reflex arc or virality

It has been demonstrated perennially that yawning is contagious, even across different species.

Studies have also shown that reflective yawning is a good gage for empathy—imitating someone, even unconsciously like crossing one’s legs in the same way or being synchronised in stride or even the more embarrassing slip or copying someone’s diction (where another might believe that he or she are being mocked instead), betrays interest—and yawns are more likely to spread around if there is some spared affinity. Recently someone has even shown that broods of parakeets pass around this reflex in a highly ritualised, choreographed manner. Further, there are theories that yawning helps to coordinate cycles of sleep and wakefulness among close associates (a zeitgeber) and might even be akin to wolfs howling together. Alternatively (but not exclusively), the ability to yawn, and mirror this behaviour, that allowed humans to expand their intellect, being a mechanism to cool overheated brains, aside from fatigue or boredom. There is no definitive consensus on either its social or physiological function, however. Although yawning itself is hardly a memorable act and I’d venture to say that I yawn in isolation when no one else is around, I can’t that’s not a false proposition and I wonder if there wasn’t one primal yawn that’s been passed around, jumping species, ever since.

daytrip: dreieich

After work yesterday, I took a trip to the nearby village of Dreieich. I had the chief aim of strolling a bit in the countryside and locating the elusive Stangen- pyramide, an outdoor installation of hundreds of graduated wood cylinders that supposedly nicely frame the Frankfurt skyline in the distance—failing that however (though long-wandering through the wheat fields and I will return this time with precise GPS coordinates), I thought to look in town, feeling a bit sorry for the place since I assumed that no one ever visited a place community that’s right off the airport.

I think I might have been mistaken and was pleasantly surprised to find a half-timbered (Fachweck) jewel of a town centre, dominated by the ruins of a fortress. Dreieich has much older Roman roots but the medieval resettlement of the area was owing to a royal hunting-grounds (Wildbann) tended there. Many of the bedroom communities outside of Frankfurt and along the Main originated in the same way—this whole area between Frankfurt and Aschaffenburg having once been a continuous wood, and is reflected in the town’s name and crest—three oaks. Burg Hayn was the stronghold for the bailiff of this estate and a sort of warehouse and armoury.
Dreieich claims to have been Emperor Charlemagne’s favourite stalk and the general layout of the fortification and village that grew up around it were copied throughout the region. Walking through the walled town was also quite nice, with much of the old character preserved, and the residents seem quite house-proud—one could even purchase the town’s half-timbered ensemble in miniature from a shop. I did seem as if it did get its fair share of visitors, bucking my assumptions, and I will return myself to locate that pyramid.

5x5

nothing up my sleeve: wonderful, strange curation of items found inside album covers

dragnet: one brilliant young inventor’s ambition to clean up the oceans to be tested in Japan

space-time coordinates: as a homage to Back to the Future II, one company hopes to make inside-out jeans a thing in time for 21 October 2015

playscaping: repurposed shoe factory and airplanes create a fantastic urban playground in St. Louis

solid-state: nice super-cut of analogue consoles in sci-fi movies

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.