mercator projection

Biologist and television host, Joe Hanson, also hosts a truly splendid blog, featuring discussions—which for instance discuss the practice of flattening out the globe (more ovoid than a sphere) in two dimensions and depending on ones centre of focus makes Greenland seemingly as big as the continent of Africa with a study in phrenology. This vignette also explores other representations that try to depict a more accurate picture. I just wonder what sort of inculcations that these examples instilled in the classroom—either an ever-present awareness of the exaggeration or a smug pride.

simulacra

A skeuomorph (from the Greek for vessel or tool and shape) is a derivative embellishment that cues an operator to a function by invoking some older physical, mechanical element. The icons of graphic interfaces are vast arrays of skeuomorphs—like the symbol of a paper envelope for e-mail, a pad-lock, a waste-bin. None of these representations exist within the computer—like the orientation of PLAY pointing to the right and REWIND to the left, there being no direction but rather an allusion to mechanism of older video and cassette players, but skeoumorphism is not limited to the quiver of familiar icons.
There's quite a range of abstractions that fall into this category—I think, to include gestures and gesticulations like widely recognized pantomime for call me or for what time is it, though the instruments likely to be used are quite other in form, not to mention things like vestigial cross-beams or pockets or Ersatz books in the office or buttons and the rendering of busyness over the hull of a star-ship that's more decorative than functional—like the Borg Cube or the trench of the Death Star (greebling is the word). There's also the subtler touches, like having a digital camera click its shutter for a satisfying and familiar sound. There has even been proposed legislation that a such devices retain this feature so people know if they are being photographed at close range—and I suppose, so the photographer is making a more conscience decision to take a picture too. Slight and flimsy gadgets are also routinely weighted down with some added metal purely to give the object a feeling of heft and thus better quality.

priam's daughter or hegemony

The UK Guardian features a rather sobering assessment for what this new year might hold, a refrain of hostilities a hundred years ago hence, which would mean that the season of commemorations assay something surpassingly ironic in their keeping, rather than the chance for honest reflection on the frailty of the human condition and wisdom, as it should be—if the warnings of this Cambridge history professor prove prescient by any degree.

Perhaps not all events, convictions and factors have one-to-one counterparts (the article is introduced with the snowclone that history does not repeat itself but often rhymes), but this Cassandra figure draws some pretty scary and apt parallels. One of the more striking passages vignettes concerns how the shift in world-dominance is ever a time of peril, citing how American quietly drew up contingency plans for an invasion of Canada in the decade after the Great War, assuming that a threatened super-power, the British Empire, would precipitate fighting close to home. There is always the potential for such dire predictions and such things as self-fulfilling prophesies, so what do you think? In any case, I hope that such admonitions are heeded.

sunday drive: idstein

On the way to Köln for New Year's celebrations, we noticed a Turistic-Tafel, one of those brown and white illustrated signs that offer what historic or cultural attractions one can find at the next exit, and since it was just at the start of our journey and it was another fair and sunny afternoon, I decided to investigate.
The town hosted a palatial Renaissance residence for the counts of Nassau, which is now used as a boarding school—including for one in the line, Adolf, King of Germany, who was once on the short-list to become the Holy and Roman Emperor of the Germans but was unceremoniously displaced by the Hapsburg family. Looking at this finely preserved city-centre, one wonders how history would be changed by the detail of that time-line.
This view is from the steps of Hexenturm, whose turret appears behind the ensemble of the old Rathaus below, which means witches' tower, though no witches ever endured an unfortunate incarceration there, the town did have quite a few victims of a series of witch-hunts in the seventeenth century and a plaque at the base of the tower is dedicated to their memories.
Behind the collection of signature Fachwerk (half-timbered) buildings, one can make out the steeple of the now consecrated Unionskirche, originally a Gothic edifice built on the ruins of an earlier Romanesque—the town lying directly on the Limes with quite a bit of revival and other remnants of the far-reaches of the Roman Empire in Germany. The building does seem a bit plain from the outside, but the interior is very ornate, replete with a ceiling of panels from the Gospels. It was a very nice place for a windshield-tour but certainly worthy of more and I am excited to go back someday soon.

what's the word? thunderbird! what's the price? a dollar twice!

I have recently discovered a new fascinating fount of nostalgic marketing in the web presence of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Here is one exemplary curation of the evolution of US airline advertising logos that's really well composed—and is just one out of a sizable archive of posts on various ephemera. The site is also a great resource for vintage advertising artwork, particularly Americana, and features time-capsules that capture pop-culture superlatives from decades ago. Triangulated with the preservation of disposables and style-movements reflected in packaging and touts that were not meant to be saved and living memories, one gets a really comprehensive glimpse into the past.

weltgeist

Newsweek has a clever and alluring review of the new work by Timothy Morton, entitled Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, which sounds like a very interesting, if not important and disabusing read. Invoking the apocalypse itself, by hook or crook, is a tautologism, because it is very human-centred and is a good invitation to consider the author's school of metaphysics, called object oriented ontology—which is a way of thinking about the universe that unseats the reigning ideas of an anthropomorphic universe and that things, even the named-nightmares that can be expressed in awful statistics, like traffic-deaths and the loss of rain-forests, have real consequences and existence independent of human perception and opinion.

We can name such things as climate-change and dystopian cults but nomenclature or Ivory Tower philosophizing does not change the impact that what can be abstracted through raw numbers and kept at arms' length have on the well-being of individual conceivers and the continuation of the world as they know it. That's one view, at least—and promises to be a very sobering and interesting exploration into the realm of these hyperobjects, things of doom and gloom—like H.P. Lovecraft's Elder Gods that are unknowable despite be very ripe for opinion and shifting, malleable attitudes. But there's surely still the classic counter-balance, which far from solely justifying our chauvinistic deportment, rather is the capacity to also recognize opportunities in those misunderstood monsters and is most likely the only camp able to remedy our problems of ego and oversight—having contributed to it to a high degree. Though man's beliefs and position are not privileged and are not a divine-right to impinge on others, resigning ones selves to the perspective of chemical valence and accident is not a hopeful nor up-building way approach—by itself—either.

peanut gallery

French artists and pro- fessional food photographers Pierre Javelle and Akiko Ida have an exhibit of macroscopic images of tiny people carrying on against landscapes of food, capturing in funny and inspired ways. Colossal features a series of their work, also to be found on their website MINIMIAM, a play on the French word miam, meaning delicious, and in person later next month at the Paris Agricultural Expo. I especially like the golfers putting the sugar binkies that top doughnuts and the cyclists waiting for a brood of chickens to cross their path over a terrain formed from a clutch of eggs, so be sure to check out more at the links and compose your own dioramas.

bucket list

As we go on together to explore some of the world's wonders this year, the brilliant and intrepid explorers at Atlas Obscura present a thoughtful gallery of some of the world's strange and unique places lost to progress in 2013. The tribute includes the Mid-Century Modern marvel of the Pan Am Worldport terminal at JFK Airport in New York, which was sadly razed this past autumn to make way for an airplane parking-lot.  I bet that there were time-travelers present to witness this unfortunate loss.

This list is by no means exhaustive and a lot of architectural and cultural treasures the world-round are endangered or have been already been paved over without wide-spread outcry—like the East Side Gallery remnants of the Berlin Wall, but it is worthy of note that all these particular monuments were located in America or China. Is there something slated for demolition in your community that you believe is worth preserving? What can you do to fight for it?