(12. 644)

synchronoptica

one year ago: more on teletext pages (with synchropoticæ) plus US vice presidents’ day

twelve years ago: August holidays and observances

fifteen years ago: visa requirements for travel 

sixteen years ago: more flea-market finds 

6x6 (12, 643)

levi strauss waltz: fledging Jefferson Airplane’s commercials for blue jeans 

moral high-ground: despite what justice we might entrust to AI, ethics remain a human responsibility  

whittle: a reductive word challenge—via Web Curios  

keygen.exe: the soundtrack of internet piracy  

si te fata ferunt, fer fata, ferere: the inscribed joists of Montaigne’ tower of his favourite classical aphorisms   

the cube: Jim Henson’s experimental 1969 teleplay for NBC

oh by jingo(12. 642)

Released on this day in 1964, the novelty single by The Young World Singers amid the race between the LBJ-Barry Goldwater-George Wallace (previously) urged people to vote for Ringo Starr for US president. Charting on Billboard’s Top 100 during the Republican convention with a concerted write-in campaign for the potential fourth spoiler candidate (Starr ineligible by dent of his being a British subject), it is unclear if their well-organised contingent had any political impact, most fans and supporters of the Beatles’ drummer “who didn’t talk about war” being under the age of twenty-one and not yet able to vote. Perhaps however it did in a small part influence the decision to lower the voting age to that of conscription and Johnson’s later decision not to seek the Democrat nomination for the 1968 election and a second term.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Laverne and Shirley billing (with synchronopticæ)

thirteen years ago: the search for past life on Mars plus budgetary woes 

8x8 (12. 641)

practically perfect people never permit sentiment to muddle their thinking: the Art Room Plant presents multiple vignettes on author PL Travers and her most famous character, Mary Poppins  

savage garden: this year’s Edward Gorey envelope art competition has a sinister botanic theme—see previously—via Web Curios 

catsup and fries: potatoes evolved from tomatoes 

🌀: a two-part episode on tempestology—the study of hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones

drowned in sound: reflections on the current state of music discovery and serendipity in general 

liberation day: Trump’s tariffs go into effect—see more hapax: a project tracking every unique English word uttered on Bluesky, including those yet to be used—via Waxy  

society for the protection of underground networks: SPUN has created a subterranean global atlas to map the mycorrhizal connections (previously) under our feet that support the ecosystem above  

傘: the spiritual underpinnings of the umbrella in Japanese society

obedience to authority (12. 640)

Begun on this day in 1961, the eponymous battery of social psychological experiments were conducted under the supervisor of Yale professor Stanly Milgram (previously) in order to gauge the willingness of test subjects to compile with instructions that conflicted with conscience and empathy. Made to believe that they were facilitators, administering electric shocks to a student to reenforce desired behaviours, the participants demonstrated a concerning eager inclination to better the performance of their assigned learners (a rote memorisation exercise) and deliver electric shocks with increasing intensity in order to marshal their faculties. In reality the punishing discharge was fictitious, delivered via a device labeled Shock Generator, Type ZLB with output from fifteen to four hundred fifty volts, well above the fatal limit, and the students were confederates of the experimenter, but nonetheless illustrating readiness to conform, despite some misgivings and signs of reservation for the distress caused with none of those refusing to give the highest level shock insisting that the experiment be stopped or bothering to check on their students. A test-case for research ethics, most responded after learning of the set-up that they were happy to have contributed and the experiment with variations has been replicated numerous time. Held in the milieu of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for war crimes in Jerusalem and the draft for Vietnam, Milgram wanted to determine if millions of German accomplices were simply following orders in genocide. The unexpected results of the first iteration, wanting to use American students as the control group and considering obedience to an authority figure to be a distinctly Teutonic trait, stopped Milgram from subjecting a group of German students, whom might well have been much more sympathetic to the plight of the “learners” due to recent history, to the same conditions. Ultimately inconclusive, reevaluation of the tests find some heuristic value but a poor lens for understanding the Holocaust and Nazism. 

