6x6

colours of the world: Crayola crayons launch a special pigment pack to capture the diverse skin tones of people around the world—since fortunately the vast majority is not this

farringdon folly: the real life landmarks that informed and inspired (see also) JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth

a typographical sirloin: visual mondegreens (see previously here and here) resulting from the keming—er, kerning of certain letter combinations

service à la française: the history and possible future of buffet-style dining (relatedly)

ultraflex: a futuristic Icelandic boogie band at the intersection of disco and Soviet-era calisthenics

where the rubber meets the road: tyre add-on device collects worn and shredded detritus before it goes into the environment

masthead and en memoriam

the elevator’s broke so he slides down a rope

Among other events of pith and moment that shares this anniversary, our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari’s Cabinet, records that on this day in 1974, David Bowie released his eighth studio album, Diamond Dogs, presaged by the single Rebel, Rebel, introducing his next glam persona after retiring Ziggy Stardust and donning the character of Halloween Jack (a real cool cat) who lives in post-apocalyptic, dystopian (Big Brother seguing into the final track, Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family) Hunger City.

core values

Eventually reaching a depth of over twelve kilometres in 1989 when further drilling was suspended due to higher than expected temperatures, Soviet scientists commenced operations on the Kola Superdeep Borehole (Кольская сверхглубокая скважина) on the far northwestern peninsula on the Barents Sea on this day in 1970. Despite the impressive depth just barely surpassed by petroleum prospectors, the borehole only penetrated a third of the Earth’s crust—the thickness of the continental shelf ranging between thirty and seventy kilometers. Research continued until 1995 when the borewell was sealed and yielded surprising findings through this keyhole spelunking into the underground including the presence of water and fossil plankton some four miles down.

beyond the quick brown fox

Via Things Magazine, we see our affection for and fascination with the typographical samplers known as pangrams (see previously) returned.  Holoalphabetic phrases as they are known are those that use all or most of the letters on a keyboard to put a typeface through the paces, and are complimented with the filler text Lorem ipsum and its variants.
Whilst these methods are conveniently mnemonic and produce a lot of happy sphinxes and jackdaws (oder Haxenfüße und Querflöte—der deutschen Beispiele: Franz jagt im komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern) they fall short in showcasing natural language distribution and the juxtaposition of perhaps contrary or ill-fitting characters. Ensnare, snuggle and boson might be more illustrative of problematic font-design. To that end, the foundry Hoefler & Co has offered some proofing texts that have a certain cadence to test one’s layout and typesetting: …Justin jocose for the djibouti sojourn of the oranj raj and hajjis. Knoll koala for the banknote lookout of the dybbuk outlook and trekked. Linden loads for the ulna monolog of the consul menthol and shallot… And so on.

now off i go

The term epidemic is derived from the Ancient Greek ἐπί- (on top of) and -δῆμος (the people) but interestingly came by way of a French borrowing, which was itself introduced to the vocabulary not with a strictly medical sense in the nineteenth century but rather in the terminology associated with theophany—that is, the gods becoming incarnate and revealing themselves to their followers, traditionally during festivals or services but also in grilled cheese and manifested in suffering and pestilence. At the beginning of such celebrations epidemics were the sacrifices of thanksgiving offered to greet their arrival. Conversely apodemics were offerings on departure to either bid their return or as often as not to keep them at bay. The gods and their scourges not permanent residents and just visiting like the itinerant cult of Hippocratic healers, the case notes, medical histories (see previously) on patients kept by journeymen physicians charting the course of a disease and its response to various interventions was referred to as epidemics.

these gender-reveal parties are getting worse

Language Log catches us up on a bit of news we missed regarding France’s stance on M. le Covid.
The Académie Française (see previously here and here) has gone against colloquial use and ruled that the virus and derived disease, initialisms they made be, should take the feminine article la. Moreover, the Académie takes exception to the use of this arguably inexpedient and inconsistent acronym in the first place, its druthers being for the Latin term morbus, as in Covim—the disease caused by the crown-shaped virus.

watermelon snow

While first puzzling naturalist contemporaries of Aristotle and fairly a common occurrence in Alpine and arctic coast regions during the summer, the phenomenon caused by a type of cryophilic (cold-loving) green algae—sometimes referred to by the above as the blooms can express in green, red and pink—is spreading due to global warming to Siberia and the Antarctic, raising the possibility of the rise of new and unpredictable ecosystems.

Called Chlamydomonas nivlais is a liminal organism, thriving at temperatures hovering around the freezing point and have recently been attracting more notice of climate modellers, since while providing an additional energy source in extreme but thawing areas and act as a sink for carbon dioxide, their suspected role in lowering albedo at the poles—that is, the ability of the surface to reflect solar heat back out into space since the snow is less white, may counteract or accelerate any greenhouse gas offset.