Having come to a similar epiphany at a point in life I considered fairly late and doubting maturity—but perhaps this sort of realisation needs time to incubate and couched in inexperience—that everyone was their own hero and main character, I found this curated list of introspective descriptors (with an invitation to readers to submit their own) from Marco Giancotti to be quite resonant. Although I don’t normal think to believe that my own subjective experience to be radically different from the next individual nor informed by some prodigious synthesis of sensations and neither compensated by recently coined conscious lacunas like aphantasia, imagination without mental images or internal monologue, the notion that we’re all naked aligned with the Emperor’s New Clothes is a really fascinating and engaging notion to ponder, nomothetic, broad generalisations versus the idiographic and the idiocentric. I like to think of myself capable of imagining in all these avenues and could accept that others do not but there is a measure of scepticism for divergence from the norm. Among the shared experiences that spoke to me, was a short interview with physicist Richard Feynman, as self-diagnosed with a benevolent form of arithromania, about how people count and calculate mentally in various ways. Much more—with growing contributions at รther Mug at the link above.
Friday, 28 March 2025
quale and qualia (12. 344)
Thursday, 27 March 2025
9x9 (12. 340)
us agency for global media: Voice of America director files lawsuit over ordered closure—a federal judge issues a temporary stay
pecksniffian paragraph: Trump as a Dickens’ stock character over his sermonising on transgender military service members
entomological adultery: the 1912 Cameraman’s Revenge painstakingly animated by Wลadysลaw Starevicz
the memes have entered the chat: the internet responds to Signalgate (aka whiskeyleaks)
arts dรฉcoratifs: rediscovering Betty Joel, Britain’s forgotten maven of Art Deco design—part of a centenary celebration of the movement—see previously
the population of an old pear tree: an 1870 work by Belgian author Ernest van Bruyssel celebrating biodiversity and insect life
import/export: ahead of the planned tariff action for 2 April “Day of Liberty” Trump announces twenty-five percent duties on foreign cars and components, triggering retaliation
are you sure ms kerger—because he is red: NPR and PBS testify before congress with its federal funding at stake—see previously
synchronoptica
one year ago: anatomised police lineups (with synchronoptica), assorted links to revisit, a classic from U2 plus a Nordic Easter witch
seven years ago: the dynamic Cosmos, more links to enjoy plus Everything’s Coming Up Simpsons
eight years ago: backmasking and the Satanic panic, the show with the mouse plus the Bombay Sapphire distillery
nine years ago: Easter greetings, revisiting the Leipzig Panometer plus a canting dialect
ten years ago: Holy Blood, Holy Grail, even more links, poet Paul Verlaine plus affecting a holiday accent
Friday, 24 January 2025
12x12 (12. 179)
contraception begins at erection: Mississippi lawmaker has introduced a bill called ‘contraception begins at erection’ outlawing male masturbation, hoping to bring balance to the reproductive rights’ restriction that focus on women—via the New Shelton wet/dry
obayashi world: Japan’s most Lynchian filmmaker
so long and thanks for all the fish: Joan Ocean’s Dolphin Connection—via Web Curios
crass competing abstrusities: official, sanctioned transcription of US secretary of state Marco Rubio (้ฒๆฏๅฅฅ) changed—possibly as a way to get around the ban the Chinese government itself imposed plus other politicians’ names—see previously

she was nasty in tone, not compelling or smart: Bishop Budde won’t apologise for her appeal for mercy and hospitality
the birthright citizens’ brigade: a list of organisations pushing back against the slide to authoritarianism in the USdreiundfรผnfzig tage: how Hitler dismantled a constitution republic through constitutional means
xanthelasma: Florida man on diet of beef, cheese and sticks of butter oozes cholesterol from his skin—see also—via Miss Cellania
a catalyst for curiosity: Wikenigma documents the unexplained—via Kottke—those scientific and academic questions that evade a definitive answer, like the Collatz conjecture
you remind me of the babe: Robert Eggers to make a sequel for Labyrinth
unplanned pregnancy: as an encore to freeing all the January Sixth rioters, Trump pardons dozens of anti-abortion protesters, some jailed for violent tactics to block clinic access and intimidating doctors ahead of the Right to Life March
Tuesday, 21 January 2025
pangram (12. 170)
In recreational and trivial mathematics, a pandigital number is value that uses its digits at least once (usually without redundancy), the first of which in base ten radix is 1 023 456 789 (one billion, twenty-three million, four hundred sixty five thousand seven hundred eight nine) and chiefly have applications in fiction and commercial advertising to display a sample credit card or identification document or phone number—reserved in many cases so they are associated with any real individual. The smallest number in Roman numerals is 1444—that is, MCDXLIV. A pandigital number in base thirty-six notation (heexatrigesimal) would use all numbers and all letters—except zero. Despite their non significant nature in terms of maths, they do possess some interesting and unexpected properties, such as the zeroless palindromic pandigital number 12345678987654321 is the square of 111111111—called a repunit—that is a number with only one digit.
