Happy Anniversary Berlin!

• Another superb book from The Pragmatic Bookshelf guys: "The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated" brilliant! http://bit.ly/34JOUE @pragprog #
• I still have 6 Google wave invite left for anyone who needs one. Just PM me your Gmail address. #
• Are the Fort Hood shooting are another case of Sudden Jihad Syndrom (SJS) – http://bit.ly/2dyCfE #
• Are the Fort Hood shooting are another case of Sudden Jihad Syndrome (SJS) – http://bit.ly/2dyCfE #
• Metrotextual epidemic! "Apparently 22 percent of British men are signing SMSs to male friends with a kiss (x)." – http://tinyurl.com/yz6d3jo #

Zygmunt Bauman – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Liquid Modernity” is Bauman’s term for the present condition of the world as contrasted with the “solid” modernity that preceded it. According to Bauman, the passage from “solid” to “liquid” modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. Individuals have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don’t add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like “career” and “progress” could be meaningfully applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable — to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.

paco camino: Vintage Ad: The Erotica phone, 1984

Postcard Lenindenkmal Ostberlin 1989, originally uploaded by tomisteinberliner.

Love this photo. Was in Berlin recently and it is an amazing city.

A good review of a new book on the great European migrations of the 18th and 19th century.

“…The migration of the British people over the globe, including North America; with the aid of some state power, certainly – the general protection afforded by the Royal Navy, occasional military expeditions to pull the migrants out of trouble, charters and treaties – but not in order to dominate anyone. Rather, the aim was to reproduce British-type “free” societies, usually freer than Britain’s own, in what were conveniently regarded as the “waste” places of the earth. Belich calls this “cloning”. It was an entirely different process from the more dominating sort of “imperialism”, representing a different philosophy, involving different social classes, and mainly affecting different regions of the world. Belich believes that it was a far more important influence than what is generally understood as imperialism on the whole course of modern history.

Belich’s approach brings out two further features obscured by conventional models. First, “settlerism” was transnational, in several senses, quite apart from the obvious one that it pushed beyond national frontiers. Other peoples did it besides Britons or even northern Europeans: Belich has interesting sections on Iberian, Chinese and Russian movements of settlement, the last-named mainly in Siberia, uncannily similar in many ways to the great “Anglo” ones. Or, rather, the “Anglo” one; for Belich is insistent that the British colonization of Canada and Australasia, and the Americans’ opening up of their West, were not merely similar but essentially the same phenomenon, umbilically linked, to a far greater extent than national accounts of each of them – and especially the myth of American “exceptionalism” – would lead one to believe. That is the first thing you discover when the imperial element is filtered out.

The second is that this kind of colonization was not necessarily a case of the centre “exploiting” the periphery. Settlers positively sought out “oldland” goods and capital rather than having them forced on them. They arguably gained more from the exchange than the metropoles did. At the very worst, “exploitation was mutual”. The cultural ties between them were also voluntary. It was the Australians who wanted to retain their British identity, rather than its being forced on them, and Britain which eventually cut the tie between them (by joining the Common Market). Resentment over their rejection by Britain led Australians to reconfigure themselves thereafter, fashionably, as colonial victims; but for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Australians and Californians preferred to regard themselves as “co-owners” of the great British and American enterprises – even as superior partners: fitter, more democratic, less debilitated by “civilization”, “Better Britons” (or Americans) – rather than marginal to them. Some even dreamt of shifting the metropolises of their worlds to their new lands: to Bismarck, North Dakota, for example, which one optimist in the 1880s “predicted seriously would someday be the centre of Western civilization”. It was this kind of process and feeling that created what Belich calls the “Anglo-world”, and contributed – more than a more one-sided “imperialism” could possibly have done – to its success.”

Read on: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6845826.ece

This is an old and excellent article on Sir Halford Mackinder, the father of geopolitics:

“Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

One such scribbler currently ruling the world is the Edwardian geographer Sir Halford Mackinder. Oxford professor, MP and imperialist, Sir Halford was the intellectual architect of modern geopolitics and the thinker who put the idea of “the Heartland” at the centre of global diplomacy.

Today, he is more relevant than ever. As Russia and Georgia continue their hot and cold war over South Ossetia, as the Kremlin attacks the European Union for its “eastern partnership” policy towards Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, and as America and Russia tussle over influence in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan, Mackinder’s realpolitik vision is at its most active for half a century. Few recall his name, but our foreign policy is now played out in his shadow.

Mackinder’s fame comes from a rather dry lecture delivered to the Royal Geographical Society in 1904, entitled The Geographical Pivot of History. In it he made two dynamite propositions. First, that the globalised world — crisscrossed by steam, telegram and train — had become a closed system. Since there was nowhere left to colonise, the world had become a unitary space with every strategic advance by one nation necessitating a rival power to retreat. In this closed geographical context, diplomacy was a zero-sum game and geopolitics meant successfully squaring political power with geographical setting.

