11x11 (13. 790)

hospoda: Czech tavern etiquette and drinking culture  

70up: following the death of Michael Apted, the cast of longest running documentary series is bowing out after the next and final instalment  

god’s own hand: the role of animacy in English genitive formation, X’s Y vs the Y of X  

area marker balls: those giant fishing bobs on power lines  

hexagonal close-packed: researchers form high pressure, high temperature ice, suspected to be present in the core of Uranus and Neptune 

dermatoglyphics: palm-reading and traditional medicine have always had a common intersection 

tacuini ægritudinum: the journey of a mysterious medical manuscript, supposedly from the legendary island of Hy-Brasil, from Baghdad to Ireland—via Strange Company  

short imaged monologues: Anthropic’s Claude responds to call to slow down AI research to prevent us from being wiped out by a paperclip maximiser—more here   

i pledge to the greatest president in the history of the united states that loves us so much he cant’t even breath: Trump urges crowd at the Republican Midterm convention to cheat like hell    

and although death is represented in the form of a human skeleton, yet this is only an emblem for death is not a being but a state: early modern flap books aimed at young readers with a special format for transformations   

between the sheets: a 1930s recipe for a cognac sour sees a resurgence in popularity

synchronoptica

one year ago: animated vignettes from Plantopia (with synchronoptica), assorted links worth revisiting plus a banger from Hozier

two years ago: more links to enjoy, nights on Earth, the Ig Nobel prize, prayers vs spells plus Cloud Appreciation Day 

three years ago: Putin and Kim meet 

four years ago: the Poet Laureate’s tribute to the Queen, the Beatles’ Apple Electronics venture plus even more links worth the revisit

five years ago: your daily demon: Marchosias, more links to enjoy, the first teenage all music and dance show plus the release of Super Mario Brothers (1985)

six years ago: dissecting the original COVID hotspot, more on radio alphabets, The Stand, the stately manor that inspired Wuthering Heights plus St Venerius

day one hundred ninety (13. 789)

As deadly Russian strikes hit all corners of Ukraine, Zelenskyy offers to meet with Putin at the upcoming G20 conference to be held in Miami. Moscow disinters the remains of a fourteenth century sainted warrior prince Dmitry Donskoi, who expelled Mongol-Tartar forces from western Russian, and distributes the relics to all corners of the country to boost the war effort. Iraq seizes an Iranian drone launching platform used to disable the Saudi East-West pipeline. The US navy attacks an Iranian commercial vessel near Qeshm Island, killing one crew member. Yemeni government forces exchange fire with the Houthi in attempt to wrest back control of the Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint in the Red Sea, the rebels having taken the strategically important island of Perim. A parliamentary spokesperson says that the Islamic Republic will withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and revise the doctrine for its programme accordingly. Tehran and Muscat reach agreement on reopening the Strait of Hormuz but there will be no action taken until the US proves that it will comply with the terms of the MOU. Visiting the taoiseach, Trump advocates for a united Ireland.  The IDF continues to shell southern Lebanon. A documentary on Israel’s use if artificial intelligence to target Palestinians in Gaza receives a twenty-five minute long at its debut at the Venice Film Festival. Anthropic restricts Iran’s use of Claude under the aegis of Operation Economic Outcast, saying it used the chatbot to spread propaganda and spy on dissidents.

a tale of a tub (13. 788)

