sehtest or the bundeswehr is everywhere

Walking through my neighbourhood, I found a quite curious piece of detritus in the street. This white flier with a mysterious black square bears the equally inscrutable but unusually polite proclamation (in English und auf Deutsch) this a training (ranging) leaflet of the Bundeswehr—from a battalion for operational information stationed quite a distance from here. The translation reminds the finder of this piece of paper out of consideration for the environment to please litter (but surely they meant to please don't) and in case of questions, to please contact the competent unit—which begs more questions than clarification of what one is now holding.
I wonder about the glossy black square—does it contain an invisible message, like a camouflaged QR-code or something to calibrate drones or satellites? Or is a paper-bomb, really mean to check “our distance abilities” projected like a paper airplane or dropped by a very obliging and careful pigeon? What it just something tossed accidentally along the way to somewhere else? Does the German army hope that people ask questions or return it?  It's a little strange but nice that there is some transparency and explanation, but I suspect it's not enough to prevent imaginative speculation.

what's the frequency kenneth?

It's interesting when phenomena, shared and recognized but impossible to relate in a straightforward way, like the sense of déjà vu, earn a name—even if there was a perfectly sufficient descriptive term before pop-psy decided to call frequency illusion the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. A linguist at Stanford University originally classified the syndrome later given an appropriately pop-culture name where one's reality seems suddenly inundated with an idea just introduced—thinking about buying a boat, for instance, summons up all sorts of unaccountable coincidences, not limited to targeted advertising beckoning at every turn, but noticing more and more boats, a documentary evening on boating, touts from a nautical-school or one's brother-in-law getting a party barge, a sale on Breton striped sailor shirts, and so on. In other words, the 

belief that things one has noticed just recently are in fact recent. Two factors comprise this feeling—one being selective attention paid to a new concept or idea and the resulting confirmation bias that reinforces its importance. That particular name was chosen by a journalist exposed to two unrelated and non-contemporary discussions about the German domestic terror group in one evening. Such an unshakeable feeling contributes to the plots of Repo Man (the plate-of-shrimp-effect), the number forty-two in The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy, Jim Carrey's character in The Number 23, as well as our own daily lives, like waking at the same time in the middle of the night. While I strongly do not believe that the universe only has indifferent coincidences on offer and it is nice to have something thematic, it is also good to distance oneself from cogitative partiality.

mediatisation or heavy is the head that wears the crown

While I am not but delighted for Britain's young princely couple over the birth of an eventual successor to the throne and out-pourings of well-wishes in general, the media frenzy and the general fawning and envy of the people of Germany (not to mention the royal-watchers who hang on every detail of the monarchs of the Nordic lands), I think it is high-time that Germany reinstated a monarchy to satisfy public-demand.
I do not believe that Germans are not engaged in politics, but their own royal family to look after might galvanize participation from more and welcome demographics, and a heredity figure-head, with all its rite and ritual—a source of fascination in itself, could take on the largely ceremonial role of the president of Germany. An heir-apparent could be prepared and preened for the job probably better than any accidental politician (appointed by a secret conclave), and surely the advent would be a boon for tourism, though plenty of intact, lived-in castles are to be found under various ownership. I'd nominate the Thurn-und-Taxis family or the House Hohenzollern but there are numerous other pretenders, each with their own cult-following and traditions vouchsafed. Perhaps there are enough grace-and-favour appointments available locally, something harmless and sine cure to satisfy ambitions and make public-servants vie for the honour.

odyssey or ministry of public order

Greece's on-going troubles are not something to be overcome by merely a hair-cut, like Samson, or like the half-giant Antaeus of the further adventures of Hercules, who lost his invulnerability once lifted off the ground, but such solutions abound. To exacerbate general frustration, expecting a solution with a failed package of austerity and tossing more bales of money on the fire, Greece, via the island of Lesbos and the border with Turkey, is facing a crippling influx of immigrants with unanswered pleas for a more comprehensive EU policy on migration and financial help to support an infrastructure already strained to breaking by a series of unconditional austerity measures.

Far from a ploy to get added economic assistance or to buy time for debt re-negotiations, these overtures from the minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection and UN observers in the face of the scramble and chaos of the migrant camps, maltreatment and insufficient means for integration, is a sombre way of redressing the highly concerning trends in the voting public, which has taken a decided turn towards xenophobia, and attitudes—as important and intimately connected with the welfare of the refugees. Greece is not alone with this nascent predicament and it would be advisable to quell such a choice or excuse for intolerance before it escalates and transforms a country's hospitality and sympathy.  To ignore the problem or wall paper over it with freshly printed euro imperils everyone.

