location scout

Daily I pass this office tower that really dominates the Wiesbaden skyline that I formally found oddly satisfying as representative of a cliché corporate headquarters that one might find in a 1980s movie where corruption is uncovered in ill-explained, cartoonish method. Since the accession of Dear Leader, however, the sight of it has grown a little less welcoming and reminds me of his property empire and personal ensemble of consulates. We’ll gladly accept our finders’ fee in any form of fiat tender.

blue birds over

Artist Banksy has created a new mural in Dover, the Guardian reports, that expresses his views on Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, especially timely as France has defied the nationalistic drift with the outcome of its presidential elections—which is located, of course, just across the English Channel from Calais and the Continent. The star being chipped away does not represent membership (there are far more countries in the Union than there are stars on the flag) but rather for “unity, solidarity and harmony.”

bully pulpit

It’s in the nature of social media to induce a fugue-state but that does not excuse Dear Leader’s abusing his position to badger a witness. The former acting Attorney General (the incumbent has of course recused himself from such appearances) testified before the House of Congress on Russian inference in the US presidential election, and how the former administration warned Dear Leader about staffing his ranks with certain individuals. Dismissed by Dear Leader for questioning the legality of his targeted travel ban, the former Attorney General seemed not to be rattled by his threatening tone.

mind the gap or devil’s haircut in my mind

Via TYWKIWDBI (scroll all the way through his Divertimento and let yourself get distracted), we learn of the of the property of symmetry or palindromicity in figures, called Scheherazade numbers by Buckminster Fuller for the leading stories that they tell after the character in 1001 Arabian Nights.
One thousand and one is too a palindrome but not a prime number but another, much larger named-number that shares both properties was named by science columnist Clifford A. Pickover Belphegor’s Prime. In long form, the number which reads the same forward or backward would be one quintillion, sixty-six billiard, six-hundred billion and one or 1000000000000066600000000000001 or easier to recall as one followed by thirteen zeros on each side with the Number of the Beast at the centre. For all these cameo appearances of superstitious numbers (notationally represented by an upside down π) is named after one of the seven demonic princes of Hell (Hebrew for Lord of the Gap), characterised by John Milton in Paradise Lost as the devil that curses man with inquisitiveness and ingenuity—considered sinful as looking for short-cuts is the way of pride and sloth.

release the kraken

Revisiting the topic of persuasive maps, Hyperallergic has scoured the huge online archive of the PJ Mode Collection of Cornell University for examples of cartographic cephalopoid and explores the motif of the land octopus as a common trope of creeping geopolitical menace. Beginning with caricaturist Fred W Rose’s 1877 depiction of an expansionist Russia as a global threat, the tentacles, most maps reflect the fears of competing Great Gamers, but some also address social matters, like this 1909 map of London that extols how high property prices creates unemployment.

bios, bias

Until Apple challenged a competitor that was unartfully cloning its hardware and software, an operating system was not subject to intellectual property protections as programs were not expressive in themselves and utilitarian in nature.
IBM’s 1981 concession licensed its disk operating system to Microsoft, which in turn generalised the boot-up programme to work on a broader platform is what we usually associate with the idea of cloning and PC-compatibles. The case that Apple raised against what it saw as obvious infringement failed in three lower courts but the appeals process finally ruled in 1984 that software could be made subject to copyright and thus brought our idea of coded instruction into the proprietary-fold. At first glance, such restrictions might seem counter to innovation and there are doubtless numerous examples in the rentier economy where protectionism and clearinghouse cartels have stopped independent experimentation, in this case the new legal framework compelled both companies (other competitors had recourse to legal—now it was defined—ways of cloning the Apple through reverse-engineering) to diversify and find niche markets, scalable of course. Apple, for its part might not have diverged from the PC market the way it did had the II remained a secure technological plateau, and Franklin came to dominate the consumer market with those pocket-sized telephone directories, translators and dictionaries and arguably contributed to miniaturisation and the idea of carrying around a suite of gadgets.