baccanalia (13. 916)

After centuries of study and several attempts to understand and recreate the colour-changing effect, a team from the University of Sheffield—an area instrumental to the Industrial Revolution, many technologies emerging from there including large scale stainless steel and commercial glass manufacture—have rediscovered the sixteen hundred year old methods that went into dichromatic the Lycurgus Cup (see previously here and here). The caged-chalice (diatretum) was made in Alexandria in the fourth-century of unknown provenance before the 1800s depicts a scene of the mythological Thracian king Lycurgus (Tamer of Wolves) who banned the cult of Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans) in his home territory and punished the followers of the god of wine, and in the iconography on the cup, Ambrosia, Dionysus’ human nursemaid, is shown acting in self-defence, transformed into a powerful vine as she is being pursued by the enraged despot, whereupon entangling him, rending his wardrobe (a act called sparagmos (σπαραγμός) and strangling him to death. Embedded flakes of silver and gold (molten nano-crystals forming a lattice work in the glass invisible to the naked eye) shift the absorption and scattering of photons depending on whether the artefact is backlit or viewed in ambient light. Our favourite part of the interview was how one of the scientists imagined how Roman craftspeople would be bemused and incredulous on the effort and experimentation that went into recreating the effect, “‘Why does she not know how to make this?’” The new cup, a local glass artist commissioned to make it, will be unveiled to the public next month at the university.

464 us 417 (13. 915)

Filed on this day in 1976 in the US district court for central and southern California in Los Angeles, Universal Studios and the Walt Disney Company sued the Sony Corporation of America to prohibit the sale of it videocassette recording system to the general public. The “Betamax” case eventually heard by the supreme court nearly eight years later, ruled—narrowly—in favour of the electronics manufacturer, deciding that making individual copies of programming for personal use does not constitute copyright infringement when created for the purposes of time shifting, viewing it sometime after the scheduled live broadcast, was fair use. The concept of pausing live television had among its first popular depictions in a 1966 episode of I Dream of Jeannie with Major Nelson requesting his genie pre-empt a football game so he could continue to watch it from that point after finishing with errands. More broadly, the majority of the justices found that similar video recording platforms could not be held liable for contributing to infringement, thus creating the home video market with a legal safe harbour, similar to the principle of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act that guarantees immunity for online platforms hosting third-party content hosted by users within in certain bounds, for the developing technology and a boon for film studios with secondary releases. The prevailing format for taping shifted away from Betamax, Sony acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 modified certain interpretation of statue that informed the original case, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejecting the fair use standard as a applied to space shifting (peer-to-peer sharing of digital media such as Napster or KaZaa) as the equivalent of the above time shifting.

 

 synchronoptica

one year ago: documenting China’s 1990s building boom (with synchronoptica), the Battle of Agincourt (1415), US moves towards regime change in Venezuela plus Trump administration closes off the US entrance of a Canadian border-straddling library

 

two years ago: cruise packages and Gen Z plus international maritime signal flags 

 

three years ago: assorted links worth the revisit 

 

four years ago: further adventures in Crete 

five years ago: the US Invasion of Granada (1971)

six years ago: a hexadecagonal country retreat, SS Crispin and Crispinian plus pandemic gods and heroes

seven years ago: a lyrical headline (1924), a video game atlas plus the world’s first erotic boutique proprietress 

eight years ago: The Master Key of Futurity, virtual restaurants and ghost kitchens plus programming a more ethical Pac Man

 

day two hundred twenty nine (13. 914)

Former US presidents and contenders offered counter-messaging to Trump’s late appeals for GOP campaigns including the Bushes tossing their support to the Democratic candidates in races in Texas and Hilary Clinton describing the American president’s renovations to the White House “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” Meanwhile, Trump hints at either a massive attack to “finish the job” or reaching a deal with Tehran, presumably to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, by Sunday. Hundreds of thousands of protesters rally in France amid heightened security and police presence. IDF conducts raids of West Bank towns, subjecting dozens of Palestinian residents to field interrogation and unwarranted detention with demolition of buildings in Hebron. The battle for control of Taiz intensifies as the Muslim world strongly condemns the Houthis for targeting the holy sites of Mecca and Medina in their assault against Saudi Arabia for backing the Yemeni government forces. As many outposts in the region have been abandoned already, the US issues more warnings regarding the safety of personnel assigned overseas and Russia denies reports of having evacuated nuclear scientists from the facilities at Bushehr. Moscow and Kyiv agree to a one-city ceasefire in Oleshky at the bidding of the Pope though Melania “Be Best” Trump tries to take credit, whilst the capital continues to sustain heavy bombardment.

lady attackpot (13. 913)

With the largeness of LLMs increasing exponentially to the detriment of their creativity and entertainment value, we had not appreciated that our trusty AI wrangler Janelle Shane (previously) could have possibly upheld the annual tradition of Botober, generative drawing prompts for humans to interpret. We learn, however, since 2023 when ChatGPT broke confinement and started scraping and scouring the internet, Shane has gone old-school with tiny, boutique neural nets from the past decade with limited training data—ie, the American registry of racehorse names from the Jockey Club. We especially liked the cues Expected Shoes, Power Noping, Speed Puddin, Qualitydance and Thunder Swan. How would you render them in your chosen media?

why don’t you pass the time with a nice game of solitaire (13. 912)

