APOD: 2024 September 1 – The Moon Dressed Like Saturn Why does Saturn appear so big? It doesn't -- what is pictured are foreground clouds on Earth crossing in front of the Moon. The Moon shows a slight crescent phase with most of its surface visible by reflected Earthlight, known as Da Vinci glow. The Sun directly illuminates the brightly lit lunar crescent from the bottom, which means that the Sun must be below the horizon and so the image was taken before sunrise. This double take-inducing picture was captured on 2019 December 24, two days before the Moon slid in front of the Sun to create a solar eclipse. In the foreground, lights from small Guatemalan towns are visible behind the huge volcano Pacaya.

Linguist Rob Watts of RobWords looked back into the ancient past to trace exactly when punctuation was put into regular use, noting that different grammatical marks came about at different times. The period, colon, and comma, for example, were employed to make sense of the endless run-on sentences of the Greeks.

The story  of our punctuation marks begins with a man called Aristophanes of Byzantium. In around the 2nd century BC,  he proposed a system to solve the problem of the unreadability of Greek writing…Aristophanes put forward a system where dots would be used to mark in sentences  where pauses of different lengths should occur. The middle one marked the  shortest break. The bottom one,  a little longer. And the top one, longer still. These were called comma, colon and periodos (period).

Punctuation was not very popular at that time and it flailed for severals centuries until religion came into play in the 6th Century.

Christian writers began to use punctuation again to help clarify their writings. They were much more keen on spreading their religion on paper than the pagan  polytheists who came before them. You see, they’d written this book called  the Bible, and it was like a bible to them and they wanted to leave minimal space for  ambiguity when spreading the word of God. Punctuation was a great way to do that. So they reverted back to something very similar to Aristophanes’ system.

Watts also explores the origins of the question mark, exclamation point, quotation marks, brackets, dash, hyphen, apostrophe and ellipsis.

Let’s explore this lot: ?!-“.’,(); …I trace the punctuation we use every day as far back as I can.

APOD: 2024 August 20 – Supermoon Beyond the Temple of Poseidon A supermoon occurred yesterday. And tonight's moon should also look impressive. Supermoons appear slightly larger and brighter than most full moons because they reach their full phase when slightly nearer to the Earth -- closer than 90 percent of all full moons. This supermoon was also a blue moon given the definition that it is the third of four full moons occurring during a single season. Blue moons are not usually blue, and a different definition holds that a blue moon is the second full moon that occurs during a single month. The featured image captured the blue supermoon right near its peak size yesterday as it was rising beyond the Temple of Poseidon in Greece. This supermoon is particularly unusual in that it is the first of four successive supermoons, the next three occurring in September, October, and November.

The fin-de-siècle interest in Japanese art is given a twist by four small books in which a group of Japanese artists illustrate well-known fables for a French readership. The books were commissioned circa 1890 by Pierre Barboutau, an art collector who specialised in Japanese arts and crafts. Barboutau’s volumes would have been intended to broaden the interest in Japanese art which had been fuelled a few years before by Le Japon Artistique, a magazine edited by a German art dealer with a business in Paris, Siegfried Bing. Le Japon Artistique was criticised for its inaccuracies by Japanese readers but it did feature colour reproductions of prints which otherwise might only be seen as monochrome reproductions. (Bing’s Paris shop, L’Art Nouveau, is also historically significant for giving a name to the predominant mode of fin-de-siècle design.)

Barboutau’s books take the French interest in Japonisme a stage further, allowing readers to experience familiar stories through Japanese eyes. Each book was printed in a limited run on Japanese paper. Of the four, I’m only familiar with the fables of La Fontaine where the emphasis on animal characters in rural settings means there are few explicitly Japanese details. Some of the landscapes are more Japanese than French, however, especially the drawing that includes a Fuji-like mountain in the background. There’s also a drawing of a group of foxes where the background details of a shrine and torii gate seem intended more for Japanese readers. Foxes in Japan are associated with the Shinto deity, Inari, to a degree that fox statues are a common site in Shinto shrines. None of this is mentioned in the book but if you’re aware of the significance it adds an additional layer to the cultural intersections.

All these books may be seen at Gallica, a valuable site whose interface is still woefully bad, especially on mobile devices. My advice, as always, is to download the PDFs.

