Things cannot go well in England Nor ever will Until every thing shall be held in common Those are the words of John Ball, who on this day in 1381 was hanged for his leadership of the Peasants Revolt. The Peasants Revolt, unlike almost everything else in the 14th century, feels comprehensible. There is one side who are obviously in the right, and there is the dreamy interest of wondering what…
RIP John Ball
January 23rd, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Cargoes, revised: the declining trade in cigarette holders
January 22nd, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Cargoes, revised: the declining trade in cigarette holders
The World Customs Organization has the unenviable job of trying to categorize everything that is traded across borders. Every few years they update their classification system, adapting to the development of new products and changes in trade patterns. Poignantly, this means the elimination of archaic goods. The list of categories eliminated between 1992 and 2007 is a record of a lost world: cigar…
Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed — book review
January 22nd, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed — book review
Jon Ronson has made a career from taking important topics, and finding the ridiculous element within them. It works pretty well for getting us to pay attention to what he has to say — I certainly look forward to reading his books, in a way I wouldn’t for a drier treatment of the same topic. In the past he’s looked at extremists, psycopaths and conspiracy heorists. Now he’s looking at online…
The establishment endures
January 21st, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
The establishment in Britain shows no signs of dying out. Here is an FT article, written by an Oxbridge-educated man, about how Oxbridge-educated men find themselves in positions of power without really needing to exert themselves or show signs of brilliance: My caste produces the opinions that most British people are expected to swallow. However, the one topic we seldom discuss honestly is our…
Sharon Stone, Leon Trotsky, and a lobotomy
January 20th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Sharon Stone, Leon Trotsky, and a lobotomy
Recently I realised how far Trotskyism has fallen. Two smart, educated companions failed to associate an ice-pick with Leon Trotsky. Instead, they associated the ice-pick with Basic Instinct. Comrades, not only have Trots been obliterated, but the world has forgotten to associate mountaineering tools with a thousand tasteless Stalinist jokes. Unfortunately, sexy Hollywood homicide isn’t a direct…
Objects on trial
January 20th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Wikipedia’s article on In Rem Jurisdiction is a thing of beauty. It’s about the situation where the defendant in a court case is an object rather than a person. Some of the case names are poetically bizarre: United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins United States v. Thirty-seven Photographs, one of many obscenity cases prosecuted in this way United States v. Forty Barrels and…
Some MoD FOI responses
January 19th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
I’m enough of a FOI nerd to occasionally delve into the collection of released information at What Do They Know. Here are a few that caught my eye from the MoD: Of the UK military trainers in Iraq, none speak Arabic or Kurdish The Minister of Defense can classify civilian aircraft as military. He apparently has not done so; this request would be worth repeating in a few years. Service personnel…
Manhattan is not burning
January 18th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Reminiscences of New York in the 70s, and how it came to be that way. Broke, with the Federal government out to destroy it, and where the police were handing out leaflets entitled “Welcome to Fear City“: One consequence of New York’s forty-year transition from junkie to preppy overachiever is that our stereotypes are out of date. Hence the continual problems for location scout Nick Carr —…
January 18th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
They used to navigate by raven, the Vikings, there being no stars visible at such high latitudes in summer. The old sagas say that the Viking settlers of Iceland took ravens. Out of sight of land, wallowing at sea, they would release a raven and watch it climb the air until it was high enough to sight land. Where the raven headed, they followed in their open boats.
Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie
January 17th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Wonderfully-titled science piece to please the goths in the gallery: “Ravens have paranoid, abstract thoughts about other minds”:
Cementing their status as the most terrifying of all the birds, a new study has found that ravens are able to imagine being spied upon – a level of abstraction that was previously thought to be unique to humans.
Homo Mentis
January 16th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
What separates humans from animals? Having a chin:
“It’s really strange that only humans have chins,” says James Pampush from Duke University. “When we’re looking at things that are uniquely human, we can’t look to big brains or bipedalism because our extinct relatives had those. But they didn’t have chins.
With ‘er ‘ed tucked underneath ‘er arm
January 15th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
The big question in medieval art – when a decapitated saint carries their own head, where do you put the halo?
A cephalophore (from the Greek for “head-carrier”) is a saint who is generally depicted carrying his or her own head; in art, this was usually meant to signify that the subject in question had been martyred by beheading. Handling the halo in this circumstance offers a unique challenge for the artist. Some put the halo where the head used to be; others have the saint carrying the halo along with the head.
Final word goes to Stanley Holloway:
Medieval Death Metal
January 15th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Metal is the true cultural heritage of Scandinavia. Proof is the Arab merchant who visited 10th century Denmark and reported: “Never before I have heard uglier songs than those of the Vikings in Slesvig (in Denmark). The growling sound coming from their throats reminds me of dogs howling, only more untamed.” [This is the immediate source, though it seems to be one of those too-good-to-be-true…
Mental Waste Collection and Disposal Service
January 14th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Via MeFi:
The MWCDS turns psychic garbage into physical trash. A telephone landline (AT&T) and cassette tape answering machine (Panasonic KX-T 1920 EASA PHONE) is available 24/7 for waste drop off. All calls are confidential. All cassette tapes are sealed in concrete after recording. After the cassette tapes are sealed in concrete a site is determined for burial or storage. The placement into this site involves a ritual administered by the GROUNDSKEEPER.
Tracking dots in printers — a history in government documents
January 13th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Tracking dots in printers — a history in government documents
For twenty years, many color laser printers have included a hidden tracking code on each page they print. Made of microscopic yellow dots, the code can reveal to the police the unique identity of your printer.An example of the yellow-dot tracking pattern The EFF and others have reverse engineered a few of these codes, shedding light on how the system works technically. What they have not…
Speed dating in Iran
January 13th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
I don’t 100% believe this, but it tickles me anyway. Supposedly, car-based flirting in Iran avoids the (potentially illegal) need to be alone with a member of the opposite sex: Rules of the game? Pile in a car and head with your same sex possie to one of the city’s flirt strips, cruise up and down until you spot a likely target, being careful to pick a car that’s broadly your car’s equal and then…
Aleph
January 12th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
We’ve just (re-)launched Aleph, the project I’ve been working on with OpenOil. It’s a specialized search engine for oil, gas and mining, aimed at helping activists, journalists and government officials make sense of the torrent of regulatory and financial information that comes out of those industries. Julien Bach made a beautiful video to explain what’s going on:…
January 11th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
in Greek mythology ‘Hyperborean’ refers to the people who lived in a land of sunshine beyond the north wind, though the word was employed in the 19th century to describe either frozen zones populated by barbarians or (conversely) communities of forward-looking thinkers.
Hyperborean Manners | Frieze
Interplanetary Kangaroos
January 11th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Among crank mail received by Seymour Cray was “a long treatise from an inmate at the county jail who had a theory of interplanetary transportation involving kangaroos whose energy output would be measured in “gigahops”.”
[source]
January 10th, 2019 § 0 comments § permalink
Things are awful. Everything is terrible. And the worse it gets, the more energy I feel. It’s like some generator that only feeds on horror. I mean, I’m terrified for my kid, and for my own old age, but goddamn I love getting up in the morning (well, afternoon) and seeing what new shapes the world has twisted itself into. Everything is on fire and I love it. I dole out advice on how to deal with these ice storms of shit that we’re living through and counsel people on how to protect their brains from it all and console people and tell them that we’re all going to find ways to get through it and I am seriously just sitting there with my feet up and an espresso in my hand and feeling fine as the planet eats itself.
Warren Ellis, Weirdness of the Now: Interviewing Warren Ellis About Normal (via ahmetasabanci)