open office

From the latest link round-up (a lot more to explore here) at Pasa Bon! comes this ambient office noise machine—fully adjustable and importantly mutable once one has had enough—for those of us pining in a sense for the familiar routine of going into work and dealing with the patter of colleagues, traffic as the white noise that would at other times be a jarring distraction. I for one have never had to try to function in a sea of infinite cubicles and am not feeling compelled to ever not in the future telework—and hope that no one else is put in harm’s way by returning prematurely—and am grateful for that but do miss a bit of the atmosphere and commiseration.

hydrological regime

While meandering for just over a kilometre, the shortest river in France that we visited several years back dwarfs these watercourses, it is nonetheless interesting to hop about the map and consider these shortest of rivers around the globe and wonder how we define our topography. For instance, the pictured Ombla, stout though only thirty metres in length, satisfies all the essential criteria plus supplying neighbouring Dubrovnik with drinking water.  More to explore with Amusing Planet at the link above.

we have met the enemy and he is us

First observed on this day fifty years ago and now celebrated in every polity around the globe as the largest secular holiday of them all, organisers in colleges and universities brought out roughly twenty million individuals into the spring sunshine to peaceful demonstrate for environmental reform.
The original impetus was a devastating oil spill of the coast of Santa Barbara, California that was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of marine creatures during the previous winter with city solemnly marking the one-year anniversary of that disaster in January with an Environmental Rights Day, further advancing the idea for a day of action generally for ecological responsibility and justice. For the occasion, illustrator Walt Kelly created an anti-pollution poster with his comic strip character declaiming the above quotation, parodying a missive sent by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (older brother of Commodore Matthew Perry) to General William Harrison on his victory, more confident and less contrite, in the Battle of Lake Erie—another environmental mess we are trying to remediate—“We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”

do the sabre dance

A short movement in the final act of his ballet Gayane, premiering in Moscow in 1942, composer and choreographer Aram Khachturian (*1903 – †1978, the Georgian artist’s music later denounced by the state as “anti-people”) lamented how this one section based on an Armenian folk dance deflected from the rest of his repertoire, in 1948 becoming a jukebox hit in the United States and elsewhere and being reinterpreted by various charting artists, including a lounge and boogie version in the early 1960s.

please mess with texas

State Attorney General has threaten individuals with punitive measures including incarceration should they make public their belief, conviction, truism that the risk of contracting COVID-19 should not be a trade-off for participating in the democratic process, thus giving credence to ballot-by-mail (see also). Never one to not exploit a crisis for pushing an agenda, one wonders how long it might be a standing-order to patronise one’s local amenities just like before without stint or worry. Interestingly, the AG does not invoke ideology or the economic argument to defend his stance but rather a legal technicality that fear of contracting an infectious disease is not a qualifying reason to request authorisation to vote by post and to advocate otherwise is abetting voter fraud.

over a barrel

Though this extraordinary development has not yet translated to free petrol at stations, the total collapse in worldwide demand for oil and full reserves and reservoirs with no excess storage capacity, a key valuation benchmark in the market has inverted the price per barrel, failing to a negative thirty-seven dollars, meaning that traders looking to offload shares would be paying a premium to do so. The situation has been exasperated by America increasing domestic production through fracking, becoming a full-fledged, failing petrostate and glutting the market in the process and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia and highlights yet another problem with non-renewable fuel sources that’s a least been partially redress on the renewable market—that of portability and shifting energy and resources to where and where it’s needed.

256 byte boundary

First encountered here, we really appreciated learning about Memories and the economy of engineering that went into coding this MS-DOS demonstration, via Waxy, and wonder if anyone else is practising constrained programming, sensitive to limitations, legacy and backwards compatibility. Considering how enduring Voyagers’ primitive operating systems are or the two-bit viruses that can bring the world to a stand-still, tiny code can have outsized implications.

deaccession

Delightfully temporarily shuttered museums are holding a virtual curatorial showdown to reveal the world’s creepiest exhibit or object in their collection. Entrants, all hideous and artefacts to make one’s skin crawl began with a ancient Roman woman’s burial hair bun and include taxidermied mermaids, talismans and torture devices—like this one pictured from the Tower of London, touted as an executioner’s mask but subsequent research suggests it’s purpose is even darker: an iron muzzle called a Scold’s Bridle, meant for public humiliation. See more ghastly, cursed objects at The Guardian article at the link up top.