Semantic Traveller: Jayson in India

Hey Everyone,

I’m sorry it took me so long to get an email out. I havn’t had internet access for the past week and a half, and I finally found an internet cafe. Thanks for everyone who wrote me, and I’m sorry I don’t have time to write individual responses.

First off, I would just like to say, IT IS HOT. It gets over 100 degrees and it is humid! Right now I am in a small town called Auroville on the coast of southern India. The town was developed about 45 years ago by the UN and the Indian government to try to create a place “free of national boundaries”. The whole idea is that the city belongs to no country and that they can make their own rules. I’ll write my own impressions on it later, but for now I’ll just say that it is definitely a cool place to be. I am taking this two week course on arches, vaults, and domes with this crazy french architect who is obsessed with vaults. I sleep in a vault, I eat in a vault, and I take classes in a vault. The man’s house is even a vault! There are about 20 students in the class, most of whom are Indian. There is 1 other American, 2 Canadians, and 2 Frenchmen. The class itself has been amazing. The work is challanging but fun, and a lot more engineering and math intensive than I expected, considering that almost everyone here is an architect. The first week was all theory, and we each designed our own free-standing vault. (I never knew so much went into designing a vault – It took me three full days!) This week we have been actually building arches and domes. Today we went to the site of one of the buildings that the architect has designed. It is a temple right on the beach. The previous temple had been destroyed in the Tsunami, so it was pretty amazing to go out there and see it.

Travel Green…With Google Maps?

Google is appealing to the ever-growing trend in eco-tourism and environmental consciousness in the United States by joining the Earth Day Network to create entirely "green" trip itineraries for anyone who inquires. With growing concern over the United States' contribution to Global Warming and Climate Change, an entire low-carbon tourism industry is developing. Google is known for starting trends. We'll see how long this one lasts.

President Designates New National Monument

June 15, 2006: Today President Bush designates the Western Hawaiian Islands, a marine area near the size of California, as a national monument. This is the president’s second use of the National Antiquities Act; the first being the designation of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan. The area west of Hawaii now protected will be completely off-limits to any commercial activity. It is about 140,000 square-miles in area and contains over 7,000 species of marine wildlife. This is the largest use of the National Antiquities Act in United States history, since it was created nearly 100 years ago.

Modern McCarthyism: Democracy Under Siege

 

Many of us aren't old enough to remember the period in the early fifties when Senator Joseph McCarthy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, and their cronies engaged in a series of witch-hunts, suspending the rights of countless Americans who they accused of communism. For those who can’t quite remember that section of our nation's history class from high school, I can only suggest you read up on it. Those of us who are familiar with McCarthyism, even minimally through films like Goodnight, and Goodluck, however, can't help but recognize similarities between the actions of our government's intelligence agencies then and those of their modern counterparts.