The latter of two sets of interstellar radio missives were beamed out to the Cosmos on this day in 2003 from the RT-70 (Radio Telescope with an aerial antenna with a seventy metre diameter and former Soviet Centre for Deep Space Communications) located in Yevpatoria, Crimea. This iteration and the first message sent in 1999 follow the same bitmap structure and include the Dutil-Dumas primer about mathematics, universal constants, chemical elements and physics plus the Arecibo Messages, the Braastad Message (to illustrate concepts of family and procreation, similar to the plaque on Pioneer) and contributions from the staff and public. Transmitted at four hundred bits per second, the message was beamed out over the span of eleven hours and targeted five diverse stars with known exoplanets, with the first arrival date of April 2036 at Gliese 49 ฮฒ, a superearth orbiting a red dwarf star.
Wednesday 6 July 2022
Monday 4 July 2022
♉︎ ⍺
First observed by sky-watchers in China on this day in 1054 (such temporary spectres were called generically “guest stars” ๅฎขๆ) and visible, easily to amateur astronomers to this day as the stellar remnant known as the Crab Nebula Supernova (SN) 1054 is perhaps one of the best known examples, though it’s nature and origin were unknown until very recently. Anticipating the return of Halley’s Comet in 1758 (see also), Charles Messier confused the static plerion for the returning traveller and was motivated by his mistake to create a catalogue of the celestial sphere, with the Crab Nebula labeled as the first Messier object, M1.
Thursday 30 June 2022
๊ฆ
Co-founded by Stephen Hawking, Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May and other former astronauts and technologists with the sanction of the United Nations, International Asteroid Day is an annual observance meant to promote awareness about the minor planets of the inner Solar System and the threats that these near-Earth objects can pose for cataclysm and ways to mitigate the vulnerability through close monitoring. 30 June was chosen as the date as it marks the anniversary of the 1908 Tunguska Event in the Eastern Siberia Taiga, an estimated twelve megaton explosion that flattened two thousand square kilometers of forest caused by the air burst of a meteoroid, devastating for local wildlife but spared greater catastrophe by dint of the region being sparsely populated by humans.
Monday 27 June 2022
opticon scillometer
The first series of the science fiction genre to air on US television networks and running for nearly six years thanks to commercial sponsors and merchandising, Captain Video and His Video Rangers debuted on DuMont Television on this day in 1949. Receiving orders from the Commissioner of Public Safety, the rangers—operating from a terrestrial mountain-top base and defended peace and order on Earth as well as distant human colonies around other stars. The move off-world was prompted by learning that ABC was producing a series based on Buck Rogers, little did the television executives know that that show would be short-lived. Despite its popularity, originally airing Monday through Saturday, it was beset with budget and continuity problems for its entire run, often filling time on this rather fraught shooting schedule, the Video Ranger Communications Officer would show clips of cowboy movies from the Ancient West as training material, “undercover agents,” with little other explanation for padding the episodes. The entire network folded shortly after the series finished, Dumont regarded as the forgotten channel, most of its catalogue lost though the rare recording has been preserved.
Saturday 18 June 2022
sunshade
Rather than pursue possibly risky and irreversible terrestrial geoengineering that might further ravage habitats and exacerbate the collapse of biomes, via TMN we learn that a group of researchers from MIT are hoping to create a thin film of deflective materials (easily deployable and reversible), like a parasol for our planet, that by just lessening the solar radiation that reaches us by two percent could give us the needed reprieve (in combination with efforts on other fronts, including serious lifestyle adjustments) to clean up our act. More on MIT’s Senseable City Lab’s Space Bubble project at the link above.
