synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronopticรฆ) plus surviving a meteor strike (1954)
twelve years ago: fostering children from Nazi Germany plus Cicada 3301
thirteen years ago: Christmas deadlines
fourteen years ago: a Star Wars/Rankin/Bass mash-up plus The War of Wealth
fifteen years ago: the fall-out of the diplomatic cable leak
Although commercial flights had been restricted coming in and out of the country for weeks over concerns of insurance liability following the deployment of a fleet of carriers to the Caribbean and intensified rhetoric over regime change, Trump made the additional step of announcing the closure of Venezuelan airspace, hinting that ground operations would begin soon. 
Whilst a tried and tired tactic of the US president is too cry wolf (as outlined in his Art of the Deal) and accelerate before negotiating, it is becoming more and more apparent that his object is to secure the South American nation’s vast petroleum reserves under conditions more favourable to the US—if not exploit them entirely, as he has attempted to do with property and natural resources in Gaza and Ukraine. Counter to the narrative of drug-trafficking used to justify the extrajudicial murders of alleged smugglers on speedboats in international waters—indefensible actions currently under investigation as breaches of international law and the Geneva Conventions, especially given the secretary of war’s order to eliminate survivors from on of the strikes—and to give grounds for his regime of tariffs long recognised as idle and specious and now void with his suggestion of pardoning the actual, convicted drug-runner, former Honduran president Jose Orlando Hernandez, extradited and serving a long sentence in a federal penitentiary for bringing caches of weapons and four hundred tonnes of cocaine to the US. Clemency is furthermore contingent on election interference. Deportation flights have also been indefinitely suspended. Trump’s targeting of the administration of Nicolรกs Maduro is based on alleged ties to the drug trafficking gang Cartel de los Soles, which like Antifa seems to be either an unorganised collective or possibly the stay-behind elements of a operation orchestrated by the CIA assembled earlier for other purposes and both declared a terrorist group. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
Courtesy of the always fascinating Maps Mania that delivers a new and novel way of embarking on a wiki-walk (see previously) by using data-visualisations overlays to plot rabbit holes in a given vicinity on a broad (or narrow) subject of one’s choosing. 
The vectors, nodes and pin-drops represent a search of “Art Nouveau” based roughly on our location and is charting out some locations and connections that I’ve never cobbled together straying off topic in some research. Not intended as a replacement for the serendipity of wandering from link to link, this one-off project realised after eight years of work is put out there with all its faults and false-leads with automated up-keep (it’s outstanding to consider the debt AI owes to an effort like Wikipedia and it’s nice when it can return the favour) as a point of departure for one’s own spelunking. Let us know what you get drawn into? We’ll send out the dogs if we don’t hear back.
Via Web Curios, we are directed towards another superb dataviz bit of scrollytelling from The Pudding tracking all instances of when the word “democracy” has been entered into the US congressional record from 1880 to the present—with threats thereto highlighted in shocking pink. Passage through the years on legislative transcripts show the changing ways the concept is debated and upheld with ample contextual call-outs for significant shifts in posture responding to war, reform, civil rights and enemies, foreign and domestic.
Whilst LEDs had been in use since the early 1960s as electronic components, with applications in remote control circuits, converting a pulse of current into a beam of infra-red light, and as indicator lamps for always-on appliances and in seven-segment displays, it was not until this day in 1996 when the Nichia Corporation, a Japanese chemical engineering and manufacturing concern, held a press-conference introducing brilliant white gallium nitride light-emitting diodes, after three years of experimentation and research, 
that the semiconductor dim bulbs, only capable of shining in invisible wavelengths to low-intensity red, hinted at their potential as a commercial lighting alternative to an infrastructure built for energy-intensive incandescents. Despite skepticism over the viability of producing a prototype using conventional technology, Nichia supported the R&D efforts of Shuji Nakamura (ไธญๆ ไฟฎไบ, only given a token honorium for his invention, he later sued for a commensure share of the profits) whose experiments eventually netted not only the illusive white LED but also the blue laser diode in the process, the solid-state stylus for HD DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs. Incoherent and giving the illusion of pure colour saturation—like pixels and their subdivisions—LEDs produce light through electrolumininescence, the wavelength determined by the recombination of electrons and electron holes, the space of an atomic lattice where an ejected particle once was and in accordance with the shell-model could be replaced, over the gradient of the semiconductive circuit, pushing out a photon.
synchronoptica
one year ago: Panasonic to digitally resurrect its departed CEO (with synchronopticรฆ), Now, That’s What I Call Music, phonological jargon as effective insults, Tulip Mania redux plus superstitious storeys
thirteen years ago: bot-driven traffic plus personalised medication
fourteen years ago: language lessons
fifteen years ago: US-EU diplomatic relations
sixteen years ago: a Thanksgiving feast plus first Advent
The misogynist rhetoric directed towards female politicians and journalists is nothing new and Trump does not have a monopoly on using disparaging words that translate into actual violence—and whilst wishing that the media would stop hanging on his every demented utterance and thus dignifying his addled, hateful invectives, we do hope that every reporter in the press pool is crafting their response of a colourful epithet, an insult to lob back that if it doesn’t get them arrested would at least result in a ban from the White House, 
something which the outlets have already signalled their willingness to give up (see previously) with what would be the most withering to these monsters by starving them of attention—and betrays a real weakness of character and a vulnerability to shield from the public at all costs. I’ve got my duly vulgar aspersion to cast on the non-zero chance that I would get called on to use it. What’s your prepared statement? Senator Mark Kelly has entered the chat. Not to psychoanalyse broken, small characters, but we suspect that Trump’s attacks against competent women—and their reception by his base, splintering as it is—is due in large part to the fact he’s only ever beaten female challengers for the presidency, those pyrrhic “victories” not without contention, so much winning, and feels denied the chance of a worthy opponent to trounce.
content without context: think twice before making that AI generated video—especially featuring a cameo of yourself
things that aren’t doing the thing: anticipation is not the same as execution
dead wood: the evolution, anatomy and biological system of our tree friends
lightbox: TIME magazine’s photos of the year
inbox: a clever way of researching and processing the tranches of email released by the Epstein estate with an interface that’s like going through one’s own account from Like Igel and Riley Walz (previously)—via Web Curios
traceroute: an overview of how the series of tubes work
the dog’s pyjamas: dressing up canines has a longer history than one might expect—via Strange Company
never break the chain: streaks are important motivators and one should pair new habits and practise with “micro-versions” to avoid feeling derailed
$spsc: Trump’s World Liberty Financial (see previously) promotes another shock token as a legitimate store of wealth
synchronoptica
one year ago: assorted links to revisit (with synchronopticรฆ) plus the discovery of the first pulsar (1967)
fourteen years ago: sociologist Jรผrgen Habermas on post-democratic Europe
fifteen years ago: more flea market finds plus security theatre and a crackdown on counterfeits
We’re heard of plenty of sorrowful instances of zombification of abandoned personal pages and outright vandalism or kettling but we had not encountered until now, courtesy of MetaFilter, with the discovery of the moribund Yahoo! GeoCities page of the musical theatre composer and impresario (previously) last updated in 2003 and restore it to full-functionality as a NeoCity. Though some elements, like the title, seem to verge on gentle parody—but who could say for sure as websites at that time were vehicles for confession and reflection rather than self-promotion, it’s a privilege to page through the newspaper clippings, dream diary, home recipes and so on.
