hgp

Formally launched in 1990 with sequencing, mostly sponsored by governmental research grants taking place in over twenty university laboratories in the UK, Germany, China, Japan, France, the US and Spain the massive, global collaboration to map the genes of human DNA from a structural and functional stance was declared complete with 99% sequenced of a composite sample to an accuracy rate of 99.99% on this day in 2003. Published in May of the following year, the approximately three million base pairs of any individual can now be mapped and analysed within a matter of minutes.

first contact

According to the fictional timeline of the Star Trek continuity, on this day in 2063 (the same day as, according to some calculations, Noah’s Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat in 348 BC), Zefram Cochrane conducted his first successful test flight jumping to warp speed. This energy signature caught the attention of a passing Vulcan survey ship, whom generously helped humanity to integrate into a suddenly much larger and varied Cosmos. The character himself is first encountered by the crew of the Enterprise (Metamorphosis, S2, E9) while ferrying a peace-negotiator, Federation Commissioner Nancy Hedford, to medical facilities for emergency intervention on board a shuttle craft. Their ship is drawn to an asteroid with an M-Class artificial atmosphere that also dampens their sensors and communication systems and discover that a human calling himself by the name of the revered inventor “of Alpha Centauri,” who disappeared a century and a half earlier under mysterious conditions but presumed dead and to have gone out in a last blaze of glory on a rocket mission at an advanced age, and an entity of pure energy that Cochrane refers to as the Companion, who intercepted Cochrane and restored his youth. In front of company and apparently not having brought it up previously in the past decades of living together, the Companion makes his overtures to the human known, expressing an unrequited love that Cochrane rebuffs rather forcefully. The Companion merges with the dying Commissioner Hedford, restoring her health, and presenting to Cochrane in a more lovable albeit mortal form. The shuttle is allowed to leave with assurances from Kirk and crew that they will keep the asteroid’s secret.

7x7

snuggling cygnets: avian photography of the year, also known as b-poty for short—via Colossal  

untitled pizza movie: documenting change in New York City slice-by-slice  

aqen the ferryman: Cairo hosts a parade for a score of royal mummies moving to a new museum—via Super Punch  

salvator metaversi: art historian turns supposed last Leonardo into an NFT to help out the family who sold it to unscrupulous art dealers 

theatre of machines: intricate gear illustrations from Agostino Ramelli (see also here and here)  

scenes from a mall: footage from the Southdale Centre’s grand opening in 1956  

knock knock: a swan terrorising a neighbourhood in Northampton—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links

tilting at windmills

We rather enjoyed this thoroughgoing appreciation of the band They Might Be Giants through their various promotional vehicles including the iterations of their Dial-a-Song service and novel, unrestrained ways to integrate new platforms and technological advances with a new release, like this stack of hypercards to file through for their fifth studio album John Henry (1994). Many more examples, samples and songs at Tedium at the link up top.

fuchsia splendens

Though our prized exemplar did not make it through the winter sadly, we did rather find it interesting to learn how this plant of the month, the fuchsia, died of an over-exposure of a different sort though its reputation is now somewhat rehabilitated. First described by a French friar and botanist under commission of Louis XIV stationed on Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the 1690s, the genus was named in honour of the German Renaissance researcher and professor Leonhart Fuchs of the previous century and considered one of the fathers of the field. In the following decades, it started to be cultivated in Europe and parallel the rise in cheap printing and lithography which resulting in multiple copies from the same prepared page easily reproduced without sacrificing the colour and detail that the flower highlighted and quickly became popular, and oversold eventually victim of its own success. While a number of enthusiasts and nurseries continued to experiment with breeding new types, public tastes were shifting, ultimately went for other novel plants including ferns, orchids, decorative palms and other ornamental plants.

retronymy

Despite having encountered such constructions previously by name and even using all the time when speaking of evolving tastes and palettes and obsolescence, we failed to appreciate how retronyms build vocabulary and track those changes and advances mentioned just above. Distinct from backronyms and neologisms, the term was coined by journalist and NPR president Frank Mankiewicz in 1980 and refers to a newer name given to an existing object or artefact to differentiate it the original version from a more recent one, whereas no need for clarification had been required beforehand. Some examples include land-line, snail mail (as distinct from email—see also), plant-based meat, American-English, Game Boy Classic and reduplication as in requesting ‘coffee’ coffee. Many more to ponder in the podcast episode below, which also includes a discussion on the twenty-seventh letter of the English alphabet, the ampersand.

