Friday 1 January 2016

mmxvi

Happy New Year, Turophiles! Best wishes to you and yours as we welcome 2016 and we have a quick survey of designated, predicted and scheduled events and commemorations for the upcoming time.
To recognise their nutritional significance, the United Nations has declared this year the international year of pulses—that is, your beans, black-eyed peas and other legumes. The Summer Games will be held in Brazil. The Orthodox Church will convene a Holy Synod. Most of the world will be treated to Venus transiting the Sun and the Juno space probe will arrive at Jupiter. Russia is planning to launch an orbiting hotel for space-tourists. Not so many bold assertions or much commitment there. It seems that only astronomical matters are the only safe-call for the world’s reluctant and conservative Nostradamuses, citing the inevitable march of time. There’s that which is called self-fulfilling prophesy. Maybe resolutions are for, after all. What are some of your forecasts?

Wednesday 30 December 2015

5x5

gnomon: sundial with exacting perforations shows the time of day in digits with instructions to make your own

race to the bottom: more and more countries are outfitting outposts in Antarctica, via Superpunch

biscione: the heraldic serpent borne on the Alfa-Romeo logo is a viper eating a child—or possibly a Moor

out standing in the field: more winners and runners up for National Geographic’s photography contest

fist-bump: handshaking protocol from around the world

Tuesday 15 December 2015

vitruvian man

Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic figure swaddled in geometry is an homage to an actual person, an ancient Roman retired general, called Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, whose pursuits after being discharged lent an indelible mark of humanising to the art of building and distinguished architecture from engineering, a romance of ruin and classical influence that has endured for the millennia.
In ten volumes, Vitruvius took a comprehensive approach to construction, effectively elevating a profession that had heretofore not garnered much respect, by demonstrating that the architect must have knowledge in civil-planning, history, agriculture, anatomy, building material, ceremony, measurement, physics and the logistics of utilities—the plumbing. De architectura was certainly drawn from many sources but it is the only surviving insight into Roman technology and aesthetic—their ingenious water supply systems, air-conditioning and manner of surveying. Anecdotally, the books are also the source of Archimedes’ bath-time eureka-moment. The illustrations were unfortunately lost but the manuscripts, discovered in an abbey in Switzerland, helped the spread of the Renaissance to the north of the Alps and prompted the Neo-Classic revival—and da Vinci’s depiction is a direct reflection of Vitruvius’ own scholarship into proportion and how we’re commensurable with ourselves and our homes.

Tuesday 1 December 2015

viennese sandbox: secessionist

Whilst in Vienna, H and I of course paid our respects at what’s described as a temple to Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) design. The Secession Building is not a museum on the interior, as we discovered after being confronted with a gallery of quite nice but incongruous exhibition of grainy photographs of rippling water and stars—though I suppose appropriate for celebrating the centennial of Einstein’s big and world-changing ideas, but rather as a hall for embracing the avant-garde as the founding artists had done.
The space was mostly empty and we had to wonder if this mop-head wasn’t in fact art or a decoy for one to make one’s own.
Descending to the basement, we discovered the Beethoven Frieze (EN/DE), created by Gustav Klimt, which was really a transfixing sight to behold with all its receding references: an interpretation of the composer’s Ninth Symphony (also known as Ode to Joy with lyrics by Friedrich Schiller), scored by Richard Wagner and performed by Max Klinger, in statuary-form.
The fresco itself also was executed only as a temporary decoration for a 1903 showing of contemporary artists, but was preserved by a collector with foresight and carefully prised off the wall upstairs before being installed in its permanent home. The Muse of Poetry looks like she’s consulting a tablet computer and does not want to be bothered (photography was not allowed and monitored, which made the experience all the more holy—down a rabbit hole of allegory) and stands in between an angelic choir and the monstrous giant Typhล“us, the gorilla creature, attended by his Gorgon daughters—all elements in the struggle of the tone poem that became a national hymn.
The frieze ends with a knight in shining armour having doffed his protection and embracing his damsel in distress, illustrating the final stanza of “this kiss to the whole world,” diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt. Outside we spied one of the ubiquitous pedestrian crossing signs that Vienna installed to celebrate its inclusive victory in the Eurovision song contest—depicting the freedom to love whomever.

