a syntopicon (13. 581)

Coined especially for the two volume with the Neo-Latin term meaning a collection of topics, the two volume register of one hundred two great ideas of the Western canon, was compiled and catalogued by philosopher and professor Mortimer J Adler, published by Encyclopaedia Brittanica Press in 1954 as an index to accompany the fifty-four library of Great Books of the Western World, covering literature and though from Homer to Freud. I can recall seeing these books near the circulation desk at my alma mater as well as the shelves of the volumes in was made to guide at home, though I don’t think I was tempted to consult it to investigate how the individual works corresponded and overlapped, which is a bit of travesty considering the amount of effort and hours of reading it took to synthesise the writing of some seventy authors and something I will have to peruse. Like a Wikipedia gloss, it is a footnote and a hyperlink, and not just a cross-reference of themes or concordance but rather an instrument of liberal education itself for discovery and research and finding the unity in ideas that sometimes can be muddled and masked by language, examining each entry from multiple different angles, breaking each into several sub-topics. Afterwards, Adler edited the single volume Propædia or “Outline of Knowledge” as an appendix for the venerable encyclopaedia marshalling human knowledge into a logical frame work from 1974 to 2010, when the last print edition was issued.

synchronoptica

one year ago: unblogged Breton (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: Lago Delio 

three years ago: assorted links to revisit plus a registry of Americana

four years ago: more links to enjoy

five years ago: your daily demon, Mario theme inspiration, the year’s midpoint, a banger from Tracy Chapman plus a visit to Oberwaldbehrungen

six years ago: even more links, Airplane! (1980) plus the US Civil Rights Act (1964)

deep blue something (13. 574)

Via Quantum of Sollazzo and deliciously reminiscent of the harried and hued colour profiles appearing in the Paris Review and the Awl right before folding, we are directed to this delightful project chasing down the paper trail of pigments, one colour per day with its chemistry, provenance and poison. There are over two-hundred fifty already indexed, like the pale jade glaze originally from ancient Chinese ceramic-making techniques, this greenwear copied by Korean and Japanese artisans (the greyish shade comes from oxidising iron during the firing of kilns, Fe₂O₃→FeO, and the Western namesake is from a character in a popular seventeenth century French pastoral novel, L’Astrée by Honoré d’Urfé, who dressed in light green garb—no relation to the Celadons Ovid’s Metamorphoses or International Klein Blue, a synthetic ultramarine with connections to the Nouveau réalisme movement and among the first pigments to be successfully patented. Each entry has adjacent palettes and new specimens are posted Sundays. I feel like this is site I will return to often.

drawn & quarterly (13. 567)

As an encore to his ambitious 2020 treatment of the US constitution, as a demonstration of the power of comics and cartoons to help make the unreadable more approachable and engaging, through a host of classic characters and styles, artist R Sikoryak publishes his Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated just in time for America’s semiquincentennial, addressing the country’s two foundational documents in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). More from Print magazine at the link above, including an interview with the author.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Château de Suscinio (with synchronoptica) plus an ensemble of monumental burial mounds

two years ago: a visit to the Borromean islands 

three years ago: assorted links to enjoy plus Dark Side of the Moon x Wizard of Oz

four years ago: more links worth the revisit plus bombshell testimony for January Sixth hearing

five years ago: the Body Language Academy, the International Criminal Court (1993), more pageantry from Weird Universe plus practical stenography

six years ago: Goldman Sans, a masculinity simulator, Martian meteors plus a complete catalogue of one’s stuff

8x8 (13. 550)

add to dictionary: a remembrance of the departed Tony Krueger, the software engineer that introduced red squiggles to word-processing to indicate a potential error  

seen by the machine: AI scores one’s relative importance by billions of datapoints called “the weights”—please consider the environmental impact before googling oneself—via MetaFilter 

drain the swamp: a meme roundup on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool  

cancon: musical acts propelled to stardom over minimum requirements for domestic content on Canadian airwaves—via Miss Cellania and Nag on the Lake  

reading the room: a moment of silence observed before interviews with filmmakers to take in the room tone as a supercut from Criterion  

a la carte: US history told in early restaurant menus—see previously  

able mabel: a robotic maid from 1966  

usa a-ok: more than amplifying random statistical noise, an interesting look at Americans’ misspellings mapped

