o snap!

First released on this day in 1990, the dance hit “[I’ve got] The Power” by Frankfurt-based creative collective Snap! quickly climbed the charts to reach highs of number two in Germany and the US and number one in the UK, Canada, Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Their third collaboration on a single, it was composed by Michael Münzing with Luca Anzilotti to showcase the vocal talents of rapper Turbo B and Penny Ford—with back-up from Jackie Harris.
First hearing the song I am confident that I did not know that the singers were German much less how my brain processed the enigmatic and dissonant (but I suppose also easily elided over) opening lyrics: “Американская фирма Transceptor Technologies приступила к производству компьютеров ‘Персонaльный спутник,’” meaning the American firm Transceptor Technologies has begun the production of the Personal Companion computer—referring to a company then recently founded in Ann Arbor Michigan that specialised in accessibility options for the visually impaired and distributed a voice-controlled console that downloaded editions of the USA Today newspaper and would read out selected articles. A strange segue but I suppose those sort of accommodations and interventions are in the spirit of enfranchisement and empowerment celebrated in the verses and bars to follow.

first-foot or hue and cry

From Things Magazine’s first link-roundup for the decade (be sure to pay him a call as well and dally for a bit) comes a handy web-application that allows one to explore the power of palettes with curated colours in context from Happy Hues. This dynamic tool explains terminology and the psychological consensus that colours have for visitors alone or in combination in terms of engendering or sustaining an emotional response when it comes to making informed design decisions.

city on a hill

Via Language Hat, we receive a news brief that probably will leave one reeling—especially if one is disposed to reflect on how chickens are dinosaurs at least on a daily basis—in that the ruined temple of the Acropolis of Athens we refer to the Parthenon, the House of the Virgins sacred to the city’s patroness Athena is most likely not the Parthenon at all and rather what the original denizens called the Hekatompedon (the hundred foot, circa thirty metre-long, temple—though the structure spanned forty-six metres).
An impressive structure to be sure but perhaps not the centrally-enshrined personification of some attributed obsession with one definition of purity as a virtue that Moderns are perhaps too quick to ascribe to the Ancients and moreover suggests that the “House of the Virgins” is better placed at the south porch of the Erectheoin and the practical purpose—as a polling place—that the structure fulfilled was not supplanted when it was rebuilt after its destruction a decade after their victory in Marathon in 480 BC by Persians returning home after the war. What is most striking for me in this revelation is that the cartographic legend for the Acropolis is only a couple centuries old and the topography is wholly reconstructed, despite populations living with the ruins continuously. Folk-etymologies and explanations arise of course, like dragons from dinosaur fossils or Germany’s Schewedenschanze—ringworks and ramparts of early medieval to sometimes pre-historic Celtic origin but colloquially named after trenches hastily dug during the Thirty Years’ War, granted, but hopefully local, native knowledge is allowed to inform academic decisions.

iata

Via Pasa Bon’s inaugural curated links of the decade, we enjoyed this visual registry of airport codes assigned by the International Air Transport Association, with an explanation of the three letter geo-locater especially helpful for when the decoding the directory designation isn’t always so straightforward.
The –X appended at the end of many aerodromes and a few feeder train stations is a marker for older stations that retained their original US National Weather Service name for consistency with the new naming conventions and many cities have retained their historic call-signs as a flag-of-convenience: SGN for Ho Chi Mihn City (formerly Saigon), TSE for Astana (formerly Tselinograd now named Nur-Sultan) or LED for Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) for example. The Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport serves three Switzerland, France and Germany and has the codes BSL, MLH and EAP.

mécanique celeste

Having so astounded the public at large and his peers within the scientific community with his spot-on prediction of not only the existence but location and general characteristics of the planet Neptune (it was proposed to make the planet’s symbol a monogram of the discoverer’s name rather than the trident ♆, prefiguring some of the controversy over the discovery of Pluto—♇—by Clyde Tombaugh to the consternation of wealthy patron Percival Lowell) using only mathematics and the observations of deviations of the orbit of Uranus counter to the laws of gravitational attraction as set forward by Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler, no one had any reason to doubt the proposition that famed astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph La Verrier (*1811 – †1877) put forward on this day in 1860, reporting that the perturbations in the procession of Mercury and Venus around the Sun (apsidal precession) required an explanation above and beyond classical Newtonian physics. Like with the Ptolemaic model of keeping up appearances, Le Verrier (with the consensus of the scientific community) logically invoked an intervening though purely hypothetical planet circling the Sun below Mercury—Vulcan (Vulcain, see previously here, here and here). In reality, Mercury’s strange observed behaviour needed not another celestial body to account for it but rather Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, formulated in 1915, vanquishing Vulcan by staking its reputation on predictions concerning occultation, planetary transit and the effect of gravitational lensing and finally confirmed in September 2015 with the detection of gravitational waves.

figrin d’an and the modal nodes

Via Boing Boing, we are introduced to the synthesizer reinterpretation of the score to Star Wars by the late, accomplished electronic music and soundtrack designer Osamu Shoji (*1932 – †2018) released in 1978 in Japan only. Though not even the only homage to John Williams’ orchestral opus in this particular genre that’s worth checking out, Shoji’s remaking of the themes and the leitmotifs are singularly spectacular, especially the directions he went with the Mos Eisley Cantina music.

time_t

At the stroke of midnight universal coordinated time 1970, the Unix epoch began. Counting the seconds from that point on and treating everyday as if it had eighty-six thousand four-hundred of them (discounting leap seconds makes the logging events slightly asynchronous with time as measured by atomic clocks but this discrepancy is factored in later in dating), the calendar convention does not have the y2k problem built into the programming from the beginning.
However, under the current conventions for designating a timestamp, Unix will experience its own on 19 January 2038, when the thirty-two-bit integers that seconds are stored in exceed capacity and reset to 13 December 1901. The future implications of this bug weren't appreciated until around 2006 when programmers (a notoriously lazy group) began to realise that their kludge, a temporary solution—a quick and dirty work-around, for computer operations to never time out (substituting forever for after a billion seconds, about thirty-two years) started to cause an overflow error when the tumblers roll over.

wir wünschen allen einen guten rutsch ins neue jahr!