countdown (11. 150)

In anticipation of Advent, our trusted AI-wrangler Janelle Shane (see previously) has created their own interactive calendar with the help (or hinderance) of the latest iteration of ChatGPT integrated with the image-creator DALL ᐧ E. Having no luck getting it to follow labelling instructions in the usual format, Shane took the alternate tactic of asking for seasonal items captioned as for language learners and compiled those uncannily close or far off, Hot Choclate, Hoy Choclæ, Gingerboman and Ice Smat—verging towards even weirder territory when asked to generate a whole holiday spread around the hearth, which prompted me to request a Nativity Scene (on the older, free version) with some rather glitchy outcomes.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: the first modern ban on capital punishment, assorted links worth the revisit plus AI poetry

two years ago: a historic public health mission 

three years ago: another MST3K classic short, more links to enjoy, a nuisance filing, weasel words plus a troupe of abstract dancers

four years ago: the hallowed ground of native Los Angeles plus the Feast of St Andrew

five years ago: Datarama, stupendous pipe organs plus pictures of an empty laundromat

32/40 b (11. 148)

Commemorated since 1978 on the anniversary of the passage of the United Nations resolution 181 on the partition of Mandatory Palestine, which proposed the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states with a special, international regime governing the city of Jerusalem, the UN-organised observance, a day of solidarity, calls for immediate steps to be taken to grant the Palestinian people full sovereignty and independence. The declaration also established a commission to study The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem to couch regional conflict and contemporary violence and displacement in terms of historical perspectives and past miscalculation and transgression.

oh no—my own dog, gone commercial (11. 137)

Via Waxy, we are directed to another soundtrack from Louie Zong (see previously) for a fictional albeit believable 1970s style Peanuts holiday special complete with Vince Guaraldi inspired jazz that captures the ethos not only for the shoppers but those working on Black Friday. Other musical segments include Cyber Monday Blues, Buyer’s Remorse, A New Week and Snoopy vs Capitalism. One could imagine the anti-consumerism messages of the limned out television special plus the harried cashiers and store workers just out the frame speaking with muffled trombone voices.

al 288-1 (11. 135)

Found on this day in 1974 in the Awash Valley near Hardar, Ethiopia by a team of paleoanthropologists led by Donald Johnson, the collection of fossilised bones making up about forty percent of a female Australoptithecus is commonly known as Lucy—after the Beatles’ song played repeatedly during the excavation—or by her Amharic designation ድንቅ ነሽ (Dink’inesh, you are marvellous). Hers and early less complete finds suggested that hominid bipedalism preceded and informed the increase in cranial capacity and intelligence. Falling on the anniversary of the initial publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, the three-million year old specimen, diminutive by today’s standards, quickly became a celebrity, captivating public interest in evolution, missing-links with the account of her discovery and reconstruction.

kid, have you rehabilitated yourself (11. 133)

Courtesy of Open Culture, we are treated to an animated version of Arlo Guthrie’s counter-culture Thanksgiving tradition—the talking blues spoken-word track for his eponymous 1967 album, a lightly embellished account of the artist’s arrest for littering, illegal dumping, a run-in with the law that jeopardised his suitability for the draft for the Vietnam War, the record protesting US involvement in the conflict. Alice Brock, the titular hostess, bailed Guthrie and his co-accomplice out of jail. Despite violent content and outdated, objectionable language bordering on slurs, no radio station observing the tradition of airing it on the holiday, no fine has ever been issued by the American Federal Communications Commission and with subsequent performances, the artist has changed a few lyrics and lines and inserted some topical asides. The arresting authority, William J “Officer Obei” Obanhein, whom became a life-long friend with Guthrie after the song was released, was a model for Norman Rockwell (previously) appearing as a police figure in his depiction of the inauguration of John F Kennedy and schools de-segregation but not, despite popular and fitting misconceptions, The Runaway, which featured another state trooper at Joe’s Diner in a neighbouring village.

the war to end all wars

Reflecting on the holiness of Armistice Day when God spoke clearly to mankind, perhaps for the last time, during the silence observed in the name of peace, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr reflected on its becoming a modern American holiday how the latter is sacred but “Veterans’ Day is not… I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance—and all music is,” we too take umbrage with how a commemoration of loss and laying down arms became to some a celebration of the warrior and his errant adventures. We appreciated this touching memorial on Remembrance Sunday of those fallen in the East London district of Spitalfields. It’s a moving tribute with short biographies, a map of where they lived and images of the doorways and thresholds that they passed under. More at Spitalfields Life from the Gentle Author.