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Choix de fables de La Fontaine, Tome 1 (1894)

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Choix de fables de La Fontaine, Tome 2 (1894)

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Fables choisies, Série 1, de Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (no date)

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Fables choisies, Série 2, de Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (no date)

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• ER Herman’s Fables
• Tenniel’s Fables
• John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Hope this isn't confusing to the Swedish people who can already translate that bubble.

Today's News:

Right before the pandemic hit, I moved into a new house that was just outside of cable TV coverage. And while I'd dabbled in streaming apps for years, this was the first time I was forced to become a full-time cord-cutter.

(note: I briefly considered getting DirecTV but every rep I talked to tried to give me a hard sell on a long contract which was a huge red flag)

Once I got a stable broadband connection at the new place, I went all-in on streaming services and that's how I've watched TV and movies ever since. I subscribe to so many now that it probably eclipses my pre-internet cable TV bill.

Off the top of my head we pay for:

• YouTubeTV (super expensive around $75/mo)
• Netflix
• Amazon Video
• AppleTV+
• ESPN+
• YouTube Premium
• Hulu
• Max

A couple years ago I got Peacock to enjoy a bunch of TV comedies, then I realized I could see Top Chef on it as well as live motocross, so that stuck around too.

Sports is a huge draw for streaming services, since they know you can find almost any shows they have elsewhere, except for exclusive live sports deals. To watch every women's pro soccer game this season, I use one of four different apps to catch them, due to licensing deals.

My thoughts leading into Paris

I planned to use YouTubeTV for watching Olympics coverage in Paris, since they do a great job with live TV. And since they offer a virtually limitless "DVR" in the cloud and Paris is 9 hours ahead, I figured I'd wake up to events saved in my library every morning. But that wasn't the case, as most NBC stuff was time-shifted for American audiences and heavily edited before broadcast.

I watched a few Paris nightly shows from my local NBC affiliate and they'd frequently only show a couple rounds from a high jump or a shot put while jumping between swimming or half a volleyball game. Super annoying when you get into an event and want to see absolutely everything that takes place as it builds to the medal rounds.

Tell me what you want what you really really want

The few times I've been in Europe, I distinctly remember turning on a hotel TV and seeing sports feeds that last for many hours. If there was a major tennis tournament and you're sitting in Belgium, you could watch each and every match and it played for what seemed like 12 hours a day live on a few channels, and usually without much commentary or commercials.

What you get from Peacock that TV can't duplicate

Before the opening ceremonies took place, a few sports began with early qualifiers. I quickly realized only the events the US was doing well in would end up on YouTubeTV, but I could catch the rest on Peacock's app in their Olympics area.

Then I realized the Olympics area of the Peacock app was much more comprehensive than my tracked olympics sports in YouTubeTV, because I wasn't seeing a four hour highly edited variety show that might barely include what I want—instead with Peacock, it was exactly the full event I wanted, mostly uncut and ad-free.

I quickly fell in love with this and tracked BMX, Skateboarding, track and field, soccer, beach volleyball, indoor volleyball, rock climbing, rugby sevens, gymnastics, and surfing events.

Surfing events were especially good since due to the high variability found in nature, surfing heats last around a half hour and the surfers might be floating in the water bobbing around for ten minutes between wave sets. Each morning I could get up, load up the latest surfing qualifier, then fast forward like mad until a heat started and someone caught an actual wave.

Each day's typical surf session was four hours on Peacock, but there was really only about ten great waves to see, and the fast forward controls were a godsend.

I'm not a huge sports nut, but I found myself tracking almost a dozen sports and following them from the initial qualifiers all the way to the final medal matches. It was exactly how I wanted to access the olympics and I had no idea Peacock could deliver it so well.

Also? It worked!

The other big surprise with Peacock is it never went down, and I never saw a delay from buffering that lasted more than a few milliseconds. I don't know how many people signed up for it, and I don't know what their cloud hosting bills are like, but I got flawless high definition streams with no delays consistently for three weeks, despite possibly millions of other subscribers doing the same as me.

I believe I'm on a Premiere Plus plan and it not only was it reliable, but it was almost entirely ad-free. Commercial breaks were auto-cut from replays (occasionally annoying when you miss a minute or two of play action) and during live events a generic photo of the Eiffel Tower would sit where ads would normally play.

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Peacock's painstakingly comprehensive Olympics coverage was quite good this year. It let me experience the games in a way I've never been able to before and I really enjoyed every minute of it. I hope all future Olympics both Winter and Summer are like this and I'll remain a happy subscriber as long as they do.