For the past two years, a mysterious and tantalizing puzzle has been intriguing internet users and the next installment of the scavenger-hunt is expected to appear within a few weeks. A computer analyst from Sweden stumbled upon an irresistible invitation from an organisation calling itself Cicada 3301. The call to find the others and to R.S.V.P. (regrets only) by teasing the hidden message out of the invite.
The clues led across a daisy-chain of increasingly challenging riddles, requiring novel and creative minds to resolve. Interest quickly spread with thousands participating and Cicada 3301 responded in kind with more and more esoteric subjects (involving obscure poetry, alchemy, rare music and even detours into the physical world) and rabbit-holes—that has brought many of the new initiates to the uncharted territories of the world-wide web, called the Darknet, that are not normally accessible to the public via search engines, the massive mantle under the surface of unindexed data that's multitudes bigger by volume that the visible internet world. Despite the great scrutiny and speculation of the hive-mind, no one has fully solved the puzzle or identified who is behind Cicada 3301. What do you think? Could it really be a recruitment tool, a push to gather the world's prodigies like in This Island Earth or The Last Starfighter? Could it be an experimental sandbox for the world's colluding intelligence networks to cull the best and brightest among cryptographers or to arrest their development? Is it just a game? Or worse, is it some publicity stunt that will lead up to the announcement of some new crap cyborg gadget? I personally think it might be a sentient internet's attempt at reaching out to its creators. Watch for the next clue to appear on 4. January 2014.
Saturday 30 November 2013
les cigales or call for submissions
catagories: ๐ซ๐ท, ๐, ๐ฌ, ๐ถ, ๐, ๐ง , networking and blogging, philosophy
flรผchtling
There was a very poignant and unexpected collection of memories narrated over the radio in commemoration of the upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of the rescue mission Kindertransport, organsied by British Jewish and Quaker leadership in the days following die Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass) until the outbreak of World War II.
One day, not long after the project started, Attenborough's mother brought home two young girls that became they boys' foster-sisters. An avid fossil- and rock-hound from an early age, it was piece of amber (Bernstein) from the beaches of the Baltic (Ostsee) filled with preserved prehistoric insects. This frozen terrarium, microcosm, was a source of fascination and inspired the nature documentary The Amber Time Machine decades later and included one of the first rigourous scientific attempts to extract ancient DNA. There was also the powerful story of Kurt Beckhardt, the son WWI Luftwaffe ace aviator, Felix Beckhardt, from Wiesbaden whose achievements were later discounted by the Nazis and supplanted by more palatable heroes because of his Jewish heritage. As his father's record and activities became more of a nuisance, the young Beckhardt was sent to England while his parents were held at Buchenwald. His parents eventually escaped and fled to Portugal—the family reunited years later but very much shaped by these separate odysseys.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, ๐, Hessen, holidays and observances, transportation
Thursday 28 November 2013
the man with the midas touch, a spider's touch
I tend to keep the news in German on the t.v. On in the background and usually I can play-along at home with divided attention but there has been a lot of talk and debate recently over tax reform and much mention of the Goldfinger Steuermodell—“Goldfinger nichts mit James Bond zu tun.” The German tax code is something impenetrable, I image even for a native, so I decided to investigate: Goldfingern, as a gerund, refers to the practise of taking advantage of a certain tax-shelter, a loophole (indeed named after the Bond villain Auric Goldfinger), which the Bundestag is moving to close.
Essentially businesses and individuals with the means buy enormous amounts of gold (or some other asset that's going to increase in value and easily convertible) through an agent, a front-company, in some other country and declare the purchase a loss in order to zero out their tax liability. Given the geometric progression on the increase of the price of the commodity, they stand to make a profit whenever they choose to sell—the next day or next year. Under existing treaties that aim to mitigate double-taxation, avoiding having to pay taxes to one's country of allegiance and to where the profit was made, money made from such transactions are not subject to tax. The agreements state that the rate will be adjusted to reflect the profits but as those engaging in this practise are already in the top bracket, there is no additional tax collected. It does not only happen in Germany, of course, and uncounted billions are estimated to be lost. When one hears about giant corporations paying nothing into the tax-coffers despite record profits, goldfingern is one of the tricks they employ—and it is not that they have particularly clever or ruthless tax-preparers.
