air strip one or all your bandwidth are belong to us

The American isotope of naivety or irony apparently has a very short half-life, at least in their government's estimation. Even before the passing, prying worry about one's mobile accoutrements tracking one's movements has had a chance to be forgotten or displaced with some more sinister distraction, heightened vigilance in the wake of the assassination of Osama bin Laden and the rift the operation caused has presented the US National Emergency Management Agency a perfect opportunity to revamp its emergency broadcast system in the form of text (SMS) alerts that take precedence over other cellular phone traffic and even work when the phone is out of the service area or switched off.

Under the umbrella of Washington, DC and New York City first and then nation-wide, this new service (which requires a special chip that all new cellular phones will be required to carry) will be able to deliver all sorts of advisories and warnings to the public.  The potential for persuasive messages and disinformation, in addition to tracing everyone's every move, has not been overlooked either.  Cellular technology and service plans are particularly expensive in the States--patrons responsible for both incoming and outgoing charges, so I imagine that one could follow the money behind this initiative too.  Mobile technology has always been able to track people and monitor their predilections, just as the internets, credit cards, library cards, and union cards have enabled in the past, though we make it easier and easier for that information to fall into the wrong hands--having Big Brother in one's pocket reminds me of those view-screens (two-way televisions) in 1984 that could not be turned off and our protagonists thought they were safe from spying eyes when the two found those eyes were out of sight.

painting the roses red

Facing ever hotter summers, white-washing (not green-washing) one's roofs is one many little steps that one can take to offset heat locally and perhaps decrease demands on cooling systems. It does seem to be a rather zero-sum undertaking--like a few of the environmental promotions that businesses have side-stepped since the paints are probably rather energy intensive themselves, like growing corn as biofuels. Maybe, however, there are lower impact ways to accomplish the same project, if one can get away with such things: don't upcycle someone's prized-collection, but one can gather junk compact discs and carpet roofs or make mosaics that way from charity shops and the stacks of redundant and obsolete media from work. One sees these four-hundred year old farm houses in Germany outfitted with solar arrays like steam-punk space probes. I imagine the glare from a shiny installation, as long as it does not offend one's neighbours or resident birds, would also blind the spy-satellites.

flatlander or same-otherwise

Quantum mechanics is a strange, non-intuitive outcome, it seems, for probing too deeply. On the contrary, I do not think things should not become more blurry and ill-defined the sharper the focus is, and perhaps precise knowledge of one aspect should not exclude any knowledge of other qualities. I’d venture maybe that we are conditioned to accept this exclusion principle, perhaps too quickly though a lot of people more creative and smarter than me have worked to describe the machinery of the impossibly tiny—that if we know place, we cannot know time or velocity, the compound of the two with a future tendency. Maybe such elaborate explanations and theories to compensate for our limited vision are not always constructive--when I was a little kid, I wrote once to Carl Sagan suggesting, not very succinctly, that the speed of light may not be a constant and that it might accelerate or slow down over the vast reaches of space.  He answered with a very nice and personal letter that the laws of nature depend on such universal constants--however, now it seems modish to talk of light-speed more fluidly.  Physical dispositions ought to be knowable in so far as classic mechanics describes the universe and matters of everyday experience, and if they do not work satisfactorily, what is that threshold of inaccuracy and could we even define such a margin of error. In the same definitive work on classical mechanics and the clockwork universe, the Principia, Sir Isaac Newton generally followed his QEDs with a statement of “same-otherwise,” an alternate proof for deriving the principles of physics.

I don’t think these different derivations were suggested that there were two equally plausible and reigning laws of nature at work, but I always thought it was a refreshingly un-arrogant coda in science writing. Maybe subatomic particles do pop discretely (digitally instead of analogue) from one state, place to another in a fuzzy cloud of possible configurations—or maybe the causeways and cogs of matter outside of normal experience are rigid, well-defined forms, billiard-balls, plum-pudding or any other tangible analogy, except the orbits and tracks and slots that they race along are engineered not in the spatial dimensions of length, width and breadth but in the six or seven postulated others that ripple over tinier spaces, like the bumps on the skin of an orange. Maybe it is not necessary to pour vast amounts of energy into a particle to coax out something exotic, an unstable component that exists like a ghostly radar blip for a vanishingly small duration. Surely every elusive component exists, though not in isolation, and perhaps invisible to us, denizens of Flatland, cannot detect these elusive particles as they move q-wise instead of sideways (over terrain there are no words for) and can only glimpse the cross-sections (what's on our plane of perception) of the internal workings once sped up greatly.

blümchen

Every spring, one little, rather horizontal cactus blooms with vibrantly red flowers that cascade over the window ledge. For this monumental effort, there ought to be a very local festival in honor of this accomplishment, like harvest celebrations or Spargelzeit (Asparagus Time) in Germany. The gardens put on dazzling, perennial shows of their own too. I have never seen, however, the big schefflera tree in the corner go to fruit and flower before.

Sometimes they are called umbrella plants but I call it a big old mall tree, for the potted tropical vegetation one finds larger shopping galleries. They have no fragrance and these little grape-like clusters have just now bloomed but I will have to monitor them. It seems strange that such a lush plant has maybe anticlimactic blossoms, while a creeping, fuzzy desert plant would put forth such a performance.