go-pro or pencil-shavings

Researchers are exploiting the amazing properties of the recently discovered carbon-foil graphene to mimic the behaviour of tendons and muscles that can tense and relax at the slightest prompt, be it moisture, pressure or light.
Once these little works of origami were better understood, range of motion could be configured in such a way and programmed to demonstrate certain strengths and agilities. The elusive class of carbon—distinct from the graphite that’s in pencil lead and diamond, had been guessed at for many years and even predicted the material’s robustness but no one could imagine how one could sheer a surface layer so thin as to realise all those assets until Manchester physicists Andre Geim with associate Konstantin Novoselov applied some office tape to a pencil-sketch he’d been making, balled up the tape and rolled it in his fingers before tossing it into the waste bin. Prompted by his partner, Geim later retrieved the bit of cellophane tape—which is a pretty nifty job in materials engineering itself being pressure-sensitive and will produce x-rays if used in a vacuum—to discover that a layer of grapheme had been preserved. Together awarded the Noble Prize in 2010 for this discovery, a decade prior Geim, making him the only laureate to hold both honours, was presented with the Ig Noble for his study on levitating frogs with small magnets. Though this imaginative parody of the pomp and circumstance international committees whose recognition can take decades or more seems to suggest a certain dastardliness in the sciences and humanities, it is quite the opposite in nomination and presentation, crediting achievements that first make one laugh and then think.

mensch und übermensch

I’d guess I’d need to categorise this as one of those things the more one thinks about it, the more manifest it becomes, and I had not given much thought to the thesis beforehand that comics as more than caricature or a stock-epithet is an act of cultural reclamation.

The rise of the genre parallels social and political movements that co-opted and perverted mythological themes, pantheons and notions of bodily perfection not in the classical, athletic and temperate sense but in terms of eugenics and dehumanisation. The bombastic fantasy of Richard Wagner and the Nietzschean Übermensch had been misappropriated and the medium of comics, drawing on real and imagined legendary sources and superhero avatars, is the taking back of such shared heritage—story-telling separated from propaganda. In the beginning, however, these characters sometimes volunteered for deployment—like in the 1940 first issue of Captain America, where the hero is portrayed as socking Adolf Hitler—sometime before the US had actually entered into the war and bucking popular sentiment—in protest to the country’s isolationist policies. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels even went so far as to ban the distribution of Superman comics under the Third Reich over intentional or perceived Jewish roots in Kal-El (close to the Hebrew phrase for “voice of God,” whom was saved from a dying planet in a space capsule but unlike Moses being found among the reeds), but the Third Reich was also very efficient on accentuating and bestowing otherness on people with traits that they would not readily self-identify with. The universes that comics contain is certainly a reaffirmation of narrative, allegory and inclusion and our alter-egos have a mythos that’s forward-going as well.

choose wisely

While out on loan, the Nanteos Cup, conflated for around the past century with the Holy Grail, the was stolen last summer but is now returned almost one year later, reports the intrepid Atlas Obscura.
The wooden drinking vessel is reputed to contain a sliver of the True Cross and is imbued with miraculous healing properties and the Welsh Nanteos estate, which it’s named for, will lend it out freely to the sick in hopes of curing them. The Sturm und Drang of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Parsifal at the turn of the century was what benighted the cup and made it one more of the several hundred candidates (literal and abstract) found in Europe. Whatever the origin, it is nonetheless quite a treasured cup and a quite massive sting operation was launched in Wales, which led to its recovery, concluding with a shadowy, midnight hand-off.

panoply or watermark

The member states of the European Union hold diverse opinions on how to interpret and respect the right of panorama, that is, the ability to freely capture and use street photography, what’s in the public space, the commons, without fear of reprisal should those images have caught a spare glimpse of some building or piece of outdoors art that is under copyright. The creators of said installations that might be crowding up the skyline that a visitor is trying to frame are afforded a proprietary ownership of how the likeness of their creations are distributed, especially for profit, and ought to be allowed to gain off their works—notwithstanding their oft photographed location. Some have been found to be baiting the system—hence German legislators codified Panoramafreiheit to avoid legal snarls and keep public-spaces public and not subtle billboards. German EU representatives are urging all countries to enshrine such protections, which would surely leave a lot of attractions impoverished for the view. Other factions, however, want there to be uniformity of enforcement, siding with the clearinghouses. Given that people are quick to deputize themselves when it comes to enforcement in unclear situations, I hope that the matter is resolved definitively and in favour of the infringers.

