stablecoin (12. 195)

Whilst throughout history, one official currency has worked to solidify trust and confidence during periods of relative peace and a strong central authority, emperors would often mint their own coinage during times of upheaval and civil unrest with fortune and the passage of time being the ultimate arbiter of valuation and propagation. Hours before his inauguration for inexplicably a second term, the family crime syndicate launched $TRUMP, a memecoin that quickly rose to a market cap of some seven billion dollars fuelled by speculative investment. Despite a rudimentary, dodgy landing-page offering the crypto-currency for sale and lack of clarity as to the purpose of the token which almost definitely forebodes the bait-and-switch tactic of most of these operations once the purported value evaporates. A former critic of cryptocurrencies, calling Bitcoin an outright “scam,” Trump has come to embrace them as the tech sector broligarchs embraced his campaign. This pre-market development comes on the eve of the term of the Biden administration, having passed and enacted progressive policies that many millions have hung their hopes and fears to over a chance that we might globally advance the urgent fight to halt the climate catastrophe or that America could model ideals of equity and project democratic respect for national sovereignty but all those positions will be clawed back, with only some vapid and hollow magic beans as a consolation.

8x8 (12. 159)

a stranger quest: an award-winning documentary about map collector David Rumsey (previously) available in full online 

stimulation clicker: a new distraction from Neal Agarwal—see previously—see also 

studio city: deadly, life-altering wildfires continue to rage through Los Angeles, reaching Hollywood and threatening landmarks 

lemon8: TikTok ushers US users to sister-site in anticipation of ban 

show bible: a rare copy of the storyboard for Alejandro Jodorowshky’s unmade adaptation of Dune recently sold at auction—see previously  

hangman: a Wordle variant called Phrazle  

camp century: revisiting the Greenland military installation and the US Army Corps of Engineers’ failed Project Iceworm to build a nuclear launch site  

datastorm: a synthesiser with presets from the 1981 arcade game Defender sound-effects—via Pasa Bon!  

not to scale: an illustration of how polar flare and distortions of Mercator projections affect perception—see previously

let’s run and we’ll have some fun now before i melt away (12. 097)

Via Clive Thompson’s latest Linkfest (much more to explore there), we learn about the 1987 commission of the Römerbrücke thermal power station, Heizkraftwerk Saarbrücken, to create a never-melting snowman sustained by the excess energy from the plant. Awarded to Swiss multi-media artistic duo David Weiss and Peter Fischili (see previously) for the concept of Schneemann, they formed a copper skeleton inside a refrigerated unit that’s renewed by frost and freezer burn, metaphorically a commentary on the climate crisis in the corporate campus of this power plant, but still needing a routine human-touch to limn his face.

synchronoptica

one year ago: dial-a-song (with synchronoptica), Trump banned from the primary ballot plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: a political sorting hat, the 2017 in pictures plus an innovative funicular railway

eight years ago: Yule Lads plus Russian meddling and American exceptionalism

nine years ago: 2015 in review plus a Christmas humbug

twelve years ago: 2012 in review

ampel aus (12. 067)

The Committee for the German Language (Gesellschaft füe deutsche Sprache—see below) has announced its Wort des Jahres for 2024 as a nod to the collapse of the Red, Yellow, Green party coalition in the government and the call for snap-elections, but there were several other words being monitored as contenders, including Klimaschönfäberei—essentially the German rendering of “green-washing,” kriegstüchtig, war-like, Rechtsdrift, a shift to more conservative and populist politics, die Selbstbestimmung in Bezug auf den Geschlechtseintrag (abbreviated SBGG), a update to the outdated 1980 law on transgender identity enacted in November that allows non-binary individuals to register under a new first name and sex without the bureaucratic onus and Messerverbot, in reference to a few incidents of knife-attacks at public events earlier in the year and the response of authorities.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronoptica), the spelling of Christmas and Hanukkah plus Germany’s Word of the Year

seven years ago: the fraught and racist history of square-dancing, net-neutrality under threat plus a catalogue of spomenik of the former Yugoslavia

nine years ago: a real world copy of the Simpsons’ home

ten years ago: the historical Snow White plus the History of the World in 100 Objects 

eleven years ago: decorating for Christmas, spies in the skies plus the languages of Switzerland

 

