Missing: A Vase, a Book, a Bird and 10,000 Years of History

From the NY Times, on the destruction of Iraq’s cultural legacy:

Above all, scholars reacted as mourners struggling with an overwhelming loss. In Boston, Dr. Russell fought back tears as he described a sculpture from the museum he had seen in the 1980’s: a small carving of a bird, one of the earliest stone sculptures in existence, from around 8,000 B.C. “The archaeologists had found it literally in the hand of its ancient owner, who had been crushed to death when the roof of his burning house fell on him, evidently as he tried to save this piece,” he said. “In light of what’s happened in the past week, that’s very hard to think about right now.”

I just lost an argument with my two year-old son. He insists that Tweety Bird is a duck. I asserted that he’s a canary.

“He’s a duck.”

“A canary.”

“A duck”

“Why,” says I, “do you say that he’s a duck.”

“Because,” says Finn, “he swims and he has duck feet and feathers.”

I had never thought of Tweety’s feet as duck feet, but he sure doesn’t seem to have toes. And if Finn is right, and he has in fact been seen swimming, then the little old lady has a duck on her hands, and not a canary.

(Anyway, Tweety has hands, hair and eyelashes, so he must be a duck from Three Mile Island or something…)

First from the travel section of the Nashville City Paper:

“As we move toward summer, the hot spots of travel are Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where currency values have plunged to a rate (in both countries) of more than 3 pesos (Argentina) or 3 reals (Brazil) to the U.S. dollar, versus one to the dollar a short while back.

Steak dinners at parillas in Buenos Aires (and what tender steaks!) can now be had for $5, whole meals with wine in Rio for $7, taxis for $1, public transportation for 50 cents! And rates for getting there are just as cheap. From May to August (off-season in both countries and cities), Solar Tours (800/388-7652, www.solartours.com) has round-trip airfares of $360 to Buenos Aires from Miami, $440 from New York and $530 from Los Angeles (the price might get cheaper deeper into the summer), and round-trip rates to Rio of $380 from Miami, $450 from New York and $520 from Los Angeles.

Although several low-cost, less-than-a-week packages to these two sophisticated capitals are described below, you might want to consider simply buying a round-trip ticket to either city and fending for yourself (and spending a longer, more magical time) once there. The weather is mild; the setting terrorist-free; and the sights, activities, tango bars and samba clubs are legendary.”

And this from the Seattle Times:

“Dozens of workers took over the Brukman clothes factory early last year, complaining they hadn’t received their full paychecks as Argentina’s economic slump deepened. Today they are fighting the owners in court, determined to keep control of the plant and their jobs.

The red-brick building is one of about 100 factories, restaurants and other businesses that have been seized by workers desperate to save jobs.

After five years of a shrinking economy, one of every two Argentines lives in poverty and nearly one in five doesn’t have a job. The slump drove four presidents from office in quick succession beginning in late 2001, and it will be the overwhelming issue facing the winner of the April 27 presidential election.

Workers at the Brukman plant say they can’t afford to give up their jobs and will do anything to keep them. Of the original 157 workers, 57 remain. Some have learned bookkeeping, others meet with suppliers, and committees organize the workload.

“We’ve been on our own for one year and four months now. We feel better now,” said Jaques Holc, 66.

The workers have been evicted twice, only to be allowed back in with the help of sympathetic lawyers. The courts will ultimately decide who will win control in a process that could take months, or years.

Fearful they could be forced out again, several workers stand guard on the factory floor every night. They cook pasta in pans and sleep on mats beside their machines.

“These are our jobs at stake. We have to protect our livelihood,” said Alba Sotelo, 47.

Economist Eduardo Fracchia said Argentina’s 36 million people face daunting problems in reversing the slump that began after a wave of privatizations in the 1990s. He said many workers who have jobs earn less than $200 a month � barely enough to provide for their families.”

theory.sauna dialogues
an IRC transcript from net.sauna

OAF: Hi

HHeater: Hi Alexander! Welcome to the net.sauna.

