Saturday 6 June 2020
northwest quadrant
novarupta
Located in the present day Katmai National Park and Preserve covering the Kodiak archipelago, Kenai Peninsula and Bristol Bay of Alaska, the caldera and volcanic dome of ะะพะฒะฐััะฟัะฐ, Latin for “newly erupted” began forming on this day in 1912, expelling ash and lava over the next sixty hours in volumes that equalled thirty Mounts St. Helens.
The largest event of its kind under the twentieth century, it is only comparable with the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. One notable legacy to be found in the reserve originally established as a monument to protect the volcanic field is the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, hewn out by the pyroclastic flow of the eruption, which still colour the canyon to the present day, the feature having been named by a member of the National Geographic Society, Robert F. Griggs—a botanist by training, who came to study the aftermath of the volcano in 1916.
wonkavator
Though still under construction, the spectacular “horizontal skyscraper” of Chonqing’s Raffles City project in the central Yuzhong district is welcoming visitors—like its namesake development in Singapore, called in honour of Sir Stamford Raffles (*1781 – †1826), Lieutenant-Governor of the East India Company and founder of the modern city state and British Malay.
The skybridge, the Crystal, is three hundred metres long and is supported by four towers at a height of a quarter of a kilometre and features a park, a history and industrial museum of the city, and an observation platform with future plans for a lounge, restaurants, bars and an infinity pool. Within the glass and steel columns, there are spaces allotted for offices, hotels, shopping centres as well as fourteen hundred residential units.
catagories: ๐จ๐ณ, architecture
Friday 5 June 2020
someday i’ll have a disappearing hairline, someday i’ll wear pajamas in the daytime
Released this month in 1994, Crash Test Dummies’ “Afternoons and Coffeespoons,” the third single from the album God Shuffled His Feet (the cover art is Titian’s 1523 Bacchus and Ariadne with band members faces on the figures) considered to be the most popular song according to the alternative rock band’s fanbase and was among the highest charting in their repetoire references the 1915 T. S. Eliot verse “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. This interior monologue of reflection and lament on estrangement, isolation and disillusioning realisation of morality resounding in both works takes on an especially resonant meaning in the latter musical tribute in these times.
Maybe if I could do a play-by-playback
I could change the test results that
I will get back
I’ve watched the summer evenings pass by
I’ve heard the rattle in my bronchi…
cool britainnia
7x7
ppe: for the cost of one kit of battle rattle riot gear, one could fully outfit over fifty care staff
world leaders have floated the use of sanctions on officials close to president trump to help protect america’s ethnic minorities: applying the tone of reporting on foreign wars and civil unrest to the US
by-line: questioning the wisdom of New York Times’ editorial policy, via Super Punch
history will be kind to these painstaking recreations of these corrupt criminals responsible for the end of democracy: 2020 Battle for the White House commemorative chess set
harlem renaissance: the US Post Office issues stamps celebrating four important literary figures
history will judge the complicit: Fresh Air’s Dave Davies interviews historian and Atlantic correspondent Anne Applebaum on imperiled democracy
white collar jobs: Facebook will destroy society
by-line or fait accompleat
Via Cory Doctrow’s Pluralistic, we are introduced to the Giant Language Model Test Room created to detect machine learning forgeries, hybrid news items autogenerated and highlights the certain slant, intentional or capitalised upon or not, of predictive text by colour coding the output, the copy of an article based on its own protocols, as an obstacle to targeted content to match targeted advertising—which seriously threaten to undermine education and discourse and reveals what’s written by reporters and what’s writes by machines.
Thursday 4 June 2020
¤
We’re directed to an interesting survey that examines the colour of money globally of currently circulating currency, banknotes and isolates the Pantone hues that inform them, further identifying trends, occupations and professionals depicted, etc. The colour chart is an exhaustive, identifying the reference colour—for example—of the Icelandic kroner as Turquenite, Arubian florins as Pink Gecko or the Bhuanese ngultrum as Sundress. The title symbol is the generic currency sign, used to represent any or all denominations and originally employed when one keyboard didn’t have all the speciality typographical characters of another, proposed and championed as an alternative to the $.