wait a second (11. 096)

Whilst the leap second (previously), by dint of their frequent insertion, can cause havoc for computer systems, meant to compensate for the drift between the drift between official Earth time and variations in the planet’s orbit around the Sun, the suggestion for their replacement with a higher order of magnitude every half-century by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) by a Leap Minute has been met with opposition. The Russian delegation, according to the Bureau international des poids et mesures, is opposed as its satellite global positioning system, GLONASS, competing with the US-standard GPS won’t be fully synchronised until 2040 as well as the Vatican, which has concerned itself with accuracy in time-keeping since its inception and the advent of the Gregorian Calendar, as well as the technology community, citing the annoyance of these drills (the difference between Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time), a longer gap in resetting the clocks could result could result in a lapsed skill set and the subsequent experiential debt could lead to short-sighted problems that contributed to the y2k problem.

the murmur of the snarkmatrix (11. 092)

In honour of the collective’s twentieth anniversary, Kottke has declared today Snarkmarket Day—actually the quietly influential, occasional blog that’s not been so active in the past few years (I can relate) is pretty thoughtful and reflective and not particularly snarky—and is turning over the reins to members and guest hosts Tim Carmody, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson for an indulgent cast back to earlier days of the blogosphere and think about how online interactions have changed in the past two decades. Much more at the links above including some pieces I can remember from over the years and a prescient 2010 coinage about generative chat called the “speakularity.”

synchronoptica

one year ago: another classic from Enya, Saint Hubertus plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: a classification of creatives, another MST3K classic plus more links to enjoy

three years ago: the November Revolution that led to the formation of the Weimar Republic plus Carrie (1976)

four years ago: a pervasive number from Rusted Root, more awful library books plus an embarassment of social media platforms

five years ago: Nixon’s Silent Majority plus a trip through the Rhön

thrifty business (11. 086)

First observed on this day in 1925 as the result of an initiative of the First International Savings Bank Congress (see also)—a summit of some three hundred fifty delegates from twenty-seven countries held in Milan—held the year prior, World Savings Day was promoted as not just an occasion to encourage home economics but to promote financial literacy. While the original motivation came in response to the end of World War I and has always emphasised education, the perceived over-commercialisation of the holiday has been subject to criticism for inculcating young people as early and loyal clients (traditionally accounts opened at this time, shifted according when and where the date fell on a bank holiday, included calendars as giveaways and other enticements) and bundling the cause with other premiums, like insurance and investment instruments. 

 

 synchronoptica

one year ago: St Quintinus

two years ago: suffrage in Switzerland, a Brazilian monopod, dancing security dogs, assorted links to revisit plus Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses

three years ago: a collection of strange classical music compositions, Frestonia, police propaganda plus more links to enjoy

four years ago: Halloween greetings, a collection of metro logos, a Cornish holiday, the Speaker of the House steps down plus the Trump impeachment

five years ago: more of the season’s salutations, an October Surprise plus the March of Folly

mol (11. 071)

As the unit of measurement for the amount of substance—proportional to the elementary entities (atoms, molecules, ions or other particles) within a volume, a way of bundling masses of into a magnitude of quantity after the conventions of a teaspoon, a dozen, a baker’s dozen or a gross so that chemical reactions, scientists can accurately express the concentration—recipe—of reactants. Despite the different natures, a mole of water (a chemical compound) and a mole of mercury (an element) have the same number of discrete particles in them—which is Avogadros’ Number, 6,022 ｘ 10²³ mol, six hundred two sextillion, two hundred quintillion. It’s useful to have such a normalising proxy for grasping the number of atoms in a given object. Enthusiasts and educators celebrate Mole Day on this day (US calendar conventions) from 06:02 in the morning until two after six in the evening as a way to drum up interest in chemistry and scientific literacy.

synchronoptica

one year ago: visiting Crete 

two years ago: your daily demon: Sabnok plus assorted links to revisit

three years ago: circuit judge Roy Cohn, a pretend Communist coup, more links to enjoy, the beginning of the world plus an appreciation of the colour russet

four years ago: more links worth revisiting plus more on the far future night sky

five years ago: the canals of Mars, swing sixties cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers, the first Russian rapper plus noteworthy files from the US National Records Archive

the poor fellow-soldiers of christ and of the temple of solomon (11. 056)

Whilst endorsed by the papacy as the favoured charitable organisation within Christendom and Instrumental in the early successes of the Crusades, subsequent failures and their vast holdings and wealth derived from an early banking service began to curry jealousy and mistrust for the Knights Templar particularly by those secular leaders indebted to them. Leveraging rumours about the order’s initiation ceremony and secretive rites, King Philip IV of France (heavily in hock) issued an arrest warrant on this day in 1307—also a Friday giving rise to the popular superstition though not the origin of it—for Grand Master Jacques de Molay and hundreds of other members. Pressuring Pope Clement V in Avignon to ascent to the mass incarceration and trial by torture, the summons opened with the words «Dieu n’est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume» (God is not pleased—we have enemies of the faith in the kingdom), they were summarily charged with fraud idolatry, blasphemy and homosexual practises, which bore substantial similarities to accusations levied against other persecuted groups including Jewish communities and independent women often labeled witches and which carried little supporting evidence. Under duress, several confessed that they did indeed commit such acts and worshipped a mummified head that they called Baphomet taken from the Temple Mount, which was officially passed off as the recovered relic of John the Baptist. Burned at the stake in Paris, their lands and wealth were confiscated by the state with the pope assigning their role to the successor group the Knights Hospitallers.

9x9 (11. 055)

the witch of positano: a portrait of Bohemian original Vali Myers who inspired Tennessee Williams and danced for Donovan’s signature song, charging one Nubian goat for her performance  

hotel california: legacy luxury in Kabul now jointly run by the Taliban and their quiet dissenters—via Web Curios  

the mysterious land of the grimaults: another look at The Saga of the Viking Women and their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent  

the rest vs the west: proven tech ventures that rival occidental offerings 

my coffee with niles: a meta episode of Frasier remade in the style of one hundred thirty animators and filmmakers  

watermeal: world’s smallest flowering plant could play an outsized role in interplanetary exploration  

don’t crash the pips: the Canadian Broadcasting Company discontinues the long dash time signal—see also  

unauthorised build: this “illegal” LEGO construction bends conventions  

nightclub school: The New Romantics and 80s youth subculture  

synchronoptica

one year ago: another MST3K classic,  the world’s first personal data protection law plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: your daily demon: Focalor, The Style Council plus a psychedelic design collective

three years ago: a fashion show with puppets plus Witchtok community doing the Lord’s Work

four years ago: the introduction of the Ampelmännchen (1961), more links to revisit plus more mushroom finds

five years ago: democracy by lottery, vintage Sainsbury’s packaging plus a music video from Bob Sinclar

méthode polonaise (11. 054)

Pedagogue and prominent adherent of Transcendentalism, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody founded the first kindergarten in the United States, and a vocal advocate that play over rote memorisation ought to be privileged in education and introduced many new ideas into the standard curriculum and public discourse, including the rights and roles of women in society and especially noted for the so called Polish System of Antoni Jażwiński popularised by engineer General Józef Bem. This grid system with a prescribed colour and symbol key to follow that although forgotten in modern teaching but very much en vogue for a time across Europe by allowing students to visualise and intuit the assigned chronology, as with parallel methods (see also) of making historical events readily approachable, optically, using their eyes and homework as “feeders to the reservoir of the mind.” These centographs were coded in a similar fashion to flow charts to indicate conflicts, conquests, conspiracies, unions and truces to make otherwise inaccessible historical events (beyond the grasp of living memory) a creative exercise in plotting and more conducive to learning. More from Futility Closet at the link up top.

the great debate (11. 041)

Via Slashdot, we are directed towards the centenary of when astronomer Edwin Hubble imaged a cepheid variable star (not a nova, N) in the constellation of Andromeda and ultimately settled the above, long-standing cosmological quandary concerning whether the Universe consisted of more than our own Milky Way, greatly expanding our horizons and astronomical perspective in demonstrating that the object heretofore regarded as a nebula and stellar nursery was a complete galaxy similar to our own some two-hundred fifty million light years distant. Sponsored by the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the debate held on on 26 April 1920 pitted astronomers Harlow Shapley, who maintained that the spiral nebulae observed were within the confines of our galaxy, against Heber Curtis who argued that they were independent galactic structures (“island universes,” as Immanuel Kant proposed in 1755 but never accepted by the scientific community due to the scales involved), very large and far, far away. A decade later, Hubble would go on to demonstrate that the apparently static Universe was in fact expanding.

hot labor summer (10. 983)

Amid ongoing strike actions by the Hollywood Writers’ Guild and pushes to unionise workers for increased leverage in bargaining with big manufacturers and retailers and the growing precarity of news outlets, this round-up and review on the US observance of Labor Day (see previously here and here) presents both hopeful and fraught factors for the movement’s reception and success. While a strong jobs market and with historically low unemployment has advantaged many workers in many industries and has momentum, changing paradigms, which companies can cite with varying levels of credulity, like generative content, cloning (the last time actors in 1960 joined the writers, a six-week stoppage awarded creators residuals from re-runs and syndication) as well as shifting to less labour-intensive manufacturing techniques—electric vehicles take few machinists to build and maintain, signalling major changes in productivity and the makeup of the workforce. While many in the US give vocal support to the ideal of unions, only ten percent of workers belong to one and the US Supreme Court has issued recent decisions that erode the right of workers to strike when negotiations, stalled and forced into a stalemate by business executives sold on technological utopias that have failed in many cases to materialise. The empires of off-license lodgings, gastronomy and taxi cabs haven’t translated to savings for consumers and are either petty kingdoms or indentured servitude for providers and streaming is just as expensive, exclusive, walled-off as cable or the studio-system. This changing posture of course has global implications and could further undermine workers’ rights.

678 heartbreak (10. 959)

In the tradition of this literary clock by Johannes Enevoldsen and other fun ways of expressing data-sets, Pudding project contributor Russell Samora has created this time-keeping device that scours catalogues of songs to find tracks containing the hour and minute in the title. It’s rather incredible how many there are to pick from though not every minute of the day is covered (filled in with a random tune) and how certain times (not the above though I thought it would be on the playlist) have an abundance of choices.

wattstax (10. 953)

The name a play on the Woodstock festival, the benefit concert to commemorate the seventh anniversary 1965 Watts Riots and help the community and organised by Stax Records with all the label’s biggest stars took place in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on this day in 1972, selected for coinciding with the thirtieth birthday of major talent Isaac Hayes. Spanning the musical genres of soul, funk, blues and jazz and included sets by Kim Weston, The Staple Singers, Eddie Floyd, Rufus Thomas, Ernie Hines, Hayes and The Bar-Kays. Invocation and various speeches were given by civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Tickets priced at a suggested donation of one dollar so everyone could attend, the festival was filmed by David Lloyd Wolper (the producer by the television mini-series Roots, North and South, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 LA Olympics) and released the following year to high acclaim.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a visit to a potash mine

two years ago: Davy Jones & The Lower Third (1965), more miniatures from Tatsuya Tanaka plus links worth revisiting

three years ago: more words of Shakespearian coinage, quality control officers, the August Coup in Russia (1991) plus the ravens of the Tower of London miss the tourists

four years ago: a classic from Miles Davis (1959), a disembodied hand dominates the skyline in Wellington plus the plague of e-scooters

five years ago: dawn in the woods, the logos of Paul Rand, an on-screen marriage ceremony that may have been legally binding, winning-streaks plus Soviets crush reform attempts in Czechoslovakia (1968)

reach out, touch faith (10. 950)

Via the ever-excellent Web Curios, we are directed towards an onslaught of AI applications and burgeoning projects including this “divine connection” in one’s pocket (see also) replete with testimonials and the disclaimer that “this app is a tool for reflection and learning, not a replacement for prayer or personal faith” offering a lifeline to the Great Come-Again Christ. This opportunity is coming as some are calling Jesus’ approach too woke and subversively suspect, and recalls an epilogue from a rather incongruous work seminar that I attended ages ago about “Living in the New Normal” which concluded that rather the inevitability of inventing God that maybe we as a society become worthy and create one, though probably not to be parsed as the canonical one. In addition to Jesus which certainly draws from rubric, premium subscribers can also choose other biblical personalities as interlocutors including members of the Holy Family like Mary or foster-father Joseph, who was admittedly kind of long-suffering save for the bit about siring the royal houses of Europe through Jesus’ half-siblings, and didn’t seem to have a lot of wisdom to dispense outside of carpentry, plus the Apostles including Judas and select figure from the Old Testament 🙏

