Author Archives: linuskendall

Review: Maps for Lost Lovers

Maps for Lost Lovers
Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No need for a map to get lost in the millions of metaphors this book is sprinkled liberally with. A story of a Pakistani family and South Asian community lost in trying to finding ways of living (and loving) in Dasht-e-Tanhai (the “Desert of Solitutde”) somewhere in England. In the way of (according to the author) Pakistani thinking, the language brims with flowers (and moths & butterflies) in a way that is entirely and utterly enjoyable.

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The person you eat bread with

[Companion – Ethymology] From Middle English companion, from Old French compaignon “companion”, from Late Latin compāniōn- nominative singular compāniō, from com- +‎ pānis literally, with + bread, a word first attested in the Frankish Lex Salica as a translation of a Germanic word, probably Frankish galaibo, gahlaibo “messmate”, literally “with-bread”, from hlaib “loaf, bread”. Compare also Old High German galeipo “messmate”, Gothic

British conman tricks Iraqi authorities to spend GBP38mn on bomb detection devices with no function whatsoever

In the meantime, McCormick approached Minnesota Global, a mail-order business in Minneapolis, the manufacturer of the Lil’ Orbits doughnut-making machine and the distributor of the remaining stock of the Gopher golf ball finder. At the end of 2005 he ordered 100 golf ball detectors from Minnesota at $19.50 each and, a few months later, 200 more. In his garage in Somerset, he later told police, he programmed these for “electrostatic ion attraction” using a collection of jam jars and spice pots that contained samples of drugs and explosives. In each jar, he placed small colored stickers and left them for a week to absorb the vapor of whatever substance his customers might wish to detect. The samples included cannabis; folded fragments of a Japanese 1,000 yen note; and a piece of gauze McCormick had used to staunch a nosebleed, which he later explained was used to aid in human detection. After a sticker had spent a week absorbing vapor, he glued it inside the Gopher. He then removed the plastic badge that identified it as a golf ball finder, and replaced it with one bearing ATSC’s logo. This became the ADE 100—sold for the first time, in March 2006, to McCormick’s agents in Lebanon. Price: $3,000 each.

via In Iraq, the Bomb-Detecting Device That Didnt Work, Except to Make Money – Businessweek.

Sex worker murdered by the man Swedish courts gave full custody of her children to

Last week Thursday an outspoken Swedish sex worker who called herself “Petite Jasmine” was stabbed to death by her former partner – a partner that Swedish court at one point gave full custody of their children on the basis of her work.

Last week Thursday an outspoken Swedish sex worker who called herself “Petite Jasmine” was stabbed to death by her former partner – a partner that Swedish court at one point gave full custody of their children on the basis of her work.

http://storify.com/linuskendall/sex-worker-killed-by-the-man-swedish-courts-gave-f

Waste and disposability as a tool for economic growth and profit

In 1956, Lloyd Stoffer famously stated “The future of plastics in the trash can.”

At the time, this was considered a very controversial statement, and he got in some trouble for it. Stoffers sentiment comes during a period where industry was facing a unique problem. The Volkswagen theory of evolution left was to build something to last, without versions, fashions, and make it easy to fix. So when someone bought it, that was it. They only needed one. With this mode of production, markets were saturating. The opportunities for growth and profit were diminishing and reaching stability.

Companies and industries that wanted to grow, that were premised on growth and profit started to intervene at a material level and developed disposability—planned obsolescence and fashion supported by a regime of advertising. They designed a throw away society. People bucked against this design. They had just come out of the Depression in the United States, and an ethos of saving, fixing, and stewardship was the norm. Industry was designing a shift in values.In his 1960 book The Wastemakers, Vance Packard writes against this sort of strategy for profit.He images a city called Cornucopia City, “located on the edge of a cliff, and the ends of [the] assembly lines can be swung to the front or rear doors depending upon the public demand for the product being produced. When demand is slack, the end of the assembly line will be swung to the rear door and the output of refrigerators or other products will drop out of sight and go directly to their graveyard without first overwhelming the consumer market” Packard 1960: 4.

