cumulonimbus or blue plate special

We enjoying reading this appreciation of the London heritage Blue Plaque scheme that shows the city’s affinity and relationship with historic personalities and properties and were delighted to learn that some commemorations have a decidedly poetic and flair.
For instance, take the plaque that marks the Tottenham home of Royal Society fellow Luke Howard hailed as “the father of meteorology” for his assiduous record keeping of early nineteenth century climate patterns but is instead given the epithet “Namer of Clouds” recalling his role in scientific nomenclature. “Clouds are subject to certain distinct modifications, produced by the general causes that affect all variations of the atmosphere; they are commonly as good visible indicators of the operation of these causes, as is the countenance of the state of a person’s mind or body,” Howard wrote, inventing a Latin-based and modular convention for identifying formations. The new stadium of Tottenham Hotspur has stands named “Stratus East” and “Stratus West” in Howard’s honour.

zwarte beertjes

Browsing the archives of Present /&/ Correct—always an advisable pastime—Coudal Partners’ Fresh Links has us cottoning onto the fantastic book cover art work of illustrator and author Dick Bruna (*1927 – †2017). Best known for his beloved character Miffy (Nijntje in the original Dutch), Bruna amassed an impressive catalogue of children’s stories and other commissions—despite being told early on that he had no talent as a painter. Peruse a gallery of dozens of posters, greeting cards and book covers at the link up top.

frauentag

Associated with socialist movements until championed by the United Nations in 1975 and this year (the UN sanctioned theme being “Think Equal, Build Smart, Innovate for Change”) Woman’s Day is still mostly observed as a holiday in Communist or former-Communist countries—albeit a big swath of the planet—and has historically been mostly ignored in the West.
Though some source the day back to a likely apocryphal protest (possibly suggested out of a desire to connect its origin with America, like with the First of May) on the part of garment workers in New York City, significant protests that marked the beginning of the February Revolution (on the Julian Calendar) of 1917 in Saint Petersburg with women textile workers staging a strike for “bread and peace” cemented the date. Coinciding with the centenary of the first general election in the country in which women could vote and stand for office, the federal state (Land) of Berlin has declared the day an official holiday for the city, German states setting their public holidays independently, with a “Frauenkampftag.”

too school for cool

Fusing the Tiny House movement with the culture of Van Life, we are introduced to a new but growing subculture of post-modern nomads called Skoolies, who live in refurbished buses, retired from the fleets that service public schools and municipalities. Correspondent for Curbed Britta Lokting infiltrates an encampment and delivers an interesting and insightful profile of some of the members of this tribe, their homes (which are far from rustic and austere) and their lifestyle.

думай иначе

Curated by the always interesting Things Magazine, we are finding ourselves quite capitvated with the visionary, revolutionary prototype computer system conceived and presented by Soviet computer scientist Dmitri Azrikan of the VNIITE (ВНИИТЭ, Всероссийский научно-исследовательский институт технической эстетики, All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Industrial Design) campus in Leningrad in 1987.
Never commercially available, the device known as Project SPHINX would nonetheless prefigure the smart homes of three decades later and ought to be a recognised precursor and would have been a major industry disruptor had we been ready for the idea of mobility and collaborative computing, with the design to integrate automation into domestic life and the work place with tele-conferencing capabilities as well for use as home entertainment, expandable memory modules, the redundancy to support several terminals and a remote control that could be used as a handheld device, different wireless components connected via radio waves, but the whole system dialled up to the rest of the world via modem. More technical specifications and more to explore at the links above.

gashlycrumb tinies

Noted macabre humourist and illustrator, Edward St John Gorey (*1925 - †2000, previously here and here) was also quite the fashion plate and his eye for style would have translated well to the rack and runway.
Though the overview focuses on costuming and his person sense of style it reinforces how all aspects of his the artist’s personality and outlets brought forward the anxieties and preoccupations (fantods—from the Welsh) of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras through unsettling, vaguely (or rather explicitly) menacing situations.

7x7

bathdoom: interior remodelling as a first-person shooter game

philosophical zombies: the Turing Test for AI consciousness

waste management: budget cuts are rubbishing recycling programmes and good intentions on the municipal level in the US and elsewhere, via Digg

das botenkind: a radio host who broadcasted for the US Army in West Berlin had her sobriquet translated as “Newsbabe”

human hoberman: an mesmerising synchronised dance on a slick floor

brick-and-mortar: gorgeous letterpress posters of artful arranged Lego reminiscent of printed circuit boards

lotus eaters: parrot junkies are having the poppy harvest in Madhya Pradesh

covalence

On this day (Old Style, 18 March 1869 on the Gregorian Calendar—it’s nice that this anniversary comes around again), one hundred fifty years ago, Professor Dmitri Mendeleev having previously formulated the Period Laws formally presented his Periodic Table as a way of arranging and understanding the elements to the Russian Chemical Society, titling his presentation The Dependence Between the Properties of the Atomic Weights, positing that the element arranged according to their mass exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties and to expect the discovery of yet unknown elements from gaps in his schema.