12/21/2012. Some say the end is near.  But there’s still time to watch the best music videos about Doomsday.

Tool – Ænema

“Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon – I certainly hope we will” sings Maynard James Kennan. Here, the end of the world means “fret for your figure and fret for your latte and fret for your hairpiece and fret for your lawsuit and fret for your prozac and fret for your pilot and fret for your contract and fret for your car.” Released in 1996 on the Ænima studio album, the song invokes a new beginning, a smoothing of a space striated by a labyrinth of crap. What better song in a time of self-inflicted World crisis. Rejoice, therefore, “my friend … I’ll see you down in Arizona Bay”.

The fan-video above shows the song text. Adam Jones, Tool’s bass player made a video for the song using stop-motion animation, available on the Salival CD/DVD box.

Wagner and Lars von Trier – Isolde’s Tod

„Heller schallend, mich umwallend, sind es Wellen, sanfter Lüfte? Sind es Wogen, wonniger Düfte? Wie sie schwellen, mich umrauschen, soll ich atmen, soll ich lauschen? Soll ich schlürfen, untertauchen? Süss in Düften,  mich verhauchen? In dem wogenden Schwall, in dem tönenden Schall, in des Weltatems, wehendem All, – ertrinken, versinken, – unbewusst, – höchste Lust!“

Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) would have preferred to listen to Beethoven’s 9^th, standing upright, with a glass of red wine in her hand: the perfect bourgeois doomsday gesture. “This is a shitty idea” says Justine (Kirsten Dunst). There is no mask of dignity, no face to keep facing the end of life in the Universe – only melancholy and infinite sadness.  We should take refuge in our childhood dreams, our shelter of hope that makes us, that will have made us human. The most important question to ask ourselves is what we want to have been. Shall we have loved, shall we have hoped like Isolde, or shall we have aped tragic postures? A question that might also give some perspective to many World-preservation ideologies, whatever, green or identitarian, they might be…

Omega massif – Exodus

Speaking of perspective, there is no such time scale as the cosmic one. Compared to it, even geology appears as a science of the event. Exodus takes you right there. Turn up the volume!

REM – It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

There was a time when MTV played music, and a time where a low-budget video could make you happy.  The song was released in 1987 on the Document album. It’s been made into a video by the team of the American painter and director James Herbert, who’s made close to twenty REM videos. It depicts a teenager rifling through an abandoned, collapsing rural home. The floor is covered with old toys. He displays some to the camera. He stands up, holding the photograph of somebody in outdated clothes – we think of his father. The end of childhood is the first kind of a world’s ends. The end of adolescence is another. Some of us were teenagers ourselves when the video was released. But hey, we feel fine. We even have kids on our own.

For the anecdote, the skateboarder’s name is Noah Ray, a boy from Athens, who now fronts the punk band “Music Hates You”, that earned Best Punk/Hardcore Band and Best Live Band honors in the 2006 Flagpole Magazine Music Awards.

More Doomsday songs

No list is exhaustive. For more Doomsday songs, see It’s the End of the World as We Know It: 25 Songs for Judgment Day this post by Pat Pemberton.

Once Unlocker installed, just left-click the file you want to edit and release it from ArcMap’s lock.

Select unlocker in the contextual menu.

Set your file free from ArcMap

The two faces of food sovereignty

Of course, the question of food sovereignty in Switzerland takes very different tonalities than it would in Africa, Latin America, or South Asia. The country’s economy is overwhelmingly dedicated to the tertiary sector, it is flourishing in comparison to its European neighbors, and its population isn’t certainly exposed to problems of famine or malnutrition in the near future. The question of food sovereignty is therefore more linked to the conservation of agriculture as a mode of life, and as a part of the commercial image of a rural Switzerland that, in effect, has worked as a great touristic attractor for more than a century. This also implies that the Swiss question of food sovereignty will have nationalistic undertones next Wednesday, since the national mythos is deeply rooted in the country’s agricultural past. This mythos also bears the memory of the “Wahlen Plan”, an agricultural program set up by the Swiss polititian Friedrich Traugott Wahlen in the years preceding and during WWII, in order to prevent war-induced food-shortage (the program never achieved more than 70% of food autarcy, or even less according to certain sources).

