3quarksdaily

The Incomparable Economist

Over at Vox EU, Paul Krugman lists 8 seminal contributions by the late Paul Samuelson to the field of economics:

There have been hedgehogs; there have been foxes; and then there was Paul Samuelson.

I’m referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction among thinkers – foxes who know many things, and hedgehogs who know one big thing. What distinguished Paul Samuelson as an economic thinker, making him like nobody else, past or present, was the fact that he knew – and taught us – many big things. No economist has ever had so many seminal ideas.

With a little help from Google Scholar, I’ve compiled a list of some of Samuelson’s big ideas. I say “some” because I’m sure it’s not complete. But anyway, here are eight – eight! – seminal insights, each of which gave rise to a vast and continuing research literature:

1. Revealed preference: There was a revolution in consumer theory in the 1930s, as economists realised that there was much more to consumer choice than diminishing marginal utility. But it was Samuelson who taught us how much can be inferred from the simple proposition that what people choose must be something they prefer to something else they could have afforded but don’t choose.

2. Welfare economics: What does it mean to say that one economic outcome is better than another? This was a blurry concept before Samuelson came in, with much confusion about how to think about income distribution. Samuelson taught us how to use the concept of redistribution by an ethical observer to make sense of the concept of social welfare – and thereby also taught us the limits of that concept in the real world, where there is no such observer and redistribution usually doesn’t happen.

3. Gains from trade: What does it mean to say that international trade is beneficial? What are the limits of that proposition? The starting point is Samuelson’s analysis of the gains from trade, which drew on both revealed preference and his welfare analysis. And everything since, from the distortions analysis of Bhagwati and Johnson to the generalised comparative advantage concepts of Deardorff, has been based on that insight.

Cooperation Gets Shanghaied

Alex Cooley on China's ventures into international cooperation in Foreign Affairs:

The recent rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) -- a mutual security assembly comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan -- has been met with skepticism in the West. Some fear that it has nefarious intentions to control Central Asia; others worry that the West will somehow be left behind in the region if it does not engage with the SCO. Since its founding in 1996 as a forum for negotiating lingering Soviet-Chinese border disputes, the SCO's mission has broadened to promote regional security and economic cooperation, and combat what its members call the "three evils": separatism, extremism, and terrorism. As its agenda has expanded, so, too, have Western concerns.

When the heads of the SCO countries called for a timetable for closing U.S. military bases in Central Asia at its annual summit in 2005, the SCO appeared to be positioning itself against U.S. influence in the region. Days later, Uzbekistan ousted American forces from a base in Karshi-Khanabad. And that same year, the SCO strongly condemned the Western-backed color revolutions that were sweeping across Eurasia, along with the Western NGOs that were supporting the movements.

Five years later, however, predictions that the SCO would develop into a full-blown anti-West alliance have proven exaggerated. Despite claims of widespread cooperation, the SCO has failed to translate its official announcements into actual regional cooperation.

Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2009

 

Phil Plait (winner of the Charm Quark in the 3QD 2009 Science Prize) in Bad Astronomy:

Every year, this gets harder.

Not that deciding what pictures to use in 2006, 2007, or 2008 was all that easy! But astronomy is such a beautiful science. Of course it has scientific appeal: the biggest questions fall squarely into its lap. Where did this all begin? How will it end? How did we get here? People used to look to the stars asking those questions, and coincidentally, for the most part, that’s where the answers lie. And we’ll be asking them for a long time to come.

But astronomy is so visually appealing as well! Colorful stars, wispy, ethereal nebulae, galactic vistas sprawling out across our telescopes… it’s art no matter how you look at it. And our techniques for viewing the heavens gets better every year; our telescopes get bigger, our cameras more sensitive, and our robotic probes visit distant realms, getting close-up shots that remind us that these are not just planets and moons; they’re worlds.

So every year the flood of imagery takes longer to sort through, and far longer to choose from. And the choices were really tough! This year leans a bit more toward planetary images than usual, but that’s not surprising given how many spacecraft we have out there these days.

I don’t pick all these images for their sheer beauty; I consider what they mean, what we’ve learned from them, and their impact as well. But have no doubts that they are all magnificent examples of the intersection of art and science. At the bottom of each post is a link to the original source and to my original post on the topic, if there is one. If you disagree with my picks, or think I’ve missed something, put a link in the comments! All the pictures have descriptions, and are clickable to bring you to (in most cases) much higher resolution version. So embiggen away!

And welcome to my annual Top Ten Astronomy Pictures post. Enjoy.

More here.

clay shirky v. evgeny morozov

In Prospect’s December cover story, “How dictators watch us on the web”, Evgeny Morozov criticizes my views on the impact of social media on political unrest. Indeed, he even says I am “the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet.” In part, I would like to agree with some of his criticisms, while partially disputing some of his assertions too. Let me start with a basic statement of belief: because civic life is not just created by the actions of individuals, but by the actions of groups, the spread of mobile phones and internet connectivity will reshape that civic life, changing the ways members of the public interact with one another. Though germane, this argument says little to nothing about the tempo, mode, or ultimate shape such a transformation will take. There are a number of possible scenarios for changed interaction between the public and the state, some rosy, others distinctly less so. Crucially however, Morozov’s reading is in response to a specific strain of internet utopianism—let’s call it the “just-add-internet” hypothesis. In this model, the effect of social media on the lives of citizens in authoritarian regimes will be swift, unstoppable, and positive—a kind of digitised 1989. And it will lead us to expect the prominence of social media in any society’s rapid democratisation.

more from Clay Shirky at Prospect here.

you can't handle the truth

In the long and tortured debate over drug policy, one of the strangest episodes has been playing out this fall in the United Kingdom, where the country’s top drug adviser was recently fired for publicly criticizing his own government’s drug laws. The adviser, Dr. David Nutt, said in a lecture that alcohol is more hazardous than many outlawed substances, and that the United Kingdom might be making a mistake in throwing marijuana smokers in jail. His comments were published in a press release in October, and the next day he was dismissed. The buzz over his sacking has yet to subside: Nutt has become the talk of pubs and Parliament, as well as the subject of tabloid headlines like: “Drug advisor on wacky baccy?” But behind Nutt’s words lay something perhaps more surprising, and harder to grapple with. His comments weren’t the idle musings of a reality-insulated professor in a policy job. They were based on a list - a scientifically compiled ranking of drugs, assembled by specialists in chemistry, health, and enforcement, published in a prestigious medical journal two years earlier.

more from Mark Pothier at the Boston Globe here.

