kitchen sink realism (12. 390

The production team behind the difficult Netflix series Adolescence about incel culture has announced it will reboot the incredibly bleak Cold War mini-series Threads (see previously, see also), aired in 1984 that depicted Sheffield harrowed by a nearby nuclear strike. BBC documentary filmmaker Mick Jackson, behind the original screening will participate in crafting episodic drama which the network feels whose time has sadly returned four decades on.

oh zaporizhzhia—i don’t know (12. 322)

Following a telephone call with Putin ostensibly securing a ceasefire on Ukrainian energy infrastructure and rather unrelenting overtures for the embattled nation’s mineral wealth, Trump called Zelenskyy to dictate the terms and to introduce a new dimension to the deal, suggesting that the United States (as with Gaza now exploding back to a state of war) assume ownership of nuclear power plants. The proposal was met with surprise, Kyiv politely mooting the offer, saying that the reactors were state-owned and could not be privatised, having only discussed during the call the one facility under Russian control but again reenforcing the idea that American economic stakes are their best protection—as with his earlier bid for control of country’s rare Earth resources. American defence conglomerate Westinghouse was in talks, prior to the start of the war, but the deal has since fallen through.

11x11 (12. 263)

broadband equity, access and deployment: Trump administration thinks the BEAD programme of the Infrastructures Investment and Jobs Act is too woke   

fermata: a thousand artists release a ‘silent’ album to protest changes to UK intellectual property rights to attract AI companies interesting in training their models on copyrighted material—via the New Shelton wet/dry—also more music without sounds 

late stage capitalism: Washington Post owner Bezos will only allow editorials that defend “free markets” and “personal liberties”—see also   

annual reformulation: important meeting of the US Centres for Disease Control to discuss strains for next season’s influenza vaccine cancelled, confirming fears that the new health secretary will pivot away from proven preventative medicine 

rif me daddy: what Trump’s AI enhanced shitpostings reveal about the administration and plans for the future of Palestine 

absalom, absalom: William Faulkner’s record-setting run-on sentence 

torus and tokamak: a German fusion startup is lauded for its plans, peer-reviewed, to launch a functioning power plant   

only the markets can save us: America’s total economic boycott planned for the last day in February 

touch grass: an app that blocks screentime and doomscrolling until one has proven one’s gone outside—via Waxy  

snoopers’ charter: Apple’s capitulation to the UK’s Investigative Powers Act is Chekov’s Gun for privacy worldwide   

by the people and for the people: dossiers of the people working for the Department of Government Efficiency

synchronoptica

one year ago: ceramicist Yoonmi Nam (with synchronoptica) plus the age of ludicrous inventions 

seven years ago: A Million Random Digits plus assorted links to revisit

eight years ago: more misattributed quotes 

nine years ago: Sàmi tone poems

ten years ago: theodicy, get anything delivered, more links to enjoy plus RIP Leonard Nimoy

cnd (12. 240)

Joined by a crowd of some five thousand others, organised and led by philosopher and activist Bertrand Russell (previously), the anti-war group with a hundred public signatories as an expansion of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (see also below) held its first act of peaceful civil disobedience on this day in 1961 with a sit-in demonstration at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall to protest the arrival of the USS Proteus on a resupply mission from American to replenish ballistic missile stocks. Surprisingly, no arrests were made. This anniversary juxtaposes with current headlines, with the the US and Russia meeting to arrange a negotiated peace in Ukraine with the invaded nation and Europe excluded from talks (Trump and Putin graciously agree to “address irritants” for the bilateral negotiation), and America instead of foisting its defences on allies against their will is signalling it will abandon the posture of trans-atlanticism that has held since the end of World War II, leaving the continent to fend for itself and normalising relations with an international pariah.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Euromaidan protests (with synchronoptica), Ballerina on the Boat, bad album cover art plus an underground newspaper

seven years ago: underwater photography, the epithets of drinking culture, the power of propaganda plus Pastafarianism

eight years ago: more underwater photography, ancient embedded sounds, more on the origin of the Peace symbol plus governance per tweet

ten years ago: an early meme, the road to Canossa plus bird poses

eleven years ago: traffic cameras in Germany

10x10 (12. 191)

i saw, i cut, i applied: a retrospective of the textile art of Ayako Miyawaki (宮脇綾子) at the Tokyo Station Gallery 

hadron therapy: researchers at CERN are collaborating with oncologists to develop precision treatment that last a fraction of a second—via the new Shelton wet/dry 

