american minerva (12. 071)

Originally founded on this day by lexicographer and text-book publisher Noah Webster under the above name with the extended subtitle Patroness of Peace, Commerce and the Liberal Arts, the daily was NewYork City’s first in circulation. Undergoing a series of rebrandings in its first few years of publication, it finally settled The Commercial Advertiser in 1803. Politically the paper was generally leaning towards support of the nationalist, conservative Federalist Party. A century later in 1904 it was again renamed The New York Globe, defunct with its consolidation in 1923 with the New York Sun, ending its run.

who, where, what (12. 068)

Via Nag on the Lake’s always outstanding Sunday Links, we are directed to the annual challenge in the King William’s College Winter Break quiz (see previously)—which never fails to baffle and probably never, honestly at least broke a cross of two. Our almanac activities are seeming to pay off at least a little bit in helping know a few answers from a century ago including: In the renaming of which city was a leading apostle replaced in honour of a revolutionary leader?  The publication of which forged document may have influenced a Conservative landslide?  The one-page assignment issued since 1904 is no longer formally graded as homework but rather as an opportunity or pupils and their families to think about research strategies over the holidays.

merriam-webster defines (12. 050)

The lexicographers present another treasury of obscure words whose utility is delightfully questionable in many cases and at times borders on the linguistic equivalent of unuselessness. There were classics ultracrepidarian—opining or operating outside one’s scope of practice, and the derived terms serendipitist and anecdotage but moreover a lot of choice vocabulary that was new to us, like novercal, pertaining to or characteristic of stepmother (without an equivalent word for stepfathers, the opposite of avuncular, of uncles, with no term for aunts), an amatorcultist, “a little insignificant love—a pretender to affection,” useful to describe one’s worst ex, neighbourstained, hopefully never to be in one’s quiver (see also), backspang, a Scottish term for a loophole that allows one to back out of a deal and antihalian, a humbug, one opposed to festivities. Much more at the links above.

you aitch-dropping apical shibboleth! (12. 040)

Language Log directs us to the very satisfying discovery with the latest SMBC (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith—see previously) webcomic on how phonological jargon can be employed quite effectively to hurl insults. Embarrassed for choice, we agree it’s hard to find a linguistic term that wouldn’t fit the pattern, even though all are beningly describing a morphological phenomenon—it’s all in tone and delivery. You voiceless epiglottal plosive—you, you reduplicative nilpotency!

monsterpiece theatre (12. 029)

Although a bit of a try-hard and with some definite tendencies towards this aesthetic, I always admired the Sesame Street character, one of the original cast members, Prairie Dawn—having developed a distinct, precocious personality out of an Anything Muppet—and aspiring journalist and director. We didn’t appreciate however how often she was shown reading (particularly during the late 80s and early 90s) reading, and not fictitious works that played on some classic title but actual literature well above her cohort’s reading-level, including A Room of One’s Own and Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Feminine Mystique, The Bell Jar and Anna Karenina.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: the retroactive canonising of Disney (with synchronoptica), sculptor Roberto Cordone plus assorted links to revisit

seven years ago: a gender-neutral God plus emotional manipulation with alcohol

eight years ago: Turkey threats to open borders to transit refugees to the EU, a tacit challenge to uphold democratic values amid fake news plus colouring-books for grown-ups

ten years ago: Ottoman successors and Nazi predecessors plus eccentric aristocrats

eleven years ago: preserving traditional viniculture in the Rheingau 

bathroom bill (12. 019)

The stupidities of American politics and culture wars is grindingly wearisome and beyond the bandwidth of most to follow—although that’s by design and the slights large and small cannot go unnoticed. Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary, a former wrestling executive officer, to dismantle the agency at a pivotal time when public school districts are underfunded and higher learning is facing an existential crisis with the prospect of artificial intelligence supplanting expertise is shocking enough, though the feeling is a little blunted given the fact the same individual headed the Small Business Administration during his first term. In the same news cycle, however, the Republic-controlled incoming Congress welcomed—on Transgender Day of Remembrance, memorialising victims of transphobia—the first openly member to identify as such by introducing a measure for the House of Representatives that would ban in the Capitol transgender women from using bathrooms designated for cisgendered women. Unclear if it will be brought to the floor to vote on house rules, the sponsor decrying an assault of women’s rights and safety with this ideology, which the target of the vitriol, newly elected member from Delaware, dismissed the proposal as a distraction from the job of governance and will make do, their platform and focus, telling of its poverty, being “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

xenograft (12. 002)

