Thursday, 6 February 2025

wiktok (12.210)

Via Waxy and though not quite a surrogate for the curated From the Depths of Wikipedia, this little GitHub app is a nice way to randomise and rewild one’s palette, as opposed to existential doom-scrolling (a programming note…) by inviting one down rabbit holes of the free encyclopaedia and get lost in a daisy-chain of linkages. Click on the logo or refresh for a new article and share what you’ve learned. It seems like I’ve run across a lot of the chance entries beforehand—or at least have a tangential affinity for them having spent a lot of time exploring on the site, a cause certainly worthy of a donation, if you can afford to show your appreciation.

Sunday, 2 February 2025

zona-free hamster oocyte (12. 202)

Routinely created for two reasons: avoidance of legal issues for working with pure human embryonic stem cells and to assay the viability of donor males for in vitro fertilisation—the hybrid cells used to map and predict genetic traits and inheritance—and to test for infertility on the part of prospect fathers, what’s colloquially known as the hamster test is considered highly unreliable yet remains a benchmark test in the US and UK. Sperm subject to assessment are incubated with hamster ova which have had the outer cell coat removed (zona pellucida, the protective membrane in place to only allow species specific penetration to occur) and considered to have passed muster if they fuse with the eggs. Generally destroyed during the conclusion of this rather monstrous exercise (like the early Friedman Test for pregnancy that involved sacrificing a rabbit or culling male chickens and the GOP’s preoccupation with being bathroom monitors) and not allowed to continue dividing, the unviable chimeric embryos are referred to as humsters.

sears, roebuck & co (12. 201)

On this day in 1925, the retailer which had previously focused exclusively on mail-order sales, opened its first brick-and-mortar department store on the massive campus it had acquired and maintained as a city-within-a-city on the westside of Chicago—the complex hosting the company’s warehouses, catalogue printing, prototyping and product-testing laboratories, fashion studios and employee amenities—with its own fire and police departments and on-site private bank.

Despite its remote location on the outskirts of the city, it proved popular with customers, owing the increased car-use and leading to the development of shopping malls and its later reputation as an anchor store—pivoting from traditional urban flagship stores (see previously) and catering to motorists. During the height of its success in the 1960s and 1970, Sears was the largest retailer in the world and moved its headquarters to the Sears Tower in 1973, the world’s tallest building briefly, surpassing New York’s World Trade Centre. Over the next decade, the company began its slow-decline, diversifying its portfolio away from retail into brokerage and real estate, a credit card—Discover—and an online subscription venture with IBM called Prodigy. Divesting itself from ancillary operations and eventually declaring bankruptcy in October of 2018, it was acquired by a private equity firm called Transform Holdco, with the remaining stores leveraged for their property value before being shuttered in 2022.

synchronoptica

one year ago: top-charting seventeenth century ballads (with synchronoptica), The Point (1971) plus a craving for compass liquor

seven years ago: French brutalist apartment blocs, postcards from Mars plus attacking the Deep State

eight years ago: a documentary on the making of Psycho

nine years ago: CS Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, assorted links worth revisiting plus US presidential candidate Ted Cruz

ten years ago: the Lost Generation plus eight or nine wise words about letter-writing

Monday, 27 January 2025

senate select committee (12. 188)

Created on this day fifty years ago by a vote of eighty-two to four in the US upper house of congress, sponsored and chaired by namesake, Democrat senator Frank Church of Idaho, the bipartisan group charged with investigating various allegations of abuse and overreach of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service as the opening of a series of such inquiries earning the monicker for 1975 as the “Year of Intelligence,” whose findings resulted in the establishment of a permanent panel on espionage and reconnaissance. Among the more shocking revelations were of the existence of MKULTRA, involving unwitting citizens in mind control experiments, operations that infiltrated political, pacifist and civil-rights organisations, dragnet domestic spying abetted by telecommunication providers and Family Jewels, a covert programme that targeted foreign leaders for assassination, many of these projects uncovered by the press though the government agencies maintained plausible deniability and the the public was unaware of the full scope of them.

