Via Mx Tynehorne’s Cabinet of Curiosities (previously), we found ourselves drawn into a web of unsolved, enduring mysteries, fringe and pseudoscience theories, cryptozoology, and urban, internet legends with this extensive and growing list of obscure phenomena from Iceberg Charts. Of course the trajectory from hesitancy, to skepticism to contrarian and conspiratorial thinking can be a slippery slope and most of the cited examples are tempered with a dose of rebuttal and academic remediation and many catalogued are harmless fun. Among the newer links, we found an enticing selection of alternative histories (see previously) plus a new one in the form of the Roman Senate’s capital condemnation of a poet, grammarian and plebeian tribune of the Late Republic called Quintus Valerius Soranus. A contemporary and correspondent of Cicero and credited with the intention of the reading aid in the form of a table of contents, Soranus was put to death by crucifixion under the dictatorship of Sulla for ostensibly, publicly revealing the arcane and sacred name of Rome. Though unclear the manner of the publication, perhaps in a poem’s acrostic—or whether this was a political pretext to rid themselves of a troublesome colleague—such evocatio was considered a grave taboo and never mentioned outside of exclusive, secret ceremonies as divulging the name was calling forth the civic, tutelary deity, which if known by Rome’s enemies could cause the protector god to abandon and defect. No one knows if the city truly had such a classified name or what it was—possibly after the elder goddess called Angeron—and the popular but possibly creatively incorrect that it was what Rome spelt backwards spelt was inspired by a dual temple built by Hadrian to the city and Venus with altars back to back and hence the ROMA-AMOR inversion.
Tuesday 7 May 2024
Friday 26 April 2024
8x8 (11. 514)
flightline: stunning visualisations of air traffic
splinternet: ByteDance does not plan to divest itself of TikTok following US ultimatum
megadeath: modelling the destruction caused by a nuclear bomb on a major citymtv buzz: a surreal montage of audio and video clips arranged by Mark Pellington (1990)
celebrity endorsement: musicians, artists and novelist pose with the Sears’ appliances in this 1969 ad campaign for Kenmore—see also
undiscovery: the Map Men chart phantom islands—including some that have made it into the era of Google Maps—see previously
22,5 light hours: engineers debug a forty-seven year old computer remotely from twenty-four billion kilometres away to revive the data stream from Voyager I—see previously
embarking: a luxury airline that caters to canines above their human companions
one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting
two years ago: dismantling Soviet-era monuments
three years ago: more links to enjoy plus a special issue of LIFE magazine
four years ago: fantasy urban map generators, more links worth the revisit plus geopolitical optics
five years ago: an elegant and modern personal seal, even more links plus a Victoria houseplant
Sunday 7 April 2024
7x7 (11. 474)
my dad is dracula (and a very good dog): the funny webcomic by Jason Poland—via Miss Cellania
good night george: a last nostalgic look the Glasgow hotel featured in Trainspotting, Taggart and with other cameos in television and film—via Nag on the Lake
volcanic vortex rings: Mount Etna is sending out smoke signals, a phenomenon never before documented on filmpenny hike: instructions to create a lodestone for mindful, distraction-free wandering, using AI, to return you to where you started—via Web Curios—it has a certain resonance but I’ll give you a magic pebble to keep in your pocket so you don’t get too lost
spyware: the secret weapons of Cold War espionage
carmel-by-the-sea: a historic hotel known as the birthplace of the Apple Macintosh restored
bug bytes: US government created comic books to fight disinformation and increase media literacy fall rather flat of their goals appealing to old tropes—via Hyperallergic
Wednesday 27 March 2024
the usual suspects (11. 452)
After years of obscuring police line-ups in creative and comical (to some) fashions, one department will comply with a request from a toy company to respectfully stop using its image to hide the faces of potential law-breakers in its social media posts. Certain authorities had been in the habit of protecting the identity of suspects for non-violent crimes in case they were exonerated and not to expose them to public shaming—the stocks—but all began to comply once legislation was passed to protect the identities of all until proven guilty. We’re not sure why such a blotter needed to be circulated in the first place, unless looking for more witnesses or issuing an all points bulletin. Mugshots are also removed after a fortnight. In any case, no more minifigs.