cinematic titanic or play MSTIE for me
Wednesday 27 November 2013
till by turning, we come around 'right
catagories: America, holidays and observances, lifestyle
sternschnuppen
I'm a little bit embarrassed by my little string of coloured lights laid along the window sill that I don't think are even visible from the outside, whereas I can see little twinkling displays across the street. My apartment building, however, is completely blacked-out—to the last flat and I think I'd be insensitive to do otherwise. I had the chance to visit the “Shooting Star” market of the city in the early afternoon. It had a nice atmosphere, but I found I was missing the crowd and bustle and not knowing what ornaments and crafts that one is missing before being compelled to move along—plus the illumination, which was meek under the overcast skies. I was having fun but decided to visit another Schaufenster, show-window, in the city museum's new exhibition, Germany for Anfรคnger—Deutschland for Beginners. A few galleries illustrated German identities and cultures, I sort of a tongue-in-cheek, self-critical manner, in twenty-six letters, no umlauts.
It addressed stereotypes and what's true about German mannerisms, D for Dialects—which are a source of pride through also of ridicule, or B for Brauchtum—customs, which can be tacky, tawdry traditions as well, and so on with a lot of deference to the Grundgesetz (the Basic, Constitutional Law) interspersed. Importantly, there was also Y (Upsilon) for Yabancฤฑ iลรงi (guest-workers in English and Auslรคndische Arbeitskrรคfte auf Deutsch) for integration, change and the Multikulti. Significantly, the etiquette for each letter was rendered in German, English and Turkish. My favourite display was O fรผr Ordnung—order, with a collection of officious-looking stamps and traffic-signs and a lengthy narrative about rules for patches of gardens, children at play to include taxation of the rain-water that runs off ones roof, met both with disdain and comfort.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐น๐ท, holidays and observances, language
Tuesday 26 November 2013
auslese
Der Spiegel's international desk has a interesting feature on attempts in the Rheingau and surrounding regions to preserve traditional viniculture with robotic aid. Engineers at the University of Geisenheim have developed a rover-prototype that can scale the steep hills at times approaching a right-angle.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ก, ๐ฅ, environment
Monday 25 November 2013
paying peter to rob paul
Just scant weeks after the European Union floated the proposal to set negative interest rates for its institutions, there are reports that some American banks threatening to impose the same for depositor accounts should the US Federal Reserve step back on its programme of buying assets—that massive lienholder effort on the part of the US government that has been keeping up appearances for months.
Sunday 24 November 2013
tv tray
I really do enjoy cooking and trying new things—as well as tried-and-true recipes that require more effort than the old stand-bys of frozen pizza, boil-in-bag Indian dinners and fry-ups (though all carefully selected), despite that sometimes my offers to help are deferred to setting the table. I insist that it's not laziness that overcomes continuing overtures to prepare something more elaborate than processed foods and ready meals but I question what's in season and has a shelf-life—since I always am a bit put-off by the idea of tidying up afterwards and making such a fuss just for myself.
catagories: ⚕️, food and drink, lifestyle
totenwinkel
Saturday 23 November 2013
zwรถlf zu eins
On the other hand, an equal amount argue that enforcing such a rule would handicap the ability of Swiss businesses to attract or retain talented leadership. It's comforting to believe that a clerk in the company mail room or a janitor might bring home a salary that's a direct and not too immodest ratio, not earning less in a year than what the highest compensated bring home in a month of the CEOs pay, but I suppose such functions are already contracted out to the lowest-bidder. What do you think about Switzerland's opportunity to make a statement? Whatever the outcome, I don't think the debate will stop when the ballots are counted.
whether and neither
Since the decision in Germany and several other countries to allow records of birth a third option for sexual identity as indefinite, as opposed to male or female, there has been much discussion among linguists on how to frame this new category—with tact and sensitivity. There have been quite a few proposals put forward, which mostly support removing gender distinction from language, culling nuance in other ways too, or reforming the word neuter and its equivalents so as to make it have no negative connotations.
Friday 22 November 2013
a noun's a very special word – it's any name you ever heard
Of course, these signs have broad appeal in their exhaustive and humourous coverage. Individual icons are available for fair-use purchase on the project's website. Decades ago, there was a similiar prodigy, called Stefan Kanchev from Bulgaria who worked on the commercial advertizing side of the house, renowned for his endless business and industry logo designs.
