les archives de la planète

Inspired by the candid images captured by his own personal photographer while on holiday, philanthropist and banker Albert Kahn resolved to commission his own personal Instagram as a goodwill missive to the whole world. Kahn set out with his crack-team of photographers, canvasing more than fifty countries from 1909 until 1929—when the Wall Street Stock Market Crash confounded the line of funding for this project—and amassed a collection of over seventy-two thousand photos, colourised using the latest processing technology. This amazing gallery curated by Dangerous Minds features Paris in 1914—just on the cusp of the Great War. I want to find more of Kahn’s archives to see what snapshot impressions are yet to be rediscovered.

vitruvian man

Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic figure swaddled in geometry is an homage to an actual person, an ancient Roman retired general, called Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, whose pursuits after being discharged lent an indelible mark of humanising to the art of building and distinguished architecture from engineering, a romance of ruin and classical influence that has endured for the millennia.
In ten volumes, Vitruvius took a comprehensive approach to construction, effectively elevating a profession that had heretofore not garnered much respect, by demonstrating that the architect must have knowledge in civil-planning, history, agriculture, anatomy, building material, ceremony, measurement, physics and the logistics of utilities—the plumbing. De architectura was certainly drawn from many sources but it is the only surviving insight into Roman technology and aesthetic—their ingenious water supply systems, air-conditioning and manner of surveying. Anecdotally, the books are also the source of Archimedes’ bath-time eureka-moment. The illustrations were unfortunately lost but the manuscripts, discovered in an abbey in Switzerland, helped the spread of the Renaissance to the north of the Alps and prompted the Neo-Classic revival—and da Vinci’s depiction is a direct reflection of Vitruvius’ own scholarship into proportion and how we’re commensurable with ourselves and our homes.

whistling dixie

Not to be confused with the historical frontier region of the Russian Empire on the northern shores of the Black Sea and a buffer for Ottoman lands, the Federal Territory of Novorossiya was short-lived confederation of separatist factions that never achieved statehood, lasting only from May until the end of 2014. Some suggest (but just as ‘separatist’ and ‘loyalist’ depends on one’s perspective) that the people’s republic was designed to fail so that in exchange for return of break-away municipalities Ukraine could be persuaded to conditionally accept the annexation of the Crimea, which rings a bit like sour-grapes. The organisers’ choice of national banner seems rather unfortunate with its resemblance to the rebel flag of the American Confederate states, considering especially how after all these years the US had finally managed to secure the take-down of some symbols of hate. Yuri and Dmitri slide into the General Lee.
Inquiring into their inspiration, officials argued that their flag design was derived from the standards of the Cossacks resisting the Tartars—though such a flag never existed, though there is some similarity to the Russian imperial naval jack. By the by, although quite happy that some select major retail outlets quite vocally expressed their solidarity by no longer selling such instruments of ‘heritage,’ despite their utility for identifying useful idiots, as with Nazi memorabilia, I don’t know what to make of the leading-wave of self-censorship with the decision (equally vocal and perhaps self-serving to relegate the Dukes of Hazzard County to the memory-hole. It is not as if people ought to learn about the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil War or racism through that television series (which, on balance, was more thoughtful than I thought), but excising that embarrassment is too revisionist for my taste. Quietly drop it as a bad show not worthy of our nostalgia but not as unthink programming. What other political entities and broadcasts might be disappeared in accordance with prevailing preference and conveniently forgot. What was Mister Roper’s agenda on Three’s Company and should future generations be spared such obvious, inverted bias? What do you think?

5x5

box seat: researchers propose turning a remote bunker in the Scottish Hebrides into a station for listening to whale opera

think different: Banksy murals in the Calais Jungle underscores the contribution refugees can make

cockpit: luxury jetliners to offer exclusive upper deck views in flight

stream of consciousness: mapping river valleys with LiDAR reveals historic courses

satellite of love: the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 relaunch pledge campaign has been record breaking

marginalia or many pleasant facts about the square of the hypotenuse

Having taken more than three hundred fifty years to prove since the claim was first coyly presented and in fiction and popular culture, the final, mysterious conjecture by poly-math and number theorist Pierre de Fermat probably did not strike the mathematician himself nor its originally prompter as particularly significant. Fermat’s Last Theorem, as it has come to be known, was inspired by a book of lemmas by an ancient Greek mathematician called Diophantus of Alexandria. For this scholar, considered the father of algebra (not a terror-organisation and ought not to be intimidating to the public like one) for inventing variable notation and despite his monumentally new paradigm of recognising fractions as legitimate numbers, Diophantus (at least in his surviving books) did not break with the traditional penchant for finding whole number solutions for problems.
Finding a nice round solution is much more satisfying and resonates far more—I think, even given computational power that masks the ugly, irrational bits. The book of Diophantus that Fermat was reading, the Arithmetica, was rather a conversational, speculative investigation that proffered that right angled triangles (following the Pythagorean Theorem, a² + b² = c²) exist where the sides of the triangle work out to be whole numbers: 3² + 4² = 5² or 9 + 16 = 25. There seemed to exist as many solutions, however, where the answers were not so tidy. Seeing this, Fermat wondered if the application could be expounded to higher exponents (and thus dimensions—something squared is a flat surface as opposed to a three-dimensional cube) and running with it, asserted that no whole number solutions can exist for a³ + b³ = c³ or higher powers up to infinity. This assertion was scribbled, coyly, in the margin of Diophantus’ ponderings with the aside that there’s a nifty proof for this necessity but not enough room to write it here. Perhaps Fermat felt that the problem was not so pressing and never again returned to that particular problem, leaving generations to wrestle with it after his notes were discovered. There’s a whole cosmos of unsolved equations that might pose more appreciable and immediate significance if explained, and while there’s no obvious application in understanding why what Fermat declared is ultimately true, the insight and techniques developed in trying to find the answer have propelled mathematics forward and have enabled all sorts of progress in understanding and has shaped the modern world. I can’t claim any understanding of the famous proof and my brain starts to hurt from it, but I wonder if it also shows, for this celebrated and veteran conundrum, why it’s the case—that whole numbers are not transcendent.

loose change or standard operating procedure

Surely one of the great tragic coincidences of recent times and a great bounty for conspiracy theorists was that the fledging European Union in late summer of 2001 was poised to assert its supranational judicial rights and challenge the US on certain relics of legislation that gave America relatively unfettered access to European and global channels of communication.
The terror attacks of 9/11 took place and the EU dropped its suit against Project ECHELON, an intelligence scheme, programme stood up by the Five Eyes of the Anglo-Saxon partnership to spy on the Soviets in the late 1960s, once—a week after filing, the whole matter was overshadowed and charges rather reversed. Back in 1998 and the following year, Swiss and then New Zealand (a reluctant junior member of the Five Eyes community herself, though many others I suspect are envious of that cadet role) counter-intelligence suspected that their faxes were being compromised and a series of headlines and nascent exposés (titled among others, “Big Brother without a Cause”) hinted at the existence of this programme and that its mission had expanded far beyond its original reach, snooping on bank activity, internet traffic, satellite telemetry and business communiques. Though progenitor of other initiatives and a mark of enduring awareness of the surveillance state and dragnet and data-warehousing techniques, the existence of ECHELON was not confirmed until August of this year—owing to the disclosures of the Fugitive Snowden.