Ria de Aveiro, Costa Nova

o baterista de Jazz David Aldridge aborda estes temas num livro intitulado Rhythm Man:
Comecei a tocar percussão nos tabliers dos automóveis seguindo os ritmos, deixando-me ir com eles, enquanto não me saía dos ouvidos [...] O ritmo e a síndrome de Tourette combinaram-se para mim desde o primeiro dia em que descobri que fazer bateria do tampo de uma mesa me permitia disfarçar os movimentos que me sacudiam as mãos, as pernas e o pescoço [...] Esta maneira de disfarçar que eu acabava de descobrir fazia-me controlar a minha energia solta, canalizando-a numa corrente ordenada [...] Esta «explosão autorizada» levava-me a encontrar grandes reservas de sons e de sensações físicas, e fez-me compreender que tinha nisso, diante de mim, o meu destino. Seria um homem do ritmo.
Musicofilia Oliver Sacks

Apanha amêijoa, Ria de Aveiro

Here’s how Nisbett and Cohen explain the cultural differences. Cultures of honor, such as the American South, are characterized by a common point of origin. They develop in situations where individuals have to take the law into their own hands because there is no formal law in place to guard against competitors who can steal valuable resources. A psychology of violence emerges. You can steal domestic herding animals (cattle, goats, horses, sheep), but you can’t steal farming crops-you, of course, could steal some potatoes or carrots, but not enough to make a serious dent in the owner’s resources. Cultures of honor therefore tend to develop among herding peoples, not farmers with crops. Many of these cultures have emerged over history and across the continents, including such herding peoples as the Zuni Indians of North America, the Andalusians of southern Spain, Kabyle of Algeria, Sarakatsani of Greece, and Bedouins of the Middle East.
Moral Minds, Marc D. Hauser

AgitÁgueda, Aveiro link

Condon spent a year and a half on that short segment of film, until, finally, in his peripheral vision, he saw What he had always sensed was there: “the wife turning her head exactly as the husband’s hands came up.” From there he picked up other micromovements, other patterns that occurred over and over again, until he realized that in addition to talking and listening, the three people around the table were also engaging in what he termed “interactional synchrony.” Their conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension. Each person would, within the space of one or two or three 1/45 th-of-a-second frames, move a shoulder or cheek or an eyebrow or a hand, sustain that movement, stop it, change direction, and start again. And what’s more, those movements were perfectly in time to each person’s own words -emphasizing and underlining and elaborating on the process of articulation -so that the speaker was, in effect, dancing to his or her own speech. At the same time the other people around the table were dancing along as well, moving their faces and shoulders and hands and bodies to the same rhythm. It’s not that everyone was moving the same way, any more than people dancing to a song all dance the same way. It’s that the timing of stops and starts of each person’s micromovements -the jump and shifts of body and face were perfectly in harmony. Subsequent research has revealed that it isn’t just gesture that is harmonized, but also conversational rhythm. When two people talk, their volume and pitch fall into balance. What linguists call speech rate -the number of speech sounds per secondequalizes. So does what is known as latency, the period of time that lapses between the moment one speaker stops talking and the moment the other speaker begins. Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground. We all do it, all the time. Babies as young as one or two days old synchronize their head, elbow, shoulder, hip, and foot movements with the speech patterns of adults. Synchrony has even been found in the interactions of humans and apes. It’s part of the way we are hardwired.
The tipping point - Malcom Gladwell

