biblioclasm

Among many other events of great pith and moment, our faithful chronicler records that on this evening in 1933 Hermann Goebbels agitated an already blood-thirty fraternal order, still giddy from their organised attack on the Sex Research Institute of Magnus Hirschfeld earlier that same week, and expressed their rage with a symbolic book burning (Bücherverbrennung) in the square (now known as Bebelplatz) before the State Opera building in Berlin.
The Student Union coordinated other similar events in university towns across Germany, attended by area Nazi officials, aiming to consign to the flames everything that was un-German. This was not the last of such rituals but some twenty thousand volumes deemed subversive where destroyed that night in Berlin alone, including works published by socio-economic theorist Karl Marx, novelists Thomas and Heinrich Mann, the Bauhäuslern, Erich Maria Remarque who penned the pacifistic recollection All is Quiet on the Western Front, playwright and lyricist Berthold Brecht, imminent scientist Albert Einstein and psychologist Sigmund Freud.

chumbox

Exploring further the “rewards” (see here, here and here) we get for actually finishing an article, Vox correspondent Kaitlyn Tiffany wades through the dregs of advertising—dubbed in the industry as chumboxes.
The goal was to chase down the elusive identity of the “vegetable” that an equally dodgily credentialed gut doctor is begging Americans to throw out now, or one of any number of snowclones in the form of body horror, oversized aloe vera, distressed comfort animals, celebrities behaving badly and far off–the-mark “targeted” ads. It’s impossible to track down definitive answers (and not like the answer would be less than enlightening and not very satisfying ultimately) but rather bounces one from spammy website to another, lower-rent one featuring progressively worse advertising marginalia, chumboxes being bait for bigger fishes that in turn lure bigger fishes, a regular pyramid scheme or rather multilevel marketing opportunity is the preferred term nowadays, comprising an unending garbage food-chain. Much more to explore at the link above.

mars: the ride

Via the always interesting Kottke, we find ourselves transported to the desert hills of the Gobi where a company called C-Space has recently opened a simulated Martian base as an education and outreach facility and tourist destination, with a space-themed hotel and restaurant. Though perhaps more of an amusement park than practical training centre, vis-à-vis institutions like Space Camp and similar programmes especially, we ought not to underestimate the power to inspire. Browse an extensive gallery of the base and its features at the links above.

firebug

Whilst most denizens of the forest would run the other direction at the hint of an encroaching conflagration, Slashdot introduces us to a tiny beetle called Melanophila acuminata—commonly known as the black fire chaser, found in large swaths of Eurasia and Northern and Central America.
While the beetle brigade will charge headlong into danger, the insect able to detect the heat of a distant fire upwards of a hundred kilometers away through “eyes” highly sensitive to stochastic resonance—differentiating the gradient and threshold of ambient thermal noise, their heroism is for the preservation of their species, the larvæ eating only burnt wood. Not only have the fire chasers been known to swarm and bite human firefighters (one wonders if this super power could be harnessed as an early alarm), there are many documented cases of the beetles being attracted to other heat decoys. Poignantly, given the outbreak of wildfires in this environment, this species will probably thrive whilst others in its cadre go extinct.

well… they have to be paid. that’s all there is to that—they have to be paid

Two years to the day after the first impeachment attempt, prior to the break-in at the Watergate complex by a month, was referred to the Judiciary Committee but failed to progress, the House Judiciary Committee re-convened to open formal hearings against President Richard Nixon (previously here, here and here) on this day in 1974.
The first twenty minutes were televised before the committee retired to closed sessions until late July when gavel-to-gavel coverage resumed. Though unknown to the committee at the time whether or not Nixon had personally authorised payments to the Watergate burglars to cover up the administration’s involvement, it was ruled that paying blackmail constituted obstruction of justice. At the conclusion of the proceedings, the House of Representative passed three of five charges levied against Nixon—the second article of impeachment was abuse of power, malfeasance in office and thirdly contempt of Congress. Criminal charges against the president for expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia without legislative approval and failure to pay taxes were blocked by Republican members.

project a1119

In response to the Sputnik crisis (previously here and here) and to boost American morale and reassert its dominance in the Space Race, the US Air Force developed a top-secret plan in May of 1958 to launch and detonate a nuclear bomb on the lunar surface.
This planned show of power was underwritten in part by geologists wanting to learn more about the satellite’s composition and formation and the team included a young Carl Sagan (*1934 - †1996). Ultimately better sense prevailed and the US (along with the Soviet Union who had a similar project in the works) called off the stunt for fear of public backlash and the uncertainty about the effects of fall-out for future colonists. The plan itself was not revealed to the public until forty-five years later in the mid-1990s, in part through Sagan’s 1999 autobiography, but did have more immediate impact with the Outer Space Treaty, accorded a decade later.