Saturday 30 September 2017

ultramar

Though the people of Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the rest of the Caribbean will survive and come once again to thrive despite of Trump’s nihilistic disdain for brown people whose vote and adoration could never be curried in a way that counts with the help of individuals and the world, it is deeply shameful who the Dear Dotard would rather focus his efforts at driving yet another wedge through a precariously united society and fanning the flames of a culture war by politicising sportsball than spare a thought for his territories beyond the seas.
Apparently his reticence over the devastation that Hurricane Maria wrought and the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico—with a population of three and a half million American citizens (with an asterisk of course since they are mostly affiliated with the Democratic Party, non-Caucasian and they cannot vote in federal elections) was beginning to surpass the threshold of bad press as Trump started to terrorise and ingratiate himself on the island’s poor governor who is beholden to Trump’s whims now and in the future, who in turn praises the federal government for its aide, in the face of Trump begging off because of logistical challenges—the Atlantic Ocean. To redress this empathy deficit (and for whatever reason, Trump sees now as an appropriate time to raise the spectre of Puerto Rico’s already wrecked economy and its indebtedness to Wall Street) in the meantime, several cruise ships have been diverted and formed a flotilla to deliver vital food, water and supplies and ferry thousands back to the mainland. The extent of the damage and the hardships ahead are really yet to be fully formulated as there’s been little chance to survey and assess, and this recovery is not Dear Leader’s reality television—please don’t let this too become his show—but rather we pave the path to restore the lives and means of seeking a livelihood to the peoples of the Caribbean and to make this moment a pivot point where our compassion for one another and consideration of our choices for the planet and the climate come into sharper focus—with or without the leadership of America, which is sadly now, even in these moments of crisis that they’re supposed to be a source of reassurance, only a divisive force to play both sides against the middle.

console

We enjoyed pouring over these exacting, surreal schematic photographs of (mostly) Mid-Century Soviet รฆsthetic gallery of control rooms of power plants, flight towers and other utilities curated by Present /&/ Correct (sundries for the modern workspace) via Boing Boing. Unfortunately, there’s no captioning and not much further information to research, as we’d love confirmation that some of these spaces have been conserved (and I’m sure some have been) in their original state and still in use.

Friday 29 September 2017

gyres and eddies

In order to draw attention to the daunting problem of oceanic pollution and the impending calamitous crisis of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a group of artists and activists are giving this whirling vortex of litter and plastic founded circa 1985 and the size of France all the trappings of statehood, with citizenship, passports, a flag, stamps and currency. On World Oceans Day observed a few months ago, the group applied on behalf of the Trash Isles to the United Nations for recognition and membership, in the hopes that with the primus inter pares effect, the world might start to take the problem with the severity it demands.

tรฅskkrรฅbรซt

In a move that heralds the beginning of a vertical monopoly of sorts, Swedish furniture and lifestyle purveyor IKEA has acquired the San Francisco-based online platform TaskRabbit that allows people to contract freelance labour for a wide-range of services—including presumably assembling IKEA furniture.
The handyman services company has another sixty-thousand independent workers signed on and has already struck similar deals with other major on-line retailers to supplement installation and delivery. What do you think of the gig-economy—or rather the “sharing-economy” as the newly-minted partners characterise it? I can’t speak to the reputation of either company separately but something in the combined enterprise strikes me as exploitative and symptomatic of our rather precarious profit-models.

we don't deserve nice things

This post is maybe too morose and dejected for a fair early Autumn Friday morning, and though only learning of this particularly photogenic Swedish tree’s existence and demise, the episode struck a chord within me and how celebrity is a crisis of character. Naturally the Broccoli Tree did not seek out the fame that led to its destruction—that was the senseless vandalism of some Herostratic offender, but it nonetheless became too famous to be left alone. So called Hugs of Death usually don’t have physical targets but adoration amplified can have lethal consequences and seeing what became of this pretty tree seems a very powerful and poignant reminder of the dangers and responsibilities of stardom—especially the self-propelled variety.

memory hole

An archive dedicated to delving through a quarter of a century of radio talk shows to cull nihilistically embarrassing interviews between the provocative host and Dear Dotard has been silenced with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) order to cease and desist.
The broadcaster that is the rightful owner of this catalogue—and the investigative archivists ought to be lauded for their stamina as the original recordings were cringe-worthy enough without the abject horror knowing that America would one day elevate this D-List celebrity to high office—is refusing to air these back episodes, but if it changed its mind the Washington, DC-based litigant would happily drop its challenge. The intellectual property owners feel that Trump’s words might be too easily taken out of context and argue that there is no way to bolster the sessions with enough background to constitute a fair-use case—that is, deeming it research or of journalistic merit. These factors and shrill cries of infringement, of course stand in sharp contrast to the special dispensation afforded Trump for his entertainment value despite the fact his deportment clearly violates company policies on libellous and abusive speech. Dear Dotard has not just threatened North Korea with destruction via his medium of choice but has repeated hurled hateful and violent insults at individuals and whole groups of people that would merit a lifelong banishment.