Monday 30 November 2015

viennese sandbox: gasometer city

A few weeks ago, I wrote about some of the creative ways that municipalities have repurposed gasholders and other industrial behemoths.
Dreamily, I had mentioned the apartment blocks of Vienna as one innovative measure and was surprised to be able to see the site in person. The panoramic installation of four former storage tanks were in operation for eight decades up until 1984 when the city made the transition to natural gas for heating. Bauwerk des Dekonstruktivismus is the designation for architectural ensembles like this. The historic outer-shells were preserved—in part owing to the environmental contamination and the potential difficulties to be faced by new tenants without the support of the government and the city, once the landmark was retired extensive renovations and redesign took place, culminating in 2001.


The complex, joined by sky-bridges, comprises over eight hundred apartments, student dormitories, cinemas, a lecture hall and a shopping centre, and has subsequently fostered a unique sense of community within the four blocks, causing academics, ethnographers and urban-planners to take note with this phenomenon. I think it would be pretty keen to live in such a place, almost like living on an orbiting space station.

Thursday 19 November 2015

docomo or the queen’s english

As is my wont, I must have glossed over this rather disturbing announcement and I truly appreciate Bob Canada for reviving this discussion—thinking that the Word of the Year as nominated and elevated by the venerable institution of Oxford University Press was “emoji,” which I thought to be pedantically behind the times, and not an emoji.
Albeit their flagship OED aims to capture language as it is actually used and not prescribe how it ought to be—despite the authority that it enjoys, I am not sure what to make our language and lexicon when “Face with Tears of Joy”—which sounds like a title museum curators would give to distinguish a work with no name, is celebrated. What do you think? I certainly use the glyphs for punctuation, I guess at the expense of full-stops, but in general not for a whole thought. Maybe Oxford’s contender was chosen too because of the ambiguity that can be substituted and encoded and be assigned different signals and meanings—like the suggestive eggplant or nail-polish representing some hollow accomplishment or indifference or the agony of being pepper-sprayed here pictured.

Friday 13 November 2015

5x5


wiki, wiki, wiki wiki-room: Wikipedia’s agnostic, philosophical co-founder is a healthy skeptic of the developing product

format-wars: after four decades, Sony is retiring Beta-Max

non-verbal: as an encore of the facial recognition algorithms that guessed one’s age, there a new application that produces an emotional composite from one’s expressions

cast-offs: as a fashion-statement, Dutch designer folds newspapers into disposable shirts you’d think twice about throwing away

thin white duke: David Bowie gets down on Soul Train

Tuesday 10 November 2015

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.

Friday 6 November 2015

gradient and avatar

Though the concept became cemented as sort of an academic urban legion through the stories of futurist Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy whose interbellum characters first speculated on social networks and social capital in a rebuilt world and the work of playwright John Guare, the notion of Six Degrees of Separation, the chain that binds any two people together with six steps or fewer, reaches even further back to the pioneering wireless transmissions of Guglielmo Marconi, speaking on the shrinking globe and growing interconnectedness among people.
Incidentally, this was probably the most original thing that the radio-promoter said or did, as Marconi rarely acknowledged the significant contributions of his fellow researchers and was very parsimonious about crediting other innovators. The Small World tracer experiments of psychologist Stanley Milgram also helped fix the notions of virality and algorithmic exploration in the public imagination: seeing if letters from geo-social endpoints could research their targets through a chain of casually acquainted couriers alone. Perhaps until the ice-breaker Six Degree of Kevin Bacon emerged, Milgram was best known for his controversial Obedience Experiments, wherein test-subject became acclimated to the idea of administering electric shocks to another individual as corrective-reinforcement to demonstrate how just following orders leads to dehumanisation and catastrophic collapse of perspective—that most would choose to be one the right side of authority, even if that meant inflicting pain on others. Another sort of hybrid experiment between these two extremes of connectedness and detachment involved stand-in actors dubbed cyranoids, after Cyrano de Bergerac’s device to woo Roxane through a more handsome interlocutor. As another heuristic tool, Milgram hoped that the understudies whispered their lines might open up insights about bias and stereotypes and self-perception too. I wonder if there are cyranoids for ghost-writers at large.

