latino sine flexione (13. 876)

Though best known for his contribution to mathematical logic and set theory, standardising the axioms deductive structure for natural numbers, Sardinian professor and glottologist (one who studies how languages evolve and change over time) Giuseppe Peano was also an advocate for international auxiliary languages, like Esperanto and Volapük, and even invented one of his own. Recognising that Latin was already esteemed as the lingua franca among certain communities, Peano pared down the declinations and inflections as much as possible to simplify its grammar whilst retaining its familiar vocabulary. Starting in 1903, Latino minimo was a gradual process and whilst disfavoured by purists and others in Interlingua circles promoting their own conlangs, with only Peano and a few colleagues publishing in simplified Latin, as recently as 2017, Latino sine flexione applied for inclusion under the International Organisation for Standardisation to be assigned the language code ISO 639-2. More from Futility Closet at the link up topp.

brewster’s billions (13. 869)

Neal Agarwal (previously) invites us to spend an outrageous fortune to better get our heads around the idea of how much a trillion of anything is—like the adage about the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars being about a billion dollars. Through big ticket item purchases, sports stadia, luxury yachts (1000x), fast food franchises and too many hamburgers—funnily enough the “Big Mac Index” is no longer a reliable economic indicator and following Jeff Bezos’ recent comments rejecting the idea that no one could become a billionaire without exploiting workers or resorting to monopsony or buying senators saying that many burger joints have expanded from a single restaurant to a worldwide enterprise by offering products and services genuinely valued by customers. We especially liked how we couldn’t donate to charitable causes or cleaning up the environment—we think Elon would have wanted it that way. This latest game was sponsored by Wired! Magazine which has a companion article with write up here.

synchronoptica

one year ago: peaceful protests against ICE agents in Portland (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: punting along the Wolblitz (with synchronopticæ) 

three years ago: assorted links to revisit, an archaeological discovery in Naples plus a station wagon camper

four years ago: more links to enjoy, World Postal Day plus to slander one’s good reputation

five years ago: even more links, happy birthday John Lennon, Karl-Marx-Stadt, drag queen tarot plus a visit to the Osterburg

six years ago: The Watcher in the Woods, more Phantom plus more links worth revisiting

seven years ago: major military exercise in Germany planned by US forces plus other European trade colonies in China

eight years ago: Trump’s legacy of failed businesses, more on the fight to save an ancient woodland plus moving Tokyo’s historic fish market

 

convenient numbers (13. 845)

Though seemingly never harmonising further in terms of paper-size, machined components, etc, the US alcohol industry did switch to the international standard of preferred metric units on this day in 1976, adopting six bottle styles to replace the thirty-eight existing ones for more efficient manufacture, storage and shipping.  

The fifth (⅕ of an American gallon, which whilst based on the British “wine gallon” confusion arose after the War of Independence when the US did not adopt the larger Imperial Gallon and containers reputed to hold ¼ of a gallon, approximately a litre were deemed short-quarts) was replaced by the seven hundred fifty millilitre bottle, the standard capacity for wine bottles worldwide and informally referred to as a metric fifth (only a one percent less volume), a handle (a half gallon) became one and three-fourths a litre. Saloons were allowed to continue to serve shots and “reputed pints,” and this move towards metrication, the US bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in coordination with the Distilled Spirits council of the United States—the only real push towards standardisation that ever occurred, allowed for a four year transition period in bottle production, adding to the chaos.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: the US federal government shuts down plus a trip to Haut-Kœnigsbourg and Kaysersberg (with syncronoptica)

two years ago: digital divinity, ghost-writing, ambient music from a surveillance system plus up-selling

three years ago: more sketching prompts for Inktober, advice columnist Claire Rayner plus the Congress of Vienna (1814)

four years ago:  The New People (1969), discovering a devilish beach house, presenting the public face of generative text-to-image technology plus disco Star Wars

