the commons

Revolutions have shifted from seasons and colours it seems towards something more in situ and the world is receiving a lesson, no less, in foreign terms for square or plaza where the protests are taking place and public politics are fomenting.
In recent memory, before the press was allowed to name and tidily adjudge such things, there was Tiananmen Square (天安門廣場, named for the Gate of Heavenly Peace which separates the area from the Forbidden City) in Beijing in 1989. Not as if everything was quiet, peaceable or simmering in the meantime, there was Tarhir Square in Cairo (Mīdān at-Taḥrīr, Liberation Place) in 2011. In 2013 and on-going is Taksim (meaning division or distribution from an Ottoman era reservoir originally on this site where the plumbing of the city was managed) Meydanı in Istanbul whose Gezi Park has become a symbol for government oppression and autocracy. Presently, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Майдан Незалежності, Independence) in Kiev has seen its square component of its name become shorthand for public uprising itself—the Euromaidan (Євромайдан) demonstrations seeking to realign Ukraine with Western Europe. Of course, there were countless rallies, marches, movements and occupations before they could be widely reported to the outside and degrees in coordination and spontaneity, and myriad in between. Overthrows and positive reform do not end with these pivotal moments, and possibly a public more educated and connected can appreciate the difficulty in managing the aftermath and transition.

verso-recto

The unique and enigmatic Voynich Manuscript, a six century old pharmacopoeia, which supposedly only returned into the world's stacks after its purchase by a Polish antiquarian in 1912 when the papal college in Rome was forced to auction off some of its collection, may have at least been demonstrated as something other than a hoax, according to one British researcher.

The text still defies deciphering and the abugidas are beyond our compre- hension—even with the aid of bizarre illustrations, but the linguist may have puzzled out ten proper names for plants—apparently as recipes for herbal-cures. Theories abound about what the book could be about, from an encrypted treatise of medicine with secret cures transmitted from antiquity, an undiscovered language to a phonetic rendering of by a European scholar of some Asian text—like the transliteration of Mandarin into pinyin and the Latin alphabet or the addition of invented lower-case letters and punctuation for Ancient Greek texts, which originally had neither, by scholars and copyists—with shorthand and ligatures, that certainly would have appeared inscrutable to readers on either extreme of these aids for reading.  One can browse or download the scanned manuscript from the holdings at Yale, where the book resides.

cosine or god bless you, mister vonnegut

Never discounting the classic novels Kurt Vonnegut Jr. gave the world with Galapagos, Slaughterhouse Five, Mother Night and a dozen more, one of the story-teller's simple gifts, long overlooked, may have been in the form of an anthropology thesis—rejected at the time for appearing too unsophisticated, which theorized every arch-of-story, all archetypes, can be represented in eight shapes. Luckily, Mr. Vonnegut later revisited his “man-in-the-hole” and other hypotheses and his lectures and conjectures have caught the interest of others, like the brilliant graphic artist Maya Eilam, who presents these ideas as a beautiful infographic.

devolution or shelbyville-adjacent

The suggestion of one of Silicon Valley's resident tycoons that California governance has become untenable and the state ought to be splintered into six separate republics has picked up some momentum for the populace too impatient for the great quake and letting Mother Earth sort it all out.

Maybe there is some truth to the claim that management is growing impossible and that a unified California is too unwieldy to be run under the former model. The proposed breakup, given enough petitioners to force a referendum on the matter, however, includes a state of Silicon Valley carved out of the adjacent state of Central California which would create the wealthiest enclave in America next to one of the poorest regions. Segregation does not seem to be solution for creating a functional government—jettisoning territories that are of different political persuasions or in different tax brackets, especially when the middle-class is burdened with actually paying into state and federal coffers while the corporations are typically the scoff-laws. Though for very different reasons, this plan reminds me of the upcoming decision of Scotland to leave the United Kingdom and join to European Union as an independent member. What do you think? Is small-time session the answer?

synchronicity

Via the peripatetic Kottke, purveyor of fine hypertext products, cites some stunning pairings of historic events that took place on roughly the same date but to grapple with this coincidence presents some real cognitive dissonance. The growing indices solicited on Reddit point out, for instance:

1888: Nintendo was founded as a playing-card company, Jack the Ripper was active in London, the cornerstone was laid for the Washington Monument and van Gogh painted Starry Night

1971: Astronauts drove a rover on the Moon and Switzerland attained universal suffrage

1977: The last execution in France via guillotine and the premiere of the Star Wars franchise

There are plenty of other jarring, curious moments of history overlapping—like the Monguls fought on two fronts simultaneous: the Crusaders in the Middle East and the Samurai clans in the Far East, woolly mammoths still existed during the time that the Ancient Egyptians were building the earliest pyramids, or the sandwich and the sushi-roll were invented approximately the same time separately by two noble men, one English and the other Japanese, both with a love for gaming and could not be bothered to devote two hands to their food. What other historical worm-holes can you think of? You'll earn a Time Tunnel badge if you can come up with a good one.

minitrue oder volksaufklärung

Though stalled for now over insider outcry, the US government's Federal Communications Commission plans to charge the agency with the onerous task of evaluating news rooms of different media outlets to assess their ability to deliver on “critical information needs” for the public was a rather chilling prospect.

The aim to create a more informed and civic-minded population is a noble one, of course, with several categories that define what a broadcast ought to convey, but it also runs the risk of possibly deputizing FCC inspectors as censors and propagandists, as it quickly could become a question of journalistic credentials if one source or another did not tow the party line in diplomacy, security or social welfare. Already outlets are pretty polarized and either championed or dismissed, while every non-traditional opinion and reporting is classified as something fringe. The FCC let the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” that mandated for equal-time to avoid a press-bias and demagogy on controversial subjects atrophy before finally expiring in 2011—for sound reasons, since a cartel is different from an autocrat and the public has to discern for itself what's worth following, even if the choices are saccharine. Implementation has been delayed—for now, but as of late, the hurdles of public-sentiment have been merely assuaged and left to be battled behind the scenes, possibly like the empty victories tossed to the public over keeping the internet out of the hands of big industry, which was instead taken up in secret arbitration and trade deals and in turned out that the whole of communications and activity was under surveillance in the first place.  It is true how they say power is never relinquished willingly.

bread and circuses

From Mother Jones magazine, comes a fascinating profile of an academic research facility in Washington state and the bakers who are striving to reverse the trend in production that have made bread instead of what has been regarded “as the staff of life,” symbolically and historically, into “the spirit of disease.”
There are legitimate cases of course of celiac disease of individuals who cannot tolerate gluten, but impatience in the industry—white bread and some seemingly whole wheat cognates (fortunately, for now, this is not a problem in Germany, though I understand there is an increasing amount of baked goods prepared in China and elsewhere that employ the same short-cuts) does not allow the yeast to fully digest the gluten and the preservatives added and has a knock-on effect up the food-chain and may yield false-positives, in addition to such dietary fads that revile processing but not necessarily the process. In the facility's experimental kitchen, bakers are returning to traditional methods, yielding a far superior and better tasting product.