10x10 (12. 049)

strapline: Cory Doctorow’s review of books for 2024  

week-by-week: Tom Whitwell’s gleanings from the past year—see previously—via Kottke 

bad precedent: the power of the pardon was never meant to condone crime 

the birthday paradox: illustrating the veridicality of coincidence—via Quantum of Sollazzo  

a boring roundup: a look at geotechnical investigations and advances in harnessing the Earth’s internal energy  

whamhalla: why Germans love and hate Last Christmas—see also  

the travelling salesman problem: a new Geotripper challenge to find the optimal route to take to a number of cities and return to the point of origin  

press-gang: Moscow authorities raid popular night clubs, seemingly detaining hundreds of men to draft for the war effort 

take time—it’s brief: one hundred superlative photos of the past twelve month—via Memo of the Air  

anthology: Lit Hub’s poetry recommendations for the year

overwintered (12. 041)

Hardly redemptive though having read about municipalities getting dual-use out of the massive amounts of energy expended on bitcoin mining before, it took me a couple of readings to get how this news article was a “bit too on the nose,” about how a Dutch tulip farmer was offsetting their heating costs by hosting crypto servers in the greenhouse. We realised however reading the completely unironic reportage that it was a very apt commentary on the original mania, speculative bubble (see also) albeit now a relatively benign one is being fuelled by one in the series of benighted ventures.

8x8 (12. 028)

ofdon: US Defence Secretary nominee views the armed forces as means for promoting Christian Reconstructionism and the patriarchy  

fugatto: a new AI-powered audio editor claims to create sounds never before heard  

mrs french’s cat is missing: the 2008 Canadian horror film Pontypool about a viral outbreak that coopts language as a vector is a MetaFilter favourite  

cop29: members agree to an annual three hundred billion dollar stipend to help poorer countries cope with climate change as talks nearly implode  

virtual geoglyphs: the community of GPS artists transforming their daily perambulations into a kind of sky-writing

test kitchen: corporate casseroles and other industry influences on Thanksgiving—see also 

letters from england: Karel Čapek’s (see previously) impression of his host country in exile 

🎯: Elon Musk muses about purchasing the news network MSNBC, along with other shitposting

10x10 (11. 983)

chonkus: a cyanobacterium discovered in a underwater volcanic vent gobbles up CO₂ at prodigious levels—see previously  

attentat im bürgerbräukeller: the meticulously planned attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi principals, foiled on this day in 1939—see also here and here  

off-course: an Emperor Penguin recovering after a epic trip from Antarctica to Australia  

for unlawful carnal knowledge: the various folk etymologies of a famous and satisfying swear—see also  

files’s done, goodbye: Elwood Edwards—who voiced AOL’s “You’ve got mail” greeting—passed away, aged 74 

bj blazkowicz: Wolfenstein franchise is enjoying a resurgence among those wanting to smash Nazis right now  

the tiktok electorate: Facebook got the blame for Trump’s win in 2016 so it follows that P’Nut the Squirrel’s influencer status might be in part responsible for 2024—via tmn  

🦘: when the last 747 of Quantas’ fleet departed Australia for retirement, its flight path drew its logo  

mauerfall: juxtaposing photos of Berlin then and now thirty-five years after the Wall came down  

cells and organelles: thousands of professionally made vector illustrations and icons from the US National Institutes of Health—via Web Curios

10x10 (11. 957)

þjappað vinnuviku: Iceland’s experiment with a shorted working week  

dénouement: examining the kishōtenketsu arc of narrative and its structure in world literature 

indirect allorecognition: injured comb jellies will fuse with another to allow one to heal—via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest

climate solutions: just a shower thought probably better shared on this website, could we reduce CO₂ concentration by making the atmosphere bigger?  

celestial symphony: the icon and ingrained theme from the 1986 Chinese television adaptation of Journey to the West—see previously  

oracles of astrampsychus: ancient tools of divantion included drawing lots, bibliomancy and a sort of algorithm—via Strange Company  

goonies in space: the latest Star Wars spinoff, Skeleton Crew  

denaturalised: Elon Musk could have his US citizenship revoked if it’s confirmed that he lied on his immigration application—via the New Shelton wet/dry  

the gaudí of mita: Keisuke Oka’s hand-built tower, the Arimaston Building in east Tokyo  

sweethearting: AI-powered facial recognition monitors for suspicious friendliness between customers and staff may be the next phase in retail security theatre

manna from heaven (11. 938)

