the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions

Via Slash dot, we learn that an upgraded e-mail service not only has a self-destruct feature (among many other new options) but that activists are petitioning the company to disable feature for governmental and public entities, fearing that they could use it to hide or delete records, research and transactions it would rather not be the subject of public scrutiny.
What do you think? Perhaps for private and personal matters, it is useful to be able to choose an expiry date for one’s missives to regain the right to be forgot and not have everything inscribed in someone’s permanent dossier. Knowing, however, that governments lean heavily on their suite of hosting services to organise and conduct their online communication and store their data, it does seem at odds with the public interest to provide the means to maintain the integrity of public records and at the same time the ability to rubbish it.

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.