World

How images change the world

An interesting argument about how and why to look at photographs of suffering.
First, put yourself in the position of the photographer; imagine you are seeing what they did right in front of you:
> Azoulay asks her readers to project themselves into the scenes of photographs, to notice the power dynamics at play, to identify the participants, and to view the outcomes not as inevitable but as one possibility among many.

Then prepare yourself to act when you see similar situations in the future:

> Viewers, through careful observation of images of horror, become witnesses who “can occasionally foresee or predict the future,” she writes. As a result, they can warn others of “dangers that lie ahead” and take action to prevent them…

> To be resisted, it seems, violence must be seen, and photography makes such vision possible.

Ways to stop climate change, ranked

[A fascinating list of ways to reduce global warming](http://www.drawdown.org/solutions-summary-by-rank), ranked by effectiveness and cost, with some surprising findings.

Refrigerant management–basically what happens when you discard an air conditioner–is the top opportunity, above anything energy-related. After that comes onshore wind farms, then two food-related items: reducing waste and eating more plants.

Pragmatic and encouraging! The authors have edited [a book around all of the opportunities, Drawdown](https://smile.amazon.com/Drawdown-Comprehensive-Proposed-Reverse-Warming-ebook/dp/B01KGZVNT0/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=).

Lessons from living with an Amazonian tribe

[Or, how to unlearn your first-world problems](https://www.fastcompany.com/40403574/i-spent-a-month-living-with-an-amazonian-tribe-at-23-and-it-changed-my-career-forever):

* You learn to ignore the mosquitoes. And hunger. And all the other stuff too.
* Everyone depends on everyone else
* Lack of distraction leads to deeper thinking
* Everything else seems easier afterward

The shape of time

I thought I’d posted about this before, but I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of the [“B-Theory” of time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-theory_of_time), and [world lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line), and the possibility of our actions in the present forming something visible outside of time. So here’s a post that includes all those words that I can add to when I find new stuff.

  • The Growing Block universe is another formulation: “The present is an objective property, to be compared with a moving spotlight. By the passage of time more of the world comes into being; therefore, the block universe is said to be growing. The growth of the block is supposed to happen in the present, a very thin slice of spacetime, where more of spacetime is continually coming into being.”

[](
http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/a20784)
“Pretty good. The ending was a bit predictable.”- [New Yorker](
http://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/a20784)

The state of the world

> In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

– [Wallace Stevens](https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/surface-things)

Clare Hollingworth, “the most interesting woman in the world”?

Her [obituary in The Economist](http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21714964-foreign-correspondent-was-105-obituary-clare-hollingworth-died-january-10th) reads like one of [those Dos Equis commercials](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3VIJjdjbxw):

> She gained the first interview with the last Shah of Iran in 1941; after his fall in 1979, he said he would speak only to her…she commandeered a British consulate car and drove into Germany from Poland. A gust of wind lifted a roadside hessian screen, revealing Hitler’s army, mustered for the invasion…Aged nearly 80, she was seen climbing a lamppost to gain a better look at the crackdown in Tiananmen Square.

:

Why voting doesn’t make anyone happy

[The Exploratorium explains voting paradoxes](https://youtu.be/tJag3vuG834), and why, no matter what happens tomorrow, no one will really be happy:

Or is it because [society is too complex for us to even understand our choices](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/society-is-too-complicated-to-have-a-president-complex-mathematics-suggest)?

> “We’ve become fundamentally confused about what the decisions are, and what their consequences are. And we can’t make a connection between them,” he added. “And that’s true about everybody, as well as about the decision-makers, the policymaker. They don’t know what the effects will be of the decisions that they’re making.”

Kenneth Arrow even won the Nobel Prize for proving that [when there are 3 or more choices, no system is guaranteed to choose an optimal winner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem).

Smaller decisions with smaller groups are more likely to work, but still fraught with peril. But go vote tomorrow, and [may the odds be ever in your favor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s7qgNMqDJI)!

Two Isolated Americas

[This makes a lot of what’s happening today make sense](https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/two-isolated-americas-fae2720fb48).

More on how the Paris climate agreement happened

The Guardian has a wonderful in-depth description of just how the world’s leaders came to an agreement on climate change action in Paris last December (previously). Lots of innovative techniques, including…

  • A headquarters with visibility across the conference:

Fabius, from his office, could be with Christiana Figueres, the UN climate change chief, for a face-to-face chat within seconds. His fellow minister, Ségolène Royal, was just along the corridor, flanked with the offices of ambassadors and high-ranking officials. Within the buzzing control room, screens relayed pictures of what was happening in each of the conference rooms scattered around the compound and 24 hour news from French and international channels.

About 60 French officials were there. In preparation for the all-night sessions that began almost immediately the conference started, a room with 20 cubicled beds was waiting for exhausted officials to refresh themselves with a few snatched moments of sleep.

  • Lots of unique meeting types, for each different type of expression and decision:

Procedurally, the French took great care. They instituted a series of talks known as “confessionals”. These were intended as confidential places where delegates could, in the words of one French official, “speak from the heart” to listening French diplomats, with no holds barred and an assurance of privacy.

There were also the absurdly named “informal informals”, in which a small group of delegates from various countries were charged with tackling a small piece of disputed text often as little as a paragraph at a time. Their task was to try to remove the infamous “square brackets” denoting areas of disagreement on the text and they met in small huddles around the conference centre, squatting on the floor in corridors or standing around a smart phone.

After these measures were still not producing enough progress, Fabius turned to “indabas” – by Zulu tradition, these are groups of elders convened to try to discuss disputes in communities. They were first tried out at the Durban climate talks in South Africa, in 2011, and under France’s plan they consisted of groups of up to 80 delegates at a time gathered to thrash out the remaining disagreements.

  • Small countries banded together to amplify their shared concerns:

While the French could draft in experienced diplomats on every side, some of the smallest countries had difficulty in keeping up with the meetings – many happened in parallel and they did not have the personnel to attend them all.

One way of getting around that was the formation of a “coalition of high ambition”, which was announced with three days to Friday’s deadline. Forged by small island states – a key figure was Tony de Brum of the Marshall Islands – and the EU, it was joined by many of the least developed countries, adding up to more than 100 nations. They could then negotiate together, with an agreed common interest. Before the end, this coalition had been joined by the US, Canada and Australia. It was hailed by Europe’s climate and energy commissioner Miguel Cañete as a key factor in the end agreement.

  • Finally, 1:1 talks between the final decisionmakers:

At this point, it was clear that further efforts were needed. There followed a rapid round of telephone diplomacy. Obama spoke personally to the Chinese leader. Hollande picked up the phone to as many of his counterparts across the world as he could manage.

Designing better futures for Syria

My own career goal is to “[help people think about the future](http://bob.ryskamp.org/design/).”

I can’t imagine a better application of that than [a group from the University of Washington](http://syria.ischool.uw.edu/) which [helps Syrian refugee children design a better future for themselves and their families](https://slate.adobe.com/cp/zlibu/).

> We asked the participants to work in pairs to fuel creativity and help ease literacy barriers. They used LEGO Mini-Figures and Bricks, art supplies, color pens, and FUJI Instamax Cameras to create the devices…

> Magical devices often depict means of transportation…Mobility is a challenge in Za’atari for different reasons–many people have physical disabilities, exasperated by war trauma, and there is no public transport to assist with lack of roads…

> Teams also designed devices similar to existing technology, such as Google glass, but that address particular needs in the camps. One team, who called themselves “Future’s Butterflies,” designed glasses that help discover and cure diseases.