My name is Paul.
I'm not exactly sure who I am.
Income inequality, as seen from space
Last week, I wrote about how urban trees—or the lack thereof—can reveal income inequality. After writing that article, I was curious, could I actually see income inequality from space? It turned out to be easier than I expected.
Below are satellite images from Google Earth that show two neighborhoods from a selection of cities around the world. In case it isn’t obvious, the first image is the less well-off neighborhood, the second the wealthier one.
Click here for full story + more cities from Google Earth
(via ssshhhhhhhh)
"Not acknowledging the hybrid nature of social mechanisms can be a source of misunderstanding and mystification in social science. For example, social activities in which means are successfully matched to ends are traditionally labeled as ‘rational’. But this label obscures the fact that these activities involve problem solving skills of different kinds (not a single mental faculty like ‘rationality’) and that explaining the successful solution of practical problems will involve consideration of relevant causal events, such as physical interactions with the means to achieve a goal, not just calculations in an actors head. Similarly, when giving traditional routines as explanations one may reduce these to ritual and ceremony (and label these ‘irrational’), but this obscures the fact that many inherited routines are in fact problem-solving procedures which have been slowly refined by successive generations. These practical routines may be overlaid by ritual symbolism, while at the same time being capable of leading to successful causal interactions with material entities, such as domesticated plants and soil."
— Manuel DeLanda - A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (p. 24)
I Self Devine - Exist To Remain (by TheRealRhymesayers)
“…the graffiti work of 24 year old Shamsia Hassani, an associate professor of Sculpture at Kabul University in Afghanistan….A lot of her work features women in burqas, but with a modern silhouette, with hips and sharp shoulders or fish, trapped…. She says: Art can bring change, I am sure. If people see an artwork, it will perhaps only cause a small shock to their mind, but that can grow and grow.” (via Afghanistan’s female banksy | Maryam Namazie)
4 april 2012,
Today, in #syntagma square, just next to the Greek parliament, a 77 year old man shot himself in the head. His last words, according to passers-by, were “I don’t want to leave a debt on my children”. Since this morning, people have swarmed around the tree, next to which the man took his own life, leaving notes and silently honoring his memory.
His suicide note reads:
“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future, will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945”
(Note: Tsolakoglou was the first collaborationist prime minister during Germany’s occupation of Greece during the Second World War and the 77-year-old man compared the currently assigned prime minister Papademos to the traitor Tsolakoglou.)
this post is by @iptamenos3
learn more about this story through this real-time storify post or through twitter via #syntagma hastag
BBC article about the 40% suicide surge in Greece
This has been given zero coverage by Greek media outlets.
"Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue."
—
from the New York Times Article “Does Language Shape How You Think?”.
such a fantastic read.
[via leftist-linguaphile]
You know what’s even more mind-blowing? Speaking a gendered language with a neuter. In Greek we can also change the gender of a given referent to anything we want by adding suffixes such as ακι, αρα, ος (aki - neuter, ara - feminine, os - masculine). It’s such a rich language - your entire thoughtscape changes once you’re immersed in it.
(via bbthity)
