nengajo

We’ve been awaiting Spoon & Tamago’s annual posting (previously) of Japanese designer New Year’s greeting cards (nengajo, 年賀状) that honour both the civil, Gregorian calendar and the luni-solar year of the Boar.
There are many entries to check out as well as the archives from years past in addition to this charging beast from Benjo Graphics and an elegant miniature calendar page from artist Tatsuya Tanaka. The year of the Earth Pig begins 5 February and corresponds most closely with the Western sign Scorpio.

7x7

personality, wessonality: spot the celebrities at the 1986 All Star Party for Clint Eastwood

spargelzeit: a little education can be empowering for keeping the resolution to eat healthier, fresher foods

urban density: exploring the crowded high-rises of Hong Kong

ikumen: the rise of the Japanese hot dads is changing the traditional roles of parenting for the better

rubisco: botanists tinker with photosynthesis to make the process more efficient

fishbit and half-wit: an assortment of the dumbest smart gadgets premiered at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) technology expo

minor arcana: the Tarot deck-like miniatures of Robert Coutelas 

bork bork oder tierlautbezeichnungen

We realise it’s a beauty salon for the canine variety but that’s still not what a dog says auf Deutsch—der Hund bellt oder macht wau wau, onomatopoetically.
Incidentally, most German animals have different though outstanding accurate cries: the goat goes meck meck (like a cat lapping up something), the dove ruckediku-ruckeddiku, and the duck goes nag nag. The last call is apparently more prominent in former East Germany as opposed to ducks going quak in the West—maybe due to a television programme, but nothing on whether dogs (this shop being just over the border) spoke differently.

cliff’s notes

Via Shadow Manor’s Art of Darkness blog, we are referred to this interactive study guide on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (previously here, here and here) that allows one to explore the topology of the Underworld and understand characters and allusions throughout without reference to footnotes that tends to draw one out of the narrative, at times, instead of deeper into the poem, as Virgil does for our narrator.
While the endearingly cartoonish quality may not have the same visual seriousness with which past illustrators have treated the fourteenth century epic—every generation taking its turn—the platform more than makes up for this (if it is indeed a shortcoming at all) in scholarship and utility. Take a tour yourself at the link above.

7x7

doxxing: personal details of hundreds of German politicians published online

just dance: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes dances to all the songs

s.s. warrimoo: the ship voyage that bridged seasons and centuries

look at that snowman go: NASA releases first images of Ultima Thule—previously

best intentions: twenty years ago, oil companies proposed massive geo-engineering projects to combat climate change—that all had serious drawbacks, via Digg

anti-deficiency act: prolonged US government shutdown causes the Federal Communications Commission to run out of funds

sw10 0bh: a proposed database would match those facing homelessness with proxy mailing addresses from UK’s over half a million vacant properties to make applying for jobs and services easier

public access

The always engrossing Kottke directs our attention to the untold story of Philadelphia television producer, social justice activist, librarian and prolific hoarder Marion Stokes (*1929 - †2012) whose obsession for preserving the present as it happened for future generations was transmuted into a secret personal campaign to record live news broadcasts and archive them, netting some seventy thousand VHS tapes spanning the years from 1979 to 2012.
The Iranian hostage crisis (previously here and here) which spawned the 24/7 news coverage cycle was Stokes’ initial impetus and she planned her professional and family life around the recording time of a long-play cassette, around six hours so she would be present to exchange tapes and keep the archives—having expanded into CNN and others—going. It was not merely a hobby or a way of taking work home, however, as Stokes knew that television stations were losing their independence and doing a horrendous job at conservation, even given the tools available to them. Her thirty-three years of continuous footage ended with her death that coincided with the taping of the massacre at Sandy Hook. Learn more about the documentary in development at the links up top and peruse the video archives here as well.

₿ i.c.o.

On this day in 2009, the first initial coin offering took place with commencement of the Bitcoin blockchain by the individual or group called Satoshi Nakamoto, creating fifty of the virtual units of account as fiat tender.
As far as sub-divisions go, one-thousandths of a Bitcoin is a millibitcoin and a hundred-millionth is a satoshi.  The peer-to-peer currency exchange (open for business ten days later) independent of central banks and intermediaries featured a public ledger that cryptographically records transactions, but its origins are somewhat murky with a good deal of speculation as to the identity of the inventor, which—antithetically—includes one Elon Musk.

chang'e

Via Slashdot, we learn that the Chinese space agency has successfully landed a probe, Chang’e 4, on the dark side of the Moon. Because of the impossibility to communicate directly with the lander, a relay satellite called Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) is orbiting the Moon and can exchange readings and instructions with mission control on each pass.
The landing site, the Von Kármán lunar crater, was a practical location as well as one with an important symbolic message, as the Hungarian-American astrophysicist and polymath Theodore von Kármán, its namesake, was the academic advisor of Hsue-Shen Tsien (*1911 – †2009), the rocket scientist and cyberneticist who founded the Chinese space programme. Though previously studied and charted, this hemisphere of the Moon that is tidally-locked and always faces away from the Earth has never been the subject on direct exploration and this achievement is in follow-up to the Chang’e 3 mission and its Jade Rabbit Rover (read more about Chinese lunar mythology and its connection with the space missions here)—paving the wave for permanent human colonisation by 2030.