al-gebra

Before that watershed moment in European scholarship when the rediscovery of the classics ignited the Renaissance, the rebirth of Greek academics and inquiry, there was a parallel precedent that took place in the Caliphate of Baghdad some four centuries earlier that secured for secular and religious spheres the systems of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and circumspection that dominated both oriental and occidental thought for over a thousand years. Plato’s dialogues and the spectre of Socrates the gadfly did not exactly dislodge the Aristotelian approach to government, civics and philosophical inquiry—that only really came much later with the enlightenment and educational reform that conceded that while the rote exercises that Plato’s pupil prescribed were excellent dress-rehearsals, they failed to prompt anything progressive. No school of thought that endured any rigour or scepticism is so easily exhaustible, but Aristotle’s early and spectacular reintroduction may have proved all-consuming in that it did rather launch an important and sustaining tradition of independent and original research, which was wedged in Western scholastics as an idée fixe by early theologians who knew no other Greek thinkers.
Abbasid Caliph Abu Ja’far Abdullah al-Mamûn ibn Harun, who ruled Baghdad in the early ninth century, had a dream, reportedly, in which the figure of Aristotle came to him with assurances that Hellenic thought was not in opposition to Islam but very much compatible with it. Al- Mamûn’s successors disagreed, but for a not insignificant run, Baghdad’s House of Wisdom was the premier repository of knowledge and research facility in the world. Academics and original sources were gathered and brisk business of translation grew up around the institute, all administered by the patron caliph who oversaw the curriculum and debating societies to further the pursuits. Whether because of the vision or because Aristotle was more fastidious in organising his writing than most (all of his works were plainly titled as opposed to Plato’s where one could not claim to know what the piece was about in a word even after having read it through), the work began with the most practical topics—biology, taxonomy, geography and proceeded to the ethics and sociology. Before the flagging support for this place of learning of al-Mamûn’s descendants and its eventual destruction by the Mongol invasion in the Siege of Baghdad, perhaps they had set out to tackle the whole of classical-thought but the venture fell victim to its own success, so to speak, as more and more discoveries and derivative writings came out of that first systematic endeavour. In the informal environment of the House of Wisdom, new and inspiring works with tangible advances being made in mathematics, surgery, engineering, map-making and star-charts. Plato and the other rarefied luminaries must have seemed old-hat.

von und zu oder king under the mountain

A nobiliary particle (Adelsprädikat) is such a brilliantly useful term that I feel I ought to have known existed already—being one of those things within the necessary periodicity of language that’s completed with jargon and technical talk—but didn’t have the word for. As the name implies, it is a catch-all for all those ennobling, aristocratic elements of a family that denote some sense of present or former elevation, like de, o’ (of), von, zu, af, van and others. In many cases in English the particle, which is the same as the adpositional word that form spatial relations—to, from, above, under—has become embedded in the name or just reverts to the name of the estate but clues are still given about ownership and heritage.

nictotine

During the Golden Age of Exploration, French ambassador to the kingdom of Portugal, Jean Nicot de Villemain, undertook a voyage to the Portuguese new world colony of Brazil in 1560, bringing back with him a specimen of a tobacco plant, which he presented to the French king. The plant was studied and classified in Paris and incorporated the ambassador’s name into the scientific nomenclature—hence the chemical compound called nicotine.  Tobacco-use was promoted a defence against the plague and grew popular very quickly.  This tobacco substance was moreover as widely used as a pesticide as it was smoked, up until the 1980s when alternatives deemed less harmful to humans could be produced cheaply.

forbidden colours or darkly adapted eye

I am not positive that the so-called chimerical colours aren’t an explanation of that dress and the phenomena doesn’t truly strike me as an optical illusion and something more akin to a more intense exercise than one subjects his or her eyes to, but nonetheless catching a fleeting glimpse of the stygian colours—that is something both dark and super-saturated, is something to behold. There are other flavours of colours outside the visual gamut, what can be displayed, reproduced, or seen due to the structure of our eyes or even imagined in the conventional sense, but these contrasting hues and resultant impossible blue are suggestive of the mythological river Styx that separated the world of the living from the underworld.