Via the New Shelton wet/dry we are directed to an omnibus article on the research and development of producing food out of air, profiling some of the two dozen firms around the world seeking to transform carbon dioxide and water (see previously here and here) into an alternative protein-source, flavouring a substrate of desiccated cell walls of autotrophic, soil-dwelling bacteria. Using a fermentation process already well established in the production of insulin and the rennet enzymes for cheesemaking (eliminating the need to harvest it from the stomach lining of calves), scientists working for these biotech startups have isolated a highly palatable bacterium that thrives in captivity and have launched demonstration farms to show the concept’s viability to mill a nutritious flour and meal using a fraction of the land—allowing more opportunities for the rewilding of fields and pastures—and resources it required for traditional farming. While commercial-scale production is in sight, the largest hurdle remaining may be convincing the public to adopt such a diet of microbes that foregoes the folkways of cooking.

late-bloomer (11. 900)

Once the peonies (Pfingstrosen) had sprouted and flowered in Spring, we cut the ones growing in the bed off the front door back lest they take too much water from the lavender and other neighbours. A few weeks ago, however, another one emerged, well out of season.
Renewal buds develop in the summertime underground, becoming stems with primordia, anlage differentiating but remaining dormant, normally. We watched this one outlier grow and waited and waited for weeks to see what would happen. Has anyone else experienced this?  Being this far out of sync seems to suggest something.  It did finally bloom, but while we were away on vacation and the strong winds destroyed it right away.

8x8 (11. 884)

glamos: Switzerland and Italy agree to redraw their borders due to melting glaciers 

a purrfect storm: the childless cat lady trope goes back to the origins of female suffrage and political participation—see previously  

main character syndrome: a need for recognition and validation fuelled by technological change drives self-mythologising whether or not there’s an audience—see also  

daily affirmation: fifty years of Saturday Night Live title cards and graphic design  

viscawide-16: a Wiki dedicated to vintage and antique cameras—via Pasa Bon!  

ultraviolence: Trump proposes sanctioning a day of lawlessness, akin to the plot of The Purge or Kristallnacht to end criminal behaviour  

we are the trampions: the annual European street car driver competition—see previously  

industrial age: UK shutters last coal-fired power-plant, ending a one hundred forty two year era

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

megaslump (11. 856)

The expanding Batagaika crater is a thermokarst depression in the northeastern Siberia taiga, presently about one kilometre long and growing at an alarming rate, beginning as a small gulley in the 1960s when the permafrost thawed (see previously) after the surrounding forests were cleared and since 1990, swallowing more and more land and becoming known as the Gateway to Hell. On a vicious trajectory, feedback loop, more thawing occurs as the gash gets bigger and the ground is bereft of tree cover and releases more ancient organic stores of carbon that further contribute to the planet’s warming, making more unstable sinkholes.

where we’re going we don’t need stroads (11. 820)

Whilst happy to live in a country that has not privileged cars over pedestrians completely where services are walkable and there’s a robust network of public transportation, there is always room for improvement at the margins—parking lots take up a lot of real estate and can be sweltering heat islands that could surely be put to a better use and there’s signs that some mid-sized cities in Germany are tending towards their American counterparts with the same horrendous corridors of strip malls, gas stations, automobile lots and fast food and plenty of investment in infrastructure has been invested in making the car king. Courtesy of Kottke, we are directed towards this reflection on how the car-centric focus of the US is like an addiction impossible to kick because of all the sunk costs and the ingrained and perpetuating cycle of more roads, more traffic and more destinations. The urban planning for the overwhelming majority of places built up post the introduction of the car is going to take a long process of unbuilding to make them liveable, and this is the American experience with hardly any exception—the article quoting Tennessee Williams’ observation that the country only has three cities: “New York, San Francisco and New Orleans—everywhere else is Cleveland,” which unfortunately rings very true for all that are consigned to be stuck in congestion and forever en route and whose errands and commute affords no chance for serendipity, divergence or nature. The title portmanteau of “street” and “road” was coined in criticism to the spreading failures of American civil engineering.

doge (11. 817)

Trump has announced that Elon Musk has agreed to head a commission for his potential administration, named the Department of Government Efficiency in reference to Musk’s favoured meme-based cryptocurrency, tasked with reducing US federal spending and the deficit. Musk’s businesses not only benefit from government subsidies and also counts NASA, the Pentagon and several intelligence agencies among his direct clients, which raises the spectre of a conflict of interest in line with Trump’s imperial presidency. Musk was formerly a member of a White House advisory council but resigned in protest in 2017 after the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, although has recently recanted that decision, saying the climate catastrophe was not in need of immediate attention and has softened his opinions of the petroleum industry.

