Counter Terra

Counter World Peace

Comrade Floris performs a figure ground reversal on the former WorldPeaceRadio and joins the counter-revolution. And updates his site with pictures of garden gnomes in a Belgian trailer park...

"If there would be WP, there would be no more reason for us to exist, and, we find WorldWarRadio somewhat pompous-sounding. On the other hand, we've simply capitulated to the bush-ite world and express that in the plain message of the homepage. We invite you to stand up, hand on your heart and yell with us this heartfelt statement, this new mantra."

Topography Via JPL

This press release announces the release of new topographic maps of the world by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory last week. Links to images are at the bottom of the page. Really gloriously beautiful things...

Bonus link: This image of the Hawaiian Islands.

Liberian Knickers

A brief blurb on the BBC gives a bit of explanation to some of the odd outfits you see among the soldiers in Liberia and other parts of West Africa.

I don't recall much of my little reading of things West African, but I do remember a bit in Jack Goody's Domestication of the Savage Mind (summarized here) that mentions the use of charms with juju and their power to ward off bullets going back at least 200 years. I believe the Ashanti, for example, used to wear dresses into battle covered in such amulets, each containing a scrap of paper with bits of arabic script written on them. I suspect the cross-dressing has a long history there as well.

Non-SF and More Enlightenment

Mr. Sterling points to this post regarding recent trends in science fiction. A comment on said post also has some bits from an "anonymous" reader of the Quicksilver draft.

...in Quicksilver the parallel is with the "age of enlightenment", wherein basic concepts were still struggling to be understood; the industrial revolution (when those concepts actually affected the real world to such a dramatic extent) didn't happen for another couple of centuries - this seems to me to be a more realistical appraisal of where we are at.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds

A really nice collection of material on mass human follies as found on Making Light.

19th century London's "wassup!": Quoz!

The politics of long hair:

When the Emperor Charles V. ascended the throne of Spain, he had no beard. It was not to be expected that the obsequious parasites who always surround a monarch, could presume to look more virile than their master. Immediately all the courtiers appeared beardless, with the exception of such few grave old men as had outgrown the influence of fashion, and who had determined to die bearded as they had lived. Sober people in general saw this revolution with sorrow and alarm, and thought that every manly virtue would be banished with the beard. It became at the time a common saying,--"Desde que no hay barba, no hay mas alma." We have no longer souls since we have lost our beards.

As well as such olde favorites as Tulipomania, relics, haunted houses, the Crusades, witch hunts, and my personal fav, The South Sea Bubble.

Every age has its peculiar folly -- some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined.

What's scary is how oddly relevant it sounds today.

GPS Landscapes

Here's a really neat collection of GPS drawings and art. There's something remarkably whimsical about this animation of children running about.
Also, here's a nice real-time GPS map project for Amsterdam.

I Cannot Disclose Its Nature

Drugs, AK-47s, and Juju. Street combat in Monrovia.

"Seven youths broke cover and emptied their assault rifles in the direction of the other side, a collection of shacks hundreds of metres away."

"The seven dashed back behind a wall, panting. It was the turn of David Kollie, 12, nicknamed Deputy, to lead the next wave. He wore a red headband, a yellow T-shirt which said "AK Baby, Man Moving, Man Dropping" and a serene expression."

"'I eat the leaf,' he said, 'but I cannot disclose its nature because that is a military secret.' Then he was on the bridge, firing away and joined by older boys, some with women's wigs and toenails painted blue. On Merclin Street a teenager with a bayonet jigged to the rhythm."

"It started to drizzle and some stripped off their T-shirts. Return fire pinged overhead and on the ground, ricocheting and chipping masonry but of little concern to Benjamin Mulbeh, strolling for cover to the beat from his ghetto blaster."

Via Die Puny Humans.

How to Bow

How-to-Bow is a very thorough primer on japanese business/social etiquette featuring scary flash characters. Notice how the senior-most manager is apparently expected to fall asleep during presentations.

"At the end of the work day when saying good-bye to the colleagues who remain in the office, one bows several times in short intervals and apologizes for having to leave early. The colleagues who stay in the office (usually the young workers or ladies, who commonly do not accompany their colleagues to the bar) express their understanding."

Also features useful information regarding eating sashimi, blowing one's nose, and using the bathroom.

As seen on Ethno:log.

The Art of Memory and The New Geomancy

Does the memory palace provide a good model for extensible, geo-friendly replacement mnemonics for DNS in the semantic web? Are spatial metaphors (decentralized and arbitrary, yet still machine-readable) better for human data navigation than well-established file hierarchies? Certainly, they should be a dimension of the possible metadata. I can't get my head around it. This post (which also references this interesting rant on DNS) got me thinking along such lines.