a series of tubes or recursive doodle

Via Colossal, photographer Connie Zhou brilliantly documents her privileged and exclusive visit to one of Google’s data centres. The organization and complexity of this wondrous information factory seems unreal, like a bonus level from Super Mario world manifest in reality. Getting this glimpse of where the internet lives reminded me of another fantastic piece of plumbing, one of the buildings of the National Library system in Paris (Bibliothéque nationale de France), which also has hot and cold running knowledge.

überdimensionales

It becomes strange what one doesn’t give a second glance after a bit of indoctrination. There is not exactly an aggressive giant chair advertising offensive making this too commonplace to notice, but one does find such structures fairly regularly in the parking lots of bigger cities—at least in southern Germany—sort of, I suppose, like Bob’s Big Boy but these examples are I think much more arresting, eye-catching landmarks, even if they’re just for marketing too.

Perusing the phenomenal adventure guide for curious destinations, Atlas Obscura, for something neat to see not too far away that we might have overlooked a few weeks ago, I learnt that the largest office chair in America is located not far from where my sister lives. From the vignette, I couldn’t really tell if it was in fact something to write home about, which she never did, or if it was something too that one stopped seeing with time and familiarity—driving with a newcomer down main street and when they ask ‘oh, what’s that?’ just replying without glancing away that’s just the largest office chair in America, sort of like Guy de Maupassant who took lunch daily directly underneath the Eifel Tower, which he thought an eye-sore, since from that vantage point, he was guaranteed not to have to look at it.  There is our regular again, Monsieur de Maupssant—he hates it here. It sounds like a distinction, nonetheless, and I will have to ask my sister to investigate.

lend-lease

I feel somewhat like a pariah, having been bounced around from one closing American military installation in Germany to another, like some foster child and it seems that I have been bad luck in terms of longevity. And as this place is winding down operations and the tempo of deployments is letting up, we’re witnessing the same mad rush to close out contracts and accounts with a flurry of new construction, both cosmetic and structural improvements.

The properties and housing units can be re-purposed for civilian use easily enough and brought up to code, streets straightened and the American ghettoes Deutsche-formed (like terraforming), but there seems to have been a lot of procrastination, denial and uncertainty about how to proceed, abandon that lets commitments and de-logistics go forward with controls or a plan. This closure cycle is different, and not just for the break of a decades’ old tradition and a cultural institution that was an integral part of the post-war era, but also because the military presence is too rarified and no parent organization is thereto assume command. All the activity, I think, overshadows chaos and the fact that no one really has designs on this substantial block of property, and is carried out to the end, since the government is honour-bound to host-nation contracts and it is cheaper to return buildings up to standards rather than raze them. Of course there is the historic character of the buildings to preserve, as well, and it would have been a loss to plaster over history and this place’s former incarnations, like one sees sometimes with faux half-timbering and friezes dappled with painted shadows, though I don’t think they’d replace this after-image. It just struck me as a little ridiculous (but typical, emblematic) that work was being carefully done around that architectural element. It’s a frustrating feeling to be always coming into things as they are changing and in transition, but I suppose that experience is neither uncommon nor unlucky.

botany bay

Boing Boing, the directory of wonderment and righteous transparency, reports on a leaked letter of instruction from the American cabal of internet service providers to their subscribers, customer-base, which makes clear in no uncertain terms that habitual copyright infringers will have the array of popular, possibly with stultifying results, social networks disconnected until the offenders (determined by the companies themselves, I am sure, who are, for the most part, subsidiaries of the film and recording industry) complete a reeducation regiment to teach people to respect intellectual property. Apparently, this new policy will come into effect during the height of the holiday season in the States, with other providers sure to follow suit quickly with litigious brinksmanship, when people are not at all distracted and have a laser-like focus on the small-print. Incorrigibles, I’m sure will be marched to their local penal colony after shopping on Black Friday.

mortising or between spaces, no one can hear you kern

Perhaps I am a bit behind the curb in noticing but I haven’t visited the auction site in a few weeks and mostly prefer my old fall-back local flea-markets—not that I only visit like a desperate madman on his way to a Secret-Santa holiday office party and we do regularly find some incredible pieces there—but I am really displeased with the choice the eBay made with its new typeface.

