golden thread

My Modern Met reports on the accidental technique that could make rugged batteries last hundreds of times longer by retaining the ability to hold a charge and not degrade so quickly, which I think has been a significant prompt for people to otherwise needlessly upgrade their quiver of gadgets.
The lithium-ion batteries that power most electronic devices are liable to wear out after a few hundred cycles due to the build-up of dendrites on the anode cell that eventually kills battery-life. Researchers have known about nanoscopic configurations for galvanic cells since at least 2007 and the potential to extend useful life exponentially (better charging-times as well), but outside of the laboratory (and a lot brilliant engineers are attacking the problem of optimal energy storage from all angles), the nanowires always proved too brittle for commercial use. Recently, a team lead at the University of California, Irvine discovered accidentally found out that slathering the delicate wires with gel made them more malleable without compromising capacity.

supergau

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of massive meltdown of the experimental nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, which is being marked by remembrance and memorials in Ukraine. A host of other events occurred on this fateful date, as Doctor Caligari informs, including the first on screen appearance in 1956 of a radioactive monster called Godzilla for American audiences, and the 1937 carpet-bombing of a Spanish village that inspired Pablo Picasso to create Guernica. It is also national pretzel day in the US and Brot Tag in Germany.  Be sure to follow the Cabinet to stay abreast of history repeating.

big brother and the holding company

The always interesting TYWKIWDBI directs our attention and sadly abject resignation to this non-descript office building in Wilmington, Delaware that dwarfs other company registers—like Ugland House, as the source article from the Guardian reports, of Georgetown in the Cayman Islands.
Though only hosting a fraction of letterbox businesses, Ugland House was incredulously called “either the world’s largest building or the biggest tax-scam on record”—but as the official address of some three-hundred thousand companies, ranging from the portfolios of politicians (making for some strange mingling of assets) to the world’s richest and most powerful corporate entities, this little yellow building is a clear and unequivocal answer as to why no Americans were tripped up in the Panama Papers.  After all, why risk engaging an offshore tax-haven when there’s something far closer to home? More than a million firms (including the media outlet cited), foreign and domestic, have been lured by the state of Delaware’s business-friendly posture, opacity and low-tax burden, whose structure openly encourages companies to shift earnings from other jurisdictions, costing other states and countries untold billions in tax-revenues.  Obviously such loopholes like this inspire rage and indignation, but given its prevalence and the duplicity of custodians, is it any wonder that this sort of thing is happening and no one is willing to do a thing to stop it?

asia-minor or turkish delight

The middle of next month (16 May 2016) marks the centenary of the signing secret pact known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement that carved up the Middle East in an arbitrary fashion, drawing the modern borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestine. Covert negotiations went on for the previous five months, in anticipation of the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Triple Entente, Britain, France and the assenting third party, Imperial Russia, but pivotal battles of the Great War were yet to be fought.
The outcome on the fields of Amiens, Ancre, Marne and Megiddo did not negatively diminish the apportioned claims of the UK for Jordan, Palestine and strategic points along the Mediterranean and for France, the Levant, represented by the eponymous ambassadors—however, Imperial Russia, who had been promised Constantinople, the straits of the Bosporus and Armenia (but consulted in matters as much as the Arabs or the Persians were) lost their territory due to the intervening destabilising of the Bolshevik Revolution that transpired in November of the following year. This forfeiture allowed the other powers to proceed with a second wave of colonialism and though the resulting architecture has fuelled overwhelming sectarian strife but did also engender a framework of protections, tolerance for minorities in the region. This imperfect and shaky geopolitical architecture endured as a legacy for nearly a century and though the formal lines in the sand still exist, what precious little about the Agreement that was sheltering and steadying was dismantled with violence and prejudice by the Cosplay Caliphate. The Agreement only came to light thanks to a leak from the Bolshevik brokers to the newspaper Pravda, in retaliation for having their claim denied, and later picked up by the Manchester Guardian. The revelation led to massive uprisings in the Middle East as World War I itself drew to a close, which was countered with damage-control measures that were not more flattering than the secret partitioning , the buzzards circling, to begin with.

someone once said pflegermaus

The German word for bat is Fledermaus (Flying Mouse) but I turned it into an ambulatory nursing mouse, like Krankenpleger. I suppose they’d also be good residents of one’s belfry.

daisy-chain or paper mario

Thanks to the always interesting JF Ptak Science Book Store, we learn a bit about the contributions of American engineer Vannevar Bush, one of the early administrators of the Manhattan Project and organising force behind the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the fore-runner to NASA.
Despite those consummate and heroic (America was all but ignorant of the potential for rocket-warfare beforehand) achievements as a manager, Bush is probably due a greater debt for his work in the 1930s that previsioned the internet and the concept of memex (indexed memory) that was sort of a mechanical version of hypertext protocols—later set forth in a 1945 article for The Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think,” describing how computational-assistance could enable individuals to amass and share an archival database of research material by following chains of associative-traits . Throughout his professional career, Bush seemed to eschew the idea of digital computing, preferring analogue models (but perhaps as something illustrative only, not schooled in a world of circuits and relays) but was also prescient in his worry about information overload and the glutting of real progress as input exceeds optimal processing capacity.