national day of reason (11. 530)

In response to the statutory observance of the National Day of Prayer—codified into law at the urging of conservative evangelical preacher Billy Graham in 1952 during the Korean War with US president Harry S Truman signing a bill proclaiming that each subsequent administration was to declare this annual holiday on the date of his choosing—this secular counter-convocation has been held on the first Thursday since 2003 by humanists and freethinkers to assert freedom from religion after unsuccessfully petitioning the federal government from endorsing the former, supported by public monies and time for Christian-dominated religious ceremonies. The latter having gained in popularity in recent years as a demonstration that nonbelievers can contribute to their communities in positive and life-affirming ways and be good without god, activities include organised food drives, blood donations and giving to other charities.

space cowboy (11. 529)

Before Star Wars or even the failed vision of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune—see also, a writer-director called Tony Foutz, who was also friends to the planned main cast, conceived of a sci-fi, fantasy project called Saturation 70, a retelling of Alice in Wonderland, in which a Victorian child falls through a wormhole and discovers himself in a dystopian Los Angeles after the climate collapse and his befriended by a group of time-travelling aliens to save the Earth from pollution—the extra-terrestrials are outfitted in hazmat suits against the toxic atmosphere, the title referencing the tolerance for carbon monoxide in blood. To star the then five-year-old son of Rolling Stone Brian Jones, country singer Gram Parsons, Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas and Nudie Cohn, much of the principal footage had already been shot before funding fell through and the production called off, many scenes filmed without a permit during a 1969 convention of alien abductees at Giant Rock near Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert. Douglas Trumbull who created the special effects for 2001 and later The Andromeda Strain was also involved. Aside from a brief showreel and a few stills, the film has been lost and regarded by cinephiles and Parsons’ fans as a rumour, nearly undocumented for nearly four decades, only a gallery showing in 2014 at London’s Horse Hospital but the story is being told in book form, featuring some never before published on-set photographs and scripts. More from Dangerous Minds at the link up above.

trench coat words (11. 528)

Via tmn, we really enjoyed this reflection and appreciation of the beautifully dissociative nature of the Japanese language and the noble attempt to articulate how the diglossia, digraphia of the written and spoken word, though a series of historical accidents, has created a unique and somewhat untranslatable perspective on the world. Beyond the embarrassment of choices that Japanese speakers have for writing (see previously) and those poetic terms with no equivalence—nonetheless important—the expatriate author a decade on explores how shoehorning the written word imported from China into a wholly oral tradition necessitates not only a pronunciation guide but context cues for orthography, adding an extra dimension to communication from the mechanics of morphology. Much more at Æther Mug at the link above including distinctive etymological class of compound words whose components are said the same but are disguised with a new kanji.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting

two years ago: another MST3K classic plus a pivotal moment in the Falklands War

three years ago: record stamps, the debut album from Kate Bush, Peter and the Wolf, more links to enjoy plus an alternate Oktoberfest

four years ago: ambient sounds of New York City

five years ago: the Queen Elizabeth 2,  more on the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, possible etymologies of OK, geese in the city at night plus more acoustic visualisations

7x7 (11. 527)

the function of colour: more scans from a beautiful 1930 volume on design in schools and workshops

sporulate: scientist create a plastic first strengthened then digested by bacteria  

wck: resuming their mission of feeding people in Palestine, José Andrés’ cookbook is nominated for a prestigious gastronomical award  

aim high in creation: a survey of North Korea’s popular culture  

barnard 33: JWST captures a sharp image of the iconic Horsehead Nebula of Orion  

dead reckoning: the history of the Etak Navigator and other cartographical innovations  

architectural renderings: the Art Deco illustrations of Charles Perry Weimer—via Messy Nessy Chic

beginners’ all-purpose symbolic instruction code (11. 526)

The original version of the general-purpose programming language (see also) developed by Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire designed in mind to build computer literacy for those outside of speciality fields executed its first code with immediate user-feedback and released after the initial demonstration on this day in 1964. With simpler and more intuitive syntax, the compiler was put into the public domain and immediately spawned several dialects based on terminals’ operating systems and memory constraints and was ideal for porting and inclusion for the growing mini- and microcomputer market for enthusiasts and hobbyists (I can remember being very pleased with some of my programs, however basic) and considered to be the first user-friendly family of high-level languages.

binomial nomenclature (11. 525)

