turn-on, tune-in, drop-out

A sort of national Sabbath, with no allowable fictions or preparations needed, is observed tomorrow with the national Day of Un- plugging—such a movement has taken on universal proportions, I think that all of us have an embarrassment of choices available to us when it comes to being off-line, dozens of analogue and manual things to make whole and appreciate. It’s not downtime, like a power-outage, that usually inspire thoughts like “I could do the vacuuming, except—“ but really a disconnection that pulls one’s attention elsewhere. I am really not one to speak to this sort of Lenten forfeiture, but it does seem like a very good idea that bears regular repeating. How do you plan to observe this date and spirit it represents?

oracle or time and temperture

A really engrossing article from Aeon magazine profiles some more big-thinkers regarding the fracturing future possibilities for mankind. Building from an earlier clever interview that leaned towards the apocalyptic, our impulsive and unhelpful tendencies are explored but also our positive capacities and how they might be synthetically extended.
Like some hard-hitting thought-experiment, which does not seem so far-fetched like the classic Cartesian teasers of Brain-in-a-Vat or Teleportation that involves re-assembly of a subject on-site with simultaneous destruction at the origin, the dialogue summons up a hypothetical, benevolent and omnipresent Artificial Intelligence, having gradually won acceptance, that’s like the Ancient Greek household gods, cults, patrons, oracles and wishing-wells, only closely monitored, mimicking current trends in social networks and driven traffic, also known as popularity. The intelligence’s only manifestation in the real world would be as a question-and-answer service—a very sophisticated one, which would learn by aggregation of all queries and solutions offered, evaluating and project their outcomes. Such a universal internet, pervasive and accessible, could learn as well by positive-reinforcement, and here I think is where the dialogue veers towards doom and gloom, sort of like a lab rat (by who are the overlords and who is the subject?) who avoids an electro-shock or earns a treat from historical successes and failures. It all sound eerily familiar, and the landscape, world-view of inquiring minds. But how accommodating is the landscaper? Certainly most problems are not without precedence and our predicaments and quandaries are not as unique as we’d like to think in some form, but a lot of examples from the past do not necessarily yield a right, correct answer

conclave

Although not without historical precedence, the more reflection dedicated to the Pope’s resolve to resign his post enlivens some interesting repercussions. It seems that one cannot simply retire from the office, and his intentions to repair to a Roman monastery make me wonder if Benedikt will be a mentor, a shadow pope, inviting a second succession of schisms for the Church Universal.
And does his decision open up an expectation, the option for all predecessors to gracefully bow out, whether a divine directive or public perception of being outmoded, like some old and tired politician. With some providence, we will not be overcome by such intrigues.

autodidactic or natural interface

A team from the University of Karlsruhe has been awarded an honourarium from an internet giant for having developed an “air-writing” system to make using touch-screens easier and more intuitive.

The input device is a glove—with hopes of reducing the apparel, the tether to a wrist-band later, and seems quite promising. The idea that we could reify our gestures makes pashas of us all, clapping to summon a servant to feed us grapes. I don’t know about integrating the ability to shout demands into everything, since words are a form of communication and not just a one way street and characters are made of a lot of errant gesture, not all of which are appropriate to realize right away or with the help of an over-zealous assistant. I do like the idea, however, that one could write on a make-believe tablet or make a telephone call by pantomime.

horse-feathers

There is due cause for revulsion and concern when it comes to food-security and integrity—and I don’t think that this strange phenomena is polluting clinical studies but it is something to consider when one has everything under the microscope and genetic makeup is something writ-large like a rancher’s brand—but Nature periodically orchestrates a very elaborate waltz between genomes, in ways not fully understood though more and more bizarre examples are being discovered.

In a process called horizontal gene transfer, DNA chimeras have been lurking unseen for eons, with volumes of genetic information inserted among very different animals—complete sections so that one can identify the host’s donor. This practice is standard procedure for bacteria but biologists did not think such exchanges were possible for complex organisms. Although there’s no means to test the hypothesis yet, one idea is non-discriminating parasite, like ticks and fleas, have helped facilitating these series of incorporations. It’s also unclear how these out-of-context sequences assist the animal, or are they merely hitchhiking, like the parasite that might have introduced this spice to accustom itself to a new taste.

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.