barefoot in the sand or casimir effect

For this centenary year of the publication of the General Theory of Relativity, Dangerous Minds has nice remembrance of the visit, decades later, by the preeminent scientist, Albert Einstein, and how he came to acquire those sandals in the iconic, candid photographs.
Be sure to visit the link for the full account, but his hosts believed Einstein was inquiring after a pair of “sundials”—which has suggests some impenetrable, secret insight into time-dilation to me. It’s interesting that Einstein, after cementing his ideas, rejected (initially at least for some of the projected outcomes but was never a convert for others) the chief cosmological consequences of his model: Einstein rejected the notion of the Big Bang (der Urknall) and the expanding Universe, the figment of Black Holes (Schwarze Löcher) and Wormholes (Wurmlöcher—also known as an Einstein-Rosen Bridge) whose dynamics suggest the possibility of time-travel. We are reasonably sure that the former two phenomena exist—and have good reason to suspect, given the sceptic’s track-record, that the latter might be possible as well. Photographs themselves are like little fossilised increments of spacetime, allowing one to reach into the past. Given that cinema was emerging around the same time, I wonder if Einstein and other theatre audiences knew intuitively to apply their sense of flashback and foreshadowing to cutting to different scenes on the movie screen.

fakery and fraudulence

I’ve finally received my long-awaited love letter from the Office of Personnel Management informing me that the totality of personal information has been compromised in a targeted cyber-attack, with the private details of my family and associates as well.
“Our records also indicate that your fingerprints were likely compromised during the cyber intrusion. Federal experts believe the ability to misuse fingerprint data is currently limited. However, this could change over time as technology evolves…” As recompense, the correspondence encourages me to register in a sort of identity-theft monitoring and protection programme, but I don’t know if I’ll be signing up as there’s not much there to instil a sense of confidence in their stewardship of any more individual data. When bits and pieces are stolen, it seems that something so easily lost isn’t worth protecting to begin with but it’s getting really intimate when a whole comprehensive profile is exposed.

docomo or the queen’s english

As is my wont, I must have glossed over this rather disturbing announcement and I truly appreciate Bob Canada for reviving this discussion—thinking that the Word of the Year as nominated and elevated by the venerable institution of Oxford University Press was “emoji,” which I thought to be pedantically behind the times, and not an emoji.
Albeit their flagship OED aims to capture language as it is actually used and not prescribe how it ought to be—despite the authority that it enjoys, I am not sure what to make our language and lexicon when “Face with Tears of Joy”—which sounds like a title museum curators would give to distinguish a work with no name, is celebrated. What do you think? I certainly use the glyphs for punctuation, I guess at the expense of full-stops, but in general not for a whole thought. Maybe Oxford’s contender was chosen too because of the ambiguity that can be substituted and encoded and be assigned different signals and meanings—like the suggestive eggplant or nail-polish representing some hollow accomplishment or indifference or the agony of being pepper-sprayed here pictured.

5x5

eddie are you okay: catchy barrel-organ version of Smooth Criminal 

lol: ukiyo artists from Edo-era Japan also liked animal memes

planchette: a Ouija board furniture ensemble 

d³Ʃx²: dedicated Whovian reveals the Doctor’s true name

octave: gallery of very large musical instruments

the bees’ knees or honeycomb hideout

As if humans weren’t already enough of a plague for the bees and their business, I learnt recently of a newly discovered component that might tease out a bit more about why bees as a real ecological keystone are vanishing and well as the wildlife they support.
Although diesel emissions are very much a contentious subject right now, it would serve one well to realise despite the increase in traffic and that our driving is leaving a much bigger footprint than we’ve been led to believe, three decades ago, the situation was far more dire with trees growing along the Autobahn covered in black soot and at least know, slowly, we are paying greater attention to the important things, diesel—specifically the nitrous oxide (NOx) which probably isn’t good for any living thing in any amount—has a measurable cognitive detriment for the pollinators. Vehicle exhaust affects the subtle aromatic chemistry of the flowers that bees seek and even a tiny change in the scent environment means that bees can’t form a mental map of the desired nectar and can’t communicate with their interpretive dance to others in the hive. Possibly this signals interference does not spread far from the shoulder of the road and may not be the chief pathogen working against the colonies (as there are several other candidates—habitat loss, pesticides, genetically modified crops, electrosmog from cellular masts, etc.), this is yet another reason to clean up our obsession with fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine, which seems quite antiquated and steam-punk no matter how it’s packaged.

