unaided eye

Though just able to reach to the threshold of the microscopic and with magnification strength more akin to a jewellers’ loupe, we’ve been having fun investigating the details of the liminal world and preparing specimen with our plug-and-play laboratory.
 It was by observing a shaving of cork that Robert Hooke first coined the term “cell” for the basic biological unit, likened to the private retreat and workshop of monastic cells—though we probably couldn’t make that leap at this resolution and with a wine cork. It’s interesting, nonetheless, what details show themselves—secrets of manufacture—like in the security features of a Euro bill.
I wonder what those micro-printed golden rings indicate off the Sicilian coast and in the Adriatic. What use could those perforated dots on the cuff serve in paper napkin making? Are they a thinble for us to get a purchase or for the presses that sort them?  We’ll see what other invisible secrets we can discover.

stp oder iso 1

It’s grown a bit colder over the last few days, more in keeping with the season, but I am fearful for the batch of earlier-adopters (bunnies and bulbs) that took the mild Winter as a cue that Spring had sprung. In Germany, accompanied by the rest of the world with the exception of America and perhaps Liberia and Myanmar, degrees (Grad) of temperature are of course registered in Celsius.
H informed me that the difference, though one might not often hear this in everyday speech, is expressed in degrees Kelvin. H was not sure about the reason and researching, I could not figure it out. Photo editing software—when referring to colour temperature use this parlance as well. A degree on the Celsius scale and one the Kelvin scale is of the same magnitude, and I wondered if there wasn’t some level of greater technical accuracy in putting it this way: Congratulations—you’ve lost two whole newtons! I think that formula would only work for someone being pushed off a ledge. Although Kelvins following the centigrade values (with 0° being the freezing point of water and 100º being the boiling), polymath Lord Kelvin, studying the laws of thermodynamics and the relations among temperature as understood at the time, pressure and volume, ingeniously realised that an ideal gas as temperature decreased would eventually shrink to a volume of zero and all molecular motion would stop. Later, this was reckoned to be -273° C, and presented a very useful tool, though no ideal gases exist. Fahrenheit might get a lot of bashing for not being as scientifically rigorous, but zero on that scale is the freezing point of brine, salt-water—which while not absolute zero, I suppose for all practical purposes might seem so. Does anyone know why in German, the gain or loss is said with Kelvins? I’d like to know.

borealis or miner forty-niner

One of the latest entries on BLDGBlog covers a fascinating and mysterious phenomena made visible by aerial surveying in the form of boreal rings of lighter pigmented, less thriving foliage that occur in the thousands throughout the forest landscape of Ontario.
Unlike crop-circles and similar occurrences that have either very mundane or other-worldly explanations, researchers are discovering a surprising and wholly unexpected account where ancient glaciation has pockmarked the woodlands with electromagnetic fields and the entire area is like a subtle circuit board. I just how that this exploration stays a geological and botanical one, rather than a tool for prospectors, though I suppose the latter could inform the former too.

applestand or given and received

I’ve really been enthralled lately with the discovery of a well researched and executed educational podcast series called Medieval Death Trip, which explores medieval chronicles and other texts more in depth than the usual footnoted references that they receive and the bidden commentary that they entail. Voraciously, I’ve been working though the extensive archive of episodes and am finding it a welcome change that a different light is cast on the Dark Ages, ethnographically speaking, rather than the usual cloistered and superstitious pall that’s afforded that epoch of history. As telling as linguistic developments and throw-backs are, one of the more illuminating points that revealed itself was in the urgency with which the need for family names came about.
Of course there was the administrate embargo of record-keeping in the form of the Domesday books that followed the Norman conquest of England for the assizers, but there was also a strong cultural emulation to give one’s offspring that patent of their usurpers, just like in the diglossic dissonance between the vernacular Old English—seen as backwards—and the courtly French. Quicker than ancient parlance fell away, giving one’s children Celtic and Nordic names went out of fashion. As few are called Cletus or Bethany any longer, within a single generation parents found it uncouth to draw on their heritage and no longer named their Æðelþryð, Ealdgyth, Ælfwine or Ælfgifu (respectively, friend or gift of the elves)—though Alfred (advised by elves) and Edgar (prosperous spear, rich prick) have survived. Old English and modern France, taken as an amalgam, have an embarrassment of names to choose from, but the Normans, though themselves of Scandinavian mercenary roots, only had a few: namely, Guillaume (reconquered as William) and Matilda (wife of said conqueror)—plus a few other crossovers, like Richard, Roger, Guy and Gilbert, which were not nearly as popular on the rankings of baby names in 1086. The potential for confusion was apparent soon enough, with brothers and sisters within the same nuclear family having to wonder who was being summoned. It sounds like a proverb, like how the camel got its hump or the Tower of Babel, to remove surnames from patronymic and codified reason, but it struck me as true and curious nonetheless. Incidentally, the name of the podcast refers to “Wisconsin Death Trip,” a thesis paper (adapted into a book and then as film) presented in a series of episodic newspaper clippings revelatory of the hardships of living in the US Midwest around latter decades of the 1800s.