Not sure what to make of the name. My guess would be that the whole global warming/climate change/energy conservation hype of the last couple of month is finally showing some effects in real life and this is a sign of the the times to come. However the turkish contractor who was applying the lettering to the windows of the shop today (apparently the shop is going to open next week) attributed the ‘crazy name’ to a combination of the facts that the shopkeeper is Surinamese (implying that dictators are positive role models over there) and that the shop would sell energy drinks.
Seems to me that globalization is more or less complete as of today. Until today i was under the impression that half of everything comes from Shenzen and the rest of the pearl river delta (also see my post about CFLs from a while ago) and the other half of things comes from other places. Looks like this is not true anymore, as now even the red wine comes from China (seems to have something to do with the fact that KLM is having an ‘experience china food and wine festival’ on board of its flights):
Never knew that the chinese were producing wine (which is surprisingly(?) good) in the first place. The internet is kind of silent about this fact as well and mainly comes up with stories about wine consumption in china: Apparently it is all the rage in Bejing to drink your red wine with sprite and ice:
Today, people in Beijing have also fallen under the spell of red wine. […] However, every imported idea inevitably undergoes Sinofication. By mixing red wine with Sprite and ice, the Beijing people have already invented their own way of “bottom-upping” dry red wine.
Just tried this myself and personally i think it makes much more sense to drink your wine without sprite and ice (all the air hostesses on this flight now consider me a crazy weirdo).
Came across this installation in front of a small internet cafe/phone shop in Psiri in the center of Athens yesterday:
When i took pictures of it a guy the indian shopkeeper of a mini market across the street came out of his shop and asked me why i was taking pictures of this ‘ugly piece of crap’. Before i could even answer him the owner of the internet cafe came out and responded to him that this was ‘creativity’ not crap, to which i agreed. During the resulting conversation with Rana (the owner) which for some reason centered on the fact that he liked Amsterdam a lot (no not because of the legal dope or any of the usual reasons people have for liking Amsterdam, but because he had perceived Amsterdam as a place without the racism he encounters in Athens, which given the xenophobic tendencies in Holland in the last couple of years i found quite remarkable) he mentioned that he was a Bengali from Kolkatta. This sparked another round of insults from the mini market shop keeper, who insisted that Rana was in fact not a Bengali but from Bangladesh adding extra flavor to the earlier complaint about racism in Greece.
Since December 2002 i have been collecting press reports about migrants who have died trying to reach Europe for the noborder website. At the time of writing this the list has grown to 179 incidents with a total of 2009 reported fatalities and an even higher number of people missing who most likely have died as well. It is also safe to assume that the majority of such cases never gets reported in the press at all (according to spanish immigration officials about 6000 African migrants have died or gone missing on the sea journey to the Canary Islands in 2006 alone).
Over the last couple of days i have taken the data i have collected and mapped it onto google earth to get visual representation of the geographic distribution of these incidents. If you have google earth installed (it is a free download from google) you can download the .kml file here (right click to download) and have a look at the data yourself.
The visual representation of the data clearly shows that most migrants perish at sea. there are 4 big clusters of incidents:
One along the west coast of Turkey (mainly boats attempting to reach the Greek islands of Lesvos, Chios and Samos from the region around Izmir). The second cluster is along the route from Libya and Tunisia to Sicily, Lampedusa & Malta (the data for 2005 actually looks like a straight line from Libya to Sicily). The third cluster is around the strait of Gibraltar and the last cluster of drownings can be found along the West African coastline (boats from southern Morocco, Mauritania & Senegal attempting to reach the Spanish Canary Islands.
This last route has become especially popular (and deadly) in 2006: in 2003 5 incidents were reported around the Canary Islands, in 2004 there were 7, in 2005 9 and in 2006 the number soared to 23 reported incidents. This increase is commonly attributed to the fact that straight of Gibraltar and the Moroccan coast have become more heavily policed by European and Moroccan police and military forces so that sub-saharan migrants are forced to find alternative routes to Europe. One of these routes is the up to 1500 kilometer long voyage across the open Atlantic ocean from Mauritania and Senegal to the Canary islands which are part of the EU. The increase of deadly ship wrecks is clearly illustrated by these two screenshots showing the incidents from 2005 and 2006 respectively:
At the same time the number of incidents in the strait of Gibraltar seems to be pretty stable at a low level, which probably does not mean that this route is still as widely used as it once was, but that it used to be a relatively safe route (no wonder give that the distance to travel is 100 times shorter) and that people are forced to take more risks here as well.
The risks of crossing the Sahara are believed to be higher than crossing the Mediterranean or the Atlantic. In response to increased restrictions in North Africa, border and police officials tend to charge higher bribes, and migrants increasingly use secondary, often more dangerous routes through the desert.
Away from the seas migrants attempting to reach the EU also die in the minefields along the Greek Turkish border, get shot attempting to overcome the fences separating the Spanish exclaves of Melilla end Ceuta from the Moroccan mainland, freeze to death at the Ukrainian Slovakian border, get crushed by trucks on both sides of the English Channel and every now and then a dead migrant or two are found in the undercarriage of an airplane at one of the mayor european airports (sometimes also as far away as Los Angeles)
I have never really understood the appeal of second life. Don’t really like the esthetics and never really got the concept of hanging out in some fantasy world that makes no sense whatsoever (if you really need that you should probably just head over to dubai). Now i have been musing about energy consumption here before, but if it is really true what this number crunching blogger writes, the playing second life is not only stupid but outright sick:
If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,000 avatars “living” in Second Life at any point, that means the world has a population of about 12,500. Supporting those 12,500 avatars requires 4,000 servers as well as the 12,500 PCs the avatars’ physical alter egos are using. Conservatively, a PC consumes 120 watts and a server consumes 200 watts. Throw in another 50 watts per server for data-center air conditioning. So, on a daily basis, overall Second Life power consumption equals:
(4,000 x 250 x 24) + (12,500 x 120 x 24) = 60,000,000 watt-hours or 60,000 kilowatt-hours
Per capita, that’s: 60,000 / 12,500 = 4.8 kWh
Which, annualized, gives us 1,752 kWh. So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison […] the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.