drag and drop: the development of tools that easily move data around with confidence it would not be lost

shǒusuì: an exhibition on community resilience through helps gird one for the trying year ahead 

two-minute warning: the Bulletin of Atomic Sciences (see previously) advance the second hand once again as a warning to world leaders  

oreoboros: a round-up of recently introduced snacks and treats—via MetaFilter 

comparative entomology: an 1879 study in the colour patterns in moths and butterflies 

object impermanence: a glitchy and broken AI knock-off of Minecraft makes for a strangely compelling experience  

experimental advanced superconducting tokamak: an artificial sun burned for nearly eighteen minutes at the EAST plasma physics lab in Hefei—a significant milestone for sustainable fusion reactions—via Boing Boing 

the little loomhouse: the history and evolution of an ensemble of Kentucky cabins to a thriving arts community

forschungslaboratorium für 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  

8x8 (12. 103)

beige and confused: with the democratisation and de-fetishisation of graphic design, Elizabeth Goodspeed questions the role of Colour of the Year  

diamond in the rough: researchers perfect nuclear-powered battery that lasts ten-thousand years—see previously  

heroön: monumental ancient shire discovered in western Greece 

now go away or he will taunt you a second time: former Homeland Security advisor is not retracting her criticism of FBI director nominee Kash Patel—see previously  

naughty, brutish and short: philosophers on Santa’s good and bad lists

continuing resolution: the stop-gap spending bill to fund the US government through March hints at a revolt by Republican congressional members, refusing to entertain provisions to eliminate the debt ceiling (which Trump needs to enact his agenda) and postpones the budget battle to a time when the GOP has a even narrower majority  

demonstration project: MIT-linked charter company plans world-first grid-scale fusion reactor 

party city holdco inc: with every report on a company going bankrupt, there are at least four paragraphs citing inflation, consumer sentiment and competition before mentioning it was private equitied to death

sword of damocles (11. 869)

On this day in 1961, US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered his address to the UN General Assembly, amidst the recent and unexpected death of Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and anxiety over posturing and sabre-rattling over the paused negotiations towards disarmament. In his forty-five minute exhortation, Kennedy praises the intra-national organisation and challenges the bipolar world to turn an arms race into a race for peace:

But to give this organisation [the Troika, the principals, the US, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, on nuclear test bans] three drivers—to permit each Great Power to decide its own case, would entrench the Cold War in the headquarters of peace. Whatever advantages such a plan may hold out to my own country, as one of the great powers, we reject it. For we far prefer world law, in the age of self-determination, to world war, in the age of mass extermination.

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

Men no longer debate whether armaments are a symptom or a cause of tension. The mere existence of modern weapons—ten million times more powerful than any that the world has ever seen, and only minutes away from any target on earth—is a source of horror, and discord, and distrust. Men no longer maintain that disarmament must await the settlement of all disputes—for disarmament must be a part of any permanent settlement. And man may no longer pretend that the quest for disarmament is a sign of weakness—for in a spiralling arms race, a nation’s security may be shrinking, even as its arms increase.

For fifteen years, this organisation has sought the reduction and destruction of arms. Now that goal is no longer a dream—it is a practical matter of life or death. The risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race.

Listen to or watch the entire stirring speech at the link above. We think the rhetoric could also speak to contemporary events and the climate catastrophe, also hanging by a thread over us all and severed by wilful ignorance, neglect and misinformation.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a blogoversary of note (with synchronoptica) plus some ruinous remixes

seven years ago: right wing elements gain influence in the Bundestag plus film cuts mimic visual perception

eight years ago: Idiocracy was not supposed to be prophetic plus phantom islands

nine years ago: data-plans and Roman calendars plus innovations in 3D printing

ten years ago: an early version of the Line (with greenhouses), Roman emperor Caracalla plus a graffiti gallery

d-minus (11. 818)

