Monday 14 November 2016

wewelsburg oder brennpunkt

I still find myself reeling with the same feeling of creeping disbelief that I first encountered not so long ago in finding that the exploits and the ambitions of the followers of the Nazi party in regards to the esoteric (as portrayed in the Indiana Jones franchise) was not wholly a Hollywood conceit and much of the occult practises to this day rather defy popular portrayal.
On our way back from a trip to Amsterdam (more on this experience to come), H and I stopped at the enigmatic castle of Wewelsburg by Paderborn in Nordrhein-Westfalen. The uniquely triangular Renaissance structure was leased in perpetuity after 1933 by Schutzstaffel—abbreviated with the stylised runes SS—leader Heinrich Himmler as a school-house for cadets but was soon convinced by mystic Karl Maria Wiligut who conflated an otherwise ordinary piece of real estate due to its proximity to the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald to declare and expand this site as the centre of the world, specifically radiating from the norther tower, reconstructed with forced labour from a dedicated concentration camp as a crypt below and meeting hall above for the upper echelons of instructors and mentors.  Neither chamber was used to purpose.
Although no records exist that speak to the exact plans and use and proctors ordered the castle’s demolition at the end of the war, the tower for the most part remained intact (due to the reinforcement during reconstruction), the inlaid of dark green marble that represents black sun, the wheel of the sun—a triad of swastikas that form the months of the year and which may or may not have historical provenance beyond the Nazis.
The power of the symbol was defused by a collection of bean-bags and reading material that told of the more distant architectural history of Wewelsburg, and this is perhaps as it should be, though the fount of inspiration and mystery beyond romance is disdained completely at the peril of future generations, whom can be hosteled here too.

Monday 19 September 2016

megabit, metabit

To my peril but also to my subsequent delight and emendation, my love-letters from Brain Pickings are usually dog-eared and set aside for reading that I always promise to get to at soon point, but that pile in my inbox is seething and threatens an avalanche. Happily, I was able to return to an intriguing sounding review of the life and times of a young mathematician who’s pioneering work in circuitry demonstrated that all logical operations could be reckoned by switches and relays and the just invented transistor, leading Claude Shannon to quickly and intuitively conclude that all information in the wilds—its natural habitat could be corralled and tamed, with data emerging as information thanks to the transfiguring exchange between the observer and the observed.

Corresponding with contemporaries that included Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush, Shannon was able to appropriate rather vague and generic terms, as had Isaac Newton in his mission to redefine physics in a disciplined and predictive manner, and furnish the world with Information Theory complete with a grammar that’s intelligible to both the mediator and the immediate. The bit is a metric, a measure of state (coined by Shannon as a portmanteau of binary digit) conveying either true or false, yes or no, but scalable out to any degree and precipitated the limning of communication and experience into a digital analogue that is accessible and exploitable by computer systems. Although we think of programmes as limited to the confines of simple logic, Information Theory also provides brute computing somewhat of a reprieve, showing that rather unique data-sets that encode unique and familiar data can be elided over, somewhat like the End-User Agreements that computers ply us with as instructive (although mathematical in nature, it is pretty human to skim), aiding in speed and compression. Moreover, as apparently as discreet and incompatible as Nature chooses to impart information, there is always a measurable threshold that computers can harness, from bar-codes and magnetic-strips to more custom parameters.

Wednesday 14 September 2016

peer-review oder lรผgensteine

There was something vaguely familiar among this list of the most infamous scientific hoaxes that prescribe a preventative dose of healthy skepticism that the Presurfer shared. One of the pranks was perpetrated in my old town of Wรผrzburg, just around the corner, at the prestigious university, where among other things, x-rays were discovered, probably began innocently enough but soon became a ruinous scandal.
Rock-hound, early fossil-prospector (though there were collections, at the time in 1725, people didn’t understand how fossils were formed and preserved) and dean of the School of Medicine Johann Bartholomeus Adam Beringer was known to hunt for specimens in the vineyards of Eibelstadt on the outskirts of the city, and some of the professor’s colleagues thought it would be a hoot if they planted some stones there for their cantankerous and rather arrogant co-worker to find. They etched into pieces of limestone impressions of bugs and frogs, which Beringer theorised were either fossils from before the Great Flood or were the artifice of prehistoric tribes. On later expeditions, Beringer also found fragments that bore the name of God in Hebrew characters, and with the evidence of the Tetragrammaton, Beringer decided that these could be no human artefacts but rather “capricious fabrications of God Himself.” Beringer commissioned a lithographer and began publishing volumes of his amazing findings. Even though disliked by the university staff, the hoaxers realised that they had gone too far and admitted to the fraud, discrediting not only Beringer academically but all involved as well. Some of Beringer’s so called Lรผgensteine (lying stones) are on display at the regional museum housed in Fortress Marienberg, and perhaps that’s where I was introduced to these eighteenth century pranksters.  Be sure to check out the link up top for more scandalous episodes of deception and duping.

