Authentic efforts to heal the environment and lessen human impact is always to be applauded and Germany, which has assumed a role of leadership both in better management of ecology and economy, I think has some very good intentions and cannot be accused of bullying Greece or exacerbating its financial problems and standing. Germany’s robust push towards greener energy and industry is at risk of becoming a pyrrhic victory and zero-sum-game, due in part to the malingering and knock-on effects of that other management sphere, the euro policy.
Friday 4 January 2013
hearth and home or genie in the bottle
Thursday 3 January 2013
chatter or natural infrastructure
The quietly superb BLDG BLOG has an excellent back-to-back series of articles on early improvisations and alternatives to telephony and wireless communications technology that patched together networks from features of native landscapes, including party lines with barbed-wire carriers across the Old West that was really a ranchpunk bit of cleverness, and serious proposals for a massive antenna array in the Wisconsin Dells (plus a bonus Soviet Dooms Day device) or Antarctica to facilitate correspondence with trawling submarines with the bedrock of the Earth acting as a transmitter for a Cold War worse-case scenario.
The series began, however, with an article from a science magazine on accidental discovery that a tall and living tree-trunk makes a surprisingly good aerial, complete with schematics and scheming. These were really engrossing stories and rather the opposite of leapfrogging technologies in their ingenuity. A tree, even if ill-used, is a far better sight than a cellular tower any day, and it would be really keen if the same creativity could rig hill and valley or derelict pathways to harness, passively, energy.
catagories: ๐ฑ, ๐ก, networking and blogging
Wednesday 2 January 2013
hang in there, baby
Though I tend to think that contemporary motivation posters, especially those letter-boxed ones with rather heavy-handed themes, are mostly effective for workers that could might someday soon be replaced by robots, I really enjoyed the series of lithographs for their artwork and message, featured right in time for the end of the holiday season and return to the office when the atmosphere at work can be quite oppressive and demotivating at times.
commutative property or sixth happiness
Perhaps I was a bit prematurely to dismiss the new year as numerically unremarkable. I heard an India fortuneteller on the radio this morning, prefacing her words and prognostications with the pronouncement that all numbers are indeed lucky, that this year, broken down as 2+0+1+3 yields six, the number of harmony in some circles and duty or domestic relations in others.
Tuesday 1 January 2013
fraternization
In reverence to one extraordinarily florid line of copy, dateline: Charlotte, 1965, which reports on the domestic murder of a millworker by his family as if the incident were a game of chess, guided by some “occult hand,” there is a loose but exclusive association of journalists that are known to one another by the clever and subtle infiltration of this phrase into print and perpetuating the reporter’s words.
This style of writing, sometimes without affection, is called Purple Prose, typified by stock-phrases like Baron Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous “it was a dark and stormy night…” Incidentally, it is an interesting comparison—purple prose—with the other colours of literary criticism, blue language and yellow journalism. It was an insiders’ joke and I am sure appreciated by anyone hep to it, and then buried away when discovered, aware that most would just overlook the obscure and fancy language. It has grown harder and harder to restrict membership, however, to those in-the-know in recent years and it does not take much sophistication to jar this phrase out of the archives of the press with a simple search on the Internet. In response to the club’s select-status slipping away, the Order of the Occult Hand, is reinventing itself with a new secret and supposedly baroque code phrase. Of course, the rebooted membership is not publishing what this new clichรฉ might be, since that would ruin the fun and expose them again. It will be a fun challenge to try to shoehorn the new passkey out of the headlines and from the newspaper page.
MCMLXXXVII or the dream sequence always rings twice
When one tries to parse the year 2013, it seems a bit unremarkable from the perspective of numerology—not a prime number and a reprieve from twelve years of red-letter repeating dates, 12.12.12, 08.08.08. It is no grand cycle within a cycle but counting conventions do make this year hark back to a yesteryear, 1987, the last time a year was expressed with four different numerals—which is a little weird when one thinks about it. What primers and refreshers took place back then and what nascent things happened all those years ago that became emergent and formative? Western hostages were taken in Lebanon and the Iran-Contra Affair Commission scrutinizes the prosecution of US foreign policy. The Unabomber is terrorizing America. U2 released the album Joshua Tree, and Michael Eisner and Jacques Chirac close the deal for the construction of Euro Disneyland. The Simpson characters first appeared as an animated short on the Tracey Ullman Show. A 19 year old West German pilot created an imaginary bridge to the East by landing his plane in Moscow’s Red Square.
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the UK continues its reign and Ronald Reagan, from West Berlin, implores Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down that Wall.” The accords of the European Community, forerunner to the EU, were debated and codified. Michael Jackson records the album Bad. The laboratories at Los Alamos host the first conference on the topic of artificial intelligence and bionic life, and Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in syndication. Free trade agreements were struck for North America and the first national Coming-Out day is celebrated in Washington, DC. Medicine first describes and diagnoses what is called chronic fatigue syndrome, and ater his death, mathematician Kurt Gรถdel publishes his ontological proof for the existence of God. The live drama of a little girl who fell down a well in Midland, Texas captivates audiences with its televised, point-for-point coverage (other iconic portrayals on TV included Max Headroom, the precursors to reality-shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Rescue 911 and the salad days of Remington Steel, Falcon Crest, Dallas, Moonlighting, Matlock, MacGuyver, Golden Girls, Designing Women and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse). The Black Monday stock market crash sends markets tumbling, just after the Dow reached the heights of 2500 points. A high speed rail network in France and Germany breaks records, and Romanian workers revolt against the regime of Ceauลescu. Windows version 2.0 is released, as is the first Final Fantasy computer game, and the US Food and Drug Administration approves the use of the anti-depressant Prozac. The world had to say goodbye to such luminaries as Liberace, Rita Hayworth, Fred Astaire, Lee Marvin, Maria von Trapp, Mary Astor and Danny Kaye. There are of course many other iconic moments of the year, which waxed and waned into fulfillment in the fullness that characterizes any year and successor events, and I am not sure how the retreat into all things retro, just beyond the easy grasp of recorded experience, resonates through to today. That year is not the template for this one, certainly, but we would be amiss to forget the past and not try to jostle up some clues, dreamy and distant, about where we are today and what the numbers might hold for us.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ท๐บ, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ฌ, ๐️, ๐ณ️๐, ๐ฑ, ๐, ๐, ๐ง , ๐งฎ, 1987, foreign policy, philosophy, revolution, transportation, ⓦ