adage or open-source

Cunningham’s Law is seemingly one of those pithy, defeatist principles that have been named and carry aloft some sense of proprietorship and savoir, stating that the best way to solicit accurate information (in the Information Age) is by baiting one’s audience with the low-hanging fruit of patently false propositions.
Of course, certain types are better lured by certain honey-pots of howling inaccuracy and I doubt a lot of contentiousness and incivility stem from one wanting to get at an elusive truth and not a sturdy and well-buffeted opinion. Howard Cunningham, however, for whom the law is named is not just some rhetorician but the programmer, computer-scientist and Happy Days father who developed the user-editable platform known as the wiki. This potential for disabusing, edification and promulgation launched thousands of websites including of course Wikipedia, which has proved not only enlightening but also worth protecting. I’m sort of ambivalent about such proverbs—like Murphy’s Law (named for Candice Bergen) or the Sportscasters’ Curse, but I am sure that there’s a grain of truth to be uncovered behind them. Cunningham, at least through his creation that he gave away freely because he could not imagine anybody wanting to pay for something so basic but useful, and his law have become a grand social experiment with plenty of bait and bounty.

precept, percept

Via the indefatigably interesting Mind-Hacks, I found out that American National Public Radio is launching a new, fresh programme called Invisibilia (Latin for all things that can’t be seen) that aims to investigate human behaviour and motives through narratives, interviews and research into realms that may shy away from direct observation. This is certainly a series that I want to tune in to.

appellation

Three of the slain cartoonists in Paris were also famed for designing rather bawdy, irreverent labels for a few select wine-makers in a tradition that covered four decades of vintages.

the adventures of strelka & belka

Collectors’ Weekly has a nice recollection of the canine-persuasion’s contributions to space flight. Laika was certainly not without many, many dogged comrades that participated in the Soviet space programme and their lives, careers and celebrity are being compiled in a new book, whose editor is also the subject of this show-and-tell.

like a feather on god’s breath

Though not entirely alone among accomplished and influential women of the Middle Ages in Europe, the fascinating life and career of twelfth century Abbess Hildegarde von Bingen did strike me as a pleasant rediscovery and one that certainly bears further investigation to appreciate her contributions fully.
Born as the tenth child to a family of minor nobility along the Rhine, Hildegarde was basically tithed to the Church and given over to a convent at a very young age. Her early life and traditional formative years were punctuated with visions—which were miraculous enough in itself, which she kept to herself, professing herself to be an unworthy vessel and inadequate messenger, and found her voice, so to speak, in middle age. Outside of this context, Hildegarde’s erudition and research—notably including the composition and scoring of hundreds of pieces of holy music (A Feather on the Breath of God was the title of one of her canticles), extensive studies in medicine, advocating the boiling of water of all things, and taxonomy of flora and fauna (which maybe three hundred years later inspired Dame Juliana Berners to group animals together with the most fanciful and creative collective terms, like a murder of crows or a murmuration of starlings) was brilliant and earned her the eventual recognition as a Doctor of the Church (bestowed by Pope Benedict in 2012), but what I find particularly amazing was that her life really did begin at forty and instead of retiring to quiet contemplation—at a time when people didn’t usually survive that long to begin with, really took ownership of what might be called a mid-life crisis and resolved to share her gifts.
Hildegarde’s resurgence in recent years is doubtlessly a grave oversight in history that needs amending but may be in part due to particularly liberated and thoroughly modern echoes in her life that resound with contemporary movements. Though claiming that all of her learning and works were the products of divine inspiration, as a woman she petitioned the Pope and played a major role in Church politics and even preached herself, her homeopathic practises fit right in today, for being a nun she said quite a lot about sexuality and could be considered the first person to pursue a course in gender-studies, not only developed chants and penned devotional songs but also wrote an elaborate musical in a morality play set to her own compositions. Moreover, she authored an illustrated exegesis of her own visions and invented a language and script that was kind of a coded pastiche of Latin and German that Hildegarde deemed more suited for those enigmatic and perplexing revelations that came to her, which she always felt incapable of fully disclosing. Some partial copies of her codex have been preserved but the complete Scivias (some six-hundred pages) disappeared in the tumult of war in 1945 from a vault in Dresden.

chronostratigraphic units

Mental Floss invites us to explore the planet’s history through this pretty keen time-spiral, produced by a design team working for the United States Geological Survey. This artwork—available also in poster form ends with the age of the Holocene Epoch, beginning about ten thousand years ago and heralds in the beginning of human civilization, but there’s also a proposed name for the current era, Anthropocene, reasoning that the impact that mankind is having on ecology merits a new division—eons, ages and periods all being measures of indeterminate lengths.

blood simple

Nature features a rather ghoulish study that rather upholds what vampires apparently knew all along: that fresh blood seems to have the potential of revitalising old vessels. Conjoined twins—or in this case, two lab rats spliced together so that share one vascular system, demonstrate what’s called parabiosis and is an experimental arrangement, which despite having provided insights during the 1970s about immunology and endocrinology, fell out of fashion. Now, however, researchers in the field of gerontology believe that they are witnessing a sort of rejuvenation of organs and tissues. Being paragons of caution and not be led by their imagination, they emphasise that they are not reversing the ageing process but rather—merely—“restoring function.” While it is an interesting historical look at these techniques, I suspect whatever distinction is supposed to be there is lost on the closeted undead and traffickers.

parity, parody

For more than a decade, the euro has outpaced the US dollar—consistently rising from a worth of under a dollar to this present inverted affair.

Though some may argue that such baited and contentious policy decisions are already figured into the markets and exchanges, others anticipate a precipitous fall in the worth of the euro against the dollar, perhaps settling at 1:1, should the European Union decide—be sold on—unanimously to introduce what’s called a bond-purchase programme. The plan (EN/DE), according to those in the know, provides for around fifty billion € in debt underwritten by reserve banks per month, and is just a dressed-up (or dressed-down) of the quantitative-easing (printing new money in order to cover old obligations) that’s been the standard-practise of America, Japan and the UK for decades. The EU has been philosophically and constitutionally opposed to resorting to such ends—even when things looked their bleakest for the Eurozone, but I suppose now do not want to be seen as kicking the can down the road, merely deferring future crises by not being bold and robust enough with the recovery. I think it is also a path not to trot down, but what do I know? Some of the same sagacious individuals point to the monetary policies of those countries above as having a net positive effect, since it served to keep the value of those currencies artificially low and thus favourable for foreign trade; Germany and Europe’s other industrial producers would benefit from more attractive exports.
Wage stagnation and inflation also seem to accompany this maneuver, no matter how good it is for trade. Though there are certain expectations and cursory discussions that seem to point to foregone conclusions, all nuance may not yet be exhausted or explored. Germany is rather vituperatively opposed to committing to quantitative-easing in its current form, seen as enabler and co-morbid with inflation and irresponsible governance. So that Germans tax-payers are not seen as liable for the weaker economies that can’t repay their debts under this latest scheme, two ideas are under consideration—either managing the whole programme through the ECB in Frankfurt or making national reserve banks accountable to the disbursement and repayment of those loans—essentially monies owed to themselves. What do you think? Does just spinning gold from straw become eventually too tempting?