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Carnac Stones (with synchronoptica) plus a trip to Belz

two years ago: exploring Maccagno  

three years ago: artist and freedom fighter Willem Arondéus, a revolt and march toward Moscow plus the last Emperor

four years ago: Germany legalises abortion plus a work cruise on the Rhein

five years ago: artist Robert Rotar, the goddess of luck, the bells of Bad Hersfeld, assorted links to revisit plus Cubist cars

six years ago: an orchestra for houseplants,  the Battle of Bamber Bridge (1943), tourists not welcome plus the Pontiac Ghost Car

face-value (13. 546)

A pair of back-to-back podcasts had an interesting that addressed the subject of minting money from different angles and both touching on seigniorage from Planet Money and 99% Invisible presented an interesting correspondence. First the Indicator episode explored the pros and cons of introducing a commemorative two-hundred fifty dollar bill for the upcoming US birthday celebration, which notwithstanding actual and potential hurdles over decorum and legality, would be a boom for criminal activity, money laundering and tax avoidance—the EU got rid of its largest denominated five-hundred euro bill, nicknamed the bin Laden and favoured by smugglers and traffickers for its portability. Most other governments have followed suit and there is even pressure to remove the current largest American note, the one-hundred dollar bill by the same reasoning, though the argument that the US treasury cites for keeping it is that the some twenty billion outstanding, through seignorage, a promissory note redeemable and fungible at any time, the positive return or carry for issuing money, represents a two trillion dollar, interest-free loan for the US, as long as they stay in circulation, particularly internationally—or stored in a vault, or in the next example, lost in the couch cushions, mellowing in a change jar or held as collectors’ items. As 99% Invisible reports, though public reaction to the debasing of American coinage from 1964 to 1965 was frictionless acceptance of face-value despite that specie had been removed and replaced with a slug clad with a shiny coating, the price of metal meant minting incurred more demurrage, depreciation, and so inspired by the commemorative issues, like the Kennedy half-dollar or the 1976 bicentennial quarters, the mint got permission, not wholly out of civic pride, in 1999 to produce twenty-five cent pieces honouring each state—and eventually Washington, DC and the territories over a ten year period, the government earning a profit for each that went coin that went into a collection, the mint itself only absorbing the fractional production costs.

@bitnic (13. 545)

Building off of the concept of distribution lists developed for IBM mainframes to handle email aliases, software engineer Éric Thomas studying at École Centrale Paris released the stable version of his modified application, with his own code, LISTSERV with automated features that allowed subscribers to join or leave groups without human administration as postmasters, edit templates and create auto-replies for system and welcome messages. Still foundational architecture, Thomas’ programme also included the first double opt-in methods and spam filters for junk- and grey-mail (bulk mailers at one point solicited but now considered a nuisance).

synchronoptica

one year ago: the menhirs of Bretagne (with synchronoptica) plus the Quiberon peninsula

two years ago: Lukmanier pass plus arriving at Lake Maggiore

three years ago: assorted links worth revisiting 

four years ago: a banger from The Knack, Logan’s Run plus the sterling area

five years ago: harvesting solar power plus Mid-Summer celebrations

six years ago: more links to enjoy, satisdiction plus scratching an itch

four colour theorem (13. 538)

The heretofore unverified but practically applied in cartography conjecture that no more than four colours are needed to distinguish bordering regions on a map was announced as proven on this day in 1976 after more than century since it was first proposed by two mathematicians at the the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Not feasible to perform the brute calculation by hand, this topology problem (see previously) was solved with the aid of a supercomputer, the first instance of a technical assist for a math problem, the claim rejected by some peers at the time because they couldn’t check the work.

synchronoptica

one year ago: arriving in Morbihan (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: Putin and Kim hold a summit, the premiere of Evita plus the estate of Jim Henson selling off its Hollywood lot

three years ago: California v Miller plus assorted links worth the revisit

four years ago: pioneering parachutist Tiny Broadwick (1913), Texas v Johnson plus more links to enjoy

five years ago: the Stonehenge Free Festival (1974), the introduction of the LP record (1948) plus Return to Oz (1985) 

six years ago: a CNN competitor (1982), EU proposes a digital services tax, remixing the Bayeux tapestry, setting the record straight, AI-generated perfumes plus Internation Yoga Day

bunny-rabbit style (13. 505)

