mediatrix

The ever alluring Messy Nessy Chic has an engrossing vignette of the 1937 World Expo, hosted in a Parisian venue, which is striking as a moderator between the inchoate belligerents of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Aside from the antagonistic pavilions, there’s plenty of other showcases to see, plus considering the motives of the creators and apolitical drives of the respective architects behind these temporary installations that makes them take on a strange permanence.

autobots, roll!

An Ankara-based research and development firm has created a range of prototype and fully operational Transformer vehicles. These BMW cars can be driven just like any car but also can take a robotic form and is fully articulated. Maybe these warriors are not quite ready for a pitched-battle but the team behind these custom Decepticons are working fervently to add more features.

rosinenbomber

Naturally, one associates the year-long blockade and subsequent airlift (Luftbrücke) in the immediate aftermath of World War II with Berlin and the Tempelhof airfield of the American Sector, and while there were serious geopolitical intrigues involved, including the Western powers propping up of the new Deutsche Mark (to make sure that a recovering West Germany was not able to completely renege on its debts, in part) that led the Soviets’ attempt to isolate West Berlin and starve the exclave into submission, in my mind it remains as a goodwill mission and those flights had to have originated from somewhere.
Two hundred thousand flights from the from the summer of 1948 until the following June formed a bucket-brigade that continuously brought food and supplies to the divided city—and I’ve never been able to quite reconcile that popular image (nothing trivial, no, but also not the stuff of a hot war either) of the airlift with the rather grim fact that all the streets on the military installation (recently named in honour of the general and deputy military governor of Germany who orchestrated the so-called Operation Vittles) are in turn named after service members who died during the operation, a moving tribute and considering the scope and complexity of the continuous runs, it is surprising how few casualties there were. Command and control for the entire mission—which was distributed over three air-corridors, in British occupied Lübeck and Celle as well as the main thrust coming from Rhein-Main airbase and Wiesbaden’s airfield—was headquartered in a townhouse at the head of Taunusstraße just off the Kurpark and Casino of Wiesbaden, since converted to apartments and a florist shop. The Soviets tolerated the stream of flights, not wanting to be accused of stoking more conflict, and supposed that the British and Americans would eventually grow weary and either surrender West Berlin or concede to Soviet demands that they stay out of German economic policy. Though the contrast of humanitarian mission so embargoed with the victory of the Allied Forces (East and West) is nonetheless still a little jarring, it’s probably far more noble and civilised for preserving the peace—mutually—in the face of frustrations that could have just as easily descended into renewed violence.

your hit-parade

There’s a very clever robotic oracle called Jukedeck that isn’t even coin-operated that will serve one up a signature tune, a jingle, a strain of incidental music that’s unique and to specifications for one to use forever however one sees fit.
From an algorithmic base, the artificial intelligence scores tunes of whatever mood or style instantly, and while presently (not as of yet as the program is still learning) none are arguably terribly catchy or timeless standards, they are fun to try on for size. I’m convinced it’s at least very good at muzak for the waiting room or holding the line and bombastic news intros. Give it a whirl and share what you get in return.

5x5

sprockets: historic, confrontational Nazi disc-jockey booth at a gramophone expo prompts a discussion on propaganda, via Messy Nessy Chic

populuxe: lone surviving prototype of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion kit home, via Nag on the Lake

the story of the hitchhiking bride: fraudulent “ghost drivers” vexing ride-hailers in China, via Super Punch

babel fish: in an on-going series of Icelandic monsters of the month, the Sögusteinn, the tale stone, a sort of egg that when inserted into the ear can answer all questions

curated: the New York’s Museum of Modern Art has made tens of thousands of images of their past exhibitions available on-line, via Kottke 

yodel-ay-hee-hoo

Via our ever-faithful surveyor Nag on the Lake, we find that some helpful soul has installed a telescopic mountain finder in the Swiss Alps. I’m sure in the midst of all that grandeur, it’s easy to misjudge distance or mistake one peak for another, but a peek through these angled tubes, labelled with the summit in your sights and the distance away, works like a sextant. Not all of us have the vocal skills to navigate, like the yodelers, with echo-location. Read more about the installation and find more fun stuff at the link above.

megabit, metabit

To my peril but also to my subsequent delight and emendation, my love-letters from Brain Pickings are usually dog-eared and set aside for reading that I always promise to get to at soon point, but that pile in my inbox is seething and threatens an avalanche. Happily, I was able to return to an intriguing sounding review of the life and times of a young mathematician who’s pioneering work in circuitry demonstrated that all logical operations could be reckoned by switches and relays and the just invented transistor, leading Claude Shannon to quickly and intuitively conclude that all information in the wilds—its natural habitat could be corralled and tamed, with data emerging as information thanks to the transfiguring exchange between the observer and the observed.

