serafina

Sick and bed-ridden, though the aesthetically-minded Fina dei Ciardi (*1238 - †1253) of San Gimignano insisted on being laid up on a wooden pallet for the remainder of her short life after catching a paralytic disease, the subsequently venerated patroness of the Tuscan town reported that the day—today—and hour of her death was prophesied to her by a vision of Pope Gregory the Great, with which the suffering but uncomplaining girl conceded.

During her protracted illness, residents visited her regularly as a source of inspiration and encouragement and after death several miracles were attributed to her relics—including fragrant violets that sprang from the wood planks she was confined to which still grow along walls and towers of San Gimignano to this day and stopping two bouts of the plague that the town was spared from in 1479 and again in 1631, and is commemorated on the occasion of her passing as well as on the first Sunday in August as a feast of thanksgiving. A hospital constructed and maintained in her honour also contributed to the town’s resilience.

7x7

inside out & upside-down: hundreds of posters from CalArts students ranging back to 1980

r360: how the coupe and microcar informed Mazda’s design

area rug: custom parametric carpets informed by their settings that really bring the room together

the floor is lava: advice for keeping the cat off the kitchen counters plus an assortment of more humourous tweets

noodles and pandas: innovative ways to discuss the pandemic without attracting the attention of the authorities

happy mutants: Cory Doctorow’s daily curated links—via Waxy

white russians: contemporary fermented dairy drinks

able baker or radiotelephone spelling alphabet

Prior to standarisation efforts in 1959 that resulted in the NATO phonetic alphabet, telegraph operators, wire-services and civilian and military authorities employed a range of some two hundred jargon alphabets for clarity over airwaves that could often come across as garbled or muffled. While many syllabaries contained over-lapping elements, communication between agencies was fraught for confusion assuredly with no definitive source out there.

One early popular but by no means universalconvention used cosmopolitan city names—and it’s interesting to monitor the shift over the years and how the choices are reflective of the current conflicts and Zeitgeist. Previously we’ve explored how the letter x was treated prior to the catch-all x-rays or xylophone as well as the digits later codified, and it is noteworthy how common-usage transverses from something international and somewhat inclusive to something clipped and jingoistic as reception has improved, albeit city names would be potentially treacherous for air-traffic controllers and first-responders.

when you gonna give me some time, corona?

Via Boing Boing, following the very practicable and effective admonishment to wash one’s hands for at least twenty-seconds and accompany the act with various suggested tunes to gauge the duration, a clever developer and designer called William Gibson has created a poster-generator that allows one to use their song of choice with the measured lyrics outlining each step as vetted by public health authorities and follow the bouncing ball. What song would you choose to help wash the germs away?  Covid-19, oh I swear what he means.  At this moment, you mean everything.  With you in that dress, my thoughts I confess verge on dirty—ah Covid-19.

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.