ebola (a-licky boom boom down)

Despite the lack of a clearly defined plan to prevent more sporadic cases of Ebola occurring in Europe, there is an air of resignation that little can be done. While the Western, antiseptic world bears the guilt for not doing more to prevent the disease from becoming endemic and the real suffering and individual tragedies ought not be overshadowed by vague fears and pandering to something adjacent to godliness (something in which there’s always money), absent a direct onslaught on the inchoate epidemic, international passenger transportation should be severely curtailed.
Public health officials do not seem exactly forthcoming and are taking an apologetic, almost defensive stance for the airline industry—which would and will no doubt take a major hit, when the matter is finally forced. Screening passengers prior to departure is window-dressing at best and a farcical stab at prevention, considering that each flyer has a vested interest in avoiding detention or scrutiny. Those suspecting that they have the disease of course want to avail themselves to better treatment facilities in America or Europe and remove themselves from areas where Ebola is prevalent. They certainly do not want to be turned back or sent to a holding room for examination, undoubtedly full of sick people. Given the incubation time to become symptomatic and uncertainty (despite sworn surety) about how it is communicated, any exercise would be a post-containment one but—without hindering the delivery of supplies and the support of aid-workers in West Africa—flights ought to be grounded, and not selectively but world-wide since viruses do not respect the borders and remoteness that air-travel has also made obsolete. Restrictions, I think, ought to remain in effect until an outbreak occurring anywhere on Earth can be successfully treated on the spot and the standards (so long as that is an elevation and not healthy hegemony, a pharmacracy or a step backwards) for healthcare and sanitation that the West has are made available to everyone. Not only is it not an unreasonable dream, the costs of not doing so are quite dear.

cliché verre

Boing Boing documents the reaction of an artificial intelligence researcher when he uploaded his holiday snapshots to an new, quick photo processing service.

Depending on the size and quality of the sample, the developer will tweeze over the images as a whole in order to refine poses, lighting, smiles and focus. Further, it can create composite images that never quite happened in reality, as the IA researcher discovered, finding a picture that he as the photographer was never able to frame but achieved the imagined, desired outcome. Cliché verre refers to the rotoscoping effect one produces by adding etches and paint to a photograph. The implications are fantastic, well beyond tweaking and tuning, but also a bit chilling—as even though a photographic perspective is never really a moment committed, frozen and fixed to some media, the notion that the aesthetic sense of a clever algorithm could act as an independent studio shop, having its subjects sit and pose for pictures that never took place.  What do you think?  Would you submit your pictures to this rather surreal service, not quite sure what would come back?

average atmospherocepalic bureaucrat in the act of milking a cranial harp

A jam-maker in Spain in the late 1950s had the idea to expand to the confectionary business, after seeing a child being scolded for sticky hands from eating candy, got the idea to put a bon-bon on a stick. Investors were wary so the entrepreneur got aggressive with marketing, commissioning the renowned artist Salvador Dali to design the package’s logo in 1969. The lollipop’s original slogan was in Catalan, “És rodó i dura molt, Chupa Chups”—that is, it’s round and long-lasting. Chupar itself means to suck.

rebreather

With signature speculation and imagination, BLDGBLOG presents an interesting abstract on the implication of the peculiar properties of a cobalt-salt, which can rather horrifyingly like table-salt to slugs, suck all the oxygen out of a room. The crystal, however, is also capable of the reverse—that is timed-released of the sequestered oxygen. Learning how to harness this little trick could mean big advances it SCUBA operations—culling air from the water—and even for space exploration, as the storage medium is chemistry, rather than bulky, pressurized-containers.

fair-play or venue d’hiver

After having put the matter up to a popular vote, Norway—one of the top contenders to host the Winter Games—withdrew its bid for the 2022 Olympics.
Faced with the enormous costs for security, construction overruns, logistical demands, negative environmental impact and witnessing the hardships that the preceding host-nations have had to deal with, Oslo joined a slew of other candidates, due to public opposition, in pulling out of the competition. Now, instead of watching the Games played out in an enchanted snowy landscape of one of the Nordic countries (Stockholm was also in the running) or Kraków, St. Moritz or München, only two challengers remain: Almaty, Kazakstan and Beijing, China. To one unfortunate city go the spoils. Another major disillusioning factor is in terms of legacy and the boon that’s failed to materialize for local economies afterwards—it seems only oligarchs, cronies in capitalism, are beneficiaries of the sport—with construction, security firms and established sponsors seeing a lucrative profit out of a process that seems a bit tarnished all around. What do you think? Are big events becoming a liability rather than an honour and the stuff of shameless self-promotion and greed, for sale to the highest-bidder?

