republic of letters (11. 802)

Via Super Punch, we are reminded of the notoriously weird and incongruous book covers (previously) of academics publisher Routledge, founded in 1836 to capitalise on the market of holiday by train and known as the “Railway Library” and later acquired the rights for printing the collected works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton before after flirting with insolvency entered the scholarly field buying out the the backlists of several university presses and journals and acquiring the imprint of several influential humanities and social sciences titles. The image references last year’s meme about the frequency among men thinking about Ancient Rome.

omnis cellula e cellula (11. 781)

On this day in 1858, the Berlin publishing house of August Hirschwald released the foundational work Cellular Pathology by esteemed physician, sociologist and anthropologist Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow, which informed modern medical thought. Not only recognising the mechanisms behind disease, injury and healing broadly, Virchow was the first to describe and name ailments and disorders, including coining terms like leukaemia, thrombosis and spina bifida and helped to formalise the practise of autopsy and forensics. Drawing on his interest in ethnography and archeology (accompanying Heinrich Schliemann during some of his Trojan expeditions) and adopting it into his medical research, while teaching at the University of Würzburg, Virchow coined the maxim that medicine “is a social science, and politics is nothing more than medicine on a large scale,” pioneering public health campaigns to counter outbreaks, and perhaps aligned with this guiding aphorism rejected the germ theory of infections (believing that they were symptoms rather than causes and that poverty was the biggest cause of sickness and death—although contributing a lot to the study of macroscopic parasites) and adamantly disagreed with Darwinian evolution—recognising natural selection but rejecting the emergent theory as flawed—see the above teaching tenure. Also opposing the social Darwinism ideas of his student Ernst Haeckel as dangerous propaganda, Virchow—for all his drive to classify and categorise—went against popular contemporary thinking by declaring race to be a social construct and thus denying anyone their designs of primacy through a large-scale study of ethnic communities across Europe and beyond.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Wattstax (with synchronoptica), assorted links to revisit plus the first school strike for the climate

seven years ago: the first FedEx delivery van,  Total Eclipse of the Heart plus grace and favour appointments

eight years ago: an exoplanet in the Goldilocks Zone, Team Refugee to get its own Olympic flag plus trying to sprout Indian Bean Trees

nine years ago: an antique look at four-dimensional space

ten years ago: disruptive natural and unnatural disasters, Netpolitiks plus Gaulish conquests

the question (11. 777)

Handling our Sunday matinee programming, Fancy Notion has selected an existential short from the animation studio of Halas & Batchelor (see previously) that ponders the meaning of life through our hopeful and introspective protagonist who finds confusion and frustration when consulting dogmatists in the fields of religion, politics, the humanities about life’s big questions but finally finds a solution with another fellow peripatetic. The venerable collaboration lasting from 1945 to 1986 was responsible for the instructional colour stop-motion feature Handling Ships for the Admiralty as a training aid for new navigators, a number of World War II productions intended to raise morale and encourage thrift, like Dustbin Parade to promote recycling and Filling the Gap about planting a victory garden as well as anti-fascist propaganda films. During the 1960s and 1970s, the duo created cartoon series for American television networks including Saturday morning staples like Popeye the Sailor, The Jackson 5ive, The Osmonds as well as the music video for Autobahn by Kraftwerk.

*    *    *    *    *

 synchronoptica

one year ago:  a prayer app (with synchronoptica) plus a pioneering mushroomer

seven years ago: a look into the far distance future, removing racist statues plus feeding an army

eight years ago: a century of Russian history in photographs, assorted links to revisit plus the making of Cabaret

nine years ago: more links to enjoy

ten years ago: subterranean warehouses, the body-politic of Rome plus German intelligence agencies eavesdropping