Thursday 21 November 2013
macbeth effect
Here is an interesting vignette demonstrating how washing one's hands turns ones self-assessment towards the optimistic and provides a sense of closure. In clinical trials at least, in what could be named after Lady Macbeth or Pontius Pilate, subjects felt better after failing to accomplish an impossible task when encouraged to wash up afterwards. Egos from the hand-washers recovered significantly faster than those who did not, the study shows. I wonder, however, if the therapeutic results have to do with the body exorcizing defeat in the the mind symbolically or rather the low-hanging fruit effect, being assigned a very easy job after presented with one that was very hard.
Wednesday 20 November 2013
yearbook, jahrgang
catagories: ๐จ๐ญ, ๐, ๐, ๐, networking and blogging
monoceros
Website io9 has an interesting book review of a new work by geographer Chris Lavers on the natural history of the unicorn and how this legendary creature has become somewhat of an obsession and a symbol pregnant with associations, connotations of all sorts, employed by many different agencies.
Tuesday 19 November 2013
dรฉclasse ou GEOLOC
I'd like to believe that I have left carefully placed footprints, conducted myself in a circumspect manner, when it comes to on-line activity or any form of communication, ever reserved—at times to my detriment in private discussion—with the knowledge that a stalker, one of those loony and obsessed celebrity-stalker types, was fervently documenting every my every move and utterance.
Not that necessarily anything was immediately incriminating or otherwise embarrassing or not tailored to a larger audience, I try to be mindful that all of this goes down on your permanent record, though not absolutely something that Saint Peter would not overlook nor give much weight. And even though I did not imagine that my secret-admirer, as Der Spiegel reports, would be the US government (or a member of the coalition of the willing), I am surprised by the latest revelation, made by the administration under statue, declassifying intelligence agency salivating plans, especially by the fourth wall (Vierte Wand) convention of being within the scope of the law. I'm not even sure what that phrase means any longer except as something to be subject to exploit and abuse.
Monday 18 November 2013
swalk—sealed with a loving kiss
Mental Floss has a delightful review of a book just published called To the Letters by historian and linguist Simon Garfield that lists some romantic and racy shorthand employed by soldiers in the 1930s to navigate around the censors and their superiors—showing that texting and sexting is not such a new phenomenon. In fact, there are examples from epistles from the ancient Romans: SVBEEQV for the Latin si vales bene est, ego quidem meaning that I am happy when you are or I hope this letter finds you well. I'd really like to incorporate some of these abbreviations into my vocabulary and would like to learn more about what we find lamentable about communication, and at any distance being something magical, and form that's not necessarily warranted moving from sonnets to spam.
catagories: ๐, language, networking and blogging
Sunday 17 November 2013
รผbergelagert
outsourcing oder linkin park
Sรผddeutsche Zeitung presents another angle by which German reconnaissance may be becoming more and more mired in American control through indirect means and the decision to contract out some of its own intellect functions. The relatively innocuous-looking office building, located in Abraham-Lincoln-Park just outside one of the US Army installations here and just across from the Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and just opposite the cemetery where I was seeking out another link to the the past the other other, is the headquarters of the German branch of the company. The Germany government has awarded CSC numerous, lucrative contracts to carry out spying and security related missions, usually executed with far less public scrutiny and government oversight than through ministry channels.
As if using mercenaries does not create big enough ethical problems on its own, the US-based company also performs extensive information-technology and logistics support for American intelligence services, much like the infamous Blackwater Corporation. By choosing to downwardly delegate some of its functions to a company whose loyalties and discretion are by definition already compromised, Germany has surely exposed itself to more mingling of data and lowered expectations of privacy without even the challenge of what it attempted to keep close-hold.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy
Saturday 16 November 2013
key-f.o.b. or check-point, checkmate
Investigative journalism with contributions from more than twenty reporters that American legionnaires are not only using its diplomatic missions as listening posts, siphoning internet traffic off of the major hub in Frankfurt and keeping handy insider read-aheads on European political and trade affairs, but are also using Germany as a launch-pad for its dirty and secretive drone-wars in Africa, helping to craft a post-revolutionary region more sympathetic to American interests and with methods and friendships not fit for open debate or public knowledge, even targeting newly arrived refugees for debriefing and plotting coordinates for the next attack.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ฅธ, foreign policy, revolution
a-list or he knows when you've been sleeping, he knows when you're awake
Though it's maybe too early for the decorations and music, it is the right time to think about ones greeting card list. The Retro Christmas Card Company allows one to personalise and automate—after a fashion, since carefully nicking open an envelop to a honest-to-goodness card is the still best part, even if it was handled by a third-party.
