gazetteer

Vox complies an interesting and sometimes rather chilling glimpse of alternative histories and outcomes mapped-out graphically in twenty unrealized battle plans, contingency operations, secessionists’ aspirations, and massive infrastructure projects.

 I especially found engrossing the portrayal of Africa without colonialism, the secret US invasion plans for Canada, or the proposal for the terra-forming of the Mediterranean Sea. A gazetteer or a gazette has sometimes been used as name for a newspaper but originally referred to a directory, an index to be used in conjunction with a map or an atlas—like the underlying battle plans or agendas that plotted out these charts.

five-by-five

great tribulation: Collectors’ Weekly features a gallery of apocalyptic images from the 17th century Augsburg Book of Miracles

cinderella dressed in yellow: a fancy jump rope prototype uses one’s persistence of vision as a display medium

hologram: actor Hugh Jackman promotes latest film with a virtual interview junket

engineered obsolesce: France is combatting throw-away consumerism by mandating expiration dates for electronic goods

pasteurised interface: writing for Æon magazine, Samuel Arbesman, mourns the why sleek and magical operating systems has alienated tinkering and understanding of how computers and programs work

posh frock or privileged witness

I don’t really know the context behind this upwelling of interest and controversy over that dress, but it’s really becoming a fascinating and unexpected vulnerability in the armour of perceptions. Firstly, it is pretty remarkable that a precedent hastag, as sort of an apotheosis to an asterisk or a dagger signaling a footnote, has come to indicate a whole on going and evolving conversation, whereas what’s denoted with a marginalia is just a postscript at best, though mostly just a sort of disclaimer. That single symbol can embrace worlds, it seems.
Secondly, and a lot of very clever people have been forthcoming with expert testimony on this phenomenon, it illustrates that although we intuit the tasteless and tawdry and wrong-headed and artless in others readily and have advanced aesthetics a great deal, we are woefully unsophisticated and take for granted that others might perceive the fundamental elements of reality in a different manner than we. Though we can imagine a fly perspective on things or remark on the Japanese distinction of colouration or laugh at the misheard renditions of others, we cannot really experience the world as it is through the eyes of others nor have the vocabulary to articulate how markedly or subtly different things are. I say it’s tangy and blorange, that dress.

it’s a fact: potato is an imaginary number

The internet cannot be extolled enough for inciting curiosity and bringing the obscure and sometimes abstruse into the light, but sometimes that highly specialised knowledge and semantics twisting in the wind prove a bit too contagious, as if there’s some cameo by an Evil Genius ready to pounce on any given string of conventional wisdom. For instance, sauntering down the produce-aisle of the information-superhighway, lately I have been schooled several times in the classification and naming-conventions of my fruits and vegetables. Today I found out that while carrots and cantaloupes are Tories, the casaba is in fact uncountable and the banana is, rather than a mineral as some of you were no doubt led to believe, actually an Eisenstein-Bose condensate.