meritocracy or redirected from micro-publishing

Though the temptation was not so easily accessible back in my college days, no one has ever been able to explain to me the academic prejudice against Wikipedia, albeit relaxed somewhat recently. Specialists always have hegemony in their respective domains, and it is as if it were fear for an oligarchy of nerds or fans (there must be a Greco-phone word for government by freaks and geeks)—however benevolent or enlightened—or a turning-away from knowledgeable and vetted sources.

Nonetheless, Wikipedia has persevered, growing both as an institution and a community. I had missed this feature before, but opening up the menus in the marginalia, one is treated to all sorts of undaunted scholarly applications, like Book Creator.

The umbrella-topic structure of Wikipedia articles, strung along in a daisy-chain for reference,

I believe would be perfectly suited to drafting a study-aid or especially to supplement a travel-guide, something a bit more in depth that branches out, like a Choose your own Adventure book but within a framework and not as boundless as the open internet. One’s handiwork can be saved and formatted in a variety of ways, and then e-mailed for distribution. With just a few extra steps, one’s books can be viewed and saved on any tablet device, ready to be quoted, reworked and re-imagined.  It would nicely personalize one's vacation itinerary, modularity, and saving the discovery for the trip and not the exhausted invention of the research and planning. 

democritus or up-and-atom

Watching the developments and set-backs in containing the fall-out from the nuclear reactors in Japan, I remembered an article from a thoughtful website turned book from 2006, “This is not a Place of Honor,” about a campaign for the long now, to ensure that future generations ten-thousand years and more from today would know to avoid the nuclear waste dumps of the present—like the site that was being proposed at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Considering human curiosity and the capacity to poke around in dangerous places, how could caretakers of the present communicate risk when all contemporary symbols and speech may fail?

The commission concluded that all conceivable warnings and barriers, including a spiky, alien wasteland on the perimeter, might have the opposite effect and entice visitors to the temples of our household atomics. Whether be it waste that was not sufficiently planned for or an uncontrolled disaster, harnessing nuclear energy has enduring consequences that are projected in the impossibly distant future, for which no auditor or insurance adjustor has actuary tables. A recent and equally philosophical post, vis-à-vis Chernobyl--or the Chernobyl solution of entombment, remembering that the Soviets sometimes staunched oil leaks with small nuclear explosions, explores how lands made unholy through nuclear disasters can be corralled off from the population. What wandering, post-apocalyptic tribe, after all, would not be eager to occupy grounds bereft of competition and sacred to the atomic-age gods? The sources cited even suggest that a religious order be founded to keep the tradition and forbidding knowledge alive from aeon to aeon. What if today’s sectarians and secretive organizations are ancient and forgotten warnings in the same vein?

licht aus

Tonight, anywhere and everywhere, at 20:30 (8:30 p.m.) local time is Earth Hour (EN/DE). Switching what off one can for the hour, and then maybe considering what can stay off before turning it back on, shows support and solidarity for climate-change awareness and conservation. This is another one of those annual observances with a short turn-around time, but the lesson and intent of this symbolic act can be applied far beyond just these sixty minutes. Considering that the environmental catastrophes recently perpetrated, the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the shipwrecked nuclear industry all the thousand daily insults were all about the demand to deliver massive amounts of energy on budget—not to mention the vacillating attitudes on stability in the Middle East, perhaps this small but wide-spread sign and changing practices and habits has even more urgency.

portemonnaie or a hole in your pocket

In German it is called a Taschen- leerer--this giant wooden hand, or vide- poche--more elegantly in French--both meaning "empty pockets," and is an end-of-the-day catch-all. After stumbling across an engrossing gallery of such studies called Everyday Carry, I decided to arrange a similar still-life with wallet. I would not be brave enough, however, to contribute there, since I don't have a small gun and a big knife. Here are the daily contents of my man-purse ("little bag")--excluding the camera, of course. Compared to the cleverly presented and compact and gritty, utilitarian collections that seem like an insight, in some cases, into the quivers--not personal but rather vulnerable, somehow--of post-apocalyptic urban survivalists, my clutter and equipage seems pretty tame. Asking people around the world to turn out their pockets, a global purse dump, would be an interesting anthropological exercise.

ego ideal or black narcissus

Though I do not believe that this an entirely fair criticism and appraisal, since there are scads of most-preferred forums and venues out there of varying quality and prominence and utility and some accords ring truer and clearer than others, I though that this analysis of one social network, one mantra was something to ruminate on. Maybe the topic only struck me--caught my attention because I have such predilections that I'd prefer not to highlight, save here, though probably readily apparent everywhere else. Maybe the creative urge, to publish, to politic or to ponificate, has been sublimated into the evanesent idea of community, though no appeal to metapsychiatry of recovery and nostagia--something undermining, devious or luddite, intended.