anna_wing

https://spectrum.ieee.org/lta-airship-faa-clearance


Sergey Brin has been backing a light-than-air airship intending for humanitarian missions.

its reported 3,000 welded titanium hubs and 10,000 carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer tubes are light enough that it can use nonflammable helium instead of explosive hydrogen as a lifting gas.

Good to know. The article doesn't say what its payload would be.

The proposed Lockheed Martin LMH-1, which was supposed to begin commercial production in 2018 but didn't, was supposed to be able to carry 47000 lbs (21318.84 kg or 21.31884 tonnes).

The Five Questions meme. I will ask, if anyone would like questions from me.

From oursin:

1. What would you like your garden to grow that it doesn't, for whatever reason?


Brugmannsias! Utterly the wrong climate: too hot, too wet. I could grow daturas, but they're too close to the ground, my witless cats would nibble them and be very sick if not dead...


2. If you could conjure up a couturier from the past to design a wardrobe for you, who?

Madeleine Vionnet. I'd love Erte or Poiret or Callot Soeurs or in fact any of the great 1920s couturiers, or even Worth post 1910 or thereabouts (and Lucille for my loungewear...), but Vionnet was the mistress of them all. Or of course Issey Miyake, who sadly would now qualify too...

3. Seashore or mountain?

Mountain, absolutely, especially when cool and forested, with onsen at judicious intervals. What with tsunami and cyclones and riptides, and too much sun, I regard the sea with vast suspicion. I suppose the seashore in a temperate climate and not in summer might be all right.

4. A book that has not been written that you wish would be or had been?

Too many, so for 'wish they had been written' I'll go with The Universal Pantograph, and Hope Mirrlees' second novel. For 'wish they would be written'...City of Opal and City of Pearl by Jane Emerson aka Doris Egan.

5. Favourite poet/s?

Rudyard Kipling, with Edna St Vincent Millay and Ogden Nash close behind.

And for people who think modern architecture can't be beautiful: behold the works of (some of) the great Japanese architects:

Kenzo Tange:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kenzo+tange+buildings&atb=v314-1&iax=images&ia=images

Tadao Ando:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tadao+ando+buildings&atb=v314-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

Fumihiko Maki:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=+fumihiko+maki+buildings&atb=v314-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

Kengo Kuma:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kengo+kuma+buildings&atb=v314-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

Kisho Kurokawa:


https://duckduckgo.com/?q=kisho+kurokawa+buildings&atb=v314-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

Yuko Nagayama:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=yuko+nagayama+buildings&atb=v314-1&iax=images&ia=images


Itsuko Hasegawa:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=itsuko+hasegawa+buildings&atb=v314-1&iax=images&ia=images

A really interesting article about the Sri Lankan cinnamon industry from Al Jazeera: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/10/18/harvesting-true-cinnamon-the-story-of-the-ceylon-spice

Housekeeper is Sri Lankan, so Before COVID, I used to get regular supplies of Sri Lankan tea, spices (including cinnamon) and Sri Lankan ginger biscuits, The Best In The World (TM). We use both cassia and cinnamon, for different dishes, and there is a clear difference. Cassia is an ingredient of Chinese 5-spice powder, so it goes into all the Chinese cooking, but for everything else, whether curries or baking, we use true cinnamon.

My family's house in the motherland has a full-grown cinnamon tree, and while we don't harvest it for the bark, bunches of the thinner, leafy twigs make lovely, scented green bouquets at Christmas.

Anyone from the US who is reading this is free to laugh at me.

I had always been vaguely puzzled by occasional references in news, or fiction, to children poisoning themselves with medication or supplements because they mistook them for sweets. Because while pills come in bright colours, they don't usually taste of anything, and if they do, it's nothing terribly nice. But I never bothered to look for an explanation. Then just recently, a friend came back from the US, and gave me two jars of vitamin supplements in a form that did look exactly like sweets, specifically those fruit-flavoured, chewy ones coated with a layer of sugar crystals, like firm jellies. I'm not sure what they're called. Marks and Spencer used to sell fancy versions.

