Light Hearted Kites

There are two extraordinarily beautiful things happening in this iPhone video by Patrick Colpron. The first is a spectacular six-sail kite designed and flown by Steve Polansky, and second is a heart-achingly wonderful song called Lighthouse by Patrick Watson. What a perfect moment in time, sort of an impromptu video poem.

Poetry Wednesday: In Praise Of Limestone

In Praise Of Limestone

by WH Auden

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes
With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,
A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs
That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle,
Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving
Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain
The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region
Of short distances and definite places:
What could be more like Mother or a fitter background
For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges
Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting
That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but
Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop
To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to
Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard,
Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish
To receive more attention than his brothers, whether
By pleasing or teasing, can easily take.

Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down
Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times
Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged
On the shady side of a square at midday in
Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think
There are any important secrets, unable
To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral
And not to be pacified by a clever line
Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds,
They have never had to veil their faces in awe
Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed;
Adjusted to the local needs of valleys
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking,
Their eyes have never looked into infinite space
Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky,
Their legs have never encountered the fungi
And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives
With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common.
So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works
Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp
Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice
For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all
But the best and the worst of us...
That is why, I suppose,
The best and worst never stayed here long but sought
Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external,
The light less public and the meaning of life
Something more than a mad camp. `Come!' cried the granite wastes,
`How evasive is your humour, how accidental
Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death.' (Saints-to-be
Slipped away sighing.) `Come!' purred the clays and gravels,
`On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers
Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb
In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both
Need to be altered.' (Intendant Caesars rose and
Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched
By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper:
`I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing;
That is how I shall set you free. There is no love;
There are only the various envies, all of them sad.'

They were right, my dear, all those voices were right
And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all: A back ward
And dilapidated province, connected
To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain
Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite:
It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself
It does not neglect, but calls into question
All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet,
Admired for his earnest habit of calling
The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy
By these marble statues which so obviously doubt
His antimythological myth; and these gamins,
Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade
With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's
Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape. 

Stop Motion Animation from Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"

A very interesting Stop-Motion animation inspired from the Ernest Hemingway classic, "The Old Man and the Sea".

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz

By Paul Marks, New Scientist

A century ago, one of the world’s first hackers used Morse code insults to disrupt a public demo of Marconi's wireless telegraph.

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?

It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903.

That things would not go smoothly for Marconi and Fleming at the Royal Institution that day in June was soon apparent. Minutes before Fleming was due to receive Marconi's Morse messages from Cornwall, the hush was broken by a rhythmic ticking noise sputtering from the theatre's brass projection lantern, used to display the lecturer's slides. To the untrained ear, it sounded like a projector on the blink. But Arthur Blok, Fleming's assistant, quickly recognised the tippity-tap of a human hand keying a message in Morse. Someone, Blok reasoned, was beaming powerful wireless pulses into the theatre and they were strong enough to interfere with the projector's electric arc discharge lamp.

Mentally decoding the missive, Blok realised it was spelling one facetious word, over and over: "Rats". A glance at the output of the nearby Morse printer confirmed this. The incoming Morse then got more personal, mocking Marconi: "There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily," it trilled. Further rude epithets - apposite lines from Shakespeare - followed.

The stream of invective ceased moments before Marconi's signals from Poldhu arrived. The demo continued, but the damage was done: if somebody could intrude on the wireless frequency in such a way, it was clearly nowhere near as secure as Marconi claimed. And it was likely that they could eavesdrop on supposedly private messages too.

Marconi would have been peeved, to say the least, but he did not respond directly to the insults in public. He had no truck with sceptics and naysayers: "I will not demonstrate to any man who throws doubt upon the system," he said at the time. Fleming, however, fired off a fuming letter to The Times of London. He dubbed the hack "scientific hooliganism", and "an outrage against the traditions of the Royal Institution". He asked the newspaper's readers to help him find the culprit.

He didn't have to wait long. Four days later a gleeful letter confessing to the hack was printed by The Times. The writer justified his actions on the grounds of the security holes it revealed for the public good. Its author was Nevil Maskelyne, a mustachioed 39-year-old British music hall magician. Maskelyne came from an inventive family - his father came up with the coin-activated "spend-a-penny" locks in pay toilets. Maskelyne, however, was more interested in wireless technology, so taught himself the principles. He would use Morse code in "mind-reading" magic tricks to secretly communicate with a stooge. He worked out how to use a spark-gap transmitter to remotely ignite gunpowder. And in 1900, Maskelyne sent wireless messages between a ground station and a balloon 10 miles away. But, as author Sungook Hong relates in the book Wireless, his ambitions were frustrated by Marconi's broad patents, leaving him embittered towards the Italian. Maskelyne would soon find a way to vent his spleen.

One of the big losers from Marconi's technology looked likely to be the wired telegraphy industry. Telegraphy companies owned expensive land and sea cable networks, and operated flotillas of ships with expert crews to lay and service their submarine cables. Marconi presented a wireless threat to their wired hegemony, and they were in no mood to roll over.