9x9 (11. 776)

reduced to rubble: the razing and rebuilding of Gaza—via Maps Mania  

anniversary vinyl: Andy Baio presses a limited edition of his chiptune homage, Kind of Bloop—see previously  

hooked on phonics: New Zealand’s requirement for structured literacy in the classroom threatens bilingualism—see previously  

dnc: parallels between the 1968 Chicago convention and the upcoming one 

isogloss: the geography of the pronunciation of scone in Britain—see previously here and here—rhymes with gone  

fredkin’s paradox: thirty useful concepts to help understand the world—via Duck Soup—see also

triplicate: researchers find that the brain keeps three copies of each memory—via the new Shelton wet/dry 

von trapp: overtouristed Salzburgers air their ambivalence about the sixtieth anniversary of The Sound of Music (see also here and here)  

east jerusalem: Israeli finance minister renews call for the annexation of the West Bank

7x7 (11. 761)

popp horlage: the network of pneumatic clocks of fin de siècle Paris 

just get me eight-hundred thousand votes: Elon Musk interviews Trump on X—see more 

home row keys: a documentary on Mavis Beacon  

porte-clés: the French youth craze for key-rings  

josuushi: counting-markers in the Japanese language, nuanced by rank, size and sentience—see previously, see more—via tmn 

homo naledi: chance discovery reveals more branches in our family tree  

death-slot: revisiting broadcast television’s dumping grounds  

spear-fishing: reportedly a group of hackers with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran were able to break in to the Trump campaign’s database 

us patent application 10/953212: a training regimen to harvest hyperspace energy and pass through solid items

synchronoptica

one year ago: a classic from Lynard Skynard (with synchronoptica) plus a tour through the Geratal

seven years ago: classic cartoon What on Earth?! plus diagrams of parliamentary seating

nine years ago: keeping stashed cash safe 

ten years ago: Mexico ends state oil monopoly plus more humanitarian airstrikes

eleven years ago: histomaps plus ages of the US Founding Fathers

thank you for bringing back the joy (11. 749)

Ninety-one days before the election, Kamala Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, during an energetic rally in Philadelphia. A progressive, Democratic leader of a more conservative leaning state since 2019, the charismatic figure earlier represented Minnesota in congress (he was moved to run for office when as a social studies teacher a field trip to a local political rally ended in the group of students not being admitted due to one member having a discrete campaign sticker for the opposition and the whole group was deemed a threat), and previously served in the US national guard and had a successful educator, including exchange programmes with students in China, football coach and has a demonstrated platform supporting LQBTQ+, women’s, consummer and labour rights as well as being the architect of the state’s liberalisation of cannabis policy, infrastructure and environmental improvements and advocacy for the right to protest US-support for Israel in its war on Gaza. Walz is further credited with coining the descriptor “weird” for MAGAists, which has quickly gained currency and widespread use among Democrats.

tron/troff (11. 710)

Via Slashdot, we are directed towards a reflective essay from Harvard Computer Science professor Harry R Lewis, whom taught both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, positing the two enduring lessons of technology: be careful what you ask them for and it can be hard to tell what they are doing. Gleaned already back in the mid- to late-1960s when electromechanical computers were far from inscrutable, prior to miniaturisation of circuits, Lewis, through switches and dials, learned how to listen to machines to not only diagnose problems but also, with careful attention (see also), to know if a programme was going to deliver reliable results and goes on to address the doubly blackboxed array of algorithms and lickspittle mimicry of artificial intelligence by never bypassing human judgment from the parameters and recognising that the humanities don’t provide ready answers but rather better informed questions and lines of inquiry.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Mary Magdalen (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: assorted links worth revisiting,  a challenging diplomatic mission plus a history of ink

eleven years ago: a toy drone

fourteen years ago: a storied Berlin discothek plus a Bulli cake

we shape our tools and then the tools shape us (11. 708)

Subtitled An Inventory of Effects and co-created by media analyst who coined the phrase referenced Marshall McLuhan in 1967, the collaborative best-seller experimentally formatted had the imprimatur of McLuhan himself to call out how various outlets massaged our senses in order to maintain currency and hold interest—with some anecdotes that it was a typo that stuck—arguing that technologies, from the wheel, to the loom, to the printing press and beyond rather than their content as an extension (and increasingly necessary aid thereto in order to function therein) of our perceptions of the world, informed by the same progress. The recording is not exactly an audio book but rather a montage of main statements punctuated by dissonant sound-effects meant to suggest the fragmentation of the listening experience.