Friday 27 May 2022
8x8
city in a bottle: a bit of micro-coding from Frank Force (previously) decoded—via Waxy
kr: the Icelandic Graphic Design Association (FรT, Fรฉlag รญslenskra teiknara) issues a challenge to come up with a glyph for their krรณna
nรฉcessaire: a French borrowing—see also—for kit and carryenough: TIME magazine’s cover lists the two-hundred thirteen US cities that have had mass-shootings this year, so far
social sentinel: a look at the dubious pre-crime predictive software that ill-serves society and the reliance on tech to come to the rescue in general
party line: last bank of public phones removed from New York City—see also here, here, here and here
swiss miss: Tina Roth Eisenberg celebrates her seventeenth blogoversary tesserae: MIT Lab develops autonomous modular tiles to create structures and habitats in space
Thursday 26 May 2022
8x8
nebeskรฝ most 721: a walkway spanning two peaks in in eastern Bohemia
shunpikes: byways constructed to bypass toll roads, like spite houses
i guess i have to put your flat feet on the ground: astronaut Sally Ride (*1951)
imagen: Google tool turns input text to images—see previously
security detail: firearms off-limits during Trump’s speech to the National Rifle Association Leadership Forum—via Boing Boing
fahrenheit 451: Margaret Atwood’s fire-resistant edition of The Handmaid’s Tale—see previously
liminal places: a portrait of the Estonian border town of Narva on the frontier of the EU and NATO and the Russian Federation
Friday 20 May 2022
6x6
from juno to jupiter: famed composer who championed the synthesizer Vangelis passed away, aged 79
of angel and puppet: an exploration of innocence through the finger puppets of Paul Klee—see previouslythe pรบca of ennistymon: a sculpture of a mythological chimera almost gets cancelled
fern gully: spelunkers in China discover a massive ancient forest in a sinkhole
capable of completing the kessel run in less than twelve parsecs: the Millennium Falcon was the last ship build at the Royal Pembroke Dockyard
v’ger: Voyager 1 beaming back usual telemetry to mission control—via Boing Boing
Sunday 15 May 2022
orbital mechanics
Enunciated for the first time the following year after some concerted fact-checking and re-taking measurements since the outcome seemed to elegant to be true, Johannes Kepler discovered the last of his three laws of planetary motion on this day in 1618, capturing the relationship between the distance of a astronomical body from its host star and the time it takes to complete a trip around it: that is, the value of the cube of the semi-major axis divided by the square of a planet’s orbital period is a constant—for our solar system. The publication was also delayed due to rather laborious attempts to reconcile his formula with the theory of the music of the spheres (see here and also above), thus making this third discovery known as the harmonic law.
Friday 13 May 2022
6x6
sagittarius a*: the Event Horizon Telescope captures images of the Milky Way’s Black Hole—previously
sluggo: “Music from Nancy”—via Waxyclick-wheel: with the announcement that the last iteration of the iPod is being discontinued after two decades (see also), enjoy this first commercial advertisement
anamorphic camouflage illusion: the Phantom Queen optical effect
รผbersetzer: Google Translate adds languages using Zero-Shot Machine Translation, now facilitating communication among one hundred and thirty-three different languages
white dwarf: astronomers witness a nova in real time
Monday 9 May 2022
orbital resonance
Though the Octave of Easter refers to a specific eight-day celebration in connect to the Paschaltide, our
word week itself (via the German Woche) derives from the same root as octave and that one out-of-cycle unit of time—that is, seemingly the sequence repeated for countless generations not determined by the motion of the Heavens or our perception of them but nonetheless in most Western and Eastern traditions named for the astronomical objects visible to the unaided eye. The ordering does not accord with the classical model of the Cosmos—the “Chaldean order” that describes the apparent overtaking and retrograde motion relative to the Earth—nor hierarchy of the pantheon, however, but rather the seven strings of the Mesopotamian lyre with which the celestial spheres were thought to harmonise: (4) Sunday ☉, (1) Monday ☽, (5) Tuesday ♂ (Mardi in French), (2) Wednesday ☿ (Mercoledรฌ), (6) Thursday ♃ (Donnerstag), (3) Friday ♀ (Venres) and (7) Saturday ♄. Vexed somewhat by the onerous and complicated Roman subdivision of the days and the planetary officer appointed to each hours, the order of the weekdays seemingly recapitulates musical theory and progression through the major scale. More at the links above and in this video adaptation below from Sara de Rose.Sunday 8 May 2022
himmelsscheibe
Friday 6 May 2022
7x7
⚠️: a pictogramatical survey of caution wet floor signs—via Pasa Bon!