Monday 12 September 2016

a halo darkly

Via the always interesting Kottke (who’s sporting a spiffy new look) we learn that tiny, dwarf galaxies as they age can attain a higher concentration of dark matter than the apparent universal constant of one part to five (in favour of the weakly reacting sort of matter rather than the one, baryonic, that we experience) because normal matter is much more flightly and prone to erosion by more massive galactic neighbours.
As counterintuitive as it seems, that much was at least expected and could be a sort of lens for getting to better understand the unidentified nature of dark matter, but astronomers were astounded to detect a wholly new class of galaxies—first spotted in the faint and shy wall-flower called Dragonfly 44. The galaxy appears to be almost entirely composed of dark matter (whether there’s a totality of dark energy as well in the mix is not mentioned) but it’s roughly the same size as the Milky Way. Imagine a galaxy our size but instead of four-hundred billion, there’s only a paltry four to eight billion stars knocking together out there—suggesting that there is something very flawed in the way we think galaxies coalesce and evolve, since those lonely stars ought to be pulled apart and absorbed into other star systems. Researchers are hoping to find more of these big, “empty” galaxies looming closer to home and perhaps observe dark matter and its properties directly.

Sunday 11 September 2016

open-house

As part of a European-wide Heritage Days, this weekend in Germany marks der Tag des offenen Denkmals (Day of Open Monuments), when historic attractions which are not normally open for public inspection (due to lack of funds, etc.) are made accessible and often special exhibitions and excursions are included. Sometimes parts of museums and great houses usually off limits are open as well and is also a vehicle to highlight and promote little known histories. If you are out and about this weekend, be sure to pay special heed to local lore to support this movement and the conservation of heritage.

Thursday 8 September 2016

old dutch master

There is a curious museum in Vienna dedicated to counterfeit works of art right across the street from the very genuine Hundertwasser Haus, that I regret we missed, but will be sure to visit next time—if for nothing else by the even stranger case of one of the museum’s contributors, Dutch painter and forger Henricus Antonius van Meegeren. A skilled but perhaps uninspired painter in his own right, van Meegeren’s contemporaries dismissed his work as too derivative and unoriginal, and so the artist turned to making copies of masterpieces. While Europe was embroiled in World War II, the Nazi command was acquiring enormous amounts of treasure and art work from all over Europe, and reportedly there was somewhat of a rivalry between Hitler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Gรถring to amass the finest collection.
Gรถring was surely pleased as punch to have acquired a Vermeer from an art dealer in Amsterdam before his boss. After the war, this painting of Christ and the Adulteress was traced back to van Meegeren, who was summarily thrown into prison for collaboration and for selling a priceless piece of the Netherlands cultural heritage to the Nazis. This crime carried the death-sentence, but in his defense, van Meegeren proclaimed, “I didn’t sell that dirty Nazi a Vermeer, since I painted it myself.” The authorities were doubtful because art experts had vouched for the painting’s authenticity, but van Meegeren was allowed demonstrate his talents with an easel, canvas and palette brought to his jail cell. Experts reexamined more supposed Vermeers—including some hanging in the Rijksmuseum purchased dearly by the Dutch government to prevent them from falling into enemy hands—and found that van Meegeren had duped dozens of people out of millions of guilders. The charges for forgery and fraud didn’t carry as severe penalties and his sentence was commuted to a year in prison. Opinion polls conducted in 1947 after van Meegeren’s release placed him among the most popular war-time heroes of the Netherlands, one cunning enough to fool the entire art world establishment plus the commander of the Nazi armed forces, Gรถring—who on learning that he had bought a counterfeit acted as if he realised for the first time that there was evil and dishonesty in the world.

