in the year 2525 or ecumenical patriarch of splayhair

Thanks to the Happy Mutants’ ansible—though a somewhat defective model, sort of like a TARDIS without a functioning chameleon drive—the wondrous Boing Boing is occasionally able to furnish us with dispatches from the far distant future (in Wikipedia article format, which is comforting for the coming generations) and has we’ve rendered over the millennia Cæsar to Kaiser and Tzar, Tzump may be a future high office. Hopefully this future is not pre-destined.

pen & ink or maids of bond street

The always serendipitous Public Domain Review has an engrossing, re-vitalised gallery of the sketches of the now obscure artist William Thomas Horton.
A top contributor to The Savoy magazine, second only to Aubrey Beardsley whose style was inspirational, Horton was discovered and patronised by publisher Leonard Smithers, whose avant-garde cadre included the likes of Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Aleister Crowley and orientalist Richard Burton. Much of Horton’s forgotten work were illustrations for the swinging London occult and mystic scene of the early 1900s, and though one might detect something superficially derivative to cohort Beardsley in his drawings, there’s something haunting, distant and unsheltering-skies big about his subject matter that lures one down these dangerous paths of the secret and arcane. Be sure to visit Public Domain Review to see the whole exhibit and to peruse their extensive and surprising archives.

dangling-participle

The Atlantic (fair warning: scholastics via repulsive celebrity) features an excellent article on how LOL (here’s the first recorded use of the shorthand) has become stripped of its meaning (not haha funny, rather LOL funny) and has become something more like a punctuation mark.
The treatment reminds me of how a few years ago an English professor made note of her students employing the slash not as either/or but as a grammatical xor in a novel way.  Though very much transformed from the early days of text-messaging when one wanted to moderate tone in his or her dispatches, LOL is not on the decline like 1337 or the higher magnitudes of laughing-out-loud and is still preferred over other symbols able to impart the same sense—none really stating “oh, this shall make you laugh” or even chuckle to oneself. Incidentally, LOL is not an international sentiment with many other equivalent ways to encode it that one can learn about in The Atlantic’s related articles, and while not the originator of the term, lol means fun in Danish—hence lollig for funny, and the word means nonsense in Welsh, both very à propos.

transept and apse

Courtesy internet caretaker extraordinaire Joanne Casey comes this featured property in Lincolnshire, which is family home nested within a converted gothic church. Many of the original fixtures have been kept intact, including gloriously beamed ceilings, the choir and the altar, plus a few gravestones in the churchyard garden. The interior is really fantastically done and is a testament to the creative use of space, and although I am happy that the building and its history (after a fashion) are being preserved, I don’t know how I’d feel about living on formerly consecrated grounds. What do you think?

miss congeniality oder fingerhut

After witnessing the chaos of the caucus-race of the fauna of Wonderland that they undertook to dry off after a swim and was unsure what the outcome was supposed to be, Alice asked the Dodo, who proudly proclaimed, “Why, we are all winners.” Duly, Alice distributes prizes (tarts) to every one of the participants but at the end—to her further confusion and protestation—has no award left for herself, at which point the Dodo demands that she surrender her sole remaining possession, a thimble, to him.
With ceremony and decorum, the Dodo honours Alice with the thimble. This exchange has been adopted by psychological circles as the Dodo Prize or the Dodo Effect, and while it addresses the culture of entitlement and right to be sheltered from dissent, it does so in an indirect fashion that highlights not confidence, privilege or hubris but the peace-making mechanism of appeasement behind honorifics and superlatives. Individuals stir discontent when they feel their power is threatened but awards of grace and favour helps underlings feel appreciated (no matter how superficially symbolic and ubiquitous those honours are) and are fantastic mediators for keeping the king or committee dispensing awards legitimate and recognised. Despite the lack of intrinsic value (or perhaps because of it), for the recipient the prize is not cheapened and assiduous minions ensure that everyone is honoured in their own way—and in case, we run out of consolations—like Epimetheus and running short on Areté for Man after visiting all the beast with gifts, it’s part of human nature to invent one’s own pageants and trophies. Whether this generous mollification helped to create the antithetical everyone-is-a-winner morale is something I think that bears more study. Was there always such a culture inside the aristocracy and at its edges that’s taken all this time to democratise? Is that accolade a deserved one too?

social studies or class and cohort

Wanting to assess the quality of maternity care just after the war, a steering committee was established in Britain in 1946, headed by Doctor James Douglas, which took a snap-shot of all the births in that country during the first week of March—the front wave of the Baby Boom generation.
Although the original mission was to improve conditions for expectant mothers and infants, the researchers quickly realised in the days before computerised data-bases what a unique trove of demographic figures they had and expanded scope and have sustained the project and have continued to follow five-thousand of these Douglas Babies. While the subjects of the National Survey does not represent the longest running scientific studies—that honour probably belongs to the pitch-drop experiment or those eternal light bulbs, it is the most intimate and extensive research into lifelong social studies with constant contact among participants and cements a legacy of preventative measures and proactive health. Hearty birthday wishes and many happy returns go out to the thousands of Douglas Babies who’ve reached this milestone this week.

the ship of theseus or the trouble with tribbles

As visionary as Star Trek was and continues to be, I wonder if the creators could have guessed at the metaphysical implications of the teleporter, which was dreamed up as a cost-saving measure. The natural consequence of faster than light travel might be transporters, as replicators were to follow, but like the Ship of Theseus—which begs the question how much of a vessel can be replaced before it’s no longer the same or asking whether one can step in the same stream twice (or even once) beaming one’s molecules may not be as straightforward as other forms of telegraphy.
Courtesy Miss Cellania, here’s an interesting primer that explores these quandaries as well as feeling out the technological boundaries and hurdles. When one considers the unsettling fact that this hypothetical technology is probably less magic and more a process of disintegration and reintegration, Doctor McCoy’s grave reluctance to subject to having his atoms scrambled. If only information is relayed, regardless of how flawlessly, and not matter, is an individual still the same person—when moulded from the dander and detritus of one’s new location? What if there’s insufficient or the wrong type of stuff at the target site to remake a whole away-team? Our bodies are far from permanent fixtures and large portions of them are refreshed in short order, though we don’t feel transported for it. Would one die only to be resurrected an instant later in some other place? What about the soul? This is all very disorientating. A functioning transporter might be a factory-psychomanteum for the mechanised production of disembodied spirits. What do you think?