doomed (we'd better be)/22

Ceci n'est pas un usb hub. Here.

doomed (we'd better be)/21

Make anything into a sandwich! Ideal with gardening tools, paint, flies, WC duck, and electric motor parts. Also available in classic white, whole wheat, unleavened, and raisin (yummmm). Here. (grazie infinite MiKo).

The company declines any responsibility for fingers accidentally bitten off. Just be careful, OK?. Pleeeeease.

doomed (we'd better be)/20

Ahhhh, augmented reality. Two cameras to look into the world, two displays to show it in a 1504x480 3D stereoscopic video. You get all the information about your surroundings, literally UPON your surroundings. They're ugly and they'll make you look like a jerk. But for sure they're useful if you don't know where the closest exotic flower shop is. Here.

where is "home"?

View houses in geneva in a larger map

doomed (we'd better be)/19

The only stainless steel wallet. I'm sure there is a reason to its loneliness. Here.

doomed (we'd better be)/18

How exhausting can seasoning be? Just pull the cord, invert and hold. The self shakers will do all the work. And they're on sale now! Here.

your mother should know (and everybody else, too)

This is cool.

one for the day

doomed (we'd better be)/17

Lack of toilets on golf courts is an issue that no modern civilization had been able to address. At least, until the UroClub was invented. A camouflaged portable urinal, designed to give you privacy (and to contain twice the volume we usually urinate). No more embarrassment, no more anxiety. Just give the appearance of taking a practice swing, while relieving yourself. I swear this thing is real. Here.

doomed (we'd better be)/16

This is already an evergreen. Wear it at a party, everybody will be staring at you. You'll just never be sure what they are really thinking. Here.

uh!

via

doomed (we'd better be)/15

Finger condoms to prevent smudges on touchscreens. At least they're reusable. Here.

one good thing about commuting

same hour, same track, same train, same trip.

becoming aware of days, seasons, colors, light.

becoming aware of weather, becoming aware of time.

(in this period, in Geneva, every day is about 2' 15" longer than the previous one)

doomed (we'd better be)/14

If you're not able to do 2 things at the same time, just focus on the jumping, the computer of this digital skipping rope will do the counting. 2,7 m long. And still perfectly portable! Here.

bastard quiver tree

Aloe pillansii
Less than 200 specimens left, all in South Africa and Namibia. One of the few perennial plants able to tolerate extremely hot and arid conditions. Porcupines, goats, donkeys, birds use it for shelter, water, and food. It may be ugly, for sure is not that bastard.

doomed (we'd better be)/13

Finally, we'll be able to record a message people will hear when pulling on the toilet paper. The romantic idea of the millennium: "Susan, will you marry me? Flush once for yes". Bloody hell. Here.

mmm

There's this new search engine, Ecosia.
The ad (on youtube, here) states that the company devolves 80% of the revenues from its sponsored links to a WWF rainforest conservation project in the Amazons. Its servers are only powered by renewable energy (that's an option you have in Germany, where I believe the servers are based). Both obviously good things.

There are a few things I don't understand, though:
- If you go to the home page, it says "each free web search saves about 2m2 of rainforest". Misleading, otherwise after about 2,000,000,000,000 (if the number's wrong on my humanistic high school) clicks on the "search" button the Amazon rainforest would be saved. In fact, it's 2,000,000,000,000 clicks on sponsored links that would eventually save it. By the way, if you perform automatic searches to help them, they block your IP.
- Search results and sponsored links are provided by Yahoo and Bing. They are absolutely normal results (you want a chainsaw? we got it!). Ecosia is not allowed to reveal any information about the revenue shares Yahoo and Bing get - just believe them when they tell they manage to give WWF at least 80% of the total.
- One of the FAQ states that Google does not partner with altruistic search engines like Ecosia, because they would lose users and generate less income. Why shouldn't that apply to Bing and Yahoo, too?

