métal hurlant

Via Neatorama comes the outstanding retro-future visions of Dan McPharlin, which pay a special homage to the science-fiction and fantasy paperback covers, video-game artwork and album covers that he grew up with.
There’s a certain impressionistic grittiness that is somehow more bonding—not just in a nostalgic sense, than the technically refined and regurgitated (so we don’t get too distracted I suppose) with the slap-dash marketing that adorns most things nowadays. The American magazine of fantasy fiction, Heavy Metal whose genre sponsored this particular style, was itself inspired in the mid 1970s by a French publication called Métal Hurlant, howling metal. Be sure to check out the links for an interview with the artist and more sublime studies of the imagination.

bicameral

Wanting to improve my geo-political senses, I put together this map with the legislative chambers represented by the banners, emblems and logos (space permitting) where they are physically placed. There is of course some bi-location in many spots, and it was interesting to find that most national assemblies, from the Alþing to the Duma, do have their own symbols. Where there was a distinction, I chose the lower lower house—the people’s chamber, but for a few countries I could only find the coat-of-arms to use.  Here is a nice peek on the inside of some of these institutions.  A few devolved regional governments are also included, as well as a few peculiars.

adage or open-source

Cunningham’s Law is seemingly one of those pithy, defeatist principles that have been named and carry aloft some sense of proprietorship and savoir, stating that the best way to solicit accurate information (in the Information Age) is by baiting one’s audience with the low-hanging fruit of patently false propositions.
Of course, certain types are better lured by certain honey-pots of howling inaccuracy and I doubt a lot of contentiousness and incivility stem from one wanting to get at an elusive truth and not a sturdy and well-buffeted opinion. Howard Cunningham, however, for whom the law is named is not just some rhetorician but the programmer, computer-scientist and Happy Days father who developed the user-editable platform known as the wiki. This potential for disabusing, edification and promulgation launched thousands of websites including of course Wikipedia, which has proved not only enlightening but also worth protecting. I’m sort of ambivalent about such proverbs—like Murphy’s Law (named for Candice Bergen) or the Sportscasters’ Curse, but I am sure that there’s a grain of truth to be uncovered behind them. Cunningham, at least through his creation that he gave away freely because he could not imagine anybody wanting to pay for something so basic but useful, and his law have become a grand social experiment with plenty of bait and bounty.

precept, percept

Via the indefatigably interesting Mind-Hacks, I found out that American National Public Radio is launching a new, fresh programme called Invisibilia (Latin for all things that can’t be seen) that aims to investigate human behaviour and motives through narratives, interviews and research into realms that may shy away from direct observation. This is certainly a series that I want to tune in to.

appellation

Three of the slain cartoonists in Paris were also famed for designing rather bawdy, irreverent labels for a few select wine-makers in a tradition that covered four decades of vintages.

the adventures of strelka & belka

Collectors’ Weekly has a nice recollection of the canine-persuasion’s contributions to space flight. Laika was certainly not without many, many dogged comrades that participated in the Soviet space programme and their lives, careers and celebrity are being compiled in a new book, whose editor is also the subject of this show-and-tell.

like a feather on god’s breath

Though not entirely alone among accomplished and influential women of the Middle Ages in Europe, the fascinating life and career of twelfth century Abbess Hildegarde von Bingen did strike me as a pleasant rediscovery and one that certainly bears further investigation to appreciate her contributions fully.
Born as the tenth child to a family of minor nobility along the Rhine, Hildegarde was basically tithed to the Church and given over to a convent at a very young age. Her early life and traditional formative years were punctuated with visions—which were miraculous enough in itself, which she kept to herself, professing herself to be an unworthy vessel and inadequate messenger, and found her voice, so to speak, in middle age. Outside of this context, Hildegarde’s erudition and research—notably including the composition and scoring of hundreds of pieces of holy music (A Feather on the Breath of God was the title of one of her canticles), extensive studies in medicine, advocating the boiling of water of all things, and taxonomy of flora and fauna (which maybe three hundred years later inspired Dame Juliana Berners to group animals together with the most fanciful and creative collective terms, like a murder of crows or a murmuration of starlings) was brilliant and earned her the eventual recognition as a Doctor of the Church (bestowed by Pope Benedict in 2012), but what I find particularly amazing was that her life really did begin at forty and instead of retiring to quiet contemplation—at a time when people didn’t usually survive that long to begin with, really took ownership of what might be called a mid-life crisis and resolved to share her gifts.
Hildegarde’s resurgence in recent years is doubtlessly a grave oversight in history that needs amending but may be in part due to particularly liberated and thoroughly modern echoes in her life that resound with contemporary movements. Though claiming that all of her learning and works were the products of divine inspiration, as a woman she petitioned the Pope and played a major role in Church politics and even preached herself, her homeopathic practises fit right in today, for being a nun she said quite a lot about sexuality and could be considered the first person to pursue a course in gender-studies, not only developed chants and penned devotional songs but also wrote an elaborate musical in a morality play set to her own compositions. Moreover, she authored an illustrated exegesis of her own visions and invented a language and script that was kind of a coded pastiche of Latin and German that Hildegarde deemed more suited for those enigmatic and perplexing revelations that came to her, which she always felt incapable of fully disclosing. Some partial copies of her codex have been preserved but the complete Scivias (some six-hundred pages) disappeared in the tumult of war in 1945 from a vault in Dresden.

chronostratigraphic units

Mental Floss invites us to explore the planet’s history through this pretty keen time-spiral, produced by a design team working for the United States Geological Survey. This artwork—available also in poster form ends with the age of the Holocene Epoch, beginning about ten thousand years ago and heralds in the beginning of human civilization, but there’s also a proposed name for the current era, Anthropocene, reasoning that the impact that mankind is having on ecology merits a new division—eons, ages and periods all being measures of indeterminate lengths.