beauty mark or parallax view

Our bit of the morning sun has unfortunately been hidden behind steely grey and rainy skies, so we weren’t able to try to see the shadow of Venus crossing the sun ourselves. The intense interest the event has garnered in hobby astronomers everywhere, however, does make me happy and I think expresses continued regard for the sciences and exploration. People flock and cluster around more common lunar eclipses (Sonnenfinsternisse) and meteor showers and though with more heuristic merit than a school science fair project reduplicated without discovery or method, and studying this rare transit will give planet hunters a better understanding of how to spot alien worlds around distant stars, who might disclose their existence by casting a similar tiny shadow and what the roughness of that shadow says about a planet’s atmosphere, size and composition. Historically too Venus has brought together astronomers from different countries and dispatched them to far-flung places, from Tahiti to the Desolation Islands (the French Kerguelen archipelago) by the Antarctic. For really the first time in modern times, scientists cooperated and collaborated on an international level to observe this phenomenon in the 18th century, needing to do so from several different vantage points, irrespective of national or religious convictions: comparing the incidence, size and angle of Venus from different points on the Earth at the same time let scientists extrapolate (from the known distances along the Earth) the distance between the sun and the Earth. That was a pretty nifty trick.

crystalline entity

With a franchise spanning over four decades, many creative and original story-lines, astute social observation and visionary gaffing and rigging that’s brought us so far the tricorder and synthehol, the talents behind Star Trek could certainly be forgiven for coming up with a few dullards. Topless Robot has gathered trading-cards on the top twenty lamest Star Trek alien encounters in a fun and irreverent way, demonstrating I think there was genius behind missing the mark. The web site also features a lot of other humorous collections of sci-fi superlatives that stirs memories of all sorts of forgotten episodes.

börsianer börsiana

The experimental nature and political integration that characterize the euro and the European Union I think may be draw unfair attention, as something perceived as more novel and catastrophic than it really is. Japanese public debt stands at some 230% of its gross domestic product (Bruttoinlandsprodukt), placing Greece squarely in the middle with 152% to America’s 99.5% reported debt that’s just at the break-even mark. Japan even managed to reach these heights outside of the strictures of a monetary or trade union and was free to fine-tune its economy and despite a robust manufacturing sector.

Most of the industrialized states in Western Europe hover around eighty percent. Some can abide and that’s a clever little measure that puts us all in our places all a great spectrum of investment and returns but of course that too is imperfect, not capturing intangibles and not taking into account circumstance like needs and means. Much impatience and frustration (right or wrong) is being visited on Germany for action, and Germany probably will in the end, before the capital and patience of the public evaporates, make a move that inspires a strange, predatory sort of confidence—a more direct endorsement, seemingly, than the mechanisms of bureaucracy. Such heroic cooperation, however, begs the question whether member states are agreeing to whatever bundle of rules and accords out of solidarity and desire to reform, regroup or just in a bid to get enough support to continue the same game. Germany certainly would not want to see all the avatar currencies returned, making a situation where the once-and-future Deutsch Mark is considerably more valuable than a splintered euro. Is such reasoning for this experimentation and not political unity the driving-factor behind a broader movement of aid and assistance?

swatches

I suppose I am not organized or disciplined enough to be a proper curator—or stick with an intelligible theme—and such things do matter among miscellany and easy-of-access considering what goes forgotten and neglected, but I was looking for a specific kind of pattern and all these diverse textile designs did strike me as having some sort of association, in a Jungian common-fate sort of way. The first is a very mod pattern from 1960, British I think. The second is from an artist working in the 1920s named Maria Likarz and suggests a hail of unread emails. The third is a 1950s Eames Era inspired print that looks like something viral, a transmission. The fish pattern is by Wiener Werkstätte compatriot Hans Carl Perleberg and I think is brilliant for the hues and direction. The blackboard abstraction is by Orphian movement founder Sonia Delaunay. And the narrow stack of arches are also from the workshops of Vienna and prefigure one of the standards of Art Dèco architecture, whose successor style—like all these other periods—hold a timeless that maybe groups them together.