3quarksdaily

December 21, 2009

The Winners of the 3 Quarks Daily 2009 Prize in Politics

Tariq Ali has picked the three winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Glenn Greenwald: Greg Craig and Obama's worsening civil liberties record
2. Strange Quark, $300: Black Agenda Report: The Great Black Hajj of 2009
3. Charm Quark, $200: News From the Zona: Republican Virtue and Equality

Here is what he had to say about them:

Glenn Greenwald's well-argued and well-written critique of Obama's record on civil liberties  with trials for some and not for others is my choice for the best piece. Interesting to note that the honeymoon with Obama has not lasted as long as the liberal love-affair with the Clintons.  More was expected of Obama which is why disenchantment levels are much higher as this piece demonstrates.

Glenn Ford's 'The great Black Hajj of 2009' continues the tradition of black dissent at a time when black politics are in decline. The opportunist wing of Afro-American groups appears to have won out temporarily and the rainbow alliance consigned to the dustbin, while advancement through the Democrats is the rage. Ford's anger is understated but a good sign that there are many out there who might stay at home on election day in 2012 rather than countenance an administration on its knees before Wall Street with the motto: 'What is Good for Goldman Sachs is good for America'--caving in to the lobby system on health reforms and fighting a 'just war' in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

News from the Zona is a useful description of the differences between cold war liberalism and its successor. The lip-service (and not just that) to equality in the former was related to the needs of the system at the time. When communism collapse this was no longer considered necessary and neo-liberalism became the new mantra...till the Wall Street Crash of 2008.

Congratulations to the winners (please contact me by email, I will send the prize money later today--and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Tariq Ali for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Carlos, Matthew Daniels, and Jennifer Prevatt. Our thanks to each of them. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about how the 3QD prizes work, here.

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December 21, 2009

Is Technology the Best Charity?

by Sam Kean

The interviewer asked Bill Gates flat out: “Bill, even your harshest critic would have to admit that your philanthropy work is, you know, planet-shaking, incredible, and could be, if you make it, a second act so amazing that it would dwarf what you’ve actually done at Microsoft ... If you had to choose a legacy, what would it be?”

Bill demurred: “Well, the most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer.”

Wha? More important no matter what, than anything else he could ever do?

During the height of the Evil Empire Gates reportedly glanced at the newspaper one morning and became absorbed in an sadly unremarkable article about a disease ravaging the third world—malaria, or polio, or a miserable tapeworm, something along those lines. Gates famously (even a little infamously) had no idea diseases like that still existed in the 1990s, much less that they dominated health care in poor countries the way cancer and heart disease do in the first world. Call him sheltered, but the Gates Foundation was more or less founded that day over coffee. Its goal: to rid the world of such scourges. Bill Gates had a road-to-Damascus moment.

And yet—given the choice between being remembered as the man who liberated humankind from, say, malaria more or less single handedly—and being remembered as the person who foisted PowerPoint on the world—Gates is choosing PowerPoint? Really? He’s picking AutoCapitalization and a dancing paperclip?

Continue reading "Is Technology the Best Charity?"

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Perceptions

Gilbert Garcin. Le moulin de l’oubli - Mill of oblivion. 1999.

"Gilbert Garcin spent most of his life managing a lamp factory in France. At 65, he retired and took up a trick photography workshop. For the past ten years he has been creating comical, surrealistic photographs which warmly highlight sometimes cold, existential questions. Garcin inhabits this strange world and ponders it together with the viewer; with Garcin you have a dedicated, but perplexed, guide."

In February, (2009) Gilbert's work was celebrated at the Festival at Rennes.

More here, here, and here.

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Who Will Be A Champion Of The Left We Can Believe In? As Bush-lite, Obama Ain't It

By Evert Cilliers

Here's the story as I see it.

In 2008, after eight years of Bush/Cheney, the horrors and wrongs of this worst-of-all presidencies were plain to see -- like Dresden after the fire-bombing, or a maroela tree after an elephant chomped it. The country had been wrecked by the dotty ideology-driven actions of extremist nutters: the false prophets of anti-science, anti-common-sense, anti-democracy, free-market-gone-crazy, conservatism-gone-fundamentalist, male-belligerence-gone-psycho.

Economically we were down the toilet and halfway to the sewer. Internationally we were pariahs. Psychologically we ping-ponged between genuine anxiety and false bravado. Worst of all: morally, we were hollowed out. Wars. Torture. Human rights abuses. Tora Bora. FEMA. Washington corruption. Wall Street fraud. Foreclosures. Unemployment. Deficits. Off-budget accounting. 30% interest charges on credit cards. Debt. Debt. Debt. Had we been ruled by the Kremlin, we couldn't have done worse. It was as if America had become a nation of 300 million suffering Jobs, struck down by the vengeful hand of an old-testament God.