 

five years ago: Botober sketch prompts, assorted links to revisit, irregular verbs, CAT scans (1971), synthetic dyes plus Night of the Living Dead (1968)

 

six years ago: more links to enjoy plus an in depth look at Albrecht Dürer’s self-portrait

 

seven years ago: Denmark recognises same-sex marriages (1989) plus Swedish sea-fortresses recommissioned

eight years ago: passive cooling, Bohemian Rhapsody in the style of Gershwin, Trump lampooned in Beirut plus documenting London’s poor

 

strange attractors (13. 763)

Taking for granted our notional grasp of chaos theory and what underpins it, we were grateful to Quantum of Sollazzo for disabusing us with this thoroughgoing essay on the Butterfly Effect and its associations with mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. The kernel of the concept came to Lorenz one evening when he decided to repeat a computations of a weather forecast in order to see what was happening in greater detail, but missed some significant digits of the input due to the variable being cut off after the thousandths place—the original calculation used a more precise number. The output of the first and second run started out virtually identical but as time progressed began to deviate wildly with a very different end result. At first believing there to be a problem with the computer, Lorenz checked the maths and determined what he was observing—that the rounding errors were steadily amplifying until dominating the solution, a measurable equation for anecdotal philosophy and thought-problems of ripple effect. On his lecture circuit, Lorenz routine shared this story with his audience, eventually incorporating a remark from a colleague that one flap of a seagull’s wings could alter the course of weather forever, and speaking a decade later on the same topic of deterministic nonperiodic flow in 1972, co-presenters suggested to title his talk “Does a the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?,” prompting the scientist to replace his mascot with a more poetic one, also fitting neatly with Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” in which a time-traveller irrevocably alters the future by accidentally mashing a butterfly in the distant past. Those bounces double.  There are limits to predictability, measurement and knowledge of initial conditions that cannot necessarily be unwound or rewound in the real world—and the verdict is still out on the veracity of the analogy, Lorenz actually proposing that “If a flap of a butterfly’s wing can be instrumental in generating a tornado, it can equally be well instrumental in preventing one”—and whilst one cannot replay an event with changed parameters, the waft of a wing, the forensics of following the long-tail of a historic incident or accident can be as compelling, particularly with the privilege of hindsight and the view from a hundred storeys up. Several pivotal accounts of tracking down those connections, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet duty officer who averted World War III, are indexed to the attempt to model chaos.

synchronoptica 

one year ago: Latin neologisms from the Vatican (with synchronoptica) plus the Japanese art of candy making 

two years ago: Howard Hughes’ private streaming service plus Putin in Mongolia 

three years ago: animator Jiří Barta plus a banger from Survivor

four years ago: a visit to the Saalfeld Fairy Grotto 

five years ago: Smooth Operator (1984), assorted links worth revisiting, Gumbasia (1955), the Quadripartite Agreement for post war Germany, another Watergate break-in, applied fungi plus thirty-plus years of Ukrainian independence

six years ago: war correspondent Marguerite Higgins Hall, a glimpse of the upcoming US election plus more links to enjoy

9x9 (13. 759)

it-narratives: the imagined inner lives of inanimate objects  

inwats: the history and use-case of the 1-800 number  

du big bang à mardi matin: Claude Cloutier’s overview of the evolution of life on Earth in his signature animation style reminiscent of aquatint printing  

shadowology: more art installations from Vincent Bal—see previously  

the decade you’ve been waiting for: Paste magazine’s contention top hundred songs of the 80s—via MetaFilter, see previously  

after the fire: Los Angeles residents moving entire homes to burnt out, vacant lots as a cheaper alternative to rebuilding 

it’s fantastic! it’s futuristic! it’s fatalistic! it’s science fiction: a 1973 BBC Omnibus documentary by Harley Cokeliss  

escape claudes: two chatbots placed in a recursive loop—see previously 

hack’s law: the hidden maths of rivers that calm the waters—via Kottke

synchronoptica

one year ago: a visit to Geraberg (with synchronoptica), woodblock printer Sekino Jun’ichirō plus the branding of the US Civil Defence Corps

