7x7

personality, wessonality: spot the celebrities at the 1986 All Star Party for Clint Eastwood

spargelzeit: a little education can be empowering for keeping the resolution to eat healthier, fresher foods

urban density: exploring the crowded high-rises of Hong Kong

ikumen: the rise of the Japanese hot dads is changing the traditional roles of parenting for the better

rubisco: botanists tinker with photosynthesis to make the process more efficient

fishbit and half-wit: an assortment of the dumbest smart gadgets premiered at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) technology expo

minor arcana: the Tarot deck-like miniatures of Robert Coutelas 

chang'e

Via Slashdot, we learn that the Chinese space agency has successfully landed a probe, Chang’e 4, on the dark side of the Moon. Because of the impossibility to communicate directly with the lander, a relay satellite called Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) is orbiting the Moon and can exchange readings and instructions with mission control on each pass.
The landing site, the Von Kármán lunar crater, was a practical location as well as one with an important symbolic message, as the Hungarian-American astrophysicist and polymath Theodore von Kármán, its namesake, was the academic advisor of Hsue-Shen Tsien (*1911 – †2009), the rocket scientist and cyberneticist who founded the Chinese space programme. Though previously studied and charted, this hemisphere of the Moon that is tidally-locked and always faces away from the Earth has never been the subject on direct exploration and this achievement is in follow-up to the Chang’e 3 mission and its Jade Rabbit Rover (read more about Chinese lunar mythology and its connection with the space missions here)—paving the wave for permanent human colonisation by 2030.

jahrgang xxmviii

As this year draws to a close, we again take time to reflect on a selection of things that took place in 2018. Thanks as always for visiting. We've made it through another wild year together.

january: Turkey enters the Syrian conflict in attempts to wrest control in the north from Kurdish rebels.  The US government experiences a partial shutdown over a lapse in funding due to a stand-off regarding the status of immigrants that were brought to the US as children by their parents.  We had to say goodbye to science-fiction and fantasy writer Ursula Le Guin.

february: There are further advances in private-sector rocketry that seem primed to usher in a new age of exploration.  Another school shooting in America fails to get the country to open up to a dialogue on gun-control. The US Federal Communications Commission repeals net neutrality consumer protections.

march: A former Russian double-agent and his daughter are poisoned in Salisbury, England.  In China, term limits for the office of president and general secretary of the Communist party are eliminated.  In the US, a nation-wide school walk-out occurs to protest gun-violence and weak gun-control laws.  Vladimir Putin is re-elected to a fourth consecutive term as president of Russia.  We bid farewell to scientist Stephen Hawking.

april: France, the UK, and the US launch airstrikes on Syria bases following a government sanctioned chemical weapons attack that killed over seventy civilians.

may: The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect in an attempt to wrest back some modicum of control over individuals’ digital dossiers. Donald Trump precipitates a trade war by imposing punitive steel tariff on exporters with other countries responding in kind.

june: At the G-7 summit in Toronto Donald Trump pushes for the reinstatement of Russia before embarking to meet with the leader of North Korea in Singapore for talks on denuclearisation. 

july: A series of climate-change driven heat-waves devastate North America and Europe, causing many deaths and torrents of forest fires.  A boys’ football team and their coach are rescued from a cave in Thailand after a harrow, seventeen-day ordeal.  Researchers confirm the existence of a subglacial lake of liquid water on Mars.  

august: The market value of Apple surpasses one trillion dollars.  The US reimposes sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme (having announced its intention to withdraw from the deal in May) while maintaining support to Saudi Arabia in its retaliatory attack on the Yemen.

september: The National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro is engulfed in flames.  The Supreme Court of India decriminalises homosexuality.  Following a contentious hearing, a controversial justice is appointed to the US Supreme Court, altering its composition.

october: A dissident journalist is kidnapped, murdered and spirited away in pieces at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Canada legalises cannabis possession and use nation-wide.  Trump deploys soldiers to the Mexican border to fend off an approaching caravan of asylum-seekers. While visiting his native China, the chief of INTERPOL goes missing and presumed assassinated. The US signals its intent to leave the International Postal Union and shutters its diplomatic outreach offices for Palestine.