To achieve the effect, one ought to stare at the target within the yellow circle for a full minute, then glance over the black square. Staring at the bright spot fatigues certain colour and light receptors (not like an after-image burnt into a television screen) and then those receptors that are used primarily to boost night-vision are excited, and one should briefly see the contradictory spectre. Maybe some have the ability to see such things everywhere—although the concept of colours can be communicated to an extent, I suppose we never know what another person perceives, and there was probably also a time not too long ago when unnatural colours like hot-pink or the florescent- and neon-tinged ones were unheard of and novel. Other descriptors include luminous and hyperbolic, and I think it would be fun to give names to that whole spectrum of overlapping colours and challenge our brains and eyes to see the impossible. Are these chimera colours—like the hot, bitter, baby and shocking, once seen unable to be unseen or must they be conjured up every time?

sunday drive: gemünden am main

Driving back for the work-week—the weekends are always too short but the intervening time does not drag on too awfully—I decided to take the scenic route which we’d just traced the day before, exploring Lohr and that narrow projection of Bavaria that extends into Hessian territory all the way to Aschaffenburg.
 It certainly was a more pleasant experience than rumbling along the Autobahn and I took the chance to stop in the town of Gemünden am Main—so named because it is where the tributaries of the Sinn and Frankish Saale empty (the streams’ mouths) into the River Main. Naturally this confluence was a strategically important spot and sometime in the early thirteenth century the Count of Rieneck erected this castle and keep as a toll-station to control traffic and trade along the waterways.
Only ruins of Schloβ Schreneburg remain but the view is an impressive one and is now a venue for open-air concerts and a home for bats. Competing claims on the land by the dioceses of Würzburg and Fulda, especially after the line of the family Rieneck went extinct, even saw the construction of successively higher castles on the rolling hills above Scherenburg, since levelled, to dominate the Main below. The waterways are still important components of the transportation infrastructure for the region, and the rail-links that run parallel supplement the connections. I think I’ll start taking this route more often in fair weather and get a better taste of what’s here for us to discover.

present and perdurant

Though modern Greek has adopted a more straightforward term to convey happiness, ευτυχία—just suggesting good works—the classical term Eudæmonia is fortunately still around with all its mysterious and internecine intrigues.
The greatest minds are unable to come to a consensus on what constitutes happiness (or whether that’s even a question worthy of pursuit), but I have to wonder if even the first interlocutors really knew what was meant by Eudæmonia. Semantics are of course important considerations and flourishing or thriving might be a better word than our emotionally-laden happiness—the Romans rendered it as felicitas, who was also sometimes deified, but I don’t believe that any translation could capture the sense of being a role-model compounded with a guardian angel or fairy godmother figure like the original Greek. One achieves happiness, it’s argued, by emulating the example of that demon—dæmons just being spirits, familiars or lesser deities and not diabolical ones. The nature of those qualities and whether there’s some universal imperative are hopeless elusive, though that does not mean we shouldn’t bother. Furthermore, one’s level of bliss can be impacted retroactively should one’s present deportment cause him or her to earn a bad reputation after death.
Thinking about these rarefied ideas in general and particularly the last bit that invokes the directionality of time makes me turn back to the novel I am currently enjoying, Jo Walton’s absolutely amazing Just City—wherein the goddess Athena gathers the prescribed youth from all ages in order to experimentally create the utopia of Plato’s Republic overseen by those who’ve prayed for wisdom. I wonder if one’s eudæmon isn’t more of a conflicted personality, like shoulder angels. The cover of the Walton’s book, incidentally, focusses in on a particular section of this larger famous fresco by Raphael—showing students engaged on the steps of the Academy below. The different elements and possible perspectives in this work of art makes me think about another of Raphael’s masterpieces, the Sistine Madonna, who’s two puti reflecting upward has become a better known detail. H and I got to see it in its entirety in Dresden once. The aforementioned fresco, however, is out of public view in the papal apartments but I recalled the style and how the tableaux extended beyond the frame, preceding into the background, as the image that was on our ticket stubs from the Vatican Museum—the ephemera buried behind too many layers of our bulletin board to excavate, just now. I don’t believe I am any closer to the being able to articulate what happiness is but do feel I’ve gone on a little trip in time just now myself.

