apiary or cargo cult

Revealed in a patent application disclosed recently, a major online retailer is aiming to install multi-level, vertical “fulfilment centres” in urban environments. Instead of the traditional warehouse model, which may be located close to transportation hubs are too far removed from consumers and workers, giving aerial delivery drones a hive (this traditional beehive form is called a skep and were fashioned out of wicker or coils of straw) to work from could facilitate commerce without contributing to street level congestion. I wonder how these changes in infrastructure and supply-chain management will affect urban planning and civil engineering.

carriage shift

Though no touch-typist am I and would be tripped up whatever the case, it’s a little bit of an adjustment for me just switching between a QWERTY keyboard at work and the only slightly different German QWERTZ layout at home.
I could not imagine, however, taking to something so radically different—for an industry standard—as what the French are contemplating as a replacement for the maligned AZERTY with the Dvorak-style BÉPO model. I’ve always thought it’s a little ironic that typewriters were given their respective layouts to keep mechanical units from jamming by pacing typists and making them work a little more deliberatively. What do you think? Should keyboards focus on ease and intuition, concede to the times (the chief complaint about the unmodified AZERTY keyboard is hunting for the @-sign) or stick with tradition? I never quite got over the fact that a telephone keypad assigned letter values to the 1 key and started admitting Q and Z.

dress right dress

The US government squandered millions, as Super Punch informs, outfitting the Afghani army.
Standard- isation in uniform and gear is of course important to signal allegiance on the battlefield and it stands to reason that the army would want something distinctive to discourage impostures. While far cheaper alternatives were available, over a quarter of the hundred million dollar expenditure went towards a proprietary camouflage pattern. The branded camo, Spec4ce it’s called (not pictured), is produced by Canadian firm called HyperStealth whose previous contracts include costuming a rogue paramilitary force for an Iron Man movie. Al Qaeda and company will surely lay down their arms and surrender to international anti-piracy laws. While the costs constitute barely a drop in the bucket in the scheme of that unending war and the American army seems pretty obsessed with window-dressing itself, it is even more regrettable that the choice in pattern was committed with no regard for landscape of Afghanistan and rather than camouflage troops, it makes them more visible.

tyto alba

Via Nag on the Lake, we learn of a very clever way to up-cycle wine packaging from the Portuguese vintners of Companhia das Lezírias . Having committed to protecting local barn owls, they are raising awareness with a collection named Tyto Alba (the Latin nomenclature for the bird) whose wooden boxes can be hung from a tree branch after enjoying. Though the accommodations might be too cramped for an owl, these bird houses, nest-boxes are a pretty nifty idea. Most populations of barn owls are not under grave threat in Europe, but the creatures have suffered at superstitious hands for ages, believed to be bad omens due to their rather liminal natures. While owls—or birds in general for that matter, are not famed for their ears, but uniquely among birds barn owls ears (if they were visible) would appear lop-sided and it’s this offsetting that allows them to use their preternatural hearing to triangulate prey in complete darkness.

don’t talk about our son, martha

Our faithful chronicler, Dr Caligari, informs that on this day, among many other events like the trial of Galileo Galilei for the heresy of positing that the Earth travels around the Sun, the concluding moves of the Machtergreifung of 1933 that banned all other political parties in Germany and the 1941 invasion that ended the country’s “Peace and Friendship” treaty with Russia—director Mike Nichol’s released his first film in 1966 with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton starring in the screen-adaptation of Edward Albee’s absurdist work Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to critical acclaim.

the confusion of the tongues

We enjoyed this history lesson in the syllabry called Deseret devised at the same time as the Mormons began their exodus to the arid territories of the American southwest.
Meaning “honeybee” in the Jaredite language (one of the four ancient tribes of Babylon that the Church of Latter Day Saints believes spread to the New World after that enterprise with the Tower failed) and also the name of the settlement before it was incorporated as the state of Utah, the thirty-eight character alphabet that represented all phonemes in the language was an attempt at spelling-reform, like the Shavian alphabet, to make learning and reading English less inscrutable for non-native speakers and immigrants. Public reception within the community was less enthusiastic than expected—though adopted by the Hopi tribe for their writing system—and combined with conspiratorial indictments that the point of the script was either to keep Mormon communication secret from outsiders or control what Mormon readership had access to, the Deseret experiment didn’t quite catch on at the time but is presently enjoying somewhat of a resurgence in interest that’s surveyed pretty thoroughly by Atlas Obscura at the link up top.

super sonic

With the very busy Schipol Airport just nine kilometres outside of Amsterdam, noise pollution has posed a serious problem for residents living in that sound footprint, which can propagate over an expanse of some thirty kilometres due to the featureless plain that surrounds the facility.
Back in 2008, however, officials seeking to remedy this situation accidentally noticed that when the fields around the airport were ploughed, noise levels dropped. Inspired and drawing on the nineteenth century experiments and demonstrations of father of acoustics, mathematician and musician Ernst Chladni, an architectural firm dug runnels and raised berms to change the soundscape of the area. The symmetrical furrows are separated by the equivalent to the wave-length of the general racket and disrupt the spread of the noise, cutting it in half. The park that separates the airport campus from populated areas has features named in Chladni’s honour—whose brilliance might be most immediately recalled with his demonstrations of sound propagating through a solid medium illustrated by the way grains of sand arrange themselves according to the vibration. Those shapes (nodal patterns) are called Chladni figures.