an offer you can’t refuse

The data breach at a clearing-house agency that adjudicates the creditworthiness of individuals and corporations world-wide represents an incredible half of the population of the United States and potentially three-quarters of the UK but is still only about a tenth of the information that the company has aggregated on some eight hundred million entities of all shapes and sizes.
Not only did the company delay disclosing the loss of consumers’ data until executives could divest their portfolios of what would surely be a hefty financial liability, it’s also seeking (as one does, I suppose) to capitalise off this crisis those scope cannot be fully appreciated by demanding that those whom they’ve wronged (and we’re all guessing here since despite counter-claims apparently one cannot get confirmation that one’s personal and financial records have been compromised or are secure until one submits to the terms and conditions of their credit monitoring service) enrol in their credit integrity programme. The initial period is free to the consumer but the following years come with a cost unless they disenrol—which might not even be an option going forward. Even if a sizable majority remembers that their trial period is about to expire and opts out and the fee is a nominal one, the potential for profits are still huge—recalling it is half the population of America that’s affected and probably untold others. Who operates like this? We have to look out for each other.  The even bigger snare in joining this phoney consumer protection plan is that in the fine-print, by accepting this handout, one agrees to army of arbiters’ negotiations on settlement and will not engage in any grievance against the company (I imagine that this is legal boilerplate nowadays for most transactions of any type) in the future—essentially signing away the ability to sue the company for damages outside of a framework that’s constructed to be more sympathetic to big business.

sunday drive: kallstadt

On a lark and taking advantage of the late summer sun, I drove towards Mannheim and visited the village of Kallstadt.
Though ancient and punctuated with moments reaching back into prehistoric times through the Roman Empire and the Frankish kings and the wine and tourist industry are quite robust, the settlement has garnered some unwelcome attention for being the ancestral home of Dear Leader.
Friedrich Trump, considered to have too delicate of a constitution to work in viticulture with his siblings, was appreciated to a barber at age fourteen but soon realised that his hometown didn’t have enough of a population in need of a scalping to earn a living. Approaching age of conscription for the Imperial German Army, Trump’s mother urged him to immigrate to America.

Arriving in Battery Park in 1885, Trump indicated on his immigration papers the fact he had no profession and lived with relatives in the Lower East Side.
After five years, Dear Leader’s grand- father left Man- hattan and followed the Gold Rush to San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest and made a fortune operating boarding houses and bordellos. When the boom began to go bust, Trump decided to return to Kallstadt in 1901 and married but eventually attracted the attention of Bavarian authorities that stripped Trump of his citizenship and right of abode due to having left the country to avoid military service and the family moved back to New York.
Kallstadt’s residents certainly don’t want their nice little town to become a pilgrimage destination for Dear Leader’s fanatics (there are much nicer houses than this last one and they’re more fond of their other son, father of condiment purveyor Henry John Heinz) and we’re certainly no enthusiasts, but maybe seeing the village and sampling the local wine might unlock and dispense some chthonic sympathetic magic and improve the prospects for future immigrants.

frontispiece

While I was not exactly expecting ancient aliens or magical rites and happy that scholarship has prevailed and that concern for women’s well-being was a matter taken seriously (though purportedly a bit gimmicky and patronising) in the 1400s, it was a little bit of a let-down to learn that the mystery of Voynich manuscript, released to the domain of citizen-science recently, has been deciphered.
The bizarrely illustrated treatise (especially when taken without context) rediscovered on the antiquarian circuit in 1912 had an unknown provenance with text that defied decoding captioning strange rituals and unrecognisable flowers and herbs. Created just on the cusps of the introduction of the printing-press in Europe and probably for a patron’s personal use and reference, the manuscript represented one of the last vanity publications of the times and was riddled with abbreviations, ligatures and shorthand that would be known to contemporary medical students but not necessarily to linguists and cryptographers. While we are sure other academics will want to weigh in and there is probably a useful tip or two contained in the volume, in hindsight given the Roman penchant to regard bathing as a panacea and the general paucity of writing on women’s health, it seems rather amazing that it went misunderstood for such a long time. At least we are left with the intentionally coy and evasive Codex Seraphinianus to ponder over the meaning of—though its author is just as unlikely to confirm or deny our interpretations.

