grußwort, ghaH ’ej Duvan mu’

Though Verboten during its first years of airing due to German regulation prohibiting television directed at audiences under the age of six years, Die Sendung mit der Maus (the Show with the Mouse) brought about a change to the law and has been educating young people and receiving critical acclaim as the nation’s classroom since the early 1970s.
The creators recognised how well children responded to commercials and advertising mascots and decided to try to harness that commodity of attentiveness and put it to good use, featuring short instructional programming illustrating how things work, interspersed with cartoons. Each episode has a standard magazine format and from the onset had a message of inclusion, introducing each segment once in German and then in a foreign language—first in Turkish, Italian and Spanish to acknowledge the children of foreign guest-workers. That tradition continues with the language changing weekly and has expanded significantly to reflect refugee families and most recently Klingon.

m-class or goldilocks

Amongst the thousands of confirmed exoplanets in the firmament and the untold trillions of worlds estimated, NASA just held a colossal press-conference that served to the public the very exciting news of a solar system discovered in orbit around a cool (ultra-cool, Red Giants are m-class stars but Star Trek’s planetary classification system is unfortunately made up) dwarf star in the constellation of Aquarius, some thirty nine light years distance from us.
Astronomers are giving the discovery the designation of TRAPPIST-1 as it was the first solar system to be observed directly using transit photometry.  The acronym for the programme and one of the telescopes used spells out Trappist, like the monastic order and brew-masters of Liège, where the search method was first conceived. Seven rocky (terrestrial) worlds orbit the star and at least three are thought to be in the habitable-zone, conducive to life as we know it thriving. After compiling and analysing telemetry for a year and half, researchers are very confident in their results. Finding no life in that entire star system would be, I’d wager, far more stranger than discovering extraterrestrial life. As we said above, this ensemble joins an already crowded Cosmos, but I think it’s brilliant that there’s already an artist’s conception to captivate and stoke the imagination—it reminds me of Mongo of Ming the Merciless and the other floating kingdoms in that overcast empire. Here’s to science, NASA and the monks. Flash jump, everybody!

tldr; or subspace, subtext

Though my faith in the robust and impeccable nature of Vulcan logic remains unshaken—Mister Spock was after all half human and thus prone to human hysterics—I do appreciate this analysis of such qualifiers of interesting or even fascinating and what they convey in modern parlance through the lens of the formative cultural impact his sober and supposedly dispassionate assessment of situations has had on generations.
Even the search for more sovereign synonyms probably do not distance us really from the subtext that what’s meant by calling something interesting means infotainment—something to hold one’s attention. It wasn’t always so and perhaps I might have presented the same argument but via the conduit of Goethe’s Faust, whose eponymous doctor dares to ask what force in creation could be more compelling than love. Interest, the demon Mephistopheles answers straightaway and without hesitation. The doomed Faust is of course cursed with a universal knowledge whose trivia and recall one could of course look up in his or hers Funk & Wagnalls but in those times conferred exclusive advantages. What do you think? Has the meaning of interesting been relaxed so as to signify nothing at all, making its opposites a grave transgression? No one wants to be uninteresting or boring, even if the judgment means little. In relative terms, I suppose there were fewer contenders for our undivided attention back then but the latter also illustrates how our perspective can make us all regret the bargain.

6x6

but they always land on their feet: gallery of brides tossing cats instead of bouquets

quantum of solace: an accessible primer on the starlit experiment that seems to suggest that we do not live in a predestined Cosmos

white monkey gig: a documentary about how foreigners were recruited to help market the Chinese building boom and subsequent bust

dii consentes: organic compounds discovered on asteroid belt dwarf planet Ceres

felis cattus: Mister Data’s sonnet to his pet cat, Spot

さくら: the cherry trees are in full blossom in the eastern Japanese town of Kawazu

mmxvi: annus horribilis, annus mirabilis

december: Pioneering US astronaut John Glenn passed away, as did America’s TV Dad, Alan Thicke. Doctor Henry Heimlich also left us, as did Zsa Zsa Gabor. Over a billion user accounts are compromised by a once pioneering search engine. Carnage and destruction continue in Aleppo as Syria, all the global powers’ proxy-war, is poised to fall to the entrenched government.  A truck ploughed through a crowded Christmas Market in Berlin.  Sadly, singer George Michael passed away as well as icon Carrie Fisher with her mother, Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds, joining her the next day.