Even earlier, Susan Strausser recounts riots by soldiers in train stations in the 1917 when the communal tin cup for water was replaced with disposable paper cups Strasser 1999: 177. Such waste was seen as abhorrent.Seven years after Lloyd Stoffer’s controversial statement, he addresses plastics industry representatives at a conference in New York City:  “It is a measure of your progress in packaging in the last seven years that this remark will no longer raise any eye-brows. You are filling the trash cans, the rubbish dumps and the incinerators with literally billions of plastics bottles, plastics jugs, plastics tubes, blisters and skin packs, plastics bags and films and sheet packages–and now, even plastics cans. The happy day has arrived when nobody any longer considers the plastics package too good to throw away.” Wasting has been naturalized. Disposables have been naturalized.

Recycling is complicit in this. It’s not a coincidence that the largest supporter of recycling is industry. The founder of the recycling symbol is the Container Corporation of America. One of the biggest supporters of New York City’s recycling program is the American Chemistry Council, the chemical and plastics lobby. Recycling not only saturates markets in a certain way—it lets industry externalize costs. If a company uses reusable bottles, it has to pay for those bottles to return, but if it uses disposables, they get sent out into the world made with very cheap materials, and municipalities pick up the bill for running them to the landfill, or recycling station, when they are done. The money saved can translate into profit. This is what is meant by “externalization.”

via Waste as Profit & Alternative Economies | Discard Studies.

Diamonds are a girl’s (… or at least a marketers) best friend

The next time you look at a diamond, consider this. Nearly every American marriage begins with a diamond because a bunch of rich white men in the 1940s convinced everyone that its size determines your self worth. They created this convention – that unless a man purchases an intrinsically useless diamond, his life is a failure – while sitting in a room, racking their brains on how to sell diamonds that no one wanted. 

via Diamonds Are Bullshit.

Every Move She Makes. They’ll Be Watching Her

There’s something rotten in the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. And it seems the Kannada and Telugu news channels have identified the problem — girls gone wild, fuelled by alcohol. On 14 May, Karnataka’s leading regional news channel, TV9 Kannada, ran a programme, Olage Serideru Gundu literally, ‘once alcohol is inside’, a fine assortment of video nasties from across the country, showing the great evils of girls drinking — the ruckus on the street, clothes askew, clashes with cops.For some years now, the disapproving cultural policing of a class of girls — ones who can afford to go out to drink — has become a staple on regional news in both states. There is massive viewership, particularly of sleazy ‘true crime’ reports, and so editors and programming heads encourage reporters to follow women and young couples, to stake out pubs, nightclubs and make-out spots. A cursory search on YouTube reveals the many news reports with such eye-catching titles as ‘Drunk women causing hulchul’, ‘Drunk women causing hungama’, or ‘How to ban rave parties to save the youth’.“We show boys too, but a girl being daring on screen instantly catches the viewers’ attention,” says Shreeti Chakraborty, senior producer with a leading Kannada channel. One clip was of an altercation between four female students of NALSAR University of Law and reporters from the Telugu news channel ABN Andhra Jyothy, outside Rain pub in Hyderabad’s Banjara Hills on the night of 11 April. Shruthi, Megha, Prachi and Adwitiya angrily confronted a drunk man filming them on his phone. The confrontation attracted a mob and reporters from ABN. Apparently, the drunk man was a reporter who had telephoned his colleagues. The footage was picked up by other news channels. Several of them branded the girls immoral, drunk and half-naked and even questioned the pub’s licence.Watching the ABN footage is instructive. The camera pans up and down the women’s bodies. It is exploitative; consent is not an option, probably not even worth a thought. The viewer is implicated by the camera’s roving eye, a fellow voyeur leering at barefoot girls in short dresses. The cameraman follows the girls to their taxi, thrusting his camera through the door, his taunts provoking the girls to shout insults. Their expressions of fury at being cornered were circulated on primetime news as the faces of unacceptable modernity, of aggressive young women out at night, women who must be checked.

via Every Move She Makes. They’ll Be Watching Her.

It seems as if among Andhra journalists there are quite a few Backpfeifengesicht. Google that.

What is even sadder is, that these kids need to defend themselves – with petitions, imagery proof, statements of which time girls left (11! not past 12) – not only against their parents, neighbors or sexual abusers in their midst, but also against journalists with cameras.

