gestalt or fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on

As an addendum to the spiffy tip we had on the crack-team of super-recognisers that could reform the way police work and mass-surveillance are carried—since what’s the use of closed-circuit television if nobody’s minding the screen, not discounting the progress of biometric markers—Dangerous Minds and Boing Boing offer up a self-assessment (a battery of tests that are like elimination rounds) that lets one find out if he or she might be blessed (or cursed) with this super-power. Science believes about one percent of the population can potentially harness this ability, and I thought it was interesting how some felt odd or embarrassed about having this breed of photographic-memory, and were worried that people might mistake being recalled as being stalked or obsessed.  Although the limited discriminatory powers of people might sometime result in profiling and mistaken identity, spotted and connected with human eyes seems more keen and focused that the indiscriminant use of facial-recognition software. What do you think? How did you score?

night flight

With a nod to the nostalgic look and feel of the Stranger Things phenomena—which strikes me as something liminal, almost familiar but not quite—Boing Boing shares a cache of 1980s animated production logos from film and television that are sure to incite a flood of memories over these faithful, old taglines. “Sit, Ubu, sit! Good dog!”

concourse oder down in the underground

The ever intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura treat us to a stunning gallery of the urban-spelunking project Manhattan-extract artist Claudio Galamini’s framed and thorough discovery of Berlin’s metro system (die Berliner U-Bahn). Since opening first in 1902, the expansion of the network to one hundred seventy stations sprawling over a distance of over a hundred and fifty kilometers, each one of the terminals (and methodically, Galamini visited every one) are unique preserved expressions of the tenor of the county, style and the economy. Be sure to visit the links above and travel along the whole line, with more to explore through the artist’s lens at each stop.

for the nonce

Thanks to our friends the OED, we learn that today, the Saint Day of Bartholomew the Apostle, patron of bookbinders, butchers and cheese-mongers, was traditional feted with a charter fair in London (chartered in the sense the market days were established to help raise fund for religious and municipal buildings, namely the priory of Saint Bartholomew) and marked the end of Summer. The evening’s repast for members of the printing guild (this day also marking the anniversary of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible in 1456 in Mainz) was concluded with a special banquet given by a publishing house proprietor for the benefit of his apprentices.
After this break, called a wayzgoose, with the days waning shorter, scribes and later typesetters would now by working by candle-light. Although I much prefer the folk-etymology of “wase-goose”—that is a sheaf or wayward goose, for the way it sort of links the traditional dinner to customs attached to Saint Martin’s day in November, the goose being a creature that meanders aimless and betrayed the reluctant saint’s hiding spot, and in the sense of a sheaf of paper, the practise of paper-makers to use the last of the season’s pulp for making windows to be hung by Saint Martin’s Day (in commemoration to his selfless act of giving his cloak to a beggar to protect him from the element—however, it probably is a corruption of the Danish word for Weghuis—that is, an inn or guesthouse where these banquets were held. In modern parlance, the term occasionally appears when speaking of an annual outing or Organisational Day for a Fourth Estate institution. In any case, we all ought to celebrate with a little wayzgoose this evening.