When signalling the start of a footrace, a starter gun is used (as opposed to a chequered flag) because the auditory cue reaches the brain, gathered from a relative paucity of non-intuitive evidence that with more invasive investigations reveal how disjointed reality is mediated by our senses. Though it’s nothing that one could easily access and would probably terribly frightening to try, our perceptions are only glancing and we carry in our minds a composite map of our immediate surroundings that merely regularly monitored for updates.
Although visually we imagine a sweeping continuity of our environment, our eyes, like a stage-hand, are more akin to the panicked flagellations of insect antennae, constantly seeking out corrections and in the absent of new input, blinders are put in place. Up to seven minutes in each hour (routine hours, though, I suppose and not when one is visiting the Grand Bazaar for the first time and is overwhelmed with impressions) we are effectively blind as our eyes dart around in search of changes—sort of like the commercial breaks in television programmes. Our separate senses, the intent to pull the trigger, the report, the puff of smoke and the recoil from above, are shuttled to our brains at different speeds so while there’s as much as a half second’s lag-time among them, they all are received as coordinated and consequent. I wonder if this mental trick of synchronicity that we can’t easily step out of could explain the dissonance between the relatable Newtonian physics and the baffling quantum reality underlying it. Vision can be assailed to an extent but the other senses present a real quandary. I suppose one could appreciate the drift in the illusion of animation, but it always struck me as rather amazing that our eyes are filled with veins and capillaries that are in our field of vision but don’t see because they don’t affect our internal maps.
Wednesday 3 February 2016
gaffer and key grip
tanked
With oil prices sinking to near historic lows, it’s really remarkable how causality comes unhinged when reason dictates that a lot of the economy hangs on the price of fuel. Though household budgets are seeing some degree of respite at the petrol station, the positive repercussions seem to end there and the myopic outlook is compounded.
Some hold the whole situation has a conspiratorial character meant to knock Russia down a notch as retribution for Ukraine, and event if this plot were true, the effects could not be contained and would lead to even graver instability in other oil-exporting nations. Without pain at the pump, environmental conscious bows out and the motivation for cleaner technologies falls away—with only greenwashing on offer. Waning demand has ensured the continued depression of prices, and the profit gradient for country’s whose wealth is an especially narrow one. In hock as much as they were just recently flush with cash because of their commodity, Russia, Nigeria, Argentina and the Middle East are faced with the reckoning of re-financing and lenders are closing their ranks for other clients and keeping prices to the consumer steady. It is sort of like personable occupants stuck in a broken elevator turning to cannibalism.The formerly safe-bets of petroleum and follow-on industries are becoming unpalatable, and investors scuttle to park their money elsewhere—in rather hollow and abstract instruments that court yet another bubble coaxed to bursting.
grace and favour or sweetheart deal
Not just in the UK (whose crown dependencies prove haven and safe-harbour for this sort of arrangements) but for the tax-paying public all over the world the apparent pittance in levies that large corporations have paid in compared to revenue is inciting outrage. Because of the byzantine complexity of the situation and the fine distinction between avoidance and evasion, it is hard to say what exactly has transpired although there’s more than a hint of civic injustice and it seems as if corporate taxes are somewhat of a voluntary contribution—and not even the suggested donation when the collection-plate is passed down.
Of course, other methods of circumvention could be cooked up and it is not so straightforward to say where a product or service fulfilled its raison d’รชtre of generating a profit—and what the public at large are privy to is necessarily mediated—but perhaps the whole corporate tax scheme as it exists, essentially hard to enforce and interrupt and by design encourages evasive manลuvres, and like proposals for a flat-tax or a Value-Added Tax (VAT) charged on the wealthy that excises a fixed percentage and eliminates loop-holes so far as deductions go, perhaps the same system would work for big businesses. The problem remains, I think, of sourcing earnings and different tax jurisdictions would walk on each others throats to claim a piece of it, but perhaps as lowering the burden is good for share-holders, a simpler and manifest tax regime might prove better for all stake-holders, corporate giants investing more in their own ecosystems (employees, research and host communities) in order to divest themselves of some fiduciary obligations.
Tuesday 2 February 2016
6x6
childlike princess: an attraction in a Munich studio holds the props from The Neverending Story
bruder spaghettus: a small town north of Berlin is the nexus of Germany’s Pastafarian faith
claim-jumpers: interesting history of the “ashcan copy,” a slap-dash way of calling dibs on a movie franchise
falconeer: to stop potential drone attacks, Denmark is training up its eagles
power hungry: interesting juxtapositions of meal-time discrepancies of the rich and poor throughout the ages
diorama: daily miniature photography project with an inexhaustible eye for tiny landscapes
men without chests, men without hats
Amidst the horrors of World War II which were driven by failed experimentation and ill-informed beliefs that mankind could be perfected through eugenics, author C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) wrote a short treatise called the “Abolition of Man,” though the ablutions Lewis was calling out was in educational reform that sought to eviscerate objectivity and inherent and abiding morals and replace them with more progressive, scientific modes of thought.
Lewis argued that the purpose of pedagogy is no more and no less than imparting right and wrong and not mistaking better for the good, and discarding old value-based systems (such terms are easily turned and spindled) left society groundless (without trunks, chests), and without thought rooted in Nature, philosophy and religion, one might as well pack it up and own to the fact that the goal is abolition of humanity. Though the technology of seventy years ago could not seriously advocate for artificial-intelligence—nor really for genetic-engineering, Lewis’ words of warning were nonetheless prescient and was very much afraid that changes in curricula would create a class of overlords with enough intelligence and insight to manipulate the rest of us. Although on the surface the tyranny and oppression of the few (which seems familiar if not illegitimate) appears quite different from the existential threat of the robot holocaust, but both cases beg that mankind’s hindrance is its own humanity, imperfect, impious and diverse. What do you think? Are we more likely to be devout (as masters) to those matters of our own creation, trusting medicine and machine, more so than the conversant but unreachable age-old ethics that have always accompanied us?
