What it means to be a teenager

“We have this complicated idea of what it means to be a teenager,” said Karen Sternheimer, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Southern California. “We’ve redefined adolescence as an extension of childhood, whereas it used to be a precursor to adulthood.”

New York Times, September 4, 2008

Little girl and a fish

Have a look at this picture taken 3 years ago. At the time I felt it came straight out of a storybook and felt lucky to have captured it.

I've received a mail requesting permission to use it, and agreed to it.

Now it's going to illustrate the programme for a (poor) Theatre Production in Tennessee (!) of the play "Kingfisher Days" by Canadian writer Susan Coyne. I'm trying to get my hands on the play itself. But they'll send us a copy of the programme once it's printed, and I'll be credited, so I'm quite pleased to be able to participate across the world to it :)

"How can he remember well his ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use his knowledge?"
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854-

"Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive. (...)

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.
"Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
-Nicholas Carr, Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2008-

Women and their self-defeating ways

"When women make their image about youth and sexuality, and not about intellect, that's kind of a dead-end road. So I think it's a combination of self-entrapment and entrapment by society."

-k.d.lang- Interview in The Guardian, 16 July 2008

The dangers of banality

"The danger of banality is an insidious one. Banality weakens our intellectual, spiritual and ethical muscles, rendering us flabby thinkers, unable or unwilling to chew over the difficult matter of experience and make it part of us. The connection between the banality of evil and the evil of banality is the danger of a surrender of our human powers of discrimination. We always need to be discriminating, and we always need to be working on refining our powers of discrimination, or one day we might find we can no longer distinguish between a human being and a widget."

The dangers of banality, by Harry Eyres, Financial Times, June 30 2008

Liberty?

I declare that I am free, therefore, I am free.

I declare that I am free, but am not actually free to be who I want to be, to think what I want to think, to practise what I want to practise, to walk in the streets safely, to represent myself in my own name. Am I really free?

We are all aware that a certain degree of restraint to freedom is an essential component of social life. It is an essential component of any community life (social, international)...

Where do we draw the line? Kosovo declared on Sunday that it is free. It decided for itself. It stopped waiting for Serbia to say so. It will likely be free in name only, for a while, since Serbia has already attacked a couple of outposts manned by the UN and Kosovan forces.

Are Israelis today hostages of their neighbours in their perpetual fear of being attacked by suicide bombers or are they free because they created a state that calls itself free?

Will Kosovo be free from the simple act of saying so? It's a start. And inasmuch as it gets the support from a number of countries (U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Saudi Arabia are a few), it can gradually make its place in the "free" world. But Serbia is intent on encompassing territorial integrity in its idea of freedom to be the Serbia it wants to be. One can argue that bombarding a province to prove to them how much you want them to be part of your territory is the bad way to go about things.

Somewhere in the 20th century, fighting a war to defend your land became bad. This was not always the case. It is still not a unanimous stand. Kosovo, a new country? Or Serbia an amputee? Not an easy one to solve.

"Better is the patient spirit than the lofty spirit. Do not in spirit become quickly discontented, for discontent lodges in the bosom of a fool." -Ecclesiastes 7:8-9, NAB-

And so came the cyclone...

...that did not come...

At 8h00 this morning, we were informed of the strength of the tropical storm Gula and of its proximity. We were told by the Meteorological Services that there was a likelihood of moving to a Warning Class 4, the highest, during the day. We took out the bread bought on the eve, started stirring the batter for cakes, and getting ready for a morning of house-bound waiting. The usual expectant feverishness swathed the island (except for those who were deep asleep and had no clue).

At 8h45 this morning, we were informed that all cyclone warnings had been removed, that the cyclone was moving away from the island and that the probability of cyclonic winds (120 km/h) was almost nil.

Satellite pictures and accounts on various websites showed no change in trajectory and apparently a small change in intensity. The mystery remains on how fast revelations reached our Meteo Services between 8h00 & 8h45. What is not mysterious though are the Mauritians' feelings when they all had to spring to their feet, iron their outfits, run to the shower, gulp their breakfast down, and go and get stuck in traffic on the highway trying to reach office for half-day's work. Or when they were told that winds of up to 100 km/h could still prevail. Or when they had to find someone to keep their kids because under sudden removal of warnings, work resumes but school does not.

The centre of Gula passed at about 150 km west of Mauritius, with generally rainy but calm weather so far. I'm guessing next time a Meteo guy comes to the radio, there's going to be some ragging.

Tuer pour rendre heureux

"Rien ne justifie la guerre. Jamais.

Et plus elle devient meurtrière, plus les prétextes qui la déclenchent relèvent de l'insanité. Un paysan qui défendait à coups de fourche le blé qu'il avait semé avait quelque raison de tuer et de mourir. Mais nous voyons aujourd'hui l'humanité prête à s'engager dans l'engrenage de l'imbécillité totale: chaque camp est persuadé qu'il n'y a qu'une façon pour l'homme d'être heureux: la sienne. Et il est prêt à imposer ce bonheur à l'autre camp par la force, c'est-à-dire par la guerre, c'est-à-dire par la Bombe. Au nom d'un certain bonheur, chaque moitié de l'humanité est prête à détruire l'autre moitié, sachant bien qu'elle périra du même coup. Tuer tous les hommes pour les rendre heureux, telle est l'absurdité fatale, que ne refusent pas d'envisager ceux qui dirigent le monde humain. Il est bien évident que toute intelligence et toute volonté sont absentes d'une telle détermination. Ici se voit clairement la sujétion de l'espèce et de ceux qui se croient maîtres de ses destinées à des lois dont ils ne soupçonnent même pas l'existence. L'aveuglement des hommes n'est pas moindre que celui des bobacs."

- René Barjavel (1966), La faim du tigre-

"Comment" et "pourquoi"

"Nous allons jeter, dans cette étrange caverne, un simple regard de profane. Un regard candide. Le regard de quelqu'un qui ne prétend pas savoir pourquoi quand on lui a expliqué comment."

- René Barjavel, La faim du tigre -