Friday 2 June 2017

6x6

of salterns and sinkholes: a look at the buried salt deposits that drive the geology of the Gulf of Mexico and we will drill at our peril

kit and kiln: captivating, hand-crafted art tiles from Ann Arbour, Michigan

flower shankar: machine learning tries its hand at coming up with band names, via Waxy

while my guitar gently shrieks: Dangerous Minds interviews Missus Smith, the heavy metal, conservatively-dressed busker who can really shred it 

sensory substitution devices: look with your brain, not with your eyes—via TYWKIWDBI  

bloop: the international scientific collaboration Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected the echoes of a massive merger of three black holes

we’re going to have the cleanest air—we’re going to have the cleanest water

To lump the outliers of the Paris Climate Accords in one basket is a real unkindness to Nicaragua and Syria, given that the former objected to the goals set forth were far too modest and the Central American country is aiming for no less than a ninety percent energy sourced in renewable, sustainable resources within the next decade, and the latter was in the midst of a protracted civil war with no functioning government (the same could arguably be said for the third party) and had no delegation to send.
Intent on keeping at least one campaign promise that panders to his base at the disdain for ever other living creature on the planet, Dear Leader proclaimed that he was elected to represent the “citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris” as he announced that after weeks of playing coy about it his decision to reassert American sovereignty by breaking with the pact.  Poor Pittsburgh. Much as is the case with Brexit (Castle Mayskull is the only other world leader not to join the chorus of unanimous dissent over Dear Leader’s bad choice), the divorce proceedings are messy and the US won’t be released from its obligations until 2020—though a frightening amount of damage could be affected domestically by undoing decades’ worth of environmental regulations and protections.
America has no cachet in the world under this tin-pot regime that advocates wilful ignorance and is completely credulous in saying that global-warming is a Chinese conspiracy meant to steal American jobs, and whatever sort of race-to-the-bottom that the US is hoping to spark with its myopic, greedy, grubby recalcitrance—the rest of the world is not having it: Parisians and Pittsburghers are redoubling their efforts for environmental reform, scientists and other subnational jurisdictions and even businesses are committed to the goals outlined in COP21 despite what Dear Leader is advocating. We ought to not need to expend extra energy and effort just to neutralise or contain the arrogant and dangerous stupidity of Dear Leader and his criminal posse of free-loaders, but tyrannies will topple perhaps this was the transgression to trigger the regime’s overthrow and to inspire some real and positive change for our environmental stewardship.

pigeon-toed

To our collective delight and incremental curiosity, a committed designer and flรขneur in Tokyo, informed by an alliterative pun as we are told many Japanese avant-garde ideas are, has fashioned pigeon-resembling high-heels using felt and paint, hoping to befriend the generally decried urban fowl. There are so far no reports on the efficacy of so disguising one’s feet and the artist is not planning on releasing such sensible shoes for public consumption, but that’s no reason not to make one’s own pair of Hato-Heels (ใƒ”ใ‚ธใƒงใƒณใƒ’ใƒผใƒซ) to make new acquaintances in the one’s own neighbourhood park.

Thursday 1 June 2017

stockenten oder libellen

In Brandenburg not far removed from Berlin, there is a unique and protected natural reserve known as the Spreewald (the forested lands of the river that runs through the capital or Bล‚ota, the swamp, in the regional Sorbian language) shaped during the retreating phases of the last Ice Age and irrigated, kept from flooding at bay by a labyrinthine network of over one hundred and fifty “navigable” canals (FlieรŸe) spanning over fifteen hundred kilometres in all.
Many visitors to the area avail themselves on a punting tour through picturesque villages like Lehde only accessible by water (with no motorised traffic allowed) but a lot of tourist stake out their own adventures in kayaks readily available for hire and paddle through the landscape on eye-level with ducks (deserving of their own ethnographic treatment) and various tribes of dragon-flies and privileged pushing along as silent as a cloud to some remarkably peaceful scenery.
We ended up taking little footage of our drifting through the reeds due to a bit of gun-shyness with our not water-proofed cameras that was probably for the best after all in terms of travel time not to mention sites we are hardly worthy of seeing, plagued by mosquitoes and my inferior piloting as we were, but it was an experience that we’d recommend without stint to anyone and we’re sorry for the limited opportunity to explore—we’ll have to return for a longer stay one day soon.

hoodwinked

Via the ever intriguing Nag on the Lake, we are finding ourselves rather blown away to learn that the English language—especially idiomatically, was informed by a sixteenth century amateur falconer and sometimes playwright by the name of William Shakespeare, who peppered and punctuated his poetry and prose with phrases known intimately to hawk-fanciers. Under one’s thumb, wrapped around one’s (little) finger, Macbeth’s “scarfing the eye” as reference to hoodwinking—keeping the bird of prey with its eyes and head covered until ready to engage and prevent distraction, broadening the meaning of the term to rouse to mean to awaken, fed up to mean something more than surfeited and haggard to mean incorrigible all came into common parlance by way of the Bard’s pastime.

the shavian alphabet

The elves at Quite Interesting—whose media properties include, funnily enough (after reading the below) the podcast There’s no Such Thing as a Fish—always present us with some very engrossing morsels of knowledge—not trivia—that we’d like to learn more about.
Often times it seems some serious scholarship—more than we are ready to commit—is required to go beyond and tease out a deeper explanation and one of their latest briefs looked to be the same sort of cul-de-sac with the fact that playwright and literary critic “George Bernard Shaw left a considerable portion of his estate to increase the [English] alphabet from twenty-six to forty letter; this was never achieved,” but happily a little research yields more answers and speculation.  Consistent in his disdain for the received rules of English orthography throughout his life (whereas Shaw was just a likely to reverse other intellectual tenants as he was to fight for their honour) and how the whole convention was fraught with confusion and indignities of spelling that no one ought to suffer for the sake of lucidity, Shaw urged spelling reforms and stipulated in his last will and testament that future royalties ought to be paid into a trust with his stated goals in mind. Truly with some forty-four phonemes commonly occurring in English and just a few letters being dual- and trice-hatted, English could admit more letters, and though his legacy did not result in widely accepted changes to traditional spelling his bequest did posthumously fund the creation of an eponymous Shavian alphabet in 1960 (a decade after his death), which represented the spoken language as phonetically as possible and had a distinct script from Latin characters (this shorthand was also used for Esperanto) so that the new spellings were not taken as misspellings.

to toot one’s own horn

It wasn’t so long ago that we had German politicians stumbling over one another to fall on their swords and getting very confessional over accusations that they had fibbed on their credentials decades ago or plagiarised the graduate theses that launched their careers.
While these indiscretions ought not be dismissed without consequence as it does speak to character and integrity—and I suppose the world would be different if certain statesmen were called out on their originality earlier and were shamed into a different career-path, it does strike one as quite illustrative of Dear Leader’s personality and business acumen that he—without doing the requisite homework that comes with adopting a family crest or inquiring with the registrars that handle such things, perhaps he ought to have gone with canting arms (I can think of some imagery)—copied the shield from a duly-vetted and awarded noble house and replaced the motto Intergritas with his surname. The coat-of-arms adorns a lot of the signage on Dear Leader’s US properties but not on his golf links in Scotland, since inside of UK jurisdiction, he can be sued for infringement and misappropriation of a family’s good name.