64gan

Via Waxy, we are directed to a series of heuristic project by Linus Akesson to reproduce music written for organ (see previously) on a Commodore 64 with a keyboard input of a chromatic button accordion, inspired by the realisation that the sounds that pipe organ makes would be perceived as very much chiptunes without the acoustics a church. Applying some mechanical interventions, Akesson enabled reverb to make his digital instrument intone more like the original.

8x8

zaouli: a traditional dance of the of the Guro people of central Côte d’Ivoire 

line-dry only: experimental living apparel sequesters carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produces oxygen  

everydays—the first five-thousand days: the digital artist better known as Beeple sold an artwork as a non-fungible token (previously) for nearly seventy million dollars at auction, more here  

⏯: Lou Ottens, the inventor of the cassette, passes away, aged ninety-four 

 upward mobility: theory that Flintstones and Jetsons take place simultaneously with an elite technocracy and a post-apocalyptic underclass—see also  

ikebana: a vintage guide to the art of Japanese flower arranging, previously  

life finds a way: using parallel processing and stochastic algorithms, one programmer generates Mona Lisa from John Horton Conway’s game  

personæ: short documentary Beyond Noh filters through thousands of colourful and evocative ceremonial masks from cultures around the world

telex

Via Weird Universe—striking us as rather incredulous as well that we’ve not blogged about this topic before though there are some corresponding posts (see here and here)—we are introduced to commercial code, a method adopted by companies to save on cablegram expenses when telegraph companies charged per word or character and thus elaborate and competing systems of encoding and decoding were developed and broadly used from the 1870s through the 1950s, both for general use and industry jargon. Secondarily a means of keeping communications private and confusing unless one had the right reference book, some systems used less common words as a cipher for a series of phrases on the same subject and sometimes included non-words, like HAUBARER for “charterers will allow the option of carrying horse for the ship’s benefit,” BYOXO for “are you trying to weasel out of our deal,” ENBET for the “captain has gone insane,” AZKHE for a clean bill of health and COSNOSCO as shorthand for “dining out this evening; send my dress clothes here.” More to explore at Weird Universe at the link up top including a good resource of scanned codebooks.

tachygraphy

First demonstrated to the public in Paris on this day in 1792, inventor and engineer Claude Chappe (*1763 - †1805) took the principles of flag signalling from the merchant navy and applied them for terrestrial use in a series of communication masts and towers within successive line-of-sight in a network that eventually covered all of France. Operators viewing their neighbouring link through a telescope could pass along the message to the next relay station (see also). Dubbed the télégraphe Chappe, alternately the inventor coined the neologism semaphore—from the Greek σῆμα + φορός, sign-carrying—and was the first practical means of telecommunication of the Industrial Age, in use until replaced by the electric telegraph in the 1850s.

deep nostalgia

We learn that a genealogy company is offering a fully automated service to reanimate one’s old photographs by applying the same sort seamlessly predictive technology behind deep fakes, transforming perhaps staid and distant images in the same sort of way that Live photos or Harry Potter photojournalism captures a few seconds of posing and framing the shot. It seems like a clever idea to image one’s relatives smiling and mugging for the camera. Learn more at Gizmodo’s io9 at the link above. 

 

6x6

affiche: early Art Deco posters of René Magritte  

dogs of war: a public service announcement issuing guidance on how to disable Boston Dynamics weaponised Spot units  

whitewash: thankfully, President Biden is able to overturn “beautiful” architecture executive order that would mandate neo-classicism in federal buildings 

clothes peg: the clothesline animals of Helga Stentzel 

second life: exploring and conserving the abandoned spaces of the internet  

mask media: brilliant Soviet Kazakh health promotion campaigns from the 1970s—see also

optimisation of manual labour

Eighteen types of elemental motions to study the economy of movement and exertion in the workplace as with a flow-chart, therblig units are intended as controls for eliminating unneeded steps. Created by industrial psychologists Lillian Moller Gilbreth and Frank Bunker Gilbreth (as near reversals of their surname), they first appeared in a 1915 trade paper article as “the elements of a cycle of decisions and motions” the scheme famously and indelibly suggesting that it be common protocol that a surgeon is handed their implements and that various checklist are put in place. Purposefully, the last step prior to execution is the admonition “to think” (not depicted as a diagrammatic symbol) rather than the first.

aufzugshilfe

Powered by a waterwheel, a simple tow-line pulling patrons to the top of the slope, the first skilift, the invention of hotel handyman Robert Winterhalder had its debut to the public on this day in 1908 at a resort in Schollach bei Eisenbach. Another impetus for its creation was the clientele that the guesthouse caterer to: those suffering from asthma and allergies who sought refuge and healing in the clean air of the countryside. Winterhalder wanted those guests to be able to experience the thrill of downhill skiing without the distress and exertion of climbing first. Up a gradient of some thirty metres over a distance of a quarter of a kilometre from the valley to the mountain hut, users were pulled upwards on a continuous loop. Residents re-enacted the centenary of its premiere, albeit with decidedly less snow in 2008.

