negative reinforcement or forever blowing bubbles

The reigning coalition in Germany has been compelled to make some difficult decisions and try to apply some sophistical cheer to an approach to the debt crisis that's been shown to be a costly failure. The public needs convincing that their tax monies are not being squandered and that this rescue package is not just a furtherance (kicking the can) of the same game, same irresponsibility and same greed that's bigger than the public's interests or hopes or aspirations. Such dishonesty and futility is being broached, I'd venture, mostly because of the berating and scolding that the European Union as a whole received from a very paternal and ironic United States: blamed for the global financial crisis and blamed for perpetuating fear and manufacturing and hiring timidity through its inaction. A lot of unsolicited advice has been traded since the public became aware of this Great Game but never in the form of an official rebuke and lecture. I hope the EU does not fold to this sort of pressure, since its only in the interest of the States and the Elite Them to stoke a virtual euro bubble. It's all hearsay.

Speaking of economic bubbles, Magic Eight Ball is indicating that the next boom and bust cycle may lie in the agricultural business--in food and drink. Cows and cars are already competing over fodder, leading to shortages and price inflation all around. I'm afraid that there will be a land-grab of the limited suitable fields and pastures, just like the exuberance that accelerated property prices during the Housing Crisis only to fall and to dash greed as well as livelihoods. There will probably also be action to turn more small farms into franchisees of agribusiness conglomerates, like the unstinting corporations that have put genetically modified crops, biofuels and corn-syrup into the food-chain. There are more of us to feed and only so much space left to grow what we need, without further decimating the environment. Hitching up home prices to a dangerous and unsustainable height was bad enough--it's scary to try to imagine how the situation might look with more immediate and needful provisions.

fortune cookie

Recently, when faced with the disclosure that monitoring of its users did not cease after they logged out, a popular social networking utility demurred to give an honest answer. To some degree, the computing public has only just been reintroduced to the concept of a cookie--a prion that is a token of one's visit history and whereabouts that helps the internet function more smoothly.

What some services do is indeed dastardly and one ought to be able to expect some way of turning off their status updates and autobiography of things they're keen on. It was scant months ago that a popular cellular telephone manufacturer (EN/DE) attributed its persistent spying (even when disabled) to an overzealous programmer and said it was not intentional. Given adequate resources and interests, anyone could monitor anyone else's activity online, regardless of membership, of course, but no one wanted their outside interests mingled with the persona that he or she shows to the world.

Social networking sites, however, have made the potential for monitoring less a question of committing resources and more of an untapped given. Untangled, facial recognition software routines even transpose internet and real-world tracking abilities. What, I believe, is the most interesting aspect to this outrage, which--if not apathy disguised--sort of flags when one really faces the prospect of boycotting the service or simply disconnecting, is that members would be convinced otherwise. Skepticism and self-censorship are healthy approaches, because users are not customers. The services are "free" and users volunteer marketing and marketable information that enriches these sites. They may promise cohesion and accountability, but what's exacted for free seems quite the opposite sometimes.

save the date

Though it's probably a little too grim for actual use as a wedding invitation, this print from artist Max Dalton, inspired by Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill volume I, is absolutely brilliant. Surplus prints may be made available at the artist's blog and this work is part of an exhibition touring the US of re-imagined Tarantino and Coen Brothers cinema icons.

appellation d'origine controlee and prussian blue

 Unlike Roquefort cheese, Champagne from Champagne, Dijon mustard, and dozens of other regional delicacies and specialties, Bavarian Obazda (also known as Obatzter, Angebatzter, Gerupfter in Franconia or as Gmanschter in Switzerland) was not awarded the proprietary protections of a geographical viticulture designation by the German courts. This spicy cheese spread is certainly unique and a signature Brotzeit dish--however, I like the fact that it was also ruled that it cannot be copyrighted. Too many things are overly-litigious as it is, without affording food and drink a court-appointed attorney and though imitators will be opportunists, distinction and quality are usually self-regulating.

Tradition, like the Reinheitsgebot (legally enforceable) and secrecy, as with the German chemists and dye-makers or Venetian mirror-makers or authentic charter house Chartreuse, whose blend of herbs is only known to two monks, forms a process with checks and balances, rather than monopolization--renown is not exclusivity, and a better model than relying on trolling and cartels. Family recipes, handed down, though there is a shift to jealously guard collections once shared under a gettization scheme, creation and experimentation should not be hindered by the letter of the law when it usual fails to keep the plaintiff undiluted in the first place.

sea of green or silent run

Recently we were watching the Wolfgang Petersen classic film Das Boot (The Boat) about a crew of submariners patrolling the Atlantic Wall during World War II. I had forgotten that their berth was in the harbor of La Rochelle, where we traveled over the summer. In fact, I didn't recall much of the movie from when I saw it originally and was dumbstruck to realize that it was made thirty years ago this year. Then a decade after its release--and this soundtrack does strike a chord, in 1991, a group of pioneering German techno artists, U96 (eponymously), remixed the glorious and marauding theme from Das Boot and reintroduced it as one of the first commercially successful works of electronic music.