la solidarité

Just down the street, the Henkell Fabrik is also illuminated with the Tricolore. Visible from the Autobahn as well, it is a very fine gesture on behalf of this storied institution, purveyors of German sparkling wine white (Sekt), housed in this grand Gründerzeit hall, to mark the tragic occasion with a show, a beacon of hope and solidarity.

public-key or the wedding-planner

Mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing’s machines predated anything we’d recognise as a computer—these processors being a pure figment of his imagination in carrying brute applications out to their natural consequence, but the incredulous brilliance of this mental exercise does belie user-interface, reliance and ubiquity but rather in puzzling out the limitations of computation and programming. Given proper a proper set of instructions, an algorithm to solve a given computational problem, one of Turing’s Machines will tease out the answer eventually—though perhaps not to human-scale regardless of how these questions might be framed in mortal and approachable terms.Faced with finding the optimal seating arrangement for a small wedding party with the protocol that no guest ought to be seated next to one another whom would detest their neighbours and ruin the celebration might be easy enough—even for a human to juggle, an as yet hypothetical computer could reach the layout in a reasonable time, too, by running linearly through every possible permutation. While unconscionable teraflops make this seem instantaneous, Turing realised that for a grander matrimony with particularly prickly relations grows exponentially in complexity and computers can only work with the facts that they are given—with no capacity for compromise or good enough. Suppose one’s guests were to be the general assembly of the United Nations and then the number of possibilities that the computer must assay becomes greater than the number of atoms in the known Universe. The computer would cycle again and again for several billion years but would eventually produce a solution. The inability to provide a quick and comprehensive answer Turing recognised was a limitation and a liability, but at the same time Turing realised that this shortcoming was enduring and exploitable. Sometimes the numbers can be crunched forever. Perhaps there is no overseer, Evil Genius out there that knows where all the bodies are buried and the dirty little secrets that might make for a convivial setting, but there are also woefully multi-generational problems that can be solved with a clue. Data-encryption on one end delivers incredibly, increasingly long strings of numbers that are the product of multiplying two other numbers together on the other end, and hackers are not able to identify one or both figures—without some sort of clue. Just decades on, it seems too soon to descend into the realm of the practical from this elegant formulation, but having this limitation enables the security of on-line encryption and passing code. On the other hand, knowing how to solve logistics problems—given that finding a solution to one challenge presupposes eliminating the other as well—will serve up amazingly efficient systems of delivery. Both economic models are inseparable, it seems.

sens critique

Though going forward won’t bring anyone back and I am probably betrayed some dreamy optimism when I hope that policy will change for the better, but to learn nothing just is further insult to the countless that have perished and suffered in the power-vacuum, voided by Western adventures, that the cosplay Caliphate has come to occupy. Refugees cannot be be conflated with a group of loutish terrorists that ascribe to noting loftier than the charisma of some bully with a vague vision, since the refugees are for the most part fleeing the same violence that visits Beirut and Aleppo on a daily basis. Some might argue that strict border controls will cause more suffering for those in transit and makes little sense as those radicalised individuals could already be present since months at their target location (plus there are always ways of inserting oneself into the massive throng of humanity on the march, such hostile and unneighbourly acts would topple the core values of the European Union, etc. etc.), however adopting a different approach may be necessary. Perhaps all borders should be closed and in order to help the most vulnerable and those with no means of securing escape (a smuggler, a bus ticket, a place on a rickety boat), refugee commissions should travel to Syrian camps for displaced persons and satisfy their quota by referring however many, once properly assessed and vetted. No one would be compelled to make the treacherous journey, no middle-men could skim profit, no terrorists could peddle their ideology and fewer opportunistic, economic migrants would join the ranks of those legitimately and immediately threatened. There are enough inchoate threats as it is, and perhaps if not dealing with an uncontrolled stream of refugees coming into the country, authorities could have been allocated resources to monitoring domestic threats that were already present and in the works. The nihilistic following does not hate the freedoms that their host countries enjoy—as difference and descent would in no way be tolerated by their home-nation regimes—and the attitude characterised by liberty seems sometimes just that. In as much as we Westerners might criticise African and Middle Eastern people for not doing more to save their homelands from tyranny, corruption and oppression, we are not terribly heroic when it comes to defending those cherished freedoms (until a common threat comes along) either. There’s precious little protest offered up against poverty and self-interested policy decisions (which helped to create this dread tension in the first place, as above) and corporate ploys that degrade and estrange the democratic process. Aujourd’hui nous sommes toutes les parisiens.