cанкт-летербург

Reckoned from when Tsar Peter the Great laid the groundwork for the Fortress of Peter and Paul at the estuary where the River Neva empties into the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic to protect his recent conquests in the Great Northern War from resurgent Swedish colonists, the grand city of Saint Petersburg’s founding is traced to this date (16 May, Old Style) in 1703, making this the three hundred and fifteenth anniversary.
In order to fulfil aspirations as a world power, Peter concluded that Russia needed a seaport and the empire’s harbour in Arkhangelsk which was frozen over half the year was not surfeiting that requisite. After conscripting labourers from all over Russia, the city was ready for occupation and the capital was moved from Moscow, where it remained until the dissolution of Imperial Russia after the October Revolution in 1917 and was renamed Petrograd—to remove any Germanic sounding elements and the capital restored to Moscow. Called Leningrad during Communist times, the original name was adopted again with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Along with Moscow and Sevastopol (another important port on the Black Sea founded some eight decades later with the annexation of the once independent Khanate of the Crimea as an outcome—previously here and here, of the Russo-Turkish War), Saint Petersburg is counted among three federal cities and constituencies of the Russian Federation. Learn more at the city’s official web-site, in Russian and English.

baywatch

Just in time for the start of the summer vacation season of the northern hemisphere, we’re given a timely reminder via Strange Company that drowning does not look like drowning.
For a host of physiological reasons, a panicked person in the water will be unable to flail about their arms or bellow for help—as seen dramatized on movies and television, and recognising a swimmer in distress is not obvious for someone who is not a trained lifeguard or sailor. Just being aware of the fact that drowning can happen quietly is powerful.  Do take a moment to read the short but potentially life-saving article at the link above.

eu 2016/679

Just days after going into effect, two internet giants, the Daily Dot reports, are facing suits in the billions for failure to comply with the GDPR, for as characterised by the Austrian privacy and consumer-rights advocate who brought the complaint despite eighteen months to prepare themselves for the new standards (imagine had they not just flaunted the coming change or indeed how different the world might be today had the regulation gone into force upon passage) still are offering users only an all-or-nothing means of opting out, which is no choice at all and contravenes the spirit of the regulation.
The companies responded predictably with continued commitments to the GDPR’s provisions and how privacy-protections are built into every stage of the user-experience. While many websites seem to have put together some wearying slap-dash boilerplate message in a last-minute, reactionary fashion—even the biggest ones with an established presence in Europe, many smaller services that harvest visitors’ data directly or indirectly—especially second-tier news-outlets have simply gone dark for Europeans until such time as they can be reasonably assured (and thus safe from legal consequences) that their accessibility isn’t afoul of the law.

time & temperature

Coudal Partners’ fresh signals direct our attention to this rather gorgeously designed and presented global weather service called Ventusky, founded in 2006 and headquartered in Plzeň. Available also as an app, the dynamic forecasts are fully customisable and there a lot of aggregated meteorological data to sift through and recombine.

conflation

Much as a meme is an elemental unit for the transmission for a particular idea or phenomenon—a cultural analogue for the notion of a gene or some defined inheritable trait—a mytheme (or mythème first proffered by ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss) is the fundamental measurement of commonality in terms of a trope or archetype across received folkloric traditions. The intended intersection of the arc of narrative and the characters of The Tempest (1610) with Forbidden Planet (1956) or Heart of Darkness (1899) with Apocalypse Now (1979) are a few examples with many more threads to be teased out by structurally analysing the stories that strike us a universal.

museet

Hyperallergic reports that the curatorial staff of the Munch Museum of Oslo have digitally archived and made available to the public over seventy-six hundred paintings and sketches of Edvard Munch (previously). This ambitious and comprehensive catalogue of the artist not only includes the museum’s own collection, revising many works that had not been on display for years if ever, but also sought to capture the holdings of other museums and those works in private hands.

combine honnete ober advancer mercantiles

Rummaging through the extensive archives of Open Culture, we discovered these wonderful, curious artefacts from 1984 and the release of David Lynch’s cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic saga Dune. In an attempt to build off the merchandizing success that followed the Star Wars franchise, publishers rushed to market a children’s colouring book and activity book, which included projects like a recipe for No-Bake Spice Cookies—cinnamon offered as a substitute for the mind expanding spice melange. Learn more at the link above.

economies of scale

Although I still listened in digest form, I found myself a little soured on TED Talks of late when confronted with the comment whose context I cannot remember questioning whether I recalled the last seminar I’d listened to. I couldn’t say and assumed that that meant it didn’t really have resonance and endurance for me as an idea but realised that I was not really analysing the opinion. Then (appropriately on the day that the GDPR became enforceable) NPR’s produced an episode of the TED Radio Hour that was every bit as probing and important and had all the hallmarks of a lecture series at its finest. Building up to the closing remarks of computer scientist Jaron Lanier, the show (do check out all the talks at the link above—my opinion is completely rehabilitated even if I still cannot remember the topic before this one) demonstrated how much of an impossible request it is of our mental capacity to hang in a state of suspension between distraction and the anxiety of missing out for an increasingly large portion of our day. Our minds are made to be bombarded with signals and impressions of all sorts and have the tolerance for a lot of stimulus but when it comes mediated through dozens of competing sources, the focus of our attention and time becomes increasingly alienated and commodified by algorithms with the goal of funnelling the most traffic by making things just a notch more extreme—until its ugliness is reflected back at us.
This engineering designed to make us sample over and beyond what we would have previously delimitated as aligned with our values, standards and beliefs of course is not confined to the on-line world and its personas and avatars but has real world consequences as virality leaps off our screens—and not just in the aggregate either but moreover individually our capacity for critical-thinking and genuine engagement atrophies when all those uncounted micro-decisions are not our own and we lose the ability to cope and cultivate resilience in the face of adversities both sudden and subtle. We are not doomed but if we fail to change and allow our lives to be defined by attention-seekers that yoke of autocracy and dystopia will be ours to bear.