week-by-week (10. 350)

Contributing correspondent and consultant Tom Whitwell, in an annual tradition has posted a collection of interesting facts he has gleaned over the past twelve months, highlighting one intriguing idea per week. The entire list is well worth your while to peruse. We've previously encountered item twenty—if you want a question answered on the internet, then post a wrong answer—in the form of Cunningham’s Law and the penultimate Swiss cheese cartel behind fondue but most were wholly new to us. We especially liked the advice on using conversational doorknobs to afford both parties to digress and confess, the fanciful Russian history articles on Chinese Wikipedia that went unnoticed for a decade (see also), inscrutable AIs—one accurately differentiating male from female eyes but none can figure out how—and the proposal for heavenbanning: instead of deplatforming an individual, replace their followers with artificial sycophants, ditto head bots and cutting off that bad actor from human interaction. Which one is your favourite?

dwa (10. 349)

Organised by VisualAIDS in New York City in 1988 and first observed the following year, Day Without Art (corresponding with World Aids Day), now a global event observed by art institutions, is a day of action and mourning for those who have died of the disease. Museums close their doors and send staff to volunteer at AIDS services centres or sponsor special exhibitions that confront the visitor with the chilling prospect for a future without art or artists, one of the most arresting displays hosted in 1991 by the Museum of Modern Art that featured a gallery of empty frames and pedestal.

oh-noetry (10. 348)

Ars Technica refers us to a sandbox experiment from Open AI for beta testing for the public that makes available its latest large language models that are better at understanding complex instructions and is capable of generating rhyming lyrics and verse.

There is an interesting aside to deflate the novelty despite the acknowledged breakthrough with a reference to the Eureka machine, demonstrated in 1845 by inventor John Clark that churned out Latin hexameter in the style of Virgil and Ovid. Give it a try and do share your results. 

Paratum, Roqueforte caseus
Mihi pretiosum esse videtur
Pinguem, sapidum, mollibusque
Mihi sapor est optimus!

8x8 (10. 347)

da ba dee: a bardcore version of Eiffel 65’s ‘Blue’  

palace intrigue: a cracked encoded missive sent by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to his French ambassador—via Language Log  

correctional facility: unearthed cache of photographs of San Quentin prison taken by inmates—via tmn  

circumnavigation: a recreation to explore Ferdinand Magellan’s trip around the world—via Pasa Bon!  

antidisestablishmentarianism: the UK is demographically no longer a majority Christian country 

still-life: a study of meta-trolling—see also  

eadburg: eight century individual scribbles in a medieval manuscript  

boards of canada: psychedelic ‘Aquarius’ remixed with Deforum Stable Diffusion

dei delitti e delle pene (10. 346)

Though preceded by periods of temporary abolishment in Japan, China and the Kievan Rus’, the first modern and permanent ban on the capital punishment was enacted on this day in 1769 by Pietro Leopoldo, ruler of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (later Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II), directly influenced by the writing of Enlightenment author Cesare Beccaria in his 1764 Of Crimes and Punishment (antiporta, frontispiece, frontespizio pictured)—widely translated and well read all over Europe—the first study of the discipline of penology and championing reform of the criminal law system. The Florentine state did away with torture and the death penalty and this anniversary is commemorated annual as “Cities for Life Day” with thousands of towns and dozens of capitals lobbying for stays in executions and restructuring incarceration.

up, up to the sky (10. 345)

Sharing the anniversary with many other sundry events of pith and circumstance, our faithful chronicler reports that on this day in 1975, the single from Silver Convention hit number one on on the Billboard Hot 100, holding the spot for three weeks before being unseated by CW McCall’s Convoy. Despite the paucity of lyrics (six words, which is an accomplishment in itself) owing to the fact that the German disco group didn’t speak so much English, it’s acknowledged to be the first avian themed song to reach the top of the charts, only followed by Prince’s When Dove Cry in 1984.

7x7 (10. 344)

canopic jars: a mummy called Pachery is the only individual found so far with his internal organs intact—via Messy Nessy Chic    

hardbottom communities: researchers work to preserve Florida’s coral reef    

nightfall: researchers discover two new minerals sourced from a meteorite strike in Somalia    

thirteenth studio album: imaging a fantasy concept record after 1970’s Let It Be for the Beatles    

kraft dinner: a Florida woman is suing Macaroni & Cheese over misleading preparation time    

crown of thorns: some Australian politicians take issue with the ‘endangered’ status for the Great Barrier Reef—see previously    

khufu: an interactive virtual tour of the Pyramids of Giza—via Maps Mania

quantum superimposition (10. 343)

Devised by Erwin Schrödinger with interlocutor Albert Einstein as a thought experiment and refined and published on this day in 1935 in the monthly journal Naturwissenschaften (The Science of Nature), a hypothetical feline is suspended between life and death—both simultaneously—its fate linked to a random and subatomic change that may or may not happen. Motivated to point out the counterintuitive and paradoxical nature of the prevailing theory, called the Copenhagen Interpretation that holds that a quantum system (an atom or a photon that can act both like a particle or like a wave) remains in a state of being added together until it interacts with or is observed by the external world. Although intended as a rebuke of the current understanding of quantum mechanics, others have extended this idea of alive-dead cat as a manifestation of the effects of vanishingly small changes on a macroscopic Cosmos and construe from it the Many-Worlds (alternate realities) interpretation application of the branch of physics. It is a matter of fundamental debate whether measurement or observation causes such a juncture to collapse into one state or another or both continue to exist but are decoherent from each other, splitting into separate universes. A “cat state” has been produced in the laboratory for short periods on collections of electrons and ions as well as in quantum computing.