Tragically a lot of people along the flood plains of the Danube, Elbe, Rhine and the Main are being made to contemplate the unimaginable—starting over and with nothing salvageable. Not comparable to over concurrent outrages, still it seems we were all unwitting accomplices, lulled into thinking that rivers would be contained with concrete and dams, shored up in response to a disaster in 2002, and policies that enabled sloppy, muddy footprints from everyone of us, as contributors.
Wednesday 12 June 2013
old head waters run dry or cry me a river
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ช️, environment, food and drink
Tuesday 11 June 2013
through the looking-glass
Though there is no other side of the coin, no deflecting of blame that makes trawling the internet in the name of security any more dolphin-friendly or excusable behaviour, but perhaps early-adopters of new technologies might exercise more caution and general-users might want to give less weight to convenience, banking on-line or ordering from shops on the internet or over-sharing.
After all, it seems that a Handy is a tracking-device, a transponder (and not a black-box) that happens to include something called a “Calling - App,” and so forth. Smart phones can summarily out fox us. Although corporations have tried to quash freedom and utility on the world wide web, no monopoly or cartel—or legal codex, has been able to keep in stride with innovation and re-invention. Should the newest gadget or platform, however, be regarded with the healthy suspicion that they are merely casings for bugs and spy cameras, maybe America will realise that its policies and diplomacy have consequences, inward and outward.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, networking and blogging
Monday 10 June 2013
duomo di como
Among all the interesting sights we saw was the City of Como on the south western leg of the lake.
From the harbour, we were greeted by a monument to science.
We overheard a tourist declare to her husband tha was in fact the “Temple of Como,” flatly, as if some pagan god dwelt there, battery-powered.
Rather it was a memorial for native son Alessadro Volta and held the first engineered and practical energy sink and cell in the world. Campers, among many others, tip their hats to Volta, I'm sure. Next after exploring the piers, we came to the ancient cathedral among the ensemble of the oldest part of the city and other sacred architecture.
We were joined in admiring the series of altars and niches by a contingency of Buddhist monks clad in orange robes. I wondered if they were fellow-tourists or if initiates were sent out into the world to document their experience on tablet devices. They seemed genuinely engaged as we were, in any case—treated to an organ concert. The performer was seated at the keyboard beneath an unusual nave with a crucifix figure coiffed with genuine human hair.
catagories: ๐ฎ๐น, ๐️, religion, technology and innovation, travel
roy g. biv or the dark side of the moon
It's not as if out of the blue, the US intelligence agencies now can see us as God and the Angels or Santa Claus—not quite or that the congress of private individuals, businesses and the negotiations of statesmanship was heretofore above snooping and observation, but still to be confronted with the brute and raw data, the scope and depth, is chilling. Already, America has demanded the flight-manifests of passengers world-wide and has become a clearing-house of financial transactions, bullying those reluctant to play along into submission. The herding instinct, strength in numbers kept us safe individually. Underscoring the tribunal of fellow-sieve Bradley Manning, a contractor with the nebulous National Security Agency could no longer face the sinister realities, of course assumed but danced around and it turns out veiled with a spindly cover of lies and false-modesty.
Thank goodness that there are individuals with the strength of convictions to speak out and force the erosion of privacy—long beat up but rarely addressed in earnest, since these quantified revelations, billions, trillions of data elements per month profiling citizens all around the world, drag-net style, like cases of industrial espionage, political baiting and spy-rings tend to create an overall confessional mood. Perhaps the owning up will be more than the fessing up that all intelligence agencies spy on one another but might inspire some more whistle-blowing. How could the German Chancellor greet the American President next time, from a background where the private-sphere is enshrined and protected and discussed and debated and shake hands with an equal who has basically appointed himself as her parole-officer, knowing more intimate details (at least anything with an electronic finger-print) than the Stasis without a blush of anger and feeling violated on behalf of the people she represents—not that Germany was more or less of a target than any other nation, the USA included.