Sunday 4 September 2016

churfrankenland

We had heard of the Kurhesse region or even Churmainz previously (referring to the principalities’ electoral passing influence) but never before the term Churfranken, which was adopted not too long ago by a consortium of towns, villages and singular destinations along the River Main between the Spessart and Odenwald mountain ranges to promote themselves. We took advantage of the extended weekend to take a drive through this area and saw a few of the sites.
First, we toured the grounds of Schloss Mespelbrunn, an early Renaissance moated castle and keep still owned by the same noble family, governor of the Archbishop of Mainz six centuries on. We had the briefest of tours before being inundated with the crowds from a tour bus that had just arrived, but we were able to navigate through the trophy room ourselves and marvel at the authentic state of the elements and embellishments.
We clung to the river’s banks, crisscrossing several bridges and saw quite a lot along the way before stopping in historic Miltenberg. Here too, we unexpectedly found ourselves overwhelmed with crowds—there was a huge festival going on, but had a nice walk through the town nonetheless. Established as Roman fortress because of its strategic and defensible location, the town prospered throughout the Middle Ages because of its deposits of red sandstone, a distinctive building material much valued all over Europe.
The market, town gates and scores of half-timbered (Fachwerk) houses were absolutely charming and well-preserved. Among the main sites is the inn Zum Riesen (the Giant), whose registration documents dating back to the early 1400s make it one of the oldest, continuously running hotels in the world, with its guests including Holy Roman emperors, kings, generals, Napolรฉon, chancellors and Elvis Presley. We’ll have to return here soon and explore more.

Friday 19 August 2016

silent gesture

That white medalist in the iconic and controversial 1968 Summer Games Black Power salute was not just some witless by-stander, as the always engrossing Kottke informs, and although the second-place didn’t raise his hand in protest, Peter Norman from Australia, wore a human rights badge and suffered consequences like his fellow athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos.
Norman was sensitive to the plight of minorities as well, having witnessed apartheid in his native land that included forced adoption of aboriginal babies to white families and other atrocities. When in 2005 the University of San Jose immortalised the moment with a statue—Smith and Carlos both former students, Norman was approached about inclusion. Norman respectfully declined, but not because he didn’t want to be associated with their defiant statement any longer—rather he wanted anyone visiting the statue to have the opportunity to stand in that vacant spot and express their solidarity too.

Wednesday 10 August 2016

overseas lipogram or parts of speech

After reading about the novel efforts of two writers to produce coherent stories without the letter e—such constraining composition is described as lipogrammatical but the results usually are not so epic in scope (usually just avoiding the rarer letters), I was reminded how, by this illustration, the biggest compliment that two interlocutors can pay one another is being mutually intelligible in their message. Literacy is not in the parsing or omission but in being comprehensible, even when handicapped and leaning too heavily on other conceits. One’s audience is moreover not averse to being challenged and it’s not always necessary to be clear and concise with convenience-words, and some effort at unpacking meaning is a welcome thing—especially if those gentle readers don’t realise what level of exertion is being asked of them.
It is difficult to say what muse possessed these authors to eschew this one letter (as is the case with most every undertaking), but perhaps e was not the most penitent of choices. Though the alphabet that we have inherited from the ages is bereft of original meanings and there is no memory left in the symbols—what we pronounce as vowels unrepresented in the written word and all signifying much different sounds according to local language and extent of contact with outsiders, the story and pedigree that we are able to reconstruct for e seems a particularly cheerful one that encapsulates why writing and communication in general is something to be cherished and cultivated. Before passing almost unchanged from Greek to Latin, the letter developed from a Semitic one that linguists believe represented an out-stretched hand and ultimately from an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph (sacred writing) that expressed jubilation upon meeting a kindred spirit. 

Sunday 7 August 2016

moisture farmers ou puit aerien

Around 1900, a Russian engineer by the name of Friedrich Zibold made the conjecture that ancient structures found on Greek outposts on the Crimean Peninsula were a sort of air-well, designed to harvest enough moisture from the atmosphere to sustain a small settlement. Despite initial successes with models based on the Greek buildings, Zibold was unable to sustain the condensation and collection of water for very long.  Later archaeological studies determined that the mysterious structures were actually burial mounds (this being around the time when interests were captivated by the idea of the Ark of the Covenant as a battery and the death ray of Archimedes), but that did not dissuade others from trying to build their own air-wells after Zibold’s calculations.
One such hive-like well (puit aerien) was erected in Trans-en-Provence in the 1930s (reportedly, a UFO scorched the fields of this community in 1981) in the dรฉpartement of the Var by Belgian inventor Achille Knapen. The site was abandoned when it also failed to collect water in the expected volumes, but this early experiment helped engineers build better and functional condensing units that help supplement the rains in places all around the world today.

