Where the barren desert begins, and lines of concrete high-rise buildings change into ashen sand, the road leaving Yazd passes two hills. Both are topped with plain, circular walls. These are the towers of silence, the last place of rest for Zoroastrians.
The walk up the hills carries me about 100 meters skyward. The path ends with a series of steep steps to nothing but some uneven rocks, which I have to climb, along the wall, to the other side of the mound. The entrance is a simple opening in the lines of the stone. I bow deeply to pass through.
This is where Zoroastrians brought the bodies of the dead and left them lying in the open. Burial contaminated the earth, so corpses were laid bare for the sun and birds. Inside the walls, there is little else than rings of tiled floor surrounding a hole filled with rocks and sand.
Apparently these constructions are no older than two centuries, nothing more than a blip in the full age of the religion. Built well after the downturn of the ancient faith, they served the Zoroastrian community in Yazd.
The ruins have hollow feeling to them, like any sacredness attached to them had been long lost. Where only priests walked, decayed rubble.
I watch local youngsters with motor bikes race up and down the path to the hills. Some of them stop on the top, as far as they can get on their bikes, and let their horns sound towards the skylines of the city. As I return back down, they greet me with joyous shouts of “Hello mister!” So much for towers of silence.
» No comments.
(This is unlikely to function in RSS viewers, please follow the link.)
Google Earth makes it drastically easier to locate maps and images of the planet and jump between different scales. One of the silly pastimes it allows is to spin the globe wildly and pick some random spot to zoom in to. Obviously, most of the time it is a boring, unfocused bit of water. Whenever you hit land, there is one thing curious about it. Almost wherever you focus on, you would see signs of people: Patches of fields like a pale Mondrian painting, roads dividing the landscape, or just vast stretches of inhabitation. When no signs of humans were visible, one usually doesn’t have to let the program slide for long in some aimless direction to come across them.
This is, to me, a tangible and concrete display of the sheer size of human influence over the globe. For a playful demonstration of the same principle, the images above display the landscape from 9 randomly chosen places within Europe. It shows in just a glance the monotony of human-built environments in our continent. I experimented also with taking the pictures from North African deserts. Somewhat surprisingly they often produced more variant shades of colour and appealing shapes.
The places are chosen by your browser and will be changed by refreshing the page. For simplicity’s sake, the spots are selected from within a rectangle that has Dunkerque and Odessa as its opposite corners.
For a similar type of argument see the Google Maps application for anthropogenic biomes.
» No comments.Premium summer journalism: marvelling at how hot it is. From Metro:
Brits to swelter as temperatures hit new high
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Baking Britain is set to hit record temperatures again as the country sweltered in the grip of heatwave conditions.
…
The weather has prompted the Government to set up a heatwave advice page on its own Directgov website as NHS Direct received hundreds of calls from patients suffering symptoms related to the heat.
With the heatwave hitting areas around London hardest, legions of workers swapped their suit trousers for shorts and took extended lunch breaks to make the most of the weather.
Staff should be encouraged to wear shorts during the sweltering heat to make work more bearable and prevent them “collapsing” at their desks, the TUC urged.
But I get the feeling that something is not right when the following is news as well. From Metro yesterday:
» No comments.Hottest June for three years
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Soaring summer temperatures and a scorching end to the month have given Britain its hottest June for three years, according to figures out today.
With temperatures climbing to a sweltering 30C and above, the last month was the hottest, driest and sunniest since July 2006.
Measured against the average over the period of 1971 - 2000, sunshine hours in England and Wales, was 222 hours, which is 117% of the 1971-2000 average, according to figures from climatologist Philip Eden. The equivalent figures for Scotland were 227 hours, 129%, and for Northern Ireland 261 hours, 142%.
…
I went for a nature walk in the centre of Europe’s largest metropolis. The Barbican is running a nice exhibition with the title Radical Nature. Though I found the land art described inside mostly quite trivial, some of the installations are quite intriguing. Well worth a visit. The best part of it was however Secret Nature, a guided walk to explore wild plant life within London, to see the uninvited green things within the concrete structures of the Barbican and the surrounding City of London.
Our guide was a very sympathetic fellow from the Royal Horticulturalist Society, with a bristly gray beard and thick glasses. A striped collared shirt was tucked into trousers that were raised well above his waist. He spoke delicate sentences with long pauses, as if to make sure no word was misplaced. He gave the impression of a man with a passion for categorization and order.
I was genuinely surprized of the variety of wild plant life that was there, in the cracks of asphalt, struggling for space in the kept green spaces, in the small holes of walls barely able to keep the necessary moisture. They were not just blunt weeds and hay, but also colourful flowers. Some of them had apparently escaped from inhabitants’ flower pots and were making a run in their newly found freedom. Such wild urban flora had previously completely escaped my attention. It was indeed like a secret, one that no-one cared to hear.
