for the nonce: nubivagant

This rare, obsolete adjective, used first in 1656 from the Latin for clouds, nubes, plus the vagant, vagus for wandering describes something emerging from the clouds or moving through the sky. Though not among the shameful paucity of subsequent citations of the word—only three lexical occurrences since the mid-seventeenth century, it does evoke William Wordsworth’s 1804 sentiment for all of us with our heads in the clouds and not fully grounded: 

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

hauptstadtbeschluss

Casting their vote on this day in 1991, the Bundestag of reunified Germany made the decision to move the seat of government and departmental headquarters from Bonn to Berlin. As stipulated by the second article of the treaty between East and West—which also established 3 October as der Tag der Deutschen Einheit—Berlin was already declared the capital in 1990. The transition took place over the ensuing decades with field offices of several ministries retained in the western conurbation, near Brussels and Germany’s most densely populated region.

fabric swatch

Via Web Curios, we quite taken with this simple, unassuming tool that generates textile-like patterns either at random or to a wide range of adjustable specifications that can then be saved as image files or exported as tiles for use as web-backgrounds if so desired.

rendered realities

Via Waxy, here is a compilation of the top one hundred alternate, richly detailed and embellished protagonist making the long slog through different backgrounds and environments transported from paracosm to paracosm selected from a challenge that over twenty-four hundred computer graphics artists participated in.  Though not quite the same parameters, it reminded us of this remarkable rotating, side-scrolling Castlevania cube.

blanc joue et mate en 2

Via the morning news, we learn that not only is there a developed, strategic version of free to print and play one-dimensional chess, there’s quite an extensive history of 1D chess variants going back decades—even as early, in the form at least of single row, constricted practises, as 1925.

8x8

here fishy, fishy, fishy: a tale of a talking fishing lure and sixty counts of mail fraud  

goldenrod: behind-the-scenes footage of droids C3PO and R2-D2 trying on their costumes  

plastic tracker: monitor the likely course of one’s discarded waste to the seas—see also—via Maps Mania 

discothek: a commercial photographer captured the golden age of nightclubs with all their eccentricities and exuberance  

juneteenth: America gets a new federal holiday to commemorate the end of chattel enslavement in the United States  

downfall: dégringolade n. a rapidly deterioration of circumstance or position, from the French to take a sudden tumble 

foreign exchange: a beautiful animated short of grains of sand and fiat currency explores the tenuous, specious agreements that underpin capitalism and the global economy  

the most compact, neatest, cheapest, and durable reel on the market: advertising niche that distresses and antiques modern sundries

endianness

In what sounds like a passage out of Gulliver’s Travels (which etymologically speaking, it does and I think about the Big-Endians when I put eggs in the egg-cooker for breakfast on the weekends and sometimes have difficulty telling which way goes up) the little-endian method of day-month-year described the sequence of expressing dates (numerically) in most European countries. In German dots are used as separators to indicate ordinal numbers, “der zweite erste” for the second of January for example or the 2.1.—and while a leading zero for days of the month under ten is permissible in Switzerland or Austria, the grammatical rules particular to Germany do not allow for it. The format leading year-month-day, going from general to specific, is called the above big-endian method and used in China and much of Asia and the style employed in the United States, uniquely, month-day-year, is called middle-endian, used as an auxiliary method by virtually no other polity.

black to the future

Recommended by Fresh Air’s jazz critic Kevin Whitehead, we very much enjoyed discovering the musical stylings bandleader and saxophonist and clarinet player Shabaka Hutchings through his recent sessions leading a reed quartet called Sons of Kemet. Much more at the link above.