november: Democrats take control of the US House of Representative with Republicans retaining control of the Senate.  The InSight probe lands on Mars, beginning a mission to pierce the surface of the Red Planet. We had to bid farewell to SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg and social justice warrior Harry Leslie Smith.  US ex-president George Herbert Walker Bush passed away, rejoining Barbara Bush, his life partner of seventy-three years, who died in April.

december: The shambles of Brexit and the investigation into the Trump campaign and administration to Russia are ongoing.  US forces withdraw from Syria with plans to also do so for Afghanistan and the country’s defence secretary resigns in protest.  We had to bid farewell to actor and director Penny Marshall.   The US government enters another partial shutdown over Border Wall funding. 

the yellow emperor’s inner canon

I first heard about this provocative project a week ago or so when the individual behind it Kuang-yi Ku got an honourable mention at Dutch Design Week for his thought-experiment but thought the gross-out factor was a bit too high—and while the images are still disturbing, Project Tiger Penis, drawing on emerging advances in the biomedical sciences and the ability to grow, print meat in the laboratory to produce authentic substitutes for articles of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Zhōngyī, 中医) did seem to resonate as a way of protecting endangered fauna and flora that are often tortured or poached for their ingredients, whose pharmacological merits are sometimes a matter of dispute.
It becomes even more relatable, I think, given the context that some religious figures have expressed a willingness to deem artificial meats in general and lab-sourced pork specifically as kosher or halal. What do you think? While reserving qualms for putting energy and efforts into making exotic potions might seem reasonable to non-practitioners at first blush (especially when examining it in isolation and outside of the customs that inform it), it behoves us to reason out that it’s presently highly questionable what good we derive from eating animals to begin with, while so many of us do as a matter of upbringing.  Without considering the impact and consequence of appetites for a moment, taste and choice are different than what can be subjected to science but one approach and way of thinking ought not to be privileged above the other because neither has found the panacea or cure for ageing. 

6x6

connect-the-dots: the distant constellations discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope include the TARDIS and Godzilla

᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜: an introduction to the Ogham script through the challenge of encoding an alphabet without spaces

teslaquila: a look at the other probable intent-to-use trademark applications from Elon Musk

frigate shoals: rather than being erased by sea level rise, a powerful storm obliterated an ecological significant Hawaiian archipelago over the weekend, via Super Punch

cloak & dagger: former Central Intelligence Agency’s Chief of Disguise reveals how field agents go undercover

geo-stationary: Chengdu announced plans to launch its own, fully adjustable artificial moon to replace street lighting

thurn und taxis

Breaking with a one hundred and forty-four year old convention that regulates postal rates world-wide in order to prevent barriers to entry by poorer nations and promote the ease of cross border communication and commerce, Trump is signalling that the US will withdraw from the treaty that legitimised and continued the Universal Postal Union, an arrangement that has fully one hundred and ninety three signatories with the four outlying states relying on other members to execute their mail delivery.
Drafted at a time when European powers were dominant exporters and much of Asia was agrarian society (also kind of a myth borne out of the idea of exceptionalism), the US believes the conditions of the treaty disadvantages American business by subsidising shipments from China and flooding markets with cheaper wares. Prior to the agreement, countries needed to negotiate separate treaties and issue stamps for each leg of the missive’s journey, often outsourcing mail delivery to forwarding agents under conditions and protocols created during the sixteenth century by the Lombard-German royal house referenced in the title. The US was already given the dispensation to dictate rates for large packages but small parcels (under two kilogrammes—in keeping with the union’s original charter to establish a uniform and affordable flat-rate across currencies and purchasing-parity for sending letters and vendors’ samples) were under the jurisdiction of the international body. The proliferation of on-line shopping translated to opportunities for retail sellers. What do you think?  Maybe the house of Thurn & Taxis were the original postal Illuminati but this recent investigation on the treaty and the Universal Postal Union from Planet Money is helpful and comprehensive primer for understanding what is at stake.

