pharmacopea

We enjoyed learning of the provenance and prompting of this detailed 1932 medicinal plant map of the United States—bordered by pharmacologically significant plants from around the world—and the ensuing discussion of the evolution and repackaging of the apothecary’s skill and experience as Big Pharma.
As appears in the map’s call-out box, the public lose sight of the contributions of a trained corps of professional to supplement medical science, whose advances cannot be discounted to be sure, at their peril and it was unwise to place too much faith in synthetic chemistry whose mechanisms can sometimes elicit more guesswork and side-effects than we bargain for.  What do you think?  Moreover, and perhaps the graver concern, we do ourselves and the profession by conflating traditional wisdom and folk-remedies with snake-oil and superstition—which stakes a claim to legitimacy because of the challenge in knowing where to draw the line. 

forge and foundry

Brilliantly, as Spoon & Tamago reports, typographer Kosuke Takahashi has created a universal font family that can be read both visually and tactilely whose braille pattern dots correspond to both printed Latin and Japanese hiragana script. The impetus for this invention was the Tokyo’s upcoming hosting of the Olympic and the Paralympic Games in 2020 but the underlying message of inclusivity is an unqualifiedly positive one.

food court

Though the history and geopolitical situation that frames Iran’s relationship to the US and the broader Western-world (and its neighbours in the region) if rather fraught and complex and believe that the profusion of convenience food is a real blight on society and the environment, we rather enjoyed this summary presentation through the lens of bootleg fast food franchises from Atlas Obscura that neither shied away from the uncomfortable truths nor trivialised the state of affairs.
Kentucky House, Mash Donald’s, Pizza Hot and others occupy an entrepreneurial and experiential space that’s otherwise absent in daily life. We also gained an appreciation for the nuance of the Persian pejorative gharbzadeghi (غرب‌زدگی) for being besotted (struck) with Western models and standards in education, business, arts and culture but also critically as it launches a discourse on imitation and authenticity and how one as a nation is can be played proxy as consumers of the products or the politics that the West is selling. Do give the whole article a read at the link up top and discover more with the help of their team of intrepid adventurers.

pilea peperomiodes

Though my adopted specimen was not getting adequate sunshine for some time, once I found a better spot for this particularly hardy succulent that goes by many different common names—the pancake plant, the Chinese money plant, the UFO plant—it’s begun thriving.
First described and collected by Scottish botanist George Forrest (perhaps a further example of nominative determinism) at the turn of the last century while exploring the southwestern Yunnan province, this evergreen with circular leaves known in its native land as 镜面草 was rediscovered in 1945 by a fleeing Norwegian missionary who took cuttings back with him and introduced them in his home country, propagating them throughout Scandinavia. Not a detrimental transplant it spread in the wild and was exchanged as houseplants under the radar of researchers and it was not until 1984 that the P. peperomiodes was formally identified and where it came from was known.

7x7

писанка: a collection of traditional Ukrainian folk design on egg shells ahead of 8 April Orthodox Easter

walking simulator: virtual tourist have free range over the landscapes created for immersive gaming experiences—even the old, abandoned levels and worlds from long shelved titles

worldcon 76: finalists announced for the 2018 Hugo Awards for science-fiction and science-fantasy plus the 1943 Retrosepctive Hugo Awards, via Super Punch

rotten tomatoes: the US has decided it will no longer regulate genetically-edited crops if it can be show that the tweaks are just a short-cut to selective breeding programmes, via Slashdot

fermi’s paradox: an illustrated lesson in astrobiology from Maki Naro and Matthew Francis

tears of a clown: downfall of a once flush service-sector career field

a is for attenborough, b is for brexit: design agency counters with an alternative abecedarium of twenty-six coins to the Royal Mint’s rather pedestrian release of the A to Z of Britain