alternative work site

In a rollicking, wide-ranging look at the precedents for the creator economy in correspondence course—notably of our scribe stenographer Sir Isaac Pitman—and the move that originally tethered us to office space, sourced to in the Uffizi in Florence, where bureaucracy and administration were centralised in 1560 as a cadet branch of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, now a world-class gallery gifted to the city after the Medici line died out.

Afforded the opportunity to work remotely and knowing arguments for compelling staff to return are specious at best—synergy and presence packaged as the benefits we are missing out on away from colleagues I think are the opaque justifications for accountability and the passkeys of those supervisors who like to play house at the office because they’re denied it at home, the informing past is an interesting and advisable lens to re-evaluate custom and workplace culture as crisis and contingency hopefully begin to ebb. Technological advance can be regressive in its demands and requirements to fill the time. Much more to explore and contemplate at Tedium at the link up top.

never an after-thirst with squirt

First broadcast on this day in 1967 during a commercial break from the WWII drama television series, the network aired a minute-long advertisement for the citrus-flavour soft drink called Squirt—which for ten-seconds appeared as muted but in living colour, even for the vast majority of households at the time who owned black-and-white TV sets.

With no general forewarning, I suspect a good number of viewers thought that they were losing their minds—or at least sense of sight and were hallucinating the flashes of colour. Those bursts were in fact the result of clever and carefully calibrated optical illusions developed by inventor James F. Butterfield the year prior, having found that working with optometrists and visual neuroscientists that the brain could be coaxed into processing colours that were not there by modulating the pulses of white light and could encode for a set of basic colours filtering a black-and-white camera field with a rotating device.

Butterfield called this outcome subjective colour. Because of the mechanical and physiological limitations—it was not a universal experience and the range of colours were limited and not very vibrant—and actual colour models were being introduced and becoming more affordable just as this technology was emerging, nothing more unfortunately came from this innovation and line of invesigation.

music-minus-one

Via Card House, our attention is directed to a record format called Sopic Cap Player and their portable party-in-a-box from 1976, impeccably sleek and modern looking for that vintage, that prefigured karaoke (a clipped compound meaning “empty orchestra,” カラオ) machines. The playlist includes “Champs Elysee” and “Waterloo Road” from Jason Crest with quite a few other cosmopolitan classics, demos and comparable technology linked in the comments section on this video shared by Techmoan’s Youtube channel.

1962-alpha epsilon 1

Launched into orbit just under a fortnight prior, the Telstar 1 communication satellite relayed the first live transatlantic television broadcast (see also here, here and here) on this day in 1962. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was supposed to give the inaugural address but the engineers acquired the signal before the US president was ready and to avoid dead-air filled the first few minutes with a televised baseball game from the Wrigley Field in Chicago before rotating through studios and field stations in Washington, DC, Quebec City, Cape Canaveral and the Seattle World’s Fair. Kennedy’s speech consisted of direct appeals to Europe that America wouldn’t devalue its currency and further frustrate plans for post-war recovery (see also) before giving the stage to news anchors Walter Cronkite (CBS, previously) and Chet Huntley (NBC) in New York and the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby in Brussels for a panel discussion of this marvel of technical achievement that they were part of. Later that evening, the first satellite telephone call was carried out between parties US vice president Lyndon Johnson and the head of AT&T (the company whose Bell Laboratories were primarily responsible for it) and in the following months, synchronised time between the continents and facilitating the first computer-to-computer data. By November, a casualty of the geopolitics that pushed such advancements as showcase and civilian applications, due to ongoing high-altitude nuclear testing that irradiated surround space, Telstar’s transistors were overwhelmed and eventually failed and could not relay signals. Though no longer transmitting, Telstar I and II (launched the following summer) are still orbiting Earth and will continue to do so for millions of years barring interference by another body.

the greatest thing since sliced bread

The benchmark for greatness and idiomatically highlighting something clever that just works, especially a recent innovation was introduced into common parlance on this day in 1928 when the bread slicing machine of inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder (a prototype he had developed back in 1912 was destroyed in a fire and it took nearly sixteen years to make a second go at it) was used by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri in the United States and sold their first pre-sliced loaves. The more common German equivalent is, however, das Größte seit der Erfindung der Bratkartoffel, the greatest invention since roasted potatoes.