The middle-man was not the NSA this time, but another good reason for sending out cards now is that it allows the intelligence services to know who in advance of the holidays constitutes a frequent and sustained contact in ones life. The service, custom-printing and mailing, offers lots of swank retro designs—plus a selection of motifs from the Mid-Century movement of 1950s and 1960s Americana.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, graphic design, holidays and observances
sanctuary
Nominated for official accolades for civilly brilliant ideas and already beloved by its residence, a community foundation has constructed and nurtured an old library building in Nรผrnberg into an educational centre for a neighbouring home for asylum-seekers with name of the Asylothek (although I had a high-school with a the cafetorium, I think Germans are very partial to inventing designations for facilities and the like, there's the unfortunately named Blitz Dรถneria by work that just does not sound like words and suffixes that ought to be associated with food and this trend is especially true for institutions like hospitals and specialty clinics—there's the Heboteum (actually right across from the dรถner [the Turkish version of a gyro, sort of] stand), a child-birthing school that sounds in German like a museum of mid-wifery.
The Asylothek is really clever institution, though true to its original purpose as a library (Bibliothek), offering a space for reading and reach with literature in immigrants' native languages, as well as a job-centre with courses on the German language and after-school activities for children. I think we take libraries for granted and such a place would really be a welcome comfort, having fled in the night to a strange land. Not that refugees need to be minded and treated like inmates, but a home has been established in Bad Karma, our fair city, in one of those abandoned—though not dilapidated, just given up as the business environment and demand changed—old villas that became resort hotels, with no apparent supervision to help ease the transition. It is not due to some ancient native skill but rather a therapeutic introduction to interacting with people again after traumas that caused the proliferation of nail-salons run by people of Asian descent, when social-workers arranged for them to give each other manicures as a way of trusting and connecting, having survived the awful experiences of wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Care-taking is as important to perception, helping to mitigate local xenophobia and unwelcoming behaviour on the part of host communities, as it is for preparing those who sought sanctuary for success.
Thursday 14 November 2013
necropolis or flying circus
Having learnt that Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen—better known as the Red Baron, the accomplished dog-fighting ace of World War I, has his final resting-place just around the corner here in Wiesbaden, I took the afternoon to investigate and explored the peaceful and expansive grounds of the Southern Cemetery (Sรผdfriedhof).
I didn't think people took them home (though the Roman practise was genuine parlour culture, burying their dead in their houses) or stored them somewhere off-site, like winter-tyres. It seems irreverent but I suppose space is at a premium and very soon there would not be room for anything else besides the grave. I noticed that the more modern epitaphs usually bore ones profession also. The architects had the most inspired grave-sites—I wondered what it meant to carry ones job into the here-after (jenseits) and hoped that all really had been proud enough of their careers to make that sort of statement. Other beautiful monuments abounded, like this bas-relief tombstone of a cavalry unit from 1914 that depicts some of the sad and terrible equipage of the war, gas-masks and bayonets. I was unsuccessful in locating the von Richthofen plot, noting that such infamy is usually something buried itself, and wondered how the aeronaut and son of the Prussian elite ended up in far western Hessen. It turns out that the Red Baron was disinterred several times since his final battle: von Richthofen was first put to rest with a military funeral not far from where he was shot down, near Amiens, France in 1918.
During the interbellum years, his brother attempted to bring the body back to be buried in the family crypt, but as the ancestral home now lay in Poland and convinced by Nazi authorities just then coming into power who hoped to exploit the rockstar status von Richthofen had attained through real and attributed victories, re-interred him in Berlin, with fanfare courtesy of the new government. During divided Germany, as the graveyard straddled the border, the headstone was often victim to a stray bullet fired at people as they tried to escape into West-Berlin, and in the mid-1970s a decision was made to transport the body to Wiesbaden and reunite him with the rest of his departed family. I don't want to regularly wander the necropoleis of the city as that's morbid but was glad I took the time to search it out and now that I know it literally is just around the corner, I will look around another day.
