endangered specie

Via TYWKIDBI (and indeed, we’d have no inkling otherwise), we learn that during copper and other metal shortages during World War II, the US mint experimented with various substitute materials, including pennies made of glass.
A possibly unique prototype sold at auction to one anonymous numismatist for a considerable sum—the batch made of this particular specie rejected and destroyed since it was a difficult medium to work with and there was no consistency in the quality. The following year, the mint issued steel pennies electroplated with zinc, and I’m pretty sure we have at least one of those around somewhere.

archæoacoustics or sonic the hengehog

Knowing that acoustics and architecture go hand in hand, researchers are using gaming and virtual reality technologies to reconstruct and recreate the soundscape that Stonehenge must have presented to congregations three millennia prior.
The stone circle would have amplified bass sounds and focused them on the centre—like the signal boosting properties of a parabolic dish, and many have remarked in more recent times, like author Thomas Hardy, on the place’s strange musical hum. As fragmentary as the tonal structure is now—polluted with the din of a nearby traffic artery, scholars are only just now able to have an idea what being in the presence of this orchestrally arranged rock ensemble might have been like. Have a listen at the link up top; it was certainly easy to imagine an acoustic presence when we visited.  There is of course always a risk—though I suppose one diminishing on one level as measurements and models get more accurate—of not getting the whole picture and allowing, expecting technology to fill in those gaps in ways that may carry forward too much license and are not faithful to the original. Telescoped out, those minor fictions could cause real major problems not only for our conception of the past but also for contemporary predictions.

infonet

I had seen a few references in circulation but couldn’t quite manage to replay the film in head until reading this excellent but cringe-inducing analysis from Frank Swain.
The essay underscores how life imitates art, and rather than living in that under-privileged but blissful unawares computer simulation, we are in fact relegated to a rather bleak vision of 2017 from three decades hence—The Running Man. Complete with the billing of actors turn politicians in Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Venture and a game-show host more powerful than the president (now even more ironic considering that Schwarzenegger has been appointed Trump’s under-study as reality television-show master of ceremonies), the film is an uncanny reflection of our gladiatorial appetites. Even the technological state of affairs with the infonet and the infonet of things held up pretty well.  What do you think? Perhaps we’ve not crossed the threshold to blood-lust and public execution of society’s maladroits but virtual sticks and stones and teapot tempests are certainly not that far behind and are effective ways to placate and manipulate the home-audience.

hail to the chief, as we pledge cooperation

It may seem, in the grander scheme of things, like something very rarefied and trifling, but the emergent protest and backlash regarding a Saint Louis art museum’s decision to loan the a painting by George Caleb Bingham—called The Verdict of the People—to loan the piece to the presidential inaugural luncheon as a prop really strikes me as one of the better, more thoughtful arguments that I’ve heard imploring institutions and individuals not to normalise a regime that’s already demonstrated disdain for not only convention but also civility and social justice.
Too often, I think, wounded pride and fear is coming off as the same shrill mantra of partisan politics that was mumbled by the opposing chorus throughout the whole terms. We know it’s different and there’s much at stake but I think there’s a serious risk of having grave concerns fobbed off as something political and therefore not urgent thanks to safeguards—sometimes called grid-lock, and glacial rates of change (albeit it this environment, maybe that’s becoming an ever poorer metaphor). This contested artwork is not Bingham’s only political allegory but does seem particularly unfit in a self-styled era of populist uprisings that didn’t manage to also capture the popular vote and seemed ultimately far from the people’s verdict.

shōgatsu

In what’s become a sort of annual tradition, Spoon & Tamago are featuring a gallery of some of their favourite New Years’ postcards (年賀状, nengajō) for this upcoming year of the Fire Rooster. Although since 1873 Japan has officially adhered to the Gregorian calendar and celebrates the new year on 1 January, tradition still has a place for the lunisolar procession of the Chinese zodiac—which heralds in the year (and a second inflammatory one) of the rooster on 28 January with a week of festivities. Let’s hope that we’re getting an especially lucky sign this time around.