afturköllun

The Foreign Ministry has informed the European Union that it will no longer be pursuing its bid of accession into the supranational monetary and trade pact.

The nation of just over three-hundred thousand residents made their bid to join the EU in 2009, just as the people were mounting a revolt, spurned by the global hedonism of speculation in investment markets that ravaged the otherwise sufficient and partaking economy that threatened to a generation without prospects and marginalise Iceland. This announcement, while doubtless a popular one and a decision to be respected by all sides ultimately, did however come from a minister who had tried before to unilaterally derail talks who committed his government without the clearance or consent of parliament. Though there is probably no chance that the minister will be made to eat his words, circumventing democratic processes does seem like rather a big deal, and though the EU remains outwardly chipper, I think it might be doing so through clenched-teeth.

five-by-five

drunk and disorderly: a supercharged tonic wine produced by monks in an abbey in Devonshire is a subject of controversy

rubber banding: some absolutely brilliantly illustrated brochures for the British video game awards

proud as a peacock: new species of spiders discovered in Australia

inked: an interactive exhibition allows people to tell a story with magical conducting ink

chatty-cathy: new fashion doll will forward children’s conversations along to corporate HQ and snitch to their parents

print-lab

Reports are emerging that organic chemists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have collaborated with engineers to produce their discipline’s own version of the 3D printer, which can transcribe small molecules and building-blocks for study and discovery. An established line of known chemicals can of course be synthesised in laboratories but usually at a great cost and with limited access which makes experimentation and distributed research prohibitively expense.

Most of such facilities are under contract to the pharmaceutical industry and it’s much more profitable for a lab to try to tease out an extension on some proprietary drug, a patent-medicine, that to devote time and effort on, say, an exotic jungle plant’s interesting, intriguing but uncertain anti-microbial properties brought to them by some unknown and uncredentialed scientist. Perhaps now, instead of supplicating and then queueing up—or trying to gather more samples from the field—researchers could just isolate the target compound, its structure and composition, and submit a print request to have batch of the chemical custom-made, which could be dispatched to several test centres or research facilities at one time. Democratising the studies, the important concepts of peer-review and vetting could perhaps become to mean teamwork, discovering novel and safe treatments and other substances (better culinary preservatives, glues, inks, textiles, etc.) more efficiently.

livery and latchkey

I wonder if there is a public shame-registry of unmarked white vans. Should we make such a thing? Suspiciously—though probably only in truth relegated to the wilds of my imagination, this one “delivery” vehicle has been parked opposite my apartment’s balcony for almost a week already and I can detect no sign of activity—other than the interior lights were on the other night and one could see the rear windows illuminated through the plastic tinting.
I tried to stare it down last night but nothing came of that standoff.  Rather than building a registry, I suppose, snapping a picture probably is more likely to tattle on the observed with hidden, backmasked Q-R codes, camouflaged in the white to off-white of the van’s paint (which is a pretty scary concept, that one’s scanning in invisible data with a digital sweep of one’s surroundings). I guess, however—thinking back to a funny, chance separate incident—there are other ways to have one’s cover blown.

