canali

Using a sounding technique that revealed the existence of a sub-glacial sea under the Antarctic ice sheet, European Space Agency researchers believe that they may have detected a shallow lake of liquid water beneath the ice-capped Martian south pole. The telemetry gathered by the Mars Express, a satellite laboratory that’s orbited the planet for the past fifteen years is still being interpreted but it’s definitely something and bear the signature of a briny sea, some twenty kilometres across but buried under a kilometre and half of frozen ice.

dingbat

Building on the success of his social medial following, archivist and graphic designer Richard Baird, as Dezeen reports, will be issuing a quarterly magazine to highlight the simple brilliance of Mid-Century Modern (1945-1975) minimalist logos, carefully selected and curated as the best in branding, like this 1974 symbol designed by Patrick Dugast for le Club de la Publicité of Québec, whose mascot is cleverly drawn out of the negative space framed by a “CP.” Visit the links above for more classically timeless and inspired emblems.  

antisocial media or latent response

Duck Soup directs our attention to an engrossing article that prises open the imagination and invites us to consider a counter-factual situation that does not presently seem so difficult to indulge and undo in questioning the way the dominant social media platforms—outside of China—are presented to us.
Was the shape the platform took inevitable and from an economic stance, the only model that made business sense and was sustainable? A personalised newspaper was foisted on users—the public essentially though I think the interlocutors are giving more credit than is due—that nobody asked for and people disliked but one that was pernicious and easily reinforced. Optimised to peddle advertisements with “connection” management or networking as a vehicle—verses a public entity or subscription service—do we necessarily arrive at manipulation and tribalism? The struggle to be omnipresent means that we can’t even be present much of the time. The interview also presents an interesting juxtaposition in how the unrestrained ambitions of the Western market to surpass relaying messages and allowing users to curate a persona and alter how we interact runs parallel to China’s universal interface and smacks of a weirdly monolithic showdown.

assignment baghdad

Geoff Manaugh, author of the always intriguing and philosophically indulgent BLDGBlog, contributes a rather cloak and dagger tale to the Daily Beast about a graduate class of aspiring architects who may have unwittingly enabled the precision and sustained bombing campaign during Operation Desert Storm (the Persian Gulf War)—rather than preserving Iraqi buildings that might fall victim to the imminent invasion.
The students gathered blue-prints and layouts of every structure in the city, granting military planners the details to put a missile down a chimney or fire a rocket through a window. One wonders how often intelligence and academic research might intersect—especially counter to the sentiments and the motivations of the researchers. Manaugh also offers in the accompanying blog post an interesting exploration of the history of keeping building plans out of enemy hands and the lengths one would go to in order to keep them secret. What do you think? One would always trust an architect with one’s potential vulnerabilities without arousing suspicion.

philhellene

At the sole initiative—though the effort took a high personal toll—of the attested hellenophile couple Eva and Angelos Sikelianos the first Delphic Festival took place in May of 1927, as Messy Nessy Chic informs, with the aim of promoting universal respect and understanding, hoping that the amphictyonic nature of the site—that is, a cooperative oracle shared among the city states of Greece, could be a harmonising focal point for peace. Activities included tours of the archaeological site, traditional Greek music performed by locals, lectures, athletic games and stage plays. The elaborate affair was funded exclusively by the Sikelianos and they managed another iteration three years later with the backing of the Greek government with costs defrayed with a national lottery.
The Sikelianos however did not see festivals and tourism as an end in themselves and hoped that the attention garnered would transfer to support for the establishment of an education centre based on Delphic ideals. A victim of their own success, backing for anything other than the fêtes was not forthcoming and deflated, Eva decided to return to America to try to renew her theatrical productions there, parting with Angelos on amiable terms. Invited to head the Federal Theatre Project in New York to help out unemployed actors, writers and directors during the Great Depression, Sikelianos produced many Greek tragedies and went on to form a dance company. Learn more and find a whole gallery of images from the Delphic Festivals at the links up top.

lanx satura

Though in classical myth without philosophical interpretation, the god Momus—son of virgin Nyx—is portrayed as the personification of reproach (Μῶμος) and is credited with the agitating presence that provoked the other Olympians to take sides in the Trojan War, the expelled minor deity is somewhat rehabilitated and appreciated in later traditions as the embodiment of satire and candour for his open criticism of the gods and their follies.
According to Æsop, Momus was banished for mocking the gods’ handiwork after being invited to judge them: decrying Hephaestus’ latest creation man as poorly designed as he’d failed to install a door in their chest so as to see their true nature in their hearts. Momus was equally harsh on Athena’s architecture for not being mobile to escape bad neighbours. Lastly, he pointed out that Poseidon’s bull was not as formidable as it could be because its horns got it the way of its eyes. Momus also had some choice insults for the other gods and goddesses. His cult saw a revival in the seventeenth century as a way to lampoon contemporary politics as an allegorical way to reform the Star Chamber—camera stellata, a court of parliamentary privilege that became synonymous with arbitrary judgment—of Heaven, the establishment pining for someone unafraid to challenge the hierarchy.

dendrite

Via Slashdot, we learn that a team of researchers associated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have achieved a significant technical milestone in creating the first digital topographical map of a fruit fly brain, a composite of thousands of slices and millions of images. The nanoscale resolution and completeness that could only be practically accomplished with the help of automation allows scientists to monitor the connections of a single neurone to another across and examine the precise web and discharge patterns underpinning specific behaviours of these complex and sophisticated creatures. For scale, entering the mind of a fly we find a network of approximately one hundred thousand neuronal nodes, whereas in humans there are one hundred billion, each with synaptic connections to seven thousand neighbours.

non sequitur

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we learn that the palaeontological community has formally accepted the name thagomizer for the anatomical arrangement of spikes on the tails of stegosauroid dinosaurs.
Coined in a 1982 comic by Gary Larson, the term was already in common-parlance, having been adopted and championed by several authoritative text books and museums and in the panel was named in honour of a departed caveman. We enjoyed seeing the Wikipedia stub on the naming waxing pedantic in pointing out, “The cartoon fate of Thag Simmons notwithstanding, stegosaurs and humans did not exist in the same era,” apparently not for the first time, as Larson suggested there be a sort of confessional whereby cartoonists can ask for absolution for such transgressions. A highly specialised parasitic louse that only plagues a species of owl in central Africa called Strigiphilus garylarsoni is named after the author.