gentleman farmer

Writing for the Awl, correspondent Clinton Crockett Peters shares the biography of that charismatic megafauna, kudzu, that has invasively engulfed much of the southern United States and is spreading. Growing up in east Texas, Georgia and Alabama I can remember those kudzu monsters, how trees covered and choked with the vine were propped up and seemed like dinosaurs in the dark, and how aggressively out-of-place it seemed but I never knew its provenance and how it was once peddled as get rich-quick-scheme.
While certainly not without merits if kept under control, kudzu—which was introduced to the American public at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia alongside ketchup, root-beer and the telephone—is native to Japan and afforded greater range will spread with devastating consequences including damage to other agriculture and ecological changes in carbon-cycles, not to mention the pesticides that some resort to beat back its advance. The versatile vine is useful for preventing erosion—though the Dust Bowl still occurred—recharging over-farmed soil and as food for people and livestock, but as with other short-sighted schemes it seems incredible in retrospect that kudzu was subsidised and its planting was encouraged, championed by celebrity “front-porch farmer” Channing Cope through weekly radio broadcasts, and took nearly another century to classify the vine as a noxious weed and begin to realise the effects of introduced species. Read all about it at the link up top.

weiße haus

I’ve passed this villa in the Hessian capital numerous times and it always caused me to do a bit of a double-take but never realised until recently that the similarity to the US presidential mansion was intentional.
In 1903, sparkling white wine (Sekt) magnate Friedrich Wilhelm Söhnlein commissioned a Zürich architectural group to build a residence for him and his new wife and re-import Emma Pabst, heiress to the American brewing dynasty, specifically in the style of the White House. The design (an homage to Irish architect Jame Hoban) was also part of the motivation for the US military authorities to commandeer the compound from 1945 until 1990 and utilise it as a local head-quarters—just removed from the Kurpark by a few hundred metres. When the villa was returned to the state, it was considered for a time as a new home for the state government or alternately listing the property as a consulate—even though many countries were represented in nearby Frankfurt. Presently the building is in private hands but can be rented for special events.

bizarre love triangle

The Spanish commercial photographer that took the image of a boyfriend with a wondering eye, as Super Punch informs, is surprised but unconcerned (so long as decorum is maintained) by how one of his staged stock photos has gone viral and is fodder for the meme-mill.  The prolific self-taught entrepreneur has used the same trio of models in most of his compositions taken over the past five years, stringing their affairs into one epic soap opera story-board.

anthropomorphic test device

Unveiled last February, the hyper-realistic, pliable figure known as Graham designed by Melbourne artist Patricia Piccinini (in collaboration with a forensics expert and a trauma surgeon) whose anatomical frame is modified to withstand low-impact car collisions has been nominated for London’s Design Museum annual award competition. Commissioned by Australia’s traffic safety board, the grotesque is sort of a reverse crash-test dummy, imaging how we might have evolved to survive automobile accidents if that were our only threat to contend with, and installs safety features in the passenger as a way to lobby the industry to make safer vehicles.

cool and calculated

Thanks to the brilliant essay by Margaret Wertheim we’re reminded that not only is non-Euclidean geometry not just some contrarian theory, it’s moreover observable in Nature and we can learn to crotchet with hyperbolic patterns.
By pondering how simple creatures and primitive—even primordial—structures can prefigure the most complex and abstract mathematical concepts that mankind is credited for discovering rather than being informed by a disembodied function, the author explores how we might not have taken the most optimal and encouraging approach to academics and suggests we engage in maths jam-sessions and that virtuosity differs only in instrument. Study and practise aren’t being supplanted by license but rather the notion that our imagination is rather inhibited by convention and we’d be better able to see the next revelatory breakthroughs if calculus was the plaything of all aspirants and not just the few. When first taking a geometry course and being introduced to the different fates of parallel lines, I recall day-dreaming about the architecture and the topologically understanding of birds but didn’t know that these abstract concepts were embodiments of the physical world. There are a lot of thought-provoking avenues to explore in the piece whether or not one believes that honey-bees or nautiluses know what’s best suited to going about their business and the most resonant support for her argument was how mathematicians have time and again have found themselves feeling doubt and disdain for their most transformative theories and nearly didn’t dare share them for fear of rejection—whereas bit of contextualisation and craft might have proved liberating.

love chechen-style or broken-window, broken-home

Rewarded with unfettered license to play-house with his country in exchange for loyalty towards Moscow, after months of brutal treatment of gay men Ramzan Kadyrov, we learn via Super Punch, is back with more social-engineering initiatives with televised reunions of divorced couples. As ludicrous and as much like the premise of a reality TV programme as the Council for Harmonising Marriage and Family Relations, which brings together former estranged partners under the auspices of it being better for the children and children raised by single-parents are more likely to turn to terrorism (apparently), may seem, it’s deadly serious like broken-window policing policies and ex-husbands and –wives have no say in their forced co-habitation, which is strictly monitored by prying-eyes, and refusal to participate could carry consequences that would potentially rival the most abusive husbands.

sign of the times

London-based artists Scott Kelly and Ben Polkinghorne are installing conspicuous banners in the midst of scenic locations all over New Zealand that make the helpful recom- mendations for similar destinations that we tolerate or disdain on-line (though not appreciating how such algorithmic shrewdness that we’re only privileged to be manipulated landscape the internet) so that visitors might mediate more on the environmental impact of their tourism and lifestyle choices. Like a garish and annoying pop-up advertisement, there are ways of course to bat it away or otherwise remove it from one’s field of view and get at the desired content but one still has to contend with that just out of the frame it’s there—like the fairway that surrounds the Egyptian pyramids or the Vatican that’s never the subject of the composition but are nonetheless fraught.

reference desk or site-seeing

From Life Hacker we get the incredibly useful tip that the whole of Wikipedia is available as a data dump any time by going here. It is currently some fourteen gigabytes of compressed information, unzipped to around sixty and can easily be tucked away onto a USB drive to have a version at one’s disposal whether on-line or off to satisfy the curiosity of the moment or merely for the pleasure of pursuing daisy-chains of related ideas down rabbit holes.
It’s a little too big to tote around on one’s mobile devices (and should one try to employ an abridged version, it feels like defeating the purpose with limitation) but the Wikipedia app is worth having—only taking up nominal space and having a very tight turning-radius owning to the fact it’s not laden down with the usual advertisement targeting software—and has a quite interesting feature, provided that one is will to share one’s whereabouts with Wikipedia: it informs on what locations in one’s physical proximity have articles written about them and what heading one should take to visit them. It’s quite useful for orientation and sight-seeing when in a new place for the first time and is really the only tour guide that one needs.