november: Donald J Trump defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton as the forty-fifth presumptive to the office of President of the United States of America. We had to say farewell to America’s TV Mom, Florence Henderson. Janet Reno died, and we had to say good-bye to Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel on Fawlty Towers. Retro funk and soul performer Sharon Jones passed away as did Leon Russell though not of precisely the same genre. Poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen left us. Fidel Castro expired aged ninety, on Black Friday and cause of death was declared as America’s return to greatness.

october: It was announced that Bob Dylan will be awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Hopefully prematurely, obituaries for the Great Barrier Reef circulated, the cause of its demise being coral-bleaching.  A craze of dressing as scary clowns and frightening people has spread globally.

september: Meaningful global climate accords held in Paris are put into force, although later in the month carbon dioxide levels surpass anything experienced in the course of human events. NASA launches a probe to study and return with samples from an asteroid with a high potential to impact the Earth—in the twenty-third century, possibly either nudging it closer or pushing it further out of bounds.

august: Gene Wilder left us. Brazil hosted the Olympic Games. The actor that portrayed R2-D2 Kenny Baker sadly departed, as did host and political discussion moderator John McLaughlin. Costa Rica powered itself with renewable energy for one hundred days and hopes to wean itself off of fossil fuels completely.

july: A wholly solar-powered aircraft becomes the first to circumnavigate the globe. We had to say good-bye to Elie Wiesel. During Bastille Day celebrations, an atrocious terror attack occurred on promenade of Nice, setting off a summer of terror across Europe. An abortive coup d’état rocked Turkey and a political purge followed, exacerbating an already tense situation. The African Union’s fifty-four member nations issue a single passport that allows holders to travel visa-free within the bloc.

june: After two decades of construction, the Gotthard Base Tunnel under the Alps in opened. The UK voted to leave the European Union. The promising actor Anton Yelchin who played the new Chekov was struck down far too early. Boxer Muhammad Ali departed.

may: Presidential elections in Austria are too close to call, and the contenders a member of the Green party and a far-right candidate will hold a run-off later in the year. Nationalism is on the rise throughout the world. Super Tuesday’s delegates are awarded to Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump.

april: The pop megastar Prince passed on. Der Süddeutsche Zeitung along with a consortium of other news outlets publish millions of leaked documents implicating many heads of state and prominent figures in the Panama Papers scandal. For the first time in history, capital punishment is outlawed by more than half the countries in the world.

march: Coordinated bomb attacks take over a hundred lives in Lahore and Brussels, and ISIS claims responsibility. Sadly, comedian and show-master Garry Shandling passed away. World-renowned architect Zaha Hadid also left us. Myanmar sworn in its first democratically elected president in half a century.

february: For the first time since the Great Schism of 1054, the leaders of the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches met and committed to an Ecumenical Declaration. Writers Umberto Eco and Harper Lee passed away on the same day. Heretofore theoretical gravitational waves were observed for the first time.  A huge swath of Canadian temperate rain-forest will be protected forever and called Spirit Bear. Bolivia and Peru also reached a deal to protect Lake Titicaca.

january: Davie Bowie tragically passed away, as did musicians Glenn Frey and Natalie Cole. There’s an outbreak of the Zika virus, causing panic in the sub-tropics and prompting many couples to postpone having children, due to the risk of birth-defects. Brutal and powerful Mexican drug-trafficker Joaquín Guzmán is re-captured after his escape from a high-security detention facility. The International Atomic Energy Agency declared that Iran has complied and dismantled its nuclear weapons programme and instructed the UN to lift sanctions. 

roger ramjet

Though a healthy dose of skepticism lingers, NASA’s propulsion labs are concluding their experimental electromagnetic drive will work—efficiently transporting payloads to the Martian surface in a little over three months instead of a year—despite the small matter of the impulse engine’s apparent violation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, the classical mechanics assertion that all actions have an equal and opposite reaction.
The demonstration that the engine does work came easier than the compelling reasons it ought not work for going against thermo- dynamics. Like how Quantum Mechanics explained observed anomalies without invoking deus ex machina needed for the Classical model by destroying the Planet Vulcan or the baffling kaon that watching a nuclear pot hinders its boiling, hypothetical pilot-waves may offer an solution, a strange one. The theory suggests that particles have precise space-time coordinates at all times, regardless of whether they’re observed or measured (against the accepted view that they do not) and may mean that in the vacuum of space, nothing is needed to push back.

