frexit, nexit or waiting for the other shoe to fall

It seems that authorities at the European Union would like to hasten the UK out of the bloc and not prolong matters, for fear that lingering would result in extended economic turmoil and that it might cause contagion.
Not only might Oxbridge, Gibraltar, Scotland and County Ulster choose secession from England, votes and sentiments more or less split down these internal borders, there’s a cascade effect already happening and I am not sure how earnest it is—though I think Brexit came as a shock to many, and if lessons imparted from Britain’s going alone will prove discouraging of revolt. The Netherlands, France and Hungary, all championed by emergent right-leaning politicians, are calling for their own plebiscites. If they do materialise, let’s hope they’re awarded better acronyms and portmanteaux, and that in the long run we don’t lose sight, amid business interests or the complaints—and some of them certainly valid ones, about EU-House rules, of the long-range objective of this Union of promoting peace, cooperation and understanding in this war-torn continent and to avoid the jingoistic mistakes of the past.

circadian rhythm

Writing for Æon magazine, Jessa Gamble posits that chronotherapies may be the next leap in healthcare and offer more focused and less intrusive (in terms of spill over and mission-creep) options for healing and preventative medicine. Clearly, judged by personal experience, our biologies resist synchronising with the pace and step of modern worlds and time pressures that mean little to our bodies and psyches but nonetheless exact a great toll on both.
Better coordination can ensure that our bodies and our schedules are not at cross-purposes. The thoroughgoing and lucid essay, with the primary prescription being to know thyself and that we fortunately are not usually able to outsmart our bodies, ought to be appreciated in its entirety, but the idea of internal (and internalised) versus external chronologies is made immediately apparent by Gamble’s opening parable of her mutant hamsters: engineered to have their bodies’ clocks set to days foreshortened by four hours or so, they were dealt a mortal blow by the terminal jet-lag of living in a twenty-four hour a day environment. If the days of these not of this world hamsters—truly aliens whose diurnal journey around some hypothetical star at some middling orbit is different from ours, are set to their altered state, then the experimental hamsters happily thrive.

cat’s cradle

Via Dark Roasted Blend comes a fascinating overview of an assortment of demonstration projects of applied robotics in construction running in various universities from Stuttgart to Barcelona. From self-building bridges and spray-on façades architectural to drones that stack and weave students are exploring what sort of recursive programming could be used to automate and innovate the building process.
Not only could these novel methods, with feedback from the robot-builders about what works and what doesn’t, provide emergency shelters and repairs to existing infrastructure, such techniques could also be applied to space exploration and offworld colonies.

common market

The only other quasi-precedential withdrawal from the European Union was in 1982 when after devolution and greater independence from metropolitan Denmark, Greenlanders held a plebiscite and by the same narrow margins (a fifty-two/forty-eight split) voted to leave.
The chief motivation to leave (a decision that suddenly reduced the landmass in the then fledgling European Community by about sixty percent) was the fishermen of Greenland being told how much they could catch and then sharing that quota with trawling powerhouses. Negotiations between København, Nuuk and Brussel took over three years, but the untried exit mechanism, Article 50 that came with the Treaty of Lisboa of 2007, was not yet in place and no things being equal in the parallels of recent times (in terms of complexity)—one can rest assured that the EU and the UK will reach a new, neighbourly deal in no time. Maybe this was one of those times that America tried to buy Greenland wholesale. I think it was around this time that the US Three and a half decades on, Greenland, wishing for greater leverage and protection to curb other manufacturing nations from flooding their domestic markets, is now contemplating returning to the EU.

morlocks and eloi

Geoff Manaugh’s always-brilliant BLDGBlog’s latest feature article treats us to some speculative but none too far-fetched spelunking beneath the island city-state of Singapore that’s outgrown its confines and could only expand in one direction. Not only does the reporting of the project, entitled Subterranean Singapore, showcase the technical and artistic side of the country’s underground ambitions, it also poses important sociological questions about what kind of societies such massive excavations might produce, with heaven and hell rather inverted and those left above ground, exposed to the elements perhaps at the mercy of those dwelling beneath.

photo-finish or vox-populi

It’s a little hard to wrap one’s head around what impact and further repercussions the outcome of the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union will have, as a framework for discharge needs to be crafted first for this separation to be in any sense amicable—countering arguments that the UK is instantly free from any obligation to the bloc of European nations, since even if they don’t want to be welcomed back into the fold with open arms, no one wants to spoil trade or travel relations—but it does illustrate how quickly that one half of a population can turn against another.
Although Britain has examined and relooked its relationship with and in the EU for over four decades now and sides had been fermented long ago, the escalation that might cascade to other polities and break-up the whole experiment did come rather abruptly, fueled in large part by social mediators. No one ought to be faulted for sharing his or her opinion and beyond guess-work, none of us can say whether this bodes fair or ill, but the referendum also illustrates I think the rationale behind representative democracies—even when at the pinnacle of that hierarchy, one finds monarchs or unelected eurocrats—who assume the responsibility to protect us (often falling short) from our own immediate wishes. Delayed or deferred gratification for the sake of the longer view may not be as appealing as whatever is trending at the moment, and politicians serve (supposedly) to manage those expectations and (supposedly) are culpable for the miscarriages of governance. Those who launch teapot-tempests, no matter what the result, are exculpable and there’s no one held to account in mob-rule to pick up the pieces if things fall apart. What do you think?  Will other members follow Britain’s lead?  Perhaps democracy in action delivers what the voters deserve. 

møbel

There’s a new film that could be described as a modern-day, Scandinavian retelling of Don Quixote called Kill Billy (DE)—a play on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill.
A frustrated purveyor of traditional home furnishing (solid, quality pieces that were to last forever) is forced out of business by a Swedish furniture and lifestyle giant—maker of the eponymous and ubiquitous billy shelving-system—and thus resolves to kidnap the company’s executive officer. Though the Swedish magnate could not be reached for comment, it appears the company’s reception of the film was a positive one as well—after all, they were frank enough to admit that we’d reached peak curtains.