It was the worst of times, and the best of times only for the nicely rich, dah-links.

But this most horrible of horrorshows opened up a great opportunity. The longing for change ached in every sensible American heart. The time for a progressive moment in our history had arrived.

Enter Barack Obama. Fueled by a compelling story, inspiring oratory, obvious decency, a challenging intellect and seemingly progressive liberal beliefs, he stepped into the moment with dazzling ability. He benefited from the progressive moment and took full advantage of it. After all, he was one of a very few voices who had spoken up against the Iraq War when it was political suicide to do so. He was the dewy rose in the scratchy patch of weeds.

Continue reading "Who Will Be A Champion Of The Left We Can Believe In? As Bush-lite, Obama Ain't It"

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Remediality Studies: The Decade Gone By

David Schneider

T.S. Eliot might well have smirked at the events of the Naughty Oughties. By one yardstick, they came in with a bang and ended with a whimper, trussed up and devoured by the dirty deeds, done extravagantly, of the stuffed men, the hollow men. 

Back in the green days of Communism's defeat (which we, in our typical hubris, called capitalism's victory) an American president spoke of creating a "bridge to the 21st century." Of course, this was dismissed as mere rhetoric by less (publicly) priapic politicians. Through the hindsight of the intervening years, however, it's become clear that such a bridge was indeed necessary. The left and right banks of America, blue in mood and red in face, were left hanging by chads on a Bridge to Nowhere, suspended within a fiction called The End of History.

History, that's the rub – history, and its myths. From the very first days of the Bush Administration, I sensed that the conservative American consciousness, boiled down into its thick molasses, was simply in fear of the future. We were held back, as a nation, by a persistent fear (predominently by those who witnessed the chaos of the '60s) that history Xeroxes itself; that any struggle towards positive change, any at all, was a fool's errand, doomed to devolve back to Fascism or Communism, except this time with the extra added bonus of nuclear apocalypse. And those of us who came to oppose this nation's decisions perhaps understood ourselves as being held back, from advancing a grade in a school called Democracy and the Pursuit of Happiness. Held back, by a dubiously legitimate leader who clearly attended Bible School dutifully but spoke as if he himself hadn't passed the 3rd grade.

History, as Morpheus said, is not without a sense of irony. And it doesn't like to be declared deceased.

I know we want to leave this low, dishonest decade, but I say: not yet, not quite yet. There are still a few days in which we may legitimately consider what happened to us, before the tsunami of ever-present tensions crashes down upon us anew.

From my peculiar and partial vantage point, every great American crisis of the '00s – Y2K, the Dot-Com Collapse, The Great Indecision, 9/11, Iraq,  Abu Ghraib, Katrina, global warming, the Media Crisis, and the Financial Crisis – stemmed from our inability to integrate the hyperspeed advances in media technology with our aging infrastructures – physical, economic, managerial, governmental, and moral. This is the chasm that needed and still needs to be bridged – it is, I believe, the parsing of Clinton's metaphor.

And from this chasm (with ceaseless turmoil seething) I saw two great übercrises mingling, and seeding the events of the Double Zeroes: a Crisis of Information, and a Crisis of "Reality." Information: too much of it, in terms too jargonized, too euphemized, and too fractured. "Reality": a state of being controlled by the new technologies of media, without sufficient intellectual tools or time for us to interrogate adequately.

Yeah, whatevs, you say. Too subtle by half, you say. It's the "postmodern condition," get over it. Or: hubris and incompetence, failing upward rather than failing better, same as it ever was. Or: The Matrix. Live in the sewers, Neo, and jump buildings in your brain (got a better idea?) Sorry, folks, but I need to plumb a little deeper than those keyword searches.

The first true terror I felt in this decade, the first moment I perceived a great unraveling, was not on September 11, 2001. The date was May 8, 2002, when MTV broadcast the episode of "The Real World: Chicago" that was filmed on 9/11. 

Continue reading "Remediality Studies: The Decade Gone By"

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You've failed again - well done!

