Wednesday 9 June 2010

slant operation

As collective outrage rallies for more than cosmetic changes to allowances for off-shore drilling, reinstating the ban, leving windfall taxes, and British Petroleum is gleeful claiming that by early next week, virtually all oil will be virtually contained, but if one was not watching carefully, it may be missed since after the news item tumbled into achival obscurity, it seems that the company bought off internet seach engines in order to re-direct people from the negative press.  I suppose that's a very bad thing, trying to muzzle the interwebs, but I guess it's not the worse thing they have done: the worse thing would be the oil spill.  There is still a big impact zone that will not recover for years, and the oil clean up operation negates all other good intentions of sound environmental policy and stewardship

shortfall

The Local has a fairly good breakdown of the austerity measures that the German government enacting in order to allign its budget within EU standards.  Meanwhile, economists within the Treasury are projecting that US debt to earnings are continuing rise and spiral out of control.  These are very different metrics and with different intentions, but it seems that German cut will do more than stave off the enevitable insolvency, compared to the grim prognostication of the Americans.

Monday 7 June 2010

peppermint disco

Today was Tom Jones' birthday.  The normally sedate and conservation German news radio station that I listen to during my commute to work announced this and really made my morning super-charged.  Last week I mentioned the virtue in being disabused from misheard lyrics but could not summon up any other examples, but now I recall that I always thought the song Sex Bomb was actually Sex Bot, as in robot or Adrienne Barbeau-bot with baby you can turn me on and other references to satillites and infrared vision.

status nascendi

New Scientist and several other sources are excitedly citing findings on a chemical, topographical study on Saturn VI (the moon of Titan) from Strasbourg's Space University (that's a pretty snazzy alma mater) as possibly indication of alien life.  Akin to noting that concentrations of oxygen were inexplicably less at the surface of the Earth, research has revealed that there may be a respiratory exchange of hydrogen for methane on Titan, for which life forms could account, from unexpectedly low concentrations below at certain altitude.  I imagine that such aliens would be like nothing decades of sci-fi fandom have primed us for, no humanoids that are political animals in any familiar way or disembodied intelligences, but delicate membranes carried aloft on the wind like jellyfish in the sky.  After all, humans are still only just recognizing that whales are not just prey or dolphins not just gay sharks, not to mention the wealth of living things that lie just below our line of sight.  Nonetheless, it is certainly news to get goosebumps over.

Sunday 6 June 2010

ancient chinese secret, huh?


This is still the year of the Tiger, and I wonder if some of what's happening around the world would have been predicted according to the trends expected in the lunar year.  Hindsight is delightfully useful in these sorts of things.  Soothsayers forewarned that it would be turbent for global economies and the Tiger is the steward of things chthonic, elemental and buried.  The same soothsayers urged investment in gold and other metals, which was not really going out on a limb with that one.
I wonder, however, given that there's all this news that lingers--and it seems no one has the tolerance or the attention span for protracted, drawn-out hearings or middling suspense any more, if Tiger can be blamed for that too.  The network news cycle does not even have the stamina for economic collapse day in and day out and soon turns its gaze on other things--but it seems like the disruptions of air traffic from the volcano in Iceland, a series of earthquakes, and now the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are not flagging. 
Of course, few stories end really once their notoriety runs out, and most people tend to forget about the recovery process, missed opportunities for revenue-generating, or environmental impact right away, despite hearteninged attempts to the contrary.  I wonder what else the year of the Tiger has in store, Golems that awake and slither from the underground.  Maybe the big lesson of the times, is not to be complacent about one's surroundings

Thursday 3 June 2010

bookface

Still winded from its mad-dash to embrace the so-called "Web 2.0," the US military is starting to aggressively push its networking and collaborative working capabilities in the workplace.  Although this change of attitude may seem like a big departure from the internet-breaking, ham-fisted security software and accountability systems or breaking of thumb(-drives) that the government usually adopts right away, this--I think--only represents more business as usual.

Reality Sandwich is running a great article about how the interwebs, especially with the support, tacit or otherwise, of the defense-industrial complex, is the new battle field for the struggle of hearts and minds.  The army, for instance, is promoting professional profiles, linked to private profiles, in order to work efficiently on team projects, as a successor strategy to SharePoint.  Having a more dynamic, less threatening interface will encourage soldiers and civilian workers to use it, and deliver tabs on all in a tidy package.  Radicals and hate-groups are tolerated there based on the same principle.  I made a profile months ago but finding it too awkward to pare down, abandoned it, and now I feel especially unwilling to return since droves in Germany have left the site over privacy concerns.
We call it "bookface" at work because it sounds like clever code, especially when it was Verboten in the office, but now that it is here, fully entrenched, no one seems that interested or willing and trusting enough to commit any work to it.  I am sure it could be used to rate your efficiency, compliance, time dottering about on government time, and I especially would not entrust any thing sensitive or classified to the timeless annals of bookface.

Wednesday 2 June 2010

how do you keep a wave upon the sand? oh, how do you solve a problem like Maria?

As efforts to staunch the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico have been met with a series of failures, and oily water is lapping at Florida and Alabama beaches and making a toxic brew of the marsh lands, I think more and more conspiracy theories are likely to be concocted: US President Obama allowing this disaster to percolate according to the wishes of an extreme environmental protection cabal and their agenda to place RDIF (radar data interchange format, sounds scarier than the abbreviation) tags on American trash bins to make certain that the Jones are sorting and recycling and not producing more than their allotment of waste, control movement, enforce rationing and basically curtail all Autobot freedom.  I think such repair to conspiracy, like any other case, suggests that the public is beginning to realize what a horrible, long-term catastrophe and embarrassment that this will turn into: consider what will happen as the hurricane season picks up pace and slathers neighborhoods with oil.  Aside from making the Everglades and the swamps sick unto death, it will destroy what little tourist, industrial and homesteader virtue the region has left.  Such a black typhoon will knock the wind out of any economic recovery, cutting a broad swath through the real estate market.  Residents will panic as property becomes unsellable and those that choose to stay behind will be left squatters in an abandoned oil slick.

Tuesday 1 June 2010

quilting bee

Pursuing my determined if not belated and unending quest to better my German language skills, I have come across a good internet resource called Linguee that uses the hive-mind of the web and far outstrips most other translator services.  Using the principle that rarely a totally unique query is put forward, it finds translations on a word or a phrase based on tranlated and bilingual texts it scans from a patchwork of all sources, travel sites, Wikipedia in other languages, governmental and scientific journals.  It deconstructs verb forms and tenses and even uses the word or phrase in several example sentences and puts legalese and technical jargon in context and is a good back-translator to check if one's own interpretation makes grammatical sense.