Phree Photoshop

Now this one blew my mind. If someone had told me ten years ago that you could have a free, light-weight image-editing software available by 2010, that would seem perfectly reasonable. But if they’d said it would work online through your browser, that would’ve been a little harder to believe. Perhaps I’m as late as heck, but today I found this app, Sumo 2.0, which is exactly that. Perhaps this is what Google is intending with that Chrome business. Frigging cool, that’s what it is.

Boa Sr

“Ancient Indian language dies out” was the title in the RSS feed that caught my attention. Boa Sr, an 85 year-old inhabitant of the Andaman Islands was the last speaker of the ancient language Bo, which has disappeared along with her. Spoken for the last 70,000 years, it’s truly exceptional amongst ancient languages for having survived so long.

To put that into perspective, other languages from the Ancient World that no longer survive include Punic, Etrurian, Hittite and even Latin. These tongues I’ve mentioned were the languages of empires, spoken by millions of souls. The most ancient, Hittite, probably took form around the 20th Century BCE, and lasted until around 1100 BCE, while Latin survived as a spoken language throughout the Middle Ages. Either way, we’re looking at a bracket of about 3,500 years where these mighty languages existed. And here is a language that lasted 20 times longer than that span. And I seriously doubt anyone can name to the day that Latin stopped evolving and became a dead language.

Obama V Banks

President Obama recently announced a host of measures to curtail the free reign banks have been enjoying for a long time. What seems a pity is that it’s taken so long and things had to come to this point for those fat, greedy, white-collared bastards to be checked. The way banks have toyed with everyone’s money, their fat-cat profits and just their treatment of ordinary people by charging ridiculous and seemingly random fees for us giving them money is reason enough to line their biggest, fattest, most corrupt bosses against a wall without so much as a fuss.

Banks, along with insurance companies and certain branches of the State, have a singular status. They are legally allowed to steal, as long as they dress up their thefts with lots of financial jargon and masses of bureaucratic manoeuvring. And they are (or let’s hope, were) legally permitted to go out and gamble with other people’s money. We know this, but we’re deluded by the sheer scale of the volumes of cash in question. If I asked my best friend for a €100, went and and frittered it all in a dingy casino, then went back and shrugged my shoulders when he asked for his money saying that’s just the way it is and on top of that, charge hum a fee for my trouble. I’d probably get my teeth knocked out and then eventually prosecuted, and as you’d be saying to yourself now, quite rightly so. Banks do that on a grand scale, but because they deal with so many millions it confers them a certain air of authority and the sense that they know what they’re doing. Or at least they did, because now the penny’s dropped and everyone’s found out what they’ve done and what a huge bunch of twats they really are.

But they keep on raking in huge profits, because their so interwoven into our society and daily lives that we’re pretty much stuck with the bastards. Their way the gained their hold on society is one of the earliest examples of lobbying in our Christian Western culture. Usury was considered a terrible sin right from the start of Christianity, and indeed all Abrahamic religions. But with economic growth in the late Middle Ages being stunted by the inability of people being able to invest in businesses via loans without the guarantee of a return, their was mounting pressure for the Church to change its stance on usury. But the Church would in no way budge in its approach to who practised such an abominable sin, but there was a handy way to go around this. They changed the definition of usury.

And so the financial sector has been able to live in spectacular wealth at the cost of everyone else, and without fear of reprisals. Obama’s measures are laudable and I certainly hope they’ll be followed elsewhere, but I suspect that the average person like me would like to see bankers strung up in public and pay for their greed. Poetic justice, like making them pay back the money the squandered with excessive interest and absurd fees and taxes laid on them, which would make them live in the day-to-day uncertainty of whether they’ll be able to pay the rent or keep their car, like the rest of us.

One thing that’s true is that the image of legally-sanctioned thieves banks have has been tarnished even further with the labels of incompetence and stupidity. If I was wary when leaving cash at the bank counter before, I’m doubly so now, and wouldn’t trust them with a fiver, let alone my wealth.

The best band you’ve never heard of

Finally, the wait was over. After years of what seemed to be absolute stagnancy, I’d be able to get my ears around new material, and expand the incredibly limited amount of existing music available.

You may ask, what the hell am I raving on about? The answer is a band whose obscurity is inversely proportional to the brilliance of their music. One could say “Coldplay”, but I’m trying to hint that the music is brilliant and not utter shite.

I’ve raved on and on about this band in my old defunct blog, but to no effect, from what the feedback, or lack of it, told me. At least if you Google their name they top the search results, but finding a song of theirs to download record of theirs to buy is nigh-on impossible, and they don’t even have a Wikipedia page.