And all was explained. I'd never seen anything like them before, I doubt if they're legal in the motherland, precisely because of the risks of making a mistake, and because they're so easy to eat quickly and in quantity. There are medicated boiled hard sweets of various kinds (Strepsils were a mainstay of my childhood), for sore throats and so on, but they have to be sucked to get any taste, I suppose it's hard to eat them fast enough to do oneself any damage.

One learns something new every day...

This means incorporating historical or historically-inspired clothes into your daily life. It is a thing that some Western historical costumers do, and I should think it would apply to the Chinese 'hanfu' movement too. There is no specific period of history required, though it does seem to be used to refer largely to Western clothes of the pre-World War I period, which are very obviously not within the normal compass of modern fashion.

From about World War I onwards, the clothes became recognisably modern in style, and could probably be worn today with not too many eyebrows raised, especially if one simply says "oh, it's designer". And styles from about the 1930s onwards would probably be categorised as "vintage fashion", rather than "historical costume".

I wear a lot of clothes that are based on or directly copied from 1920s styles (the linear, tubular look suits the flat, rectangular body shape common in East and Southeast Asia perfectly), so possibly I'm doing it too!

I practice some of these in a very sporadic way, since embroidery is one of those things that does not hurt if left to lie fallow for a decade or so. And it has occurred to me that it would be very nice to have a tapestry kit of Otto Eckmann's "Five Swans" tapestry. A full-size tapestry kit. Failing which I would have to actually draw it myself. The advantage of this is that I could modify it, and it would be "Five Swans In Lothlorien". The disadvantage is that it just wouldn't happen, because I am idle.

One of the better legacies of the era of European colonialism is the many collections of gorgeous paintings of local flora and fauna, often commissioned from local artists, some named, some not. A few of them have been published, but most remain in the collections of museums and botanic gardens, most of which retained their own teams of local botanical artists. In Southeast Asia, the predominant local styles derived either from the various Indian or the Chinese schools, and this is reflected in the work of the natural history painters.

The William Farquhar Collection of Natural History Drawings, now in Singapore, has been published in 1999 and 2010 editions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Farquhar_Collection_of_Natural_History_Drawings
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=william+farquhar+collectino+of+natural+history+drawings&atb=v225-1&iax=images&ia=images

The famous watercolours of Southeast Asian fruits and flowers by the Dutch botanical artist Berthe Hoola van Nooten were published as chromolithographs in the Netherlands in 1863 and had several editions, though sadly as far as I know no modern one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthe_Hoola_van_Nooten
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=berthe+hool+van+nooten&atb=v225-1&iax=images&ia=images

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles' collection commissioned while he was in Sumatra was published by the British Library in 2009; it's out of print but available second-hand:

https://www.amazon.com/Raffles-Ark-Redrawn-Drawings-Collection/dp/0712350845

The Dumbarton Oaks collection has at two such albums, exquisitely beautiful, and viewable online:


https://www.doaks.org/resources/online-exhibits/botany-of-empire/illustration-and-representation/album-of-chinese-watercolors-of-asian-fruits
https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:426038375$13i

https://www.doaks.org/resources/online-exhibits/botany-of-empire/illustration-and-representation/album-of-70-asian-fruit-paintings
https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:426036981$2i

Obscure developing country has quiet, uneventful election today:


https://www.irrawaddy.com/elections/myanmar-voting-goes-smoothly-election-monitor-group-says.html

I am fond of Middle-eastern food. Lebanese, Turkish, Iranian, Moroccan, Egyptian, they're all good. My main resorts for actual cooking are Claudia Roden and Arto der Haroutanian's books, Nawal Nasrallah's "Delights From The Garden of Eden" which I believe is about to reissued in a second edition, and 'Entertaining the Persian Way' by Shirin Simmons, which seems to focus on Zoroastrian cuisine.

Aljazeera English recently had a lovely piece on English translations of medieval Arab cookbooks, which sound absolutely fascinating, and which I will buy as soon as Book Depository resumes local delivery SOME DAY.

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/medieval-arabic-cookbooks-reviving-taste-history-200514062518909.html

The titles are:

"Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table", Nasrallah's translation of a 14th century Egyptian cookbook; and

"Scents and Flavours", a translation by Charles Perry of a 13th century Syrian cookbook.

I consider it utterly delightful that a Sassanian gentleman would have kept a personal recipe collection. Very right and proper, and a habit that I would encourage. I do it myself.