As our faithful chronicler reminds, on this day (see PfRC passim), the neo-noir political thriller from John Frankenheimer based on the eponymous novel from three years earlier, starring Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey and Henry Silva, premiered on this day in 1962 at the height of tensions between the US and Soviet Union—during the Cuba Missile Crisis. The plot, from Richard Condon’s book, relates the narrative of a decorated veteran of the Korean conflict (Harvey), a member of a prominent American political dynasty, whom apparently escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp after his platoon was captured and welcomed home as a hero. His oedipal mother (Lansbury) exploits the Medal of Honour recipient to propel the campaign of her husband, a US senator, in his campaign for the vice-presidency, promoting claims that the incumbent has allowed the State Department to be infiltrated by Communist sympathisers, echoing the McCarthy witch hunt. Whilst in actuality detested by his subordinates as strict and aloof, other POW soldiers later freed give fawning testimonials that their commander was brave and sympathetic but was unbeknownst to all brainwashed during his captivity as a sleeper agent programmed to assassinate the running mate of his step-father, the party nominee for office of the president, by the USSR and China and cause the destabilisation of the US government, a plot uncovered by Major Marco (Sinatra), though one interpretation of the film suggests an Inception level of hypnosis with Marco being an accessory permitted recovered memories through his recurring nightmares and that Sinatra’s character was also a Manchurian agent under the influence of controller Eugenie Cheyney (Leigh)--possibly as a back-up or for plausible deniability, a stranger encountered on a train who later bails him out of jail for assaulting Chujin (Silva), the platoon’s Korean guide and translator who immigrates to the US after partition and becomes Harvey’s minder, posing as seeking gainful employment as his domestic—in one of the first depiction of East Asian martial arts in Hollywood. Playing cards trigger Harvey’s programming.

keep calm and carry on (13. 911)

In parallel with this emergency preparedness guide from the Swiss government, which sanguinely asks “for how long would you like to be self-sufficient?” though one cannot choose a period of greater than a fortnight, the UK has introduced a “realistic and reassuring” campaign with similar guidelines on what to have on hand without inducing panic or hoarding impulses among the public in the face of a nebulous, unidentified disaster. Though the imagination is invited to wander into dark spots when faced with shortages as with past outreach efforts, from catastrophic and all at once to the creeping unraveling of supply chains, a lesson seemingly forgot five, six years on from COVID—sabotage to the power-grid, severe weather conditions driven by a super-charged El Niño and the latent climate collapse, cyber-attacks, unconfined epidemics or any combination thereof, slow or fast moving, it is always best to expect the unexpected.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the 1975 Women’s Strike in Iceland (with synchronoptica), a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs plus conversation pits

two years ago: assorted links worth the revisit

three years ago: Gym Tonic (1998) plus poisoned-pixels against AI

four years ago: a visit to Knossos  

five years ago: the hymn of the United Nations plus Trog (1970)

six years ago: When the Wind Blows (1986), assorted links to revisit plus the Centre for American Politics and Design

seven years ago: chaos erupts as Trump impeachment hearing as supporters disrupt testimony 

eight years ago: an audio grimoire read by Vincent Price, the 2008 Recession, more inventions from Simone Giertz, more links to enjoy plus an interesting case of tort law

 

day two hundred twenty eight (13. 910)

Amid unrelenting attacks from the Houthis, Saudi Arabia postpones hosting UN World Data Forum, days after cancelling its “Davos in the Desert”—the annual flagship Future Investment Initiative conference aimed to diversify its portfolio away from being a petrostate. The headquarters of Saudi-Aramco is evacuated over safety concerns for remaining staff. Though the White House defers with a GLOMAR response, sources familiar with the planning confirm to the press that Washington and Tel Aviv are in the process of finalising a renewed series of strikes on Pickaxe Mountain and Iranian petrochemical facilities, not wanting to further exacerbate markets (though they are reacting) in the last days to the run-up to the respective countries’ elections. Even if the ultra-conservative government of Netanyahu is ousted, Palestinians hold out little hope for reform or improvement as the opposition refuses to entertain a two-state solution. US troops withdraw from bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Jordan, as the Revolutionary Guard announces a total ban of American service members and vessels from entering the gulf region and threatens to attack personnel and US assets.

9x9 (13. 909)

screenage wasteland: adult children curating their senior parents’ algorithms to blunt engagement with AI slop, scams and ragebait—[archived]—via Web Curios  

menagerie: inmates care for animals at the world’s only penitentiary with a zoo in the Florida Keys—via Damn Interesting  

omnibus: an archive of the science and scifi anthology, published from 1978 to 1995—via Kottke  

epic elfie: a grateful pachyderm snaps a wide-angle photograph without the need for a selfie-stick—see also 

the battle of blythe road: a spell-hurling duel between Aleister Crowley and WB Yeats in 1900—via Strange Company  

eagle’s nest: arsonists torch Hitler’s Alpine retreat, the Kehlsteinhaus 

cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war: Palmer Luckey launches an initiative to produce genetically enhanced canines for the US military and law enforcement, reducing reliance on European kennels  

window from the house of d: a court and then a prison for wayward women informed the bohemian and queer character of Greenwich Village—see previously  

emomercial: targeted advertisement for an assumed demographic can become an unexpected catharsis

synchronoptica

one year ago: storyboarding with tarot (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links worth the revisit 

two years ago: AI learns to point and click, London’s mortality weekly plus the life of Boethius  

three years ago: Mole Day 

four year ago: arriving in Crete 

five years ago: your daily demon Sabnok plus more links to enjoy

six years ago: circuit judge Roy Cohn, a pretend Communist coup, more links, the beginning of the world plus an appreciation of the colour russet

seven years ago: even more links worth revisiting plus more on the far future night sky

eight years ago: the canals of Mars, swing sixties cover of Red Hot Chili Peppers, the first Russian rapper plus noteworthy files from the US National Records Archive