casting stones or papst blue-ribbon

The staff at Der Spiegel is presenting a preview of the Pope's potentially difficult visit to his homeland, which H and I will be attending this weekend--beginning with biographies of the prominent-players Benedikt will encounter on his State visit, replete with skeletons in the closet. Berlin's lord mayor has said that the Pontiff is welcome in his city, but so are the protesters. Through the lens of Catholicism, Germany's statesmen are revealed as a quite a lot of reprobates.

"Luckily for the pope, he won't have any problems with two other prominent people he will meet in Berlin. Chancellor Angela Merkel (remarried) and German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle (gay) are both Protestants."

I suppose, by the rules, we all do. There are serious social schisms that need to be healed and some shadowy deportments that have gone too long without saying. Once, in seminar in college, I proclaimed--rather obtusely, that Jesus says: "The rules are for bad people." While I don't believe that's necessarily rubric or Church doctrine, there is ample latitude for tolerance and learning from one another and loving one another, despite any differences in upbringing and inculcation.

basta and geldpolitik

I am not sure what to make of this Fire Sale that the United States has announced with its apparent intent to offer unlimited US dollar-denominated loans to try to hold interest rates down for European countries coming against their debt thresholds. This emergency relief seems like a mechanism to undo the gossipy damage done by downgrades from the credit rating agencies, since credit-worthiness determines the upward usury on loans--in other words, to allow everyone to keep playing. Though ostensibly Germany's Federal Ministry for Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (Bundes-ministerium für Ernährung, Landwirtschaft und Verbraucher-schutz) may be an exception, it seems like most of the work of governments, bullied by supranational finance institutions, is devoted to protecting the lender organizations and promoting good PR for their schemes and trustworthiness, with little regard or recourse for the debtors. Holding players to another round, without rigid or fair rules to play by, instead of allowing a pass or fold yields diminishing returns and impoverishes everyone, no matter what the window-dressing. These insubstantial lifelines tossed to the EU allows the dollar to dodder a bit longer at favourable lows and generates nominal revenue off of phantom loans, and a fixed margin of appreciation (how much the dollar-euro exchange rate varies) keeps the borrowers from speculating over-much against the lenders. If the euro value tumbles, the dollars become the functional currency, but if the euro gains in value against the dollar (as it should do because the European market are inherently stronger and more stable), such debt becomes cheap to pay off. The euro is not in distress and it does not need this kind of American chivalry and chauvinism (and maybe the munificence of others too), and it looks as if the creditors' champions have succeeded in expanding (diluting) their money supply without immediately and clearly sacrificing the security of their players for their very next round.

ahoy, hoy or pirates' progress

Yarrggg, mateys! The Pirate Party (die Piratenpartei) secured a significant number of seats in Berlin's general state-election, and they are able to aptly celebrate their victory with International Talk like a Pirate Day (EN/DE). That's really something. I wonder if excitement over the opportunity to use this patois helped to rally the voters and to mutually raise awareness about electronic privacy and public-domain issues.

Another fabulist tradition of adventures and incredible yarns has just recently been re-kindled: after publishing its collected stories and taking a two year hiatus, Damn Interesting appears to be returning with more bizarre and engrossing vignettes that are certainly more enduring in terms of scholarship, research and interest than the daily buzz, but it is also a treat to have fresh dispatches from the weird and wonderful.

mowgli or babelsberg

We may well all have been had, but this sort of story, tragic and mysterious, is engrossing and seems a little too quiet to be a hoax--the English daily the local reports on a teenage boy who emerged from the forests outside Berlin in early September, healthy but apparently oblivious of his origins and identity after having lived in the woods for five years with his father. He only speaks English and demonstrates only rudimentary understanding of German. I am reminded about another supposed wild youth of Germany, Kaspar Hauser of Ansbach, who may have, as a rightful heir to the throne, been cast into the wilderness and hidden away by a pretender or usurper. The story, just told in brief, seems quite sad and I am sure that the German Sprachraum is sensitive to such dramatic appearances, especially considering the continuing revelations of kept basement-women and cases of decades of mistreatment and isolation. In fact, this sort of thing seems to be a particularly German leit-motif, with Rapunzel, the Bamberg Boy who was raised by cows, Peter of Hamelin (same town where the villagers lost their children because they failed to pay the piper) who was adopted by the British monarchy. There is also the film Hanna (a German-American venture from Babelsberg studios), about a prodigious and deadly little girl, raised alone by her father in arctic wastelands and intensely tutored in what to do in case of an emergency, like the youth found outside of Berlin was instructed to go north. It is a mystery--and I wonder what kind of escapism it is to feel estrangement, savage otherness, that such things happen to anybody but at the same time hope it's not a prank.

