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szene: via the Everlasting Blort, a fine gallery of the Swiss rebellious rocker subculture of the 1950s

guano islands act: the happenstance and acquisition of the US minor outlying territories

sibyl’s leaves: the Athenian Oracle, an early nineteenth century precursor to question-and-answer websites—all you wanted to know but were afraid to ask

velvet underdogs: right proper send-up for the much-maligned medium

patrimoine mondial: though Hanseatic Hamburg, Champagne and Burgundy are getting deserved attention, UNESCO’s latest inclusions go much farther 

grexit, stage left

Naturally the chorus of international observers and lenders bemoaned the Greek referendum up until the last moment after the polls closed and the ballots counted, crying that such a move to distance itself from the European Union, notably a political experiment and not an economic bloc primarily, did not behove the country and would not give them a better bargaining position. I don’t know that I would place much trust in any of the oligarchs championing one course of action over the other, since they undoubtedly have obscured agendas and some stand to benefit regardless—or in spite—of the outcome at the expense of others.
Sovereign debt was not what brought Greece to wrack and ruin, and after six years of being in arrears with economic contraction and punishing privations and in an even sorrier state—who could blame the people for vocalising one way forward when a decision was forced upon them, steering towards the sea-monster Scylla and knowing there would be sacrifice to avoid sure destruction if they got too near the whirlpool of Charybdis, like Odysseus and his crew—but rather the world-wide recession is to blame. perpetrated by market bubbles that exposed borrowing countries to faults in EU refinancing mechanisms. Obfuscation also on the part of the supranational banking sector, shoring up Greece’s portfolio for an EU who wanted to hear exactly that—not a Europe without Greece or a Greek state that was only on the periphery, like the other Balkan marches. The parallel is imperfect, chiefly due to Greece’s dues-paying membership in the EU, but a sanguine and constructive comparison is to be found in Argentina’s bold decision, facing bankruptcy a decade hence, to unpeg its currency from another sort of hegemony, the US dollar, and face down months and years of chaos and hardship, to emerge the more robust for the dare—though an opportunity arguably squandered by not undertaking more lasting reforms in the good years. If Greece does adopt this tacking manœuvre after all, let’s hope it does ultimately flourish.

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first rule – don’t talk about fight club: bacterial cock-fighting may lead to new antibiotic therapies, via Dangerous Minds

don’t pay the ferry man: mysterious figuring punting in an Australian lake dressed as an undertaker, traveling via open casket

nightmare of dishpan hands: vintage laundry shaming

disrobed, disarming: 3D printed model of the Venus de Milo allows art history scholars to guess what she might have been doing with her hands

gravity assists: a thoughtful explanation and reflection of the slingshot effect in space propulsion via BLDGBlog 

malkunst oder we’re having a heat-wave, a tropical heat-wave

I have always had a fondness for such murals cast onto the rather monotonous concrete (Beton) façades of buildings—celebrating perhaps a hobby of the owners, industry, religious and regional motifs, hope or hospitality, especially vintage 1960s and 1970s (during the rebuilding boom mainly of the post-war period) for their abstract, modern design—and have used a lot of these images previously, like this homage to pigeon-fanciers or this mosaic on the side of the bank in Bad Karma and many others that I struggle to find as I have not bothered curating them properly.
On the hottest day since a dozen years, when the mercury rose to 40º Centigrade (an unnatural, wilting and disgusting 104° Fahrenheit) we ventured out to have a refreshing dip in a pool in a the nearby village of Schönau.
 Along the way towards the bathing installation (which was quite nice and didn’t feel overly crowded even though everyone else in a twenty kilometer radius had the same idea as us), I noticed quite a trove of such decorations, and I knew that I had to return, despite the unflagging heat, and take a few pictures before the go the way of the Gartenzwerge (lawn gnomes) or church bells (something that people aren’t always sentimental for or even tolerant of) and are torn down or spackled over in the name of progress.

siss boom ba

Just in time for US Independence Day (and probably equally valid for Bastille Day), Mental Floss presents an animated field guide for identifying the various standard effects used in pyrotechnic displays. I never knew that they had specific names, other than “ohh” and “ahh.” The image used of a frozen firework in bloom is a long-exposure image captured deftly by the brilliant photographer David Johnson at a show in Australia with more examples at the link.

manifest destiny

Though the timing and the title of columnist Dylan Matthews’ piece for Vox, ‘Three Reasons Why the American Revolution was a Mistake,’ is perhaps a little overboard and ire-drawing—surely begging commentary that begs whether one actual read the article, it is something that’s worth the read and reflection.