Via Kottke, we are directed to a decades long, well maintained passion project that has reliably remained the go-to destination on the internet for educating oneself about shoelacing and knot tying. There’s a wealth of useful and practical advice here with contributions of fans and enthusiasts spanning years. New to us, we happily don’t arrive here too late to find it retired, archived or worse zombified, a fall that befalls many inactive sites that once had a following as a landing page for catch-penny SEO, or even worse succumbed to enshittification by the platforms and infrastructure that undergird such veteran webpages, but there is a tinge of sadness to learning about Ian’s Shoelace Site, a dying breed whose likes are disappearing from the web, resilient to the above symptoms that make the internet brittle and anaemic it’s still susceptible to the sleek plagiarism and repackaging that erodes the quality of the lessons, not only with AI scrapping and TikTok artists reposting content without attribution but also usually get things wrong. I am going to learn some new, satisfying knot techniques and wish I had known years before in protest to the heartbreaking hunger that the web has developed.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronopticæ)

twelve years ago: travels in Liguria 

thirteen years ago: flooding in the Danube 

fourteen years ago: mood rings and classroom metrics plus EU economics rollercoaster

9x9 (13. 499)

of all the us presidents he’s still the mussoliniest: Randy Rainbow reprises his rendition of the Major General’s Song, see previously—via Miss Cellania  

twenty-first century nightmares: Bill Hsu presents a collection of dark animated films 

hello dalí: a marginally remastered copy of the bizarre 1973 ITV profile of the artist surfaces on Youtube  

éolienne: an innovative nineteenth century redesign for the windmill  

responding with improvisation and exhaustion: meeting the subliterate where they are is a disservice to education  

necropolis: marine researchers discover the site of a whale fall in a deep rift valley of the Indian ocean  

guest-starring in alphabetical order: Poseidon’s Underworld on the short-lived 1984 television series Glitter about the cast of a glossy magazine  

the meatseller: an harrowing and brutal animation of a young migrant’s journey from Nigeria to Italy 

 there was nothing in al capone’s vault but it wasn’t geraldo’s fault: premiere episode of America’s history in one hundred objects (see also) begins with an underwhelming time capsule opened in 1976

6x6 (13. 496)

epistolary: a profile of one of China’s last working Qiaopi writers (侨批) who sends letters and remittances to relatives overseas 

robert tyzyczhowzswiski is asking the court to change his cognomen: the trials and tribulations of legal stenographers—see also  

gonzo and camilla: revisiting emperor Honorius, chicken fancier  

inter esperantistoj; the undying dream of the universal language—see previously—via Web Curios  

post-hoc rationalisation: more lawyers get in trouble for reliance on AI 

fountain of knowledge: Japanese quiz culture was shaped by the post-war US occupation

unstable geometries (13. 494)

We appreciated the introduction to abstract artist Sanford Wurmfeld whose studies in shifting hues and tones across large scale grids explore the act of perception and mood as a function of the time it takes to look at something. His installations of cycloramas and wall-mounted works are methodical and precise and are to my mind the opposite of optical illusion—no trickery or fatigue which sets no mood. Crediting the works of Josef Albers and Mark Rothko as his influncers, Wurmfeld is considered a co-founder of the Hunter Colour School, a heuristic for the phenomenology of the transformative effect on the viewer. More from Hyperallergic at the link above and the artist’s website.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the death of Nero (with synchronopticæ) plus California national guard activated against the governor’s will

twelve years ago: a visit to Pisa 

thirteen years ago: returning from Lake Como 

fifteen years ago: credible sources plus gin and garnish

sixteen years ago: austerity measures in Germany plus oil spill impact zones

seventeen years ago: banking secrecy  

in search of… (13. 479)

Polymath and multi-hyphanate, Dr Robert Harvey Rines, whom helped develop the Microwave Early Warning System in the Cold War after serving as an officer in the army signals corps, as trained a jurist for intellectual property, prolific inventor, librettist penning musicals about the life of HL Mencken (previously) among others, violin prodigy playing a duet with Albert Einstein at age eleven at a summer camp in Maine, and adjunct professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the last forty five years of his career, is probably best known for leading the American expedition, sponsored by the US Academy of Applied Sciences and the The New York Times, the quest for Nessie, the most thorough and comprehensive search for the Loch Ness Monster up to that time, that commenced on this day in 1976. Becoming obsessed with the mystery of a possible cryptid after a visit to the area four years, Rines launched a scientific safari provisioned with sophisticated sonar and photographic, many instruments of his own design, and whilst garnering a great deal of publicity for his efforts, including several intriguing but blurry photographs, after six months, the project was halted due to lack of hard evidence. This famous “gargoyle head” image was later discovered to be a rotting tree stump on the silty bottom of the loch, since located and put on display in the Nessie gallery at Drumnadrochit on the western shore. Rines for his part never stopped believing that there was more to the legend and kept up the exploration, albeit on a smaller scale, for the next decades.

