case study or island of stability

Couched as we are in alternative truths and a totalitarian regime that would have us believe that we have always been at war with Eastasia, we appreciated this look back on the term gaslighting from the Neurocritic first through its contemporary resonance that insists on a new normal (that’s the most insidious thing for which we cannot afford to let our guard down), then looking back to its Victorian, domestic-noir origins and then to a series of citations in medical literature that appropriated the term from the 1944 film adaptation, already in colloquial use since the 1960s. This form of psychological terrorism uses trickery and deceit to plant seeds of doubt by means of persistent denial and contradiction and invalidate a counter-argument. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Though noticing a dip in the lights was dismissed as a figment of the abused’s imagination and seemed a rather insignificant detail to stake one’s sanity on, it was the one truth in the framing of the original story that the protagonist could find refuge in.

adventuræ maris, wreccum maris

After gold was discovered in the hills of California, there was incredible rush to deliver prospectors and cargo to the territory by way of the shallow wharves of Yerba Buena Cove of San Francisco, which as Super Punch informs, resulted in the impressment of any spare sailing vessel into this lucrative venture.
Once moored in the cove, however, captains found little incentive to make a return journey and many ships of all description were more or less abandoned. As the settlement grew and grew, these wrecks were absorbed as landfill and make up a strange and hidden landscape of buried treasure and is now being charted out with extensive detail by the city’s historical maritime counsel. Some ships were salvaged and repurposed as building materials but others due to the way the laws of subrogation were interpreted at the time were intentionally scuttled because the land under the sunken boat (the cove was very shallow and could be turned into dry land with a few wheelbarrows of sand and a day’s labour) became the property of the wreck’s owner. Read more about this project in National Geographic at the link up top.

cubing the sphere

Via Waxy we learn that after months of work, Marc ten Bosch is releasing a toybox of four dimensional playthings that one can experience in a virtual setting and discover the “physics” of how such pieces interact.
This unstructured form of play allows users, taking wobbly baby-steps, to discover how these hybrid hyper-shapes work. The added dimension is a physical one, and not an aspect of passing time that we pretend to intuit or at least be better acquainted with, because while these forms may be impossible to render in our reality, our mechanics can be scaled algebraically to any number of extra dimensions and is only limited by our imaginations. I’ll bet that this is a pretty mind-expanding experience to immerse oneself in and recommend that you give it a try.

corona radiata

Our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari informs that among other happenstance for this date, Queen Elizabeth II had her coronation ceremony in 1953, an event broadcast for the first time to a home audience.  Even though the technology for replaying the event did not then and does not now really exist, the BBC had the foresight to record it in three-dimensions for posterity. The queen’s reign presided over the terms of fourteen prime ministers from Sir Winston Churchill (vested in Parliament by Queen Victoria) to Theresa May. One hundred and sixty years prior to the accession of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror took place and in between in 1924, the United States of America magnanimously grandfathered in Native Americans as US citizens under president (the Queen has seen eleven of them come and go) Calvin Coolidge’s Indian Citizenship Act, though most weren’t granted suffrage or universal recognition until decades later.

botany bus

Filed unfortunately under fleeting wonders as this traveling installation is only a temporary one, mass-transit passengers in Taipei are being treated to a perfusion of lush, living plants and moss-covered seats in a special forest livery roving the concrete jungles of the metropolis. For a week, commuters get the chance to commune with Nature courtesy to an experiment carried out by local florist and designer Alfie Lin. The ride looks absolutely magical and we’re hoping that it inspires other metro-systems to try providing similar, enduring experiences.

6x6

of salterns and sinkholes: a look at the buried salt deposits that drive the geology of the Gulf of Mexico and we will drill at our peril

kit and kiln: captivating, hand-crafted art tiles from Ann Arbour, Michigan

flower shankar: machine learning tries its hand at coming up with band names, via Waxy

while my guitar gently shrieks: Dangerous Minds interviews Missus Smith, the heavy metal, conservatively-dressed busker who can really shred it 

sensory substitution devices: look with your brain, not with your eyes—via TYWKIWDBI  

bloop: the international scientific collaboration Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected the echoes of a massive merger of three black holes

we’re going to have the cleanest air—we’re going to have the cleanest water

To lump the outliers of the Paris Climate Accords in one basket is a real unkindness to Nicaragua and Syria, given that the former objected to the goals set forth were far too modest and the Central American country is aiming for no less than a ninety percent energy sourced in renewable, sustainable resources within the next decade, and the latter was in the midst of a protracted civil war with no functioning government (the same could arguably be said for the third party) and had no delegation to send.
Intent on keeping at least one campaign promise that panders to his base at the disdain for ever other living creature on the planet, Dear Leader proclaimed that he was elected to represent the “citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris” as he announced that after weeks of playing coy about it his decision to reassert American sovereignty by breaking with the pact.  Poor Pittsburgh. Much as is the case with Brexit (Castle Mayskull is the only other world leader not to join the chorus of unanimous dissent over Dear Leader’s bad choice), the divorce proceedings are messy and the US won’t be released from its obligations until 2020—though a frightening amount of damage could be affected domestically by undoing decades’ worth of environmental regulations and protections.
America has no cachet in the world under this tin-pot regime that advocates wilful ignorance and is completely credulous in saying that global-warming is a Chinese conspiracy meant to steal American jobs, and whatever sort of race-to-the-bottom that the US is hoping to spark with its myopic, greedy, grubby recalcitrance—the rest of the world is not having it: Parisians and Pittsburghers are redoubling their efforts for environmental reform, scientists and other subnational jurisdictions and even businesses are committed to the goals outlined in COP21 despite what Dear Leader is advocating. We ought to not need to expend extra energy and effort just to neutralise or contain the arrogant and dangerous stupidity of Dear Leader and his criminal posse of free-loaders, but tyrannies will topple perhaps this was the transgression to trigger the regime’s overthrow and to inspire some real and positive change for our environmental stewardship.