Saturday 6 August 2016

why don’t you pass the time with a game of solitaire?

Politics is a dirty business and all politicians, regardless of ilk, are tainted, and perhaps it is really a last ditch effort to question the mental fitness of the presumptive or label his strategy as that of an unwitting or flattered Manchurian Candidate. Volumes have already been written about the contender with no end of antagonism for the last supposed reserve of hope for America’s credibility—and probably penned under the same muckraking standards, but to us it smacks a far greater intrigue when one looks at the advisors that Trump is retaining.
Paul Manafort, national chairman of his campaign, previously served as advisor and grey eminence for presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush I as well as championing Filipino and Congolese dictators Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko. Most recently, Manafort’s services had been engaged by former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who arguably by rejecting closer ties with the European Union, facilitated the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, despite testifying the opposite intentions. I wonder if a fractured US, gerrymandered down party lines, might be the realisation of the vision to making that country great again. Despite other publicised misgivings and solicitations for the intelligence apparatchik to expose whatever state secrets his opponent may or may not have put in jeopardy, Trump announced that he is rather OK with that kind of assault on territorial integrity. What if the US wanted to reclaim Cuba, the Philippines and Panama?  Then again, perhaps that is his mission-statement that appeals to his supporters—the idea of sovereignty based on oversight or old treaties is something defunct and that all’s fair in love and war.

uniform resource locator

We are reminded by the always marvellous Nag on the Lake that the first bona fide website came on-line a quarter of a century ago on 6 August, 1991.
While working at the predecessor research facility to CERN, internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee was frustrated that there was no unified way to navigate the various databases that universities had established a universal access key as a way linking across different servers. These days we would characterise such disjointed pockets of information a walled-garden, and had not Berners-Lee realised that without making his hypertext transfer protocol public-domain, rivalry and acquisition would have doomed the project that augments and compliments our reality to unimaginable degrees before it was even given license to experiment and innovate. The original first website is conserved at the hyperlink here.

Friday 5 August 2016

pushing on a string

Money of course has as much socio-cultural currency as it does utility as means of exchange or a store of wealth. And because it’s romanced beyond the scope of economics, I believe that that’s why it’s more or less acceptable for monetary policy and engagement left to the rarefied atmosphere of central banks, unelected and generally not accountable to anyone, and governments probably prefer it that way. Such hallowed things ought to be left to the vaulted chambers and excluded from public scrutiny. The economists populating these monasteries are usually very good handling impossibly large numbers and working out the mechanics of supply and demand but often fail to appreciate the human factor and irrational attachment.  As less than one percent of cash is hard currency, central banks see no reason why the rest of it shouldn’t be as well and are baffled by the response of members of the public for something tangible to hold on to amongst all this make-believe.
A wholly virtual monetary system, however, would become one without a fixed value, a rate-of-exchange when it came to automatic teller withdrawals—since there’d be nothing to take out, and the value of “cash” in one’s wallet would be unhinged and fluctuate like any other commodity on the market, with greater or lesser purchasing power from second to second. That does not sound comforting but I suppose it ought to. The other big idea of central bankers currently gaining traction is the idea of dissuading saving and encouraging lending and outlays by offering negative interests rates on depositors’ accounts—which theoretically could yield scenarios were one is paid to take out a mortgage, but only if all the people that believe in the almighty dollar behave perfectly sensibly would the economy be actually stimulated. There’s quite a lot of historical evidence to the contrary, in fact, and governments taking a more active role and perhaps deploy helicopter money—that is, to direct central banks to make payment to citizens, a term coined by Milton Friedman as it’s akin to the excitement experienced if someone was tossing money out of a helicopter to a crowd, despite the deflationary-pressures that might emerge—or consider funding a universal basic income, which might become not a choice but rather a necessity as robots take more and more jobs—and it’s not only the truck drivers and warehouse stevedores at risk but the lawyers and accountants too. The phrase, “pushing on a string,” is attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to economist John Maynard Keynes, and is meant to illustrate that markets can’t be nudged in both directions but rather tugged.