Taken by academics as an over the top invictum against academia itself and an attack on the Royal Society and Enlightenment science of Newton and an afford to decency—even more so than “A Modest Proposal”—Jonathan Swift’s 1726 visit of Lemuel Gulliver to the levitating island of Laputa and its earth-bound territories speak to our current embrace of artificial intelligence as a short-cut and a short-circuit of critical thinking in the classroom and beyond. Resonant across three-centuries, our traveller’s audience with the regent and court magisters find him on a flying landmass (like contemporary tech utopias like the abandoned project NEOM), though with a limited range of six league (thirty kilometres) due to the specific geological properties, rare Earth elements, needed to support them aloft. Philosophers were so preoccupied with speculative thought that they needed prodding by dedicated retainers to get them to listen to anyone or social engage in any form. Most scientific advances remained in the realm of the abstract and theoretical, failing to work in practise, like extracting sunlight from cucumbers, but one device does, despite enormous effort and inefficiencies does work, a very labour-intensive wooden contraption that allows even the most ignorant and ungifted persons to participate in poetry, politics, mathematics and theology without study—neither reading nor writing—the gears of word calculator rotated by forty men into position, forming words and sentence fragments to be assembled by scribes, predicting the underclass supporting the energy-guzzling, autocomplete nature of ChatGPT. Laputa is an expansion of Swift’s earliest prose parody of the title, the allegory generally understood to be an attack on internecine Christianity but chiefly a lament on what passed for scholarship, rote memorisation and for those who embraced this new learning without caution or criticism. It is fitting that after departing this innovation-hub, Gulliver travels to his final destination to the equine society of the Houyhnhnms and their human work-horses, mute and brute, weeks spent in the company of the masters, trying to learn their language and copy their gait in order to avoid remaining just another yahoo in their eyes.

hardfork (13. 787)

Having encountered multiple instances of esoteric programming languages beforehand, we were pleased to add another one to our toolbox in the literally object-oriented coding of efghij—everyday food, garden and home item jenga.  Arranging a still-life out of a set of ordinary, with the fork as a variable, the glasses, clothes peg and condiments expressing specific functions and conditional constructs, the pictured conditions yields the output “Hello world!” (see above) as a pillow-case bearing that message. The title refers to a change in command protocol that is not backwards compatible, splitting the network into separate versions, one path following the new rules and the other the old rules. More regarding syntax, ease of use from Futility Closet at the link above.

white house arcade (13. 786)

The already doltishly defaced White House web site, we can only hope the content is one day jettisoned into the Sun—and perhaps the whole presidential palace raised to the ground and begin anew, inshallah, though increasingly it looks like America may never recover from this grift and mean hatefulness—has, we learn through the litigious threats of the Tetris Company against the Trump administration for copyright infringement, wanting no association with the “Build the Wall” knock-off and successfully managed to get the game taken down, a bit of the Streisand Effect but drawing attention to the particularly pathetic and embarrassing, added a suite of video game clones, slapdash AI-generated, propagandised versions that are guaranteed to be unplayable with poorly designed mechanics that just pander to the xenophobia of the MAGA base.  Though the now gone Tetris mini-game (replaced with a place-holder) was probably the most offensive one—and dumb as the point of play is to remove blocks and not construct a barrier to repeal a zombie invasion at the border and the wall stacks up quickly, likely not in court to be ruled a violation of intellectual property due to its rules of play—there’s cheap points too for a Flappy Birds imitation of a bald eagle navigating a bill through Washington, a Snake-like game called Rio Run with border patrol agents blocking immigrants (OK, this is as bad as the Tetris takedown), a Roller Coaster Tycoon counterfeit with the goal of funding one’s children’s Trump Savings Accounts, gamified but without any educational content to help parents make informed investment decisions and lastly appealing to the MAHA wing, a Burger Chef knockoff to sort school lunches and Make America Healthy Again.

les trente-six vues de la tour eiffel (13. 785)