OAF: Thank you for the invitation

HHeater: How is Stockholm doing; beautiful day there? It is blazing sun in Linz.

HHeater: The sauna stove was accidentally left on for the night, temperature in the sauna was 50 Celsius when I entered, almost 60. Now the door is open, cooling down for the beginning of our dialogue.

OAF: I don�t know anything about the weather – I have worked all night.

HHeater: I had a party instead. Would you like to dive in to talk about dialogue?

OAF: Nice feeling I liked your ? so how about a beer (danish).

HHeater: Thanks, pop it open. Sk�l. Kippis. I throw some on the stove also to get an aroma of fresh rye.

OAF: Wow sk�l to you too – but do you really think that it has so much to do with physical spaces?

HHeater: Dialogue, you mean? Ok. I will do an introduction to the net.sauna research…

OAF: ok

HHeater: We started out researching how intimate dialogue is related to an environment, a space with certain conditions. Also we were interested in looking at the cultural tradition of sauna as a dialogic space. Within the Ars Electronica framework, it has turned out that this quiet sauna space is rudimentary enabling factor for intense and intimate dialogues. Also, in chat environments, we are now on a password (door) protected channel. If it was open space, our dialogue could be interrupted at any moment… We attempt to move the metaphor of sauna as a dialogic space into the net.space.

OAF: Aha – nice idea – of course a dialogue can be intimate but is it always like that?

HHeater: No… there are several factors when dialogue is not intimate, for instance, a dialgoue in a space where there are other people, who have a different agenda, different will. I think chat is not = dialogue… I tend to see dialogue as a productive mode. You, as a philosopher having researched dialogue, how would you define it, and how would you see intimate dialogue as a concept?

OAF: I was just wandering in my brain and writing …. but intimate can also be that you know the persons or the rules – (I belive that dialog is a kind of play). And I think that a dialogue is productive, it must be so, but the dialogue also allow jumps to strange things – since it�s productive.

HHeater: Exactly, productiveness is about unexptected new links, like hypertext in corporeality. And yes, knowing your partners in dialogue is important, or having a shared ground.

OAF: But why are we afraid of to be productive? I mean to say it?

HHeater: I think productiveness has a heavy baggage from industrial metaphors…

OAF: Hm but now is it postpost to accept it? I don�t care but our thoughts of our time are interesting.

HHeater: Being part of a linear process, identifiable results (expected outcomes) is the industrial understanding of productiveness. Productive dialogue for me deals with innovation, delight, construction of knowledge and also understanding of the other person in the dialogue.

OAF: That must depend on a kind of scale or? Like fractals.

HHeater: Please elaborate on the scale and fractals…

HHeater: Sauna is getting steamy again; dialogue and human heat is replacing the machine generated dry air in the sauna. Dialogue is the fuel of human interaction; previous net.sauna dialogue logs are thrown into the stove to generate more intimacy through dialogic steam.

OAF: A scalpel (sharp knife) looks like a saw in a microscope – it�must be the same with a very non linear event in a smaller scale – it would look like a line.

HHeater: … please link that to the intimacy of dialogue… nice analogue.

OAF: Ho ho that one demands more beer. Sharp objects must be handled with trust.

The Egg Nebula

On September 27 and October 16, 2002, the Hubble Space Telescope pointed its Advanced Camera for Surveys at the 3,000-light-year-distant Egg Nebula in the constellation Cygnus. The view is nothing short of stunning � it is as if someone tossed a pebble into a celestial pond. The scene here is a composite image from three polarizing filters. Light from each filter has been colored red, blue, or green; the colors indicate different orientations of dust particles in the nebula.

The ripples are actually shells of gas and dust sloughed off in convulsions by the obscured, dying central star. Although it is hidden by a donut-shaped disk of thick, dark gas, beams of light from the central star do leak out, which in turn light the “pond.”

From Sky and Telescope