Marizane is a band that formed circa 1991 in L.A., featuring singer-songwriter Todd Jaeger and keyboard player Debbie Shair. They did a couple of tunes produced by Tony Visconti of David Bowie fame, but all their releases were EPs and never really took off as a band. Their sound and even song thematics were reminiscent of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust-era material, and urban legends state that Bowie himself heard a demo played by a Los Angeles DJ and asked “When did I record that?”

The comparisons to Bowie are endless, and I myself stumbled across their work when I came by a song called “The Devil’s Address”, labelled as a rare Stardust-era outtake. This was patently bollocks, of course, because a) it was far too good to have been left out of an album and b) it definitely wasn’t Bowie on vocals. I hate to fly in the face of popular opinion, but neither Todd Jaeger or Marizane sound like Bowie. They sound like Marizane, which is at least as good as sounding like DB himself. And I place a lot of emphasis on this just to show how good this band is.

This month, Marizane launched a full-length album entitled Cosmosis, which is a joy to hear and addictive to boot. Even my 11 month-old daughter likes to listen to it, and believe me, she’s picky about her music. Along its twelve tracks you can hear how the music has evolved from the first rare EPs, from something more hard-rockish to a softer, more lyrical rock. You still have the operatic background and a glam-esque piano-guitar-keyboard structure, but it’s matured and controlled, though I mean this in the best possible sense (if it even makes sense at all, but then that’s how hard it is to convert what you think music sounds like into prose). All I can say at this point is it’s absolutely brilliant stuff, and by far my favourite record of the year (even better that Andrew Bird’s Noble Beast IMHO), but it can only be downloaded on iTunes from what I can tell. It’d be nice to get on CD, and even nicer if Marizane toured and played a date over here in Europe.

If per chance any of this has whetted your appetite, you can read an interview with Todd Jaeger and Debbie Shair here, and listen to what can be considered one of their golden oldies, “Of the Alien Christ”, on a YouTube video.

Dark matter

Scientists say that they may have finally detected so-called “dark matter” on Earth. “Dark matter” is a huge invisible, undetectable part of the universe, and was postulated to exist when astronomers calculated that all the visible matter in the sky wasn’t enough to explain, for example, why galaxies rotated at the speed at which they do, which is too fast for the calculated amount the appear to contain. I’m a hopeless layman, but to me this sounds too much like the 19th century’s luminiferous aether, a medium whose existence was inferred by the behaviour of light and electromagnetic forces. It was scientific dogma until Albert Michelson and Edward Morley’s experiments with an interferometer provided the first strong evidence that it might not actually exist, and then Albert Einstein’s paper on the Special Theory of Relativity disproved the aether altogether. Perhaps dark matter could be such an instance in science, where all the evidence clearly points to its existence and it explains a lot, but let’s not forget that it’s undetectable by its own definition. That makes the simple scientific remark that no-one’s seen it a non-valid argument against its being real. The aether explained everything nicely too, until it was rubbished.

Oil reserves: are they enough?

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), oil reserves are enough to spend the next years in a hunky-dory state of bliss and petrol-burning carefree habits. A senior official, however, says otherwise.

It certainly seems plausible that the U.S. has pressured the IEA into a bit of fibbing concerning the matter, and personally I don’t think the downplay is a bad idea, neither is the so-called “whistleblowing”. The downplay will avoid mass panic, doomsday prophetics and draconian measures suddenly curtailing emissions and what-not. The more alarmist version of the forecast will keep us on our toes and not let the movement toward what we now call alternative fuels lose momentum.

But having said that, I’d be slightly more inclined to go for the bleaker versions of forecasting fossil fuels in the future. Knowing we have twenty or thirty years reserves still to exploit and then actually going about exploiting them is a damn stupid thing to do. I hope in fifty years time, there’s still petrol around so I can drive a classic car, instead of knowing it’s been squandered. Yes, I know these things do and should take time, but it’s been an excessively slow process.

Take hybrid retrofitting, which I was always harping on about. That technology should be years old by now, not still trying to take off. Where are the second-generation biofuels? Where’s the emphasis on solar cells? Why aren’t governments in backwaters like here in Portugal cracking down on badly-made buildings that lose heat like radiators and waste cartloads of energy? Yes, the road to greenery is long and winding, but the crass morons parked in the middle of the road and blocking the way aren’t helping.

Crafts of Arts

By the time I was around 25, I realised my plans for World Domination weren’t going to come to fruition. So I turned my attention to finishing my already overdue studies of Architecture, and my ever-evolving activities concerning the elaboration of comics.

