everybody always confesses—you can’t help it

Slated to be released on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the original publication of nineteen eighty-four on 8 June 2023 and greenlit by the estate of George Orwell, the dystopian, cautionary tale will be retold from the perspective of Julia, Winston Smith’s erstwhile subversive, thoughtcriminal, inculcated to the Party at a young age and avid member of the Junior Anti-Sex League and the Two Minutes Hate directed against those who would betray the revolution but who quickly redirected her fervour to rebellion, though knowing they will eventually be caught and betray one another’s confidence.

say, say, say

On this day in 1983, the duet between Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, first released in October of that year, rose to top the US singles charts, holding the number one spot for six weeks—enjoying comparable success in Canada, Norway, Australia, Switzerland and the UK. The narrative of the music video profiles a team of con-artists, patent medicine sellers called Mac and Jack.

nobelfesten

Cancelled for a second year due to the pandemic, normally the Nobel Banquet (previously here and here) is held annually on this day (the anniversary of the death in 1896 of its benefactor, inspired to become a philanthropist after reading a premature obituary of himself that described him as a war profiteer, indeed having amassed his fortune from dynamite), the fête hosted in the Blue Hall of the rathaus of Stockholm for 1971 would have included amongst its guests Willy Brandt, chancellor of West Germany, Pavlo Neruda, Chilean poet and diplomat, Simon Kuznets, responsible for turning economics into an empirical, cyclical science, and Gábor Dénes, inventory of among other things holography.

sex-postive

Perennially indebted to our faithful chronicler, we are reminded that on this day in 1994, that US Surgeon General under Bill Clinton, VADM Dr. Minnie Joycelyn Elders, was forced to resign for expressing her views frankly on what at the time was considered taboo topics of discussion including drug legalisation, distributing contraception in public schools and most controversially introducing masturbation (on World AIDS Day) to sex-education curricula. Championing control of reproductive rights and decriminalisation of drug offences during her sixteen month tenure, Elders’ ideas for visionary for a stage in American cultural that pivoted particularly in the prudish direction, though rather than being about what’s discussed in polite company was never the issue but instead the societal norms and strictures put in place to uphold and perpetuate the patriarchy and class-structure.

legacy software

With a possible folk-etymology referencing Harvard’s Cruft Hall with its preponderance of superannuated electronics from its role during wartime research and development, cruft is a collective noun for a group of hackers. The term, however, has negative connotations of slapdash and shortcut programming which leaves large sectors of unneeded, redundant code.

from the depths of wikipedia

Via Waxy, we very much enjoyed this interview with Wikimedian and influencer—kindred spelunker and caretaker—Annie Rauwerda who shares her adventures lured down strange rabbitholes, daisy-chains and cul-de-sacs across several platforms. Perhaps the lone social media mogul whose project the public can intuit, Rauwerda regales, entraps us with delightful and seductive trivia, like Dolbear’s Law for instance, which describes the relationship between ambient air temperature and the frequency of cricket chirping (the number of chirps in eight seconds plus five is pretty close to the thermometer-reading in Celsius).

6x6

recursive: Ghislaine Maxwell sketches the courtroom artist sketching her 

temporal distortion: an xkcd comic that references every ambiguous birthday scenario 

check out those gams: a pair of pageants with a narrower focus on beauty—via Nag on the Lake 

menty-b: Macquarie Dictionary’s short-list for Word of the Year  

qed: an overview of maths in film and television 

hungry eyes: the canon of Western art as viewed through the lens of food

ngc

On the anniversary of the discovery of a pair of barred-spiral galaxies in 1785 by Anglo-German astronomer by William Herschel whilst observing the night sky in Leo Minor, Edwin Powell Hubble, namesake of the space telescope, first found evidence, using Cepheid variables-whose periodic pulsations can be used to measure cosmic distances-that the Universe extends far beyond our own Milky Way and that nebulae were far too distant and were in fact galaxies in their own right. Definitively demonstrating his proof the following year and though contrary to scientific consensus at the time that the Universe was our own galactic skies some researchers-Hubble included, harboured suspicions that the Cosmos was a much bigger place since the conjectures of Immanuel Kant in his 1755 treatise on the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens, positing that the Solar System is a smaller reflection of the fixed stars.