Tuesday 5 August 2014

time-capsule or animal reservoir/arthopod vector

Searching for something else (because a query on a specific illness raises all sort of alarms from the health authorities that mine deeply into such thing for the sake of public health and tracking the drift of disease), I came across an interesting training module, from April of 2009, which curiously captured the sentiment and official disposition of an exercise in outbreaks a few years hence.

A government sanctioned primer on Ebola and other insidious hemorrhagic viral infections, with doctors as its intended audience, devoted quite a lot of the lessons to the subject of biological warfare and how laboratories formerly under the control of the Soviet Union could be easily compromised and stocks of deadly viruses could be released. There was a spate of citations on how the Soviets had successfully weaponised the Marburg virus and a similar aerosol method could be used for Ebola. Such were the fears, however packaged (I could not find an updated version), when a whole barnyard of flues were passing through and no there are no such provocative musings, despite the blackballing and demonising of Russia, and like speculation is limited to local witchdoctors and a lingering distrust of Western-sponsored aid-stations. A cold-comfort that was also often repeated throughout this syllabus was the fact that the stigmata of bleeding out of every orifice rarely resulted in enough blood-loss to be fatal—never mind that the integrity of one's vascular system had degraded to such a point.

d'oc or au contraire

Continuing my want for accompaniment and stares in stopped traffic—of which there is a good deal of and part of my motivation, although it’s getting harder and harder to tell blathering to one’s self from blathering to someone far distance or shouting orders at one’s communication devices but perhaps the call and response pace of a foreign language audio-textbook looks less than natural, during my commute—which sometimes can take a significant amount of time, I try to recite at least the introductory lessons of the library’s collection.
I am preparing for our next vacation and always figure it is worth risking a little confusion or letting something learnt expire in the meantime due to disuse to exercise the mouth. I think American English especially is not a very enunciative one and the work-out and exaggeration are necessary for any progress—whatever might stick during these sessions, since I am paying more attention to the road. I knew the German interjection Doch! for really or uh-huh, but while listening to the parallel structured lessons, I learned that the come-back phrase is really a formal and polite contradiction of a question framed in the negative, akin to yes indeed.
The French equivalent is si as opposed to the usually oui, which I never appreciated before. Both languages have two ways of saying yes and one word (form) for no.   English, it turns out, once utilized four forms that followed this pattern and were appropriate responses, depending on how the question was posed—yes/no for negative questions and yea/nay for positive ones:
Will she not stay? Yes, she will.
Will he not go? No, he will not.
Will she stay?  Yea, she will.
Will he go? Nay, he will not.

Monday 4 August 2014

carbon-sink

The Times of India has a tantalizing little article to re-calibrate the direction of environmental research, turning it back towards carbon-sequestration through a study on ant colonies. Of course, forests and coral reefs perform the same function on a much larger scale than one teeny-tiny bite of breath at a time—trapping whole bucket-fulls of greenhouse gases at once, if left alone.
Careful atmospheric measurements and observation suggests that the creatures make a mortar of limestone to shore up their tunnels and nests. Such examination of ant farms is really a foil to one of the greatest contributing factors to environmental change—behind industrial pollutants and ecological destruction: through mechanised and deep ploughing and tilling, layers of carbon-dioxide that would otherwise mellow underground is released by the acre. I do not believe that the ill-effects of modern cultivation is just the undoing the carefully coordinated work of ants and other chthonic beings.

claire obscure

In as much as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and wife in Sarajevo was not the sole catalyst and cause of the outbreak of World War, I appreciated the message of a documentary produced a few years ago that conveyed that those preceding years were not just a prelude, the eve of war. Aside from advances in mechanization, transportation and the migration of populations from rural to urban-areas, a singular event did lead to the diversion of much of that new and untempered energy towards the build-up of navies and military power: shortly after the invention of the airplane and the science of aerodynamics, French inventor and aeronaut Louis Blรฉriot successfully flew across the English Channel (La Manche) in the summer of 1909.

Though celebrated on both sides for this great achievement (Blรฉriot was encouraged by a £1000 prize offered by a British tabloid to whomever could manage such an impossible task), more sombre-thinkers realised that this feat meant the end of Britian’s imperviousness, separated from the rest of the violent continent by a natural moat and an admiralty unmatched. Seeking to exploit this newly discovered weakness, other nations quickly sought to bolster their sea-power, and England wanted desperately to maintain its supremacy, whatever might attack from above. Defensive or offensive, sadly, such contingencies ache to be used. Inspired by the disruption patterns in Nature, the zebra and the great spotted and striped cats, a group of artists, under the leadership of Norman Wilkinson, were commissioned to disguise the fleet in what was known as dazzle camouflage. The striking geometric patterns and colours were not to conceal but rather confuse, by making it difficult to discern speed and heading—making the job of a marksman, whether from sea or air, much more of a challenge, often wasting rounds by misjudging distance. The practise continued until the beginnings of WWII and the advent of radar that replaced range-finding. Pablo Picasso asserted that he and others of the Cubist movement (that occurred around the same time leading up to WWI) but possibly, it was the other way around. I wonder what other seminal events might be bound up in other colourful techniques

Sunday 3 August 2014

idem or a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido

I can remember driving around the countryside in the mid-nineties, long before the days of content-on-demand and in a region whose FM stations did not match my tastes in music exactly with a lot of Country-Western and white-people Gospel, and discovering the wilds of AM radio, who devoted swaths of the programming-day to conservative then liberal tirades—sometimes confusing liberal with libertine.
I found it formative to be exposed to all sorts of alternative points of view—that sometimes retreated to conspiracy-mongering. Everything was open to dissent, however, and like a canon of nostalgic music to draw on, I wondered really what it means nowadays to have entertainment on demand for material that one has not been exposed to before—since we are getting worse, I think, at being very original or anything but derivative. Regardless of how dogmatic or admitting of disagreement these shows really were, I do remember how they characterised the opposition, especially avid followers of one figure in particular—as Ditto Heads. That seemed particularly fitting, and though of course the phenomena still exists, that term has fallen out of favour—because, perhaps, that's what the Medium (another term those shows used for the monolithic main-stream) has become, a media-echo of re-blogging and without much endurance to keep up a rally and when there's only flitting narcissism and everything true becomes a nice back-drop to frame it in.