Besides this relativization of the question in the Swiss case, one could generally ask whether a discussion on food sovereignty really has the entire place it needs in the national parliament of a single country. World climate change and population increase, factors of dominant impact on agriculture, are matters of planetary concern, and the question of food can only be efficiently discussed at that scale. Highly varying scenarios in terms of food productibility in diverse regions of the world, including Switzerland, can also be imagined: in the long term, national retrenchment might turn out being a very bad strategy.

On the other side, the industrial world has reached an unprecedented degree of exploitation of remote lands. Nation states that now discretely compete for the fertile soils might one day end up in open conflict. Land grabbing, the newest practice in terms of externalization of the agricultural production, reaches extraordinary proportions in low GDP countries, notably in Africa. As an example, 400’000 hectares of soil are rented in Soudan by the US-based company Jarch Capital (source: International Food Policy Research Institute). China rents only 300 hectares to Tanzania for its rice production, but also 5 millions of hectares to Zambia and Congo for making biofuel: another practice in contradiction with the food sovereignty of our planet. The Swiss company Addax Bioenergy participates in the phenomenon by renting 14’000 hectares to the peasants of the Sierra Leone.

The question of food sovereignty is thus mostly interesting if asked in terms of slowing down the agricultural expansiveness of certain countries, to which Switzerland belongs. Thinking about how to cease to live beyond the means of one’s soil could also be seen as a way of maintaining world peace.

Some numbers and the question of meat and milk

Now, biofuel kept apart, a weighty factor in the Swiss agricultural needs is the consumption of meat and dairy products. For every five human inhabitants of Switzerland, the territory also counts six chickens, a pig, and a bovine. In 2010, Switzerland produced 500’000 tons of meat, half of which pork, as well as 4 millions of tons of milk. This sums to 55 kg of meat and almost 500 liters of milk per capita. But the average Swiss consumes more than that and, by this choice, forces himself to import meat, notably poultry, of which more than a half comes from abroad (sources : Union Suisse des Paysans ; Office Fédéral de Statistiques).

Consumption of meat in Switzerland in 2009

Even the meat produced in Switzerland has something imported in it, since the animals are partially fed by matters coming from abroad. The importations of hay, for instance, have reached record level last year with 167’000 tons. To this, add 282’000 tons of soja press cake (tourteaux de soja), 91’000 tons of forage corn, 68’000 tons of forage rice, 62’000 tons of forage barley (orge fourragère), 42’000 tons of colza and sunflower press cake as well as other matters (source: Fédération Suisse des Producteurs de Céréales) ; in all more than a million of tons of vegetal (and animal) matters imported to feed cattle.

This need to import is all the more impressing if you consider the extent of indigenous production of forage: 32 millions of tons, whose culture uses 70% of the Swiss agricultural surfaces (surfaces agricoles utiles) without counting the part of bread grains that actually end up in the stomachs of livestock. Most of those agricultural surfaces are natural or artificial prairies, half of which are situated in a zone of plains and hills, where many other cereals or vegetables could be cultivated. In other words, « there is some leeway », and a significantly higher degree of food sovereignty – whatever its ideological foundations – is plausible… under condition of absorbing less meat and dairy products.

Agricultural surfaces in Switerland, 2010.

