naturalfeature:iberian peninsula

Are Genetic Testing Sites the New Social Networks? - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/style/23-and-me-ancestry-dna.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/06/07/style/00dna-04/00dna-04-facebookJumbo.jpg

At-home genetic testing services have gained significant traction in the past few years. 23andMe, which costs $99, has over five million customers, according to the company; AncestryDNA (currently $69), over 10 million.

The companies use their large databases to match willing participants with others who share their DNA. In many cases, long-lost relatives are reuniting, becoming best friends, travel partners, genealogical resources or confidantes.

The result is a more layered version of what happened when Facebook first emerged and out-of-touch friends and family members found one another. Children of long-ago casual sperm donors are finding their fathers. Adoptees are bonding to biological family members they’ve been searching for their entire lives.

The Genetic Global Village

Others who have their DNA tested are forming relationships not with specific people, but with their family’s places of origin.

One example is Leah Madison, 32, an education outreach coordinator for the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. She was planning trips to Peru and Korea when she learned a year and a half ago from 23andMe that her family came from Greece, Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.

Over the winter she and her father went to the Iberian Peninsula for two weeks. She felt an ineluctable connection to the people as she ate their bread masterpieces, toured buildings by Antoni Gaudí and danced to flamenco music.

“I had a piece of paper that tells me I’m from Spain,” Ms. Madison said. “But then I went there and I noticed all these people have curly hair, and maybe that is where mine comes from?” Now she feels compelled to visit the other places as well.

Perhaps the most frustrating reality is when users don’t have any known connections at all. This can happen to people in certain ethnic groups, including Latinos and Asians, that thus far have fewer people using the services and a smaller database.

“Diversity in genetic research is a global problem,” said Joanna Mountain, the senior director of Research at 23andMe, adding that the company is offering free testing in some countries to begin to rectify that. “The results for Hispanics and Asians aren’t there yet, but they are coming,” said Jenn Utley, a family historian at Ancestry (the parent company of AncestryDNA). “The database keeps growing.”

#Génomique #Données_personnelles #Familles #23andme

Selective authenticity and the Spanish Empire in computer games.
▻http://www.presura.es/2017/08/29/selective-authenticity-and-the-spanish-empire-in-computer-games

http://www.presura.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/conquistadors_by_dakiew.jpg

Furthermore, what the historian-developer’s unwillingness tells us is that digital simulations of the past still draw from historical explanations dating from the 19th century. This is, they focus on the tale of great men and great nations that prove their right to rule by defeating their enemies through the use of violence (Venegas Ramos, A., 2016). However, nowadays the video game medium is mature enough to write the history of Humanity, and the Spanish Conquista in particular, by leaving the myth of the mounted musketeer back in the Iberian Peninsula.

The World according to Eratosthenes

▻http://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/10400/10489/10489.htm

http://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/10400/10489/10489.jpg

Projection: Unknown,
Source Bounding Coordinates:
W: E: N: S:

Description: A facsimile of the world map by Eratosthenes (around 220 BC). Eratosthenes is the ancient Greek mathematician and geographer attributed with devising the first system of Latitude and Longitude. He was also the first know person to calculate the circumference of the earth. This is a facsimile of the map he produced based on his calculations. The map shows the routes of exploration by Nearchus from the mouth of the Indus River (325 BC, after the expedition to India by Alexander the Great), and Pytheas (300 BC) to Britannia. Place names include Hellas (Greece), Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea), Mare Caspium (Caspian Sea), Gades (Cadiz), Columnæ Herculis (Gibraltar), Taprobane (Sri Lanka), Iberes (Iberian peninsula), Ierne (Ireland), and Brettania (Britain), the rivers Ister (Danube), Oxus (Amu Darya), Ganges, and Nilus (Nile), and mountain systems. The map shows his birthplace in Libya (Cyrene), the Egyptian cities of Alexandria and Syene (Aswan) where Eratosthenes made his calculations of the earth’s circumference, and the latitudes and longitudes of several locations based on his measurements in stadia.

Place Names: A Complete Map of Globes and Multi-continent, Europa, -Libya, -Asia, -India, -Scythia, -Arabi
ISO Topic Categories: society
Keywords: The World according to Eratosthenes, physical, -historical, kEarlyMapsFacsimile, physical features, topographical, society, Unknown, 220 BC
Source: Ernest Rhys, Ed., A Literary and Historical Atlas of Asia (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton & CO., 1912) 2
Map Credit: Courtesy the private collection of Roy Winkelman

#cartographie #cartographie_ancienne

• Wistful Photos Capture Nomadic Life in the Bucolic Iberian Peninsula
▻http://www.featureshoot.com/2014/09/wistful-photos-capture-nomadic-life-in-the-bucolic-iberian-peninsula

For Country Fictions, Madrid-based photographer Juan Aballe chronicles life in the rural corners of the Iberian Peninsula, capturing the quiet, bucolic lifestyle of its villages through a rose-colored lens. Inspired by a group of his friends, who had abandoned metropolitan areas for a life nearer to the natural landscape of places like La Mancha, Andalusia, and the Pyrenees, Aballe himself thought of relocating to the country; Country Fictions is the manifestation of his fantasy, a vision of a life that never came to be.

http://www.featureshoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Juan_Aballe_08.jpg http://www.featureshoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Juan_Aballe_07.jpg http://www.featureshoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Juan_Aballe_02.jpg http://www.featureshoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Juan_Aballe_11.jpg http://www.featureshoot.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Juan_Aballe_15.jpg

#Photographie #nomade

►http://anarchistnews.org/content/eyes-south-french-anarchists-and-algeria
It is held in some circles that #anarchism, like Marxism, is a form of thought and praxis that originated in nineteenth-century Europe and as such is inseparably related to this social milieu; interventions and mobilizations taken outside of this geographical-historical intersection, however strongly critical they be of patriarchy, the State, and capital, are in patronizing manner considered not to be anarchist. This raises the question of ethnocentrism among self-identified proponents of anarchist social philosophy—a concern that is not without its historical basis, given that even the Spanish anarchists of the CNT and the FAI refused seriously to consider emancipating Spain’s colonies in Morocco as part of the radical socio-political program it would counterpose to feudalism and capitalism in the Iberian peninsula.1 These glaring trends are ones that anarchist academic David Porter confronts and challenges strongly with his Eyes to the South: French #Anarchists and #Algeria, an extensive work that examines the various dramas of modern Algerian history and the engagement by French anarchist observers of this. In broad terms, it can be said that Porter in this work seeks to advance a mutual enrichment between established Western anarchist perspectives with the effectively anarchist practices seen in the Algerian context after the military defeat of Nazism in Europe, in addition to challenging the reactionary tendency of residents and workers of core Western societies to identify with the colonial projects promoted by their ruling classes as well as showing the potential of anarchism’s relevance to the lives of the social majorities of the world—following in the example of the CNT-FAI in Spain.
[If we are lucky we will win 1936 all over again]