Best known for his picture series of the Eifel Tower (see previously), with the seasons changing, we appreciated this gallery of Henri Rivière’s lithographic works spanning the first decade of the twentieth century, capturing other quarters of Paris. Somewhat of a departure from the earlier project that was a faithful interpolation of Japonisme and Japanese printmakers in terms of layout and presentation, these vignettes still maintain the traditional minimal palette and outlines and previews the coming ligne claire style adopted by European comic artists like Hergé. Rivière also painted scenes of Breton and a study in waves, like his inspiration, Hokusai.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a customisable chyron roll (with synchronoptica), more synthetic geology plus AI as a calculator for words

two years ago: a nineteenth century puppet theatre, New York’s Chelsea Hotel, branding wild horses plus Haile Selassie deposed (1974) 

three years ago: The Blob (1958) 

four years ago: the Chaos Computer Club (1981), medieval dog names plus the beach photos of Philip Barlow

five years ago: the Battle of Marathon, a sudden revelation plus more nearby abandoned places

six years ago: doom loops, traffic planning and civil engineering, Lascaux Cave rediscovered (1940), flights to nowhere plus the invention of the written word

seven years ago: Bonanza (1959) plus the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany (1990)

 

day one hundred eighty-nine (13. 784)

Russian army returns to bases in Syria, contradicting claims that facilities at the port of Tartus would be transferred to Damascus. Houthis seize Red Sea coast as the Saudi East-West oil pipeline shuts down following an Iranian drone attack, pushing oil to a four-month high. A quarter of a century after the attacks that shook the world, Americans reflect on 9/11, including retrospective reevaluations of mistakes that were made in the immediate aftermath. The Clintons, the Bushes, the Obamas and the Bidens attended a remembrance ceremony in Lower Manhattan, flanked by current and former New York City mayors, while Trump—told he would not be allowed to make a political speech, was in attendance at a ceremony at the Pentagon, sleeping through most of it, only to wake up in time to make his push for the justification of his war of choice with the Israelis in Iran, backed up by Hegseth, who frames both today’s fight and the fight from twenty-five years ago as a continuum, “The struggle against evil continued and it continues now. It will continue until Judgment Day. Our only answer here on Earth is eternal vigilance.” Forever wars carry a dark legacy—with the US president having recently weaponised the Department of Homeland Security, created directly to prevent future attacks, to embark on a weeks’ long campaign to purge voters from rolls as part of a broader plan for intimidation and disenfranchisement ahead of the upcoming elections, which might be suspended anyway over some manufactured crisis, and the blood and treasure of a generation squandered, unaccountable trillions wasted in pursuit of a few terrorist, toppling regimes, fighting the resultant insurgencies to make the world a more dangerous place, the nation ceding its industrial, technological, diplomatic and economic edge in the process, particularly now with allies alienated by unending hostilities, which would have been better spent on education, outreach and universal healthcare, reversing climate change at a crucial juncture—opportunities lost to pandering to insecurity and illusionary exceptionalism.

i keep running and i don’t touch ground (13. 783)

Back in 2020, Matthew Wilder’s 1983 synth-pop breakout hit saw a resurgence when it became the subject of a brief viral trend on TikTok, which involved texting the lyrics line-by-line to friends until they recognise the song or disengage, then filming oneself dancing in front of the message chain, the inherent ridiculous of it—fresh at the time, often pranks or cheating lovers meeting their comeuppance—delighting the artist for the moment of rediscovery, though covered several times in the interim with a number of interpolations of the melody, and prompting Wilder to release a lyric video in the form of the exchange. Signed to Arista Records, Wilder was struggling to find his voice and a style of music that fit him, he self-financed the recording of “Break My Stride” as a rebuke to recording industry executives, whom Wilder felt were blocking his creativity with the song reflecting how he felt about his career at the time. The label, seeing little potential in Wilder, ended his contract, freeing him to shop around his repertoire and made a connection with iconic record promoter, responsible for shaping the careers of the likes of Elton John, Teena Marie, Murray Head, Lionel Richie, Neil Diamond, Paula Abdul, Wham!, Kim Carnes and many others, and reputed soldato of the Gambino crime family, accused of widespread racketeering and payola (the illegal practise of concealing pay-for-play deals with radio stations and now extended to streaming services but much harder to enforce) of Joe Isgro, who helped propel the single to the top of the charts by creating the illusion that it was a sleeper hit. 🏃🏽‍♀️💨