Thursday 4 August 2016

free-return trajectory

An internet giant and associates intend to land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon before the end of 2017, we learn via Kottke, after overcoming the administrative embargos established under the terms governing the parties of the Outer Space Treaty, which provides that no government can claim ownership of any celestial body, nor can weaponise space and is responsible for commercial spacecraft launched under their jurisdiction—no matter how close or loose that association is, what with multinational entities beholden to no state.  The treaty was installed shortly after the US government seeded the upper atmosphere with tens of thousands of microscopic needles at the height of the Cold War as a contingency for maintaining global communications in case the Soviets cut the undersea cables spanning the Atlantic.
Incidentally, the first private, commercial mission to the Moon was a fly-by and fourteen day Earth orbit executed by a German รฆrospace company in October of 2014 (EN/DE), memorialising its founder who had recently departed, but entailed no actual touch-down or permanent presence and this upcoming enterprise will be a first. In addition to being liable for the craft that take-off under their auspices, space-faring nations also retain ownership of the artifacts that they leave behind, space-junk, equipment, rovers and flags but can stake no claim—despite America’s push to have Tranquility Base protected as a national historic monument. I wonder how the Outer Space Treaty applies to wholly private activities—like asteroid mining, whose mere spectre should have already stopped the gold speculators, or space tourism. While we have to have confidence that governments with the urge to explore and not exploit, will only vet businesses of a like character, on the other hand, one has to wonder about burdening entrepreneurs with an insufficient regulatory framework and disincentives when private innovations may be a far greater boon to all of humanity than anything government can produce. What do you think? Not only do I not want to see tatty resorts crowding up the lunar surface, who’s to say that one could brand hollowed-out planetoids (or at least overlay them with advertising in a virtual augmented reality) or net a comet and remove it from the skies forever?  I think the potential amazing advances will carry the day and prevail, however, in the end.

Wednesday 27 July 2016

creative commons

For a decade, Wikipedia has held an annual competition to showcase the best photography that freely licensed for anyone to use, and Twisted Sifter has a finely curated gallery that features the superlatives from this past year and links to see all the winners lauded since 2006. There’s some really amazing and iconic images to discover, and the effort and enthusiasm really highlights the importance of this community of volunteers.

Sunday 24 July 2016

mo(u)rning in america

Via Marginal Revolution’s curated links, we are invited to check our punditry-meter when considering—or privileging—the current political landscape in America and abroad. Rhetoric is certainly spun-up to a fevered-pitch but the other thing about persuasive or sophistical speech is that is also serviceably modular and forgettable. While there is certainly cause for alarm and precedence for danger and intrigue and an awful redux of some things we’d thought we had dispatched, maybe there’s little novel in the present situation to bemoan.
Looking at these melodramatic instances from recent campaigns and critiques, I am reminded of far older politicking that conceived the polarising two-party system of the US: like the Tea-Partiers of the last election cycle, there was in the mid-1850s a movement called the Know Nothings—being a quasi-secret society whose membership and activities they’d never divulge to outsiders, owning up to no knowledge of whatever accusations. Even more anachronistically, they called their political caucus the Native American Party in order to balance out the political vacuum with the collapse of the of the Whig constituency and existed exclusively to warn-off the decent suffragans of the country about the dangers of immigration—especially of the Catholic persuasion with marching orders from the Pope to subvert the country. Unsuccessfully, they campaigned to reinstate former president Millard Fillmore and in the wake of the US Civil War, sublimated themselves into the grandees of the GOP. Fillmore had the first bathtub put in the White House, among other things. Even compared to contemporary events, the politics of America seem almost abruptly passรฉ, given that BREXIT has effectively already built that border-wall, Theresa May has been installed as an unelected Prime Minister (though a Bremain-supporter, is quite a boon to an Anglo-Saxon named Status Quo) and dotty former London mayor Boris Johnson has been elevated in the caretaker cabinet to the office of Foreign Minister. America, for once, might have an uphill battle for lunacy.

Sunday 19 June 2016

entrada

Though it might be safe to assume that the Aztec Empire of Mesoamerica was already doomed by the arrival of Europeans bringing Old World diseases with them without the ambitions of Conquistador Hernรกndo Cortรฉs, it is hard to say what fortunes hinged on the ingenuity of one of expedition’s (entrada) artillery units, named Francisco Montoya.
While most of the slaughter and abject destruction was perpetrated by the Spanish with what would have been traditional weapons at the time (swords and arrows and missionaries that the natives knew and could repulse) and was indeed somewhat facilitated by client states of the Aztecs (a modern fiction to simplify a rather politically complex and strained alliance that referred to a mythological region called Aztlan somewhere in the north where the people had migrated from—sort of like metaphorically calling England Avalon), willing to throw off the yoke of Tenochtitlan, who’d just consolidated power only six decades before the arrival of Columbus, and sided with the Spanish.