I have a very geeky 9 year old daughter; there really is no doubt about that. One day last spring, a school friend had transgressed in some way in the class and her "punishment" was to stay inside at recess and clean out the pencil sharpener. My daughter offered to give up her recess and help her, not really because she is such a loyal friend, but because she was so excited at the idea of taking the pencil sharpener to pieces and then putting it together again. She woke up that morning and declared, "Today is going to be the best day ever, I get to take the pencil sharpener to bits, clean it and put it back together!" To my knowledge, she had never actually taken a pencil sharpener to pieces before and had no real knowledge of what it would take to put it back together again. But she was totally, blissfully unperturbed by the almost certain failure she would encounter before perhaps, by chance, landing upon the correct assembly…or not. I can't remember whether she ever succeeded in her task, it doesn't really matter, what matters is that she was undeterred by the prospect of possible failure. And this fearlessness in the face of likely failure is one of the reasons that I believe that my daughter will grow up to be a very innovative person.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the US and the world needs to be more innovative in this new world economy. It is equally clear that the US is in real danger of not only losing traditionally left-brained and factory line jobs to China and India, to name but a few of the growing outsourcing destinations, but is now beginning to lose its much vaulted innovative edge. As this New York Times piece lays out, the “United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness.” And there’s no doubt in my mind that failures in our education system rank high in the US fall from innovation grace. “What skills do children need to be innovative” is an increasingly written about topic and President Obama recently launched a campaign, “Educate to Innovate” to address this very issue.

A lot of competing theories abound in the innovation field, but there is at least one very clear theme that seems to be almost an unchallenged assumption: you cannot have innovation without failure. Fail fast and fail often.

Continue reading "You've failed again - well done!"

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Films of the Decade, Again?

Continue reading "Films of the Decade, Again?"

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December 20, 2009

An Interview with Shilpa Ray

In Brooklyn Vegan:

It was approximately a year ago that Shilpa Ray left her band Beat The Devil to focus on her own project with her own band that she calls Shipa Ray and The Happy Hookers. That would make 2009 not only their year, but their first year.

My own excitement for the band came right around January/February when I first heard their 8-song unreleased CD-R. Soon after that they accepted my invitation to play the official BrooklynVegan SXSW showcase, and they've managed to keep busy all year. Shilpa ended up self-releasing their album, and she and her hookers have played numerous shows in NYC - too many to count, but they've included a Woodstock tribute at Castle Clinton, a residency at Pianos, and this year's CitySol festival. And they're ending the year strong. They just opened two NYC gigs for the Fiery Furnaces, are opening for Grant Hart of Husker Du this Saturday at 92YTribeca (12/19), and now have a glowing recommendation from Nick Cave.

Shilpa answered some questions about her year. Read them below...

You released a record in 2009. How'd that go?

Arduous and fun. I loathe tedious, mundane tasks, which works against me in this Golden Age of DIY. I guess I missed out on the "Golden Age" where all a musician had do was play music and snort big record company advances. Part of me wishes I was Rod Stewart. Hell, I don't even get to have a hopelessly devoted girlfriend to takes care of me or at least tolerate my "genius", my tortured soul, and my many many mistresses.

Have you met Nick Cave? Did you know he was a fan at all before that interview came out?

Actually the story has more to do with my friend Ratso (aka Larry Sloman) than Nick Cave. Ratso's a badass writer who's written for Rolling Stone, High Times, and has authored/co-authored several biographies, namely Howard Stern, Bob Dylan and Harry Houdini. I met him after the Sly Stone Tribute Concert at Castle Clinton, and agreed to do his variety radio show at KGB bar on the Lower East Side. It was mind blowing. I felt like we were transported to 60s, 70s era New York. The kind of stuff I'd skip homework for and read about when I was a teenager. There was even a singer with a platinum white bee-hive hairdo, the spitting image of Dusty Springfield, who opened the show. The whole look and feel of this radio show against the commie red lit backdrop of the KGB bar was so complete.

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Waterworld

Evan Lerner in Seed Magazine:

The discovery of a new planet has always been exciting, but the bloom is starting to come off the rose now that we’ve done it more than 400 times. A University of California–Santa Cruz team announced the discovery of six new planets orbiting two stars earlier this week, but they weren’t even the toast of the exoplanetology world, much less international newsmakers. Those honors went to a team led by Harvard’s David Charbonneau.

Quality trumps quantity when it comes to such discoveries, and Charbonneau’s planet has a number of newsworthy traits. At more than six times our own planet’s mass, it’s a “super-Earth,” but this new world’s relatively low density means it’s likely made mostly of water. Though it orbits uncomfortably close to its star, the planet’s water may be kept liquid at 200° C by a dense, highly pressurized atmosphere. Not exactly a tropical paradise (though Dennis Overbye’s New York Times headline describes it as “sultry”), but easily the most Earthlike planet we’ve been able to characterize thus far.