Saturday, 4 January 2025
pomega (12. 142)
Via Clive Thompson’s latest Link Fest, we are introduced to another chaotic twin of ฯ called ฯ—from the above script variant of pi, also called varpi—that represents the transcendental mathematical constant ratio of the perimeter to the diameter of Bernoulli’s lemniscate, analogous to the way pi defines a circle. The foci of the elliptical plane are equidistant in this figure which has applications in orbital mechanics (see previously). The curve having a shape similar to a figure 8 or the infinity symbol, ♾️, is from the Latin for something bedecked with hanging ribbons and occur in nature as often as the perfect circle. Much more from John Carlos Baez at Mathsodon at the link above.
Friday, 27 December 2024
mmxv (12. 116)
Numerically speaking, the coming year has some compelling arithmetic properties—albeit some are classified as amusing puzzlers without mathematical significance, though nonetheless worthy of exploration—foremostly being that it is a square that remains square if all its digits are incremented: itself a square (45²), the sum of three squares (5² + 20² + 40²) and the product of two squares (5² x 9²), the sum of a 9x9 multiplication table, and split as (20 + 25)² = 2025. Moreover by both American and European calendar conventions (because of the communicative property of addition) 24 July is a Pythagorean Day, with 24² + 7² = 25², like the last one on 16 December 2020. More from Futility Closet at the link above.
Friday, 29 November 2024
the thirteenth floor (12. 042)
Although acquainted somewhat with taboo numbers and avoidance of certain addresses, I hadn’t seen it in practice—admittedly applying my own form of lore and arithromania to disbursements when paying bills and try to have a figure four in there albeit mindful that auspicious dates, versions can deceive—and enjoyed this enlightening overview from Language Log in the form of a superstitious elevator panel, removing the fourth storeys as a homophone for death (ๆญป, sรฌ, sฤญ), or more specifically according to the Eighteen Level of Hell in Chinese mythology, as elaborated in Journey to the West, the association with the Mirror of Retribution, the literal “evil mirror platform” (ๅญฝ้ก่บ)—accounting for further omissions for those wanting to bypass the degrees of purgatory awaiting the ones dodging dharmic-for-karmic justice in this life. Much more at the links above.
Sunday, 17 November 2024
julian day zero (12. 009)
Introduced by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1957 to track the orbit of Sputnik with a thirty-six-bit mainframe, to save on memory and compute resources by expressing time-coordinates in just eighteen-bits through 7 August 2576, the Modified Julian Date system simply dispatched with the proceeding two-million four-hundred-thousand days of history from the dawn of the calendar, counting backwards and resetting the number at noon on this day in 1858, often further truncated. This was also the reference epoch (see previously) for the earliest operating systems, chosen in part as it predated most modern record keeping. Because of the continual count, it is easier for software to process the intervening time elapsed between two events for applications like calculating interest, sell-by-dates for perishable inventories, etc, in the same was computers can’t really perform mathematical operations except by matrices. The Julian Period was proposed by sixteenth century academic Joseph Justus Scaliger (a year after the unrelated calendar was replaced in most of Europe by the Gregorian one) as the sum product of three calendrical cycles that comprise the system, twenty-eight solar cycles, nineteen lunar cycles and fifteen indiction cycles (the periodic census and tax reassessment of the Roman Empire that occurred every fifteen years)—or a span of seven thousand nine hundred and eighty years, reaching back in time under the assumption that all were synchronised at the beginning of time. Scaliger calculated this to be 4713 BC, well before any events in recorded history known to him.