two years ago: a pivotal moment in the Star Trek timeline, aspiring travel-writers, assorted links worth revisiting, a trip to Schwickershausen plus the largest aerospace exhibition 

three years ago: ten-thousand digits, danger signs, the Goring Gap plus more links to enjoy

four years ago: a banger from Tina Turner plus legibility and semi-vowels

five years ago: an attempt was made with AI for a mash-up, the Carrington Event (1859), the Cod Wars (1958) even more links plus reskilling as a swan

six years ago: a Banksy-sponsored rescue boat, Church rejects modernism plus saints named Hyacinth 

🥁 (13. 695)

Web Curios directs our attention to an engrossing tool that explores planar percussion, allowing one to experiment with different drums and hear and explore the sonic output in great detail. With Eigendrum (see also) can also outline their own drum and listen to the acoustics, no matter how implausible, with visualisations of the reverb and fade and mallet. The intersection of maths and music, the sound of a standing wave across a bounded surface is −∇²u = λu, u being the edge where it zeroes out and lambda wave length. Most planes however are eigenvalues and do not follow the formula and must be solved numerically, scaled by inputs—in the case of one’s own creations. Bang a gong and do let us know what you discover.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Milgram experiments (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links to enjoy 

two years ago: retroactive statehood for Ohio 

three years ago: an atlas of the internet, then and now 

four years ago: Come on Eileen 

five years ago: St Donatus, letters from space, dazzle camouflage for cars, mysterious emojis plus husband-and-wife trees

six years ago: getting rid of the rum-ration plus wine windows

9x9 (13. 655)

all the queens houses: the eclectic architectural vernacular that makes up the New York City’s most diverse borough  

everything counts in large amounts: the moral imperative to understand big numbers, however unimaginable—via Kottke   

incendie de forêt: over a quarter million residents in France and Spain are evacuated from encroaching wildfires  

question de forme: the geometric animation of René Jodoin—see also, see previously

concurso de belleza: Trump cites his beauty pageant credentials to claim to be the competent authority when Venezuela is ready for elections  

plotlines: charting the journey of the protagonist in select classic novels with period maps—via Language Hat 

devil dog: Poseidon’s Underworld (previously) reviews the 1978 made-for-television star-studded spectacular about a satanic litter  

interstitial: Western science seems to recognise the meridians and subtle body of acupuncture and Ayurvedic traditions with a popular article on human anatomy’s third circulatory system  

cornell, 1965: filmmaker Lawrence Jordan’s 1978 profile of peer and colleague Joseph Cornell of Utopia Parkway, Flushing Queens

ear-shot (13. 652)

Just when we thought we had exhausted the quirky and confusing subject of courtesy and conventional measurements (see previously), we discover the mil (via Futility Closet) which was used as a common unit of distance among the countries of Scandinavia. Ultimately derived from the same Roman source as the mile (mille passus, a thousand paces), it is now standardised as ten kilometres—the same as the obsolete myriametre (ten-thousand metres) once used in France with the inception of the metric system, and likewise is only used in informal contexts with no representation on maps or traffic signs, though still used colloquially and by Swedish tax authorities for calculating deductions for business travel and as the usual way to measure fuel consumption and efficiency, litres per mil, but historically varied widely by local surveying. In its final form, the Danish mil was reckoned as just over seven and a half kilometres as the equivalent of four minutes of latitude though a lot of regional variations persisted through the nineteenth century and endure in common parlance, halvmil being a widely used term for five kilometres, from skogsmil or rast, a Forest Mile or the distance that traveller on foot would be able to cover between breaks, like a league representing the pace of the average gait in the course of a hour. Synchronised along with the rest of the adoption of SI units ultimately, the Finnish, Suomi native term for mil, peninkulma, originally closer to those neighbouring shorter conventions between four and seven kilometres away came from how far removed one could hear a dog’s bark.

