Via Messy Nessy Chic’s latest virtual lost-and-found, we discover that there is a museum that exclusively curates discarded and retrieved shopping lists. The collection is approaching four thousand pieces of ephemera and shows that we are not alone in standing at the check-out line with non-sequitur items, not always being able to retrieve the proper name for something and that penmanship and spelling can be tough things.
Tuesday 6 September 2016
who ever heard of a snozzberry?
bespin cloud city
As part of a brilliant series about colonising the Solar System (responsibly and not in manner that might threaten native life forms), Universe Today looks at some of the proposed platforms for human settlement on Venus, which don’t make our Doppelganger out to be Evil Twin, failed Earth it is in our imaginations. Conditions on the surface are pretty inhospitable, nonetheless, but one clever plan from NASA would see colonies floating in dirigibles high above the Venusian clouds, High Altitude Venus Operational Concept (HAVOC), that would mine the sky for chemical elements. Be sure to check out the whole article and more stories about space exploration at the link up top.
pudding lane
After the devastation, the mostly timber urban core was rebuilt with the signature grey Portland limestone, but the social and economic disruption must have endured for generations and surely many who lost family and fortune never recovered. The event included a street fair with food and burn treatments from the time.
exponential
The always insightful รon 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.
Monday 5 September 2016
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I believed like most among the reluctant and truant—later to be superseded by something called the end of Daylight Savings time which elicits an almost universal groan of complaint, that the academic year had the cycle it does in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.
