the confusion of the tongues

We enjoyed this history lesson in the syllabry called Deseret devised at the same time as the Mormons began their exodus to the arid territories of the American southwest.
Meaning “honeybee” in the Jaredite language (one of the four ancient tribes of Babylon that the Church of Latter Day Saints believes spread to the New World after that enterprise with the Tower failed) and also the name of the settlement before it was incorporated as the state of Utah, the thirty-eight character alphabet that represented all phonemes in the language was an attempt at spelling-reform, like the Shavian alphabet, to make learning and reading English less inscrutable for non-native speakers and immigrants. Public reception within the community was less enthusiastic than expected—though adopted by the Hopi tribe for their writing system—and combined with conspiratorial indictments that the point of the script was either to keep Mormon communication secret from outsiders or control what Mormon readership had access to, the Deseret experiment didn’t quite catch on at the time but is presently enjoying somewhat of a resurgence in interest that’s surveyed pretty thoroughly by Atlas Obscura at the link up top.

super sonic

With the very busy Schipol Airport just nine kilometres outside of Amsterdam, noise pollution has posed a serious problem for residents living in that sound footprint, which can propagate over an expanse of some thirty kilometres due to the featureless plain that surrounds the facility.
Back in 2008, however, officials seeking to remedy this situation accidentally noticed that when the fields around the airport were ploughed, noise levels dropped. Inspired and drawing on the nineteenth century experiments and demonstrations of father of acoustics, mathematician and musician Ernst Chladni, an architectural firm dug runnels and raised berms to change the soundscape of the area. The symmetrical furrows are separated by the equivalent to the wave-length of the general racket and disrupt the spread of the noise, cutting it in half. The park that separates the airport campus from populated areas has features named in Chladni’s honour—whose brilliance might be most immediately recalled with his demonstrations of sound propagating through a solid medium illustrated by the way grains of sand arrange themselves according to the vibration. Those shapes (nodal patterns) are called Chladni figures.

pew-pew

Two young boys in Erding outside of München are apparently the subject of investigation for having fired rubber pellets from toy guns at Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun while he and his entourage were cycling through the Altstadt. No injuries were sustained but the incident was reported to local authorities, nonetheless. The king, also styled Rama X, owns a few holiday homes in Bavaria and it is unclear if this occurrence might not have further repercussions, as it is illegal to insult the king—but with Germany’s intention to over-turn its law on lèse-majesté (Majestätsbeleidigung), any wounded feelings would probably not have legal standing.

meridian planum

Though only meant to survey the Martian landscape for a mere ninety days, thirteen years on the rover Opportunity is still exploring the Red Planet and sending back telemetry and some pretty stunning vistas.
This view from the Endeavour impact crater is absolutely astounding, and the twenty-two kilometre in circumference canyon was named for a Canadian township officially, but it is itself an homage to the ship of Lieutenant James Cook’s vessel of exploration to Fiji, New Zealand and Australia. There’s a lot to be said for such technological resiliency and the audacity of a few select engineers is something to respect. Visit the link above for a curated gallery of Opportunity’s amazing photography.

carrot and stick—tomato, tomato

While of course toil with or without motivation is certainly possible—and in fact, most of us are either compelled to at the end of a whip or in involuntary indenturehood that’s a bit of a looser leash, I enjoyed reading this little bit of cheerleading on how to be smarter about procrastination and focus.
It’s of course too easy to get distracted by shiny-objects or going for low-hanging (what’s beeping or vibrating and clawing for our attention) fruits to the perpetual off-putting of addressing more pressing and systemic matters (or even trivialising them to convince ourselves what we’re avoiding isn’t all that important after all) but there is value to be had in structured procrastination, especially if it’s something that might put one more in the flow. Given oneself license to engage in doing nothing can also be productive in the long term, rather than fight against apathy and lethargy to the point of exhaustion. It does appear vital, however, that we allocate a certain amount of time—not to complete a task, but rather to work on it, or take a break from it. One timeboxing technique to explore is called the Pomodoro (an efficiency-expert named his method after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that he used in his student years) whose steps are pretty straightforward but could prove effective for some people struggling to stay on task: commit to something that needs doing, set the timer for twenty-five minutes, work until the bell rings and repeat—taking ever longer breaks between iterations. While I am sure there’s an app for that, I imagine that they’re already too culpable in indulging our interruptions or at least a convenient scapegoat.

fungus among us

Though not quite the confectionary house of the witch that lured inside Hansel and Gretel, a very clever student at London’s Brunel University (named for the famed architect and civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel) is developing a construction medium that fruits from edible mushrooms. The stringy, root-like mycelium is mixed with cardboard as a filler and then left to grow to form a pretty robust frame. The student envisions future bottom-up, pop-up kiosks and food booths serving dishes plucked off the walls. Apparently mycelium has already been field-tested and there is a precedent for these “mushroom sausages” as building elements with bio-bricks and other experiments that one can learn more about at the link above.

soylent blue

The private bioinformatics company’s that’s responsible for the research that drives several different markets from medicine to agriculture to biofuels latest venture involves harvesting algae as an energy source.
Usually the by-products that humans find useful are rather inimical to the organisms continued existence—fat in this case which the algae produces but only naturally in dire situations and when it’s deprived of essential nutrients. Some gene-editing, however, can induce simulated starvation and cause the algae to produce fat that is efficiently converted into fuel, almost equivalent to a vegetable oil. While earlier iterations of renewable biofuels were fraught with controversy as green-washing and not truly sustainable as it was competing with food-crops, there’s algae in abundance and this particular variety can thrive in polluted and brackish waters and perhaps even cleaning them up a bit in the process. What do you think?  Do developments like these take some of the edge of engineered Nature and ought they?

elements of eloquence

Language Barrier reacquaints us with the unwritten guidelines of style that native English speakers follow without thinking and the exceptions that make the rule.
Adjectives need to be presented in the following order, lest they ring dissonant, according to author Mark Forsyth: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose plus the noun or gerund being modified.  For example, one can plan for a sturdy great old crooked black English umbrella—whereas shifting any of those attributes around would make one sound rather unnatural. Those outliers, like Big Bad Wolf (size preceding opinion), can be explained by another unconscious rule—that of ablautive reduplication that mandates alternating vowel sounds go from i to a or o (for the sake of economy) and not the other way around: flip-flop, tick-tock and so forth. Ding dang dong.