The Eastern Telegraph Company ran the communications hub of the British Empire from the seaside hamlet of Porthcurno, west Cornwall, where its submarine cables led to Indonesia, India, Africa, South America and Australia. Following Marconi's feat of transatlantic wireless messaging on 12 December 1901, ETC hired Maskelyne to undertake extended spying operations.

Maskelyne built a 50-metre radio mast (the remnants of which still exist) on the cliffs west of Porthcurno to see if he could eavesdrop on messages the Marconi Company was beaming to vessels as part of its highly successful ship-to-shore messaging business. Writing in the journal The Electrician on 7 November 1902, Maskelyne gleefully revealed the lack of security. "I received Marconi messages with a 25-foot collecting circuit [aerial] raised on a scaffold pole. When eventually the mast was erected the problem was not interception but how to deal with the enormous excess of energy."

It wasn't supposed to be this easy. Marconi had patented a technology for tuning a wireless transmitter to broadcast on a precise wavelength. This tuning, Marconi claimed, meant confidential channels could be set up. Anyone who tunes in to a radio station will know that's not true, but it wasn't nearly so obvious back then. Maskelyne showed that by using an untuned broadband receiver he could listen in.

Having established interception was possible, Maskelyne wanted to draw more attention to the technology's flaws, as well as showing interference could happen. So he staged his Royal Institution hack by setting up a simple transmitter and Morse key at his father's nearby West End music hall.

The facetious messages he sent could easily have been jumbled with those Marconi himself sent from Cornwall, ruining both had they arrived simultaneously. Instead, they drew attention to a legitimate flaw in the technology - and the only damage done was to the egos of Marconi and Fleming.

Fleming continued to bluster for weeks in the newspapers about Maskelyne's assault being an insult to science. Maskelyne countered that Fleming should focus on the facts. "I would remind Professor Fleming that abuse is no argument," he replied.

In the present day, many hackers end up highlighting flawed technologies and security lapses just like Maskelyne. A little mischief has always had its virtues.

What ‘The Dictator’ Gets Right

By Paul Berman, The New Republic

True story: I’m on the sunny sidewalk outside Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator, and out of the theater saunters one of my fellow audience members, dressed in slacks and Islamic headscarf of a sort that is pretty conventional in south Brooklyn, and she doesn’t mind a casual exchange of views. “I have to tell you,” she says, “it was offensive to a lot of people.” She reflects a little more. “It was funny, though.” Her gaze falls on Court Street. “I laughed.” She laughs. “I loved it!”—and she breaks into a gloriously sheepish smile. I tell her, “I liked the part where he falls in love.” She looks at me like, what are you, stupid?—then adds in self-exculpation, “The movies are supposed to be fun!” And off she goes, nearly skipping down the afternoon street.

The part where he falls in love comes when the Baron Cohen character, General Aladeen, dictator of Wadiya, having made his way to New York to address the United Nations, ends up working at a lefty feminist grocery co-op in Brooklyn. The co-op manager turns out to be an ultra-authoritarian of political correctness, a sort of fascist. And the dictator melts. He melts still more when the co-op manager liberates him sexually by teaching him to masturbate. The Dictator is a gross-out movie. And the meltdown reaches completion when, in the course of orating against the evils of democracy, he notices her cute little perky face in the audience, and his speech veers into a defense of democracy. Under democracy, he observes, a woman might fall for a man even if her father were not being tortured in the next room; and he is in love.

My fellow audience-member may have been right about me. Still, the essential realism of the scene becomes clear at the end of the movie when the dictator, having proclaimed democracy in Wadiya, has been elected president with 98 percent of the vote and marries the Brooklyn co-op manager—only to discover that she is Jewish, which leads him to order her execution.

Then the credits roll and you watch a series of pointless outtakes that must have struck the director as too amusing to omit from the movie. And it is right to watch, not because anything worth seeing appears on screen but because, with a movie of this nature, you try to get your money’s worth.

Do I have to take The Dictator seriously? I am sitting in the backyard of an oyster bar across from the theater with a plate of oysters and a glass of wine in front of me, and honestly the film has put me into too genial a mood to quarrel with failed jokes and occasional doldrums. Suddenly I recognize the movie’s appeal. The movie is about Brooklyn—the real-life Brooklyn of annoying P.C. nitwits, embittered émigrés from desert tyrannies, echoes of the crisis in the Muslim world, people from far-away who reinvent themselves, yellow taxis, lingering memories of 9/11, and the varieties of bad taste. Art is gusto or nothing, and The Dictator displays, on these local themes, sufficient gusto to while away an afternoon.