Thursday 28 September 2017

tambo ฤto

For nearly the past quarter of a century the villagers of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture have strategically, meticulously planted dozens of varieties of heirloom and modern rice to create a colourful canvas out of their surrounding paddies. The scale and complexity of the works of art has grown every year—including Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji in 2007—have helped revitalise local tourism and is truly a community effort. Be sure to visit the link up top for more landscaped murals and a video presentation on rice paddy art, or tambo ฤto as it is called in Japanese.

vansploitation

Prolific custom-vehicle creator George Barris (previously) also designed and built the Love Machine that was the central figure (Vandora) of the film Super Van and spawned a sub-genre of romance on the road. As with some of Barris’ other creations, the chassis of the Love Machine went through several incarnations that avoided acknowledging its spotted past including an appearance as a shuttle bus on Back to the Future II and on the television series seaQuest DSV.

darmok and jalad at tenagra

Sourced without a doubt from The Greatest Generation, io9 (named for a theoretical input-output device that allows users to peer into the future at the price of their sanity) presents a collection of some of the strangest plotlines from Star Trek: TNG for the series’ thirtieth anniversary, which debuted on this day in 1987.

Tuesday 26 September 2017

public-notice

Chillingly, the US Department of Homeland Security has posted it proposed policies for monitoring the social media accounts of all migrants and their associates to the Federal Register (the official journal of the government) and is soliciting comments from the public. And while there will always hopefully be institutions to challenge the expanding reach of Big Brother (which has been in development for decades and something we’ve all been complacent about and complicit with) and the bureau probably won’t be granted everything its asking for, it is disturbing that any semblance of privacy (and Americans ought not be privileged over the rest of the world by dint of their citizenship since soon they won’t be) is becoming a rarer and rarer luxury only for the powerful and the duly deputised.

6x6

brick and mortar: the trajectory of on-line retailer Amazon very closely mirrors that of Sears and Roebuck  
corporate sponsorship: former London mayor tried to secure funds for the Thames Garden Bridge by allowing Apple to plop a store in the middle of the river

choo-choo: an incredibly charming hand-drawn train journey animation, via Waxy

songun: striking and iconographic ephemera from North Korea

tree of life: a look at how many species and varieties that each plant and animal emoji represents, via Kottke

ama: highlights from an interview with Monty Python alumnus John Cleese

sologamy

A thoughtful, reflexive essay on the trend of self-marriage, after indulging us with a personal peek at the private-public declarations of matrimony (held in a karaoke bar in the former no-man’s land between East and West Berlin), poses the question whether the rite is an emancipation from having to prove one’s worth by merit of relationship status or an oppressive, pathetic totem of self-absorption and a photo-opportunity.
While marriage and companionship has had a lot heaped on it in the past few decades—radically transformed from a utilitarian and practical arrangement that was essentially a commercial transaction to one with heady, superlative expectations of romance, protection, friendship, counsellor and a dozen other roles that might have been cast across a wider social network, it still seems robust and resilient enough to bear that burden. For those whom marriage might not impart an element of social mobility, however, self-marriage might not just be the trite amour-propre of narcissism that it seems to be and rather the staging that culminates in a ceremony (executed or not) is certainly a rebuke for spinster and crone (or whore) and all the other nasty terms that society directs at single women—who are the majority of participants. What do you think? Commandeering social conventions are a way of highlighting the constraints and limitations of our society but rather than betraying ourselves as needy and infantile, and I believe the author’s exercise was neither endorsement or condemnation but rather an expose and exploration worth contemplating on the nature of sanction and the sacrosanct but we’re probably each other’s own best allies for keeping us in good health, accountable and sane, morally and ethically.

