a backhanded compliment or role-reversal

The ever-engaging Boing Boing points readers to and hosts a brillant discussion on a recent market analysis from the Boston Consulting Group, which forecasts that a collusion of factors including the increased valuation of the Chinese yuan, the weak dollar and US corporate tax incentives will, in as little as five years, yield a revival of the moribund American industrial and manufacturing sector, reversing the trend of off-shoring of jobs.

The article is not cheery, just rather matter-of-fact, so it is difficult to read the tone, but I would venture that the ultimate message is not one of congrat-ulations. There are other factors to consider: the American South is desperately poor and already short-shrifts its workers with less than living wages. Monied influences have relaxed environmental protections. China, India and Mexico are enjoying higher standards of living and have become consumers as well as producers. Labour protections and unions in the States have been rendered toothless. The wild card of fuel and transportation costs also probably plays a big role in this study. Means of production and infrastructure, however, are already there in the Rustbelts of the US though mothballed. This might turn out to be a strange inversion that does not sit easily with me, although such a prediction might spur some positive investment in production and jobs. I do not want to see a renaissance that results in the same exploitation--or greater, and ecological ruin. Americans surely have expertise if its business leaders do not let that vision and commitment become clouded by greed and a rush to the bottom. Germany is not perfect but has managed to remain an economic powerhouse through manufacturing and afford a social state with high wages and good environmental stewardship. I think part of that success, at least, can be attributed to that sense of expertise and precision, and not soley the financial cues to repatriate ones factories.

sound and vision

Over the weekend, H and I attended a little get-together to watch the Eurovision grand finale from Düsseldorf. Some moments from the dazzling production and some of the entries that made the cut can make one laugh, cringe or groan but it's always fun, especially with friends, since it opens up an acceptable forum for all the stereotypes and politically incorrect characterizations of national identities. Of course, one painful and proud number does not represent the sum of another country, even though it may lend some interesting insight into the ways and limits of reinterpretation of mostly American-style pop music. ABBA was made famous through a Eurovision win, as did Lulu and Céline Dion. Apparent political influences and old grudges that normally go unsaid really seem to emerge, however, during the long, long voting process. Though the winning country from the previous year gets to host the event, audience voters cannot choose their home country, and it seems that maybe old aspersions come in to play, as the electorate, like something out of the Holy and Roman Empire of the Germans, has expanded to encompass a broader region, including the "new Europe," Russia and the former Soviet satellites, the micronations, Turkey, plus Israel and the Kingdom of Morocco.

Amongst this harmless fun, I think, suspicions lurk including conspiracy and questions about EU membership and national identity. The annual song contest, however, I believe in the end, tutors more in geography rather than geo-political intrigues and does more for awareness and togetherness than salt old wounds. See you next year from Baku!

would you like to fly in my beautiful balloon

A few days ago, we were treated with a hot-air balloon launch from the grassy clearing by the stream (Wiese--it seems there is no precise equivalent in English--lawn, yard, pasture, knoll). We went down and investigated the whole production, which took quite some time: the lighter-than-air craft did not pop out of the cargo van fully-formed. It was neat to watch the crew unfurl the envelope and prepare it for flight but I realized that it was very labour intensive and not something to be done on the cheap or sadly not spontaneously. When the balloon finally took off and the van went to chase the passengers where the wind carried it aloft, I kept thinking about that poor aeronaut's wife and how the skin would never be folded back or crumpled quite right again for storage, but it does seem to be a labour of love and a lot fun.

suspension of disbelief or not the droids you're looking for

The White House press apparatchiks have collectively agreed to stop staging photographs, after a routine set-up to capture and archive the announcement of the operation to intercept bin Laden has apparently fueled doubt and rumours that that undertaking was itself faked. Everyone, I think, realizes that such images, intended to be iconic and for posterity, are posed and composed, and the media as well as officials participated in this harmless polishing. It is dangerous, however, should the press alters the substance of the news on behalf of the government, with smear campaigns and the usual bread and circuses. I think there is no mean intent behind this very clever Darth Vader parody, which makes the stakes and reaction skewed through inversion, but maybe co-opting that image in this way also encouraged the press corps to change their theatre.

marquis façade

In the immediate aftermath of the operation to kill bin Laden, a German cable news broadcaster apparently scrambled to get information on SEAL Team VI, who executed the ambush, as a very astute Observer noticed while the anchor went on, obliviously nonplussed. Maybe it was a bit of a journalistic challenge to find any solid facts about this team, like searching for the fighting "Men of the 303." Life imitates art and vice-versa, however, and I suppose that the unit badge for the Cardasian resistance forces, the Maquis of the Star Trek universe, is a near-match (or possible inspiration) for the real unit patch, minus the extraneous phaser, bat'leth weapons, and Klingon skull.

air strip one or all your bandwidth are belong to us

The American isotope of naivety or irony apparently has a very short half-life, at least in their government's estimation. Even before the passing, prying worry about one's mobile accoutrements tracking one's movements has had a chance to be forgotten or displaced with some more sinister distraction, heightened vigilance in the wake of the assassination of Osama bin Laden and the rift the operation caused has presented the US National Emergency Management Agency a perfect opportunity to revamp its emergency broadcast system in the form of text (SMS) alerts that take precedence over other cellular phone traffic and even work when the phone is out of the service area or switched off.