I don't know about you, but I'm quite sure I've never clicked on a sponsored link in my life. They look filthy. Could it be possible that Yahoo and Bing use Ecosia to make people more willing to pick a "special" links over "regular" ones? Wouldn't that contribute to make the two companies much more effective - THE people you want your activity to be advertised by? Ads are not Ecosia-specific, Yahoo and Bing would still get profits from getting more ads. If that's true, I then would also like to know what benefits a search on Ecosia provides to Bing (therefore to Microsoft), that is just another corporation, with its social responsibility, its greenwashing campaigns, and its environmental impacts.
Any idea anyone?

creativity serving the dark side?

doomed (we'd better be)/12

Five blades. One precision trimmer. Blade coating and lubricating strip. A battery to power micropulsations. On-board microchip to manage the power. Low battery light indicator. Automatic shut-off. Hint: you shave with it. Here.

doomed (we'd better be)/11

I sadly only have a picture for this. Literally, it is worth more than a thousand words. Noodle fan!

the uses of Haiti/2

As you can probably notice, this is a long one. Not really "writing for the web".

Via Leonardo (one of the best - Italian only), a link to an article on "il Giornale" (one of Berlusconi's newspapers), stating that the possibly 150,000 victims and 3,000,000 homeless in Haiti are due to the fact that the country has chosen a non-capitalistic development path. As a consequence, it has failed in overcoming poverty, whereas we capitalistic developed countries succeeded.

That a country which has been first a slave-labor-based plantation, then a militarily occupied territory, lastly the personal domain of a handful dictators, may have been able to autonomously determine its economic policy, already sounds like an overstatement. Whenever the Haitians have tried to pursue an idea of self-determined government there has always been a foreign power ready to restore things the way they used to be. To me, whatever system they live in today, it looks rather imposed than freely chosen.

That Haiti is an example of anti-capitalistic economy is plain wrong. The country has been re-populated with Africans to be used as a plantation to meet the western countries' needs. It is actually a manifestation of what globalization already looked like in pre-industrial period. And, with a little help of the US, it's stably been a free market economy in the last century. Just an extremely poor one, where development has never happened.

That capitalism should be the reason our lives are so good, I find even more debatable. The argument there is quite a common one. Our system is right because our life expectancy, per capita GDP and material consumption are higher, and this has been made possible by capitalism, free market, and industrial revolution.

In fact, the better lifestyle of citizens of advanced economies depends only in part on the widespread availability of cheap commodities and services (food, water, clothes, sanitation, transportation, heating systems) which have indeed been made available by mechanization of productive activities and fast and free circulation of wares. It is also founded on a whole set of measures that redistribute profit to ensure social security and welfare.

Every State defines boundaries outside of which a measure that could be desirable, since it makes an activity more profitable, becomes illegal, because it creates a series of negative side-effects, of externalities, that a society can't afford. We take for granted that children shouldn't be allowed to work, that nature should be safeguarded, that men and women should be equally paid, that any working environment should be safe and that workers should be protected in case of accidents or sickness. And most of the developed States, through progressive taxation, generally ensure that good education and work opportunities are not restricted to those who can pay for them, that health care is available to all, that people have a fulfilling life when they're retired or unemployed.

These measures are essentially anti-capitalistic. They modify the market and limit the accumulation of wealth to guarantee every citizen the access to a set of fundamental, non negotiable rights. They have been progressively conquered by the civil society with a struggle against the capital, and finally imposed though democratic legislation. Without the definition and the respect of this set of rights, the lumpenproletariat that populated European cities a couple of centuries ago wouldn't probably be any better off.

We have been quite good in producing and enforcing these rules in our countries (although not uniformly), but the same hasn't happened on a worldwide scale. Actually, we are more and more experiencing the opposite.

In the absence of internationally recognized standards and rights, low fossil-fuel-based-energy prices have contributed in creating a kind of "international reserve army of labour", composed of developing countries that have all the interest in keeping regulations as loose as possible, to lower the production costs and be more competitive. In order to maximize profits, many productive activities (especially industrial, labour intensive, polluting ones, that require less qualified manpower) have moved to countries where the labour is cheap and workers are not guaranteed, where the environmental legislation is non existent, where safety regulations are not respected, building codes not enforced, urban growth not managed. And where any form of development would make production more expensive, leading to the loss of the competitive advantage, of the only reason why a certain activity is carried out right there.

