7x7 (10. 314)

umwelt: a short video to compliment Ed Yong’s exploration of animal cognition—previously 

what9whos: a proprietary geocode system based on the names of the actors who’ve portrayed the Doctor from Gallifrey 

lexical lists: the index, the listicle are the oldest forms of narrative  

commit to being extremely hardcore: the Twitter exodus continues  

speaker of the house: after two decades of party leadership in the lower chamber, Nancy Pelosi is stepping down 

chart-topper: a collector has amassed every single number one single in the UK—see previously  

mockingbird: you’ve likely been fooled by an avian friend––see also

dictes & sayengis of the phylosophers (10. 313)

 The first printed book in England to bear its date of issue inside the colophon of early publisher William Caxton (see previously), the compendium of words of wisdom and collected quotations was introduced as an incunabulum on this day in 1477 as a Middle English translation by Anthony Woodville, bibliophile and brother-in-law of Edward IV, based off the original work of eleventh-century scholar Al-Mubashshir ibn Fatik—with some attributions and biographies, mostly on Greek and legendary thinkers but later revisions included biblical words of wisdom, slightly dubious but long since established as canonical.

the quest for self-winding (10. 312)

This was a bit of a haunted memory for me as I recalled this one scene with the Droste Effect but couldn’t name the animated film until this reminder from last month from Nag on the Lake and Memo of the Air asking “what lies behind the last visible dog?” It is the 1977 cinematic adaptation of the young adult novel by the same name from a decade earlier by Russell Hoban, which was released by Sanrio studios on this day that year. The Mouse and His Child tells the story of two conjoined clockwork toys holding hands who gain awareness after being unboxed in a shop, and although forming a close bond with an elephant and seal, are ridiculed for the suggestion that they remain in the shop and form their own family. The titular protagonists accidentally end up discarded and once at the dump and are forced into a pressgang by a rat who runs a casino at the rubbish yard on the labour of broken toys but escape aand are rescued by their friends from the shop, eventually realising their goal. The film version features the vocal talents of Cloris Leachman, Andy Devine and Peter Ustinov.

луноход-1 (10. 311)

 Russian for “Moonwalker I,” the robotic, remote-controlled lunar rover Lunokhod-1 landed in the MareImbrium (Sea of Rains) on this day in 1970 for a mission which far surpassed its designed lifetime of approximately ninety Earth days, three lunar days, to travel over ten kilometres in the course of nearly an Earth year’s time, eleven lunar days. The mission officially concluded after communications ceased and attempts to re-establish contact discontinued on the anniversary of the launch of Sputnik in 1971 after beaming back thousands of images and high-resolution panoramic shots as well as soil sampling and analyses.

irulegiko eskua (10. 310)

Although unearthed during excavations near Pamplona last year, the significance of the ancient Bronze Age artefact known as the Hand of Irulegi has only recently come to light, informing our view of the Vascone tribe and their proto-Basque language, the ancestor of modern euskera, once thought to be a pre-literate culture. Written in Iberian script, the only word deciphered so far is sorioneku, a word with a modern cognate meaning “good fortune.” It is believed that this metal-alloy talisman would be hung at the threshold of a home for protection. Previously researchers believed that the Vascones had no system of writing before the arrival of the Romans and only used symbols to mint coins.

orion (10. 309)

After a series of delays (see previously here and here) the first uncrewed mission of the Artemis programme took off in a predawn launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying aloft the empty (Snoopy and a cadre of mannequins were on board to gauge for radiation and stress levels) capsule, named after the goddess’ giant hunting partner and cast amongst the stars after his accidentally blinding as the source of the phrase ‘standing on the shoulders of giants,’ on a twenty-five day, two-million kilometre test-flight that will see the craft fly around the Moon and back before splash-down on 11 December. This exercise will prove crucial to later crewed missions scheduled for 2025 with the ultimate goal of establishing a permanent, long-term presence on our satellite and have a staging platform for further exploration.

st bernard (10. 308)

As Design Boom reports, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) have created a an edible drone prototype that can be dispatched to stranded hikers and mountain-climbers to provide a life-sustaining emergency meal whilst waiting for help to arrive. Acknowledging the limitations on payload for most aerial craft—usually only up to thirty percent of their own weight, developers concocted a way to make the structure part of the delivery with rice-cake wings.

innerspace (10. 307)

Designed by astrophysicist Frank Drake (see previously) with input from Carl Sagan and others as a proof-of-concept demonstration rather than an attempt to enter into to dialogue with extra-terrestrials and criticised as being too low-resolution to be recognisable to future recipients, the Arecibo Message (see also here and here) was beamed from the radio observatory in Puerto Rico on this date in 1974, aimed in the direction of the globular star cluster M13, some twenty-five thousand light-years from Earth. When encoded graphically, the some sixteen hundred bits of data produce the pictured image with seven elements, from top to bottom: the decimal system, the valance of the elements that make up DNA, the chemical formula for the constituent nucleotides, the approximate number of said organic molecules in the human genome with representation of the double-helix structure, the average dimensions of a human male plus the Earth’s population (four billion, compared to eight billion presently), a representation of the Solar System and finally in purple, the Arecibo telescope. The precise number of bits, 1 679, is a semiprime—that is, the product of two prime numbers, seventy-three and twenty-three, to prompt one toward the right orientation, the alternate arrangement producing static. An answer came in 2001 in the form of a crop circle near the Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire—rather intricately replacing the carbon-based DNA with silicon and the pictogram of the human figure looks alien—though this reply was unfortunately an elaborate hoax.