bottle episode (12. 493)

Traditionally made for bottling Chianti, the style of glass vessel from Tuscany with a rounded body and wrapped tightly in a straw basket—designed for ease of transport (see also), cushioning the wine and stackable with inverted bottles fitted into a row of upright ones—over the centuries became subject to various regulations to discourage counterfeiting and filling used bottles with new wine by fiascaio (fiasco-makers) resulting in substandard containers, hence bare from the shoulders up to show the vintner’s label and seal.  The etymology in English usage for failure or scandal was perhaps transferred via the French faire fiasco from Italian theatre jargon for botching a scene—to “make a bottle—a glassmaker humiliated when an intended more elegant piece didn’t come together and they settled with the simpler but utilitarian form. The sense could also come from card play in which the loser having to buy the next round of drinks. Fiaschi are mainly nowadays for decorative purposes or souvenirs, the Bordeaux-style of bottle (bordolese—see previously) becoming more popular with automation and easier to manufacture.

synchronoptica

one year ago: an epic murder-mystery puzzle book (with synchronoptic) plus US women allowed to wear pants in public

seven years ago: more customary units plus the EU bans plastic drinking straws

ten years ago: the US special envoy to Britain during WWII 

thirteen years ago: American propaganda turns inward

fourteen years ago: extraterrestrial prospecting

apparent magnitude (12. 492)

Realising I had taken for granted knowing what the unit of measurement was, or what exactly it was gauging, we appreciated this introduction and overview of the decibel—via Quantum of Sollazzo. Sort of like the distinction between mass and weight, sound intensity is measured in terms of pressures in pascals as the deviation from the ambient caused by an acoustic wave through a given medium, and the decibel as a way of expressing the ratio between two values logarithmically—with the silent partner being the threshold of human hearing. Originally stemming from a technique to measure and compare signal loss over telegraph lines and later telephone circuits, first expressed as loss per miles of standard cable, the new definition developed by Bell Labs was received favourably by operators and long-distance providers, named in honour of the communications pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. Still used chiefly to calibrate signal strength and fidelity as power passes through different exchanges across a network (mathematically, it is easier to process and account for the changes in transmission media and resistance by their additive properties rather than cumulatively by logarithms, which is incidentally the reason why older hardware and appliances last longer being over-engineered by dint of material and electrical tolerances calculated with a slide-rule and rounding up adding up to machines built to a more robust standard than for their planned lifecycle. Because humans perceive an increase in loudness exponentially rather than linearly (per studies in psychophysics known the Weber-Fechner laws that demonstrate gradual increases are likely to go unnoticed by the senses, the contrasted stimuli also seen to carry an effect in registering numbers and statics, in placebos—titration of all types through interoception and voting), the dB scale became a useful measure, as with the Richter scale for earthquakes and the Fujita scale for tornados, for when a in situ judgment might fail.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronoptica) plus the discovery of Troy

seven years ago: mythemes, a global weather service, the GDPR goes into effect, drowning does not always look like drowning, the founding of St Petersburg, ancient and modern trade routes plus a walk along the former inter-German border

nine years ago: the classified section, petty commodification, French-Canadien curses plus pizza as alimony

ten years ago: more links to enjoy, a supernatural dating society, the upcoming G-7 plus a new city in Mongolia

open source (12. 491)

Echoing today’s previous posting, we very much enjoyed making the acquaintance of an omnipresence and prolific graphic design artist and illustrator called Takashi Mifune—whose work, anonymous for its ubiquity and described as unpinning “social infrastructure,” has influenced Japan’s public aesthetic and visual vernacular. Though not unique in offering clip-art, the website maintained by Mifune Irasutoya (いらすとや, illustration shop) makes his cast of iconic characters and symbols freely available to for personal and commercial applications, with the large range covering every conceivable situation and occupation—from the everyday to the niche—and consistency of style (see previously) has garnered the artist’s momentum and reputation as the standard for signage. Featuring highly specialised jobs, current events, cultural neologisms, maladies, warnings, restrictions and artefacts with far more briskness and particularity than other catalogues of stock images, inspiring contests to recreate works of art with Mifune’s drawings, subject matter easily summoned up from the commonplace to centrifuges, Prototaxites (an extinct plant life-form between fungi and trees), traditional dress of La Sape subculture, wisdom teeth, both bipedal and quadrupedal versions of chupacabras and the Antikythera mechanism. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link up top.

you may need rendering support (12. 490)

Despite being last updated in 2012, the announcement from Japanese wireless carrier Docomo (a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) that it is officially discontinuing support for its emoji set marks the end of an era that spanned decades and played a foundational role in emoji communication and native texting environments. Beginning in 1995 with the simple inclusion of a ❤︎ icon that could be displayed on pagers (see previously)—and the user outcry when the option was quietly removed in a subsequent update demonstrated to the concern public interest not only in symbolic shorthand but also a way to accent missives when not communicating face-to-face, the reaction informing the glyph collection to come. In 1999, Docomo introduced a set of one hundred seventy-six character syllabary of supplemental monochrome, twelve-by-twelve pixel icons designed by Shigetaka Kurita (栗田 穣崇), which inspired by universal street signage, pictograms and the mood and emotional cues employed for manga protagonists called manpu (漫符, a bead of sweat to signal accomplishment or apprehension), created the base lexicon and grammar that Unicode adopted later. Although limited to the network, the emoji set, growing colourised and more articulated, saw its legacy enlivened by platforms with greater interoperability and customisation and is honoured as a linguistic fossil and the emoji equivalent of Latin.