This process has become absolutely fundamental in ensuring material well-being of consumers in developed countries. Our access to cheap food, clothes, cars, fuel, and so on, is totally based on it. Its consequence is that socio-economical and environmental externalities have been moved out of our sight, giving us the illusion of living in the best of possible worlds, but, in reality, drastically worsening the life conditions of billions living somewhere else. Prosperity chez nous is actually based on environmental destruction and social injustice chez eux. Simply, we don't care.

Haiti's current situation is not just a failure of the prevailing international economic system. It is absolutely organic to it. Unregulated globalized capitalism needs "black holes" to accumulate its externalities. It needs a Lake Victoria for its perch fillets, it needs an Amazon forest for the soya to feed its cows, it needs a Bhopal to establish its dangerous activities. And it also needs places like Naples to dump its toxic waste, or Rosarno (or the old part of New Orleans) to pile up cheap manpower.

It always directs its undesirable side-effects to places where laws and regulations are non existent, or non enforced. There always are places like that. They can be managed, conserved, and even be created, through military interventions, financial crisis, coups, civil wars, embargoes, and conflicts.

It's really not about the poor countries being too under-developed. Not only following us on our "development" path is not going to solve their problems; it is actually what's causing them. Without boundaries and constraints, the capitalist production system tends to create "islands of wealth in oceans of poverty". And it will keep preventing a large share of the world population from having its basic needs met, its fundamental human rights respected.

This system we live in can only look good if we decide that liberté, égalité, and fraternité only apply to those that already are free, equal, and similar to us. We found them such good ideas for ourselves, why should it be any different with a few other billion people?

More snow (in Gland)

It's been cold-cold-cold for the last two weeks. Most of the Boreal hemisphere completely covered with snow, and not going to get any warmer for some more time. Aerial pictures (grazie MiKo) show Europe and North America as they probably used to look like during some past ice age.

As unavoidable as the raisins in the panettone, there come the climate change skeptics (like here) with the traditional snowfall-argument: "we are experiencing one of the harshest winter ever recorder, the world just can't be getting any warmer". I don't know if these people are in good faith. For sure, a single, localized meteorological event, even an extended one such as this cold spell, doesn't define global climatic trends. Confusing the two levels is like thinking that every sheep is black just because the only sheep you've ever seen was. Or better, in this case, it's more like forgetting the 457 white sheep you've seen so far to only consider the last one, which was black.

In the meanwhile, the Austral hemisphere has just experienced the hottest year on records, half a °C warmer than the 1950-1980 average.

- The southern hemisphere is mostly covered by water, which has a much less variable temperature than the land (one of the reasons why the weather in Napoli is way lovelier than, say, Ankara), and is a much more reliable indicator of a worldwide trend;

- while during 1998 (the hottest year so far), warming related to El Niño had been especially significant, last year it was been negligible, which probably means that global warming accounted for most of this temperature increase.

One more white sheep. Let's try not to fall asleep.

doomed (we'd better be)/10

Everybody knows how exhausting it can be to lick an ice cream with 40°C in shadow, not to mention the fact that most of us do not master the technique to keep it in an aesthetically pleasant shape. No more sweating, no more hassle, no more irregular, awfully looking ice creams with the motorized ice cream cone holder. Here.

the uses of Haiti

Ok, Haiti hadn't experienced major earthquakes in the last 200 years.

Ok, since 1692 in the whole region there have been only 3 recorded quakes which have caused more than 1000 victims, the deadliest being the 1843 Leeward Islands one, with 5000 deaths.

Ok, the event was very close to the major urban area in the country, and very shallow, and hit Port-au-Prince with extreme violence. And strong aftershocks further damaged the area.

But a disaster such as this is really not a question of bad luck. You might not know when the earthquake is going to happen, but you can be quite sure that having a couple of million people in poorly built houses on the top of a fault which has been accumulating energy during the last two centuries is going to lead to a massacre, sooner or later.