Tuesday Poem

Mid-term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay
Counting bells knelling classes to a close,
At two o'clock our neighbors drove me home.

In the porch I met my father crying--
He had always taken funerals in his stride--
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were "sorry for my trouble,"
Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,
Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.
At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on the left temple,
He lay in the four foot box as in a cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

By Seamus Heaney

From Death of a Naturalist; Faber and Faber, London, 1966

A Transylvanian critic takes on the popular Twilight series

Peter C. Baker in The National:

Readers, you all know where I stand: mainstream Transylvanian cinema is hands down the most vibrant in the world today. I’m not talking about the so-called independent fare that gets drooled over by left-wing academics in the Cluj-Napoca Times, the so-called “paper of record”, but never plays in cinemas where you and I live. I’m not talking about “experimental” shorts that consist of nothing but close-ups of necks. And I’m definitely not talking about black-and-white “mumblecore” films where a bunch of overprivileged slackers sit around being lazy, and never even show their fangs.

Foreign film? Thanks but no thanks. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: what do far-flung elites know about the daily concerns – the hungers, the fears, the desires – of real Transylvanians? The only thing worse than a foreign film, to be perfectly honest, is a foreign film made by humans. Liviu Vlaicu at the Cluj-Napoca Times can say whatever he wants: 90 minutes with no bloodsucking just doesn’t add up to entertainment. Don’t be tricked into thinking otherwise by the pimply 108-year old at your local video store – and don’t be fooled by the titles, either. Beware, readers, of Reality Bites, There Will Be Blood and Red Dawn: none are what they seem.

Last year, when I first heard that a human movie was doing big box office here in Transylvania, I wrote it off to the enthusiasm of self-hating city slickers like Liviu Vlaicu who drink organic blood from bottles (if they drink real blood at all). But as the weeks wore on and Twilight steadily conquered our multiplexes, I became worried and curious. I went to the movie’s website, and here is what I found: this movie selling out theatres across Transylvania – written by a human, directed by a human, starring humans, based on a book by a human – claims to be about vampires.

More here.

Hollywood gives biologists a helping hand

From Nature:

Computer programs like those used in animated movies such as Shrek could soon be helping more cell biologists explain hypotheses — or even to make new discoveries, according to scientists presenting work in San Diego this month at the meeting for the American Society of Cell Biology.

"We want to be able to make predictions," says Adrian Elcock of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. "At the very least we want our models to reproduce known behaviours." Elcock is simulating the movement of proteins and other big molecules inside virtual bacterial cells. He built models from known data — including the atomic structures of proteins and concentrations of the 50 most abundant macromolecules in Escherichia coli — and then factored in how the molecular structure of each might cause proteins to stick to each other. His model nicely reproduces established data showing that green fluorescent protein diffuses approximately 10 times more slowly in the crowded environment of a bacterial cell than in a test tube.

More here.

Trusting Nature as the Climate Referee

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Imagine there’s no Copenhagen.

Imagine a planet in which global warming was averted without the periodic need for thousands of people to fly around the world to promise to stop burning fossil fuels. Imagine no international conferences wrangling over the details of climate policy. Imagine entrusting the tough questions to a referee: Mother Earth.

That is the intriguing suggestion of Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph in Ontario who, like me, is virtuously restricting his carbon footprint by staying away from Copenhagen this week. Dr. McKitrick expects this climate conference to yield the same results as previous ones: grand promises to cut carbon emissions that will be ignored once politicians return home to face voters who are skeptical that global warming is even a problem. To end this political stalemate, Dr. McKitrick proposes calling each side’s bluff. He suggests imposing financial penalties on carbon emissions that would be set according to the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. The penalties could start off small enough to be politically palatable to skeptical voters.

More here.

The World's Fastest Animal Takes New York

Meera Subramanian in Smithsonian Magazine:

I’m standing a thousand feet above the streets of New York City, on the 86th floor observatory deck of the Empire State Building, looking for birds. It’s a few hours after sunset, and New York City naturalist Robert “Birding Bob” DeCandido is leading our small group. We can see the cityscape in every direction as the cool wind tousles our hair, but our gaze is focused up. Migrating songbirds, many of which travel by night to keep cool and avoid predators, are passing high overhead on their autumn journey. DeCandido has taught us how to differentiate the movement of small birds—“See how they flap-flap-glide?” he tells us—from the erratic motions of moths, But there is another denizen of the city’s skies that we’re all hoping to see.

A blur of a bird zips past the western flank of the building, level with the observatory. It’s too fast for a gull, too big for a songbird. Maybe a pigeon. Maybe something else. There is an excited buzz as we fumble with binoculars, unable to track the receding figure.

Ten minutes after that first flash, an unmistakable form draws our eyes directly overhead. Collectively, we cry, “Peregrine!”

More here.

Lego Matrix: "Trinity Help!"

Mammogram Math

John Allen Paulos in the New York Times Magazine:

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama promised to restore science to its “rightful place.” This has partly occurred, as evidenced by this month’s release of 13 new human embryonic stem-cell lines. The recent brouhaha over the guidelines put forth by the government task force on breast-cancer screening, however, illustrates how tricky it can be to deliver on this promise. One big reason is that people may not like or even understand what scientists say, especially when what they say is complex, counterintuitive or ambiguous.

As we now know, the panel of scientists advised that routine screening for asymptomatic women in their 40s was not warranted and that mammograms for women 50 or over should be given biennially rather than annually. The response was furious. Fortunately, both the panel’s concerns and the public’s reaction to its recommendations may be better understood by delving into the murky area between mathematics and psychology.

Much of our discomfort with the panel’s findings stems from a basic intuition: since earlier and more frequent screening increases the likelihood of detecting a possibly fatal cancer, it is always desirable. But is this really so?

More here.

The Obama Nobel Speech: What It Reveals and What It Conceals

by Michael Blim

And so the speech, the “just war” speech is given. Or rather “the cold war” speech is given.

President Obama’s Oslo Nobel acceptance speech, that is. It could have been given by John F. Kennedy. It could have been written by Kennedy’s Sorenson, Goodwin, or Schlesinger, filled as it was with allusions to freedom, liberty, tyranny, and the need to defend the vital center.  It was all there: America the underwriter of world security and the keeper of world peace since World War II, the historic champion of democracy even when compared with Johnny-come-lately Europe, the everlasting voice for universal human aspirations.

