quiet room

“Write to me always,

even if just a little,

Eugène Bidau (French, 1839-1899)

thinking about this alternative pain scale recently and wanted to bring it back for those who may have never seen it.

pain is subjective and therefore difficult to communicate, and is especially difficult for neurodivergent people in particular - but this chart is designed to help make that communication easier.

I recommend saving this and pulling it up in any clinical pain-assessment setting - it’s saved my ass more times than I can count regarding accurately conveying my symptoms and getting the correct level of care required for them.

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

If you are in the US, you may be aware that librarians are Going Through It because some malicious people believe in fascism and have decided to make that our problem. Whether you are in the US or not, there is something you can do to help your local librarians out:**

Say something nice to us.

You can post on social media and tag your library, you can find the library’s main phone number and call, you can go in person, you can send a card (we display cards in our break room)! I guarantee you that you will make the day of the person you talk to, we will immediately go tell all our colleagues how lovely you were, and you will help us live to love and fight another day.

*it is a fetching piece of millinery in purple silk

(downs three cups of coffee in quick succession)

The above advice remains one thousand percent true no matter where you are in the world, I would venture to say.

For those of you in the US, I am going to add that if you need a way to not feel helpless, getting involved with your library is a wonderful and *genuinely useful, will make a day to day difference in your neighbor’s lives* thing to do. Librarians are there to provide, vet, and guide you through reams of information. Give us a hand and everyone wins. This can look like:

- using the library and getting to know the staff

- if there’s a volunteer Friends group, join it! Or start one! These folks raise extra money for the library and often run things like book sales

- going to library board meetings and standing up during public comment time to talk about how much you love the library and the First Amendment

- if you have an elected library board, run for it. Usually the only qualification is you have to reside in the district the library serves.

- vote yes on library funding measures

Go in June and tell them you love the Pride displays. Go in February and talk about Black History month. Go any time of the year and say how glad you are to see diverse authors, queer representation, etc. say you’d love to see more of those things, programs on those themes, all of it.

Is your library county funded, city funded, state funded, etc.? The government bodies which fund your libraries are the ones you want to be getting in touch with EVERY winter/spring (the new fiscal year starts July and often library funding for the year is decided late spring) to tell them how much you love the library and want it to have more funding. In more local systems, grassroots calling campaigns still work!

On that note: is your library seeking unionization? Once again, you can help by calling and writing to the local government responsible for your library system to tell them you support library staff having a workers' union. End of October is usually the deadline to sign off on a unionization vote, and officials sometimes need incentive to do so via loud public support.

What schools system does your public library serve? School library/book policies (such as challenges and bans) can spill over into the public libraries as well-- but school libraries also need your support! Attend their board meetings and voice your support for the first amendment whenever possible.

Are there library board spots up for grabs? This is a crucial time for a library. Sometimes a system allows for voting in the board members but most systems simply hire someone via a job listing. In this case, contact your sitting board members and tell them you are a library patron and want them to hire someone who supports intellectual freedom and first amendment rights. Get all your friends and family to do the same. Attend board meetings and tell them, too. A single pro-censorship board member can do a lot of damage to a library system.

See about getting in with that organization and see what the library actually needs. Most of them DON’T NEED BOOKS. They likely need money for programming, technology, maintenance, and staff support. They need help promoting their services, they need private investment, they need internet from this century.

Jette Stoltz (Swedish, 1923-2010)

Jette Stoltz graduated in 1944 and then studied art at Konstfack , the Scanian School of Painting in Malmö, Otte Sköld's School of Painting and the Academy of Arts in Copenhagen. In 1951 she came to Paris where she studied with Fernand Léger.

She debuted in 1956 in Stockholm where she sold 36 paintings in three days.

Stoltz had a strong Christian faith from childhood and it is a recurring theme in her paintings. After a stay at the Franciscan monastery in Assisi in 1949, she converted to Catholicism . She returned to Italy after her studies and Rome occasionally became her residence.

In 1986, she appeared in the TV program Här är ditt liv (Here is your life, loosely based on "This is your life" show) and the magazine Kulturens Värld.

Who are the Shompen?

