case study or island of stability

Couched as we are in alternative truths and a totalitarian regime that would have us believe that we have always been at war with Eastasia, we appreciated this look back on the term gaslighting from the Neurocritic first through its contemporary resonance that insists on a new normal (that’s the most insidious thing for which we cannot afford to let our guard down), then looking back to its Victorian, domestic-noir origins and then to a series of citations in medical literature that appropriated the term from the 1944 film adaptation, already in colloquial use since the 1960s. This form of psychological terrorism uses trickery and deceit to plant seeds of doubt by means of persistent denial and contradiction and invalidate a counter-argument. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Though noticing a dip in the lights was dismissed as a figment of the abused’s imagination and seemed a rather insignificant detail to stake one’s sanity on, it was the one truth in the framing of the original story that the protagonist could find refuge in.

adventuræ maris, wreccum maris

After gold was discovered in the hills of California, there was incredible rush to deliver prospectors and cargo to the territory by way of the shallow wharves of Yerba Buena Cove of San Francisco, which as Super Punch informs, resulted in the impressment of any spare sailing vessel into this lucrative venture.
Once moored in the cove, however, captains found little incentive to make a return journey and many ships of all description were more or less abandoned. As the settlement grew and grew, these wrecks were absorbed as landfill and make up a strange and hidden landscape of buried treasure and is now being charted out with extensive detail by the city’s historical maritime counsel. Some ships were salvaged and repurposed as building materials but others due to the way the laws of subrogation were interpreted at the time were intentionally scuttled because the land under the sunken boat (the cove was very shallow and could be turned into dry land with a few wheelbarrows of sand and a day’s labour) became the property of the wreck’s owner. Read more about this project in National Geographic at the link up top.

cubing the sphere

Via Waxy we learn that after months of work, Marc ten Bosch is releasing a toybox of four dimensional playthings that one can experience in a virtual setting and discover the “physics” of how such pieces interact.
This unstructured form of play allows users, taking wobbly baby-steps, to discover how these hybrid hyper-shapes work. The added dimension is a physical one, and not an aspect of passing time that we pretend to intuit or at least be better acquainted with, because while these forms may be impossible to render in our reality, our mechanics can be scaled algebraically to any number of extra dimensions and is only limited by our imaginations. I’ll bet that this is a pretty mind-expanding experience to immerse oneself in and recommend that you give it a try.

corona radiata

Our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari informs that among other happenstance for this date, Queen Elizabeth II had her coronation ceremony in 1953, an event broadcast for the first time to a home audience.  Even though the technology for replaying the event did not then and does not now really exist, the BBC had the foresight to record it in three-dimensions for posterity. The queen’s reign presided over the terms of fourteen prime ministers from Sir Winston Churchill (vested in Parliament by Queen Victoria) to Theresa May. One hundred and sixty years prior to the accession of Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten, the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror took place and in between in 1924, the United States of America magnanimously grandfathered in Native Americans as US citizens under president (the Queen has seen eleven of them come and go) Calvin Coolidge’s Indian Citizenship Act, though most weren’t granted suffrage or universal recognition until decades later.