megabit, metabit

To my peril but also to my subsequent delight and emendation, my love-letters from Brain Pickings are usually dog-eared and set aside for reading that I always promise to get to at soon point, but that pile in my inbox is seething and threatens an avalanche. Happily, I was able to return to an intriguing sounding review of the life and times of a young mathematician who’s pioneering work in circuitry demonstrated that all logical operations could be reckoned by switches and relays and the just invented transistor, leading Claude Shannon to quickly and intuitively conclude that all information in the wilds—its natural habitat could be corralled and tamed, with data emerging as information thanks to the transfiguring exchange between the observer and the observed.

Corresponding with contemporaries that included Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush, Shannon was able to appropriate rather vague and generic terms, as had Isaac Newton in his mission to redefine physics in a disciplined and predictive manner, and furnish the world with Information Theory complete with a grammar that’s intelligible to both the mediator and the immediate. The bit is a metric, a measure of state (coined by Shannon as a portmanteau of binary digit) conveying either true or false, yes or no, but scalable out to any degree and precipitated the limning of communication and experience into a digital analogue that is accessible and exploitable by computer systems. Although we think of programmes as limited to the confines of simple logic, Information Theory also provides brute computing somewhat of a reprieve, showing that rather unique data-sets that encode unique and familiar data can be elided over, somewhat like the End-User Agreements that computers ply us with as instructive (although mathematical in nature, it is pretty human to skim), aiding in speed and compression. Moreover, as apparently as discreet and incompatible as Nature chooses to impart information, there is always a measurable threshold that computers can harness, from bar-codes and magnetic-strips to more custom parameters.

landtag

A week ahead of the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Hessen—the first German constituency at that level to be formally reconstituted after World War II as the chief staging-grounds of the American-occupied sector—I was able to arrange (or rather happened upon) a tour of the formal ducal residence that hosts the state parliament (Hessischer Landtag), just removed from the Rathaus and main market square of Wiesbaden, the capital.

Click on any image to enlarge it.
The city will commemorate the occasion by opening all of its ministries on 24 September to the public but it was a privilege to have a guided tour that rather tidily tied together the idea of accessibility, image and engagement on the part of the represented. The entrance, facing the people’s Rathaus, is very much in keeping with the Baroque style of the city’s other royal structures—and was the duke’s (later created grand duke of Nassau-Orange) winter-quarters, the summer palace being a few kilometres down a grand avenue on the bank of the Rhein in Schloss Biebrich.

Just off the central stairwell (Treppenhaus), there was a greenhouse of sorts whose walls were still decorated with a lush jungle motif—distinct from the icy snow-flake theme that subtly adorned the rest of the palace in the ceilings and in the parquet of the floors (I am thinking that people were just beginning to study wintery precipitation under the loop) that once held exotic plants. Now the space only held busts of past Hessian minister-presidents, but having been elevated, the grand-duke took up new addresses and his botanical collection went to Frankfurt am Main to seed the area that’s now known as the Palmengarten.

Another legacy of the royal family was the unexpected premature death of the Duchess Katharina, his Russian wife, caused the grieving Duke to build the Orthodox chapel on the Neroberg as tribute (more on this place to come). This routine of upstairs and downstairs and quite a few of strategically-placed mirrors were designed to make this rather modestly-sized castle appear as large as other great houses in Europe for visiting dignitaries, and we were participants in another carefully arranged diplomatic nudge by being invited, unusually for any historic tour, to sit on the furniture.

In these representational chambers, the love-seats (so called Causeusen) were angled to make opponents to face each other askance and so more relaxed—other sofas had extra wings for advisors. I felt out of my class as a political boffin as others in the group recognised the dance-hall and balconies as places or receiving honours and momentous addresses.

The great hall hosted the first sessions of the state parliament in 1946 and marked the point of transition into the modern addition, refurbished in 2008 in order to make the work of government more transparent and rather a fish-bowl with passers-by able to catch a glimpse or more of the proceedings with windows ringing the gallery of the plenary chamber. The ceiling and seating layout reminded me of the convention held at the Paulus Kirche of Frankfurt (see link above) held in Frankfurt that established the Weimar Republic. I wonder what more insider-secrets await with the open-house event next week.

form follows function

Via The Awesomer, we are given an interesting and exciting primer to the potential of metamaterials being explored in the Human-Computer Interaction Labs of the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam—really a well-equipped sandbox studio that lets engineers play with advanced three-dimensional printers.
The internal lattice of these structures defines their mechanical properties, rather than their outer shape and composition, and thanks to careful craftsmanship, the input of a poke or a pinch can be translated to any desired output (something tunable) without the intermediary components of latch, bolt, keys, tumblers, hook or crook. Complex machines could potential come no assembly-required as their function is built into their cells and a bit of pressure and release drives the apparatus.

code of conduct

Pounced on by the marvelous Nag on the Lake, we are treated to another gala museum exhibition by our guides at Hyperallergic, this time of New York City’s mass-transit manners mascot of the 1960s, Etti-Cat. Posters by Jo Mary McCormick-Sakurai that regaled subway cars with this proto-meme admonished commuters to act their act age ~ please ~ and to be courteous to their fellow-travelers, surrendering seats to the elderly, stepping lively and refraining from littering and vandalism. This campaign did succeed in making people behave with more civility to one another and made the trip a bit more pleasant.

cabin in the woods

Apparently just in time for Halloween, a developers are hoping to release an augmented reality game to bring monsters into one’s own homes—for those among who aren’t already enough challenged by playing life on hard-mode.
The platform will take full advantage of the surveillance powers of our smart phones to accurately plot the layout of one’s home (assuming that many of us reside in places that must be mapped out, like the Overlook Hotel) and will monitor players’ heart rates and galvanic responses to gauge how frightened they are as they are running for their lives. What do you think about that? It won’t be like those whodunnit dinner theatres I suspect and I don’t imagine well catch a reprieve. Who is needing to invite more ghouls and demons into their lives?  Announcing it so early, is this holiday-creep as well as holiday-spillage?

finally republicans are worrying about women's health

high-fructose

Via Kottke comes a comprehensive exposé by the New York Times shows how the sugar lobby bribed researchers to shift the blame of coronary disease and all the other ill-effects (real and reputed, since the findings and received-wisdom is perhaps not to be trusted) that the substance can cause to saturated-fats and other culprits.
Though we’d like to think, nearly five decades on, that as consumers and political animals we are justifiably accomplished in spotting misdirection and skeptical of the pronouncements of experts, a little nudge has great ripples and derails agency and choice as much as the discussion. We are responsible for our health and well-being, without a doubt, but plying sugar-coated inquiries have created such a dearth of selections that it’s been made nearly impossible to make informed decisions. What do you think? It’s hard to hold such behaviour to account, no matter how unconscionable it is. Even if you chose to go beyond from scratch and grow your own food from seed (if you can find a supply not tainted by a vertical monopoly), you’d be even harder pressed to find a plot of land not systemically polluted or otherwise compromised by contamination.