Monday 25 September 2017

jump-cut

Despite its novelty and notwithstanding anecdotes of panicked early audiences rushing away from the screen at the sight of an oncoming train, cinematographers put together and edit scenes and montages in much the same way as humans augment their visual experience by allowing their brains to fill in the gaps, as we learn from ร†on Video via Laughing Squid. Previously we were introduced to the rather vexing notion of saccade-masking and how we are effective blind to the outside world a significant portion of the day and how smooth, sweeping transitions are illusory compared to the fragmentary and clawing reality of our sense of sight, and this short documentary does a very good job of demonstrating how resolving focus, peripheral vision, intention and attention collaborate to produce a director’s cut of remembered sight whose stage and screen parallels perhaps couldn’t be appreciated until deconstructed.  Aside from the rather remarkable fact that we were so willing to take to the format and venue and are now more willing to engage with our flat things than the real dimensions around us in terms of narrative and belief, the genius of film-makers for exploiting this visual conceit for story-telling was something taken for granted as well.

triumvirate

While it is no doubt terrifying that for the first time since 1957 (before the liquidation of the Deutsche Reichsparte and Vaterlรคndische Union) there are openly fascist elements in the Bundestag (plus representation in the parliaments of thirteen out of sixteen Bundeslรคnder) and that a small percentage of the voting population has given a mandate to such a world-view, it is definitely preferable to suffer a thirteen-proof dotard than take the full, unadulterated wrath of bigoted despotism.
Perhaps it is better to give Nazis the stage to fail spectacularly than expend the efforts—better spent elsewhere—to convince the world that this is not a lesson, couched in the same terms, that we need to revisit. And while the share is not a controlling one and other minority, anti-establishment parties will I am sure will I am sure be willing to cast support to the CDU and SPD (though unexcited about the prospects of continued teamwork) in order to retain a viable government without having to resort to engaging a chauvinistic political bloc, these are untested times and no matter how one interprets the outcome, the AfD still finished in third place. I don’t know if governance by consensus and dialogue can continue with such a foil that represents something far more obstructive rather than constructive, and in this fragmented environment I expect more legislation to succumb to gridlock and internecine fights and flounder. What do you think? We’re grateful that Merkel retains the chancellorship but are repulsed by the way xenophobia and totalitarianism is regaining purchase.

Sunday 24 September 2017

stimmzettel

It’s federal elections in Germany and every suffragan is given two votes—one to choose their local representative to send to Berlin for the Bundestag (the legislative and constitutional body) and the other to select a political party affiliation that determines the mandate each political group carries. Though voting may translate to a cult-of-personality, Germans know that they are not electing a chancellor in any direct sense, just operating under the assumption that a party will want to retain their present leadership and form a government with the assent and cooperation with those garnered a share of seats in Federal Diet. Though it’s not beyond reproach to argue that forming the same coalition among senior and junior partners is not ideal for democratic institutions but it is certainly preferable to chaos and antithetical compromise, and while there are two major groups, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) that usually have to work towards solutions that both can live with, the landscape is wholly other the binary natures of many other national constituencies. There’s the pro-environmentalist Greens plus the Ecological Democrats and the Animal Rights Party, two sorts of independent-voter movements plus those seeking secession for various states, the Pirate party, the further left-leaning, the Marxists and the Communists as a robust counter-balance to the hard right elements Alternative fรผr Deutschland (AfD) and the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland—die NDP which considers itself a successor to the NSDP.
I was also happy to see that among the contenders on the ballot was die PARTEI—an intentional mockery and miscarriage of politics, whose satirical rotation of representatives (listed candidates take turns at the EU and retire after a month) in Brussels won on the slogan “for Europe—against Europe” in 2014, just like Frontfrau Alix Schwarz advocating for both peace and war. The group’s political activities this election-cycle has been infiltrating the social media circles dedicated to AfD adherents and lampooning their message with rather destabilising consequences. Refreshingly, unlike many other joke campaigns, die PARTEI actually had a plan for what it would do if elected to high office.

Saturday 23 September 2017

shibboleth, cool whip

 Recently we were introduced to a phonological concept that struck as completely novel though we’d been acquainted with one of its most cited examples for some time: the rhyming passkey—in a sense—Bรปter, brea, en griene tsiis; wa’t dat net sizze kin, is gjin oprjochte Fries (Butter, bread and green cheese; who can’t say this is no authentic Frisian) was employed during an early sixteenth century revolt to weed out Danes in their midst, reasoning that only native speakers could pronounce all the words properly.
The term shibboleth is from a biblical battle where accent and pronunciation similarly distinguished friend from foe and can figuratively refer to not just a language test to differentiate in-groups from out-groups—given that scripts are adapted to the set of sounds unique or common to every language—but more broadly to cohesive, meaningful jargon, shared experiences, anthems, prayers or other common cultural touchstones. I suppose the term could further be abstracted into sort of an anti-alphabet or anti-lexicon of limitations, like asking a German to say “squirrel” or any number of tongue-twisters that it would be a challenge for a foreigner to master. Do you know your own personal set of shibboleths? We are all outsiders and misfits to some group and that’s perfectly fine. Why are you saying it all weird?

