svetovni dan čebel

Born on this day in 1734 (†1773), professionally trained painter become beekeeper to the Viennese Hapsburg court, Anton Janša cultivated expert knowledge on their care and maintenance and published authoritative manuals and delivered lectures on apiculture across the Empire in order to maximise their yield of honey and wax and pollination of crops. In addition to the rotation of hives in pastures, Janša’s designs for bivouacs with stacked combs (see also) are the still the modern standard today, and since a bid to the United Nations from Slovenia was accepted in 2017, Janša’s birthday has been memorialised as World Bee Day.

pizza arbitrage or avoid the noid

First rejecting the characterisation of the whole house of cards of mail order schemes that pushes no cost merchandise in exchange for favourable reviews and nights on the town fuelled and funded via recommendations as too unsustainable to be believed and then learning of the seemingly contradictory exorbitant fees that food delivery aggregators charge to restaurants for membership, I was really taken aback by this bit of trading and markets incongruity that seems to be an example of business working for exposure.
Essentially the delivery service that a pizzeria proprietor uses undercuts the price paid per pizza taken from the order-in diner—the result being, experimentally verified, it being more profitable for the eatery to order their own pizzas and netting the difference. Of course, this mismatch and spreading out risk wouldn’t be sustainable with a network of restauranteurs capitalising on this sort of scheme but it’s the bubble and burst cycle that’s reflected in macroeconomics all the time—strange as it seems on this level. These platforms and the exploitative gig empire, a sheen of refinement, sophistication and technical skill but all held together with great effort and with the most precarious and vulnerable doing the most work, are subsidised by bigger platforms and by our own delusions of taking part and conceits of convenience.

bikini state

Established on this day in 1970 and in use until 2006 before being replaced by a more general and public terror alert status system, the eponymous indicator—which the Ministry of Defence says is a random and meaningless choice by a computer (see also)—was similar to counterparts in other countries though levels were determined by the threat to the institution and organisation itself rather than a generalised contingency plan.
Starting with Code White, the least serious and thus never invoked during the history of the BIKINI state, meaning no information available / “situation stable,” black meaning the possibility of an act with targets being undefined and alternately the potential for civil unrest with public safety questionable, Black Special, an increased likelihood of attack, Amber, a substantiated threat with a specific target or a transition to war, and Red signifying that the UK is at war with attacks imminent. The public became acquainted with the scheme through the 1984 apocalyptic war drama Threads.

6x6

why that’s a perfectly cromulent word: neologisms coined, defined and used in a sentence by a machine learning algorithm—via Things magazine

elrodon, son of halcyon: anti-depressant (see also) or Tolkien character—via Super Punch

your perfectly creased coordinated casuals: Kristen Wiig reads the early work of Suzanne Somers—via Nag on the Lake

specious logic: Trump argues against testing and tracing

howards end: E. M. Forster’s prescient 1909 sci-fi foray “The Machine Stops”

the floor is haunted: responsibly confined to our own living rooms, AI Weirdness (previously) imagines escape rooms

channelized blast zone

Here pictured just a day before the eruption four decades ago that left the peak without its northern face and scarred by a massive crater, one can appreciate how it had earned the title of Fuji-san of North America, Mount Saint Helens (known to aboriginal populations as Lawetlat’la or Loowit) began its crescendo of seismic activity back in late March venting steam before dramatically exploding with ash and pyroclastic columns and flows. According to most sources, fifty-seven people lost their lives, debris from the resulting landslide buried sixty square kilometres of the surrounding area, two hundred homes were destroyed as well as vast tracts of forested land and rivers clogged with ash and pumice.