päntsdrunk

Though perhaps not as wholesomely shareable as the Danish concept of hygge and perhaps not as resonant as another word in the language jingfin that has prompted millions of Chinese to declare themselves spiritually Finnish, we appreciate that the Finns also celebrate the concept called kalsarikännit—roughly translated as the state of pants-drunkenness, extolled in a book by journalist Miska Rantanen subtitled the path to relaxation.
The government of Finland (which back in 2015 also created a pair of emojis to convey the concept) offers the definition of “the feeling when you are going to get drunk home alone in your underwear—with no intention of going out.” Anecdotal evidence plus the country’s consistently high global rankings for happiness, openness, equality and egalitarianism suggests that there’s something to the practise and the balance it brings. Read more at Kottke at the link above.

nüshu

Sixth Tone brings us a poignant story about a disappearing tradition whose last caretakers are to a degree contradictory to the reason that the nüshu system of writing was contrived in the first place.
As opposed to the thousands of logographic characters of standard Chinese, nüshu was developed as a syllabaric simplification, a phonetic alphabet, for women to use to communicate and record their thoughts around the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries (the Song and Yuan dynasties) without the benefit of formal education that was afforded to their male counterparts in the county of Jiangyong in Hunan province. As the Cultural Revolution ensured that access to education was universal and equitable, the secret and confessional form of writing became—which locals refer to as “long-legged mosquito script”—antiquated and the last proficient and native user, a woman called Yang Huanyi, passed away in 2004, nüshu is now only known through study and research, instead of being passed on from mother to daughter as a provisional form of literacy Unfortunately, despite its new-found visibility with on bilingual shop signs to appeal to the tourists, it’s no longer the exclusive outlet of the under-valued but initiated (the in-grouping of the out-group) and much of what’s preserved with this resurgence is distorted and incorrect.

嫦娥

Like its counterpart Apollo, the Chinese lunar exploration programme has a divine namesake and their space agency has presented an ambitious plan to turn a bit of lore into reality with its aim to construct a “palace” near the Moon’s south pole by 2030. The lunar base or rather tubular palace is in reference to the abode of the immortal Chang’e (嫦娥)—a rather reluctant goddess, who had divinity thrust upon her, estranging her from her mortal husband.
In the distant past, ten suns came to dominate the skies and threatened to scorch the Earth, but the heroic archer Yi shot down all but one, saving the planet. As reward, the gods gave Yi a single portion of the elixir of life, which would render the imbiber undying. Yi didn’t want to live forever if he could not be with his beloved wife Chang’e, so hid the potion. One of the archer’s apprentices, however, attacked Chang’e while her husband was out hunting and tried to force her to give him the elixir, and overpowered, Chang’e escaped by the only means she had—drinking the potion herself. Instead of allowing herself to ascend to the highest heaven in the company of the other gods, Chang’e settled on the Moon to be as close to her husband as possible. Inconsolable, her only companion for the past four millennia has been a white rabbit Yutu—which was the name of the rover vehicle that was delivered to the Moon’s surface by the mission Chang’e 3 when mankind returned to the satellite for the first time in nearly four decades in December of 2013. Read more about the programme at the link up top.

spring cleaning

Conversely to the celebrations that dominate the fifth day that placate the god of wealth, the sixth day of the lunar new year—as our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari informs—is reserved for the ghost of poverty Gao Yang (颛顼), grandson of the Yellow Emperor.
Credited with the invention of the calendar and zodiac, the legendary ruler garnered the reputation of being a peculiar spendthrift despite enormous wealth and the charity of his subjects, this day marks the end of festivities and the return to business—in order to stave off destitution—in many jurisdictions and involve idiosyncratic domestic rituals to send the spirit packing, including making sure that one’s washroom is presentable for supernatural inspection though major cleaning undertakings happen a few days prior to the New Year. Also, on this day in 1972, just like the old Vulcan proverb proscribes, Richard M Nixon visited China—the first time a US president was hosted in a nation with no formal diplomatic connections—and met with Chairman Mao Zedong in order to normalise Sino-American relations.

