cameo appearance

Among several other etymological origin stories along the lines of the painting of a landscape preceded its coinage as something to gaze upon or wander through, we learn of the unexpected legacy of the namesake Comptroller-General of Finances, Étienne de Silhouette.
Charged with bolstering the treasury in preparation for the Seven Years’ War with England, Silhouette took the unpopular emergency measure of melting down flatware and jewelry for bullion and levied a “general subvention,”—that is a tax on ostentatious displays of wealth, such as family paintings.  Anything that suggested imposed austerity or frugality was deemed à la Silhouette—including those modest profile portraits that later gained respect as an art form in late eighteenth century. 

anatomy of a typeface

Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals we learn from graphic artist Nate Piekos’ Better Letterer corner (see also) that traditionally in comic book captioning the “I” with crossbars is used exclusively for the personal pronoun whereas the single stroke “I” is used in all other contexts.

ymir and járnsaxa

With the discovery of twenty more natural satellites in its orbit this year, the cronian constellation surpasses Jupiter as the planet with the most moons, an astonishing eighty-two.
The new moonlets are distant objects travelling around Saturn in the opposite direction from the inner moons and are suspected to be captured asteroids and are part of the Norse group—the International Astronomical Union (previously) reserving the naming-convention to figures from Nordic mythology (see also), mostly after giants and giantesses, with the exception of Phoebe, named after a Greek Titaness discovered in 1899, before the establishment of the IAU and the first moon discovered via photography. The public is invited to take part in coming up with their official designations.

phonophobia

The always resonant Kottke directs our attention to a thorough-going essay from The Atlantic contributor Bianca Bosker on noise pollution and the deleterious long-term effects that one’s acoustic environment has on one’s health, significant negative impacts dismissed because of the receding nature of the culprit. Despite how we fancy ourselves to adapt to the din of city streets, we cannot turn off our ears and the attendant physiological stress responses are activated even if we manage to sleep through it.
Germany has far more robust regulations and social norms against producing a racket and my experience is far different than the nightmare anecdotes that we read about but I do wonder at my own sonic landscape and how it switches so abruptly from the workweek in a crowded apartment complex alongside a busy road (still tolerable, I’d argue, but now am given cause to wonder if I’m not deluding myself since the only habituation to clatter is training oneself to be even more sensitive and bothered by it) to the holidays and weekends home in a tiny village in a clearing in the woods, serenaded by nature and very little traffic other than the occasional rumbling tractor. The story brings out the assault that becomes intolerable—especially for those without the privilege to remove themselves from the worst-planned and intrusive environs, but also features plenty of meditation on personal soundscaping and finding peace and quiet.