by-line or fait accompleat

Via Cory Doctrow’s Pluralistic, we are introduced to the Giant Language Model Test Room created to detect machine learning forgeries, hybrid news items autogenerated and highlights the certain slant, intentional or capitalised upon or not, of predictive text by colour coding the output, the copy of an article based on its own protocols, as an obstacle to targeted content to match targeted advertising—which seriously threaten to undermine education and discourse and reveals what’s written by reporters and what’s writes by machines.

¤

We’re directed to an interesting survey that examines the colour of money globally of currently circulating currency, banknotes and isolates the Pantone hues that inform them, further identifying trends, occupations and professionals depicted, etc. The colour chart is an exhaustive, identifying the reference colour—for example—of the Icelandic kroner as Turquenite, Arubian florins as Pink Gecko or the Bhuanese ngultrum as Sundress. The title symbol is the generic currency sign, used to represent any or all denominations and originally employed when one keyboard didn’t have all the speciality typographical characters of another, proposed and championed as an alternative to the $.

usage rights

Via Pasa Bon! and their latest curation of remarkable things (opmerkelijke zaken—bijou, incidentally, was long considered to be a Dutch word since it was inconceivable that that forbidden letter combination might be valid in English and the French borrowing is pendantically spelt byou in Holland), we enjoyed this gentle lampoon of the domineering stock image distributor, though they probably deserve worse for their rather infamous cases of copyfraud and overreach in watermarking and demanding payment for public domain photographs. The idea is fun—nevertheless, and makes me wonder about what very niche variety of stock photos I could furnish up, royalty-free.

farce majeure

Tossing out more problematic catch-phrases and loaded buzzwords—this time Richard Nixon’s “silent majority,” Trump is lauding his militarily-enforced curfew and peace-keeping measures as the model for other governors and mayors to emulate when it comes to suppressing the people’s right to assembly and nonviolent activism.
This mobilisation—loftily called Operation Thetis no less, presumably for her role as legitimising the reign of Zeus and defending him against a rising rebellion and coup-plotting on Mount Olympus—has garnered Trump resistance and criticism from both his current and former defence secretaries over his heavy-handed tactics and the wisdom of invoking the Insurrection Act to stop rallies. While pleading ignorance about the photo-op and the general impossibility of working in that dysfunctional regime are plausible excuses, his current minister who is contradicting Trump about the wisdom sending in the cavalry is not beyond reproach for letting the situation get as bad as it is—plus we’re sure that Mr. Esper wants to maintain morale and cohesion among the ranks, which are comprised of forty percent minority service members. As for retired General Mattis, it’s tempting to see breaking his silence now as anything but redeeming since he should have said something whilst he was still in a position to affect change, one can hope, like with all the other rehabilitated war criminals, that his willingness to criticise, even belatedly, might inspire others to do the same.

l’appellation d'origine protégée

Known to his subjects both as the Beloved (le Bien-Aimé) and the Mad (le Fou), on this day in 1411 (see previously) sage Charles VI of the Valois dynasty, in the midst of civil war and trying to win over allies, granted to the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon the monopoly to sell cheeses with the designation of “Roquefort”—to include the caves wherein the cheese is ripened (affinage). This exclusive right, still upheld today, is one of the earliest and love-lived instances of legal protected and enforceable designation of origin.

republik freies wendland

Though only in existence for a month before police cleared the protest camp and micronation (see also) on this day in 1980 and evicted the occupants outside of Gorleben to rally against the excavation of a nuclear waste dump there and accused of high-treason by the interior minister of Niedersachsen, the self-proclaimed community of some five thousand encamped on a barren patch of the Lüneberger Heath that was cleared by the wildfires of 1975 had an impressive infrastructure designed for the long-term with permanent shelters, shared facilities, greenhouses, a health clinic, a hair salon, a radio station, sauna and solar- and wind-generated electricity.
Geologists had been conducting drilling tests to determine whether the salt domes beneath the nature reserve were suitable for storing nuclear waste. During the Republic’s final days, a sit-in was staged of at least two-thousand Wendlanders were carried away by police forces with the demonstration coming to a mostly peaceful conclusion, with authorities thanking them for their nonviolent approach. Though the controversial dump was ultimately built in October 1986, the anti-atomic movement progressed and did eventually achieve more and greater, transformative accomplishments, and also despite its brief existence Wendland has an enduring and outsized legacy, including as recently as 2015 the mayor of a nearby municipality extended to Edward Snowden asylum with a “Wendepass” from the days of the Republic.

it was the third of june—another sleepy, dusty delta day

As our faithful chronicler reminds, today was the day that Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, according to his 1967 ode by Bobbie Gentry, songwriter and performer from Chickasaw County, Mississippi whom was familiar with the rural span and the indelible impact of suicide on a family and community that have no language (excepting perhaps these lyrics) for it.
Addressed as mealtime pleasantries by another family adjacent to the tragedy and not knowing their own daughter’s connection or feelings, the narrator has to reconcile what has transpired for herself and suffers silently. As an interrogatory prelude as to why McAllister killed himself, fans pressed Gentry what the pair had tossed off Choctaw Ridge with theories ranging from an engagement ring, LSD and a draft card. Gentry demurred, saying only to “Suppose it was a wedding ring.” The eponymous bridge became quite a tourist draw in July and August in that same year once the song began to chart and the county began imposing fines for those leaping off of it but as the height was low, the risk of injury or death was in fact minimal. The original bridge was destroyed in a fire in 1972, the tune overshadowing a very real tragedy that took place in the immediate area in 1955 when fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till was accused of offending a white woman in her family’s grocery store and lynched by an angry mob, his body sunk in the Tallahatchie river on the twenty-eighth of August. The Ode saw sustained international popularity as well with a French version by Joe Dassin called “Marie-Jeanne” some months later, a Swedish one by Olle Adolphson titled “Jon Andreas visa,” a German and Italian translation called “Billy Joe McAllister” and “Ode per Billy Joe” respectively—all true to Gentry’s story but told with local landmarks, and there was even a novelisation and film adaptation in nearly a decade after its release.