Tough-minded idealism, cold war realism. The United States, the President says, goes to war to defend its interests only when its cause is just. Afghanistan is a war of self-defense, and thus is just. Other wars undertaken while we have protected the peace these last sixty year have been just too, and they include the first Iraq War and the Balkan wars against Serbia. Missing from the ledger of the just are the Korean, Vietnam, and Second Iraq Wars, though American action in the Korean War is still so unquestioned that its costs and consequences lie unexamined.

We live, the President tells us, in an imperfect world. In a breathtaking claim upon human nature and humanity’s history, he argues that we as a species knew war before we knew peace, and accepted war as another fact of life “like drought and disease.” Though our natures remain warlike, and evil and injustice a constant of the human condition, he believes that we have made halting steps toward the rule of reason as well as a greater human interest in governing our conduct, especially during the American half-century.

Obama’s is a profoundly Christian vision, though a less Manichean outlook than was characteristic of the hot Cold War. The persistence of evil, however, is still its center. Humanity must hope for redemption but persevere in the face of life’s inevitable iniquities. Like Browning, he argues, “that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Applying the pilgrim’s progress to war can be both deadly and deceiving.  Deadly because devotion makes a casualty of proportion, and memory becomes millennial. The march of human progress makes even terrible human tragedy and mendacity small.

Continue reading "The Obama Nobel Speech: What It Reveals and What It Conceals"

Perceptions

Meryl Smith. Excessory Baggage. 2008

Metal screen, paper mache, leather, gold paint, zipper.

MS: "I made "excessory baggage" for a group exhibition at The Honey Space, where 5 curators asked artists to create sculptures that fit the measurement requirements for international carry-on luggage."

More here and here.

Shards and Fragments: Eva Hesse Studioworks

by Sue Hubbard

What is the purpose and function of art? The work of Eva Hesse challenges us to ask this question. Her history has been well documented. Born in Hamburg, in 1936, to a family of observant Jews, she was, at the age of two, put on a Kindertransport arriving first in Holland, then England and, finally, in America in 1939. A sense of tenuousness and the impermanence of things colours her work. The balls of screwed paper, the bits of flimsy gauze, mesh and cloth are like whispers rather than assertions, thought processes made physical, rather than finished objects. Her life was short. At the age of 34, when living in New York, she was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour that cut short her career as a sculptor just as it was getting underway. The body of work she left was remarkable. Poetic, anxious and intense it made manifest her inner, often turbulent emotional life. A writer of diaries, autobiography was the base note of her work.

Like the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton the trauma of Hesse's early childhood strongly affected her emotional development, as did her parents' separation and divorce, and her mother's subsequent suicide in 1945. These events left her insecure and anxious, so that in 1954 she made a decision to enter therapy. Her subsequent analysis had a profound effect on her work as she began to examine herself more closely. "I think art is a total thing. A total person giving a contribution. It is an essence, a soul.... In my inner soul, art and life are inseparable." It is, also, not implausible to consider that on some level she must also have been haunted by the ‘what might have beens’ that would surely have befallen her if she had failed to leave Hamburg in 1936 and faced the fate of many other Jews of her generation. The ghost of the holocaust, as well as her own family traumas, shadows her work.

Hesse's creative talent had been evident since childhood. At the age of 16 she graduated from the New York School of Industrial Arts, later attending the Pratt Institute of Design. But by December 1953 she had dropped out to study figure drawing at the Art Students’ League, whilst also working as a layout artist for Seventeen magazine. Then, in 1957, she graduated from Cooper Union in New York, going on to study at Yale with the assistance of a Norfolk Fellowship.  

There she worked as a painter, studying colour theory under Joseph Albers. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism her work, during the five years from 1960 to 1965, was mostly small, and intensely personal. Her powerful drawings, with their circular and container like shapes, anticipated her later sculptural configurations; her interest in the metaphors of inside and outside, of what is contained and what is left open ended.

Continue reading "Shards and Fragments: Eva Hesse Studioworks"

The Humanists: Frederick Wiseman's High School (1968)

by Colin Marshall

Are we meant to look at Northeast High School in 1968 and marvel at the similarities to our own memories, or at the differences? Surely Frederick Wiseman's documentary, unencumbered by framing or commentary, would have looked like life when first screened. Did Wiseman himself compare the experiences of these late-60s kids in front of his camera to his own, from the late 40s? Could he have avoided it? Did he feel the condition of the American high schooler had improved or worsened since then? Should we feel things have taken a turn for the better, or the worse?

Kids These Days presumably see the picture, with its improvisatory handheld camera, harsh black-and-white 16-millimeter visuals and occasionally cloudy sound, as a garbled transmission from the ancients. But the astringent aesthetics resolve into the trappings of an all too recognizable sub-society: drab utilitarian surroundings, ceaseless bureaucratic ceremony, trumped-up administrivia, arbitrary judgments from pathetic figures, the glazed eyes of one's fellows. Past the superficial, what's the big deal? It's just another couple semesters in high school.

Contemporary reactions to the film would surely surprise them. "High School shows no stretching of minds," writes Peter Janssen in Newsweek. "It does show the overwhelming dreariness of administrators and teachers who confuse teaching with discipline. The school somehow takes warm, breathing teen-agers and tries to turn them into 40-year-old mental eunuchs." What eighteen-year-old could guess that this gritty time capsule was once banned in the state of Philadelphia for its sheer gall in daring to reveal that — brace yourself, America — teenagers subject to public education are, on the whole, bored and unreceptive? That's not the stuff of a brazen j'accuse — it's self-evident to the point of otiosity.

But regardless, what a gift Wiseman has given us. Each viewing of High School is tantamount to a trip, if a short one, in a time machine. Now often cited as an early example of cinéma vérité, the documentary drops us straight into Northeast High and ejects us 75 minutes later, having offered not a word of guidance, explanation or editorialization. We pass, ghostlike, through classroom, hallway, auditorium, office and gymnasium, rarely noticed by faculty, staff or student. (This is definitely a time before reality television.) On a hunt for the interesting, Wiseman's camera swings from one subject to the next, occasionally pausing to closely observe the fine detail of a grimace, fidget or hesitation.

