veritasiness

In order to reveal the potential fraught nature of the policy which has already seen fellow candidate Joe Biden having to waste time and energy dispelling a patent mischaracterization from the desperate incumbent intent on bringing the whole world down with him, contender Elizabeth Warren just called out a garbage social media giant’s practise of not rejecting or demoting political advertisements based on the truthfulness or accuracy of their claims about their opponents and exempting them from internal fact-checking standards.
Her method was simple and effective, announcing that the company’s founder and CEO has thrown his support and backing to the Trump re-election campaign. Even if Mark Zuckerberg does not find the idea abhorrent given the revenue that Trump has given him, it is still a damning indictment given the obvious sway that such a statement would hold given his global reach that far outstrips any other polity in the world, larger than a nation state, larger than religious affiliation. Seconds later in the same political ad, Warren admits that her bold assertion is a total falsehood but one permissible by the company’s own rules.  To add more milieu to the exchange, Warren has already established her antagonistic credentials by vowing to break-up the monopsonistic cartel that is intend to trounce on competition and users’ expectation of transparency.

With a resplendent encampment in the desert much like the summit between Francis I and Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, some attribute the decadent festivities that began on this day in 1971 and continuing until 16 October as a significant factor contributing to the downfall of the Shah and the ousting of the monarchy in this grand fêting of the institution itself on the occasion of its twenty-five hundredth anniversary.
Commemorating the sixth century BC founding of the Achaeminid dynasty, the celebration meant to showcase Iran’s contributions to civilisation and modern advances quickly became a partisan issue and the monumental cost (by some estimates, upwards of twenty-two million dollars) of banqueting and parades curried support for the Ayatollah. In exchange for the Shah’s funding of his own experimental film not released until 2018, Orson Welles agreed to narrate (see also) a documentary of the party for the hosts, which was attended by almost all the world’s royals and heads of state.

cameo appearance

Among several other etymological origin stories along the lines of the painting of a landscape preceded its coinage as something to gaze upon or wander through, we learn of the unexpected legacy of the namesake Comptroller-General of Finances, Étienne de Silhouette.
Charged with bolstering the treasury in preparation for the Seven Years’ War with England, Silhouette took the unpopular emergency measure of melting down flatware and jewelry for bullion and levied a “general subvention,”—that is a tax on ostentatious displays of wealth, such as family paintings.  Anything that suggested imposed austerity or frugality was deemed à la Silhouette—including those modest profile portraits that later gained respect as an art form in late eighteenth century. 

anatomy of a typeface

Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals we learn from graphic artist Nate Piekos’ Better Letterer corner (see also) that traditionally in comic book captioning the “I” with crossbars is used exclusively for the personal pronoun whereas the single stroke “I” is used in all other contexts.

ymir and járnsaxa

With the discovery of twenty more natural satellites in its orbit this year, the cronian constellation surpasses Jupiter as the planet with the most moons, an astonishing eighty-two.
The new moonlets are distant objects travelling around Saturn in the opposite direction from the inner moons and are suspected to be captured asteroids and are part of the Norse group—the International Astronomical Union (previously) reserving the naming-convention to figures from Nordic mythology (see also), mostly after giants and giantesses, with the exception of Phoebe, named after a Greek Titaness discovered in 1899, before the establishment of the IAU and the first moon discovered via photography. The public is invited to take part in coming up with their official designations.

phonophobia

The always resonant Kottke directs our attention to a thorough-going essay from The Atlantic contributor Bianca Bosker on noise pollution and the deleterious long-term effects that one’s acoustic environment has on one’s health, significant negative impacts dismissed because of the receding nature of the culprit. Despite how we fancy ourselves to adapt to the din of city streets, we cannot turn off our ears and the attendant physiological stress responses are activated even if we manage to sleep through it.
Germany has far more robust regulations and social norms against producing a racket and my experience is far different than the nightmare anecdotes that we read about but I do wonder at my own sonic landscape and how it switches so abruptly from the workweek in a crowded apartment complex alongside a busy road (still tolerable, I’d argue, but now am given cause to wonder if I’m not deluding myself since the only habituation to clatter is training oneself to be even more sensitive and bothered by it) to the holidays and weekends home in a tiny village in a clearing in the woods, serenaded by nature and very little traffic other than the occasional rumbling tractor. The story brings out the assault that becomes intolerable—especially for those without the privilege to remove themselves from the worst-planned and intrusive environs, but also features plenty of meditation on personal soundscaping and finding peace and quiet.

good liars

A duo of satirists who got their start during the Occupy Wall Street have placed some guerilla advertising on the trains of New York City’s subways target Trump, his hatchet men and propagandists, eliciting some much needed comic relief amidst the terror of the times.
One prank banner invites those in need of legal counsel to call Crazy Rudy with a hotline number that’s been flooded with positive responses including many whom chose to extend the premise. As uncomfortably close to the truth as these advertisements are, the comedians are careful to note their activism through the humour and that the ridiculous is deserving of ridicule, lest it become normalized.

circle of friends

First proposed in the 1990s by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the eponymous number suggests a range of values to the number of socially significant relationships that individuals can maintain, pinning—and certainly not without inviting rigourous debate—the number of cohesive and stable groupings to around one hundred-fifty.
Arriving at this number through ethnographical studies and researching the cognitive capacity of non-human primates defined three categories of decreasing connection as bands, kinships and tribes, being the broadest and largest affiliation. Though perhaps the original studies were skewed towards the WEIRDs and there are appreciable cultural differences as well as varying capacity for differing personality types, the foundation of the theory seems solid and is reflected in institutions and organic organization. The critical question that presently scrutinises Dunbar’s Number is whether social media, especially for those digital natives who have never known a time without an online presence, changes that ratio. What do you think? It is unclear if we are increasing our reach and ability to sustain meaningful relationships with the help of technology or if like the low-demand but rewarding feeling of accomplishment that we get from amplifying outrage, this sort of popularity is a poor substitute for substance.