Perennially indebted to our faithful chronicler, we are reminded that on this day in 1994, that US Surgeon General under Bill Clinton, VADM Dr. Minnie Joycelyn Elders, was forced to resign for expressing her views frankly on what at the time was considered taboo topics of discussion including drug legalisation, distributing contraception in public schools and most controversially introducing masturbation (on World AIDS Day) to sex-education curricula. Championing control of reproductive rights and decriminalisation of drug offences during her sixteen month tenure, Elders’ ideas for visionary for a stage in American cultural that pivoted particularly in the prudish direction, though rather than being about what’s discussed in polite company was never the issue but instead the societal norms and strictures put in place to uphold and perpetuate the patriarchy and class-structure.
Thursday 9 December 2021
Wednesday 8 December 2021
legacy software
catagories: ๐ฌ, networking and blogging
from the depths of wikipedia
Via Waxy, we very much enjoyed this interview with Wikimedian and influencer—kindred spelunker and caretaker—Annie Rauwerda who shares her adventures lured down strange rabbitholes, daisy-chains and cul-de-sacs across several platforms. Perhaps the lone social media mogul whose project the public can intuit, Rauwerda regales, entraps us with delightful and seductive trivia, like Dolbear’s Law for instance, which describes the relationship between ambient air temperature and the frequency of cricket chirping (the number of chirps in eight seconds plus five is pretty close to the thermometer-reading in Celsius).
catagories: ๐ก, networking and blogging, ⓦ
Tuesday 7 December 2021
6x6
temporal distortion: an xkcd comic that references every ambiguous birthday scenario
check out those gams: a pair of pageants with a narrower focus on beauty—via Nag on the Lake
menty-b: Macquarie Dictionary’s short-list for Word of the Year
qed: an overview of maths in film and television
hungry eyes: the canon of Western art as viewed through the lens of food
ngc
On the anniversary of the discovery of a pair of barred-spiral galaxies in 1785 by Anglo-German astronomer by William Herschel whilst observing the night sky in Leo Minor, Edwin Powell Hubble, namesake of the space telescope, first found evidence, using Cepheid variables-whose periodic pulsations can be used to measure cosmic distances-that the Universe extends far beyond our own Milky Way and that nebulae were far too distant and were in fact galaxies in their own right. Definitively demonstrating his proof the following year and though contrary to scientific consensus at the time that the Universe was our own galactic skies some researchers-Hubble included, harboured suspicions that the Cosmos was a much bigger place since the conjectures of Immanuel Kant in his 1755 treatise on the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens, positing that the Solar System is a smaller reflection of the fixed stars.
Monday 6 December 2021
schleicher's fable
Dying this day of tuberculosis in Jena in 1868, (*1821, Meiningen), linguist August Schleicher informs our contemporary views on the Indo-European (previously) family of languages and attempts to reconstruct a common ancestor. Previsioning or at least parallel with the development and advancement of Charles Darwin’s evolution of species, Schleicher's comparative study was grounded in the natural descent and competition and pass through life-cycles as any living being among world language and established a system of classification based on the taxonomy of botanical varieties, modelling a Stammbaumtheorie, a family tree showing trunk, branch and twig. Working backwards to a common ancestor, the hypothetical and at times conjectural—though malleable and subject to revision, Proto-Indo European (PIE), Schleichter illustrated his concept, vocabulary and its antecedents and what inference can be made about cultural norms and outlook through reconstruction with a brief fable:
Using modern spelling conventions, his [The] Sheep and [the] Horses (das Schaf und die Rosse) is rendered:
H₂รณu̯is h₁รฉแธฑu̯ลs-kสทe h₂รกu̯ei̯ h₁i̯osmรฉi̯ h₂u̯l̥h₁nรกh₂ nรฉ h₁รฉst, sรณ h₁รฉแธฑu̯oms derแธฑt. sรณ gสทr̥hโรบm u̯รณวตสฐom u̯eวตสฐed; sรณ mรฉวตh₂m̥ bสฐรณrom; sรณ dสฐวตสฐรฉmonm̥ h₂แนแธฑu bสฐered. h₂รณu̯is h₁รฉkสทoi̯bสฐi̯os u̯eu̯ked: “dสฐวตสฐรฉmonm̥ spรฉแธฑi̯oh₂ h₁รฉแธฑu̯oms-kสทe h₂รกวตeti, แธฑแธr moi̯ agสฐnutor”. h₁รฉแธฑu̯ลs tu u̯eu̯kond: “แธฑludสฐรญ, h₂ou̯ei̯! tรณd spรฉแธฑi̯omes, n̥smรฉi̯ agสฐnutรณr แธฑแธr: dสฐวตสฐรฉmล, pรณtis, sฤ h₂รกu̯i̯es h₂u̯l̥h₁nรกh₂ gสทสฐรฉrmom u̯รฉstrom u̯ept, h₂รกu̯ibสฐi̯os tu h₂u̯l̥h₁nรกh₂ nรฉ h₁esti”. tรณd แธฑeแธฑluu̯แนs h₂รณu̯is h₂aวตrรณm bสฐuged.
A sheep without wool saw two horses, one slowly draughting a heavily-laden wagon and the other quickly carrying a man rider. Addressing the horses, the sheep said, “My heart pains me, seeing man driving horses. In reply, the horses said, “Listen sheep, our hearts pain us when we witness man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself, leaving the sheep with no wool!” Having attended to the lesson, the sheep fled into the plains. A version of this allegory appears in the Alien prequel Prometheus in a short exchange between an android and the ship’s computer to prepare for first contact with the “engineers.”
Sunday 5 December 2021
the cat will eat you
Referred via our peripatetic friend Everlasting Blรถrt, we quite enjoyed the introductiong to the extensive portfolio of Matt Semke whose collections of sketches and animations (framing exhibitions entirely in the GIF medium, at the risk of posting too many successive ones myself, as a way to limn the format’s possibilities and limitations) evoke this element of the Kafkaesque with sort of a contemplatively resigned yet disarming nature to them and a style possibly referencing that of La Planรจte sauvage. Much more to explore at the links above.
hawkmen diiive!
With a spectacular soundtrack by Queen and with a cast that includes Timothy Dalton as Prince Barin, a Robin Hood like character who rules the woodland region called Arboria and subjects our titular hero to the “wood beast” ritual that’s a lot like the pain box in Dune, Brian Blessed as the above Prince Vultan of Sky City, Topol as Dr. Hans Zarkov, Mariangela Melato as General Kala, Max von Sydow as (problematically) the ruler of planet Mongo, Ming the Mercliless, the cinematic adaptation of the King Features Syndicate comic-strip, Flash Gordon (previously), premiered on this day in 1980 in US markets (a week later in the UK). The Earth beset with natural disasters, Gordon—a star quarterback for the football team the New York Jets is sidelined during a short airplane journey where he and travel agent Dale Arden encounter a scientist (Zarkov) who believes that the climatic catastrophes are being caused by a malevolent and extraterrestrial source and lures Arden and Gordon to help him on a mission to determine the source, ultimately confirming Emperor Ming’s involvement. The trio are soon captured and Ming orders Arden prepared for his harem, Zarkov’s useful knowledge extracted and reprogrammed and Gordon executed.