Saturday 5 January 2013

lol or I am the monarch of the sea, I am the ruler of the queen’s navee

To celebrate National Trivia Day, 4 January (my apologies for missing it), Mental Floss contributor Jason English (dead link) published a selection of outstanding facts and figures to ruminate over. I think that the most appealing trivia really pulls one into the circumstances behind the bald and enticing oddities and invites, demands further research and piques the curiosity.



One of the items concerned this corres- pondence between retired Admiral and First Sea Lord Baron John (Jacky) Fisher and Winston Churchill from September of 1917, which contains the first usage of the initialism (with explanation) OMG. The context of the message seems a bit tongue-in-cheek, maybe a play on the honours OBE, Order of the British Empire, and similar styles.
Curious, I learned a little bit about the writer and discovered that Fisher, perhaps only second in renown and importance in naval history to Lord Nelson, served first during the Crimean War and kept the Russian Empire from expanding further in the Scandinavian territories, and later then under his command British supremacy in the Mediterranean (the anchor locations of Gibraltar, Malta and the Suez) was solidified and the navy was significantly modernized. A lot more could be said and will require more studies into these lives and times. Fisher was a colourful and energetic character, besides—penning the interjection OMG! was just a bit of gilded (but rousing) trivia distilled at the end of a long and illustrious career.

Friday 4 January 2013

duchenne whistle

Seventeenth French founding-father of neurology and a revitalizing force for interest in the galvanic response and bioelectricity, which was dismissed by medical science in the intervening century as somewhat of a parlour-trick beforehand, Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne made many enduring contributions to the field but is probably best known for capturing the aesthetics of a genuine smile.

Duchenne is probably also due a nod for the advancement of photography for his studies emotional expressions (also to the development of the theory of evolution and the hazards of lead-poisoning as well), which enabled him to isolate and identify the subtleties (now recognizable) that distinguish a fake, sky-waitress smile from an authentically experienced one. I hope I don’t always present a robotic smile but it is never strained or contrived—not overmuch. He did try to electro-shock subjects out of a posed grimace or a grin, occasionally, as those were the tools of his trade, but Duchenne was also able through gentler means to coax and capture natural glimpses and outpourings of emotion. His resolve to decode the masks of sentiment and passion honoured him as terminology to separate the real from the phony.

hearth and home or genie in the bottle

Authentic efforts to heal the environment and lessen human impact is always to be applauded and Germany, which has assumed a role of leadership both in better management of ecology and economy, I think has some very good intentions and cannot be accused of bullying Greece or exacerbating its financial problems and standing. Germany’s robust push towards greener energy and industry is at risk of becoming a pyrrhic victory and zero-sum-game, due in part to the malingering and knock-on effects of that other management sphere, the euro policy.

I remember watching an episode of I Dream of Jeannie that stuck for some reason from when I was little, where Jeannie waxes philosophical about the limitations and consequences of her wish-granting, which does kind of seem to violate the causality of the show, and tells Master that she cannot stop the rain (for a rocket launch—that or, Jeannie’s evil twin sister, called Jeannie II, tries to sabotage a mission with the weather) because it would cause a flood or drought somewhere else. That’s a bit like the greening of Europe, with energy borrowed and swapped and problems exported. The poor Greeks, in many cases, can no longer afford fuel to heat their homes and so aren’t ordering it—which surely sends chills through the market for suppliers, as well—and are praying for a mild winter and to warm a few rooms in the night are burning anything combustible—books, bits of furniture, trash. It is nothing wide-spread or dystopian yet, though desperate and I’m sure humiliating, but sure it is a dangerous thing to do and releases a lot of toxins into the air as well. Dirty, lazy smog is gripping the metropolitan areas and I would venture, undoes all of Germany’s best efforts. Concern for the globe, I think, demands some global-thinking.

Thursday 3 January 2013

chatter or natural infrastructure

The quietly superb BLDG BLOG has an excellent back-to-back series of articles on early improvisations and alternatives to telephony and wireless communications technology that patched together networks from features of native landscapes, including party lines with barbed-wire carriers across the Old West that was really a ranchpunk bit of cleverness, and serious proposals for a massive antenna array in the Wisconsin Dells (plus a bonus Soviet Dooms Day device) or Antarctica to facilitate correspondence with trawling submarines with the bedrock of the Earth acting as a transmitter for a Cold War worse-case scenario.
The series began, however, with an article from a science magazine on accidental discovery that a tall and living tree-trunk makes a surprisingly good aerial, complete with schematics and scheming. These were really engrossing stories and rather the opposite of leapfrogging technologies in their ingenuity. A tree, even if ill-used, is a far better sight than a cellular tower any day, and it would be really keen if the same creativity could rig hill and valley or derelict pathways to harness, passively, energy.  

Wednesday 2 January 2013

hang in there, baby

The richly resourceful diving bell of the past, the Retronaut, curates a magnificent selection of motivational business posters from the 1920s with the unsinkable employee Bill Jones, an Artsy-Craftsy creation of British Parker-Holladay Company, with transatlantic offices.
Though I tend to think that contemporary motivation posters, especially those letter-boxed ones with rather heavy-handed themes, are mostly effective for workers that could might someday soon be replaced by robots, I really enjoyed the series of lithographs for their artwork and message, featured right in time for the end of the holiday season and return to the office when the atmosphere at work can be quite oppressive and demotivating at times.

commutative property or sixth happiness

Perhaps I was a bit prematurely to dismiss the new year as numerically unremarkable. I heard an India fortuneteller on the radio this morning, prefacing her words and prognostications with the pronouncement that all numbers are indeed lucky, that this year, broken down as 2+0+1+3 yields six, the number of harmony in some circles and duty or domestic relations in others.

