shoo fly

Experimentation is possibly demonstrating the waning efficacy of pesticides, namely in tests involving the pervasive chemical DEET. Mosquitoes that are spreading the scourges of mankind that defy overcoming on first exposure avoid the active ingredient, developed by the US military to make jungle warfare more tolerable, but upon their second encounter, seem inured to the taste and don’t seem to mind it so much, like acquiring a taste for coffee or beer and maybe even a liking for it.

Seeing mosquitoes ignore the intended effects after just the next exposure is interesting enough and I’m no advocate of dousing oneself or one’s surroundings with concoctions of dubious value (or making it a pedigree of one’s fruits and vegetables), but it gets really interesting when one raises the question whether such circumstances exist in the field, do mosquitoes get the opportunity to return to the same watering-hole a second time, would be a fair question—or are the laboratory stocks of mosquitoes and their forebears too acclimated to such synthetic experiments, like little trained fleas whose talents run in the family. Departure—prematurely, from the scientific method builds up undeserved confidence and we would do right to wonder about what’s not dispensed with moderation

bottleneck

Spielgel’s Eines Tages has a fascinating little article about a short-lived micro-nation that came into being in the Rhine Valley due to cartographical errors in dividing up occupied Prussia after WWI among the British, French and American area-of-responsibility. A gap resulting in dividing control which left the region containing the monastic town of Lorch, Kaub and Limburg isolated and able to claim a quasi-independence.

Because of this quirk, as the mayor of Lorch proclaimed (who was subsequently elevated to president), from 1919 to 1923 with the formalized French occupation of the Ruhr and putting a stop to the shenanigans of this Freistaat Flaschenhals (the Free State of Bottleneck) with its annexation back into Prussia. The shenanigans consisted of border enforcement, issuance of their own stamps and currency, and profits to be made from smuggling coal, cows and wine from occupied lands into unoccupied Germany.

Trains and barges had to avoid this isolated territory, but pirate operations and black-market trading became quite sophisticated rather quickly. This place is really a picture-postcard idyll, not very far away at all. We’ve been through the area a few times but never knew about this history before, and on our next trip, we’ll have to see what traces we can find about this curiosity.

future-perfect or jam to-morrow

BBC Magazine profiles an interesting study from Yale University’s department of Sociology on the potential connection between the confines of grammar and financial readiness, with likely bonds among the cultural gradients in the spectrum of mores, like hierarchy, collectivism versus individualism, gender equality, etc.
The lead researcher groups all the world’s languages into two classes, one group, which includes English, is marked by a strong shifting of tenses to express action, intentions and wishes that are to take place in the future, covering both the mundane and the inspired, and the other group of languages whose rules of grammar do not make a big distinction between present and future. The difference does not fall strictly among family lines—for example, while in English one must say, “It will snow tomorrow,” auf Deutsch, a close relative, one can say, “Morgen scheint es” with no ambiguity.  European on balance languages seem to have the most formal ways of differentiating time. After large-scale studies on the future-oriented habits of speakers of these different lingual classes, mostly involving savings and retirement but also habits, like exercise and preventative health, that defer rewards for present action, the researcher found a strong correlation between shoring up for one’s future, whether one’s Golden Years or something more immediate though not instantly gratified, among those speakers whose tongue did not really have a separate future tense.

I wonder if there is also some corollary for those complex past-perfect constructions that some languages admit: I would have had already been on the road, had it not been snowing. Some peers in the fields of sociology, economics and linguistics found these conclusions to be specious, but such ideas, daily affirmations in the way grammar may make tomorrow very different from today (I always thought it interesting that in Spanish and German and a lot of close dialects, the word for mor- ning and tomorrow are the same and without causing grave confusion), estranging and currying procrastination.

exchequer

Lashing out again with a stolid critique of how the kindness of governments to business is less than optimal, like a cornered viper—old and tired but still wanting to show it can strike, one of the credit-rating agencies has stripped the UK of its top-shelf status, over ballooning sovereign debts that are edging to three-quarters of national output. I suppose it is on some level responsible to try and check borrowing and incurring more liabilities with such denouncements but relatively, a lot of economies—though not the physical, functional marketplace (should there be one) necessarily, are in the same boat and Aaα may just be the new top credit score.

existential event

The very fine and peripatetic blog Kottke directs to an interview from The Atlantic with Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom about humanity’s penchant to attribute its destruction to something external, like a collapsing environment, meteor impact or seismic event rather than culprits of its own making.

