When the wind and cold/warm air currents collide while snowing, you get the funny “snowing upwards” effect (and sideways also, of course). The 5ºF “real feel” is not so funny though 
When Émile Durkheim wrote on the concept of anomie (expanding on Jean-Marie Guyau’s work) in his 1897 book Suicide, he spoke of one end of anomie: a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion causing a destructive mismatch (moral deregulation and an absence of legitimate aspirations).
This is happening in the XXI century world, in many countries: those totalitarian (military or religious) societies where the social rule, expectations, and repression conform a cage around individuals, deposessing them of their individuality, their aspirations, subtly (or otherwise) imposing a social corset where the individual can not be itself, concentrating only on breathing, surviving.
But, on the other side of the spectrum, in many other countries (and more surprisingly and hypocritically, in many of those described above) the opposite also leads to anomie: the lack of social coherence, with the vanishing of values, identity, and a group project to contribute to. Places where institutions loose their credibility in a sea of corruption, double talk, and abuse. Where groups’ concerns are only objectual (money, possessions, looks) but never include the individual, the person.
Left or right, up or down, too-rigid or non-existant values… forces pulling us appart. Polarized forces tearing us down. Forces which can only lead to one exit…
Tomorrow, January 21st, 2012, NY
As I walk towards my office, I see an ad that makes me sick (as a matter of fact, I see many, but this one points to something other that the consumerism-sexism-excess that we are so dangerously getting used to).
The ad says “Turn now into memories”. How wrong is that?!!
Now is now. Now has to be now. Now should be now. Now has to remain now.
When you strive to “turn now into memories”, you are missing out on the real now. Like those parents that take the camcorder to their kids matches, record everything… and then realize they did not watch nor enjoy the game because they were worrying about “capturing everything” through a little tiny viewer or screen. Like those lovers who incessantly snap pictures of their loved one, stopping at the surface, missing on the real beauty which is within, in every gesture, look, attitude, word… or like those “a snapshot for Facebook” fake smiles of groups of (generally adolescent girls, but not always) people at a bar, bunching together, showing off thick layers of make-up and long rows of teeth gritting rather than smiling.
[You don't have to read Adorno, Lacan, Danto, Munro, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Ortega y Gasset, Santayana, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Margolis, Kant, Hume, Heidegger, Hegel, and the rest to be able to be critical about the gaze. I know you get the point]
There is value, and need, in storing, in being able to review, and particularly in being able to share. But let’s not turn that into the whole point.
Live. Now.
Enjoy. Now.
It is always NOW.
Thanks to Sara, there is a very easy way to add code to your site to protest against SOPA:
Drop the following code in between your two <HEAD></HEAD> tags on your site, your users will be redirected to the blackout page that describes what you are doing and why.
<script>
window.location = "http://protestsopa.org";
</script>
Then, when the protest is over, simply remove the added code. The protest is starting at 12am on 1/18, and lasts 24 hours.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia_anti-SOPA_blackout
To: English Wikipedia Readers and Community
From: Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director
Date: January 16, 2012Today, the Wikipedia community announced its decision to black out the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours, worldwide, beginning at 05:00 UTC on Wednesday, January 18 (you can read the statement from the Wikimedia Foundation here). The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that, if passed, would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.This will be the first time the English Wikipedia has ever staged a public protest of this nature, and it’s a decision that wasn’t lightly made. Here’s how it’s been described by the three Wikipedia administrators who formally facilitated the community’s discussion. From the public statement, signed by User:NuclearWarfare, User:Risker and User:Billinghurst:
- It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.
- Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.
- On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations.
In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently,
- We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.
- But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or, if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.
The decision to shut down the English Wikipedia wasn’t made by me; it was made by editors, through a consensus decision-making process. But I support it.Like Kat and the rest of the Wikimedia Foundation Board, I have increasingly begun to think of Wikipedia’s public voice, and the goodwill people have for Wikipedia, as a resource that wants to be used for the benefit of the public. Readers trust Wikipedia because they know that despite its faults, Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place. It’s not aiming to monetize their eyeballs or make them believe some particular thing, or sell them a product. Wikipedia has no hidden agenda: it just wants to be helpful.That’s less true of other sites. Most are commercially motivated: their purpose is to make money. That doesn’t mean they don’t have a desire to make the world a better place—many do!—but it does mean that their positions and actions need to be understood in the context of conflicting interests.My hope is that when Wikipedia shuts down on January 18, people will understand that we’re doing it for our readers. We support everyone’s right to freedom of thought and freedom of expression. We think everyone should have access to educational material on a wide range of subjects, even if they can’t pay for it. We believe in a free and open Internet where information can be shared without impediment. We believe that new proposed laws like SOPA—and PIPA, and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States—don’t advance the interests of the general public. You can read a very good list of reasons to oppose SOPA and PIPA here, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.Why is this a global action, rather than US-only? And why now, if some American legislators appear to be in tactical retreat on SOPA?The reality is that we don’t think SOPA is going away, and PIPA is still quite active. Moreover, SOPA and PIPA are just indicators of a much broader problem. All around the world, we’re seeing the development of legislation intended to fight online piracy, and regulate the Internet in other ways, that hurt online freedoms. Our concern extends beyond SOPA and PIPA: they are just part of the problem. We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone.On January 18, we hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.Sue Gardner,
Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Yesterday, along a MeetUp group, we visited several art galleries in Chelsea (NY): Mike Weiss Gallery, Gladstone Gallery, Luhring Augustine Gallery, Metro Pictures Gallery, The Pace Gallery, and Mary Boone Gallery.
Leaving my personal comments on the displayed works aside (as usual, the pleasure of this kind of pilgrimage is to leave your mind and senses open, and let the works and stimuli slowly sink in), one thing surprised me quite a lot: Ai Wei Wei‘s work Sunflower Seeds was supposed to be walked on (at least it did at the Tate Modern in London, for the first 10 days of the exhibit), but at Mary Boone Gallery there is a security guard that prevents visitors from doing exactly what the artist intended.
Ai Wei Wei's Sunflower Seeds © Mary Boone Gallery
After discussing this with the gallery’s official, I understand that the Tate has many more resources, and can afford to re-arrange the seeds every so often, and Mary Boone can’t. But, in that case, are they distorting what the artist intended? Up to what point a DIFFERENT work is being displayed?
Art, if it does not make you feel or think… it isn’t. Some would say.
To top it all off, dinner at Blossom was impeccable.
AccuWeather has an interesting system called RealFeel. For example, today is 22ºF, but when you step outside, you can’t help scream “Shit, it’s cold!”. Accourding to the AccuWeather’s RealFeel system (which I assume takes into account more than just humidity, like wind), it feels like 10ºF. What it does not take into account is if you forgot your hat, scarf, or gloves (then you are lost, even if you wear UniQlo’s HeatTech undies)
My friend Victoria Contreras is a real Renaissance artist, what we would call today a hacker artist: one that explores different media, different methods, different interest, in a bold, almost childishly uninhibited playful way. While the influences are obvious, and not everything is on the same level (as is always the case in those who try it all), this is what I would call “a case of interesting people”.
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