 It looks like something that I could manage in PowerPoint (not to disparage what one can create with that platform either). The redesign conveys nothing, and I find it a little remarkable that the typesetting of the clothing retailer GAP (which I have no connection with) made its way to the headlines here, among others, with protests in the streets that forced the company to redact those changes, condemned to have never happened and no one is allowed to speak of, fleet-footed but there’s nothing about the decision of a multinational’s altered appearance.  Marketers ought to be careful about messing with an established look.

balkanization

 A US politician, not a contending mouth-piece fortunately but despicable all the same, made the hateful comment some months ago that the Palestinians were a made-up people and proposed to exclude them with prejudice from all future negotiations. While this was not the words of a gadfly and hopefully the statement’s reverberations went no further than a few pandering sound-bites, the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize on the European Union, and a lunch-time quiz to name the twenty-seven member states of the EU, a tricky task sometimes with some distinctions lying in semantics and treaties and not just geography, made me wonder if the same arrogance and dismissiveness are not also at work in the halls of this organization. I want to say this carefully, and I hope that I am not so naïve as to gloss over real—though cryptic—bigotries or the rules and reforms contingent on ascension, but I was not fit for the challenge and could not name two members on the periphery of the glaring hole at the nexus of the Balkans.  The region that gives its name to allegorical device was created by the successive collapse of empires, first the Ottoman, then Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Imperia and the finally the Soviet Union, and the fast breaks with feudalism revived sectarian fighting, parallel to the wars and de-colonization of the European powers in Africa and Asia that redrew the lines in the sand, creating new national entities with borders that did not necessarily match historical and culture contexts.

The region has made a lot of progress since being defeoffed and may not be looking to reinstate being lorded over in any measure nor want to join, necessarily, at this juncture—quite a few of the current members I think are grumbling over their association and it is not as if all the current upstanding, founding membership was completely forthcoming and honest about their own conditions and by-laws in the first place. While I am sure there are good reasons for doing so, there is even one country there named, in English, anyway with the unspeakably sad moniker of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), and I could not guess what the endonym might be and it seems to make it seem more like a place where Europeans do not live.  The EU is not Europe and forced, coerced inclusion is never a good thing, but it is a distressing thought that accomplishment and self-determination would be belittled for the sake of making the disparager’s case look more secure.

household atomics

Although it is a matter for debate and speculation through the rather myopic lens of the Cold War and the policy of deterrence what the grounding motivations for the speech and the project were, US president Eisenhower’s 1953 address to the United Nations’ General Assembly on “Atoms for Peace” was a bold and defining departure.
This message, most likely worded to bring the antiseptic of daylight, more transparency and less secrecy that characterized how research and maintenance of stockpiles was conducted prior, to that “bucket of sunshine,” as Khrushchev called the bomb, aimed to promulgate nuclear power for peaceful purposes—energy, medical research, etc., and to assuage public fear that such destruction would not be visited on the Earth again, with the irreconcilable horrors of Japan still very raw and tensions escalating between the two superpowers. No longer state secrets because of this move for peaceful proliferation, the US knew better that state of players on the periphery and developing and nascent powers, with newly-acquired know-how under special tutelage, were able to develop generators, reactors and laboratories.
Until recently, this openness has helped mean that the founding members of the nuclear club have kept their munitions but very few have applied for membership, perhaps content with pursuing their own goals in regard to transitional power supplies and perhaps with the assurance that, in a pinch, they too could weaponize their stocks. Some argue that the underlying stratagem was to persuade NATO allies to shift their focus to developing and maintaining a nuclear arsenal, rather than more costly traditional armaments and standing armies and regard the policy of sharing technologies as having gravely backfired. I believe, rather, that this approach figuratively built in fail-safes and backdoors that was a greater instrument of restraint than mutually assured destruction. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle but well-crafted diplomacy and confidence seem much more enduring than dictates and fighting wars by proxy.

verðlaun, iad duais, the prize, o prémio, el premio, el premi, ar priz, le prix, de prijs, den präis, der prisen, premija, den prisen, i priset, palkinto, auhind, der preis, il premio, præmium, il premju, lu premiu, w nagroda, a díj, cena, çmimi, premiul, τα βραβεία, прэмія

It is a great honour to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, along with 502 million fellow Europeans, and I believe in the congratulatory and admonishing spirit of the committee’s unanimous decision. Individuals surely take on the burden and potential of promoting harmony, too, and there are worthy and magnanimous individuals out there working in the public and struggling in the shadows to those ends, but awards en masse, neither slights for the other nominees nor anodyne and over-cautious, are not without precedent, like when the prize was given to Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans Frontièrs, Ärzte ohne Grenzen) or Great Britain conferring the George Cross collectively to the people of Malta for gallantry during World War II.

Cumulatively, the people of Europe and not just their ombudsmen and institutions have realized peace, progress and understanding while preserving and even sharpening individual culture and heritage in just scant decades from a landscape of conflict and autocracy. Conspicuous heroism is sometimes hard to see in the glare of everyday daylight. This is a feat that should not go unrecognized and the prize is not diluted by bureaucracy as an instrument of reconciliation and cooperation that goes by an institutional name, but rather, I believe, serves as an important nudge that everyone, regulators and citizens and those associates and cadets branches and those waiting in the wings alike, should try to live up to what’s been bestowed on and inherited and be not distracted from the course by threats that divide and diminish.