Tragically on this day 1984 Baby Fae, the first infant recipient of a non-human organ transplant from a baboon donor, died a month after her birth, though having lived by several weeks any other trial preceding hers and surviving the rare and fatal congenital disease, hypoplastic left heart syndrome that would have left her circulatory system untenable outside the womb. The radical operation, as no suitable human heart was available, became the subject of ethical debate, though demonstrating a proof of concept, which the administering surgeon built upon to safe further lives with this experimentation, albeit informed consent on the part of Baby Fae’s parents was questionable. Baby Fae’s death was attributed to rejection by her Type-O blood to the new heart culled from the female baboon population of type AB. Several pop culture encomia came afterwards with for instance from the Paul Simon Graceland album lyric, “Medicine is magical and magic is art / Thinking of the Boy in the Bubble / And the baby with the baboon heart.”

 synchronotpica

one year ago: the musical stylings of King Solomon (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: assorted links to revisit plus the Day of the Imprisoned Writer

eight years ago: a retractable pedestrian bridge, recreating snapshots over the decades, more tributes to Leonard Cohen plus an unusual museum collection

nine years ago: a history of safe-spaces, English is weird, collectors’ items plus Je suis Charlie

ten years ago: the Rosetta mission to probe a comet, the Frisian language, sight and colour in Nature plus obscure units of time

terrain model theory (11. 992)

Though still unclear that RFK, Jr will play a significant role in the Trump administration’s setting of medical care policy and public health practises, a staunch proponent of the anti-vaccine movement accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic but also with antecedent denialism over AIDS and a host of other ailments as well as promoting the idea that the standard, lifesaving regimen of childhood vaccinations cause autism and lately advocates removing fluoride from drinking water, Kennedy’s conspiracy theories have fuelled the embrace of rival Antoine Béchamp’s disproven alternative (see also) to Louis Pasteur’s model of germ theory: pleomorphism—that the state of the internal topology of the body (accumulation of toxins due to poor diet and exercise) is the cause of disease by attracting scavengers and not compromised immunology by invading pathogens.

sancarlone (11. 972)

Fêted on this day, following the sainted Milanese archbishop’s death in 1538, Carlo Borromeo, is celebrated for his reforms and the introduction of seminaries for the education of priests as a force, along with Ignatius Loyola, of the Counter-Reformation. Though we didn’t make it to his home town of Arona to see the colossal bronze created in his likeness during the seventeenth century on a recent visit to Lake Maggiore (at twenty metres tall, the world’s largest statue of the kind second only to the Statue of Liberty and hollow on the inside for visits up to the head), we did see some of his family’s other properties. Carlo’s patronage ranges from the obvious catechists and spiritual directors to the more obscure apple orchards and starch-makers and is invoked against a range of stomach diseases and digestive ailments.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a German supermarket chain allows customers trade worthless NFTs for coupons (with synchronoptica) plus leap minutes and seconds

seven years ago: electric VM mini-buses

eight years ago: statues celebrating women’s suffrawicker ge in the US Capitol, Türkiye requests rendition of disloyals in Germany, a magazine for discerning sweater-wearers plus self-repairing materials

nine years ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus the wicker peacock chair

ten years ago: DNA is not life’s only blueprint, charivari plus the Fall of Rome

floating instrument platform (11. 951)

Originally launched in 1962 by the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the US Office of Naval Research and decommissioned since 2017, the R/P FLIP, the vessel (see previously) designed to partially flood its ballast and capsize to pitch it backwards ninety degrees, was headed to the scrapyard but has now been saved and will see a second incarnation as an environmental research ship. Past studies included whale behaviour, ocean turbulence and effects on intensity and directionality of underwater acoustics—presumably to track the movement of submarines—see also. The engineering marvel able to reorient its labs ninety metres under the surface and shield experiments from the wind and waves is being purchased by DEEP, a private consortium devoted to exploration and developing subsea habitats, and is being retrofitted in France. More from the CBC at the link above.

peabody visual aids (11. 899)

Courtesy of Messy Nessy Chic, we enjoyed perusing this gallery of antique library infographics salvaged from the trash in 2003. Making use of the Dewey decimal system, the reference and the periodical desk less daunting for students, these posters which date from the 1930s and 1940s (see also) and were designed by Professor Ruby Ethel Cundiff who pioneered the use of multimedia and cooperation between school libraries and the classroom in a career spanning five decades, defining reference collections and library science during her tenure at the Peabody College for Teachers, now part of Vanderbilt University.

