bathing beauties or adult-swim

From around the mid-eighteenth century through the Victoria Era, females wanting to take the sea air and enjoy a day at the beach were wheeled out past the maddening crowd of potentially gawking and leering males in personal stage-coaches, as Presurfer informs.
Etiquette and modesty (though these rules were recent impositions and far different from the practise of mixed skinny-dipping) dictated dictated that women bathers would enter a mobile changing booth, “bathing machines,” in formal street garb and disrobe, doffing her dress in for an equally concealing swim-suit and in the shallows, be allowed to frolic on a tether or at the strong hand of attendant. After this experience, the swimmer would be escorted back, drying off and donning her street clothes again for the sake of decorum. Maybe this production is less showy and less inclusive than a burkini.

lingua franca or brexit, stage left

To the disdain of the Maltese and Irish—whose concerns are being downplayed as they elected to make their first official languages Maltese and Gaelic, respectively, some in Brussels want to see the use of the English language in official parlance scaled back. Although there’s no legal status accorded to the “working languages” of the European Union and French and German are only spoken by tradition, some feel that the UK should take its linguistic and cultural dominance with it. What do you think of this proposal? I am already a little fearful that a large percentage of the world might forget about Europe as some byzantine amalgam that’s just alien and just the end of some long, strange continuum of foreignness without the Anglo-Saxon element.

gort-appointed attorney

Though I’ve always dreaded the day when torrents of tut-tutting virtual attorneys scour the internet like ambulance-chasers seeking out and perhaps even provoking legal contests, as yet another presence that is liable to force people from the web, I do tip my hat to the young individual who has created a rather Turing complete electronic barrister that has, pro bono, appealed nearly of a quarter of a million parking-violations, winning far more than half and getting human (and perhaps robotic ones too) drivers out of four million dollars in fines in New York and London. I suspect, however, the metropolises might turn litigious in kind.

books—check ‘em out!

The Vault’s Rebecca Onion has a nice appreciation of the Mid-Century Modern posters of Mary Joan Egan and Cynthia Amrice, commissioned as part of the US Congress’ Library Services and Construction Act of 1962 that sought to provide federal assistance to public libraries in order to expand their services—especially in blighted and rural areas. Sadly, due to shrinking budgets, the initiatives have been all but discontinued since the mid nineteen-nineties, but this gallery is a nice reminder of what libraries were (and are) capable of and, beyond their educational value, makes one appreciate how technologically astute these neighbourhood institutions could be with micro-film readers, photo-copiers, typewriters and film projectors and reach back to a time when office equipment seemed more magical and curious.

sectio aurea or shoe-gazing

Via the always sublime Nag on the Lake, we discover that there exists a pocket-scope that helps a photographer triangulate his or her shot in order to telescope the proportions of the Golden Mean. I wonder how such a compass—integrated as an æthetic by-law into one’s picture taking might result as perfectly-timed, perfectly-framed images. Such a comely and perfect ratio probably comes both by accident and by design.

the price of eggs in china

Via the ever brilliant Kottke we are treated to an excellent primer on the origins of data-visualizations: infographics ISOTYPEs as persuasive tools and encapsulating representations, the mapping of information beyond geography, began to come into their own in the early nineteenth century. Of course, in line with our inherent distrust of Big Data and opinion polls that can be leverage for any message whatsoever, statistics can be biased and incomplete and return a not-so-flattering composite, but being able to present analysis in a way that’s not just publicly-digestible and nearly intuitive but also can disabuse certain assumptions and specious causalities.
Since compendious research was first presented in this format by a gentleman economist and apprentice of steam-engine inventor James Watt, called William Playfair, champion of the infographic and in turn inventor of the pie-chart was able to illustrate the relation between wages and taxes or the true cost of importing commodities or these elegant so called “rose charts” drafted by pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale that conveyed the causes of death for soldiers in the Crimean War was far surpassed by poor sanitary conditions rather than combat—previsioning the germ theory of disease and infection, among many others, helped to dispel native prejudices and create a more informed public. Let’s hope that there’s still honesty in demographics and polarity, but such compiling of numbers outside of individual human experience does beg the question whether we developed this way to limn huge volumes of data—which is rather taken for granted, out of a need to communicate what does not fit to lay wisdom and perhaps common-sense or that we compile facts and figures to rarified levels in order to showcase our drawing talents.