ser mรกs listos: Mexico makes significant overtures to decriminalising marijuana
coronal: new spectacular footage of the Sun‘s activity courtesy of Solar Dynamics ObservatoryThough the concept became cemented as sort of an academic urban legion through the stories of futurist Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy whose interbellum characters first speculated on social networks and social capital in a rebuilt world and the work of playwright John Guare, the notion of Six Degrees of Separation, the chain that binds any two people together with six steps or fewer, reaches even further back to the pioneering wireless transmissions of Guglielmo Marconi, speaking on the shrinking globe and growing interconnectedness among people.
Incidentally, this was probably the most original thing that the radio-promoter said or did, as Marconi rarely acknowledged the significant contributions of his fellow researchers and was very parsimonious about crediting other innovators. The Small World tracer experiments of psychologist Stanley Milgram also helped fix the notions of virality and algorithmic exploration in the public imagination: seeing if letters from geo-social endpoints could research their targets through a chain of casually acquainted couriers alone. Perhaps until the ice-breaker Six Degree of Kevin Bacon emerged, Milgram was best known for his controversial Obedience Experiments, wherein test-subject became acclimated to the idea of administering electric shocks to another individual as corrective-reinforcement to demonstrate how just following orders leads to dehumanisation and catastrophic collapse of perspective—that most would choose to be one the right side of authority, even if that meant inflicting pain on others. Another sort of hybrid experiment between these two extremes of connectedness and detachment involved stand-in actors dubbed cyranoids, after Cyrano de Bergerac’s device to woo Roxane through a more handsome interlocutor. As another heuristic tool, Milgram hoped that the understudies whispered their lines might open up insights about bias and stereotypes and self-perception too. I wonder if there are cyranoids for ghost-writers at large.
One of the pioneering rocketry engineers outside of the German camp (corresponding with many of the scientists who would comprise Operation Paperclip) was an individual named Marvel Whiteside (Jack) Parsons, who inspired by science fiction went on invent jet fuel and various techniques for improving thrust and guidance that solidified America’s standing in aerospace industry and helped the nation realise better the potential of the applications, was a founding member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) after the Great Depression subsided.
Parsons’ interest in science fiction also made him impressionable to the useful imaginations of others, and after a brief stint as a devoted Marxist (which might have proven highly-suspect later on), Parsons turned to the new occult religion Thelema, dicated a few decades earlier by British philosopher and prestidigitator Aleister Crowley, having received these revelations whilst vacationing in Cairo from a prรฆter-human law-giver. In the tradition of humanist writer Franรงois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Thelema maintains that man was the measure of all things through tantric sacraments and magick (the Force explained in terms of the new Quantum Mechanics) admits of a complex cosmology and ritual acts, including one which Parsons and his friend L Ron Hubbard (who, cogently I suppose, later went on to found the Church of Scientology) performed in order to summon one goddess known as the Mother of Abominations. Ever the champion of research and space exploration, Parsons continued his aerospace experiments undeterred, offering free-lance services to Mexico and Israel, after he was dismissed from JPL for his infamous behaviour and accused of un-American activities. Under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Parsons died working on some pyrotechnic special effects for an upcoming Hollywood film in his home laboratory—the Parsonage. Though Parsons did not live to see the Space Race that he enabled and some miraculous achievements in exploration and understanding of the Cosmos, his legacy, despite how it might have been deprecated and over-shadowed, remains undeniable.
Atlas Obscura has an interesting, involved biography of the complicated and convoluted live of Mad Monk Rasputin’s daughter, Maria.