Friday 22 September 2017

6x6

1995: a retrospective of the first five web applications that informed the internet as we know it, via Waxy

travelling matte: a thirty kilometre long art project for train passengers between Jena and Naumburg

bellerophon: incredible Roman mosaic discovered by amateur archaeologists in the Cotswolds

lay of the land: different proposals for visualising maps and daily journeys through the lens of time

mona lisas and mad hatters: other Elton John songs that Dear Leader uses to refer to world leaders

phase shift: pumping air through sand makes it behave like a liquid, first spotted here  

Thursday 21 September 2017

devil’s on the doorstep

Thanks indeed to TYWKIDBI for giving us the chance to re-visit the engineering superstition (not pictured) that considered feats of medieval architecture so far beyond the capacity of human builders—especially bridges—that local populations would have had to enter into a diabolical compact in order to have their commission fulfilled.
Certainly encountering such marvels would have been rare and awe inspiring, but people, vastly under- estimating their own abilities, attributed them to more ancient, pagan times (the opposite direction from another bit of German lore, the Schwedenschanze (EN) that mistook ancient fortifications and earthworks to be remnants of the Thirty Years’ War with Sweden rather than traces of prehistoric humans).  During the Middle Ages even the relics of Roman roads were considered to be too logistically sophisticated and in excess of mortal requirements to not be the product of some Faustian bargain.  I wonder what sort of preconceptions are clouding our vision presently that we will only be able to dispel with hindsight.

cheminรฉes sarrasines

We enjoyed this article on the enduring mystery of the so-called Lanterns of the Dead from Amusing Planet and reminded us how we were first acquainted with the structure while on holiday on รŽle d’Olรฉron.
The purpose and origin of the towers that appear predominately in southern France but are also to be found in other European countries is unsettled but one theory suggests that the towers were guideposts built along ancient pilgrimage trails that pointed the way to the Holy Land—the French word for moors (maures) misheard as the word for “dead” (morts) and the new appellation eventually held. The use of the towers to gain one’s bearings—or orientation, of course comes from the lands to the East where the sun rises.

Wednesday 20 September 2017

l’autre moi

We’re again indebted to the brilliant Nag on the Lake for bringing us quite a fascinating biography of two brave and creative individuals whose story and contributions to the resistance went untold with the life and times of step-siblings and life-time partners Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe—also known as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore.
Pioneering selfie-artists and authors, Cahun and Moore (the other me, as Cahun called her lover) challenged traditional gender roles and honed their identity and craft at a time when the world was going full-on fascist and fled Nazi-occupied Paris for the Channel Islands. Up to this point, their situation reminded me a bit of that of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas during the war but seeing that after resettling in Jersey in 1937, they really stuck their necks out rather than keeping a low-profile as Jewish lesbians might do. Nazi forces invaded the island in 1940 and the two risked their lives with a psy-ops hearts-and-minds campaign to make Nazi soldiers believe that there was a large-scale, professional effort to take back Jersey imminent, aided by a typewriter and translated text to lend credence to their claim and helped with the liberation of the island. They were eventually taken into custody by the secret-police but their stance was enough of a reprieve to stay their punishment until the Axis powers in Europe surrendered.

rocket man or unga chunga

The imbecile Dear Leader was given a platform at the United Nations general assembly which to the consternation and alarm of not only those US allies in the region but I’d venture every soul departed, on Earth and yet to come pledged to “totally destroy” North Korea and its twenty-five million residence should it continue to menace its neighbours and America.
Despite his past criticism for the international body for inaction and inefficiency (and cheap emerald marble backsplash), he flinched, thankfully, in his pugilistic rhetoric by heaping the onus on the UN by saying that hopefully a military response wouldn’t be necessary: “We’ll see—that’s what the UN is there for.” Such bluster is not only a grave embarrassment that strips America of all credibility—and although Americans might distance themselves from their leadership, the rest of the world is losing patience fast with those apologies and pretenses—it carries consequences and responsibilities that Dear Leader has proven himself incapable of assuming.

6x6

hello, I am a bear: ursine pondering and poetry, via Dave Log

alles in ordnung: German government being sublimely dull

down in the underground: the forgotten catacombs underneath Brussels, via Messy Nessy Chic

muted: hushed and concise social media is reviving the cinematography of the silent film

orbit city: celebrating the life and work of Gin Wong, the architect who inspired The Jetsons

adult swim: synchronised images of Soviet-era public pools

Tuesday 19 September 2017

port authority

Though we’ve previously encountered some of these fantastic, never realised plans for buildings and infrastructure in New York City as isolated proposals, like a gargantuan skyscraper by Antoni Gaudรญ or an elevated ten lane highway crossing Manhattan, having the chance to see many of this past visions as an ensemble superimposed on a scale-model of the great metropolis is completely transformational.
Among the many innovative and utopian ideas that we were introduced to by this nicely researched and curated exhibition to be held in the Flushing neighborhood of the bureau of Queens the urban air authority was our new favourite—a massive airport and runway built over the docklands along the Hudson River.