Thursday 5 November 2015

magicking or the jack parsons‘ project

One of the pioneering rocketry engineers outside of the German camp (corresponding with many of the scientists who would comprise Operation Paperclip) was an individual named Marvel Whiteside (Jack) Parsons, who inspired by science fiction went on invent jet fuel and various techniques for improving thrust and guidance that solidified America’s standing in aerospace industry and helped the nation realise better the potential of the applications, was a founding member of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) after the Great Depression subsided.
Parsons’ interest in science fiction also made him impressionable to the useful imaginations of others, and after a brief stint as a devoted Marxist (which might have proven highly-suspect later on), Parsons turned to the new occult religion Thelema, dicated a few decades earlier by British philosopher and prestidigitator Aleister Crowley, having received these revelations whilst vacationing in Cairo from a prรฆter-human law-giver. In the tradition of humanist writer Franรงois Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Thelema maintains that man was the measure of all things through tantric sacraments and magick (the Force explained in terms of the new Quantum Mechanics) admits of a complex cosmology and ritual acts, including one which Parsons and his friend L Ron Hubbard (who, cogently I suppose, later went on to found the Church of Scientology) performed in order to summon one goddess known as the Mother of Abominations. Ever the champion of research and space exploration, Parsons continued his aerospace experiments undeterred, offering free-lance services to Mexico and Israel, after he was dismissed from JPL for his infamous behaviour and accused of un-American activities. Under somewhat mysterious circumstances, Parsons died working on some pyrotechnic special effects for an upcoming Hollywood film in his home laboratory—the Parsonage. Though Parsons did not live to see the Space Race that he enabled and some miraculous achievements in exploration and understanding of the Cosmos, his legacy, despite how it might have been deprecated and over-shadowed, remains undeniable.

three-ring or alas and alack

Atlas Obscura has an interesting, involved biography of the complicated and convoluted live of Mad Monk Rasputin’s daughter, Maria.

The entire article is a rewarding read and not to reveal too many spoilers, after being transplanted from rural Siberia to Saint Petersburg for cultural refinement and fleeing the Revolution after her father’s mysterious assassination, Rasputina first found work in a cabaret act in Bucharest, all the while continuing a rapport with her murdered father through sรฉances—who apparently offered dubious romantic advice, carrying on with a confidence-trickster who impersonated an impoverished Romanov family member. In the mid 1930s, Rasputina immigrated to America and worked as a lion-tamer, until being mauled by a bear put an end to that career-path. Afterward, she worked as a riveter in a Los Angeles shipyard during World War II while publishing her life story until compelled to retire due to her age, though still hale and hearty. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Rasputina supplemented her pension by giving psychic-readings, complete with trance visitations of candid First Lady Betty Ford.

Sunday 1 November 2015

arcana and hour-glass

The esoteric roots of the Third Reich—which misappropriated and ruined a lot of heretofore widespread symbolism—was based in a selective but seemingly innocent cultural revival and revanche of Germanic interest after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire that began with the folk- and linguistic studies of the Brothers Grimm. Once a lexical tradition—though borrowed and forced to fit a unified agenda, a practise perpetuated to awful extremes in just a short amount of time, other aspiring mystics found niches that could be capitalised upon in similar ways.
As nationalist sentiments simmered, parlour-games like astrology and divination seemed to be too entrenched with foreign influence and a domestic, German versions of the signs of the zodiac and tarot-readings (and the I-Ching) was readily adopted. The individual responsible for this new set of symbols was an Austrian occultist named Guido von List, who became obsessed with the cult of Odin. Stricken with cataracts, von List identified himself more and more with the Norse god, who had traded one eye for wisdom and insight, when a surgery left him temporarily blind for a period of almost year. During this time, von List found the meaning of the runic alphabet revealed to him and subsequently published his pamphlet on the Armanen Runen, which while based on the established signs, widely distorted their accepted meanings. Most familiar and infamous, the swastika was an international symbol, maybe one of the Indo-European people’s most ancient and enduring symbols, that meant “gift” or good-luck, almost universally. The English term for Hakenkreuz (the hooked cross or the cross with serifs) retains the original Sanskrit meaning of good fortune, which almost makes it seem as if the symbol were defamed twice over.
The dual lightening-bolts that came to represent the Schutzstaffel (the SS) singularly represented the sun and not victory (Sieg), as von List attributed being unable to foresee the consequences. The interpretation gets even more far-fetched with the Hagal rune—แšผ being the sign for hail or a snowflake enlisted, strangely, as a mark of solidarity and faith. The rune for a yew-tree which originally connoted a measure of protection was somewhat sequitur associated with the pharmaceutical arts (as was displayed on the apothecary shingle for many years) but then แ›‰ (Algiz) was expanded as the Lebensrune to indicate life and parturition and its inverted form แ›ฆ was forwarded to mean death. The sign was the badge of those charged with administering the Lebensborn programme and became a common way on headstones to indicate date of birth and date of death, instead of the traditional * and ✝. The above snowflake rune, Hagal, was accorded with the high-status of signifying fidelity because it contained both life and death. Despite the dubious and engineered heritage, masses of people took this home-spun fortune-telling and the trappings of new iconography very seriously and as a source of national identity, and once a new regime adopted these badges of power, they already had an air of legitimacy.

