dark they were and golden-eyed

Our faithful antiquarian, JF Ptak’s Science Books, finds some lush, poetic language in the debate that spanned from the time when astronomer Percival Lowell’s assistant Carl O Lampland described the exacting photographs taken of the surface of Mars by Eugene Michel Antoniadi.

Lampland came by this poetic license by way of an Italian false-friend (falso amico) but the mistranslation sparked a vigorous back and forth about Martians and design that lasted from 1886 to 1909, when the photographer accounts for the optical illusions in the channels that captivated the public and attempts to finally dispel the persistent illusion. There’s an excerpt below in translation but be sure to visit the source up top for more verses and more finds from old books and journals.

Our observations lead us to divide the channels into several categories, namely: In diffuse shadows, more or less irregular, some of which appear double in a fleeting way; In gnarled blobs; In gray masses, shapeless and disjointed; In irregular, thin blurring, in the construction of a hedge of Martian seas, and widen into a vast and confused shadow further on, like new with their tributaries, seen at a great distance.

lending library

The Washington Post gives a kind and circumspect obituary for Todd Herbert Bol (*1956 - † 2018) who passed away over the weekend, succumbing to the cancer that took the life of his mother nearly a decade prior and inspired him to create his global, public bookshelf initiative as a tribute to her memory and generosity.
The first Little Free Library was posted outside his home and Bol’s network eventually would surpass the number of libraries built nation-wide in America by tycoon and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie—but that’s not even counting those affiliate champions who found much appeal in this simple concept and a little craft. There’s one in my neighbourhood that’s expanded to baby clothes and shoes as well as children’s books at the foot of a large apartment block, and this repurposed telephone booth that we encountered at a campsite in Switzerland.  The quick but enduring and endearing spread of Bol’s idea means his legacy will go on for a long, long time.  Give your local bookshelf a friendly acknowledgement and donate a good read.

planetary terrestrial analogues library

The European Space Agency has collaborated with numerous museums and university geological departments to curate a collection of rocks and minerals, BLDG Blog reports, as a heuristic tool for future exploration, reasoning out properties of extra terrestrial surfaces and strata by relating it to more mundane and familiar correspondents.
Jarosite, for example, is a rare volcanic rock that is testament to the presence of water on Earth and was found on Mars early on before any evidence of water had been discovered. The growing catalogue of space-prospectors consists of around forty-five hundred known Earth minerals, complimented with three hundred isolated from meteorites, one hundred thirty from the Moon and about eighty Martian samples.

disinformed

Actual, malicious hacking is of course not the cultural heir to countless generations of superstition that evolved from mischievous spirits to gremlins and system bugs but the fact that the pedigree isn’t always knowable tends to flatten and conflate matters for everyone. It’s hard to know whether at work we’re not under some general assault or whether it’s just a matter of poor design and systemic overburdening whose annoyance over technical difficulties are little consolation insofar as oneself isn’t the target of an attack. Most routine disruptions are just that but lately things—both during work hours and at home—seemed to have turned a touch personal. We feel we reliably understand our catalogue of repertoire for correspondence and creation but when things start to appear to go missing and unindexed, I at least begin to feel gaslighted.
I began noticing that blog posts that I knew I had composed in the past—sometimes far beyond that relative horizon called “recent”—that I wanted to footnote a current topic with weren’t to be found, search internally and externally. Pictorial searches sometimes seem to net better yields but if I didn’t have faith in the fullness of my recollection and didn’t manage an independent archive myself, I would begin to question whether the missing pages existed in the first place. “I wrote about this topic before but Google says I didn’t.” A few other internet caretakers have also mentioned this in passing and I am reasonably sure that they’re experiencing the same sort of emphasis on currency and novelty that I have been—still one has to wonder how to define sabotage and subterfuge (or innocent incompetence and the over-confidence in our abilities) in a space where gravity and the laws of physics are subject to change. We tend to think of the architecture of basic services to be permanent and self-sustaining but there’s an awful amount of behind-the-scenes maintenance that goes into it and maybe we’ve just become too accustomed to a set of expectations, a frustration that betrays our impatience. When I heard of co-workers bemoaning that they were unable to search our email server exchange for older missives as reference, I was a little baffled and dismissive—that is, until I experienced the same glitch, which isn’t consistent seemingly or long-lived enough to properly investigate and work up any sort of relatable or repeatable remedy. Lack of information is a flavour of disinformation. If this undermining (real or perceived) is the work of an Evil Genius to torment, train or trick, it’s a pretty impressive vulnerability to exploit.

luftangriff

This evening and into the next morning marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the deadliest and most destructive bombing attack by the Allied forces on the town of Kassel.
The attack punctuated a series of strategic air raids that had been periodically targeting manufacturing facilities and defensive infrastructure killed an estimated ten thousand civilians and the resulting fire engulfed the city for seven days afterwards. Counted with Dresden, Hamburg, Pforzheim and Darmstadt, Kassel had among the highest number of casualties from aerial bombing.

gca68

On this day, fifty years ago President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed into law the Gun Control Act of 1968, which focused on regulating the firearms industry and owners by restricting interstate trade in guns and weapons to licensed dealers and exporters.
The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy nearly five years earlier prompted the legislation, which still languished in Congress and the Senate, when it was discovered that the president was killed with a rifle purchased by mail-order from a magazine. The murders of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert Kennedy earlier in 1968 renewed the effort to change the law, which additionally mandated that buyers have licenses for and register their weapons and prohibited categories of persons, including felons and the mentally incompetent, from owning guns.

leaf-peeping

I took a stroll through the fields to the forest’s edge above our village watch the slow transition of the leaves to their autumn colour palette.  The sunshine was not as forthcoming as yesterday that bathed everything with a blushing golden hue in the mid-afternoon but the woods still put on a spectacular show for this opening act that is to be followed by several encores.