There were parallel ranges for familiar creatures, like foxes, elk and deer with giraffes, camels and bison. Raccoons, mongooses, pythons and company, too. We had a bite to eat that surveyed the whole park below at the end of our little safari. The zoo was certainly worth the visit and I hope there’s more places like this—independent and impassioned because the difference is telling and appreciable, to discover and explore.
As many other spa towns at the turn of the century, Bad Nauheim attracted many celebrities, including those of the scientific community. I had seen that iconic class-photograph of past, present and future laureates previously but had not realised that it was taken during a conference held on these grounds. Another influential luminary that often visited, as a child, was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who was brought there numerous times to take the waters. Not only did these memories later inspire FDR to build his own health spa, he also ordered that Bad Nauheim be spared Allied bombing during the war, despite its proximity to Frankfurt and to one of Hitler’s command centres—called Adlerhorst, the eagle’s eyrie (nest) and often conflated with theKehlsteinhaust near the Austrian border.
The complex is still a temple of wellness but seems to have lost either its exclusive luxury or democratic access—I’m not sure which but very happy the elegant, moderne setting was preserved and there to enjoy. Elvis Presley was also stationed there in the years just after the war—and though not as famous as the crosswalk on Abbey Road, used one of the gates of the town as cover art for his album, Hunk o’ Love.
With massive overcrowding in shelters and resources already under great strain, it ought not to be a surprise that tensions among refugees encamped are rising and tragically, there will be more violent flashpoints.
There was an incident in nearby by Suhl, that awful and uncivil as it was, that has been, I believe, wrongly classified as a hate-crime (a bias-based incident, to wit) whereas—with no excuse or solution forthcoming, the stress of the moment and environment did not allow for much pre-meditation—though putting a Quran in the toilet is not exactly blind passion either. Discomfort and fear is no excuse for bad conduct that’s making a bad situation far worse, but the leap to intolerance, rather than reflecting on finding ways to improve the stability of the homelands one is leaving or that some people just are jerks or that riots are bound to break out and there might be ways to mitigate them, is pressuring officials to call for segregating the Balkan refugees from the Syrians and the Afghans. Given the lack of shelter and support, separation does not seem like a feasible solution, and it rings to me a bit disingenuous if not paradoxical since integration and broadmindedness are being thrust at both guest and host but pandering to the prejudices of the few are spoiling the response and reception.
Listening to a really engrossing panel discussion of geologic ice ages and the usual state of affairs of the planet Earth—how the drama has gone on for รฆons without of intervention or influence and what level of detail can be teased from the rock and sediment of how the inaccessible past looked, I felt a little sad that although those taking part in the discussion saw no need for some moralising postscript because it still felt rather grubby and contrarian to be talking about the topic, though strictly in the framework of billions of years and the science of geology, without addressing the weather—and made one feel like a climate-change denier. People tend to shy away from taking about vaccines, evolution or the politics of race, irrespective of the setting, to avoid controversy and being tagged with such a label and science suffers, as does the way such things are debated and understood in the public sphere.
The language of academics seems almost more relaxed than the choice words of journalists and pundits, and I was delighted to be instructed. For the past fifty million years or so to the present day, the Earth has been experiencing an ice age, by the definition that there is permanent ice at one or both poles, and the Earth has been making the transition from Icehouse to Greenhouse conditions for all its history. Though the intensity of the cycles have varied and have gotten somewhat less extreme out of consideration for the living organisms there to witness these shifts (and the Earth has been mostly a hot-house—with only some fifteen percent of the geological record attesting to a colder climate), researchers believe that it’s the cusps of these changes that drive evolutionary development, the emergence of the creatures that would become us corresponds with switch that began about fifty million. The imbalance of climatic change—or the reason there are such variations in the first place, has to do with geography driven by tectonic shift: without a landmass near or at the top or the bottom of the world there is no polar ice and oceanic currents also play a big role, like the blockage of the Isthmus of Panama or the massive southern sea that encircles Antarctica that keeps warmer water at bay. Whereas Icehouse Earth has presented in the distant itself more like icy Europa and Greenhouse Earth has been a far more watery and steamy place, the carbon-dioxide that human industry and occupation has released into the shrinking wilds has pushed our greenhouse gases beyond the levels that Nature can tolerate in an Ice Age—as my sanctimonious coda. I wonder how the New North will fare?
The Public Domain Review invites to delve into the fourth dimension with a spectacular gallery of diagrams that anticipate the concept of spacetime and non-Euclidean geometries by British mathematician and science-fiction author Charles Howard Hinton—who first coined the term tesseract (from the Greek ฯฮญฯฯฮตฯฮตฮนฯ ฮฑฮบฯฮฏฮฝฮตฯ for the four rays that bridge the gap from the edges to the outer vertices) to describe the projection of a cube through a higher facet. As six square faces “net” into a cube, a tesseract—to be depicted in a two dimensional, flat environment—with its twenty-four faces rather defies experience and visualisation and unlike a sphere, cube or pyramid that’s only presented in one way (or perhaps two, rotated—folded or unfolded and face-on), and can be represented in a number of alternate ways (animation helps, and as with any process, some assembly-required) including the iconic cruciform study of Salvador Dalรญ or the hypercube of La Dรฉfense in Paris—a post-modern interpretation of the Arc de Triomphe.
A fascinating feature article by Frank Pasquale, writing for รon magazine, called the Digital Star Chamber is an excellent articulation of some of the fears that harboured when comes the faith we’ve vested in the unaccountable algorithms and the predictive models that produce. The story is told through the lens of the new class of instaserfs who’ve entered into a contractual relationship, albeit voluntarily, that’s very much of balance and crushing for the entrepreneurial spirit.
Not only is the potential for mischaracterisation tremendous, not without human bias and prejudice but subject to the same slant as racial profiling and stereotyping despite being computer generated—the collected demographics and dossiers of markets have real world consequences beyond targeted advertisements, like the ability to get a loan or not due to the deportment of one’s neighbours or predictive purchasing habits, allowed on an aeroplane or into a foreign country, with whom one is mated, what kind of medical treatment that one receives, or even how one’s own shingle, enterprise, is framed. Such judgements were always there is formulae that companies employ for determining a good or bad risk, but now even the criteria themselves are obscured and there is no chance for appeal. Of course, in a broad sense algorithms must provide a a functional gauge and reliable measure, despite our instinct to style ourselves other than average, otherwise there would be no longevity to such routines and recipes and they are forever being manipulated in mysterious ways. It is nothing new or novel to compartmentalise individual behaviour for study, nor unfortunately is it a new development to blindly trust the results insofar as they are mechanical and supposedly non-judgemental. Our reliance and deference, however, becomes very perilous considering how exposed we have allowed ourselves to become transparent and vulnerable as opposed to the voyeuristic and inscrutable number-crunching systems that stalk our every real and assumed step. What do you think? How ought such prowling agents be held to account?