6x6

bohemian to brocore: a non-exhaustive list of aesthetics—via Things Magazine 

billions and billions: a picture of the night sky that contains a petabyte of data 

fairy wren for scale: an ornithological chart comparing the diversity of body-size among our feathered friends

https://jeffreycombs.tumblr.com/post/622945915961065473/1-second-of-every-star-trek-tos-episode-enjoy

the hook shot: a fun and welcome example of chindōgu, the Japanese art of unuselessness 

satana lero wapezeka ndiwe edzi: the musical stylings of Gaspar Nali 

the city on the edge of forever: pictured also courtesy of Things Magazine, one second from every episode of Star Trek TOS by the franchise’s frequent guest star

7x7

high dive: Casa Zicatela in the Oaxaca coastal region references Le Corbusier and the retro look of municipal swimming pools 

rip: legendary actor Christopher Plummer (*1929) has passed away 

polar flare: visualising the true size of terrestrial landmasses through cartographic distortion plus mapping countries as offworld colonies  

gulf stream: lack of circulation during ice ages past may have meant the Arctic and North Atlantic Oceans had fresh water 

dataviz: sleek, informative infographics by the Great Grundini  

réseau pneumatique: an exploration of the pneumatic postal system of Paris—see also  

hq2: a preview of the new Amazon headquarters (previously) building in Arlington, Virginia

6x6

fietsstrook: LEGO cycling lanes (see previously) on their way 

pay no attention to that man behind the curtain: Jeff Bezos to hand over the reigns of power at Amazon 

it’s a duck blur: an in depth, retrospective analysis of the 1989 Capcom video game Ducktales  

end effector: Boston Dynamics’ Spot gets an arm and gripper attachment 

nihon no shiro: abstract woodcuts of the castles and palaces of Japan—via Present /&/ Correct  

force multiplier: innovative, portable CLIP drive transforms any convention bicycle into an e-bike—via Swiss Miss

7x7

japandi: a lookbook overview of interiors that combine Japanese and Scandinavian aesthetic elements  

six arms strong and true: more machinalia from Boris Artzybasheff—see previously  

pharmaduke: re-captioning the Brad Anderson comic strip with psychedelic trip narratives, via Things Magazine  

high stakes: revisiting a quarter-century old public wager that technology would destroy society—via Slashdot  

vaccination venues: the architecture of public health promotion  

house of style: supermodel Cindy Crawford guides us through Paris Fashion Week in 1992 on her MTV show  

gradation: moving from binary to blended, a study of the spectrum of everyday objects commissioned for Japan’s award-winning children’s education programme Design Ah

8x8

testi stampati: the riotous typographical illustratrations of Lorenzo Petrantoni  

painterly realism: Nathan Shipley trained a neural network to turn portraiture into convincingly true-to-life photographs 

civilian climate corps: a vision of how putting people to work on conservation projects can help save both the environment and the economy  

narratology: a purportedly exhaustive list of dramatic situations—see also here and here  

stonx: a long thread explaining the GameStop short-squeeze—via Miss Cellania  

paradoxical undressing: National Geographic forwards a new theory to account for the Dyatlov Pass Incident (previously) of 1959  

butler in a box: before digital assistants there was domestic aid in the late 1980s 

will success spoil rock hunter: Art of the Title looks at the opening montage of the 1957 CinemaScope classic

early adopters

We thoroughly enjoyed this review and overview of how new media and technological innovation influenced and informed Eastern Europe through the lens of the last years of the Polish People’s Republic. 

The efforts on the part of the authorities could not outpace and eventually lagged far behind ever more ingenious and widespread means of implementation that circumvented attempts of censorship or suppression (see also), eventually conceding to the inevitable. Considering the role of John Paul II in social and civic reforms, the account of young priests using new media as teaching aids and for screening—cassette cinemas—films that were banned in the theatres and helping to carve out a refuge from the state regime. The image is a still from a 1988 adaptation of Pan Kleks (Mister Inkblot) and his magical academy. More from the Calvert Journal at the link above.