course and wythe

One of the more viable indigenous, constructed scripts (see also here and here), the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets profiles the Mandombe system of writing, revealed to its author by a venerated Congolese religious leader in a dream, recognising the sacred serpentine turns along the familiar backdrop of a brick wall.
Inspired, glyphs were developed whose pronunciation and inflection was determined on direction and orientation and is suited for the national languages of the country, with more efforts underway to transcribe neighbouring languages into Mandombe, and is taught in parochial schools affiliated with the church that conceived it in the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola as well as in France and Belgium.

shortlisted

We enjoyed pouring over this gallery of photographs curated by Plain Magazine that have been nominated to contend for high honours in the annual Sony World Photography Awards (previously) and we were especially intrigued by the symmetry of the scene captured by Eng Chung Tong of an extraction operation in Malaysia entitled Synergy of Humanity. We were also very pleased to see the ethereal submerged choreography of Christy Lee Rogers had made the cut as well for this twelfth iteration of the competition. More to explore at the links above.

alley oop

Though not the first or most famous of its class, learning that the mildly mysterious Coso Artefact was discovered on this date in 1961 by some rock-hounds in California’s Owens Valley did impel us into the strange and contentious realm of out-of-place archaeology. While prospecting for geodes, the group found a spark plug from the 1920s encased in a rock that was estimated to be a half-a-million years old.
Though geological processes could account for the concretion and nodule formation around the clear anachronism, proponents of time-travel, prehistoric alien visitation and lost civilisations of course carried the day—as they do for other anomalous found objects, deemed in the wrong chronological context, that are categorised as OOPArt (Out-of-Place Artefacts). While not all are haunted with the blight of pseudoscience and sometimes there is a honest misinterpretation, wishful-thinking or confirmation-bias over a pet theory, most claims are dubious and tend to be a demerit to human ingenuity and accomplishment, like the Nebra Skydisk or the Antikythera mechanism being the artifice of extra-terrestrials or even gods, pareidolia due to suboptimal inputs and of course outright forgeries and hoaxes meant to embarrass or strengthen an agenda or alternate point-of-view.

itineraria

Maps Mania directs us to a clever application that helps one create custom, emblematic metropolitan street map posters as a scalable vector format (SVG)—which admittedly has a level of flexibility and versatility in programming and dynamic displays that I did not appreciate until this introductory tutorial.
Admittedly too it’s a bit out of my league as well but the coding is not a necessity to play around with the tool and appreciate the patterns of traffic management and civil engineering, especially where it intersects with olden and ancient places. I encircled the Altstadt of Wiesbaden, around the Rathaus and Stadtschloss that houses the state parliament. Give Maptime a try and show us what you create as an icon of your city.

digital first

In a move similar to the investor malfeasance behind the ultimate demise of Sears and many high street anchor stores—rather than the narrative we’ve been sold about the pivot to online retail, an aggressive real estate operation is behind at least some of the rampant dissolution of the press and local media outlets.
The predatory firm is picking off already distressed newsrooms and redeveloping their property footprint—scaling back staff and encouraging tele-work (wrecking cohesion) in order to free up office space, either converted and sold on or retrofitted as a co-working venue. The title (not the same as the management group) refers to the idea in communication theory that breaking news should be channelled through new media (social platforms that direct to a web presence) rather than traditional formats—for the sake of expediency, though polish and rigour are often sacrificed in the process to have a scoop.