Tuesday 5 March 2013

heart on your sleeve or windowpane

While I want to believe that the public, early-adopter, the technocrati, and developers have considered how convenience and novelty are drives easily deputized as the stuff of spies and snitches, but although I was not overly fond of the idea of the normalization of wearing certain blinders that kept one focused on something other than the here and now from a stand point of accelerating psychological concerns, I certainly did not extrapolate any higher-order concerns. All forms of surveillance and reconnaissance are already possible, of course, via a variety of measures which do not always talk to one another (this inability to communicate, I think, keeps a lot of us employed as interpreters, incidentally), but what implications are there to actually dispatching willing legions of monitors, eager (or at least persuadably so) to archive the whole of their experience without an editor or intermediary?

Monday 4 March 2013

unmarked white van or deppenapostroph

Usually I am not one to rise above mild amusement and not call unnecessary use of quotation marks when I see them used liberally on signage (although there appears to be a certain fondness for this practice in Germany). When I see this superfluous punctuation I want to stoop and gesture and make those air apostrophes. I am not addressing that other practice that’s a terribly prevalent butchering of the genitive case—Gertie’s Pilsstube is more often seen than the correct Gerties.

There’s a rather non-descript service vehicle that I see around the neighbourhood (incidentally, I think unmarked white vans would be a great name for any entrepreneurial enterprise) with the decals along the side for ,,ROBERT” interior construction (Innen- und ausbau). I would never decry this one, since I later realized that “Robert” was most certainly the quite competent handy-man who re-did my little workweek apartment, the floors and all, by surprise. Perhaps ,,ROBERT” is some attempt at cultural integration or some byzantine regulatory requirement for truth in advertising. If it is really the service vehicle of Roberto, that don’t know but I try not to be one to police grammar and punctuation, since I know I have a lot of faults of my own. I tend to be hyphenation-happy, for one.
I do believe that there is room for license, according to the Army book of style, there are actual rules, which cascade out like poetry or that Monty Python skit about woody words. One should omit the hyphen when words appear in regular order and the omission causes no confusion in sound or meaning: banking hours, blood pressure, book value, census taker, life cycle, living costs, mountain laurel, palm oil, patent right, real estate, time frame, violin teacher. Well, I want to connect all of these with a dash. Next, one should compound two or more words to express an idea that would not be as clearly expressed in separate words, as in: bookkeeping, follow-on, forget-me-not, indepth, in-house, gentlemen, man-hour, man-year, newsprint, offload, railcar, right-of-way, yearend. Restraint should be exercised in forming unnecessary combinations of words used in normal sequence: atomic energy power, child welfare plan, civil service examination, income tax form, parcel post delivery, per capita expenditure, real estate tax, social security pension, soil conservation measures, special delivery mail. I don’t know about all of that. It seems to me like something that someone saw on a sign once and took to heart.

Sunday 3 March 2013

mcdoof

The latest cover and theme of Der Spiegel magazine (which I think though available on-line a perhaps regaled with more premium advertizing space will never be something out-of-print or solely archived in waiting-rooms) really poses a message to consider, especially taking into account how convenience foods are engineered for endurance.

 Maybe such an EU-style Surgeon General’s warning writ-large is needed. Taste and texture conspire for something that is not particularly memorable for the palette, lest one gets too inured to it, something unlike a very good meal that would be unseemly nonetheless to repeat too soon. This sort of subliminal, proletariat appeal is by design and a wonder of marketing and promotion, supported by an army food-hacks and production short-cuts. The fast-food industry and of course other addictive substances are able to buck the justification that “but I had Chinese for lunch” or “Greek just on Tuesday.” It is becoming harder and harder, however, to position oneself in a landscape to honestly choose and avoid the underlying staples.

global hawk or pretty bird

There’s a very blurry line between hobby helicopters and aerial surveillance drones, and I fear that government agencies, wanting to protect their assets and bailiwick will probably begin severely restricting what hobbyists can and can’t do. Just as much as there is an already growing public resistance to and fear of sky-spying, home-made drones could be easily deployed as Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots to jam the airspace. Technology can be a kill-joy and make things quickly accelerate.

Watching a demonstration video about a local club that builds and flies these kit vehicles, and how they navigate and stay oriented with the help of GPS, it all of a sudden became clear to me that the EU project to build a separate, parallel global positioning satellite array, Galileo, was not just a prestige project or a waste of money (the world’s current GPS telemetry provider is owned by the militaries of the US, Russia and China and although made available to the public for civilian use, could be switched off at any time). The European GPS is not being built for the benefit of toy helicopter enthusiasts or vacationers that might get lost along the way to their destinations but I guess for a strategic reality that might see the satellite signals cut off in order to stop rogue and rebel and recreation from interfering with the business of scouting. I wonder, however, if the dreary imaginations of the people who plan for these contingencies also consider that guidance is adaptive and there are plenty of other less lofty landmarks to go by.

