apocalypso or head in the sand

Via the resplendent Nag on the Lake comes a look at the latest art installation of London sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, positioned on the banks of the Thames, not far from the Houses of Parliament. The artist who has executed many submerged galleries to surprise and enthral divers in Cancun, the Bahamas and Caribbean, has created ghostly likenesses of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which are only visible twice daily at low-tide as a statement against sanctioned environmental abuses and the adage that what’s out of sight is out of mind. The knights agee are modelled after businessmen but their mounts have their heads replaced by another sort of horse’s head, the pumpjack or nodding-donkey of an oil drill.

unknown knowns or ignotum per ignotius

After being rather gobsmacked on learning that there was a single term, adiaphora, that could be used to describe all those non-essential conventions of a faith, I found myself looking askance towards my own humble quiver of vocabulary, to discover an antonym for omnipresence. An individual or a system described as parviscient could be said to know very little, but as the term is derivative (a back-formation) of all-knowing, it also suggests fancying oneself to be quite clever in one’s ignorance. There are a lot of awkward situations that could be diffused with such a word.

aloha ‘oe or business-casual

No matter how long one has been in the US labour force—or indeed the international one since it seems that the tradition has been widely adopted, relaxing the office’s dress-code on Fridays seems something as firmly ingrained as the desperate compulsion to clean one’s desk of backlog procrastination and pass it off to another on that same day of the week. I know some co-workers just beam at their accomplishments, thinking it took me all week to perfect that problem and now I give it to you.
The former observance, however, is a relatively new practise with rather surprising origins. Purveyors of what is known as Aloha Attire sold, in lieu of conventional business dress as the islands’ hot climate make it far too impractical to expect workers to wear suits and ties, Hawaiian shirts and related apparel, meant to be worn untucked, to make office conditions a little more tolerable. Championed by a consortium of native textile manufacturers called the Hawaiian Fashion Guild to boost sales, the shirt-makers lobbied the US Congress (perhaps a small concession after the territory had been annexed by a fruit magnate) for an Aloha Week to strengthen relations between the islands and the mainland. Changes came about slowly and the garb was still associated in the main with tourists and outsiders’ ideas of what Polynesian culture ought to be, but the stock-market crash of 1987 and the savings-and-loan sector collapse that followed cemented Casual Fridays—whose unofficial uniform is the Hawaiian Shirt. Businesses had sustained significant losses and that translated to several lean years in salary and compensation, and companies hoped to placate the disgruntled without actually spending any money. This tradition of dressing-down for the weekend was born as a way of boosting employee morale—one which the fashion industry probably greatly appreciated as well, forming another nuanced category of clothing

enhanced vegetation index

Recently ecologists endeavoured to take a more accurate census of the number of individual trees, as each comprises an arboreal habitat within its own branches and is also a part of a larger, contiguous network of the forest.
Taking to the woods with clipboards and questionnaires, researchers discovered that their previous estimates on the total, global tree population—relying mostly on satellite images that showed ground cover and calculating the percentages of wild and cultivated land, were off by almost a power of ten: instead of some four hundred billion leafy compatriots, there are some three trillion. The old methods did not take into account the shifting densities that the census-takers encountered in their surveys, and the demographic projections seem to be solid and rigorous—not just another model to be later prised apart. The findings are optimistic (forests are more robust in some parts of the world than they were a century ago) but we humans still are not good stewards of the environment and could prove to be an important point of departure for further sustainability studies and determining how much room is needed to grow and thrive.

4x4

keep britain tidy: brilliant idea to keep smokers from tossing the butts on the street

mind the map: expansive, frenetic hand-drawn landscape of London that took a decade to complete

microcosmos: a visit to Amsterdam’s microbial menagerie, via Superpunch

yes, very like a cloud: via Mindhacks, an explanation of the robotic hallucinations of the Deep Dream project – they’re experiencing pareidolia, seeing dinosaurs in the sky 

palisade-park or load-bearing

This nice little appreciation of the iconic stave church of Borgund in Norway from Twisted Sifter reminded us of our visit there a few years ago. Of course the natural beauty of that country is nonpareil with whatever man-made constructs can frame it. It was truly a wonderful and privileged experience and we are hoping to be back and astounded again one of these days pretty soon.