Switzerland counts 8 million of inhabitants today, and will count 10 millions in 2050. The planet will probably breach 9 billion at the same date, with growing inland demand in today’s food-exporting countries. If the Swiss maintain their current diet, the need for a massive importation of meat and forage will become both more insistent and more difficult to organize. It is a good thing to reflect on how to change course. In this respect, a debate on food sovereignty might be a good training for our phantasy. To seriously envision this objective would certainly require an intensification of the discussion between dieticians, peasants, land planners and agronomers. One of the astonishing facts that becomes visible in the figure below, for instance, is the relatively small amount of meat being consumed, in comparison with cereals and vegetables, considering the extent of its import and the amount of space allocated for its production. One can also observe the much greater energetic conversion of cereals. Unfortunately, publicly available data of the Swiss Federal Office of Statistics doesn’t say what part of the actual tons of food are being imported or home-grown. Nevertheless, 32’000’000 tons of home-grown forage, compared to the only 3’600’000 tons of vegetal food consumed every year by the Swiss, seem to leave some margin for land-use conversion…

Consumption by product type. Switzerland, 2009

If what the numbers suggest is true, the solution to food sovereignty consists neither in a raise in indigenous food production advocated by right-wing parties, nor in a radical decrease of consumption advocated by the radical green left, but in the optimization of consumption with regard to overconsumption of meat and dairy products. We should be able to tell how many hectares of crop of which type are needed to provide the human bodies of 10 million of citizens with everything needed for a healthy life, as well as how to organize the culture of these crops in order to avoid soil degradation under the specific climatic and conditions of Switzerland. If the idea of food sovereignty is to be taken seriously, research projects in this sense must be concluded in the near future. The expected outcome is not to impose a technocratic solution to human diet but to get a better perception of what part of food importation results from necessity and what part from a particular diet choice.

Hopefully the debate of the National Council will not sink into obscure nationalist concerns. But if one absolutely seeks a Swiss specificity, it can best be found in the low relevance that vegan or strictly vegetarian diets would have in the country. Half of the usable agricultural surfaces remain in alpine zones, unfavorable to the culture of cereals or vegetables, but favorable to pasture and forage production. A possible model of a « Swiss sovereign food diet » would then be a vegetarian one, embellished by occasional meat and dairy from the Alps. Meat would become a pleasant luxury and a social gathering around the event of its preparation. The change of diet would bring about a better health, and perhaps even more pleasure in the taste of meat. Whosoever will can even consider it as an expression of identity.

For further reading

Christian J. Peters, Jennifer L. Wilkins and Gary W. Fick, 2007, “Testing a complete diet model for estimating the land resource requirements of food consumption and agricultural carrying capacity: The New York State example”, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, Volume 22, Issue 02, June 2007, pp. 145-153.

- Hey, this looks like a sunset! he said.

- Or a sunrise, she said.

- For a sunrise, he said, there’s not enough grey. Not enough morning dew.

- There’s dew all right! she said. Could be an impressionist painting of the pixel age.

- You’re sweet guys, the guy at the desk said.

- But what is it, actually? she said.

- EU’s per capita domestic product from 1998 to 2011, expressed in “purchasing power standard” (PPS). To get the PPS, you divide the per capita GDP by the purchasing power parity index. It says, more or less, how much stuff an average person can afford in one’s own country. Red means the lowest, blue means the highest. Yellow’s intermediate. By definition, it’s set to 100 every year, meaning 100% of the EU per capita GDP. Deep red means: the average person in that country can afford only 26% of what the average European affords. The years go from left to right. I’ve ordered the countries according to PPS values in 2007.

– The year when the US housing bubble blows.

- But, she said, if the average is set at 100 every year, you don’t really see an evolution.

- No, you’re right. Or let’s say: you see the evolution of the differences between European countries. You could have a column of yellow only, if variance dropped to zero. But it doesn’t.

- The upper left corner region is the most red, and the lower right the most blue. What does that mean?

– It either means the poorest countries evolve to become more average, or that the average is becoming poor. It also means that the gap between the richest country and the EU average keeps on growing

- Luxemburg’s so blue! the first guy said.

– The average Luxembourger can buy three times as much as an average European does. I guess Switzerland’s like that too, but it’s not in the picture. It’s in the middle of Europe, but it’s not there.

- Bulgaria and Romania start off in deep trouble, but it gets better every year.

- They evolve towards the average. That doesn’t mean better, though. Last year, university lecturers working full time in Romania told me they still depend on subsistence agriculture. On weekends, after the lectures, they fetch food at their parents’ farms.