Possibly too was an unfortunate series of coincidences and the way their calendar was constructed to stir superstition and resignation, which certainly could not compete with Spanish manifest destiny and prospecting for treasure. Although equipped with plenty of munitions, canons and muskets, the primitive gunpowder that had recently been communicated to western Europe from the Chinese was in short supply. The prepared mixture was unstable and unsuitable for sea-voyages, and though most of the constituent ingredients were available in situ, sulfur was a rare commodity. Our clever Francisco Montoya (prepare to die), determined not to have brought all these weapons for nothing, led a daring mission into the caldera of an active volcano, Popocatepeti (probably sacred to the Aztecs and a place of worship and sacrifice), to collect sulfur and produce enough gunpowder to compel the Aztecs with shock and awe to capitulate in less than two years (heady with the recent and parallel achievement of the Spanish crown called the Reconquista, recapturing lands on the Iberian peninsula that had been under Muslim control for seven centuries) after the expedition arrived in 1519.

Saturday 4 June 2016

the un-dead or working-title

A recent entry on the superb Futility Closet informs on the early character-sketch of Count Dracula through Bram Stoker’s preliminary notes outlining the novel. Among the draft attributes that did not make it into the original story but are sometimes woven into later popular mythology—surely a remnant of folklore—are:
the inability to be photographed (shows up as a skeleton) or captured in painting (ends up with the likeness of someone else) and is tripped up whilst crossing thresholds, unable to do this without assistance.  Arithmomania is not among the strengths or weaknesses, but interestingly, Dracula was to have picked his destination, engaging a solicitor through a form of rhapsodomancy, consulting Virgil or various classic poets’ random verses for guidance. Alternately, the Count was to have dabbled in bolomancy—that is, throwing darts at a map. Incidentally, such practise of bibliomancy, usually turning to the Bible, were not condemned by the Church as witchcraft and were perfectly acceptable means of seeking guidance and council, whereas the casting of bones or favomancy (divination through tossed beans) and the like were judged sorcery.

Saturday 21 May 2016

gieterse punter

In the middle reaches of the Netherlands, in the province of Overijssel, there is landscape formed by peat reclamation and in the centre of this transformative operation, one can find the so-called Venice of the North (Hollands Venetiรซ, though I would have thought that nickname would be reserved for Amsterdam) in the old part of the village of Giethoorn, directed to our attention courtesy of the Presurfer. The network of canals, legacy of the intensive mining, make the predominant mode of transportation whisper-boats (punters with muted motors) or ice-skating in the winter time. The place certainly looks idyllic and relaxing and surely worth a stop next time we are in the area.

Monday 2 May 2016

ponceau 4r

As possibly one of the biggest hoaxes to come out of France since arguably the Priory of Sion (and notable for being a contemporary phenomenon with the bloodline conspiracy), the missive known as the Villejuif leaflet (anonymous but sourced to the oncological institute in the Paris suburbs) spread from 1976 onward with impressive virality contained a list of twenty or so—several different versions were in circulation for over a decade—of food additives, preservatives, and colouring agents alleged to be carcinogenic.
The original author of the pamphlet that was shared more than seven million times via chain-letters (chaรฎne de lettres, and more by word of mouth) across Europe was never identified and seemed to be spring-boarding his or her concerns off of the newly introduced codes called E Numbers that standardised food chemical labelling for the continent—as if the coding scheme was a veiled way to peddle poison like the notion that barcodes were the mark of the Devil, the classification system reserving E100-199 for dyes, E300-399 antioxidants, E900-E999 for sweeteners and so on. Obviously, processed food ought to be avoided when possible, and naturally the definition of fit for consumption is a fluid one, though I think that these specific panics are sometimes red-herrings, like so many red M&Ms, and regulatory bodies within the EU have rejected some of the substances deemed safe in the US—even if that use in America is strictly limited to colouring the skin of oranges to make them look riper or as cosmetics for other things that generally aren’t in the human food-chain, but that list also included a lot of naturally occurring compounds that are synthesised in industrial kitchens, like sodium sulphite, potassium nitrate, and citric acid. It was that last item that especially caused a panic, which is a pervasive food-additive, and propagated as the most toxic.  Perhaps the list (which we still encounter today as super foods and super villain foods, confronting us especially in the whitespaces of the internet) began innocently enough when a concerned but confused citoyen heard that citric acid was an essential catalyst for the Krebs cycle, mistaking the German word for cancer for the act of metabolising.  Incidentally, E124 or Ponceau 4R is a chemical pigment meaning poppy-red and one of the few not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration