straw-man

Though superficially it might seem to some like a petty, nannying move though in reality every incidental, insignificant bit counts for something that hangs around well past its usefulness, the European Union has done something really bold and urgent in banning plastic products like drinking straws and disposal plastic utensils and cups for personal use.
Planned legislation also includes provisions to take plastic products out of circulation with scheduled milestones to phase items out and fining members per kilogram that goes unrecycled. Proponents are hoping to fend off minor annoyances and inconvenience (for that’s all it is, despite what the industry lobbyists would have one believe—plastic shopping bags have been all but banned for years and no one’s worse off for it) but a rigour public education campaign to be more mindful of our buying habits, alternatives and consequences of what we’re tossing away.

on the compositions of yards and perches

Looking to buy a new television, I tried to assay the difference between the German measurement of Zoll and inches across—if there was any and whether that distance mattered if measured diagonally as opposed to on a grid and there was a little more to the story than we expected. An inch (also statutorily three dry barley corn or fifteen poppy seeds across) was traditionally defined as the width of an adult’s thumb, a twelfth of a foot—give or take.
Although a Zoll as a unit has a bit more precision invested in it and is greater than an inch by an exacting but negligible amount—it’s also short for the informal and nebulous length of a “Stück Holz” or a piece of wood and is curiously the width of a Zollstock, one of those collapsible measuring sticks commonly found in Germany, more in use than a tape-measure to assess something’s size in exact terms. Although one will most likely only encounter the unit itself for screen-dimensions, it’s also present in contemporary pants sizes, bullet calibres and nuts and bolts. Twelve inches make a foot and three feet make a yard; five and a half yards make a perch and forty by four perches (also termed one chain by one furlong) make an acre, which was itself defined as the area of land that could be reasonably expected to be ploughed by a yoke (pair) of oxen in the space of a day. Before adopting the metric system in 1871, German conventional weights and measures were even more confusing and incongruent with a Landmeile (Land Mile) ranging in value from twenty-four thousand feet (Füß, itself ranging from nine to eighteen inches) in Bavaria and Württemberg to a thousand metres (three thousand two hundred eight one feet) in Wiesbaden. The above mentioned Zoll usually made one-twelfth part of a foot but in some places it was considered one-tenth.

sperrzone oder deutsche-deutsche grenze

We owe the expanse of forest in part at least to being on the former border that separated East and West Germany (previously here, here and assuredly elsewhere) and the Grünes Band Deutschland (the German Green Belt) conserved by environmental organisations to form a natural reserve linked along the former Iron Curtain, forming a quite exceptional no man’s land of undisturbed species and habitats.
Today all that remains is a trail marker and a slight gradient change. On the Thüringen side, there’s carriage way for patrol vehicles that runs parallel to the corridor and a small memorial to two casualties of the intervening minefield during an escape attempt in 1965.
The first stages of the partition of Germany from 1945 to 1952 was also referred to as the “Green Border” before fortifications were established and movement strictly controlled but authorities on both sides soon realised that they needed to increase security measures in order to stem the flow of economic refugees in the eyes of the West and “spies, diversionists, terrorists and smugglers” according to the East.

via regia

Via Hyperallergic, we are directed towards this comprehensive and highly detailed chart mapping out all the major and minor trading routes established and solidified during the High Middle Ages—a vast and sophisticated network that connected European, African, Asia and Far East merchants—with nodes not only along the Silk Road—and gives some perspective on the drive to advance markets and what sort of rates of exchange enable and underpin these linkages.

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.