rennsteig oder überquerte

Over the weekend, H and I took an albeit short but rejuvenating camping excursion to the Rennsteig—ridge-trekking—National Park in the highland of the forests of Thüringen.
Normally, we’ve blasted past this area on our way towards Leipzig and Saxony, although we’ve taken a few occasions to visit the promontory castle the Wartburg and a few other locations in the region beforehand, tunnelling through the mountains in one of the longest enclosed stretches of Autobahn that goes through the mountains in Germany—whereas only the passes were navigable before this engineering project.

This time, however, we paused at the head of the trail in a conservatory called Hohe Sonne to take a hike through the so-called Drachenschluct—the dragons’ gorge, a narrow path that winds through the rocky outcroppings that tower above. It was only an infinitesimally small fraction of the trails through the woods that link up with the international path from the Balkans to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, the pilgrimage route of Saint James (Jakob).
Afterwards, we toured around some of the villages, which were pretty distinctive places, within the park and visited the ruins of a fortress above the Werra valley known as Brandenburg, whose campus represents on the largest keeps in Middle Germany. It was fun to imagine what it might have been like intact.
Slowly we made our way back to the campsite we had found hugging the little lake (See) of Altenburg, just south of Eisenach and the entrance to the park. It was relaxing to finally get settled and sleep out-of-doors, even if it was only for the night and we aren’t exactly roughing it. The next day, we had a late start but we were still able to do a little exploring with the balance of Sunday and drove to Gotha.
This city, birthplace not only of many the royal houses of Europe and the commercial, services-sector boom that followed the Industrial Revelation—spinning straw into gold, as it were, with insurance and finance, was a beautiful but surprisingly quiet place—the sort of quiet that I am sure is not altogether constant or pervasive but tends to go, subdued, with those places whose history needs to be studied and teased out.
Below the patio of Schloss Freidenstein, one of the largest Baroque compounds of Europe and residence for the dukes of Saxe-Gotha, cascading down to the market square and the ancient Rathaus is a water-feature, whose fanciness is testimony to the water supply problems that the city in almost the geographic centre of Germany and the point nemo of any natural sources for plumbing.   A canal was dug of some twenty-five kilometres to form an aqueduct to channel fresh water into the city—surely not a feat to be memorialised by Roman standards but certainly a reminder of how much was lost in terms of the civilising arts when Rome went away—and allowed the city to thrive

utc or the living daylights

Via the splendiferous and venerable Presurfer comes an interesting survey of the time zone deviants of the world—those who rejected the original international accords that established Greenwich Mean Time to coordinate a smaller, industrialised planet and those who later came to make being out of sync into a political expression.
The article leads with the complex, bureaucratic chronometer of the Russian Federation, which has undergone numerous changes, tweaks and adaptations that usually go under-reported to the world at large—but surely these alterations and alternations are not insular matters. Though Day-Light Savings Time was famously decreed in 2011 to last all year, and multifarious adjustments took place regionally in the meanwhile, no one seemed to pay it much mind until the IOC asked Russia to go back to Winter Time during the Solchi Winter Olympics for the convenience of the Western European audience. Perhaps another overlooked casualty in the Crimean conflict were the two native Ukrainian time zones who saw their coverage much reduced and re-aligned with Russian Time. This piece made me think of another depiction I came across last year of how much the twenty-four time zone deviate from real time of day, according to the Sun. There are quite a few stories of loitering and malingering to explore and reflect on our convention and what reach change (planes, trains, markets and computers plus for whom it’s tolerable and for whom it’s intolerable and out of the question—as it does seem unthinkable and inviolable for some and no grave matter for others) can have.

5x5

m-class: astronomers locate a planetary system in Cassiopeia with suite of three super-Earths

golden ratio: vitrine cabinet with tiling that follows the Fibonacci regression

big in japan: a sleeping bag reminiscent of anatomical hero Slim Goodbody

electric light orchestra: Stephen Orlando makes the scroll and notation jump off the sheet

tornado magnet: state rules that Oklahoma governor must evict his daughter, who is living in a mobile home on the grounds of the governor’s mansion

caseus formatus

Although I was quite proud of my handiwork with a periodic table of cheeses, though incomplete, I also find this infographic by Pop Chart Labs to be a pretty keen way of representing the casein continuum as well. A gourmet or connoisseur of cheeses has the funny sounding designation of turophile—from the Greek τυρός (τυρί), cheese, which while sounding different from the familiar formaggio, fromaĝo, fromage, Käse or queso but compare the word for butter, βουτύρου, literally cows’ cheese and suggestive of the turning and churning of the process.

lernu! or dum spiro spero

The World Youth Esperanto Summit will be held in Wiesbaden next week (nur auf Deutsch) in order to raise awareness for this constructed auxiliary language. Though fluent speakers are approaching some three million individuals and the principles of lingual harmonisation—not to displace established languages and dialects but to give individuals a third-way (also in the propædeutic—raŭmistoj sense of learning for its own sake and not necessarily for proficiency) of shared communication into hopes of promoting peace and reconciliation, the movement, which began in 1905, faced many challenges and successive totalitarian regimes sought to marginalise its momentum and utility by deeming it subversive or even cultish.