8x8 (11. 799)

heatwave toolkit: applying yogurt to one’s windows to cool homes and offices  

calculating empires: an exploration of the genealogy and evolution of technology and power from the fourteenth century on—via Pasa Bon!  

better than binary: a look at the potential for base-three in computing applications and security—see previously  

coriander, comfits, confetti: Italian cuisine, shifting tastes and etymology  

campaign photo op: Trump staff had a violent altercation with Arlington National Cemetery officials—see previously  

chaos rainbow: an unusual monochrome optical meteorological phenomenon over a baseball stadium  

license to travel: the three thousand year history of the passport, linking bureaucracy with our hopes and aspirations  

süßwarentechnik: Swiss researchers discover a way to produce chocolate using the whole cocoa fruit rather than discarding most of it

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: an optimised crash-test dummy, the backstory on the distracted boyfriend meme plus a villa modelled on the White House in Germany

eight years ago: moving a museum plus Calais’ Jungle encampment

nine years ago: the reproducibility crisis, more links to enjoy plus a squishy map

eleven years ago: Italian Ghostbusters 

8x8 (11. 746)

divi recap: the obfuscating vocabulary of finance and corporate take-overs 

ch₄: methane removal may prove as the most effective way to curb the climate collapse  

anima and archetype: an overview of the thought of Carl Jung—see previously  

mamala: Maya Rudolf returning to the cast and reprising her role as Kamala Harris for the fiftieth season of Saturday Night Live—via Miss Cellania  

v. to remove monks from: demonachise and other infrequently used words  

wall flowers: increased appreciation of complex and nuanced botanical behaviour leads a new branch of plant philosophy  

rewiring: if billionaires truly wanted to save the planet, they’d buy heat-pumps for every home—via Kottke 

big brother and the holding company: the spiteful origins of Berkshire Hathaway and corporate hard-pivots

the unchained goddess (11. 698)

Open Culture directs our attention towards the highlight of the Bell Systems Science Series, nine television specials originally broadcast between 1956 and 1964, with the first four written and produced by award-winning filmmaker Frank Capra (previously), recently having found himself “retired” from Hollywood due to being blacklisted as a communist sympathiser over his body of work (previously here and here)—despite being holding rather conservative political views himself, with the AT&T sponsored commissions being viewed in retrospect as a quiet means of rehabilitating his image and reputation, with the 1958 examination of weather. Though somewhat less well received by critics and audiences than Capra’s previous three instalments (perhaps the topic considered too pedestrian in comparison with the others on the circulatory system, the sun and cosmic rays), The Unchained Goddess is indelible and enduring with a prescient message about the effects of Anthropogenic climate change and the cascade of the warming atmosphere and sea-level rise. Much more at the links above.

* * * * *

synchronoptica

one year ago: photos of the Anthropocene (with synchronoptica) plus a continued blockade on Ukrainian grain shipments

seven years ago: swimsuit models, Voltaire’s science-fiction, the premiere of SpongeBob plus the Golden Submarine

nine years ago: assorted links to revisit plus Merkel’s immigration policies under scrutiny

twelve years ago: climate change and too much water plus a branded look for US Commanders in Chief

fourteen years ago: a trip to the Baltic coast

9x9 (11. 694)

fungal magic: an update on the mushroom documentary narrated by Björk  

always lands on its feet: the myriad ways animals negotiate the laws of physics—see also  

meisje met de parel: decoding Vermeer’s true colours—see previously—via Miss Cellania 

i’m your heat pump: a seductive slow jam seems to educate the public on the thermal energy transmission system 

eno: the generative documentary on the self-described non-musician that changes with each viewing  

legal daisy spacing: a purported 1985 manual for terraforming a planet that presents a warped bureaucracy and sterile landscaping  

nolle prosequi: federal judge overseeing illegal retention of classified documents trial against Trump dismissed the indictment over the improper appointment of the prosecution’s special counsel—see previously here and here  

reimann hypothesis: new insights about the distribution of prime numbers—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

kräuterbuch: Johannes Hartlieb’s fifteenth century treasury of herbs

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica), Netscape plus the Rosetta Stone

seven years ago: dark matter, more on the election integrity commission plus the bicentennial of Frankenstein

nine years ago: thalassocracies, plutographies plus more links to enjoy 

eleven years ago: a slightly NSFW Soviet adult literacy reader

twelve years ago: the German banking system plus the Oberammergau Passion Plays