♄ ii

Not only have astronomers possibly deduced the mechanisms that generate and sustain heat to keep the subsurface ocean of the Cronian moon Enceladus from freezing over but can also extrapolate from their research that there has been a watery environment under the frozen shell for billions of years.
The satellite is named after the primordial giant (dread offspring of the Titans) that sparred with the Olympian goddess Athena in the Gigantomachy, and vanquished was buried beneath Mount Ætna. Attributed as the cause of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, scientists had their curiosity about the tiny moon piqued when they observed dramatic geysers of water shooting out of the southern hemisphere and seeding one of Saturn’s outer-most rings, and they thought an ocean might be hiding below as with Europa. Presumably, the age of the ocean would be long enough and stable enough to allow life in some form to gain a purchase and adapt to such harsh conditions. Looking out at this distance, delicate arrangement (though others might think that a barrier of ice is far more sheltering that the cold, open sky) makes me lament how careless we are with our ecosystem and hope that we might not have to learn the hard way.

war & pieced

Hyperallergic features a fascinating and therapeutic exhibit of quilts created by convalescing soldiers, put together mostly from remnants of their uniforms. Redeploying service members from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries British military adventures were encouraged to take to crafting rather than resorting to other, less healthy means of coping. Finished examples are exceedingly rare, but several samples have been brought together and put on display in the American Folk Art Museum in New York. 

shake ‘n bake (and I helped)

While I’d not want to risk alienating potential future sponsors, the profusion of mail-order meal services out there sort of baffles me—and I suppose in good faith I couldn’t accept their support since there’s no way such jostling and shuttling about staple ingredients repackaged could be ecologically excused—and I wonder what the allure is exactly. I remember reading once, and subsequently encountering many retellings in marketing contexts, how cake mixes and the like began to call for a superfluous egg because the extra effort lent a sense of legitimacy and accomplishment and appealed to bakers more so than the variety that did not.
Maybe the dining experience and our relationship with handed-down recipes are like that. I guess in that sense buying the experience, the virtual and vicarious reality, is what’s on offer and for myself, I’ll resort to processed foods, like boil-in-bag curries that allow me the pleasure of cooking rice to go with it or load-baring pizzas that I can flavor to taste, but I think I’ll not need a courier and a subscription.

time’s arrow

Linguists and historians suppose that the notion of clockwise and anticlockwise motion on the sun dial and clock face is related to the left to right apparent motion of the Sun as it crosses the arc of the sky for an occident observer—which, if true, raises some interesting questions about its antecedents.
Via Naked Capitalism we are treated to an exploration of the idea of circum- ambulation—at least in an Anglo-Saxon context with heavy resonance, surely, elsewhere. Though humans have always had the march of the heavens to trace, until the prevalence of time keeping and assigning direction to time’s arrow (also for navigation and shop-work with tools and bolts) it was probably enough in most situations to indicate direction rather than tendency. The terms sunwise (Uhrzeigersinnes), the Gaelic deasil (Deisel) and the Latin dexter, however, did exist before time pieces were common—with the Middle English widdershins—from the German widersinnig for going against, indicating a counter-clockwise motion (geden den Uhrzeigersinn). From lexical evidence, sunwise and widdershins to often be invoked when describing human processions around sacred sites. More about these propitious marches and examples of backwards running clocks can be found at the links above.

playthings

It seemed a much simpler when toys came to life by dint of their personalities and one’s imagination and whatever extra features or accessories were attached were just bonuses.
The pretend of yesterday, however, is approaching companionship and one has to wonder what it means to educate and then abandon for the next entertainment. Perhaps it is this ability to learn and keep us engaged that makes it less likely for us to move on—since I hope that we learn too that play is not just some frivolity that one matures out of. By the same token, we ought not to resign what we create to the same indenture as our own formative freedoms sometimes unobligingly enters into through circumstance and necessity (and cannot escape) and not make present toys tomorrow’s involuntary labour-force. What do you think? Not to be too serious over matters of fun and games, but our Yoda would indulge some philosophic-sparring and it does seem far less palatable to be trafficker than to be trafficked oneself and to be making inferiors with superior capabilities.

take only photographs, leave only footprints

A pun on the way English-speakers used to refer to Volkswagen, abbreviatedly, as veedubs, a company in North Yorkshire is championing the electric, green revolution of the recreation vehicle and camping industry with eDub Trips.
To reduce the impact of the camping trip—ahead of the automotive manufacturer’s pledge to offer alternatively powered vehicles by 2022—eDub is converting classic VW mini-buses into fully electric models and in order to finance further effort, renting out the campers for weekend excursions. As nice and hopeful as the latest advancements in cleaner energy and electric-vehicles are, there’s always the point of return on investment to aspire towards—with presently the amount of pollution generated to build that brand new car won’t ever be balanced out by the tidiness of its performance throughout its lifetime. I’d dare suggest that putting out on the market anything less is just green-washing, but I think what eDub Trips is doing with its modernization campaign represents genuine progress in the right direction.

major arcana

Despite the banal and unsurprising nature of the cards we are dealt by our daily social media digest, it’s still nonetheless exciting to forecast one’s fortune and fate. One clever illustrator from Italy named Jacopo Rosati, we were introduced to by Dangerous Minds, obliges with a collection of tarot cards that make up a narrative of the typical user experience.