Came across this sweet little video recently. Check it out for yourself

Earlier this summer, my partner and I bought these cute, functional, folding bikes that have already become our primary mode of transportation. I used to bike when I was a wee teenager, growing up in New Jersey, while my partner had never biked before.

So lately, we have been going out biking almost everyday, getting used to the rules and routes of the city, it’s a whole other world when you’re on a bike. I noticed that when I first started driving years ago too – your perspective of the space you inhabit changes based on your mode of transportation – subways make me consider the underground routes to get from one part of the city to another, cars make me consider the highways, the one-way streets, the alternative smaller streets I can take to avoid heavy traffic. And now, biking is teaching me to notice even more things like where the ramps are, where the road is most uneven, where there are long blocks versus short blocks, and where the road is on an incline and where it’s on a decline, where cars tend to cluster and where there are bike lanes in the city.

I love noticing this shift in perspective, and I would encourage everyone to try different modes of transportation in whatever area you’re in, to get an idea of the perspective shift – try walking around for a week instead of driving to wherever you normally go in your neighborhood. Or take the train or the bus, instead of driving to a distant destination. Most of us are so hooked on cars and highways and parking lots, that we rarely just walk, or bike anywhere. I urge you to try it sometime, especially if you live in a part of the planet where it’s the later half of the summer season now. Just go, go out, and walk, or bike if you can get a bicycle (hint: they’re also a lot cheaper than cars!). You’ll love it!

On a related note, check out this site to see how Toronto is becoming more and more bike-friendly.

This was written as part of a response to Martha Nussbaum’s opinion piece found here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/veiled-threats

I’d like to share my personal view on the burqa (face mask) controversy. My views are not based on the black-and-white, binary, false dichotomy presented too often by both supporters of the face-mask ban and those who wish to defend the garb.

Continue reading 'The Burqa/Niqab ban controversy'»

…apparently, Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante. [with Wikipedia Links & Mouse-over Tags]

It’s got 103 of the most interesting figures of history juxtaposed together, and in some cases, interacting with each other, in a timeless image. From Bill Gates to Plato, Bruce Lee to the Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II, Margaret Thatcher to Audrey Hepburn, Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein, Sigmund Freud to Jack Kevorkian, Albert Einstein to Che Guevara, Charles Darwin dressed as Noah, to Osama Bin Laden and the 72 Houris. Check it out!

Originally painted by three Chinese artists: Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An, in 2006; oil on canvas.

Here’s an interesting way to look up how the web is feeling: We Feel Fine

From their mission page:

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 – 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles’ properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

Fascinating stuff, actually. You just might get that addicting feeling using this search applet…

(yes I missed 1 day of the NaBloPoMo… sue me )

Came across this beautiful, articulate and talented Iranian-Canadian singer and activist, Nazanin Afshin-Jan:

and a *MUST WATCH* interview with her from AlJazeera English:

If you haven’t seen this yet, here’s your chance It’s a well researched critical analysis of this current hot-button issue.

Aafia Siddiqui VS (Jews, Zarina Mari, Shazia Khalid and others) by Anas Abbas

Thanks to a Facebook friend, I came across this article in the Times Online which reports on zoological findings that dolphins’ brains, cultural and emotional complexities, and behaviours are close to those of humans. I think this is significant because there are more and more people waking up to the realities of how we treat non-human animals, and what that implies for us and our humanity, as well as the correlations between cruelty towards other animals and cruelty towards humans. If you know me at all, you know this is one of the most important fields of study, reflection and activism to me. Some excerpts from the Times Online article:

The researchers argue that their work shows it is morally unacceptable to keep such intelligent animals in amusement parks or to kill them for food or by accident when fishing. Some 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises die in this way each year.

“Many dolphin brains are larger than our own and second in mass only to the human brain when corrected for body size,” said Lori Marino, a zoologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has used magnetic resonance imaging scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

<snip>

In one study, Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.

In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.

Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.

