brav und borrel or thesaurus of feels

Professor and contributor to The Journal of Positive Psychology, Tim Lomas, aims to enrich our emotional landscape with a collection of some two hundred terms that have no equivalent in English. One can see the abstract at the journal’s website that began this continuing undertaking, but Boing Boing goes one further, sharing a selection of some of the terms of endearment (and they are positive and fulfilling sentiments in the main).

It’s hard to say if stocking our quivers with more precise, nuanced words improves our emotive literacy but I agree that the project and further investigation is worthwhile for its own sake. Some of my favourites included:

Rare English: grok—understanding so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed

Icelandic: að jenna—perseverance for seeing a boring chore through

Hindi: talanoa—gossip as a social-adhesive

Greek: ξενία—recognising the importance of hospitality

Be sure to check out Boing Boing’s choices and learn more about the study, perhaps finding a new way of expressing what resonates with you. I especially appreciated how the article was categorized with the tag “the meaning of liff,” in reference to the Douglas Adams collaboration to fill lexical gaps for relatable experiences for which there was beforehand no adequate expression.

biotop oder flyover

With nice weather and reckoned sufficient time, I (possibly impulsively) decided to meet a couple of colleagues for dinner in Mainz under my own power and set out crossing the Rhein on foot from the Hessen capital of Wiesbaden to the adjacent capital of Rheinland-Pfalz. It’s a funny and persistent syndrome that’s mostly not been a disservice, but trying to imagine distances in my head are without fail translated to something much smaller, a sandbox that one can just dart from one corner to another without any investment of time and energy.

It always ends well, in any case, and I was treated to vistas that one could not appreciate at higher speeds, certainly not from the passenger seat of a car, and the islands of industry and the contemplative lagoons at rest and the green verge that buffered the city from the shore. I knew the general direction but away from the clearly marked path, I had a clever application in my pocket that gave me a nudge if I was marching in the opposite directly but did not reign in my exploration overmuch. Truly away from the roads and taking the most direct routes, given my mode of transportation, I was astounded to find myself hiking through a really amazing and unexpected nature reserve just above the river’s floodplain—unseen but infinitely more interesting than some fallow-field of highway median.
I found myself in a landscape of sand dunes (der Mainzer Großer Sand), whose pronounced topography did not present a struggle but was distinctly not flat, the sort of geometry one grows unaccustomed to along more manicured trails.
This ancient environment was host to tall cypress trees and other flora that belonged in more Mediterranean climes, owing to the fact that although nutrient poor, sand was far better at holding heat.  Approaching the boroughs of Mombach and Gonsenheim, the dunes made the transition into a great forest, only gently interrupted with a few paths, that is the largest contiguous one in the region at seven square-kilometers, a wood of some eighteen-hundred acres. Despite being often turned around and stopping to marvel at the landscape, I still made it on time but with none to spare.

cue cutlines

After the dismal (ricocheting, perhaps) failure of its last Chat Bot, Microsoft has unveiled a routine that writes captions (cutlines really as the output is a few lines of description) for your photos, Gizmodo reports. The programme seems reliably good, especially in the face of the heaps of obscenity I’m sure the internet is tossing at it, but be forewarned, as the service curates the images submitted to it for training purposes. Although not the first attempt at automated captioning, it does seem like a good approach to organise one’s ever growing archives of pictures.

flights of fancy or project longshot

The announcement coinciding with Space Night, the anniversary marking Yuri Gagarin’s seminal space-walk—as Boing Boing reports, Professor Stephen Hawking is partnering with a consortium of investors (we are all stake-holders in this enterprise) to send a swarm of small space probes, propelled aloft on the beams from an array of lasers—which providing that the focus can hold, could see at least some of the tiny craft (about the size of a pocket calculator with sails unfurled) reach our nearest stellar companions, the group also known as Rigil Kent, the foot of the Centaur, around five-hundred times the distance from the Sun to Pluto, in just two decades. The method makes me think of the Little Prince hitching rides on passing comets. Starshot, as it’s called, has some technical challenges to overcome, and regrettably it seems perhaps sustained public enthusiasm for science projects, and who knows what we’ll discover—but I think that Hawking and associates can push our horizons.

tobacco mosaic

Graphic artist Eleanor Lutz’ latest project is a series of animated viral trading cards, that teach about the infectious agents’ properties and causes one to better appreciate these hauntingly complex structures. Such pathogens, liminal and not easy to distinguish from vegetable and mineral and I think that notion of an autonomous and adaptive poison imparts them with their sinister reputation, but as persistent as these pestilences are, our bodies have become ever more resilient in rebuffing countless and non-stop assaults. This piece comes to us by way of the outstanding Kottke, who has introduced us, to our delight, to Lutz’ works previously.