Wednesday 13 November 2013
news at seven or genie in the bottle
Do you remember when everything was a matter of timing? Nostalgia aside, certainly it still is though without the help-meets of expert and extended knowledge that someone, somewhere is willing to share and amend recall.
information-action ratio
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ฌ, ๐ก, networking and blogging
as high as an elephant's eye
While the staple crop, one of the more domineering and hardy among agriculture, perfected by millennia of stewardship, presents nothing objectionable in itself—and quite the opposite if tended responsibly, corn management and corn policy (native to America but an invasive species) has grown into something untenable and potentially disastrous.
Without even addressing the myopic decision to tinker with the genetics of our food, the way corn is grown, the harvest almost exclusively diverted into feeding animals and automobiles and producing food additives and fillers, like the dreaded corn-syrup. Not counting acres and acres destined to become ethanol, biodegradable plastics or base ingredients for something more chemical and refined than flour or meal, this second-hand nutrition, feeding livestock rather than eating what we've reaped ourselves, reduces the efficiency of the land by some eighty-percent and more. Of course, through subsidies at the expense of the tax-payer and at the expense of the environment, creating vast tracks of monocultures and demanding more and more resources and land be used to satisfy exponential appetites with nascent returns, are eventually articulated as something more profitable to some, which is also something not valued-added for all.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐, ๐ฑ, environment, food and drink
Tuesday 12 November 2013
billy goat's gruff
catagories: ⚕️, ๐, food and drink, networking and blogging
Monday 11 November 2013
footlights or starry, starry night
From Der Spiegel's international desk comes an important piece not only about only about about the grandeur of being able to see the stars and constellations and the muzzling scourge of light-pollution but, I think, even more to its credit waxes philosophical about the great electrification experiment and what it means that our nighttime is something aggressively alienated with some awful municipal flash light tag.
day-trip: oppenheim or down in the underground
The sun was out today as as part of disjointed reprieve in the weather and golden autumn before winter begins to set in.
I took a drive to the near- by town of Oppenheim around noon, marveling at the turning leaves of the vineyards racing past on one side and on opposite at the narrowing Rhine river and pleasure boots moored to hibernate for the season.
This town between Mainz and Speyer was along the road of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV's penitential Walk to Canossa (the source of the saying, “nach Canossa gehen,” meaning an act of humility or submission—taking ones lumps) a fortress in northern Italy, in hopes that the Pope might reverse the decision to excommunicate Henry for insisting that he was his sacral right to nominate bishops. The Emperor crossed the Alps barefoot and in a hair-shirt, the account goes, and was made to kneel outside in a blizzard for three days before being admitted into the fortress.
The town's history, however, extends back to Roman times and is nowadays renowned for its wine production, vines winding and cascading any place a foothold is available, and is anchored with a quite romantic little Altstadt surrounded by turreted-walls and the beautiful Gothic church of Saint Katherine, absolutely brilliant with a kaleidoscope of fine stained-glass windows.
This outstanding church is most significant work of the era between the cathedrals of Kรถln and Strasbourg, and having seen many additions and rebuilding since its dedication in 1225, has a small exhibit on stone-cutting and glass-liming as well as having a few extra puzzle pieces stored away. Behind the church is a small chapel with a Charnel House below, an ossuary with the bones of some 20 000 residents, pilgrims passing through and soldiers from the many battles that occurred here.
And just beyond, on the Weinburg, are the impressive ruins of castle Landskron, channelling the sunlight and offering a sweeping view of the region. These royal walls, the shell of an imperial palace, are testament to events the saw the town's complete destruction in the late 1600s, when burnt during the Nine Years' War when France took control of
the Rhine valley, and the only other evidence is found in a suburban labyrinth of medieval passages that connect the vaulted cellars in a network that spans the entire town centre.
Guided tours can be arranged that lead one through these tunnels, though only an estimated three percent of mysterious maze has been rediscovered, corresponding to the town as it was before the fire and not necessarily as it was rebuilt, on the weekends, so this will be an adventure for another day.
Many houses and offices, however, are linked together by these passageways that rise and fall on several levels below the streets. This storied town also featured an elementary school with a wonderfully grand Art Deco (Bauhaus) doorway and faรงade from 1926. There is too the former Franciscan Cloister of St. Bartholomรคus (St. Bartholomew, now a parish church) with this really great modern, abstract mural on its walls makes it look like the shrine of the Autobots.
andromeda strain
A research laboratory in Braunschweig, working with ESA, the European Space Agency, has been culturing samples of extremely hardy bacteria that have been isolated in samples collected on parts of space-probes after being sterilised for assembly and deployment.