The guide had some delightful stories about the origins and journeys of the plants. They spread via birds and the lunch boxes of city workers, or were earlier carried in the bowels of horses pulling the beer into the local pubs from the country. Some had come from as far as China and Indonesia. The most fascinating case was a small yellow flower that looked rather commonplace but in fact originated from Mount Edna. It had been introduced to the Oxford Botanic Gardens sometime in the 17th century and had soon began spreading along the walls of colleges. When the railroad arrived, the cunning plant advanced along the rails propelled by trains. (I find these stories amusing when they are told as if the flora acted with full intention - I suppose it is particularly justified in the case with the uncultivated plants that make their moves regardless of people.) It had now made its way into the square mile. The City is obviously one of the main hubs of the globalized world, drawing in people from everywhere and directing the flow of the world’s funds. Some of its guests from far away lands go mostly unnoticed.
» 1 comment.Bradford Cox on yksi pop-musiikin luovimpia artisteja, yksi harvoja joka onnistuu kolistelemaan raja-aitoja ja tuottamaan samalla lähestyttävää ja nautittavaa musiikkia. Cox laulaa kuin eläväisempi rock-versio Trickystä, huokaillen ja antaen ässien sähähdellä ja rähistä. Keikalla hän polkee jonkinlaista kaikulaitetta edessään, joka levittää äänen eteeriseksi nauhaksi taustalle. Tämä luo kummallisen vaikutelman: Cox vääntelee naamaansa ja tuntuu huutavan, mutta sanat saapuvat myöhässä ja pehmeämpinä, jääden ilmaan kiertämään. Näkyvä ja kuuluva tuntuvat kulkevan eri tahdissa, kuin 90-luvulla katsoessa elokuvia tietokoneelta. Keikka noudattaa suureksi osaksi Cryptogramsilta tuttua kaavaa. Terävä grungepop, jossa mekaaninen rumpali lyö kuin rumpukone, katoaa välillä suhiseviin, muodottomiin äänivalleihin, niin kuin Radio Helsinki katoaa Lahden moottoritiellä.
» No comments.
This is a picture of the connections between my Facebook friends with each other. It is possible to make them with a Facebook application and some rather unfriendly analytical software.
Graphs are a fascinating form of information. They don’t have a single, unambiguous visual representation. The network could be drawn in endless different ways. The software available has some fancy formulas to group the nodes that have many connections close to each other. It takes a little tinkering, but when you get it right you start to see certain groups forming. These aggregations are not based on any preset classifications, but rather a manifestation of the links between the points - or in this case, people. This is at first slighly confusing, as it requires looking at the labels of the dots (not displayed here) to even come up with an interpretation of what one agglomerate is.
The results are unsuprising. The different different aggregations are mostly based on the different cities I’ve lived in. There are people from Vienna, Oxford, Berlin, and Finland in general with very few connections between them. My acquaintances from Africa create a hexagon, linked only within themselves. The software is able to discern also subgroups within the larger city-based camps. In Helsinki, the swarm of spots on the bottom right corner, it is possible to separate three smaller clusters with some satellites. These are groups of friends from university, from my high school and other people from Lahti. Oxford shows similar distinction between people I know from college and the department. These clusters stand out despite the fact that, within the larger group, everyone is heavily connected with each other. Another neat display are the few links between the larger groups. These actually consist only of people that have happened to move from one locality to another, from friends that have visited me or people whom I’ve happened to know in two of the cities.
One of the early visions about the Internet, still kept alive by some techno-optimists, is a dream of being completely virtual, without limitations of the material or spatial, like a digital spirit without a body. There is little sign of that here. Despite all this social networking, the networks of my friends are still fully place-bound. Our dematerialized society seems to consist of us meticulously recording and keeping track of all the connections we have established, mainly through good old-fashioned sporadic face-to-face meetings. Networking sites don’t encourage us to form new links so much as they help to make a precise copy of the connections formed outside them. The upside of this is that social forms become traceable, calculable. Our communal lives can be followed and drawn up, if only to show that the same old limitations persist.
» No comments.Olin viikonlopun B:n vieraana ja katsoimme elokuvan Pather Panchali, intialaisen klassikon 50-luvulta. Kyseessä on ensimmäinen elokuva Satyajat Raylta, joka on ilmeisesti kova tekijä kotimaassaan, sen verran innostunut B hänestä oli. Ray oli tehnyt filmin amatöörinäytteliden ja olemattoman budjetin varassa. Se esittää pienen maalaiskylän elämän ja kuoleman kiertoa hitaan ja vähäeleisen, kekseliään kerronnan kautta. Upeaa mustavalkoista kuvaa maailman värikkäimmästä maasta.
Häkellyttävin kohtaus tapahtui kuitenkin jo ennen itse elokuvaa. Heti DVD:n käynnistyttyä ruudulle ilmestyi pariksi sekunniksi värikkäisiin koristeltuihin asuihin pukeutuneita ihmisiä äänekkään laulun saattelemana. B selitti, että kyseessä oli hindulainen rukous. Ensin luulin että kyse oli jostain uskonnollissävytteisesti levitysyhtiön mainoksesta, mutta B selitti että välähdyksen kohteena eivät tosiasiassa olleet lainkaan kuluttajat. Pätkä oli lisätty levylle sen uskonnollisen vaikutuksen vuoksi, jotta jumalat soisivat yhtiölle onnea. Kyseessä on siis eräänlainen mekaaninen rukous, jota katsojien näytöt ja kaiuttimet valjastetaan toistamaan. Hindujen jumalat ovat niin suurpiirteisiä, etteivät erottele ihmisten tai yritysten välillä, he eivät välitä toistaako rukouksen vakuuttunut uskovainen vai ajatukseton kone, kunhan mantrat tulevat lausutuksi.
