sts-51-l (13. 124)

Seventy-three seconds after launch on this day in 1968, space shuttle Challenger broke apart, disintegrating fourteen kilometres over the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Cape Canaveral, killing the seven crew members and marking the first fatalities in US spaceflight on a craft that had left the launch pad—hence the l for lost on the flight designation. Scheduled to deploy a communications satellite and study the approaching Halley’s comet, astronauts included Christa McAuliffe as part of the Teacher in Space project, an outreach programme founded under the Reagan administration in 1984 to inspire STEM studies—cancelled found the death of its first participant.  Because of McAuliffe’s inclusion as a payload specialist, selected out of over eleven-thousand applicants, there was heightened media attention to the orbiter’s tenth and otherwise routine mission and many students in classrooms across America witnessed the disaster live, myself included recalling that TV cart. The cause of the break up was failure in the primary and backup o-ring seals, allowing hot pressurised gases to vent uncontrolled from the booster rockets and caused the craft, climbing at nearly twice the speed of sound to pitch and spin and was torn apart by aerodynamic stress. The launch continued despite warnings from flight engineers that the seal system would breach in the extreme cold—for Florida—weather that morning, possibly to take place before the president’s state of the union address scheduled to be delivered in the evening. A congressional investigation was launched and the shuttle programme suspended until September of 1988 with Discovery. The shuttle programme was retired in 2005 following the loss of Columbia during deorbiting in February 2003 when a piece of insulation foam that had dislodged during the launch struck the tiles that protect the craft from the heat of reentry, which as with the degredation of the o-rings, NASA did not considered to be a potential risk to the astronauts’ safety. The Soviet Union named two craters newly discovered on Venus in honour of the memory McAuliffe and mission specialist Judith Resnik and five other crew members. The second payload specialist Ronald McNair had brought his saxophone with him to record a track for inclusion for the upcoming album Rendez-Vous by John-Michel Jarre.  

achivio grafica italiana (13. 123)

 

Via Kottke, we are referred to this remarkable reference source dedicated to the entire rich heritage of Italian typography and graphic design. This growing collection, each specimen and exhibit curated and given context—like the pictured book jacket for Edizioni Politiche covering the fight for equity in pay and labour conditions of African Americans, is the personal project of Nicola-Matteo Munari, partnered with Designculture and has been adding accessions since 2015. There’s a lot of works by Massimo Vignelli and from the Olivetti studio workshop to discover plus countless other artists to adopt and champion, like Italo Lupi with this commission for a chakra calendar, that may have been just under one’s radar. 

 

xxx & j (13. 122)

From British author Brian Bilston (previously)—hailed as the Laureate of Social Media for our fractious times and alternately, aptly described as the Banksy of Poets—we appreciated and could related to these verses he shares as a handy, perhaps perennial mnemonic to recall the length of this interminable month—which rivals other seemingly unending suspensions in time, with January concluding 7 December 2042.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Be my Valentine, Charlie Brown (with synchronopticæ) plus assorted links to revisit

thirteen years ago: Nature harnessing quantum mechanics 

fourteen years ago: PIPA, SOPA, ACTA plus a visit to Suhl

fifteen years ago: code red plus uprisings in Egypt

sixteen years ago: local news 

seventeen years ago: woolly memories 

eighty-five seconds to midnight (13. 121)

The Washington DC based Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences advanced their Doomsday Clock four seconds forward, announced in a press release citing failure of global leadership to contain or reverse an array of existential threats including record-breaking climate trends, rogue AI, reframed nuclear pacts and bald dereliction when it comes to disease control and prevention. Inaction and lack of a cooperative framework signal that time is fast running out, though the organisation still maintains that the clock can be turned back in their annual assessment, although collapse of hard-won progress into more tribalism and nationalistic posturing does not seem very reassuring. More from the board at the link up top.

autobiography (13. 120)