persistence of vision

Professor and lecturer at the Chinese Academy of Art in Hangzhou, Cao Shu, has produced a visually captivating short animation comprised of a few disposable motions that typify what we do in those moments when we’re waiting for what’s next—taking a sip of a drink, glancing at one’s watch rotoscoped to take in the entire sweeping survey of art history from the Ancient Egyptians to the Post Modern era all in less than a minute. Visit the link up top to learn more about the styles and movements and to watch the entire video.

aquaculture

We are finding ourselves spoiled to distraction with Present /&/ Correct’s latest batch of postings which are all pretty visually stunning but we found ourselves especially taken with the photography of the award-winning, Hong Kong based Tugo Cheng whose keen eye captures (refined with a background in architecture) the contrasting and complementary symmetry and geometry of China’s coastal fishery operations. Find more images at the links above.

shaoxing

We thoroughly enjoyed learning about artist and sculptor Warren King—via Colossal—and his latest series of projects executed in his signature medium of cardboard. Wanting to learn more of his heritage and ancestry, King has been travelling back to China and meeting with and interviewing residents of the village of his grandparents who have shared their memories of the past tumultuous five decades, and his expressive, life-size figures represent the reconstructing connections that are at once incredibly resilient to reach across the years while at the same time fragile and tenuous. Check out a gallery of King’s work at the links above.

祝你生日快乐

Accomplished self-trained pharmacist and educator from Ningbo and Nobel laureate for developing malaria treatments that have saved the lives of untold millions, Tu Youyou is celebrating her eighty-seventh birthday today. It can seem very confusing but I suppose it’s really quite a straightforward matter to wish her a happy one. Ms Tu relates that her given name comes from a verse in the Shih-ching (the Chinese book of classic poetry) that the deer bleat ‘youyou’ as they gaze on wild Artemisia (hao)—a type of sagebrush whose chemical derivative (artemisinin or qinghao su), Tu would come to discover, can be used as an anti-malarial drug.

subtle allegory or indistinguishable from magic

This short synopsis of the premise of a science fiction premise really resonated with us: first serialised in 2006, Liu Cixin’s award winning (and recently adapted into film) The Three-Body Problem (三体) proposes that humans have encountered no alien races because extra-terrestrials conspire to contain one another, lest they advance and become a threat.
Introducing this dominant race dispenses neatly with the other reasons aliens are not visiting. Rather than actively disarming and disabling their machines and modes of exploration, the only thing aliens would need to do to humans or any other planet-bound denizen would be to bring in an element of woo and superstition and pseudoscience, maybe a peppering of miraculous events that defy logical explanation to really enforce and cement beliefs. Playing the long-game, the dominant races’ containment-policy ensures it has no competition by undermining trust in science. Given our violent regression to primitive charms and preserving appearances, however, I think that perhaps blaming a technologically superior alien race for keeping humanity relegated to the cosmic backwaters also violates the principal of Ockham’s Razor, lex parsimoniae. We certainly hope that this message is preserved in the theatrical release.

foil me—you can’t get foiled again

Despite all the bombastic claims, the US imposing a seemingly crippling, trade-war signalling tariff on Chinese aluminium has little relation to the reality of economic repercussions with the assault as a bureaucratic-foil since American assets that Trump is seeking to privilege are already producing at capacity, these posturings represent something significant.
In the same way that this regime would proffer the dismantling of the federal government as it is known and reduce it to its component parts betrays a woeful ignorance of the role that each department and agency plays in vouchsafing the country, its natural resources and material wealth, the stability and prosperity of future generations is being traded off wholesale to champion the mood and sentiment of the moment. While Dear Leader is liberal with his grace and favour postings—though slow to fill some of those sinecure positions where the opportunity to appear tough on bloated, expansive government is a greater enticement—and the competency of the office-holder (or the continued vacancy) does not seem to have momentous impact, those scientific studies and internships that go unfunded and policy that goes undrafted and undebated do matter immensely and is not administration for its own sake. We see who really benefits from this embargo against Chinese aluminium, despite how its framed, and like the science and service of various government agencies that are easily taken for granted because we don’t see them, aluminium foil is pervasive as a packaging and preservative material and component of almost all manufactured goods. We ought to take a critical eye to civil service and make certain that the public is getting a fair return on its investment but we also ought not be so easily swayed with sophistry just by dint of the unfamiliar.