When I was 6 or 7, I saw at the newsagent’s near my house a copy of a Marvel comic called Secret Wars sitting on the shelf. It was an English version of the American original, where instead of a monthly issue the British editors in Bayswater had decided to cut up the monthly stories into chunks and publish them weekly along with other cannibalised fragments of comics such as Zoids and Machine Man. But I remember being transfixed by the action on the cover, and the colour and strangeness of it all. I was no stranger to superheroes, but I’d never owned an actual comic before, having only come into contact with the genre through Adam West’s Batman and Christopher Reeve’s Superman films. I asked my mother, who I was with, to buy it for me straight away, which, thankfully, she did.

And so I was introduced to a whole new plethora of superheroes, without a Superman or a Batman in sight (the distinction between the Marvel and DC universes weren’t obvious to me at time, as can be fathomed by my youth and no knowledge of comics, but it was confusing at first), but others with which I was engrossed straight away: Iron Man, Wolverine, Thor, Captain America (and the rest of the Avengers), the X-Men and most of all, Spiderman, who’d become my favourite.

But most importantly, it marked the first time I picked up a pencil and paper and started to copy Mike Zeck’s drawings, and began to learn about how to represent people more like they were than the matchstick-men kids usually scribble. That was the moment it all began, and I quickly decided I like this sort of thing. I liked it very much. I began to scrounge my father for his discarded sheets of A4 paper containing obsolete information concerning his business and began to draw on the blank backs of them. I learned how to draw muscles and faces, shadows and perspective, proportion and expression. In one fell swoop, Secret Wars won me over by reconciling brightly-clad bringers of justice and another of my fancies, science-fiction. In the 12-part mini-series, the cream of Earth’s superheroes and supervillains are kidnapped by an omnipotent entity and set against each other on a planet created specifically for the effect. For kicks, the entity, known as The Beyonder has advanced technology and ships on the planet, and buildings to be used as bases for each faction. And so I also learned how to draw spaceships and sci-fi environments, far before learning to do actual existing sorts of backdrops (to be fair, I only learned it while training to be an architect).

My new found knowledge quickly catapulted me to the top of my class in drawing, so much that while studying Greek Mythology in Mrs. Harris’ 1st year juniors class, my rendition of Medusa’s severed head done in chalk on card, complete with fangs, reptilian eyes and purple snake hair was used as a prop of the same Gorgon’s ghastly semblance for a dramatisation of Perseus’ epic tale.

It took me many years to grow out of superheroes, which eventually happened perhaps due to my growing preference for European work over the fast-food American style of comic, or perhaps due to the decreasing quality and ever more complex and numerous titles, characters, story-arcs, questionable aesthetics and apotheosis of pathetic artists in the Marvel Universe. I will, however, remain forever indebted to the entire silliness of costumed do-gooders, and in particular to that tale of lost superheroes flung across the universe, for my skills in doodling.

Hope for the world, after all

A group of rich Germans is drawing up a petition for wealthy citizens to pay higher taxes, so that they can help the country’s dire economic situation. They estimate that taxing the very well off just 5% over two years would raise a staggering 100 billion euros.

The petition has 44 signatories so far, and will be presented to newly re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel.

They group say the financial crisis is leading to an increase in unemployment, poverty and social inequality.

Simply donating money to deal with the problems is not enough, they want a change in the whole approach.

Wow. This is so admirable I can’t find the words to sum it up. Here in Portugal, the wealthy are so notoriously tax-evasive and have been for so long and with the connivance of the state that no-one even bats an eyelid any more when considering the gigantic social injustice of the tax-system, or when a super-rich or even moderately rich person is caught defrauding the country.

Nuclear batteries

Every now and then, there are bits of new techno-science that seem to be the very stuff of Science Fiction. Perhaps Iron-Man’s armour would be possible with this breakthrough: tiny, nuclear-powered batteries. This invention is good enough to make it onto the BBC’s top ten most read list, which is quite a feat considering how hard it is for a science story to be so divulged, and a testament to how interested the average person is in this technology.

Unfortunately, neither article linked here speaks of the autonomy of the battery or its size, perhaps the two most crucial characteristics for practical use. The only clue we have as to applicability is its safety, a reassurance of whoever uses one won’t die of radiation poisoning.

“People hear the word ‘nuclear’ and think of something very dangerous,” Dr [Jae Wan Kwon of the University of Missouri] said.

“However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pacemakers, space satellites and underwater systems.”

The future of public transport

An article regarding the future of public transportation. Points to zeppelins (yay!), helicopter backpacks, Segways, mag-lev trains and so on. (via PopSci)