Beginning on this day in 1962 and concluding at the month’s end just weeks before the Cuba Missile Crisis, Exercise Spade Fork was part of a US federal emergency preparedness plan to mobilise and reconstitute the government in the aftermath of a nuclear attack (see previously). In this scenario, run parallel to the military exercise codenamed High Heels II, America was hit first with a pre-emptive, decapitation strike targeting the presidential retreat and childhood home of Jacqueline Bouvier, Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island. Comprised of a force of seventeen hundred civil servants, an “Executive Reserve” received specialised training to maintain command and control and manage resources. Subsequent strategic doctrine, however, has superseded such a sequence of events, since taking out another power’s leadership is prone to failure and backfire as the easiest contingency to prepare for and without the central authorities in place, belligerents lose the ability to negotiate and put the decision to retaliate in the hands of rogue elements. Midway into the drill, plans were modified in order to provide cover for the mobilisation of army units to deploy to Mississippi in order to enforce the ruling of desegregation of public schools when the governor refused to honour the court order to integrate the state university.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a banger from The Jam (with synchronoptica), Keith Haring’s computer art plus a musical number about medication from Ginette Garcin

seven years ago: assorted links worth revisiting

eight years ago: Powers of Ten, The Great Fire of 1666, colonising Venus, discarded shopping lists plus a tree house in Stuttgart

nine years ago: more links to enjoy, a more accurate tree census, Aloha attire plus an antonym for omnipresent

ten years ago: the life of Caesar, the new temperance laws plus common misconceptions

formosa strait (11. 790)

Triggering the first serious nuclear crisis of the Cold War with the US contemplating using its arsenal against the then unrecognised Communist government of the People’s Republic of China to protect the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s occupying Quemoy (Kimen, 金門, ‘Golden Gate) and Matsu (Lienchiang, 連江縣) islands in the Strait of Taiwan, only ten kilometres distant from the Chinese province of Fujan, a repelled amphibious invasion on this day in 1958 resulted in a continuous volley of shelling. A prominent subject of the televised Nixon-Kennedy debates, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff resolved to at minimum dispatch escorts for resupply missions, a nuclear response not within popular will (previously), volleys were exchanged until 1979 when as a prelude to the US normalising relations with China under a rather eccentric agreement that allowed bombing on alternating odd days and even days for restocking, with troops of both sides guaranteed safety from attack. The US quietly redeployed the extra warships in the region in December of that year and while there were occasion flairs in fighting turning deadly for China and Taiwan, the intermittent bombardments mostly consisted of an exchange of propaganda leafets.

7x7 (11. 758)

pop quiz: extended CVs of classic game show hosts  

pass the mayo: condiment’s dynamic nature could help solve containment challenges for nuclear fusion  

wingnut: a South Berkley salvage store turned museum—via Nag on the Lake’s always excellent Sunday Links  

cocónonós: a Bogota-based fusion band—possibly named after the ill-fated Tiki drink shared with Geordi La Forge and Christy Henshaw on their first date  

bias towards coherence: Trump’s latest on rally attendance and his greatest hits  

the type specimen of humanity: the designated permanent reference for Homo sapiens is Carl Linnaeus  

magick show: Richard Metzger’s latest occult project

 synchronoptica

one year ago: cutting archived content for the sake of SEO (with synchronoptica), a racist brawl in Alabama plus multi-hyphenates

seven years ago: reproductive awareness

eight years ago: ant wars, Martian landscapes, disproportionate and xenophobic calls for burqa bans, a floating home in Canada plus Facebook and clickbait

nine years ago: Liberia and the US 

ten years ago: a party at Neuseenland plus the geopolitics of terrorism

uvb-76 (11. 597)

Courtesy of ibīdem, we are directed to an omnibus post on numbers stations (see previously) featuring the enigmatic beacon designated also with the callsign MDZhB (МДЖБ, referred to as the Buzzer) broadcasting on short-wave radio. Mostly monotonous, there are sporadic interruptions with voice transmission, usually in Russian but sometimes audio-drops of Yosemite Sam and other memes but otherwise in strict messaging formats. This ostensible activation code was replaced with the ominous filler of Swan Lake during a brief period in November of 2010, a well-established preemption when all Hell is breaking loose to the consternation of monitors but regular programming soon resumed. While patently considered as a communications encoded directive for Soviet and Russian field agents, the transmitter does not possess the earmarks of a true numbers station, missives being too random, and is seen as sort of frequency- , domain -holding mechanism to dissuade others for future contingencies, including as some have suggested an automated “dead hand” signal which if broken would trigger a retaliatory response, assuming that command and control had been taken out by a first strike.

dalí atomicus (11. 596)