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

postpositive (11. 683)

Via TYWKIWDBI (indeed), we are brought back to the subject of forming the plural of compound expressions through what are also referred to as post-nominal adjectives, which in English syntax can be employed for subtly and nuance—asking to be directed to the responsible people versus the people responsible or adjacent to something versus something adjacent—and occur in a number of set and archaic phrases, usually derived from Latin and French, like midnight dreary, body politic, proof positive, and the legal term malice aforethought (premeditated, from malice prépensée).

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a marker to symbolise the start of the Anthropocene Epoch (with synchronoptica), a crowd-pirated movie plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: LeVar Burton Reads, open-pollination, THC regulations in the EU, a typeface combining Hebrew and Arabic plus Trump as Putin’s useful idiot

nine years ago: exploring Pluto and beyond

in the year twenty-twenty-five (11. 676)

By inference, example and declaration, the American people and the world has been warned repeatedly, relentlessly of what a second Trump term would entail, a conservative agenda of policy proposals that failed to coalesce on the first attempt radically transforming the republic into a regressive evangelical hypocracybased on the rule of tribal grievance and restoring the patriarchy. With the express aim of purging what’s characterised as “woke propaganda” in regulation and curriculum under a Trump regime, emboldened and enabled, the administration not only is plotting to gut the administrative state under a unitary executive with autocratic powers, eliminate environmental regulation (framing global warming as a hoax), consumer safety, civil liberties and protections (framing affirmative action and equality as “reverse racism”), mass deportations, stripping of citizenship, abortion access, pornography as well as no-fault divorce—essentially rolling back the hard-fought progress of the past seventy years and this all, with the extensive blueprint pre-positioned, might happen on day one.

8x8 (11. 642)

crazy logic: a rather seamless mashup of Gnarls Barkley, Rockwell, Pink Floyd and Sumpertramp  

ыһыах: the Yakut people of arctic Siberia celebrate New Year on the Summer Solstice  

culicidology: a fascinating two-part discussion of mosquitoes with Alie Ward 

baggage carousel: an animated journey of checked airline luggage 

the phrygian cap: the Paris Games’ mascot with a revolutionary past—via Miss Cellania  

the beige begins early here folks: McMansion Hell (previously) presents another instalment of the American Medieval Revival—via Things Magazine  

re-alignment: just ahead of Solstice celebrations, activists with Just Stop Oil douse the megalithic calendar with orange paint power 

chiroptera: a ballet chroegraphed by Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk—via tmn

then they showed me a world where i could be so dependable, oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical (11. 633)

Rising to number six on the US Billboard Hot 100 on this day in 1979 (the seventh spot in the UK charts), the lead single from Breakfast in America (see previously) was a deeply personal reflection by Supertramp’s singer-songwriter Charles “Roger” Pomfrit Hodgson, honoured with the Ivor Novello prize the following year for best song, both musically and lyrically, about his decade away from home as an adolescent at boarding school and an indictment on the priorities of the educational system for eroding individuality. The critically acclaimed song’s instrumentals feature castanets, saxophone and the tackle sound-effect from a Mattel electronic football game. The version by German techno band Scooter—as Ramp! (The Logical Song)—from 2001 peaked at second place in the United Kingdom, topping the charts in Norway, Ireland and Australia.

