sequence of events

Via Waxy, we’re invited to play a fun game sourced from Wikipedia by Tom Watson to order historical occurrences, personages and places in chronological order with some happenings far more distant or contemporary (see also) than one might at first believe. Give it a try and let us know what’s your longest winning-streak.

tempus fugit

From our faithful chronicler we are introduced to the Weber-Fechner law, a pair of complementary psychophysical hypotheses that account for the common experience of the accelerated passage of time as we grow older. Named for Ernst Heinrich Weber (Gustav Theodore Fechner described it mathematically), the phenomenon suggests that we perceive ratios and given a sufficiently larger sample size—smaller contrast, we begin to gauge change in logarithmically rather than linearly. More at the link above, including a video presentation by Dr Hanna Fry of The Curious Cases podcast with co-host Dr Adam Rutherford.

king’s pawn game

Via the always attuned Things Magazine, we are introduced to the brilliant and influential ambient, electronica artist Manuel Göttsching, leader of the Ash Ra Tempel group, through the lens of his solo work, named for the opening chess move (also a reference to the harmonic range of a guitar, Göttsching’s primary instrument)—an hour long track improvised with a sequencer in 1984. A mainstay of techno happenings, the artist was rather taken aback to learn that people danced to his music.

from inca to excel

Via Æon, we quite enjoyed this introduction to the system of knotted fibres called khipu (see also) as an accounting and record-keeping tool of the Wari peoples and spread across the Andean region some fourteen-hundred years ago. Decoded by specially-trained khipukamayuqs, these mobile ledgers were periodically recalled to court authorities to lodge tax-compliance, census numbers, commerce, genealogy and inheritance—and with only a small proportion of museum-holdings deciphered, some holdout the possibility that these data-points were a means to encode the fulness of language.

die sternjägerin

Born this day in the City of Gdańsk in 1647 (†1693), Elisabeth Catherina Hevelius (née Koopmann) is considered to be one of the first women astronomers and significantly contributed to observational knowledge of the skies, publishing Prodromus astronomiæ in 1690, a catalogue of over fifteen hundred stars. Sharing the same professional passion as her husband, Johannes Hevelius (Jan Heweliusz), the two—both from a wealthy merchant background, moved around the various cities of the Hanseatic League before returning Danzig and constructing a complex of buildings which was at the time among the best observatories in the world (Stellæburgum—Star Castle) and garnered quite an international reputation with extensive joint research on sunspots and selenography (charting the features of the lunar surface) and hosting visiting dignitaries and scientists like Edmond Halley—greatly impressed by the couple’s calculations that articulated how comets orbit the Sun in parabolic paths.

thank you for being a friend

With a television career that spanned nearly all of the history of the medium, both in front of and behind the camera as the first woman to produce a sitcom, advocate and actor Betty Marion White, born this day in Oak Park, Illinois in 1922, left us just a few weeks shy of her one-hundredth birthday. Appearing first on radio programmes in the late 1930s, White’s work in the industry covered a remarkable ten decades.

iron triangle

In a farewell address to the people of the United States of America, on this day in 1961, outgoing US president Dwight D Eisenhower (see previously) issued a stark warning about the detriment that vested interest between military contractors, corporations and their lobbyists and the Legislative and the Executive could have for public policy. Admonishing the people that that they must not fail to comprehend the “grave implications” of recursive network and rotating-door politics, Eisenhower went on: “Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved—so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military-Industrial Complex… Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defence with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

ayn of green gables

On a property tour of the suburbs of Chicago, McMansion Hell (previously) explores the turrets, cornices and entryways that are, couched as architectural elements, the gross signifiers of ostentatious wealth. It’s as if the local Home Owners Association are spurring on a competition to see which monstrosity can project the most power. More at the links above and be sure to subscribe so as not to miss an update.