- Look at the Baltic States. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had some serious fallback in 2009. It becomes always more yellow, and then ‘bang!’, it’s red again.

- They’ve been hit harder than others by the Global Financial Crisis.

- Unlike Malta. It seems to rebound then, after eight years of relative decline, though. I don’t know why.

- Perhaps it just doesn’t get as bad as elsewhere.

- Greece and Portugal get the blow in 2011. The UK too, actually, only there, we start of more greenish in 2010. There’s some buffer before falling in deep red poverty.

- For me, the most intriguing are the “dew countries” in the lower part of the frame.

- What?

– You know, the yellowish-greenish ones, like morning dew above the blue line of Luxemburg.

– Or the evening fog.

– At moments, they turn bluer, at moments, they become yellow again. As if they couldn’t condensate more wealth. As if it was evaporating as fast as it condensates.

- I’m afraid they just oscillate around the average, said the guy at the desk. Remember, yellow means average, not more or less.

- Average is so unpoetic, the first one said.

The one at the desk laughed.

– Average is all we got. Look, I got rid of the country names, and I’ve adjusted the line heights to the population sites. It’s something like a time-series cartogram. Now you see how many Europeans live in the average, how many struggle more then others, and how many get walthier or poorer over the years.

– Seems like most Europeans live in the fog of average wealth, she said.

– And a quarter of them struggles to survive.

- Hey, where’s Luxemburg? she asked.

- It’s got only half a million people. You can’t see it on this map.

Tools: Excel (conditional formatting for the first figure and line height for the second one), Illustrator.

Data source: Eurostat data provided on the INSEE site.

To restore it, just save the following code as a .reg file and run it (thanks to Archos alias Limneos for posting the code on a SevenForums):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt]
"PerceivedType"="text"
@="txtfile"
"Content Type"="text/plain"
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt\PersistentHandler]
@="{5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}"
 
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\.txt\ShellNew]
"ItemName"=hex(2):40,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,\
  6f,00,74,00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,\
  00,6e,00,6f,00,74,00,65,00,70,00,61,00,64,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,2c,00,\
  2d,00,34,00,37,00,30,00,00,00
"NullFile"=""

PS: in case you’re wondering what the hex code in ItemName means, it just stands for “@%SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe,-470″. This means that standard Windows notepad is used to create the file, but just to create it. This has no impact on the default .txt file editor and double-clicking the created file will just open it with whatever you defined as such.

Windows 7 acts way too smart sorting files by names to my taste. On more ancient versions of Windows (e.g. Windows 2000) the sorting order would be something like this:

• Ie4_01
• Ie4_128
• Ie401sp2
• Ie5
• Ie501sp2
• Ie6

On Windows Vista, XP, Server 2003, or 7, however, you would get this order:

• Ie4_01
• Ie4_128
• Ie5
• Ie6
• Ie401sp2
• Ie501sp2

As you can see, the newer versions don’t stick to sorting, they try to interpret file names, deciding for you that Ie401sp2 is a number that should come after Ie5! This is very tedious when you try to keep your filenames organized, especially when you use alphanumeric prefixes to do so.

Luckily, a Microsoft web article gives a solution.

Open your Windows registry.

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Currentversion\Policies\Explorer

Add a new DWORD with  value: “NoStrCmpLogical”

Set it to 1.

That’s it. Now Windows 7 sorts your files as it should, without fancy sub-algorithms, from 0 to z.

First image taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover, landed on Mars in the morning of August 6.

This morning August 6th, after fourteen years of planning and months of anxious waiting, the Curiosity mars rover has landed, sending as a proof of its success a fisheye picture of pebbles, dust, and its own shadow on the surface of Mars.

It is the largest and most advanced machine to ever land on another planet. In its one-ton iron belly pounds a nuclear heart. From now on, it will talk to us, across millions of kilometers, about Mars’ past. And since every story also contains a wish for its own pursuance, it will also tell us about its future, about our future, on Mars and on Earth.

