i love a parade

This joyous three-minute parade of happy cats marching and playing musical instruments, via Misscellania, is from the opening of a popular Japanese video game app called Mitchiri Neko, whose goal of collecting sightings of a various virtual cats and journaling about it sounds really bizarre and complicated but cute, made us smile. Versions spanning ten hours and more are available as well, if you need a longer break. Neko (猫) means cat of course and the Maneki-neko, the iconic one waving its paw, means the beckoning cat.

dawn’s early light or up and atom

Over a decade ago a cadre of staunch Cold Warriors including Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn publicly reversed their stance on classical nuclear deterrence and disavowed the strategy that arms race made the world a safer place but rather was making it a far more dangerous one—propelling another round of decommissioning.
Reaching back further to 1981, Harvard Law Professor Roger D Fisher, a specialist in negotiations and conflict management, suggested unflinchingly in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, that should the President of the United States of America want to active his or her nuclear arsenal—rather than having the codes kept at arm’s length in the nuclear football which the president could access whenever the impulse possesses him or her (Reagan preferred to keep the codes in his jacket pocket)—the Commander-in-Chief ought to be made fully aware of the gravity of the decision, which would result in the death of millions of innocent civilians if not the whole of humanity. The launch codes rather ought to be implanted in the heart of a volunteer attaché that accompanies the president at all times with a large knife. To retrieve the launch codes means that the president must personally kill and butcher one person that represents all those faceless millions that chauvinism and phoney patriotism make into abstractions. I wonder if such a theoretical volunteer would be a willing martyr or if Trump would even be dissuaded by such measures.

dinosaur court

Via Messy Nessy Chic, we are introduced to the world’s first paleontological park of Crystal Palace in the borough of Bromley commissioned as an extension of the Great Exhibition of London in 1854. Though considered scientifically naïve by contemporary standards, the attraction predated Charles Darwin’s publication and contrary to Victorian affection for the supernatural these “antediluvian monsters” weren’t taken as patent evidence for dragons and weathered subsequent derision well enough to earn protected status and become a cultural touchstone. Learn more about the historic park and the mythos surrounding it at the link up top.

full-stop or situational switching

Learning why some can interpret a text message ending with a period as either hostile, insincere or overly formal and that the ability to detect punctuation out of place (not grammatically but contextually) can signal greater social literacy made me reflect on how I’ve nearly completely eschewed periods and commas in favour of quiver of emojis to break up a telegram—but hope that I’m upholding good orthography elsewhere and for other occasions and forums. Here and here are a few other novel ways that new forms of communication are changing the way we frame our words. What changes or tendencies have you noticed in the ways you dash off notes to one another? How much more weight now is attached to a tittle and a jot?

8x8

meltdown: a good primer to the security vulnerability revealed in micro-processors

shorttermism: a look at some of the factors driving factory closures despite long-term, sustained viability

kyngreiðsluskilyrði: the Icelandic government is determined to close the gender pay gap by making it illegal to set wages for women less than men

curb side: a look into America’s valet parking Olympics

investment instrument: a few ideas on how to spend your bitcoin

the insolence of the young: memorandum circulated as a gag to the staff of the Atlantic in 1973 on repulsive topics is weirdly resonant

the blog is dead, long live the blog: a nice reflection on the practise and pursuit with a kind tribute to the Presurfer

border slash: the US expends over a million dollars annually to maintain a deforested boundary between it and Canada—to ensure that the border is more than an imaginary line, via TYWKIWDBI  

coming attractions

In 1999, two friends uncovered a treasure trove in a Nebraska antiques shop of over sixty thousand letterpress blocks used to advertise films in newspapers. Their two thousand dollar investment which covers nearly the entire history of motion pictures (from the silent-era up until 1984) has been appraised at ten million. At the link above, there is a short documentary that showcases a part of the vast collection.