gentlemen—you can’t fight in here—this is the war room (12. 324)

Though denied as rumour and fake news, the Pentagon had set up a briefing for Elon Musk it seems on the potential for conflict with China. This meeting, if it occurs as scheduled, follows the abrupt and unexpected closure of the Office of the Secretary of Defence’s Net Assessment group, an internal think-tank projecting decades into the military’s future and produced prognoses and reports of long-term threats based on their research, and the meeting in the Tank, a secure conference room, privileging the unelected bureaucrat to unprecedented information on American strategic capabilities and its intelligence on China’s perhaps is the armed forces’ five bullets to DOGE to keep them from culling vital positions and funding within the military needed for such a stand-off—already having pressured the Pentagon from buying jet fighters made by one of his space-launch competitors. Giving the CEO of a defence contractor access to this level of information and a role in influencing direction is certainly a conflict of interest and presents grave consequences for forward posture.

spaghettification (12. 323)

One might be familiar with the above transformation when one wanders too close to a black hole but there’s more physical properties to ponder in pasta that touch on the broader mysteries of the Cosmos. Noting the expertise required to produce the finest and most delicate varieties of angel hair, researchers applied science to create a matrix of nano-noodles to study the limits of dough and starch, inadvertently finding the resulting pasta to have enhanced stiffness and with possible applications as a biodegradable substitute for plastic. Enduring conundrums also present themselves in the form of the slurping problem—and variants—and Richard Feynman’s obsessive quandaries (previously) over why dry spaghetti always snapped in two and the physics behind stress and tension, which after a quarter of a century yielded a three way fracture with some mechanical finesse. More from BBC contributor Joseph Howlett at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: World Puppetry Day (with synchronoptica), the Loyalty Order (1947) plus a Disneyland Dream (1956)

seven years ago: Karl Marx pedestrian signals, Tanglewood Tales plus Lewis Carroll’s logic game

eight years ago: assorted links worth revisiting 

nine years ago: pixelated palettes plus artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder

ten years ago: Russian disinformation campaigns, the Reeperbahn and the Order of the Garter, more links to revisit plus Frida Kahlo in Detroit

oh zaporizhzhia—i don’t know (12. 322)

Following a telephone call with Putin ostensibly securing a ceasefire on Ukrainian energy infrastructure and rather unrelenting overtures for the embattled nation’s mineral wealth, Trump called Zelenskyy to dictate the terms and to introduce a new dimension to the deal, suggesting that the United States (as with Gaza now exploding back to a state of war) assume ownership of nuclear power plants. The proposal was met with surprise, Kyiv politely mooting the offer, saying that the reactors were state-owned and could not be privatised, having only discussed during the call the one facility under Russian control but again reenforcing the idea that American economic stakes are their best protection—as with his earlier bid for control of country’s rare Earth resources. American defence conglomerate Westinghouse was in talks, prior to the start of the war, but the deal has since fallen through.

epicentre (12. 321)

Initially really taken by the wire-frame geopolitical globe overlay (I can remember playing with such a model in a computer programme ages ago), this 3D quake-watcher—via Pasa Bon!—monitors seismic activity in real time. In full-screen mode, it delivers a cinematic visualisation (with sound) as the transparent Earth rotates with a sidebar of live events, listing location, depth (hypocentre), magnitude, alerts and tsunami risk plus an explorer mode to track hotspots.

reference epoch (12. 320)

Via Waxy, we are directed to a single-purpose website that untethers dates from the common era (which still is predicated on AD and BC) an makes time relative to whatever historical (or prehistorical) marker one wishes to use. In addition to showcased epoch events, there is also a simple script to install for one’s own project. 2025 is 7,5kAC—that is After Cheese.

auswärtiges amt (12. 319)

Following the detention and expulsion of three nationals (two tourists and a green-card holding permanent resident), the Foreign Office has issued a travel advisory for Germans travelling to the United States. While in most cases residents of the EU can enjoy visa-free travel in America for up to ninety-days, the decision on whether a traveller can enter ultimately lies with the host country’s border authorities, the enforcement reciprocated. Tantamount to a warning only in degree, Berlin advises prospective vacationers to prepare for arrest, holding (in the cited cases, for periods exceeding two weeks in austere conditions, far beyond just ruining one’s holiday) and deportation even with documentation and pre-flight vetting through ESTA (their Electronic System for Travel Authorisation visa-waiver programme).

synchronoptica 

one year ago: an intemperance scale (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: the Game of Life, an evacuation collection plus a profile of Atlantic City

eight years ago: mandalas from sifted red earth, plans for a paperclip skyscraper plus more on map projections

nine years ago: duelling constitutions plus belated pi day

ten years ago: assorted links to revisit plus collaborative human-robot experiments

8x8 (12. 318)

first comes the performance, then comes the repetition, then comes the integration: thirty lonely yet beautiful acts of defiance—even including social media—via Kottke 

fubar: Muckrock presents its FOIA Foilies awards for 2025—probably too early—see previously  

not shuttered, per se, just considered complete: venerable UbuWeb started back up after closure last year  

audible enclaves: researchers have discovered how to beam sounds to a targeted listener—via the New Shelton wet/dry 

it’s peanut butter jelly time: froghorn.exe is an homage to what used to be the internet’s biggest draw  

programmable mutterer: the allure of magical thinking and how the displaced grace of AI could prove more analogous to markets and institutions steering better than individuals  

smoking gun: Trump declassifies a tranche of documents on the JFK assassination, unredacted and “ushering in a new era of maximum transparency  

greeks bearing gifts: Senator Schumer votes to let the wooden horse into Troy

georgia claimed her—georgia named her (12. 317)

Recorded on this day by Ben Bernie and the Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra and released the following day, spending five-weeks at number one on the American charts, the jazz standard was inspired by a chance meeting with the composer and longtime state house representative Dr George Thaddeus Brown, pledging while in office to name his daughter in honour of his constituency—the anecdote reflected in the above lyric. Renditions include performances by Bing Crosby, Cab Calloway, Django Reinhardt, a more empowered version by Roberta Flack, the Harlem Globetrotters’ theme from the instrumental rendering by Brother Bones and His Shadows featuring whistling and rhythm spoons and the below opening scene (which lives rent-free in my head) from the 1983 film To Be or Not To Be featuring Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft dancing and singing in Polish.