Maybe there’s not a whole lot of hydrogen in this balloon. And yet! In the matter of dictator movies, I prefer Baron Cohen to, say, Walter Salles, the director of a movie about Che Guevara. The Dictator is anti-dictator. The film even makes a semi-profound point near the end by observing that, as of our own moment, the dreadful dictators of modern times have fallen—Qaddafi, Saddam, Cheney—and goes on to observe that, even so, dreadful dictatorships may not, in fact, be at an end: a subtle contradiction, a footnote to the End of History thesis. Then, too, the dictator observes that democracy is not much different from dictatorship, except for the parts that are better, and maybe democracy is a great thing, after all, even if it’s not perfect. This particular display of political nuance is not offered with any equivalent filmmaking nuance. Baron Cohen’s technique is to stand up and lecture at us. Here is a film that is not about filmmaking. It’s a good lecture, though. I would even say that, politically speaking, Sacha Baron Cohen is—I hate to use this word, it ought to mean death to any artist—sound.

The misogyny and shock-jokes seem to me mostly a fig leaf which, in the modern style, consists of genitalia instead of covering them. You will see this for yourself if you sit through the childbirth scene with its trans-vaginal cell phone and its moment of amorous intra-uterine hand-holding—though maybe, now that I reflect more deeply, parts of The Dictator were, in truth, a bit much. But look what has happened: My glass is empty, the oysters have disappeared, the sun is setting, an hour has gone by, and I have begun to speak about the movie in the past tense. 

Increasingly Threatening Taglines by Beauty Products

By Kendra Eash, McSweenys.net

“Capture your beauty with both hands.”

“Beauty—it’s yours. No matter WHAT.”

“Hoard your beauty like you’ve never hoarded before.”

“Take advantage of your beauty—and then convince it to stay the night, just this once.”

“Who’s that in the mirror? Is it your beauty that escaped from its basement cage?”

“Run your beauty off the road—and onto your face.”

“Your beauty runs deep. Six feet underground to be exact.”

“Don’t let your beauty get away. Gun it down.”

“Looking for someone? You just found her—rifling through your beauty. It’s time to cut a bitch.”

“Bring your beauty to its knees. Pistol whip it until it tells you why it’s been avoiding you all these years.”

“If your beauty isn’t in your hands—then you killed for nothing.”

“Maybe she’s born with it. Or maybe she killed her sister for it. Either way, she’s really beautiful.”

“It’s high noon—and beauty just drew its gun. But you’re faster and you riddled it with bullets. Good job, because even with the gaping holes you’re still kind of beautiful now that you put the carcass of beauty all over you.”

The geopolitics of the Eurovision Song Contest

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

What caught my eye this week was a dispute between two members of a grand old European alliance. The alliance isn't NATO; it's not the Arctic Council nor the Euro Zone, nor the EU. I'm talking about the annual Eurovision Song Contest.

It's camp; it's cheesy; but it's a huge hit across the pond. Every year, dozens of countries send their top performers to an American Idol-style music competition. More than a 100 million viewers tune in to vote for their favorites. The one rule: you can't vote for your own country.

And so the tradition has continued since the 1950s. Abba won for "Waterloo" in 1974. Celine Dion made a splash in 1988 representing Switzerland. But somewhere along the way the contest became known less for big names, and more for kitsch: Sequined costumes, outlandish productions, the works. Now, despite its name, Eurovision is not just a European competition. Algeria participates and so does Israel. This year's host is Azerbaijan. And that's why Eurovision is in the news this week.

First some background: Azerbaijan has long clashed with Armenia. In 1994, the two countries ended a years-long war over the separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh. But tensions flared up again recently when an Armenian soldier was shot to death at the border.
So with Azerbaijan as the host, Armenia is  pulling out of the Eurovision party. The intrusion of politics into these kinds of events is not new. Music competitions, like big sporting events, are often proxies for larger disputes or trends. When Moscow hosted Eurovision in 2009, Georgia was reluctant to take part because it had just fought a war with Russia.  But music can unify, too. That same year, Israel's entry featured a duet with an Arab and Israeli Jew.

For me, the fascinating thing about Eurovision is not the performances or the music. It's the politics and public psychology. Here at GPS, we plotted the capital cities of the winning countries from the past two decades on a longitudinal graph - yeah, that's the kind of thing we do in our spare time. We found that in the 1990s, the winners tended to be from Western Europe - Dublin or London. But by the late 2000s, the winners mostly came from the East - Moscow and Kiev. Europe's center of gravity is clearly moving East.

And these voters have interesting tendencies. In 2003, Britain got exactly zero votes - that was the year the Blair government supported the war in Iraq. Votes aren't always conscious political choices. But we saw trends. Greeks always vote for Cypriots. The Cypriots return the favor. Viewers from former Warsaw-Pact countries often vote as a bloc. So do members of the former Yugoslavia. In 2007, Serbia won after picking up maximum points from Bosnia-Herzigovina, Croatia, Macedona, Montenegro, and Slovenia. All in all, this is an interesting window into Europe.

So it got me thinking. We have American Idol here in the U.S., and we have "The Voice". But perhaps what we really need is our own Eurovision - an "Americavision".  Will people from red states strategically vote for each other? Will the two coasts create an alliance? Will there be a North-South divide?

I hope a TV executive somewhere is watching. Remember to credit us with the idea - and maybe send a few royalties our way.