great calamary (12. 396)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/sea-monsters-sea-fables/ Published as literature to educate and to disabuse attendees of the 1883 International Fisheries Exhibition held on the campus of the Royal Horticultural Society in South Kensington, the event running from May to October perhaps not as storied as other Victorian world’s fairs but heretofore attracting the most visitors and exhibitors due to its rather well-apportioned aquaria on a scale never before seen and menagerie of sea birds and marine mammals gathered from all over the Empire. Distributed by the Literary Committee, also charged with documenting the proceedings of the exhibit, the pair of illustrated guides commissioned of one Henry Lee, “sometimes naturalist of the Brighton Aquarium,” were meant to unmask the mythos of the deep by glossing the monsters and fables of the sea and tempering the imagination with scientific reason and technological and exploratory advances that left little room for the leviathans and merfolk. Demonstrating how such encounters could be explained away while expressing concern over less fantastic natural treasures and how our penchant for conquest could be their undoing as well, it’s interesting timing to come across these handbooks as the first documented footage of a colossal squid, a Kraken albeit a baby one, has been captured and shared. More from Public Domain Review at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: oceanic microplastic plus Britain from Above 

eight years ago: leek pasta plus the Turkish expatriate vote

nine years ago: worlds out of balance plus auditory hallucinations

eleven years ago: a night at the opera

infinite quilt (12. 395)

Via fellow internet caretaker and peripatetic, Messy Nessy Chic, having keep this tab open all day as a screen-saver and palette-cleanser, we would be remiss not to share this mediative botanical recursion that slowly zooms through a continuous and unending landscape of branches, leaves, roots and reefs which this halting gif-capture does not do justice. This Webby award winning collaboration from artists Sophia Schomberg and Nikolaus Baumgarten, the title Arkadia/Arcadia refers to the utopian ideal of pastoralism in harmony with Nature, a vision both bucolic and unspoilt by those humans who lightly manage it.

atl (12. 394)

Founded this day in 1925 with a groundbreaking ceremony on an abandoned auto racetrack leased by the city at no charge other than the commitment to develop it into an airfield and to name the property Candler Field in honour of the donor, former mayor and Coca-Cola tycoon Asa Candler (see previously, having purchased the recipe for the tonic from chemist John Pemberton for $238.98 in 1888), the modern day Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International is the busiest in the world by passenger volume, serving over a hundred million travellers annually. It is also the headquarters and main hub of Delta airlines as well as several global air freight companies. The inaugural mail flight operated by Florida Airways in mid-September of the following year, along with Pitcairn/Eastern aviation that ultimately secured exclusive rights to the route of the neighbouring state still remains as the most frequent destination for planes departing Atlanta heading to the Orlando, Tampa, Miami and Fort Lauderdale areas. Cancún is the most popular international destination, at half the passenger volume of the Florida capital.

synchronoptica

one year ago: 90s clip art (with synchronoptica), a self-defence manual, avian sleep-singing plus the origins of brain-washing

seven years ago: the Silurian hypothesis, empires of commodification plus the textile art of Paul Steinberg

eight years ago: more Easter salutations, European long distance trekking routes plus adhering to the letter of the law

nine years ago: a list of banned bar patrons plus the new name for the Czech Republic

twelve years ago: ribbon-awareness month, saving the pollinators plus conspiratorial thinking

gleichschaltung (12. 393)

From the relatively contemporaneous neologism developing apace with electrification, the term which historians employ to describe the system that Adolf Hitler used to impose totalitarian coordination and control over all aspects of German society within the constitution bounds of the Weimar Republic—from the press, to the economy, to culture and education—and refers to the conversion of alternating to direct current, technically rectification or phasing—it is usually translated in the socio-political sense of Nazification as “synchronisation” or “bringing into line.” The Nazis adopted similar terminology, like Ausschaltung, the act of switching off, the deletion of anyone counter to this fusion of party and state. Enabled by a series of laws enacted following Hitler’s election as chancellor in the space of nineteen months that undergirded various orders and decrees: measures include the declaration martial law following the burning of the Reichstag that suspended civil liberties and the media outlet, a cover for voter intimidation and suppression of opposition parties ahead of the general election; the formally titled “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Reich” suspending parliament and giving the executive the power to pass legislation without them—called the Enabling Act, Ermächtigungsgesetz; deploying chancellery-appointed governors in each constituent state to reconstitute local legislatures according to ballots cast in the above 5 Match 1933 elections; the Law for the Restoration of a Professional Civil Service which dismantled the bureaucracy. Later supplemented by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda to promote Nazi values and prejudices through clubs and associations (infiltrating existing ones and establishing compulsory membership in new ones) and oversee news and entertainment, and industry and trade unions were also aligned. Those whose loyalty was deemed unimpeachable, regardless of station or influence, were rewarded with the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) programme with vacation resorts, hobbyists groups, vocational opportunities and motor clubs, leading to the building of the Autobahn network and the Volkswagen—which also aided in the perception that they were bolstering the German economy through make-work initiatives.

