Sunday, August 10, 2014

Rattus Rattus

You often see many rats on the rail tracks in Mumbai. So I started to form a heroic image of them in my head: Rats, the true survivors. Because really, do they really want to hang out in sewers or is it just that they can without being killed!


Further investigation into the evolution of the city rat, led me to the lesser highlighted information of our genetic cousins:
Social intelligence
A 2011 controlled study found that rats are actively prosocial. They demonstrate altruistic behaviour to other rats in experiments, including freeing them from cages. When presented with readily available chocolate chips, test subjects would first free the caged rat, and then share the food. All female rats in the study displayed this behaviour, while 30% of the males did not.[19]

And if they write this (the below) about rats, I wonder what could be said about the humans :)
Rats as invasive species
When introduced into locations where rats previously did not exist they cause a huge amount of environmental degradation. Rattus rattus, the black rat, is considered to be one of the world's worst invasive species.[38]As part of island restoration some islands have had their rat populations eradicated to protect or restore the ecology. Hawadax Island, Alaska was declared rat free after 229 years and Campbell Island, New Zealand after almost 200 years. Breaksea Island in New Zealand was declared rat free in 1988 after an eradication campaign based on a successful trial on the smaller Hawea Island nearby.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat)

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

"Flora"

images
dance technique
skin grabbing your bone
intensive
changed perception of body
what is dance, movement
went to darkness
in london
born blind, blind at 18
how to teach dance to blind
how to understand their own body
started reading philosophy
black box
camera obscura
4 m by 2 m
interviews with people with different eyesight
see only
how does it affect your life
what do you think reality is?
musician do add
sound track

An exciting start to curation for The Story of Light

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

paul

Jaya:

http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean#t-137501
i really hope i can push economic inequality as an agenda for my freaking country to take up!

Paul:

Large inequality is indeed one of the things having most known negative externalities to a society. Therefore income taxes and progressive wealth taxes are needed to collect money and then distribute it to the less fortunate.

The extent of this egalitarianisation does have a limit though. Money may make people mean, but taking away all inequality will take away all incentves for people to do their best. Luckily we are all wired is way that something in us wants to do better than our neightbour. If that 'doing better' will not be translated anymore by money, people will start to dustinguish themsleves to the more powerfull in a different way, creating the crony, corrupt and kleptocratic systems we have seen in history so often and still see.

So there will need to remain a link between risk and reward. People who will use their talents and take risk will be better off than people who choose not to do that. Taking that incentive away is recepie for disaster.

But we are a greedy selfesh bunch and I believe that we want more all the time. When the bankers got bonusses of 1mln per year and they saw their peers got 2mln, they felt fucked over, when Chaves had done its 8 years of dictorial socialism he changed the law to be able to stay in power longer, putin will not stop stealing land after the Crimea invasion. If we think we can get something we want it and will take it and our brains will tell us it is our right to have it and that our cleverness got us there. Because our brain is wired this way we survived for so long and are now the most powerfull species on the planet.

So because we can't help ourselves we need some help. We need the governement to take away some of our income and capital and give it to the weak abd unfortunate. The governement needs to ensure the weak are protected by a propperly functuning legal system. They need to ensure all have access to propper education and healthcare. They need ensure governance of markets is healthy including transparency, sound supervision of law abiding business and force excesses out of the system by laws (for example cap bonusses).

Its not just governement though trying to cap our animal instincts. It should also be us customers influencing the good in the world by making the right choises. Our brains have a limit overseeing the consequences of the decisions we make, and if we are aware of the consequenses we rarerly rationally weight them. That is not because we are inherently unethical selfish or lazy, it is just bounded rationality. So each time we make a decision we should be reminded of the consequences. If we buy clothes we can include the condition of the Bengal laborer in our decision, if we buy meat we know how the cow had lived and how he was slaughtered, if we buy cigaretes it should show dying people to remind us we are killing ourselves, if we go fuel up our car at Shell we should have to do that standing in 1 meter of water reminding us about the global warming consequences. We humans just need to be helped sometimes a bit in our decisions. Read 'nudge'. Increasing transparency in markets and products will hugely help.

We are not bad people, we sometimes just do bad things. The systems around us can curb that for the better.

X

Monday, April 07, 2014

"the other"

"my other half"
i liked that about the first one
"the complementary whole"
i like that about the second one 
in both
i is immersed in the other
the separate between the together
the discrete within the continuous

Friday, February 07, 2014

Moving

I am not living in a forest.
The world has moved on.

(East Timor, June 2012)

Monday, January 13, 2014

"Aazaadiyan - Udaan (2010)"




Pairon ki bediyan khwabon ko baandhe nahi re, kabhi nahi re
Mitti ki parton ko nanne se ankur bhi cheeray, dheere dheere
Iraade hare hare, jinke seeno mein ghar kare
Woh dil ki sune kare na darre, na darre

Subah ki kirno ko rokein jo salaakhein hai kahan
Jo khayalon pe pehre daale woh aankhein hai kahan
Par khulne ki deri hai parinde udh ke choomenge
Aasman aasman aasman

Subah ki kirno ko rokein jo salaakhein hai kahan
Jo khayalon pe pehre daale woh aankhein hai kahan
Par khulne ki deri hai parinde udh ke choomenge
Aasman aasman aasman

Aazaadiyan, aazaadiyan
Maagey na kabhi, mile mile mile
Aazaadiyan, aazaadiyan
Jo cheenay wahi, jee le jee le jee le

Subah ki kirno ko rokein jo salaakhein hai kahan
Jo khayalon pe pehre daale woh aankhein hai kahan
Par khulne ki deri hai parinde udh ke choomenge
Aasman aasman aasman

Kahani khatam hai ya shuruwaat hone ke hai (hone ke hai)
Subha nayi hai yeh ya phir raat hone ko hai (hone ke hai)
Kahani khatam hai ya shuruwaat hone ke hai (hone ke hai)
Subha nayi hai yeh ya phir raat hone ko hai (hone ke hai)


Aane wala waqt dega panha hai
Ya phir se milenge do raahein
Khabar kya, kya pataa

The irony of the relationship between technology and idleness

One of the purposes of everyday technology (mobiles, laptops, etc.) is to make us more efficient. But we rarely use our 'freed up&...