re:birth

Plain magazine introduces us to the expansive, creative portfolio of Thomas Olliver through one of his latest projects that imagines social media platforms given traction and parlance in the media res of the gadgetry of pagers and disposable cameras, making a really provocative statement on the idea of delayed gratification and what we were formerly content to occupy ourselves with. What do you think? Sometimes nostalgia can be good counsel. A skeuomorph almost certainly is. Is the greater sophistication of our figeting a true refinement or were we better off knowing time spent doodling in fuss and frustration is our own and perhaps not a masterpiece?

crop-rotation

A Minsk-based agri-business start-up called OneSoil, we learn via Big Think, has fused satellite telemetry and artificial intelligence to create rather beautiful land-use visualisations (covering North America and Europe with plans for expansion) and deliver efficient and “precision farming.”
It’s really telling of the dreadful excellence of humans to contemplate how we’ve transformed the planet through landscaping and how big our collective footprints are, but hopefully data can impart a sense of responsibility and stewardship as well as tool for mitigating the effects that a warmer, wetter Earth means for ecosystems and our food supply. There’s also a feature that treats visitors to a randomised gallery of particularly striking fields—and though maybe not the most beautiful composition, we appreciated studying the overview of pastures and croplands near by broken up by forested areas.

phileas fogg

Though a far more serious investigative journalist earning her credentials for her undercover exposés on working conditions in factories and mental institutions, reporter and foreign correspondent Nellie Bly (the nom de plume of Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman) was dispatched on this day in 1889 on a round-the-world voyage—with only two-days’ notice, to match or best the record established by the Jules Verne novel.
Editors at Bly’s newspaper had been contemplating this sort of publicity race (at Bly’s suggestion) for some time and the last-minute dash materialised once a competing New York publication announced that they’d be sending out their writer Elizabeth Bisland also on a quest to circumnavigate the globe—but in the opposite direction, westward-bound and then steaming across the Pacific.
A missed connection in England ultimately cost Bisland the contest, with Bly returning triumphant (only informed of her competitor by the time she arrived in Hong Kong) in New York after seventy-two days. Bly’s sponsorship by a daily newspaper rather than a monthly magazine as Bisland with constant coverage and a prize on offer for the reader who could guess the date and time of her return was also a motivating factor for the intrepid traveller.  Bisland finished four-and-a-half days later, both adventurers beating the benchmark set by Verne.

co-educational

On this day in 1968, for the first time since its founding in 1701 as an academy dedicated to the study of theology and liturgical language, the Yale board of governors and trustees voted to approve the admittance of women students for the following academic year, referring the matter to faculty for ratification. The resolution passed with near unanimity, with only one vote against out of two hundred senior professors. At the same time, the university’s sister institution, Vassar College (founded as a women’s only school in 1861) announced it would start matriculating male students.