Bootstraps

BBC reportsthat India will try to “bridge the digital divide” between South Asia and Africa by offering on-line physician consults and medical training to the struggling continent.

Another illustration that globalization, like almost everything else in this world, is a double-edged sword.

The Koreas

Notice the Koreas (smack in the middle). South Korea is all aglow, while North Korea is benighted.

Without resorting to the simple and dogmatic answer that “South Korea is capitalist and North Korea is communist” (though not incorrect, the answer is incomplete), ask yourself, “Why?”

Now you are a geographer! (And an economist, and a political scientist, and a sociologist, and a historian, and a high-school basketball coach – er, wait…)

From Global Issues:

Africa Refugee Numbers

“If this scale of destruction and fighting was in Europe, then people would be calling it World War III with the entire world rushing to report, provide aid, mediate and otherwise try to diffuse the situation.”

Here’s a great set of economic-geographical questions from Daniel Little.

Crammed between Russia and Europe are a bunch of nations whose names end in “-istan”. Most of these countries are a mystery to people in the West, though a couple of them – particularly Afghanistan and Pakistan – have attained something like celebrity status in the hemisphere.

This begs the question: what does the suffix “-istan” mean? Here’s the answer.

Given the appearance of the suffix in so many countries, one might think it’s meaning is profound and earth-shaking. “-istan” means “place”, specifically, “place of dwelling” or “land of”. So to append the name of a country with “-istan” is to call it home, the place where you stand, where you stay.

So maybe you learned something today.

The potential social implications of this are mind-boggling.

Or not.

“…the world drifts and our maps don’t work anymore, our paradigms and stories fail, and we have to reinvent our understandings, our reasons for doing things … What we need most urgently, in both the West and all over America, is a fresh dream of who we are, [and stories] which can tell us how we should act… They will be stories in which our home is sacred, stories about making sense of a place without ruining it … Wreck it and we will have lost ourselves, and that is craziness.”

- William Kittredge
Who Owns the West? (1996)

Iceland tops the list.

Further proof (as if any was needed) that sometimes, when you lose, you win. But of course, sometimes when you win, you lose.

So sometimes when you lose, you lose. Wait, doesn’t that happen all the time?

People aren’t the only victims of the fires in Australia. Our thoughts are with all the nation’s creatures.