blue-collar or the golgafrinchans

Though I am never one to be surprised that I managed to miss an item of depth and scope and am usually very pleased for the serendipity of discovering it later—since after all there’s too much emphasis put on the new and novel (even if often it’s little more than a repackaged footnote), I was really floored when I was introduced anthropology professor David Graeber’s wiltingly vivid critique of the labour force as a reflection of the values of those who bind the purse strings. As predicted by economist John Maynard Keyes back in 1930, by the end of the century, mankind had harnessed technologies sufficient to allow us to fulfill our productivity quotas with a fifteen hour workweek and enjoy more leisure time without stint.
There is for me little room for doubt that that came about for us globally but we are not able to accept it and kept our current caste-system.  In a perfectly engineered jobs market, however, the growing bulk of which are in administration and management, are distastefully unfulfilling and we’ll plug away well beyond those first few break-even hours to whittle away at redundancy, said technology even stealing more of the balance of free-time. We’re committed to this for the sake of appearances and stability, rigged also for us to harbor resentment for those who we suspect not putting in their fair share of drudgery, that’s yet pointless and the invention of some corporate constabularies to keep us safely occupied. Naturally, those in power fear the tide of social unrest that characterised the 1960s and 1970s and don’t want to see it return—certainly accounting for why the Occupy-Movements were disdained.  Discord is also sewn, deviously well, among those tethered to their petty bailiwicks and those who perform actual work, a class maligned of teachers, sanitation workers and nurses and assailed with selfish questions of minimum wage, social security—and that intervening service-sector that’s been created to cater to that overwhelming sea of middling-management, also expected to work the customary workweek, though time must fly for them.
And of course, there is a corollary envy for the wealthy, privileged and talented who got all the breaks and whom give us off course something to aspire to and a reason to play along.  Still, it does psychological violence to our morale.  Even with the amount of manufacturing jobs swept out of sight—in order to build and sustain this dystopian state of affairs, it’s not as if there are legions of assemblers and welders nor wild crews of labourers under the whip of a single floor bosses—and a disproportionate number of meaningless, imaginary jobs are held in the world’s workshops too. If this article is new to you as well, I highly recommend reading it, as I think my humble abstract has turned out to be nearly as long, and be sure to staff it through your aggrieved colleagues and co-workers.

five-by-five

franchise: plans are in the works to release more variations on the theme of Ghostbusters

harilik tamm: the Orissaare Oak in Estonia named European Tree of the Year

wolf-pack: more mezmerising psychedelic animated animal GIFs from TJ Fuller

big easy: check out the design proposals for New Orleans’ Tricentennial Tower

nonce: just because a vigourous campaign has pushed a portmanteau from the internet to the dictionary, does that make it part of the lexicon?

magic feather or remastered

While I have no reservations that Tim Burton’s filmmaking vision could not fail to limn an interesting version of the story, but I do wonder about the overall trend of meddling with the classics.
Some things are still royalty generators without repackaging them as a novelty to a new generation—as lore that was good enough to repeat was passed along from parents to offspring before Hollywood and pollsters, and I wonder why—in of all Disney’s extensive library, they are choosing to bootstrap Dumbo. This one, clocking in at just over an hour and one of the shortest features that the studio made, always struck me as vaguely off-putting what with the cruelty and the way people picked on Jumbo Junior, the later day controversy levied against the crows (the characters were both called “Jim Crow” in the script) as a racist depiction. Happily, I was relieved to learn that I had misremembered Mother Elephant’s rampage and incarceration—not being put down like Bambi’s mom, and make what you will about the way they discover Dumbo’s amazing power after an all-night bender and a visit from the Pink Elephants.

reklame oder reclamation

Just scant days after the French government legislated an expiry date for consumer electronics in order to combat designed obsolescence, when there’s no longer factory-support, Germany is attempting to take the measure a step further (DE/EN) by directing retail outlets to accept shoppers’ trade-ins—not for cash but as a more important civic-duty.
Larger electronic stores are required to accept customers’ smaller items, like old toasters, electric-toothbrushes and cell phones, in order to dispose of them properly and ensure valuable components are harvested and recycled—plus their bigger items like dishwashers and refrigerators, when buying a new one. This mandate extends to on-line shops as well. It’s perhaps easier to schlep one’s outmoded gadgets on the next shopping-outing rather than venture out to the special trash sort yard or feel guilty about stuffing it into the regular trash or kipping it off on the roadside, and though possibly a logistics horror for the sellers, to harness all the gold in circulation in everyone’s last phone and computer is a pretty nice prospect all around. Maybe, between the two laws, people will consume less just to toss away as the industry creates more items to endure and that can be upgraded rather than turned in. What do you think? Will this scheme be good for the environment as well as for business? I can imagine salvage really taking off.