bay of rainbows

China has successful launched a probe expected to enter orbit around the Moon on 6. December and make landing the following week in a lunar region called the Bay of Rainbows—Sinus Iridum, an area relatively flat and free and free of craters being a youngish plain of an ancient lava flow and not far from where the Soviet Luna 17 probe touched down in November of 1970 and bounded by the Jura mountain range—of the Moon.

Boing Boing covers the news nicely, whose mission objectives and technical specifications were kept secret until right before pre-flight. The probe's duties include high-resolution photography and soil sampling (which is nothing to be sniffed at), with the eventual aim of establishing a base for unmanned exploration. I especially like how the rover is characterised as massing in at 140 kg as Earth weight has a variable meaning once free of Earth gravity. A lot of earthling terms, night and day and coordinates of longitude and latitude take on new meanings when applied as a template, but its interesting to note how observation, compromise and mathematics applied to the real and apparent lunar cycles have influenced very mundane customs, like the Chinese calendar and, in turn—time and tide, for forecasting and planning purposes around auspicious dates. Converted from the Western calendar, touch-down is 11/12/13 and I'm sure qualified astrologers could say more about that.

rorschacht or pareidolia

Via Laughing Squid comes this growing Twitter gallery of objects of objects that appear to have anthropomorphic faces, whether by chance or accident, like the mesa that became the Face on Mars due to the camera angle and the human tendency for identification. There are a lot of really good ones but among my favourites is this hungry, hungry helicopter with an appetite for soldiers at the link and the more abstract extensions of the occurrence. It was really weird when an alien face appeared in my beer glass and was quite persistent or the montage of the three wise men on our freshly painted wall, though I do not have convincing photographic evidence. What examples do you have?

pro bono publico

The Washington Post has a sweet article on the evolving efforts of the Holy See to expand its charitable works. Confident of Pope John Paul II in his later years, Francis I appointed Archbishop Konrad Krajewski as his chief almoner, responsible for acting as the pope's giving-ombudsman, both raising and distributing contributions, including with far nobler indulgences.

Formerly the position had become a relatively sinecure office awarded to retiring bishops, but the Pope has given the archbishop his blessing to take license which should not seem so extraordinary but is inspired nonetheless. Krajewski is attended by an off-duty cadre of Swiss Guards and go out into the streets of Rome on a nightly basis to help the homeless and offer what relief from plight that they can. It's pretty powerful what's being done by this papacy to colour the invisible with the hues that they deserve, and nothing pale or superficial, but the crux of his duties probably lies in Krajewski's observation that rather than a moral band-aid for himself to feel better and sleep better at night, he hopes to provide first-aid and that charity has to cost something so it can change the giver for the better. A small donation may not be without meaning and effect, but charged as the chief almoner of the Vatican, a simple tithing does not do to achieve a greater balance of equality.

this day in PfRC history

I have managed, sometimes more prolific than others, to keep this blog up and running for more than five years now. It began as a travelogue and some of the earliest entries are pretty embarrassing and disjointed (meant to be my own private mySpace sphere, I guess)--and that's certainly not to say that I've matured or picked a theme or that the latest entries are not embarrassing in their own time or from some future perspective.

Looking back at the chronicles: one year ago today: Good Saint Nick with a short biography about the life and legend of the saint and his patronages.


Two years ago today: the Other Shoe recounting internet censorship efforts through fairy-tale idylls.

Five years ago today: in former communist East Germany, the Government works for You with Thanksgiving dinner at the army mess-hall and experiences, impressions from my first trip to Leipzig.