This pretty much places people who play second life in the same league as those who drive SUVs in urban environments.
There is an amazing post about sewer systems under the big cities of Europe, America and Australian over at BDLGBLOG (amazing pictures as well!). It argues that the complexities of these sewer/tunnel systems is best being understood as more or less complex mathematical systems (knot theory):
Manchester’s storm overflow sewers, the rumor goes, are actually topological models. They are knot theory in built form.
Other rumors claim that a former student of that program is now Chief Engineer for the city of Brisbane, Australia, where he leads the construction of new civic infrastructure; every sewer and spillway built there is designed by him alone. As a result, each time you flush a toilet in Brisbane, a bewildering and exhaustively contorted world of concrete knots and brick culverts comes to life, engineered to faultless precision, washing everyone’s waste out to sea.
Manifolds, loops, toroids, even prime number sequences: the entire history of Western mathematics can be derived from the sewers of Brisbane, monuments of urban plumbing.
Whole thing reminds me of one of my favorite ever movies called Moebius in which a train on the subway system of Buenos Aires suddenly disappears and a mathematician is called in to examine the mystery. although the movie is student project of the Universidad de Cine in Buenos Aires it is extremely beautiful (if you like subway tunnels that is…)
It used to be pretty much unavailable (i even went to the Universidad de Cine and they did not have copies for sale) but it seems to be available as a torrent.
Yesterday night (while standing on my balcony listening to the radio) I realized that my neighbours must have a rather strange idea about my identity:
Dutschlandfunk (the german national news/culture radio station) has the annoying habit of playing the german national anthem at the end of every single day (and now during the german EU presidency they also feel compelled to play the European anthem, right after it). Now i tend to listen to Deutschlandfunk a lot (particularly the 23h to midnight wrap up of the days news) and this means i end up playing the national anthem every other day or so. To my neighbors this must look (sound) as if i am some Über-patriotic weirdo who keeps misses his home country so much that he has to listen to the national anthem before being able to fall asleep. Guess i have to explain this to my neighbors (or better someone should tell the Deutschlandfunk to stop this silliness).
Looks like someone has finally figured out how the world works. Hamza Mustafa, General Manager, The World, said:
This is a big step forward in the evolution of The World. […] I think few people understand how The World will actually work in reality
Unfortunately the website which records this bold statement does not go into any further details concerning how the World works, which is a bit disappointing – if you ask me.
Even more so as the world in question is the archipelago of artificial islands that is currently developed by Nakheel Properties off the coast of Dubai, and one could really expect them to know how their frivolous project of creating a world shaped archipelago is supposed to work – or not?
This is a trend that i had already noticed last December in China (not sure if in India): Energy efficient CFLs seem to be all over the place in areas like the Pearl River Delta with it’s rapidly growing energy consumption or Lebanon, whose power generating capacities have been severely reduced in the 2006 war (If you look closely at my pictures from Lebanon you will see that all but one light bulb are of the CFL type).
This is in stark contrast with the situation in Europe where these types of light-bulbs still seem to occupy a niche position. Now most likely this is due to the fact that we do not have the same energy constraints (yet) and can thus afford to happily wast our electricity, but a little bit of googling reveals that the fact that you do not see many CFLs around here (i do not have a single one in my house) is probably due to an altogether different reason:
Since 1998, China has become the world’s largest producer and exporter of the energy-saving lamps, changing the structure of a global market that was once monopolized by European and American companies such as Philips, GE, and Siemens-Osram. Chinese manufacturers supplied close to 1 billion CFLs worldwide in 2004. […] In the face of intense international competition, the low price of the Chinese-made bulbs has been the leading factor behind this growth.
[…] The European Commission imposed the five-year CFL duty in 2001 after the European Lighting Companies Federation, a trade group for European producers, claimed that China was flooding the market with cheap bulbs. The anti-dumping tariff was a huge blow to Chinese CFL manufacturers, who were dependent on exports for a large share of their market. Half the country’s CFL enterprises went bankrupt within the year, reducing the number of domestic producers from 4,000 to 2,000 in 2001, then to some 1,400 in 2002. To stay afloat, Chinese manufacturers shifted their attention to Asia and the Americas, regions that have imported more than 70 percent of China’s energy-saving bulbs in recent years. [source: worldwatch.org: China Pushes for Even Greater Share of World CFL Market]
So the real reason for not seeing lots of CFLs in Europe lies in the fact that the EU Commission decided to apply import duties on cheap CFLs from the PRC so that companies like Phillips, GE and Siemens can continue to make a little profit while we are happily wasting electricity. Makes me wonder about the European Commission’s sense of urgency even more than i did last week…
meanwhile... is the personal weblog of Paul Keller. I am currently policy director at Open Future and President of the COMMUNIA Association for the Public Domain. This weblog is largely inactive but contains an archive of posts (mixing both work and personal) going back to 2005.
