unmasked assailants

In a tragically recurring, typically, predictably American phenomenon (conversely these past two months marked the first time in decades that there has not been a major school shooting being that the schools are closed), involving shoppers not abiding by emergency hygiene standards enforced to keep us all safe violently attacked the store employee who gently admonished them, we are reminded of the light, careful tread of the exonerative tense that news outlets, to shield themselves from legal liabilities often are trained to repair to.
This indirect tone is not the needed foil for the passive apology of public figures—mistakes were made—does not speak to the principles of being unbiased or non-prejudicial but rather—instead of holding people, in whatever capacity to account for their bad behaviour, gives reporting the swaggering, deputised tenor of police-procedurals and victim-blaming.

hr 6819

Building on their previous discoveries the European Southern Observatory (ESO) based in Chile has found a so called quiet black hole relatively quite nearby in a star system visible to the unaided eye, located somewhat ironically in the minor constellation of the southern celestial hemisphere called Telescopium.
One of the fourteen of the eighty-eight star formations credited to the astronomer and geographer Abbé Nicolas-Louis de la Caille (*1713 – †1762) who catalogued over ten thousand stars, Telescopium like many of the newly mapped groupings was named after contemporary tools and implements: a clock, a microscope, a chisel, navigation devices, etc. A thousand light years distant, the black hole is dark companion to a binary star system (QV Telescopii), its presence betrayed by its gravitational distortion of the orbiting pair, giving researchers the clues and tools to find more cryptic black holes in the neighbourhood. Learn more at the Universe Today at the link above.

unnamed

Synonymous with anonymous and from the Greek ἀδέσποτος—that is, without a master or owner, adespota is used in classical scholarship as a collective term to cover writings that were not attributed to any particular author, especially epigrams taken from plaques and monuments whose provenance and history was lost when they were anthologised.
The related German borrowing for use primarily in the context of art history rather than written work is Notname—not a not-name a bit confusingly like a Notausgang on an exterior door isn’t No Exit but rather Emergency Exit—is a contingency or convenience name given to the portfolio of an artist or their school whose true identity is unknown—such as the Master of the Embroidered Foliage or the Berliner Maler.

flash jump!

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to an unreleased promotional video that was to be put out by Queen to herald their soundtrack to the cinematic, operatic adaptation of the Flash Gordon comics. The rock band having also furnished the score for Highlander in theatres and television and provided the soundtrack in its entirety including incidental music and character motifs, only singing for two tracks but letting movie dialogue be the libretto of other songs of the album.

you know what the crime is. the crime is very obvious to everybody.

Not content with peddling the false narrative of criminal misconduct on the part of his predecessor whose meaning is anyone’s guess—ruminating vaguely during a White House Rose Garden press conference (previously) which sink to new depths of derangement daily “it’s been going on for a long time. It's been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened”—Trump then directed his ire back at the assembled journalists.
Becoming verbally abusive with a CBS correspondent of Asian American heritage, Weijia Jiang, who challenged his misleading propagandising of corona virus testing as leading and winning and framing it as if it were a contest that someone excused prior missteps and people still dying (presently at eighty thousand in the US and rising and by far leading in the number of cases and deaths), Trump nastily suggested that the reporter ask China, a gaffe made worse by Trump’s dismissal and denigrating a second female member of the press pool and storming away in a tantrum.

blue jeans and bloody tears

Inadvertently creating the new subgenre technofear with a nonsensically subversive and unexpected anarchical message, a team of researchers from Rotterdam—the city that had been slated to host the Eurovision Song Contest (previously here, here and here)—cancelled for this iteration but still held on-line—trained a neural network on more than two hundred of the winners and catchiest entrants from over the decades, generating this number that samples from those common elements. Learn more about the teaching methodology at Ars Technica at the link up top.

the united states of voronoi

Named after the mathematician who defined their properties, Georgy Feodosevich Voronoy (*1868 – †1908), a Voronoi diagram triangulates and parses cells or regions (previously) by their spatial affinity to a given seed or site.
Redrawing borders of the continental states, as Jason Davies has done, so that each point within those bounds is geographically closer to its own capital city than the capital of any adjacent polity yields an interesting distribution that somehow aligns with the character of the capitol not being necessarily the largest city and representative of the population as a whole and preserves (with notable distortions) to an extent the shape of the states on the map.

7x7

great railway journeys: POV footage of Swiss trains racing through the countryside accompanied by techno music

day-o: a family in lockdown recreates dinner party scene from Beetlejuice

starfish and coffee: Prince is the opening act for the latest Link Pack from Swiss Miss

down to gorky park: an in depth investigation into whether the 1990 Scorpions’ power ballad was a US was soft power ploy by the intelligence services

oslo maps the world: visit dozens of global festival venues virtually, via Maps Mania

novas: a mirror universe mixtape of 1982—one of the 1982s, via Kicks Condor

sun dance: a mesmerising percussion set paired with high resolution footage from the Solar Dynamics Observatory