exponential

The always insightful Æon Magazine features a brief appreciation of the short documentary that illustrates the scale of the Cosmos by the Mid-Century Modern design duo Charles and Ray Eames called Powers of Ten (subtitled a Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero), first released in 1968 and then remastered for classroom in 1977. Watch the nine minute classic about microcosms and macrocosms at the link, which has taught a generation about perspective and orders of magnitude.

matriculation or bailiff and bail

I believed like most among the reluctant and truant—later to be superseded by something called the end of Daylight Savings time which elicits an almost universal groan of complaint, that the academic year had the cycle it does in order to take advantage of child-labour.
That children ought not be released to pursue more rarefied and noble things until the season’s bounty (in northern climes) had been duly harvested seemed plausible—though I never knew any classmates who told of summers spent toiling in the fields and despite the fact that instruction began well ahead of our traditional thanksgiving rituals. Perhaps it was something inherited and was allowed to creep earlier in the year, like Christmasy retail pep-rallies. The cycle of primary education, however, is parallel to the ancient schedule of the first universities, revived in the Middle Ages, whose school year corresponded with the fiscal year, marked by Michaelmas, the feast of Saint Michael and the Archangels on the penultimate day of September (or a bit later in the Julian calendar). Though the connection between the expulsion of Lucifer and the settling of annual accounts might seem as tenuous as the logic above (and time-tables for tax regimes vary widely, though the more vibrant sunsets and delayed dawns might remind of this Fallen Angel, and thus in a sense seasonally-locked), most governments, businesses and academic institutions derive the time they set aside for this reckoning, the dismissal, renegotiation and renewal of contracts according to this calendar. New pupils and teachers were evaluated at this time, as well. Gaudeamus igitur.

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The poor Chancellor is seeing her party thoroughly routed, coming in third place behind the right-wing populist movement Alternative für Deutschland in state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern—at least if exit-polling is to be believed—and I wonder if this might be indicative of wider-sentiment that’s presently being dismissed as ‘bitter.’
The Chancellor assumed her signature stance (it must be awfully hard to find something to do with idle hands when there’s so much attention on them) during encounters with the press immediately afterward—and there’s even a name for that pose, the Merkel-Raute (Merkel’s Rhombus), which her political party endorsed the emoji version of above. Seeing her standing with poise reminded me of a rather astute observation about other politicians mirroring that gesture (people unconsciously adopt mannerisms like these, usually out of deference) I saw a few weeks ago, like it was some gang-sign for those in the know. I’m convinced that Frau Merkel is the leader of some Illuminati (the hands framing the All Seeing Eye) coven that includes Theresa May, David Icke, Gordon Brown, Jean-Claude Juncker, C. Montgomery Burns and Dora the Explorer. What do you think? I worry that we might now know too much for our own good.

by jove!

Unlike with other planets, astronomers had never been privy to a glimpse of the polar regions of Jupiter beforehand—since this gas giant and its constellation of satellites just fails to reach the critical mass of sustaining nuclear fusion and is more like a star with its own solar system than part of our own has no significant tilt to its axis.
With other worlds, scientists can spy the poles, given enough patience when the planets lean into their seasons, but being so massive, Jupiter is not obliged to (or maybe it does but tilts the rest of the solar system with it). Though already primed with excitement of seeing a wholly new face of Jupiter, no one was quite prepared for the vision of its aurora at the southern pole, a huge blue polygonal typhoon that looks like a completely new planet, rather than the expected continuation of autumnal, harvest-coloured storm bands. Meteorologists and astronomers alike are intently studying these preliminary findings, hoping to be able to explain the fluid-dynamics and dynamism of the down-under.

redoubt and ravelin

The always interesting Kuriositas has an engrossing feature on the concrete and steel behemoths, the Flak Towers that form to this day a considerable portion of the skylines of some of the cities defended from Allied airstrikes during World War II.
These poignant reminders, whose terminology comes to us from the mouthful Flugabwehr- kanone, like remnants of the Atlantic Wall and pillbox bunkers along the beaches that are too sturdy to be easily demolished are not just sentinels of a muted, recent past—many urban centres, like with this tower in Hamburg, have decided not to try to raze these structures and live with their legacy (which was not only offensive but also provided shelter for tens of thousands during air raids) by repurposing them in innovative ways. Be sure to check out the full photo-essay on Kuriositas to learn more about the flak towers’ past and future.

them!

Reading a bit like a formicidic version Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the research of Polish entomologists into an ant “colony” discovered subsisting in a derelict nuclear weapons bunker yields quite a few unexpected findings, via Super Punch.
That the ants could carry on at all under such harsh and deprived conditions is remarkable to begin with, but even stranger is how they go through the motions of eusocial behaviour (more on the insects here and here) absent a queen or off-spring of their own, the population only being replenished by hapless outsider ants that fall through holes in the ventilation shaft and are obliged to join their ranks. The environment in the bunker is not at all suited to ants, being constantly cold and nearly devoid of food sources. Scientists are not speculating that the ants stave off certain starvation by somehow feeding on radiation, but rather gruesomely guess that the ants are surviving off the ecology that has established itself in the ants’ rather extensive graveyard (among the normal conventions that they try to keep up in these very abnormal conditions) and are in a way cannibals once removed—or zombies outright.