stokoe notation

With a vocabulary of over two thousand immediately memorable signs, a visit to actor and American sign language consultant Robert DeMayo (via Bored Panda) is sure to teach and boost retention, imparting a bit of knowledge that’s practical in itself but can also give one a fresh perspective and a new way of communicating.

milliarium aureum

Though far from pardoning all the hardships that the global fast-food franchise has brought on the neighbours that it’s saturated, we did enjoying hearing of how one restaurant incorporated some ancient ruins into its dining experience, conserving a bit of an archaeological excavation in the process.
The parent company invested an additional three hundred thousand euro to ensure that a stretch of Roman road was properly preserved and protected that was discovered during ground-breaking back in 2014, and now is on view thanks to a transparent floor in the restaurant. This compromise reminds me of the shopping mall in Mainz that’s host to a subterranean first century sanctuary of the goddess Isis and the Cybele discovered in 1999 when the mall’s proprietors were looking to expand underground parking.

victory garden

Via Nag on the Lake, we discover a collaboration between a Swedish furniture and lifestyle magnate and SPACE10 has resulted in an open-source, free to replicate pavilion called the Grow Room for planting and raising one’s own sustainable produce, even in an urban setting. Given the motivation and basic carpentry skills, anyone could set-up their own personal farm with some seed, soil, plywood and a jigsaw.

privileged witness or over the hill

Nuancing the anthropic problem—that the Cosmos seems custom-tuned for nurturing the development of sentient life as we know it and if any universal constant were off by the slightest amount, there would be no stars in the sky nor carbon from the furnaces of the suns—Geoff Manaugh posits the truly profound scenario that beings living at this stage of the Universe’s development might be among the last that could understand the nature and the history of it.
Fast-forward to a race coming into existence billions of years in the future, and their skies will still be peppered with stars but only those of their parent galaxy, the accelerating force behind the expanding Cosmos having pushed galaxies so far distant that they lie below the fold and even the most powerful telescopes could not detect their estranged neighbours. And while coming of age in a much smaller, ahistoric and constant Cosmos—horizons only as far as one’s own galaxy and not inconceivable huge and ancient—seems bleak and desolate and the invitation for myth-making, it’s also somehow comforting and reassuring. As much as I think we should take pride in what we’ve learned about cosmology and are capable of producing models that reveal much of how physics works on all scales, our assumptions may be wrong, ill-informed because we too came of age at a time of historical disadvantage—too far separated or too closely embedded to take in a comprehensive view.

sea-monkey kingdom

One internet giant and mobile phone distributor had a strange, complex notion to put little aquariums inside the phone-casing that held living, hardy tardigrades—also known as water bears, as Super Punch informs. As tough as these little beasties are (capable of being boiled, frozen, irradiated and the vacuum of space), they couldn’t take the spotlight of the camera that magnified their tableau so their owners could watch them, and realising that these weren’t virtual pets but actual living creatures and not just existing for our temporary amusement, plus mounting technical set-backs, the project was eventually called off.

fm (no static at all)

Due to the finite nature of the speed of light, denizens of TRAPPIST-1d would be just learning about the final football game of Pelé, the Red Army Faction hijacking of a Lufthansa flight to Somalia, Miss Oklahoma and ill-will ambassador Anita Bryant is pied for her homophobic platform and the eradication of smallpox—plus witnessing the beginnings of the Space Shuttle programme, disco and the launch of Voyager 1 and perhaps hear Earthlings’ surprised reception of the Wow! signal that they dispatched such a long time ago. Excuse the lateness of our reply. Also on the air waves in the fall of 1977 were the musical stylings of newcomers The Sex Pistols and veterans Queen, Billy Joel and Steely Dan and M*A*S*H* plus One Day at a Time, the Norman Lear sitcom that’s been rebooted recently.