tenty-wise (13. 599)

Originating in Teutonic lands and referred to as hund or hundreð, the long hundred represents the quantity of 120. A hybrid of both Germanic and Romance influence, English eventually added the qualifier long to distinguish it from their short hundred and historic manuscripts and accounting records often include marginalia glosses to distinguish numbers meant to be understood as decimal rather than dozenal or base twelve—Et quolibet c. continet vi. xx., Each such ‘hundred’ contains six score.  Due to extensive trade networks, England maintained these competing units (see previously), with a hundred kippers (though not herring) to be one hundred twenty fish, a hundred of linen cloth being hundred twenty ells of fabric. The convention is preserved today with the measure of dry goods as the hundredweight (also known as the quintal (for five twenties and abbreviated cwt), in Canada and the US as one hundred pounds (forty five kilograms) and in the imperial customary system as eight stone (one hundred twelve pounds—the long hundred was also called the twelfty, fifty kilograms), with both systems reckoning a ton as twenty hundredweight and necessitating the need to differentiate between a long and short ton—see above. In North America, this metric is used for blacksmiths’ anvils and for stock trade in paper, livestock and some cereal grains and seed oils. In the metric system, a quintal, hardly ever used as a unit of mass (q), is equivalent to one hundred kilograms, the obsolete measure defined in a decree issued 13 Brumaire, IX (4 November 1800) but never included as part of the IS weights and measures. The Zentner (derived from the Latin centrum) as a measure of mass in the German Sprachraum—exported abroad with beer brewing—was the back translation of one hundred Pfund, presently settled on fifty kilos, approximately one hundred ten pounds, with a Pfund informally used to ask for five hundred grams.

9x9 (13. 539)

criterion collection: a roundup of dirigible-themed movies, featuring, among others, Fay Wray and Ronald Reagan as secret agent Brass Bancroft  

the camelot of africa: a tour Ethiopia’s Gondar castles 

binomial coefficients: some numbers in Pascal’s triangle make very few cameos and no one is sure why  

lost world: museum docent Louis Gratacap pioneered the genre—see previously  

fast-track enlargement: talks begin for EU accession for Ukraine and Moldova  

ger:gre: Monty Python’s Ancients v Moderns football match  

planetary-mass companion: the famous Pink Planet may be a failed binary star system  

a tisket, a tasket: an update on the headquarters building of Longaberger baskets—see previously  

sac pour mal de l’air: a collection of air sickness bags from a variety of airlines

four colour theorem (13. 538)

The heretofore unverified but practically applied in cartography conjecture that no more than four colours are needed to distinguish bordering regions on a map was announced as proven on this day in 1976 after more than century since it was first proposed by two mathematicians at the the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Not feasible to perform the brute calculation by hand, this topology problem (see previously) was solved with the aid of a supercomputer, the first instance of a technical assist for a math problem, the claim rejected by some peers at the time because they couldn’t check the work.

synchronoptica

one year ago: arriving in Morbihan (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: Putin and Kim hold a summit, the premiere of Evita plus the estate of Jim Henson selling off its Hollywood lot

three years ago: California v Miller plus assorted links worth the revisit

four years ago: pioneering parachutist Tiny Broadwick (1913), Texas v Johnson plus more links to enjoy

five years ago: the Stonehenge Free Festival (1974), the introduction of the LP record (1948) plus Return to Oz (1985) 

six years ago: a CNN competitor (1982), EU proposes a digital services tax, remixing the Bayeux tapestry, setting the record straight, AI-generated perfumes plus Internation Yoga Day

date::italy (13. 467)