mediterranean diet

Marginal Revolution correspondent Alex Tabarrok clues us in to the mysterious and probably lost herb favoured by the ancient Greeks and Romans called silphium, which was so renowned as a flavour-multiplier and for its pharmacological merits was worth its weight in gold—or salt.
Despite their best efforts to cultivate the plant in their own lands, however (and there are surprisingly many familiar staples that still defy cultivation), silphium, fantastically also known as laserwort, would only thrive in a narrow band of terrain in Libya and was the essential export item of the city of Cyrene—critical to its trade and economy—and while remembered in coinage and heraldry, no one seems quite sure of its actual appearance and properties or whether the valued herb went extinct or survives in undisclosed pockets in northern Africa. The plant’s reputation as a means to allay the maladies of those struck with love and as a mediator for one’s germinative functions may also have given rise to the ♥ symbol (as well as having been accorded its own special glyph for the flowering plant) and its connection to romance and shared affections on the speculation that supposedly related species have heart-shaped fruits. Maybe this spice being extolled as a super-food is a bit of an embellishment but the world may never know what culinary and medicinal treasures might be absent from our dining experience.  I wonder what other secret ingredients out there that have remained unknown, lost to history, over-consumption or lost of habitat. 

cis-gendered

Via the always engrossing Nag on the Lake, we are confronted with a rather fraught and ethically challenging application of machine learning after researchers imbue an artificial intelligence with gaydar.
It’s not perfect and perhaps it is picking up on some other sign that we’re overlooking, but by studying the facial features in just a single photo, the neural network was fairly accurate, approaching the eightieth percentile for both men and women, and raises interesting questions about the role of biology in sexual orientation—a debate that’s not settled here but that we also couldn’t have concluded on our own, apparently. And as potentially annoying as the prospect already seems, it’s not just about targeting demographics with advertisements that the computer thinks you might also like—but could also be abused to malicious out individuals and could be quite harrowing for those in positions or communities that are not open to such behaviour or sentiments. What do you think? It’s really no one’s business—and even trusted those algorithms that claim anonymity and discretion all end up tattletales, and the programme is not one hundred percent accurate and generates mischaracterisations and wrong assignments.

proclamation 4311

Our faithful chronicler Doctor Caligari reminds us that among many other notable events, on this day in 1974 US president Gerald Ford issued a pardon to Richard Nixon in order to spare his family further humiliation.
“Theirs is an American tragedy in which we have all played a part.” Not to underestimate the fickle nature of US sympathies nor the ego of a narcissist and with the understanding that despite how unrewarded it seems that at the end of the day, it does not matter if Dear Leader is given credit for prodding the world towards a more social just state by re-branding the striving of past generations to those whom are direct beneficiaries, but I do still harbour the hope that there’s little tolerance for revision and that the whole criminal syndicate goes down together.

ballast and binnacle

An 1815 travel guide to Madeira and the Caribbean is illustrated with a series of supplemental plates that contain sort of a first-mate’s log and the account of parallel trade voyage pictographically—with hieroglyphs, as the author states. These little drawings that capture the day’s events (or lack thereof) is a rather a novel story-telling device for the time and of course prefigure the idea of scripting oneself in emoji. Be sure to visit Public Domain Review at the link above to browse the full volume and to discover more antiquarian delights.

garden variety

Housed in a deconsecrated church and owing its existence to landscape artist, botanist and curio collector John Tradescant the Younger who designed the surrounding gardens and was entombed there along with twenty-thousand other souls, London’s unique Garden Museum is reopening after a year and a half of careful renovation that protected the character of the medieval structure.
The structure was abandoned and slated for demolition in the early 1970s until it was saved and converted into a celebration of garden design and history by an impassioned couple, with exhibits on the social and practical aspects of the craft. Tradescant (1608*-1662†) frequently made excursions to the new world and introduced many new varieties of plant-life (the taxonomy of many flowers are so named in his honour) to England and acquired in his travels new artefacts to add to his familial cabinet of curiosities—the Ark, which was the first collection of its kind put on public view in England and included a specimen of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. The Ark was also seed that germinated into the Ashmolean collections of Oxford but has been reunited with its curator and is now also to be found in a niche of St Mary-at-Lambeth’s.