synchronoptica
one year ago: a US supreme court justice flies provocative flags (with synchronoptica), a WWII battle for an Aleutian island, the anatomy of a limerick plus Trump found guilty of falsifying business records
seven years ago: all about Ostheim
nine year ago: a wearable, in-ear translator plus giving Tumblr a try
ten years ago: Swiss cheese goes blind plus Alf’s hip-hop album
eleven years ago: mourning a ruined laptop, semi-conducting cement plus getting ready to travel to Lake Como
synchronoptica
one year ago: laundry lessons from Japan (with synchronoptica), assorted links worth the revisit plus a post-war postscript from Thomas Mann
seven years ago: Native Americans granted citizenship
ten years ago: the founding of Leipzig, more links to enjoy plus acceptable facial hair for Norwegian sailors
twelve years ago: furloughing federal workers
thirteen years ago: Germans and joy plus counterfeit wine
Having known just a little about the development and integration of closed-captioning technology, we really appreciated this fascinating deep dive from Radio Lab into its history and struggle for equal access that followed, with accommodation, advances in hardware and software, representation and mandates all intertwined and informing one another, concluding with a reflection on how the process is being automated with artificial intelligence and how in training the machine, we ourselves are transformed through the collaboration. Of course the story didn’t end with triumph of accessibility through the above first demonstration, as the advances for the hearing impaired community were not widely accessible: most programming was not captioned and for those that were an expensive decoder was required as a television peripheral. The situation gradually improved and after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, TV sets were required to include closed captioning technology and all broadcasts were mandated to include subtitles. 
A workforce of thirty thousand transcriptionists were at work to capture all stations’ content and in order to reach all of the growing market with the rise of cable programming, institutions providing the service turn to emerging voice recognition systems. These early versions were too bug-prone to be useful, especially for realtime applications and failed to keep pace with live dialogue, seizing up at the slightest accent. Researchers, however, discovered that they were more responsive and accurate with the voices of the trial participants, and soon one devised helping the computer by reading back the words in a steady, well-enunciated manner that it could manage. A team of voice writers across the States repeated scripted shows and news reports as they were aired and achieved a pretty good level of fidelity by 2003. Even with only their master’s voice, the programme still had its shortcomings and the voice writers developed a code of substitute words to clear up homophones and short prepositions, for example: echoing, “She has tootoo daughters inly college comma tootaloo period” would yield the yield the desired text, “She has two daughters in college, too.” Two decades on, the software has advanced to the point where it can transcribe instantly without the help of an interpreter and is improving with AI refinements.
Traditionally made for bottling Chianti, the style of glass vessel from Tuscany with a rounded body and wrapped tightly in a straw basket—designed for ease of transport (see also), cushioning the wine and stackable with inverted bottles fitted into a row of upright ones—over the centuries became subject to various regulations to discourage counterfeiting and filling used bottles with new wine by fiascaio (fiasco-makers) resulting in substandard containers, hence bare from the shoulders up to show the vintner’s label and seal. 
The etymology in English usage for failure or scandal was perhaps transferred via the French faire fiasco from Italian theatre jargon for botching a scene—to “make a bottle—a glassmaker humiliated when an intended more elegant piece didn’t come together and they settled with the simpler but utilitarian form. The sense could also come from card play in which the loser having to buy the next round of drinks. Fiaschi are mainly nowadays for decorative purposes or souvenirs, the Bordeaux-style of bottle (bordolese—see previously) becoming more popular with automation and easier to manufacture.
synchronoptica
one year ago: an epic murder-mystery puzzle book (with synchronoptic) plus US women allowed to wear pants in public
seven years ago: more customary units plus the EU bans plastic drinking straws
ten years ago: the US special envoy to Britain during WWII
thirteen years ago: American propaganda turns inward
fourteen years ago: extraterrestrial prospecting
Realising I had taken for granted knowing what the unit of measurement was, or what exactly it was gauging, we appreciated this introduction and overview of the decibel—via Quantum of Sollazzo. Sort of like the distinction between mass and weight, sound intensity is measured in terms of pressures in pascals as the deviation from the ambient caused by an acoustic wave through a given medium, and the decibel as a way of expressing the ratio between two values logarithmically—with the silent partner being the threshold of human hearing. 