Via Quantum of Sollazo, we enjoyed this addendum (see previously) to close gaps in historical records between New Style and Old Style and calibrate, synchronise dates matched to when different regions adopted the Gregorian calendar, a switch very unevenly distributed. Whilst most retroactive record keeping has a certain degree of tolerance for approximation, the advent of Julian days, a cyclical count whose current epoch started at noon, New Year’s Day 4713 BCE, a event unrecorded by any contemporary chroniclers we assume, with the alignment of the twenty eight year solar cycle, the nineteen year lunar cycle and the fifteen year indication cycle of Roman tax re-assessments, imposting, used until the Renaissance to date documents. The title function adjusts the day count to reflect when Catholic Europe had taken up the new standard, with England and its colonies changing over later, to convert from the civil calendar, the non-Julian Day date to a universal, effectively linear one—like the latter secular innovation of a star date, though the useful fiction has no consistent reckoning. Just one year after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar, in order to synchronise events not only with the Protestant world but also to bring Persian and Egyptian history into the fold, chronologically underrepresented, Franco-Italian Calvinist polymath Josephus Justus Scaliger (confusingly known as Giuseppe Giusto de la Scala outside of Anglophone circles) advocated for the date count, divorced from reign or religion and predating any written historic records, now some six thousand years hence, also confusingly not named for the just deposed calendar calendar nor its namesake but rather in honour of his father, fellow scholar Julius Caesar Scaliger, whom was christened after the first Roman emperor.

radio bubble (13. 449)

Via tmn, we enjoyed contemplating how much we’ve contributed to the cosmic conversation with the ever expanding shell of signals, every form of broadcast communication that has escaped the ionosphere and into the void of space. Though only a few missives were intentional and the vast scale of galaxy means that despite the impressive sounding volume of the bubble, two-hundred and forty light years across (the radius cubed of radio history multiplied by π times four-thirds, dating back to Marconi’s experiments at the turn of the last century, beamed out at the speed of light) only covers a vanishing small fraction of our own galactic local neighbourhood, still the silence (see above) is humbling and lonely. Our vision far outpaces our voice.  More from the Scientific Drop at the link above.

gestalt (13. 431)

Via Clive Thompson’s latest linkfest (lots more to discover there), we discover this catalogue of scores of visual phenomena and optical illusions catalogued and indexed by one Michael Bach, polymath and ophthalmologist. Each entry includes details about the provenance and with an explanation of what’s going on perception-wise, including how to unsee it—see also. Furthermore, unlike this sample GIF of Roget’s Palisade, the illusion first described by the author of the eponymous thesaurus though his take on the mechanism behind the illusion does not quite fit with the current understanding of what’s classed as the rolling shutter effect, the animations that Bach has created can be paused, the colours denuded and sped up or slowed down. Let us know your favourites and what you find most befuddling.

8x8 (13. 417)

little green men: pivoting to priorities, US Department of War’s latest tranche of declassified files on UAPs—via Maps Mania  

4½ to fish 7: humanity’s obsession with large numbers 

hide the pain harold: Sweden state broadcaster found András István Arató, the retired electrician whose stock photo is behind the meme, celebrating the Saturday’s inauguration of Péter Magyar as prime minister in the streets of Budapest  

a comparison using like or as: a meta-analysis of similes from popular fiction—via Nag on the Lake 

d-line: after a century of delays, Los Angeles metro Wilshire Boulevard extension opens   

frictionless transactions: an AI agent pickpocketed $200k from a crypto-wallet with Morse code  

ultrafinitism: an exploration of what can be gained by rejecting the concept of the infinity—via Web Curios 

this way up: an appreciation of the cartographical studies of the Map Men

azimuth (13. 369)

Tip of the hat to Language Hat for bringing resolution to an ongoing investigation to discover the meaning and inclusion of a puzzling glyph on the Unicode block of Miscellaneous Technical symbols, U+237C, called Angzarr (⍼), and not the logogram for the character who left his race of Muggles to do wizarding in the 1984 fantasy series by author Nancy K Stouffer whom JK Rowling allegedly plagiarised from. After nearly four years of research, Johnathan Chan discovers that the character represents azimuth (اَلسُّمُوت, the directions) the vector from the observer to target or point of interest, used for star charts, navigation, cartographical projections and in ballistics. The symbol itself seems to represent the way a beam of light passes through a sextant to measure an angle.

