saint cassian of imola, pray for us

Fourth century tutor and teacher, Cassian—whose martyrdom is venerated on this day (†303), refused to make sacrifices to the gods of the Romans—as was ordered by Emperor Julian the Apostate (the epithet a gift of the church he distrusted)—and so was turned over to his pupils, judging that their education and emendation should be an effective prescriptive. Cassian was bound to a stake and the students tortured him to death, stabbing him with their pointed styluses—eager to get revenge for the punishments and trials that their teacher had inflicted on them. This act is recounted in several contemporary cultural sources including the Annie Dillard novel The Living, John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces and the namesake of a teachers’ lounge at the Bethel College of Liberal Arts in Kansas and the parable open to interpretation. Cassian is the patron of the commune of Bologna, México City, Las Galletas in Tenerife as well as educators, stenographers and parish clerks.

vertumnalia

Most famously portrayed in Milanese Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s 1590 portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II with a fruit and vegetable filter—Arcimboldo’s signature work as well, signifying the age of prosperity under his reign, Vertumnus is the shape-shifting deity of the seasons and metamorphosis and is celebrated with festivities (fasti) on this day on the Roman calendar.
Suitor of Pomona, the goddess of gardening and fruitful abundance—a hamadryad, that is a kind of nymph that lives in trees, Vertumnus seduced her in her orchard, having earned her confidence in the guise of an old woman, whom procedures to lecture her on the dangers of rebuffing advances, and this myth is considered to be the first Latin one, not derivative of earlier Greek traditions—the domesticated nature of landscaping and tending fruit trees perceived as too tame for the woodland spirits yet neither something as intensive—or fickle and dependent on the favour of the gods as agricultural activities. The god’s statue in a temple near the Forum Romanum was hewn from maple trunk and decorated according to the changing seasons typified by vestments made of the turning of leaves.

lilium martagon

Our thanks to friend of the blog Nag on the Lake for helping to identify a flower that I’ve encountered quite often in mid-June over a window of a few weeks during my walks in the woods. I had tried to research and learn what they were but having heard of an elusive and exotic local variety of orchid, I had pursued the wrong line of investigation.
The martagon lily (Türkenbund-Lilie, the epithet referring to the characteristic reflexed petals also derives from the word for a type of turban) has a range across Eurasia and is popular as a garden plant as well due to its long life span of fifty years and more. It was believed to have curative properties by practitioners of traditional medicine but is highly toxic to cats.

model 5150

Sharing the anniversary of its release along with many other events of great pith and substance including the sage 1869 proclamation of Emperor Norton I of the United States and Protector of México that dissolved and abolished political parties under penalty of imprisonment, as our faithful chronicler records, the first IBM Personal Computer (PC) was presented to the public on this day in 1981—its open source architecture (see also) and off-the-shelf elements attracted third-parties to create software and peripherals that were otherwise PC-compatible, thus creating a market and speeding adoption of office and home computing.

now that’s the ticket

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to a preview of the combined campaign poster for former rivals and contenders for the office of president of the United States of America which completes Joe Biden’s re-branding and represents only the fourth time a woman candidate was championed for national office by a major political party (see also, footnotes on number two) but crucially, the first time one prevails, we believe. Moving away from his solo work, for which Biden had previously used the more angular and sharp font Brother 1816, he and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris have chosen a newly commissioned typeface called Decimal from Hoefler & Co. (see previously)—the same foundry that created Gotham for Barak Obama’s run for high office.

spacepower

Foregoing the space bar, the United States of America’s newest military branch has outlined its vision and mission couched in very jingoistic and war-like language how it will establish and maintain dominance in the firmament. Unlike the Space Race that ran parallel to the nuclear build-up that was marked by achievements and milestones of one-upmanship that the Soviets indisputably won—with the exception of the crowning technical success of landing a crew on the lunar surface and bringing them back safely repeated over several iterations—there’s not so much a spirit of competition and exploration, with shining moments of cooperation, but rather sabotage and denial of access for those aspiring to join.

13 baktuns, 0 katuns, 0 tuns, 0 uinals, 0 kins

Corresponding with 11 August of 3114 BCE, if one were to retroactively apply the Gregorian timetable, this date represents (depicted left) the start of the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, cyclical though non-repeating tally of days since creation—or rather when humans first appeared as cultured creatures, the world having existed since time immemorial and epochs prior to their arrival. That prior age came to an end, amid a lot of ill-informed hysteria, on 20 December 2012—and we are well into the fourteenth b’ak’tun.

 

kardashev scale

From Kottke’s Quick Links, we are treated to another lucid and illuminating vignette from Kurzgesagt on anthropic limitations when comes to looking for intelligent life elsewhere in the Cosmos and how energy signatures might be the one common thread of evidence, as it were, when it comes to recognising alien civilisation and looking beyond our limited and biased horizons.
Proposed in 1964 by astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev (*1932 – †2019), the eponymous scale was a way to gauge the technological state of a culture—terrestrial or otherwise—based on the amount of energy that they are able to use efficiently and to what ends. Type I can effectively harness all the light and heat energy that falls on the planet from its home star(s)—which is about four magnitudes greater than what humans generally generate mostly from fossil fuels but possibly attainable if we continue with scientific advancement. Type II would be capable of harvesting the net energy of its solar system, possibly isolating itself and obscuring its existence with a Dyson Sphere. Type III could harness the energetic output of their entire galaxy. Alternatively, mathematician John David Barrow has inverted the scale and finds greater economy in miniaturisation and what he has classified as microdimensional mastery—going from human scale construction and manipulation down to chemistry, nanotechologies, genetic manipulation, atomic tinkering and eventual alternation to the fabric of space-time.