Published in six volumes the following April, the recom-mendations led to a presidential executive order banning the killing of foreign leaders (like with pictured dart gun loaded with shellfish toxin, as an untraceable and lethal weapon) issued by Ford and reaffirmed by Carter and Reagan (watch the numbering—they are sequential and skipping a few means it is classified, starting with EO 14147) and the publication of an NSA watch list that included activists, journalists, actor and Church himself. After briefing before congress (testimony was not unauthorised by the Ford administration’s advisors), Senator Church appeared on the news programme Meet the Press (previously)—discussing No Such Agency without mentioning it by name, warned:

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air… Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left: such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government—no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…

I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

Saturday, 25 January 2025

franklin mint (12. 182)

Via fellow peripatetic and internet caretaker Messy Nessy Chic, we are directed towards the first officially circulated coin of the United States, known as the Fugio cent, purportedly designed by Benjamin Franklin owning to its similarity to his earlier continental dollar coin, struck as samples for potential currency but never put into circulation. Minted in 1787, the obverse features a sundial with the common Latin dictum “I fly”for such installations (see previously) and the English adage to “mind your business,” referring to being attentive to one’s budget and household. The reverse is decorated with thirteen chain links, representing the colonial states (see also) with the third motto of “We are One”—transitioning back to the Latin of “E pluribus unum” of the Great Seal of the US. A horde of several thousand of these pennies was discovered at the Bank of New York in 1926 and given out as souvenirs to clients until the intervention by the American Numismatic Society two decades later, recognising their historical and colletable value and the remaining sixteen-hundred remained together.

Friday, 24 January 2025

alasitas (12. 178)

Derived from the Aymara word “buy from me” and evolving from an annual event pre-dating European contact that involved communal prayer for good crops and an exchange of staple goods, evolving over time to accommodate missionary teaching and colonisers’ sense of acquisition, the month-long fair in La Paz—and other Bolivian communities—honouring Ekeko (Iqiqu), the indigenous god of abundance, begins today at noon. Similar to the paper votive offering given and received for Lunar New Year’s celebrations, people purchase miniature plaster representations of luxury items that they hope to get in the coming year from artisans and have them blessed by shamans and local priests.

Thursday, 23 January 2025

i18n/l10n (12. 175)

Abbreviated with the above numeronyms, internationalisation and localisation refer to the dual challenges of designing systems and applications that can be used both globally and in a specific and bounded spot for both output and input, display and data-encoding. Embracing translation and standardisation of regional metrics, time-zones, including register and format, Unicode maintains a registry of predefined variables covering scripts, directionality, layout, sorting and alphabetisation and punctuation. Specifically, however, it does not take into account economic differences (prompting user selection, though there are defaults) of paper size, post and telephone formats, currency, systems of measurement, compliance for privacy and accessibility, disputed borders, map keys and tax regimes, which require typically native knowledge.

Tuesday, 21 January 2025

pangram (12. 170)

In recreational and trivial mathematics, a pandigital number is value that uses its digits at least once (usually without redundancy), the first of which in base ten radix is 1 023 456 789 (one billion, twenty-three million, four hundred sixty five thousand seven hundred eight nine) and chiefly have applications in fiction and commercial advertising to display a sample credit card or identification document or phone number—reserved in many cases so they are associated with any real individual. The smallest number in Roman numerals is 1444—that is, MCDXLIV. A pandigital number in base thirty-six notation (heexatrigesimal) would use all numbers and all letters—except zero. Despite their non significant nature in terms of maths, they do possess some interesting and unexpected properties, such as the zeroless palindromic pandigital number 12345678987654321 is the square of 111111111—called a repunit—that is a number with only one digit.

Saturday, 18 January 2025

movin’ on up (12. 190)

One of the longest-running sitcoms in television history and the second spin-off of All in the Family—after Maude—Norman Lear’s The Jeffersons follows the lives of the former neighbours of the Bunkers who were able to relocate from Queens to Manhattan (a deluxe apartment in the sky) due to the success of the couple’s dry-cleaning chain. The Jeffersons itself had one short-lived spin-off featuring their housekeeper, Florence, who takes a job as the team chief of a luxury hotel cleaning crew, and has continuity with the hospital drama E/R (the CBS production, lasting only one year, before being picked up by NBC a decade later in 1994 as ER, as developed by writer Michael Crichton, with the same cast of principals of George Clooney and Mary McDonnell). A traditional sitcom, the show occasionally had episodes covering serious subjects, like racism, gun-control, gender-identity and alcoholism and generally high ratings—though suffering from switching time-slots—it was ignominiously cancelled by the during the summer-break of its eleventh season in July 1985 without warning to the cast, Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley, and without a series finale.

fight for the future (12. 189)