synthehol

Vice Magazine interviews neuropharmacologist and addiction expert David Nutt who has spent the past two years developing a “chaperone” drug to introduce to the public that will replace alcohol, by imparting the good effects of drinking without the most delirious ones.
Dr Nutt had been pondering the idea for some time previously but did not have the medicinal tools at his disposal until a recreational chemist accidentally created what’s being called alcosynth and subsequently donated the formula to science. Dr Nutt predicts the demise of traditional booze within decades and will have his first field trials in Germany soon—due to the UK’s drug protection laws stymie research and distort social harms.  What do you think?  Will this catch on or become the disdain of purists?

press, depress, mash, hit, punch

With a sense of nostalgia that really is resonant, Messy Nessy Chic curates a vintage gallery that pays tribute to the disappearing push-button—those real, physical knobs and switches that arrayed dashboards, control panels and cockpits as well as gadgets and household items that felt so satisfying to push, and highly tempting to do so despite what catastrophic results might ensue. It’s certainly worth scrolling through all the images, especially the concept cars of future-past, and worth it as well sticking around and exploring more of her website.

memory alpha

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of the Star Trek franchise in 1996, NBC concocted a special cross-over with the then top rated television programme and the present incarnation of the space-western, with sheriff CPT Janeway and the cast of the series Fraiser (without Kelsey Grammer being unfortunately already engaged in being CPT Morgan Bateman of the USS Bozeman stuck in a time-loop for nine decades). Though not as epic as a true cross-over episode like Phyllis Diller hailing on Gilligan’s Island with the Harlem Globetrotters on the Love Boat meet the Scooby Gang nor quite as cringe-worthy as a Very Star Wars Christmas, watching this is nonetheless pretty fantastically awkward.

star date 1312.4

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premier of Star Trek and the launch of an amazing franchise—the Next Generation itself already having passed the half-way mark towards that milestone. Though NBC aired the pilot episode on 8 September 1966, it was actually screened by a Canadian broadcaster two days prior. Here and here are some fun commemorations from earlier in the year. Although it only ran for three seasons before being canceled (two years shy of its stated mission)—having been kept aloft by a tremendous fan-base, the cultural impact and endurance (not to mention the predictive aspect) of the show are immeasurable.

6x6

purdah: in defiance of statute and accepted cultural norms, an online campaign invites Iranian women to share images of themselves with their heads exposed, and in solidarity, men appear in hijabs

final frontier: the monumental park outside of Moscow honouring the pioneers of space exploration

red dwarf: the hinted at existence of exoplanet Proxima Centauri β is confirmed

goodwill ambassadors: Messy Nessy Chic digs up some vintage pocket guides issued to American service-members fighting overseas

at the third stroke: British Telecom is seeking out the speaking clock’s new voice, via the Presurfer

beyond antares: ladies and gentlemen, presenting the musical stylings of Miss Nichelle Nichols

5x5

post-mortem estate planning: last wills, Old Testament and ghosts make for an intriguing unexplained mystery

same as it ever was: Kermit the Frog, with accompaniment from Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, perform Talking Heads

mothra: a profile of the incredible Humming Bird Hawk Moth—I’ve spied these things in the garden and no one believed me

gesticulate: a glossary of essential hand gestures—especially useful for debates, via the brilliant Blört Everlasting 

expletive attributive: “Swear Trek” provides the profanity that ought to accompany interstellar exploration

fifteen thousand when we get to alderaan: purchasing-power or human capital

I had been ruminating this growing discussion over the question why the Star Trek and the Star Wars universes deliver us to such a starkly different future and past (presumably—but reference points are hard to cement for long ago and far away) for the past couple of days, and the comparison and contrast that space-faring civilisations and how that’s reflected in society. Whilst I believe that the trajectory lies mainly in the story-telling, exploration for its own sake and exploration for self-fulfilment and both franchises can be a reflection of the epic and there’s some cross-over and significant departures from the set course, it’s interesting to ponder the different outcomes and considering how technology either liberates economically or further enslaves.  Do you think either world-view presented will shape how we conduct our own exploration and colonisation? 

fingerhut

Given that more and more applications and gate-keepers are relying on biometric markers over passwords for authentication and the quite justified fear that such irreplaceable and fixed latch-keys are in the wilds already to be exploited, a clever design student has created prosthetic thimbles (Fingerhüte), which are fleshy, randomised and durable enough to be recognised by the bouncers that are to protect our privacy and integrity. Such sophisticated but simple accessories perhaps would not be as prone to dusting and lifting as our forensic evidence that is not so simply retooled through lock-smithy or the trust of said institutions. While much of the world traffics in skeuomorphs for many things, the designer’s native China has done away with lock and key for residences as well and this was the impetus to deliver the alternative of rubber finger-tips.

