big fat surprise

A study, heavily laden with footnotes and cross-references, from the British Medical Journal suggests that all the lies the public have been fed regarding diet and nutrition over the last five decades or so was more or less experimental in nature—with the subject of study being more marketing, agricultural surplus and farming lobbies rather than health and well-being—and could neigh equate with mass-murder. This rather short analysis has been bantered about in the news for the past few days and subject to quite a bit of elaborate and imaginative conclusions, which was the stuff of the fringe-community previously, for going against the rubric of the Food Pyramid.

The article is not a summary dismantling of the pseudo-science, sponsored studies and poor sampling techniques that launched a thousand fad-diets and ensured that despite what appear to be good-faith remediation, we are as a whole, much unhealthier than ever before, but it does open the way for rigourous and humbling studies to follow. What do you think? Were we just naïve in believing that we not are surrounded by touts and hucksters—untouchable even in more wholesome rackets? Is this bit of righteous arson just clearing the stage for the next round of opportunists, as usually what’s quality isn’t worth the investment?

sea of serenity or columbiad

Though the first steps and thoughts uttered on the Moon are much celebrated and well-known, the final reflections of the last human to walk on the lunar surface are also profound and poetic. As he was getting ready to return to the lander 13 December, 1972—just over forty two years ago, astronaut Eugene Cernan mused:

‘...I'm on the surface; and, as I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come—but we believe not too long into the future—I’d like to just say what I believe history will record. That America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. “Godspeed the crew of Apollo XVII.”’

It always strikes me how short of period those missions spanned, in the crippling, unhappy days of the Vietnam War, and the reference-realisations that we thought we needed and had a really good reason for the exploration and the whole retroactive time-travel associated with adventures and imaginations that only seemed to have crept in one direction.

Humans first landed at the Sea of Tranquility (Mares Tranquillitatis) carried aloft by the orbiting command module called the Columbia after the Columbiad, the giant space-canon in Jules Verne’s book From the Earth to the Moon (which bears a lot of other similiarites to the actual missions’ execution), and humans left for the last time from a canyon called Taurus-Littrow in the Mares Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity. Though never meant to be a party-crasher as the programme held its own and in many ways surpassed the achievements of the Americans—and in the first act of cooperation with the US, Soviet mission-controllers released the flight plan of its latest launch to ensure the safety of astronauts, Luna XV overlapped with Apollo XI and the first manned landing on the Moon. The Soviet module collided with the side of a mountain was it was coming down at the moment when the Apollo astronauts were first emerging from the lander for their walk-about.

Had the Soviet mission—the third attempt aimed to bring back rock samples, been a success, it might have still been overshadowed by humans presence, but the programme might have demonstrated that the same feats could be accomplished without risk to life and limb, being the first space programme reliant on advanced robotics and computers. IX having landed successfully on the Moon some three years earlier, II having rammed into the Moon a decade prior, while the first mission overshot its mark and became the first satellite to orbit the Sun and others—continuing until later summer of 1976—taking photographs and measurements, delivered roving vehicles and did succeed in returning soil samples, the scientific value—for the cost—of Luna XV would have outshone Apollo. If this pace and urgency had been sustainable, and even friendly as it later became, I wonder where we might be now. I hope too that we have the patience and the ambition to realise the vision that the last human to walk the Moon expressed.

pontiac rebellion or sons of liberty

Not to shatter any illusions, but one of the underlying motivations for the American Revolutionary War that cast off the yoke of British colonialism and set up a republic by and for the people in the face of monarchy—sorry San Marino, you apparently don’t count, before all that championing of the unreasonable nature of taxation without representation, was a touch less savoury.
Founding myths are important, obviously.  Proxy guerrilla warfare was staged against the British by competing powers in Europe—notably the French (spiraling debts incurred over these engagements led to France’s own revolution), the Spanish and the Netherlands who stood to gain with the UK tied up in internal conflicts—ensured that the conflict would continue, even after the concession of self-rule for the North American Colonies. Before these high-minded casus belli were discovered, however, it was the Crown’s irksome insistence to keep its word on treaties established with Native American tribes that was a sore point of agitation for settlers looking to expand their holdings. Because of growing tensions and potential exploitation of Indian lands, a series of royal proclamations decreed that there could be no private property deals between the colonists and Indians and that land corporations, like the Ohio and Illinois companies, would arbitrate the transactions—not that these companies were above suspicion themselves. Plantation owners seeing their aspirations mired in more bureaucracy rebelled for deed and title.