8x8

billboards and hoardings: the evolution of outdoor advertising  

ptychography: a high resolution imaging of atoms—see previously  

the village: lovely Mid-Century Modern accommodations in Portmeirion—where The Prisoner was filmed  

vqgan+clip: Picasso’s Persistence of Memory with Lisa Frank filter applied—via Waxy  

ems: composer and sampling pioneer Peter Zinovieff has passed away, aged eight-eight—via Things Magazine  

pulp tarot: a divining deck (previously) informed by Mid-Century illustrations from Todd Alcott

siss-boom-bah: a Japanese pyrotechnics catalogue (see also) from the 1880s  

indexing: a look at how the adoption of vertical filing helped ushering the Information Age—see also here and here

long-play microgroove record album

First introduced by the Columbia Record Company at a specially convened press conference in New York City three days’ prior, the 33⅓ revolutions per minute (rpm) vinyl record became commercially available to music studios on this day in 1948. The format and standard still not having passed in obsolescence after all these years, the record had been under development since 1939 and put on hold during the war and though many studios and manufacturers harmonised with this arrangement for pressing for speed and length, others—notably RCA Victor with its parallel 45s introduced a year afterwards, refused to accept Columbia’s licensing and system, not to detriment of competition and innovation, since compatibility issues could be worked out through manual customisation—adjusting the playback speed and getting adapters to adjust for spindle size and stylus requirements.

aggregat 4

During a test launch taking place on this day from the proving grounds of the Peenemünde Army Research Centre (Heeresversuchsanstalt) of a V-2 / A-4 rocket, a manufactured object for the first time passed the Kármán line defining the edge of atmosphere and outer space (the after-the-fact boundary usually placed at one hundred kilometres above the surface of the Earth) and reached an apogee of one-hundred and seventy-six kilometres before falling back to the ground, not designed to attain orbital velocity. This particular achievement was the greatest vertical distance covered by a projectile thus far but the team of scientists, under the leadership of Werher von Braun, were more proud in with their 1942 feat of having penetrated the rarefied thermosphere—about eighty kilometres above and where ultraviolet radiation creates ions and the charged atmosphere allows radio wave communication to be transmitted and received beyond the horizon. Coincidentally one year later to the day, in 1945, the US Secretary of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a secret recruiting programme called Operation Overcast to bring scientists from Nazi Germany to America to assist in shortening the war with Japan and augment post-war and peacetime rocketry applications. Interviewing US Ordnance Corps officers would attach a paperclip to the files of those they wanted to be brought to the States for work, importing through 1990 more than sixteen hundred researchers as intellectual reparations claimed by the Allies (minus the Soviets that had their own recruitment campaign) with an attendant $10,000,000,000 worth in associated patents and industrial processes.

iso 646

Considered one of the early and foundational milestones in electronics engineering and developed as an offshoot of telegraphic encoding (see previously here and here), the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) was first published by the American Standards Association (ASA—presently organised as the American Nation Standards Institute, ANSI) on this day in 1963. Its application in linking networks of machines was formalised and demonstrated by 1969 (see also) and has been since elevated to an internet standard, undergoing multiple revisions from conception through 2017. Initially recognised for its ability to aid in sorting list, character order is called ASCIIbetical and the collating sequence of data puts numbers and punctuation before letters and upper carriage letters before their smaller versions. While ASCII is constrained to a character set of only one hundred twenty eight, it is rolled into the larger and more inclusive, international Unicode standard.

7x7

dit-dot: via Web Curios (a lot more to see at this latest instalment), we’re invited to learn the basics of Morse code (previously) with this well designed, gamifying tutorial 

passeggiando: be a virtual flâneur in these composite Italian cities 

broadcast energy transmitter: delivering renewable energy from where it is plentiful to where it’s need via submarine transnational supergrids 

flock together: a TED Ed presentation on the evolution of feathers  

pyramid power: Duns Scotus and the esoteric history of the dunce cap—via Boing Boing  

essential reading: The Atlantic’s Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for his COVID reporting  

ää: a collection of essays from the Times Literary Supplement on defence of endangered, indigenous languages

9x9

glass menagerie: a Murano bestiary on display in Venice  

glow up: beauty tips from Ancient Roman—via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump  

coconußritter: a short about Foley artists and creating soundscapes  

happy little clouds: explore a relaxing gallery of Bob Ross paintings (previously), via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links   

culaccino: a database of words that do not readily translate succinctly, like this Italian term from the mark left on a table by a cold glass—via Swiss Miss 

electrobat vi: antique electric forerunners side-by-side with modern EVs  

the perils of everybody: a ‘mistake waltz’ that illustrates the pratfalls all ballet recitals are prone to  

where the buffalo roam: restoring the ecosystem of the North American Great Plains by reintroducing charismatic megafauna  

kitchenette: re-examining Liza Lou’s beaded exhibits

high fidelity

Via the always serendipitous Present /&/ Correct, we found ourselves quite taken with these extensive archives of vintage catalogues of Japanese gadgets and accessories—Walkmans (which were manufactured up to 2010, with over two-hundred million cassette-playing units produced, ubiquitous and causing a minor safety furore with some municipalities banning them over distracted, inattentive pedestrians—the eponymous effect sometimes interpreted as isolating, early models had a “hotline” switch to facilitate conversation without removing headphones but was not well received but allowed individuals to define their surrounds through their personal soundscape and is applied to successor technologies), boom-boxes and other portable media players—see also. Much more to explore at the links above.