Originally stemming from a technique to measure and compare signal loss over telegraph lines and later telephone circuits, first expressed as loss per miles of standard cable, the new definition developed by Bell Labs was received favourably by operators and long-distance providers, named in honour of the communications pioneer Alexander Graham Bell. Still used chiefly to calibrate signal strength and fidelity as power passes through different exchanges across a network (mathematically, it is easier to process and account for the changes in transmission media and resistance by their additive properties rather than cumulatively by logarithms, which is incidentally the reason why older hardware and appliances last longer being over-engineered by dint of material and electrical tolerances calculated with a slide-rule and rounding up adding up to machines built to a more robust standard than for their planned lifecycle. Because humans perceive an increase in loudness exponentially rather than linearly (per studies in psychophysics known the Weber-Fechner laws that demonstrate gradual increases are likely to go unnoticed by the senses, the contrasted stimuli also seen to carry an effect in registering numbers and statics, in placebos—titration of all types through interoception and voting), the dB scale became a useful measure, as with the Richter scale for earthquakes and the Fujita scale for tornados, for when a in situ judgment might fail.
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronoptica) plus the discovery of Troy
seven years ago: mythemes, a global weather service, the GDPR goes into effect, drowning does not always look like drowning, the founding of St Petersburg, ancient and modern trade routes plus a walk along the former inter-German border
nine years ago: the classified section, petty commodification, French-Canadien curses plus pizza as alimony
ten years ago: more links to enjoy, a supernatural dating society, the upcoming G-7 plus a new city in Mongolia
Echoing today’s previous posting, we very much enjoyed making the acquaintance of an omnipresence and prolific graphic design artist and illustrator called Takashi Mifune—whose work, anonymous for its ubiquity and described as unpinning “social infrastructure,” has influenced Japan’s public aesthetic and visual vernacular. Though not unique in offering clip-art, the website maintained by Mifune Irasutoya (ใใใใจใ, illustration shop) makes his cast of iconic characters and symbols freely available to for personal and commercial applications, with the large range covering every conceivable situation and occupation—from the everyday to the niche—and consistency of style (see previously) has garnered the artist’s momentum and reputation as the standard for signage. 
Featuring highly specialised jobs, current events, cultural neologisms, maladies, warnings, restrictions and artefacts with far more briskness and particularity than other catalogues of stock images, inspiring contests to recreate works of art with Mifune’s drawings, subject matter easily summoned up from the commonplace to centrifuges, Prototaxites (an extinct plant life-form between fungi and trees), traditional dress of La Sape subculture, wisdom teeth, both bipedal and quadrupedal versions of chupacabras and the Antikythera mechanism. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link up top.
Despite being last updated in 2012, the announcement from Japanese wireless carrier Docomo (a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) that it is officially discontinuing support for its emoji set marks the end of an era that spanned decades and played a foundational role in emoji communication and native texting environments. 
Beginning in 1995 with the simple inclusion of a ❤︎ icon that could be displayed on pagers (see previously)—and the user outcry when the option was quietly removed in a subsequent update demonstrated to the concern public interest not only in symbolic shorthand but also a way to accent missives when not communicating face-to-face, the reaction informing the glyph collection to come. In 1999, Docomo introduced a set of one hundred seventy-six character syllabary of supplemental monochrome, twelve-by-twelve pixel icons designed by Shigetaka Kurita (ๆ ็ฐ ็ฉฃๅด), which inspired by universal street signage, pictograms and the mood and emotional cues employed for manga protagonists called manpu (ๆผซ็ฌฆ, a bead of sweat to signal accomplishment or apprehension), created the base lexicon and grammar that Unicode adopted later. Although limited to the network, the emoji set, growing colourised and more articulated, saw its legacy enlivened by platforms with greater interoperability and customisation and is honoured as a linguistic fossil and the emoji equivalent of Latin.
synchronoptica
one year ago: more adventures in the Thรผringer Forest (with synchronoptica) plus a notable Shiba Inu passes away
seven years ago: between distraction and anxiety, Dune product tie-ins plus digitising the Munch Museum
eight years ago: Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Trump calls NATO partners deadbeats plus preparing for a short sabbatical
nine years ago: shooting stars on demand, Wundarr the Aquarian plus rabbits doing violence in medieval manuscripts
ten years ago: a visit to the Neckar valley plus assorted links to revisit