one year ago: The Leopard (1963) plus Everything is a Remix
two years ago: Starlight Express plus Let America Be America Again
three years ago: a cargo freighter blocks the Suez Canal, Moby Dick by Matt Kish, statehood for Washington, DC plus the Tenerife Airport Disaster (1977)
four years ago: the etymology of a snack cracker, Typhoid Mary, vintage bathrooms, an Oscar boycott (1973) plus job losses soar due to the pandemic
five years ago: Japan becomes less vegetarian (1872), driving home through the Rhรถn plus The Disorder of Things
Thursday 21 March 2024
eo 9835 (11. 439)
Also knowns as the “Loyalty Order” and instituted to combat supposed communist infiltration in the echelons of the federal government, the executive order was issued by US president Harry S Truman on this day, primarily in response to criticism that the Democrat administration had been too lax about suppressing Soviet influence, fuelled by ongoing investigations by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although Truman hoped that this move might placate his dissenters, it quickly snowballed, leading to the creation of the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organisations and a sweeping FBI inquiry of all three million federal employees—three hundred were ultimately dismissed as security liabilities—warranting further research if the subject was disposed to disloyalty in the form of sabotage, espionage, treason, sedition or advocacy thereof. The order was ultimately revoked in stages by Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and repealed entirely under Bill Clinton in 1988, eliminating fealty in favour of allegiance, which had become entrenched as discriminatory hiring policies that barred gay individuals from foreign service positions and that required that gay charitable and educational organisations applying for a tax exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service publicly disclaim that homosexuality was a “sickness, disturbance or a diseased pathology.”
catagories: ⚖️, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ณ️๐, ๐ฅธ
Monday 18 March 2024
7x7 (11. 435)
deadwooding: Banksy acknowledges authorship of a new mural bringing back some greenery to an aggressive prune tree in Finsbury Park
subspace: an ultra high-definition video of a cat chasing a laser-pointer was beamed over thirty million kilometres to improve future video calls to the Moon and Marsrunning-stitch: beautiful embroidered portraits from Karola Pezarro
deadspin: more on the internet’s undead, reanimated by private equity and name recognition—see previously, see more
bunga bunga: Italy’s Foreign Press Association to move into former home of Silvio Berlusconi, who famously disparaged reporters as Communists
honeytrap: Aphra Behn’s intersecting careers as a professional writer and spy
sequoiadendron giganteum: imported by the Victorians as status symbols, Giant Redwoods (see also) are thriving in the UK at more than half-a-million and growing
Sunday 17 March 2024
you sad pocketbook of polluted purulence (11. 431)
Via Nag on the Lake’s always excellent Sunday Links, we are directed to a handy password generator created and coded by Ron Hardin that generates randomised phrases in the form of rather arch insults, which satisfies the hallmarks behind this top layer of security by being hard to guess, not readily susceptible to a brute-force attack and deliciously memorable, mostly alliterative, adhering to the techniques of champion memorisers. Especially if it’s work-related, it’s cathartic to hurl such aspersions into the void even if it is only for one’s benefit, aghast and empowerment—and are probably as secure as any alternative. See what scornful phrases you can come up with, you dear old harrowing can of cantankerous claptrap.
Friday 15 March 2024
6x6 (11. 422)
sfx: more mind-blowing short videos from OpenAI’s Sora—see previously
outstanding in the field: highlights from the annual British Wildlife Photo
negative pressure ventilator: an obituary for author, lawyer and polio survivor who used an iron lung for seven decades
getty images: foundation and museum has made over eighty thousand artworks and artefacts from its collect available to the public
free drawing: lessons in illustration from 1925 by Franz ฤiลพek and Hermann Kastner bytedance: users react to app’s uncertain future in the US
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links to revisit
two years ago: another MST3K classic, a Roman holiday plus the Doomsday Clock
three years ago: the Ides of March, the Feast of the Holy Lance, more links to enjoy plus a lost and found project
four years ago: the Osaka World’s Fair Expo (1970), a Roman Star Trek episode, disease vectors, antique bills of sale, some blasphemous graffiti plus Scotland’s new bank notes
five years ago: a non-gendered digital assistant, xenophobic dogma, unblurring photos, college admission and privilege plus more links worth the revisit
Tuesday 12 March 2024
███████ ██ ████████ (11. 417)
In collaboration with the Electronic Free Foundation, Muckrock (previously) has just announced its annual Foilies award winners, recognising the most egregious instances of US government violating the precept of the public record. Ahead of their also recurring Sunshine Week to champion the importance of transparency and access, this tenth iteration really featured some strong resistance to FOIA requests, doubly depressing considering the death of local journalism and advocacy outlets, flouting disclosure requirements of the law. From attempt to tag a cache of email correspondence with the label “NO FOIA” in hopes to keep fraud from the public eye or attempts to reveal corruption and mismanagement met with ingratitude to zealous librarians checking out books themselves to keep them out of circulation while bans for certain literary works were still pending court challenges and politicians trying to keep secret their travel expenses. These achievements, both large and small, have impact, and are not bailiwick of lawyers and reporters, only requiring determination. Learn more at the link above.
