… (12. 446)

At the end of last month, one of the few remaining telegraph stations in China prepared to shut down, thousands traveled to Hangzhou in far eastern Zhejiang province to pay their respects and dispatch last missives (see previously). We enjoyed the shared memories of workers and patrons as told through the story of one individual who undertook a rather epic journey on a slow train east to send his first and last messages. Writing out their notes by hand, character by character, people sent telegrams to themselves, friends and relatives both yet to be born and departed and operators recalled the echoing cadence of the office and specific numerical sequences used to encode words and phrases. The once vital communications network has all but disappeared, although during the last day of operation, the station, which had in recent years only been sending an average of twenty-five a year, processed nearly six-thousand telegrams. Memories are not so far removed as China has had telegraphy technology since the nineteenth century, it remained popular and the only guaranteed method of reaching someone urgently until peaking in the late 1980s when more than forty million messages were sent annually, individual stations handling on average a hundred thousand each.

космос-482 (12. 445)

Launched 31 March 1972, the Soviet Venus probe that failed to escape low Earth orbit is expected to make a crash landing, plunging through the atmosphere today, more than fifty years after the mission was aborted and while debris of this size, five hundred kilograms, deorbits regularly, most space junk of this mass disintegrates before reaching the surface, breaking up into shooting stars—however with a titanium heat shield and built to withstand the rigours of exploring our hot and crushing neighbour, it is likely to survive the journey and land in one piece. While far more likely to hit the ocean, it could smash down on someone’s property (see previously here and here). Shrouded in the secrecy of the Cold War Space Race, it was common practice for the USSR’s space exploration programme to use low Earth orbit as a staging grounds, a sort of parking lot, for missions to other planets, launched well ahead of the ideal path for future rendezvous with their intended targets, and all given the designation of Kosmos so as not to publicise mission goals. A misfire of the booster rockets condemned the vehicle to this decades’ long limbo, retaining the original mission identification, rather than making it the planned Venera 9 atmospheric study.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a collection of abandoned blogs (with synchronoptica) plus the Tea Act of 1773

seven years ago: the FCC complains about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner plus photographer Rodney Lewis Smith

eight years ago: Persian miniatures, Trump fires FBI director James Comey plus artisanal coins

eleven years ago: cracking down on intelligence leaks plus the practise of kintsugi

twelve years ago: plagiarism scandals in German politics

16-bit intel 8088 chip (12. 444)

Whilst there is more perhaps more superficial interoperability in computing today than in years past (see previously), this unlikely but sublime poem by Charles Bukowski, laureate of American lowlife, after receiving a Macintosh and laser printer from his wife for Christmas in 1990 and significantly increasing in already prodigious output in his final years, his experience with lost files and frustrations with manufactured obstacles speak to the same phenomena of walled-gardens, lock-in, portability issues and general enshiffication.

with an Apple Macintosh
you can’t run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer. both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can’t read each other’s
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can’t use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.

Whilst not pioneering in his adoption or embrace, Bukowski quickly came to assert that, despite technical difficulties recognised as defective by design, he could not write any other way. More from Kottke at the link above.

chrysopoeia (12. 443)

Although the aims of alchemists of transforming base metals into gold has been previously achieved through synthetic transmutation first in 1941 by heavy bombardment of mercury with neutrons—though the resulting isotopes were extremely radioactive and again in 1980 by Glenn Seaborg at Lawrence Livermore labs by surgically removing protons and neutrons from bismuth atoms, these demonstration projects were prohibitively expensive and would need to be scaled up a trillion-fold in order to produce a microscopic speck of the precious metal. We learn, however—via tmn—that researchers working on the ALICE programme at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the acronym somewhat disappointingly only standing for A Large Ion Collider Experiment designed to study conditions immediately after the Big Bang with by creating exotic plasma phases of matter, have recently detected the mass albeit very short-lived conversion of lead into gold as the extremely hot and close-packed conditions cause dissociative reactions that can cause the target element to eject a small number of protons and neutrons, producing gold (the similar densities probably what inspired the study of alchemy in the first place). The above quick-silver and thallium were also temporary by-products of nuclear transmutation. Related to the title term, χρυσοποιία, ἀργυροποιία (argyropeia) refers to artificial silver-making, usually trying with copper.

ballerina cappuccina (12. 442)

