summative or headline roundup

Some cabinet officials in Germany’s ruling coalition want to levy a fee from those aggregator sites like Drudge Report or Yahoo! News and other services that supposedly profit unduly by leveraging the reporting of other agencies, baiting readers to their own mastheads then trickling off like Plinko bearings to the primary sources. This idea is only as of now a suggestion, but framers have been working on legislation since 2009 and similar plans have already been discussed in the States—with the Drudge tax, and has the support of some German publishing-houses (Verlag) and much hand-wringing and vocal protests on the opposing side. Lawmakers want these asymmetric earners (through front-page ads) to share profits with the makers of their content, the journalists. It seems like a fair proposition, at first, glance but the reasoning, I think, quickly folds. Aggregators don’t intercept potential advertising revenue (although I suppose, for example, if a reader first encountered some tempting resort ad in Pago Pago, the reader probably wouldn’t click on it a second time when mirrored on the newspaper’s web site) but feed and drive visitor traffic, and surely, in turn revenue.

If news- aggregators with high-visibility are targeted for skimming too much off the top, what’s to prevent this tariff from creeping to any link or the adjudging, rating, following or otherwise liking or disliking of social-networking sites? This proposal is like a shadowy, non-codified once-and-future ACTA or Son of SOPA, meant to de-vitalize the internet because the entertainment industry feels it’s turnover is being infringed upon. And there would of course be consequences, like the spectrum of what’s newsworthy shrinking and the feeder-services might be only willing to do business, find what’s fit to print, with its partners and affiliates.

prosopagnosia or lost-and-found

This strange news item from Iceland has already been circulating the internet, concerning a solitary foreign woman who visited the volcanic canyon of Eldgjá as part of a bus tour through the southern highlands, but I think the idea is pretty intriguing and bizarre. After a hike, she freshened up and changed her clothing and jacket. This act, which went unnoticed and made her unrecognisable to her fellow travellers, and a miscounting of the number of passengers on board by the driver and guide, caused a panic to ensue. The woman, draped now with the cloaks of something other than mistaken identity, did not recognise herself in the description of the missing passenger and certainly did not consider herself lost. Maybe, like in another historic case in Iceland mentioned in the article, she even participated in her own search-party.

I am glad everything turned out fine and it is starting to sound like an urban legend, but I think it begins to highlight some important questions.  Of course, this is a rare and frightening occurrence but I do wonder if there is not some mechanism responsible that’s a contemporary cog of inattentiveness and private, not shared perceptions. Like people saying, “without pictures, it didn’t happen,” and the ability to readily tag and label everything for processing and easily convey under most circumstances, documentary evidence, I wonder if our senses and personas are somewhat spoilt and skewed. I wonder if that means there will be more such incidents in the future.

rote

One activity to try at home (preferably without witnesses) is to repeat one’s name until becomes meaningless. I can remember a schoolmate doing this as a little kid and I couldn’t identify the point for her perspective when the repetition became a transcendent thing, numb and unthinking like a trance, but for me it was when “Rosie” intoned turned into “Zero.”
It can be an interesting experience, to lose oneself—akin to trying to reconcile an optical illusion, and I think just as interesting are venues, formats and presentation that somehow always either require rehearsal or become invisible altogether.  There’s the traveling mat of one’s commute or household inventories that fade into the background, not looked at any longer (though one might notice their alteration or absence quicker than one would expect), but with the former, there are processes, no matter how dull or stale and imprinted to memory that don’t become obedient reflexes, something done in one’s sleep. Job searching, no matter how automated and centralized it is made, cherry-picking from a database rather than patrolling a beat or rustling the classifieds, seems to be one of those things.

Even something important and demanding is prone to distraction, and possibly because there is such a wide and raw focus with the unknown and expectations, makes the process, the search even more of a vehicle for the stickier burrs that refuse to stay in the background and are obnoxious cheerleaders that make it easier to miss other steps and details.One gets around the glitches and limitations soon enough, but still the slightest things refuse to flag.  There was one phrase that ran through every vacancy announcement that I took a second, considered look at, describing the city where the job was located, as the Nice of the North.  That repeating characterization drove me really to distraction.  I suppose because it was a constant amid a lot of variables.  While I think that is an apt and creative comparison and I do not consider myself a sophisticate, I do have to wonder at this effort to impart this bare fact to prospective employees.  I wondered if the targeted audience would think of the city in Southern France rather than struggling to understand the moniker, something like calling New Orleans the Big Easy.  I am glad that I have secured a position in the Nice of the North, though, so I will not need to face these daily diversions and am wishing everyone else the same luck, success and escape as well.

brica-braca or the long now

Photographer David Johnson, via the astounding Colossal, the blog of Art and Visual Ingenuity, had a chance to experiment with new techniques and captured some blooming, long-exposure images of fireworks, during the International Firework Show held in Ottawa in early August.

