äquidistanzprinzip

The Local (Germany’s English language daily) alerts us to the fact that this moment, Monday 5 February 2018, marks the last time in history that the period of time Inner German border (deutsch-deutsche Grenze) stood was greater than the amount of time that Germany has been reunited. The BDR and the DDR were separate political entities for a longer period of time but there was no physical barrier until 13 August 1961. Visit the link up top for a selection of pivotal moments in the twenty eight years, two months and twenty-six days of the Wall’s existence.

mensis intercalaris

Previously we’ve discussed how the sixty days or so that mark the dreariest winter season went by without record until King Numa Pompilius (in the days pre-Republic) instituted calendar-reform measures to augment the fair-weather ten month calendar that the Romans had been using since the city’s founding, recognising that dates were being constantly recalculated as the seasons drifted into one another and that the civic uses of a calendar expanded beyond its agricultural roots, but we didn’t know the whole story nor of their superstitious aversion to round numbers.
Ianuarius and Februarius (from the word februum, a device for ritual purifications and figuratively marked the time when fallow fields were tended to and when olive trees could be pruned) were added as the last months of the year, and to coincide as closely as possible to the passing of the lunar year, they assigned each month either twenty nine or thirty-one days on an alternating basis. To mathematically align with the 355 days of the lunar year and the twelve observed cycles of the Moon, however, one month would have to have an even number of days, so February became the odd one out. The insertion of intercalary time was still necessary to manage the procession of the seasons but instead of a leap-day like we award February with on a regular basis, the Romans adopted an entire leap-month called Mercedinus—“work month”—which should have been used judiciously every other year to keep everything in sync. All time-keeping decisions, however, were invested in the pontifex maximus, and as an active politician usually held this esteemed position it was not unheard of exercising this prerogative as a punitive or prolonging measure to increase or curtail the administration of consul members, at the expense of accuracy in tracking time. When Julius Caesar took power in 46 BC, he decreed that Rome stop this caprice and adopt a solar calendar that is more familiar to the modern civil calendar, based on Western traditions. 

feline fugue

Reflecting on the universal appeal of music, researchers at the University of Wisconsin wondered back in 2015 if a sliding set of parameters could be introduced to resonate with non-human animals for real human compositions. Adjusting tone, pitch and tempo, an audience of cats became visibly involved, as compared to works arranged for human ears, which elicited little to no notice. How do your companions, of any variety, react to this recording?  Learn more about the experiment and research at the link above.

xxoo

In an era—perhaps just a bit more enlightened –when we are at one and the same time keenly aware of the routes and vectors of disease transmission and are beginning to understand the complexity of the micro-biomes that inhabit us and promote health and inhibit infection, it’s strange to consider the US National Pharmaceutical Society’s endorsement for this germ-chastity screen for a couple to kiss through—it also reminds me of a modern counterpart in this kiss by wire.
Much illness came about due to over-sanitary conditions and we are stronger for exposure and we benefit by cross-contamination and swapping the survivor-stories among one’s beneficial bacteria. One can even arrange a transplant procedure from a donor to rehabilitate the health of one’s gut floral that’s been compromised by diet, disease or over-medication. And like yesterday’s over-emphasis on sterility, we’re facing a similarly (probably much more dire) threat with the abuse of antibiotics which has severely dulled their efficacy, and seemingly the only thing that might rescue us until we can develop new weapons against pathogens that we’ll use responsibly (and we were warned) is our shared herd-immunity, perhaps with some unfiltered kisses.

yolo

H and I thought it bad enough when a portion of the remaining Berlin Wall fell victim to gentrification or the travesty of the massive compound called the Colossus of Prora commissioned as part of the Kraft dürch Freude (Strength through Joy) programme as a seaside retreat and then existed East German secret military base being turned into luxury apartments, and that they were among examples of the worse ways to pave over the past—that is, until learning of this quite tone-deaf property development firm in Hanseatic Hamburg.
The mixed use residency and deluxe shopping experience refurbishes the Stadthof which once hosted the Gestapos’ regional headquarters and interrogation cells. Originally the layout was to accommodate a museum and memorial to those questioned and disappeared there but the plans were decimated and the monument was reduced to the form of a section in a book shop about Nazi secret police with the possibility of a few plaques. The worse transgression was this wrought iron entry way (next to a table giving the history of the compound) that evokes the look of the lettering dismissive, dehumanising gates of concentration camps and juxtaposed with such a twee and trite message of welcome seems not only wilfully ignorant but an insult to what happened here.

friday matinee massacre

For those of you playing along at home, just to re-cap the individual, Devin Nunes—who drafted and dropped a think-piece that reinforces the narrative of the government agencies being infiltrated by ideologues of the Deep-State and are conspiring against the Trump administration not only wrote the memorandum himself, ordered de-classified and released to the public by Trump (propelled by the momentum of a twitter storm) against the wishes of the Federal Bureau of Investigations since it could not be expected to rebut this characterisation without disclosing classified and privileged information—was the same individual who in April of 2017 was temporarily removed from the investigation into ties with the Russian oligarchs and possible meddling over disclosure of classified documents to the White House he had obtained from the White House.
Trump was convinced that Obama was spying on him via his microwave oven and Nunes later rejoined the Committee. This was our Friday Matinee Massacre—paralleling the way Watergate pivoted after Nixon’s series of firings. To see what could come next, one need only look to the beleaguered Turkish people under their despot Erdoğan whose purges have not stopped and have intensified recently after medical professionals and academics (already under assault) are being ostracised and alienated for the smallest perceived infractions and anything that does not please the ruling party. Those found afoul in the public sector are not only summarily dismissed from the jobs, they are also not allowed to seek any government-sponsored assistance, and blacklisted—atomised as it were from contacts and social support—are either impoverished or imprisoned and have to resort to selling off their possessions and property to survive. These changes tend to creep up on you and we tend to miss the gradations until they’ve become so ensconced that it’s difficult to regain liberties and trust we’ve sacrificed.  We have to try and stay a few plays ahead.

red rover

Kottke directs our attention to a small but truly breath-taking gallery of photographs that the semi- autonomous Martian rover Curiosity (previously) has amassed in the first two-thousand sols (the measure for the time it takes for the fourth planet to orbit the Sun, slightly longer than our mundane equivalent). It does given one pause to appreciate how sharp and clear these images (approaching half a million) beamed back are and that we can explore an alien world with such a degree of awe and intimacy that we might expect for remote yet very terrestrial terrains.