petit voiture

Just a Car Guy graces us with the bracing find of a 1903 model of a De Dion-Bouton vis a vis voiturette (a four-wheeler) charging through the streets of Paris, outfitted with pneumatic tyres, patented by a French inventor named Alfred Ducasble, to ride rough-shod over the cobblestones without sustaining wear and tear. Gifted toymakers turned automotive engineers Georges Bouton and his brother-in-law Charles Trépardoux, under the patronage of automobile pioneer and marquis Jules-Albert de Dion, founded the automobile and railcar company in 1881 and originally made steam- and electric-powered models before turning to the internal combustion engine, and was until the 1920s the largest automotive manufacturer in the world, churning out a volume of two thousand vehicles annually from its factory on the banks of the Seine in Puteaux.

sphagnum, p.i.

From the science desk at Gizmodo we learn that algae are not monopolising the bio-fuel revolution and there’s another contender in the lowly but amazing moss. The superficial achievement of engineering a fragrant plant so a patch of one’s garden might smell of patchouli oil is just the beginning. If developed responsibly, moss could become a universal, self-sustaining medium (peat, turf was until modern times after all the only fuel resource we knew how to effectively collect and use) that could be genetically tinkered with on demand and deliver flavoured, edible, nutritious compounds to be moulded and presented as a mealtime skeuomorph, effectively the replicator from Star Trek.

iconoclasm

For its Branded in Memory project a marketing and demographics website challenged one hundred and fifty Americans (most of the corporate logos are global brands but there are some specific to American markets) to recreate—without peeking—a batch of famous marque emblems and afterwards arranged the entrants from least to most accurate. The results are pretty insightful and illustrate what logos reside in our conscious and which are somewhat less ingrained. Colours were consistently correct (unless one was attached to a logo that the company retired long ago). How would you fare? I think it would be a fun project to recreate this experiment for those (probably woefully uniform) shops on your local high street or for the labels from your usual grocery shopping inventory.

6x6

what you’re saying is called “internalized misogyny” face: McSweeney’s growing index of alternatives to resting bitch face

heartbreakers: Tom Petty’s daughter shares personal photographs and memories plus more tributes from Everlasting Blört

escuela nacional de arte: the abandoned, unfinished architectural masterpieces of Cuba’s state art school campus

southern exposure: Ernest Shackleton entertained crew members during Scott’s expedition to the South Pole with an illustrated magazine, which reminded me of this other travelogue

airs on a shoestring: a growing cartographic representation of over fifteen hundred samples of musical genres, via Kottke

electric sheep: the eponymous Replicant bounty-hunters, Bladerunners, were named after a black-market healthcare system set in the imagined dystopic Manhattan of retro-future 2009

tectonics

Though the seven continents that we are best acquainted with have corresponding landmasses that rise above the waters, there’s no reason to hold landforms to this requirement, there being no universally accepted geological definition of what constitutes a continent, and there’s a movement, we discover thanks to TYWKIWDBI, to have an eighth land-mass adjacent to Australia so recognised. Most of Zealandia (or alternatively, Tasmantis) remains submerged below the surface of the Pacific with only New Zealand, New Caledonia and Norfolk Island peeking above the surface. What do you think? It struck me at first as the same sort of technicality that downgraded Pluto, but I do wonder how much sense our thresholds and naming-conventions make outside of sentimental attachments.

plenary session or lingua franca

We enjoyed considering the strange but sensical dialect called European Union English, via Miss Cellania, that’s a sort of jargon by committee that arises in international institutions where groups of non-native speakers (and it naturally wouldn’t be only in the working-language of English, and one might wonder if post-Brexit it will still have the same official standing, but similarly coding errors would be propagated through French and German and others as well) develop a highly formalised cant and bend words to their experience.
Using to dispose of to mean to avail oneself for a chance or opportunity or being vexed by the false friends of actual (Aktuell meaning current rather than existing) and eventual (Eventuell being a possibility rather than an eventuality, a foregone conclusion). That last linguistic Flascher Freund, Fauxami leads us into even more interesting territory with examples that don’t mean what one could be forgiven for thinking they do. Whereas in German or Spanish punctuality might be anything related to a particular moment or juncture, punctuality in English only refers to the quality of being at the agreed upon place at the agreed upon time and has that former sense of punctiliousness and periodicity in EU documents—whose turn of phrase appears in translations down the line. Perhaps—if stereotypes are to be believed, Germans are a bit nonplussed at the fact that tardiness is such an epidemic problem that there needs to be a special word to describe the virtue vis-à-vis the vice. We could certainly imagine other scenarios where the existence of an opposite, essential trait would be indeed baffling. Similarly (though no rules of grammar or precedence to suggest otherwise), standard-issue English uses the term opportunity as a synonym for chance rather than conferring the quality of being opportune or timely to a given event. Be sure to review the whole list of odd usage compiled by the supranational body itself at Mental Floss. Has your profession bumped up against the limits of translation only to transcend them? Although these constructed definitions and how they might come across to native speakers as an entertaining and engrossing thing to see unfold, I wonder if those snatches of Latin frozen in legalese struck those outside of the profession as vulgar and amateurish rather than venerable.