6x6 (12. 502)

the chairs of dr who: the quest to identify as much seating as possible from the series’ first great age from 1963 to 1989—via Pasa Bon!  

π in the sky: random star distribution reveals the mathematical constant with surprising accuracy  

cowardcore: milquetoast Pride apparel collections—via Super Punch—see previously 

the amalfi coast of japan: sites that compare themselves to more famous vacation destinations 

all these worlds are yours, except europa—attempt no landing there; use them together, use them in peace: future missions to drill into the icy crust of the ocean moons—see previously  

maxwell house: a fascinating omnibus of the cinematic commercial advertisements of Ridley Scott

taco trucks on every corner (12. 501)

Not the first meme on the subject, Trump has before propagated a false hysteria back in 2016 during his first campaign (at least the first one that netted a win for the serial candidate), repeating a snippet from an activist and agitator with Latinos for Trump complaining about continued immigration from México: “My culture is a very dominant, culture and its imposing and causing problems—if you don’t do something about it, you’re” going to have the above. In response, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce launched a Guac the Vote campaign to utilise these menacing snack bars as voter registration information booths. Now in the wake of a contested order to halt the president’s power to unilaterally impost tariffs without the consent of congress by a tribunal with a highly specific role, the US Court of International Trade—a quasi-judicial entity of the Treasury Department to deal with customs disputes, composed of expert judges appointed by Obama, Reagan, GW Bush, Clinton and Trump himself with the authority of a federal court but unlimited jurisdiction, referred to the Supreme Court for appeal, a Financial Times reporter has coined an acronym and modus operandi that has really gotten under the skin of the administration: TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) policy not only implies that this timorous madman approach gets too spooked when markets tumble and reverses or pauses the implementation in response to economic pressure, he and his cohort of loyalists also grift off stocks on the rebound of his actions, insider trading in a very public forum. Trump himself excused his vacillation as negotiation, describing himself in opposite terms despite investors seemingly willing to blow off threats as bluster and bullying and telling a journalist inquiring about the unflattering meme that it was “a nasty question” and never to ask it again. The special tribunal that enforced an injunction of Trump’s predictably chaotic behaviour argues that without the participation of the legislature and other parties with standing, the citation of national emergencies (drug trafficking and trade deficits) do not merit the prescribed remedies.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronoptica) plus Trump’s trials recall Cop Rock

seven years ago: a trip to Treffurt, French publicity caravans, crazy walls, Vegas hospitality workers strike plus more links to enjoy

eight years ago: more plagiarism scandals in government, the Shavian alphabet, Shakespeare and hawk-fanciers plus a trip to the Speewald

nine years ago: xenoglossy, the Bible in emoji plus visiting Restormel castle

ten years ago: more wearable technology, the philosophy of Erasmus, a trip to Gersfeld plus even more links

hohenwartetalsperre iv (12. 500)

We took a short drive to look at the Hohenwarte dam wall (Staumauer, see previously) and took a nice long walk with the dogs down a trail through an enchanted forest (there were a lot activities set up for kids hidden amongst the trees, like our own Zwergweg) and across the basis by a former cardboard factory. We could see the Pumpspecicherwerk (pumped hydroelectric energy storage plant in the far distance, a gravitational sink that is a source of potential energy, channelling water uphill to a higher holding basis during off-peak hours and releasing it during higher periods of demand to generate electricity in the turbines.

