8x8 (10. 575)

of bunkers and bridges: the government fall-out shelter behind Reykjavík’s Bústaðakirkja 

the outfit says soundgarden, and the zine says bikini kill but the bedroom set definite says chemical brothers: the new historical American Girl Doll is from the 90s  

hobbyist for hire: a tribute to the amateurs that inform so much of our professional base knowledge 

tiger by the tail: exploring the forgotten history of the big cat on the edges of Hong Kong  

a project for a metropole: the impossible, monumental architecture proposed eighteenth century influencer Étienne-Louis Boullée—see also 

ahh ridiculous: the 1960 space exploration film 12 to the Moon, with an international crew, which also received the MST3K send-up 

internyet: a look inside the obscure Russian agency charged with censoring the web

radio detection and ranging (10. 574)

Already having pioneered and already discovered practical applications for radio direction finding in the 1920s for meteorology by using the signals given off by lightning to track thunderstorms—known as high-frequency direction finding or huff-duff, and then conscripted into service in tracing submarines, their bearings revealed by intercepted communications, on this day in 1935—after being asked by a reporter to comment on the possibility of a death ray that the Nazis were rumoured to be developing and assuring the public it was not feasible but sparked another idea—Robert Alexander Watson Watt and partner Arnold Wilkins made the first public demonstration of the technology that would become known as radar by bouncing a signal from a BBC short-wave transmitted off an aircraft, showing its location and velocity could be calculated by measuring the time it took for the object’s echo to return.

gumby dharma (10. 573)

The always excellent Fancy Notions directs our attention to a 1977 psychedelic stop-motion short from Art Clokey (previously) meant as a visual metaphor for “evolving human consciousness.” Produced over the course of three years, it was a family collaboration, the sequences shot in their basement in Topanga, California. Tragically Clokey’s daughter took her own life aged 19 after witnessing a friend killed by a lighting strike and Mandala is informed by and dedicated to Ann’s memory.

rot54 (10. 572)

Radio Free Europe reports on the efforts of Arevik Sargyan trying to salvage and resurrect an impressive scientific legacy started by her uncle by restoring the research hub constructed on the slopes of Armenia’s highest massif, Mount Aragats as part of the campus of the Orgov Radio-Optical Telescope. Built in the decade from 1975 to 1985, it halted operation for a period in 1990 and mothballed in 2012, though its status as a registered monument has afforded the site some protection, the facilities are falling into neglect, but this latest campaign to preserve and restart the project conceived by astronomer and engineer Paris Herouni (Պարիս Հերունի) championed by his niece is gaining traction.

double you (10. 571)

Having previously explored the letter w as a semi-vowel and interventions to making English’s Latin inheritance more legible at speed, we enjoyed this further examination, via Strange Company, on how uu became w through the intermediary runic character called wynn (ƿ), becoming the preferred representation of the sound from the eight century on for clarity’s sake with the ligatured form coming to dominate scripts around thirteen hundred.

dataviz (10. 570)

Via the always excellent Web Curios, we are directed to Information is Beautiful (previously) with its selection of superlative static and interactive infographics short-listed as the most effective and elegant ways of communicating demographics and trends from a given dataset. We especially liked the decade of changes visualisations that immediately laid bare both precarity and opportunity in the Earth Carillon but we expect you’ll discover your own new favourite way of presenting charts and graphs.

the great bøyg of etnedal (10. 569)

Accompanied by an original score by Edvard Grieg that includes two of the most recognisable pieces of classical music, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and “Morning Mood,” Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, chronicling the journey of the titular protagonist from his home in Norway to Egypt and back again, premiered on this day in Oslo (then known as Christiania) in 1876. A social satire struggling with modernism with both pastoral and surreal portrayals of characters and calamities as our dissolute anti-hero comes to understand the consequences of his actions and the nature of responsibility—regardless whether or not accepted, its underlying message is echoed succinctly in the line: “If you lie; are you real?”

numeronym (10. 568)

Whilst the number-based word is an abbreviation as in K9 for canine (and it’s interesting to consider the range of emoji suggested when typing, especially when code-switching a “fee…” produces 🧚‍♂️—from the German—or eliciting a torrent of other non sequitur symbols) is the most common usage, it can also refer to the contraction in the form of omitting the second through penultimate letters of word and replacing them with their numerical count, usually a longer word but not necessarily, for example: h7k for hyperlink, s5n for shorten or g11n for globalisation. The first needful and non-cryptic reduction and redaction was in the assignment of an email address for an employee with a surname too long for the mail daemon to handle so Jan Scherpenhuizen was assigned “S12n” with coworkers coming to refer to him by his truncated name, with such original constrained handles becoming somewhat of a badge of honour in that business’ corporate culture.