synchronoptica

one year ago: more adventures in the Thüringer Forest (with synchronoptica) plus a notable Shiba Inu passes away 

seven years ago: between distraction and anxiety, Dune product tie-ins plus digitising the Munch Museum

eight years ago: Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Trump calls NATO partners deadbeats plus preparing for a short sabbatical 

nine years ago: shooting stars on demand,  Wundarr the Aquarian plus rabbits doing violence in medieval manuscripts

ten years ago: a visit to the Neckar valley plus assorted links to revisit

threat model (12. 489)

Not content with being partially lionised over the yet unproven claim that the COVID pandemic might have been caused by a lab leak from a facility studying corona viruses in Wuhan, the new head of the US National Institutes of Health is not only suggesting that the NIH itself created the novel virus, triggering a mass walkout during his first all-hands meeting, like-minded cohorts in the US Food and Drug Administration have severely restricted access to vaccines for the vast majority of Americans, as if we needed another reason not to travel—or to erect a cordon sanitaire to stop the spread of vectors for measles, bird flu and any number of preventable maladies, quitting the WHO and the media blackout when it comes to monitoring emerging outbreaks—insisting on amplifying warnings of side effects, despite the efficacy of treatment and the low incidence. Having missed crucial windows to ramp up production for the next season, many major pharmaceutical companies gave up altogether. Click through for important reminders on how Long COVID is the retronym of the polio generations endured—and yet another reemergent illness that had been eradicated—and one’s first line of defence.

in a word (12. 488)

Courtesy of Futility Closet, we enjoyed this moment of logophilia with an selection of obscure words from the personal collection of Eric Albert, frequent contributor to Butler University’s journal of recreational linguistics, Word Ways, specialising in research and demonstrations on palindromes, tautonyms (reduplication like aye-aye or namby-pamby), anagrams, pangrams and lipograms. We especially liked supermuscan defined as having the qualities greater than which is typical of a fly; alkahest, a universal solvent—chiefly in the alchemical sense; titivil—a demon who collects dropped or mumbled parts of the mass and bears them off to hell as evidence against the offender—see previously; brotus, any extra measure given without charge, as in a baker’s dozen; ecdysiast, one who rhythmically disrobes as in a strip-tease artist; holmgang, a duel fought on an island; velleity—the lowest degree of desire, a slight wish; microlipet, one bothered by trifles; palinode, retracting or recanting something formerly praised; supellectile, pertaining to furniture; and poliad, a nymph that lives in the city. Some in the catalogue were familiar to us but there’s a surplus of choice news terms to be found clicking through. Let us know your new favourites.

new territories (12. 487)

Being for a long time fascinated by the idea of the crowded, lawless and ungoverned exclave within an enclave called Kowloon Walled City (see previously), we were astonished to be referred this recorded walk-through captured in the space of an afternoon (no daylight reaching the lowest storeys) by University of Hong Kong architecture student Suenn Ho, having no idea that such footage and interviews existed, taken in 1991, a couple years prior to its demolition, evicting the some thirty-five thousand who lived and worked within the confines of less than three hectares—translating to an incredible population density of over one and a quarter million residents per square kilometre. The former footprint now a park and its reputation sanitised, Hong Kongers, formerly condemned Kowloon as a dangerous slum when mass-urbanisation started in the 1960s, are now romanticising this dystopian neighbourhood and we are happy this documentary has been preserved for posterity. The Japanese film crew mentioned early on also produced a short piece, available here.

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synchronoptica

one year ago: exploring the Vesser valley (with synchronoptica) 

seven years ago: photographer Zofia Rydet plus potentially eliminating the deadliest disease vector

eight years ago: a poem for Manchester, Trump to visit the Pope, micro-mastery, diplomatic indiscretions  plus America’s designs on its southern neighbours during the US civil war

nine years ago: Kraftwerk animated plus that proposal for an elevated bus

twelve years ago: a day-by-day account of World War I

 

sigils and signs (12. 486)

Having previously looked at other visual language compliers expressed through artistic elements and other than the usual strings of functions and conditions of coding, and very much reenforces overdue acknowledgement that the jargon of computing can act as a gatekeeper and that unnatural language can create an out-group (see also) for whom these incantations seem like wizardry, and given our preoccupation with secret signs, we were very much
intrigued by this mystical platform of magic circles, via Clive Thompson’s latest Linkfest (a lot more to explore there) under development by Denis M Moskowitz. The sampled, quicksort spell is a rendering of the Euclidean algorithm for calculating the greatest common divisor of two numbers—that which divides them both without a remainder—a benchmark test for the logic of a new programming language with an intuitively visual component. Moskowitz has also created a character set of glyphs or monograms after the chaos magic of Austin Osman Spare (previously here and here) whose seals unlock the basic grammar of coding. Much more at the links above.