co-morbidity

Some cancers are more pernicious than others oncologists are finding due to bacteria that can metabolise a certain strain of cancer-fighting medications taking up refuge in tumours and gobbling up the drugs before it can be used to combat the malignancy. Developing resistance to traditional treatments is potentially catastrophic and if we lose the efficacy of all antibiotic remedies we’ll find our healthcare reverting to that of the Middle Ages but this seemingly novel resistance through a sort of unintended symbiosis certainly bears out further study and may be more prevalent than expected—all the more reason to protect what resources are in our quiver.

sign and shingle

An exhibit at San Diego’s Mingei International Museum features sixty nineteenth century kanban (billboards or hoardings) commissioned by shop-keepers from professional artisans who handcrafted them. These Edo-era pieces were designed to be attention-grabbers and often were crafted in the form of the wares on offer to allow shoppers to navigate crowded commercial streets and markets intuitively, like the pictured canting kanban for a spectacle shop. Be sure to visit Hyperallergic at the link up top for more curious curations.

omphaloskepsis

One hears the phrase navel-gazing bandied about quite often in a (mostly) figurative sense to call-out egotism or indulging in self-absorbed pursuits, but we failed to realise that contemplating one’s belly-button is an ancient prescribed practise rooted in yogic and Eastern Orthodox traditions. Mediating on the navel—the seat of the sacral chakra—is a heuristic tool that aids in reflection on the self and the wider Cosmos or inducing a trace-state.

any port in a storm

Taking advantage of a constitutional crisis that has promulgated the dissolution of parliament (I can remember when a nation’s collapse into chaos garnered more coverage), neo-Nazi internet refugees behind the publication of The Daily Stormer have taken up residence in Iceland, and not because of the country’s pledge to create a sanctuary of internet freedoms but rather because enshrined within that legal framework it is stipulated that only the executive can revoke an .is domain and it appears that they’ve won at least a few weeks’ worth of reprieve since Iceland is lacking one. As repulsive as hosting such a presence might be, Iceland ought to be proud of this technicality and have some extra motivation to form a stable coalition to be rid of this parasite soon. The present editor-in-chief to the publication is heir to Julius Streicher’s (Gauleiter of Franconia) original Der Stรผrmer that focused chiefly on the problems of miscegenation, an unofficial weekly digest for useful idiots which became a growing embarrassment to the Nazi party who was nonetheless executed in Nuremberg for war crimes.

Monday 18 September 2017

ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny

Researching another topic, I came across the line that reportedly one of der Fรผhrer’s favourite go-to sayings was that “politics is applied biology,” misattributed to nineteenth century biologist and educator Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, who did remark that the social sciences—a much broader retrospective of human affairs—are instances of applied biology.
It’s also another mark against him too that he espoused rather racists theories couched in the language of science but without scientific basis, captured in the title phrase (that may sound familiar) that an individual’s biological development is a summary and reflection of its evolution as a species—based on the imaginative though equally incorrect premise that human embryonic stage resemble a progression through more primitive forms of life—which I recall being taught in elementary school. Haeckel’s vast body of work and contributions to life sciences aside from these significant missteps define the way we view the natural world and his place in the scientific community (like his favoured non-Darwinian Jean Baptise Lamarck who privileged exercise and atrophy over natural selection) ought not be excised from history. Haeckel did a lot for scientific literacy, having introduced the public to the rich ecological diversity at scale all environments support and prefigured the ascending understanding of genetics by introducing concepts like the stem-cell and the missing link.  In his way, Haeckel also started the discussion ethics in biological research and experimentation and how humans might one day soon not only be able to understand but also to edit Nature. Despite the fact that Nazi propagandists selectively exploited some of his research and he reinforced the prejudiced views of race of the day, the political movement that Haeckel founded in 1905 centred around pantheism was disbanded in 1933 and disparaged—along with all other partisan groups—and Haeckel would be dismayed to see his teaching perverted had he lived to see it.  As a war correspondent late in life, coined the term “First World War” for the beginning Great War, a term that did not come into common use until its post-mortem six years later, worried that this European conflict would spread. Despite having the same ambiguity in both German and English, we did not need to wait until there wasn’t a First World War II for it to be clear whether people feared for an expanding global battlefield or whether the richer countries of the planet were fighting amongst themselves, as that classification scale was a Cold War invention.

