祝你生日快乐

Accomplished self-trained pharmacist and educator from Ningbo and Nobel laureate for developing malaria treatments that have saved the lives of untold millions, Tu Youyou is celebrating her eighty-seventh birthday today. It can seem very confusing but I suppose it’s really quite a straightforward matter to wish her a happy one. Ms Tu relates that her given name comes from a verse in the Shih-ching (the Chinese book of classic poetry) that the deer bleat ‘youyou’ as they gaze on wild Artemisia (hao)—a type of sagebrush whose chemical derivative (artemisinin or qinghao su), Tu would come to discover, can be used as an anti-malarial drug.

check your privilege, obi-wan

Kottke is now the host and curator of The People’s History of Tattoonie, which itself was in danger of becoming rarefied and disjointed as an anthology of sorts. Usually I find such satire a little heavy-handed for my taste as we all ought know not to impose our cachet and culture upon something long, long ago and far, far away (notwithstanding how a more advanced culture would have more mature definitions of identity than we do, and in the end we usually just look smug fancying ourselves to be the soul of consideration and accomodation) but this dialogue, line of argument is pretty brilliant and needless to say illustrative. “Your ‘Big Story’ of the military-imperial complex lets you ignore what’s right in your FACE.”

bess, you is my woman now

5x5

an error in the matrix: those iconic strings of computer code in the opening credits of the franchise are sushi recipes

clerestory: fantastic Mid Century Modern bird houses

the glasgow school: Scottish sisters and classmates whose style profoundly influenced what we call Art Nouveau, via Everlasting Blort

pseudo-random numbers: some computer encryption is based on the unpredictability underlying globules of oil and water of a wall of lava lamps

event horizon: a preview of some of the planned excursions into outer space for the upcoming year

savvy consumers

Via Kottke, we discover an open directive from Foster Kamer that should top our list of New Year’s resolutions—which might prove surprisingly easy to uphold considering what’s at stake—that encourages literate and circumspect consumption of journalism by unshackling oneself from one’s social media feeds.
We can choose to step away from the cycle of manipulation and the internet echo chamber—and perhaps the fear of missing out (FoMO)—by not incentivizing the content-brokers and help those whose horizons are already being limited and not allow the hosting or favour of a single outlet be the measure of success. Supporting independent and quality reporting and diversity of content can be made to seem like either impossible or unnecessary, given our own vanity with what we regale ourselves with—though the plurality of view-points is an illusory one, or that there’s no standing up to the giants who’ve set the hurdle to entry too high. The antidote to the notion that the internet is a one-stop shop, however, is simple and just takes a bit of attention and intention to make online ecology a better one—whose health and integrity have become even more vital to the off-line world as the boundaries are blurred: step out of that walled-garden and rely on your browser, search-engines (though be wary of what is driving these as well), use book-marks, subscribe to newsletters and create your own daily-digest and push back against the monoculture we’re enabling because we are easily besotted with convenience and a bit of flattery.

avoirdupois or system of a down

The United States of America’s unique status globally as a hold-over on adopting and integrating the metric system of weights and measures cannot be laid at the feet of any historical incident or accident other than familiarity and resistance has become sort of a fount of national pride—with even the most traditional patches of England and her colonies rejecting the Imperial system as an outmoded artefact but it was nonetheless a pleasure to indulge that pirate intrigue had a hand to play in America’s delinquency in adopting the international standard.
A hodgepodge of units inherited from metropolitan Britain and concurrent thalassocracies was vexing the young country’s trade and threatened to intimate certain allegiances and so then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson invited one French scientist behind the development and standardization of the metric system, Joseph Dombey, to come and demonstrate the merits of his enterprise. Storms blew the visit emissary’s boat into the privateer-infested waters of the Caribbean, however, who ransomed Dombey (ransomed him to death—unfortunately) and cared nothing for his baubles—including a metallic rod that was to be America’s standard kilogram, though there’s a movement in place to divorce the value from a physical representative. It is difficult to gauge what consequence that the success of Dombey’s and Jefferson’s mission might have had, as America launched several other campaigns to align themselves with international standards (the USA is in possession of four archival kilograms for calibration purposes) but never managed to overcome the inertia of custom, which is a powerful thing to be sure.