shadow-casting

Though previous acquainted with the ukiyo-e master Utagawa Hiroshige (安藤 広重, 1797 – 1858), we were unfamiliar with this form of expression in his repertoire in the form of these “play prints” (omocha-e, 玩具絵—see also) in this series of diagrams on making shadows puppets—quite superior to these, which prefigured the magic lantern and all the development and exchange (many of the incremental steps superseded and quite forgotten despite the intermediate value of the artefacts, fashions and temporary obsessions) of technologies that led to film, animation and animé and whatever is to come. Much more to explore at the links above.

rebound

Though it never occurred to us that such equipment needed inventing and a champion—despite the fact that every exercise and intervention does, we enjoyed learning of the contributions of avid gymnast and promoter George Peter Nissen (*1914 - †2010) who developed the trampoline and made the sport and pass-time an enduring world-wide sensation through this rather arresting feat of man and kangaroo. Inspired by the safety nets of trapeze artists and having toured fairs and carnivals of North America after university studies as a performer and learning the word trampolín—springboard, Nissen registered a trademark for his bouncing apparatus. Having petitioned for the sport to be included in the Olympics for decades, Nissen finally succeeded with trampolining added to the Sydney Games in 2000. The stunt however was captured in 1960.

stack overflow

Released on this this day in cinemas in 1995, the Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren dystopian science-fiction adaptation of the eponymous William Ford Gibson cyberpunk novel, the film takes place in 2021 with global population deeply and irretrievably engaged with an augmented reality internet which has a debilitating long-term effect called “nervous attenuation syndrome” (NAS) and transfer and transmission of data is closely controlled by mega-corporations who enforce their hegemony through the mafia.

Reeves’ character is a mnemonic courier discreetly transports data, avoiding traffic on the worldwide web, with an implant in his brain, and is entrusted with the safekeeping and eventually uploading into the public domain documents that reveal the corporations’ connections with organised crime and the computer virus that will return power and autonomy to the people, teaming up with the Lo-Teks under the leadership of J-Bone, played by Ice-T, a mysterious female projection of an omnipresent digital assistant and a genetically enhanced dolphin with abilities to break any encryption.

rpow

Nearly a year and a half after the minting of the first blocks of the chain and demonstration that block chain was viable in code as a reusable proof-of-work system (a cryptographic transfer wherein one party shows to another that an established amount of computational effort has been expended with no other disclosure between the two sides), the first known cryptocurrency commercial transaction (see also) occurred between a programmer and a pizza chain, the later exchanging ten thousand bitcoin for two pies on this day in 2010. At the time of publication, this figure is valued at over three-hundred thirteen million euro.

the veldt

Bringing holographic interface closer to the immersive level of experience to be had aboard the holodeck, we learn via Slashdot—aptly illustrated with a tiny dogfight, the exchange of phaser fire and photon torpedos, between a Federation starship and a Bird of Prey—researchers at Brigham Young University, building on past successes, have created free-floating images with lasers that do not need a display. Instead taking advantage of the electrostatic effect and Brownian motion, miniscule particles are illuminated creating the illusion of permanence and untethered projection, the objects drawn in space with the viewer able to perceive them as if they were tangible objects.

nik of time

With a different sort of Sputnik with its attributed suffix being in the news again, we rather enjoyed this shared correction, letter to the editor that disputes the etymology that credits the pioneering Soviet satellite with enriching the English language with the terms peaceniks, beatniks and no-goodniks, whereas first usage of the formulation precedes the orbit by decades, with H. L. Mencken mentioning –nic or –nick as part of the lexiography as a suffix indicating free agency with examples including a boastful upstart in Allrightnick and a victim of tuberculosis in a consumptionick. Judging by the above and number of comments garnered, the claims and counter-claims (the truth is probably somewhere in between) are a good illustration of the phenomenon called Cunningham’s Law. The idiom‘s nick is an archery term and referring to the nock or notch of a bow that holds the bowstring.

point danger

Erected on the headland marking the boundary between New South Wales and Queensland near Coolangatta and Tweed Heads and inaugurated on this day in 1971 to commemorate the bicentenary of Captain Cook’s first voyage along this part of the Australian Gold Coast, the original source of the lighthouse’s signal being a laser-beam as part of an experimental approach to develop more efficient warning beacons. The technology however did not work according to plan and the lighthouse was retrofitted with a traditional light source in 1975. 

 

 

family office

Via Kottke, we are directed to this endearing and expect homage to the vision of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi in the form of this landing page that’s a business card of a business incubator that speaks to its philosophy and unique approach to innovation not to mention a captivating scroll-through with 8-bit dinosaurs, weather and witches.