othello

The social construct of race—a figment though its derivative racism is very much a reality—was coined with the debut performance of the stage play Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth on 29 October 1613 in which the character of an African king addresses the audience and remarking upon the amazement that beset the faces of all these white people.
At the time of the playwright’s career, the colour lines were already coming into sharper contrast but that sense of otherness had lied just as much between the English and the Irish or the Italian and the Sicilian and was without respect to racial identity. The language and concept of race grew out of tribalism (ancestry) as a way to justify colonialism, enslavement and secure international trade—but there was not always a time when such superficial and broad classifications of one’s complexion was accorded so much power. What do you think? Though as handmaidens of ideas that we’ve matured beyond, prejudice and bigotry no matter how unwelcome cannot be said to have outlasted their purpose—since one group will always want to claim dominance over another and needs divisive abstractions to these accomplish these ends—but perhaps by dint of the transformative and relatively very short histories of race politics we can again foster societies that don’t ascribe to such standards that foist affiliations on others by their outward appearance.

Sunday 17 September 2017

panopticon

For any of you humans brave or fool-hearty enough to tread into heretofore uncharted neural network territory, Waxy presents AI Spy, an absurdist version of the game meant to impart a sense of patience in children during prolonged travel and in waiting rooms where one is pitted against machine-learning in a sort of augmented reality setting, the computer asking the user to limn its surroundings in photos and selecting interesting artefacts to tease out. Part of an on-going series of weekly projects, playing requires some suspension of disbelief and asks humans to think like machines

masquerade

Over-sharing (indeed the utopian oblige of it all) and the way we’ve filled in the gaps of celebrity as a crisis of character and of history through nostalgia and an endless series of hails, salutes and remembrances has made a parallel world in our own image that’s apparently of more consequence than the real physical world—without even venturing into the myriad ways we’ve disrupted Nature with unnatural selection—where we’re held hostage to those who know (that is have to incontrovertible, time-stamped evidence) those things that we are not the most proud of and would never want to promote as part of our on-line and public persona.
Even if the forces that be are not malevolent spirits and have no intention of betraying one’s secrets, it’s still a regime of unease and blackmail that really mentally challenging to endure and as a result—whether we’d admit to this revolt and backlash or not since complacency and the status quo have been accorded higher sanctities—people seemed instead of dealing with this aggregated dossier without alibi to turn pre-emptively confessional and willing to excuse past indiscretions no matter what they were nor whom the peccadilloes belonged to, either out of unrelenting fear or mistaking empathy for whataboutery—the sophistry of appealing to one’s opponents’ apparent past hypocrisy as relevant to the present situation. Perhaps it’s a very American trait to ignore a very large problem like the concentration of data and having no control over how its interpreted and shared or stolen because it would be complex to solve and require a lot of sacrifice to deny there’s a problem at all and instead excuse the symptomatic being caught red-handed or being made to eat one’s words as some sort of shared consolation-prize that exculpates any bad behaviour.

Saturday 16 September 2017

brimful of asha

The neighbourhood bodegas (cognate with boutique, Spanish for wine-cellar and ultimately from the Greek แผ€ฯ€ฮฟฯ„ฮฏฮธฮทฮผฮน for to put away in the sense of a repository) or corner shops (or dรฉpanneurs) are the anchors of communities, and a tech start-up that’s telling consumers to shut-up whilst they’re being disrupted is developing a rather unpopular business model that aims to replace these indispensable institutions with vending machines stocked with whatever honour-bar and tone-deaf line of merchandise vying for dubious product-placement. What do you think? Unicorn-chasing—much like ambulance-chasing, surely fuels the rank-hypocrisy of misguided confidence that assumes that complacence and convenience is paramount.

fluid dynamics or bonzai kittens

A French physicist wins the coveted Ig Noble prize with his thesis that felines exhibit both properties of being both solid and liquid states simultaneously.
It’s sort of like the superposition of Schrรถdinger’s Cat, studying the creatures’ remarkable limberness and ability to fill any space and assume the shape of its container. Prizes also come with an honorarium of ten trillion (Zimbabwean) dollars. Read more about the other laureates in different categories, including an unconscionable experiment that compared the brain waves of cheese-lovers and cheese-haters (also taking place in France) to see if the source of aversion could be pinpointed, at the link up top.