glass menagerie (12. 392)

The epidemic whipped into the height of frenzy on this day in 1954 following newspaper reporters and appeals for intervention from local authorities, the state governor and ultimately president Eisenhower, the Seattle Windshield Pitting Panic is considered to be a text-book example of mass delusion—sometimes mislabelled as mass hysteria, classed with near contemporary occurrences like Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast—propagated by rumour, mis- and disinformation and mass media when residents of the Washington capital and surrounding communities were invited to closely examine their cars’ windshields and discovered them to be scored with previously unnoticed pits, dents and dings. I recall getting out of a movie once with a lot of car-bombings and in the parking lot of the theatre was inspired to check below the steering column and was petrified to feel a bundle of wires—though quickly calmed down once I realised that I had never before poked around down there. Originally suspected to be a rash of sabotage or vandalism, but the scale and scope quickly lead to other theories arising beyond a conspiracy of hoodlums, sourcing the normal weathering to a range of agents from sand flea eggs hatching, cosmic rays, a nearby large radio transmitter operated by the navy, UFOs, a shift in the Earth’s magnetic field to fallout from nuclear testing. As damage reports preoccupied police, a committee of scientists from the state university was called together to survey cars on campus and compare to reported incidents. Concluding the wear and tear was the result of average road-use, calls to the police abruptly dropped off two days later.

 

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Rennsteiglied (with synchronoptica) plus wondrous woodcuts of astral phenomena

 

seven years ago: Thousand Insects of Japan plus creative anatomies

 

eight years ago: illustrator Boris Artzybasheff

 

nine years ago: more words with no English equivalent 

eleven years ago: Banksy graffiti at the GCHQ plus sea water to fuel

9x9 (12. 391)

field of vision: the evolution of eyes branching out as on a tree of life   

land-grant college: the federal-funding based model for American post-secondary education is based on a deliberate post-World War II decision to outsource expertise and experimentation rather than compartmentalise it within government consortia  

habeas corpus: relenting to the idea that some people have no rights is siding with authoritarianism and hoping you aren’t next   

under construction: transform any modern website a late 90s GeoCities masterpiece—via Clive Thompson’s Linkfest   

thank you easter bunny—bwak, bwak: more on the controversial, re-constructed, retcon of the holiday mascot 

⌂: the tiny house in the middle of IBM’s eight-bit character set, adopted by PC clones with the 1981 Code Page 437—see previously—and its possible relation to Blissymbolics 

rinki-tink in oz: deportation and administrative oversight in L Frank Baum’s paracosm   

uniwersytet latający: US institutions higher education can defy Trump’s crackdown by outreach and going underground, as Polish universities did under Communism—via Kottke   

recaptcha: corvids demonstrate surprising mental acuity for identifying outlier shapes and geometric regularity—via MetaFilter

synchronoptica

one year ago: St Liduina (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links worth revisiting

seven years ago: US refusing Syrian refugees, American kakistocracy plus some local prehistory

eight years ago: bunking busting bombs, the White House Easter Egg Roll plus a grim future vision of US national parks

nine years ago: animated viruses, solar sails, more chatbot failures plus a walk from Wiesbaden to Mainz

eleven years ago: Ukrainian break-away republics

 

kitchen sink realism (12. 390

The production team behind the difficult Netflix series Adolescence about incel culture has announced it will reboot the incredibly bleak Cold War mini-series Threads (see previously, see also), aired in 1984 that depicted Sheffield harrowed by a nearby nuclear strike. BBC documentary filmmaker Mick Jackson, behind the original screening will participate in crafting episodic drama which the network feels whose time has sadly returned four decades on.

not magic—it’s all done with mirrors (12. 389)

Via MetaFilter, we thoroughly enjoyed this latest music video from OK Go (previously), for a song with the generic title Love, that features rather than CGI an amazingly choreographed array of industrial robots that the singers interact with precise timing to create one four minute continuous, kaleidoscopic shot (one can see more on the making of the spectacle here though the execution is transparent and no less upstagingly mind-breaking for it). It was filmed in the Keleti (Eastern) train station of Budapest.