love of two is one

Via MetaFilter, the 1994 television miniseries adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand (see previously) is available for your streaming pleasure—all five hours and forty-two minutes of it. The aspect-ratio does need adjusting and there are reportedly moments when the audio cuts out due to since conflicting copyrights, but it’s free and—mostly, in full. Mostly, and with limited commercial-interruption.

spartari radio language

Though I was hoping for this to take a fun and unexpected turn into Polari rhyming slang, Carlos Spartari’s 1930s contribution radiotelephony procedure (also known as on-air protocol, the standard for communication over two-way transmissions to optimise clarity and reception probably best exemplified in NATO call signs and spelling alphabets) strikes at the same time as both overly fussy and demanding and as work of sheer genius in the field of constructed languages.
Meant for international use, Spartari’s proposal required neither listener nor receiver to learn a special grammar or jargon with all messages encoded and decoded in seven musical notes plus an eighth punctuation tone like solfège and even the nineteenth century universal auxiliary language Sol-Re-Sol based on the same scale. Learn more from our faithful antiquarian, J.F. Ptak’s Science bookstore, at the link up top.

ibiza on ice

Six months on, the Guardian profiles the resort town of Ischgl and the clientele it attracts and how its party lifestyle and après ski venues became an incubator for COVID-19 and helped the epidemic turn pandemic. There’s lots of scapegoating and finger-pointing to sort through but the consequent spread and back-tracking seem rather incontrovertible. The bar where most of the contagion is traced, Kitzloch, was shut down on 10 March with the entire town quarantined from three days afterwards until 22 April.

palabra jot

Probably at least a semi-legendary figure though charged with an onerous task nonetheless, court historian, secretary and studious bureaucrat Cangjie (倉頡) was tasked with the job of inventing written language around forty-six centuries ago when the Yellow Emperor expressed his dissatisfaction with the available method of recording information—that is, knots in string.
Though gifted and determined, Cangjie was at a loss until he began to contemplate the tracks and footprints left by animals and humans. Encountering an unfamiliar impress, Cangjie inquired with a hunter what sort of animal could leave such a mark. On learning it was the print of a Pixiu (貔貅, the equivalent of a chimera), Cangjie was inspired to create a set of logograms that would become written Chinese. Traditionally depicted with four eyes, it is said that at his eureka moment, the deities and ghosts wailed and wept as the living could be duped no longer thanks to a written record and the heavens rained down millet and grain. This figure is the namesake of the first Chinese language dictionaries and the method for adapting Chinese for Western keyboards.

arrivals and departures lounge

Though it was endearing to see a family undertake a cancelled trans-Pacific vacation or to tour airports with a sense of nostalgia and Wanderlust, Singapore Airlines’ plans to take travellers aloft on actual flights to nowhere both starting and ending at Changi airport (the city state bereft of domestic travel opportunities) seems wasteful and perverse. What do you think? Circling the runway is very resource intensive and an economy that need to maintain such circulation seems childish and like a bit of grifting that we’d do better to move beyond and not let a cloying attempt to save a market with no rehabilitation further take down the environment with it.

grotte de lascaux

Discovered by eighteen-year-old Marcel Ravidat and three friends when his dog, Robot, fell into a hole on this day in 1940, the four companions descended the fifteen-metre-deep shaft into the underground gallery believing it might be the legendary secret entrance to Lascaux Manor and were astounded to find the ancient cave paintings covering the walls.
The depictions dated at around seventeen thousand years old are produced with pigments that suggest an advanced knowledge of deriving colour compounds as well as an understanding of scale and perspective and include human activities, abstract symbols and a host of animals, felines, horses, bears, deer and aurochs. The site has been closed to the public since 1963 once it was determined that the influx of visitors was causing the rapid deterioration of the paintings though many at scale replicas have been created.

rules of the road

Via Strange Company’s Weekend Link Dump, our attention is turned toward traffic planning and the evolution of the parking lot as a cultural and ethnographic study, guided and informed largely through the direction of businessman and civil engineer William Phelps Eno (*1858 – †1945).
Despite (and perhaps because) never learning to drive himself, Eno was an early champion for traffic control and regulation—mostly non-existent before his pioneering proposals for London, Paris and New York, and helped to move street signs, cross-walks, one-way streets, roundabouts and traffic islands into mainstream adoption.  Framing regulations, like right-of-way and priority Eno also helped frame the language: to rank was to line up vehicles one behind another aligned with the kerb—what we’d called parallel-parking—whereas to park, was to stand (left for “dead” as opposed to a “live” vehicle continuously occupied by its driver and prepared to move it for the accommodation of others) one’s car at an angle to the street. These new rules quickly revealed the need for dedicated parking lots and streets were becoming more congested and less navigable due to vehicles left unattended. Municipalities attempted to restrict the rank and file to “live” automobiles only but this became unenforceable as ownership increased beyond those whom would or could engage a chauffeur or valet and instead began allocating spaces for off-street parking.

doom loops

Via Cory Doctrow’s Pluralistic blog, we are directed towards an excellent, circumspect column from Ed Yong outlining nine reflective and recognisable factors driving the pandemic spiralling spread in the United States—as that country’s death toll surpasses two-hundred-thousand with no signs of improvement or organised mitigation measures on the horizon.
How many of these factors resound for you—not just as a criticism of others but a trap, a fallacy that you’ve fallen for yourself to a degree? We especially appreciated mulling over what Yong frames as the “serial monogamy of solutions”: only paying attention to one intervention at a time and rejecting it for its perceived short-comings when a success, prevention takes a multi-pronged approach. We can also relate to the regression to personal blame—beggaring one’s neighbour for not taking the situation and rituals as seriously as you have decided it is within the Overton window (which is also a heuristic for examining creeping normalcy and regression to the mean) of margins of behaviour—not flagrant violations thereof—that have been put out (or not) by authorities. One not only needs a coherent, universal policy informed by science to strengthen individual convictions (no matter how faithfully I wear a mask and avoid crowds, I can’t do that for others) one also needs to redress systemic problems that are obstacles to recovery, like social programmes and access to health care.