fantastic planet

With some 1800 confirmed and strongly suspected extrasolar planets discovered and more coming into focus nearly every day, it really is a revolution like when van Leeuwenhoek first peered into a microscope and a whole, unseen universe of tiny beasties came into sharp resolution. The cache of discoveries is much more than can be committed to memory, like the pantheon of our possibly not-so-unique Solar System, more already than the catalogue of ships that stormed the beaches at Troy and maybe soon the whole of the story-telling tradition of the Iliad. Though most have not been substantiated beyond radar ghosts, astronomers have found some truly bizarre specimens (or relationships) that both rival and parallel imagination and science-fiction.

In addition to a slew of bulked-up terrestrial planets, there has been worlds battered by x-rays, worlds blacker than midnight, ones with two suns like Tatooine, ones gassy and disperse, and possibly orphaned worlds wandering interstellar space with no host star. It is hard to comprehend, minus even the number-count or superlative, extreme examples, that each of these worlds are actually worlds with at minimum a richness of geology with weathered and cultivated landscapes. In anticipation of a new golden age of exploration, clever people have even devised clocks and calendars for the Martian day (Sol) and year. If such detailed and idiosyncratic knowledge can be applied to a world that is by turns tantalizing and rather mundane, it is hard to imagine what's to become of our earthling standards.

grading on the curve or trivial pursuit

According to a study (EN/DE) just released by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), trends suggest that Germany is on track to make less significant contributions of highly skilled and literate individuals into the workforce. Such talents are of course hard to quantify, and I think it is more troublesome that the brute ignorance and general surrender of the American education system (and the dominant attitudes of a post-education populace) are being underestimated by making light comparisons.

The cautionary tale of the American education system, dissected honestly and fearlessly, should be enough to scare any student to work-harder and collectively retain that cutting-edge. The OECD may be just trying to frighten Germany back in line too with its prognosis. Though to feel over-secure in any critique, especially on teaching, is done at one's own peril, I do wonder if the change has less to do with the rigour of instruction than shifts in the way people reason and remember. There was another study concluded a few months ago from a university neurology department (the fact that I don't need to really say which university or when, exactly, sort of illustrates my point) that suggested internet search engines, the miscellany of everything, have transformed the way people try to retrieve information. Subjects were asked quiz questions, like: name a national flag that consists of only one colour. I thought that one was easy, since there is/was only one: Libya's green flag. For many subjects, however, the process of formulating an answer had turned (as far as such things can be seen and measured) from searching ones memory and extrapolating a guess to rather thinking of where and how they could find the answer, presumably what search parameters to use on the internet and where they could look, and regarded that space as an extension of his or her own mind. Recalling facts and figures and precedent is certainly different than appreciable skill or artistic talent, but maybe there is a similar phenomena in play: that engineers, tinkerers and doctors are too part of a continuum, requiring a different approach and metric.

bing bang or urknall

The ever-splendid Boing Boing (a directory of wonderful things) featured a pretty neat infographic illustrating the cosmological unfolding of the Big Bang model from Omid Kashan. It is really captivating, and intuitive without reading the impossibly small text, that show abstracted phases of development, like umbrage on the Moon, and reminiscent of the glorious and psychedelic ordinal counting exercising from the Children's Television Workshop, the pilfered map of the holes in the fabric of the Universe in Time Bandits, or some astral space-pirate treasure map all at once. Another outstanding venue for such reinterpretations and celebrating knowledge and discovery is the magazine Mental Floss. I've been monitoring that site more frequently, and I really enjoy their self-proclaimed science-ish and trivia sections--in addition to the daily exploration.