Something I Learned Today
Over at Medium, Tom Whitwell sums up 52 things he learned in 2024. Some highlights:
- Ozempic is a modified, synthetic version of a protein discovered in the venomous saliva of the Gila monster, a large, sluggish lizard native to the United States. [Scott Alexander]
- In China, there are a registries of haunted apartments. If you’re willing to live somewhere with a sinister history, you can get a discount of 30%. [Andrew Kipnis]
- After security at Milwaukee airport there is a ‘Recombobulation Area’ for people who have been discombobulated by the security experience. [Molly Snydervia Nick Parker]
- People whose surnames start with U, V, W, X, Y or Z tend to get grades 0.6% lower than people with A-to-E surnames. Modern learning management systems sort papers alphabetically before they’re marked, so those at the bottom are always seen last, by tired, grumpy markers. A few teachers flip the default setting and mark Z to A, and their results are reversed. [Jill Barshay]
Check out the whole list.
Bottle Bill
La Petite Victoire is a non-alcoholic sparkling beverage that is sold in an eye-catching textured bottle designed by global package design firm Stranger & Stranger. Via Core77:
Stranger & Stranger is a sort of hit-machine firm for the alcoholic beverages industry. In an interview with industry periodical SevenFiftyDaily, writer Alia Akkam reveals that the firm's packaging rebrands "have tripled sales for some wine and spirits labels."
One gets the sense that if you used a bottle like that to christen a ship, you’d sink it.
Crystal Blue Persuasion
Fans of bottled water may be familiar with Saratoga Water, bottled in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Its cobalt blue bottles are fairly iconic, at least in parts of upstate New York, but now, via the Daily Gazette, Pantone has given the blue its own official name:
Called Saratoga Signature Blue, the name was announced at Design Miami, a popular art expo that started earlier this week and runs through Sunday.
Signs of the Times, Part the Ongoing: Do the Math
New Cuyama, Calif., is a small desert town roughly 90 miles north of Santa Barbara. Via Boing Boing, they have an unusual “welcome to…” sign:
Why someone felt the need to add up un-add-uppable units remains a mystery.
The town was founded in 1951 by the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) following the 1949 discovery of oil. ARCO built the entire town infrastructure, including housing, businesses, and even funded schools. During its early days, New Cuyama was considered the "pearl" of eastern Santa Barbara County due to its oil production. However, as oil and gas production declined, the area returned to its agricultural roots.
If not its mathematical roots.
Precious Metals
The Type Archive in the U.K. was a repository of eight million typographic artifacts including such historic materials as relics from the Stephenson Blake foundry, the hot-metal technology of the early Monotype Corporation, and the wood letters created by Robert DeLittle’s factory. Alas, the Archive closed in 2023, orphaning the collection. Now, via Print magazine, typographer and stalwart Type Archive volunteer Richard Ardagh took on the responsibility of celebrating these artifacts, and to that end has written a book scheduled to be published in winter 2025. Steven Heller spoke with Ardagh:
At first I began bringing my camera to document artifacts that I found interesting and to help founder Susan Shaw with promotion. After she died in 2020 I tried to take more photos, as the future of the archive began to be questioned. The book is made up of these images, as well as some that I commissioned especially and others inherited from before I was involved. It’s arranged in sections by material: iron, steel, copper, brass, bronze, wood, paper. The history of typefounding spans 500 years and is quite complex, so this ordering is an attempt to make the content accessible at first glance and also to highlight how many different materials a letterform passed through before appearing on the printed page
Keep an eye out for the book to help support this project.
Georgia on My Stone
Another week, another unearthed relic that challenges our assumptions about the history of language and writing. This time, it’s a carved tablet with an unfamiliar script discovered by locals in Georgia (the country) near Bashplemi Lake in 2021. Says Gizmodo:
A study published in November in the Journal of Ancient History and Archaeology suggests that the inscription could be an ancient local Georgian script. If this interpretation, and the artifact’s tentative dating to the Early Iron Age or earlier, are confirmed, it could rewrite our understanding of the origins of Georgian writing.
“The signs on the tablet undoubtedly represent a script,” the researchers wrote in the study, adding that it could even “have been an alphabet.” The inscription, dubbed “Bashplemi inscription” after the nearby lake, is composed of 39 unique characters—likely including numbers and punctuation marks—with some repeating for a total of 60 signs divided into seven horizontal lines. Though the text remains undeciphered, certain characters appear similar to other scripts.
“Generally, the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any script known to us; however, most of the symbols used therein resemble ones found in the scripts of the Middle East, as well as those of geographically remote countries such as India, Egypt and West Iberia,” they explained, also listing Phoenician, Aramaic, and Greek. Additionally, they noted a likeness to Bronze and Early Iron Age seals unearthed in Georgia. Many of the similarities, however, were with Caucasian scripts (a region including parts of Georgia, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia), including Georgian Mrgvlovani, Albanian, and proto-Georgian.
