Wednesday 5 March 2014

dimensionally transcendental

The ever facinating BLDGBLOG shares some images and background on an exhibit recently closed at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art of these elegantly crafted tables, desks, and bureaus from the workshop of Abraham Roentgen and son, active during the eighteenth century. These beautiful pieces of furniture transform—more than meets the eye, to reveal nested drawers and trays, ingeniously and economically taking advantage of hidden and folded space.

Tuesday 4 March 2014

parallax view or high-noon

Slowly but surely creeping towards the hours where sunrise and sunset do not precede the work day, I found this map pretty keen, which globally illustrates how far time-zones around the world diverge from the true solar mean.

Of course, all these lags and accelerations are relative and governments and businesses necessarily must coordinate opening times, which do not always respect ones natural hour in the sun, but I do wonder if, for ones biological clock and circadian rhythms (from the Latin for about a day and having nothing to do with cicadas or locusts like I thought) there are long-lasting effects for individuals dictated to rise later and so on. What do you think—how close are you to real time?

Monday 3 March 2014

reductio ab hitlerum

Apparently at one point during his conversation with the US president, the Russian premiere invoked that the invasion of the Crimean peninsular was executed for the protection of ethnic Russians living in the area. Immediately, this elicited a petition by many Russians and Russian-speakers residing there, refusing those overtures, stating they needed no protecting and felt, on the contrary, very secure and welcome.
Though no further violence has actually yet been perpetrated with the occupation of the region, the next maneuvers are unclear, and I am sure that someone, somewhere has pointed out the obvious, said the argument that's no popular or considered logically flawed, but isn't this current reasoning parallel at least to the invocation of “protecting the ethnic Germans” in 1939 in Gdansk in Poland or in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, Japan declaring Korea a protectorate in 1905 before formally annexing the country in 1910, or the acts of others that one cannot call to the carpet, not to mention dozens of trespasses committed in the name of US interests and for earlier empires? This invasion was premeditated and not a spontaneous response to an opportune moment of civil disarray and the defanged counter-balance is left with few tenable options, even in terms of economic sanctions—considering Europe's dependence of Russian natural resources and especially allied China's favourable assessment of Russia's actions, able to levy painful usury as the financier-in-chief of the world's accustomed lifestyle. Ukraine, despite the odds, could however offer resistance, having a respectable arsenal in comparison regardless of the spread of their antagonist, but this possibility is being decimated by Russians recruiting Ukrainian force individual by individual, luring them away with a passport and citizenship.

Sunday 2 March 2014

prevernal

By the meteorological reckoning, Spring time sprung over the weekend with the beginning of the month. The cross-quarter day, the March Equinox, however does not come until later in the month, not that we got so much as a shudder, much less a faint or a swoon of Winter here.
Some cultures utilize an equal rigid though variable metric, still astronomical—like the Celts, who have developed a scale to ascertain the relative strength of the noon-day sun and declare the season to have begun once the and some cultures even ritually observe a native totem-animal, anxious whether the beast has seen his shadow, portending either a prolonged Winter or an early Spring.
Though the climate is getting all bolloxed up and Nature is confused, by our estimate and at our behest, I suspect the biological signals are probably the best measures, like these crocuses and snow-drops in our garden, that we are emerging from hibernation.