mama don’t take my photochrome away: hand-selected photographic wonders from the archives of the US Library of Congress
As a sneak-preview of an upcoming exhibition in Santa Monica, California, Dangerous Minds has curated a small selection of the bizarre and unsettling art of Clive Barker.
Better known for his work in horror film, Barker is also a prolific writer—having authored and adapted the Hellraiser franchise himself, and painter. Be sure to check out the link to see more grotesques and learn more about the creative force behind them—if you dare.
Atlas Obscura has an interesting article on the rather surprising difficulty the world has faced in adopting a universal “phonetic” code for communicating numbers.
Unlike the NATO alphabet employed for spelling out words and instructions in a way that minimises confusion across the distant crackle of radio communications or across different languages, there’s never been an internationally-recognised way for ensuring clarity in numbers. The entire essay is well worth reading, and among the more clever proposed but failed ideas was from the ITU in Geneva at a 1967 congress: using a redoubling of English numerals and their Italian equivalents—nadazero, unaone, bissotwo, terrathree, kartefour, pantafice, soxisix, setteseven, oktoeight, and novenine. I rather liked that, reminding me of the yan-tan-tethera of sheep-counting.
Around 1900, a Russian engineer by the name of Friedrich Zibold made the conjecture that ancient structures found on Greek outposts on the Crimean Peninsula were a sort of air-well, designed to harvest enough moisture from the atmosphere to sustain a small settlement. Despite initial successes with models based on the Greek buildings, Zibold was unable to sustain the condensation and collection of water for very long. Later archaeological studies determined that the mysterious structures were actually burial mounds (this being around the time when interests were captivated by the idea of the Ark of the Covenant as a battery and the death ray of Archimedes), but that did not dissuade others from trying to build their own air-wells after Zibold’s calculations.
One such hive-like well (puit aerien) was erected in Trans-en-Provence in the 1930s (reportedly, a UFO scorched the fields of this community in 1981) in the dรฉpartement of the Var by Belgian inventor Achille Knapen. The site was abandoned when it also failed to collect water in the expected volumes, but this early experiment helped engineers build better and functional condensing units that help supplement the rains in places all around the world today.
Politics is a dirty business and all politicians, regardless of ilk, are tainted, and perhaps it is really a last ditch effort to question the mental fitness of the presumptive or label his strategy as that of an unwitting or flattered Manchurian Candidate. Volumes have already been written about the contender with no end of antagonism for the last supposed reserve of hope for America’s credibility—and probably penned under the same muckraking standards, but to us it smacks a far greater intrigue when one looks at the advisors that Trump is retaining.
Paul Manafort, national chairman of his campaign, previously served as advisor and grey eminence for presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush I as well as championing Filipino and Congolese dictators Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko. Most recently, Manafort’s services had been engaged by former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who arguably by rejecting closer ties with the European Union, facilitated the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, despite testifying the opposite intentions. I wonder if a fractured US, gerrymandered down party lines, might be the realisation of the vision to making that country great again. Despite other publicised misgivings and solicitations for the intelligence apparatchik to expose whatever state secrets his opponent may or may not have put in jeopardy, Trump announced that he is rather OK with that kind of assault on territorial integrity. What if the US wanted to reclaim Cuba, the Philippines and Panama? Then again, perhaps that is his mission-statement that appeals to his supporters—the idea of sovereignty based on oversight or old treaties is something defunct and that all’s fair in love and war.
We are reminded by the always marvellous Nag on the Lake that the first bona fide website came on-line a quarter of a century ago on 6 August, 1991.
While working at the predecessor research facility to CERN, internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee was frustrated that there was no unified way to navigate the various databases that universities had established a universal access key as a way linking across different servers. These days we would characterise such disjointed pockets of information a walled-garden, and had not Berners-Lee realised that without making his hypertext transfer protocol public-domain, rivalry and acquisition would have doomed the project that augments and compliments our reality to unimaginable degrees before it was even given license to experiment and innovate. The original first website is conserved at the hyperlink here.
We found Tintagel to be very mystical indeed and had our imagination inspired, but the newly uncovered archaeological evidence that might lend more credence to the legend was quite welcome developments as well, as Mental Floss informs.
Careful excavations conducted in mid-July on a previously unexplored hillside have found the massive foundations of palace walls and other artefacts (befitting the elite) that date to the fifth or sixth centuries, more in line with the timeline attributed to the Arthurian Romance (the medieval ruins that adorn the promontory are too new and ironically the main site overlooks the so-called “Merlin’s Cave,” an attraction that caused some to criticise the site’s caretakers as pandering to the simple-minded), are causing scholars to re-examine assumptions about the myth—perhaps like finding Troy not so long ago. The work was just completed and the researchers have a lot of evidence to sift through and assess.