five-by-five

cat fancy: collection of Wikipedia articles involving legendary felines

ottoman empire: accordion coffee table doubles as a dress

merry melodies: five bizarre Looney Tunes cartoons

honeycomb hideout: Oslo builds a bee highway through the city

vajen-bader: possible 1800s steampunk inspiration for Star Wars cast of characters

palabra jot

Just as the kingdoms of Heaven and the Earth were already careening in directions unknown with the confluence of Martin Luther’s critical and revolutionary stance, Henry VIII’s dissention that led to the Anglican confession, the discovery of the New World materialising and successive plagues picking off large swaths of the impious and faithful alike, the event that probably shook the foundations of the Church the most was a conciliatory bearing, a compromise characterised as a Middle Way, advocated by one of its own, Dutch theologian and scholar Desiderius Erasmus.
In the spirit of Cicero, regarded as the father of humanism, Erasmus championed dialectic over pure dogma and believed that religion revealed rather than one imparted made one’s belief genuine and steadfast—although Erasmus did not go as far as Luther in abolishing the priestly class, maintaining that tutors were necessary. Furthermore, raising more contention with the Protestant movement than reconciliation, Erasmus argued that that personal, less mediated relation with the divine was not consequent to the notion of predestination, accepting that one is part of God’s plan and happy with that, but instead that the orthodox idea of free will (which is not unfettered agency but the ability to see outcomes as otherwise than they actually turn out—that is, understanding that one’s actions and intentions have consequences, for good or evil) still had a place in this reformed cosmology. The most public and controversial act of the academic, however, was his decision to brush up on his Greek and Latin (the stock-phrase Pandora’s box comes from one of Erasmus’ earlier, honest mistranslations of Hesiod—it ought to be Pandora’s jar) and undertake to produce a definitive new translation of the Bible, since Luther’s own (thanks to the advent of the printing-press) was a popular success and successful too in promulgating historic typos. Luther, as King James and virtual all theologians relied on the four century translation of Saint Jerome of the Greek testaments into Latin. Wanting to provide his parishioners as pupils a better text and feeling admittedly divinely inspired, Erasmus quipped that “it is only fair that Paul should address the Romans in somewhat better Latin” and began his new version. Though a traditionalist in terms of Church politics, Erasmus did a poor job in restraining himself when it came to language. While I am sure that all linguists of any ilk sort of cringe to find surpassing λόγοϛ rendered as plain old word (Verbum), it was just too much for the Church to take when the first proofs started, very first chapter and verse, “In the beginning there was Conversation…” It is hard to say if Erasmus and his adherents might have negotiated a more peaceful and civil schism or might have made matters far worse, but both sides rejected this agitator’s backing as too much of a liability.

