pontificia cohors helvetica

We discover via Super Punch that the latest class of soldiers to matriculate into the Pope’s elite (notice that this is now the only acceptable context for that word) army, the Swiss Guard, will be issued as parts of their elaborate uniforms 3D plastic printed helmets rather than the traditional worked metal ones.
Though it strikes me as a bit costume-shop, there’s also surely less impact on the planet in having printed gear—which also burdens the wearer significantly less, though at nearly a thousand euros a piece (but still half the price of engaging a blacksmith) one has to wonder when and how the revolutionary, democratising moment of this technology will arrive.

the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions

Via Slash dot, we learn that an upgraded e-mail service not only has a self-destruct feature (among many other new options) but that activists are petitioning the company to disable feature for governmental and public entities, fearing that they could use it to hide or delete records, research and transactions it would rather not be the subject of public scrutiny.
What do you think? Perhaps for private and personal matters, it is useful to be able to choose an expiry date for one’s missives to regain the right to be forgot and not have everything inscribed in someone’s permanent dossier. Knowing, however, that governments lean heavily on their suite of hosting services to organise and conduct their online communication and store their data, it does seem at odds with the public interest to provide the means to maintain the integrity of public records and at the same time the ability to rubbish it.

exoskeleton and arachne

The Verge reports on an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers who are not only looking at the amazing strength and tensile properties of silk—both from silk worm cocoons (previously here and here) and spider webs—to make lighter and stronger combat gear and body armour and for internal medicine as well.
Naturally flexible and less likely to be rejected and breakdown inside the body than the screws and plates meant to hold us together while we heal, doctors could use threads of silk to stitch us up. The researchers are also experimenting with engineering silk (previously) that has disinfectant properties and materially fortifying bones with a protein (fibroin) isolated from silk.

electoral college

On this day in 1733, polymath and political scientist Jean-Charles de Borda was born in the Aquitaine city of Dax whose most significant contribution to the sciences were his precise tables of logarithms meant to help with the transition to the metric system and decimalisation (including the calendar) in general after the French Revolution.
We are probably more familiar with him for his namesake method of voting, however, referred to as the Borda Count, wherein constituents rank candidates in order of preference and the overall winner secures his or her standing via consensus rather than a bald majority. Only three governments currently use the inclusive, weighted criteria of the Borda Count in some form for national elections—Kiribati, Nauru and Slovenia—but a large number of student body government and academic races are decided by these means as well as many sporting superlatives and significantly the winners of the Eurovision Song Contest are picked by a modified form of Borda’s system too. Maybe these other institutions are on to something.