The splendiferous Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a lovingly curated gallery of mesmerizing phenakistoscope animations, whose looping effect (and themes, perhaps) are not much different than what’s produced by GIFs (which I have been kind of obsessed with lately).
Debuting in the early 1830s, the invention of Belgian Joseph Plateau but with several other independent animateurs promoting their own spectacles, the phenakistoscope spread quickly across Europe, the engaged audiences viewing a spinning disk through a series of tiny slits to achieve the illusion of motion. Until opticians devised techniques of projection—which saw an explosion in phantasmagoria with similarly prefixed motion picture devices—spectators had the Greek root ϕενακιζειν, which meant deceptive. I hadn’t thought about it beforehand but the German term for an animated feature is “Trickfilm.”
Thursday 29 October 2015
persistence of vision
Thursday 22 October 2015
5x5
pachyderm: Icelandic cliff-face looks like an elephant
hello – you have found my shop of rare and wonderful things: Super Mario style map of Twin Peaks
glyph-list: latest issue of emojis to supplement your vocabulary, via Kottke’s quicklinks
det var helt texas: in Norwegian vernacular, the state’s name signifies being unbalanced
hot or not: Canadian prime-ministers ranked
Tuesday 20 October 2015
mathmagicland or word-problem
Could the oral tradition of story-telling and the development of maths be related expressions of one and the same human need? Stories of course can be formulaic and numbers can be characters in an archetypal tale themselves, but I wonder if the divergence and convergence is something more fundamental.
Friday 16 October 2015
5x5
twilight of the gods: Nina Hagen, Grace Jones and others feature in a Biblical Rock Opera, Gutterdämmerung, who strive to return the Earth to a state of vice
marylebone: BLDGBlog ponders the supposed funerary teleportation grid of Greater-London
scrumptious: venerable art foundation raises funds for galleries and museums with edible masterpieces, via the splendid Nag on the Lake
babel: a few odd, nuanced (but expeditious) terms found in EU English
catagories: 🇬🇧, 🌍, 🎶, 📐, 🔭, food and drink, language, transportation
Tuesday 13 October 2015
fun fact
Though in its original meaning, the trivia signified the foundational triad of the liberal arts—that being grammar, rhetoric and logic, needed to be mastered before graduating to the more stimulating disciplines of music, geometry, arithmetic and astronomy, its Latin adjectival form (triviālis, a word which has surely been claimed by some pharmaceutical or disputed game-show outcome arbitrage service by now) already denoted something akin to the English form trivial—trifling and fit for the street corner, being where three paths met. One ought to be proud of one’s accumulated knowledge and share it magnanimously and without stint, but this etymology and association makes me think of some pusher standing at an intersection bellowing to passers-by, “The mad professor intoning ‘Science!’ in She Blinded me with Science is show-master Magnus Pyke, cousin of Geoffrey Pyke eccentric, well-meaning boffin who proposed building aircraft carriers out of ice and saw-dust during World War II. The first one’s free! Spermology is the study of trivia!” This literal deconstruction makes me also think of how pornography means, innocently, the writing of prostitutes: “Dear Diary, What a day – but it’s better than waitressing…”
Monday 5 October 2015
vulgate or hashtag hastings
It strikes me as a little paradoxical that the claim to the Divine Right of Kings comes of the newer, reformed protestant tradition with monarchs dual-hatted as heads of state churches, the Church of England, the Church of Norway, et alia rather than from something more seeped in history. This political and religious creed, holds that the kings rules by God’s grace alone is not subject to any earthly estate or institution, including the will of the papacy. In other words, the monarchy was invested with both civic and spiritual powers, bucking ancient divisions of authority, which were nonetheless prone to overlap and currying favour or displeasure and later developments, revolts and the spread of democratic-thinking cut short the tenure of a monarch, but this doctrine. Prior to the Reformation—however, alliances were built and strengthened through military campaigns, persecuted under the papal banner, that continued nearly without interruption up until that schism for Western Christianity in the form of the Crusades, launched against whomever was deemed to be a heretic. The first instance of this type of campaigning on a grand scale had a different character than the retaking of the Holy Land but there are definitely parallels with the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the First Crusade that coalesced just three decades later.
catagories: ⛓️💥, 🇫🇷, 🇬🇧, 🇳🇴, 🌍, foreign policy, language, Middle East, religion, Wikipedia
Saturday 12 September 2015
Sunday 6 September 2015
unknown knowns or ignotum per ignotius
catagories: 🎓, 💭, 🥸, foreign policy, language
Saturday 5 September 2015
rebus oder panda, pizza, oselot
There is how PfRC translates into emoji, according to the service Linkmoji. This demonstration, that comes to us via WIRED!, is a little baffling linguistically, I admit, plus a bit recursive as we are just linking back to this site. So share with us how your website looks in webdings or however this sequence is generated. It seems to come out differently each time and there are poo and non-poo versions available.
catagories: 📐, language, networking and blogging
chivalrous or back in the saddle again
The Norman Invasion of England in the year 1066 utilised the same technological advance in order to prosecute the same sort of vast capturing of land as Mongol Horde had used to gain territory on the liminal edge of the known world almost eight hundred years prior (and with latter day iterations as well). Though somewhat taken for granted due to its patent simplicity—particularly among the horsey-set, the stirrup proved probably as significant force in shaping civilisation as the introduction of printed word in the West, enabling mounted warriors to manoeuvre the battle-field with much greater speed and stability than had visited the defeated beforehand.