Corresponding with contemporaries that included Alan Turing and Vannevar Bush, Shannon was able to appropriate rather vague and generic terms, as had Isaac Newton in his mission to redefine physics in a disciplined and predictive manner, and furnish the world with Information Theory complete with a grammar that’s intelligible to both the mediator and the immediate. The bit is a metric, a measure of state (coined by Shannon as a portmanteau of binary digit) conveying either true or false, yes or no, but scalable out to any degree and precipitated the limning of communication and experience into a digital analogue that is accessible and exploitable by computer systems. Although we think of programmes as limited to the confines of simple logic, Information Theory also provides brute computing somewhat of a reprieve, showing that rather unique data-sets that encode unique and familiar data can be elided over, somewhat like the End-User Agreements that computers ply us with as instructive (although mathematical in nature, it is pretty human to skim), aiding in speed and compression. Moreover, as apparently as discreet and incompatible as Nature chooses to impart information, there is always a measurable threshold that computers can harness, from bar-codes and magnetic-strips to more custom parameters.

landtag

A week ahead of the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Hessen—the first German constituency at that level to be formally reconstituted after World War II as the chief staging-grounds of the American-occupied sector—I was able to arrange (or rather happened upon) a tour of the formal ducal residence that hosts the state parliament (Hessischer Landtag), just removed from the Rathaus and main market square of Wiesbaden, the capital.

Click on any image to enlarge it.
The city will commemorate the occasion by opening all of its ministries on 24 September to the public but it was a privilege to have a guided tour that rather tidily tied together the idea of accessibility, image and engagement on the part of the represented. The entrance, facing the people’s Rathaus, is very much in keeping with the Baroque style of the city’s other royal structures—and was the duke’s (later created grand duke of Nassau-Orange) winter-quarters, the summer palace being a few kilometres down a grand avenue on the bank of the Rhein in Schloss Biebrich.

Just off the central stairwell (Treppenhaus), there was a greenhouse of sorts whose walls were still decorated with a lush jungle motif—distinct from the icy snow-flake theme that subtly adorned the rest of the palace in the ceilings and in the parquet of the floors (I am thinking that people were just beginning to study wintery precipitation under the loop) that once held exotic plants. Now the space only held busts of past Hessian minister-presidents, but having been elevated, the grand-duke took up new addresses and his botanical collection went to Frankfurt am Main to seed the area that’s now known as the Palmengarten.

Another legacy of the royal family was the unexpected premature death of the Duchess Katharina, his Russian wife, caused the grieving Duke to build the Orthodox chapel on the Neroberg as tribute (more on this place to come). This routine of upstairs and downstairs and quite a few of strategically-placed mirrors were designed to make this rather modestly-sized castle appear as large as other great houses in Europe for visiting dignitaries, and we were participants in another carefully arranged diplomatic nudge by being invited, unusually for any historic tour, to sit on the furniture.

In these representational chambers, the love-seats (so called Causeusen) were angled to make opponents to face each other askance and so more relaxed—other sofas had extra wings for advisors. I felt out of my class as a political boffin as others in the group recognised the dance-hall and balconies as places or receiving honours and momentous addresses.

The great hall hosted the first sessions of the state parliament in 1946 and marked the point of transition into the modern addition, refurbished in 2008 in order to make the work of government more transparent and rather a fish-bowl with passers-by able to catch a glimpse or more of the proceedings with windows ringing the gallery of the plenary chamber. The ceiling and seating layout reminded me of the convention held at the Paulus Kirche of Frankfurt (see link above) held in Frankfurt that established the Weimar Republic. I wonder what more insider-secrets await with the open-house event next week.