gold-pressed latinum

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Star Trek, the Canadian mint will be issuing commem- orative coinage with images of the franchise’s original series—including solid gold Star Fleet emblem communicator badges with a face value of C$200, though as bullion worth over one thousand. For those of us on a yeoman’s salary, there are smaller-denominations as well as other collectibles. I think all this excitement is wonderful and well-deserved, although it’s a bit ironic, I think, as the economics of the Star Trek Universe is not just cashless but seems close to utopian.

babel fish

Via the always excellent Nag on the Lake, we are offered the chance to fund a veritable Universal Translator in the form of an ear-piece that will make speakers of a foreign language mutual intelligible. Admittedly, I am a bit skeptical of such wonders—though I’d surely have gravitated to the same cause—plus at least in theory (not in rigourous practice yet) I was very impressed with Google Translate (especially how it matched the type-face)–but I am willing to defer judgment and vacation with confidence.
The device obviously makes me think of that other plot convenience of Douglas Adams, the Babel Fish, an organism that delivered on the same promises. This specimen willingly inserted in the auditory organs of every civilised and contacted denizen of the Universe was a wholly organic construct (as far as we readers are privy) rather than a learned but artificial feed-back loop, but this product of natural selection raised an important paradox, which I think we tend to miss when congratulating ourselves on our own cleverness. Such a devastating useful creature proved the existence of a divine creator, and thus God who must exist by faith alone and was understood to no longer be in the habit of manifesting himself like that disappears in a puff of logic. A keen little aide that might help bridge the communication gap like this may not in itself present an existential crisis, but maybe the full faith and confidence that we put in technology’s omnipresence and omnipotence does. What do you think? I would definitely try this ear-piece, listening-aid out.

it came from the cineplex or darth by darthwest

The summer blockbusters are championed by a duo of my favourite bloggers, Bob Canada and Dr. Caligari, we are treated to a comprehensive preview of the 2016 box-office, which is predictably franchised, derivative and cannibalistic. I too wish I had invested in the punctuation mark known as the colon for all the subtitles. By the miracle of assiduous chronicling, however, the fact that there is nothing new under the sun is revealed by marking that on this day in 1999, the Star Wars saga (among other events) released its first prequel. Some clever individual, we also find, is bucking the tread with a brilliant mingling of Hitchcock and Lucas

spock is not impressed with your handheld genetic sequencer

I am nonetheless with this achievement of miniaturisation that The Atlantic expertly presents first through the driver of much innovation, pushing our envelop out of necessity, positing how residents of the International Space Station could properly diagnose their ailments and turn to an effective treatment. Many have a weakness for antibiotics to remedy those bouts that masquerade in all those unremarkable symptoms that could be bacterial or viral.
Given the limits of the dispensary, it would be unwise to pursue the wrong plan, so enter the hand-held DNA sequencer dubbed MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Within the laboratory bulky and delicate, such a device had heretofore been impractical in orbit but could now provide vital information about how pathogens and contagious agents function in microgravity and in close-quarters. The article ponders then the perhaps apocryphal, the stuff of urban-legend, scanning might reveal whose dog is despoiling one’s garden or the walkers who fail to attend to their charges’ business properly might become a civic duty. Beyond forensics, the potential, however, for crowd-sourced research is beyond all bounds—equipped with tricorders, we become minions, legion, and like medicine men or witch-doctors examining our surroundings and finding unique organic compounds and novel interactions.

rent-to-own

H and I both are getting new tricorders upon the expiry of our current contracts. We’ve opted for the new model housed in the body of the last generation and are more excited about the much improved terms of the associated data-plans, which is a strange upgrade for a new gadget, to my mind, which does not betray any visible difference (despite twenty-four months of wear and tear), seeming a bit more like imposture than perfection—initially, at least.

set phasers to stunning

From the ever brilliant Nag on the Lake comes news that MAC cosmetics will be honouring the five decades that have passed since the debut of the Star Trek franchise with a line of beauty products inspired by the fashionable and strong female characters of the franchise, including LT Uhura, Counselor Troi, Seven of Nine and (perhaps less of a role-model) Vina, the Orion slave girl. Make me up, Scotty, indeed!  Riker is a little jealous, I think, but I can envision a men’s line on offer real soon.