broadsheet

This past year was certainly a banner one for anniversaries and centenaries marked the world over, and it seems as if the trend is hardly escapable since we’re survivors of history’s dreadful-excellent heap of memory.
It is a good thing surely not to forget to celebrate what we’ve achieved and overcome but this whole movement to propagrandise and make, especially a century’s passing, a moment of national pride and a rallying-cause happened in 1617—one hundred years after reformer Martin Luther famously nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberger Dom and sparked the era of Protestantism, masterfully captured in this poster with quite a bit of allegory to study, like a political cartoon. Of course, this stand is celebrated every year—peacefully and surely Luther does not endorse the use of his likeness for this campaign message, on 1 November, but apolitically. Mass distribution of this broadsheet—and Luther’s Bible, were made possible by newly introduced printing technologies and the Princes of Prussia certainly were not going to let the date go by without some manipulative media. Clashing forces of the Lutherans and the counter-Reformist Catholic lands in a fractured Holy Roman Empire quickly escalated—especially with sentiments fueled on both sides by caricature and fear-mongering, and led to the Thirty Years War, which was one of the darkest and bloodiest wars of European history Christian sectarianism. I hope that we don’t need our memory jarred with new violence for old.

synæsthetic clock

Via Colossal, here is a wonderfully calm and mesmerising thing to look at: What Colour is it? from Berlin-based artist James E. Murphy, a little webpage that displays the time of day as its hexadecimal (internet browser) colour value, drifting through the hues as the seconds pass. Laughing Squid also features an earlier interpretation that can be downloaded as a screen saver. This would also make a nice face for the upcoming onslaught of so-called wearables—smart watches and other accessories. Synæsthesia refers to those lucky mutants who perceive, intuit sounds as having a tactile feel to them or days having a specific visual properties.

arcade sounds

Via Laughing Squid comes a nifty series of the lyrics to David Bowie’s timeless ballad “Space Oddity” illustrated through panels, imagined album covers of vintage arcade and console video games. Though not quite lent the psychological heft of one’s own favourite songs or of Mozart to settle one’s mood, video game music (think Коробейники, the Tetris song) is composed specifically to remove distractions and helps to keep one focused.

iso 4217 or beyond the dniester

The autonomous strip of land between Moldova and Ukraine that hugs the Dniester river known as Transnistria or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Приднестровская Молдавская Республика) represents the region that did not want to disassociate itself from Mother Russia as the Soviet Union was dissolving.
Though independent from the Moldovian government, Transnistria’s political status has gone unresolved for more than a decade, enjoying only severely limited international recognition mostly from states in similar situations that generally go unrecognised themselves. This situation has resulted in high-hurdles to trade and permeated economic isolation, only open to a few select markets—which inevitably produces a gun-running economy. The predicament has also led to a few innovations—such as can be curried in such an environment, including a unique coinage to compliment their native, “token” currency. These Transnistrian rouble coins are made out of composite plastic and look to me, endearingly, like guitar-picks.

null-set or four-squares

Æon Magazine features a really inviting and illuminating essay from earlier this Summer on how Eastern thought, Buddhism in particular, which can come across to Western-thinkers as hopelessly mystical and too pliable for admitting contradictions, while saying nothing about inherent truths in any system, prevision—in a sense—and converge in the logical constructs of mathematics, modern set-theories which have applications in computing and high-level physics.

Again—I suppose that the inherent truth behind these disciplines, which appear rigourous and legitmate to the experts that create them, is not something unredoubtable in itself, like claiming that one of the two superficially different modes of philosophy is more enlightened than the other, plus religion and worldly informatics do not necessarily have the same aims. While Aristotle, championed by the Romans and the Church and became the influential standard for scientific investigation, insisted that everything was black and white—everything either was or was not—another, third option was not given, terium non datur, as the Romans called it. Around the same time, Buddha and his disciples were considering a fourth, with the option of a fifth up to the thirty-second degree, option in the range of possibilities by subjecting all question to what’s called catuṣkoṭi, a sort of four corners of being, wherein something is either true and only true, false and only false, partially both or neither true nor false. Concepts like this come across as infuriating often in Western contexts, though many thinkers have touched on this set of logical operators before and they appear contractually in programming and in the maths that allow it. Though on the surface the states of catuṣkoṭi might sound a little like the conjunctions of AND, OR, NOT and XOR, to really start seeing the states as non-contradictory, one can start to think of them in terms of relationship and functions.
The article illustrates this range of connexions through parentage and siblings: mother of is functional since any son or daughter has just one, whereas son of or sister of is relative since there could be any number of permutations, dependent on the family or none at all. This article and discussion is certainly something to step away from and reflect on—rather than reading in one sitting, but it is without a doubt fascinating that mathematicians and logicians came to restore to the same quiver of paradigms as Eastern philosophies, without being some closeted mystic or Buddha-apologist. The fifth option, which could explode into all sorts of other dimensions, is what’s called the ineffable (a pretty neat sounding word): when those paradoxes and fundamental contradictions are handed down to us, seemingly only for the sake of confusion, a kōan—the sound of one hand clapping, we have to admit that it’s an experience too big to get our heads around and thus unspeakable. Presented with this possibilities—that there are things in the cosmos which we cannot articulate or even perceive, certainly seems very real and probably comprises an infinitely bigger part of reality, it seems however that we are just pushing back contradiction by a few powers, which may be significant in itself, by knowing of something that we can’t hope to address or not knowing about it at all.