Wednesday 28 October 2015

rutherfords and risk-assessments

Immediately for me invoking recollections of that endless film franchise Final Destination, wherein some hapless teenagers have premonitions of freak accidents that are perpetuated by some Rube Goldberg chain of events and shoddy craftsmanship, the notion of the micromort, conceived by ethicist and information-scientist Ronald Howard of Stanford University, modestly and eloquently has further reaching meaning in terms of public literacy in probability and statistics, risky undertakings, and deflecting media bias.

As a unit or scale, the micromort roughly measures a one-in-a-million chance of dismem- berment or death from exposure to various activities—both bidden and unsolicited, like base-jumping, shark-attacks, skiing, drug use, quick-sand, terrorism, diet—allowing one to weigh the peril though in the end the odds seem to say on our side. I don’t think that this a model that insurance companies use, per se. Facts and figures can be easily turned into anecdotal evidence in support of any argument or newly-fashioned threat. Not to disparage the better intentions of keeping healthy, wealthy and wise, but the burden bore by saying that sitting is deadly and is ratcheting up one’s individual risk by—say a fifth, does not factor in prevalence and can be misrepresented as something huge and something that we’re morally obligated to counter. History is punctuated by moral panics and distortion, but even more so now, as we’re already couched in safety and leisure, and the idea of security and hygiene has supplanted superstition. Like the dread millisievert, the rutherford is also a doseage of radiation exposure and can also be easily taken out of context. What do you think? Does being informed carry with it a healthy degree of skepticism?

Tuesday 27 October 2015

stretch of sands or jack sprat

The dicey encounter between the US and Chinese navies in the rarefied archipelagos of the South China Sea represents of course modern points of contention but the history, the anchorage of the Spratly Islands (known by several other, disputed monikers) reaches into the distant past and under tenser auspices. Though just outside of major shipping-lanes, the disperse islands, some eight hundred shoals and reefs that constitute a mere four square kilometers of land combined, did not garner much attention, regarded as treacherous waters to be avoided—outside of a few micronation claimants—until the end of the nineteenth century, seeing the chance to expand their sphere of influence and control of the channels of commerce, Britain made the first petition.
This territorial extension did not yield a secure title as the newly independent Philippines first needed gentle reminders by their former minder, the USA, that their lands did not extend that far out (though the lesson did not really penetrate with these squabbles extending through the people’s revolution in China, the Republic in exile in Formosa, another try for a micronation utopia, and finally the intentional wrecking of a Filipino submarine on one of the islands and a permanent military detachment around that wreckage) and then was overcome by the outcome of the Sino-French War that erupted over Qing China’s incursions into Tonkin (the northern part of French-Indochina, now Vietnam). Japan occupied most of the archipelago during World War II, with the Republic of China (now confined to Taiwan) re-establishing garrisons after the Japanese surrender. Lending more support to Chiang Kai-shek than to the communist, mainland government, America preferences rather inflamed the dispute and helped foment the notion of a one-China policy—insofar as the stance translates to Western ears. Post-war, the stakes grew with natural resources to exploit and Malaysia and the Sultanate of Brunei joining in.

Monday 26 October 2015

paramour or family planning

Jewish traditions were first exposed to the tale of Lilith, the “Night Hag,” during their Babylonian Captivity from ancient Sumerian sources, and conflating demonology (daimลnion) with fairies, which are liminal beings capable of both beneficence (like a fairy godmother) and wickedness (mischievousness mostly) and from a psychological stance infinitely more fascinating, decided to wed her to Adam. Whether also chthonic or baked in fire, Lilith was understood to be also elemental and thus not derivative, unlike Adam’s second wife Eve, and thus not very keen on the idea of being subservient or second-class.
After having had liaisons with multiple archangels, God decreed this strident, toxic woman to be no suitable mate and surgically excised Eve as Lilith’s under-study. Apparently, with sentiments more in line with those of fairyfolk, however, Lilith did pine for Adam and for her squandered chances of having children—being that she had become too venomous to nurse any child, no matter how immortal its parentage, having garnered the reputation of being a succubus, which is an awful sounding name for a seductress but is usually just rendered as paramour with no paranormal connotations. The different biological-clocks and this asynchronicity remains a theme in folklore throughout the ages, with Lilith’s curse representing fussy babies that have difficulty breast-feeding and her minions intent on kidnapping human-children, replacing them with an identical-looking changeling. It was taken as a near impossibility for fairies to breed naturally, they replenished their ranks by substituting a wizened, geriatric fairy for a new soul—and in disguise, generally the human foster-parents would care for and for the retired fairy in its old age, though sometimes the changeling could be tricked into betraying its true nature as an old, experienced soul by confronting the infant in question with baby-talk or something equally nonsensical, whereupon the old fairy would protest or attempt to correct the illogical behaviour. If this enchantment is not drawn out in a timely-fashion, the supernumerary child would later show a penchant for developmental disorders and neurological abnormalities—at least that’s how maladjusted offspring were explained through the nineteenth century. Only when fairies were pushed back into the woodwork, supplanted by medicine and machinery, did they begin to take on a diminutive stature and the diaphanous wings, and not uncannily human, characteristics that most associate with fairies today.

