canting arms

Our gratitude to Dangerous Minds for introducing us to the graphic design studio called Bands FC that creates sort of crests for music groups in the style of football clubs—and vice versâ—applying a system of vexillography and design rules that are rather clever though not entirely comprehensible to me at least, though they helpfully show their work.
It was hard to choose favourites among the musical homages, but there are many more examples are to be found at the links above plus the opportunity to support their operation by purchasing player/performer trading cards or a stylish team jersey with the group’s own logo.

transiting exoplanet survey satellite

Via Gizmodo, we learn that NASA’s TESS probe (previously) has begun survey observations that will examine the motion and luminosity of two hundred thousand nearby stars for tell-tale signatures that they are hosting planetary systems.
The advanced, precision satellite will image an area of sky for twenty seven days before moving on to the next patch, ultimately beaming back telemetry that covers about eighty-five percent of the heavens. The goal of the mission is to provide the successor to Hubble, the upcoming flagship James Webb Space Telescope, with a selection of targets to watch. TESS is scheduled to send its first transmission back to Earth in August and report back every thirteen and a half days thereafter—at the point in its orbit it approaches the closest to home. Considering the wonders already discovered relatively unaided, it’s stultifying to try to imagine what may be revealed to us next.

8x8

home-grown: a design studio in Brooklyn grows gourds in moulds to create an alternative to disposable cups

hidden in plain sight: Greenwich’s secret nuclear reactor

mea culpa: social media turns to television advertising in an attempt to win back users’ trust—we’ve seen these on German prime-time too

the colour of pomegranates: rediscovering the suppressed films of director Sergei Parajanov

quiet skies: the US Transportation Security Agency directs air marshals to arbitrarily monitor frequent flyers

an der schönen blauen donau: a time-lapse of a bean germinating into a plant, accompanied by the waltz

king cotton: an art exhibit, referencing the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, disabuses notions of American exceptionalism

clickbait: a shop sells tee-shirts that purposefully enrage pedants by getting movie quotes and titles slightly wrong, invoking Cunningham’s Law

four panel format

On this day fifty years ago, cartoonist Charles Schultz introduced the first African American character in his nationally syndicated comic strip Peanuts (previously), Franklin Armstrong.
In the wake of the assassination of Dr Rev Martin Luther King Jr and the general tumult of 1968, a school teacher in Los Angeles named Harriet Glickman began a chain of correspondence with the cartoonist, asking him to bring in a black person into the cast. Franklin’s appearances were sporadic until Schulz received a letter from a newspaper editor to the effect that they had no objection to having a black character but implored Schultz not to portray them in school together—which advanced Franklin to the head of the class, seated at the desk in front of Peppermint Patty. The previous year, Schultz introduced an occasional classmate named José Peterson, of mixed Swedish and Mexican heritage, who was possibly the first non-pejorative portrayal of someone of Hispanic descent in comics.