Such a plant also allows excess energy from intermittent sources—like solar and wind—to be saved. The lake and surrounding area were full of recreational opportunities, more wandering and cruises over the length and breath of reservoir.

opus 314 (12. 499)

To mark both the fiftieth year of the European Space Agency and the second centenary of the birth of the composer—as well to redress a glaring omission in the playlist of Voyagers’ Golden Records, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed the “Blue Danube” livestreamed for terrestrial audiences and beamed out to the stars from an ESA dish antenna in Cebreros, Spain, part of the array of the deep-space network. The waltz by Johann Strauss II had its association with the wonder and grandeur of the Cosmos cemented by its use in the score of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey—see also—and broadcast at the speed of light, the single will have surpassed the twenty-four billion kilometres transversed by the twin probes launched in 1977, overtaking Mars in just four and half minutes, Jupiter in thirty-seven minutes and Neptune in four hours. ESA director general hopes that this concert will inspire future scientists and explorers and become the anthem of space travel.

synchronoptica

one year ago: outtakes from Dalí Atomicus (with synchronoptica) plus more on numbers stations

seven years ago: brutalist birdhouses  

eight years ago: a visit to Schloss Moritzburg plus bot armies

nine years ago: a trip to Berchtesgaden plus language and colour perception

ten years ago: the lifecycle of ladybugs

so long, elon (12. 498)

Departing from his post adhering to the statutory limits of his appointment as an emergency hire—though departing from the usual politicians’ script of “spending more time with my family” to spend more time with his businesses and showing up for his outprocessing with a sufficiently theatrical black eye, which he blamed on his child X although it could have been any number of agency chiefs, department heads or any conscientious bureaucrat (or Brigitte Macron) that socked him one on his way out, Musk as the destructive and chaotic force behind DOGE fell far short of his stated goal of trillions in savings and eliminating government fraud, waste and abuse. Instead the public reputation of Tesla and Starlink have been battered (as well as demonstrating his personal repugnance) , important public work selectively and irreparably, ruining lives and careers along the way. Realising the Sisyphean task and the fools’ errand, Musk’s ego is also bruised—laid bare by wilful ignorance of what services that the US federal government provides and how those functions hang together and so called inefficiencies are by design to prevent mass surveillance, not a legacy to be fixed by AI. For his exit survey, Musk also punched back in a way albeit it too little and too late given his influence, criticising Trump’s reckless Big Beautiful Bill as ultimately economically damaging.

hohenwartetalsperre iii (12.497)

Early in the day, we took a trip to the larger town of Ranis to stock up on provisions and revisited the fortified castle, with its Ilsenhöse passage leading from the bailey to the old market recently confirmed to have some of the oldest prehistoric evidence for the settlement of Homo sapiens in the region—more than forty-five thousand years ago, particularly rare for an urbanised area.

The eleventh-century castle on a promontory overlooking the town has been in the ownership of the Germany Red Cross since 1994, the dynasty of von Breitenbuch selling the historic site for a nominal fee. Back at the campgrounds, we followed a trail along the water’s edge to a forest path littered with slate—a common architectural element for the region that afforded us some commanding views of the artistic bends in the watercourse.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a US supreme court justice flies provocative flags (with synchronoptica), a WWII battle for an Aleutian island, the anatomy of a limerick plus Trump found guilty of falsifying business records 

seven years ago: all about Ostheim

nine year ago: a wearable, in-ear translator plus giving Tumblr a try

ten years ago: Swiss cheese goes blind plus Alf’s hip-hop album

eleven years ago: mourning a ruined laptop, semi-conducting cement plus getting ready to travel to Lake Como

hohenwartetalsperre ii (12. 496)

While we’ve undoubtedly both been off for Ascension Day (Christi Himmelfahrt, forty days after Easter) and knew about the conflation and coopting of the public holiday as Vatertag, Herrentag or Männertag to disassociate it from religious overtones especially in atheist East Germany with a emphasis on partying and taking a nice long hike with a wagon-load of beer (without the family members in tow), we had never really witnessed the celebrations en mass.

We wanted to go wandering along a narrow footpath above the shoreline to the next village of Linkenmühle, hosting a guesthouse and the only ferry in the state of Thuringia, which we made but the going was a bit uncomfortable with the added traffic of the holiday and inebriated men pulling carts. The gastronomy was very crowded but we enjoyed ourselves and decided to take the highroad back via a logging path over the mountain.