*    *    *    *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting, Screaming Lord Sutch, chicken orbs plus the exorcism of a werewolf demon (1983)

two years ago: Ziggy Stardust, the monkey puzzle tree plus Bloomsday

three years ago: your daily demon: Bathin, Psycho (1960), more links to enjoy, a summit in Switzerland plus a guide to hurricane name enunciation

four years ago: the sacking of Cambridge (1381), trends in house numbers, renaming US army bases, the first woman in space plus CPT Picard Day

five years ago: microplastics in our bodies, a field of poppies plus graphic designer Otto Aicher

six years ago: purging the Deep State, a visit to Burg Sonnenberg plus black hole solar systems

seven years ago: the Dunning-Kruger effect, IKEA cookery plus experiments in human-dolphin communication

eight years ago: denying a platform to dissenters, Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), coats-of-arms for same-sex couples plus Frankenstein and the year without a summer

advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young (11. 611)

Via our faithful chronicler, we are reminded of the spoken-word composition by Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann (Romeo + Juliet, Strictly Ballroom, The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge!), which topped the UK singles’ charts on this day in 1999. The essay is in the tone of a hypothetical commencement speech and was written two years prior by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich—though often misattributed due to a viral email circulated around graduation time to Kurt Vonnegut and address given at MIT (here’s the one they’re probably thinking of), and hits, mellows as pretty poignant, particularly as it’s the year I got my college diploma. Trust me on the sunscreen.

extended diacope (11. 557)

Via Language Log, we are directed to an omnibus linguistics lesson of fascinating terms of literary criticism and figures of speech—which although containing a few that we’ve encountered before (though often needing to look up to remind ourselves of the particular scheme and trope) like tmesis, eggcorns and mondegreens, amphiboly and redundant acronym syndrome syndrome—there were quite a few new concepts to ponder, like rebracketing, a fusion of terms whose components are then taken apart and reconfigured in a way that’s readily intelligible, like alcoholic to workoholic, and the so called cutthroat compounds, agentive and instrumental exocentric verbs-nouns like the class itself or scarecrow and scofflaw. From the source, there was also the humourous dysgraphomophone—a homophone that looks like a typo used purposely to catch the eye or to lure someone into correcting it: like indorse their banns—to formally back (from dorsum, dorsal) their wedding announcement. More at the links above. 

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: Martian topography plus some Ancient Greek terms that should be reintroduced

two years ago: Chess (1986),  the Mise of Lewes plus St Matthias

three years ago: more on grawlixes plus the curse of toil 

four years ago: St Corona, The Safety Dance (1983), pandemic neologisms, a mole on Mars, paperback dress-up plus misremembered cultural touchstones

five years ago: quiltwork of Old World diseases,  celebrating Doris Day, shark faces, the US Library of Congress’ open archives, paleofuturism plus safeguarding private data

ampas (11. 553)

Founded on this day in 1927 by head of the studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer producer Louis B Mayer in order to create an organisation to mediate labour disputes without the need for outside, independent trade unions and improve the image and reputation of the film industry with input from prolific actor and matinee idol Conrad Nagel (who would six years later go on to establish the Screen Actors’ Guild) and thirty-five other professionals including Mary Pickford and Harold Lloyd, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was to hold an annual banquet but no mention of awards at the time. During the Great Depression, the Academy lost credibility as an arbitrator when it came to labour negotiations and gradually pivoted towards its present role as an honours society, with meritorious awards for “distinctive achievement” in one five branches—acting, directing, writing, technical accomplishment and producing—eventually becoming known as the Oscars. Around the same time, the Academy founded the first film school in collaboration with the University of Southern California, a library charged with collecting all publications about movies and state-of-the-art screening venue for members.

nailed it! (11. 549)

Via Super Punch we learn—and on par with the Finnish practise of awarding a hat and a sword—that Sweden carries on with the unique and obligatory tradition, described as “Lutherishly,” for PhD candidates to nail one’s thesis, disseration to a wall or plank a few weeks prior to one’s defence. Referred to a spikning, students will post their paper (nicely bound by the university’s library press, and with the written approval of their advisor, signed off as Må spikas, “May be nailed”) in the halls of their respective departments for others to pursue and dispute. The comparison to the sixteenth century revolutionary protest against the selling of plenary indulgences seems apt but Martin Luther took the idea from academia and not the other way around.

