shock and awe

Gleaned from the latest instalment of Kevin Stroud’s excellent History of English podcast, our generic word for firearm entered the English language in the early fourteenth century as gunpowder was gradually making its way to Western Europe as the namesake of a very large and formidable catapult inscribed in the armorial inventory of Windsor Castle called Domina Gunilda.
This practise of naming munitions and engines of war after women is an ancient tradition that still echoes today and sure carries some problematic psychological associations—though recalling that the common female name of Norse extraction might be somewhat fitting, itself derived from Gunnr the Valkyrie, meaning battlefield and the handmaid of Odin assigned the onerous task of separating the heroic from the cowardly casualties and determining who gets into Valhalla. It is unclear if Lady Gunilda herself actually used any of the newly introduced gunpowder as a range-multiplier (early cannons, like their Chinese predecessors relied mainly on their ability to scare and disorientate belligerents by its noise rather than projectiles) though other, contemporary documents mention “gonnylde gnoste”—that is, Gunnild’s spark—and whatever the firepower, the written use of gonnes and handgonne appears shortly thereafter.

kernspaltung

Along with laboratory assistant Fritz Straßmann, chemist Otto Hahn, researcher at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, made a breakthrough on this day in 1938 that led to the understanding of the process of splitting the atom.
The results of their experiments were interpreted and explained to them by physicist Lise Meitner a few weeks later—being chemists, they interpreted the change as a chemical one—confirming that they had in fact demonstrated the previously unknown property of nuclear fission after bombarding uranium with neutrons and reducing it to barium—with attendant energy as a by-product, ushering in the Atomic Age.

gibbous

To illustrate that even truly awful, jingoistic and pointless maps can be thought-provoking in more than pedantic ways and worth one’s consideration, Big Think reviews a few of the charts and infographics curated by the self-evidently titled Terrible Maps. I would certainly take objection to their map comparing the number of countries with their flag on the Moon (1: the US) with the number of countries with the Moon on their flags (13: Islamic majority countries.
While the US was the only country so far to land human beings on the lunar surface and return them to Earth safely, the first terrestrial flag planted on the Moon was the flag of Soviet Russia and since the Apollo missions, Japan (Hinomaru is the Rising Sun), China (the stars are symbolic of the four classes of worker and the Chinese nation) and India (the round symbol is twenty-four spoked Ashoka Chakra). Though no flags with the Moon on the Moon yet, I count at least twenty-one national flags with crescents. The thirteen ensigns right facing with a star and crescent are based off of the symbol of the Ottoman Empire, though depending on one’s location above or below the Equator and how the flags are hoisted and the way the horns are facing, the orientation of the Moon’s increscence is not a reflection of astronomical reality. What do you think? One has to wonder if this misrepresentation isn’t intentional on an important level and not meant to be emblematic the Earth’s satellite at all. Like discussion and debate about the privileging nature of map projections is conversation that we were late to bring to the table, it’s worth examining one’s geographical and historic biases, which are sometimes presented to us with a key and legend.

ailill mac máta

A pair of prodigal County Roscommon residents, interesting in plying their craft brewing experiences in their homeland isolated and fermented a special troglodytic wild yeast from a paleolithic archaeological site and cave complex to provide a point of departure to explore the influence and the background of the story of Queen Medb, also tied to this land.
Not to be confused with Queen Mab, Shakespeare’s invented fairy monarch though perhaps informed by the semi-legendary figure, her name shares its etymology—appropriately—with mead as she who intoxicates and according to ancient sources, Medb was born in the same cave, Oweynagat, held also to be a portal to the Underworld. The warrior queen, as all females in the egalitarian world of the Celts, was liberated and independent and not defined by her gender, unlike most women in other contemporary Western European cultures. The brewster (see also) worked with experts in microbiology to detect the undomesticated varieties of catalyst and bravely—since the divide between the world of the living and the world of the dead is most porous at that time of year—went spelunking in Oweynagat on Samhain to collect the yeast. Read more about the quest for the ingredients of this special ale and discover more strange brews at the link up top.

pleonasm

The above term, from the Ancient Greek πλεονάζω for I am superfluous, can be used to describe the phenomena of unnecessary repetition, like referring to one’s PIN number, saving something in PDF format, or making a visit to the ATM machine (this particular foible is called the RAS syndrome, RAS itself an initialism for “redundant acronym syndrome”).
Pleonasm also occurs especially when it comes to invoking topology or a group that’s customarily named in a different language—such as blaming the incident on the al Qaeda, visiting the Milky Way Galaxy, being extracted from the La Brea Tar Pits, or surveying Table Mesa or the Rock of Gibraltar.