genesis

Counted in the manifest in what aimed to be the first private space probe to land on the Moon among other cargo including a veritable Noah’s Ark the sum of human knowledge on a medium to last a billion year, Super Punch informs, the Beresheet mission was also carrying a sizable compliment of hardy tardigrade passengers.
When the craft crashed upon landing, it spilled out the water bears famously resilient for being able to withstand extreme and punishing environments, including the vacuum of space. While we cannot say whether this accident has transferred life to the Earth’s satellite, we learn that according to NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection this act of panspermia is not in violation of the agency’s directive meant to protect planetary environments like Mars, Europa or Ganymede that are understood to be more fecund and whose ecology might be threatened by contamination—as considered that humans have already quite befouled the lunar surface some fifty years ago.

ferrari veicoli speciali

Messy Nessy Chic directs our attention to the adorable off-road Ferves Ranger.  Introduced at the 1966 Salone dell‘Automobile di Torino, the four-wheeler (there was both a passenger and a cargo version) with an open chassis and Fiat motor notably had a left-hand drive and six hundred models were produced until the manufacturer ceased operations in 1970.

le vol

On this day in 1919, in order to redress what was perceived to be a slight during a parade on the Champs Élysées when flying aces were grounded and ordered to march on foot a month earlier, veteran and aviation instructor Charles Godefroy (*1888 - 1958) volunteered to pilot a Nieuport 27 biplane through the Arc de Triomphe.
Godefroy had his friend the reporter document the feat. Displeased with this surprise stunt that terrorised people on the streets and fearful of imitation that would put more in peril, however, authorities banned the publication of the footage—at least for the time being. Excused with a warning, Godefroy then retired from flying at his family’s insistence and ran a vineyard in a Parisian suburb.

invasive species

Via their excellences Nag on the Lake and TYWKIWDBI, we are reminded of how garbage we humans are and how noble our contrition can manifest itself through the adoption and caretaking of what’s labelled as endlings, the last of one’s kind—the sole remaining representative of a species reduced to this state not by honest brokers but by dint of the wantonness of our existence. Palliative perhaps but far from a lost cause, find out more about endlings and their unsurrendering custodians at the links above.

honorificabilitudinitatibus

Whilst the agglutinative nature of German might be more familiar with its very, very long compound words, for which there is grammatical no upwards limit though terms would become unwieldy and unintelligible eventually, Turkish also has this feature. This construction through affixes illustrated in the passage by author Koksal Karakus in addressing education reform:

We are in a teachers’ training academy that has nefarious purposes. The teachers trained here are indoctrinated on how to make unsuccessful ones from the pupils.  So—one by one—teachers are being educated as makers of unsuccessful ones. One of those teachers, however, refuses to be maker-of-unsuccessful-ones—or in other words, to be made a maker-of-unsuccessful-ones; he is critical of the academy’s stance on their performance. The rector who thinks every teacher can be made easily into a maker-of-unsuccessful-ones is quick to anger. The rector invites the teacher into his office and confronts him, “You are talking as if you were one of those we cannot easily be made into a maker-of-unsuccessful-ones, isn’t that right?” The final form is the seventy-letter:

muvaffakiyetleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine

Though not a case of agglutination like the Turkish example or the above medieval Latin ablative form for “being in a state capable of receiving honours” appearing in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, it nonetheless recalls the motto of Saint John’s College (pictured above), a sort of word play in Latin: I make free adults from children by means of books and balance.

alh84001

Coincidentally sharing the anniversary of the 2012 landing of the Curiosity rover at the Bradbury Landing Site in the Gale crater where the object is believed to have originated, on this day in 1996, NASA issued a press release endorsing the claims of a group of researchers that claimed to have found biogenic markers on a Martian meteorite recovered in the Allan Hills region of Antartica back during a 1984 expedition.  The classification of rocky compositions, shergottite, nahklite and chassignite, all sound vaguely Lovecraftian, the Ancient Ones buried at the South Pole.  Though the claim was sensational and controversial from the beginning, inconclusive with all the unusual microscopic features and traces eventually explained without having to invoke biological causes—further promping the scientific community to require claims of such magnitude to rely on than morphological evidence (eidonomy, external anatomy, being rather famously subject to pareidolia), the research and the media attention opened a dialogue and re-engaged the public imagination at a time before we knew of the proliferation of exoplanets and helped us develop the academic discipline to frame our aspirations for more exploration.

übermorgen or it’s jam every other day

A few of the world’s languages, including one Bantu, Mwoltlap of the Vanuatuans and the passé composé of classic French of the 1600s (J’ai vu quelque chose—I did see something but I talk like that anyway) have a specific tense called hodiernal—hodie or hodierno being Latin for today, with distinct ways of addressing events taking place in the past or future in respect to the day of record.
Events referenced that take place before or after the unit of the present day are categorised as pre- or post-hodiernal. Other Bantu languages have crastinal aspect for events that take place on the subsequent day (Latin crāstinō die is tomorrow) or post-crastinal for the day after tomorrow (Übermorgen). More rarely, only reported among speakers of the Plateau family of languages in Nigeria, there is also the hesternal (hesterno die, yesterday) for actions that transpired then.  These forms would I imagine make for some interesting and exacting conjugations in popular ballads: “Today is the greatest day that I’ve known,” “Yesterday came suddenly” or “Just thinking about Tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow.”