synchronoptica

one year ago:  automated purging of US government workers (with synchronopticæ) plus a Star Trek: TNG superfan

fourteen years ago: looking forward to our Norway holiday 

fifteen years ago: Ascension Day 

sixteen years ago: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill 

8x8 (13. 433)

marathon du médoc: get in shape for the annual event combining wine tasting and running at the Bordeaux château and vineyard—via Messy Nessy Chic 

of mice and men: the difference between singing rodents and the non-verbal variety maybe similar to the evolutionary split that humans took from other primates 

net exporter: Ukraine sees drone demand from eleven countries as manufacturers expand production  

childlore: a growing list of popular adolescent myths that have passed from generation to generation  

thirty-eighth parallel: North Korea abandons goal of reunification with the south—see previously  

scope of work: the ingenious design of the screwdriver handle  

gravitational constant: geometers including surveyor Charles Mason (of Mason-Dixon line fame) conducted the Sciehallion Experiment in the Scottish Highlands to determine the mean-density of the Earth, weighing the mountain Sith Chailleann—fairy hill of the Caledonians  

holztrompete: Richard Wagner fused a brass and a woodwind instrument for Tristan und Isolde—via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest

storia di un burattio (13. 415)

Originally a satirist poking fun at the Italian state of disunity and fractured governance, that is until his newspaper, Il Lampione, was censored at shutdown by the Grand Duke of Tuscany after the Italian Wars of Independence, Carlo Collodi turned to authoring children’s stories as the newly unified Italian state was subsidising school readers and the commissions, now serialised in another publication he founded in 1853, Lo Scaramuccia, provided a steady source of income whilst also being a vehicle for continued lampooning under cover of allegory. Pinocchio, originally published in fifteen instalments ending in 1881 with the puppet dead, strung up in the branches of an oak tree, by Fox and Cat—far weirder than the Disney version and akin to a more classical fairy tale with his cricket conscious killed with a hammer by his own hand but returning as a Force ghost, the puppet’s feet burned away, the transformed protagonist in asinine form, injured and rendered useless to his owner, drowned, devoured by a shark, disgorged and skinned so his hide can be used to fashion a drum, the corpse Blue Fairy, etc, etc—and fine. Due to overwhelming demand by his readership, Collodi is compelled to continue the story with more volumes. Whilst united, only a small vanishingly small percentage of the population spoke standard Italian, the diglossia of dialects mutually unintelligible, Pinocchio written in the language of the central region of Toscana and championed as the standard, with simple sentence structure and vocabulary, widely popular and accessible, the motivation behind commissioning children’s reading material, helped to a large and under-appreciated extent to create a common tongue.

z—is for zoning that marks off the land, so that homes, schools and factories are properly planned (13. 374)

With an energy and outreach similar to India’s census for the people, via Boing Boing, we are directed towards this rhyming abecedary produced by the Committee on City Planning (in full here) in 1937 under the mayorship of Fiorello La Guardia (previously)seizing an opportunity to educate in youngest residents in the field of civil engineering and instil the concept of considered regulations on maintaining the metropolis. Some of the entries reflect a certain agenda, foreshadowing NIMBYism and getting rid of the elevated trains in favour of expanding the subway and promoting municipal markets over street food vendors.

daddy, what’s sundowning? (13. 351)

The most memorable and harrowing instalment of the series of commercials from Time-Life, aired first in December of 1985, the twenty-five volume serialisation of the conflict bookended the Reagan administration, released from 1981 to 1988, The Vietnam Experience sought from a mostly American perspective to bridge the rifts across the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers and generations next through exposure of tactics, cultural gaps, secret, parallel waging of conflicts by assaying the social and political aftermath and reckoning. To these ends, the two-minute spot features a plaintive question as father and son (the other timely response is “Look it up, dear” promoting Encyclopaedia Britannica from the following year and maybe prompting a generation of independent-research) whilst touring the newly dedicated and controversial veterans’ memorial wall of Maya Lin. The gravelly narration is provided by Martin Sheen, delivered with the intonation of his role as CPT Willard in Apocalypse Now, framed as a “question a child might ask” and followed by several others in the same vein, “Daddy, did we win?” and portentously warning that these queries must not go unanswered. Though in the fullness of time technically not forever wars as eternity will eventually embrace the Sun’s supernova, we have to wonder what cold-comfort we might offer in terms of explaining what’s a late night rage tweet, what’s a golden shower, covfefe, self-own, projection, deflection, hamberder, etc to someone who has not directly lived through these time.