Monday 11 March 2024
000_34L82nw britain-royals (11. 415)
Whilst speculation about the whereabouts and fate of Kate Middleton not seen in public since a Christmas engagement has run rampant, with alleged sightings in the unlikeliest of places including the Wonka Experience, a family photograph posted on Mothering Sunday has backfired and done little to quiet the rumours after the wire-services issued a mandatory kill-notice to remove the image released by Kensington Palace due to an editorial issue and possible manipulation. The Princess of Wales later admitted to doing the touch-up work herself and apologised for the lightly edited portrait taken (see also) by the prince for causing such controversy and at a time when all the principal royals are out of the picture and not performing public duties, it only fuels conjecture, sometimes to wild conclusions.
Sunday 3 March 2024
penrose tiles (11. 398)
Given the potential, inevitably of quantum computing to break even the hardest encryption and pose an existential threat to the digital framework of privacy and security that we’ve become accustomed to, a possible reprieve in the form of aperiodic tiling is welcome news. Rather than focus on the symmetrical and repeating approaches to tiling a surface, polymath and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose and others began to study inflation and deflation of imperfect coverage in the 1970s, and anticipating the models of quantum computing, physical qubits and the superimposed virtual states, the never-repeating mosaics are not in themselves a place to hide information but a check-digit redundancy to ensure calculations stay on course. Given the nature of quantum mechanics—measuring the in-between state, neither zero or one and both, will cause the value to collapse, making the circuitry a rather delicate and unreliable thing and could lead to a more robust and internally consistent way for encoding and encryption as we know it. More at the links above.
Friday 1 March 2024
8x8 (11. 392)
unauthorised avatar: Ukrainian individual discovers her likeness from her self-help videos have been cloned to sell Russian goods, friendship with China
criterion collection: a curated series of great moments from the film company’s archive of Closet Picks
il galateo, overo de’ costumi: the age of impoliteness—an influential sixteenth century Venetian treatise of delicacy and mannersthe weeknd stroke psa: a song parody about signs and symptoms of a cerebrovascular incident
@smalin: graphic artist Stephen Manlinowski creates beautifully animated classical and jazz score—via Web Curios
the hero’s journey: “the chosen one,” coming of age narratives of Dune, Star Wars, Harry Potter are mostly about adolescent boys coming to grips with their sexuality—via tmn
dark currents: a 1992 public access occult soap opera from Marrawamkeag, Maine inspired by Dark Shadows, Twin Peaks
thimblerig: internet retailer’s financial shell game and predatory pricing enabled it to create an untenable monopoly not thought sustainable
Saturday 24 February 2024
back-end analytics (11. 377)
Though tacking the prefix smart on appliances and/or connecting them to the internet of things has a mixed record and has raised many alarms over privacy concerns, this scandal revealed by a glitch in a vending machine, one of an array of banks of automats installed at the University of Waterloo in Ontario really illustrates how—as with contracts for delivery robots surveilling other campuses to collect dragnet data in jurisdictions with less stringent protections—innovation is just a cheap veneer for marketing and demographic stockpiling. No one was expecting, much less consented to, being subject to a facial recognition programme when it came to this transaction. The smart snack dispensers are being replaced with more traditional and less sinister ones, hopefully something more tried-and-true that take coins and display their selection behind glass, rather than on screen.
Tuesday 20 February 2024
10x10 (11. 365)
royal mews: King Charles’ one of a kind electric Jaguar up for auction—via Miss Cellania
ppe: the portable nuclear bomb shield, patented by Harold Tiff
got clearance clarence: after embarrassing blunder over bad travel advice, Air Canada advocates personhood (and limited liability) for its chatbot customer representative
1776 days: Julian Assange’s long detention and fight against rendition to the US for Wikileaks
tigers blood: new singles from Waxahatchee
daddy daughter day: breakdancing, bitcoin father revealed as a veteran of member of the Christian Coalition and conservative speech writer
the second in line: Swedish illustrator Mattias Adolfsson—via Messy Nessy Chic
body armour: Casimir Zeglen, the priest who invented the bulletproof vest
motorcade: Joe Biden’s Cadillac sedan for sale—via tmn
synchronoptica
one year ago: artist creates a prosthetic extra digit plus assorted links to revisit
two years ago: more links to enjoy, the subterrene (1972) plus The Shape of Things to Come (1936)
three years ago: introducing the Jeep (1941), a Nyan Cat NFT plus a suite of Japanese pictograms
four years ago: more mass-transit upholstery, RIP Larry Gordon Tesler who invested copy-and-paste, superannuated map styles, the possible extradition of Julian Assange plus the new US ambassador to Germany
five years ago: all the presidents’ meals, a secret meeting between industrialists and the Nazi government (1933), more links worth the revisit, the US emergency broadcast system (1971), vintages mazes plus the bokeh technique