oilfield units (13. 341)

Somewhat preoccupied with the engineering diglossia of customary and scientific units of measurement (see previously here, here and here)—no longer encountered pervasively as the UK have given up the Imperial system almost in totality (with a few outliers like fuel efficiency is still expressed in miles per gallon), we really enjoyed this rant about drilling a borehole of Babel over the petrodollar and US-imposed standards and conversions, courtesy of MetaFilter, which whilst maddening don’t lead to catastrophic miscalculations on a regular basis—punished for our own ambition and avarice with a confusion of the tongues in the form of ten thousand different metrics whose meaning can vary a lot in a discipline where precision counts. A barrel of crude is, incidentally, abbreviated BBL, after the blue barrels that Standard Oil adopted as its standard, with a volume of forty-two American gallons (approximately one hundred and fifty nine litres or thirty five Imperial gallons at standard temperature and pressure), with a thousand barrels not enumerated as KBBL (further Simpsons references below) but rather Mbbl (from the Roman mille) and a million barrels as MMbbl then returning to Greek prefixes for a billion barrels with giga- in Gbbl. In contrast, a barrel of beer is thirty six Imperial gallons or half a hogshead and the wine industry also has its own standards, though most of the world has adopted DIN of the Euro Keg of fifty litres. As for density, it is confusingly measured in MW, not megawattage but “mud weight,” pounds per gallon or pound cubic feet.  More insanity, pidgin and jargon to follow.  

một trăm (13. 331)

Via Laughing Squid, we are directed to this rather lit rap video from language teacher Levion that teaches one how to count to one hundred in Vietnamese following in the tradition of Multiplication Rock and others that reenforces learning through a catchy format. The teacher also uses the technique for teaching colours and the days of the week. This is really rapid-fire but in the cadence one can pick up of the patterns and conventions of the numbers (see previously). More straightforward in terms of forming the base, there are historically two sets of numerals, native Vietnamese used here and the version most used for everyday accounting purposes and another of Sino-Vietnamese influence generally only used for fixed expressions and very large numbers, like Latin and Greek prefixes in English. Arabic numerals and Roman script (chữ Quốc ngữ) supplanted Chinese characters during the era of French Indochina.

jazzy spies (13. 295)

Also known by the above for the closing undercover lineup, the Jazz Number series was a collaboration between Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick,whom provided the vocals after her then husband, Jerry Slick of San Francisco animation studio Imagination, Inc, was commissioned to produce the segments for the new Children’s Television Workshop show Sesame Street. Slick’s team of animators were also behind the noonee, noonee typewriter guy and this upbeat psychedelic interstitial certainly belongs on the pantheon of nostalgia along with the pinball count and Multiplication Rock! More from Open Culture at the link up top.

cipheritis (13. 203)

An alleged mental disorder, reportedly diagnosed by German physicians, though with no clinical description and a paucity of case studies, zero stroke dysfunction was experienced by patients during the period of hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic (see previously here and here) with otherwise well-balanced individuals compelled to write out unending strings of zeros (see also here and here, also called ciphers after the Arabic root) as a coping mechanism for the rapid and exponential increasing of prices and depreciation of paper marks when the buying-power of one’s wages became essentially worthless by the end of one’s shift. Most common among those working in finance, accounting and sales, sufferers also had a tendency to retreat into complicated mental computations whose solutions were logarithmically fleeting.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a catalogue of historic dice and card games (with synchronopticæ) plus Germany votes

twelve years ago: more secession sessions, Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes plus more on the mysterious Voynich manuscript

thirteen years ago: external threats, UK creditworthiness downgraded plus grammar and financial readiness

fourteen years ago: au revoir mademoiselle plus reforming the German welfare system

fifteen years ago: budget crunch in Wisconsin 

sixteen years ago: church elections 

seventeen years ago: ornate spam