Continue reading "The Humanists: Frederick Wiseman's High School (1968)"

Monday Poem

“Fish and other marine life could be left gasping for breath in
oxygen-poor oceans for thousands of years to come if global
warming continues unchecked, scientists warn in a new study.”
   –National Geographic News; Jan. 28, 2009

Dead Zone

You are sequestered in water
I am confined by the air

You are scaly and finny
I am soft-skinned and fair

I am a reader of volumes
You are a swimmer in time

You read the text of the ocean
I stroke the sea of my mind

You draw your breath from a liquid
I take mine from a gas

I am as slow as a dimwit
You are exceedingly fast

I know little of coral
You know nothing of trees

You know the feel of a current
I know the touch of a breeze

You seem content to be fishy
I’m seldom content to be man

You take pleasure in isness
I take it however I can

Your limit seems bounded and narrow
I think my limit is none

I die by the bounty I squander
You die by the damage I’ve done

By Jim Culleny, December 7, 2009

Look Who's Talking: The Turing Test's 3,000 Year History - And My Proposed Modification

by Richard Eskow

In his famous experiment, Alan Turing pictured somebody talking with another person and a computer, both of which are out of sight.  If they're unable to tell the computer from the human being, the machine has passed the "Turing Test."  But here's a question for a human or a machine to answer:  Why did Turing pick speech as his proof?

The Test is usually described as way to determine whether a computer has achieved consciousness, but Turing's original framing was more subtle.  "I believe (the question of whether machines can think) to be too meaningless to deserve discussion," he wrote.  "Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

Now, that's interesting:  Not only did Turing choose good conversation as a valid substitute for proof of machine "thought," but he then added an implied proof - based on what people say.  If people say machines "think," then they do think.  If people say they're conscious, then they are conscious. 

Why such an emphasis on speech - the machine's, and our own?  The idea that language, words, and names are a measurement of consciousness goes back at least 3,000 years, to the Tower of Babel story from the Book of Genesis. "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech," it says, "and they said ... let us build us a city and a tower ... and let us make us a name."  You know what happens next:  "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one  ... now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do."  The great tower, that literal Hive Mind with its worldwide common language (HTML?), came crashing down.  The lesson?  Language and knowledge equal personhood, but too much equals Godhood.

People could create artificial life in the ancient texts, too - but their creations couldn't speak.  In the Talmud, Rabbah makes an artificial man that looks just like the real thing, but a shrewd scholar - one Zera, who I picture as looking like Peter Falk in Columbo - administers a Turing Test and the creature flunks:  "Zera spoke to him, but received no answer. Thereupon he said unto him: 'Thou art a creature of the magicians. Return to thy dust.'"

Flash forward to the 1600's and Descartes, who wrote in Discourses On the Method:  "If there were machines which bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as closely as possible for all practical purposes, we should still have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not real men. The first is that they could never use words, or put together signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others."

I don't know Descartes if read the Talmud, but he claimed to be religious and even wrote an ontological argument for the existence of God (if not a very convincing one).  There's no question he read Genesis, as well as many other papers, poems, and stories derived from these ancient texts and legends. 

Did Turing read Descartes?  We don't know - but we can be pretty sure he saw another work:  Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.  The monster, who was eloquent in Mary Shelley's book, was mute in the movie.  Whether or not the film makers were echoing these ancient stories, they'd undoubtedly seen the 1920 German film The Golem (see above), based on a folktale derived from the Talmud passage about the wordless "man" made of dust.  The Golem story spread in the shtetls of Eastern Europe during the 18th Century at the same time the Frankenstein story was written. They may both have stemmed from the same fear - that humanity's industrial advances were bringing us to a new Babel even as new medical discoveries invaded God's turf.

I'm not a big fan of the Turing Test (which is analyzed in detail here).  I'm sympathetic to the Chinese Room argument that you can replicate speech without creating the sentience behind it.  I lean toward the idea that most speech is just an output for the human species, the way honey is for wasps or webs are for spiders.  My first mother-in-law could weave something that looked like a spiderweb, if you asked her nicely, but that didn't make her an arachnid.  So if we build an AI - or meet an alien, for that matter - that can speak like a human being, I still won't be completely convinced it has consciousness like ours. 

Which gets us to singing.  Its main evolutionary purpose seems to be attraction - either sexually, or as a way of establishing trust.  Daniel Levitan suggests that singing might have been used to convey honesty when a stranger approached a new community, because the emotion conveyed  is more difficult to fake.  Maybe that's why Bob Dylan's more popular than Michael Bolton:  It's easier to lie with words than music, and the successful transmission of emotion is more important to us than the sweetness of the voice.

So I hereby propose a modification to Turing's test:  Instead of asking our entity to speak, let's ask it to sing.  If it can make us cry with a sad song, we'll say that it's conscious.  And if it can get us aroused - with, say, a new version of "Sexual Healing" - well, then let's just say our experiment could take an unexpected turn.

It's true that all of the arguments against the Turing Test could also be used against this one, so it doesn't really advance the debate very far. But what the hell:  At least we might hear a decent song for a change, instead of all the crap they've been playing lately.

Like Lives: On Lorrie Moore

David Wallace-Wells in The Nation:

In the spring of 1985, Knopf published Self-Help, an acerbic collection of stories by the precocious aphorist Lorrie Moore. Self-Help was also a debut, and it was also written largely in the second person, but it told a very different story about the allure of city life and the comforts of living in close quarters. One would not want to change places with anyone in Moore's New York--"it is like having a degree in failure," she wrote of living there--or, for that matter, with those characters in Scranton, Rochester or Owonta, who viewed the '80s not as a new frontier but as a deadening stretch of the same old disappointments, romantic, professional, intellectual and filial. A mordant series of devotional texts, Self-Help traced those disappointments, mapping the lean inner life of the American boom years. The second-person voice of Bright Lights was flat, credulous and smug; Moore's prose was briny, superior and self-loathing. The book was a study of the dream life of fatalism, and it was narrated in the clairvoyant mood.

"Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie," begins "How to Be an Other Woman," the cheeky first story in the collection. "Whisper, 'Don't go yet,' as he glides out of your bed before sunrise and you lie there on your back cooling, naked between the sheets and smelling of musky, oniony sweat. Feel gray, like an abandoned locker room towel." "Smoke marijuana," advises an entry in "How to Talk to Your Mother (Notes)." "Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong. It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the refrigerator. It could be anything." "How to Become a Writer": "First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably."

More here.

kadifes

jon stewart and the minarets

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Paul Samuelson, 1915-2009

Michael Weinstein in the NYT:

When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague.of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T.

Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the Cambridge, Mass., university, among them Mr. Solow as well as such other future Nobel laureates as George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.

Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.

“I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks,” Mr. Samuelson said.

His textbook taught college students how to think about economics. His technical work — especially his discipline-shattering Ph.D. thesis, immodestly titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis” — taught professional economists how to ply their trade. Between the two books, Mr. Samuelson redefined modern economics.

Catalin Avramescu on the Idea of Cannibalism

Over at the excellent Philosophy Bites, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton interview Catalin Avramescu:

Catalin Avramescu, from the University of Bucharest, discusses the part played in 17th and 18th century thought by the cannibal. Cannibalism provided a kind of test case for all sorts of natural law theories - it also posed difficulties for those who believed in a literal resurrection of the body after death, since if eaten, then their body parts would have been assimilated into someone else's body.

Listen to Catalin Avramescu on the Idea of  Cannibalism

The introduction to Avramescu's An Intellectual History of Cannibalism can be found over at Princeton University Press.

Also, Jenny Diski's review of the book can be found over at the LRB, here, and Justin's review in n+1.

Gross National Politics

Deborah Solomon interviews Martha Nussbaum in The New York Times Magazine:

Your inquiries have lately revolved around the politics of physical revulsion, which you see as the subtext for opposition to same-sex marriage.
What is it that makes people think that a same-sex couple living next door would defile or taint their own marriage when they don’t think that, let’s say, some flaky heterosexual living next door would taint their marriage? At some level, disgust is still operating.

In your book “From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law,” which will be out in February, you draw a distinction between primary disgust and projective disgust.
What becomes really bad is the projective kind, meaning projecting smelliness, sliminess and stickiness ontoa group of people who are then stigmatized and regarded as inferior.

On the other hand, might one argue that disgust has been a positive force in evolution, keeping people away from dirt and germs?
We are disgusted by lots of things that are not really dangerous, such as a sterilized cockroach, as studies have found.

Do you find blood disgusting?
Blood in your veins is not disgusting. It’s when blood comes into the open that it gets to be disgusting. The common property of all these primary disgust objects is that they are reminders of our animality and mortality.

Feminism's Face-Lift

Alexandra Suich on the "bo-tax", in The Nation:

NOW has not taken to the streets to campaign for affordable access to face-lifts, and it is unlikely that the group will do so. But by framing it as a women's issue, NOW's president has given cosmetic surgery giants like Allergan, which makes Botox, a social grievance and one of its strongest arguments. Where companies and plastic surgeons might have only been able to whine to Congress about lost profits, they can now claim they are campaigning against a tax that unjustly targets women. The Bo-Tax, Allergan's spokeswoman explained to me without detectable irony, is about "a woman's right to choose."

In 1991, Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, which argued that society promoted unrealistic images of female beauty to keep women locked in place, forlorn and self-hating because they could not achieve that flawlessness themselves. Her book encouraged women to mobilize and discard their aspirations of plastic perfection and helped launch the Third Wave of feminism. Today, in a disturbing twist, NOW's president is not decrying the "beauty myth" but is accepting a "beauty reality."

The real issue here is not whether women should have the choice to get plastic surgery. It is not a ban on plastic surgery that has been proposed, only an excise tax. What is of greater concern is that the leader of the most prominent feminist organization in the US could speak out on a topic of such minor concern when there are so many feminist issues at stake in the healthcare debate, like reproductive rights and insurance coverage of mammograms. Botox should not be further from feminists' minds. Aligning feminism with the cause to keep plastic surgery costs low reinforces the notion that feminism is a movement for white, middle-aged, middle-class women. Feminism has needed to lose that label for more than a century.

Is Obama's War in Afghanistan Just?

Michael Walzer makes the case that it is, in Dissent:

THERE is one strong argument for undertaking the effort Obama has called for that he didn’t make and that may be more compelling than the strategic arguments he did make. It’s a moral and political argument about what we owe the Afghan people eight years after we invaded their country.

Things have not gotten better for most Afghans in those years, and for many of them, who live in the battle zones or who endure the rapaciousness of government officials, things have probably gotten much worse. At the same time, however, there have been some gains, in parts of the countryside and in the more secure cities. American and European NGOs have been doing good work in areas like public health, health care, and education. Schools have opened, and teachers have been recruited, for some two million girls. Organizations of many different sorts, including trade unions and women’s groups, have sprung up in a new, largely secular, civil society. A version of democratic politics has emerged, radically incomplete but valuable still. And all the people involved in these different activities would be at risk—at risk for their lives—if the United States simply withdrew. Given everything we did wrong in Afghanistan, the work of these people—democrats, feminists, union activists, and teachers—is a small miracle worth defending against the Taliban resurgence.

Higgs Could Reveal Itself in Dark-Matter Collisions

Jon Cartwright in Physics World:

The LHC was built to search for a wealth of new physics but its foremost target has always been the Higgs. The only fundamental particle in the Standard Model yet to be discovered, the Higgs – or more precisely its associated field – is supposed to “stick” to other particles and thus give them the property of mass. Many particle physicists have been hoping that the LHC’s expected collision energies of 14 TeV will be powerful enough to finally unearth the Higgs, and in doing so wrap up the Standard Model.

However, Taoso’s group, which includes members at Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University in Illinois, US, thinks experiments searching for traces of dark matter might get there first. Dark matter is thought to make up more than 80% of the matter in the universe but it does not interact with light (hence being "dark") so its presence has only been inferred from its gravitational effects on normal matter.

Most models of the universe suggest that dark matter was more prevalent in the distant past, and this has led physicists to assume that dark-matter particles have been annihilating one another through collisions. Although dark matter itself doesn’t interact with light, such an annihilation could generate a photon and another particle, possibly the Higgs.

The researchers claim that detecting this Higgs would be a matter of spotting the partner photon with an energy reflecting the Higgs’s mass. If their calculations are correct, gamma-ray telescopes like Fermi might see the first evidence within a year.

Modeling Human Drug Trials — Without the Human

From Wired:

In 1997, the UK Department of Health launched a studyto determine whether a popular cardiovascular drug, atorvastatin, could reduce the number of heart attacks and strokes in diabetic patients. The trial, known as the Collaborative Atorvastatin Diabetes Study(Cards), took seven years to complete. Money had to be raised, doctors had to be recruited, and then 2,838 patients had to be monitored weekly. Half of the diabetics were given the drug. The other half received a placebo.