It was a steep climb and with a field blackberry (Brombeer) brambles that we needed to carry the dogs over due to the thorns of but worth it for the views and very much to ourselves. We came to an establishment called Ziegenhof—a working goat farm—with caprine-based refreshments, including goat-milk ice cream and a variety of cheeses—on the way back down to the campsite.

Through the night, several party barges were launched—we could hear the music as they passed, familiar Schlager song mostly but a few new to me, like this rendition Wir haben Grund zum Feiern (We have a Reason to Party to the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”—see also) from the dock for a tour of the reservoir.

synchronoptica

one year ago: laundry lessons from Japan (with synchronoptica), assorted links worth the revisit plus a post-war postscript from Thomas Mann

seven years ago: Native Americans granted citizenship 

ten years ago: the founding of Leipzig, more links to enjoy plus acceptable facial hair for Norwegian sailors

twelve years ago: furloughing federal workers  

thirteen years ago: Germans and joy plus counterfeit wine

hohenwartetalsperre i (12.495)

 

Taking advantage of the holiday and Brückentag, H and I (with the dogs) went caravaning, returning to the reservoir created by the damming of the Saale river valley in the 1930s (see previously here and here) to chiefly mitigate flooding and found a campsite centrally located in the eighty-kilometre long lake with five successive cascading basins outside the village of Neumannshof on the water’s edge. 

The village and the municipality of Gössitz lying on a higher plateau of the foothills of the southern Schefergebirges (Slate range) is surrounded by thick woods and the Slavic name means “forest mountain.” Commissioned by optics manufacturer Carl Zeiss of Jena later for its potential for electricity production, the feat of engineering is a major source of hydropower to this day.

voice writers (12. 494)

Having known just a little about the development and integration of closed-captioning technology, we really appreciated this fascinating deep dive from Radio Lab into its history and struggle for equal access that followed, with accommodation, advances in hardware and software, representation and mandates all intertwined and informing one another, concluding with a reflection on how the process is being automated with artificial intelligence and how in training the machine, we ourselves are transformed through the collaboration. Of course the story didn’t end with triumph of accessibility through the above first demonstration, as the advances for the hearing impaired community were not widely accessible: most programming was not captioned and for those that were an expensive decoder was required as a television peripheral. The situation gradually improved and after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, TV sets were required to include closed captioning technology and all broadcasts were mandated to include subtitles. A workforce of thirty thousand transcriptionists were at work to capture all stations’ content and in order to reach all of the growing market with the rise of cable programming, institutions providing the service turn to emerging voice recognition systems. These early versions were too bug-prone to be useful, especially for realtime applications and failed to keep pace with live dialogue, seizing up at the slightest accent. Researchers, however, discovered that they were more responsive and accurate with the voices of the trial participants, and soon one devised helping the computer by reading back the words in a steady, well-enunciated manner that it could manage. A team of voice writers across the States repeated scripted shows and news reports as they were aired and achieved a pretty good level of fidelity by 2003. Even with only their master’s voice, the programme still had its shortcomings and the voice writers developed a code of substitute words to clear up homophones and short prepositions, for example: echoing, “She has tootoo daughters inly college comma tootaloo period” would yield the yield the desired text, “She has two daughters in college, too.” Two decades on, the software has advanced to the point where it can transcribe instantly without the help of an interpreter and is improving with AI refinements.

bottle episode (12. 493)

Traditionally made for bottling Chianti, the style of glass vessel from Tuscany with a rounded body and wrapped tightly in a straw basket—designed for ease of transport (see also), cushioning the wine and stackable with inverted bottles fitted into a row of upright ones—over the centuries became subject to various regulations to discourage counterfeiting and filling used bottles with new wine by fiascaio (fiasco-makers) resulting in substandard containers, hence bare from the shoulders up to show the vintner’s label and seal.  The etymology in English usage for failure or scandal was perhaps transferred via the French faire fiasco from Italian theatre jargon for botching a scene—to “make a bottle—a glassmaker humiliated when an intended more elegant piece didn’t come together and they settled with the simpler but utilitarian form. The sense could also come from card play in which the loser having to buy the next round of drinks. Fiaschi are mainly nowadays for decorative purposes or souvenirs, the Bordeaux-style of bottle (bordolese—see previously) becoming more popular with automation and easier to manufacture.

