department of the interior (12. 987)

Having encountered some of these brilliant and iconic Depression Era posters sponsored by FDR’s Works Projects Administration, we appreciated learning about the landscape architect and graphic designer behind the strategic and unified tourism campaign to promote US national and state parks, Dorothy Waugh, through an exhibit of seventeen of her placards—particularly at such a fraught time for these preserves, understaffed, subject to revisionist histories, corporate encroachment and surge-pricing. Due to the scope and scale of her work for the Civilian Conservation Corps’ infrastructure projects for the parks system, Waugh went from being the sole artist to hiring and supervising a team of draughtsmen and also produced easy to follow diagrams and designs, most workers unable to interpret blueprints and formal specifications, for the construction picnic areas and campsite conveniences as well as other basic structures. Much more from Print magazine at the link above.

kalle anka & c:o (12. 986)

Mental Floss brings us reporting on another imported holiday tradition (same procedure as every year) in the annual ritual on the afternoon of Christmas Day in that liminal time-slot after dinner and before super after the excitement of the gifts are baked in with over a third of the households in Sweden sitting down on the sofa to engage in a bit of nostalgia by watching the broadcast of a 1958 made-for-tv Disney anthology clip show called From All of Us to All of You, hosted by Jiminy Cricket, known locally as “Kalle Anka och has vänner önskar God Jul”—despite Donald Duck being only one character out of a cast of many. First aired on the Sweden channel SVT1 in 1960, it has grown into a yuletide custom more or less without change or commercial interruption for over six decades.  The entire programme can be found here.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the Unwort of the Year (with synchronopticæ), King William College’s Winter Break quiz plus the narrative murals of a luxurious Roman villa

fourteen years ago: memes of the year 

fifteen years ago: carbon chauvinism  

sixteen years ago: a visit to Colditz 

nth degree (12. 985)

Large amounts notoriously difficult to wrap one’s head around as it is (see previously here and here) and language attempting to sidestep contemplation of the practicably infinite, we enjoyed this gloss by linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis of Wayne State University’s catalogue by first known publication of words used for indefinite hyperbolic numerals in English—placeholder names also called non-numerical vague quantifiers. The oldest examples dating from the mid-nineteenth century is umpty or umpteenth—used to describe an exponential difference and originally taken from a vocalisation of the dash in Morse code—dit and iddy were the dots. Zillion and its snow clones are first attested in print at the turn of the century.

sounds about white (12. 984)

In contrast to last year’s officer holder, Pantone’s Colour of the Year (see previously—it’s truly not an annual tradition to keep a close eye on, though in this case, it’s not just the lower the stakes, the stronger the conviction) of Cloud Dancer seems a rather bland, neutral choice at first blush and a reversal of its previous pick of “Mocha Mousse” (someone said 2025: poop 2026: toilet paper) but then an interesting one given the political climate in the US specifically and has instead courted controversy, given the election of Trump to a second term, accidental Nazi salutes, immediate assaults on programmes working towards diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility both in the federal government and then followed by private industry, revisionist histories including erasure of Black contributions and America’s past of slavery, enabling racial-profiling and unleashing armies of immigration officers on cities to terrorise people whom appear to have non-caucasian heritage, freezing immigration while offering refugee status to Afrikaners and the courts again set to hear the administration’s argument in favour of overturning birthright citizenship, just focusing on the solely racist actions. It seems the trend institute was not just throwing in the proverbial towel—though we contend that they well could have just been calling it in with the selection and exalted copy sounding suspiciously machine-generated.

synchronoptica

one year ago: America’s first electric vehicle (with synchronopticæ), celebrating a century of Dick van Dyke, St Ambrose, the fallout of AI replacing hyperlinks plus Scrooge’s tombstone

fourteen years ago: US state department announces it will no longer tolerate homophobia plus an end-of-the-year-figure-with-wings

fifteen years ago: disingenuous transparency 

sixteen years ago: COP 15 plus cable conglomerate to acquire NBC

trans erasure (12. 983)

More despicable and insulting than the childish substitution of the official portrait of Joe Biden with a crude picture of an auto-pen, in the gallery of past leaders of the US Health and Human Services department—a cabinet-level agency of the executive branch focused on public health—the former assistant secretary and surgeon general of the preventative medical corps, Admiral Rachel Levine, appointed by Biden, has been dead-named with an altered caption under her picture—to, according to Alabama urologist and current director, to ensure that the HHS both internally and externally reflect a gold standard of science guided by biological realities.

dūstscēawung (12. 982)

A tenth century Old English term, the word carries the rather poetic meaning of contemplation of dust, the latter half of the compound evolving into the Middle English escauvinghe, shewing—in the sense of presentation or to examine or inspect, which comes down in the modern word of scavenge via scavage—that is a toll placed on imported goods, similar to a tariff. Whilst dustsceawung can connote a sorrowful occupation and a sort of nihilistic thanatopsis , it also, through its lexical lineage, refers to being caught up in minutiae but also the brighter and more reverential acknowledgement that such omnipresent motes (“suspended in a sunbeam”—crumbled empire but also stardust) once were and can be other things, a daydream of transience and the future.

9x9 (12. 981)

on average there are only 0.061 haunted locations per square mile in the uk: ghost mapper 

forty winks: an appreciation of sleep and everyday aesthetics  

married to the sea: CEO of US military contractor Palantir argues case for making war crimes constitutionally allowable  

grunts and thwops: cetologist share their first chat with a humpbacked whale named Twain—see previously 

the dangerous christmas of red riding hood: a 1965 revisionist fairytale from the Wolf’s perspective, starring Liza Minnelli  

ar 4294: giant sunspot cluster on par with the concentration that sparked the Carrington event pointed directly at Earth—via Damn Interesting  

mixtape: a growing repository of found cassettes from around the world with content and provenance—via Web Curios   

enhanced vetting: Trump’s state department directed to deny visas for fact-checkers and content-moderators in defence of free-speech absolutism  

mycology mapped: an engrossing explainer of the fungi kingdom and its place in the ecosystem 

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: Ze Frank on molluscs (with synchronopticæ), a digital advent calendar plus gift ideas for the holiday office party

thirteen years ago: a gaslit whistle-blower 

fourteen years ago: Eurozone credit downgrades 

fifteen years ago: net neutrality and IMF priorities 

seventeen years ago: Christmas decorations 

gpt@3 (12. 980)

Via Web Curios, we find this quite astute retrospective of the state of artificial intelligence and large language models as it enters its fourth year, introduced to the public at the end of November 2022, with a set of certain precepts that encapsulates the hype and fear of the technology, allowing that AGI is achievable and could be beneficial to society at large but with the reservation that the current pathway is not the means to get there, the Singularity is not predictability, and the current phase, fraught with infringement, entrapment and havoc-causing for the environment and the economy when the bubble bursts is only intrinsic to moving beyond regurgitation. Though a bellwether for the recursive improvement on old fashioned automation, the histrionics have not borne out—with valid objection from those prematurely made redundant—stagnating corporate adoption and quietly lowered expectations the one front that make the present state of the art inherent and leading towards something genuinely useful lies in its allure of infinite patience. Notwithstanding all those attendant scourges ennumerbated above, the current LLMs will suffer (buffered with hubris) unlimited indignities, tweaking, and asking for the thousandth time and deliver, though scaling and devouring the totality of human-juried exchanges has not solved problems of basic alignment between input and output.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronopticæ) plus the condemnation of witchcraft (1484)

twelve years ago: more Wikileaks revelations plus the shift towards realism in Western art

thirteen years ago: homages to memes 

fourteen years ago: a broccoli curry