On this day in 2012, over one hundred thousand popular (and unpopular, we figured out how to draw the curtains too) sites joined Wikipedia, Google and other prominent social media platforms in solidarity with a twenty-four hour web blackout in protest, formalised and coordinated under the above grassroots aegis, against two bills in the US congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act. Privileging copyright security over online freedom of speech and making hosts, particularly non-domestic ones liable for infringement, the mass movement garnered millions of signatures for a petition as well as millions of constituents contacting their representatives in the American government to express their opposition and ultimately defeated both SOPA and PIPA as senate sponsors withdrew their support.

synchronoptica

one year ago: theosophical Though Forms (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: White House imposes creative input on mission patches

eight years ago: the relics of war plus an atmospheric death ray

nine years ago: the Cosmological Constant plus more links to enjoy

ten years ago: Lovelace and Turing, the Satanic Children’s Big Book of Activities plus German currency harmonisation

Friday, 17 January 2025

9x9 (12. 188)

:): :an emoticon generator to create custom expressions—unless your interface automatically turns them into emoji—via Web Curios 

amicus brief: US supreme court upholds TikTok ban—whose enforcement is punted to Trump—in violation of right to free speech but fact-checking is now censorship 

optics: Trump inaugural to be held inside the capitol rotunda, citing the weather—see Monday’s post  

my dear, clawsette, i love you very much: the 2018 SNL sketch ‘Diner Lobster’ garnered numerous accolades including an award from the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals and inspired many sequels  

artist in residence: the rotating helm of a digital creator’s demesne 

hall of fame: though a bit premature, Bob’s Big Boy’s (a favourite haunt of his) obituary for David Lynch is superlative in detail, a believer in reincarnation, Lynch “life is a short trip. We’ll all meet up again”—via Super Punch  

boosterism: EU orders X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to surrender it recommendation algorithm with a retention directive for purview on future changes  

lol’d into submission: general reaction to the recent shooting death of the pizzagate theorist suggest that there has been a paradigm shift regarding conspiracy 

the war of iron swords: Israeli security council ratifies Gaza ceasefire agreement after a dicey delay with Trump taking credit but not responsibility if the multi-part deal crumbles, like the agreement to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, which cursed his successor 

.---- ----. ----- ....- ..--- —..: a Morse Code clock—with optional sound—via ibฤซdem

Saturday, 4 January 2025

[citation needed] (12. 144)

Via tmn, we are directed to Molly White’s thoroughgoing examination on the intensifying campaign on the part of a chorus of conservative voices attacking Wikipedia’s right to exist as the pitched-battle against free and open access information. In a Christmas Eve directive issued on X—former known as Twitter—its owner, free speech absolutist and Kekius Maximus instructed his followers to stop donating to “Wokepedia.” Self-selecting and cherry-picked, these shallow and repackaged grievances against the volunteer-based authoritative reference source include mistaking and misrepresenting initiatives to counter misinformation and bolstering the site’s reliability as their latest bugbear of DEI, they characterise Wikipedia as liberal propaganda, infected by the “woke mind virus” as evinced by their treatment of patent conspiracy theories and resistance to recognising Fox News as reliable sources. Restricting availability only to their approved syllabus, this latest assault is just another way, like banning books and pornography in the name of child protection and promoting family values, is designed to keep the proles under control and not enjoy the liberties and prerogatives of the rich and powerful. Needless to say, if you have the means, contribute—especially when other outlets have demonstrated their willingness for obeying in advance.

squadrisimo (12. 143)

In a speech given on this day in 1925 in the Chamber of Deputies (Camera dei deputat, the lower house of the bicameral Italian parliament), which history sources as the start of his fascist dictatorship, Benito Mussolini took full responsibility for the actions of the paramilitary wing of the party, the Blackshirts—Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale—and challenged his political opponents to try to remove him from office, promising to restore order within forty-eight hours. Originally a loose organisation of disaffected veterans of World War I who employed violence as an intimidation tactic against reformers, progressives and Socialists, membership had grown to over two-hundred thousand by the March on Rome in late October 1922, swearing their allegiance to Commandant-General il Duce. The murder of a Socialist deputy, Giacomo Matteotti, who criticised the 1924 election due to voting irregularities which solidified Mussolini’s control of government, prompted a cover-up pinning the assassination on Matteotti’s own party. Whilst much of the opposition boycotted sessions, hoping to force King Victor Emmanuel to dissolve parliament, the Blackshirts presented Mussolini with the ultimatum to crush their enemies or they would do so without him. Fearing a revolt by the militia, Mussolini dropped all pretence of democracy, dismantling all constitutional and normative checks on power and declaring himself the only competent authority to set the legislative agenda.