The Shompen are an indigenous culture that lives in the Great Nicobar Island, which is nowadays owned by India. The Shompen and their ancestors are believed to have been living in this island for around 10,000 years. Like other tribes in the nearby islands, the Shompen are isolated from the rest of the world, as they chose to be left alone, with the exception of a few members who occasionally take part in exchanges with foreigners and go on quarantine before returning to their tribe. There are between 100 and 400 Shompen people, who are hunter-gatherers and nomadic agricultors and rely on their island's rainforest for survival.

Why is there risk of genocide?

India has announced a huge construction mega-project that will completely change the Great Nicobar Island to turn it into "the Hong Kong of India".

Nowadays, the island has 8,500 inhabitants, and over 95% of its surface is made up of national parks, protected forests and tribal reserve areas. Much of the island is covered by the Great Nicobar Biosphere Reserve, described by UNESCO as covering “unique and threatened tropical evergreen forest ecosystems. It is home to very rich ecosystems, including 650 species of angiosperms, ferns, gymnosperms, and bryophytes, among others. In terms of fauna, there are over 1800 species, some of which are endemic to this area. It has one of the best-preserved tropical rain forests in the world.”

The Indian project aims to destroy this natural environment to create an international shipping terminal with the capacity to handle 14.2 million TEUs (unit of cargo capacity), an international airport that will handle a peak hour traffic of 4,000 passengers and that will be used as a joint civilian-military airport under the control of the Indian Navy, a gas and solar power plant, a military base, an industrial park, and townships aimed at bringing in tourism, including commercial, industrial and residential zones as well as other tourism-related activities.

This project means the destruction of the island's pristine rainforests, as it involves cutting down over 852,000 trees and endangers the local fauna such as leatherback turtles, saltwater crocodiles, Nicobar crab-eating macaque and migratory birds. The erosion resulting from deforestation will be huge in this highly-seismic area. Experts also warn about the effects that this project will have on local flora and fauna as a result of pollution from the terminal project, coastal surface runoff, ballasts from ships, physical collisions with ships, coastal construction, oil spills, etc.

The indigenous people are not only affected because their environment and food source will be destroyed. On top of this, the demographic change will be a catastrophe for them. After the creation of this project, the Great Nicobar Island -which now has 8,500 inhabitants- will receive a population of 650,000 settlers. Remember that the Shompen and Nicobarese people who live on this island are isolated, which means they do not have an immune system that can resist outsider illnesses. Academics believe they could die of disease if they come in contact with outsiders (think of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas after Christopher Columbus and the way that common European illnesses were lethal for indigenous Americans with no immunization against them).

And on top of all of this, the project might destroy the environment and the indigenous people just to turn out to be useless and sooner or later be abandoned. The naturalist Uday Mondal explains that “after all the destruction, the financial viability of the project remains questionable as all the construction material will have to be shipped to this remote island and it will have to compete with already well-established ports.” However, this project is important to India because they want to use the island as a military and commercial post to stop China's expansion in the region, since the Nicobar islands are located on one of the world's busiest sea routes.

Last year, 70 former government officials and ambassadors wrote to the Indian president saying the project would “virtually destroy the unique ecology of this island and the habitat of vulnerable tribal groups”. India's response has been to say that the indigenous tribes will be relocated "if needed", but that doesn't solve the problem. As a spokesperson for human rights group Survival International said: “The Shompen are nomadic and have clearly defined territories. Four of their semi-permanent settlements are set to be directly devastated by the project, along with their southern hunting and foraging territories. The Shompen will undoubtedly try to move away from the area destroyed, but there will be little space for them to go. To avoid a genocide, this deadly mega-project must be scrapped.”

On 7 February 2024, 39 scholars from 13 countries published an open letter to the Indian president warning that “If the project goes ahead, even in a limited form, we believe it will be a death sentence for the Shompen, tantamount to the international crime of genocide.”

How to help

The NGO Survival International has launched this campaign:

From this site, you just need to add your name and email and you will send an email to India's Tribal Affairs Minister and to the companies currently vying to build the first stage of the project.

Share it with your friends and acquittances and on social media.

Sources:

India’s plan for untouched Nicobar isles will be ‘death sentence’ for isolated tribe, 7 Feb 2024. The Guardian.

‘It will destroy them’: Indian mega-development could cause ‘genocide’ and ‘ecocide’, says charity, 8 Feb 2024. Geographical.

Genocide experts call on India's government to scrap the Great Nicobar mega-project, Feb 2024. Survival International.

The container terminal that could sink the Great Nicobar Island, 20 July 2022. Mongabay.