it happened on the way to the forum: command economy or endangered specie

After the comic-tragedy of of a succession of rulers elevated, blindsiding both the nominees—ambitious or inuring and the state with no forward-looking policies in place and only filling the power-vacuum by whatever pretender might be sucked in next with the sufficient gravitas to plug the hole for a few years and sometimes just for a few weeks, Diocletian from Illyria (modern-day Dalmatia in Croatia) came on the scene, having risen through the military ranks to command the cavalry during campaigns in Persia and on the Danube frontier and radically reformed the way the Empire was governed, by turning the state back to the role of state-craft.
In order to prevent any potential usurpers from raising a fighting force that could unseat the incumbent, during the reign of Aulerian, the Emperor had taken personal charge of the bulwark of the legions and when crises emerged, marched his private army to whatever new insurgency, domestic uprising or incursions on the borderlands, was presenting itself. The tacit seemed to bring a measure of stability to the Empire, with Aulerian's tenure exceptionally long and productive compared to other office-holders of the time, but was very taxing and inefficient, given how the troops had to rush to counter any and all threats, and threatened to endanger the Empire any time there was an attack on more than one front. Realising these risks, either sacrificing border-security for the safety of the regime or vice versa, Diocletian took the bold and ingenious move of sharing imperium—first with a trusted co-regent—and then splitting the Empire into four united regions, reasoning that no man could let his ambitions get the better of him ruling a quarter of the civilised world with virtually full autonomy. Tax havens were eliminated and no province, even what had formerly been the home province of Italy, was accorded especial treatment, with capitals established at Antioch (on the Syrian/Turkish border), Nicomedia (near the more famous Constantinople), Milan and Trier, and demarcating a division of skill-sets that was not distinguished before, created separate military and civil-service career tracks that put professional administrators in charge of tax-collecting, the courts, assessment and public-works projects.
The bureaucratic hierarchy established put the persons of the Emperors behind endless corridors of intermediaries, answerable to the next higher officer, and lent them an air of almost a demi-god and not the the aura of the First Citizen, a common-man brought up in the ranks of soldiering and fraternising with the people, putting forth the principal of rule by the grace of God, the divine right of kings. The Empire consisted of around one hundred small provinces, which were grouped into larger political units called diocese (of the same Greek root for administration as the cognomen Diocletian), under the governance of an ombudsman called a vicar. These vicars coordinated the larger federal policies among the regional powers, and this structure was preserved, with essentially the same borders, by the Catholic Church after the Fall in the West to the present day. Of course, this apparatus was not just put in place to shield the upper echelons of leadership or to protect personal and dynastic interests, but rather, there was a lot of business, civil-affairs and economic-recovery, to attend to. These matters had been neglected for years, with emperors expected to preside over decisions large and small in trials and policy and near continual debasement of coins, reducing the precious metal (specie) content which resulted in inflation. Diocletian knew that simply coining more money made it worthless and began to round the worthless coppers and slugs and minted new currency of nearly pure silver and gold content.  His attempt was a worthy one, but Diocletian and his ministers did not take nearly enough of the old coins out of circulation and his successors did not enforce all the elements of the recovery plan, as tradesmen and later governments did not understand the economic principles in play. Money was still not worth its face-value.

Because tax revenues were falling precipitously and pur- chasing- power was declining, Diocletian suggested another bold reform that simply removed the intermediary of money and instituted payment in-kind. Sending out his legion of bureaucrats to take stock of what non-liquid assets every one possessed and how much each family needed to live, they returned and constructed a comprehensive equivalency chart to, without the medium of money, show that so many hours of work in the fields or of tending the herds or of soldiering or of shuttling munitions or of arrow-making, etc. was equal to so many units of grains, bolts of fabric, jugs of wine, tableware, etc. This thoroughly researched commissariat determined the annual budget for all the land, and actually functioned pretty well, leading to a better and more equitable return of services in exchange for what the Empire doled out. Barter such as this was naturally not conducive to international trade, the rest of the world having been introduced and now hopelessly accustomed to the Roman coin, but helped to stabilise the economy and replenish state coffers with fiat money. Diocletian even anticipated what might happen if everyone went after the easy or glamourous jobs, like prospector or astrologer, instead of more menial and harder work in exchange for their stipends, like garbage-collector or butcher, and called for the formation of trade guilds which set quotas and applied standards for admissions. Though ultimately the Empire fell in the West over invasion, military coup and economic implosion, Rome did go on existing for another one hundred or so years, already moribund when Diocletian came to power, and chose co-regents that allowed the Empire in the East to survive for another millennium. Diocletian retired graciously, the first and only Emperor to abdicate, to his homeland.

market days

H and I had the chance to make our annual pilgrimage back to one of the best-attended Antikmärkte in the region, held on an earlier October date that forever seems enchanted with sunshine and good weather. Of course the hunt is more important than whatever treasures are found and we did find some nice keepsakes for this year's addition to the annual.
This gathering draws in dealers from all over Germany and the professionals know what prices that they can fetch, usually—experts from the German version of Antiques Roadshow, Kunst oder Krempel, also had a booth set up to offer on the spot appraisals.
We also had the chance to take a nice, long stroll around the beautiful city of Bamberg and spy some of its landmarks. There are an abundance of flea markets in Germany, with many of the same collections of items on tour, to explore but we are looking forward to the Bamberg show next year already.