The finding could revolutionize our understanding of the history of ancient Georgian writing, which has believed to have spread only after the adoption of Christianity in the area in the early fourth century CE, but the Early Iron Age dates back to around 1000 BCE—more than a millennium earlier.
Rome If You Want to
The Pope has gone electric—but don’t call him Judas. Although, to be more specific, the Popemobile has gone electric. Via Core 77:
Mercedes-Benz typically makes fast, powerful cars. However, they've just unveiled this one-off EV designed "for the special purpose of slow journeys at public appearances." Introducing the all-new Popemobile, a zero-emissions vehicle based on the G580.
Mercedes has been in the Popemobile business for nearly a century. Notably, the switch to electric was reportedly requested by the key passenger himself: "We are overjoyed to be able to fulfil. the Holy Father's wish for an electric Popemobile," says Mercedes board member Britta Seger, "and are particularly proud to be able to build the vehicle according to his requirements.
The “Blessing of the Battery” must have been quite the event.
Graphene: Cementing Its Reputation
Was it a good week for graphene news? It’s always a good week for graphene news! Bio Graphene Solutions (BGS) has completed a pilot commercial concrete pour with EllisDon Corporation and Tomlinson Ready Mix, one of Ottawa’s largest concrete providers. From (who else?) Graphene-Info:
The Company’s proprietary graphene-enhanced admixture was integrated into the operational flow of a Tomlinson Ready Mix 32MPa-C-2 sidewalk concrete pour at an active construction project managed by EllisDon’s Ottawa team. The biographene-enhanced concrete mix utilized 10% less cement than the control mix design without sacrificing the fresh properties of the concrete. This pilot testing is a critical milestone in demonstrating the in-situ performance of the biographene-enhanced mix, validating lab trials which have shown that the concrete achieves the 28-day targeted strength of 32MPa by 7 days.
Enterprising
Sometimes it’s not easy being a Trekkie. Case in point, via Boing Boing, the tortured tale of lifelong Trekker Beda Koorey, 76, who once had vanity license plates for her car that read “NCC-1701,” which is of course the registration number of the USS Enterprise. However, recently Koorey has received tens of thousands of dollars in parking tickets and bridge tolls, all mailed to her home. And the thing is: she doesn’t even own a car anymore. Norman, coordinate:
Star Trek NCC-1701 souvenir license plates are readily available for less than $20 on Amazon and elsewhere. So basically, bad actors—and I don't mean William Shatner—have been doing naughty things in cars baring the novelty plates—and the violations are being sent to Koorey.
…“I got a phone call from Ohio, a police chief looking for plates because they were involved in a robbery,” Koorey said[…] “I’ve run out of ink. I’ve run out of stamps,” Koorey said of trying to answer every summons[…]. “I can't afford it. I'm on a fixed income.”
Highly illogical.
Around the Webb, Part the Infinite: The Trouble with Hubble
We haven’t checked in with the James Webb Space Telescope in a while, but it is still wowing scientists and challenging long-held notions of physics and the way the universe works. Says Ars Technica:
New observational data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has confirmed that prior measurements of distances between nearby stars and galaxies made by the Hubble Space Telescope are not in error, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. That means the discrepancy between observation and our current theoretical model of the Universe is more likely to be due to new physics.
New physics. That’s pretty substantial.
As astronomy fanciers are aware, the Hubble Constant is a measure of the Universe’s expansion rate, expressed in kilometers per second per megaparsec (Mpc). Every second, every megaparsec of the Universe expands by a x number of kilometers. But what is x? Ai, there’s the rub.
There are basically three methods scientists use to measure the Hubble Constant: looking at nearby objects to see how fast they are moving, gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes or neutron stars, and measuring tiny deviations in the afterglow of the Big Bang known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However, the various methods have come up with different values. For instance, tracking distant supernovae produced a value of 73 km/s Mpc, while measurements of the CMB using the Planck satellite produced a value of 67 km/s Mpc.
However:
Just last year, researchers made a third independent measure of the Universe's expansion by tracking the behavior of a gravitationally lensed supernova, where the distortion in space-time caused by a massive object acts as a lens to magnify an object in the background. The best fits of those models all ended up slightly below the value of the Hubble Constant derived from the CMB, with the difference being within the statistical error.
Enter the Webb.
Earlier this year, JWST researchers reported on measurements built on last year's confirmation based on Webb data that Hubble's measurements of the expansion rate were accurate, at least for the first few "rungs" of the "cosmic distance ladder." But there was still the possibility of as-yet-undetected errors that might increase the deeper (and hence further back in time) one looked into the Universe, particularly for brightness measurements of more distant stars.
Ultimately:
Now it's up to the theorists to come up with novel hypotheses to explain these findings. “One possible explanation for the Hubble tension would be if there was something missing in our understanding of the early Universe, such as a new component of matter—early dark energy—that gave the universe an unexpected kick after the Big Bang,” said JHU cosmologist Marc Kamionkowski, who was not involved in the new study. “And there are other ideas, like funny dark matter properties, exotic particles, changing electron mass, or primordial magnetic fields that may do the trick. Theorists have license to get pretty creative.”