Saturday, 16 November 2024
bleuje (12. 005)
Our thanks to Web Curios (a lot more to explore there) for giving us the proper provenance and credit for a cache of mesmerising animated GIFs that we had saved our our sandbox with a direct link to the artist’s gallery and other projects including coding, simulations, previous collaborations and more visualisations. By Etienne Jacob, these moving, looping studies in maths and geometry are certain to soothe and inspire.
Friday, 1 November 2024
i’m feeling lucky (11. 952)
A court in Moscow has imposed a symbolic fine of ₽2 undecillion (around $20 decillion, a thirty seven digit figure that far exceeds all the money in the world but still magnitudes less than a googol) on the parent company of search engine Google and YouTube for blocking seventeen of the country’s media outlets and news channels following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, to curb the spread of disinformation and propaganda. The calculation comes from an original ruling that penalised the company with one hundred thousand roubles per day (around a thousand dollars) per plaintiff that the channels were not restored, doubling weekly—hence the exponential growth—for non-compliance. Youtube remains available within Russia though threats to ban it for not showing state-controlled broadcasts remain on the table. For its part, Alphabet is not to concerned about on going litigation.
Sunday, 20 October 2024
amidakuji (11. 918)
A way of establishing 1:1 correspondence with any number of random pairings of equal size—for instance assigning roles to actors or chores to a group of helpers—the lottery game of chance, guaranteeing equal chance and distribution is called the above in Japan (้ฟๅผฅ้็ฑค, after the aspect of the Buddha associated with discernment and perception), in Korean as Sadaritagi (์ฌ๋ค๋ฆฌํ๊ธฐ, ladder climbing) and in Chinese as Guijiaotu (้ฌผ่
ณๅ, a ghost leg diagram). Participants’ names are listed in the row above with vertical lines dropping down to an assignment directly below. Concealing the names and jobs, the lines are hashed with random horizontal detours that must be taken on to the next column until reaching the bottom. Revealing the lines to the players but still keeping the other names and jobs concealed, they choose their path downward, the permutations in the snaking path ensuring all tasks are taken—unlike with drawing lots, flipping a coin. Aside from practical applications, such lottery elements can be found in the bonus rounds in video games to randomise one’s chances of getting the best prize.
Saturday, 7 September 2024
10⁶⁰⁰ (11. 819)
Via Things Magazine (lots more to explore there), we get the chance to revisit the electromechanical rotor cipher machine, the advanced HX-63 developed by a private Swiss firm, which would prove difficult to crack even by contemporary standards and in 1952 was exponentially more secure than the CIA’s top model. Over the course of a decade, only about a dozen of the units were manufactured and though most clientele remained anonymous, the French defence ministry was one known buyer and a defence contractor found the device in a Cold War communications bunker and restored it to working order. The potential of those above undisclosed purchasers to be forces not aligned with Western interests caused the intelligence agency to intervene and not only eventually stop their sales but also to enter into a partnership with the company to produce a model with a backdoor so the CIA could decrypt any transmission. More from IEEE Spectrum at the link above including a video demonstration of the restored, uncompromised model and more on how the technology works to encode messages.
synchronoptica
one year ago: INTERPOL (1923)—with synchronoptica—plus divination through cheese
seven years ago: an appreciation of composer Edvard Grieg, a meditation on the dacha plus cabmen’s shelters
eight years ago: restoring the Houses of Parliament, the debut of Star Trek, a Buddha-inspired knitted cap plus the debut of Voyager
nine years ago: a partially submerged art installation in the Thames is a statement on climate change
ten years ago: window displays, NATO talks on the Russian invasion of Ukraine plus a visit to Bad Vilbel
Sunday, 1 September 2024
9x9 (11. 807)
city corridor: Metropolitan Museum of Art to exhibit the built and unbuilt visions of architect Paul Rudolph—see previously
move over miss marple: German television mystery series imagines what the former Chancellor is doing with her retirement
batteries not included: peruse the complete catalogues of Radio Shack produced over its six decades of business—plus this theme songmizzenmast: experimental solar sail prepares for its first voyage—see previously
a copy of a copy: AI’s synthetic data is its downfall—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links
marshmallow test: the heuristic for delayed gratification and executive functions is fraught with bias and harmful assumptions—via Hyperallergic
preowned platform: IKEA launches a second-hand marketplace to become a circular company within the decade—via Nag on the Lake
substantially worse than random chance: seemingly counterintuitive probability puzzles are perplexing social media—see previously
cerceri d’invenzione: the aesthetic and romance of imagining ruins of foregone civilisations
Thursday, 29 August 2024
8x8 (11. 799)
heatwave toolkit: applying yogurt to one’s windows to cool homes and offices
calculating empires: an exploration of the genealogy and evolution of technology and power from the fourteenth century on—via Pasa Bon!