Wednesday 14 February 2024
9x9 (11. 351)
planisphere: explore the fifteenth century Mappa Mundi—made by a Venetian cartographer and monk map who never left the lagoon
high rollers: the character and history of burlesque showsrobots.txt: a tiny text file that has been the underpinnings of the internet is unravelling due to AI
a load-bearing day: the confluence of several celebrations, including Ash Wednesday (be furiousing rather than fasting), Valentine’s and the Luni-Solar New Year
my unfortunate incarceration: the abundant prison-tech alliance is a brutal harbinger of what’s to come
bulletisation: the functional literacy crisis in reading comprehension—via the morning news
service sector: some large companies requiring AI-informed personality tests for vacancy applicants
disco vicar: some Anglican churches and cathedrals opening for parties
news deserts: explore local journalism and those newsrooms hanging on—via Maps Mania
Sunday 11 February 2024
callsign (11. 345)
Via the always excellent Maps Mania, we are referred to the rather infamous interactive flight tracker from Jack Sweeney that amalgamates real-time, crowd-sourced transponder data that follows commercial and
controversially the flight-plans of private jets belonging to well-known figures, the open-source forum used by other aggregators to publicise and monitor the itineraries and environmental footprint of celebrities who would rather their outsized impact, hypocrisy and whereabouts to be known. Some believe that keeping tabs on soi-disant free-speech champion Elon Musk motivated him to purchase Twitter and try to silence his critics. Taylor Swift also recently expressed feeling her privacy and security violated by Sweeney’s site—but in response sold one of her private aircraft, possibly for an upgrade. We were surprised to see the quite a number of smaller, non-commercial flights over our airspace. More at the links above.
8x8 (11. 343)
๐ถ: a Good Internet cross-posting of Good Music, featuring a mix of tracks from Wilco, Kim Gordon, the Beths and many more
nato backstab: in a Drudge Report style headline, the Huffington Post reports Trump at a campaign event that he might encourage Russia to attack ‘deadbeat’ alliesinternal monologue: philosophers explore new field of the inner voice at the intersection of psychiatry
compliance moats: anti-anti-monopolists and data-brokers wrangle over regulation
story-walk: using olfaction with narrative to simulate reflection and retention
certificate of honourable discharge: explore the best-preserved Roman military diploma (constitutio) in a new 3D exhibit
grand bargain: US Supreme Court seems poised to keep Trump on state ballots but deny him blanket immunity
i’m only sleeping: a Grammy winning painted music video of the Revolver track from Em Cooper
Thursday 18 January 2024
7x7 (11. 278)
you are not a product: the demise of the social network Ello’s ambitions
right: US to UK export Word of the Year—see previouslymystic pizza: a new popular regional style from the US state of Connecticut
arbustum: ancient Roman wine-growing techniques and forest agriculture may help battle modern climate change
sora-q: Japanese space agency is poised to land a transforming robot on the Moon
gloogo: a lexicon of words that don’t exist yet but should (see also) from Burgess Unabridged—the source of the term blurb
๐: time spent pausing is a worthwhile pursuit—see also on the fermata
Wednesday 20 December 2023
7x7 (11. 199)
dongmei zone: seven months interred in a online scam labour camp—via Waxy
santa claus go straight to the ghetto: David Byrne shares his Christmas playlist
napolรฉon vu par abel gance: a 1927 ingenious, panoramic adaptation of the historical figurelocal inference: when AI assistants leave the cloud and haunt one’s laptop, all bets are going out the window—via Good Internet
autogamy: evolutionary changes in wild pansies suggest that the flowers have given up on increasingly rare insects and are turning to self-pollination, a vicious cycle for the whole ecosystem
tom & jerry: the typology of North American eggnog cartons—via Kottke
jewel streets: a twelve-block neighbourhood known as the Hole of New York City neglected and forgotten for decades
Tuesday 19 December 2023
in the stacks (11. 195)
Whilst the institution remains open to the public and its collection of manuscripts and rare books remain securely archived and conserved, the total collapse of the British Library’s digital infrastructure that made its entire catalogue freely accessible to all worldwide following a malicious cyberattack on Halloween is almost as grave as loosing the originals. A ransomware gang, auctioning off personal data of patrons and staff alike, has rendered its services largely unavailable even for those readers and scholars geographically close enough to visit in person and makes potential and present patrons reflect on nature of this sort of institution and how theft of connection is as bad as theft or destruction of knowledge itself.
synchronoptica
one year ago: A Christmas Carol plus assorted links to revisit
two years ago: celebrating two decades of The Lord of the Rings, a literary clock plus more links to enjoy
three years ago: Dalรญ holiday cards, more links worth revisiting plus an angel on Mars
four years ago: Trump impeached, Clinton impeached (1998) plus map haikus
five years ago: even more links, French carols, sonic shades plus Trump withdraws from Syria
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ฅธ, libraries and museums