bale and bellwether

Confirming that the world is an inexhaustible fount of delights to behold, Messy Nessy Chic invites us to explore the abandoned “Colin’s Barn” outside in Crudwell parish, near Malmesbury. In the 1980s, a shepherd named Colin Stokes built this sprawling fortress for his flock but choose to move to greener pastures in Scotland once a quarry was slated to open in the area and left his elaborate castle to the elements. The ensemble of buildings, designed for a sheep-sized court, have weathered the years quite well, having become a sanctuary for birds and bats and definitely a place to seek out next time we’re in England.

broadsheet, broadside

Although not yet incorporated into the paper’s print editions and the take-away message is about letting the sunshine in, the new motto of the venerable and respected Washington Post “Democracy dies in the Darkness” is a pretty chilling and goth, emo by-line for the age we’re living in. Journalists and experts deserve our support and not our disdain, since liberty does wither and die without those willing to report and to challenge.

m-class or goldilocks

Amongst the thousands of confirmed exoplanets in the firmament and the untold trillions of worlds estimated, NASA just held a colossal press-conference that served to the public the very exciting news of a solar system discovered in orbit around a cool (ultra-cool, Red Giants are m-class stars but Star Trek’s planetary classification system is unfortunately made up) dwarf star in the constellation of Aquarius, some thirty nine light years distance from us.
Astronomers are giving the discovery the designation of TRAPPIST-1 as it was the first solar system to be observed directly using transit photometry.  The acronym for the programme and one of the telescopes used spells out Trappist, like the monastic order and brew-masters of Liège, where the search method was first conceived. Seven rocky (terrestrial) worlds orbit the star and at least three are thought to be in the habitable-zone, conducive to life as we know it thriving. After compiling and analysing telemetry for a year and half, researchers are very confident in their results. Finding no life in that entire star system would be, I’d wager, far more stranger than discovering extraterrestrial life. As we said above, this ensemble joins an already crowded Cosmos, but I think it’s brilliant that there’s already an artist’s conception to captivate and stoke the imagination—it reminds me of Mongo of Ming the Merciless and the other floating kingdoms in that overcast empire. Here’s to science, NASA and the monks. Flash jump, everybody!

i for one welcome our robot overlords

Perhaps betraying an enormous amount of good judgment that surpasses their programming, androids seem, as Gizmodo delightfully points out with a thorough and rather exhaustive array of examples, not to warm to the pseudo-populist leaders of the world.
It’s not as if they’ve just been warned-off by some of the politicians that have experienced Dear Leader’s forceful and strange hand-shake and the aversion, surely mutual, seems nearly universal among the recently matriculated. As the author posits, these PR agents might have been sent from the future to give us a subtle warning, encoded in etiquette.