Saturday 2 March 2013

ab in beurlaubt

The US executive and legislative branches were unable to reach or fake a compromise, which triggers a count-down, sort of like a Rube Goldberg contraption, towards budgetary sequestration across most of America’s federal programmes, mandatorily paring funding and raising the spectre of furloughs (unpaid absences) for hundreds of thousands of government workers world-wide.

It is wholly excusable, I think, for most of the international public to be aghast at the dysfunction while thinking that a temporary curtailment of the sticky wickets of bureaucracy won’t cause any significant damage. It’s an embarrassing situation and a disservice to populace, to be sure, but I think blame and hyperbolic overtures to the boogeymen of security and the already prevalent attitude (in perception and in fact) regarding faded glory do really overlook the cascading effects of the situation. Though the expected cost-cutting measures, immediately and projected out over the next decade, represent only a tiny, tiny fraction of the larger deficiency, some 85 billion dollars out of an either four, eleven, 15 (or exponentially higher) trillion dollar debt, cutting back work on the proposed scales could mean a twenty percent drop in the purchasing power of the federal work force and those associated with it, not to mention those indirectly affected by delay and errors, all of whom will probably never be fully redressed.
This fifth does is not a chuck out of the whole of the abstract US economy, mostly conjuring money out of the movement of money and pushing paper, but—and perhaps even more urgently, this reduction is a double-decimation, not just in terms of income and employment and delivery, but a realignment, like annexing twenty percent of the America’s smaller communities, absorbing them into larger neighbours with an even more massive yet over-burdened civil institutions. It is like the pettiness and gridlock of the Congress leaking out of the Beltway and set loose on all aspects of the American public.  The wheels of government will continue to turn with skeleton-crews, more work pressed out of staff remaining, rotating singly through the work week with less continuity and more matters overcome in the transition because it will have to. Authorities, in spite or because of the knock-on effects, may realize that adjustments (austerity American-style) can be accommodated and can make do with a scaled back government—or, and probably heralded by flagging spending and all around timidity, essential and uniting services both will become untenable under a reorganization that excised too much stability, functional determination and assuredness, whether or not misplaced, out of communities too quickly.

east-enders or construction-spree

Although this sounds like a perennial face-off, since the city council has supported the building project since 1992, and more contemporary architectural initiative—like the unfinished money-pit of the Berlin-Brandenburg Airport or the reconstruction of the City Castle (Stadtschloss) lost during DDR times. make the government’s excuses and poor-mouthing seem less than genuine—one does not need any additional details or background to be shocked and livid at the on-going efforts of planners to raze one of the last remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall (disassemble and relocate, rather) to make room for a block of luxury flats.

Throughout the division of Germany the Wall was a pallette for graffiti and protest, and after Reunification international artists were invited to turn the remaining Wall into a canvas for free expression and personal liberties, here in particular on a section called the East Side Gallery running parallel to the Spree river, and it would be a tragic loss of culture and memory should it be made to tumble, especially for sake of real estate speculation. Protests continue as well but are now mobilized in the street and on-line, fixing solidarity, and hopefully will prevail.

elective affinities or the boys from brazil

Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis has recently brought experimentation to the scientific community and the public with much enthusiasm and a certain flair that demonstrates the possibility of a future forms of communication, suggestion, via pure thoughts with a brain-to-brain interface. The trial consisted of two laboratory rats, geographically separated: one, the transmitting rat in a facility in Nicolelis’ native Brazil was conditioned to associate certain cues with the chance to get a reward, sweetened water as opposed to plain water. The other rat in the States, the receiver, was in a similar environment and opportunities for the treat were precisely synchronized.
The rat in America, however, was not privy to any of the sending rat’s cues, except that the rats’ brains were wired with electrodes and the former could telegraph via cables in the facility and over the Internet a micro-stimulus to the latter when he anticipated getting the reward. Their coordinated responses resulted in the American rat going for the reward at the exact moment the Brazilian right got the cue nearly seventy percent of the time; the Brazilian rate was transmitting the same conditioned response, impulse practically every time. The success rate shows that some significant mental exchange was going on but also suggests the limitations of scientists to pin-point the exact same neurons in two different subjects and that while there may be over-arching similarities, no two brains—or though-processes for that matter, are exactly identical. This sort of tethering is not telepathy or even Bluetooth. Communication was not reciprocal and who knows what the strangers would have thought if they knew their roles? What do you think? Will such stuff of science-fiction be the twitterpation of the near future and should we pursue this route?