boundary street

Though arguably the sunset for the British Empire occurred that moment when they could no longer operate unilaterally and the US opposed their seizure of the Suez Canal and the seaways of the Arab Gulf in 1956, those in attendance for the transfer of sovereignty ceremony for Hong Kong on this day in 1997 expressed a palpable sense of the UK’s imperium having come to a close.
Although Hong Kong island and Kowloon peninsula (with that unsupervised exclave within an enclave) were ceded to the UK in perpetuity under the terms of the Treaty of Nanking and only the New Territories around Hong Kong bay were subject to a ninety-nine year lease, but during negotiation between the Chinese government and Prime Minister Thatcher in the mid-eighties, the UK conceded that Hong Kong could continue to be prosperous without the full territorial integrity enjoyed for the last century. And with assurances that the residents’ previous capitalist system and way of life would remain unchanged for the next fifty years. While Hong Kong residents enjoy considerable autonomy and is considered a separate jurisdiction by other nations and international organisations, there is also a sense of incursion and abandonment from its former metropolitan. When the handover occurred, few would have predicted that China would have produced economic centres—bastions of finance and industry—to rival the former colony’s allure. Nonetheless, however, that capital diminished to an extent and Hong Kong, because of its special status, soon became more of a harbour to park wealth and facilitate money-laundering. Thinking strategically, perhaps if Hong Kong had remained unique as an economic powerhouse it was hoped that Hong Kong’s model would become something infectious for the mainland and result in the spread of democracy. With tensions rising on each successive anniversary, it’s becoming less and less clear whether Hong Kong’s culture and politics will be suffered lightly for the next thirty years.

great leap forward

The Atlantic presents a rather sweeping, comprehensive list of political, foreign policy milestones and anniversaries that will occur in the upcoming year, illustrating how fraught diplomacy with compounded legacies not easily shaken and those foundations probably ought not to be tempted.
February marks a quarter of a century since the European Economic Community embarked into a new system of greater legal and political integration—beyond trade deals, with the Maastricht Treaty, which led to the creation of the contemporary EU, though it now stands at a crossroads. It is the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917 that created the Soviet Union as well as the fiftieth anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Of course cultural movements and revolution don’t exclusively cause contemporaries to confront (and tackling “on this day” is only contending with a shadow of the original event and certainly not its precedents—and perhaps in the moment of memorial, not its antecedents either) the past only on round birthdays (there are many more events covered in the article) and the nostalgia for chronicle and a surfeit of past to the fill the present has become a sort of a touchstone lately—and hopefully the trivia can tease out some curiosity into the deeper history and influences as well—and perhaps shows that the whole jabberwocky of bookends needs respect and continual servicing. What do you think? Perhaps there’s also a strong desire to step away from a present in hopes that we can bound it—and whatever slurry of 2016 won’t wash into the new year.

luck dragon

Kottke invites us to marvel at the recently completed Lucky Knot Bridge (whose long form inexplicably name is the Lucky Knot / Dragon King Kong Bridge) which despite appearances is a real, physical work of engineering and not some concept artist’s rendering. Spanning the Xiang river, you can find the bridge designed by NEXT Architects of Amsterdam and Beijing in Changsha, the capital of the Hunan province and find out more about the projects at the links.

6x6

miracle on thirty-sixth street: the tangled story of the popularisation of Christmas lights by a Thomas Edison hanger-on, via Strange Company

ground level ozone: following Rotterdam, Beijing has installed an air-pollution scrubbing tower that is improving atmospheric quality and reducing smog, via Nag on the Lake 
gentlemen only, ladies forbidden: for a taste of what a Trump administration might mean for America, one should look to his golf resort in Scotland, via Boing Boing

biomediated structures: Martian rover Spirit has stumbled across a landscape that looks a lot like terrestrial hot springs and may be a sign of ancient life

facepalm: an illustrated 1644 treatise aims to codify the universal language of hand gestures

eat an apple every day then see the doctor anyway: an appreciation of the art of the fruit sticker plus a calendar for this ephemera that might encourage healthier eating habits