Culture of Old Europe Is Uncloaked in an Exhibit at N.Y.U. – NYTimes.com
Fascinating.
This photograph I took in Helsinki last November during Slush can be found on page 200 of the Norwegian book Delte Meninger. I understand that it’s a book about participatory culture on the web. It’s all in Norwegian but regardless I’m tickled pink that they sent me a copy. Go Norway!
nrc.nl – International – Court upholds verdict on Hamas chant (the chant being “Hamas, Hamas, gas all the Jews” and the verdict being 80 hours community service)
Earlier this year Amsterdam and Rotterdam mayors, Job Cohen and Ahmed Aboutaleb, threatened a five-year ban on supporters at matches between Ajax and Rotterdam team Feyenoord if fans chanted offensive slogans.
Interestingly, the mayors come are Jewish and Muslim, respectively.
As you can see on the side of the page, I need your votes! I submitted a SXSW panel on the European startup scene and I’d love your support so we can go to Austin next Spring and tell everyone what’s up!
nrc.nl – International – Watch out – electric cars are coming to Amsterdam
Apparently only electric vehicles will be allowed in Dutch city centers. In 2040.
High-Tech Fish Farms Angle to Make Hard-to-Rear Cod the Next Salmon – WSJ.com
Over-fishing has slashed the annual Atlantic catch to 137,000 tons last year, from 1.8 million tons in 1968, according to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, a fishery research institute based in Denmark.
Ouch.
Speaking of cod, Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World is very good. It’ll give you a whole new and will probably make for bracing reading now that Iceland’s economy is now little more than cod and aluminum smelting. I kid, I kid! Kind of.
As the saying goes, God made the world but the Dutch made the Netherlands. Of course, no landscape is untouched: walk through the British countryside and what seems to be untouched forests and hills turn out be forests planted several centuries ago and hills continuously molded over the past millenia by human activity. On the road from Haarlem to Schipol I once saw a grass-covered ziggurat-shaped hill with an incredibly straight alley of trees running by it. Rather than pretending that their environment isn’t man-made – the British aren’t the only offenders at maintaining such an illusion though I think they’re some of the worst – the Dutch celebrate the artificialness of their landscape. Building on that thought, there’s a great piece in the Herald Tribune about an MIT professor encouraging a polluted region in Italy to embrace man-made nature.
What Belgium was to paedophilia in the 1990s, Austria is to female sex slaves in dungeons in the 2000s.
Dungeons & Austrians – International Herald Tribune