living daylights

The European Commission is soliciting feedback on the option to end the requirement for harmonisation across the EU for daylight savings time, citing the potential for negative health consequences caused by the bi-annual change and prompted by Nordic members who’ve dutifully sprung forward and fell back despite the fact that no hour of sunshine at these higher climes is won or lost.
Railway and telegraph networks necessitated synchronisation and standardisation in the late eighteenth century and the concept of adjusting the clocks with the seasons was first proposed by an insect collector and astronomer (and frequent train passenger) named Charles Hudson in 1895 and was not implemented until the spring of 1916 with the German Sommerzeit as a way to conserve coal during the war. The current EU compact dates to 1980, in response to the energy crisis of the 1970s, and if repealed, the change wouldn’t be automatically nullified, just the participation of each member state. What do you think? Modern time-keeping devices can assuredly handle the changes and dispensing with the ritual will be certainly welcomed by many but time and tide admit politics and identity as well.

highlighting the remarkable

I know it’s an advertising campaign but this series, found via Swiss Miss, from German marker manufacturer Stabilo takes a highlighter to historic photographs to help call-out the overlooked contributions of women to science and governance is pretty enlightening.

There’s just a few images in this print-run but surely there’s a lot of untapped potential out there. First Lady Edith Wilson, who assumed the roles and responsibilities of the US president after her husband was debilitated with a stroke in October 1919 (prior to the Presidential Succession Act and even before universal suffrage in the US) is included, as well as the pictured Austrian- Swiss physicist Lise Meither, whose celebrated career and academic recognition is overshadowed by the failure of the Nobel Prize committee to acknowledge her essential role in the discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s.

distracted boyfriend

English Rococo painter and portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds is perhaps best remembered for his commission depicting celebrated theatre manager, playwright and Shakespearian company actor David Garrick. Reynolds’ Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy from 1761 and displayed at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire is an allegory of the Renaissance romancing of Hercules’ uncomfortable choice between pleasure over virtue and seems quite memetic indeed. How would you caption these characters? Do let us know.

master negotiator

saltern

For his upcoming coffee table edition of Habitat, Augsburger crop-dusting photographer and graphic designer Tom Hegen, we learn via My Modern Met, has scoured the Earth capturing one of humanity’s oldest forms of environmental interventions—harvesting salts and other minerals through evaporation. The intermediate and legacy effects of these pools and ponds yield vibrant and brilliant abstractions from a privileged perspective—hosting high concentrations of different halophilic algae and bacteria at various stages that looks like a Mondrian composition, and hopefully stirs the observer to consider our intrusions and mediations in a different manner as well.   Be sure to visit the links above more explosively colourful landscaped gradients.

spidey-sense

For hundreds of years people have observed the phenomena of ballooning or kiting behaviour by small spiders that allow them to launch themselves and glide for hundreds of kilometres over land and sea, suspended aloft on gossamer leads.
Even the German term for “Indian summer,” Altweiber-sommer, references the season when the winds fill with errant webs, but for nearly as long as people have noticed this mode of transport, we learn via Dave Log, something has also struck naturalists as aerodynamically incomplete about the explanation that they were just haplessly bobbing along. Researchers, experimenting on past suppositions, are discovering that spiders are not only harnessing the wind but also electrostatic forces to take to the skies, steering their course by sensing and negotiating the Earth’s inchoate magnetic field and the discharge of lightning. 

main street, usa

Our gratitude once again to Nag on the Lake for acquainting us with the enigmatic and extensive catalogue of historic, nostalgic photography of Barry L Gfeller.
A seemingly solitary person who lived and died in his childhood home was surprisingly well-travelled and his survivors were shocked to find among his legacy over fifty thousand snap-shots documenting over two decades of road-trips across the United States and Canada, fossilising impressions of Main Streets that in many cases no longer exist. Caretakers are actively searching out a permanent home that could host all the pictures and make them available to the public and to researchers. The current host website is pretty sophisticated, nonetheless, and features interactive maps where one can trace Gfeller’s travels and perhaps find a vintage scene of one’s own town. Be sure to visit the links above to learn more.

purse-spective or beyond the valley of secret treasures

Via the splendiferous Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (a quite nice tradition) we encounter street artist Thrashbird who has turned an abandoned cement factory on the Oregon-Idaho border—all the limestone has been quarried away and now with the bust following the boom, the place is a veritable ghost town—into a giant and expressive canvas to make a statement on exploitation and industrial decay. Huge concrete blocks—perhaps test or sample structures worked up for potential clients—were strewn along the former factory grounds and Thrashbird envisioned them transfixed as monumental handbags—the luxury sort that attracts counterfeits.  Visit the links above to learn more.