I’ve always been facinated by words that have no direct translation into other languages. I think the words say something about the culture and people that use them. It also reminds us of that connection between language and thought and language and culture. Does language shape thought? Or does thought shape our language? And do our languages shape culture? Or does the culture shape the language?

Well, I’ve just stumbled across another of those words, _Sankofa_

bq. Sankofa is an “Akan”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akan_people word that means, ‘We must go back and reclaim our past so we can move forward; so we understand why and how we came to be who we are today.’

Another word that’s stuck with me is _Setsunai_

bq. There’s no good single word for this feeling in English; I generally think of it as setsunai, which is a close-to-untranslatable Japanese word I can best render as “that beauty which is also melancholy or painful.” Setsunai, “to me”:http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=798, is a feeling of glances and gestures made in pictures, when through what is in the photographic frame you are offered some tiny understanding of what is outside it and must remain outside it.

“Adam Greenfield”:http://www.v-2.org/displayArticle.php?article_num=182 actually got this interest going a few years ago with _Querencia_

Apropos of recent musings, Juanita B., our favorite new-breed librarian, writes to remind me of the wonderful word querencia. It’s a little hard to translate directly into English; words like “home,” “nest” or “sanctuary” have resonances that can’t quite be trimmed to fit.

Juanita cites Barry Lopez’s The Rediscovery of North America: “Lopez explains that querencia is a place where one feels secure, _’a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn.’_ In Spain, it is the place in the ring where the wounded bull goes to renew his strength and center himself, ready for a fresh charge. What a beautiful concept: ‘A place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs.’”

“Craig”:http://www.lowfatbrains.com/ thinks that we’re seeing the world slowly moving towards a single language, or just a handfull at least. He said that he’d recently discovered that we now only have 8000 actively used lanuages. We used to have close to 100 000. He’s probably onto something. It’s a really sad realisation though.

Personally I think it will be an unspeakable tragedy if we start losing these words…

Régine Debatty’s “We Make Money Not Art”:http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com is, without a doubt, my favourite blog. It’s a consistent source of facinating technology and really innovative ideas.

Today’s source of facination is “Organic concrete”:http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/006998.php:

!http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/yyy/I02_04_betao.jpg!

Applied as a surface, organic concrete makes it possible to obtain permeable living surfaces, offering a natural component for public urban spaces.

But wait, there’s more! And this is a “personal favorite”:http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004088.php of mine…

!http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/yyy/mail.gif!

“Chronos Chromos Concrete”:http://www.innovation.rca.ac.uk/archive/pr_sing.php?i=0, a project by Chris Glaister, Afshin Mehin and Tomas Rosen at the RCA Innovation Unit (London), uses heating elements and ink to allow graphics, words and numbers to be displayed within concrete.

And then there’s “this too”:http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/003654.php:

!http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/yyy/wall_01%5B1%5D.jpg!

A wall made of LitraCon has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of optical glass fibers, view of the outside world, such as the silhouette of trees, houses and passersby, are transmitted inside the building.

These are the kind of technologies I find really exciting. They physicaly, reshape the world around us. You don’t have to be a geek to appreciate this kind of innovation.

I say the Chronos Chromos Concrete is my personal favorite because it paves the way for a marriage of the physical and digital worlds and we can only imagine what that will give birth to.

I’ll be attending this:

World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures:
London 2005

When: Saturday 1st & Sunday 2nd of October
Programme: see the “programme page”:http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/programme.html
Where: Limehouse Town Hall, 646 Commercial Road, London, E14 7HA (Map)
Registration: http://www.wsfii.org/register.php
Wiki: http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/wiki
Mailing lists: Join the announce list and/or the discussion list

On the first weekend of October (1st and 2nd) the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures is taking place in London. This event will bring together individuals and groups from across the world working on projects such as free wireless networking, free of copyright mapping and open hardware. It is also part of a larger season of events based around alternative approaches to knowledge production and access and timed to coincide with the UK’s hosting of a pan-European Creative Economy conference.

The event is open to all but we encourage you to register because space is limited. A small entrance fee of £10 is planned to help pay for costs but concessions are available.

Increasing volumes of information are fueling a need for new ways to interact with data. Keyboards, mice and computer screens have served us well so far but they come from a time when we manipulated information personally. Today we have so much to work with that just cant do it all on our own anymore. So we have started building tools to do it for us. Rss feeds, podcasting, del.icio.us are all tools we’ve built to help us agregate information but these a designed to address the problem of finding information. What about displaying information?

Imagine you are a gardener. You grow your own network garden where each plant, which you have already selected and planted, grows up fed by your communication data.

!http://jee.manme.org.uk/img/garden.jpg!

“GORI”:http://jee.manme.org.uk/ars2005.php means ‘an open hook’ in Korean and it is often used to represent human relationships. Here it is used to express the image of ‘fastening or loosening the relationship at your will’

The project intends to explore the relation between an individual and his or her everyday social experience in the network and represent it by using metaphors of nature.

Pretty cool huh? More conceptual than practical Philips, however, has also announced a really “impressive bit of technology”:http://www.polymervision.com/New-Center/Press-Releases/Article-14693.html:

!http://www.geekzone.co.nz/images/news/readius.jpg!

The Readius is the world’s first prototype of a functional electronic-document reader that can unroll its display to a scale larger than the device itself.

Now thats straight off the pages of scifi novels. In fact I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s “Diamond Age”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0553380966/103-3514303-4171801?v=glance at the moment which revolves around a book that works a lot like the Readius (it’s more advanced though). The book generates content tailored to Nell, the little girl who finds the book, printing it in plain text or animating it thanks tothe stolen technology that was used to create it’s pages.

These interfaces are slowly becoming a reality…