Tuesday, 31 December 2024

fifty-two more things (12. 127)

Following the tradition of Tom Whitwell and others, Kottke directs our attention to the index of weekly lessons gleaned from the most interesting items encountered by Kent HendricksThere are a lot of engrossing, data-driven behavioural nudges in this rather disabusing list showing that correlation is not causation necessarily, like the increased likelihood of receiving an ADHD diagnosis on 31 October because kids are excited about Halloween trick-or-treating—unrelatedly, the third most popular podcast in America is entirely about telling parents that their kids are not autistic but rather telepathic—swears have a measurable effect on endurance and strength and the tyranny of trendy baby names. A few items we had also come across, like Russia’s suit against Google amounting to a googol and diocese of the Moon. Most were however very new to us and we also liked the study that, objectively, showed AI’s carbon footprint is less than a human’s as they can perform the same task, writing an essay, creating a picture, in far less time and the amount of energy expended (see also further down about metabolic loads and caloric costs) and CO₂ expelled by a biological foil is far greater or that the Cocaine Bear was taxidermied and is licensed to officiate marriages in Kentucky. Check it out and let us know what are your favourites.

synchronoptica

one year ago: AC/DC’s first gig (with synchronoptica), assorted links worth revisiting, Holy Mountain (1973), the chimes of Big Ben plus a New Year countdown

seven years ago: 2017 in review, the Anywhere on Earth archival rule, more on the Greenwich Time Signal plus racing home for New Year’s

eight years ago: biodegradable bullets plus New Year’s greetings

nine years ago: more year end lists plus Saint Silvester

ten years ago: x-ray film bootleg vinyls, the origins of the ball drop plus welcoming 2015

Sunday, 29 December 2024

the boy who wouldn’t grow up (12. 122)

Released almost twenty years to the day after the stage adaptation on this day in 1924, J M Barrie’s novelisation of Peter and Wendy, the Paramount feature—then called Famous Players-Lasky, was considered to be a lost film for decades. The only known fragment of footage was in the promotional compilation, The House that Shadows Built, put together by the studio in 1931 to celebrate its twentieth anniversary and exhibit movies that never had a proper theatrical release which featured scenes from several silent-era pictures that only are extant as clips, sort of like the lost plays of Ancient Greece that only are referenced in footnotes. A well-preserved copy was found, however, in 1950 and prompted the Disney animated version a few years later. With fidelity for the original story, the Darlings ultimately adopt the Lost Boys and Wendy is allowed to return to Never Never Land once a year to assist with Spring Cleaning. Peter is played by Betty Bronson and George Ali acts as Nana the Dog (a Doug Jones, Andy Serkis of that time and a far better nursemaid than the Lost Boys had) and Crocodile.

Friday, 27 December 2024

starquake (12. 115)

On this day in 2004, forty-two thousand years after a powerful explosion occurred on the surface of the magnetar, a class of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field, located in the constellation of Sagittarius, the resultant gamma ray reached Earth, the brightest event known to have been experienced on the planet with an origin outside the universe, the incredibly dense and compact star (only fifteen kilometres in diameter) designated as SGR 1806-20 and discovered in 1979 as a gamma-repeater (see previously) releasing as much energy in a tenth of a second as the Sun will in one hundred and fifty thousand years. The expanding cloud, shock wave of radiation briefly enlarged the ionosphere and it is estimated that a comparable blast within ten light years of Earth would ravage the atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer.

synchronoptica

one year ago: solfรจge in other languages (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: messianic complexes, one of small character, memories of y2k plus an inverted skyscraper

eight years ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus telegraphing kisses

nine years ago: banana supply chains plus more links to enjoy

ten years ago: tiny houses, Russian metro stations plus stress and motivation

Tuesday, 24 December 2024

forschungslaboratorium fรผr elektronenphysik (12. 106)