broadsheet

This past year was certainly a banner one for anniversaries and centenaries marked the world over, and it seems as if the trend is hardly escapable since we’re survivors of history’s dreadful-excellent heap of memory.
It is a good thing surely not to forget to celebrate what we’ve achieved and overcome but this whole movement to propagrandise and make, especially a century’s passing, a moment of national pride and a rallying-cause happened in 1617—one hundred years after reformer Martin Luther famously nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberger Dom and sparked the era of Protestantism, masterfully captured in this poster with quite a bit of allegory to study, like a political cartoon. Of course, this stand is celebrated every year—peacefully and surely Luther does not endorse the use of his likeness for this campaign message, on 1 November, but apolitically. Mass distribution of this broadsheet—and Luther’s Bible, were made possible by newly introduced printing technologies and the Princes of Prussia certainly were not going to let the date go by without some manipulative media. Clashing forces of the Lutherans and the counter-Reformist Catholic lands in a fractured Holy Roman Empire quickly escalated—especially with sentiments fueled on both sides by caricature and fear-mongering, and led to the Thirty Years War, which was one of the darkest and bloodiest wars of European history Christian sectarianism. I hope that we don’t need our memory jarred with new violence for old.

synæsthetic clock

Via Colossal, here is a wonderfully calm and mesmerising thing to look at: What Colour is it? from Berlin-based artist James E. Murphy, a little webpage that displays the time of day as its hexadecimal (internet browser) colour value, drifting through the hues as the seconds pass. Laughing Squid also features an earlier interpretation that can be downloaded as a screen saver. This would also make a nice face for the upcoming onslaught of so-called wearables—smart watches and other accessories. Synæsthesia refers to those lucky mutants who perceive, intuit sounds as having a tactile feel to them or days having a specific visual properties.

arcade sounds

Via Laughing Squid comes a nifty series of the lyrics to David Bowie’s timeless ballad “Space Oddity” illustrated through panels, imagined album covers of vintage arcade and console video games. Though not quite lent the psychological heft of one’s own favourite songs or of Mozart to settle one’s mood, video game music (think Коробейники, the Tetris song) is composed specifically to remove distractions and helps to keep one focused.

iso 4217 or beyond the dniester

The autonomous strip of land between Moldova and Ukraine that hugs the Dniester river known as Transnistria or the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Приднестровская Молдавская Республика) represents the region that did not want to disassociate itself from Mother Russia as the Soviet Union was dissolving.
Though independent from the Moldovian government, Transnistria’s political status has gone unresolved for more than a decade, enjoying only severely limited international recognition mostly from states in similar situations that generally go unrecognised themselves. This situation has resulted in high-hurdles to trade and permeated economic isolation, only open to a few select markets—which inevitably produces a gun-running economy. The predicament has also led to a few innovations—such as can be curried in such an environment, including a unique coinage to compliment their native, “token” currency. These Transnistrian rouble coins are made out of composite plastic and look to me, endearingly, like guitar-picks.

null-set or four-squares

Æon Magazine features a really inviting and illuminating essay from earlier this Summer on how Eastern thought, Buddhism in particular, which can come across to Western-thinkers as hopelessly mystical and too pliable for admitting contradictions, while saying nothing about inherent truths in any system, prevision—in a sense—and converge in the logical constructs of mathematics, modern set-theories which have applications in computing and high-level physics.

Again—I suppose that the inherent truth behind these disciplines, which appear rigourous and legitmate to the experts that create them, is not something unredoubtable in itself, like claiming that one of the two superficially different modes of philosophy is more enlightened than the other, plus religion and worldly informatics do not necessarily have the same aims. While Aristotle, championed by the Romans and the Church and became the influential standard for scientific investigation, insisted that everything was black and white—everything either was or was not—another, third option was not given, terium non datur, as the Romans called it. Around the same time, Buddha and his disciples were considering a fourth, with the option of a fifth up to the thirty-second degree, option in the range of possibilities by subjecting all question to what’s called catuṣkoṭi, a sort of four corners of being, wherein something is either true and only true, false and only false, partially both or neither true nor false. Concepts like this come across as infuriating often in Western contexts, though many thinkers have touched on this set of logical operators before and they appear contractually in programming and in the maths that allow it. Though on the surface the states of catuṣkoṭi might sound a little like the conjunctions of AND, OR, NOT and XOR, to really start seeing the states as non-contradictory, one can start to think of them in terms of relationship and functions.
The article illustrates this range of connexions through parentage and siblings: mother of is functional since any son or daughter has just one, whereas son of or sister of is relative since there could be any number of permutations, dependent on the family or none at all. This article and discussion is certainly something to step away from and reflect on—rather than reading in one sitting, but it is without a doubt fascinating that mathematicians and logicians came to restore to the same quiver of paradigms as Eastern philosophies, without being some closeted mystic or Buddha-apologist. The fifth option, which could explode into all sorts of other dimensions, is what’s called the ineffable (a pretty neat sounding word): when those paradoxes and fundamental contradictions are handed down to us, seemingly only for the sake of confusion, a kōan—the sound of one hand clapping, we have to admit that it’s an experience too big to get our heads around and thus unspeakable. Presented with this possibilities—that there are things in the cosmos which we cannot articulate or even perceive, certainly seems very real and probably comprises an infinitely bigger part of reality, it seems however that we are just pushing back contradiction by a few powers, which may be significant in itself, by knowing of something that we can’t hope to address or not knowing about it at all.