numeracy or oh, throw me a bone

At a recent BREXIT debate, one young audience member posed a clever but rather straightforward to the interlocutors, which of course left both parties baffled and stammering: to paraphrase—when politicians and pundits speak of billions (in whatever denomination) in costs or potential economic losses, are we using the long-scale or the short-scale (échelle longue et échelle courte) of a billion?
One million—universally, is ten to the sixth power, but the word billion can either be understood as one thousand millions or, in accordance with its original etymology as bi + million, the second power of a million, one followed by thirteen zeros (10¹²). Like America, England and Ireland use the short-scale most of the time—but not always and quite different from the convention on the continent that employs the long-scale, for the most part, but the distinction is not like driving on one side of the road versus another, as the distribution is more equally spread and not necessarily rooted in colonialism or empire. Most languages other than English don’t use the terms interchangeably or loosely and a billion (or some cognate) means a trillion—like the German words Millionen, Milliarden, Billionen, and it certainly is more heated and anchoring to speak of trade deficits and debt in terms of run-away trillions—rather than in more manageable and meagre billions.

prayer circle

When I first saw this little video game reminder making the rounds that we can do better than to recuse ourselves, saying that a change in legislation could not have prevented yet another abject tragedy in the only Western country where this regularly happens, I did agree with the message, though thought it was perhaps overly cynical.
After learning, however, that one powerful doyen and determinant of lifestyle and communication used its leverage to excise gun emojis from its platform and vocabulary (a symbol of a gun is not a gun, of course, but like an assault weapon who legitimately needs that in any circumstance?) and that the US Senate failed to enact any meaningful reforms to gun-control, I think that these elected representative, in hock to the firearms lobby, deserve every bit of contempt and ridicule that not only their constituents but also the whole world can muster.

wedge-wood

The always brilliant Nag on the Lake shares the time when Sir Edward Rayne, designer of couture shoes for the well-heeled and fashion ambassador at large, was inspired by the signature blue jasper and cameo earthenware of Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, a fellow royal warrant holder.

Wedgwood’s jasperware line was in turn inspired by an ancient Roman bas-relief glass urn, called the Portland Vase, which was lent to the porcelain company’s founder as the paradigm of what the artist was struggling to create in his workshop—and then went on more or less permanent loan to the generations of this family, whose branches include naturalist Charles Darwin, economist John Maynard Keynes and writer Thomas Huxley. Those are quite some taxonomic credentials, but even though elevated footwear might seem unnatural and impractical, this type of shoe underwent a process of evolution as well—originally contrived to help keep Persian warriors in the saddle. I wonder what other cross-over collaborations have taken place between fashion and homeware in the past and what pairings would make potentially good candidates in the future.

saga eða von og von brigði

Combining the finest traditions of epic, slow television and the road-trip, Reykjavík based post-progressive rock band Sigur Rós is making a circuit of the entire island nation in order to compose and document a soundtrack that’s generated, through specialised software with a commanding and adaptive perspective on the band’s style, by their ramblings around Iceland.  No one quite knows how this soundscape will turn out, much like any prolonged tour returning the unexpected, and will be used to open a music festival later this summer. I wonder if this experiential aspect for incidental music, machines inspired by nature or the draw of the road, is going to take off. Von (hope) was the band’s first album and while vonbrigði means disillusion “von brigði” means, as double-entendre, variations on Hope. Visit the link above to see the whole saga with musical accompaniment.

who lives down drury lane

Via the latest edition of Marginal Revolution’s assorted links, we are introduced to the discipline of civil engineering that’s inexorably connected with the streetwise and politic archeology that either celebrates or banishes the heritage of place through time.

As the most present and immediate sign of the times, either true and tethered to some landmark or subject to the revisionists of history, physical addresses—inherited or imposed by a regime that in the name of order wants to assign residents of a ghetto or favela to a fixed abode—carry an enormous burden, often but not always a reflection of the desired and generic demographic and favoured figures of the times.  Walking through neighbourhoods, one does often encounter streets named for local sons and daughters, for a certain landmark, mills and water-wheels no longer there, a craft-guild or spot reserved for certain commerce, but more often than not there are rather pedestrian and sanitised thematic quarters (and not just in newer developments), named after trees, non-controversial artists and composers, the next village along the road’s route, European capital cities, etc. This obvious (or subtle) reflagging does pique one’s curiosity to find what naming-conventions addresses had in prior years.  What do you know about your street’s name and history?

metadata or mal d’archive

Fraught with the prospect of a digital dark age where our “content” has been either corralled in walled-gardens that can both facilitate communication or become a memory-hole at the whim of fortune, interest and competitive forces (reflect for a moment on all the effort spent cultivating a mySpace profile or application to any number of now defunct services) or are all but lost to rampantly changing forms of media storage (think what might be forever trapped in a spool of CDs that one does not even have the player for any more or in one’s old digital picture frame—like General Zod and the other criminals from Krypton) and presentation in incompatible software, the internet’s founders are launching an initiative to make the work of a few dedicated archivists much more distributed and less tied to any single agenda, no matter how altruistic or self-interested.
In part, like voluntarily over-sharing too much about what we’d prefer to be private and not construed with little detective-work, it is our own fault that so much of what we’ve created is subject to segregation, forgetting or censorship, and the impetus to return to a landscape that’s organic and a bit unkempt is strong for a lot of reasons.  Certainly there’s no way of knowing what sort of studious record-keeping (in any format and on any subject) might benefit future generations and as awash as we might be with the onslaught of information and different ways to leverage and nuance it, there is no need for something to pass to the ages by our own negligence. Who can say? The cookies and tokens of today might even have an important structural or descriptive component (and may even be the engines behind an internet that backs itself up) that we cannot not appreciate in this contemporary billboard jungle.