gazette or worth-1000

Here is a thoughtful essay from veteran blogger Jason Kottke that expands on the lingering and drawn-out obituary and eulogizing of blogging as a form of communication that have been steadily eroding the format for sometime.

It's really thought-provoking and Kottke is being a gad-fly in demonstrating how journals and journalism are being splintered into different presences and personae spread along a variety of specialised platforms that are very compart- mentalised and don't communicate very well with one another. Taking any usual type of sharage to task, one would probably not describe the activity or announcement as web-logging—or writing. Surely no one old school gets to gauge quality by virtue of formatting and window-dressing alone, since expression is a plastic and ever-evolving thing and means are just media. It seems to me however, there is an important distinction with a blog that lies in the difference between what one might list as a hobby, a project (or a passion or a living), and what one might list as a habit, an interest.

haus am see or sugarcubes

This isolated structure located on the Icelandic island of Elliðaey is actually a lodge established in the 1953 just as the last permanent residents were leaving for the mainland.  

As the sustained isolation made it not an ideal place for ranchers and fisherman, a group of hunters had the lodge built, though called the Bjork Hús it has nothing to do with a grace-and-favour residence being granted to the singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir for being a national treasure or for making Iceland famous, as a place to gather for annual puffin-hunting expeditions—which would not be an activity that I would like to have my name connected with. The pictures of the place are really breath-taking, however.

narrative-arch or denouement

Fast Company presents an interesting study in the grammar of comic strips and finds that the human mind interprets the funnies, according to their established conventions, as a distinct lingual system.
The brain probably makes its own ways of making sense or following a story or a message presented in any venue or format and comics offer a good test subject as there are measurable elements of predictability from the set-up to the punch-line and when presented with irregular panels the departure was registered as jarring, like a linguistically value but non-nonsensical construction. I suppose there are too many variables within the plastic arts, a meme for example, to understand how it might be comprehended—or got.

toy breed or companionship task

A Scandinavian laboratory, which has introduced such products as a rocking chair battery charger, a hovering lamp that follows one around and a cloud for indoors, now purports to be working on a device to translate the barks and whimpers of ones pet dog to human language by triangulating the electro-encephalograph readings with a known canine lexicon and special adaptive software (sadly, the link is not working any longer so perhaps the experiment folded, bad, bad host). Though I don't know whether a talking dog (imagine the frank and uncensored admissions and the obligatory conversations and ethical considerations) would necessarily be an improvement on the current relationship that we enjoy with animal friends, I think it is absolutely fantastic that such mad scientists exist and are there and with a sandbox to be kick-started.

dura lex sed lex

No one is particularly heaving a sigh of relief over the off-the-cuff adjudication of one US District Judge's that the mass-surveillance carried out by American intelligence agencies was “significantly likely to be unconstitutional.”

Even without considering the source, who is part of the cadre who orchestrated dreadful scandals like the Iran-Contra Affair (the scheme to supply Iranian kidnappers allied with Lebanon weapons through Israeli channels and use the proceeds to divert arms to the paramilitary group opposed to the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua, all at a premium for the military-industrial complex—the enemy of my enemy is my friend—and to free some hostages by negotiating with terrorists), overturning the mandate that cigarette packages bear graphic warnings since being forced to do so would have infringed on the tobacco-manufacturers' First Amendment rights, and questioning the president's legitimacy at every turn over his citizenship, such opining is inviting blowback. It is a minority—or at least split, opinion among the legal professionals who've commented on the spying scandal—which in any case, only concerns itself with its own jurisdiction, American citizens on American soil and not the rest of the world. De minimis non curat lex. Appealing to a higher court could result in dire consequences in the long-term for the USA.

heart-strings

Though I think I always want to root for the underdogs and want to be skeptical of the overlords but I remember never having even the slightest bit of immunity when it came to those long-distance telephone commercials rolled out around the holidays by Ma Bell before the break-up and then by competitors. This new holiday advertisement by Apple is in that vein and tears down all one's defenses and cynicism. Click through to watch Misunderstood and have a hanky ready.

papa noël

Collectors' Weekly presents a brilliant and comprehensive feature on the origins and evolution of Santa Claus, including some ideas for the future, with many varied forms of spokesmanship and endorsements that don't quite fit the image, even for a mascot refined for marketing purposes. Nonetheless, the history is quite sweet and endearing, mingling several traditions, cultures, portrayals and exploitations, which in the end yield an undeniable, inalienable sense of wonder and belief, whose quirks and miracles that deserve discovery for oneself.

charter or seigniorage

Next week marks the centennial of the creation of the US Federal Reserve System, mandated by the legislature in response to a series of market panics that came in the aftermath of the Great War and given the triple duties of promoting full-employment, stability in prices and affordable loans. It seems to me that these goals—cushions are the very antithesis of what in reality and any victory, I think, comes in spite of the Fed's better intentions. After failing to avert the Great Depression that followed about a decade, precipitating the next world war, after its founding, the institution—which is not a governmental entity but like any other private bank, just enjoying something akin to a royal charter, like the Dutch East-India Company, it was awarded with broader powers and roles, including dictating monetary policy through an elastic supply, being the bank of the US government—where tax revenues are deposited, being an emergency lender of last resort, banking regulation and supervision and a cheque clearing-house.

That first enumerated power (which other central banks do not have unilaterally) is of course most controversial and possibly most counter-productive to its original charge, as there has been a creeping inflation of around 2000% over the past hundred years (with significant stagnation elsewhere) and though the increase has on balance been gradual and inuring, there has been more frequent periods of price spikes. In order to oversee the quantity and quality of money, the Fed acts as the US Treasury's financial agent by distributing physical cash according to its assessed need: mints produce paper money, which the Fed purchases at labour cost (about 6¢ apiece, whether for a one dollar bill or for a hundred dollar bill) and sells to banks at face-value. Coins, on the other hand, which are regarded as dirty and reviled things, the Fed must buy at retail. I suppose that's part of the logic behind the suggestion that the US president could have solved the budget crisis by striking a pair of trillion dollar coins, but there's also a lot less of metal in circulation and an assault against paying in cash. Now on the eve of this anniversary, the Federal Reserve's prerogative to spin gold out of straw, though far from being called into question, may throw a recovering American economy into turmoil with a decision to ease the printing and stop backing-up debt as routine.