In early 2004, a few months before the results of the trial were released, the American Diabetes Association asked a physician and mathematician named David Eddyto run his own Cards trial. He would do it, though, without human test subjects, instead using a computer model he had designed called Archimedes. The program was a kind of SimHealth: a vast compendium of medical knowledge drawn from epidemiological data, clinical trials, and physician interviews, which Eddy had laboriously translated into differential equations over the past decade. Those equations, Eddy hoped, would successfully reproduce the complex workings of human biology — down to the individual chambers of a simulated person’s virtual heart.

Because the results of the real Cards trial were still secret, Eddy knew only the broadest facts about its participants, such as their average age and blood pressure. So Eddy and his team created a simulated population with the same overall parameters. Each person “developed” medical problems as they aged, all dictated by the model’s equations and the individual risk profiles. These doubles behaved just like people: Some, for example, forgot to take their pills every once in a while.

It took Eddy and his team roughly two months to construct the virtual trial, but once they hit Return, the program completed the study in just one hour. When he got the results, Eddy sent them to the ADA. He also mailed a copy to the Cards investigators. Months later, when the official results were made public, it became clear that Eddy had come remarkably close to predicting exactly how everything would turn out. Of the four principal findings of the study, Archimedes had predicted two exactly right, a third within the margin of error, and the fourth just below that. Rather than seven years, Eddy’s experiment had taken just a couple of months. And the whole project had cost just a few hundred thousand dollars, which Eddy estimates to be a 200th of the cost of the real trial. The results seemed to vindicate his vision for the future of medicine: faster, cheaper, broader clinical trials — all happening inside a machine.

More here.

Growing up in Ethology

Richard Dawkins writes a brief scientific autobiography:

I should have been a child naturalist. I had every advantage: not only the perfect early environment of tropical Africa but what should have been the perfect genes to slot into it. For generations, sun-browned Dawkins legs have been striding in khaki shorts through the jungles of Empire. My Dawkins grandfather employed elephant lumberjacks in the teak forests of Burma. My father’s maternal uncle, chief Conservator of Forests in Nepal, and his wife, author of a fearsome ‘sporting’ work called Tiger Lady, had a son who wrote the definitive handbooks on the Birds of Borneo and Birds of Burma. Like my father and his two younger brothers, I was all but born with a pith helmet on my head.

My father himself read Botany at Oxford, then became an agricultural officer in Nyasaland (now Malawi). During the war he was called up to join the army in Kenya, where I was born in 1941 and spent the first two years of my life. In 1943 my father was posted back to Nyasaland, where we lived until I was eight, when my parents and younger sister and I returned to England to live on the Oxfordshire farm that the Dawkins family had owned since 1726.

It was through my father’s middle brother that I met the young David Attenborough...

More here.

american fantastic

A body is discovered in woods in rural Indiana, skinned from the neck up. The head is like “the cupped husk of a peeled orange”. The detective investigating soon unearths evidence that this grisly murder is linked to a war between two ancient secret cults, one celebrating laughter, the other despondency. The victim, a circus clown, was an adherent of one cult. His killer, from the opposing cult, removed his face – clown makeup and all – in order to appease a joyless deity and help usher in a dismal apocalypse. This short story, “The God of Dark Laughter”, by American author Michael Chabon, is an archly witty and chilling tale which plays on coulrophobia – a fear of clowns. It was first published in 2001 and is included in American Fantastic Tales, a two-volume anthology compiled and edited by the Wisconsin-born horror novelist Peter Straub.

more from James Lovegrove at the FT here.

philology, movies, Old French, camp slang, archaeology, cartoons, the poetry of the ages, bibliography, Victoriana, television ads and more

John Ashbery’s new collection, dedicated to his partner, David Kermani, draws its exotic title — “Planisphere” — from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” in which two perfect lovers have been kept apart by the goddess Fate, since their perfection would be her ruin:

And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed
(Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel),
Not by themselves to be embraced,

Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear.
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramp’d into a planisphere.

A three-dimensional globe is flattened to two dimensions, and the distant poles at last can touch. Such an image fits Ashbery’s surreal imagination, with its arresting leaps and resistant incoherence.

more from Helen Vendler at the NYT here.

American horror

While assembling my notes for a review of the Library of America anthology "American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny" (Library of America, two volumes, edited by Peter Straub: "From Poe to the Pulps," 746 pp., $35; "From the 1940s to Now," 714 pp., $35), I noticed a peculiar thing. The quotes that I had quarried seemed to assemble themselves into a sort of ur-story, a template of the unheimlich. As I stitched together sentences from the works of writers as varied as F. Scott Fitzgerald and H.P. Lovecraft, John Cheever and Kelly Link, something about the common gambits and rhythms, across nearly two centuries, sent a chill through me. The following text has been constructed entirely from sentences found in "American Fantastic Tales." Each is numbered and identified at the very end.

The cautious reader will detect a lack of authenticity in the following pages. I am not a cautious reader myself, yet I confess with some concern the absence of much documentary evidence in support of the singular incident I am about to relate. (1) It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. (2)

I am the most unfortunate of men. (3) When I was eight years old my father was killed in the war, and my mother was broken-hearted. (4) My best friend when I was twelve was inflatable.(5) What began as a game, a harmless pastime, quickly took a turn toward the serious and obsessive, which none of us tried to resist. (6)

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.

Gifts from the sixth dimension

From MSNBC:

String theorists say we may live in a 10-dimensional universe, with six of those dimensions rolled up so tightly that we can never see them. So how can you possibly visualize six-dimensional space? This year's top gift for science geeks can help. The 2009 geek-gift competition resulted in a repeat (geek-peat?) of last year's outcome: Andrew Meeusen of Mesa, Ariz., received the most votes once again, this time for suggesting the Calabi-Yau manifold crystal.

So... what the heck is a Calabi-Yau manifold?

That's where extradimensional physics enters the picture: As string-theory fans know all too well, there are inconsistencies between small-scale and large-scale physics that could best be resolved if the universe as we know it has 10 dimensions, including time and the three spatial dimensions with which we're familiar. So what's up with the other six dimensions? Theorists would say we're just not built to perceive those dimensions, perhaps because they folded down to sub-sub-submicroscopic size as the universe took shape. A couple of mathematicians named Eugenio Calabi and Shing-Tung Yau worked out the geometry for how such folded-up extradimensional spaces might behave, and that's how Calabi-Yau manifolds got their name.

