yellow jack

While all of Italy is under lockdown conditions forming a cordon sanitaire to medically isolate potential carriers and stop the spread of sickness, it’s worth noting that the term quarantine itself is owing to the Venetian thalassocracy and the best-practises that the city modeled.
From the local dialectical form of quaranta giorni, it refers to the forty day period that ships, cargo and compliment were held in abeyance in order to not transmit the plague, which in a decade’s time in the mid-fourteenth century had claimed thirty percent of the Eurasian population. The safeguard was first developed in Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and confined visitors to an outlying island for a period of thirty days (a trentine) before granting them admission. After avoid the Black Death’s first iteration, the government of Venice moved to extend the restriction by ten more days, which happened to match the course of illness from the bubonic plague from exposure to incubation through to the contagious phase and recovery. In the language of maritime signal flags, the solid yellow banner, Q for Quebec, historically indicated quarantine but now certifies that the vessel is free from communicable disease and requests free pratique—that is, to enter a port. Whereas the above semaphore whilst in harbour, L for Lima, means the ship is under quarantine.

black monday

Already jittery and fragile in the face of the evolving thread and response to the efforts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, world stock markets experienced a sharp, precipitous decline—a drop fast enough to trigger a breaker-switch that suspended trading on Wall Street for a quarter of an hour to give investors a chance to regroup, when the mood was yesterday exacerbated by an oil war that erupted once Russia and OPEC were unable to come to a consensus on the right production numbers to ensure fuel retain value as a commodity during a steep decline in demand due to disruptions in shipping, travel and manufacture over said pandemic.

Saudi Arabia signaled it would flood the market with cheap crude and undercut the competition from Russia and the US—whom both have large reserves but lack the refining capacity, constricting further the prospects where the market could move its money with the retreat en masse to bonds having reduced the yield to under one percent, raising the spectre of defaults and bankruptcy. Italy’s expansion of its quarantine measures nationwide and North Korean missile tests did nothing to elevate spirits. With interest rates at historic lows and many companies’ portfolios just a tick above junk status (a comfortable, low-effort place to be until it suddenly wasn’t) national banks nor advocate stakeholders have really been painted into a corner and can do little to intervene. Though the Trump regime is more interested in the stock market and how his reelection hinges on its performance, the government may be forced to entertain extending the basic right to workers of paid sick leave, though such reform probably smacks too much of creeping socialism to allow it to gain a foothold.

sxs

Anecdotally in order to bypass the intermediary services of a human operator whom the inventor suspected of siphoning off his primary business by diverting calls to her husband, a competing undertaker, tinkerer and mortician Almon Brown Strowger of Kansas City, Missouri patented an electromechanical stepping switch telephone exchange system—a uniselector that allowed subscribers to dial numbers directly, the electric pulses cycling through to the desired number—on this day in 1891.
Due to this set up, the Strowger switch is also known as a step-by-step (SXS) switch and was coincidentally granted exclusive licensing rights on the anniversary of the first convincing public demonstration of telephony fifteen years earlier by Alexander Graham Bell, whose principle was inspired and informed by the water microphone and harmonic telegraph prototype of Elisha Gray who in turn owed his discovery to a long line of innovations. Selling the rights to replicate his engineering, Strowger’s invention saw the proliferation of the many automated exchanges run by independent municipal telephone companies in the US and UK with the decade.

n&b block

Previously we’ve explored Nintendo’s business enterprises prior to video games but didn’t know about their foray into toy building blocks to compete with LEGO bricks until encountering this range of construction sets. Designed to be compatible and complementary with the Danish original, N&B blocks (courtesy of Present / & / Correct, produced from 1968 to 1972) though unlicensed were not a simple counterfeit and offered several unique kits and accessories.

anima mundi

Adding an extra dimension of respect and upcycling, reviving the mantra of reduce, reuse and recycle among the environmentally-minded (we might also add another r-word in refusal of what does not avail itself of one of the other options in the first place) that’s in danger of becoming a platitude, we thoroughly enjoyed this introduction to the Japanese concept of mottainai (もったいない) exclaiming lament over waste and regret of something not being used to its full potential.
The sustainable antidote to affluenza—the plague of throw-away culture and disposable society, the term and its meaning correspond with other aspects of Japanese culture and reverence for resource and repair, mottainai premises that if one values an item intrinsically—to include its packaging—there’s no reason for waste at all. Much more to explore at the links above.

sars-cov-2

When the outbreak first occurred and the scale and scope began to become more appreciable, there was speculation whether the novel coronavirus might be China’s Chernobyl moment, a cover-up and a public-relations disaster that was on par with the physical legacy in terms of trust for the Soviet leadership by the people—and while criticism for China may continue from both ends, both faulting them for silencing early responders and more the enduring surveillance apparatus meant to monitor and control its spread—the metonymical characterisation is probably better hitched to the United States of America for its obfuscation and inadequate response.
The press and medical science, both institutions that Trump and authoritarians revile in general, are sorely needed to be brought into the fight and unwillingly to enlist their unbegrudging help, the regime has turned to bombast and denial and equating ignorance with containment. Not only does this moment lay bare the precarity of the US dysfunctional healthcare system and labour market, millions of those just getting barely getting by with no margin for contingencies to fall back on and uninsured, far more afraid of the bill than maintaining a clean bill of health, it threatens to dismantle the façade that Trump and his ilk were good for business as the world economy adjusts to deal with old, new realities that lurk at the periphery along with their usual cadets of xenophobia and conspiracy.

a kind of spouge

Dalton Sinclair Bishop (also known by his stage name Jackie “Manface” Opel), of Bridgetown, Barbados (*1937) had his promising career as a song-writer and performer tragically cut short this day in 1970, killed in an auto accident in his hometown. Though his discography and legacy with standards like Higher and Higher, You’re No Good, and When a Man Loves a Woman are in themselves unimpeachable, Opel is most famous for his invention of a genre of music called Spouge (sometimes spelled Spooge) as a fusion of ska and calypso styles that was very popular in the mid-1960s, both regionally and further abroad, influencing hymns, gospel music and sea-shanties amongst the diaspora. Instrumentation was originally limited to cow bell, bass guitar and steel drums but eventually expanded to trombones and trumpets—and even synthesizers with the style’s perennial rediscovery and homages.

approaching pavonis mons by balloon (utopia planitia)

A few days ago, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day featured this collapsed opening in a shield volcano (Peacock Mountain) in the Martian Tharsis region—originally discovered during the Mariner 9 mission in 1971 with the gentle rise and general topography near the planet’s equator making the feature a good candidate for the anchor of a space elevator, tethered to the captured asteroid of Deimos—and teased that the protected environment within the cavern could be a promising refuge for hold-out Martian life forms. Long before being imaged again by a Mars orbiter in 2011, it was the subject of the eponymous Flaming Lips’ song from their 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. The next phrase of the exploration programme, due to land February 2021 includes a rover called Perseverance equipped with a drill to extract and study core samples and an aerial drone, which could peer down into such places.