your daily demon: buer

Ruling from this day through 9 May, this infernal president of the grimoire Pseudomonarchia Dæmonum and its appearance when the sun is in Sagittary and like his archer compatriots embraces some of the characteristics and conflation associated with Chiron, chief of the Centaurs, who taught moral and natural philosophy and revealed to humans the balm and bane of plants and herbs.

Buer, opposed by the angel Aladiah, also shares some of the mythology of Ixion, father of the Centaur race first pitied by Zeus, as a King Lear-like figure, and given a seat at the table of the gods but then cast out of Olympus for lusting after Hera. Zeus ordered Hermes to bound Ixion to a fiery wheel that was always spinning, wandering the heavens for eternity. This tenth spirit presents as an asterisk (*) or triskelion, this chimeric demon has the face and mane of a lion and five goat legs capable of motion in all directions and commands fifty legion.

7x7

sensory deprivation: science fiction author Hugo Gernsbeck invented an isolation helmet to eliminate distractions  

while my guitar gently weeps: Prince performs a mind-blowing solo during a 2004 induction ceremony for George Harrison into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 

🆎: revolutionary way to use thirty-year-old gaming controls (see also) to reach new heights in high-scores

seti@home: project Breakthrough Listen seemingly revives the spectre of Fermi’s Paradox  

gratitude journal: tiled grid of things to be thankful for from Kira Street inspires one to make one’s own mood board  

urban renewal: colour-coded maps like stained glass help one visualise how cities age and grow 

; vs –: duelling punctuation preferences of famous authors

revenge of the sixth

A bit deflating like learning a super hero’s catch-phrase was derived from a Ted Cruz joke or some other detestable tool, we were a little disheartened to learn the albeit non-canonical, not endorsed Star Wars holiday is sourced and cited to a celebratory message that the Conservative Party took out in the London Evening News just after exit polls declared Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister on this day in 1979:“Congratulations Maggie, May the Fourth be with you!” The advertisement caused some consternation among the Tories—thinking bringing in such a pop culture reference, though two years old by then, out of place, though calling Reagan’s his missile shield, the Strategic Defence Initiative after the space opera made the pun socially acceptable, and made the phrase, trope an enduring relic of the Reagan-Thatcher era.

geodesy

The first of a pair of research satellite reflectors—LAGEOS, from Laser Geometric Environmental Observation Survey, was launched on this day in 1976 (the partner mission was launched in 1992) placing the aluminium covered brass sphere, dimpled and looking like an oversized golf ball, in an extremely stable orbit. The enduring experiment is designed to aid with satellite orientation and terrestrial distances with the highest precision available, due to their regular circumnavigation of the Earth.  Approaching the period of a natural satellite, these artificial moons are expected to remain in orbit for over eight million years and contain a time-capsule, message in a bottle (see previously) for future Earth civilizations once it does re-enter the atmosphere, fast-forwarding continental drift to show their expected arrangement at that point in the future as compared to the present and page Pangaea accompanied by a binary calendar with the launch date starting as year zero.

monotype

Default settings are an announcement to one’s audience and become the pervasive standard of least-resistance—as seen in the domineering notes, notices and presentations appearing in the pre-set font family of the Microsoft Office suite of products and so it was a welcome bit of news that the choice was not to be so much foisted on users or queued up in recently used—in the architecture of the programming—but rather would rather replace, unseat King Calibri (Lucas de Groot’s 2002 creation is a fine one but suffer from ubiquity) with a user-juried selection (albeit a self-selecting pool) with contenders including the symmetry-breaking Seaford from Tobias Frere-Jones, Grandview from Aaron Bell that is informed by older German roadway signage and the Mid-Century modern Bierstadt of Steven Matteson—namesake of a suburb of this other Deutsch font city.

fah ond fyrgeard ferhearde heold

Mentioned no fewer than five times in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (previously) and with subsequent and comparable artefacts excavated in later years from the Sutton Hoo and other sites, the Benty Grange helmet found on this day in 1848 in an ancient mound burial site in a farm in Derbyshire was the first evidence of the well-attested seventh century boar-crested headgrear. The nose-to-nape band portrays a charging wild swine at the crown with an incipient cross inlay—this example of spangenhelm—that is, a segmented helmet of bone that’s since decayed away displays both Christian and pagan iconography and possibly captures a moment on the cusp when conversions were carried out by Irish missionaries. Apparently any faith tradition would do on the battlefield or against the scorn of Grendel’s mother.

information as a public good

The annual observance focused on the above theme, World Press Freedom Day was enshrined by the United Nations in 1998 as a time for reflection and remediation for governments to uphold their commitment to freedom of expression and an adversarial press and encourage journalists and media professionals to recount their struggles and pledge to truth and ethics in pursuit of reporting. The day falls on the anniversary of the forerunning Windhoek Declaration of 1991 when a consortium of newspaper reporters from all across Africa met in the Namibian capital resolved to promote an independent and pluralistic press for the continent. The Press Freedom Index is also updated at this time, ranking the ability for journalists to cover candidly government and corporate behaviour.

this is npr

With this day marking the first on-air original programming from Nation Public Radio a half-century ago after the previous year’s passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, NPR and its member stations reflect on and renew their unique mandate to serve and amplify a listening audience that mirrors the fullness and diversity of the United States. The network’s original mission statement charged and championed its affiliates as being the source for “information of consequence” that helps the celebrants of human experience be “enlightened participants” in society. All Things Considered was the first segment broadcasted.