More here.

H. W. Fowler, the King of English

From The New York Times:

“To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sèvres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee,” Eve­lyn Waugh once said of a fellow writer. I sometimes feel like that chimp, and perhaps you do too. When it comes to handling the English language, we are all fumblers — with the possible exception of Waugh himself, who, as Gore Vidal once observed, wrote “prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that its creator is fallible, or at least part American.” Some care about getting English right; others don’t. For those who do, there is a higher authority, a sacred book, that offers guidance through our grammatical vale of tears. Its full title is “A Dictionary of Modern English Usage,” but among its devotees it is known, reverentially, as “Fowler.”

One such devotee was Winston Churchill, who cared greatly about language, even in wartime. “Why must you write ‘intensive’ here?” Churchill demanded of his director of military intelligence while looking over plans for the invasion of Normandy. “ ‘Intense’ is the right word. You should read Fowler’s Modern English Usage on the use of the two words.” Just who is this Fowler, this supreme arbiter of usage, this master of nuance and scruple, He Who Must Be Obeyed? His full name was Henry Watson Fowler, and he lived from 1858 to 1933. He was educated at the Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he failed to take a top degree. For a while he taught classics at a school in Yorkshire (contemporaries there described him variously as “a first-rate swimmer” and “lacking humanity”), but his career as a schoolmaster ended prematurely because of religious doubts. He then tried to make a living as a freelance writer in London, without much luck.

More here.

Saturday Poem

Gravestrip in Sichuan Province,

West China

Along the edges of the fields the gravestrips,

with their headstones marking final destination,

journey's end. And from this speeding train

each strip appears a moment only, then

is whipped away-- apt metaphor for life,

for these straw-hatted men and women bending

to the clay. Remember Kavanagh,

who couldn't think his mother buried in that

Monaghan graveyard but was always with him

walking along a headland of green oats

in June? These workers toil beside their elders

always with them too, reminding them

that the earth is God, or near as makes no difference,

and each of us allowed a moment only,

one quick glimpse before we're sped away.

by Eamon Lynskey

from Crannóg 20  spring 2009,
Crannóg Media

Triple-zero

Carina Storrs in Scientific American:

Overlooking the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany, a four-story modern glass house stands like a beacon of environmental sustainability. Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are "triple-zero," a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste).

Since the construction of the first triple-zero home, Werner Sobek's firm of engineers and architects, based in Stuttgart, has designed and built five more in Germany, with a seventh planned in France. The energy used by these buildings, including the four-story tower where Sobek resides, comes from solar cells and geothermal heating.

More here.

Grigori Perelman’s Beautiful Mind

Jascha Hoffman in the New York Times Book Review:

In 1904 the French mathematician Henri Poincaré made a conjecture about three-­dimensional space that may help to explain the shape of the universe. Although it was crucial to the growth of the field of topology, Poincaré’s conjecture resisted proof for a century. When a Boston philanthropist announced a million-dollar prize for its solution in 2000 it was unclear whether he would ever have to pay.

Then, in 2002, a Russian mathematician named Grigori Perelman posted a terse paper to an online archive. In the course of tackling a broader problem, Perelman seemed to have miraculously swept away the remaining obstacles to proving the Poincaré conjecture. Soon the mathematical rumor mill was buzzing. The proof seemed genuine, but word was that Perelman had no plans to publish it.

This was only the beginning of the weirdness.

More here.

He's dead, Jim!

The Afghanization of Central Asia

Alexander Cooley in Eurasianet:

US officials now view Central Asia as instrumental to operations in Afghanistan. Over the last year, the US military has established the so-called Northern Distribution Network (NDN) - a set of commercial agreements with each of the Central Asian states to allow the transit of cargo to supply US forces in Afghanistan. The creation of this web of re-supply routes was deemed essential after militants succeeded during summer of 2008 in seriously disrupting the main US supply routes from Pakistan into Afghanistan.

A key assumption that underpins NDN, as envisioned by the US commander, Gen. David Petraeus, is that the provision of economic benefits to Central Asian states will give their governments a clear stake in the coalition campaign in Afghanistan. NDN proponents also claim that the network will improve Central Asia’s ailing transportation infrastructure and improve the economic fortunes of remote and impoverished parts of the region by linking them to trans-national trade routes.

Already, the US military is shipping an estimated 30 percent of its Afghan supplies through NDN and hopes to move tens of thousands of containers a year. Under the troop surge, NDN will become even more critical to US war efforts.

But by conceptualizing Central Asia as a logistical appendage to Afghanistan, US planners are missing an opportunity. The Pentagon, and Washington in general, is not formulating a longer-term strategy that confronts the internal challenges of each of the region’s countries. Even worse, US policy planners may be unwittingly exporting Afghanistan’s security and governance crisis to its Central Asian neighbors.

More here.

3QD Politics Prize 2009 Finalists

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six. Thanks again to all the participants.

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a "trophy" logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll!

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Mr. Tariq Ali, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Embers from my Neighbor’s House 
2. Black Agenda Report: The Great Black Hajj of 2009 
3. Glenn Greenwald: Greg Craig and Obama's worsening civil liberties record 
4. Justin E. H. Smith: On Criticizing Israel 
5. News From the Zona: Republican Virtue and Equality  
6. Wisdom of the West: Blunderbuss

We'll announce the three winners on December 21, 2009.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists.

The Play’s the Thing

Michael Bérubé reviews On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd, in American Scientist:

Let me explain a thing or two about humanists like me. There are legions of us who reach for our guns when we hear the word genome. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the history of eugenics, and we flinch whenever someone attempts an “evolutionary” explanation of Why Society Is the Way It Is; we suspect them, with good reason, of trying to justify some outrageous social injustice on the grounds that it’s only natural. Likewise, there are legions of us who clap our hands over our ears when we hear the term evolutionary psychology. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the follies of sociobiology, and we’ve suffered through lectures claiming that our species is hardwired for middle-aged guys dumping their wives for young secretaries and students (I sat through that lecture myself) or that men run the world because women have wide hips for childbearing, whereas men can rotate three-dimensional shapes in their heads (okay, that one is a mash-up of two different lectures).

Brian Boyd is here to change all that. On the Origin of Stories attempts an evolutionary explanation of the appearance of art—and, more specifically, of the utility of fiction. From its title (with its obvious echo of Darwin) to its readings of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who!, Boyd’s book argues that the evolution of the brain (itself a development of some significance to the world) has slowly and fitfully managed to produce a species of primate whose members habitually try to entertain and edify one another by making stuff up.

