[PHOTO] The Galleria Italia, AGO, from below

The Galleria Italia, AGO, from below
Originally uploaded by randyfmcdonald

Frank Gehry's renovation of the Art Gallery of Ontario has many complex spaces. The above shot is an example, his wood-ribbed Galleria Italia facing Dundas Street West as seen from below while the reflective glass facade that can produce spectacular photos--like these two--at sunset as light reflects off isn't nearly so obvious.

[LINK] "épuration, crowdsourced"

The human flesh search engine, Alex Harrowell let us know at A Fistful of Euros, has come to post-revolutionary Egypt in the form of the Flickr group Piggipedia, "an effort by Egyptian Flickr users to pool their photos from the revolution and identify the plain-clothes cops and private thugs responsible for the worst of the violence, with a view to prosecuting them or failing that, just ostracising the hell out of them."



Last October I'd blogged about the human flesh search engine, and how Internet vigilantism might have been favoured by the Chinese government as a way to distract the potentially unhappy masses with visible, deserving targets for public anger. The human flesh search engine isn't only about that, though; the concessions made by China's officialdom to the desires of its Internet users is proof of those individuals' agency and their organization. Power comes down, and comes up, as people find new opportunities for its use. "If sex infects new media like a virus, yadda yadda William Gibson feh, just wait ’til you see how revenge does." Yes, pretty much.

[LINK] "Of Palaces and Politics"

The latest, unusual, episode of the ongoing drama over Macedonia--what is it, where is it, who has a right to claim Macedonian identity?--is described in Transitions Online by Ljubica Grozdanovska. The Macedonian government, it seems, has chosen to grant several dozen square kilometres of land to host a palace for the royal family of the Hunza people of northern Pakistan on the grounds of the latter group's claim to descent from the soldiers of Alexander the Great.

Around 140 kilometers southeast of Skopje, hard by the Greek border, lies the village of Paljurci.

In truth, it’s hardly a village, as no one lives here anymore. In 1908 Paljurci was attacked and burned to its foundations by Greek soldiers. Today it’s better known as the site of a dammed-up lake, and the only sign of former habitation is an abandoned well. Aside from that, the remnants of a stone wall mark the spot where the front line passed through here in World War I.

That’s all about to change. This tranquil spot, criss-crossed by armies for hundreds of years, is set to become the setting for a palace to house the royal family of the Hunza people of northern Pakistan. The Hunzas, who claim descent from the army of Alexander the Great, will get a grant of 37,000 square meters of state-owned land from the municipality of Bogdanci, in which Paljurci sits.

“We have decided to give this land as a present because they are descendants of Alexander the Great and the Hunza people feel like true Macedonians. Many citizens of Macedonia don’t feel like they belong to this country,” says Risto Ichkov, the mayor of Bogdanci and member of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party.

The gift has the blessing of the government but has shocked many historians into near speechlessness. And opposition parties argue that it is another step in the government’s “antiquitization” of the country.

The plan is part of a search for identity that Skopje has led the nation on, with the current government insisting that Macedonians are a part of the ancient race that goes by that name, countering decades of history lessons that traced the citizens of the present-day Macedonian state to the Slavic lands of the Carpathian mountains.

Skopje has embraced – some would say expropriated – the figures of Alexander the Great and his father, Philip II of Macedon, much to the irritation of Athens.

As part of its quest, the government commissioned the huge Skopje 2014 project to remake the city into a seat of neo-classical and neo-baroque architecture. Additionally, the name of the airport was changed to Alexander the Great, while the city stadium is now the Philip II of Macedon Arena.

[. . .]

As for the claims for the Hunza royals, Alexander’s army did reach into Pakistan, but a 2006 study in the European Journal of Human Genetics seemed “to exclude a large Greek contribution to any Pakistani population, confirming previous observations.” The researchers identified Alexander’s ethnicity as Greek, and that country has its own proxy in this fight over Alexander’s far-flung descendants. In the same region of northern Pakistan, the Kalashi people also claim to be descendants of Alexander’s army. A few years ago, Greece built a cultural center there and it finances some cultural activities in order for the Kalashi people to learn more about the ancient hero.

Macedonians got their first look at the Hunza people in 2005, when journalist Marina Dojcinovska traveled to Pakistan and made a documentary about them. Since then, she has been their link to Macedonia.

Go, read.

[LINK] "How Mongolian hordes reduced the Earth’s carbon footprint"

This io9 note, written by Alasdair Wilkins, makes an interesting point.

In the 1200s, Genghis Khan and the Mongolian army built an empire that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to central Europe, ruling over a fifth of all land on Earth and over 100 million people. And all that conquering reshaped the Earth, reducing carbon dioxide levels enough to offset a year's worth of gasoline usage today.