Under the umbrella of Washington, DC and New York City first and then nation-wide, this new service (which requires a special chip that all new cellular phones will be required to carry) will be able to deliver all sorts of advisories and warnings to the public.  The potential for persuasive messages and disinformation, in addition to tracing everyone's every move, has not been overlooked either.  Cellular technology and service plans are particularly expensive in the States--patrons responsible for both incoming and outgoing charges, so I imagine that one could follow the money behind this initiative too.  Mobile technology has always been able to track people and monitor their predilections, just as the internets, credit cards, library cards, and union cards have enabled in the past, though we make it easier and easier for that information to fall into the wrong hands--having Big Brother in one's pocket reminds me of those view-screens (two-way televisions) in 1984 that could not be turned off and our protagonists thought they were safe from spying eyes when the two found those eyes were out of sight.

painting the roses red

Facing ever hotter summers, white-washing (not green-washing) one's roofs is one many little steps that one can take to offset heat locally and perhaps decrease demands on cooling systems. It does seem to be a rather zero-sum undertaking--like a few of the environmental promotions that businesses have side-stepped since the paints are probably rather energy intensive themselves, like growing corn as biofuels. Maybe, however, there are lower impact ways to accomplish the same project, if one can get away with such things: don't upcycle someone's prized-collection, but one can gather junk compact discs and carpet roofs or make mosaics that way from charity shops and the stacks of redundant and obsolete media from work. One sees these four-hundred year old farm houses in Germany outfitted with solar arrays like steam-punk space probes. I imagine the glare from a shiny installation, as long as it does not offend one's neighbours or resident birds, would also blind the spy-satellites.

flatlander or same-otherwise

Quantum mechanics is a strange, non-intuitive outcome, it seems, for probing too deeply. On the contrary, I do not think things should not become more blurry and ill-defined the sharper the focus is, and perhaps precise knowledge of one aspect should not exclude any knowledge of other qualities. I’d venture maybe that we are conditioned to accept this exclusion principle, perhaps too quickly though a lot of people more creative and smarter than me have worked to describe the machinery of the impossibly tiny—that if we know place, we cannot know time or velocity, the compound of the two with a future tendency. Maybe such elaborate explanations and theories to compensate for our limited vision are not always constructive--when I was a little kid, I wrote once to Carl Sagan suggesting, not very succinctly, that the speed of light may not be a constant and that it might accelerate or slow down over the vast reaches of space.  He answered with a very nice and personal letter that the laws of nature depend on such universal constants--however, now it seems modish to talk of light-speed more fluidly.  Physical dispositions ought to be knowable in so far as classic mechanics describes the universe and matters of everyday experience, and if they do not work satisfactorily, what is that threshold of inaccuracy and could we even define such a margin of error. In the same definitive work on classical mechanics and the clockwork universe, the Principia, Sir Isaac Newton generally followed his QEDs with a statement of “same-otherwise,” an alternate proof for deriving the principles of physics.

I don’t think these different derivations were suggested that there were two equally plausible and reigning laws of nature at work, but I always thought it was a refreshingly un-arrogant coda in science writing. Maybe subatomic particles do pop discretely (digitally instead of analogue) from one state, place to another in a fuzzy cloud of possible configurations—or maybe the causeways and cogs of matter outside of normal experience are rigid, well-defined forms, billiard-balls, plum-pudding or any other tangible analogy, except the orbits and tracks and slots that they race along are engineered not in the spatial dimensions of length, width and breadth but in the six or seven postulated others that ripple over tinier spaces, like the bumps on the skin of an orange. Maybe it is not necessary to pour vast amounts of energy into a particle to coax out something exotic, an unstable component that exists like a ghostly radar blip for a vanishingly small duration. Surely every elusive component exists, though not in isolation, and perhaps invisible to us, denizens of Flatland, cannot detect these elusive particles as they move q-wise instead of sideways (over terrain there are no words for) and can only glimpse the cross-sections (what's on our plane of perception) of the internal workings once sped up greatly.