Seventeenth French founding-father of neurology and a revitalizing force for interest in the galvanic response and bioelectricity, which was dismissed by medical science in the intervening century as somewhat of a parlour-trick beforehand, Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne made many enduring contributions to the field but is probably best known for capturing the aesthetics of a genuine smile.
Friday 4 January 2013
duchenne whistle
hearth and home or genie in the bottle
Authentic efforts to heal the environment and lessen human impact is always to be applauded and Germany, which has assumed a role of leadership both in better management of ecology and economy, I think has some very good intentions and cannot be accused of bullying Greece or exacerbating its financial problems and standing. Germany’s robust push towards greener energy and industry is at risk of becoming a pyrrhic victory and zero-sum-game, due in part to the malingering and knock-on effects of that other management sphere, the euro policy.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช๐บ, ๐ฌ๐ท, economic policy, environment
Thursday 3 January 2013
chatter or natural infrastructure
The quietly superb BLDG BLOG has an excellent back-to-back series of articles on early improvisations and alternatives to telephony and wireless communications technology that patched together networks from features of native landscapes, including party lines with barbed-wire carriers across the Old West that was really a ranchpunk bit of cleverness, and serious proposals for a massive antenna array in the Wisconsin Dells (plus a bonus Soviet Dooms Day device) or Antarctica to facilitate correspondence with trawling submarines with the bedrock of the Earth acting as a transmitter for a Cold War worse-case scenario.
The series began, however, with an article from a science magazine on accidental discovery that a tall and living tree-trunk makes a surprisingly good aerial, complete with schematics and scheming. These were really engrossing stories and rather the opposite of leapfrogging technologies in their ingenuity. A tree, even if ill-used, is a far better sight than a cellular tower any day, and it would be really keen if the same creativity could rig hill and valley or derelict pathways to harness, passively, energy.
catagories: ๐ฑ, ๐ก, networking and blogging
Wednesday 2 January 2013
hang in there, baby
Though I tend to think that contemporary motivation posters, especially those letter-boxed ones with rather heavy-handed themes, are mostly effective for workers that could might someday soon be replaced by robots, I really enjoyed the series of lithographs for their artwork and message, featured right in time for the end of the holiday season and return to the office when the atmosphere at work can be quite oppressive and demotivating at times.
commutative property or sixth happiness
Perhaps I was a bit prematurely to dismiss the new year as numerically unremarkable. I heard an India fortuneteller on the radio this morning, prefacing her words and prognostications with the pronouncement that all numbers are indeed lucky, that this year, broken down as 2+0+1+3 yields six, the number of harmony in some circles and duty or domestic relations in others.
Tuesday 1 January 2013
fraternization
In reverence to one extraordinarily florid line of copy, dateline: Charlotte, 1965, which reports on the domestic murder of a millworker by his family as if the incident were a game of chess, guided by some “occult hand,” there is a loose but exclusive association of journalists that are known to one another by the clever and subtle infiltration of this phrase into print and perpetuating the reporter’s words.
This style of writing, sometimes without affection, is called Purple Prose, typified by stock-phrases like Baron Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous “it was a dark and stormy night…” Incidentally, it is an interesting comparison—purple prose—with the other colours of literary criticism, blue language and yellow journalism. It was an insiders’ joke and I am sure appreciated by anyone hep to it, and then buried away when discovered, aware that most would just overlook the obscure and fancy language. It has grown harder and harder to restrict membership, however, to those in-the-know in recent years and it does not take much sophistication to jar this phrase out of the archives of the press with a simple search on the Internet. In response to the club’s select-status slipping away, the Order of the Occult Hand, is reinventing itself with a new secret and supposedly baroque code phrase. Of course, the rebooted membership is not publishing what this new clichรฉ might be, since that would ruin the fun and expose them again. It will be a fun challenge to try to shoehorn the new passkey out of the headlines and from the newspaper page.