Via Strange Company, we enjoyed seeing the outtakes and creative process behind the 1948 surreal photograph taken after at least twenty-six attempts by Philippe Halsman and later published in Life magazine (see previously). The collaboration, one of many over decades of working together and complementing one another’s media, was instigated over his four year project of the Leda Atomica, the painting seen in the background, which dealt with ideas of suspension, repulsion and cohesion and reflected the Zeitgeist of the Nuclear Age. There was a countdown to coordinate the composition—on three, assistants threw the cats and buckets of water and on four, Dalí was to jump. After each take until both were satisfied, Halsman entered the darkroom to develop the film while the cats were collected and dried off.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a spy whale

two years ago: an optical illusion plus assorted links to revisit

three years ago: visualising marine traffic, Funky Town (1980), St Elizabeth plus the US Armed Forces Network Europe

four years ago: a US national protest map plus The Mythological Astronomy in Three Parts

five years ago: more punitive tariffs from Trump

8x8 (11. 539)

an elegant weapon for a more civilised age: the physics and power demands of a lightsaber  

defective fleet of fly sky-wreckage: nothing good has the acronym MRSA (Material Review Segregation Area) 

chic boutique: Messy Nessy to open a brick-and-mortar clubhouse and shop in Paris  

wopr: US urges China and Russia to pledge that AI will never have command and control of nuclear weapons  

poultice: an orangutan observed self-medicating a wound in the wild with a paste made of plants with healing properties 

serenity amid disaster: a short animation from Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, “The Flying Sailor,” examines the wonder and fragility of existence  

peak wtf: gun-mounted flashlights popular with American police officers 

oh, the asthma guy: a conversion with that one friend who’s never seen Star Wars

8x8 (11. 514)

flightline: stunning visualisations of air traffic  

splinternet: ByteDance does not plan to divest itself of TikTok following US ultimatum  

megadeath: modelling the destruction caused by a nuclear bomb on a major city  

mtv buzz: a surreal montage of audio and video clips arranged by Mark Pellington (1990)  

celebrity endorsement: musicians, artists and novelist pose with the Sears’ appliances in this 1969 ad campaign for Kenmore—see also  

undiscovery: the Map Men chart phantom islands—including some that have made it into the era of Google Maps—see previously  

22,5 light hours: engineers debug a forty-seven year old computer remotely from twenty-four billion kilometres away to revive the data stream from Voyager I—see previously  

embarking: a luxury airline that caters to canines above their human companions

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting

two years ago: dismantling Soviet-era monuments

three years ago: more links to enjoy plus a special issue of LIFE magazine

four years ago: fantasy urban map generators, more links worth the revisit plus geopolitical optics

five years ago: an elegant and modern personal seal, even more links plus a Victorian houseplant

castle bravo (11. 393)

Already subjected to a series of nuclear weapons tests as host to Operation Crossroads (see previously, see also), on this day in 1954 the United States conducted the first in the battery of design experiments with Operation Castle, detonating the a high yield thermonuclear, fusion bomb on an artificial island platform in the lagoon of Namu in the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands. The strongest tactile explosion in history, the bomb was more than one-thousand times stronger than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, exceeding expectations of developers and spreading fallout (the heaviest in the form of pulverised and irradiated coral) across the region and far beyond. Residents were not evacuated and the decision was made not to abort the test despite wind shear that imperilled the islanders as well as personnel involved in the research. Trace amounts of radioactive material detected as far away as Australia, Europe and North America turned Castle Bravo into an international incident, prompting worldwide monitoring of fallout levels and a ban on further atmospheric tests.

spoiler alert (11. 235)

Turning our attention to past movies set in the then future of our present (hopefully not prophetic), the first round goes to the 1975 darkly, problematically comedic post-apocalyptic adaptation of the Harlan Ellison novella of the same name. A teenager portrayed by Don Johnson (Miami Vice) scavenges through the wastelands of the US southwest following a nuclear war accompanied by his telepathic dog (voiced by Tim McIntire). Orphaned at an early age with no formal education or socialisation, the adolescent is focused on survival, interested solely in food and sex—conquests secured with the aid of his canine companion in exchange for meals as the genetic modifications that bestowed super-intelligence leaves him incapable of tasks like hunting. After numerous run-ins with bandits, mutants and rogue androids, the teenager is eventually recruited by an aristocratic scout of a subterranean colony as a stud to help with low viable breeding population. A preview and links to the whole movie available at Weird Universe above.  Most other selections seemed to be based in 2024 for purely arbitrary reasons and only two to three years behind when they were produced—with the exception of the 1999 Josef Rusnak and Roland Emmerich vehicle that was overshadowed by the similarly themed Matrix and was a victim to the strange echo-phenomena of “twin films”that sometimes happens in Hollywood (due to screenplay shopping and submission to multiple studios, industrial secrecy and espionage), like the asteroid flicks Armageddon and Deep Impact, Dante’s Peak and Volcano, 1981’s The Howling, Wolfen and An American Werewolf in London, Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down, or on stage Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar. A multibillion dollar computer company in then present-day Los Angeles is experimenting with a virtual reality simulation of the city in 1937 populated by individuals unaware that they are part of a program. Entering the simulation in order to solve the mysterious death of the company CEO, the protagonist and heir to the enterprise (and a prime suspect) finds clues that lead to the revelation that thousands of parallel virtual worlds exist but there is only one reality whose inhabitants have developed a virtual world of their own, but having a pocket metaverse within another does not necessarily result in privilege or insight. The protagonist disconnects and emerges into reality advanced a quarter of a century.

