A pretty cool use of a blank Ukrainian building face. Though the symmetrical black squares do call to mind a combination of Tetris and Space Invaders—I'm not sure if that's an asset or not.

architecture, cultural worlds, games, gardens and cities, tourism, ukraine, words

Nate

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People of Lvov city in Ukraine decided to add another attraction for the visitors of their city. According to the artistic project it was decided to place a giant 100 feet (30 meters) tall at the wall of the one of the multi-stored residential houses.

There is one interesting detail about the design of the puzzle. It looks like an empty puzzle during the day-light, but at night when special lights are on the words in the puzzle become visible with a lightly-glowing fluorescent color.

The questions for this crossword puzzle are located in different point of interests of the city, like monuments, theaters, fountains etc. So people while walking around the city can try to answer the questions and writing down the answers. When the night comes to the city they can meet at this house and check their degree of intelligence.

Sometimes cultural objects—homespun cloth in Independence-era India, the predominance (in spite of pressure to import cheaper international varities) of locally-grown rice in postwar Japan—take their most profound meanings not so much from the object itself as from the technology (actual or implied) that is used to produce the object.

asia, clothing, cultural worlds, food and drink, horizons of the possible, india, japan

Nate

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When a modern Japanese family sits round the supper table eathing their bowls of Japanese-grown rice, they are not simply indulging a gastronomic preference for short-grain and slightly sticky Japonica rice over long-grain Indica rice from Thailand. They are eating and absorbing a tradition—in the sense of an invented and reinvented past. While the television beside the dining table pours out a stream of images of the here-and-now, of an urbanized, capitalist, and thoroughly internationalized Japan, each mouthful of rice offers communion with eternal and untainted Japanese values, with a rural world of simplicity and purity, inhabited by peasants tending tiny green farms in harmony with nature and ruled over by the emperor, descendant of the Sun Goddess, who plants and harvests rice himself each year in a special sacred plot. Simple peasant rice farmers are as marginal in contemporary Japan as hand-spinners are in India, but the small rice farm, like the swadeshi [homespun-style cloth] industry, lives on as a powerful symbol.

What happens when you team what are arguably the cutest marine vertebrate and invertebrate, respectively? A fascinating, not to mention fun-to-read-about example of non-human culture-making and -keeping.

animals, horizons of the possible, oceans, tools

Nate

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Tool use is rare in wild animals, but of widespread interest because of its relationship to animal cognition, social learning and culture. Despite such attention, quantifying the costs and benefits of tool use has been difficult, largely because if tool use occurs, all population members typically exhibit the behavior. In Shark Bay, Australia, only a subset of the bottlenose dolphin population uses marine sponges as tools, providing an opportunity to assess both proximate and ultimate costs and benefits and document patterns of transmission. We compared sponge-carrying (sponger) females to non-sponge-carrying (non-sponger) females and show that spongers were more solitary, spent more time in deep water channel habitats, dived for longer durations, and devoted more time to foraging than non-spongers; and, even with these potential proximate costs, calving success of sponger females was not significantly different from non-spongers. We also show a clear female-bias in the ontogeny of sponging. With a solitary lifestyle, specialization, and high foraging demands, spongers used tools more than any non-human animal. We suggest that the ecological, social, and developmental mechanisms involved likely (1) help explain the high intrapopulation variation in female behaviour, (2) indicate tradeoffs (e.g., time allocation) between ecological and social factors and, (3) constrain the spread of this innovation to primarily vertical transmission.

Reading this, I find my usual lines of agreement and objection a bit confounded: heartened by his admiration and conclusions but offended by his logic, which sweeps and oversimplifies to say the least.

africa, cultural worlds, gospel, horizons of the possible, missions

Nate

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Now a confirmed atheist, I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.

I used to avoid this truth by applauding - as you can - the practical work of mission churches in Africa. It’s a pity, I would say, that salvation is part of the package, but Christians black and white, working in Africa, do heal the sick, do teach people to read and write; and only the severest kind of secularist could see a mission hospital or school and say the world would be better without it. I would allow that if faith was needed to motivate missionaries to help, then, fine: but what counted was the help, not the faith.

But this doesn’t fit the facts. Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.

From a three-article series that the New York Times ran Christmas week. A lovely portrait of the sort of exchange that plays to the needs and strengths of both the sending and receiving cultures: priests come to the US to serve understaffed dioceses, whose members can then be brought into partnership to support development projects in their priests' home countries.

africa, asia, cultural worlds, gospel, horizons of the possible, kentucky, missions

Nate

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Majestic in a green chasuble, Father Ibemere delivered his homily strolling up and down the aisle. When it was time to distribute the eucharist, he bent down to give communion to a man he knew was too ill to stand.

After the Mass, however, one member of the congregation, Virginia Ballard, gestured toward the Nigerian priest and confided in Father Venters, “I can’t understand what he said, but he’s a sweet young man.”

Mrs. Ballard went on to praise Father Ibemere’s knowledge of the Bible, his capacity to remember the names of congregants, his willingness to teach the Americans about his home in Nigeria. “He is a holy man,” she concluded, “and we are honored to have him.”

I wonder, how much does the same critique apply to Lazy Utopias and—more crucially for many religious folk—Lazy Apocalypses?

dystopia, future, horizons of the possible, utopia

Nate

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Why is the dystopian future always literally dark? Why is it always raining or overcast? Why is the architecture always a mix of hyper-modernism, brutalism and squatter slum? Why is the politics always so transparently totalitarian, so fascist-plus-rebels? Why is it so retro and abstract?

Why doesn’t the dystopian vision ever include sunshine and children playing in its ruins? Why does it not include the constant, untiring efforts of most people to do what they can with what they have to improve their situations? Why are most people in the dystopian future always powerless to change anything? I could go on, but you get the point.

The biggest problem with dystopian fiction is not its pessimism. I do think there’s a serious issue about who’s interests are best served by making people fear the future, but I think the biggest problem with most dystopian fiction is its laziness and derivative quality. Lazy futures act like visionary static, crackling and dirtying the signal-to-noise ratio, making it harder not only for truly insightful futures to be found, but corrupting the ability of normal people to see why those visions are worth understanding.

I love this sort of list-making: on the one hand, calling out a tired old cliche and making the case for better writing; but on the other, injecting new life and wonder into the same cliche. Reading through the list, and imagining (sometimes with great difficulty) the possible contexts becomes an exercise in wonder.

cliche, horizons of the possible, metaphor, wonder, writing

Nate

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The Aquaman of the Democratic Party
The Dr. J of murdering people
The Ludwig Wittgenstein of trash TV
The Ned Flanders of the gay blogosphere
The Mae West of fowl
The Sydney Bristow of Miss Hosie’s fifth grade
The Brangelina of the lion kingdom
The Ron Burgundy of the three-feet and under set
The New Jersey of the Batman dimension
The Tina Fey of crazed retrograde gender pundits
The Bea Arthur of diet sodas
The Dr. Doom of my teenage existence
The Nancy Reagan of giant mutant cockroaches
The Mini-me of oscillating tools
The James Brown of neurotransmitters
The Sarah Silverman of operating systems