innocents abroad oder entlang der neckartal

For the long-weekend, though a bit wary of weather that appeared a little dodgy, we decided to stay relatively close to home and visited a portion of the Neckar river valley, going along portions of the tour that Mark Twain helped to retain their character and inchoate charm in his travelogue of Europe on a steam-powered pilgrimage to the Holy Land called The Innocents Abroad —though I’d argue that the area does so despite this notoriety.
Although H and I quite fancy ourselves sophisticates, we saw and learned quite a lot that we thought—between the two of us, we were familiar with.
The spare pair of days really telescoped themselves well to feel like a fully-fledged vacation just after we left the Autobahn at a curious place called Bad Wimpfen, with its medieval watch tower dominating the one-time imperial city of half-timbered (Fachwerk) buildings.
The market and spa town that grew up on the edge of the Roman world, the Odenwald Limes, was swapped between Frankonia, Hessen, Greater Hesse, Baden, Würrtemberg-Baden and then finally the modern state of Baden-Würrtemberg after it lost its imperial immediacy that meant that Bad Wimpfen was a city-state.
Afterwards, we took a leisurely drive, hugging close to the Neckar, between high cliffs, alternately thickly forested or cultivated as vineyards. For all the scenic beauty of the valley, it was strange that one could only capture it from on high—in sweeping vistas. H and I climbed next to Burg Guttenberg in Haβmersheim (I remember this because quite soon, the names of places veered decidedly less creative—all called Neckar- this or that—and kind of ran together) with its imposing late Middle Ages fortifications. The peasants were preparing for a jousting display but when such festivities weren’t underway, the castle was known as a regional centre for falconry.
Burg Guttenberg was on the opposite bank of the Neckar, facing Burg Horneck, a castle of the Teutonic Knights and just a little further on we came to the impeccably preserved playground called Burg Hornburg above the village of Neckarzimmern. The park consisted of a wine-cellars, hotel (where Twain stayed) and restaurant, naturally—and the estate has been in the same noble family for many generations, the friendly attendant and sommelier addressing another gentleman who stopped by as “Herr Baron”—but also an impressive ruin to explore and climb higher and higher.
We found a campsite in a nearby village of Binau right on the banks of the river.
 It was a nice place to rest for the evening but—and I suppose no one wants this in their backyard, seeing the nuclear power plant (Atomkraftwerk, AKW) Obrigheim just in the distance was a little off-putting. The next day, we cruised further along the river, past Neckargerach and Zwingenburg, and on to the small town of Eberbach with its massive cathedral set against the highest summits of the Odenwald. Another place mentioned in the whistle-stop tour was Burg Hirschhorn, another well-preserved castle with a playground.  Next, H and I visited the village of Neckarsteinach.


 This heavily fortified and guarded town on one of the most formerly strategic and contested bends of the river is the southern-most projection of Hessen, and today forms quite the picturesque spot.
Four castles (die Vierburgenstadt as its known) cling to the ridges above the river valley and on the promenade, we were able to frame three of them in one shot. We camped between Neckargemünd and the outskirts of Heidelberg—probably Twain’s most celebrated destination but one which we’d both knew quite well and worth a future trip of its own.
The next day we passed through the storied city and quit the path following the Neckar to tour the palatial grounds of the massive gardens of Schwetzingen, nestled between the branches of the river.
The summer residence of the court of the Palatinate Electors, the rococo architecture and landscape is the German kingdom’s version of Versailles.
Even if the weather had held, it was maybe a little too ambitious to hope to cover all of the garden, with its resplendent sculpture, hedge mazes, menageries and architectural follies—including this “mosque,” there was too much to see in one afternoon. We could see the rain clouds advancing and hurried back to Lady. We’ll come back to see more one day soon, and some day perhaps repeat Mark Twain’s whole grand tour, making it our own.

memes, memeplexes and neurath’s boat

Via the dazzlingly peripatetic Nag on the Lake, comes a look at ISOTYPEs—that is International System of Typographic Picture Education, which sounds so much better than the term infographic, which shall be evermore banished.
I am grateful for learning about these brilliant, vintage diagrams as I had previously discovered the sleek and singular icon libraries of Gert Arntz but had not realised that there was a direct link and application in the educational materials of philosopher Otto Neurath of the Vienna Circle. Like the Ship of Theseus, Neurath’s boat is a paradox to compel one to confront his or her foundational beliefs by dissecting so-called viral memes—those tenants we might identify with but which are recursive and self-serving. Members of the Vienna Circle, formed in the aftermath of World War I, encouraged life-long learning and rigorous self-examination.

gold bug or strong room

I didn’t know this when H and I were visiting Columbus, Georgia and enjoyed an iced-coffee in this historic bank building (nor did we think to snap a picture at the time of the vault that one can sit in), but it was supposedly from the very vaults here that a teller refused to relinquish the cache of semi-legendary Confederate gold, having been evacuated from New Orleans as the Union armies advanced for safe-keeping, to General P. G. T. Beauregard when ordered to take it from its temporary depository. According to Bearegard’s own memoirs, it was taken then by force but no one knew what happened to that treasure afterwards.  Gold bugs, incidentally, not only refer to those with a compelling desire for prospecting but also to those who humbug the government’s stewardship of the treasury and doubt that there is any gold in Fort Knox. 

lifecycle replacement or persistence of memory

The whole time I was enjoying Doug Dorst’s frame novel S, I did not realise that the subtitle, The Ship of Theseus, was itself a reference to a rather famous philosophical model.

