exoskeleton and arachne

The Verge reports on an international, interdisciplinary team of researchers who are not only looking at the amazing strength and tensile properties of silk—both from silk worm cocoons (previously here and here) and spider webs—to make lighter and stronger combat gear and body armour and for internal medicine as well.
Naturally flexible and less likely to be rejected and breakdown inside the body than the screws and plates meant to hold us together while we heal, doctors could use threads of silk to stitch us up. The researchers are also experimenting with engineering silk (previously) that has disinfectant properties and materially fortifying bones with a protein (fibroin) isolated from silk.

electoral college

On this day in 1733, polymath and political scientist Jean-Charles de Borda was born in the Aquitaine city of Dax whose most significant contribution to the sciences were his precise tables of logarithms meant to help with the transition to the metric system and decimalisation (including the calendar) in general after the French Revolution.
We are probably more familiar with him for his namesake method of voting, however, referred to as the Borda Count, wherein constituents rank candidates in order of preference and the overall winner secures his or her standing via consensus rather than a bald majority. Only three governments currently use the inclusive, weighted criteria of the Borda Count in some form for national elections—Kiribati, Nauru and Slovenia—but a large number of student body government and academic races are decided by these means as well as many sporting superlatives and significantly the winners of the Eurovision Song Contest are picked by a modified form of Borda’s system too. Maybe these other institutions are on to something.

takeaway

We rather enjoyed considering the etiquette, etymology and superstitions attached to leftovers and the convention of the doggie bag and had to wonder if the term was really falling out of common-parlance—the “this is for my pet” cover story having been dispensed with a while ago and restaurants in many places glad to pack up the remainders of one’s meal (though as correctly pointed out, not all cultures are accommodating to this notion).
We couldn’t determine the prevalence of this vernacular phrase exactly, which some suspect might be a corruption of docky (lunch) bag from an old East Anglican word but we’re siding with the canines and hope it has not already fallen out of fashion, but did to our unending delight run into another inscrutable pet name in that a traditional English breakfast, constituted of leftovers from the night before—usually boiled potatoes (though after a special meal, sometimes meat) and fried cabbage, is called “bubble and squeak.” The expression is a bit of onomatopœia, referring to the sounds preparing the food side-by-side makes and first appears in print oddly in dramatist Thomas Bridges 1762 A Travesty of Homer, a parody of The Illiad: “We therefore cooked him up a dish of lean bull-beef, with cabbage fry’d, …Bubble, they call this dish, and squeak.”

pickett & prueher

Hyperallergic profiles an absurdist duo that go by the stage names Chop and Steele (depending on the venue and the “talent” they’re hoping to showcase, I guess) who’ve been booked as an act, cooking segment or otherwise subject matter experts by a large number of local and regional stations eager to fill programming time for mid-morning television.
Often understaffed and under-funded, local outlets have grown desperate for content and the fact that the two, who are also hosting and curating a Found Footage Festival of other questionable on-air guests, and have pretty lax vetting standards and many times fail to do the requisite research. What do you think? I have sympathy for some of the unsuspecting anchors but maybe the local news channel ought to be pranked and pirated to teach them the lesson that quality costs a little extra effort.

8x8

breaking bad: purchasers of second-hand campervans in New Zealand are warned that they may have bought mobile methamphetamine laboratories

late to the party: Bob Canada notes that the Marvel Cinematic Universe just celebrated its tenth anniversary, with the first instalment (nineteen to date) Iron Man premiering in May 2008

glaswegian: Peter Sellers demonstrates some of his vocal skills

don’t let it rest on the president’s desk: Twitter urges users to change their password—as they’ve seen them

it happened on the way to mulberry street: the rise and fall of the silk industry (elsewhere) in Connecticut, via Kottke

galactus: concerned about relaying Earth’s location to future hostile aliens, comic legend Jack Kirby proposed that the images of super heroes grace space probes, via Boing Boing

matchmaker, matchmaker: social media giant enters into the realm of online dating

better call saul: some of the shady practises of the White House legal team, via Miss Cellania’s links  

caquelon oder der fondue verschwörung

Reprising an older episode from October 2014, Planet Money helped us get wise to the Swiss cheese cartel (Schweizerische Käseunion) and how the former marketing and trade company—given the powers of a regulatory body, in effect, by the Swiss government, successfully campaigned and unified production to keep the industry safe and solvent while also promoting and popularising fondue and raclette as traditional, national dishes. Chartered in the midst of the First World War, the Käseunion drew up production quotas and a pricing regime to prevent cheese from being too far devalued.

Neutral Switzerland having weathered the war unscathed, it retained its systems of production but no longer had the rest of Europe to export its cheese to. The low demand and high supply was kept under control by the monopoly, who directed production and pared down the thousand varieties formerly produced to just seven authorised kinds and then eventually down to three: the iconic Gruyère, Emmental and Sbrinz. Fondue was not invented in the 1950s and aggressively marketed around the world in the 1960s and beyond as a vehicle for selling more surplus cheese and the characterisation probably is sure to offend but we’re suspecting that that version is not too far off. As attested turophiles, however, we don’t care if the image of bubbling cauldrons (caquelon) of cheese at the ski chalet is a bit of a ploy. Amid scandal and corruption, the Käseunion was officially disbanded in 1999, and while their legacy is still felt, cheesemakers are free to return to producing some of the heirloom varieties.

transit authority

Though this fare strike on routes in Okayama is not the first example of a social picketing without disruption to services, it was certainly a new and novel concept to us.
Bus drivers threw blankets over the ticket machines and refused to accept payments from riders in order to protest their wage situation and rate hikes that leave drivers worried that they might be undercut by competing lines. The first mention of this sort of demonstration dates back to 1944 when streetcar workers in Cleveland, Ohio stopped collecting fares to leverage better wages and working conditions. Generally such strikes have positive outcomes since passengers are not inconvenienced but quite the opposite and the gesture fosters a sense of solidarity. What do you think? I wonder what sort of analogues there are for this type of protest in other sectors.