to rub minds

Via TYWKIWDBI, we learn that lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary (see previously) have added—not without controversy as some question what qualifies for proper English and possibly a misguided push for inclusivity that netted street slang along with useful and unique turns of phrases—twenty nine terms to acknowledge the contributions that Nigeria has made to English as a global language and not the exclusive domain of any single authority as well as taking a survey of the some five hundred native languages spoken there, like the above example meaning to brain storm and collaborate, including senior wife, okada—a motorcycle taxi service, a send-forth—a farewell celebration, a mama put—a food vendor and ember months, the last third of the year. A few Nigerian English coinages have already come into common-parlance, such as to come of age, free and fair and a no-go area.

super tuesday

Ahead of the first national primary to secure the candidacy of the Democratic Party, the field of contenders has thinned significantly with former South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and former hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer—after spending a quarter of a billion dollars of his personal fortune—have dropped out of the race. Klobuchar and Buttigieg (whom polls consistently showed him roundly unseating Trump in a one-to-one race) have yielded the party’s central constituency and endorsed former vice president Joe Biden for the high office.

dallas, patrie du dollar du pétrol

I knew that the long-running 1978 US prime-time soap opera with its spinoffs that followed the feuding of the oil tycoons the Ewings with its cliffhangers and long story-arcs enjoyed more than a cult following in Germany but did not realise that the theme tune had been modified for francophone television markets to include expository lyrics. Continuing with the second verse and refrain:

Dallas, tu ne connais pas la pitié
Dallas, le revolver est ton idole
Dallas, tut e raccroches à ton passé

Find all the lyrics and translation plus various performances at Boing Boing at the link above.

matrix

We’re familiar with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave but our thanks to Fancy Notions for referring us to this 1973 animated short illustrated by Dick Oden and narrated by Orson Welles that we had not encountered beforehand. The dialogue of Socrates and his interlocutor, portrayed as Plato’s brother Glaucon, that puts forth this archetypal thought-experiment contrasts the power of education and enlightenment and wilful ignorance and how shadows can limn our reality.

k-briq

A Edinburgh firm called Kenoteq in collaboration with the city’s university is taking on the dirty business of construction by reclaiming materials that would otherwise end up in landfills and reconstituting the building blocks (see previously) without firing them in a kiln—making the process even more sustainable and environmentally friendly. Moreover the basic units can be created in situ from the salvaged material—saving on pollution caused by transportation.


 

bottle episode

Via friend of the blog, Everlasting Blört, we are introduced to a range of fantasy maps in the form of comics cartography in a series of cityscapes, headquarters and hideouts that includes one of the more intriguingly maniacal super villains in Brainiac, Superman’s arch nemesis. An extraterrestrial cyborg (a technopathic probe), Brainiac is responsible for the destruction of Krypton but also saved its capital city by miniaturising the buildings and inhabitants (blissfully unawares) as part of scheme to amass a collection of metropolises and repopulate his home world with subjects to rule over.

roll for perception

Founded a decade prior and six years after the establishment of role playing games as popular platform with Dungeons & Dragons, Austin-based Steve Jackson Games saw success with several genre-based games of strategy with dice, cards and table tops games as well as popularising the idea of creating and decorating miniature models of the enemies and playable characters became the subject of a sting operation culminating in a raid and seizure on this day in 1990 by the US Secret Service.
The impetus for monitoring and investigation was based on a rather spurious, tenuous concern that a proprietary document on how 911 emergency numbers (see previously) operated shared on a BBS (bulletin board system) in Chicago subsequently appeared on one in Texas for whom an SJG employee was webmaster (yell for the SysOp). The dragnet warrant consisted of nothing but over-reach and compounded three company computers along with over three hundred floppy disks, including the master programme for the firm’s computer version of its most popular game due to be released shortly but delayed in a fashion that crippled their business. Steve Jackson Games took the Secret Service to court and successfully sued them to recuperate some of their financial losses and encourage the agency to not be causal and sloppy about their justification. This suit and the Secret Services failure to amend their ways in a string of similar but unrelated operations (Operation Sundevil, a crackdown on perceived illegal hacking activities) during the same year that reflected the government’s learning curve when it came to technology were the catalyst for the establishment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an international digital rights group that champions internet civil liberties.

intaglio

In the a tradition parallel to trap streets (see previously here and here) but with more delightful consequences, we discover that Swiss map-markers faced with the potentially tedious task of reproducing the country’s varied topology are not above, like the marginalia of a medieval scribe, of seeking a bit of relief by the occasional hidden doodle in a mountain face—those isometric lines indicating relief, the angle and the orientation of the slope (and in no way snuck into a guide for climbers mind you), being called hachures (Schraffen oder Bergstriche). See more examples at the link above from Amusing Planet.