Saturday 24 October 2015

sentimental journey

Once Protestantism took hold in large swathes of northern Europe, particularly in England, the pilgrimage undertaken to exotic lands fell out of fashion, people of means needed to articulate another rite of passage that would fulfil this lost outlet. Almost immediately, the notion of the Grand Tour was invented as an authoritative substitute, since one could claim instant superiority in matters of taste and worldliness over one’s neighbours for having seen the masterpieces of the continent first-hand and having even brought back some art as souvenirs.

Though such deportment would have been non- permissible beforehand on the Camino de Santiago, such gap year trips were also seen as not only edifying but also the chance to discretely work whatever hot-blooded passions (associated already with Mediterranean climes) that might need to be exorcised to avoid any scenes at home. The odd and singular aspect of these sojourns was that the itinerary was squarely planted in Catholic lands, which were considered the subversive enemy for the reformed countries of the north—almost as if the most popular tourist-destination for Americans during the Cold War was Stalingrad, immersed in the culture of an ideological nemesis. Many Britons and others felt it was unpatriotic to indulge the sights of the south, but a domestic tourism industry was not developed until the French Revolution made travel impossible, and the Low Countries as well as Scotland and the fjords of Norway were discovered by people who had not previous ventured outside the capitals. After matters had settled down a bit and travel to Southern Europe was again possible, people complained of the changed character of tourism—there were just too many of them and one could hardly be enraptured by art and architecture in a pulsing, pushing crowd of sight-seers. The elite among the holiday-makers began turning away from these cultural enlightening itineraries in response and began to focus on natural destinations, like the beaches and mountains, leaving the cities and museums for the masses.

Thursday 22 October 2015

temporal excursions

Though perhaps not presented in the most rigorous format, Neatoramanaut Rob Manuel does offer a rather compelling and intuitive argument regarding the strictures of time-travel—wherein a back- to-the-future scenario plays out more like being visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past with one being unable to interact or change history in any way.

Scientific minds, worried about paradox and the space-time continuum collapsing due to an essential violation, believe that the fabric of the Universe already enforces a sort of chronological censorship in so far as travelling backwards in time would only admit of self-consistent ventures. In other words, time-travelers could not take a trip to the past and attempt to change any outcome without the Universe conspiring to preserve the time-line, likelihoods going out the window as probability bends to favour more and more improbable events in order to stop an impossible one for occurring. Actually succeeding with the assassination attempt or any number of interventions, despite all the inherent good behind it, would after all have negated the motivation to create a time-machine in the first place.  What do you think?  Are there ways to get around clumsy paradoxes? 

Monday 19 October 2015

guerre civil

Indulging the counter-factual (supposing an alternate history) risks belittling suffering as it happened and building up for oneself a grasping sort of fantasy world, but in that split one also calls to account the calculated omissions and permissions of other powers. The Spanish Civil War that simmered to its critical point in 1936 is something incomprehensible, with long chains of causation reaching back generations and projected forward four decades and more with only drives attributed to make sense of the terrible and theatrical violence. I cannot claim to understand what each faction represented, but to the victor goes the spoils, like Qaddafi, who only reigned a slightly shorter period of time.
The unlearnt lessons of this war that was not contained to a domestic dispute are cemented with Picasso’s mural Guernica that distil the horrors of war that appears at the entrance to the United Nations’ Security Council chambers—at least, that is, from 1985 to 2009 with a notable veiling in 2003 during the Iraq War (when the American defence minister Colin Powell did not want to speak with backdrop of a mutilated horse’s ass) and afterwards the tapestry was sent on tour pending renovations. One is invited to imagine viscerally what befell the victims of this one arbitrary episode among many, but I think too that one is remembered as to how this conflict was also what we’d now call a proxy-war (though certainly not the first, nor the last). The struggle to take region, town by town, did not remain an internal affair for long, with Hitler and Mussolini almost immediately siding with the Nationalists, sending materiel that included the planes that bombed the quiet village of Guernica. British Gibraltar, through the UN’s predecessor that was supposed to prevent such escalations among members, placed an embargo, but with anti-Communist sentiments, did little to quell hostilities. Mexico and the USSR supported the Republicans but garnered a paucity of outside support. Whether the members of the future Axis Powers acted only out of ideology or wanted to destabilise the UK and France is unclear, but it seems as if other stances were assumed, with less entanglement and partisanship, the future might have played out very differently.

