worth 1000

Messy Nessy Chic interviews Leipzig transplant and surreal photographer Frank Herfort now capturing the ambiance of post-Soviet public spaces and shares the story behind some of the striking images. This picture gave me the impression of a deleted scene from Twin Peaks and the explanation—while not unsettling—is anything but mundane. Peruse a whole gallery of his works at the links above and discover more jarring juxtapositions that those part of the shot don’t seem to regard as unusually photophilic but are nonetheless content to be part of the composition.

chocolate cake

In a last minute mad dash to at least keep the lights on for a few more days, the US legislature passed what’s known as Continuing Resolution, a stop gap, kicking the can appropriations measure that keeps the American federal government funded for another week.  A few days from now, we’ll be witnessing the same histrionics, except afforded more time for debate that probably translates to neither side finding a point of compromise—and, ironically, the US government will close up shop for Cinco de Mayo over among other items, a border wall. Remember the Alamo—that was some beautiful chocolate cake.  Regardless of the outcome, we are only speaking of funding the government through the end of the fiscal year, 30 September, and after that the stakes get much higher.

nestling or radiological dispersal device

Through a FOIA filing, Paleofuture has obtained an orientation, promotional film that the US Department of Energy issued in 1976 to present ostensibly to Congress members in order to justify their budget item for a little programme called Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) but without revealing too much about their covert operations and techniques, which makes an ideal conversation piece for addressing the horrors and abject anxiety that the public is spared when it comes the daily duties of first responders.
Without peeking behind the arras periodically, one might think that the job of governing is a walk in the park. Run of the mill bomb-threats—in many cases hoaxes or attempts at extortion, suddenly in 1970s America became far more serious and fraught, with the menace of a dirty, nuclear-laced explosive being detonated in a crowded urban area. To this day NEST has maintained a low profile and the times it has been deployed to respond to a terrorist-threat involving nuclear materials have been under-reported and handled discreetly, sparing the public the burden of worry. Read more about the history of dirty bomb threats and watch the video at Paleofuture.

pishtaq, iwan

A Hong Kong based design team has constructed a coiling passageway of arches in Sharjah—one of the capital cities of the United Arab Emirates, that portrays the architectural development of the Islamic arch. Like the more familiar Doric, Ionic and Corinthian progression of the Greek column, the Islamic gateway went from the unadorned to the more elaborate over the ages: round, ogee, tented, parabolic, multifoil. Take a video tour with BLDGBlog at the link up top.

one million b.c.

Like forensics experts working on a case that went cold hundreds of thousands of years ago, archæologists are discovering that equipped with the next generation of genetic sequencers that there able to find bits of ancient hominid DNA when sifting through the sediment of practically any old cave.
No fossil evidence nor artefacts, though surely that’s pretty exciting to uncover, is required to trace how our direct ancestors and Neanderthal cousins spread across the continents and perhaps interacted. Surely this can be expanded to the whole of the plant and animal kingdoms, as well.  I wasn’t expecting that our machines were so finely calibrated to detect biochemical markers as so faint a trace, but this is sure to be revolutionary as palæontologists have already managed to extrapolate and reconstruct whole monstrous dinosaurs and more modest primogenitors of our kind out of just a fragment of a tooth or a little toe bone.