hardhat riot (11. 546)

As our faithful chronicler reminds, on this day in 1970, around noon a group of more than four-hundred construction workers—many working on the World Trade Center—converged on a group of anti-war protesters, mostly college students picketing the New York Stock Exchange and rallying on the steps of Federal Hall, originally a Customs House on Wall Street, setting up a memorial for those killed at Kent State four days prior and calling for an end to the fighting in Vietnam and Cambodia, release of political prisoners and an end to military-related research on university campuses. By lunch time the clashes turned violent with some eight hundred office workers joining the ranks of the agitating construction workers, breaking through a thin line of police separating the two sides and pursuing students and onlookers and beating them safety equipment and tools. Law enforcement, sympathetic to the counter protesters, did little to intervene or stop the melee. Two weeks of protests followed before the demonstrations, pitting labour union leaders against pacifists, subsided and towards the end of the month, the organiser of the initial riot and a delegation of representing some three-hundred thousand unionised trade workers, were invited to the White House to meet with president Richard Nixon, who said he sought to honour those labour leaders “and people from Middle America who still have character and guts and a bit of patriotism,” accepting hard hats as a gift. For his loyalty and role in starting a culture war, a values war that divided traditionally shared sentiments among Democratic voters, that leader Peter J Brennan was appointed secretary of labour and the cabinet official outlasted the Nixon administration and served under Ford as well.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: an early fifth century bog man

two years ago: the Nebra Skydisc

three years ago: a classic Eurodance number, assorted links worth revisiting plus more photographs from Pete Souza

four years ago: the death of Tito (1980), more links to enjoy plus Russian borderlands

five years ago: more links worth the revisit plus Heath Robinson contraptions

beginners’ all-purpose symbolic instruction code (11. 526)

The original version of the general-purpose programming language (see also) developed by Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire designed in mind to build computer literacy for those outside of speciality fields executed its first code with immediate user-feedback and released after the initial demonstration on this day in 1964. With simpler and more intuitive syntax, the compiler was put into the public domain and immediately spawned several dialects based on terminals’ operating systems and memory constraints and was ideal for porting and inclusion for the growing mini- and microcomputer market for enthusiasts and hobbyists (I can remember being very pleased with some of my programs, however basic) and considered to be the first user-friendly family of high-level languages.

10x10 (11. 517)

age inappropriate: amid a the aggressive banning and policing of reading material, “disturbing” titles help teens become more empathetic and literate—via tmn 

brolly: a faux Britishism for umbrella—from an American regionalism—with an interesting history 

 …but often rhymes: what historian Thucydides would make of parallels and analogies 

true facts: Ze Frank on smart bees—previously

moulin rouge: the red windmill blades on the Parisian landmark collapse—via Nag on the Lake—more here 

completist: venturing to the remote US national park that requires a passport 

what’s the truth about mother goose: a search for the personage behind the nursery rhymes  

never-ending cash machine: a collection of lost and unreleased 

to the manor born: a series of articles on how to quantify a castle, palace and stately home—via Strange Company 

house penguin: recent anti-trust case over the acquisition of one publisher revealed sobering insights about the state of the industry

synchronoptica

one year ago: the evacuation of Prypriat (1986)

two years ago: a single from Harvey Danger (1998), more removal of Soviet monuments plus no new applications for flag icons and emoji

three years ago: Saint Zita, redrawing geopolitical boundaries according to indigenous lands, peaceniks, Dr Mabuse (1922), etymologies of company names and brands plus sustainable diets

four years ago: All Quiet on the Western Front, another Roman holiday, a comic make-up tutorial plus engine sounds for electric cars

five years ago: ranking the 404 landing pages for the US presidential candidates