the pump don't work because vandals broke the handle

Despite unresolved tensions with the contentious deployment of the Euro Hawks, huge and marauding things, along with the whole idea turning sour for the programme's once strongest proponents over privacy and safety concerns, as the BBC reports, the German national railway system (die Deutschebahn) is floating the idea of having miniature drones patrolling the switch-yards for graffiti vandals. While without the range and appetite for snooping of their side-lined bigger brothers, allowing such surveillance does seem to be a slippery slope towards commercial interests pushing the decisions that make government policy wilt. What do you think? Is it any different from a company using curmudgeonly security guards to keep away meddling kids or over-stepping their beats?

hard-currency

When my mother and I were together for the first time in Germany, we were bemused by the profileration of what we called cheese-banks, Sparkasse—saving cheese (Käse, we thought). It turns out, via Oddity Central with a bonus report from the BBC, there are such institutions in the Parmesian producing region of Italian, at least, which will larger wheels of cheese as collateral for loans to local businesses at a nominal interest-rate, including a fee for storing their assets in conditions where they will mature properly.

picture-picture or long, lost weekend

Over the past several weeks, there have been a series of ninnying events though while far from spoiling our time together away from work, that grey immanence not having undue influence after hours, have presented challenges or bluffs that we not the choicest. First, I thought I had lost all my keys entirely—though I later found after a lot of bother that I had in fact had them with me the entire time, packed away in advance. Now, I've ruined a perfectly good computer (read: on its last legs, although functional and ironically lamented nearly on a delay basis that it was due for an upgrade) by sloshing a glass of wine over it and most of the entire dining table.

Searching for solutions afterwards and having made a triage of staunching the stains from setting in on the placemats first and foremost with a lot of salt, which turned out to be an ingenious investment, made of a spot-resistant material and already sort of the shade of wine-stain and came out perfectly clean, I learned that I did not react perhaps with the requisite urgency of doom and gloom. The laptop was powered down and I sopped up what I could see—although reading more, and with a paucity of domestic animals or clumsy children to blame for my own bad table-manners, I see I ought to have panicked over this most unpredictable of accidents, and I should have immediately disassembled the entire computer, buried it in a bag of rice and still hope for the best but prepare for the worst. The computer did thankfully, under the auspices of those guardian gremlins that manage such things, come on once and gave me a chance to back-up all the photos that I had neglected for months but then never again. At least, not for now: apparently there are a lot of testimonials too about computers eventually recovering after days of drying—propping them open in the shape of a lambda in a warm and dry spot is recommended rather than a hair-dryer. The separation anxiety is much more than I expected.  This accident gave the excuse to get a new computer but possibly not with the research I wanting to ply to it. I know it will take sometime to get used to the new environment and I think I got something also good and functional, logically, but it now feels like a boombox, huge and unwieldy compared to the Walkman that I had before, and though I am confronted with newish innovations and navigation at work, it has been a few years and I was not expecting to be keep so safe or have my intuitive sense called to the carpet. One has to purposefully run applications as an administrator in order for them to work and the hacks I was used to have been replaced with apps, all touchy-feely and visual. Since unboxing the new laptop, I have spent this whole time trying to put a sepia-tone on the entire platform in order to restore some degree of familiarity.

carrot and stick: world war one centennial coverage

Mental Floss guest blogger Erik Sass is continuing his excellent and engrossing day-by-day accounts of events one hundred years ago, leading up to the outbreak of the Great War. Sass’ 70th installment recounts the shocking and consequential spy scandal that shook confidence in Austro-Hungary’s intelligence service and may have compromised the Empire’s defensive strategies and offensive contingencies to the Russians and their allies—potentially provocative triggers to know how one’s enemy might react to a given set of circumstances.
The espionage affair centred around Colonel Alfred Redl, chief of the military spy programme, and though one may never know his exact motives or to what extent fretful extortion and blackmail was pressured upon him, and his private life, which would have destroyed his career on its own if he were outed. Industrious and innovative, Redl quickly ingratiated himself up in the ranks of the army, through a series of post usually reserved for aristocrats and titled-elite and plied tools of quite progressive techniques in intelligence-gathering, like wire-tapping, covert photography and hand-writing analysis. Whether simply motivated to kept rather open-secrets subdued or sell real secrets to promote an increasingly extravagant and bold lifestyle, we may never know for certain—and probably nothing at all about this intrigue were it not for the confessions of the woman engaged as Redl’s beard, his alibi, who expressed concerns about his involvement with the Russia military. In apparently a carrot-and-stick approach, Redl was encouraged to sell Austrian and German plans to the Russians, in exchange for large sums money, delivered anonymously by post. Hoisted by his own petard while stationed in Prague, it was one of Redl’s early suggestions of data-mining and triangulation that lead to suspicions of his loyalty and his eventual capture. A search of his apartment and interviews with liaisons uncovered (implicating many others in the army) the lifestyle that he struggled to keep hidden.

