hoppípolla

The legendary Icelandic band Sigur Rós will be remixing one of their most popular songs (which in its original version accompanied the 2006 launch of the first Planet Earth series hosted by Sir David Attenborough) for the next iteration.
Very particular about commercial ventures, the band was however all too pleased to rework one of its signature tunes for the sake of environmental awareness and showcasing some of the spectacular creatures that our presence is imperilling. See teasers for the latest instalment and listen to the song at the Grapevine above and if you’ve not yet seen it, check out this amazing, nail-biting iguana vs snakes chase-scene from the pilot episode of Planet Earth II here.

old glory or oconus

Via Hyperallergic, we’re treated to a gallery of submissions for the radical redesign of the US flag in 1958 in order to accommodate and highlight the incorporation of Hawaii and Alaska as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states as by President Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps as a symbolic end to America’s imperial aspirations—having gone from sea to shining sea and then some.

More than three-thousand entries, some variations on the same theme and others highly abstract, hopeful, patriotic and provocative, came in at the time and though the bulk has gone unseen since examined, considered and dismissed by the jurors, all the designs have been conserved in the archives of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. A new coffee-table book has collected some of the best of them for your consideration.  Check out the link up top for more information and alternate flags.

source code

In deference to aspiring human writers and accomplished robotic ones and since if you’ve procrastinated until now, there isn’t enough time left in National Novel Writing Month to crank out your œuvre, take a look at this parallel call for submissions that calls for awareness on the subject and nature of sentience and autonomy with National Novel Generation Month.
While apparently not self-aware and just following the protocols of their programmers, the output of this observance is at once both sublime and surreal works of literature—the generative code that participants write as throughput is really something apart, a hybrid that we maybe don’t have it yet in our philosophical quivers to address. Check out the link above to learn more about the project and a curation of a few select entries that demonstrate the profundity and creativity that we’ve managed to tease from ourselves and instantly, inexhaustibly commission a story into existence.

dongle or airdrop

I knew that the close-proximity wireless data transfer was the namesake of Viking ruler Harald Bluetooth and even bore his runic initials in the medium’s symbol, but I ought not have just been pleased and satisfied with that bit of trivia and not wondered why.
The person of Bluetooth, to whom that moniker was given for his fondness of blueberries, was interestingly the second king of a uniting Denmark and Norway and father of the first canonical Danish king of England, Sven Forkbeard. An engineer at the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson who was working in 1997 on a way to synchronise devices, mobile phones with computers at the time, at close range was reading a history of Scandinavia at the time and choose “Bluetooth” as the working title for their project—in collaboration with Finnish Nokia. Once the technology had been worked out and they were ready to unveil this new feature, on the advice of marketers they nearly named the ad-hoc networking feature Flirt—close but not touching, but harking back to the original implication behind the name—for the king who brought together diverse tribes into a single united kingdom (and made them all into Christians as well), they wisely and artfully decided to stick with Bluetooth in the end.

7x7

utopia planitia: Mars’ plains of paradise host a frozen lake rivalling Lake Superior, via TYWKIWDBI

let’s go out to the lobby: imagining C-SPAN’s Golden Elevator-cam coverage

the star rover: astral projections with Jack London’s final and uniquely philosophic science-fiction novel

airstrip one: vast expansion of UK domestic surveillance powers were rather overshadowed by Brexit and cadet events

the pearlies: the London subculture for charitable works and social justice with impeccable fashion-sense

rassilon imprimatur: celebrate the fifty-third anniversary of Doctor Who by watching all the reincarnations

good old puritan custom: leading lifestyle maven of the 1850s Sarah Josepha Hale’s petition to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, realised as a time for healing and reconciliation during the US Civil War 

gobble, gobble

We here at PfRC wish you and yours a peaceful and bountiful Thanksgiving. Thanks as always for stopping by.

the great dictator

As if we aren’t already living in times fraught with chilling and terrifying things, Paleofuture—with a bit of digging—uncovers the reductio ad Hitlerum and finds that the pledge to make Germany great again was indeed uttered sometime prior to the year 1934 by the chief mover and shaker of the moment.
The farewell tour of the incumbent included Obama passing the mantle of protector of the free-world to his counter-part in the person of the chancellor.  Without drawing parallels as nationalist movements tend to resolve the fact that despots are elevated to power not because but rather despite of (or excused for) their less digestible views, quite enough scary things are being proffered in the here and now, threatening to erode the precious progress that American and the world has made for peaceable and responsible co-habitation.

roger ramjet

Though a healthy dose of skepticism lingers, NASA’s propulsion labs are concluding their experimental electromagnetic drive will work—efficiently transporting payloads to the Martian surface in a little over three months instead of a year—despite the small matter of the impulse engine’s apparent violation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, the classical mechanics assertion that all actions have an equal and opposite reaction.
The demonstration that the engine does work came easier than the compelling reasons it ought not work for going against thermo- dynamics. Like how Quantum Mechanics explained observed anomalies without invoking deus ex machina needed for the Classical model by destroying the Planet Vulcan or the baffling kaon that watching a nuclear pot hinders its boiling, hypothetical pilot-waves may offer an solution, a strange one. The theory suggests that particles have precise space-time coordinates at all times, regardless of whether they’re observed or measured (against the accepted view that they do not) and may mean that in the vacuum of space, nothing is needed to push back.