i’m not against wishful thinking—not now (11. 191)

As our faithful chronicler informs, just in time for the holidays, the bleak, apocalyptic adaptation of the Nevil Shute’s novel of the same name by director Stanley Kramer had its premier (on both sides of the Iron Curtain simultaneously) on this day in 1959. A cast including Fred Astaire, Ava Gardener, Gregory Peck and Anthony Perkins portrays the aftermath of a nuclear conflict (which unlike in the book version, no one is assigned blame for instigating World War III) where the entire population of the northern hemisphere is killed by the effects of radio active fallout. The lone surviving American nuclear-powered submarine berths in Melbourne as prevailing air currents are slowly carrying the nuclear debris south, threatening to make the other half of the globe uninhabitable as well. Despite a brief hope that dispersement calculations were too conservative and that there might be a chance for salvation, the radiation does not dissipate sufficiently to make it less lethal.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: Saturday Super Store plus assorted links to revisit 

two years ago: Saturnalia, an exceptional millipede plus Hunky Dory (1971)

three years ago: your daily demon: Murmur plus more links to enjoy

four years ago: Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire (1989), dispatches from Kew Botanical Gardens plus navigating spaces not designed for accommodation

five years ago: a breakthrough for nuclear fission plus the origin of the word gun

▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ▄ ▄ (11. 128)

Our faithful chronicler informs that on this day in 1983, ABC aired The Day After—portraying a skirmish at the East and West German border that quickly escalates in a full-scale nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States told through the lens of several farming communities seemingly far-removed from the front but near American missile silos. Starring Jason Robards, John Lithgow, Steve Guttenberg and JoBeth Williams, the made for TV-movie garnered an incredible audience-share of over sixty percent of households (no commercial interruptions) and showed the struggle and aftermath of nuclear fall-out for the survivors—see also—and was rather incredibly re-broadcast by Soviet state television (dubbed but true to the original dialogue) just four years later during the negotiations for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force Treaty between Reagan and Gorbachev. The film ends with a disclaimer right before the closing credits that the work is fictional and the actual outcome of a nuclear war would be far worse.

 synchronoptica

one year ago:  Cabaret (1966), assorted links to revisit plus Incense and Peppermint (1967)

two years ago: Dasius of Durostorum plus more adventures in Poland

three years ago: more links to enjoy, Italy’s fateful day plus St Felicity

four years ago: emoji storms plus the Occupation of Alcatraz and Unthanksgiving

five years ago: a variation on Nyan Cat plus another lesson in Slang School

mol (11. 071)

As the unit of measurement for the amount of substance—proportional to the elementary entities (atoms, molecules, ions or other particles) within a volume, a way of bundling masses of into a magnitude of quantity after the conventions of a teaspoon, a dozen, a baker’s dozen or a gross so that chemical reactions, scientists can accurately express the concentration—recipe—of reactants. Despite the different natures, a mole of water (a chemical compound) and a mole of mercury (an element) have the same number of discrete particles in them—which is Avogadros’ Number, 6,022 ｘ 10²³ mol, six hundred two sextillion, two hundred quintillion. It’s useful to have such a normalising proxy for grasping the number of atoms in a given object. Enthusiasts and educators celebrate Mole Day on this day (US calendar conventions) from 06:02 in the morning until two after six in the evening as a way to drum up interest in chemistry and scientific literacy.

synchronoptica

one year ago: visiting Crete 

two years ago: your daily demon: Sabnok plus assorted links to revisit

three years ago: circuit judge Roy Cohn, a pretend Communist coup, more links to enjoy, the beginning of the world plus an appreciation of the colour russet

four years ago: more links worth revisiting plus more on the far future night sky

five years ago: the canals of Mars, swing sixties cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers, the first Russian rapper plus noteworthy files from the US National Records Archive