Paradoxically, the ship of the legendary founder of Athens was maintained in a seaworthy state for generations after his death, according to a pledge to honour his memory, but with time and tide, rotten planks had to be replaced at regular intervals. Eventually, none of the original material would have remained, begging the question, posed by many quizzical minds, is the Ship of Theseus still the same ship if 99%, 90%, 50%, 5% or none of the parts were original and all had been replaced. Some argue yes and some no. Now understanding this allusion, the connection becomes quite apparent to the story. Though debatably, one cannot step into the same stream twice, Heraclitus believed that persistence, through the element, medium of time, projects identity outward, even if all the component parts—our bodies included, are continuously eroding and being replaced. What do you think? Is that rescued and refurbished jalopy the same classic car? Is it still Lenin who’s visited in his mausoleum, or now, as he lies in state, even more reliably and fixedly the man?

five-by-five

one ring to bind them: wonderfully geeky and romantic science-fiction inspired jewellery

swim-lanes: a vintage timeline of human history

dollies: beautiful lace patterns created out of newspaper collages

[edit]: audio landscape of revisions, additions to Wikipedia

ampelmännchen: in the run up to EuroVision, Vienna installs same sex couple cross-walk lights

futurama

This aesthetic and consumer culture known as populuxe, distinct from Mid-Century Modern, was an exclusively American phenomenon, typified by the look of a retrograde future which brought technology and optimism sharply in focus. To discover more examples, check out the brilliant web-presence of curator James Vaughn (X-Ray Delta One) for an endless gallery of architectural models, industrial landscapes, movie posters, glamourous advertising and other ephemera of the age.

much coin, much care

Though I would not describe myself as a dedicated and studied numismatist—albeit perhaps somewhat more reasoned the collectors of com- memorative coin sets, which is exactly for whom they’re issued but I do admit to having a cigar box heavy with a small fortune, at face-value at least, of the special national series of the euro-zone members, the Bundesländer, and various defunct currencies. I was never before given in change a Cypriot coin, however, and it did take a moment to register, remembering that only Greece had formerly been accorded with using something aside from Latin script but that was before Cyprus joined the Union, the name of the island displayed in Greek and Turkish. The totem depicted on the obverse, nearly worn away since 2008, the idol of Pomos, is a prehistoric talisman of fertility and the seven thousand year old figure is wearing a charm of herself around her neck—the portable versions being popular in the day. Given the events of that year, I hope Cyprus picked an auspicious time to adopt the euro.

monotheism or my way or the highway

King Hezekiah, son of Ahaz and father of Manasseh, of Judah may not immediately conjure up any associations from the Bible or history, but his contribution to the manner in which future has unfolded is perhaps unmatched in its significance. Having witnessed the destruction of Samaria in the seventh century BC by the Assyrians, and fearing the same fate for Jerusalem and his southerly kingdom once it too came under siege, Hezekiah pledged to make the faith of the Judeans an exclusive one in exchange for deliverance. The king ordered the Temple Mount to be cleared of pagan paraphernalia and purged of altars (bamot, the high places) to all other gods save for their patriotic champion YHWY.
Jerusalem did not fall, thanks to the Angel of the Lord massacring a hundred thousand Assyrian soldiers and the clever underground sewer systems that Hezekiah had installed to allow the city to wait out a lengthy siege with a fresh water supply, and henceforth the Abrahamic religions were monotheistic ones—not implying that God had consorts and side-kicks before had that went suddenly out of fashion but that polytheistic traditions were generally much more tolerant and accepting of diversity and peaceable. A transitional term called henotheism (from the Greek for one God, as opposed to single, coined by theologist Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling) holds that while one community worships a single, omnipotent being, the possibility of other deities, worthy of worship, is also acknowledged as well as the notion of divinity bounded by Fate or the laws as created—as opposed to the religious chauvinism and exceptionalism that Hezekiah’s deal-making gave us.