It is strange how words become ammunition in reporting:
Sunday 10 August 2014
autarky or war of words
catagories: ๐ท๐บ, ๐, ๐ฑ, foreign policy
Thursday 7 August 2014
creative-commons or infinite monkeys typing
Wikipedia is rebuffing the take-down requests of a nature photographer, who after leaving his camera disguised in the jungle to capture images of macaques of Indonesia discovered that the monkey had discovered the hidden device and took hundreds of selfies.
Since the images have gone viral, the photographer hoped to earn something in the form of royalties or at least recognition and became rather irked when the images became part of Wikipedia's open collection. Demands that the pictures be removed and relegated to the nature photographer were rejected by the public encyclopedia, reasoning that the monkeys were the authors of the collection and it would be their decision if the material remained in the public-domain or not. US statute, which Wikipedia cites and most editors agree with, states that non-human authors have no automatic expectation of attribution and so such material defaults to be released to public-domain. What do you think of this legal battle, this copy-fight? The photographer did go through a lot of trouble and expensive to set up this photo-booth but maybe the macaque also knew what he was creating.
catagories: networking and blogging, travel, Wikipedia
Wednesday 6 August 2014
gentrification or the YUN ones
The Daily Beast featured recently a bitter-sweet and thought-provoking interview and profile of a blogger who is passionately documented the death-knells of a great metropolis. New York City is being summarily and quickly terraformed into a suburban-idyll, a playground acceptable to American Mid-Western standards and values and is being turned away from its eclectic identity.
wolfssegen oder an der grenze
Derived from the same Latin root as the Roman Limes—the border of the frontier and furthest reaches of the empire, a liminal being is one that is on the perimeter and stays back and forth between more comfortable and familiar categories, and defies easy classification. Limen—or liminal points—are the terms for the threshold of mental or physical sensation, those disappearingly small perceptions that are just on the edge of the senses or awareness and a gauge for dismissing what one may have just imagined. Such beings partake of two, usually opposed, states and are stock-characters of folklore and fantasy, from chimera and hybrid creatures, part human, part beast, to vampires, zombies and other ghouls, neither alive nor dead—even to cyborgs and thinking-machines and the uncanniness that surrounds them.
Equally curious is the repulsion and attraction that normal humans have to them, whether classic and reputable or new and novel. Wolfssegener, Wolf Charmers, are ancient professionals—probably dating back to prehistory—and were quite respected in villages, like the figure of a shaman or witch-doctor, for keeping themselves and livestock safe from wolf-raids. Once Europe was taken by the mania of witch-trials in the late Middle Ages, however, Wolf-Charmers were persecuted as werewolves themselves. Such hysteria is a cyclical occurrence and happens in all cultures, and for all the attention that this chapter has received, it may not even be the most wide-spread maker of monsters (NDSAP propagandists in 1930s and 1940s framed the historic witch-hunts as a conspiracy to destroy Aryan womanhood, and even the early and revival witch-trials differed significantly in character—the former more concerned with practitioners currying unfair advantage over their neighbours with magic and the latter having more to do with social-order and the anarchy caused by being in league with the Devil). As in Medieval Europe, coping with the stresses of societal change—those forces which push the limits of what we perceive as normal and normative, which included the dawn of the Age of Exploration, the Reformation and counter-movements, seem to compel populations to create, designate liminal status.
catagories: ๐, ๐ง , myth and monsters, religion, revolution