Personally, though I don’t buy into this sort of resonance and extra properties of digits wholesale and without reservations, I do often catch myself noticing a four (creation and rebirth) buried in a string of numbers all the time—though I use every mathematical operator I can think of to get to four, mixed multiplication, division along with addition and subtraction. I have notion from somewhere that four was my auspicious number, though I can’t recall what brought me there. I suppose that there would be no harm in it if I have been mistaken all these years and my lucky number turns out to be five instead. Also, when possible, I always try to remit a payment that works out to four, 82,00€, $48.00, £62.00. It is all a bit mad, I’m sure, and I guess a little bit maddening—look! It's a four, but it seems to me that vast outpouring of bills is a pretty flat landscape, dominated by zeroes and ones, and maybe a little packet of good fortune can be wired out as well. It’s a bit like ones choice for postage stamps, when bills were still mailed out, and payments usually were franked with grim and plain stamps, or else a bit of the evil-eye and just the opposite.

Tuesday 1 January 2013

fraternization

In reverence to one extraordinarily florid line of copy, dateline: Charlotte, 1965, which reports on the domestic murder of a millworker by his family as if the incident were a game of chess, guided by some “occult hand,” there is a loose but exclusive association of journalists that are known to one another by the clever and subtle infiltration of this phrase into print and perpetuating the reporter’s words.
This style of writing, sometimes without affection, is called Purple Prose, typified by stock-phrases like Baron Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous “it was a dark and stormy night…” Incidentally, it is an interesting comparison—purple prose—with the other colours of literary criticism, blue language and yellow journalism. It was an insiders’ joke and I am sure appreciated by anyone hep to it, and then buried away when discovered, aware that most would just overlook the obscure and fancy language. It has grown harder and harder to restrict membership, however, to those in-the-know in recent years and it does not take much sophistication to jar this phrase out of the archives of the press with a simple search on the Internet. In response to the club’s select-status slipping away, the Order of the Occult Hand, is reinventing itself with a new secret and supposedly baroque code phrase. Of course, the rebooted membership is not publishing what this new clichรฉ might be, since that would ruin the fun and expose them again. It will be a fun challenge to try to shoehorn the new passkey out of the headlines and from the newspaper page.

MCMLXXXVII or the dream sequence always rings twice

When one tries to parse the year 2013, it seems a bit unremarkable from the perspective of numerology—not a prime number and a reprieve from twelve years of red-letter repeating dates, 12.12.12, 08.08.08. It is no grand cycle within a cycle but counting conventions do make this year hark back to a yesteryear, 1987, the last time a year was expressed with four different numerals—which is a little weird when one thinks about it. What primers and refreshers took place back then and what nascent things happened all those years ago that became emergent and formative? Western hostages were taken in Lebanon and the Iran-Contra Affair Commission scrutinizes the prosecution of US foreign policy. The Unabomber is terrorizing America. U2 released the album Joshua Tree, and Michael Eisner and Jacques Chirac close the deal for the construction of Euro Disneyland. The Simpson characters first appeared as an animated short on the Tracey Ullman Show. A 19 year old West German pilot created an imaginary bridge to the East by landing his plane in Moscow’s Red Square.
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the UK continues its reign and Ronald Reagan, from West Berlin, implores Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that Wall.” The accords of the European Community, forerunner to the EU, were debated and codified. Michael Jackson records the album Bad. The laboratories at Los Alamos host the first conference on the topic of artificial intelligence and bionic life, and Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in syndication. Free trade agreements were struck for North America and the first national Coming-Out day is celebrated in Washington, DC. Medicine first describes and diagnoses what is called chronic fatigue syndrome, and ater his death, mathematician Kurt Gรถdel publishes his ontological proof for the existence of God. The live drama of a little girl who fell down a well in Midland, Texas captivates audiences with its televised, point-for-point coverage (other iconic portrayals on TV included Max Headroom, the precursors to reality-shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Rescue 911 and the salad days of Remington Steel, Falcon Crest, Dallas, Moonlighting, Matlock, MacGuyver, Golden Girls, Designing Women and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse). The Black Monday stock market crash sends markets tumbling, just after the Dow reached the heights of 2500 points. A high speed rail network in France and Germany breaks records, and Romanian workers revolt against the regime of CeauลŸescu. Windows version 2.0 is released, as is the first Final Fantasy computer game, and the US Food and Drug Administration approves the use of the anti-depressant Prozac. The world had to say goodbye to such luminaries as Liberace, Rita Hayworth, Fred Astaire, Lee Marvin, Maria von Trapp, Mary Astor and Danny Kaye. There are of course many other iconic moments of the year, which waxed and waned into fulfillment in the fullness that characterizes any year and successor events, and I am not sure how the retreat into all things retro, just beyond the easy grasp of recorded experience, resonates through to today. That year is not the template for this one, certainly, but we would be amiss to forget the past and not try to jostle up some clues, dreamy and distant, about where we are today and what the numbers might hold for us.