load-bearing bifurcation: engineers incorporate sturdy, often-discarded tree forks in construction
thameside tv: clips from London’s first pirate station—see alsono tofu: the Noto typeface (previously) a suite of emoji
unit patch: the more inscrutable badges of the US Space Force—see previously
pocket mac: the process of designing a fake vintage product
☿: Unicode Consortium’s growing list of astronomical glyphs, magical charms
Sunday 1 May 2022
7x7
chairportrait: thirty iconic designer styles of seating depicted minimally by Federico Babina
der pate technos: a celebration of the career and legacy of Klaus Schulze (RIP)
recursive: vending machine gachapon—see previously
the wretched, bloody and usurping boar: architecture and monumental authoritarianism in places like the Battersea Power Station—via Things Magazine with more on the property
reverspective: the illusory paintings of Patrick Hughes
eye-chart: JWST is now fully-focussed and calibrated and primed for new discoveries (previously)
lookbook: a collection of sculptural furnishings that match their residence
Friday 29 April 2022
otherworldly
Perfectly embodying the above phrase, the Martian helicopter Ingenuity on a recent survey flight found and documented the wreckage of the landing gear, parachute and buffering shell of the rover Perseverance. Click to enlarge plus more at the link above. The photographs and telemetry will inform future missions on how to best protect payloads and optimise equipment.
Saturday 23 April 2022
8x8
song birds: a printed circuit bluejay and other avian friends
industrials: a leitmotif of edifying vocabulary—see previously—from Futility Closet
occultation: Perseverance rover captures Mars’ lumpy moon Phobos partially eclipsing the Sun
infinite tapestry: a generated side-scrolling landscape—via Web Curios
days of rage: a gallery of activism posters curated by the USC Library system—see previously—via ibฤซdem
art bits: an archives of HyperCard stacks (see also)—via Waxy
ghost in the shell: skeletons in video games
cheeps and peeps: the rich, melodic syntax of birdsong
Sunday 17 April 2022
unbound hyperbolic orbit
Via Slashdot and a tranche of documents declassified by the US Space Command (previously) learn that one of Earth’s first encounters with an interstellar interloper happened fully three years prior to ‘Oumuamua with the explosive impact of a meteor strike that disintegrated in the Pacific off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The high speed (about sixty kilometres per second) and usual trajectory of the object place its origins outside of the Solar System. Confirmation was initially stymied due to data partially coming from a then-classified satellite that monitored for ballistic launches, but now confident of the object’s provenance, a mission to the bottom of the ocean is being entertained to search for fragments.
Friday 1 April 2022
cosmic call
First spotted by Damn Interesting’s Curated Links, Scientific American reports that as the fiftieth anniversary of the Arecibo Message approaches researchers at the FAST radio telescope and affiliates at SETI and METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence because no one wants to answer their phone apparently) have devised a new bit-mapped series of missives to put out to the Cosmos. The sample image illustrates prime numbers and binary and decimal notation and is one of several (whilst debate continues if it is wise to advertise our presence and level of technologic competence) to be bundled along with the components of DNA, particle physics and human physiology, like this iconic message in a bottle.
7x7
health officials warn of “second wave” of immersive van gogh exhibitions: symptoms to be on the look out for include a flattening of the artist’s legacy and an intense desire to watch Emily in Paris
a book by its cover: the absurdist collages of Paperback Paradise
match game: flawless digital recreations of classic TV game show sets
111 west 57th street: super tall, slender residential tower tapering from Steinway Hall is an homage to the piano-maker
earendel: the Hubble space telescope images the oldest, most distant star
old dutch master: a series of fifteenth century Flemish style portraits recreated in an airport lavatory—see also—via Things Magazine
achieve hover status—everyone else will want to hover but can’t: an AI (see previously) comes up with pranks to play on the user
Saturday 19 March 2022
6x6
unit patches: an assortment of mission badges from the US Space Force—see also here and here
redacted: Sunshine Week and the least forthcoming US government agencies
ambassador, the thane of cawdor / dialect so def, it’ll rip up the floor: notes on rap and language
album amicorum: revisiting the seventh century friend book, das Groรe Stammbuch, of diplomat and influencer Philipp Hainhoferuncle vanya’s: after mass exodus of Western companies, Russia seems poised to appropriate and nationalise franchises