better than binary: a look at the potential for base-three in computing applications and security—see previously
coriander, comfits, confetti: Italian cuisine, shifting tastes and etymology
campaign photo op: Trump staff had a violent altercation with Arlington National Cemetery officials—see previously
chaos rainbow: an unusual monochrome optical meteorological phenomenon over a baseball stadium
license to travel: the three thousand year history of the passport, linking bureaucracy with our hopes and aspirations
sรผรwarentechnik: Swiss researchers discover a way to produce chocolate using the whole cocoa fruit rather than discarding most of it
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica)
seven years ago: an optimised crash-test dummy, the backstory on the distracted boyfriend meme plus a villa modelled on the White House in Germany
eight years ago: moving a museum plus Calais’ Jungle encampment
nine years ago: the reproducibility crisis, more links to enjoy plus a squishy map
eleven years ago: Italian Ghostbusters
Tuesday, 13 August 2024
7x7 (11. 761)
popp horlage: the network of pneumatic clocks of fin de siรจcle Paris
just get me eight-hundred thousand votes: Elon Musk interviews Trump on X—see more
home row keys: a documentary on Mavis Beacon
porte-clรฉs: the French youth craze for key-rings
josuushi: counting-markers in the Japanese language, nuanced by rank, size and sentience—see previously, see more—via tmn
homo naledi: chance discovery reveals more branches in our family tree
death-slot: revisiting broadcast television’s dumping grounds
spear-fishing: reportedly a group of hackers with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard of Iran were able to break in to the Trump campaign’s database
us patent application 10/953212: a training regimen to harvest hyperspace energy and pass through solid items
synchronoptica
one year ago: a classic from Lynard Skynard (with synchronoptica) plus a tour through the Geratal
seven years ago: classic cartoon What on Earth?! plus diagrams of parliamentary seating
nine years ago: keeping stashed cash safe
ten years ago: Mexico ends state oil monopoly plus more humanitarian airstrikes
eleven years ago: histomaps plus ages of the US Founding Fathers
Wednesday, 31 July 2024
chiliad (11. 735)
Via Curious Notions, we learn the above term from the Ancient Greek ฯแฟฮปฮนฮฌฯ for a grouping a thousand things mostly encountered in modern English in the form of chiliastic, a Christian doctrine associated with the a thousand-year period of peace and prosperity the would follow the return of Jesus or—synonymously—believe in an apocalyptic millennium. Used generally to denote large in number or uncountable, it is on tenth of a myriad (M̄, the subject numeral rendered as X̄, with the largest Greek exponent M̄M̄ denoting a hundred million—see previously)), probably from the Greek word for swarming ants (ฮผฯฯฮผฮทฮพ) and both can be used as a noun or adjective (distinguished in the cases “chiliad reasons” or “a myriad of reasons”) with hyper-pedantically, as with decimate, the former citing exactly a thousand causes and the former meaning a diverse basket of them.
