bierpinsel

Via Messy Nessy Chic, we learn that after proving itself to be unviable as a commercial venue, the forty-six metre “beer brush” tower in Berlin will be on the auction block as a residential property.
The Brutalist, protected monument was originally conceived as suggestive of a tree was opened as a nightclub and restaurant in 1976 and after a succession of owners shut down finally in 2006 and remained vacant, later becoming an officially sanctioned canvas for graffiti artists. For the lucky winner, they’ll be in possession (hopefully as an actual abode and not some vanity backdrop for tourists) of a twelve thousand square metre, four room, four bath home.

army surplus

Cause certainly for alarm but no cause for surprise and not the first time that geopolitics have been used to leverage flagging economies, but just in case you we were unaware carnival barker Trump is exploiting regional and global tensions in order to bully allies into buying expensive American weapons systems.
This pitch is unoriginal, naturally, with all modern wars have been about expanding markets and fighting saturation, also known as peak missile defence shield. This arms race, however, comes at a very different time from when we were convinced of the last existential threat with data having replaced spycraft and elbow-grease and alteration far from the hallmarks of ingenuity but rather something that will violate the terms and conditions of one’s warranty, and of course statecraft a casualty of nativism and naïvism. As a collective civilisation, I think that the world cannot be put back in the mould of a military-industrial model and trying to compel others to return to this mind set and take up arms is nearly as dangerous as the incendiary posturing and unacceptable.

hertzsprung-russell

Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares a truly wonderful tale about how scientific perspective evolves with new understanding and how curiosity has proven essential in reaching new heights that afford greater vistas.
The accidental story about the chain of collateral anomalies captured when observing another astronomical target in 1917 is a really resounding endorsement to aspire to the occasion no matter what one’s background is. With hindsight, we can see that the oddities noted a century ago are pretty solid evidence that a white dwarf (the stellar remnant of an imploded red dwarf) had recently ate and was still digesting its solar system. Though many projects are made of more mundane stuff than suggesting the existence of exo-planets decades ahead of the generally accepted thinking, there are numerous collaborative, citizen science endeavours achieving breakthroughs all the time. Do read the whole riveting re-telling at the link up top.  This is also your cue to dive into whatever archives at hand and be grateful for good record-keeping.

♄ ii

Not only have astronomers possibly deduced the mechanisms that generate and sustain heat to keep the subsurface ocean of the Cronian moon Enceladus from freezing over but can also extrapolate from their research that there has been a watery environment under the frozen shell for billions of years.
The satellite is named after the primordial giant (dread offspring of the Titans) that sparred with the Olympian goddess Athena in the Gigantomachy, and vanquished was buried beneath Mount Ætna. Attributed as the cause of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, scientists had their curiosity about the tiny moon piqued when they observed dramatic geysers of water shooting out of the southern hemisphere and seeding one of Saturn’s outer-most rings, and they thought an ocean might be hiding below as with Europa. Presumably, the age of the ocean would be long enough and stable enough to allow life in some form to gain a purchase and adapt to such harsh conditions. Looking out at this distance, delicate arrangement (though others might think that a barrier of ice is far more sheltering that the cold, open sky) makes me lament how careless we are with our ecosystem and hope that we might not have to learn the hard way.

war & pieced

Hyperallergic features a fascinating and therapeutic exhibit of quilts created by convalescing soldiers, put together mostly from remnants of their uniforms. Redeploying service members from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries British military adventures were encouraged to take to crafting rather than resorting to other, less healthy means of coping. Finished examples are exceedingly rare, but several samples have been brought together and put on display in the American Folk Art Museum in New York. 

shake ‘n bake (and I helped)

While I’d not want to risk alienating potential future sponsors, the profusion of mail-order meal services out there sort of baffles me—and I suppose in good faith I couldn’t accept their support since there’s no way such jostling and shuttling about staple ingredients repackaged could be ecologically excused—and I wonder what the allure is exactly. I remember reading once, and subsequently encountering many retellings in marketing contexts, how cake mixes and the like began to call for a superfluous egg because the extra effort lent a sense of legitimacy and accomplishment and appealed to bakers more so than the variety that did not.
Maybe the dining experience and our relationship with handed-down recipes are like that. I guess in that sense buying the experience, the virtual and vicarious reality, is what’s on offer and for myself, I’ll resort to processed foods, like boil-in-bag curries that allow me the pleasure of cooking rice to go with it or load-baring pizzas that I can flavor to taste, but I think I’ll not need a courier and a subscription.

time’s arrow

Linguists and historians suppose that the notion of clockwise and anticlockwise motion on the sun dial and clock face is related to the left to right apparent motion of the Sun as it crosses the arc of the sky for an occident observer—which, if true, raises some interesting questions about its antecedents.
Via Naked Capitalism we are treated to an exploration of the idea of circum- ambulation—at least in an Anglo-Saxon context with heavy resonance, surely, elsewhere. Though humans have always had the march of the heavens to trace, until the prevalence of time keeping and assigning direction to time’s arrow (also for navigation and shop-work with tools and bolts) it was probably enough in most situations to indicate direction rather than tendency. The terms sunwise (Uhrzeigersinnes), the Gaelic deasil (Deisel) and the Latin dexter, however, did exist before time pieces were common—with the Middle English widdershins—from the German widersinnig for going against, indicating a counter-clockwise motion (geden den Uhrzeigersinn). From lexical evidence, sunwise and widdershins to often be invoked when describing human processions around sacred sites. More about these propitious marches and examples of backwards running clocks can be found at the links above.

playthings

It seemed a much simpler when toys came to life by dint of their personalities and one’s imagination and whatever extra features or accessories were attached were just bonuses.
The pretend of yesterday, however, is approaching companionship and one has to wonder what it means to educate and then abandon for the next entertainment. Perhaps it is this ability to learn and keep us engaged that makes it less likely for us to move on—since I hope that we learn too that play is not just some frivolity that one matures out of. By the same token, we ought not to resign what we create to the same indenture as our own formative freedoms sometimes unobligingly enters into through circumstance and necessity (and cannot escape) and not make present toys tomorrow’s involuntary labour-force. What do you think? Not to be too serious over matters of fun and games, but our Yoda would indulge some philosophic-sparring and it does seem far less palatable to be trafficker than to be trafficked oneself and to be making inferiors with superior capabilities.