in-flight entertainment

Fascinatingly, we learn via Just a Car Guy, that the 1925 silent film “The Lost World,” featuring a cameo by its writer, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle—perhaps better known for his character Sherlock Holmes, was the first in-flight movie screened to commercial passengers in April of that year during a hop from London to Paris. An eccentric takes his team of explorers to search for a lost expedition through the Amazon rain forest to a remote plateau in Venezuela and encounter a sheltered population of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. As clever as this technically challenging act was and how we might take it for granted today, the fact that the reels were highly flammable nitrate carried aloft on a wooden-framed aircraft seemed particularly ill-advised stunt to assay. Luckily, nothing happened on this trip—otherwise, cinemas in the sky might have never taken off. And condemned to infamy, The Lost World might have not gone on to inspire King Kong and the Jurassic Park franchise.

little ben or gmt +1

With its bigger, more famous big brother having gone silent for the next few years, perhaps residents are paying more notice to the clock tower’s commemorative copy on a traffic island by Vauxhall Bridge near Victoria Station.
The cast iron replica was first built in 1892 and subsequently de-commissioned, re-commissioned and moved venues several times. A rather unsettling design choice—especially for an already harried commuter rush to catch a train connection—is that the time-piece is permanently set to Day-Light Savings Time, so that for five months out of the year, it’s displaying the wrong hour. The original thought behind this rather baffling decision seems lost, but is now explained as a gesture of Franco-British solidarity, with a rhyming couplet titled Apology for Summer Time: “My hands you may retard or may advance / My heart beats true for England as well as France,” a reference to how it shows the correct continental time when it behind domestically during the winter months.

daytrip: hochrhön

We had the chance to do a bit of local exploring near our home and we found the ruin (die Mauerschädel as it’s singularly known) of a fortified church built around the year 1000 and abandoned about three centuries later during the height of the plague (Pest) in the fields behind the village of Filke, the inter-German border separating Bavaria from East Germany once passing through the nave of the structure.
In the 1970s, the whole of the structure was ceded to Bavaria for security purposes. Though the outbreak of the plague is considered the likely culprit for its eventual abandonment, another anachronistic suggestion is that once bulwarks of the region, Filke and other surrounding settlements that essentially became ghost-towns before being eventually repopulated sacrificed themselves to the marauding tribes of the Huns, able to Christianise the scouting parties only to be later betrayed and massacred. A maiden in white is said to haunt the grounds, but that is a relatively recent embellishment.
Afterward, we took another detour to see some marshland in a nature reserve (the whole region is a nature reserve, really, but there are also specially designated areas that are protected from traffic and development) but the trails didn’t really get very near and the scrub separating it from the path was intimidating. H and I did however get the chance to explore the deep woodlands and encountered some deer that bounded past us before we could react.
More our pace, however, we found an assortment of mushrooms and toadstools that we resolved to learn about and come back to the clearing where they seemed to thrive.
The forest directly behind our house are baronial lands, still in the same family, and we wouldn’t want to be accused of poaching.

a quantum of solace

A diverse group of physicists are undertaking a top-down review of quantum mechanics in order to reframe it in a fashion that does not come off so weird and counter to the ways we interact with reality. Not just a question of scale but a landscape haunted with both living and dead cats, action-at-a-distance, and particles that are in two places at once, there’s no guarantee that there are easier, more fundamental answers to be found but of course the pursuit is worthwhile.
Rather than admitting to a mission statement in this discipline, quantum theory is informed of a loose association of analogies and observable phenomena—plus the mathematics to support it, the efforts of this consortium might lend something more cohesive and regimented and even lead to deeper truths and perhaps a glimpse of what causes happenstance to be focused or fuzzy. It’s a bit like marvelling, as one does, at the fact that our march of numbers from primitive counting to hopelessly complex calculus works and the Cosmos seems to oblige. What do you think? Sometimes I think scientists grow uncomfortable not with the fact that there are significant challenges in the evanescent and struggle to articulate complex concepts to the uninitiated (though inability to explain something in simple terms probably betrays a shaky grasp) but rather the rather defeatist allure of pseudoscience that some see fit to plug the gaps in understanding. The scientific method does not ask we abandon that which is outside its purview as normative, subject to belief but its mysteries, spookiness and deviation from predestination included, are not there either to help those forces gain a purchase.

name and shame

In this dystopic reality-show reality that we’re living in, Dear Leader has named four finalists in his competition to safeguard America’s southern frontier which will construct a test-length of barrier outside of San Diego for trials that will evaluate how effective the respective firms’ designs are in combating scaling and tunnelling underneath—which walls seem quite vulnerable to.
The House of Congress, despite Dear Leader’s assurances that Mexico would pay for the wall, pledged about a tenth of the estimated cost of the massive project but the Senate has yet to make the same concession—to which Dear Leader has threatened to shut down the government should his project not receive funding. While the legislature is generally not cowed into submission by Dear Leader’s rather empty threats (he vowed to take away Senators’ health care if they didn’t strike down Obama-Care but has yet to make good on that promise), I except that funding for his precious wall to be conflated with much needed relief for rebuilding places in Texas and Louisiana devastated by a hurricane and subsequent flooding—a despicable thing to bundle to the nihilistic priorities of pandering up with America’s heritage of immigration and openness. Though finalists, the construction firms only represent the best in one class—namely, concrete deterrence—given that the Customs and Border Protection agency will be making nominations for another category within the week—non-concrete deterrence, which includes entrants for hammocks, gravestones and a utopic terra nullius.