More here.

Mikhail Baryshnikov and Cesc Gelabert during a rehearsal

Friday Poem

Anniversary
..................
I believe this is steam from your coffee cup,
or maybe a cloud. The years have piled
one atop the other in a great tower.
........................
If we blink a month passes, if we yawn a year.
We rise from bed, wash our faces.
........................
Sometimes sit together and read
the newspaper, sit and watch television,
sit and one of us is there and one isn’t.
........................
Then the alarm goes off and you are far away
in California, visiting your mother, or I am
with you there and our daughter is on my shoulders.
........................
We are so young in the photograph that I touch
a finger to your face.
........................
In my dream we are sitting in lawn chairs
on a back porch, the years unspooling.
........................
And our bodies are a field
of scrub, are desiccated weeds.
........................
It is like coming up the front yard
of a great house where the lights are blazing,
but you are not certain
anyone is left inside.
........................
The days so foreign now, like old men
whispering at a bus station,
each moment liminal.
........................
And a kind of voluntary blindness,
in the same way that floaters in the eye
are soon forgotten by the brain, overlooked,
and yet exist.
........................
by Doug Ramspeck
........................

from Inertia Magazine, Inertia7, 2009

Tariq Ali: Obama’s Afghan-Pak Syndrome

From Democracy Now!:

Tariq Ali is author of more than 20 books, including history, politics, and fiction. His most recent books are Protocols of the Elders of Sodom (2009) and The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (2008). He is a regular contributor to The Guardian, New Left Review, and the London Review of Books.

British-Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian Tariq Ali spoke at Hampshire College on November 17 for the the Twelfth Annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture. The annual Eqbal Ahmad Lecture honors the teaching, scholarship, and activism of the late Eqbal Ahmad, who was a longtime Hampshire College professor.

Watch the lecture on video here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

Obama’s Nobel Remarks

From The New York Times:

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:

I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility. It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations -- that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate. Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.

And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who've received this prize -- Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela -- my accomplishments are slight. And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics. I cannot argue with those who find these men and women -- some known, some obscure to all but those they help -- to be far more deserving of this honor than I. (Picture)

More here. 

Ovaries reveal their inner testes

From Nature:

Inside every ovary lurks a testicle just waiting to develop. So says a study in mice that further overturns traditional views of sexual development — and reveals that females must constantly suppress their masculine side.

Mathias Treier, a geneticist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues deleted a gene called FOXL2 in sexually mature mouse ovaries. When they examined the ovaries three weeks later, they had switched sex and started pumping out the hormone testosterone. "The major finding is that females must actively suppress the male pathway inside the ovary," Treier says. "Here is a gene that is not located on the sex chromosome that makes you stay female."

More here.

The Cairo Conundrum

Shadi Hamid in Democracy:

With Afghanistan, Iran, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sucking most of Washington’s limited attention, Egypt has faded into the background.

But Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world and still its pre-eminent cultural and intellectual center, is a bellwether for the region. American policy toward Cairo, its closest Arab ally and, since 1979, its second-largest recipient of foreign aid, has been in need of a facelift for some time. U.S.-Egypt relations have long been governed by an understanding that, in return for supporting American interests in the region, Washington would turn a blind eye to Egypt’s authoritarian practices. This bargain–interests in exchange for ideals–remained firm until the Bush Administration began to realize, in the aftermath of September 11, that the status quo was not as stable as originally thought. Support of Arab autocracies had boomeranged, producing a Middle East consumed by political violence and extremism. In her own Cairo speech, four years before Obama’s, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither."

More here.

the highway called Legacy of the Imam ends at Evin Prison

On June 12, 2009, I was among a hundred or so people standing outside a girls’ school in Mashhad, Iran, hugging the shade of a yellow brick wall. My friend N. and I were waiting to vote in the presidential election. It was Friday, the Iranian weekend. Stores were shuttered, intersections free of surging traffic. The mood was mellow—when a stooped old woman cut to the head of the line, several of us smiled. In the school parking lot, a Revolutionary Guard lounged on a chair, cradling his Kalashnikov. He waved us past garish instructional murals—the cornea of an eye; a red heart complete with ventricle—into a dim hallway strung with colored bulbs. Through an open door a radio blared; all morning the state network had broadcast patriotic marches and exhortations to vote. A slender man with gray hair and glasses held out a hand. I gave him my National ID Card. “Birth certificates only,” he said, returning it.

more from Gelareh Asayesh at the American Scholar here.

swiss minarets

So Nicolas Sarkozy, responding to the minaret ban in Switzerland, admonishes us to practise our faiths with "humble discretion". To be recommended humble discretion by President Sarkozy is like being counselled modesty in dress by Lady Gaga, or self-denial by a banker. But France's mercurial president does have a point when he says, in his recent article in Le Monde, that it is not enough simply to condemn the Swiss referendum vote; we should try to understand what motivated so many Swiss, and what this tells us about Europe today. How is it possible that, in a country with just four minarets, 57% of those who voted, on a turnout of 53% – in other words, more than a quarter of the Swiss electorate – could vote for the constitution to be changed to include a blanket ban on the building of minarets? Were they responding to inflammatory posters showing minarets that looked like missiles all over the Swiss flag, together with the threatening figure of a woman in a niqab? Or to ludicrous arguments like that of the Swiss People's party representative Oskar Freysinger, who said "the minute you have minarets in Europe it means Islam will have taken over"? By which logic, Spain and Britain are already Islamic countries. Was this an expression of rampant "Islamophobia", finding different targets from country to country but basically the same poison under the skin? Or was it merely anxious people crying "this change in our societies has come so fast – tell us where it is all going to end"?

more from Timothy Garton Ash at The Guardian here.

Thursday Poem

Delight is to him- a far, far upward, and inward delight-
who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth,
ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
  –Herman Melville; Moby Dick, Chapter 9

The Tao Te Ching —Verse 8

The highest good is like water
flowing down without intent
nourishing all things.

It’s content with the low places
people snub, so is like Tao.

In dwelling keep close to the ground.
In thinking keep it unadorned.
In conflict be just.
In governing beware of control.
In work follow your bliss.
In family life be completely there.

When you’re content to be
no more than yourself
without comparing or competing
you’ll have respect.

by Lao Tzu

from The Tao Te Ching