Courtesy of Public Domain Review, we enjoyed this propaganda piece touted by the overseas film unit of the US Office of War Information, released in 1943—two years after the vehicle’s public debut—which was not only addressing an audience of soldiers and patriots as the all-terrain concept that will defeat America’s enemies, but also consumers for the eventual surplus market, narrated from the Jeep’s perspective as a radical, utilitarian departure from the normal decadence of most domestic models by Irving Lerner, soon hereafter blacklisted as a left-wing filmmaker with allegations of espionage for the Soviets for displaying over-interest in the Manhattan Project which he was commissioned to document, although later rehabilitated with posthumous credits for Spartacus, Steppenwolf and Executive Action. Accompanied by his friend the American GI and featuring cameos by Desi Arnaz and the Queen Mother, Wendell Willkie and FDR, the Jeep mentions he comes from a highly developed country with many roads and cars and how pre-war plans for expansion of highways were sacrificed for the effort, finally given a field exam crossing deserts and fording rivers.

*     *     *     *      *

synchronoptica

one year ago: Yellow Submarine Crocs (with synchronopticæ), the Church commission plus a lean large language model

twelve years ago: a stolen relic of John Paul II 

thirteen years ago: guesthouse signage 

fourteen years ago: artificial sweetener plus Der Zauberberg and Davos

sixteen years ago: old thing—undesirable; new thing—desirable 

gossip bench (13. 119)

Via fellow internet peripatetic, we are referred to the item of furniture developed over time out of necessity and convenience, popular during the 1930s to the 1950s—also known as telephone tables—when their use was became commonplace and a fixture in any household. Cumbersome and non-portable, phones were usually placed in a central location, without affording much privacy or discretion, and craftsmanship adapted to the tethered situation with a comfortable chair and sideboard for storage—directories, calendars, magazines. Such a piece would be a useful vintage addition for the home office and might prevent me during the walk-and-talk from wandering into dead-zones (Funklöcher) in the house. See more examples from Messy Nessy Chic’s latest turn around the internet with much more to explore besides.

10x10 (13. 118)

write his merits on your mind: a fitting eulogy for murdered ICE victims from eighteenth century poet William Drennen on the persecuted and defamed activist William Orr 

drizzle: the controversial conservatory teacher Li Jinhui (黎錦暉) who brought jazz to Shanghai 

sons of torum: the dreamtime legends of the vast taiga 

fungus among us: the sociophonetics of the mushroom kingdom—from the Roman legal Latin res fungibiles, replaceable things 

the life aquatic: a tribute to David Bowie on the tenth anniversary of his passing with beautiful Portuguese covers of the classics 

arsenal and armoury: a new exhibit examines global traditions of battlewear, beyond white knights  

stooky bill: a visit to the London address where television was first demonstrated—see previously—a hundred years ago today 

deluge: British Museum curator on the “ark tablet” and the universal myth of the Great Flood  

chill session: a set of deep cuts from Daft Punk 

border czar: Trump dispatches Tom Homan to Minnesota to manage the campaign of state terror

the porkkala concession (13. 117)

Operated as a Soviet naval base, leased to the USSR under the terms of the Moscow Armistice of 1944, the peninsular for a period of fifty, originally scheduled for repatriation in 1994, was returned to Finland early after eleven years of service on this day in 1956 with the displaced former inhabitants of the communities of Kirkkonummi, Ingå and Siuntio restored their lands. Hosting the bulk of the Baltic fleet and some sixteen thousand sailors and submariners at one point on the borderlands just some thirty kilometres from Helsinki, the withdrawal was based on several political factors in including the Finno-Russian Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance of 1948, Khrushchev’s shift away from Stalinism, other basing opportunities and Finland’s own post-war policy of neutrality, which also precluded its accession to NATO. Presently the Pokkala peninsula is home to main base of the Finnish naval forces at Upinniemi.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Welsh labyrinths (with synchronopticæ), assorted links to revisit plus a real life Voight-Kampff test

twelve years ago: nursing shortages, all-inclusive vacation packages plus more on the monomyth

thirteen years ago: tavern etymologies 

fourteen years ago: the potential of 3D printing plus the right to be forgotten

sixteen years ago: crafty advice plus Davos security chief found dead