A series of AI-generated memes featuring a cast of surrealist chimeric characters, usually a visual portmanteau of animals with vehicles or fruit with anthropo-morphic features emerged a few months ago and the phenomena is called Italian brainrot (see previously) for the accompanying text-to-speech voiceover in not-quite-nonsense Italian (see also) for rhyming effects to low-effort static images, which nonetheless seemed primed to evoke a feeling of uncanniness. Minted as volatile meme coins, they seem to be employed to underscore aggressively self-aware shitposting as well as the amount of AI slop inundating the internet. The original Tralalero Tralala and Bombardino Crocodilo have been cancelled as Islamophobic but have returned in a more satirical form and all are subject to remix and revision as well as commentary about the impermanence problem of AI image creation when an input is subject to the telephone-game. The trend is also ostensibly in response to mainstream studio entertainment, franchises sorely lacking in originality.  Chimpanzini grappalini

@eliotmediaoficial Todo lo que debes saber de los personajes del brain rot italiano #chismecito #tik_tok #tiktokers #creadores #trends ♬ sonido original - Eliot Store

synchronoptica

one year ago: AI-generated cityscapes (with synchronoptica) plus Swedish PhD traditions

seven years ago: US-Iranian tensions plus US withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal

eight years ago: Belphegor’s Prime, Trump’s interference with the justice system, Banksy’s Brexit mural plus a suitably gilded property

eleven years ago: a hoard of paintings of unknown provenance plus the question of Scottish independence

twelve years ago: Nazi Germany’s capitulation and a fateful date

6x6 (12. 441)

αντίδωρον: brilliant wrapping paper makes presents appear as loaves of bread  

impact statement: for the first time, an AI avatar of a murder victim testifies in court 

heptapods: imagining alien languages reveals insights into the nature of our own ways of communicating—see previously 

picking fights: while Trump declares a ceasefire with the Houthi militant group—which we only know about because of Signalgate—the administration signals it will not get involved over the dispute in Kashmir  

orrery: a centenary of planetariums still inspiring awe—via tmn—see previously  

decomposing: lab-grown mini-brains of a deceased musician create posthumous compositions

origami mouse: a pointing device that folds flat when not in use—via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest—along with a few more fun items on arcade classics

ubi et orbi (12. 440)

Admittedly the headline briefly turned me Anglican, and like many who could not countenance the idea of an American pope—especially after the brashness and endorsement of Trump and Vance and the near-schismatic behaviour of the American conservative Church—with its ugly superpower status and general cultural hegemony—reading a bit into the newly elected Pope Leo XIV, walked back my aversion and apprehension somewhat.  Aside from his chosen namesake, as lately created a cardinal by his successor and appointed to the important clerical office of the prefect for the Dicastery of Bishops, charged with selecting new senior advisors after serving as the head of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and before that general of the Augustinians, Robert Francis Prevost from the South Side of Chicago, son of immigrants of French, Italian and Spanish heritage, spent many of his formative years in Peru, earning robust credentials in seminary as well as an educator. After elevation to cardinal-deacon, the lowest rank whose appointment derives from administrators of the Papal Household and assigned governance of one of the districts of Rome, Prevost was made protector of the chapel Santa Monica delgli Agostiniani just outside of the Holy See, designed by architect Giuseppe Momo, most celebrated for his Scala Momo which visitors descend to the Vatican Museum, as a dormitory for the order and those attached to the mother church. His first messages of peace, love and understanding were reassuring and one has to hope his fellow nationals can’t make too much hay out of this incidental kinship or smuggle in nationalism and authoritarianism under the guise of being a good Christian.

tag der befreiung (12. 439)

Berlin, for the first time since reunification, observed a public holiday for this eightieth anniversary of VE Day with political leaders—pointedly excluding the ambassadors of Russia and Belarus—gathering in the Bundestag to commemorate liberation from Nazi dictatorship. President Frank-Walter Steinmeier told guests assembled in the chamber that Germany must never downplay its burden of responsibility for the second world war and the Holocaust as the perpetrators that caused the Shoah and were unwilling or unable to resist the regime orchestrating these crimes against humanity. Steinmeier went on the acknowledge the role of the Red Army, comprised of Russians, Ukrainians and many others, in freeing Europe from the regime—but adds that the “liberators of Auschwitz have become the new aggressors,” rubbishing long-standing regional peace and security which stood as a sign of hope that we had retained some lessons from the past and revising and inverting the historical records—excusing his war of aggression as a fight against neo-Nazism—with imperial ambitions. That war casting a pall over solemnities that were otherwise celebrating the beginning of an unprecedented period of liberty and freedom, many others recognising the dire need for recommitting to the defence of democratic values and harmony.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Hard-Hat Riot of 1970 (with synchronoptica) plus locomotive music

seven years ago: a Prohibition Era Isle of Pleasure charted plus assorted links worth revisiting

eight years ago: HH Holmes’ murder castle, the French far-right, PC clones plus the cartographic trope of the land octopus

ten years ago: a utopian factory town plus an ingestible password 

eleven years ago: a self-massage technique called she-do