double-rainbow

Though the heat en route was oppressive, I am glad that H and I were able to enjoy the sun and the sand and the summer weather last month, since it seems that Sommer ist vorbei—or at least delayed on account of rain. It has been a real shock to the system, this mercurial heat replaced by sultry dampness stock-still, and people are struggling with summer colds. The weather needs to be redirected to Russia where fire-fighters are battling encroaching flames on the periphery of Moscow and countless villages have been grazed by uncontrolled fires. I hope they can curry some relief. Meanwhile, undetered, we are planning a few get-aways nearer to home, planning maybe to visit the ancient city at the confluence of rivers, and aptly-named, Regensburg, and seeing the monument at Valhalla or perhaps some tamer river-rafting on the Danube.

location scout

Hollywood is in the pre-production phases of a period adventure, a new version of the Three Musketeers starring Orlando Bloom, Christoph Waltz and Milla Jovovich, which will be at least in part filmed in the nearby cities of Würzburg and Bamberg, both beautiful and rich in history. Later this week, there will be a casting-call for extras. I am pretty excited about the exposure and augmented appreciation this will bring for this part of Franconia, but at the same time, I have a protective instinct for these places. I have remarked that both Würzburg and Bamberg have some excellent and authentic shoots to offer, and these places are not exactly undiscovered but neither are they over-run with tourism and too-common parlance.

I had wanted these streets as back-drops for independent movies or at least to tell the stories that Würzburg or Bamberg have to tell, and not some transplanted, ersatz swashbuckling in three-dimensions: the Peasants' Revolt, political intrigues with the Electoral College of the Prince-Bishops, the castle and the keep, Celtic monastics, the discovery of the x-ray, the invention of radar, the fire-bombing post Dresden, the US occupation, the art and architecture. I ought to work up a treatment myself, though H and I can be the perfect wall-flowers in the meantime.

skullduggery

Failure to adapt to changing economic conditions, both on the part of predators and prey, give license for a lot of failed schemes to stick around like blots of quicksand: pawn shops, bail-brokers, pay-day loan offices and other lending sharks intent on unending swim.  This too has made those forces determined to glean whatever profits they can from one's privacy even more firmly entrenched and desparate to try the most distasteful and tactiest of tacits.  I imagine that tombstones (pepperoni and cheese) of the future will be equipped with USB ports where visitors can plug in and download the archives of departed loved ones' tweets and other exhaustively monitored cyber spasms.  Reminscing, of course, will be peppered with targeted advertizing.  The interwebs will be a very poor executor and not many secrets will be secreted away.

minority report or farce protection

As Wired Magazine reports, Google and the CIA are exploring a partnership with a cyber-security firm, which I am sure was already double-dipping and in the rolls of the Washington Post's revealing exposé on US intelligence's poorly-constructed parade float of an operation, that promises to deliver reconnaissance on future crimes. By trawling blogs, tweets and other social networking sites, the firm hopes to project and predict potential threats before they happen through examining the broader network of connection and links. I was under the impression that intelligence analysts fight crimes by looking at these same context clues and making projections. With all the other surplus and redundancy, it is a challenge to imagine that these techniques could produce anything original and would only reduplicate different drafts of the same information already in circulation. I am not sure what Google's interest in this enterprise is. Besides the role of technical advisor, as the company reinvented Project Keyhole as Googlemaps and makes it freely available though with possible, I can only think that such prognostication could maybe catch future file-sharers and copy-fighters. For the intelligensia, possibly the biggest benefit could be in plugging leaks and nabbing the snitches.

Oedipus Rex or was not was--everybody do the dinosaur!

The Sphinx challenged Oedipus on the road to Thebes with a riddle: what creature walks on four legs, then two, then three? Paleontologists have found themselves confronted puzzle, as New Scientist reports, and this is really mind-blowing and disabusing. Certain specimens that researchers have always held to be examples of different species may actually be the same animal at different stages of growth and development. If people did not have the experience of frogs and butterflies contemporarily, who would have thought to connect them to fossil evidence of tadpoles or caterpillars?

it's time to play the pyramid

I've think that a word cloud has been a good and accessible way to present a concept scatter-shot.  Maybe one's CV or résumé in the future could be in word cloud form, plastered here and there like the translucent advertizing film that they preserve mass-transit busses in.  I stumbled across a snazzy, aesthetic word cloud generator called Wordle quite by accident.  I pasted the text from the last two months of blog entries in it and it spun out this picture.  It's funny to see one's words parsed this way and what tags are tops.

flavor-fla

At the beginning of the month, voters in Bavaria moved to reject (I believe) the state's remaining vestiges of smokers' protections.  The act, Raucherschutz, was criticized in part because the measure had a misleading name--were voters endorsing protection for smokers' and smokers' rights or protection from smokers and the rights of nonsmokers.  The confusion in wording smacked of the criticism levied against the 2008 US state of California's ballot Proposition 8.  Proposition 8 sought to formally define the institution of marriage to exclude same-sex partnerships, so an affirmative vote for Proposition 8 was delivering a resounding no to marriage equality.  In both cases, lobbyists took advantage of this fact.  The Raucherschutz also passed, some believe because enough people misunderstood the message.  Mostly the new law dealt with schemes that bypassed fairly comprehensive EU smoking bans, like hookah bars or beer tents or beer tents inside of nominally non-smoking establishments.  The debate is still on, and a second vote may be pending, whether "members' only" clubs and renting a restaurant for completely private function are exempt.