It’s not often that we sympathise with the Mossos d’Esquadra, Catalonia’s regional police force. All too often recently, they have hit the headlines for truncheoning protesting young Catalans or beating up suspects, so it was rather refreshing to read this on Europa Press: A Mossos d’Esquadra agent was injured in the knee on Wednesday by a bullet that rebounded after another policeman shot at a wild boar which had ventured into Barcelona’s Sants district, according to police sources. This took place between 4am and 5 am, when the animal reached a populated area – it got as far as Calle Numància – and the agents started the search to shoot the wild boar in an open space. The presence … [Read more...] about Catalan police gunned down in Barcelona wild boar mayhem!
presence
O Lusitania
Tabucchi loves Lisbon, the film director Wenders loves Lisbon, and I much like Lisbon: the sweet urban decadence of it, the formidable Atlantic ocean of it making it Europe’s last vestige on the southern flank, but also an easy, open way to the new world, as far as the immensely flowing Amazon. A city in a nation well positioned for potential greatness, but Portugal still needing to be represented in the international literary canon with its only available candidate at one point, the poet Fernando Pessoa it seems. A chap through his compositions and spiritual meanderings contributing to its name, ironically named pessoa, meaning person in Portuguese, yet a man cleverly made up of many … [Read more...] about O Lusitania
How police brutality helped Spain’s 15-M protests
In recent days, music fans and political activists in Spain have been remembering Gil Scott-Heron, the singer-songwriter who died last Friday. The ongoing sit-ins and protests that started across Spain in the lead-up to May’s local elections have seen inevitable links being drawn between Scott-Heron’s anthem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and the 15-M/Democracia Real Ya movement. But the day after Scott-Heron’s death, when the TV showed images of Catalonia’s mossos d’esquadra local police force brutally charging into a crowd of unarmed, peaceful demonstrators in Barcelona, it seemed more fitting to think of another seventies cultural touchstone: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork … [Read more...] about How police brutality helped Spain’s 15-M protests
A real feel for virtual reality
Computer graphics have come a long way since the painfully pixelated days of Pac-Man, yet few people would think virtual characters or objects are real. Place someone in a virtual reality environment, however, and they will almost certainly interact with their digital surroundings as if they were physically there. In trying to understand presence – defined, in this case, as the propensity of humans to respond to fake stimuli as if they are real – researchers are not just gaining insights into how the human brain functions. They are also learning how to create more intense and realistic virtual experiences, opening the door to myriad applications for healthcare, training, social research … [Read more...] about A real feel for virtual reality