Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Been seeing a lot of copies of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs by Nasrin Alavi getting handed out at Northern Voice 2006. I've had the book for a couple weeks now—the publisher, which is blogging, kindly sent me a review copy with a nice note. I'm halfway through the book now, and it's a nice combination of historical and cultural commentary from the author i.e. excerpts from Iranian weblogs written in Persian translated into English. In other words, so far a good combination of context and primary readings.

I'd love to see a lot more books that translate weblogs written in languages I can't read into English. Chinese would be the first language I'd push for, since I've long forgotten how to read the 200 or so characters learned in university, but excerpts of articles written in Brazilian Portuguese and Korean are languages I could see as being books I'd buy.

Michael Shaw, discussing a photo that some people wanted to believe contained the face of the new President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the influence what people see has on those people: “When people look at a photo of Terry Schiavo and insist she's sentient, or when Bill Frist says that he can determine the same thing partly from observing images, it's hard to argue with what people want to see. In fact, in spite of research that has seriously questioned the nature of visual recall (especially in criminal cases), people continue to rely on such inferences.”

He posts the cropped version of the photo that people would have seen in the newspaper, and then posted the uncropped version that did not get as much attention. He's careful to state that it's possible that Ahmadinejad was involved in what in the embassy takeover more than 25 years ago, but that the photos shown in the media do not constitute enough evidence, and that even an alternate framing calls into question whether the man in the photograph took the lead role in the event the photograph depicts.

To prove that submitting ideas here works, Jim writes in to call attention to his call for charitable donations to help the survivors of the Iran earthquake. He wonders why we distinguish between those who are from nearby and those who are far away. We're all residents of the same "home" (planet Earth), Jim says, and that should be enough for us to have the same amount of compassion for those far away as we do for those nearby.

Evidently, tomorrow, there will be revolution in Iran. Enquiring minds want to know: will it be televised? [via Don Park]