week-by-week

As we are rapidly propelled to the end of another year and the time comes for annual superlatives, we are treated again by Kottke to fifty-two things that consultant Tom Whitwell has gleaned over the past year personally and professionally.
The index is a fascinating revue of not only contemporary times but also many are contextualised as historical development, like the bit of trivia that the first Automated Teller Machine cards were mildly radioactive paper vouchers that were machine readable or that phosphorus-rich dust from the Sahara carried aloft is crucial for the sustainment of the Amazon rainforest. What are some of the facts that you’ve learnt this year? Be sure to check out the whole list and you might come across a few items you first heard of at PRfC.

8x8

modernistmas: a collection of modernist gingerbread architecture

wizard sniffer: the stellar rise in popularity of the interactive, choose-your-own-adventure fiction, via Waxy

domo arigato: the international robotics exposition in Japan

the jones act: GOP tax reform levies a twenty percent tariff on goods manufactured in Puerto Rico

payload: to demonstrate his new, reusable rocket’s mettle, Elon Musk will apparently launch his own Tesla Roadster into orbit around the Sun, extending out as far as Mars

the clanking of the chains that jacob marley forged in life: soundtracks for Melania Trump’s festive White House

lb&scr e2 class: extreme stunts with a Thomas the Tank Engine playset

we’ll be having a wonderful christmas time: Sir Paul McCartney’s lost experimental 1965 album was meant to be a present to his bandmates

synesthesia

Apparently twenty percent of the population are susceptible to the “noisy GIF” phenomenon and hear a thudding sound in time with this animation. Do you hear these electric pylon jumping rope? It seems like a natural enough association to make in anticipation but I wonder why only some perceive it and others do not. It makes me think about the deaf couple that ran a boutique specialising in fine glassware that I visited a few times. The way that they handled vases were shudder-inducing for me—certain that they’d shatter something but I realised that they knew the tolerance and fragility of their items far better than I did and hearing glass on glass was not necessarily insightful.

hallux

The always engrossing Hyperallergic invites us to consider another uniquely enigmatic aspect of Leonardo da Vinci’s work aside from Mona Lisa’s smile with his attention to human anatomy found in the feet of his subjects. Living and working in age when feet and toes were not generally shod and kept out of public sight, the artist was doubtless keenly aware of feet physiology and endowed his super human subjects with speculatively his own minor deformation (not a sign of lycanthropy)—called Morton’s toe (for an American orthopaedic surgeon) and classically a “Greek foot” (pied grec, piede greco) where the second toe appears longer than the big toe.
Many statues of antiquity were executed in this way—including homages like the Statue of Liberty—as opposed to the Egyptian foot where the greater toe is longer. Many more pedary profiles (there’s no science behind this—sort of like palmistry or phrenology) are to be found and Da Vinci’s characters amazingly exhibit them all.

sloppy joes

A quick read of the tea leaves on how the US Department of Agriculture—the agency responsible for maintaining the integrity of America’s foodstuffs—might relax some of the stricter standards put in place to ensure that public school meal programmes (for comparison, here are some global examples) were healthful and nourishing, Naked Capitalism hit upon an interesting, adjacent campaign combatting food-waste.
Many of the dissenting voices who’ll advocate classifying catsup the tomato paste of pizza as a vegetable say that kids end up throwing away big portion of these healthier meals and while the problems that afflict institutional lunches are not new and schools have challenges staying in compliance, some districts are engaging their pupils by setting food sharing and donation programmes to reduce the amount of food that gets thrown away. Students are required to fill their trays with a balanced meal—including a portion of vegetables, a carton of milk, et cetera—but after passing through the line, they are empowered to trade something unwanted (within reason) for an extra helping of something desired and know that they are giving food away to the hungry and disadvantaged of their communities. Instead of ingratiating processed foods at a formative age, it’s probably a far more important lesson to imprint that waste and choice has consequences.

fine dining

Unfortunately, the US Sh*t Poster in-chief is an influencer and is setting—unsurprisingly—an atrocious example with his dietary predilections, which is a resounding endorsement for the processed, nutritionally vacuous and brandable foods that he’s chosen to limn the limits of his palette.
Such a cycle of meals only serve to keep us indentured to the systems underlying it: an economy bolstered by mcjobs, precarious and underserving healthcare that’s over burdened in part by lack of choices (though Dear Dotard could avail himself of any number of gourmet repasts and one would assume exercises his taste to leverage guests with dinner table diplomacy) and the pharmacopeia to stave off the deleterious effects of such a lifestyle. Hopefully, most of us have matured beyond this stage of being a finicky eater and perhaps like other unwelcome commendations and subsidies, people will further distance themselves from this short list of go-to franchises.

loose-lips

We appreciated the message, style and provenance of this series of UK World War II propaganda posters circulated in 1940 in order to impress upon the public the importance of avoiding idle talk and over-sharing, since someone was always listening and even seemingly innocuous details (which we’re want to spread despite ourselves for the chance to pique and leverage the interest of our cohort) could be aggregated into rather circumspect intelligence on plans and operations. We see who’s eavesdropping on the after work conversion of our pub-goers, and given the number of secrets still surfacing, I think that the campaign was on balance a successful one.

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media obsolescence: a personalised nostalgic romp through which ‘tech world’ informed your formative years, via Things Magazine

temperance: a 1908 map that charts insobriety across England

don’t make them like they used to: after nearly four decades of dormancy, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent Voyager 1 course-correcting instructions—from twenty-one billion kilometres away, and the little probe complied

petard hoist much: why a legislative victory on tax reform could furnish the Republican party with exactly what it needs to abandon Dear Leader

vizard: bizarre sixteenth and seventeenth century fashion trend of obscuring the female visage with a featureless black dot to preserve the skin from the sun and errant glances

#otd: the US senate voted overwhelmingly to censure colleague Joseph R McCarthy in 1954 for his persecution of ruthless investigations of thousands of alleged Communists which brought dishonour and disrepute on the government