campus martius or thunderbirds are go

The successful landing of the Martian rover, Curiosity, is an outstandingly impressive accomplishment in itself, but the speculation and wonder to follow are to boast, I think, even bigger triumphs of the imagination and engineering. Despite all the creative practice that writers of fantasy and science-fiction have delivered over the decades, a wonderful range and vocabulary to describe what alien life might be like, the universe is still not granting to humans the license to be prepared or even to not overlook, not recognize it when it is there. It would be equally novel and significant, surely too, if there was no evidence of life, past or present.

 A full complement of sensors and gauges is there to divine for water and peer closely into the soil, after our own biases, and this array of equipment represents the best that technology can produce and ought to certainly find some trace and something unexpected. Not to discount the capacity for imagination and resourceful, but we’ve really nothing of precedent to compare this to—European explorers, perhaps, mistaking the Americas for the coasts of India or dinosaur fossils for dragons, other personifications and prejudices, and it’s hard to hold the human mind to any standard and disabuse anticipations. There may be no shadow or pale in evidence, a footprint or channel, visible, sequences and chemistries may not happen in human-sized time, and it could be a dreamy, escaping contagion, possessing or inspired, that do resemble the supremely unaccountable and unexplainable lunacies that are described in myth and lore and their modern incantations of magical-thinking or science-fiction, like the Colour Out of Space (DE) or the Andromeda Strain (DE). I also wonder about how scientific systems of classification might be re-enforced or upset: would a genus or family be a coherent and valid idea elsewhere? Would like kinds necessarily be present and identifiable, or only individuals or colonies? What would that do for our sense of order and predictability and want to catalogue and name things? Come what may, this mission promises discovery and may show that curiosity is insatiate.

citius, altius, fortius

Here is a collection of icons or pictograms designed for the different venues of the 1968 summer competition. This set of symbols made for the host Ciudad de México established an international standard that’s prevaded all sorts of gatherings, pointing the way and demarcating usage. I wonder if, given an expansive palette and canvas and absent the potential babel of diplomacy, language would have gone retrograde with such expressions and signs and would have invented or re-purposed them even if the need was not there. Most platforms, real and virtual, have liberal margins and encoding and masking is not necessary but logos are still invented and postal and area codes are as much identifiers as the localities that they stand for. The capacity for meaning to remain recognizable and immediately intelligible while curling in on itself, I think, is a hallmark of good and enduring design.

viva lars vegas or norwegian photo round-up

 I just wanted to take the opportunity to share a few not orphaned but as of yet unused photographs from our Norwegian adventure. On our way home, passing through Stavanger, I caught out of the corner of my eye a street called Lars V--, which naturally I dubbed Lars Vegas.
It was truly a fantastic trip and with a different motif around every turn, it is impossible to distill or censor ones impressions to just a few iconic images. Nonetheless, here are a few.

milkman or pfandtasic

For several years now, there has been a campaign against litter and to promote recycling in many parts of Europe by imposing a deposit on beverage bottles, from a few cents to a significant portion of the cost—like with bottled water when the empty bottles can be worth more than their contents.  This is called Pfand in the German Sprachraum. 

Generally, I am pretty cognizant of the culture that has developed as a results of these fiat containers, which are not like leaving bottles out for the milkman on the stoop—washed and reused, like the phenomena of driving around ones trash, keeping a hamper full of used glass and plastic, the people of all types and means that dig through dumpsters for a Guthaben tossed or couldn’t be bothered with, and even opportunities to donate one’s deposit to charitable organizations right at the supermarket, but on vacation my awareness is especially acute. In Norway, they employ the same system, though called pant there and it’s funny how this special minting influences shopping, not wanting to be laden with a bottle that one cannot return at home, sort of like the coinage that money-changers won’t convert. Someone ought to develop an applicant—although I suppose it would be like a coupon-scam, that could scan the bar-codes that the Automats read and print or etch the appropriate mask, since the bottles have all the same potentially intrinsic recycling value and stores selling them are just following a mandate towards that end.

Speaking of masking with bar-codes, as those QR-codes, able to tag one’s phones, are becoming more and more prevalent on billboards and signage, I began to wonder whether such inscrutable things are for one always connected with what they appear to be, could guerilla marketing be appropriating advertising space and redirecting people to a competitor or something completely different, and whether such codes could be made invisible and less voluntary, forcing one to like something just for glancing at it, tricking someone with crypto-sponsorship into buying one product over another for snapping a photo of some scenic view, in reality brought to you by corporate and not just nature or history. It’s a scary thought—to sway ones gadgets with subliminal messages and what is seen that cannot be unseen

from russia with love or ladies-in-waiting

Over on the side bar, are you seeing those solicitations for romantic services for those wanting to meet women from Eastern Europe, too—or is that just a glitch in my own marketing algorithm? Those advertisements are prejudicial and tawdry and I think reinforce negative and unwarranted stereotypes, and makes one wonder about the threshold for promotion and sponsorship quality. Still, seeing such ads made we wonder what people might say about the girls from this particular Ukrainian locality.

smoking is derpy