hosh (hosh@hub.disroot.org)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Jul-2018 04:30:53 EDT
hoshPeaches are one of the only fruits that also smell delicious. Most other fruits either don't have much of a smell or it's fairly subtle. Guavas are a definite exception to that rule - usually if you like like the smell of them, you also like the taste of them. I like neither. Then there's the South East Asian fruit, the Durian. I've never smelled or tasted them, but it's usually said to have an obnoxious, overpoweringly putrid odor. It's related to the Indian jackfruit, which I've tasted but not smelled - I usually arrive in India only at the tail end of their season.
hosh (hosh@hub.disroot.org)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Jul-2018 04:18:56 EDT
hoshWrongly used the word "ligature" in an earlier post where I should have used "character" or simply "letter". According to Wikipedia A ligature "occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph." A grapheme is " the smallest unit of a writing system of any given language. Graphemes include alphabetic letters, typographic ligatures, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and other individual symbols..." A glyph is "an elemental symbol within an agreed set of symbols, intended to represent a readable character for the purposes of writing." A phoneme is "one of the units of sound (or gesture in the case of sign languages, see chereme) that distinguish one word from another in a particular language." An allograph *" denotes any glyphs that are considered variants of a letter or other grapheme, like a number or punctuation."
"Allographs have found use in humor and puns; a famous example of allographic humour is that of spelling fish ghoti."
hosh (hosh@hub.disroot.org)'s status on Monday, 09-Jul-2018 16:16:32 EDT
hoshWe have a garden in our community to honour persons who, during times of conflict or genocide, act in order to rescue members of the other people. In every conflict you have a few such cases - Armenia, WWII, Rwanda, the Middle East...
The actions of such persons are altruistic in every way - not only do they receive nothing in return, but they are maligned, lose standing within their own community, may risk their very lives, and afterwards their stories are usually forgotten - because they later become uncomfortable or inconvenient for both sides to the conflict. (The community of the perpetrators may feel shame that some people acted more kindly, and the community of the victims may find it inconvenient to remember that not every member of the community of perpetrators acted uniformly badly.)
Such saviours are the true guardians of our humanity at times when it grows exceedingly thin and tenuous. Because, as one has ample opportunity to notice, during an acute conflict people grow extremely aware of the suffering on their own side and, to the same degree, oblivious to the suffering of the other people. If humanity means the ability to feel empathy towards fellow human beings during time of need, this is often the first thing to go at such times. It therefore becomes all the more necessary to preserve one's humanity, if one is not to lose one's soul. There are so many who go through life with dark corners in their memories that they are afraid to enter.
This kind of altruism, of heroism, is definitely worth attention, and worth remembering, because it can serve as a useful light for others to follow when the time comes that they need to face similar choices. And such stories do not cover up that a genocide has actually taken place.
Because I live in an area of the world in which there is intense human suffering, when a story like the rescue of some children from a cave in Thailand is commanding all the media attention, I just can't help wondering what other stories are being currently missed. Does anyone else remember why the Rwanda genocide wasn't big news in America? The news channels happened to be preoccupied with O.J. Simpson. But what to do, bad news is boring, and it isn't so sure that saturating the air waves with this on a constant basis actually helps at all. The war in Syria is still going on. There is no justice for Palestine. The Rohingya are still being ethnically cleansed, the civil war in the DRC continues as usual. Whatever.
"We are wanting to solve two world problems. On one side we call it the waste plastic epidemic, and on the other side the poor quality of roads that we have to drive on today." Plastic waste is "pelletized" into small granules and replaces 20% of the sticky, oil-based bitumen that seals traditional roads. Every ton of asphalt contains approximately 20,000 single-use plastic bottles or around 70,000 single-use plastic bags.