Curiosity shall look for water, condition of life, and for methane, trace of life as we know it. It will perhaps give more ground for our dreams of a new life on Mars, a human life. But it can also corroborate our hidden fear: knowing that where life once had been, remains only iron dust. A foreboding of a future in which Earth, too, is only home to the shadows of whispering machines.

He will never know exactly who hatched the expulsion order, or why. Even today, long time after his death, the political confrontations around his character remain mysterious at times. In the little Swiss town of Yverdon, for instance, right wing liberals went to great lengths to prevent his work from being commemorated in their streets. In 1912 already, the controversy raged around the bicentenary of the philosopher. The French nationalist Maurice Barres then denounced Rousseau as an “apostle of all anarchies”.

Rousseau, in his lifetime, perceived only the effect of the “dark construction” (édifice des ténèbres) whose paranoid shadow follows him in any shelter. The expulsion from Saint-Pierre is not his first, but this one is different: it marks the end of two “the happiest months of his life,” spent alone, feeling his “own existence without bothering to think”, as he wrote in his Confessions and his Reveries:

“The various soils of which the island, though small, was composed, offered me a sufficient variety of plants to study and to rejoice seeing for the rest of my life. “‘When evening approached, I walked down the peaks of the island and I was happy to sit by the lake in a hidden sanctuary; there the sound of the waves and the agitation of the water layed my senses to rest, chasing all other agitations from my soul, plunged them into a delicious reverie; and the night often surprised me without me noticing.”

He shall find similar conditions only in the grave, in which he’ll be laid on a small island, in the lake of René de Girardin, in Ermenonville near Paris, in the shade of poplar trees. Soon, however, some murderers of the century also came to commune with themselves in this fresh shade: Marat, a native of Reunion Island; Bonaparte, who shall rule, one day, on the parody of an empire – Elba – before his final fade-out on the island of St. Helena. Four years before the birth of Bonaparte in Corsica, the island had asked Rousseau to write its constitution. But the same year Bonaparte was born, the island lost its status of autonomous republic. Its constitution, as Rousseau had written on St. Peter, never enters into force.

Shortly after the philosopher’s death in 1778, however, ten islands similar to his last refuge in Ermenonville, and bearing Rousseau’s name, spread in Europe: the “Rousseau Island” in Geneva, in Worlitz (Saxony-Anhalt), in Berlin’s Tiergarten, in Arcadia Park near Nieborów (Poland).

The peculiarity of the “Rousseau Islands” is that none is far from shore. Only the water of a lake, or a pond, isolates them from the surrounding continent, and from the men who inhabit it. Sometimes there is simply no water, only poplars around a mound of earth, like the “Tomb of J. J. Francois Rousseau” erected by Maurice de Lacy in Neuwaldegg near Vienna. Metaphorically speaking, these islands are perhaps all replicas of this delicate solitude, where man, confronted to no-one, limited only to the capacity of his body, and with nature as his only entourage, can only be “good”, whoever he is.  It is probably easier to be a saint, when isolated from the world and from the sounds of the city, where one sees only “walls, and street crimes”, as Rousseau did. And no doubt more obvious to be “just” when unexposed to friction with otherness – that otherness who can bring forward the ugly creature living in the depth of anyone, but who everybody denies being…

Most Rousseau Islands shall suffer flooding. The one in Geneva is hosting a pub. That of St. Peter ceases to be an island in 1878, becoming a peninsula following the correction of the Jura waters. Rousseau’s body is not to be found on any of them. He was transferred to the Pantheon in October 1794, upon the decision of the Thermidor Convention, a few months after the beheading of Robespierre, who, too, had communed with himself, one day, on the Island in Ermenonville. Cities seem to possess a certain power to absorb their opponents in their necropoleis.

The ephemeral fate of the islands, meanwhile, testifies of a nature very indifferent to the idyllic image the philosopher draws of her. A nature who cares little about its own “idyllic” role and status, in short, but a fragile idyll nevertheless, if the word “idyll” is to designate an environment welcoming to the human species and nature.