Bull!
We’ve all heard the old expression “like a bull in a china shop,” but are bulls known for ransacking china shops? Should we just assume it’s going to trash the place? Do we have any data? Well, via Laughing Squid, Zac Alsop, who was cited in this space about a year ago for entering a robotic dog in a dog competition, decided he would conduct an experiment, whereby he would put an actual bull in a china shop. After procuring said bull, finding a china shop was a bit more difficult, as not many china shop owners are especially sanguine about large bovines blundering about the place.
Alsop eventually decided that it was easier to build his own. He enlisted the carpentry services of his friend José for the build. Alsop was also concerned that how ceramic shards might hurt the bull. Although he was assured that the bull’s hide is tough enough, Alsop engaged the services of prop maker Callum Fellows to make pieces out of “siliglass”, which smash easily without harm.
More like “sillyglass.” But anyway. The results? Spoiler alert: the old adage is correct.
12 Days of Cheese
As tempting as it would be to give one’s paramour an endless series of geese, pipers, milkmaids, lords a-leaping, and so forth, chances are he or she would prefer 12 days of cheese, and thanks to Whole Foods, they can. Says (who else?) Food & Wine:
The range of options once again showcases Whole Foods’ global offerings — France, Spain, Switzerland, and Italy are all represented — along with top-tier domestic options, some of which are exclusive to the chain. The 12 cheeses were selected by the market’s specialty cheese team, which includes certified cheese professionals recognized by the American Cheese Society. “The holiday season is all about sharing special experiences, and our 12 Days of Cheese lineup brings together the very best of what I love about cheese: its ability to surprise, delight, and spark connection,” says Cathy Strange, Whole Foods’ ambassador of food culture, who formerly served as the chain’s global cheese buyer for more than two decades. “Each cheese has a story: from rare, exclusive varieties to familiar favorites, every selection is an invitation to explore and savor.”
Click through the story for an extensive guide to charcuterie and wine pairings.
First launched in 2012, this year’s 12 Days of Cheese runs from December 13 to 24, and Prime members get as much as 35% off each of the chosen cheeses. And no partridge or pear tree need be involved.
This Week in Printing, Publishing, and Media History
December 9
1608: English poet and philosopher John Milton born. (“There goes paradise,” said his mother.)
1793: New York City’s first daily newspaper, the American Minerva, is established by Noah Webster.
1897: Activist Marguerite Durand founds the feminist daily newspaper La Fronde in Paris.
1906: American admiral, computer scientist, and designer of COBOL Grace Hopper born.
1960: The first episode of Coronation Street, the world’s longest-running television soap opera, is broadcast in the United Kingdom.
1965: A Charlie Brown Christmas, first in a series of Peanuts television specials, debuts on CBS.
1968: Douglas Engelbart gives what became known as “The Mother of All Demos,” publicly debuting the computer mouse, hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface using the oN-Line System (NLS) at the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
1979: The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first of only two diseases that have been driven to extinction (rinderpest in 2011 being the other).
December 10
1520: Martin Luther burns his copy of the papal bull Exsurge Domine outside Wittenberg's Elster Gate.
1768: The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is published.
1815: English mathematician and computer scientist Ada Lovelace born. Working on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, she s often considered the first computer programmer. (She was also the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron.)
1830: American poet and author Emily Dickinson born.
1851: American librarian and educator, creator of the Dewey Decimal Classification Melvil Dewey born.
1884: Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published.
1909: Selma Lagerlöf becomes the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
1936: Italian dramatist, novelist, and poet Nobel Prize laureate Luigi Pirandello dies (b. 1867).
1946: American newspaperman and short story writer Damon Runyon dies (b. 1884).
December 11
1918: Russian novelist, historian, short story writer, and Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn born.
1972: Apollo 17 becomes the sixth and final Apollo mission to land on the Moon.
December 12
1821: French novelist Gustave Flaubert born.
1901: Guglielmo Marconi receives the first transatlantic radio signal (the letter "S" [***] in Morse Code), at Signal Hill in St John’s, Newfoundland.
1999: American novelist, short story writer, and playwright Joseph Heller dies (b. 1923).
2020: English author John le Carré dies (b. 1931).
December 13
1962: NASA launches Relay 1, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit.
1972: Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt become the last humans to set foot on the Moon.
December 14
1902: The Commercial Pacific Cable Company lays the first Pacific telegraph cable, from San Francisco to Honolulu.
1903: The Wright brothers make their first attempt to fly with the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, N.C.
1948: Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann are granted a patent for their cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game.
1972: Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan is the last person to walk on the moon.
December 15
1791: The United States Bill of Rights becomes law after it is ratified by the Virginia General Assembly.
1939: Gone with the Wind (the highest inflation-adjusted grossing film) receives its premiere at Loew's Grand Theatre in Atlanta, Ga.
