justice served or benedict donald

In case one needs further reminders that elections have consequences no matter how bleakly the opposition is presented and another scolding lesson in civics, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has taken a break from conducting job interviews for the next (interim) FBI director (and I thought the US Attorney General had recused himself from all aspects touching Russia, so I suppose that diminishes the applicant pool considerably) to issue instructions to the Justice Department and the federal court system to ratchet up sentencing for criminal offenses to the highest magnitude that the law allows.

This means throwing the book at young people for truly victimless charges of drug-possession and ruining lives needlessly and growing the population of people incarcerated—one that already surpasses the rest of the world’s jails combined. Relaxed, mature cultural attitudes are pushed to the fringes, protest rendered inviable and loyalties gauged. Many are anticipating the American mid-term elections of 2018 and the chance for the Democrats to wrest back control of the legislative branch and the backlash against the Republican collaborators, but that date is a long way away and I don’t think that America, under Dear Leader, will survive such a long assault. Let us hope that the Attorney General will one come to rue giving such a directive once he and his cronies are on the receiving end of the law.

munakata or men’s spaces

Similar to the monastic Greek island of Mount Athos, the Shinto maintain a remote and isolated brotherhood on an island in the East China Sea between Fukuoka and Busan, South Korea—which is strictly off-limits to women.
Since the fourth century, the waters where the group of islands which includes the sacred Okinoshima are found have been vital trade routes and the tradition of prayer for safe passage, invoking the three Munkata sea goddesses (the Virgin Mary is the only female that can be in the monks’ company on Mount Athos), and economic prosperity has continued unbroken since. Women are banned from the island at all times and under all conditions (though there’s no word if they have the same strictures for female farm animals, like Mount Athos), but even male outsiders are just barely tolerated, allowed to visit on one day in the year in remembrance of a tragic 1905 naval battle that took place nearby, and not allowed to talk of their experience. Since 2009, there has been discussion of inscribing Okinoshima into the UNESCO World Heritage registry and perhaps the island, with its ancient temples and vast collection of offerings ferried from passing ships on to its shores for a millennia and a half, will be so honoured but not without detractors for the place’s practises of exclusion, which some consider not in keeping with the principles of the United Nations. What do you think? Maybe boys should be allowed their clubs, but such traditions can also be used as leverage for institutionalising and justifying misogyny in other contexts.

/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.