hail to the bus driver

Though the scope and scale of public celebrations looks to be limited (though just taking the bus, subway or tram is a good way of keeping this tradition), today—18 March—has been designated since 2009 as Transit Driver Appreciation Day.
This particular date was selected in deference to one of the last great contributions of author and engineer Blaise Pascal (previously) for the inaugural circuit coaches with a fare of five sou (Carrosses à Cinq Sols) launched in Paris on this day in 1662, against the express wishes of the king and parliament who didn’t want the rabble crowding their boulevards and impeding their passage through the city. The enterprise—the first public transport in modern times—was well received and the king relented and allowed the eight-occupant carriages to make their appointed rounds—the first line going from Porte Saint-Antoine to Rue Dauphine via Pont Neuf.

a higher plane of existence

Any time reason and enlightenment encroach upon superstition and mystery, especially in the late Victorian Era, there will be some notable movements in counter-reformation, as Public Domain Review explores, like in séance and mysticism and perniciously in opening up a new realm as the last refuge of miracles and the supernatural.
Sort of like how the indeterminacy and unknowability of quantum mechanics provides a hold-out for the magical (I’m guilty of this sort of thinking as well, from time to time) in those days, people looked towards the extra dimensionality outside of our perception and experienced—only briefly intersecting as for the denizens of Flatland (1884), not flat-Earthers but rather two-dimensional beings that could not imagine a realm of geometric solids, and these unexplainable encounters inspired maths lecturer William Anthony Granville to author a sort of Euclid’s Elements in 1922 that went about trying to axiomatically prove assertions in Christian text rather than the nature of polygons. Read Granville’s entire The Fourth Dimension and the Bible at the link up top and find out more about the precursor works that led up to it.

день святого патрика

The observance of the Feast of Saint Patrick of course spread with the Irish diaspora across the world and was probably readily adopted by surrounding host communities in part due to the fact that it was the one exceptional day during Lent when prohibitions on food and drink were relaxed—though that indulgence has been much abused. Parades and associated festivities have taken place in Russia since 1992 and nearly every year thereafter through the auspices of the Russian Celtic Society. In 2017, the Russian Orthodox Church even added Saint Patrick to their menologium—the liturgical calendar—along with thirteen other post-Schism ancient saints (enlighteners, converters) of Western countries, though the holiday is observed on 30 March [Old Style for 17 March].

wrong side of the tracks

We are finding ourselves quite a bit conflicted about the new development at Midtown Manhattan’s Hudson Yards in general as a gentrified, cordoned off play area for the well-heeled but are nonetheless impressed with the copper, multi-storeyed pavilion called the Vessel from the studios of Thomas Heatherwick (previously here and here)—whose criss-crossing stairwells and latticework of landings create quite an interesting viewing platform to survey the post-industrial neighbourhood and the tenants. It reminded us of the monumental eighth century stepwell of Chand Baori (nearly on the same scale but with an exterior outlook as well) in Rajasthan. Much more to explore at the links above.

co2-bilanz

Via Slashdot, we discover that a Leuven-based research team have managed to modify solar cells to decompose water into its component parts and produce hydrogen in situ.
The system harvests moisture from the air while generating photovoltaic power and the dual-application really reveals itself as complete, self-sustaining (if it can be scaled up) and self-sufficient as trials suggest that a small array of panels can procure enough power to light and heat a smallish living space without adding to the household’s carbon footprint. Demonstration projects are already underway in the UK and Belgium that keep homes warm using hydrogen instead of natural gas and can use the alternate fuel with existing pipes and infrastructure with relatively little retrofitting required. If the hydrogen does not need to be pumped in from outside, the process becomes even more efficient.

🏹🚣🤸🤽

The 2020 Tokyo Games pictogram family is in homage of that same venue’s 1964 designs to appeal to an increasingly international gathering of athletes and audiences as we’ve previously explored, and now Present /&/ Correct refers us to a document from the Centre of Olympic Studies that profiles all fourteen intervening sets (like this 1988 version for Seoul) and the artists who created them.