synchronoptica
one year ago: deferred resignation programme (with synchronopticรฆ) plus who goes MAGA?
twelve years ago: crypto and money laundering, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership plus Dr Strangelove
fourteen years ago: movie posters from a parallel universe plus botanical nomenclature
fifteen years ago: optical effects
sixteen years ago: smoke-free workplaces
no ordinary venue: disgraced FIFA ex-president Sepp Blatter encourages a World Cup boycott of the US
slideshow: reconstructing the lecture series of Theosophist and meteorologist Clement Wragge
margin unit: Persevereance rover discovers evidence of an ancient beach in Mars’ Jezero crater
jesse garon presley: Scott Walker’s ballad about Elvis’ lost twin
squaring the circle: a clever workaround to the geometrical conundrum
optimised for nastiness: Sir Tim Berners-Lee is in a battle for the soul of the web
the streets of minneapolis: Bruce Springsteen’s tribute to the resistance and its fallen champions
don’t look up: asteroid 2024 YR4 has a four percent chance of striking the Moon
tangible data: information that one can hold in one’s hands—via Kottke
host nation: Italian officials condemn planned presence of US ICE agents for the Winter Games
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.
synchronoptica
one year ago: Be my Valentine, Charlie Brown (with synchronopticรฆ) 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
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.
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 synchronopticรฆ), 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
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 (Funklรถcher) in the house. See more examples from Messy Nessy Chic’s latest turn around the internet with much more to explore besides.
