/fɪʃ/ or inter-galactic phonetic alphabet

Upon learning that the Klingon word for love is bang (in the sense of a closing salutation as in with affection, whilst the act itself is muSh) whilst listening to back episodes of The Greatest Generation podcast reminded me of another linguistic Easter egg cobbled into the constructed alien language: ghoti.
I’m sure that the standard received Klingon pronunciation of ghotI’ holds but the term, which was also incarnated as a Christian punk band in the 1990s called Ghoti Hook, has its origins in an 1855 correspondence between a publisher and an essayist sharing the frustrations of the irregularities of the English language. Sounding out the gh as in enough, the o as in women and the ti as in motion, one gets fish. The Klingon word for fish has been used, rather unfairly it seems, to calibrate speech synthesisers, and we wonder how the Universal Translator would tackle this recursive case.

7x7

pantone 222: Italian designer matches landscapes to colour swatches, via Nag on the Lake

bucket list: an interesting POV piece about the visitors to a watering hole in the desert

love symbol: though the Artist’s scene didn’t make it into the film, he’s still included in the closing credits of Fargo
yertle and mack: a free-loading robot makes us wonder if cybernetic technologies might also become parasitic, via Super Punch

hat-p-26b: water vapour is detected in the atmosphere of Neptune-sized exoplanet

courtesy call: in Japan, one can arrange to have a hale and hearty fisherman act as their morning alarm

papa-oom-mow-mow: an appreciation of the novelty song Surfin’ Bird by the Trashmen, covered by many 

deceptive cadence

The always marvellous Nag on the Lake brings us a pleasant performance of the first digits of the mathematical constant π composed for piano by David Macdonald in the key of A minor.
The music is underscored with a series of factoids about the number, including the supposition that every possible sequence of numbers—a string of perfectly consecutive numbers, lottery winners, one’s past and future cell phone numbers—is contained in the infinite series but it’s never proven until calculated out, many argue. That piece of knowledge made me recall that I’ve encountered this quandary before—formalised as the Kate Bush Conjecture, wherein the singer on a 2005 album sings π to seventy-eight decimal places before skipping ahead to the one hundred thirty-seventh. The theory was advanced, arguing that that sequence would be found somewhere within the number, just not at the beginning. Infinite yet non-random, π is suspected to have that property though it remains unproven.

retronautics institute

First introduced at last year’s Geneva Motor Show, the darling little Microlino electro-auto by Swiss designer Wim Ouboter evokes the bubble chassis of the BWM Isetta of the 1950s. Priced at twelve thousand euros, the company is slated to reach its production goal of five thousand by the year’s end.

optics

Though Dear Leader was more than willing to levy an unfounded claim that the past administration was somehow spying on his activities via microwaves, he seemed to take no expectation with the idea that a cunning Russian agent posing as a journalist, unescorted and given exclusive access to the Oval Office, might have been capable of smuggling in a surveillance device.
Also, please do discount the fact that the photo-op was on the occasion of the Russian foreign minister and ambassador meeting Dear Leader for the first time—just fresh from firing the FBI director spearheading the investigation into Russian interference in the US presidential election and the same ambassador figures large in that network of associations. Stultifyingly, Dear Leader’s next engagement was to appear with the reanimated toad and noted war criminal Henry Kissinger whose superior’s modus operandi was compared to Dear Leader’s recent behaviour by a lot of people in many different forums.

xylotheque

The intrepid explorers of Amusing Planet introduce us to a very special sort of “book” depository curated in locations across Europe and beyond that began with the advent of modern forestry in the eighteenth century.
Botanists began forming libraries whose stacks contained wooden books that were compartments that held the twigs, fruit, root and bark samples of different sorts of trees—ξύλον being Greek for wood and θήκη a library. The word book in English itself is a cognate of the Germanic word for the beech tree, with early writing carved on blocks of wood. The pictured shelf is part of the Schildback Xylotheque located in the city of Kassel and there’s much more to be found at the link up top.

numismatica

In a bid to boost tourism and to celebrate its heritage as mint of the Roman Empire, the volcanic island of Ischia will be issuing its own artisanal coins based on the historic tender cast in the ancient metal-works.
To be used alongside the common currency, in the village of Ponte they will have a face-value of twelve euro but surely many will be taken out of circulation as souvenirs. Often overlooked due to its proximity to glamourous Capri, the island where Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra was filmed hopes to show to the world it has a lot on offer. Visit the link up top for more information about the coins and take a virtual tour of Ischia.