ætherial or to catch a thief

Technologically savvy forensics experts in Germany (the broadcast is only in German) see great potential in exploiting inchoate but measurable aberrations in the environment—specifically the electromagnetic fields generated in any indoors area by electrical sockets.  The not completely hypothetical situation that researchers hope to stage and test the refinement of their gauges involves the story of a murder most-foul.  A woman has been killed, the experiment supposes, and in the absence of any physical evidence, damning or exonerating, the investigators have no way to eliminate or prosecute one of the suspects over the other, the woman’s husband or their neighbor.

Screams and a struggle, without corroboration, however do not go without an audible-footprint, at least indirectly—thanks to the unique and indelible cycling of electricity delivered over alternating current, there’s a time-stamp running in the background of any audio or video recording—that can pinpoint when and where the recording was made and if it was edited, no matter how cleverly or professionally done.  While Big Foot and UFOs are not necessarily in the vicinity of AC power sources, informants and confidential sources usually are and governments are hoping to be able to catch whistle-blowers in the act.  So much for crime-solving, but the poor woman’s death was not captured by any means—conventional at least, but supposing the attacker carried on his person some sort of electronic device, that electric hum would echo in a complimentary way to the method of exposing a snitch.  Though any change or disruption power would be infinitesimally small, one’s devices and electronic accessories can also be exploited, like seismographs, picking up any change in the electromagnet landscape.  Even though the mobile phone forgotten (given that that cell-phone is not already tattling or building an alibi in other ways) in the attacker’s pocket derives no charge from the electricity lurking in the wall socket, via induction, that external power source disrupts the phone’s internal current, in tiny but telling ways, and imprinting the signature of one’s whereabouts at any given time.  Atoms are judged to be perfectly elastic, capable of forever bouncing off one another without drag one experiences on the macroscopic level, but there are certain tell-tale stress-marks that have to do with the optimal, most efficient alignment of a wire in a circuit. While these are not measurable performance-metrics at the moment—that we know of, and exceedingly small it looks like such static might be of vital interest in the near future.

null-set or zero, my hero

Brain Pickings, using a speculative survey of the nature of nothing and how chaos, harnessed for opportunity can come of that void as a provocative point-of-departure for talking about mindfulness, aggrandizement and general overall well-being and resiliency.
Research shows that the placebo-effect (from the Latin, I will please) is not negated after all when subjects know that they are part of an experiment and are taking an inert little helper, and the essay goes on to address those obvious but escaping maxims of circumspection, curiosity, hope and a sense-of-purpose that are so fundamental and basic to the good life. I know, easy to say and it's the most difficult thing in the world not to be an existential brat and hold everything in perspective—despite numerous studies showing that these clinical zeroes, just thoughts, calm and collecting, and the real negating notion that a disclosed sugar-pill is still not too much of a let-down, it is the concept of zero (from the Arabic, it is empty) that is really novel and interesting when applied philosophically. Maybe all other achievements, progress is really not due to complicity, cooperation or incorporation but the ability to dismiss that direct chemical intervention as a placebo.  Though we can relate to nothing left or even indebtedness, nothing and nothing as a place-holder is a pretty abstract idea to grasp. It has developed significantly over the generations but I think a really concrete understanding of a void eludes us. What do you think? Can fulfillment or genuine needs be answered by a series of nothings?

carillon

The Local's Austrian edition has a curious dispatch from the city of Graz, regarding a compromise struck between community planners, the majority of the resident and the Muslim population of the city.

The Islam Cultural Centre of Graz, whose grounds house the mosque and minaret, the tower where the muezzin traditionally announces the call to prayer to the faithful, will signal prayer time—inaugurated with the start of Ramadan over the weekend, but with a beam of light, like a light-house and supplemented by sending an alert to the mobile phones of subscribers. Being the first mosque in the region (and also because it is the first and only, not all the twenty thousand estimated members of the community would be in ear-shot of the call), the cultural centre did not want to be overly intrusive and commissioned this silent invocation. What do you think about that? Is this a mutually acceptable solution? No one is proposing to mute church bells—which are much more pervasive—but what if someone did?

pavlovian response

In the name of science, a popular social media platform conducted a massively multiplayer experiment on unsuspecting users, to see if they could engineer an individual's behaviour through being selective on what updates it spoon-fed from ones constellation of contacts. According to disclosures, which only makes one wonder what might lie beneath and what other mind games we are exposed to—outside of those socially-acceptable forms of manipulation that we deal with, like marketing and politics—several hundred thousand users had a particularly inauspicious week, as only bad news from their friends was filtered to them—while the other half enjoyed a seemingly manic, rollicking good time, at least vicariously.

Certainly, attitudes and emotions are contagious and one ought not to derive all one's stimuli and emotional modelling from the computer—and I do question the scientific rigour of this study as we don't really know what algorithms or protocols were used to gauge the the affective timbre of one's activities. I guess there is no accounting for envy, Schadenfreude or sour-grapes.  If social networks feel that they have stumbled across some new and powerful way of toying with the masses, do you think indoctrination and brain-washing could be that far behind, since one's sphere of acquaintances, no matter how small or reticent do usually have a far greater representational impact? I am feeling more and more suspicious about the headlines are being plied.

pataphor or décervelage

There is a branch of philosophical thought that transcends metaphysics (hard enough in itself to define but dealing with fundamental laws and first principles) developed by a French avant garde artist and his followers called ´pataphysics. Though it is a challenge to imagine much less convey what this discipline deals in, one meaning is that it is the study of imaginary solutions, answers without questions, and the science that governs those exceptions that make the rules.

The prime or apostrophe that precedes the word signifies that the pataphysican adheres to Alfred Jarre's original school of thought, and not some unorthodox sect of pataphysics—unscored, but I suspected it had something to do with the soft-breathing diacritical marker of classical Greek orthography. Growing out of the movements of theatre of the absurd and dadaism is media, an institute of higher learning, the Collège de ´Pataphysique based on Jarre's philosophies was founded in Paris in 1948, and attracted such pupils as the Marx Brothers, Joan Miro and many of the artists of the surrealist movement. During the 1960s and 1970s, campuses opened up around the world and there are still some formal classes held, dealing with concepts like clinamina, from the early atomists which describes the smallest possible swerve that can translate to the biggest impact, antimony—duality, mutual-incompatibility or cognitive discord—and of course the pataphor, a figure of speech that departs from the literal message two-fold but more than a stretched-metaphor. The crest of the college and associated organizations is the image of the greedy and wanton King Ubu, the title character of Jarre's play that was on the surface some strange, juvenile pastiche of King Lear, Hamlet and Duck Soup but was a powerful and discomforting social-commentary on avarice in war (and was never produced again, except in puppet form).

tea and trost

The ever-excellent Neat-o-Rama features a brilliant lexicon of beautifully artificial, though authentic and convincing sounding to define types of forlorn feelings had not yet been named. Carefully crafted by a former English language dictionary editor, this growing and expansive collection surely gave the author the creative outlet to be expansive with words. I am particularly fond of the first three entries:

Sonder n. The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your

own.

Vemödalen n. The frustration of photographing something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist—the same sunset, the same waterfall, the same curve of a hip, the same closeup of an eye—which can turn a unique subject into something hollow and pulpy and cheap, like a mass-produced piece of furniture you happen to have assembled yourself.

Vellichor n. The strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Be sure to check out the link for the complete list and etmyologies and the website that gives names to those vague sorrows. Trost is a real German word, meaning solace or sympathy, that I thought was a good fit.