home box office or prestige television

Though the origin story that one of the co-founders conceived of the idea of a movie-by-mail service over his anger at being charged forty dollars in late fees by Blockbuster Video on a rental of Apollo 13 turned out to be apocryphal and when the concern first started losing money they offered to merge with the same brick-and-mortar network looking to them to supply logistics, Netflix—recently attaining a market valuation larger than the oil companies during the global lock-down and quarantines—was founded on this day in 1997, seeing a niche in the recently introduced media format, the DVD, bandwidth and streaming-speed limitation not yet providing the infrastructure for cinema on demand.
To realise the on-line delivery model that Netflix had hoped to provide from the beginning, they initially developed a dedicated “box” that would download movies overnight during off-hours so that they’d be available to watch the next day in 2005, but with recognising the compelling popularity of Youtube and the willingness to entertain relatively low-resolution content, the company abandoned their device and went for a lower quality streaming service deployed by 2007 and backed by an algorithm that eagerly suggested what to watch next, outpacing the previous recommendation routine Cinematch. The company transformed how people watch television and intake media and has spurred many competitors for our attention and time.

blessed are the cheese-makers

Having previously used the term turophile (see also here, here and here) to describe our devoted fans, we were delighted for another encounter with the root word in an albeit different though possibly less fringe context and community with artotyrite (ἀρτότυρος, from the Greek for bread and cheese)—used to name the members of a second century Galatian gnostic Christian sect who celebrated the eucharist with this additional ingredient.
Considered heretical also for allowing women to perform baptisms and hold religious office and for preferring to observe Easter according to the Hebrew calendar in mid-Nisan regardless of the day of the week and hence their other epithet Quatrodeciman—the Fourteeners—but mostly for the cheese, these outcasts who based their practise on the idea of offering first fruits not only of the field but also their flocks to the Divine, presumably also included wine in the sacrament of communion.

ieee

Born on this day in 1920 in Dallas, Texas, Otis Frank Boykin (†1982) was an accomplished electrical engineer with over two dozen patents to his name and credited with the invention several products and processes that led to improved resistors that Boykin applied to tamper-proof cash boxes, computers, cardiac pacemakers and missile guidance systems.  The inventor’s birthday also coincided with the first demonstration of the principle of electromagnetic induction by Michael Faraday (see previously) in 1831, whose successful series of public experiments led to the formulation of Faraday’s Law that predicts and describes how a magnetic field will interact with a circuit, the underlying concept for electrical motors, generators and inductors.

schwebebahn

With unreserved enthusiasm, Dan Schindel of Hyperallergic recommends us to indulge in this admittedly outstanding restored footage from 1902, another superlative highlight from MoMA’s Film Vault Summer Camp, of Wuppertal’s flying, suspension train (mentioned previously but have yet to make that trip plus see also) shortly after going into service. This clip is two-minutes in length and the entire circuit through the city, which one can still take today, lasts around half-an-hour, calling at ten stops.  Much more to explore at the link up top.

the secret teachings of all ages

Having joined that Great Beyond on this day in 1990 (*1901) and perhaps finding out the accuracy of what he taught, Canadian-American mystic and prolific lecturer Manly Palmer Hall was best remembered for the eponymous ambitious and comprehensive survey and fusion of wisdom literature.
An encyclopaedic outline compiled and ultimately published in 1928—volumes sold per subscription prior to publication (which strikes one as exceedingly modern though such funding methods, cash-on-delivery, have a long past) and recruited top talent in all departments, including printers, the eminent illustrator J. Augustus Knapp and book designers once employed by the Vatican and great universities—as a concise and accessible digest of metaphysics that challenged one to examine symbols, convention and ritual though the lens not of a received religion but rather as a heuristic tool for probing universal truths. Travelling from his native Los Angeles to Europe and Asia, Hall acquired many rare books and manuscripts on esoterica as original sources and due to the success of his publication of The Secret Teachings of All Ages and some generous patrons (also not a new scheme) and in 1934 founded public trust called the Philosophical Research Society—still in operation, to further his studies, curate collections and host events and seminars on the occult and mythology.