Despite these hardships, however, historically Esperanto was an official language in the condominium of Neutral Moresnet and is presently the language of instruction of San Marino’s institutions of higher education. I wonder to what degree the adherents of the original goal of the widespread use of Esperanto as a lingua franca, incorporating elements of many branches of the Indo-European family of languages and outliers, has been displaced by the dominance of English pidgin and technically enabled dialectic and whether what we’re heir to isn’t far off from the fina venko, the final victory that a universal language could help end wars and cultural jingoism. The name of the language means “one who hopes,” like the Latin phrase dum spiro spero, “while I breath, I hope” or where there’s a will, there’s a way. Kion vi pensas? Is this language a relic for hobbyists or really an instrument for understanding? I hope I get the chance to spy some bilingual signage around town at least while the conference is being held.

5x5

take a look, it’s in a book: WPA-era gallery of library promotional posters

big baby jesus: a study of infants in medieval art, encompassing the idea of the homunculus—that great individuals come fully-formed, via Kottke

torch song: auto-tune robot performs 1990s ballads with emotion

rock lobster: part the first of an homage to the phenomenal B-52s

what’s up doc: celebrating seventy-five years of Bugs Bunny with a look back to his first appearance

birthright or pride and prejudice

The always challenging Æon magazine, far from raining on anyone’s parade, does introduce a seed of doubt in a sense and circumspection that needs addressing in regards to society’s increasing acceptance of lifestyles that do not fit the standard hetero-normative model and reforms in regulatory frame-works either granted or bidden.

Though contextually there is no direct correspondence and biographies and history is told by people recognising early on that they don’t quite fit with what society expects of them and much hardship can ensue in trying to either conform or be made an outcast, but it’s nonetheless an interesting and contentious to wonder what it means that the community embraces being born with one predilection or other—whereas, for other civil rights movements, to be defined by one’s genes would be an egregious insult and very much counter to their goals. Happily, just as attitudes have shifted from revulsion to tolerance to acceptance for gay rights, so too it has become repugnant to hold attitudes that another’s chances are somehow limited or prejudiced due to their genetic pedigree or gender. Is the nuance something completely different—or is it the same as saying that one’s deficient of mathematical acumen can be attributed to one being born a woman is the equivalent as a born and bred gay individual’s lack of heterosexuality? Such declarations can be unintentionally discriminatory. The politics of identity are still hot items, depending on one’s side and advantage in the matter—whether it is something self-reported or imposed from an outside source.  What do you think?  Is the question of determinism an old vestige of racist-thinking or something becoming obsolete and optional and a cause for celebration for that alone?

chain-reaction

Via the provocatively peripatetic Dark Roasted Blend (which I’ve sadly overlooked for too long), I learnt that in Gabon in Western Central Africa research on a cluster of sites near abandoned uranium mines confirmed in the early 1970s the primordial existence of a previous hypothesised possibility of sustained field of naturally occurring nuclear fission. While it’s doubtlessly outstanding that some clever geologist might cross disciplines and posit that a spontaneous event and arbitrary arrangement, the composition of the veins of the underground especially so shortly after human had managed to harness this power artificially (in the mid-1950s) and go about finding evidence of it—it makes me think about those coal fires that have gone on smouldering because or despite of our estimation of it (scientists believe that this reaction lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, while our experiment has only gone off for a few decades), it is to my mind even more spectacular that this so far unique event is accessible to science with some degree of surety considering it happened nearly two billion years ago.
Although the geological record can to some degree be rewound back all those epochs—when Gabon and Africa was not where it is today or maybe under the oceans, there’s certainly no archaeological or even hard biological evidence that’s available as a point of reference. Only the mathematically reducible half-life of nuclear isotopes leave a trace that can be extrapolated. I wonder if it’s assumed that there’s a natural aversion to such a set-up, that entropy eschews this arrangement. Other than these obedient numbers that date and betray the rate of decay after the spark is ignited—plus exhausted mines when all the useful stuff is carted away, there’s little trace of this infernal landscape—expect that others have suggested that another, more violent spontaneous event a couple of billions of years earlier might have been responsible for the creation of the Moon. The majority of astronomers believe that a meteoric impact that’s marred in the Gulf of Mexico ejected the mass that’s now our natural satellite into orbit but a nuclear explosion along the Equator could also have produced it—and in Pangaea, Africa and South America were kissing-cousins. I wonder if such natural fission might be taking place on other planets and possible explain some of the unexpected. Be sure to visit Dark Roasted Blend for further wonderments and curiosities.