significant digits

With all the talk and nerves, one would reasonably conclude that Europe and the euro are being assaulted on all fronts not by a debt-burden or over-wrought speculation but rather by a crisis in the currency and partnership itself. European manufacturing and innovation has not been overtaken, and there is no talk of war-mongering--there has been quite a bit of thinking out loud and gloomy scenarios that have been other than helpful and have stoked panic, so I think every possibility on one's mind has already been voiced, inflation is not galloping in the marketplace (other than through shortages caused by environmental changes, like the wildfires in Russia, etc), and the euro, relative to other currencies) has only lost fractional value and is certainly one of the more stable ones.  A tenth of a cent in the exchange rate does make a difference to traders and those with dollar denominated loans--or try to out-smart the next moves, like me--being paid in US dollars. The bailout, relief programs of the States are echoed in the plans for a euro rescue fund, having wealthy member countries contribute to a pool credit that will be made available to poorer members on contingency.

What this rescue fund is, however, is not a rainy day account but rather an instrument to facilitate some countries to make more loans to others in distress without violating the founding principles of economic health for joining the EU in the first place. And it is no solution to throw more money at a problem that was precipitated in the first place in part by being overextended on easy-credit. There might be a less damaging and indentured way beyond this slump and worry--interestingly, it is the banks and investors that revealed the sovereign debt problem by refusing to extend more credit, though it took them decades to admit to themselves that this too was unsustainable, but those same financiers do not want to entertain the following alternative either: allowing some economies the option of bankruptcy (not messy and predatory and sudden) in a controlled environment, with support on hand and at the ready, provides economies with the hope of a definite end and a scheduled rebuilding.

pontifex and bauhaus

This past weekend was a busy and a bittersweet one for H and I. First, very early on Saturday, we joined some thirty-thousand pilgrims, winding our ways through dark and circuitous alleys policed by a huge security force to the Cathedral Square of the old city of Erfurt, where incidentally Martin Luther reformer and architect of the Protestant schism was educated in the priesthood and was first ordained, to celebrate the Eucharist with the Pope.

It was a very moving experience to share with all those thousands, focused on one individual. Having recovered from that adventure, we crossed to the antipode of Germany to the city of Darmstadt--beautiful and enjoyable but sad as we bid my parents farewell as they were getting ready to return to the States. We met them at their temporary vacation cottage, nearer the airport, and went into town to first see the apartment complex, the Waldspirale, designed by the Austrian artist Hundertwasser, with onion-topped domes and a strange non-Euclidean geometry that was like something out of the blended imaginations of the Flintstones and Dr. Seuss.

Darmstadt is replete, as well with, examples from many styles and movements and we passed through blocks of Jungstil (Art Nouveau) townhouses on our approach to the artist colony and architectural workshop and laboratory in the Mathildenhöhe neighborhood. The park is a cascading ensemble of early 1900s design.

The Hochzeitsturm (Wedding Tower) is a quintessential Jungstil skyscraper though draped for renovation in the background (here's a little version made for blind visitors) in the background, behind the Russian Orthodox Chapel and water elements.  Spending an afternoon at a café on the grounds was a very nice way of saying to my Mom and Dad that we will see them real soon and wishing them best of luck for their continued adventures.

antitelephone

There's quite a bit of discussion about the rather rigourous and consistently unexpected measurements that physicists at the CERN laboratories have chanced upon and disclosed as an invitation for peer-review. Neutrinos from Switzerland are arriving in a partner research facility in Italy a bit earlier than expected, just a bit faster than the speed of light, which is a cherished constant and supposed impossibility. I think no one is suggesting that Albert Einstein's century old theories of special relativity and derived equations are wrong, but such discoveries are exciting and disabusing, even when debunked and remediated. I do wonder how the neutrinos' arrival was clocked in the first place, though I am certain that the scientists are desperate themselves to be proven wrong. CERN is a particle accelerator and when one is coaxing particles within fractions of the speed of light, the energy required approaches infinity and mass, inertia that resists going faster builds and builds. Nothing in Einstein's work, however, precludes the existence of particles that always move at the speed of light or even faster, just so longer as they were not accelerated and cannot convey energy or information. Rather than strictly quantifying an exact relationship between matter and energy, Einstein's work is a framework that reveals logical profundities that are reflected and confirmed in our understanding of the fabric of the universe. That physical objects, as predicted by Einstein and others, undergo a time-dilation as they increase speed has already been proven: subatomic particles boosted to near light speed, in a sense, survive much longer and travel further than their limited half-life at rest proffers. By extension, anything traveling faster than light, would appear to a stationary observer to be moving backwards in time. The neutrinos could arrive in Italy before they were dispatched from Switzerland, but such a result seems to violate common-sense, causality and everything else. If, as in the contemporary thought experiment, one's future self could call and influence the decisions of one's past self, everything seems to come apart and go all out of sequence--unless that is what already is happening and we cannot see it for our own logical blinders.