♅ v

Discovered on this day in 1948 by Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper (namesake of the circumstellar disc, the Kuiper Belt) at the McDonald Observatory in western Texas, the smallest, innermost icy moon of Uranus was named for Prospero’s daughter Miranda from Shakespeare’s The Tempest following the naming conventions for the other satellites. Orbiting the Sun on its side like its host world, it is prone to extreme and its mantle has one of the most varied and fantastical terrains known with one feature, called Verona Rupes (after the Italian village and setting for a pair of plays and the Latin for cliff), the highest escarpment in the Solar System at twenty kilometers. Due to Miranda’s weak gravity and off-kilter stance, it would take nearly a quarter of an hour to fall from this height to the surface.

xmodem

Emerging from the disruption and necessary respite, downtime afforded by the Great Blizzard of 1978 that blanketed much of the US Midwest, computer hobbyists Ward Christensen and Randy Suess of Chicago created the programme and platform to host the world’s first Computerised Bulletin Board System (see also) on this day of the same year, inventing much of the accepted protocol and terminology for messages, threads and forums.

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Though antecedents exist especially with opening captioning on the BBC and PBS for episodes of The French Chef, closed-captioning technology that would become commercially available by the end of the decade was first demonstrated on this day in 1972 to students a Gallaudet College (the day before the anniversary of the prestigious school for the deaf and hard-of-hearing’s founding in 1864 in Washington, DC). A unit separate from the television set interpreted and displayed the embedded code for an episode of the ABC police procedural drama The Mod Squad.

6x6

taxon: vintage animal family cards  

property values: Trump family accounting firm drops them as a client, disavows the validity of a decade’s worth of business assessments  

able baker: a collection of US museum ships—via Things Magazine  

daily constitutional: map out one’s lunch-hour ambulations 

wobo: Heineken breweries in the early 1960s produced brick-like bottles that could double as construction material, via Messy Nessy Chic  

metamates: Facebook staff receive a new official monicker aligned with corporate branding

billet-doux

Via Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day, we are introduced to the French for literally a “sweet note” that has been adopted in the common-parlance since the seventeenth century as an alternative for a romantic missive.  Pronounced Billy-DOO, the plural form is billets-doux. 

separated by a common language

Brought to our attention by Memo of the Air, we rather enjoyed this impromptu survey of American versus British English terms conducted by longtime UK expatriate living in the US, Tom Coates. Having lived outside of the English Sprachraum for some time but listening to the BBC quite a bit, I had at least a passing notion of what all of the words denoted—it’s another level beyond calling an elevator a lift or a roast a joint—and the only ones that struck me as puzzling presented in the line-up, though no having never encountered them in the wild before, were quango—a devolved crown entity, a quasi-NGO that receives public funding and sometimes subject to criticism for not being held accountable—and pelmet, a valance made of fabric meant to conceal curtain fixtures. It was interesting to note that among the unfamiliar US words, there were more than a couple over-the-counter drugs (that you should ask your GP about), and given the current trans-Atlantic exposure, one has to wonder how many might recall furlough, Brexit, Marmite, purdah or prorogation in a few years.

yereyira

Via Bad Ethnography, we enjoyed this musical anthology of otherwise unreleased West African artists found in the cellphones (used as a multimedia device absent personal computers, cloud-computer or reliable internet access) of denizens of the Sahara. Though over a decade old there are three volumes to discover now with many of the musicians found and given proper attribution for their accompaniment that sustained many caravans through literal and figurative the desert.

format cells

Though admitted one to slightly whinge at idea of spreadsheet software being used to make sign-in rosters as its highest calling, we are rather taken with the Excel art (see also) of Oleksiy Sai that provides commentary on corporate culture and office politics, noting that the hierarchy and norms while perhaps the youngest iteration of courtly etiquettes are probably the best-defined and most condemned in their breach of protocol. More at the artist’s website and Calvert Journal at the link up top.