The Unicode Consortium is proposing the inclusion of seven emoji for the standardised catalogues referenced by operating systems and will be under review through the beginning of July, when expected to be officially adopted. Though uniform and universal (with some exceptions), it will be some time before we can use a leafless tree to convey climate change and drought or the exhausted eyebag expression in general as platforms add their own vernacular in a process that can lag for several months. In addition to these pictograms, scripts from west Africa, India and Nepal are being added as well as new Japanese ideographs plus some four thousand Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and a historic Albanian set of characters and symbols from legacy computing.
Wednesday, 22 May 2024
v 16.0ฮฒ (11. 572)
kalaallit nunaanni nuna eqqissisimatitaq (11. 571)
Founded on this day in 1974 and expanded in 1988 to protect nearly a million square kilometres in the northeastern part of the island, Grรธnlands Nationalpark is the world’s largest and tenth largest reserve in the world (the larger areas consist mostly of marine environments). Approximately the size of Egypt, the park has no permanent human population, though about four hundred encampments, research stations and cleanup sites of abandoned mining operations see use over the summer months. One of the least visited parks in the world, it is home to numerous walruses, polar bears, wolves, seals, narwals and whales and a significant portion of the world’s musk oxen.
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synchronoptica
one year ago: the Trevi Fountain (1762)
two years ago: Nsibidi signs, tramdriver championships, the Oompahs plus Icelandic horses answer your emails
three years ago: a crawling map, a generational chart, more on the blockchain, saving the Icelandic language plus politics and EuroVision
four years ago: PacMac (1980), assorted links to revisit plus the necessity of book culling
five years ago: a see-through church, IKEA’s test kitchen, heritage tourism, exploiting gig-workers, noctilucent clouds on Mars plus sacred groves in Ethiopia
Tuesday, 21 May 2024
8x8 (11. 570)
nicht abgeholtes gepรคck: the main station in Freiburg has a mystery vending machine where one can buy unclaimed items left in delivery lockers—see previously
the ahramat branch: a long ago dried up arm of the Nile may explain some of the mystery behind the building of the Pyramids of Giza
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endless shrimp: the American seafood chain was private-equitied into bankruptcy and not by dent of its generous promotions—more here
first draft: in a since deleted post, Trump advocates for a “united Reich” in a video featuring hypothetical newspaper headlines following his reelection
on the town: the story behind the ten-year-old who in 1947 spent a week in San Francisco with twenty dollars
we call it maize: an interesting hypothesis that ancient Incan stonework and other architectural elements may be an homage to corn kernels
out-of-order: broken and unused vending machines from around Japan—via Cardhouse—see also
synchronoptica
one year ago: Croatia Diplomacy Day, a classic from David Bowie, an evergreen piece on American gun-violence plus assorted links worth revisiting
two years ago: Ok Computer, a rainbow fifty pence coin for Pride, more feathered friends plus Amelia Earhart crosses the Atlantic
three years ago: your daily demon: Beleth, Elton John in the Soviet Union plus trace a raindrop from river down to the sea
four years ago: vintage Las Vegas logos, an avant-garde art show (1951) plus The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
five years ago: the White Night Riots (1979), regional airline logos, OK Cola, African air-carriers, one hundred and twenty years of photography plus a camera on a sushi conveyor belt
Monday, 20 May 2024
i am disappoint (11. 569)
The always interesting Language Log introduces us to a class of typos with two-subsets that we can find very relatable and gets the onus of the blame when conducting a bit of post-publication proofreading: completion errors, when typing or writing (there is both a motor-mechanical and muscle inertia in effect) starting out with one intention and an intrusive ending inserts itself, and capture errors, an action slip when a reflex behaviour creates an unwanted parallelism. What’s a sticky key you’re vexed by? Surely beyond spoonerisms such slippage happens in speech with frequency and I wonder how too such intrusions are compounded—or not—by auto-complete.