Prior to the publication, on this day in 1753, of the work by Carl Linnaeus (see also), listing every known species of plant at the time (around six thousand specimens compared with the over four hundred-thousand of flowering plants alone described today), there was no consistent standard for the scientific naming of botanic organisms, later adopted by consensus for all forms of life, and most exemplars would be given a long though descriptive polynomials, like herbaceous perennial catnip—now Nepeta cataria, before called Nepeta floribus interrupte spicatis pedunculatis. The genus, the taxonomical rank between species and family, was followed by a specific epithet or “trivial name” developed out of a student project to classify what cattle forage. Arranged into a thousand genera, there were no accounts of what the species looked like in this text and one needed a companion volume to cross reference.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus Citizen Kane (1941)

two years ago: the Moonies, more text-to-image generation, more links to enjoy plus an Esperanto punk band

three years ago: Operation Neptune Spear (2011), Mister Rodgers testifies before Congress, dogs with torches in paintings, shrinking glacial maps, more Citizen Kane plus retiring the Op-Ed section

four years ago: Ballet Zoom, pigeon calls, the Penny Black (1840), the Feast of Saint Joseph, Soviet Winne the Pooh, a charting hit from Tim Curry, the flag of the territory of Florida plus an anime selfie filter

five years ago: edible seaweed containers plus an album from McGruff the Crime Dog

primary endosymbiosis (11. 524)

An endosymbiont is an organism incorporated into the cell of another organism in a mutually beneficial relationship—though it’s hard to draw the line from what we would consider weeds, hitchhiking genes or parasitism—and this rare and seminal phenomenon evolutionarily energised complex life roughly two billion years ago when a cell-attacking virus absorbed a bacterium that eventually became the organelle of all advanced cell structures known as the mitochondria, the cellular power-house. Going forward another billion years, a similar auspicious capture of a cyanobacteria led to the development of chloroplasts that are common to the plant kingdom. Not on the same level as the above symbiogenesis but not insignificant are the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that cohabitate in the root nodules of legumes, the chimeric lichens and the algae that live in coral reefs. Now—via the New Shelton Wet/Dry—we learn that researchers are uncovering evidence of another possible biological sea-change—possibly comparable to the way animals and plants have terraformed the Earth but we shouldn’t count on this as our saving grace for what we’ve done to the environment—with signs that common marine algae is engulfing bacteria—like pulses, peas and beans above—that enables seaweeds to fix nitrogen. Aside from possible insights into the once-in-a-billion-years enhancement, it could present a fundamental change in agricultural practises and mitigate some factors in climate modelling.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Wes Anderson’s Star Wars, the 1939 World’s Fair, hypertext markup language is released into the public domain (1993) plus more gashapon mania

two years ago: text-to-images plus modern medievalism

three years ago: your daily demon: Paimon plus a tiny Japanese fire truck on the streets of San Francisco

four years ago: the Church of Satan (1966), social-distancing headgear plus municipal flags of Russia

five years ago: more mass-transit upholstery, windowless houses, assorted links to revisit plus Walpurgis Night

kenshō seikatsu (11. 523)

Listening to a re-run of This American Life on human spectacle introduced with widespread delusion of being an unwitting main character in a simulation, articulated by The Truman Show, the first segment “I am the Eggplant,” about an individual conscripted into a very public psychiatric experiment—that because of its vintage, really went from one extreme of the panopticon to the a much darker, tortured place with several addenda. The Nippon Network’s reality game show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (進ぬ！電波少年—Do Not Proceed, Crazy Youth!) that aired from 1998 to 2002 was wildly popular and known for putting participants in rather extreme and absurd situations, and among the best known long-running contests (unbeknownst to the player) was called Prize Life, that recruited, abducted a young, aspiring comic called Tomoaki Hamatsu, nicknamed Nasubi (なすび, eggplant) owing to his long face, after winning a drawing for a “show business related job” who as his reward was challenged to live in an apartment with no possessions (including clothing, which was censored for the audience with a strategically placed digital 🍆, hardly compelled to be modest since he did not know he was being live-streamed the entire time—wondering if that’s the origin of the emoji’s double-meaning) or food and no contact with the outside world (see also) for fifteen and could subsist only from his “winnings” by from mail-in sweepstakes from magazines. These prizes turned out to be rather useless but after fifteen months in isolation (moved from an apartment in Japan to an identical one in Korea by the producers to keep the location hidden from the paparazzi) his winnings finally amounted to enough a million ¥ , to be declared victorious. Reality television has been a mainstay of entertainment for the past twenty years but the disorientation, disappointment and the glib cruelty made me draw comparisons to Squid Game. A feature documentary is about to be released on Nasubi and his ordeal but you should listen to the interview and thematically related acts first.