here there be robots

I am pouring over this highly detailed map of the topography of Mars, deftly executed by hand by the graphic artist Eleanor Lutz, in the style of late Middle Ages surveyors—like the Mappa Mundi of Hereford Cathedral.
“Here there be robots” refers to the landing sites (or ranges) for the various probes sent to explore the Red Planet, echoing the phrases “here there be Dragons” (hic sunt dracones—which only appears once and on a globe) or the more common “here there be Tygers” and the widespread practise of fulling in terra incognito with sea serpents and other terrible beasts, though the surface of Mars seems to be a place relatively accessible to us. The map even includes histories on the place names and a table of geographic terrestrial equivalents, off-world features generally taking Latin nomenclature.

les propheties

Of course the prophesies of soi-disant seer Nostradamus are generally poetical ramblings of tenuous woo that each age can find some kind of resonance for, if one applies himself hard enough, but if not the most helpful of forecasts are mostly harmless fun.

This mystic and creature of the court, a favourite of Queen Catherine de Médicis much like Rasputin to his Tsarina, was prolific and scholars, perhaps driven by unacknow- ledged bias, have found certain correlations to historical figures, as well as contemporary commentary. Wondering where the presidential candidacy that has inspired chills on an international scale might be secreted among the quatrains (if they’re truly still relevant), Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing teased out several disturbing findings in short order: there are quite a few references to the “false trumpet” bringing wrack and ruin. Beschizza offers his own interpretations of the stanzas and invites us to research for ourselves.

state of the cart

Though H and I usually eschew taking a shopping-buggy, using just a basket or a bag and preferring not to lug home more from the corner market than we can comfortably carry, the story behind the ubiquitous and often overlooked shopping cart, via the always interesting Presurfer, is pretty fascinating—especially for the insights into marketing and consumer-conscience.
An enterprising green-grocer from a small town in Oklahoma, drawing on his war time experience as a provisioner in the commissariat, realised that the standard arrangement of having clerks wait on one customer at a time was inefficient and that the self-service model was a far better one. Emerging from the Stock Market Crash and the Great Depression relatively unscathed, as people always need staples regardless of the economy, the chain of supermarkets the inventor and entrepreneur founded were holding on but just barely. In a flash of brilliance, the creator of the shopping cart found a way to persuade shoppers to buy more food (and differently packaged food, prepared meals and canned-goods) with each visit by lightening their burdens and giving their load to the steely sinews of an oversized basket on wheels. It would be hard to account for all the ways this invention changed our buying patterns and diets.

iconoclasm

Courtroom sketch artist extraordinaire Atlas Obscura brings some excellent and thoughtful reporting on the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal, which for the first time—fueled by revulsion, terror and heartbreak of the cowardly and wanton deportment of the Cosplay Caliphate—is hearing a case against with cultural heritage is the plaintiff and victim.
Though there is sadly thousands of years of precedence regarding the wilful destruction of ancient artefacts and unexplored archaeological sites (not to mention pilfer and plunder), no case has been successfully lobbied before in this venue. It was not the recent tragic losses of our shared patrimony in Syria or the destruction of Slavic and French landmarks and monuments by the Nazis a few generations removed (although the beginnings of a legal framework came out of those events), but rather a lesser-known (and perhaps the greater loss for its lack of public attention) incident where an individual attempted to steamroll the cultural landscape of Mali, near Timbuktu. The world is trying the thugs of today’s headlines in absentia, of course, but with this docket the Court hopes to create laws and language sufficient to to deter future losses and craft the codex to throw at the current perpetrators.

round-house

Beginning in the twelfth century down to modern times, families in the Hakka highlands took to designing unique earthen dwellings in order to protect themselves and their livestock from gangs of bandits.
This housing arrangement is called tulou, in the specific architectural style of the Fujian region, eventually came to be more like little self-contained cities—not like gated-communities, with meeting halls, warehouses, wells, coops and pens. In addition to affording residents a great degree of security, even withstanding cannon-fire, the structures were also ideal for climate-control and robust when encountering tremors of earthquakes. Be sure to check out the piece on Kuriositas for a comprehensive gallery of these buildings and learn more about their history.

doggerel

Like realising that to the rest of the world, in normal parlance the abbreviation LWOP would probably not signal “leave without pay” but “life without parole,” a conceit fit more for a country-western lament rather than the docket, I discovered that for most of the world the phrase quid pro quo does not connote primarily reciprocation—tit-for-tat—but rather misapprehension or even substitution, to mistake one thing for another or appearing in cookbooks as QPQ when one can use olive oil in place of tallow and for prescriptions when one medicine was unavailable.
Similarly while quis might now be a gauge for user- friendliness in the Questionnaire for User- Interaction Satisfaction, a battery of tools used to rate the experience for different platforms—it used to signify something quite different in schoolyard vernacular. If we could borrow a page of dialogue from the salad days, courtesy of Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the day, quis, the Latin pronoun akin to who, was often used as a much more elegant and compact way of inquiring “who among you wants this particular thing which I am offering?” Quis? The claimant would respond with ego, me. Whether any bright young things ever had such an exchange outside of Brideshead Revisited, I’m not sure, but it ought to be brought back, nonetheless.

allele, alelo or progressive trait

While neither condemning nor condoning the practise of tinkering with genetics, the science desk of Buzzfeed (ironically, as it is the males who buzz and annoy but only the silent females that bite and suck blood) presents a really solidly comprehensive article that at least exculpates and explains the methodologies from a community health standpoint behind releasing hundreds of thousands of genetically-compromised males into the wild breeding population to keep it under control. The problematic mosquito that is the vector of dread disease in Brazil and is spreading to neighbouring regions is an invasive species—an import from the Nile region—and although very much still a scourge in its native habitat, the humans, living lived with them for generations, are less prone to outbreaks.
Getting rid of this unwelcome invaded might allow indigenous insect populations to return and bring further natural regulation to the ecology. It is unlikely there’s any correlation between the trials, conducted in 2012 and the present emergence of viral infections—due to time and distance with the incubation period of the Zika virus and the other diseases it transmits being mere weeks. The surge in cases most likely indicates that the testing produced victims of its own success, in much the same way as a concerted campaign in South America to eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes decades earlier worked just well enough to shove off public notice and eventually caused a relapse. What strikes me as really surprising, however (and again, the mutated males could not spread the virus as they don’t bite), is that the male mosquitoes are not engineered to have woefully short life-spans in a straightforward manner: the mutants, programmed to self-destruct, will live out their normal adult lives provided they are given an antidote, an antibiotic, once every four days. Outside of the laboratory, this substance cannot be found and after mating, the males die and pass along this trait to their offspring. Maybe it was that little detour for sterilisation management gives the conspiracy-theorists ample purchase.

foundscape or crowd-surfing

From the ever fascinating shelves of antiquarian JF Ptak, comes a fun little exercise to try for oneself and I’ve noticed that I tend sometimes to zero-in on the same sort of details in scanning crowds: locate a historic picture of gathered masses, like this detail from 1903 when people had come together to hear US presidential incumbent and candidate Teddy Roosevelt and see what sort of details and stand-out expressions one can find amid the sea of headdresses. Foundscapes he calls them. It’s certainly more fun than finding the panda hiding among skunks—or whatever that was—to look for one’s own Doppelgänger or probable time-travelers lost in the crowd. Be sure to check out the book store for many more curiosities.