Thursday 14 September 2017

objets trouvรฉs

Thanks to the forever marvellous Nag on the Lake for directing our attention to the romantic and indulgently thoughtful Parisian institution of the city’s central Lost and Found Bureau.
The repository for mislaid personal items collected from the metro and museum networks or turned in by caring individuals that hope possessor and object can be reunited has a long history, sourced by to the reign of Napoleon I, just a spare two decades after the Revolution that radically redefined the sense of ownership. Whereas under the feudal Ancien Rรฉgime, lost property of tenets generally reverted to the landlord—and still is in Anglo-Saxon legal frameworks what with possession being nine-tenths of the law (just consider this place where Hoggel resides), finders were no longer necessarily keepers and the right to ownership was enshrined as a fundamental and inalienable one. The curation of the collection and compassion of the staff is rather incredible. The dignity of an individual is of course greater than the sum of his or her things, but I think the greatness of one’s character comes through with these intimate, emotional reunions and allowing things to shift from expendable to indispensable.

hms semaphore

One automobile manufacturer recently outfitted a test-pilot as an empty driver’s seat in order to gauge public, man-on-the-street reaction to autonomous vehicles, not so much for the rubbernecking effect that driverless car illicit but rather a means to study how such cars might signal their intentions and how quickly traditional vehicles and pedestrians sharing the road might pick up on that newly minted language. Presently drivers get a lot of mileage out of a tap of the horn or flashing high-beams but apparently a more sophisticated system is needed to interact with human controlled traffic. While some useful data was gleaned off of the stunt, the methodology reportedly was not the best.

Wednesday 13 September 2017

the commons

One could be forgiven for missing this one announcement from Apple amidst all the other novelty surrounding the occasion marking a decade since such gadgets have come to be an extension of ourselves and of living remotely, but we agree that Apple’s presumption to tout its sleek stores as the new town squares is telling of the pseudo-public and pseudo-democratic nature of online engagement.
The notion of the third place—a hangout, a haunt, like a favoured bar or cafรฉ, that’s neither work nor home—has been on the wane in most societies, and doubtless the smart phone was a major contributing factor to that decline. A visit to one of the flagship boutiques is a pleasant experience without the usual trappings and overt pressure of a retail establishment but just as social media or any other major platform on the internet, that space or forum is the absolute nadir of openness and cannot be a guarantor of freedoms. Possibly Wikipedia is the virtual exception that manifests as the physical rule. What do you think? People can of course build the momentum to counter unpopular policies and practises and these platforms, untethered have been the catalysts at revolutionary moments but social media sites, businesses beholden to their investors, cannot be accorded, flattered with the crime of censorship, since to do so cheapens and imperils authentic democratic institutions and the responsible exercise thereof.

Tuesday 12 September 2017

wahlkampf

Weeks ahead of the relatively anodyne federal elections in Germany, we appreciated this retrospective on campaigning here from Rebecca Schuman (complete with pronunciation help)—where despite the fact that partisan battles are severely curtailed and essentially limited to poster format, there are no political television commercials and just a few government sanctioned debates, we have the gall to feign campaign fatigue. Though the incumbent can be assured of her re-election, there’s still much at stake, including battered relations with Turkey, and we ought not become complacent or disengaged. There are an awful lot of posters, however, as I suppose the one thing that’s not regulated and they’ve canvased every tree and lamp post—and those slogans and messenging are deserving are deserving of critique.

hail to the chief as we pledge cooperation

As obedient as my workplace was in acknowledging their new Commander-in-Chief, I had assumed that the portrait of on the hierarchy board was a stylistic choice, a scowling Dear Leader looming rather exaggeratedly with the White House in the background, and not a provisional screen-grab that various agencies and offices have agreed to use in lieu of an official photograph—that’s yet to be taken and distributed across the government. Many offices, in fact, absent an official photograph that matches those on lower rungs in the chain of command have chosen to display no picture for the past nine months. A few weeks ago, I overheard someone urging their companion to take the elevator up one flight with them rather than taking the stairs so as to avoid having to look at the big wooden tablet hanging on the wall in the stairwell. It is a rather demoralising sight to behold as a daily reminder.

6x6

all the lonely people: the backstory of Eleanor Rigby and a chance to own a rather macabre piece of Beatles’ memorabilia, via Nag on the Lake

nuda veritas: the murals of Gustav Klimt re-enacted with live models, via the Everlasting Blรถrt

poker face: lessons from a professional player that apply to life outside of the game

weblog: eulogising Jerry Pournelle, who was not only the first to write a book solely on a computer but also one of the pioneering bloggers

field guide: understanding the symbols of hate may prove empowering in shaping the trajectory of society for the better

enduring mystery: those claims of having deciphered the Voynich Manuscript were a mix of unprovable claims and already surmised details  

