askance and apogee

Though we know the motivation behind this rather fantastic and arresting gallery of satellite images shot at an angle rather than the customary flat projection is not a purely aesthetic one as these swarms of satellites that may be able to produce a complete, daily snap-shot of the surface of the Earth soon are gathering telemetry to both mitigate human and environmental crises and at a premium trends on freight movement and industry activity so investors can hedge their bets appropriately—the insight economy, they are nonetheless incredible and a real privileged vantage point to help us appreciate the size of our footprint and the majesty of the natural world, which might be diminished on a leveler atlas. Be sure to visit the links above for more landscapes and urban environments.

santa maria della pietà

Somehow we’ve overlooked this tiny chapel in the historic centre of Naples on prior visits but learning about Cappella Sansevero gives us a very good justification to make a return trip and seek it out.
Commissioned in 1590 by a grateful Giovanni Francesco di Sangro after recovering from a serious illness, the private chapel was dedicated to the Virgin Mary (La Pietà) and including an array of Masonic symbolism and became a late-Baroque to Rococo sculpture gallery in the mid-eighteenth century, showcasing incredible marble-working skills that turn the medium into delicate veils and the warp and weave of a fishing net, reputed to be transformations achieved through alchemy (of which the then head of household was an avid practitioner) rather than the talent of the sculptor. Possibly building on the legend of the supernaturally hypertrophic effort, the chapel also hosts an exhibit on early embalming techniques and features skeletons and viscera hermetically preserved.

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.