The stirrup is just a loop of leather that hangs to the side of a saddle, enabling riders to mount their steeds quickly and keep their balance. As just a small detail, it took some people quite a long time to notice and appreciate this modification that imparted significant advantage to the cavalry of the foot-solders. These more agile mercenaries that took up specialised arms and steeds became the professional landed knights under the feudalist system of the Norman conquestors and their Frankish overlords and sought to broaden the pyramid-scheme wherein defenders pledged oaths of fealty to a certain tract of property and to a certain lord. In order to maintain this allegiance, the knights—which were called then chevaliers (from the French term for horse), lived by a certain, defined code of conduct, which was called chivalry. This transformation makes me think of the way one’s portion of meat was translated from the field (grimy old English barnyard words for swine in the sty) to the dinner plate (expressed in refined French words for haute-cuisine, like pork).
Friday 4 September 2015
downspout or rear window
Though as the term to eavesdrop has evolved a great day from the notion of a busy-body positioning himself or herself at an advantageous audio-locus (the point just under the eaves of the roof where rain water drops down) by a neighbour’s house in order to overhear happenings inside, to casually listening to the conversation listening to a private conversation to outright espionage, I think that the mentality of the eavesdropper has remained fairly constant, insofar as they want the fragmentary, a little mystery to reconstruct that leaves other explanations out there even though the listen may assert his or her own conclusions. Surveillance that leaves little to the imagination—though thinking one can be implausibly wrong is interesting too—that assumes the mantle of ubiquity is not eavesdropping, and neither is it pleasant or the least bit stimulating to find oneself in a public place that’s been pressed in private service and one’s privy to an unguardedly intimate or strained discussion. I wonder though, if by introducing the element of time and prediction for future behavior and past links, one preserves the allure of the furtive, or whether reputation and risk becomes just something actuarial and algorithmic. What do you think?
5x5
ivy league, fig leaf: elite university matriculating classes from the 1940s and 1950s were compelled to disrobe and be photographed
streets with no game: homogeneity and monotony is turning urban design into a matter of public health
rock elettronico: 1970s Italo pop hit with gibberish words meant to sound like English
brick and mortar: life-sized Lego building blocks
Sunday 30 August 2015
dodona and di-oscuri
In one of its latest acquisition released for all, the Public Domain Review presents the 1898 illustrated ethnographical exposition on bird-watching in the Bird Gods by Charles de Kay with decorations by George Wharton Edwards. The book opens with a strong injunction against those who’d seek to preen their own image with furs, skins, plumage and big-game trophies, written at a time just after the herds of buffalo were wiped out in North America and about a decade before the passenger pigeon went extinct and goes on to address the cultural and religious connotations attributed to auguries in action and in their natural habitat.
catagories: 🌍, 📚, 🦢, 🧠, antiques, environment, language, myth and monsters, philosophy, religion
Thursday 27 August 2015
5x5
23 and me: Æon magazine explores the ethics of genetic omniscience
used in a sentence: author composes stories taken from dictionary examples
huitzilopochtli, chutzpah: University of Connecticut fighting Hummingbirds
boondocks: a look at how language and culture define the Hinterland
catagories: ⚕️, environment, language, myth and monsters, travel
Tuesday 25 August 2015
de minimis or new wine in old skins
Sunday 16 August 2015
5x5
worth 1000: iconic emojis that art history students would appreciate and we could all employ
neon-natal: an old street lamp flashes in silent celebration each time a baby is born in Ghent
seat-cushion becomes a floatation device: Victorian life-preserver and personal entertainment centre
patience: the real reason behind the inclusion of the classic games-bundle was to teach dexterity
Friday 7 August 2015
5x5
ration card: the wartime UK version of Monopoly had to make concessions to the fighting effort
pet sounds: Cornell University digitised their huge library of animal calls and bird-song
sakoku or ttp: nineteenth century Japanese woodcuts of exotic, visiting Americans after America insisted on diplomatic ties
isobar: Stockholm airport invites passengers to experience the weather at their destination before departing
catagories: 🇫🇮, 🇬🇧, 🇯🇵, 📐, environment, foreign policy, language, transportation
psychobabble
catagories: 🧠, food and drink, language
Thursday 30 July 2015
caseus formatus
lernu! or dum spiro spero
The World Youth Esperanto Summit will be held in Wiesbaden next week (nur auf Deutsch) in order to raise awareness for this constructed auxiliary language. Though fluent speakers are approaching some three million individuals and the principles of lingual harmonisation—not to displace established languages and dialects but to give individuals a third-way (also in the propædeutic—raŭmistoj sense of learning for its own sake and not necessarily for proficiency) of shared communication into hopes of promoting peace and reconciliation, the movement, which began in 1905, faced many challenges and successive totalitarian regimes sought to marginalise its momentum and utility by deeming it subversive or even cultish.