synchronoptica

one year ago: an epic murder-mystery puzzle book (with synchronoptic) plus US women allowed to wear pants in public

seven years ago: more customary units plus the EU bans plastic drinking straws

ten years ago: the US special envoy to Britain during WWII 

thirteen years ago: American propaganda turns inward

fourteen years ago: extraterrestrial prospecting

apparent magnitude (12. 492)

Realising I had taken for granted knowing what the unit of measurement was, or what exactly it was gauging, we appreciated this introduction and overview of the decibel—via Quantum of Sollazzo. Sort of like the distinction between mass and weight, sound intensity is measured in terms of pressures in pascals as the deviation from the ambient caused by an acoustic wave through a given medium, and the decibel as a way of expressing the ratio between two values logarithmically—with the silent partner being the threshold of human hearing. Originally stemming from a technique to measure and compare signal loss over telegraph lines and later telephone circuits, first expressed as loss per miles of standard cable, the new definition developed by Bell Labs was received favourably by operators and long-distance providers, named in honour of the communications pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. Still used chiefly to calibrate signal strength and fidelity as power passes through different exchanges across a network (mathematically, it is easier to process and account for the changes in transmission media and resistance by their additive properties rather than cumulatively by logarithms, which is incidentally the reason why older hardware and appliances last longer being over-engineered by dint of material and electrical tolerances calculated with a slide-rule and rounding up adding up to machines built to a more robust standard than for their planned lifecycle. Because humans perceive an increase in loudness exponentially rather than linearly (per studies in psychophysics known the Weber-Fechner laws that demonstrate gradual increases are likely to go unnoticed by the senses, the contrasted stimuli also seen to carry an effect in registering numbers and statics, in placebos—titration of all types through interoception and voting), the dB scale became a useful measure, as with the Richter scale for earthquakes and the Fujita scale for tornados, for when a in situ judgment might fail.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronoptica) plus the discovery of Troy

seven years ago: mythemes, a global weather service, the GDPR goes into effect, drowning does not always look like drowning, the founding of St Petersburg, ancient and modern trade routes plus a walk along the former inter-German border

nine years ago: the classified section, petty commodification, French-Canadien curses plus pizza as alimony

ten years ago: more links to enjoy, a supernatural dating society, the upcoming G-7 plus a new city in Mongolia

open source (12. 491)

Echoing today’s previous posting, we very much enjoyed making the acquaintance of an omnipresence and prolific graphic design artist and illustrator called Takashi Mifune—whose work, anonymous for its ubiquity and described as unpinning “social infrastructure,” has influenced Japan’s public aesthetic and visual vernacular. Though not unique in offering clip-art, the website maintained by Mifune Irasutoya (いらすとや, illustration shop) makes his cast of iconic characters and symbols freely available to for personal and commercial applications, with the large range covering every conceivable situation and occupation—from the everyday to the niche—and consistency of style (see previously) has garnered the artist’s momentum and reputation as the standard for signage. Featuring highly specialised jobs, current events, cultural neologisms, maladies, warnings, restrictions and artefacts with far more briskness and particularity than other catalogues of stock images, inspiring contests to recreate works of art with Mifune’s drawings, subject matter easily summoned up from the commonplace to centrifuges, Prototaxites (an extinct plant life-form between fungi and trees), traditional dress of La Sape subculture, wisdom teeth, both bipedal and quadrupedal versions of chupacabras and the Antikythera mechanism. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link up top.

you may need rendering support (12. 490)