les cigales or call for submissions

For the past two years, a mysterious and tantalizing puzzle has been intriguing internet users and the next installment of the scavenger-hunt is expected to appear within a few weeks. A computer analyst from Sweden stumbled upon an irresistible invitation from an organisation calling itself Cicada 3301. The call to find the others and to R.S.V.P. (regrets only) by teasing the hidden message out of the invite.
The clues led across a daisy-chain of increasingly challenging riddles, requiring novel and creative minds to resolve. Interest quickly spread with thousands participating and Cicada 3301 responded in kind with more and more esoteric subjects (involving obscure poetry, alchemy, rare music and even detours into the physical world) and rabbit-holes—that has brought many of the new initiates to the uncharted territories of the world-wide web, called the Darknet, that are not normally accessible to the public via search engines, the massive mantle under the surface of unindexed data that's multitudes bigger by volume that the visible internet world. Despite the great scrutiny and speculation of the hive-mind, no one has fully solved the puzzle or identified who is behind Cicada 3301. What do you think? Could it really be a recruitment tool, a push to gather the world's prodigies like in This Island Earth or The Last Starfighter? Could it be an experimental sandbox for the world's colluding intelligence networks to cull the best and brightest among cryptographers or to arrest their development? Is it just a game? Or worse, is it some publicity stunt that will lead up to the announcement of some new crap cyborg gadget? I personally think it might be a sentient internet's attempt at reaching out to its creators. Watch for the next clue to appear on 4. January 2014.

flüchtling

There was a very poignant and unexpected collection of memories narrated over the radio in commemoration of the upcoming seventy-fifth anniversary of the rescue mission Kindertransport, organsied by British Jewish and Quaker leadership in the days following die Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass) until the outbreak of World War II.

Some ten thousand children in Nazi Germany and in occupied lands were placed with foster families in England, Scotland and Wales. The first trains departed Germany to arrive in Harwich on 1. December 1938. The war orphaned many of these saved children but bonds were strong with their adoptive families. Though the story of this exodus is retold from time to time through the lens of historical drama and has been the subject of theatre and movies and fate of these refugees is not unknown or forgotten, involving many famous personalities, it does seem that the dread decision to split families apart, parents hoping to find sanctuary that many times was not a temporary arrangement, and the acts of kindness maybe have been so well attended. The remembrance is especially pointed with the current climate on immigration and welling refugee crises. Just a few from a multitude of stories, the radio montage was mostly recounted through the experiences of Sir David Attenborough, whose family, a headmaster at a boys' school in Leicester responded to the urgent call for volunteers to take in displaced children.

One day, not long after the project started, Attenborough's mother brought home two young girls that became they boys' foster-sisters. An avid fossil- and rock-hound from an early age, it was piece of amber (Bernstein) from the beaches of the Baltic (Ostsee) filled with preserved prehistoric insects. This frozen terrarium, microcosm, was a source of fascination and inspired the nature documentary The Amber Time Machine decades later and included one of the first rigourous scientific attempts to extract ancient DNA. There was also the powerful story of Kurt Beckhardt, the son WWI Luftwaffe ace aviator, Felix Beckhardt, from Wiesbaden whose achievements were later discounted by the Nazis and supplanted by more palatable heroes because of his Jewish heritage. As his father's record and activities became more of a nuisance, the young Beckhardt was sent to England while his parents were held at Buchenwald. His parents eventually escaped and fled to Portugal—the family reunited years later but very much shaped by these separate odysseys.

the man with the midas touch, a spider's touch

I tend to keep the news in German on the t.v. On in the background and usually I can play-along at home with divided attention but there has been a lot of talk and debate recently over tax reform and much mention of the Goldfinger Steuermodell—“Goldfinger nichts mit James Bond zu tun.” The German tax code is something impenetrable, I image even for a native, so I decided to investigate: Goldfingern, as a gerund, refers to the practise of taking advantage of a certain tax-shelter, a loophole (indeed named after the Bond villain Auric Goldfinger), which the Bundestag is moving to close.
Essentially businesses and individuals with the means buy enormous amounts of gold (or some other asset that's going to increase in value and easily convertible) through an agent, a front-company, in some other country and declare the purchase a loss in order to zero out their tax liability. Given the geometric progression on the increase of the price of the commodity, they stand to make a profit whenever they choose to sell—the next day or next year. Under existing treaties that aim to mitigate double-taxation, avoiding having to pay taxes to one's country of allegiance and to where the profit was made, money made from such transactions are not subject to tax. The agreements state that the rate will be adjusted to reflect the profits but as those engaging in this practise are already in the top bracket, there is no additional tax collected. It does not only happen in Germany, of course, and uncounted billions are estimated to be lost. When one hears about giant corporations paying nothing into the tax-coffers despite record profits, goldfingern is one of the tricks they employ—and it is not that they have particularly clever or ruthless tax-preparers.