» No comments.
On one of my first days free from the university, I was still held captive by a book concerning revolutions, and since I was in Paris, I wanted to find some. The Carnavalet museum hosted a good collection of paintings and memorabilia of the city’s tumultuous past, even when the most precious pieces have been brought to the Louvre.
Since the museum presented information only in French, I had a great deal of trouble following the pulses of revolutions of the 19th century. The pictures were also of little help, since the representation of separate events barely differed from one another. There were heroic depictions of fighting on the streets blocked by barricades, the long preferred method of uprising. Both romantic portraits of the martyr leaders as well as depictions of the horrors of terror were displayed.
In the rooms covering the late nineteenth century the style of pictures changed abruptly. This was the time when Haussmann designed new boulevards for the city, creating new walkways that were broader and brighter than the city had seen before. The avenues were meant to be places where the newest fashion items could be acquired and spectacularly put on display. On another note, they were also wide enough to prohibit any blockade of barricades. With impressionistic strokes, the later paintings show the colourful life on these streets. They celebrate a formal equity achieved through the struggles of previous centuries: In principle, everyone was free to come to the boulevards and take part in the spectacle. At the same time they point to the real inequity, most evident in caricatures of the newspapers, that is created in the exclusion of such consumption.
Today the Haussmann boulevards are under a siege as vicious as the barricades, despite the defense of their increased width. In fact they are beleagured precisely because of it: They are filled with cars, transformed into major transport routes. Amidst all the traffic, anyone would be hard pressed to find spectacular display of city life.
» 1 comment.% wget ‘http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22china+*+coal+*+plant +every%22&num=30′ -U X -O -|perl -p -i -e ’s-<.?b>–g;s/std>.*?(China.*?)[.,<?!]/@\1\n/ig’| sed -n -e ’s/.*@\(C.*\)/\1/pi’|uniq
China is adding a large coal fired plant every week to ten days at this point
China opens a new coal fired plant every day
China is building a new coal-fired plant every week generating unprecedented levels of pollution
China opens another coal fired plant every 8 days
china adds a new extremely dirty coal power plant on line every week
China's building a new coal-fired plant every few days
China is building a new coal-fired plant every week while the US directly follows China
CHINA building 1 coal fired power plant every day
China builds one coal fired generating plant every three days
China commissions a new coal-fired plant every 5 days
China's commissioning of 1 coal-fired power plant every week
China is bringing on a coal-fired plant every 10 days
China opens another coal power plant about every week but anyway
China alone opens a new coal-fired plant every 4 - 7 days
China commissions a major coal-based plant every 5 days
China continues to add another coal burning power plant every 10 days
China is building one new coal-fired plant every week
China is opening a new coal fired plant EVERY 10 days
China apparently brings another coal power plant online every week
China build one coal power plant every week and no action
China not to build a coal-fired power plant every week
China one new coal power plant every five days
China is building a new coal-fired plant every week and shake their heads
China fires up yet another coal burning plant every 5 days
China - a coal power plant goes up every two weeks
China is building a new coal-fired plant every week and shake their heads
China is building 1000 MW of coal-fired plant every few days and India the same every two weeks
China builds one coal power plant every week
China opens another coal-burning plant almost every week
Assembling some empirical material for a paper, I get to linger on one of my favourite pastimes: reading newspaper articles. Though when they all are about carbon mitigation, the story gets old rather quickly. Some rather amusing pieces still shine through, particularly the attempts of the affluent working on climate issues to bring their private lives in line with their ambitions. The standard procedure is naturally to offset, but the Prince of Wales wouldn’t settle for such a platitude. From an article in The Times:
Travel by public transport rather than chartered jet or helicopter is the key, but such a reform is likely to be achieved only partially. One possibility being looked at is that the Prince should travel between Highgrove and Clarence House by catching an ordinary scheduled train at Kemble, his local station, which would take him into Paddington. But when one is a Prince security is an unavoidable issue, and if he caught the 10.46 to London a first-class compartment would have to be sealed off and guarded.
He is believed not yet to have caught the train.
Using the royal train would at first sight appear to be more eco-friendly than taking the BAe146 jet or getting into a chartered helicopter. However, given the size of the Prince’s entourage its coaches are never full, and some reckon that, per capita, it could be even less emission-efficient than air travel.
It ain’t easy being a prince! Luckily some inventive chap in his team later came up with a solution:
» No comments.The Prince of Wales became the first member of the Royal Family to use their newly converted eco-friendly train. He arrived at Scarborough station on the Royal Train which now runs on fuel processed from waste vegetable oil and will cut CO2 emissions by 19 per cent. The Prince was visiting a hospice and a Georgian museum refurbishment in the seaside town. He also met one of the town’s most famous residents, Sir Jimmy Savile.