Togo is one of the many nations of the world whose name I recognize but about which I know nothing. I hope to change that over time since Alicia, the daughter of a cousin, will be spending the next two years on a Fulbright Fellowship in the town of Kara in the north of that west African nation, working with an HIV/AIDS treatment program.
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There is something quite hypnotic about this digitally manipulated short film set to music by Fernando Livschitz that seems to show traffic going through a busy intersection, weaving in with pedestrians and cyclists. Since it was not done using green screens (I think), I have no clue as to how it was done so that the cuts and splices became so invisible that the whole thing looks like a choreographed ballet. I know there are VFX professionals who read this blog and I am sure they can figure it out and let the rest of us know.
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The Advocate published a list of the 50 most influential LGBT people in the media, limiting themselves only to those who have been open about their sexual orientation. These lists are brazen attempts at getting hits but I clicked anyway.
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So the people of Scotland vote on independence today. Voting ends at 10:00 pm with final results expected around 7:00 am Friday morning, but results will start trickling in at about 1:00 am, all local times. Last-minute polls predict that the ‘no’ vote against independence having a 52-48% lead, if the 8% of undecided voters are excluded.
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From George Monbiot, I learn that all but one (Sunday) newspaper in the UK opposed separation by Scotland, so the fact that the vote is so close at the moment is quite remarkable since my sense is that newspaper reading is much more widespread in the UK than in the US and thus likely to be more influential in swaying public opinion.
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The Daily Show examines president Obama’s ISIS speech on Wednesday and concludes that he has thrown away his reluctance to get involved in yet another front on the never-ending war and has gone all in with the warmongers.
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While the militarization of police departments has been getting some scrutiny, what has not received much media attention is that some school districts are also purchasing heavy weaponry under the same program in which the government gives away its military hardware.
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While there has definitely been progress in acceptance of the idea that the LGBT community has the right to full and equal participation in society, we should not be too complacent either, because there are still pockets of vicious anti-gay sentiment out there, even in supposedly sophisticated urban cities of the northeast like Philadelphia (which translates as ‘brotherly love’), where just last week a gay couple on a street in the city center was viciously attacked by a group of men and women.
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With a great deal of nervousness, Ton Siedsma agreed to an experiment. He would load an app on his smartphone that would send all its activity metadata for one week to Dimitri Tokmetzis who works on datajournalism projects and who would in turn forward it to the iMinds research team of Ghent University and Mike Moolenaar, owner of Risk and Security Experts. All three would analyze the metadata to see what they could learn about Siedsma.
The amount they learned was shocking.
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