fungus among us

Inspired by the diversity of toadstools and mushrooms we came across recently on our walk in the woods, I was drawn to a special exhibit at Wiesbaden’s museum (previously here and here and probably in more spots) on the nutritive, toxic and social history aspects of fungi.
From classification and identification to application and preservation, the displays were engrossing and enlightening as they ranged from the culinary, pharmaceutical and their oversized role as pigments for dyes and warrior cosmetics and I especially liked the artistry of the dioramas with a section dedicated to the workshop that created these diverse, liminal (neither animal nor vegetable)  mushroom mannequins.
Actual specimens, like creatures of the deep, wouldn’t survive public scrutiny and many could potential offer hazard and models were made and placed in their native environments to illustrate their role in the ecologies of various biomes. The exhibits on the usage of fungi were supplemented by local anecdotal enterprises, like a crafty woman who coloured wool in many shades with mushroom sourced pigments and another who was a successful farmer and we’re thinking of cultivating our own in our root cellar and have embarked on a course of study to those ends.
It is strange to think how these elaborate and embellished fungal fruiting bodies are just vehicles, ultimately, to spread spores and propagate the species but I suppose that the same is true for ourselves, however we might consider ourselves the refined heirs of a long line of succession. 

Monday 11 September 2017

gaudeamus igitur

Though possibly too late for this year’s matriculating class of freshmen, we enjoyed coming across this McSweeney’s index of honest Latin mottoes for the over-rated alma mater—especially deserving for those schools whose elite status is only by dint of exorbitant tuition and not academic excellence. Per aspera ad malam occupationem (though adversity to a bad job) does look sufficiently pithy to be an actual maxim but the whole list is funny—sort of like the faux binary nomenclature of Road-Runner and Wile E Coyote. As much pomp and circumstance that is accorded to the title hymn (So Let Us Rejoice), the composition gently pokes fun at the sacred cows of university life and has been a beer-drinking song from at least the early eighteenth century on.

an offer you can’t refuse

The data breach at a clearing-house agency that adjudicates the creditworthiness of individuals and corporations world-wide represents an incredible half of the population of the United States and potentially three-quarters of the UK but is still only about a tenth of the information that the company has aggregated on some eight hundred million entities of all shapes and sizes.
Not only did the company delay disclosing the loss of consumers’ data until executives could divest their portfolios of what would surely be a hefty financial liability, it’s also seeking (as one does, I suppose) to capitalise off this crisis those scope cannot be fully appreciated by demanding that those whom they’ve wronged (and we’re all guessing here since despite counter-claims apparently one cannot get confirmation that one’s personal and financial records have been compromised or are secure until one submits to the terms and conditions of their credit monitoring service) enrol in their credit integrity programme. The initial period is free to the consumer but the following years come with a cost unless they disenrol—which might not even be an option going forward. Even if a sizable majority remembers that their trial period is about to expire and opts out and the fee is a nominal one, the potential for profits are still huge—recalling it is half the population of America that’s affected and probably untold others. Who operates like this? We have to look out for each other.  The even bigger snare in joining this phoney consumer protection plan is that in the fine-print, by accepting this handout, one agrees to army of arbiters’ negotiations on settlement and will not engage in any grievance against the company (I imagine that this is legal boilerplate nowadays for most transactions of any type) in the future—essentially signing away the ability to sue the company for damages outside of a framework that’s constructed to be more sympathetic to big business.

Sunday 10 September 2017

sunday drive: kallstadt

On a lark and taking advantage of the late summer sun, I drove towards Mannheim and visited the village of Kallstadt.
Though ancient and punctuated with moments reaching back into prehistoric times through the Roman Empire and the Frankish kings and the wine and tourist industry are quite robust, the settlement has garnered some unwelcome attention for being the ancestral home of Dear Leader.
Friedrich Trump, considered to have too delicate of a constitution to work in viticulture with his siblings, was appreciated to a barber at age fourteen but soon realised that his hometown didn’t have enough of a population in need of a scalping to earn a living. Approaching age of conscription for the Imperial German Army, Trump’s mother urged him to immigrate to America.
Arriving in Battery Park in 1885, Trump indicated on his immigration papers the fact he had no profession and lived with relatives in the Lower East Side.
After five years, Dear Leader’s grand- father left Man- hattan and followed the Gold Rush to San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest and made a fortune operating boarding houses and bordellos. When the boom began to go bust, Trump decided to return to Kallstadt in 1901 and married but eventually attracted the attention of Bavarian authorities that stripped Trump of his citizenship and right of abode due to having left the country to avoid military service and the family moved back to New York.
Kallstadt’s residents certainly don’t want their nice little town to become a pilgrimage destination for Dear Leader’s fanatics (there are much nicer houses than this last one and they’re more fond of their other son, father of condiment purveyor Henry John Heinz) and we’re certainly no enthusiasts, but maybe seeing the village and sampling the local wine might unlock and dispense some chthonic sympathetic magic and improve the prospects for future immigrants.