not for all the tea in china (13. 679)

Whilst some are uncommon lexical fossils, some three dozen Chinese terms for teas have been formally made part of the English corpus, language of course reflecting discernment revealing historic attitudes ranging from admiration, appropriation to derision. Bohea and Keemun have been borrowed directly from their regional provenance as well as descriptive words for different styles like oolong (烏龍) and congou, and souchong developed and cultivated in the Wuyi mountains of northern Fujian—green, white, black all coming from the same tea leaves, just dried and cured with different processes which affect the taste. The etymologies of some terms are more abstract, such as “pekoe” for grading leaves, with the Western tea trade’s standards—ostensibly from a word meaning downy and referring the quality of a leaf freshly emerged for the bud and suitable for the highest quality brew—it may have been invented by nineteenth century magnate Sir Thomas Lipton with his premium “orange pekoe” (something that did not exist in Chinese tea culture) in deference to the House of Orange-Nassau and the more established Dutch East India Company who first introduced the beverage to Europe, and then there’s the unfortunate pantomime stock character Widow Twankey. A corruption of the tea export hub of the district of Tuxni (屯溪) in Anhui province that had an unfair reputation of producing lower quality tea leaves, older, courser, raggedy and became associated with something past its prime with a stereotyped staple role in musical stage comedies that would make Mickey Rooney’s part in Breakfast at Tiffany’s seem mild in comparison, an eccentric matronly figure, usually played by a male actor in drag, running a Chinese laundry. One would like to report such depictions did not linger but the 1861 routine lasted through the vaudeville era in the 1930s and the Widow Twankey was revived in the third season of Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys as a recurring character—played by Michael Hurst—Iolaus, Hercules’ charioteer in that series as well as on Xena: Warrior Princess, in drag and conflating several mythological tradition as the original was Aladdin’s mother somehow. Fortunately other tea-terminology, not the reserve of experts and connoisseurs, is transmitted accurately and with respect though the business of trade was anything but.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Helsinki Accords (with synchronoptica), more synthetic geology plus the playfulness of AI

two years ago: Ford is prepped for his new role,  the samplers of Lorina Buwler plus cartographic innovations

three years ago: Dune published (1965), assorted links worth revisiting plus the case against Trump

four years ago: a taxonomical exploration plus MST3K on Hercules Unchained

five years ago: the debut of MTV (1981), more on hyperinflation, the biblically nameless, more Universal Everything plus a prime pollinator

six years ago: Lammas Day, Deadmau5 and the Neptunes plus facial masks inspired by mass-transit upholstery patterns

day one-hundred forty-eight (13. 678)

Kyiv is pummelled by Russia raids as Ukraine awaits promised permission from the US to produce their own Patriot air defence batteries, America expressing some reluctance now over releasing the licenses. As rhetoric intensifies, both Washington and Tehran threaten to attack vital infrastructure in gulf nations hosting America bases, oil fields, refineries and commercial assets and bridges, highways and power plants in the Islamic Republic, the latter in Trump’s sites speaking during a cabinet meeting called at Camp David, the US president whilst admitting Iran did have a few missiles left, was militarily defeated: “All you can do is keep winning, and the eventually something will happen.” Houthi rebels deny accusations that they plan to place tolls on passage to the Red Sea, insisting that the Bab el-Mandab strait will remain free. The Revolutionary Guard disables more tankers attempting to cross the Hormuz as US naval forces hold the blockade on Iranian ports. Fifty thousand migrants in the span of twenty four hours attempt to enter the exclave of Ceuta through Morocco as the EU moves to suspend member Spain from the Schengen free-movement zone to control immigration.

latent diffusion (13. 677)

Via Web Curios, we are directed towards this excellent dissertation by Kevin Kelly (KK＊) that without recourse to analogy provides one of the most satisfying account—but not explanation since what’s going on under the hood is a mystery to its architects—of how large language models arrange information and build connections through the lens of the latent space—my metaphor, the synapses between neurones—as a potential new medium for artistic exploration. Conceived originally for translation only, the three terminological components of LLMs have semantic meanings behind them: large for containing all the knowledge of Wikipedia and whatever else can be gleaned digitally, language refers to the intent for automatic interpretation drawing on the sum of human writing and applying autocomplete rather than teaching the neural network grammar and the rules of individual tongues to synthesise and imitate and model for the compression routines that for efficiency marshalled concepts in vectors to contain all this statistical data of the next word locally, in the laboratory or on one’s own phone without the need to venture online for what’s on the tip of the tongue—a new kind of abstraction, mindfulness in the billions of rays shooting off in all directions. Researchers were shocked that not only did their experiment yield passable translations without being pre-programmed with the linguistic structure but without containing copies of the collected works of Shakespeare (only the metadata) could render their response in the form of a sonnet and could indeed compose an “original” work in the style of the Bard. Everything, all at once intersects eventually mapped out with an address a multitude of coordinates long. Maybe PfRC has been scraped but only in the sense that it’s not really plagiarised but only adding to an increasingly long, long register of relative whereabouts). Some in the industry maintain that for the model to make new connections and new insights requires data-centres, countless circuits working in concert—something not every one agrees on, with diminishing returns like prospecting for bitcoins, and push for open-source scalability—especially when no one knows where the spark, insight (if it can even be called that) comes from. The artistry enters in the triangulation, stream of conscious style, in that liminal space where the AI shows its work (in theory at least and can be conduced to) and can be dialled up along any lines of reasoning, more poetic, more understandable, coherent, etc without broaching the question of understanding.

present /&/ correct (13. 676)

Having been a long-time fan and standard go-to resource for vintage stationary, brochures and advertising ephemera, we quite enjoyed this interview with Bloomsbury shop and blog co-founder Neal Whittington on the occasion of their entrance into the world of publishing and share some stories about their finds over the years—sometimes ambitions become deadstock but never surplus to needs. The history of the venture and the curated collections is inspired. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link above. Do explore their sundries.