Aveiro - Portugal, campeão europeu 2016 face


The historian William Cronon, nom whose book Changes in the Land these quotations are taken, concludes: Indian burning promoted the increase of exactly those species whose abundance so impressed English colonists: elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, ruffed grouse, and so on. When these populations increased, so did the carnivorous eagles, hawks, lynxes, foxes, and wolves. In short, Indians who hunted game animals were not just taking the ‘unplanted bounties of nature’; in an important sense, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating. When later generations of European colonists began to penetrate into the Midwest of North America, they came across a very different landscape: the prairies. The endless open spaces, inhabited by large herds of buffalo, seemed to them to be primeval. However, the nature of this landscape was largely the result of the burning practices of Indian hunters, who had been systematically burning down tracts of forest in order to create more grassland for buffaloes and other herbivores. As the historian Stephen Pyne observes in his book Fire in America, ‘except for the High Plains, where the short grass expanses were more or less determined by climate, nearly all these grasslands were created by man, the product of deliberate, routine frring’.Whenever, in our own time, a piece of prairieland was left to itself instead of being subjected to regular burning and grazing, the grasses were soon overgrown by trees and the prairie spontaneously reconverted to forest.
Fire and civilization - Johan Goudsblom

A RTP anterior ao 25 de Abril era um medium paradoxal. Por um lado, cumpria por inteiro nos noticiários a função de megafone do regime salazarista-marcelista. O próprio chefe do Governo, Marcelo Caetano, apologista da TV, usava a seu bel-prazer a RTP, que ajudara a criar, com as suas Conversas em Família, que não eram nem conversas nem em família, antes prelecções, em forma de aulas de cátedra para o povo. Antes dele, Salazar desconfiara da TV, com razão, pois o medium podia facilmente destruir o seu mito, a custo construído, de ditador à distância. Defensor da forma de comunicação do medium, Caetano não discursava, como fizera Salazar, antes simulava “conversar” com alguém que, todavia, não intervinha na “conversa”. As prelecções políticas do chefe do Governo terão criado um efeito contrário ao desejado: ao “naturalizarem” o primeiro-ministro, tomavam-no vulnerável. Ao querer distinguir-se de Salazar, Caetano enfraquecia a aura de distância e de génio solitário que o seu antecessor criara. Por outro lado, com liberdade de escolha dos programas (não se comparava com a TV dos regimes de tipo soviético), a TV portuguesa abria horizontes aos espectadores. As séries estrangeiras mostravam outros mundos, culturas, regimes, amiúde mais livres. Os programas portugueses, mesmo se apolíticos, eram instâncias dialógicas; o diálogo contradizia, pela sua mera existência, a unicidade e a verticalidade da mensagem política do regime. Nesse sentido, Zip-Zip foi uma pequena revolução comunicacional. Era gravado em “falso directo” perante uma audiência ao vivo, no formato hoje chamado talk show, e apresentado dias depois. Pelo humor de Raul Solnado, falava de questões de actualidade, não directamente políticas.
Eduardo Cintra Torres, A Televisão e o Serviço Público

Sean Riley & The Slowriders, Vagueira face


Antes do século XX, a versão fundamentalista do islamismo dos salafitas era pouco atractiva fora do deserto arábico. Já não é assim. Os que se dedicam à difusão do salafismo, financiados pelos petrodólares da Arábia Saudita, tiveram um grande impacto na forma como muitos muçulmanos comuns interpretam hoje a sua fé, assim como na forma como se relacionam com as outras religiões e com os muçulmanos menos ortodoxos e os não-sunitas, em especial os xiitas. Controlado pelos extremistas islâmicos, este salafismo financiado pelo petróleo serviu como justificação ideológica para a jihad violenta, que tem por objectivo reinstaurar o califado islâmico do século VII, e impulsionou grupos como a al-Qaeda, o Hamas e as brigadas de bombistas suicidas sunitas do Iraque, da Palestina e do Paquistão.
A motivação saudita para exportar o islamismo salafita tornou-se ainda maior depois de radicais fundamentalistas terem desafiado as credenciais muçulmanas da família saudita no poder ao assumirem o controlo da Grande Mesquita de Meca em 1979 o ano em que, por coincidência, se deu a revolução iraniana e houve um elevado aumento dos preços do petróleo. Como Lawrence Wright sublinha na sua história sobre a al-Qaeda,A Torre da Derasosrego':
O ataque à Grande Mesquita (...) despertou a família real para a efectiva possibilidade de uma revolução. A lição que a família retirou daquele impasse sangrento é que apenas poderia proteger-se contra extremistas islâmicos dando-lhes mais poder. (...) Consequentemente, os muttawa, vigilantes religiosos subsidiados pelo governo, tornaram-se uma presença esmagadora no Reino, vagueando pelos centros comerciais e restaurantes, perseguindo os homens para irem à mesquita nas horas da oração e garantindo que as mulheres estavam devidamente cobertas.
Não contente com a opressão, no seu próprio país, do mais pequeno grau de liberdade religiosa, o governo saudita partiu para a evangelização do mundo islâmico, utilizando os milhares de milhões de rials ao seu dispor através do imposto religioso - o zakat - para construir centenas de mesquitas e universidades c milhares de escolas religiosas em todo o mundo, com imãs wahhbita e professores. Assim, a Arábia Saudita, que representa apenas um por cento da população mundial muçulmana, apoiaria 90 por cento dos encargos de toda a religião, anulando as outras tradições islâmicas. A música desapareceu do Reino. A censura abafou a arte e a literatura; e a vida intelectual -que quase não teve possibilidade de florescer no jovem país atrofiou. A paranóia e o fanatismo ocupam naturalmente as mentes fechadas e receosas.

