5x5

take a look, it’s in a book: WPA-era gallery of library promotional posters

big baby jesus: a study of infants in medieval art, encompassing the idea of the homunculus—that great individuals come fully-formed, via Kottke

torch song: auto-tune robot performs 1990s ballads with emotion

rock lobster: part the first of an homage to the phenomenal B-52s

what’s up doc: celebrating seventy-five years of Bugs Bunny with a look back to his first appearance

birthright or pride and prejudice

The always challenging Æon magazine, far from raining on anyone’s parade, does introduce a seed of doubt in a sense and circumspection that needs addressing in regards to society’s increasing acceptance of lifestyles that do not fit the standard hetero-normative model and reforms in regulatory frame-works either granted or bidden.

Though contextually there is no direct correspondence and biographies and history is told by people recognising early on that they don’t quite fit with what society expects of them and much hardship can ensue in trying to either conform or be made an outcast, but it’s nonetheless an interesting and contentious to wonder what it means that the community embraces being born with one predilection or other—whereas, for other civil rights movements, to be defined by one’s genes would be an egregious insult and very much counter to their goals. Happily, just as attitudes have shifted from revulsion to tolerance to acceptance for gay rights, so too it has become repugnant to hold attitudes that another’s chances are somehow limited or prejudiced due to their genetic pedigree or gender. Is the nuance something completely different—or is it the same as saying that one’s deficient of mathematical acumen can be attributed to one being born a woman is the equivalent as a born and bred gay individual’s lack of heterosexuality? Such declarations can be unintentionally discriminatory. The politics of identity are still hot items, depending on one’s side and advantage in the matter—whether it is something self-reported or imposed from an outside source.  What do you think?  Is the question of determinism an old vestige of racist-thinking or something becoming obsolete and optional and a cause for celebration for that alone?

chain-reaction

Via the provocatively peripatetic Dark Roasted Blend (which I’ve sadly overlooked for too long), I learnt that in Gabon in Western Central Africa research on a cluster of sites near abandoned uranium mines confirmed in the early 1970s the primordial existence of a previous hypothesised possibility of sustained field of naturally occurring nuclear fission. While it’s doubtlessly outstanding that some clever geologist might cross disciplines and posit that a spontaneous event and arbitrary arrangement, the composition of the veins of the underground especially so shortly after human had managed to harness this power artificially (in the mid-1950s) and go about finding evidence of it—it makes me think about those coal fires that have gone on smouldering because or despite of our estimation of it (scientists believe that this reaction lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, while our experiment has only gone off for a few decades), it is to my mind even more spectacular that this so far unique event is accessible to science with some degree of surety considering it happened nearly two billion years ago.
Although the geological record can to some degree be rewound back all those epochs—when Gabon and Africa was not where it is today or maybe under the oceans, there’s certainly no archaeological or even hard biological evidence that’s available as a point of reference. Only the mathematically reducible half-life of nuclear isotopes leave a trace that can be extrapolated. I wonder if it’s assumed that there’s a natural aversion to such a set-up, that entropy eschews this arrangement. Other than these obedient numbers that date and betray the rate of decay after the spark is ignited—plus exhausted mines when all the useful stuff is carted away, there’s little trace of this infernal landscape—expect that others have suggested that another, more violent spontaneous event a couple of billions of years earlier might have been responsible for the creation of the Moon. The majority of astronomers believe that a meteoric impact that’s marred in the Gulf of Mexico ejected the mass that’s now our natural satellite into orbit but a nuclear explosion along the Equator could also have produced it—and in Pangaea, Africa and South America were kissing-cousins. I wonder if such natural fission might be taking place on other planets and possible explain some of the unexpected. Be sure to visit Dark Roasted Blend for further wonderments and curiosities.

cognitive dissonance

By way of a book review that seeks to make the superficially blithe, a link taken for granted really, connection between our emotions and our physical well-being and resilience—these all being popular concepts that are well rooted in modern thinking—the brilliant Maria Popova of Brain Pickings delivers a surprising historical context and development that demonstrates that the relationship is not a straightforward one and not without coups and reversals of fortune.

Rationalist thinkers like René Descartes who doubted the world away to rid us of superstitions and preconceptions, unleashed a second rather unintended severing of the medical science, couched in terms of an imbalance in the humours, that was the basis for our understanding of the body and the mind—in the West—since Antiquity. The rejection of such tenets made the scientific method and progress a reality but left the place of emotions and mood untethered and out of place in a sense. Although we might be desirous to view the mind-body link has something continuous, even if presented through metaphor, romanticism and unscientifically, but it really was not until the middle of this past century when the connection was re-established and researchers deigned to take the matter into consideration with the pioneering work of an endocrinologist (one who studies of glands and hormones) from the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Hans Seyle (Seyle János). As a professor in the McGill University of Montreal, Seyle formalised the concept of stress as a biological response and driver and was responsible for making the idea pedestrian and accessible as well as international, the word being the same in all European languages. Unlike with present day jargon which is mostly new dressing for old wounds, like calling mobbing or work-place bullying by peers horizontal violence, introducing stress as bridge between emotional and physical health was not giving mankind a new buzzword, but rather re-legitimatizing, not rechristening, of a defunct system of correspondences that had previously only been admitted into health care as negative behavioural neuroses and psychosomatic, self-inflicted illnesses. Be sure to check out Brain Pickings for the full and fulfilling repertoire of literary discoveries.

maelstrom or ta-ta for now

Corporate Europe Observatory handily tackles the the hopelessly, visceral public (though deserved) mistrust on the end-stage rounds of the secret and privileged TTIP negotiations with a selection of fine new charts and graphs that distill the barrage of intentionally confusing and cross-purposed leaked propaganda that shows where the bodies are buried and what business groups have been lobbying most vociferously. Although the appointment of Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström hinged on greater transparency and more public-interest inclusion, this watchdog demonstrates that precious little change is forthcoming and the only arms that the people can take up against this wholesale selling-out is by staying informed through such advocating outlets.