The freesheet Metro reports on a demographic shift. People born in 1948 no longer constitute the largest group in the country. Oh no.

Moreover, more people now leave Finland than arrive, according to figures passed to YLE.

If I understand a report in today’s Guardian correctly (and if Benjamin Haas, the Guardian reporter, has outlined the issue correctly) South Korean law does not take geography as its basis, but rather citizenship.

Every other legal jurisdiction that I have heard of bases itself on geography. This difference has immense implications for what we think about the relationship between citizens, the state, and the legal framework that adjudicates between them.

Lev Manovich argues that the database is replacing central perspective as the dominant symbolic form by which we make sense of our world. In this he follows the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose Philosophy of Symbolic Forms defines the task of humankind as seeking “the categories of the consciousness of objects in the theoretical, intellectual sphere” and suggests that this “starts from the assumption that such categories must be at work wherever a cosmos, a characteristic and typical world view, takes form out of the chaos of impressions.”.

This essay is simply me thinking aloud about some of the issues and questions that this raises.