Forty years ago this week not only saw the launch of the Voyager, our cosmic embassy, probes but also the reception of the Wow! Signal by Ohio State’s Big Ear radio telescope, discovered a few days later when volunteer astronomers were reviewing the print-outs.
Though never repeated (and it’s worth pointing out that for all our errant broadcasting, we’re not particularly chatty, either—the pixelated Arecibo message of 1974 is one of the few interstellar missives humans have sent) the strong, narrow-band that blip remains the prime and sole candidate for an alien transmission. The alphanumeric values represents the intensity variation of the signal over about a minute of time and appears to have originated in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.
Tuesday, 15 August 2017
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viva piรฑata
Via Dangerous Minds, we find ourselves regaled with the sculpturally elegant and fantastical piรฑatas inspired by the monsters and chimera of Hieronymus Bosch of south Texan artist Roberto Benavidez. All connoisseurs would of course perish the thought of assaulting any of these exquisite papier-mรขchรฉ creations with a bat. View more of the artist’s gallery of works at the links above.
idling
A preliminary but rather brilliant year-long trial in Denmark is demonstrating that parked electric vehicles can help to regulate the power grid. Recharging batteries overnight and during work hours can place stresses on utilities infrastructure and is already changing peak hours and demands but by keeping cars otherwise engaged and active players in their refuelling, the grid could selective reduce, increase or take back energy from the batteries (plus presumably store excess capacity) on this extended grid. As if this was not incentive enough in itself, the exchange—which is something I’m sure we’ll being taking for granted in the near future, can also earn some money for the vehicles owners paid out by the grid’s operators.
blogoversary
Remarkably on this day nine distant years ago, PfRC began as a little travelogue. Still wanting for a theme and some direction some four thousand posts later, we hope to continue making it worth your while to visit for years to come. Here are our top ten most viewed posts of all-time for your consideration, the rankings possibly being somewhat skewed due to gentle vandalism (or shameless self-promotion) but such is the architecture of things on-line, we suppose:
Thanks for stopping by and making this hobby an enriched and rewarding experience. Please stay tuned for continued curiosities and adventures.
Monday, 14 August 2017
david bowie, david bowie
The photographer Gerald Fearnley who took the cover-image for the artist’s eponymous first studio album (“Sell Me a Coat,” “Maids of Bond Street” and many others titles) in 1967 is sharing some of the unused outtakes. One can see the germ of some of his other personalities that would be developed fully later in Bowie’s career present and exposed already on this one roll of film.
orpheus und euridike
Forty years after its first publication and three decades since it was translated into English the research and culminating work Male Fantasies (Mรคnnerphantasien) of ethnographer Klaus Theweleit are tragically enjoying particular relevance and probably should have never been allowed to recede into relative, academic obscurity.
Fascist movements and the undercurrents thereof defy the narrative of explanation that we look toward at such fraught and pivotal moments because fascism by its nature is a mockery of reason and rises by viciously attacking the framework of education and emendation that normally protects society from the worst manifestations of despotism from getting a toe-hold. In efforts to come to terms with the horrors his country committed when he was an infant, Theweleit looked first to the usual bellwethers of economic pressures and charismatics and discovered that such explanations fell short before turning to the disaffected paramilitary pulp fiction that circulated in the last days of the Weimar Republic. A critical reading of this previously ignored corpus of literature and ephemera that reflected the Zeitgeist of fear informed Theweleit’s brutal, psycho-political, fantasy-driven collage and collective unconscious. The sprawling study exposes the pre-ลdipal male psyche that cowers behind the tough personรฆ of foot-soldiers and deputised goons that lives in abject fear of the feminine other—couched in terms that are not too different than what passes as dialogue these days, a morass that’s an enticing and perilous deep, a swamp to be drained, something visceral, fluid and fount of all sorrow. The body politic is inseparable, it seems, from our fragile psychology, and is ironically financed by a further appeal to vanities through our equally reason-defying obsession with appearance, stopping the dissolution of our physical bodies and in turn our virtual avatars. This social imprinting comes from within and until society can confront this, our worst tendencies are not calmed but primed to erupt at any moment.
sunday drive: die siebenschlรคfer
For a few weeks now there’s been a detour due to major roads construction on the way from home to my work-week apartment that necessitates that one drive straight up a mountain range to get to the Autobahn, and there’s been some new vistas to enjoy despite the dodgy weather. I made it a point to visit a little wayside, hilltop chapel near Ebersburg dedicated to the Seven Sleepers.
Click on the images to enlarge them. Both Islamic and Christian traditions share the story of seven young men who flee persecution in Ephesus around the year 250 AD by hiding in a cave to emerge from a long slumber three centuries later, at a point in history when the Roman Empire had a more favourable view of Abrahamic religions.
Indeed under Emperor Decius, such religious practises were outlawed as antisocial and subversive but the Empire turned to adopting Christianity as a state religion. One story names the youths as Achilledes, Diomedes, Stephanus, Eugenius, Probatius, Sabbatius and Quiriacus plus their loyal dog who stands watch the whole time. According to other accounts, the seven are still sleeping and there is also a bit of conflation and cross-over with stories of Joseph of Arimathea as the keeper of the Holy Grail, identifying the Chalice Well in Glastonbury as the cave of the Seven Sleepers.
Sunday, 13 August 2017
form follows function
After having my interest piqued regarding different legislative bodies around the world, I tried my hand at surveying parliaments by their emblems but this uniform and minimalist approach, via Nag of the Lake, which an Amsterdam-based design firm has taken is immediate, imagining how spaces of assembly and debate are influenced, restricted or otherwise facilitated by comparing and contrasting the seating layout of various national and supranational constituencies. Most parliaments adhere to five typologies (architecturally-speaking, the layout, the accommodation)—opposed aisles, classroom, semi-circle, horseshoe and tending towards full circular. These theatres in the round are typical for newly constituted legislatures and are most democratic, according to the authors’ research—while a semi-circular typology is most conducive of consensus-building, but I also suppose that the number of parties would factor in as well. Other, arguably outmoded set-ups seem to hinder governance.
