ICAO

Just a month after Norway debuted its selection for its redesigned paper currency, the Nordic nation unveiled a sleek, minimal look for its passport and identity cards. Though unconventional and laser-etched with security features that are really beautiful (take a look inside at The Local) rather than just dependably brutal, the format meets International Civil Aviation Organisation standards and the first documents with the new design are set to be issued in a couple of years.

think different or the great and final samādhi

Writing for the ever excellent Boing Boing, Jason Louv presents a very fine accounting of the parting gift that Steve Jobs shared with those friends, family members and associates, copies of the Autobiography of a Yogi, with a biography of the guru challenged to come to America to impart Hindu meditation to the West. The yogi’s story and success in introducing some of these practices in the 1920s and 30s have a significant legacy and have impacted many. As the author lucidly demonstrates, however, the notions of yoga and relaxation as imported—without a guru to oversee the export—become rather muddled, since the mental exercises are only aides, discipline-builders and not ends in themselves: meditation is not about self-help but rather liberation from self. The idea of abandoning one’s identity to be subsumed by the Cosmos does rather chafe at the ideals held by many Americans about self-reliance and selfhood and does seem infinitely elusive, but objectivity, tranquility and the courage to look inward is something that we can all strive for.

immrama or beyond the beyond

Though the Turkish president is facing some unfair ridicule for claiming that the relationship between the Islamic world and Latin America is a far more ancient one, Ireland stakes an even older title with the legendary voyages of Saint Brendan of Tralee.
Though the saint never stated that America was the Earthly Paradise (another candidate is La Palma in the Canaries), the Isles of the Blessed he was charged with finding by an angel for having been skeptical about an account of miracles and strange beings, Brendan does have a dedicated society of believer advocating his discovery preceded even that of Leif Erickson and the Vikings. Having embarked on this immram (the Irish word for a seafaring odyssey), the abbot assembled a cast of fellow monks (plus a few naysayers for good measure) may not have reached the Americas—though that is a matter of debate and faith—but came across many other curious places along the way. It is told that the adventures camped one evening on the back of a slumbering sea-monster, the aspidochelone, having mistook it for an island, make landfall on the island of the Birds of Paradise that sing like a choir of angels, encounter other monastic communities—including a hermit who has lived in the elements for sixty years draped only in his own hair and taken care of by an otter, a fiery land of blacksmiths that cast molten slag at the visitors (possibly a reference to volcanic Iceland) and crystal pillars in the sea (maybe icebergs) and the lonely skerry where Judas gets his respite from Hell on Sundays and holidays.

hair of the dog or copra cabaña

Do you remember the panic and hysteria over monosodium glutamate (MSG) in Chinese foods or the revelation that a bag of movie-theatre popcorn had the fat content of eighteen fast-food burgers?  A related shock-campaign transformed the world’s culinary landscape in the early to mid-1980s when the old staples of the industry, tallow—lard and tropical oils, coconut and palm, were demonised as the fount of all ills and understudies quickly championed good health and general dietary decency.

The forces behind this paradigm was not, however, a temperance union seeking to unseat processed foods nor agents really interested in public health, but rather flagship agriculture lobbies. Soy, maize and rapeseed crops had of course been cultivated for millennia but not for their oils, as the unsaturated fats were too unstable at high temperatures and quickly went rancid. Once the process of hydrogenation was perfected, bombarding these bumper-crops of the West in order to mimic superficially some of the qualities of the now derided saturated fats, these new, refined oils infiltrated everything we eat. In order to initiate and sustain this rather significant change, a selective explanation and quasi-myth of saturated fats—with an overwhelming array of nuances with un-, mono- and polysaturated, triglycerides and trans-fatty acids, was carefully crafted. With the taste for colonialism turning sour, a whole business started over spices, around this time, conditions were ideal for the promotion of a yet unexploited by-product of farming. The public is mostly appeased by this simplistic coup and throughout alternatives have been available for the sake of those malingerers—considering, however, that nearly all foodstuffs are swimming in corn-syrup and other beefed-up oils, it is a little like the token egg that cake-mixes call for, unnecessarily but it makes people feel more like they are baking. What do you think? Some argue that the normalisation process on these new oil sources create industrial solvents that are not digested in healthful ways.

meh moi

It’s funny how the twists of language and etymology are pulverised by convention and custom until those curious lumps are all but flattened out. English does have a lot of beautiful, virtually redundant words from Greek and Latin traditions that signify practically the same thing. There are, however, many pairs too of more recent lendings and borrowings that withdrew from English as a Germanic word, discovered by the French speaking a Celtic-Romance language as a useful term and returned to modern English under a different guise. Beforehand, it had never occurred to me to wonder why there are more than a few w-g couplings in English that essentially mean the same thing, much less that they were actually different ways of pronouncing one word that eventually took on separate connotations. There is ward and guard, warranty and guarantee, warn and garish, and even wench and garçon (both from an original word meaning outcast).
In these examples, the former from Germanic roots and the latter French, the g-sounding equivalents were reintroduced to spoken English during the Norman Conquest and gradually took on certain nuances in meaning. The French, possibly as the Gaulish that the aboriginal population did not use that particular sound, had a lot of trouble making a w-sound and so prefixed it with a g-sound to make it more pronounceable and less harsh on the ears. It might not seem like much that a given set of glyphs can be used to represent sounds in an agreed-upon manner but one that outsiders would surely recognise as anything other than phonetic and intuitive, but that abiding is pretty remarkable. On the other end of the spectrum, there are a whole host of not invented languages, but rather invented but Greco-Latin based alphabets, like runes (used for inscriptions only as the Germanic peoples were functionally illiterate), Gothic, Glagolithic, Cyrillic, and many others. From an aesthetic standpoint, of course I think that this diversity is a beautiful thing—but from a practical point of view, when writing was dismantled by trade and kept the same to facilitate that same commerce, it seems a little… meh… maybe just adding to the babble and otherness. I never reasoned, however, an alphabet would be designed to give speakers the means to express sounds not present in the derived, given form.
The Greeks and the Romans used the Phoenician alphabet just off the shelf, however, and just changed what sounds the letters represented to suit their way of speaking. Originally, the writing system that the Phonetians used was something called an abjad—that is an alphabet without vowel sounds represented, only consonants and the reader would know the appropriate ligatures by context—and the first letter Alef, which became Alpha and the Letter A did not make that sound (or any sound, as a glottal stop) at all.