Of course, external threats and the fragility of life are a factor and garner attention, but it is more likely what we synthesize ourselves (including a degraded eco-system) prove a more likely cause of our downfall, creating and crediting enfeebling regimes far more dangerous than a pyro-plasmic blast. Selectivity is still going on a-pace in Nature with this bubble-chamber of technology evolution going off at a perhaps different velocity. It’s a bit gloomy but I really appreciated the poster waxing philosophical after reading the article, pondering, projecting whether the lack of contact from an alien race wasn’t due to a technological developmental threshold once reached, say cellular telephony or nano-technology, which is archetypal and inevitable and all the potential neighbours destroyed themselves. This pondering echoes the frightful but sobering prognostications of author and astronomer Carl Sagan, who suggested the same over the atomic bomb. Native cleverness should not make the Universe a desolate place.

mental note or zettelchen

We all have certain internal monologues, which are sometimes broadcast in other venues, but others, possible more rare since so much is shared, with varying degrees of self-censorship and editing, are meant for our consumption alone. German public radio had an excellent vignette about one such surreptitious collector of those private streams-of-thought (leidiglich, nicht entweder auf Deutsch), intended for the author’s eyes only, and compiled her findings and reflections into a book on the ephemeral phenomena of the shopping-list.

Mostly found cast off at the islands in the parking lot where one returns shopping-carts, the character of these anonymous reminders, which only need be intelligible to the user for the nonce, became quite an interesting subject and obsession. Most lists, interestingly, are written in long-hand and at least half-way understood by strangers, and others still are coded strangely as if necessity and vice were a matter too delicate to commit to paper, lest someone should see that this household is a buyer of toilet tissue, and many also betray an escaping word that is not readily recalled—Fuβrubbelding, an exfoliator for one’s calloused feet, I guess, but perhaps that is the correct German term. Sometimes when I go to the super-market without a good plan in my head and get a little overwhelmed by the selection, I’ll spy other shoppers and think, “Oh, that’s exactly just what I need: a shopping list,” and get a little jealous. It only need be a cue good enough for daily chores but such notes provide an unexpected insight, when not much else is close-hold. H and I sometimes write grocery lists for each other and I’m not sure that the detail or idiosyncrasies are not much different than what we’d make for ourselves.

norange and copasetic

Mental Floss has a neat little article on the origin and mutation of English words garbled by mishearing them and shifting grammar conventions.
I never thought about elision being behind differentiation from foreign sources, like Apron and Napkin from the same root—though Napron transformed into “an apron,” same with Umpire, from the French for nonpareil (nonper) or the n- became incorporated with nickname. I can think of some examples of slurring peculiar to English that has given rise to perfectly respectable words, like the injection Zounds! from Christ’s Wounds or the happy affirmation of Copasetic, a signal used by bootleggers during Prohibition to indicate that the coast was clear—that the cop is on the settee, dozing. No, there was never a norange in the English language but it seems a likely candidate—as the native Asiatic fruit came to the West via Persia and Spain as narang and nananja and came to be known in other Germanic languages as a Chinese Apple (Apfelsine) but in England, via France, as an apple from Orange, un pomme d’orenge, for the port city on the Mediterranean.

free-hold and thegn

I find it nice that my old bank, and perhaps my new one as well, supports the dream and demand of home-ownership with various avenues thereto, even though such aspirations in Germany are not unattainable, of course, but traditionally not defining of one’s character and not some obligatory rite of passage, to be saddled with an enduring debt to call one’s own. I find it a little off-putting that the Rubik’s Cube image of a house chosen resembles the movie poster from the film Cabin in the Woods, making the whole arrangement seem rather darkly and sacrificial, and not in a responsible way. A home and wealth is something generational, a legacy but neither are regarded as with such status any longer, I think.