Stanford researchers considered four of the most traumatic periods in the last 1200 years - the Mongol invasions of 1200 to 1380, the Black Death that killed 25 million Europeans between 1347 and 1400, the European conquest of the Americas between 1519 and 1700 that killed as much as 90% of the native population, and the fall of China's Ming dynasty from 1600 to 16450. All these cataclysmic events involved tremendous loss of life and agricultural devastation, the latter of which can be traced in the historical record through analysis of soil samples.

Still, for all their human carnage and crop destruction, none of these events really affected the Earth itself in a fundamental way. The only exception was the Mongol invasion, which dropped global carbon dioxide levels by about 0.1 part per million. This made forests absorb back about 700 million tons of carbon dioxide, roughly equivalent to the amount released in a year's worth of gasoline demand.

Those might seem like major effects, but the last two hundred years of industrialization has created an entirely new scale. As lead researcher Julia Pongratz explains:

"Since the pre-industrial era, we have increased atmospheric CO2 [or carbon dioxide] concentration by about 100 parts per million, so this is really a different dimension.

Part of the problem is that heavy agriculture and deforestation elsewhere overwhelmed any local effects of these tragedies. The indigenous peoples of the Americas had a relatively small agricultural footprint, which means their mass slaughter and death had little ecological impact. The Black Plague and Ming Dynasties both took place over only about a half-century, which is too short a time-span for trees to regrow and new carbon to be stored.

Go here for the original study.

[LINK] "Predators"

Over at Love and Fiction Publishing, Clifford Jackman, fresh from his trip to Africa, speculates about what makes predators not only so successful, but so respected by human beings.

There is something boring about herbivores. They stand there and eat grass and look at the world placidly. Predators, on the other hand, have to hunt their food, and I think people have the idea that they are, and have to be, fitter, stronger, smarter than the other animals, that the predator is at the “top” of the food chain because of its merit, that it has won some kind of talent contest (the survival of the fittest) over the meek herbivores. As if there is almost a social hierarchy among the animals, with the lion (the biggest, strongest and most numerous predator) as the “king.”

And it's interesting to me how we seem to associate successful people, who have money or fame or success with the opposite sex, with predators.

The problem with this analogy is that predators are not, in fact, "fitter" than herbivores at all. They are, in fact, spectacularly lazy. Lions in particular are the most epically boring animals on safari. They lie on the ground, beating their sides with their tail, while antelopes gallivant less than a hundred yards away. Their whole bearing is one of indolent power, not restless hyper-activity (although it should be noted that the cheetah, alone of the big cats, always preserves an air of repressed energy even when resting).

As for predators being faster than their prey, well, that is simply incorrect. An antelope can outrun a lion without any problem at all. Neither are they particularly stronger. A giraffe can kill any African predator with a single kick. A lion does not have the faintest chance against a full grown rhino or elephant or waterbuffalo. Nor would I like a crocodile's chances against a full-grown hippopotamus.

And this brings us to the secret of the predator - that it is not in fact faster or more powerful than its prey, but instead simply chooses its opportunities very, very, very carefully. A predator is as indolent as possible, even during the hunt, to preserve its energy. A predator will attempt to separate a baby from the herd or target any animal that appears weak or lame. A predator does not earn its position through strength, speed, or any other meritous quality, but only cunning and a relentless drive to choose the safest option, without any concerns for honor, nobility, or fairness.

"Perhaps the real message is we should be careful drawing analogies between people and animals." Perhaps. Perhaps, as Clifford also suggested, the message is that the ideas and people we may favour aren't intrinsically superior so much as they benefitted from the predator's sense of timing.

Anyhow. Go, read.

[LINK] "The Rise of the Guardian Coup: The International Community and the Seizure of Executive Pow"

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money's Robert Farley comes this interesting paper abstracted below.

In this paper, we use new data on coup d’etats and elections to uncover a striking change in what happens after the coup. Whereas the vast majority of successful coups before 1990 installed their leaders durably in power, between 1991 and 2001 the picture reverses, with the majority of coups leading to competitive elections in 5 years or less. We argue that with the end of the Cold War, outside pressure has produced a devel- opment we characterize as the “electoral norm” – a requirement that binds successful coup-entrepreneurs to hold reasonably prompt and competitive elections upon gaining power. Consistent with our explanation, we find that post-Cold War those countries that are most dependent on Western aid have been the first the embrace competitive elections after the coup. Our theory is also able to account for the pronounced decline in the non-constitutional seizure of executive power since the early 1990s. While the coup d’etat has been and still is the single most important factor leading to the down- fall of democratic government, our findings indicate that the new generation of coups have been considerably less nefarious for democracy than their historical predecessors.

Farley's annotation bears copying:

I would suggest that an increase in the density of military-to-military ties, as well as a qualitative change in the content of the norms transferred through those ties, probably plays a large role in this finding. In any case, it’s very good news for Egypt. It’s also interesting that the protesters as a whole seem to perceived the military in a way that’s compatible with this finding, even though Mubarak stacked the senior leadership with his own people. While we wouldn’t want to assume that the impact of transnational ties was determinative, there nevertheless appears to be strong reasons to believe that they had some effect.