Autodidact in applied physics and prolific inventor, Baron Manfred von Ardenne, after presenting to the public his concept of Fernsehen a year and a half earlier, achieved his first wholly electronic transmission of television pictures, using a cathode ray tube (see more) for both transmission and reception, on this day in 1933. Following trial runs on broadcasters, Ardenne’s technological advance progressed quickly with the private station of Paul Nipkow culminating with the live airing of the 1936 Berlin Games. Having also conducted pioneering experiments in the fields of radar, radio, isotope separation and inventing the scanning electron microscope, Ardenne’s research facilities in Berlin-Lichtenfelde were put a protective order by Soviet occupying forces in April 1945 and Ardenne and his colleagues were reassigned to laboratories in Abkhazia to work on the atomic bomb project (see also)—like the Russian version of Operation Paperclip. Realising that participation in such a plan would jeopardise his eventual repatriation to East Germany, Ardenne convinced authorities to focus on uranium enrichment rather than weaponising the programme, slowly development until the Americans bombed Japan and an extensive espionage network determined that it was more than theoretical possible. Once Ardenne returned to the DDR and assumed an advisory role in the government, he applied his study and resources to medical diagnostics, inventing an early form MRI scanner and radiotherapies to treat cancer.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: Christmas Greetings (with synchronoptica), Aida (1871) plus more accidental Renaissance art

seven years ago: Sleighrunner, Trump’s challenge coin plus more Season’s Greetings

eight years ago: A Human Document, internet court plus a collection of Yule Logs

nine years ago: more Yule Logs 

ten years ago: a visit from Father Frost

eleven years ago: 2013 wrapped plus a holiday reckoning  

Sunday, 22 December 2024

operation mhchaos (12.102)

Hired by the New York Times in 1972 to compete the scoop of the Watergate scandal by the Washington Post, the first big headline by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh for the paper (having previously exposed the cover-up of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and American participation in the overthrow of the Chilean government the year prior) broke on this day in 1974, in the Times Sunday Edition, revealing that the US Central Intelligence Agency had turned its gaze inward against its jurisdiction and was conducting a massive covert domestic spying operation on anti-war protestors, wire-tapping the phones of tens of thousands of US citizens and infiltrating groups. Operation CHAOS was originally chartered under the administration of Lyndon B Johnson in 1967 but was greatly expanded by Nixon even after initial findings indicated no link between prominent peace movements and foreign embassies in the US or abroad—the prefix MH designated the area of operation to be global—and this secret redux of McCarthyism, given Nixon’s deportment, proved highly unpalatable to the public. Although ending the programme, Hersh felt betrayed after subsequently learning of secret meetings between the Ford administration and the editors that censored material, including political assassinations never disclosed to the reporter, prompting Hersh to distance himself from investigating the agency in the future.


synchronoptica

one year ago: an AI Nativity (with synchronoptica), a monumental Beethoven debut, a cloned feline plus another Tennessee Williams’ classic (1965)

seven years ago: Ockham’s razor and aliens plus assorted links to revisit

 
nine years ago: more links to enjoy
 

Friday, 20 December 2024

justizvollzugsanstalt (12. 098)

Released under clemency conditions from the Landsberg prison complex outside of Munich from his confinement for participation in the attempted coup, Bรผrgerbrรคu Putsch, of the government of the Weimar Republik, Adolf Hitler (previously) used his incarceration to dictate Mein Kampf to his deputy Rudolf Hess. Following the war, the facility was a holding area of war criminals during the Nuremberg Prozess and as early as the establishment of West Germany in 1949 and the abolishment of the death penalty there was a push for reformation and rehabilitation with the prison today being run as a progressive correctional facility with job training for basic vocations.

Sunday, 15 December 2024

vexing vexillology (12. 084)

Via Web Curios, we very much appreciated, as an enthusiastic vexillophile, the chance to return to a favourite topic of national standards and iconography in this survey and analysis of flag design elements. Compared by colour distribution and proportion, they all can look alike—or by dent of dominate layouts—but what was most fascinating about this project was a chart of tracked-changes, revealing that the US flag had an unrivalled thirty-six
iterations (we suppose that most aren’t updated for incorporated territories) as contrasted with Germany’s ten or the second-place Afghanistan’s twenty-four, flag age (Denmark is the veteran) as a history lesson or this sort of periodic table that shows where unclaimed terra nullius could rise to statehood. Recursively, the above banner with a weaver’s hitch (or/azure) is the flag of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations, from vexillum, a type of square ensign for the Roman calvary which was coined for the study of flags—separate from heraldic scholarship—in 1957 by Whitney Smith, and encyclopaedist and graphic designer who contributed to the Guyana, Aruba and many newly independent, formerly colonial territories as well as a flag for Antarctica.