Haiti is usually considered the perfect case study to explain the concept of vulnerability to disasters. Together with the Dominican Republic, it occupies the island of Hispaniola, which is struck almost yearly by some hurricane. The two countries are subject to winds of the same strength, rains of the same intensity, waves of the same height. But the same event that on the Dominican side would kill 1, makes 6 victims on the Haitian one.

This is not about the Dominicans being luckier. Rather, it is about the Haitians being poorer. A huge, poor population that ends up living and working in cheap, fragile buildings in cheap, dangerous areas, such as steep slopes and riverbeds. That relies on its local environment for food and energy provision, contributing to the overexploitation of the island's forests (which causes the soil to become less stable and less able to retain rain, and makes water runoff more violent, increasing frequency and intensity of floods and landslides) and of its coastal ecosystems (which protect people and their livelihoods from coastal hazards). That has never experienced a period of democratic stability and development. That can't count on any kind of welfare state, urban planning and building codes, decent health care, disaster preparedness system, or recognition and satisfaction of basic human rights.

This earthquake surely dwarfs any other event on the records, but in the last 10 years the country has already been hit by 37 major natural disasters, including the 2008 hurricanes (Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and Ike) which killed about 800 and left 800,000 homeless, and the 2004 hurricane Jeanne, with its 2750 victims. The country is so vulnerable that almost every time a strong natural event hits it people are killed, buildings are destroyed, properties are lost.

In explaining these disasters, the human components are much more relevant than the violence and unpredictability of the natural events. And are deeply rooted in the country's history. This is where the appeals for funding, the emergency interventions, and a world-wide mobilization of people and resources fall short.

Obama, who now promises full support to the country, should remember how systematically US have undermined Haitian democracy throughout the last century with the aim of exploiting the country's resources and market, first as direct occupiers, then leaving the country in Trujillo's hands, financing the 30-years long Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier's regime, and contributing to the coup that, in 1990, overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically-elected leader the nation had ever had. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, who now pledge financial and technical aid, should remember how happy they've been with the neoliberal regime US created to "restore democracy" in 1994, which worsened the life conditions of an already desperate population, or how passively they have acknowledged the embargo US imposed on the country after the 2000 local elections, which the Americans considered "irregular".

Under these conditions, is it any surprising that the population have basically experienced no development in the last two centuries? Could a country where the rights of the workers have been systematically denied, where the poor, black population has always been considered a danger for the capital, where wealth and power have been systematically concentrated in the hands of a handful families, turn out to be any different?

It's not a question of collecting more money, of rescuing the thousands buried alive, of providing food and shelter to the survivors. And it's not only question of building safe houses, schools, hospitals, infrastructures. Poverty and vulnerability won't disappear that way. Without a profound modification of the nature of the economic and political relations at the national and international levels, there's no way to avoid the progressive construction of catastrophes such as this earthquake, there's no way to avoid the fact that there will always be a former tropical paradise ready to be turned into a terrible hell circle.

doomed (we'd better be)/9

Are you one of those people who can't focus on anything more than 21 seconds? Then this penguin is for you! Nobody knows tea like a distinguished penguin! Here. It even comes with a stylish hat! Here.

3 cm2 snowfalkes have been restlessly coming down since (at least) today morning at 8:00

doomed (we'd better be)/8

This one is really clever. Twirls up spaghetti, tagliatellI and noodles. Use it anywhere in Italy and you will have kindergarden kids throwing watermelon peel at you. 2 AAA batteries not included. Sadly, here.

zitto chi sap' 'o juoc'

Reality is much simpler than what we pretend is real.

doomed (we'd better be)/7

Couverts mise en bouche jetables. Have a mouthful and throw away. Here.

an etymology

For quite a long time I've been thinking a blog of mine would be something unnatural, a wrong way to talk to an undifferentiated community of strangers, some kind of not-so-secret diary that would expose stuff not really meant to be public.

