Wednesday 12 December 2012
peer, neighbour, hierarch or honeycomb hideout
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, labour, revolution
Tuesday 11 December 2012
taurus-littrow
catagories: ๐, ๐ก, ๐ญ, networking and blogging, Wikipedia
Monday 10 December 2012
thaw or back forty
The frigid weather and the cavalcade of snow made me wonder about the point of correspondence between the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales, having always thought that that unnaturally low but not unattainable temperature marked the threshold of one or the other measurements—that the system broke down after this point and relied on the other to carry it.
Mathematically, I suppose that it is not unusual that the two systems ought to match up at some point, as opposed to any other point, such as one that’s closer to everyday weather. The two scales are based on like fractions and intervals but have slightly different rationales: both are measured in degrees but the earlier Fahrenheit system takes the measurements of an angle more literally.
Knowing that there was distinct possibilities for something much colder than wintry ice, set its null point to the freezing point of salt water, and the 32° F of melting ice is separated from the boiling point of water (212° F) by 180 degrees with hopes of placing other natural phenomena at other perfect, round angles, like human body temperature at 60° from freezing, etc. but these hoped-for correspondences did not quite pan out. The more straightforward degrees, gradients of Celsius are one-one-hundredths of the way from freezing to boiling of water under standard conditions, by definition—it being worthy of noting that pressure, altitude differences have negligible effects on how water freezes (except in extreme cases like at the bottom of the ocean) but has quite a large impact in terms of boiling. Originally, the Celsius scale was inverted, based on this dismaying observation, with 100 set at the freezing point and counting down to zero where water started to boil. I image had it remained so, as the Swedish astronomer had proposed, there might be some very different match ups in the weather, but of course, cold to one person is absolutely balmy in other climes.
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐ญ, environment, philosophy
as plain as or party on the patio
Friday 7 December 2012
evergreen
We managed to free the old hand-me-down artificial, office Christmas tree from that storage closet that we lost the keys to just in time for the party. It did make the gathering a bit more festive and bright, but it looks positively bleak and overly contemplative there alone in the stairwell. We moved it out there from the conference room so others might enjoy it.
catagories: holidays and observances, lifestyle
and/not/or/xor
There has been a strange clang of dissonance in terms of secession and admission criteria with the Catalonian versus the Scots’ independence movement. While addressing the autonomous region of Spain, political strategists seemed to want to throw cold water on the whole idea with the suggestion that Spain, as a member of the European Union with veto rights against the ascension of another member could choose to exercise that right in retaliation against the break-away region.
catagories: ๐ช๐ธ, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ฌ๐ท, foreign policy
Thursday 6 December 2012
gaslight or don't step on the mollraths
Quite by accident, I stumbled across an affair that seems fit for treatment as a thriller by Alfred Hitchcock: some seven years ago, an employee of one of Germany’s beleaguered big bad banks was remanded to the custody of a high-security psychiatric hospital after being diagnosed as having chronic paranoid personality disorder. I missed any coverage of this story in the local media but the UK Guardian featured a pretty frightening and unflattering article.
catagories: ๐จ๐ญ, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ง , economic policy
Wednesday 5 December 2012
tl;dr or loving spoonful
I have seen quite a lot of weird and wonderful through-the-looking-glass homages of art imitating digital life, but something about the tribal makeup of this woman, inspired to pose as Grumpy Internet Meme Cat really just struck me as the be-all, end-all, sort of like a Faberge Egg, Busby Berkley choreography, or some amazingly executed Rube Goldberg bucket-brigade of customer service teamwork to make a wish come true. Now with that spoonful of sugar, there is, however, much too much cowardly incivility and trolling, bullying on the internet.