Thursday, 16 July 2015
mad dash or beyond thunderdome
catagories: ๐️, ๐ฌ, networking and blogging
pentathlon or gin and conics
The surprise, unsought for confirmation of hitherto theoretical exotic quark combinations from the laboratories of CERN was certainly noteworthy, but I personally had a very difficult time penetrating what the discovery meant. As best as I understand it—and with no reserves about revealing my ignorance or misapprehension, the fact that quarks can be conduced to form up this way for a fleeting instance—it is not a state found in nature outside the lab except perhaps in exploding stars or the mind of God, could led to important insights about what’s called the strong-nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces that govern physics on a cosmological scale, according to the current Standard Model.
Wednesday, 15 July 2015
6x6
extended family: wild horses in the Falklands adopt a penguin
fido: the second day of Nepalese Festival of Lights, Tihar, is honours the trusted friendship of dogs
box-office bombs: why don’t we remake awful movies better instead of trying to improve upon the classics?
footlights: beautiful gallery of European opera houses from on stage
toupee: internet challenges pet owners to trump it up
surface features: xkcd lampoons the latest telemetry from Pluto
catagories: ๐, ๐ฌ, ๐ญ, ๐บ️, holidays and observances
namely: plutographic
Not to take any wind out of the sails of our celestial celebrity, via the Oxford English Dictionary’s daily vocabulary teaser comes a little jewel of a word, coined by the writer Tom Wolfe, plutography.
hella throughput
One other state assess to undergo privatisation, despite protests and public sentiment is the historic and busy port Pirรฆus in Attica, one of the largest in the world and fount of Greece’s thalassocracy—a sea-going empire and later shipping tycoons and trade magnates and island-hopping around the archipelago. Pirรฆus also happens to be the name of our second favourite Greek restaurant—having been recently unseated by a new favourite called Athen, being the German form of the great city ฮฮธฮทฮฝฮฑ and it strikes me as curious how different name cases come across in different languages with different conjugations and declinations, Athens sounding something akin to, “Let’s go to Walmart’s.”
Having the public relinquish a controlling stake in this venture is really torturous and I wonder how the past and the future will judge this decision. Pirรฆus is also known as the Lion’s Port—referencing a monumental fountain that stood at the harbour’s entrance from the third century BC to the late seventeenth century, when it was looted along with other spoils by invading Venetians during the War of the Holy League, the belligerents being Western Europe and Balkan rebels against the Ottoman Empire of the east. This ancient lion, somewhat defaced by the graffiti Nordic mercenaries excited over their war trophies, was delivered to the Arsenal (shipyard) of Venice—where it still stands along with other captive lions. The sobriquet is also still in place, despite the lion’s three centuries of absence, and I wonder if Greece has asked for it to be returned.
Tuesday, 14 July 2015
meanwhile, back at the agora oder unsichbares hand
I fear that the Greek people are being saddled with a curse that will survive many generations, sort of like predatory pay-day loan storefront lent legitimacy by central banks’ underwriting that traps people down on their luck in a vicious and unending cycle, pushed into a coup d’Etat. The most optimistic estimates predict, I heard, for repayment—just getting back to zero and being broke again (the condition that most countries cling precariously to) and not in arrears or receivership—is at best a hundred years and that is contingent on a period of peace and stability that has not been enjoyed in a long, long time.