Aspiration with nowhere to fly to
I was in Senegal for a few weeks, and was assisted by an able and creative young man. For a while, I wondered why he did not react to my text messages. His French was good. He dressed well, if rather flashily in my Anglophone view. We had a fight when I asked him for receipts and I realised he could not read.
One of the things I was curious about was those people who risk life, lungs and thousands of family dollars to get to Europe. All the news-papers talked about “desperation”. It did not make such easy sense.
You have young Congolese men going to Angola with $5 000 to get on a ship to Brazil —not to find an economic future in one of the fastest growing economies in the world, but to work in Brazil and find their way to France.
In Senegal’s Mbour, a kind of touristy Franco-African village, young men lift weights and run on the beach every day, training to cross the Sahara. They train as if they are planning an international sporting career, with commitment and pain. They talk, and plan and share intelligence. It has become a movement. France is no longer the place to go — it is Italy and Spain. One group says “Barça or die”. They take vows that if they do not get to Barça, they are prepared to die.
Tags: did, die, how, major, static
March 16th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
What are you? An economist?
March 16th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I think the caption is relating the speed/altitude/weight of the space shuttle to these other objects, rather than suggesting the launch causes laws of physics to change.
March 16th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Stølum, H.-H. “River Meandering as a Self-Organization Process.” Science 271, 1710-1713, 1996.This article published in Science might help with your incredulity. I haven’t read it in several years, but I remember it used simulations as well as empirical observations. Check it out for yourself.
March 16th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
a fictional movie producer?
March 16th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Don’t ask pi.
March 16th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
charminggeek, you and i both know that last comment wasn’t needed. Didnt your school teach you it’s not polite to be a dick?
March 16th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Which means, if you measure at exactly the right scale, anything with a fractal shape will have the ratio of pi.
March 16th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
I am familiar with the fractal nature of rivers and coastlines, and did not suggest I knew the length of a river. I was just offering the definition of “as the crow flies” as something other than “how a crow actually flies”.As for defining where a river begins and ends, the source is defined as the point furthest from the mouth in the drainage that has water year-round. The mouth is the point where the river enters the sea (or salt lake). These “points” are, of course, not really points in the geometrical sense, so some uncertainty remains.