Taking advantage of the spring weather, we took a short rumble down a portion of the Romantic Road (die Romantische Straรe), the route of fairy tale castles, palaces and fotresses that criss-cross the borders of Bayern and Baden-Wรผrttemberg in the western reaches of Franconia to Upper-Bavaria. Towards the end of our trip, we passed through the village of Creglingen on the Tauber river, nicely rendered in this landscape by the artist Carl Grossberg in 1926. We did not photograph this particular vista because of the afternoon sun, but I was really captured by the artist's modern, cartoonish style.
Afterwards, I researched a bit further, got a lesson in art-history and found more of Grossberg's works and discovered that the collection epitomizes the German New Objectivity movement (Neue Sachlichkeit, new matter-of-factness) that aimed to capture the practicality of form and function associated with civic involvement and political engagement of Germany's inter-war Weimar Republic and an off-shoot of the Bauhaus movement.
As opposed to Futurism or Expressionism, this impartial attitude
emulated the perceived values of America's infatuation with work and
progress and represented an inward-turning towards institutions and
public life, and Grossberg did in fact produce many interesting
schematics depicting industry. I do, however, really enjoy his imaginative way of inserting sloths and monkeys into office-settings for effect and comment.
Sunday 9 March 2014
daytrip: maintauberfranken
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐, ๐, Baden-Wรผrttemberg, Bavaria, philosophy
tehdit
In an apparent about-face to the regime's earlier courtship of technology and telecommunications and in response to opposition politicians that have hijacked the internet as a platform for lies and libel, at least—according to the incumbents, the government of Turkey is looking to curtail freedom of expression on-line when the integrity of the public and republic is at stake, including the whole-sale blocking of certain popular sites.
The European Union is joining a chorus of Turkish protesters in revolt, however this individual-mandate, which Turkey wants to install as a way for policing the internet and dousing out sparks before the lead to righteous conflagrations, blocking the activity of certain persons or a link before they can blossom or metastasize—though blatant censorship is little different from roving arbiters and trolls that have door-stops within governments to get their way and can be scarier yet than calling twitterpation a “menace (tehdit) to society.” These laws are ostensibly meant for protection of individual privacy and dignity, adding a bit of amnesia to the internet which never forgets—which seems on the contrary like something quite positive and reasonable, since going back to the idea of an individual-mandate, great freedom also carries with it great responsibility—especially when evangelizing, but the potential for abuse is always there, as those most eager to do the judging usually have no business doing so.
catagories: ๐น๐ท, ๐ฅธ, networking and blogging, revolution
Saturday 8 March 2014
zur farbenlehre oder roy g. biv
Marine biologists studying a specific species of mantis shrimp (Fangschreckenkrebse) that inhabits coral reefs—an explosion of colour, shade and shadow, have found that these crustaceans have some of the most advanced eyes compound eyes in the animal kingdom. These shrimp have sixteen distinct photo-receptive cells, ommatidium whereas human eyes only have four to filter for red, green and blue and contrast, to differentiate, to tune for three times more colours and perceive polarised light and across different spectra.
catagories: ๐, ๐, ๐, environment, philosophy, Wikipedia
Thursday 6 March 2014
menagerie
Beyond mermaids and unicorns—and even enjoying less widespread popularity than rarer chimeras like griffins, harpies or the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (cotton, not so much a monster), there is a neglected bestiary, which the marvelous Atlas Obscura pays tribute to. My favourite creature enrolled here is the odd Lidรฉrc from Hungarian folklore—a sort of familiar, hatched as the first of a brood from a black hen, after being incubated in a human armpit—according to some traditions.
This newly-hatched imp, industrious and loyal, eventually becomes also a curse and a liability. Though always at their master's disposal, such congress becomes a dangerous thing, but can be gotten rid of through a variety of equally specific rituals, like giving one's Lidรฉrc an impossible task, like a logical feed-back loop that will eventually cause a fatal-error. It reminds me of the notion that vampires exhibit arithmomania and are compelled to count whatever is cast out in front of them, like grains of rice, or the Greek custom of setting out a colander during the Christmas season to trip up evil spirits, since they are obsessed with numbers and will try to count all the holes. They only make it as far as two, however, since three, the Holy Trinity, makes them disappear and start all over. It's interesting that monsters are framed with compulsions and I wonder what that means.
catagories: ๐, ๐ฆ, ๐ง , myth and monsters, philosophy, religion
Wednesday 5 March 2014
cold fusion
Kottke shares some interesting developments on the world-wide initiative to harness essential limitless energy with nuclear fusion by creating a wee constellation of tiny terrestrial (or at least mundane—that is, below the sphere of the Moon). The project has a commendable mission statement, as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor abbreviated ITER, or rather iter from the Latin for the way, it aims to bend physics to satisfy man's needs, like with Prometheus—punished for giving humanity the gifts and curses of fore-thought and fire, in a sustainable manner. Whether it is possible to contain this sort of power is uncertain, but progress seems in jeopardy due to the bureaucratic nature of such a collaboration.
Such a complex engineering project has even spawned its own form of currency to facilitate funding of grants, and I am sure that there are secreted cautions among the members, especially those who supply the world's traditional fuels—who spread rumours that bringing the CERN collider on-line would ingest the Earth in a microscopic blackhole. Kottke's posts are always value-added, waxing philosophical and triangulating with curious but cogent parallels, and wonders if in this case, it is not an effort better handed off to industry. Many of today's businesses, flush with money and not only interested in preserving the status quo (though dominance and vertical monopolies are not much different) might want their own stellar prestige project.
catagories: ⚛️, ๐ก, ๐ญ, environment, foreign policy
dimensionally transcendental
Tuesday 4 March 2014
parallax view or high-noon
Slowly but surely creeping towards the hours where sunrise and sunset do not precede the work day, I found this map pretty keen, which globally illustrates how far time-zones around the world diverge from the true solar mean.
Monday 3 March 2014
reductio ab hitlerum
Apparently at one point during his conversation with the US president, the Russian premiere invoked that the invasion of the Crimean peninsular was executed for the protection of ethnic Russians living in the area. Immediately, this elicited a petition by many Russians and Russian-speakers residing there, refusing those overtures, stating they needed no protecting and felt, on the contrary, very secure and welcome.
Though no further violence has actually yet been perpetrated with the occupation of the region, the next maneuvers are unclear, and I am sure that someone, somewhere has pointed out the obvious, said the argument that's no popular or considered logically flawed, but isn't this current reasoning parallel at least to the invocation of “protecting the ethnic Germans” in 1939 in Gdansk in Poland or in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, Japan declaring Korea a protectorate in 1905 before formally annexing the country in 1910, or the acts of others that one cannot call to the carpet, not to mention dozens of trespasses committed in the name of US interests and for earlier empires? This invasion was premeditated and not a spontaneous response to an opportune moment of civil disarray and the defanged counter-balance is left with few tenable options, even in terms of economic sanctions—considering Europe's dependence of Russian natural resources and especially allied China's favourable assessment of Russia's actions, able to levy painful usury as the financier-in-chief of the world's accustomed lifestyle. Ukraine, despite the odds, could however offer resistance, having a respectable arsenal in comparison regardless of the spread of their antagonist, but this possibility is being decimated by Russians recruiting Ukrainian force individual by individual, luring them away with a passport and citizenship.
catagories: ๐จ๐ฟ, ๐ท๐บ, ๐บ๐ฆ, ๐, ๐ฑ, foreign policy, revolution