Quente, plano e cheio - Thomas L. Friedman

he also disapproved of whining because he understood that it is contagious and destructive. Comparing notes on how unfair or difficult or ridiculous something is does promote bonding-and sometimes that’s why griping continues, because it’s reinforcing an us-against-the-world feeling. Very quickly, though, the warmth of unity morphs to the sourness of resentment, which makes hardships seem even more intolerable and doesn’t help get the job done. Whining is the antithesis of expeditionary behavior, which is all about rallying the troops around a common goal.
An astronaut's guide to life on earth - Chris Hadfield

Panteão, Roma wiki
Protestos Iranianos contra Hassan Rouhani link

The myth of the noble savage had emerged from the accounts of the first French explorers of the Pacific, but in reality the South Seas were full of discord. At the time of Cook’s first expedition, Tahiti and its neighbours were in turmoil as the cult of ‘Oro spread from its temple on the island of Ra’eatea. There, bodies were used as rollers under the keels of sacred canoes and Captain Cook himselfvisited a coral pyramid where human bones crunched beneath his feet. Again and again he came across cannibals, although he was generous enough to note that their habit appeared ‘to come from custom and not from a Savage disposission’.
Savagery, inborn or through custom, began soon after people arrived in the Pacific. Two millennia ago it took just a few centuries for the first migrants to Mangaia in the Cook Islands to consume the local wildlife. In time they were reduced to eating rats (as the islanders still say, ‘It’s as sweet as a rat’). Then they began to devour each other. On Mangaia’s six square miles lived half a dozen tribes, who fought, fought and fought again, With evidence of forty-two separate wars over fifteen hundred years. Rousseau would not have approved.
Evolution Darwin’s ‘doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms’ is cruel, but can give the impression of being kind. Many creatures do appear to indulge in mutual aid.

CORAL: A Pessimist in Paradise Steve Jones

LADY BRACKNELL. I rely on you to arrange my music for me. It is my last reception, and one wants something that will encourage conversation, particularly at the end of the season when everyone has practically said whatever they had to say, which, in most cases, was probably not much.
ALGERNON. Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music, people don’t talk.
The importance of being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

Fruit flies and nematode worms have long been the workhorse of biology, for they share many genes with humans and can be bred with ease. In fact, the double helix shows that each of those laboratory stalwarts is less like us than was once assumed as for reasons quite unknown both have, on the long road from the Pre-Cambrian, lost even more inherited information than we ourselves have. As a result, each is left with a unique and diminished identity of its own and corals have more distinctly human genes than either of them.
The big step forward made by humans or flies compared to polyps is that we have an anus: every one of us, however eminent, is a tenametre tube through which food flows, for most of the time, in one direction. Hydra and its kin are in contrast mere sacs, obliged to suck in sustenance and throw out waste from a single hole.
Corals - Steve Jones