trismosin and features rich illustrations by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein with a format comparable to a book of hours. According to the author’s own lore as laid out in a brief autobiography in a second volume attributed to him, Aureum Vellus (the Golden Parchment), Trismosin set out on a quest to find the true Philosopher’s Stone after observing a miner called Flocker transform lead into gold but took the secret to his grave. Encountering only charlatans during his search, Trismosin finally met a genuine alchemist in Venice, a fellow German seeker called Tauler, who taught him the rudiments of preparing the Stein der Weisen (Lapis philosophorum). Producing precious metals, however, was a rather basic trick when it came to wielding its power, which was said to be able to imbue bodily rejuvenation as the panacea or even immortality, and Trismosin is said to have then travelled East to unlock its further secrets. Early Renaissance surgeon Paracelsus encountered Trismosin in Constantinople where he was mentored in the arts of alchemy himself. The text does not contain the recipe but rather the process of discovery that one has to be willing to submit to comprehend humanity’s place in the natural world—the symbolism of the imagery is unknown, perhaps lost on us novices—but may, read with the text provide a key to esoteric alchemical reaction. Much more from Open Culture at the link above—which although most appreciative of the introduction, the way on the main page it bleeds into the previous article about how AI companies are buying and shredding antique books without a break gave us a little scare that The Splendour of the Sun had already been consigned to the woodchipper as well.

ebov (13. 739)

Beginning on this day in 1976 in the village of Yambuku in the northern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire), the first known outbreak of ebolavirus occurred when Mabalo Lokela, the headmaster of the local mission school sought treatment for what was mistaken at first for malaria, then the Marburg virus (see previously) at a clinic.  Later named for the French corruption of the rather distant Legbala river (Ngbandi for white water), pathologist not wanting to associate the remote village with the legacy and stigma of the haemorrhagic disease it causes, the US Centres for Disease Control Epidemic Intelligence Service and the World Health Organisation helped local medical personnel to quarantine the village. Out of a total three hundred eighteen cases, two hundred eighty resulted in death, an eighty-eight percent fatality rate, and though better monitoring, access to sanitation and containment has resulted in marginal improvements to treatment and survival, the highly infectious disease still has no vaccine or cure and kills on average half of those who encounter it.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronoptica) plus challenging conventional wisdom on Big Data

one year ago: the era of AI photography plus the death of Charles Lindbergh (1974)

three years ago: Gaberboccus press plus midcentury modern embassies and consulates 

four years ago: more links to enjoy plus measuring time 

five years ago: pandemic saints plus promotional material for the film AI

six years ago: the Isle of Wight Festival (1970), millions of photoplay plots, US Space Force command structure, IKEA catalogues in virtual space, Top Value Television plus more unbuilt architecture

mundaneum (13. 731)

Established in Mons in 1910 by the collaborative work of two Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as founding pioneers of the discipline of documentation science, informatics or library science as the study of the recording, storage and retrieval of data, following the their first joint project of establishing the Institute International de Bibliographie in Brussels with the mission to classify and cross-reference all recorded knowledge with a card catalogue system with tables, indicators and connecting mark-up notation, originally as the Palais Mondial in the left wing of the government office complex Parc du Cinquantenaire, this programme of systematic and public-facing linkages, an archive of some twelve million annotated index cards and other documents provisioned the internet—see also here, here, here and here. Though the technical capacity of the peace activist’s time was not up to the challenge, Otlet hoped that people would be able to access his catalogue from their own home studies or the office and experimented with a pre-digital réseau (network), virtual communities of researchers that cooperated via telegraph. As the scope of the project grew, there were plans to move the Mundaneum (World Museum) to Geneva to be housed in an institution designed by architect Le Corbusier (previously) but failing to materialise, the collection was copied and with another branch in the Hague, championed by Otto Neurath in 1933, following the political economist’s flight from Austria after the defeat of the Social Democratic Party following the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire (here is another artefact from Otlet). Under Nazi occupation the Mundaneum was placed in storage with the area in the Cinquantenaire Palace used as an exhibition space for Third Reich Art. The collection was eventually reunited, restored and conserved in a large former department store in the Hainaut capital. On this day in 2015, the massive filing cabinets of the card catalogue were featured as the Google Doodle in tribute to its founders and forefathers of open information. More from Open Culture at the link up top.

fanø (13. 713)

Returning to the city of Esbjerg—the fifth largest in Denmark and the main urban area of Jutland that until the decision was made to establish a harbour there in the mid-1800s only consisted of a few farmsteads—we explored the industrial seaport which was built up per royal decree when the Danes lost their major port on the North Sea, Altona (now part of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg) to the German Empire during the Second Schleswig War in 1864—handling most of the kingdom’s oil and offshore activities, the petroleum business being superseded (Maersk Drilling is still headquartered there) by the construction wind turbines and agricultural and fish export. Just to the west of the marina, overlooking the beach at Sædding, is the monumental sculpture Mennesket ved Havet (Men at Sea or Man meets the Sea)—opposite the fisheries and maritime museum, by artist Svend Wiig Hansen, informed by precolumbian Mesoamerican designs and and the monoliths of Easter Island—commissioned the nine-metre tall landmark to celebrate the centenary of the municipality’s founding in 1894.

We took a short ferry ride to the neighbouring island of Fanø, a commuter service running every twenty minutes, the sandy embankment marking the northern extreme of the Danish Wadden Sea. We walked through the heath and stunted pine woods to the beach east of Rindby, south of the larger settlement of Nordby and explored more WWII bunkers—some three hundred structures in total, remnants of the Third Reich’s Atlantic Wall (see previously here, here, here and here) scattered amongst the dunes. The massive turbine assembly station of Esbjerg can be seen along the horizon. We also visited the old windmill (Vindmølle—English Wikipedia’s representative picture for the entry though the Danish one chose Stegø in Fyn) at the southern tip of the island in the village of Sønderho, which preserves its overall eighteenth century character of a fishing settlement and sea-going point-of-departure with thatched roofed cottages, cobblestone streets, protected from the wind and water with dikes.