7x7 (13. 675)

giant’s causeway: Curiosity rover discovers valley of honeycomb polygonal rock formations—see also  

ars notoria: a magical medieval text that promised a pathway to instant, universal mastery of the liberal arts 

singing seat: artist Dan Ortiz Leizman transforms Monobloc chairs into stringed instruments 

translator of original ‘minions’ epic poem slams sexless, bloodless film adaptation: most fun movie discourse since Barbenheimer—see more, see also here and here—via Kottke   

it’s giving: a glossary of Gen Z lexical constructs  

mittingsaia: a mysterious illustrated Swiss manuscript from the 1940s in the style of a European travel brochures with undecipherable captions that resemble AI hallucinations  

van allen belt: despite its small size, no bigger than North America, Mercury’s weak magnetic field can trap solar winds

synchronoptica

one year ago: Trump administration obliterates Clean Air Act plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: obligatory voting in Australia (1924), the Likert scale plus more on millenialism

three years ago: more links to enjoy 

four years ago: a banger from Annie Lennox, even more links, more antique abecedaria plus graphic designers Elinor and Joe Selame

five years ago: time crystals, photographer Lora Webb Nichols, Olympic mottoes, assorted links worth the revisit, a world music radio station plus a David Bowie inspired costume

six years ago: more links to enjoy, a Chinese mission to Mars plus an interim emoji release

day one-hundred forty-seven (13. 674)

Saudi Arabia announces a maritime defensive alliance to secure navigation through the Strait of Bab al-Mandab correcting the Red Sea and the gulf of Aden and repel attacks by the Houthi. Trump claims breakthrough deal for the disarmament of Hamas in Gaza reached by his Board of Peace—saying the US will implement the accord unilaterally if Israel does not agree. NATO jets scramble as Russian missile strays into Polish airspace and detonates outside of a village, the latest in a series of incursions. Under protection of IDF, dozens of Israeli settlers storm a small village near Nablus in the Occupied West Bank. Iranian drones hit a US base and Chinese-owned commercial tower in Kuwait.

terra deserta (13. 673)

Mid-grade curious as to why the descriptor wilderness was likewise applied to the deserts spaces of the Bible and to our more conventional understanding of untamed forests, we found this excerpt from a new book by Cal Flyn on the savage landscape rather inexhaustibly fascinating. Though these habitats might seem poles apart—with only spirtual challenges lurking in the former, medieval monks in the Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire solidified parallels between the tribulations of the prophets, the desert mothers and fathers, and the rewilding of vast swaths of land in Provence, Bretagne, Burgundy and Transylvania and other former colonies saw a sharp decline in population and many villages, villas and fortifications abandoned along with fallow fields that allowed the return of the forest primeval. Returning from the brink of extinction, with attendant lore and literature surrounding the liminal woodlands at the edge of cultivation and urbanisation became an allegory for the trepidation of earlier time out of mind, causing a stark rebellion against the encroachment of the undomesticated with commiserate suspicion for its denizens both human and non-human, transmogrifying contemporary fears of famine and pestilence to remote dwellers, bears and werewolves, though counter-narratives also prevailed with the ancient masonry of ruins repurposed as churches and city walls.

double indemnity (13. 672)

While the argument that generative AI tools democratise certain fields to an extent by allowing non-professionals to bypass the gatekeeping of jargon and unnatural language is not without merit, we’ve seen too many slapdash hallucinations leaking out into the real world with no proofing or editing that does not exactly instil trust or confidence in the output—see previously. We had under appreciated the consequence of DIY, vibe-coded projects in the field of cartography however until reading this post by Jonathan Crowe of the Map Room, whom despite his long experience and interest in the subject is an avowed amateur in the best sense. The intersection of demographics data and our built environment is already fraught with biases and assumptions, based on one’s postal code, and can disadvantage some in terms of loans and credit just for their neighbourhood—and of course false data makes surveying for ethnographic outcomes and opportunities garbage. Among several poignant observations, there was one particular account of an online brochure—or perhaps even a printed handout—for an insurance underwriter (those rates are determined to by one’s address—see also) whom could not be bothered to represent the geography of their covered area correctly that inspired us to test it out. The prompt was “Can you please (it is important to ask politely) create for me an accurate actuarial map of the continental US with the states and major cities labelled?” and the results, though first draft and raw were pretty disturbing. Although the general bounds and borders, recognisable to many, but otherwise all over the map—and it gets worse the more one studies it (compared to this non-AI antique one), from the unfathomable legend, Dopulation, • Tucson, to New York City in Quebec, to Connecticut where Wisconsin should be, Milwaukee on the eastern seaboard, to made up polities like Wyomina, Flahia, Missisgloo and Ballingiore—some others too garbled by Zalgo text. More from Map Room at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa (with synchronoptica), assorted links to enjoy plus Lolita

two years ago: more links worth revisiting plus Monty Hall enlightenment 

three years ago: virulent evangelising, even more links plus SARStock (2003)

four years ago: assorted links 

five years ago: Freyja’s Day plus recreating classic screen-savers

six years ago: a French microcar, oceanographer Marie Tharp, a Canadian mint honour, fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto, another goth saint plus local keepsakes