 synchronoptica

one year ago: St Helen,  a 1922 gliding competition plus a bubble-wrap instrument

two years ago: your daily demon: Forneus, disfluent fonts, culture wars at school board meetings, School House Rock! maths shorts, more phonetic spelling proposals plus Mid-Century Lithuanian illustrators

three years ago: Roman emperors reconstructed with AI, Michelle Obama at the DNC, Women’s Suffrage in the US (1920), a new American Gothic, constructed languages, aesthetic data visualisations plus Hamlet variations

four years ago: canons for spawning fish,  more odonymy, more McMansions, a visual vernacular in architectural element plus the Lost of Colony of Roanoke

five years ago: a mid-70s vision of future space stations, an Icelandic word for a break from the heat, Wikipedia’s gift shop, making frozen treats heat resilient plus an early AI image maker

spotlit (10. 947)

Stan Carey of Sentence First introduces us to a special, exclusive—exhaustive class of English language action words called variable verbs through entertainment industry term and derivatives greenlight, figuratively giving the authority or permission to go ahead with a project dating back at least to the late 1930s, which subjected to a meta-study of corpora seems to prefer the past tense of -lit despite the general decline in favour of -lighted since the 1950s. It makes me wonder about similar lingo like the above, limelight or gaslit—which seems wrong in the mouth except for describing a stove—and reminds me of the strange code-switching that occurs in phrase “googled” something in other languages. We especially liked the contradistinction as illustrated by one commenter who may have “moonlighted on a moonlit night” but never vice-versa.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: an ABBA classic plus the first trans-Atlantic telegram (1858)

two years ago: a 1979 classic from The Knack, the fall of Kabul, an audio sampler of metro announcements plus the majik art of Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel

three years ago: revisiting the Australian wildfires from the start of 2020, a very young Freddy Mercury, the art of Chase Middleton, St Roch, Flip the Frog and Mortimer Mouse (1930) plus more vagabond maps

four years ago: Trump tries to purchase Greenland, an online museum of various platforms’ first versions, the 1619 Project plus maps commissioned by colonisers of the New World made by native peoples

five years ago: the photography of Christy Lee Rogers, the Law of Jante, US Midterms plus RIP Aretha Franklin

happy blogoversary to us—we are fifteen (10. 943)

As PfRC turns fifteen we wanted to once again extend our thanks and gratitude to our readership and to the members of the wider blogosphere (listed under our Smøgåsblog) for their sustainment and inspiration that keeps the internet curious, entertaining, engrossing and engaging.  

Since hitting our last milestone, here’s a roundup of some of our most popular posts with a few honourable mentions:

10. A post on the New York premier of Stravinsky’s Firebird with Marie Tallchief  

9. A growing collection of bad book covers

8. The oldest formal data protection law from the State of Hessen, promulgated in 1970

7. a city map generator with a nice aesthetic

6. the graphic design of Joe and Elinor Selame

5. Street photographer Harold Feinstein

 4. The tyranny of time

3. an AI presents the most popular Halloween candy for each US state

2. an unusual beach house in Baja California

1. The celebration of the Discovery of the True Cross

Honourable mentions go to a claymation short expressing evolving human conscious, a scopitone classic and pie charts to dissect our anxieties

Wishing you all the best for the balance of the year and don’t be a stranger!

synchronoptica

one year ago: our blogging birthday, another Roman holiday, assorted links to revisit plus private equity

two years ago: our thirteenth blogoversary, Nixon takes the US off of the gold standard (1971), the Eternal Word Television Network (1980) plus a modern Euclidean proof

three years ago: high-brow toilet humour,  PfRC turns twelve, more gachapon machines plus a new logo for the beleaguered US postal service

four years ago: Woodstock (1969), a US seafood franchise, our blogging birthday, more on what3words, Japan surrenders (1945) plus the Kölner Dom

five years ago: we turn ten, composer Lalo Schifrin, an architect experiments with public versus private space, plocka uppa plus imagining written English were spoken phonetically