Second, the key to world power lay in “the Heartland of the Old World”, the Eurasian land mass stretching from the mouth of the Elbe in Germany to the mouth of the Amur in Outer Manchuria. This vast land mass included the Iranian upland in the southwest and part of the Mongolian upland in the southeast, but its core was constituted by the Russian Empire. In centuries past this terrain had been the pivot of world history as the Huns, the Mongols and the Magyars swept into Europe. Ranged against this “Heartland” sat the representatives of the outer fringe, the sea powers — Great Britain, the United States and Japan. And what geopolitics came down to was an ongoing struggle between the Heartland and the sea powers. Mackinder, as a loyal servant of the British Empire, was desperately worried that an expansionist Russia would act to the detriment of British imperial interests.

He explored these themes further during the 1919 Versailles peace conference in his most significant work, Democratic Ideals and Reality (tellingly republished this summer under the Faber Find imprint of lost classics). In contrast to President Wilson’s visionary rhetoric of democracy and national self-determination, Mackinder argued that the First World War victors should base the new world order not on lofty ideals but the hard geopolitical realities underlying history. And the most pressing of those realities was the threat posed by a united Russia and Germany. Mackinder’s thesis was simple: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; who rules the World Island commands the world.”

To prevent just such a terrifying power bloc, he advocated a cordon sanitaire of independent states in Eastern Europe — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary — to act as a bulwark between Germany and Russia.

Unfortunately, in Britain Mackinder was a prophet without power. “

Read on: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6838864.ece

Dopamine is thought of as the pleasure and reward neurotransmitter. New research is revealing that it is not quite a simple as pleasure drug: 

In the emerging view, discussed in part at the Society for Neuroscience meeting last week in Chicago, dopamine is less about pleasure and reward than about drive and motivation, about figuring out what you have to do to survive and then doing it. “When you can’t breathe, and you’re gasping for air, would you call that pleasurable?” said Nora D. Volkow, a dopamine researcher and director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Or when you’re so hungry that you eat something disgusting, is that pleasurable?”

In both responses, Dr. Volkow said, the gasping for oxygen and the wolfing down of something you would ordinarily spurn, the dopamine pathways of the brain are at full throttle. “The whole brain is of one mindset,” she said. “The intense drive to get you out of a state of deprivation and keep you alive.”

Dopamine is also part of the brain’s salience filter, its get-a-load-of-this device. “You can’t pay attention to everything, but you want to be adept as an organism at recognizing things that are novel,” Dr. Volkow said. “You might not notice a fly in the room, but if that fly was fluorescent, your dopamine cells would fire.”

In addition, our dopamine-driven salience detector will focus on familiar objects that we have imbued with high value, both positive and negative: objects we want and objects we fear. If we love chocolate, our dopamine neurons will most likely start to fire at the sight of a pert little chocolate bean lying on the counter. But if we fear cockroaches, those same neurons may fire even harder when we notice that the “bean” has six legs. The pleasurable taste of chocolate per se, however, or the anxiety of cockroach phobia, may well be the handiwork of other signaling molecules, like opiates or stress hormones. Dopamine simply makes a relevant object almost impossible to ignore.

Should the brain want to ignore what it might otherwise notice, dopamine must be muzzled.

From: A Molecule of Motivation, Dopamine Excels at Its Task – NYTimes.com

many similar words. Subtly different meanings. All definitions via onelook.com

Log
noun:  a written record of events on a voyage (of a ship or plane)
noun:  a written record of messages sent or received
verb:  enter into a log, as on ships and planes

Chronicle
noun:  a record or narrative description of past events
verb:  record in chronological order; make a historical record

Annals
noun:  a chronological account of events in successive years
noun:  reports of the work of a society or learned body etc

Record
noun: a compilation of the known facts regarding something or someone
noun:  anything (such as a document or a phonograph record or a photograph) providing permanent evidence of or information about past events

Diary
noun:  a personal journal (as a physical object)
noun:  a daily written record of (usually personal) experiences and observations

Journal
noun:  a daily written record of (usually personal) experiences and observations
noun:  a ledger in which transactions have been recorded as they occurred

Calendar
Noun: a list or register of events (appointments or social events or court cases etc

Timetable
noun:  a schedule of times of arrivals and departures
noun:  a schedule listing events and the times at which they will take place

History:
noun:  a record or narrative description of past events

Rory passed on this old but fantastic Pat Connell classic.

“They have tried to make it illegal to criticise evil. Its a bit like because thew bacteria are offended.”

Via YouTube – Islam’s war on freedom]