eine richtig gute laune der natur

Though perhaps not a global brand (but that status probably works to the advantage of the drink’s image and reputation), the soft-drink Bionade is certainly popular in Germany and across Europe and rather famously rebuffed efforts by one of the world’s major cola licenser’s to buy the rights to bottle it and it was first formulated and is still produced today just around the corner in Ostheim vor der Rhön.
Back in 1995, worried about the solvency of the family brewery and anticipation a trend of healthier living, the Braumeister sought to diversify by offering a non-alcoholic beverage that adhered to the German purity regulations that govern how beer is brewed and produced an organic, fermented drink which after a battery of experiments yields a bit of glucose rather than alcohol and flavoured with a secret recipe of fruit and herbal essences. Culturally, thanks in part successful marketing campaigns and product-loyalty by an identified demographic, the drink has earned the earned the cliché of Bionade-Biedermeier—sort of like Champagne-Socialist or Bourgeois-Bohemian but a gentler rebuke. Bionade comes in several varieties including Holunder (Elderberry—said to boost immune-response), Lychee, Orange-Ginger, Black Currants, Quince with Herbs and Strong.

would you mind coming with me, piglet, in case they turn out to be hostile animals

Minted in the realm scientific methodology, the literary allusion to the Woozle effect—that is, appeal to authority or evidence reinforced by frequent citation—was first used to criticise confirmation bias in research and long-term studies three decades after A. A. Milne first portrayed Winne-the-Pooh and Piglet embarking off into a snowy Hundred Acre Wood to track down the elusive Woozle. The down believe that they are bearing down on the mysterious creature, until as Christopher Robin points out to them, they are going around in circles and tracing their own footprints.
Woozle hunting or the Woozle effect occurs when a thesis or argument is premised upon an earlier reference that itself lacks scientific rigor or unverified claims and whose non-facts become the basis of urban-myth or custom. Examples of this phenomenon might be the prohibition of not wearing white shoes after Labor Day—which was just a snobbish joke that became culturally ingrained or the avoidance to leads to clumsy syntax by citing misplaced grammatical rules about not splitting infinitives (to boldly go where no man has gone before) or ending a sentence with a preposition (this is the sort of tedious nonsense up with which I will not put)—both rules made for Latin and not English since they were each grammatically impossible to do and in the case of the latter, English absolutely excels sensibly at what can be called prepositional stranding. Of course, there can also be more serious and stubborn examples of the Woozle effect in public discourse.

우정의 다리, мост дружбы

With a working-group being appointed to explore fording a second link between Russia and North Korea to supplement the Friendship Bridge—the sole crossing built in 1959 to allow train service over the Tumen River by special arrangement only and notably since last year a fibre optic cable, Calvert Journal correspondent Tom Masters candidly shares his railway journal from Pyongyang to Vladivostok. The account makes for an interesting read and the trip is illustrated with a lot of photographs. One of the only other points of entrance and egress for the country is the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge over the Yalu River, originally spanned by the Japanese Imperial Army when it occupied north-eastern China and the Korean peninsula during WWII, which allows both trains and cars but no pedestrian traffic.

their floors are sticky-mart

I was impressed and perhaps inspired when challenged inventor and noted 1970s men’s cologne Elon Musk deleted his Facebook pages for his enterprises—offering that they were pretty lame anyway. I hope others will follow Musk’s example, but while the great and the good can just will it so, it’s harder for most to just sever ties, despite how much it might be in our best interest, and send the message to all and sundry to be better stewards (volunteered or otherwise) of our data, realising that privacy policies begin with each of us. To better appreciate and anticipate the abusive and manipulative cloying that lasts until the final signing-off (and probably well beyond) Boing Boing directs us to a step-by-step narrative and reflection of the hurdles one must negotiate in order to unburden oneself of the social media platform. Your friends will miss you!

garbage in / garbage out

Though it is quite possible that for the present that the boasts of political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica regarding the scope of its role in swaying recent elections is just that—a little immodesty and exaggeration to reinforce their relevance—and perhaps an uncalculated bit of misdirection and subterfuge from the real agents imposing dear costs on rationality and reasonableness, it would nonetheless be ill-advised to be complacent and be unready in the event that such social engineering and manipulation becomes highly effective in the future and that what information we volunteer cannot be used against us.  

μ☉

From the curated newsfeed of Damn Interesting, we learn that astronomers by reverse engineering present conditions and vectors have worked out that the Solar System was grazed by a passing red dwarf some seventy thousand years ago.
Though fifty thousand times further than the Sun is from the Earth, the flyby of Scholz’s star (named for its discoverer Ralf-Dieter Scholz of the Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam who also worked out the prehistoric trajectory) came within one light year’s distance and was probably visible as a dim red smudge in the night sky. The red dwarf is also suspected to be a binary system, paired with a non-luminous, invisible brown dwarf, or giant planet and those gravitational disruptions the visiting star caused will eventually—in about another million years—send a volley of comets into the inner Solar System. It’s an intriguing comfort to know that humans and Neanderthals that shared the Earth looked up and into the night and made up stories about what that red, marauding blur might be—but that mythology is only conjecture, just as how humans or other beings might interpret the omens of those future comets.

yes, I am the lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please

Via Kottke’s Quick Links, we are introduced to a Berlin-based internet search engine called Ecosia whose simple and transparent business model based on advertisement revenue (if they’re going to profile you, invade your brain and vie for your attention anyway, then let it be at least for a good cause) has so far managed to underwrite the planting of approaching twenty four million trees—with a goal of a billion more trees by 2020.
We’ve grown keenly aware  of the contribution of forests to ecological balance, biodiversity and climate stabilization but we’ve got a long way to go to make up for our thoughtless past behavior. Join the team at Ecosia on their journey to achieve this good turn for the planet.