berliner blau

As part of a series of profiles on colours and their surprising origin stories (previously), we enjoyed reading about Katy Kelleher’s favourite—the blue of blueprints, van Gogh’s Starry Night and Hokusai’s Great Wave—the profound but wholly synthetic and accidental Prussian Blue.
As a colour—with medical applications later discovered that make the compound part of every first aid kit—it was discovered accidentally when one Doktor Johann Conrad Dippel was sharing a Berlin laboratory with a pigment-maker and was mixing up a batch of his signature bone-slurry. The alchemist—who many believe was the inspiration for Doctor Frankenstein, and there was some inadvertent cross-contamination which turned suspected ruddy hues to an intense blue.  The timing of the discovery perfectly filled a market gap at a time when dyes and pigments were expensive and not particularly colour-fast and became a very lucrative mistake for both involved and quickly augmented the spectrum of the art and textile world. 

fiat

As Slashdot reports, there’s been a flurry of speculation that the secret identity of the creator of bitcoin who goes by the alias of Satoshi Nakamoto is none other than visionary inventor Elon Musk.
The arguments strike me as pretty persuasive and suggest that Musk created the medium of exchange to fund his space-faring ventures and to give future colonists a monetary system untethered to terrestrial governments, and has been discreet about his alternate platform as he had already been sufficiently disruptive to moving money with earlier his invention of Paypal and bitcoin is not exactly complementary to the system of trust and transparency underlying the electronic payment system.

hq2

Via Super Punch, we learn that states and municipalities in America are willing to make any sacrifice, including surrendering any pretence of the democratic process, in order to lure the second headquarters of a major on-line retailor to its doorstep. The sweetheart tax deals, which betray the rotten, saccharine decay that underlies governmental institutions that have given up and sold-out without so much as offering the least bit of resistance, will be of course a matter of prestige for the host city—but in a back-handed sort of way, as we’ve seen with other big venue events becoming rather a liability than a boon and a blessing, but that prize and the injection of fifty thousand potential jobs are demanding outsized costs.
Chicago—for example—has offered to divert the income tax of the company’s own employees back into the company’s coffers, and locations in California and New Jersey have offered land, billions and deferred tax payments, should they set up shop in their states. Governments have always had to play games with industry to attract and retain manufacturing and employment opportunities but a wholesale race to the bottom with democracy should illicit as much aversion and antipathy as would one would shoulder for laxer environmental or labour laws (which could be in negotiation as well, since the investigation has only been able to obtain details on a tenth of the competition) since tax revenue that could be used to fund schools, museums, food programmes, scientific research and other areas of public interest is instead going towards corporate welfare. What’s to stop the next company shopping for a tax-break to not be even bolder with its demands?   The community does not share in this enrichment and further austerity and cuts to services are justified.

liquid courage

There was a study, survey published earlier this week—from the British Medical Journal and not some suspect source desperate for some viral break-through—that’s really been cycling around in my head as I’ve encountered different citations on how different types of alcoholic beverages elicit different emotional and physical responses from drinkers.
Despite the authority and confirmation of consensus, it struck me as highly anecdotal and of dubious scientific-value to know that tequila was emboldening or that red wine made one sleepy—sleepy! or that white wine was apathetic, agnostic. I wasn’t impressed as broadly I wouldn’t think those characterisations were that revelatory. The research, however, was an appeal to those who did not share this common fate or those who drank as a means to recreate these deleterious but predictable emotional milieu in order that one better understands his relationship and motivation as perhaps abnormal, unhealthy and destructive. That is a scientific approach that I can support and knowing that one’s efforts might not carry their intended consequences is important—except like in most things, self-medication comes at the cost of self-diagnosis

spivak pronoun

The result of changes that had been under consideration for over three decades, the archbishop of Uppsala, the head of the formerly state-sponsored Church of Sweden (the organisation became independent in 2000), announced that as the nature of God surpasses human understanding and the conventions and trappings of gender, that God will as of Pentecost (Whitsunday, Pfingsten) next be simply God, with no gendered qualifiers.
The term Lord will also be struck from Church liturgy. I suspect God endorses this decision.  Sweden linguists two decades before the Church began to contemplate the reform suggested in 1966 that the gender neutral personal pronoun Hen be adopted (like they and theirs) as an alternative to Hon (she) and Han (he). Not only is the number of the alternative in agreement grammatically, it is inclusive and does not call on those addressed with it to acquiesce that they are different or being contrary.  Stylistically, this construction has not replaced its forebears (first attempted at the turn of the century, Spivak pronouns attempt to swallow or elide over the quibbling between his and hers) but also does not sound wholly out of place in any context.

mountweazel

Taking a cue from Paul Anthony Jones celebration of forgotten words, The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities, the BBC’s Culture section has curated a selection thirty terms rescued from obscurity by a dedicated panel of academics pouring over antiquated reference materials and there’s plenty to delight and worth returning to common-parlance from all sources.
One of our new favourite ideas came with the title’s turn of phrase: like the cartographer’s phantom trap-street that were embellishments added to maps which didn’t exist and would catch plagiarists in the act, a mountweazel is a fictitious entry added to dictionary or encyclopædia that would similarly expose a copy-cat researcher. The original Ms Mountweazel was given a professional calling and a tragic fate, due to an occupational hazard, and we wonder if the deterrent, if better known, might not be elaborated further and have biographical standing in her own right. Be sure to peruse the registers and let us know your new favourites and your plans to re-introduce them.

franksgiving

While we hope for our American readership that the family gathering presented an opportunity for constructive political dialogue and not abject avoidance of potentially incendiary topics that no matter how dicey do need airing, there was a time when the movable feast of Thanksgiving was itself an even more a divisive, partisan issue, as Atlas Obscura recalls.
With the US still recovering from the economic downturn of the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt conceded to the pressure of retailors, fearing a shorter Christmas shopping season had the tradition of proclaiming the last Thursday of the month of November to be a national day of thanksgiving been kept, and changed the date of the holiday. FDR’s decision caused disruption, as expected, and drew ire that followed party lines with twenty-two states celebrating the on the new date and twenty-three on the old date that year. The move garnered the president a lot of criticism with some claiming it represented an abuse of executive powers and earned sobriquets like the “New Deal Thanksgiving” or “Franksgiving,” an affront to the “Republican Thanksgiving” as Abraham Lincoln had intended it, with some states still observing the old style date until the mid-1950s.  As with most legislation, it took an act of congress to settle matters and align the whole country’s calendars.