panorama or pictures of the floating world

Via the always extraordinary Nag on the Lake, we are treated to a modern day homage of the iconic series known as Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji by ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai with the comprehensive illustrations of Shinji Tsuchimochi of his home town, Tokyo. Though not quite the multi-year endeavour of Hokusai (beginning in 1826 and taking seven years to complete), Tsuchimochi’s project, the Hundred Views, has taken three years and captures the spirit of the genre—which roughly translates to “pictures of the floating world”—with some whimsical details and cultural touchstones.

unreliable narrator or where is my mind?

Æon magazine (which I realise that to my peril, I am not reading as often as I ought) presents a really fascinating proposition on the philosophy of the mind that suggests that perhaps we are not our own privileged witnesses to our own internal narrative and that the inner-workings of our thoughts are as inaccessible to our conscious-thinking as those presented by others around us.
As we mature, we (hopefully) through a capacity for empathy learn to understand expectations and to reasonably interpret the thoughts of another and react according. What if, however, our treasured internal monologue were only just as “superficial” as our limited mindreading abilities turned inward? If empathy works well enough for social beings, why add another speaking-role to cognition? Evidence in support of this position lies in a battery of tests that demonstrate how individuals readily assign volition (preference) to purely unconscious choices—not that we cannot be aware of our motivations, just that a lot of our actions and beliefs might be less transparent than we’d like to think.

alphanumeric or space-time coordinates

I never quite got the hang of UK postcodes, but I suppose any other system and structure might appear just as baffling to an outsider, and perhaps numerical proximities aren’t the most efficient way of parceling up land.
Though I don’t think that we missed out on seeing anything that we we intended to because of this oversight or lack of faith and confidence in our rather unreliable navigator (for taking the choicer, scenic routes from time to time), but getting a little frustrated that many attractions did not have well-defined street addresses, we tried plugging in the postcode coordinates finally which bore us straight to the location. I didn’t think the SATNAV (Navi) would understand those. It made me think of an ambitious project that I had read about a few weeks prior that aimed to standardise all localities globally by dividing the world map into some fifty trillion three square metre plots, each assigned simple and memorable three word designations, in a multilingual context. This project is headquartered in London, incidentally, and has the geo-locator future.human.foster, which I feel to outsiders is possibly more accessible than W1A 1AA. Explore the map and find out your home address in three words.

system of a down

Far worse than the potential dictatorial stance of the likes of the Free World under the yoke of a Trump regime or the sprawling tin-pot nation of Fāçbükıstan, our friends in Turkey are facing the insufferable under the endless presidency (it seems like few politicians can go gracefully into retirement, and it is convenient to swap the offices of president and prime minister) of Erdoğan.
The latest dillusory stunt is Ankara’s recall of its ambassadorial mission to Berlin (restored, apparently after pulling out recently over a satirical song by a German comedian) is over the German parliament’s resolution to designate the Ottoman Empire’s killing and persecution of Armenians (and other minorities) during World War I as genocide (Völkermord). Turkey is rebuffing criticisms both internal and external and accuses Germany of being provocative—but pledges that in no way will this grave and unfortunate decision affect the deal with the EU to siphon refugees first through its borders, discouraging the dangerous overseas crossing.  If Turkey is truly earning a place within the European Union community with such gestures, one would think it would play this leverage with more strategy.  With this resolution, Germany is joining a chorus of voices, including the Pope, but there was some tremolo-heroics behind the symbolic vote (which was just as likely to have not occurred), with some top government officials conspicuously absenting themselves from the assembly.

sympathetic and contagious magic

Writing for the Slate blog, The Vault, Rebecca Onion presents a selection of some fantastic forgotten American superstitions, collected by a teaching-college professor in 1907. The professor asked a large sampling of students to share all the rituals and beliefs for courting good luck or warding off bad that they could think of and then rank them by personal credulity.
One can read the entire study here, but I did like quite a few of Onion’s choices: if a fire puffs, then the neighbours are quarrelling. If you find a hairpin and hang it on a nail, the first person to speak to you afterwards will marry you. If you drop a dishrag and it does not spread out, you can expect a gentleman-caller. Carrying an axe through the house will bring bad luck. If you see a white horse, you will see a red-headed woman. Never leave a loaf of bread upside down, for it will be sure to cause ships to sink. If you throw a horse’s skull over your right shoulder without looking back, you will never get the smallpox. Ivy is an unlucky plant. Straight hair will go curly if cut in the dark of the moon. There’s also quite a few bizarre little rhyming incantations to repeat upon seeing fortuitous events. This endeavour makes me think of the Brothers Grimm collecting, aggregating and classifying folk tales