I've been regularly following and appreciating the handful of usual suspects, almost exclusively celebrities' blogs, more professional than personal, with zillion contacts per day. And I've always been wondering why a random amount of random people should be interested in what I think or write or do, and, most of all, why they should even be aware of it.

Then I started reading a few blogs by people I really know, and meet, and spend time with, (here, here, here, here and here), almost secretly, trying not to leave any trace, in the unspoken and slightly embarrassed way everything happens with my closest acquaintances.

And I realized a couple of things:

- None of us is Beppe Grillo. No horde of unknown barbarians is ever going to invade our semi-public backyard.

- From the very first moment you open a facebook account, your best kept secrets are public domain anyway.

- A blog, for a lazy person living abroad, is a great way to communicate. What alternative do you actually have? Sending an informative mass email to your contact list once in a while (probably starting with "apologies for the mass email")? Having a periodic chat with every single one of your distant friends and relatives about what you're up to, where you're living, your plans for the future? That could easily turn into a full-time activity, and a boring one. With a blog you write something, you've done your homework, then it's up to your interested counterpart to do its own bit.

The occasion for my first post was an entry I had to write for the COP15 blog IUCN set up for the Copenhagen climate conference (here). What I wrote got cut and I decided to have it online the way I had written it in the first place. That's why it's in English - and because is good exercise anyway.

At that time I was in a kind of troubled period, and having something pointless to focus on was of great help, so I kept writing. I also wanted to organize the information I was collecting on the negotiations. And thinking to the blog as an effort that would last no more than 20 days actually helped in getting a little bit more involved in it.

Through a series of limitations to the scope, to the audience, to the commitment period, I started writing here. Surprisingly enough, it's the same process I've been through when I decided I wanted to write a song.

Now, I guess that's just the long answer to a doubt my first friend expressed here. Yes, you did influence me. Fact is, I naturally tend to get logorrheic.

doomed (we'd better be)/6

The sun in your house. And it's in italian! Here.

down

Waking up to a sun so unbelievable it feels even warmer.

Then, being swallowed by the brouillard.

Horse & cart, an inflated tire, dérapages.

Stones, poles, branches - white doodles on a grey page.

My breath is everything. The rest is a silence never heard before.

Of course I am a city boy.

doomed (we'd better be)/5

120€ to carry your wood to the chimney. Here.

doomed (we'd better be)/4

Good dogs deserve better water. In the meanwhile, the end is near. Here.

up

Today I've seen a frozen sea.

And I've seen a white continent.

I've seen a border from above, and there was nothing to see.

But the line where sea and land met was so clear. Liquid water, solid water.

And I've gone through gaseous water. It could have been solid air, no way to tell.

I've seen how uncreative and predictable are the shapes that humans draw. We couldn't have invented the ear - we made a gramophone instead.

I've seen a sun in which nobody would believe.

And I've been wide awake, despite the lack of sleep.

So much for a delayed flight, in a cold winter morning.

come una grande nave che solca le onde del mare

Did you know that every Danish church has a replica of a sailing ship hanging from the ceiling? There are around 1300 models hanging all over the country, the oldest being exactly 300 years old.

Since before the Christian era, belief was that offering a ship to the Gods would guarantee a safe trip to the crew. Once the Christianity spread in the country, the tradition was kept and the miniatures started being offered like any other ex-voto. Didn't expect to find such a thing in a reformed church though.

The symbol is especially powerful since the Church's history is full of marine metaphors. The life of a Christian is considered a journey over a tempestuous sea, with Jesus guiding him as a pilot. The Church itself is said to be a ship, with Christ as captain. A church, as a building, is divided in naves. And in Denmark the church ceilings were traditionally made of wood beams, as to represent a ship turned upside down.

Can anybody figure out what the anchor means?

doomed (we'd better be)/3

Heated dog shelter. Yeah, sure. Here.

doomed (we'd better be)/2

Wireless electronic price labels for supermarket shelves. Here.

doomed (we'd better be)/1

An iPhone app that makes the CPU work to its maximum capacity to warm your hands. Here.