Certainly these are upper middle class kids with a sense that they have the right to drink if they want, so they can fight back… Just think about what this kind of exploitative misogyny means for people without that sense of right or entitlement.

Narendra Modi lands in Uttarakhand, flies out with 15,000 Gujaratis – Times Of India

DEHRADUN: In the two days that NarendraModi has been in Uttarakhand, he has managed to completely rile not just the Congress government of Vijay Bahuguna but also the administrative staff involved in rescue operations at Kedarnath, Badrinath and Uttarkashi. But above all, he has also managed to bring home some 15,000 stranded Gujarati pilgrims.

The Gujarat CM, who flew in on Friday evening, held a meeting till 1am with his crack rescue team of five IAS, one IPS, one IFS and two GAS (Gujarat Administrative Service) officers. Two DSPs and five police inspectors were also part of his delegation. They sat again with the nitty-gritty of evacuation in a huddle that a senior BJP leader said lasted till 1am on Sunday.

Around 80 Toyota Innovas have been requisitioned to ferry Gujaratis to safer places in Dehradun as have four Boeings. On Saturday, 25 luxury buses transported a bunch of grateful people to Delhi. The efforts are being coordinated by two of the senior-most IAS officers of Gujarat, one currently stationed in Delhi and another in Uttarakhand.

via Narendra Modi lands in Uttarakhand, flies out with 15,000 Gujaratis – Times Of India.

 

No need to change the title. It is ludicrous enough as it is. Ignoring for one minute the stupidity of a CM flying in (most likely disturbing existing resuce operation) in order to save “his own people”, lets do some math.

  1. Luxury buses, 25 buses, times 60 people, times max 2 trips per 24 hour span = 3000 people
  2. Innovas, 80 cars, times 7 people, times 3 trips per day (in flood prone areas, I am being optimistic) = 1680 people
  3. Boeings, 4 planes, time 200 people, times 3 trips per day = 2400 people

So, even using wholly unrealistic assumptions on capacity and number of times per day, it seems that he would have quite some difficulty getting more than 7,000 people out in a day  (lets ignore the issue of gathering all these people in one place at once for boarding the Boeings or busses) … a far cry from 15,000 certainly.

But of course, kindergarden maths is not what this is about, so for some more intellectually fleshy thinking about it read it all on Kafila.

Oh, and in recent news: Plants talk

Abstract

Background

Both competitive and facilitative interactions between species play a fundamental role in shaping natural communities. A recent study showed that competitive interactions between plants can be mediated by some alternative signalling channel, extending beyond those channels studied so far (i.e. chemicals, contact and light). Here, we tested whether such alternative pathway also enables facilitative interactions between neighbouring plant species. Specifically, we examined whether the presence of a ‘good’ neighbouring plant like basil positively influenced the germination of chilli seeds when all known signals were blocked. For this purpose, we used a custom-designed experimental set-up that prevented above- and below-ground contact and blocked chemical and light-mediated signals normally exchange by plants.

Results

We found that seed germination was positively enhanced by the presence of a ‘good’ neighbour, even when the known signalling modalities were blocked, indicating that light, touch or chemical signals may not be indispensible for different plant species to sense each other’s presence.

Conclusions

We propose that this alternative signalling modality operates as a general indicator of the presence of heterospecifics, enabling seeds to detect and identify a neighbour prior to engaging in a more finely-tuned, but potentially more costly, response.

via BMC Ecology | Abstract | Love thy neighbour: facilitation through an alternative signalling modality in plants.

Protesters against rape arrested

Early in the morning today Thursday (13th June) there was a protest in the wake of the two latest gruesome gang-rapes and killing in West Bengal. They peacefully sang and held placards, an offense for which the police responded by brutally manhandling and arresting the protesters.

Early in the morning today Thursday (13th June) there was a protest in the wake of the two latest gruesome gang-rapes and killing in West Bengal. They peacefully sang and held placards, an offense for which the police responded by brutally manhandling and arresting the protesters.

http://storify.com/linuskendall/peaceful-protesters-against-rape-dragged-away-and