red rover

Kottke directs our attention to a small but truly breath-taking gallery of photographs that the semi- autonomous Martian rover Curiosity (previously) has amassed in the first two-thousand sols (the measure for the time it takes for the fourth planet to orbit the Sun, slightly longer than our mundane equivalent). It does given one pause to appreciate how sharp and clear these images (approaching half a million) beamed back are and that we can explore an alien world with such a degree of awe and intimacy that we might expect for remote yet very terrestrial terrains.

southern exposure or defaced blue ensign

Via Futility Closet we learn that from 1889 to 1968, the flag of the British overseas territory of the Turks and Caicos islands displayed a stevedore working between two piles of salt (representing the chief trade good of the time when the Admiralty decided that the Caribbean islands needed a distinctive banner) with a sailing vessel in the background.
Upon review, a helpful bureaucrat—perhaps ignorant of the geographical location and the main export of the island group—shaded the leftmost pile as to suggest the door of an igloo. The correction endured until a royal visit prompted an update, changing the coat of arms to feature the islands’ symbols—a conch shell, a spiny, indigenous lobster and a native sort of melon cactus whose flower resembles a fez and bestowed the Turkish name on the smaller landmass, with the native Taíno words for a chain of islands, caya hico, making up the remainder.

choux de créteil

Completed in 1974, Messy Nessy Chic acquaints us with the Brutalist concrete ensemble of apartment towers dubbed Les Choux (the Cauliflowers) due to the distinctive balconies, which residents were encouraged to grow gardens on in hopes that the community would become a self-sufficient utopia.
Indeed the neighbour that architect Gérard Granval created for the south-eastern suburb of Créteil had everything that its dwellers could want for—a cinema and a shopping centre—and was designed to uphold principles of minimising one’s ecological footprint and discouraged gentrification by admixing a population of students with people of various income levels and social support reliance. In 2008, the Ministry of Culture recognised the group of ten cylindrical buildings as piece of architectural heritage. See a vintage promotional video of the grounds and a few other structures created by Granval at the link above.

tincture

Colossal introduces us to the colour-classification system that was devised by a German geologist called Abraham Gottlob Werner to create a standardised nomenclature for describing minerals and then expanded by Scots painter Patrick Syme to include subjects for students of Nature in 1814—which the Smithsonian is reissuing. Each poetically-named hue cites occurrences in the animal, vegetable and mineral domains, and a copy of this volume accompanied Charles Darwin on his journeys in the HMS Beagle. Like with the rich and precise language that heralds use to describe armorial bearings, before photography and the general portability of information, accuracy of transmission was paramount for identification and faithful reproduction.