i’m feeling lucky (11. 568)
Well before the default search engine began adding AI overviews to its results, users expressed their frustration and rebellion by adding a /r to their query to solicit some community juried results from Redditors less biased towards optimisation and more geared towards what people drove through discussion. Whilst rankings on any platform have never been free from a certain tilt that may create unwanted obstacles—or produce the desired outcome—this sort of copilot mode be default risks the user blaming, shooting the messenger (see previously) for what’s served up through the enhanced algorithm. Although Google chose to showcase its latest AI-focused upgrade on its biggest forum, the alternative filter, emulator of familiar web-caches reaching back a decade before SEO and general bot buttinskis was announced quietly by a liaison on a competing site. Sans ads, knowledge panels and scraping metadata from websites—but with tradeoffs—the parameter and suffix udm=14 brings one back to the unadulterated web to an extent that’s probably more geared to utility rather than simply nostalgia. More from Tedium at the link above and here is a website that automates it for your browser of choice.
the great 404 (11. 567)
Via Maps Mania, we are invited to revisit the Kessler Effect (previously here and here) and the pressing, existential problem of space junk. NASA scientist Donald J Kessler conjectured in 1978 a upper-limit for density of satellites in low-Earth orbit, a threshold beyond which (a level that according to some estimates is already passed) even a minor collision could cause a catastrophic chain-reaction, an ablation cascade that would render subsequent launches impossible and leave future exploration grounded and triangulate the implications, connecting the dots, by finding constellations in the debris field as it becomes more fraught and a challenge to break through, like the pictured Broken Compass (see below, see also). What asterisms can you see?
synchronoptica
one year ago: Blessed Alcuin’s logic puzzle, nine kings, one room (1910) plus an extreme exoplanet
two years ago: assorted links to revisit plus more Alcuin
three years ago: a brood of cicadas in North America emerges, taxia of twist-ties, naming every colour plus the fly-bee
four years ago: World Bee Day, Theatre of the Orb of the World (1570) plus Meck Dec Day
five years ago: standardising le Grand K, the NSA (1919), fetishising the five-paragraph essay, medieval medical records plus a new single from Vampire Weekend
Sunday, 19 May 2024
pfingstsonntag (11. 566)
Courtesy of H’s fancy drone piloting we had a nice bird‘s eye view of the grounds but we were soon sharing the airspace with avian friends (I had never heard the belching cries of swans or the clapping of a stork before) and craft launching from a nearby strip built for model airplanes which could really do some impressive stunt maneuvers—none of which I could manage to capture, not for the lack of trying.
one year ago: St Ivo, The Phantom Menace (1999), assorted links to revisit plus more medieval collective nouns
two years ago: Amy Fisher (1992), St Dunstan, an altarpiece by Titian plus the zine of William Blake
three years ago: a birthday wish (1962), an animated stratified map, a classic by Paul Simon plus the stadio typeface
four years ago: the UK public terror alert system plus unsustainable arbitrage
five years ago: the Dutch Venice, etiquette as a social wedge, a tardigrade stress-ball plus flora and fauna of the New World charted out
Saturday, 18 May 2024
neustadt a. / a. (11. 565)
We ventured out to visit the main town of the region, Neustadt an der Aisch—a member of the cohort of European municipalities called Neustรคdter numbering around a dozen—and saw the old town, which was cultivated through the auspices of House Hohenzollern under the burgraves of Nรผrnberg into a cultural, political and economic hub along the main overland trade route between Wรผrzburg and Nรผrnberg already by the twelfth century but ending after the Thirty Years War in the mid-1600s and falling under Prussian sovereignty. Neustadt faded in importance but due to subsequent developments in the rail network (which followed those ancient merchant roads) and repopulated with Germans expelled from the Sudatenland, Neustadt regained some of its former prominence.
one year ago: a classic from Looking Glass plus assorted links to revisit
two years ago: the Geneva Convention on Environmental Modification (1977), another MST3K classic, a national assembly in Frankfurt (1848) plus more links to enjoy
three years ago: even more links plus the plan to put a roller coaster on the Golden Gate Bridge
four years ago: the eruption of Mt Saint Helens plus more links
five years ago: an old/new painting by Vermeer