socks-studio

Zoroastrianism traditionally conceives death as a temporary triumph of evil over good: rushing into the body, the corpse demon contaminates everything it comes in contact with.
The flesh of a dead body being so unclean it can pollute everything, a set of rules had to be created in order to dispose of the corpse as safely as possible: as the natural elements of earth, air and water are sacred, the corpses were not to be thrown upon the water or interred. Cremation was also forbidden, as fire is the direct -purest- emanation of the divinity.

Hence a complex ritual was developed, in which the corpses would be eventually exposed to birds of prey and thus devoured, in a final act of charity.
After death every division of class and wealth disappeared, for all deceased would be treated equally.

A proper architectural typology was invented solely for the purpose of burial’s ritual: transported in the desert by nasellars (traditional zoroastrian pallbearers), the bodies of the deceased were then carted onto sandstone, forbidding hills, to be eventually disposed on cilindrical constructions called Towers of Silence.

A Tower of Silence, or Dakhmeh, is a structure laying on the top of a hill, consisting of concentric slabs surrounding a central pit. The bodies were arranged onto four concentric rings: men, outermost, than women and children. Despite the fact the the birds of prey needed less than an hour to leave nothing but bones, the remains of the dead were left bleaching on the upper circles no less than a year before the nasellars could come and push the skeletons onto the underlying ossuary pit. Running through sand and coal filters, the disintegrated bones were eventually washed away in the sea.

A guardian traditionnaly lived near the Tower of Silence, and was the sole person allowed to handle the ceremonial procedures, while relatives of the deceased stayed in a house below, and were forbidden to enter.

Iranian Zoroastrian discontinued this ceremony, and the Dakhmeh were banned in the 70′s; conversely, Parsi modern-day Zoroastrians in Mumbai and Karachi still mantains the tradition of burial by exposure, through the use of their own Towers of Silence.

Further read:
Towers of Silence on Wikipedia
A Sea of Lead, a Sky of Slate
Historical Iranian Sites and People

Please be aware that some of the images at the end of the post are extremely graphic. Viewer discretion is advised.

Show the images

Marnehuizen is a Dutch false and uninhabited city included in the military camp of Marnewaard, near Groningen.

The city provides the army a stage to simulate future urban combats, emergencies and raids, and it consists of a number of streets, some dwellings, a section of railways with a train station, a bank, a supermarket, a warehouse and even a sewers systems. Europe prepares for what is already happening in Athens and what is probably going to happen again in metropolis under siege like London and Paris.

Marnhuizen represents all cities without being one and it appears strickingly similar to the scenario for Lars von Trier’s film Dogville. From the Funambulist‘s review:

“Dogville, a film from Danish director Lars von Trier (2003), is somewhere in between nowhere (utopia) and elsewhere (heterotopia). (…) This space is just like any other spaces in cinema, it exists outside the reality since it is representing this same reality.”

Jeroen Hofman collected his photographs of Marnhuizen in the book “Playground”
This work has been prefaced by Dr. Pieter van Vollenhoven, member of the Dutch Royal House and former military, which personally used to supervise emergencies simulations and was the chairman, until last year, of the Dutch Safety Board.

Via: Il Post

Edward McKnight Kauffer (14 December 1890 – 22 October 1954) was an influential American-born artist noted for his avant garde graphic design and poster art, especially in England.

Via: Imaging the future / hilarious, depressing or what?

Italian online newspaper Il Post publishes a report by a group of four Austrian researchers from Wien University, about an innovative statistical method to detect electoral frauds:

It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting:
Statistical detection of systematic election irregularities

Democratic societies are built around the principle of free and fair elections, that each citizen’s vote should count equal. National elections can be regarded as large-scale social experiments, where people are grouped into usually large numbers of electoral districts and vote according to their preferences. The large number of samples implies certain statistical consequences for the polling results which can be used to identify election irregularities. Using a suitable data collapse, we find that vote distributions of elections with alleged fraud show a kurtosis of hundred times more than normal elections. As an example we show that reported irregularities in the 2011 Duma election are indeed well explained by systematic ballot stuffing and develop a parametric model quantifying to which extent fraudulent mechanisms are present. We show that if specific statistical properties are present in an election, the results do not represent the will of the people. We formulate a parametric test detecting these statistical properties in election results. For demonstration the model is also applied to election outcomes of several other countries.

Crossing the percentage of voters with the percentage of winning party’s voters, and analyzing the number of districts by color, Peter Klimek, Yuri Yegorov, Rudolf Hanel e Stefan Thurner traced a sort of poll’s fingerprint, and put into evidence suspect cases and irregularities.

Districts usually cluster around a given turnout and voting level. In Uganda and Russia these clusters are ’smeared out’ to the upper right region of the plots, reaching a second peak at a 100% turnout and a 100% of votes (red circles).

While the report is not of easy lecture if you’re not really into statistics, it shows an interesting use of science to uncover one of the most efficient yet hidden display of tyrannical power.

Read the full text pdf on arxiv.org.

Via: Il Post

Massimo Cristaldi is an internationally awarded Italian photographer.
Here’s the 2008 series Sichuan, his personal take on the disastrous earthquake that devastated that Chinese province.

“A violent earthquake causes thousand of victims and enormous damages. What remains are ruins and lost people. 18,522 still missing after China quake.”