sisyphean or gravity-assist

One of the sad ironies of electrical infrastructure is that the places, like Germany, with the highest utilisation rates of renewable energy also have the highest incidence of air pollution, due to fact when there’s not enough wind or sunshine, there’s only recourse to burning coal or natural gas and no large-scale means to store excess production for use when it’s needed.
The impediments lie in not only not being able to save energy for a later time, unpredictable vectors like the Sun and the wind can easily over-burden a distributed grid whose output has to be spent, along those wires, in one way or another. There are some methods to harness this abundance, however, like the sluices that store potential energy (please don’t mind my bad German)—or project in the state of Utah called the Sisyphus Train, where excess aggregate of electricity is used to power a locomotive to the summit of a hill, and there it rests like the accursed boastful king’s eternal task to roll a boulder uphill. This labour is not futile or in vain as when needed the turbine rolls back downhill, generating electricity during its descent.

finger-licking good

Though perhaps the efficacy is in line with what it ought to be, I imagine that there was no need for this sort of product tie-in, which certainly would not be a good shark-repellent and perhaps as good a lure as a bucket of chum. The idea that marketers (who should be made to sit in a corner and think about what they have done) had for this gimmick is that the “skin that should be extra crispy this summer is on your fried chicken.” This revolts me on several levels at once, but apparently the campaign was effective with the sun-screen having already sold-out. I guess when you hit the beaches and are wafted not by the smell of salty air but another, rather intrusive aroma, you know right away who to avoid.

popular imagination

A small specialist publishing house in Burgos with a penchant for the palindrome, the Local’s Spanish edition reports, has been granted permission to recreate exact replicas of the enigmatic and mysterious Voynich manuscript, named after the Polish antiquarian who acquired the fifteenth century document from Italian Jesuits just before the start of WWI. Scholars, collectors and cryptographers have been bewitched by this inscrutable tome ever since it came to light—having baffled all and successfully thwarted every attempt to decipher it or deduce it’s authorship—or even its purpose.
The text consists of a score of unique glyphs that has all the hallmarks of an alphabet and natural language but cannot be decoded, adorned by bizarre and beautiful illustrations that provide little in the way of context clues—naked women and plants that don’t exist, leading some to suggest it is a book of magic spells or a treatise on alchemy, rendered so, covertly by one of the respected and orthodox luminaries of the age—or even the artefact of a visiting extra-terrestrial or temporal tourist. What is your theory? Images of the entire book has been available online for some time (the original is kept safe in a vault at Yale University), but the publishers home that exact copies that capture the weight of the parchment, every tear and stain might just embolden the wit of academics in the near future to take that leap and be able to intuit its meaning.

6x6

fungus among us: a look into the amazing, networked lives of fungi, including the potential for living bricks made out of mushrooms and pistachio husks

one hot minute: Koko the Gorilla shows bassist Flea how it’s done

gumshoe: Scotland Yard’s new task-force of super-recognisers could revolutionise the force, via the always marvelous Nag on the Lake

we represent the folly cove guild: the unsung graphic designers of Cape Ann Massachusetts and their stunning, iconic prints and patterns

the ocean’s hotdog: the tale behind the origin of fish-fingers, the convenience food no one asked for

amber room: excavations begin for legendary Nazi gold train—which could also be carrying proto-type weapons, via Hyperallergic  

vorrat

While it is always sound advice to “prepare appropriately for a development that could threaten our existence and cannot be categorically ruled out in the future” it does smack as pretty frightening and foreboding (especially in German), and the directive to citizens to stockpile food as an element of a broader civil defense plan does raise one’s spider-senses.
The timing of the announcement, which was last issued during the Cold War, does not, I think, indicate some imminent attack but rather a general precaution—especially as it is customary to make a trip to the neighbourhood market an almost daily occurrence and not buying in bulk—nor cue people to change their lifestyles. What do think? While not down Tornado Alley exactly or contending with tremours, German does have its share of natural catastrophes as well, without leaning on the threat of war or terrorism. Surely this plan was months in development and includes increasing the budget for emergency services and increasing hospital capacity, and there was no intent to cause panic or stoke conspiracies or the admission that multiculturism and inclusion is something to cower before.

symbiosis

I think that most of us are willing to accept than the constellation of microbes that accompany us throughout our lives, the trillions of viruses, bacteria and other germs, are more than mere hitchhikers or pathogens but are really in many ways the ones at the helm and we are in a sense the stowaways—though that’s poorly processed with statements like a bacterial imbalance is responsible for what we’re unable to overcome through willpower or in the form of gimmicky probiotics. Listening to an excellent conversation on Fresh Air from NPR (listen to the entire talk—there’s much more in it than my humble take-away), that truth was made clearer to me plus that we are just beginning to appreciate the complexity of the ecology within us.
While searching for the edges, we find things like the proven yet poorly understood therapy of fæcal transplants for treatment of certain chronic gastro-intestinal ailments and the digest that surrounds the deleterious effects of non-discriminatory anti-biotics and over keeping too clean and hermetically-sealed, it struck me how the mechanism and relationship is better illustrated in the perhaps more straightforward insect world—where we’re not caught up in pride and hygiene. Fully forty percent of the insects and arthropods in Nature (quite a lot of the world’s life but just a fraction of the whole, considering the population of bacteria and archaea) host a truly remarkable and versatile bacteria called Wolbachia, which seems to have as much influence on the bugs it resides in as their genetic makeup. Inherited—or rather passed (the research helping us realise that a robust immune system is passed from mothers to babies indirectly by compounds in breast milk that only helpful bacteria can eat), along matrilineal lines only, the bacteria are responsible for shaping the society of termites, ants and bees by controlling the breeding-stock and according that rarefied privilege to a select few or even facilitating the ability for others to reproduce by cloning. Perhaps contrary or an alternative to the method of propagation and self-preservation that hosting pesky pathogens imparts (and how that might operate and might have granted an advantage is also poorly understood), that same bacterium also inhibits mosquitoes from acting as disease vectors when introduced to a population without fumbling around with their DNA. That really speaks to me and suggests that we ought not to try for the low-hanging fruit before understanding the whole ecosystem and also what might opportunities might be won in small nudges.

furby-gurdy

Thanks to Neatorama for introducing us to wonderfully crazed cacophonous taxidermy of custom instrument designer David Cranmer. In addition to his latest interactive Owl Theremin, one can find musical demonstrations of a badger version of the Moog kit or a hurdy-gurdy made from the innards of the must-have robotic pet of the late 1990s at the link up top.

dog & butterfly

While I like to pretend that I usually find these cross-species animal friendship stories a little dopey, sometimes they just resonate with me. Like with the story of this duck that appeared out of nowhere for counseling and companionship for this depressed and anxious dog—there was just something to the narrative and storyboard that struck me as genuine and heart-warming.