load-bearing month

Fixed and statutory holidays aside, I was wondering if the advance and regression of the Moon inevitably yoked Fasching, Carnival, Marti Gras with the Lunar New Year, but then I realised that this upcoming week, beginning with the ringing in of the Year of the Snake, is really chocked full of celebrations, with the feast day of Cædmon, the earliest Anglo-Saxon poet known by name, following on Monday, with the birthday of statesman Abraham Lincoln and the commemoration of Freedom to Marry, when San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome back in 2004 directed staff to issue marriage licenses in a non-discriminatory manner, then on 12 February.

Wednesday (the 13th) marks the Roman feasts of Lupercalia (spring-cleaning and to encourage fertility, for which two billy-goats and a dog were sacrificed, and were call februa, and celebrants wore their skins) and Parentalia to honour one’s ancestors. Next is naturally St. Valentine’s Day, an international and thoroughly modern institution. 15 February marks Susan B. Anthony Day, American suffragette, and scads of other national observances. Friday marks Kim Jong-il’s birthday and the martyrdom of Elias and his Companions who sought to free and comfort Christians condemned to lives of slave labour in Roman mines during the persecution of Emperor Maximinus II. Saturday sees also the Roman holiday of Flamen Quirinalis (the first three months of the old Roman calendar did not really count, thus November for nine and December for ten, and all these holidays carried on for quite a while) who was considered the deification of statecraft, spear-wielder, and perhaps prototypical cousin to the image of Cupid. That’s quite a bit to pack into one week—not to be overshadowed by any one in particular and there seems to be a common thread running through them all.

fractuous

Some factions of the government in Germany want to selectively open up some regions to the controversial method of extracting natural gas and disinterring other useful resources from the ground, known as fracking—hydraulic fracturing, much to the dismay of members of the public and environmentalists, who fear that they are trying to rush through the policy-reprieve, untested and under-studied ahead of national elections in the Fall of this year. It sounds, unfortunately, like some pandering and ill-conceived rallying-cry, akin to “drill, baby, drill!” and not at all keeping with the move towards the greening of the dirty business of cleaner energy.

While critics of the procedure across the Atlantic where it is in wide use often cite real but possibly dramatized and diversionary effects, like giant, marauding sink-holes and increased seismic activity, German opponents point to fundamental concerns, like the potential for contaminating ecology and ground water, and well as the extraction being retrograde, releasing huge stores of carbon already successfully sequestered by Nature while engineers and scientists are struggling to find ways of keeping the current spillage in check and entombed. I wonder, too, whose backyard these operations will be in.

shoal

Ichthyologists have recently determined that social fish “smell” distinctly different to members of their own species according to maturity and size. Researchers believe that this mechanism developed in order that schools of fish could more quickly gather and sort themselves for protection, assuming a uniform front against predators, since from a fish-perspective, I imagine that it would be hard to judge size by sight. Schooling also helps with foraging for food and facilitates finding a suitable fish-mate.

hey mister talleyrand or church and state

An obscure and archaic concordat (the name for a treaty drawn up between an ecclesiastic and secular state) between the Kingdom of Bavaria (and its successor, Freistaat Bayern) and the Holy See was quietly renewed at the beginning of the year, pledging public funds for the up-keep of churches, parochial schools and the salaries of bishops, who were in a sense displaced. Prior to the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars, the kingdoms of Germany, within the Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans, were quite unlike their neighbouring domains, never united and made up of a patchwork of territories with all manner of varying privileges, rights, freedoms, and thrall, with many city states answerable to no one but the emperor and with powerful and influential networks.
A parallel clerical hierarchy was its own second state wielding a different influence but also with their own wealth and land-holdings. On-going political pressure from the government of France, culminating in revolution and conquering marches, for unity and orderliness—plus a princeling’s ransom that saved some toy kingdoms from being annexed, resulted in alliances forming in Prussia and land-grabs on the part of defeated and diminished states that prompted them towards mediatisation, secularization of church property.
Bavaria alone acquired some 14 000 square kilometers of land (after having loss some 10 000 sq km in the wars), plus the attending population and revenues from bishoprics, monasteries, abbeys, and convents (in addition to a few autonomous enclaves, principalities and locales with imperial immediacy). The decision to absorb church lands was one of the last of the Empire, but the Vatican brokered a deal with Bavaria in 1817 provides that the government maintains former church property, which is still in effect.

The some eleven million euro annually that Bayern spends is quite a bargain, though some tax-payers might object, for all the gains, and the renewal of agreement did not change this year in kind—only pooling funds for distribution, so that the leaders of individual diocese are not on state payroll. While churches and institutions are cared for (other Europe countries have also negotiated their own care-taker agreements with the Holy See with differing provisions), still it makes for some awkward and immemorial bureaucracy where holy sites fall under the sometimes (yet) competing jurisdictions of government, religion and the league of historical and cultural preservation.

the latrix or virtual reality

I missed this study and rather fanciful proposal from astrophysicists at the University of Bonn, which Wired magazine makes eloquently accessible with plenty of science-fiction and philosophical allusions, stating that essentially by observing the paucity, the tiniest corners, of the Universe that humans are able to simulate (it is an escapingly small environ that can be recreated in the laboratory but because the dimensions—but apparently not the focus—are so limited, we can see there is an underlying quantum lattice-work that does not admit to superimposition, sort of like the antiquated idea of electron-shells) and the upper-limits of how energetic something can be, one begins to find the edges—like dots of pointillism that arrange themselves to form a full picture or the mechanics behind a carnival ride.

Suspending disbelief for a moment, these barriers suggest a self-contained experiment with fixed parameters, elusive but not beyond the eventual acuity of the persistent and morbidly curious. Perhaps this is a clue, peeking behind the curtain, but (and I am sure popular speculation goes far beyond the claims and competency of the research) but it also may be a phenomena programmed into our scientific methods and props. Not too long ago, I can recall, sort of an enthusiastic worry that eventually the advancing capacity of digital imagery with exponential mega-pixels could eventual out-map the real world, pictures containing more “information” than their subjects. I wonder how this will play out.