As for Rousseau, finally, the most fitting tribute to his life may be found in the Ballad of the Adventurers by Bertold Brecht:

Sickened by sun, with rainstorms lashing him rotten

A looted wreath crowning his tangled hair

Every moment of his youth apart from its dream was forgotten

Gone the roof overhead, but the sky was always there

Oh you, who are flung out, alike from heaven and from Hades

You murderers who’ve been so bitterly repaid

Why did you part from the mothers who nursed you as babies

It was peaceful and you slept and there you stayed

Still he explores and rakes the absinthe green oceans

Though his mother has given him up for lost

Grinning and cursing with a few odd tears of contrition

Always in search of that land where life seems best

Loafing through hells and flocked through paradises

Calm and grinning, with a vanishing face

At times he still dreams of a small field he recognises

With a blue sky overhead and nothing else

Colored proportional circles cannot be drawn directly on polygons, but they can be drawn on points. Thus, all you have to do first is to put your polygon data into point data. In the following example, I will be using a pre-existent point layer of commune centers to map data pertaining to the communes. This is a standard cartographic practice when mapping with symbols, as the populations you map tend to concentrate, well… in those centers. If you were mapping, say, climatic data, you would put your circles on the spots of the measurement stations. If you don’t have such a point layer, you can make one, for example by using Data Management Tools > Features > Feature To Point. In this example I already have my commune centers:

Points and polygons

The next thing to do is to add thematic data from polygons to points. You can do this by the “join” method, based on the spatial locations. Every point falls inside a polygon, and gets its data. The new point layer will be saved wherever you want, under whatever name.

Joining data from polygons to points

Usually, you have raw data only, given in absolute values. Colored circles are useful above all when you want to show both proportional and absolute values. Proportional values should be rendered as color shades, and absolute values as symbol sizes. In this example, we will show the population of women per commune, and their relative importance, given in per cents of the total population. We have to calculate these per cents. This can be done by first opening the attribute table of our freshly produced point layer and by adding a field:

Add a new field to the attribute table

We shall name our new variable “pct_femmes”:

Then we use the field calculator to get the percent of total population. Note that I use the Python language in my script. VB works too, but looks slightly different :

Now everything is ready to produce proportional circles. Right-click on your point layer to open its Properties. Under the Symbology tab, choose Quantities > Graduated colors. Pick your relative variable (“pct_femmes” in our case) and your color ramp. Than click on the “Advanced” button and pick “Size…”. In some cases, you might need to “Apply” first, otherwise “Size…” remains greyed out.

As my size variabe, I pick “P00BWtot”, which, in my case, is the absolute number of women. I divide it by 100 to limit the size of my circles. Log() or another transformation can also be applied, in order to smoothen the variation of circle sizes.

Picking a variable for circle size

This is it, your bivariate symbol map in ArcMap, you’re done…

Bivariate symbol map in ArcMap

… or almost done. Apparently, symbol “size”, in ArcMap, defines not the surface of the circles, but their diameters. There is a π * r^2 factor you have to account for in your formula. π being a constant, you can skip it if you wish, but you need to square-root your values if you wish your circle areas to be proportional to them. Thus, “Sqr ( [Sum_P00BWTOT]/ 3.14)” or simply “Sqr ( [Sum_P00BWTOT])” is what you want to use as for your Advanced Size expression.

Further, as you can see on the figure above, ArcMap does not take into account circle overlapping. If you don’t want your large circles to hide the small ones, you have to order them by size, in descending order of your population variable (in our case Sum_P00BWTOT). In ArcMap, sorting your table in table view won’t be enough for this purpose. You need to sort your dataset in the dbf file, which is only slightly more tedious. Use ArcToolbox > General > Sort to do this:

Sorting data in ArcMap

An alternative method would be to order the dbf file associated with your layer with some external software, for example Libre Office Calc. But I will not get into the details of this here. Using the methods described up to here, this is what you get. This time you’re all set:

Bivariate symbol map with sorted overlapping circles in ArcMap