Tuesday, 30 July 2024
monty hall enlightenment (11. 733)
Via Quantum of Sollazzo, we are invited to revisit the sometimes fiercely and vehemently counterintuitive probability puzzle based on the TV game show Let’s Make a Deal. Though it is easy to demonstrate that one should always switch doors, have a two out three chance of winning rather than staying with one’s original choice, there are an array of perfectly unreasonable factors that at play that make people stick with their original bet and believing the odds to be even, whereas they’re only ⅓ as likely to not walk away with a prize goat, the dilemma and its trenchant nature says a lot about human bias and errors of commission. Even mathematicians and physicists come to the wrong conclusion until being disabused (sometimes it never takes as our original selection is endowed by magical thinking and those times when we switch and lose cling to our minds more) by brute repetition or by positioning themselves as host and realising that certain protocols are followed in games of chance. This is a specific and tenacious example which illustrates our withering capacity for judgment but I wonder if there are analogous other odds that we similarly misunderstand.
Tuesday, 16 July 2024
⚶ (11. 696)
Observed between 1802 and 1807 before being identified as a minor planet by astronomer Heinrich Olbers, whom having already discovered and named what is now understood to be the asteroid Pallas gave the honours to mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, whose orbital calculations had enabled researchers to confirm the existence of the first such object in that region of the solar system, Ceres, presumed—incorrectly—to be fragments of a larger, destroyed planet, and called the discovery after the Roman goddess of hearth and home, Vesta. The Dawn mission, dispatched to explore the asteroid belt, entered into a year-long orbit around the brightest and second-largest asteroid on this day in 2011. Presently represented by the modern astrological variant of the original symbol conceived by Gauss, it was suggestive of the altar of the goddess and home-fire by extension, the first form is scheduled to return as a Unicode character, the pictorial representations repopularised following their retirement in the mid-1800s as impractical as the cosmic backyard became more crowded with eight major planets and over a dozen minor ones. During the interim until the 1950s, asteroids were given the naming convention of ordinal numbers, according to the sequence of their discovery, this one called ④ Vesta.

synchronoptica
one year ago: professional uniforms (with synchronoptica), an experimental overland train plus the Trinity nuclear test (1945)
seven years ago: a linguistic curiosity
eight years ago: a beach on the รle d’Orรฉlon
nine years ago: classes of quarks plus a Mad, Mad, Mad Max mashup
eleven years ago: informant gadgets
Monday, 15 July 2024
9x9 (11. 694)
fungal magic: an update on the mushroom documentary narrated by Bjรถrk
always lands on its feet: the myriad ways animals negotiate the laws of physics—see also
meisje met de parel: decoding Vermeer’s true colours—see previously—via Miss Cellania
i’m your heat pump: a seductive slow jam seems to educate the public on the thermal energy transmission system
eno: the generative documentary on the self-described non-musician that changes with each viewing
legal daisy spacing: a purported 1985 manual for terraforming a planet that presents a warped bureaucracy and sterile landscaping
nolle prosequi: federal judge overseeing illegal retention of classified documents trial against Trump dismissed the indictment over the improper appointment of the prosecution’s special counsel—see previously here and here
reimann hypothesis: new insights about the distribution of prime numbers—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links
krรคuterbuch: Johannes Hartlieb’s fifteenth century treasury of herbs
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica), Netscape plus the Rosetta Stone
seven years ago: dark matter, more on the election integrity commission plus the bicentennial of Frankenstein
nine years ago: thalassocracies, plutographies plus more links to enjoy
eleven years ago: a slightly NSFW Soviet adult literacy reader
twelve years ago: the German banking system plus the Oberammergau Passion Plays
Wednesday, 12 June 2024
11x11 (11. 625)
indemnity clause: a look at the exactingly detailed Sanborn maps created for US insurance firms in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
unseen persia: thousands of historic photographs of Iran during the Qajar dynasty leaked on-line from the archive of the Golestan Palace

bahรญa de cochinos: Russian warships on drill visit Cuba
doubly-disambiguated bishop non-capture statemale: a vlogger tries to categorise the rarest chess moves
transponder: wood proves surprisingly durable material in space as agencies plan to launch experimental satellites, like ships on the high seas—via the Linkfest
1337: a pretty exhaustive list of English words that can be spelled on a calculator turned upside down
hollywood canteen: a fond farewell to Janis Page, recently departed at 101
the brannock device: a better shoe-sizer based on the barley corn
gallus gallus domesticus: photographer recreates exacting portraits of Edo-era Ito Jakuchu’s studies of chickens—via Nag on the Lake
geochron: the incredible restoration of 1960s analog, electromechanical world clock and map