i-spy or chivalric code

The various US government agencies that pose as very magnanimous monarchs, eager to dub subjects—and not just creatures of the court but also mercenaries, with the titles of Sir Top of Secret or Lady Confidential now has an expansive plan to walk back (bad link) their veritable jubilee, as quite a few notorious individuals holding a security clearance have proved to be less than loyal—at least in the estimation of the secret-sharers. I remember once watching an actual knighting ceremony, and as is the wont of tradition the band began playing the tune from Monty Python's Flying Circus (John Philip Sousa's Liberty Bell march, which is also performed on the occasion of US presidential inaugurations).
I suppose the panel of judges for beauty contests and OPM (the Office of Personnel Management, which actually bestows these honours) have about the same mentality. Ambitious or not, the uniformed services and associated civilian counterparts, from whom many careers are built as their networks, platforms and jargon require interpreters, aims to monitor every move of their title-holders—at least, every move on the internet, easily retrieved but also easily faked and only want the computer says. Having seemingly forgot that this sort of surveillance is already not only possible but also carried out, the spooks, trustees and petty tyrants are concerned about their privacy, but more to the point they also have concerns for the integrity of the actual secret business that they are doing, also subject to a continuum of voyeurs.

chicken kyiv oder rollsplitt

While the US and the EU are at odds as to the better means of sanctioning Russia's encouraging the Crimea to assent to annexation, there seems to be precious little traction from outside pressures. Obviously this invitation was well choreographed and premeditated, and whether the aggressions are opportune, taking advantage of an uprising off-set, or merely staged and coinciding with the world's focus on the Winter Games (or a negotiation of both) is unclear.
 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.

daytrip: maintauberfranken

Taking advantage of the spring weather, we took a short rumble down a portion of the Romantic Road (die Romantische Straße), the route of fairy tale castles, palaces and fotresses that criss-cross the borders of Bayern and Baden-Württemberg 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.

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.

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.

It's difficult to truly understand what this exponentially higher range of visual acuity means and hard to make parallels, it's not as simple, I think, as looking at a thermal image of something, donning night-vision goggles or being Geordi La Forge or Superman. It's been long known that bees and butterflies and other inspects have advanced visual systems that humans cannot imagine, except as a bewildering kaleidoscope, but researchers now theorise that the ability to perceive so many more aspects of the their environment, including time and tide and what's washed in with them, through their eyes, what humans know as reason and reflection, higher-level mental processes, are by the crabs and their kin just seen, intuited, with in their field of vision and require no further thinking.

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 Lidérc 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 Lidérc 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.

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.