university commas (11. 898)

Courtesy of Language Log, we enjoyed this comic panel from xkcd (previously) about signature punctuation pedantry that goes beyond the sometimes contentious serial separator known as the Oxford comma with editors and proofreaders agonising over what’s perceived to be omissions or superfluous errata. Other places of higher learning were spared the indignity but surely there are other candidate colleges.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology list diff was an especially nice touch for a full-stop.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica) plus a warrant out for the Knights Templar

seven years ago: a negative-emissions power-plant in Iceland plus Barnum’s white elephant

eight years ago: super strong silk, more links to enjoy plus Nobel laureate Bob Dylan

nine years ago: pioneering inventions plus some trivia about trivia

twelve years ago: EU citizens share Nobel Peace Prize

gods and monsters (11. 878)

Having to unfortunately access our dear Blört by proxy (get me to a hotspot, anon, and wishing a belated, incredible twenty-fourth blogoversary), courtesy Web Curios we are directed towards another veteran website (established in 1999), the portal (please mention it by name when praying) not only offers a daily deity, information for various and obscure panthea, a running tally of the most popular divinities but also extensive mythological resources and research material. We enjoyed very much learning of the Greek mountain nymph Chelônê (Χελώνη) who is considered the personification of lateness, for failing to show up at the wedding of Zeus and Hera, an occasion for which the groom dispatched his messenger to summon all animals, men and gods to the event. Secretly disdaining their matrimony and mocked Zeus for his sister-wife, Chelônê chose to sit it out and fearful of attracting the ire of the couple, Chelônê said she never received an invitation. Clearly on the guest list but not bothering to RSVP much less to show up, Hermes took this accusation as personal affront and transformed this attested home-body into the creature that would forever bear her name, tortoise (via the Latin testudo)—an condemned to carry her house on her back since she liked it so, and would never have to leave home again. A variant on the curse—or blessing—comes from a later fable in which Momus, satirist of the gods, questioned the wisdom of giving man the gift of architecture for building shelters for their otherwise vulnerable bodies since they were fixed and had no wheels for escaping troublesome neighbours, and praised the snail’s petition to carry her home—when Zeus was doling out gifts at the dawn of creation—which proved to be no burden at all.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: the Sycamore Gap tree chopped down (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: the anniversary of the premier of Star Trek: TNG, more custom cars from George Barris plus rice paddy landscape art

eight years ago: the Voice of America radio service

nine years ago: passports for the stateless,  a Blood Super Moon plus mushroom season

twelve years ago: illustrating the international date line

the sammies (11. 853)

Via tmn, we learn of the awards ceremony hosted by the US Partnership for Public Service that acknowledges the seen and unnoticed efforts by contentious bureaucrats of the federal government, who many are presently reviling as the Deep State. Named for the late benefactor Samel J Heyman, businessman and philanthropist who encouraged recent graduates to pursue a career in government, the gala has been hosted annually during the first week in October in Washington, DC and a selection committee of journalists, politicians, educators and corporate executives nominates individuals in the categories of emerging leaders, citizen services, science and the environment and safety, security and international affairs plus employee of the year out of the pool of the two-and-a-half million who work for America’s largest employer. The awards ceremony is surprising moving and deserving of its monicker as the Oscars of government work.

synchronoptica

one year ago: rotating ramen (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: a sanctuary of internet freedom, navel-gazing, antique Japanese hoardings, bacterial phages fight tumours plus more unbuilt architecture

eight years ago: more on the pioneers of Information Theory

ten years ago: more on Scottish secession 

eleven years ago: the US debt ceiling

to honour achievements that make people laugh and then make them think (11. 840)

The laureates of the Ig Noble Prize (see previously) have been announced in a competition organised by the scientific humorist society Annals of Improbable Research since 1991 and hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who arrange the ceremony with awards in ten categories, celebrating the best in unusual or seemingly trivial studies, presented by their Noble-winning counterparts. The botany prize was awarded to a team of researchers that found that the leaves of the parasitic chameleon vine (Boquila trifoliolata) will imitate an artificial host plant in order to blend in. Building on the effects of the placebo and the nocebo, the award for medicine went to an experiment demonstrating that fake drugs with painful side effects can be more effective than real treatments with none, and as has been widely reported, the prize in demographics was awarded for research that helped debunk some of the mystique of the so called Blue Zones, areas famous for having supercentenarians, also excel in bad record keeping.

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