charm-offensive or eye in the sky

While I do not think an adopt-a-drone programme would necessarily change public attitudes towards surveillance and not confuse security with protection and prevention as a civic cause—and perhaps we were not among those early hobbists who experimented with that first wave of spin-offs, playing with our new toy, a surprisingly robust but demanding in terms of navigation helicopter with a tee-tiny video camera (high-definition nonetheless) is proving to be a lot of fun and thought-provoking, given what we're capability of doing, with a bit of practice. It is scary to think what a skilled pilot with a greater budget of duty to inform might accomplish. It was also strange that we started learning how to operate the model just as the hearings into the Euro-Hawk fiascoes have been removed into a public forum and rather than as individual characters, film casts drones as a dread chorus. Maybe the trend peaked too soon, late to the game as we are, but I think that dexterity and availability have something to do with perception: how would the public have reacted to be policed (meaning chiefly preventing people from loitering and idleness) by patrol cars with no one else had such a horseless carriage?
 Even though ours had a personality, through the inscrutable technical manual and quirky behaviour, instantly, it's not a fleet to be batted away by the elements, not legion, nor a personal guardian angel or fairy godmother. I wonder if that's how we think of drones, in a theatrical way—a side-kick or a nemesising force, from the crows of Odin that scanned the universe, to Bubu the clockwork owl, VINcent from the darkly bizarre movie Black Hole, that flying sceptre from Flash Gordon, to the imperial probe that betrayed the rebels' location on Hoth, as sort of something one-off (with an inviolable set of weakness and limitations that is am important plot-point) and not with replacements waiting in the wings and certainly nothing accessible by mere mortals. It's pretty cool to be challenged with the clearance of extra dimensions and pretty fun too to get a glimpse from above without having to budget for imagination.

dominions, virtues and authorities

Though probably not a wholly innocent or prudent plea, patience, and not meaning license to defer problems until after federal elections, is not a bad idea in situations where in the first place the rank hypocrisy of doing what can be done elevated and uncontrollably spread the magnitude, post-haste and without regard for the consequences, the German leadership, despite accusations to the contrary and attendant dangers of being caught in a lie, is calling for public calm over the stewardship of its data.

Mounting evidence, however, is indicating, contrary to claims of ignorance or at least omission, a rather prolific partnership among the Bundes- nachrichten- dienst (BND, the Federal Intelligence Service, which is devoted to foreign intelligence gathering) and the Bundesamt für Verfassungschütz (BfV, the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution, the domestic counterpart, whose name is a bit strange since Germany has not had a constitution in name since the days of the Weimar Republic and rather a lexicon of by-laws—nonetheless complete). The willingness, degree and mutual benefit, cognizance aside, of this collaboration is an open question and will likely remain so for some time. No one ought to be subjected with arbitrary interference to personal matters, no matter how low the common-denominator. The outrage (lack thereof) seems sort of selective.

your free trial of the internet (inter alia) has expired

After the allure of free congress and enough free samples of everything imaginable, on-line culture is being slowly given a new paradigm that buries much of what the public has become addicted to, casually and without turning back, behind water-marks, clearing-houses, functionality splintered into thousands of idiosyncratic applications, paywalls, subscriptions and compartmentalized by various services that compete rather than communicate with one another, as Buzzfeed's Charlie Warzel presents in a brillant essay on this shift in attitudes and accessibility.

Of course, this pushers' modus operandi developed gradually, and having crossed the threshold of this gateway long ago (which the internet was never intended to be but no more and no less than a resource bridging connections among people and ideas), and the engineers maintaining the network, as well as the general public are not really noticing the drabness descending. It's probably beyond the scope of the article and smacks of tinny and misplaced nostalgia or neo-luddism (Luddismus, angst vor dem Neuland), but the trend seems like a metaphor for a lot of other movements and disclaimers draining the wholesomeness and fun out of things, displaced with approximations of safety, convenience and community, like the surveillance state and its litany of justifications or the empowered lobbies that peddle free samples of genetically-modified food and pharmaand general re-packaging and sponsorship that makes it hard to anything without submitting to some inscrutable authority. What do you think? If it is truly something that people are willing to accept, is this drift tolerated in the on-line world necessarily spilling over into everything else?

billow or augmented triad

Who knew that augmented reality (AR) technologies were making advances on the other senses, and in ways that were more than revivals of already-proven techniques—like 3-D movies?
Now one, instead of bi-coloured cardboard and stage-light gel glasses, wears Dr. Strangelove's spectacles, though there has been improvements by tweaks, if not bounds. A researcher at the University of Illinois has teamed up with Disney's imagineering laboratories to create a device, Airreal, that can resonate at specific vibrations and broadcast, project as puffs of air phantom sensations.
I suppose an array could be set up like surround-sound speakers, giving all members of the audience the feeling of being caught in a rainstorm, pelted with snow flakes, over having a bullet wiz by. In closer quarters, the device can toss one a virtual coin, seen through some other means, with the feeling of it landing in one's palm, plus replicating any given tactile sense or texture. That is pretty far-out, and makes me remember the first time that I wore 3-D glasses, which weren't red and blue, was when my family and I visited Epcot Center and saw Michael Jackson in the film Captain EO way back in 1987.