kunstkammer, wunderkammer

This rainy and gloomy afternoon, another one in a series that’s really inverted the calendar all over again, turned into a perfect opportunity to spend some time in the local museum, quite a celebrated institution, and sheltering from the nasty weather in the endless maze of galleries, I really enjoyed myself.
The Wiesbaden collection consists to a large extent of the encyclopedic anthologies of the family of Johann Isaak von Gerning donated to the state, but due to the constraints of time and space, rotates its exhibitions with a hauntingly perfect thematic unity. A little leitmotif, follow the bouncing ball, subtlety tied everything together as I advanced from hall to hall.
One great interest of von Gerning was rejoicing in his native Rhine and the museum composed a very nice display of landscapes, and it was interesting to see a romanticized and sometimes fantastically impossible portrayal of some of the places we’ve seen in the area and places yet to visit—but that’s what art is and for an accurate image, one should settle with a photograph. Numerous guest painters who had also visited the Rhine’s castles and mountains also shared their impressions.
 The landscapes were punctuated with examples of baroque-era taxidermy and entomological collections, which were repeated later in the complimentary exhibits that featured the aesthetics of Nature in several acts, the whole spectrum of colour, range of motion and variations on any given theme. The permanent stores on show were also interspersed with some pretty unique installations of post-modern art that amazingly contributed to the natural progression.

getting to bayes

There’s an instrument of disabuse for everyday assumptions and likelihoods that I had not heard of before called Bayesian Probability, after its proponent 18th century English poly-math and minister, Thomas Bayes. Intent on rescuing providence, rationally, from chance, Bayes championed a sort of inverted inspection of odds, imploring people to look to prior arrangements and question how the deck may be stacked and weighted in favour of certain outcomes. Although modern interpretations of Bayes’ thinking maybe over-reach his original context, the notion that probability—writ large and scientish, is based in part on belief is not something merely synonymous with gullibility and naivety and magical-thinking.

Rather, how we measure the likelihood of outcomes can hinge on personal experience, and maybe to a fault, since successes and failures (surprises and dis- appointments, too) are counted by past usefulness and go unnoticed and with indifference otherwise. Sometimes it’s an over-simplification to believe that the chance is 50-50 since we are better acquainted with either something working-out or not and not something in between. Something about the way we pose the question or prime the conditions may obscure our judgment. We are also, sadly, more accustomed to failure than success. This is a bit revelatory and makes me wonder what misguided influences might be tarnishing my choices—not that perfect and logical decisions seem all that savoury either as an alternative. I am remembered to something along these lines whenever I play the lottery but also know that though a long-shot, one only needs to be right once.

put the needle on the record or ong, plong, kerplinky, plong

The imminent BLDGBLOG reports on a project that illustrates the amazing precision and focus that can be attained with laser-cutting techniques, with audio records scribed in a low-fi manner over disks of wood, and then departs into the author’s signature expansion—a flight of fanciful speculation that carries the idea to a certain and inchoate conclusion, with landscapes imprinted and the soundtracks of everyday objects amplified though an ultra-fine stylus.

I think this is pretty keen—I’ve always held a secret though unscientific conviction that every sound, from whispers and footfalls to bangs and other knalls, is preserved somewhere in an atomic memory—sort of like the growth rings of trees or the back-formations of the valleys and mountains where one can, with some causal algebra, solve for the factors that led to the present state.