schuppli's blog

The international legal principles in these five treaties provide for non-appropriation of outer space by any one country, arms control, the freedom of exploration, liability for damage caused by space objects, the safety and rescue of spacecraft and astronauts, the prevention of harmful interference with space activities and the environment, the notification and registration of space activities, scientific investigation and the exploitation of natural resources in outer space and the settlement of disputes.

Gaston Bachelard’s 1949 book, Le Rationalisme appli- qué (RA; best translated as Reason Applied), is essen- tial to an understanding of his work, and Bachelard is essential to an understanding of twentieth-century French philosophy. That this book has never been translated into English shows how little the anglophone world is yet acquainted with some key aspects of this corpus.

Teddy Cruz reviews the shifting political landscape of the last two decades in Latin America. Breaking from US dependency, the continent has charted an alternative course as municipalities have reconnected public policy, social justice and civic imagination. In order to address inequality, new models of urban development have been produced on sites of scarcity, and city mayors and administrations have been prepared to learn from each other through best practice.

Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread - to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the "psychoacoustic correction" aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or "sound bombs") over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm.

Among the many astonishing claims that Barack Obama made in his recent speech opposing the Palestinian bid for statehood was that ‘peace will not come through statements and resolutions.’ This is, at best, an odd thing to say for a president whose ascendancy to power itself depended on the compelling use of rhetoric. Indeed, his argument against the power of statements and resolutions at the United Nations to achieve peace was a rhetorical ploy that sought to minimise the power of rhetorical ploys.

The distinct French and Italian concepts of appareil/apparato and dispositif/ dispositivo have frequently been rendered the same way as ‚apparatus‛ in English. This pre- sents a double problem since it collapses distinct conceptual lineages from the home languages and produces a false identity in English.