<snip>

Researchers have found that brain size varies hugely from around 7oz for smaller cetacean species such as the Ganges River dolphin to more than 19lb for sperm whales, whose brains are the largest on the planet. Human brains, by contrast, range from 2lb-4lb, while a chimp’s brain is about 12oz.When it comes to intelligence, however, brain size is less important than its size relative to the body.

What Marino and her colleagues found was that the cerebral cortex and neocortex of bottlenose dolphins were so large that “the anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain”. They also found that the brain cortex of dolphins such as the bottlenose had the same convoluted folds that are strongly linked with human intelligence.

Such folds increase the volume of the cortex and the ability of brain cells to interconnect with each other. “Despite evolving along a different neuroanatomical trajectory to humans, cetacean brains have several features that are correlated with complex intelligence,” Marino said.

There was a time when women, black people, mentally ill people, children, were all in various ways regarded as “sub human”, as inanimate objects, to be used, abused, and discarded. Today, we still have some segments of populations arguing for the lack of any rights of non-human animals. This will change, in time, and our current practices of cruel factory farming, animal testing, breeding for entertainment, etc., will, I can say with a some confidence and a lot of hope for the sake of humanity, become more obsolete, and become as illegal and socially unacceptable as slavery, child labour, pederasty, misogyny and eugenics are now.

A British MP has caused some controversy by publicly stating that profiling of Muslims is to be expected in the light of recent events:

He said: “I think most people would rather be profiled than blown up. It wouldn’t be victimisation of an entire community.

What I like is that Muslim organizations and Muslims with influence are starting to finally speak up in mainstream society, bringing up important issues like the fact that many of the terrorist attacks happening in the world today are being committed by Muslims, and in the name of Islam.

What I don’t like is firstly that things have actually come to this, and secondly that profiling based on race or religion could really backfire. First of all, this opens a whole can of worms in terms of who is Muslim and who isn’t. Is it based on name? On one’s parents’ religion? What’s next? Requiring people to put their religion or religious background on their passports? Like what was done to Jews in Soviet Russia? And how hard would it be for someone to bypass such a superficial system of checks: a change of name, a change of outfit?

I do think that people of certain names, backgrounds, looks and ages will, and it could be easily argued, should, be scrutinized more than the mostly superficial checks that airline passengers are subject to. However, I think the issue needs to be approached intelligently, to find efficient solutions (and there have to be many complementary solutions, there really is no one simple magic answer), that precisely and successfully help identify and quarantine those who intend to use public spaces as personal, fatal soap boxes. We could start by hiring people of higher and more sophisticated educational backgrounds to screen passengers, and we could invest in providing training to airport personnel to better understand things like body signals, psychology, etc.

All of which leads me to wonder if perhaps we’re headed for this.

Your thoughts?

Have you ever said, “I’m not gay, but…” or “I’m not bisexual, but…” as a disclaimer before expressing how much you are attracted to someone of the same gender as you?

If you are progressive, liberal, and you stand for LGBT rights, have you ever wondered why you need to give a disclaimer like that before expressing feelings that might qualify you as being bisexual?

I have.

First of all, as a bisexual woman (I prefer the term queer) who has been in relationships with both men and women, and who is in a happy, long-term relationship with a woman, I find it hurtful when some of my friends still qualify their own sexual desires for people of the same gender by first separating themselves from people like me. There’s nothing wrong with being heterosexual, but there is something very wrong with being heterosexist, which is the idea that heterosexuality is the default, natural, normal thing to be, and that it’s a black or white area with no variations.

If you are telling someone how you support gay rights, you don’t need to keep qualifying that with “I’m not gay or nothing, but…”. Similarly, if you are telling people that you are bi-curious, or attracted to someone of the same gender, then those of us who have put our lives on the line to be honest about sexuality, would appreciate it if you could stop talking about this matter like it’s a hot potato that you are willing to support in passing, but not willing to own, even when you yourself have feelings that would qualify you as bisexual.

Continue reading '“I’m not a queer or nothing, but…”'»