một trăm (13. 331)

Via Laughing Squid, we are directed to this rather lit rap video from language teacher Levion that teaches one how to count to one hundred in Vietnamese following in the tradition of Multiplication Rock and others that reenforces learning through a catchy format. The teacher also uses the technique for teaching colours and the days of the week. This is really rapid-fire but in the cadence one can pick up of the patterns and conventions of the numbers (see previously). More straightforward in terms of forming the base, there are historically two sets of numerals, native Vietnamese used here and the version most used for everyday accounting purposes and another of Sino-Vietnamese influence generally only used for fixed expressions and very large numbers, like Latin and Greek prefixes in English. Arabic numerals and Roman script (chữ Quốc ngữ) supplanted Chinese characters during the era of French Indochina.

ex’23 (13. 318)

Courtesy of fellow peripatetic Messy Nessy Chic’s latest batch of finds, we are acquainted with pioneering theorist and consultant Faber Birren (whose given name, from his maternal grandmother’s surname is a flourish of nominative determinism, a close anagram of Luxembourgish for colour) whom after an adolescent period of experimenting with dyes and painting murals pursued a a programme of pedagogy at the University of Chicago. Unable to surrender his conviction in the importance of colour, regarding it as an article of faith, and dissatisfied with the lacking curriculum in his field of study, Birren dropped out and began a course of self-study in 1921, publishing several influential articles on putting chromatics and contrast to use, eventually establishing his own firm with clients including Monsanto, General Electric, DuPont and the US military. Birren was later contracted as a consultant colourist for Disney advising animators for the schemes of Bambi, Pinocchio and Fantasia and with the outbreak of World War II, Birren was conscripted to make work environments safer for the influx inexperienced workers coming to factories to replace the workforce diverted to the war effort. The coding conventions Birren prescribed are still in use today with the best preserved examples being the sea-foam green used for control panels (the object of this investigation and conserved in museums and legacy installations and universally adopted, also with fire-extinguishers), the lighter shades being used on walls and consoles to reduce visual fatigue. The title nom de plume is from Birren’s colour scale of reflected light in the most calming spectrum and sourced from his trade range colour.

10x10 (13. 316)

carry on patriots: US secretary of war Hegseth nullifies probe into unauthorised helicopter fly-by and salute of Kid Rock  

feiqian: centuries old networks of underground banking provide the freedom from government oversight and privacy that crypto has failed to deliver  

road-trip: after a two year hiatus, Tom Scott returns to YouTube  

der orchideengarten: the first horror and sci-fi magazine—see previously 

the c-word: US scientists are speaking in code, the so-called “climate hushing” to continue their research 

general ledger accounting codes: an appreciation of Excel and how the spreadsheet reshaped business  

laudatio canis: a late fifteenth century testimonial about the virtues of dog-ownership—see previously  

mergers and acquisitions: Larry Ellison’s Oracle lays of thirty thousand workers in a cold-call dismissal after Paramount takeover of Warner Brothers leaves parent company in debt and without backers  

påskekrim: the Norwegian tradition of settling back with crime novels over the Easter holidays  

send in the flying monkeys: a music video with elements of Monty Python and Hieronymus Bosch that addresses the current US state of the union

9x9 (13. 308)

ruina montium: an striking landscape in Spain created by the ancient Romans fracking for gold—via Miss Cellania  

13 ｘ 7 = 28: Abbot and Costello try to meet their sales quota—via MetaFilter 

i’m your hell, i’m your dream—i’m nothing in between: a linguistic and semantic history of the term bitch 

anatoly kolodkin: US waives sanctions to allow Russian tanker to deliver crude oil to Cuba  

coalition of the willing: recalling the legacy Icelandic PM Davíð Oddsson of committing the nation to the unjustified invasion of Iraq in 2003, juxtaposed with contemporary Spain  

cocktail nation: Spy Vibe’s regular segment on swank vintage soundtracks  

lip-filler accent: influencers inform the way we speak—via Nag on the Lake, see also  

gigo: AI is an accelerant for academic fraud, selling papers and citations to pad one’s portfolio  

unoosa: a profile of the director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs who alerts the world of impending asteroid impacts