Albeit that the world would be a very different and not necessarily better place if many uprisings and coups d’État, Putsch, pronunciamientos and other peaceful, textured and dyed revolutions had or had not transpired and we can never know, but it is not misguiding to suspect that the universal abolition of slavery might have been a quicker and more peaceful matter had the colonies not seceded—and despite national myth-building, this was very much a motive. The native population too might have received better treatment. The above would be more than reason enough and thirdly, the received politics also goes without saying, that the framework of democracy where no one is de facto illegitimate leads to loggerheads and partisanship. What sort of alternate history can you imagine?

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gazetteer: an interesting and indemnifying collection of global maps

cuisine de rue: an in depth guide to the street specialties of European cities

dragnet, gumshoe: via our friends at Nag on the Lake, the non-profit group Sea Shepard is spearheading a campaign to create sneakers made exclusively from trash dredged from the oceans

moku hanga: Lucasfilm commissioned a master artist to create traditional Japanese woodblocks of the Star Wars saga

opening credits: a tribute to the iconic film title work of Saul Bass

self-same or et in arcadia ego

Some seven centuries prior to the famous Cartesian maxim Cogito ergo sum (originally formulated with the French Je pense, donc je suis), another mathematician and philosopher—plus notably a physician, who attested that all medicine was guesswork and theoretical—from Persia (presently in part of Uzbekistan, those a creature of the courts through the realm) called Abu Ali al Hussein ibn al Sini (Latinised as Avicenna) prevision the philosophy of self as a first principle (or evidence thereof) by supposing a floating man—suspended in a sensory-deprivation tank as it were.

Heir to the grand translation movement, this floating man, blindfolded, and with his extremities stretched to the point, arms and fingers and other limbs, where he could not investigate his own identity and thus had no external confirmation of his body, would still nonetheless, that Avicenna posited, have a conception of his self, identity as separate from the universe at large that was buoying him up, insensibly. Whereas the assertion by René Decartes that I (ego) think therefore I am, which doubts away the whole cosmos, supposing by turns that his consciousness is a brain in a vat, feed deceptions by an Evil Genius (like the film saga of The Matrix) until there is only his doubt that he can be reliably certain of the fact that he—it is I, who is doing the doubting. After all this skepticism, Descartes seeks to rebuild the Universe as it is, only now more confident that his senses and reason is not deceiving him. It’s rather easy to intuit this after Avicenna and Descartes have done all the hard work, but both writers expect of their readership to try the thought experiment themselves (choosing the red-pill, again like Matrix) and to go through the same harrowing rigours of discovery. While Descartes was already hoping to establish the nature of the cosmos out of his Cogito, Avicenna may have had less ambitious goals (even though more conclusions fall out of his argument)—just demonstrating, no mean feat certainly, that one’s consciousness, mind or soul had an existence regardless of what outside impressions augmented it and therefore could be said to be immaterial and unperishingly incorruptible.
For Avicenna’s next trick, he deduced the argument of infinite regression and first-causes to prove the logical necessity of a creator to set everything in motion—whose reasoning and nomenclature influenced philosophers and theologians, many luminaries tilling the same ground, until the present day. Building off Aristotle’s taxonomy, Avicenna figured that there were three kinds of things in the Universe, putting them into sets like a good mathematician: one, those things which can not be, like a square-circle, an anti-whale or infinity plus one—though we might be able to imagine otherwise; two, that which exists in the physical world which are contingent on something else—that is everything with a parentage and a history, from a tablet computer to the Andromeda Galaxy, and up to a point, we are able to tell that story (for things that do not exist but could, there are the same antecedent causes that we might also account for, like there never having been a Persian Empire because Alexander the Great was never born); the third sort of thing exists without being contingent on any else—unmade and the creative impetus, the divine (Aristotle believed that the Universe had not origin and was eternal). That’s pretty tidy and has been championed by countless thinkers since. Avicenna’s statements, however, eventually fell out of favour with the theological establishment believing he was degenerating the faithful with his mathematical proofs, as I suppose that the same articles of faith are superfluous in a logical framework. The Cartesian Cogito also retains its relevance, influence and heritage (currency and cachet) but post modern thinkers introduced yet another element of doubt that creates a pretty big whole in Descartes’ regression and progression about what that I was that was doing the reflecting was. Was it really me or is it us, and since the present is the only thing one fancies himself positive of (since false memories could also be implanted) and that’s always slipping away (so we suppose)—is anything more possible than pre-reflection that doesn’t essay the heart of doubt? But that is for another post.