orion (10. 309)

After a series of delays (see previously here and here) the first uncrewed mission of the Artemis programme took off in a predawn launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying aloft the empty (Snoopy and a cadre of mannequins were on board to gauge for radiation and stress levels) capsule, named after the goddess’ giant hunting partner and cast amongst the stars after his accidentally blinding as the source of the phrase ‘standing on the shoulders of giants,’ on a twenty-five day, two-million kilometre test-flight that will see the craft fly around the Moon and back before splash-down on 11 December. This exercise will prove crucial to later crewed missions scheduled for 2025 with the ultimate goal of establishing a permanent, long-term presence on our satellite and have a staging platform for further exploration.

st bernard (10. 308)

As Design Boom reports, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) have created a an edible drone prototype that can be dispatched to stranded hikers and mountain-climbers to provide a life-sustaining emergency meal whilst waiting for help to arrive. Acknowledging the limitations on payload for most aerial craft—usually only up to thirty percent of their own weight, developers concocted a way to make the structure part of the delivery with rice-cake wings.

innerspace (10. 307)

Designed by astrophysicist Frank Drake (see previously) with input from Carl Sagan and others as a proof-of-concept demonstration rather than an attempt to enter into to dialogue with extra-terrestrials and criticised as being too low-resolution to be recognisable to future recipients, the Arecibo Message (see also here and here) was beamed from the radio observatory in Puerto Rico on this date in 1974, aimed in the direction of the globular star cluster M13, some twenty-five thousand light-years from Earth. When encoded graphically, the some sixteen hundred bits of data produce the pictured image with seven elements, from top to bottom: the decimal system, the valance of the elements that make up DNA, the chemical formula for the constituent nucleotides, the approximate number of said organic molecules in the human genome with representation of the double-helix structure, the average dimensions of a human male plus the Earth’s population (four billion, compared to eight billion presently), a representation of the Solar System and finally in purple, the Arecibo telescope. The precise number of bits, 1 679, is a semiprime—that is, the product of two prime numbers, seventy-three and twenty-three, to prompt one toward the right orientation, the alternate arrangement producing static. An answer came in 2001 in the form of a crop circle near the Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire—rather intricately replacing the carbon-based DNA with silicon and the pictogram of the human figure looks alien—though this reply was unfortunately an elaborate hoax.

6x6 (10. 306)

honkbal hoofdklasse: Dutch for ‘Major League Baseball’  

fragrant, acid, burnt and caprylic: the Crocker-Henderson odour classification system 

dinosaur.pocket: AI generated Mastodon instances by Janelle Shane (previously) 

the floor is lava: a fun looking arcade experience though the best part was climbing over the furniture and leaping from place to place  

pontifex: the cathedral-like under-girding of the bridges of Seoul 

phryge-fest: Paris unveils its Olympic and Paralympics mascots—anthropomorphic hats

7x7 (10. 305)

eyes wide shut: morbid fascination for both the collapse of Trumpism and Twitter  

massa alimentícia: former pasta factory in Portugal for sale—via Messy Nessy Chic 

slava ukraini: president Zelenskyy visits liberated city of Kherson   

backstory: a modern history of our butts  

pets.com: series of Silicon Valley layoffs  

turbulent indigo: Joni Mitchell reminisces on her career with Elton John  

hidden in plain sight: the anti-MacGuffins of Hitchcock’s Charade—via Language Hat

antecedent and order of precedence (10. 304)

Having speculated on this oddly ridged yet unwritten rule on adjectival order in English which is not always intuitive for non-native speakers, we were quite taken with this obvious exception to the rule juxtaposing “big dumb hat” and “dumb little dog” posed to the Help Desk at Language Log. It’s a nuanced and complex answer to why “little dumb dog” sounds so out of place having to do mostly with stress and syllable count and constraints of subjectivity, a speaker’s tendency to want to distance more biased terms from what’s being described.

cinebox (10. 303)

I was wracking my brain and hitting an internal googlewhack over the audio-visual jukebox short films (finally found what I vaguely recalled blogging about before—an overview of the technology and content that spanned the history from the pre-WWII Soundies and Panorams to their revival in the late 1950s by a French company) that less mainstream performers used to promote their latest singles and see that it also inspired a search by friend of the blog par excellence Nag on the Lake, who preening through a lot of unfortunate link-rot, discovered and shares a great repository of scopitones. Check out the links above for more of these precursors to music videos and streaming whose particular style (Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots are Made for Walking” is a less obscure epitome) prompted essayist Susan Sontag to nominate them for inclusion as part of the “canon of Camp.” Let us know your favourites.

rock inky (10. 302)

Founded in March of the same year (first weekly pictured) and delightfully referred to as the titular class of publications, the circular, the New Musical Express (NME) first started its singles chart on this day’s edition in 1952, the first British newspaper to do so, following the model of the US magazine Billboard. Listing the top twelve, the first number one hit was Al Martino’s “Here in My Heart,” which held the top spot for nine consecutive weeks—a record not broken until Bryan Adam’s ballad for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991. Associated with gonzo journalism particularly during the mid-1970s and its coverage of the rise of the punk genre, the label went on to report on film, television, gaming and pop culture before folding its print enterprise in 2018 and becoming an online magazine.