Lax and taut by turns with the focus, he managed to capture the stages of bursting unseen, like some colourful and exotic fruit gone explosively ripe.

tv tray or serialization

As a little kid, I can remember being very engrossed, as I think a lot of kids were, at the breakfast table with the ingredient lists and nutritional information on the back and sides of cereal boxes.

 Letting my coffee cool a bit this morning, I wondered if people, especially kids, indulge in this sort of distraction. I bet parents would regard this innocent distraction more welcome than the chamber music of texting or the private dinner-theatre of web-browsing. I’m guilty too, not always able to pull myself away from the screen (it’s funny how so much of our time is spent staring at quadrilaterals—cereal boxes too—but without even seeing the rectangular frame. I do continue to pour over food labels but the message has changed a little: the names of the additives don’t seem quite like a sea-monkey kingdom potion (although not everything need be a sinister let-down and there’s some magic yet to be found in preparation and the recipe but there are more hacks and fillers rather than kitchen-witchery) and thinking about the provenance, packaging and the poly-lingual labeling is more interesting. I suppose, in the end, there’s not too much difference in how one chooses to take one’s morning briefing.

rheingold

Mostly just to see something that we had not had the chance to see before and take out the camper in fair weather but partly also to check out the environs further afield of my future workplace, H and I took a weekend trip through the Rheingau. The region was outstandingly beautiful, opening into a vast landscape of vineyards climbing trellising upwards from the manicured banks of the Rhein, gently sloping and peopled heavily with palaces and cloisters and villages reminiscent of the French countryside.
Not to disparage the fine cities that sprawl to form a megalopolis from Frankfurt to Wiesbaden to Köln and beyond, but we had not experienced anything else in the area. Surely, we are saving a lot to explore for later but did visit some of the defining destinations points that came in quick succession as soon as we left the city-limits.
One attraction that we found was the Niederwald Monument, personifying Germania and built to occasion the unification of imperial Germany after the Franco-Prussian wars, windswept at the summit of the Rheinish terroir, and among a collection of Empire colossal monuments commissioned and built all in a shared spirit, like the gallery of greatness at Walhalla, the Monument to the Battle of the Nations (Das Völkerschlachtdenkmal bei Leipzig), or the Barbarossa Monument (der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Denkmal) in Kyffhäuser meant to intimate that the then new emperors were the legal successors to the Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans. I suppose that I am taken with this chauvinism precisely because I’ve been raised with my own for a long time now. Since I came to Germany, I have lived in a few places but none outside of Bavaria—or even Franconia.
Not that I regard people in Hessian or anywhere else as more or less German or anything, there is a certain attitude and dialect that one becomes accustomed to and can learn not to see. There are some aspects and trappings of common heritage and identity that can make what’s familiar or excused or unapologetic rather heavy-handed when just a little less familiar when seen in others. I guess I have a little trepidation but I’m sure it’s my imagination magnifying things. In any case, I am glad that we were able to visit the countryside first as tourists.

a mass of incandescent gas

Via the ever excellent Boing Boing, National Geographic reports on the singular roundness of the Sun. It is in fact on average the most perfectly spherical object known to man. The globes of the planets and satellites of course strive to this same figure but due to the tugging of other objects and their own rotation and compositions have settled mostly for a slightly oolong shape.

The article does not directly rate other, distant stars but seems to suggest that an astral body of a different class and age would not maintain a circular form. Scientists believe being able to better measure the tiny, hair’s breadth imperfections could better anticipate solar-induced weather conditions on Earth, like eruptions that disrupt communication or even the cycle of ice-ages. I wonder if astronomers have the ability to see if a far away star’s silhouette is round or distorted. Could that be a better indicator of a brood of planets—or specifically those that could harbour familiar biology, than watching for other types of perturbations? Does the reciprocal tug of a constellation of planets produce this perfect shape? Were the outline of a star proved to be a positive indicator of earth-like worlds, it would be a bit like the progression of the ancient astronomers from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Kepler, which saw the centre of the universe move from the Earth, to the Sun, to a point somewhere in between, the heavens not orbiting around the centre of the Sun but rather some fulcrum that was the sum negotiation of everything pulling against everything else.