Author: DB

Magenta is a town in Italy about 25km west of Milan.

The Battle of Magenta was fought on 4 June 1859 during the Second Italian War of Independence, resulting in a French-Sardinian victory under Napoleon III against the Austrians under Marshal Ferencz Gyulai.

The second War of Italian Independence, also called the Franco-Austrian War, the Sardinian War, the Austro-Sardinian War or Italian War of 1859, was fought in Lombardy. It was fought between Austrian and Franco-Piedmontese armies and resulted in the annexation of most of Lombardy by Sardinia-Piedmont, leading eventually to the unification of Italy.

France’s assistance was not out of the magnanimity of its heart. A year before the war, in the Plombières Agreement, France agreed to support Sardinia’s efforts to expel Austria from Italy in return for the Duchy of Savoy (in the north-west of Italy bordering France) and the County of Nice.

In the RGB colour wheel, magenta is opposite Green, and made therefore from blue and red. Natural compounds of blue and red do not mix to form the colour we know as magenta, which is made chemically. It was first made in 1856 as Fuchsine, or rosaniline hydrochloride, a magenta dye with chemical formula C₂₀H₁₉N₃·HCl.

After the Battle of Magenta in 1859, the name of the compound became known as magenta to reflect the carnage at the battle.

I just made a patch of magenta in RGB and CMYK. The proportions are easy. In RGB magenta is the mix of 100% Red and 100% blue, both of which are produced as 255 on the intensity scale. The resulting patch gives a file size of just 7KB. In the CMYK colour space the file size is fifty times that size. I’ve no idea why. Plus there is the fact that displaying CMYK on an RGB computer screen is its own kind of madness. Still, here are three patches, first the hexadecimal RGB #ff00ff for magenta, then the formula I just mentioned, and then the CMYK.

Question: Can you see a difference between the first two patches?

A relatively shallow (up to 200m) continental shelf extends over the northern part of the Black Sea. Beyond that is the Euxine Abyssal Plain of the Black Sea with depths ranging from 2,000 to 2,200 m. The deepest measured point is 2,216 metres, located south of Yalta in Crimea.

The Sea of Azov, connected to the Black Sea by the Strait of Kerch, is the shallowest sea in the world, with a maximum depth of 15 meters.

To get from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean a ship has to pass through the Bosphorus (which ranges from very shallow to 110m with and average of around 65m) and into the Sea of Marmara and then the Dardanelles Strait (55 to 90m deep) and from there out into the Aegean and the Mediterranean.

The Euxine Abyssal Plain gets its name from the archaic name for the Black Sea, from Latin Pontus Euxinus, from Greek Pontos Euxenios, literally ‘the hospitable sea,’ originally Pontos Axeinos, ‘the not-clear or the inhospitable sea.’

“How mundane”, we say. And how do we use that word, what do we mean? We mean how dull and uninteresting, lacking in anything out of the ordinary.

Where does the word come from? It comes from the Latin word mundanus – meaning belonging to the world as opposed to the transcendent, the spiritual. So effectively we mean – how lacking in uplifting qualities.

Spaying as a procedure only applies to female animals. Castration as a procedure only applies to males. Neutering is the general term that applies to animals of either sex.

The verb to spay dates to the fifteenth century from spaien, meaning to stab with a sword or to kill a hunted animal. It was also used to mean to remove the ovaries of a hunting dog from the word espeier meaning to cut with a sword.

An article on the rising costs facing bands wanting to play at venues mentioned the word cabotage.

Cabotage is the transport of goods or passengers between two places in the same country by a transport operator from another country for the purposes of hire and reward.

There’s a consultation document issued by the Department for Transport under the title “Road Transport Cabotage: Consultation about further flexibilities during 2022 for foreign hauliers”

The article said venues had closed and more were closing because of COVID and Brexit.

Perhaps soon there will only be remote recording – hard to imagine given the powerful feelings that concerts bring out in audiences

The death of cells which occurs as a normal and controlled part of an organism’s growth or development.