dedodedo

At the recommendation of Miss Cellania, we learn that there is much more to Hampsterdance than we had otherwise appreciated. With memes and virality, we’re all audience and authors both but the quirky little website that seeded internet culture and its norms of communication has a specific attribution. CBC Arts correspondent Leah Collins plums the midst of time and takes us back to 1998, to a world before social media when GeoCities and personal and prestige websites dominated and gives us an anecdotal and oral history of the project and its unexpected legacy.

hiobsbotschaft

Without much notice but definitely a slight, the Trump administration downgraded the diplomatic status of the European Union from member state to international organisation. The US State Department having failed to notify the EU of this change, the official reaction is still pending and only came to light inadvertently when the ambassador of the Washington mission did not make the cut for invited guests for the state funeral of George H W Bush. The supranational bloc was elevated back in September of 2016 after lengthy negotiations with the Obama administration.

acrostic or minibus appropriations

As the partial shutdown of the US government creeps into its third week, furloughed and exempted (working for delayed pay) staff at the National Weather Service’s Anchorage, Alaska bureau managed to embed a desperate plea in the forecast discussion.
One cannot expect to essentially close one quarter of the federal government without some nasty consequences down-stream and knock-on effects for departments that are open. Aside from rubbishing national parks, the workers and their families held kept in suspense, the air traffic controllers and screeners working without compensation (whoever thought we would be sharing a cup of kindness for the Transportation Security Administration), the research not being conducted and the tax statements not being processed (plus a litany of other thing not being done), there’s real dangers to public safety just being barely kept at bay by the dedication of a few.

this is not america

Via Boing Boing, comedian and musician (and frequent contributor to Quite Interesting) Bill Bailey gave an entertaining and informative presentation on the differences between major and minor keys and how the tonic tensions and resolutions affect the character of the tune being played. His rendition of the Star Spangled Banner (beginning at 2:02, previously) takes on a wholly different dynamic and indeed comes across a bit Russian.

waxing and waning

The design collective Whyixd has installed an ensemble of whirling LEDs to form a kinetic sculpture on the campus of National Chiao Tung University that illuminates the sky and delivers passers-by with a subjective experience of the lunar phases. Named like a bit of open-ended code, the project, “#define Moon_,” acknowledges that the perspective is unique for each viewer and something to take umbrage with, especially in light of the revival of the Space Race.

à la carte

Via Super Punch, we’ve found ourselves obsessing and delighting over this menu from an Italian restaurant whose selection of pizzas are named after the dates of significant events in the lives of the proprietor’s family. It’s a pretty endearing and make us wish we had a restaurant to commemorate special occasions. More to explore at Super Punch at the link above—a consummate connoisseur of premium tweets and other fine hypertext products.

atchison, topeka and santa fe

These portrayals of urban rail routes that are a distant memory as Underground strip maps (see also here and here) are a really striking aesthetic choice on the part of draughtsman Jake Berman that makes us at the same time pine for the amenities of the past and appreciate what we still have in Germany and the robust public transportation network that we have here. Do you have memories of a similar service in your town that is no longer there?  Check out more superannuated streetcar and train lines showcased on Atlas Obscura at the link up top.

iupac

Via Digg, the United Nations has declared 2019 to be the Year of the Periodic Table in recognition of the moment of insight that Dmitri Mendeleev had one hundred-fifty years ago in 1869 when he committed each of the sixty-nine then known distinct chemical elements on note cards and arranged them by properties in such a fashion as to predict, forecast the existence of yet unknown substances that would later fall neatly in place.
Not to discount the genius of the moment, the development of the familiar design was a lengthy process with many alternate proposals, visual cul-de-sacs (see also here, here and here) and effort that draws off the research and inspiration of many that came before and tried to communicate some essential quality about the building blocks of Nature. In addition to the symbolic chemistry that John Dalton proffered in 1803 to help limn his modern Atomic Theory, the Conversation takes a look at the other stages and versions—with some more radical deviations—that culminate with the iconic and instantly recognisable classroom model.