enumerated powers

valle perturbante

Via the ever-excellent Boing Boing comes a preview from Dangerous Minds of the soon to be published of a new edition of the bizarre, Hieronymus Bosch-like, Fantastic Planet illustrated manuscript called the Codex Seraphinianus.
The work is similar to other mysterious codices and artefacts, like the Voynich Manuscript, Carl Jung's Red Books or the Nebra Skydisk, subject to much speculation and wonder, except that the author, Luigi Seraphini, is still very much around—he has only been rather silent about his meaning, hundred of plates picturing alternate and alien biologies and taxologies written in a secret language that place the familiar business of anthropology, mechanics and natural sciences in highly unusual settings.
Seraphini, having first released the book in 1981, went so far as to claim there was no meaning behind his work, but I don't think anyone believes that. The review explores the enduring fandom and following the manuscript has garnered during the information age and perhaps how such an abstraction previsioned it.   More strange imagines are to be found at the link above and one is invited to guess at the meaning. Readers can order the new book from Rizzoli Publishing House later in the month of October.

honeypot or carry on constable

Since 2007, law enforcement in the United Kingdom has gotten into the spreading practice of using lures and decoys to apprehend burglars in the form of Capture Houses and Bait Cars. There is a strange and indefinable feeling of entrapment or pre-crime to this tactic, though I wouldn't actually say it makes me think neighbourhoods are not better served by rounding up more of a certain element, but one has to wonder about the defenseless, anomalous households and whether such easy targets might not present some not otherwise inclined with a gateway target.

After casing the joint for sometime, finding the home to be predictably empty and outfitted with only the usual array of security and deterrents, chains and bolts and lights on a timer (though I suppose attentive neighbours might always prove the best offense), the perpetrator would be greeted with usual tantalizing array of electronics in a setting meant to appear lived in. The home, a freestanding unit, row-house or a flat in a sizable apartment-block, has been vacant for sometime—idle except for an impressive lot of surveillance devices that the police have contracted experts to install in these simulacra that fully document and tag the thieves, probably also revealing something about best-practices in burglary and loot-liquidation. Elsewhere, law enforcement agencies have even mocked up store-fronts to bait would-be robbers. It is quite surreal to think about how that quiet apartment or fly-by-night operation constantly under new management might not be what they seem at all, but more like a hunting blind.

static or if these walls could talk

Apparently allowed four hours like every other non-essential federal employee to prepare for an orderly shutdown, update out-of-office automatic replies and voice mail instructions, the Voyager 1 space probe, as it is poised to leave the Solar System, messaged, poignantly:
“Farewell, Humans—you'll have to sort this one out yourselves.” Like always, NASA could be noising-off all sorts of fascinating things, like following up on that teaser byline about a exo-planet with an atmosphere comprised of water in an exotic plasma state or the timing of the admission by the Russian Ministry of Defense that it is woefully unprepared to protect the Earth from attacks by extra-terrestrials—to say nothing of the suspension of reporting on asteroids hurtling towards Earth. That is not to say government institutions have a monopoly on research and exploration or that the progress and inspiration of science hinges alone of social-media, but it does seem like a very precarious set-back.