Despite being last updated in 2012, the announcement from Japanese wireless carrier Docomo (a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) that it is officially discontinuing support for its emoji set marks the end of an era that spanned decades and played a foundational role in emoji communication and native texting environments. Beginning in 1995 with the simple inclusion of a ❤︎ icon that could be displayed on pagers (see previously)—and the user outcry when the option was quietly removed in a subsequent update demonstrated to the concern public interest not only in symbolic shorthand but also a way to accent missives when not communicating face-to-face, the reaction informing the glyph collection to come. In 1999, Docomo introduced a set of one hundred seventy-six character syllabary of supplemental monochrome, twelve-by-twelve pixel icons designed by Shigetaka Kurita (栗田 穣崇), which inspired by universal street signage, pictograms and the mood and emotional cues employed for manga protagonists called manpu (漫符, a bead of sweat to signal accomplishment or apprehension), created the base lexicon and grammar that Unicode adopted later. Although limited to the network, the emoji set, growing colourised and more articulated, saw its legacy enlivened by platforms with greater interoperability and customisation and is honoured as a linguistic fossil and the emoji equivalent of Latin.

synchronoptica

one year ago: more adventures in the Thüringer Forest (with synchronoptica) plus a notable Shiba Inu passes away 

seven years ago: between distraction and anxiety, Dune product tie-ins plus digitising the Munch Museum

eight years ago: Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Trump calls NATO partners deadbeats plus preparing for a short sabbatical 

nine years ago: shooting stars on demand,  Wundarr the Aquarian plus rabbits doing violence in medieval manuscripts

ten years ago: a visit to the Neckar valley plus assorted links to revisit

threat model (12. 489)

Not content with being partially lionised over the yet unproven claim that the COVID pandemic might have been caused by a lab leak from a facility studying corona viruses in Wuhan, the new head of the US National Institutes of Health is not only suggesting that the NIH itself created the novel virus, triggering a mass walkout during his first all-hands meeting, like-minded cohorts in the US Food and Drug Administration have severely restricted access to vaccines for the vast majority of Americans, as if we needed another reason not to travel—or to erect a cordon sanitaire to stop the spread of vectors for measles, bird flu and any number of preventable maladies, quitting the WHO and the media blackout when it comes to monitoring emerging outbreaks—insisting on amplifying warnings of side effects, despite the efficacy of treatment and the low incidence. Having missed crucial windows to ramp up production for the next season, many major pharmaceutical companies gave up altogether. Click through for important reminders on how Long COVID is the retronym of the polio generations endured—and yet another reemergent illness that had been eradicated—and one’s first line of defence.

in a word (12. 488)

Courtesy of Futility Closet, we enjoyed this moment of logophilia with an selection of obscure words from the personal collection of Eric Albert, frequent contributor to Butler University’s journal of recreational linguistics, Word Ways, specialising in research and demonstrations on palindromes, tautonyms (reduplication like aye-aye or namby-pamby), anagrams, pangrams and lipograms. We especially liked supermuscan defined as having the qualities greater than which is typical of a fly; alkahest, a universal solvent—chiefly in the alchemical sense; titivil—a demon who collects dropped or mumbled parts of the mass and bears them off to hell as evidence against the offender—see previously; brotus, any extra measure given without charge, as in a baker’s dozen; ecdysiast, one who rhythmically disrobes as in a strip-tease artist; holmgang, a duel fought on an island; velleity—the lowest degree of desire, a slight wish; microlipet, one bothered by trifles; palinode, retracting or recanting something formerly praised; supellectile, pertaining to furniture; and poliad, a nymph that lives in the city. Some in the catalogue were familiar to us but there’s a surplus of choice news terms to be found clicking through. Let us know your new favourites.

new territories (12. 487)

