6x6

a murder most foul: an interactive map of crime scenes and hauntings of Victorian London, via Things Magazine

crying in public: a comparable emotional map of New York City, via Waxy

klimaendring: receding glaciers are revealing ancient artefacts in Norway faster than archaeologists can keep up, via Strange Company

editorial board: moving beyond titles and suggested topics, neural networks are being trained to write Wikipedia articles, via Slashdot

expo 67: Canada Modern archives the early golden age of the country’s contemporary graphic design movement, via Present /&/ Correct

postcards from sakha: photographer documents like in Yakutsk, Russia’s arctic republic

olive garden of eden

Via DaveLog v 3.0, we are treated to a good primer on the theology surrounding Pastafarianism, sourced directly back to the first prophet of the His Noodliness, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, physics student Bobby Henderson, who back in 2005 demanded that classroom curricula be apportioned equally in thirds, reserved amongst creationism and intelligent design, evidentiary conjecture-based scientific disciplines that includes the theory of evolution and the Pastafarian gospel, in protest to the Kansas Board of Education’s decision to give equal time under the law to only the former two perspectives.
Though many of its tenets are gentle parodies of religious fundamentalism, Pastafarianism has earned a place on interfaith panels and its priests and practitioners are afforded equal recognition with more established faiths and has been employed, as His Noodliness intended though ever once and awhile ingratiating falsified evidence and testimony contrary to its own origin story, as a persuasive counter-argument against those laws that would ravage the line that separates Church and State or deny others of freedom from religion altogether. Be sure to visit the links above for more Bible studies. R’amen.

rabble rousing or working the crowd

Hyperallergic’s Sunday Required Reading column points us back towards an Aeon magazine essay on the seemingly opposed forces that tyrants stir in their backers and in others complicit in their rise to power by appealing to one’s self-hatred through the promise of utopia never delivered.
David Livingstone Smith expands on the ideas that psychoanalysis Melanie Klein espoused to explain the sophistical powers of propaganda and charismatism that won over a great swath of Europe broken and recovering after WWI. Decision and motivation, under Klein’s model, are informed and haunted by two kinds of anxiety and how we cope explains volumes: either paranoid, we find ourselves persecuted by malicious, external forces or depressed, we find ourselves faced by being consumed by what we love. Both modes (and the sentiments feed into one another) can lead to the embrace of a totalitarian figurehead as an ego ideal and provokes the response of a manic defence that further solidifies one’s beliefs in the infallibility of the overtures of leadership and confirms that outside verification is superfluous at best by disassociating dependence and the need for something beyond a demagogue vested with omnipotence and omnibenevolence.

tosspot, hydropot

Third in colourful metaphors in the English language and bested only by the topics of sex and money, the term alcohol itself (from the Arabic alchemy word for the coal, any powder won through evaporation and distillation) is a relative new borrowing, compared to the numerous epithets of drinking culture that reach back thousands of years.
Whilst for ages more potent drinks enjoyed a better safety record than plain water—given the fact that there no treatment facilities and the benefits of boiling water were perhaps unknown to most hydropots, as the brave souls were called, tosspots—for those with no reluctance to throw back a beer (or several) might have to deal with a different sort of post-revelry regret in the form of a hangover. Precautions, remedies and cure-alls have equally old provenance, with the gem stone amethyst (from the Greek for sober) believed to be a magical charm to stave off intoxication. A few other borrowings of the language and not mineral variety include lampooning—from the French Lampons! for let us drink (compare to the Michelin mascot Bibendum from Horace’s Odes Nunc est bibendum, or rather It’s Booze Time!) which a night spend carousing—from the German invocation gar aus trinken to empty the glass—might facilitate, either in person or increasingly online. In any case, remember to drink responsibility and be sure to check out the link up top to learn more.

photic zone

Winners and honourable-mentions have just been announced for the British 2018 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest (previously) and My Modern Met has curated a gallery of some of the choice entrants culled from over five thousand submissions with interviews with the photographers about the composition and the preparation that went into capturing the picture. Aside from special categories for UK bodies of water, there were qualifiers from all over the world for Wide Angle, Macrolensing, Shipwrecks and Salvage, Portrait and Behaviour. Explore either link above for many more amazing images—especially stunning are the liminal ones that occupy both the realm above and below.

our russian chauffer, picov andropov

Our thanks to Weird Universe, the elevation of Monsignor Jaime L Sin, archbishop of Manila, to senior ecclesiastical leader, i.e., Cardinal Sin, the career-paths of several high court judges and the Mona Lisa smile of Dona del Giocondo for pointing us towards the term that describes how some individuals gravitate towards a profession that fits their family name, nominative determinism.
While there are surely more examples of people entering a trade where their name has no correspondence, when there is a match, it becomes quite resonant and theories abound regarding that calling, from unconscious wish-fulfilment, obligation or peer-pressure, and even inherited traits of careers passed down from one generation to the next—e.g., families of Smiths, Tailors, Bakers and Carpenters. Though fewer and fewer matriculate through those ranks these days, when one is true to their name, it is noteworthy and earns the neologism aptronym (rather than patronym) for being particularly apt and well-suited. Have you encountered any particularly good examples of this phenomenon? Doctors and lawyers seem really prone to such quirks of destiny.

rounding-error

Depressingly—and without even the need to compare itself to the rest of the world—daily three hundred and fifteen people are shot with a firearm, on balance, and of those two hundred and twenty-two individuals survive. These average figures are staggering already even without invoking those unspeakable tragedies that come about with all too regular recurrence and with a problem as endemic and pervasive, no one needs to be personally affected to appreciate the stakes.
Of those shootings that don’t result in a fatality (though to say nothing of physical and emotional scarring) most, one hundred sixty-four were caught in a gun attack, and of the rest, they are survivors of a suicide attempt (ten), they were shot by accident (forty-five) and three were shoot as part of a sanctioned intervention (out of zealous self-defence, over trespassing). Of the remaining ninety-three incidents daily that do result in death, a third are murdered and nearly two-thirds die from suicide with the remainder being accidental (one) or a legal intercession (also one). On a typical day, seven of the fatalities are children and teenagers. These sobering statistics come across with pointed accuracy despite the fact that Congress (at the behest of the weapons lobby that owns them) has imposed a moratorium on investigative studies by government entities into the causes and possible solutions for gun violence (something blindingly obvious, I should think) and also for the fact that those competent authorities that have oversight and responsibility for gleaning what traceable data there is are in danger of being defunded and will be smothered like so many other nuisances.