The New Yorker has an excellent little extract regarding the Stanford Achievement Test proctors' effort to make the standardized college entrance exam more relevant to students, to assess the skills they need to develop in this brave new world.
Many questions are tailored to the internet environment. I can recall when the SAT was a bastion of stellar vocabulary and recognised rigour but maybe that demonstrates a certain immaturity. I am not sure how in earnest the analysis is and suspect it's humourous, one question posed quotes a short passage from Jane Austin (already suspect) and asks how to best entitle a post with this content to draw in the most traffic.
Wednesday 12 March 2014
shouts and murmurs or no. 2 pencil
catagories: ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, networking and blogging
Tuesday 11 March 2014
i-spy or chivalric code
![](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--DtzXTthgZc/Ux9swJPTjPI/AAAAAAAAOXg/oJXxpirS9-s/s1600/Knighty_Knight_Bugs.png)
chicken kyiv oder rollsplitt
A balmy winter in western Europe that could have better weathered the valves being shut off for delivery of natural gas from Russia or America's announcement to scale back the army and military presence in Europe, deemed stable and no longer interbellum and relics of the long, Cold War being cannibalised for adventures further east. It's a bit of a reach but I wonder if this was not some sort of double-bluff, a head-fake, to bolster new Europe's alignment with the West, and legitimize America's missile shield in Poland and mission-creep elsewhere.
This sort of psychological battle for hearts and minds seems like a very real possibility, given Russia's counter-wooing of satellites like Moldova, with an offensive to expose the hollow promises of joining Europe, demonstrating that economic integration is other than rosy, including Russian-influenced embargoes on Moldovan wine exports. In exchange, the nations, which in turn harbour break-away republics with limited recognition like Transnistria or Georgia's South Ossetia in 2008, are portrayed as presented with false taunts and alternative life-styles. Regardless of circumstance or politicking, citizens reserve the rights to secede, devolve or resist, but this sort of partitioning is a bit scary on both sides, interest reserved—whether or not one is just spinning diplomatic wheels.
catagories: ๐ฒ๐ฉ, ๐ท๐บ, ๐บ๐ฆ, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ฑ, foreign policy, revolution
Sunday 9 March 2014
daytrip: maintauberfranken
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.
![](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uR4cNAKywcI/UxxDDVQ96vI/AAAAAAAAOVk/gG-JHmw9ISM/s1600/Carl_Grossberg_Jacquard-Weberei.jpg)
![](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Gamr38e7VkQ/UxxDF7bovyI/AAAAAAAAOV8/Jj9j9iAR8lQ/s1600/Carl_Grossberg_Traumbild_Dampfkessel_mit_Fledermaus_1928.jpg)
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