Being for a long time fascinated by the idea of the crowded, lawless and ungoverned exclave within an enclave called Kowloon Walled City (see previously), we were astonished to be referred this recorded walk-through captured in the space of an afternoon (no daylight reaching the lowest storeys) by University of Hong Kong architecture student Suenn Ho, having no idea that such footage and interviews existed, taken in 1991, a couple years prior to its demolition, evicting the some thirty-five thousand who lived and worked within the confines of less than three hectares—translating to an incredible population density of over one and a quarter million residents per square kilometre. The former footprint now a park and its reputation sanitised, Hong Kongers, formerly condemned Kowloon as a dangerous slum when mass-urbanisation started in the 1960s, are now romanticising this dystopian neighbourhood and we are happy this documentary has been preserved for posterity. The Japanese film crew mentioned early on also produced a short piece, available here.

*    *    *    *    *

synchronoptica

one year ago: exploring the Vesser valley (with synchronoptica) 

seven years ago: photographer Zofia Rydet plus potentially eliminating the deadliest disease vector

eight years ago: a poem for Manchester, Trump to visit the Pope, micro-mastery, diplomatic indiscretions  plus America’s designs on its southern neighbours during the US civil war

nine years ago: Kraftwerk animated plus that proposal for an elevated bus

twelve years ago: a day-by-day account of World War I

 

sigils and signs (12. 486)

Having previously looked at other visual language compliers expressed through artistic elements and other than the usual strings of functions and conditions of coding, and very much reenforces overdue acknowledgement that the jargon of computing can act as a gatekeeper and that unnatural language can create an out-group (see also) for whom these incantations seem like wizardry, and given our preoccupation with secret signs, we were very much
intrigued by this mystical platform of magic circles, via Clive Thompson’s latest Linkfest (a lot more to explore there) under development by Denis M Moskowitz. The sampled, quicksort spell is a rendering of the Euclidean algorithm for calculating the greatest common divisor of two numbers—that which divides them both without a remainder—a benchmark test for the logic of a new programming language with an intuitively visual component. Moskowitz has also created a character set of glyphs or monograms after the chaos magic of Austin Osman Spare (previously here and here) whose seals unlock the basic grammar of coding. Much more at the links above.

sara-la-kâli (12. 485)

Venerated on this day in folk Catholic traditions, sharing it with her companion and co-worker St Joanna though not officially recognised by the Church, as the patron protectress of the Romani people, particularly in the Camargue region of southern France with her shrine in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer considered a place of pilgrimage, St Sarah, according to legend, was a servant of the Three Marys, a maid of Mary of Clopas (sister-in-law of Joseph) from descendants from the coastal area of Malabar and brought to Egypt through Indo-Roman trade, where they landed after the Resurrection fleeing persecution and to work as missionaries to the continent. “Sarah the Black”—Romani Sara e Kali, she shares her name with the Hindu goddess worshipped in the northern part of India where the Romani originate. This religious syncretism is unique in Europe, though many pagan customs were adopted by Christianity, and on her feast, her statue is taken to the sea for a ritual bath with the ceremony paralleling worship of Kali and solemn ablutions.

⁓ (12. 484)

Although also slightly peeved that the em-dash has become the signature punctuation of artificial intelligence chatbots (see also, scroll down for an act of malicious non-compliance with an agent) and sad to see the way I write coopted—though maybe leaning too heavily on a brittle linkage and perhaps should rely more on brackets or the semicolon, I was naturally intrigued by this proposal for a separator available exclusively for human use to signal that it was not penned by machine, the am-dash, via Web Curios and as in cogito ergo sum. Superficially like the title swung dash (used primarily, however, to set apart a list of alternatives or approximates or in dictionary entries to avoid reprinting the term being defined), the am-dash would be but of a restricted character set—see also.
First widely used in the Nicholas Okes’ publication of Shakespeare’s plays to capture pauses, interruption and epiphany of the staged performances in the early seventeenth century, Jonathan Swift’s 1733 verse On Poetry later encapsulated the style as:

Blot out, correct, insert, refine,
Enlarge, diminish, interline;
Be mindful, when Invention fails;
To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails.