 synchronoptica

one year ago: retroactive statehood for Ohio (with synchronopticæ) 

twelve years ago: promoting a vegetarian diet plus an exhibition from the Hessen state archives

thirteen years ago: the pictograms of the Mexican Games of 1968 

10x10 (12. 639)

we don’t serve their kind here: “clanker” from the Star Wars franchise has become a universal slur for robots 

jeanine, you’ve changed: a thread about how a consultancy firm in 1987 was responsible for making late 80s and 90s cartoon characters bland and unanimated—via Super Punch 

retrospective: an interview with photographer Dennis Morris whose expansive portfolio of music royalty and documentation of the East End offer a correspondence and symmetry  

do you take this burger to be your dinner: the return after a long hiatus shows that King of the Hill was always about food 

regolith: former reality TV star, Fox News anchor and acting NASA administrator (plus also US Secretary of Transportation) announces the acceleration of the building of a lunar nuclear reactor, as well as freeing commercial drones from line-of-sight supervisor requirements 

ásatrúarfélagið: the resurgence of Norse paganism in Iceland 

bakeneko: superstition and myth regarding cats in Japanese culture—via Nag on the Lake and Everlasting Blört—see previously, see also 

hamburger royal ts: some facts about the McDonald’s Quarter-Pounder  

just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade: set in 1984 California during Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign, the critically polarising 1990 Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (previously) speaks to the present 

flivverboob: a 1922 slur for a careless driver that didn’t not seem to catch on

diurnal cycle (12. 638)

Launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome on this day in 1961, the Vostok 2 capsule carried aloft mission pilot Gherman Titov, who became the second human to orbit the Earth after Yuri Gagarin (below right)—and the four person in space counting the suborbital flights of US astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom. Based on the determination that safe re-entry in the open steppe of southern Russia would not be possible if the craft overshot two orbits—much to the protestation of flight medics that believe that human physiology could not withstand an extended time in space—the mission became an endurance test, lasting just over twenty-five hours, and equipping the capsule with more advanced communication and climate controls. Proving that humans could live and work in space, Titov orbited the Earth seventeen-and-a-half times, achieving many firsts, including the first nap in space and a minor bout of space sickness (adaptation syndrome) being the first to vomit aloft, and equipped with a professional still- and film-camera captured the first images of the Earth from above aside from earlier V2 rocket-mounted footage. Titov was subjected to a battery of medical tests afterwards and the mission was considered an overwhelming success. The day of his safe record, the US congress approve, by voice vote, a spending package of over one and a half trillion dollars to fund the American space programme, including almost five hundred billion earmarked as seed money for a crewed mission to the Moon. During a visit to the World’s Fair in Seattle, when questioned by reporters how his space flight had changed his philosophy and outlook on life (see also), Titov was quoted: “Sometimes people are saying that God is out there. I was looking around attentively all day but I didn’t find anybody. I say never angels nor God.” Misattributed to Gargarin, it was cited as evidence of wide-spread Soviet atheism and used as anti-religious propaganda by the Americans.  

synchronoptica

one year ago: a 1963 surf-rock banger (with synchronopticæ), chess notation plus presidential candidate Kamala Harris introduces running-mate Tim Walz

thirteen years ago: hot Eastern European girls, return for deposit plus some impressions from Norway

sixteen years ago: the German Thirteenth Month bonus 

homoplasy (12. 637)

Having recently pondered the convergent instances of evolution that birthed multiple iterations of the crab and crab-like, we quite enjoyed this corollary from MetaFilter on new findings that show that among mammals, by dent of the food source’s sheer abundance—a ready and steady diet, have developed specialisation for eating ants and termites at least a dozen separate times. Myrmecophagous species have occurred independently, from aardvarks to pangolins to armadillos to echidnas (a monotreme), but the rate and occurrence of this adaptation has happened far more frequently and at a much faster pace than the above carcinisation. Everything becomes anteater.