Tuesday 13 October 2015

acculturation and ascendency

Just recently I learnt that there is a yet unfolding what to frame the inquiry as to why—given that the Chinese invented the most uncontestably useful and revolutionary innovations in world history, the compass, the stirrup, weirs and dams and locks to allow for inland navigation, porcelain, the spinning wheel, the printed word and gunpowder—China did not continue on the same trajectory in scientific and technological achievement and was overtaken culturally and demographically (by most estimates) by Western Europe with their Age of Exploration, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, fueled in large part by the introduction of such ancient Chinese secrets to the West. The so called “Needham Question” was posed first in the early 1950s by biochemist and China-scholar Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham and sought answers to this conundrum at a time when many Westerners believed the above modern hallmarks were Western inventions, and whose extensive research into the question is yet being unpacked. Given that I was under the impression that China was only interested in gunpowder for dazzling pyrotechnic displays and religious ceremonies (something facetious to believe really, like saying after inventing democracy, philosophy and the fine arts, the Greeks decided to call it a day) and it was Europeans who weaponised it, I suppose it would be wise to explore how such misconceptions come about and perhaps why such advances were not entirely seismic—at least seen through the lens of the occident and the focal point of centuries on.

Though not entirely a monolithic geopolitical landscape at any point in its history, China was a highly bureaucratic meritocracy that spanned a land-mass the size of Europe, which was then a fractious space filled with hundreds of petty kingdoms that would like nothing better than to blow one another to smithereens. Paper and the printing-press were certainly drastic and sweeping when introduced to Europeans, but in China an entire book-culture had already been cultivated for nearly a thousand years (by the time it had reached Europe) and every household had at least a small library. Not that reading was just a sedate pastime but cultural alignment under the Emperor with regimented social order and the lack of subversive elements (depending of course on one’s perspective) printing pamphlets and broadsides shone the presses in a quite different light. It remains very much an open question, ripe for thought, with some arguing that the state fostered a climate in which conscientious bureaucrats were rewarded above all else—discouraging scientific and engineering ambitions beyond what maintained hierarchical cohesion. Others believe that the nature of Chinese religion, which was non-exclusive whereas Christendom was violently so, was not conducive of competition nor of scientific inquiry over metaphysical thought—though holding those precepts hardly sound true for Taoism or Buddhism. Yet others believe—which may be tending in the right direction but makes China out to be a frail place, that the forced-opening of markets, prizing into a self-sufficient economy, and colonisation threw the Empire into social chaos, for which it could not adapt native resourcefulness. Maybe, however, we view China and Asia as a whole like all “faded glory” vis-ร -vis its present presentiments—a threatening dynamo that’s subsumed all the things we’ve declared ourselves inefficient for, another level of faded glory—which seems a dangerous standard to grade things by. What do you think? It is not as if China is no longer inventing things and ought to make the Western world wonder about its privileged position.  Did China not have its enlightenment because it neglected to harness the power of steam, which incidentally was another Greek discovery (the รฆolipile), some two thousand years old?

Sunday 11 October 2015

inter gravissimas

Due to the calendar reform of 1582, most of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Lithuania did not have these past few days in that year—the date jumping from the fourth to the fifteenth of October.
Pope Gregory XIII issued his papal bull, Inter gravissimas, in order to correct for the drift in the Julian calendar but certainly did not considered it a name sake or legacy item, and it was only later historians that sought to reconcile earlier dates on civil calendars, prolepsis, applying the new conventions backwards (which also marked the beginning of the new year with different dates, city by city), that came up with the designation. Confusingly, France implemented this change around two months later, leaping from the ninth to the twentieth of December. Great Britain, Tuscany and the Protestant Kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire waited until the 1700s to make the change. I think all these people had the good sense to stay in bed and wait for tomorrow.