Your poem finish’d, next your Care
Is needful, to transcribe it fair.
In modern Wit all printed Trash, is
Set off with num’rous Breaks⸺and Dashes—

Much more at the links above.

9x9 (12. 483)

leaderboard: an exclusive look at the $TRUMP memecoin banquet   

leap together: Kermit the Frog delivers a commencement speech at Jim Henson’s alma mater 

biosignature: potential signs of alien life on exoplanet K2-18β raises the question of when evidence becomes definitive 

industrial light and magic: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, founded by Star Wars franchise creator and slated to open next summer, made redundant fourteen percent of staff

mr tompkins in wonderland: after attending a lecture on relativity, a bank clerk discovers the ability to perceive quantum phenomena and the foreshortening of spacetime   

liquidity squeeze: collaborative scholarship and the fake Roman financial panic of 33 AD—via Strange Company 

yeah—it has been hard, mainly because of the numbers: a vintage 2005 spoof on every television news spot on the economy

matriculation: graduates answer questions posed by their past selves insider trading: US attorney general divested herself of between one and five million dollars worth of shares ahead of Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement

synchronoptica

one year ago: Phyllis Diller’s garage sale guide (with synchronoptica), an alternative space shuttle design, AI can’t do minor edits plus assorted links worth the revisit

seven years ago: more removing science from the classroom, a cosmic interloper, eyeball worlds, wine windows plus the Dear Leaders fail to meet

eight years ago: corporate welfare 

nine years ago: transparent wood plus a visit to Weimar

thirteen years ago: the chemistry of wine

underground press (12. 482)

The masthead logo of the counter-culture alternative newspaper in print from 1966 to 1973 featured the image of vampish 1920s silent film start Theda Bara—intending to use a picture of the It Girl Clara Bow of the same era but didn’t stop the presses over that mistake and left Bara through its thirteen year run, the International Times having been cowed into shortening its name into an initialism standing for nothing (like KFC, an orphaned acronym) after the threat of a lawsuit by the venerable newspaper the London Times. Featuring regular contributions from William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Germaine Greer along with kindred publications also based in London—Oz under the editorship of Felix Dennis, who later became a more mainstream publishing mogul of Maxim, Stuff and Blender, and Durham’s own Muther Grumble issues challenged the UK obscenity laws and were an outlet covering everything from the environment, emerging bands, sex, drugs, protesting the Vietnam War, feminism and social justice and the trio of newspapers were accused of corrupting the youth of the city, offices raided on multiple occasions which temporarily halted distribution—but as ever, a sign that you are doing something right. More at the archive links above and from Print Magazine’s Daily Heller.

11x11 (12. 481)

ν octantis: astronomers discover a tight binary star system with a lone exoplanet wedged in the middle  

{sum free sets}: Cambridge graduate student proves an conjecture of Paul Erdős on the limits of the additive property—via Damn Interesting 

gorgoneion: the backstory of Medusa 

market instability: complaining that negotiations have stalled, Trump threatens to impose a fifty-percent tariff on EU exports to the US 

ambigram: more invertible messages—made by impossible letters (see previously here and here) 

the old, old, very old man: the sudden death of super-centenarian Tom Parr in 1635 illuminates our long quest for longevity—see also 

marked decline: the precipitous drop in the use of semicolons—with a quiz to celebrate its proper placement  

urban renewal: arborists are planting giant sequoia (previously) in blighted Detroit neighbourhoods—via Kottke  

pandemonium: when the pantheon of gods and goddesses came into the world, they already had company with a multiplicity of daemons acting through human agents 

exchange programme: US Department of Homeland Security revokes Harvard’s ability to enrol foreign students  

brown dwarf: in the distant past, Jupiter was nearly twice its present size with a much stronger magnetic field, revealed by the orbital dynamics of its constellation of satellites—see previously