Orbiting the red dwarf star GJ 1214 in the Ophiuchus constellation, the planet is also quite nearby by astronomical standards. At a distance of 42 light-years, it would still take several thousand lifetimes for us to get anything there, but its close proximity makes it an excellent target for ranged study by the James Webb Space Telescope scheduled to launch in 2014. In the meantime, the aging Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes may be used to study this bizarre waterworld.

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put on your sunday clothes

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Sunday Poem

It Denotes

If you walk by
And find me,
Lying on my side, curled
Like a comma
On a street corner
With no blanket
To cover myself
I am not in a coma
It denotes . . .
Stop briefly
And ponder over these times.

If you find me
Lying on my side
Legs stretched and straight
Head and shoulders
Bent forward, towards my loins
Like a question mark
It denotes . . .
Provide explanations . . .
Why certain people
Happen to sleep
On street pavements.

If you find me
Lying on my back
My whole body stretched
At a horizontal attention
like an exclamation mark
It denotes . . .
I am in shock
Do not bother
I will recover.

And when you find me coiled
My head between my legs
Round like a full stop
It denotes . . .
Stop and render first aid
Subject freezing.

by Julius Chingono

publisher: First published on PIW
 in a special Zimbabwean edition,
10th June 2008, 2008

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A Facebook Christmas Love Story

Walter Kirn in the New York Times Magazine:

In Limbo, where I’ve so often spent the holidays, I sat down last year in front of my computer on the night before the night before Christmas and tried to soothe my balsam-scented loneliness by reaching out to my newfound social network (“social networks” being what we have now in place of “friends and families”). Outside, in the streets of my snowy Montana hometown, noisy drinkers were strolling from bar to bar as I typed out the sad word “Facebook” on my keyboard and scanned my screen for familiar names and pictures. I didn’t find many for the simple reason that I was a novice at silicon socializing, and 90 percent of the people I knew on Facebook were people I didn’t know at all.

More here.

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A review of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics

Ronald Graham in American Scientist:

This impressive book represents an extremely ambitious and, I might add, highly successful attempt by Timothy Gowers and his coeditors, June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader, to give a current account of the subject of mathematics. It has something for nearly everyone, from beginning students of mathematics who would like to get some sense of what the subject is all about, all the way to professional mathematicians who would like to get a better idea of what their colleagues are doing.

The 75-page introduction, which was written by Gowers, gives a very readable account of the basic branches of mathematics (algebra, geometry, analysis) and how these overlap and relate to one another, how they have developed and are continuing to do so, and how they are driven in large part by the types of questions mathematicians ask. This section should be mandatory reading for any prospective mathematics student.

Most of the articles that make up the rest of the book were written by leading experts. For example, Carl Pomerance has contributed a stimulating essay on computational number theory, Cliff Taubes provides a wonderful overview of differential topology, and Jordan Ellenberg gives a thoughtful summary of arithmetic geometry.

More here.

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GROWING UP IN ETHOLOGY

Richard Dawkins in Edge:

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.

More here. 

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Decade of science highs and lows

From MSNBC:

2009

50. Water on the moon: NASA sends a probe called Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, crashing into the moon. Weeks later, scientists report that an analysis of the impact debris confirms the existence of "significant" reserves of water ice. The mission followed up on indications from earlier probes (Clementine, Lunar Prospector, Chandrayaan 1, Cassini) and even from Apollo lunar samples. Some speculated that the findings could lead to a fresh round of lunar missions, but as the decade came to a close, NASA's plans for future exploration were still under review at the White House.

For the rest of the 50-year timeline, you can revisit the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s separately, or see them all together on CASW's Web site.

Here are five more "Oh! Oh!" and "uh-oh" moments that are worth mentioning in a 10-year science review:

Oh! Oh! The International Space Station! The first expedition crew moves into the space station on Nov. 2, 2000, marking the beginning of full-time habitation that has continued for almost 10 years. The crew receives its first paying passenger in 2001 when millionaire investor Dennis Tito comes aboard. Six more have visited since then.

More here.

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Noam Chomsky on the Coup in Honduras

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Decoding the New Taliban

Steve Coll in The National:

If the American-led war in Afghanistan fails to contain the Taliban, it will not be for lack of resources or military talent; it will be because American leaders have failed to see and analyse the conflict’s diverse human terrain. Afghanistan may be known as a graveyard of empires but it is also a graveyard of generalisations. As the US Commanding General in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, pointed out in his pessimistic assessment of the war last summer, international forces operating in Afghanistan have “not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples, whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley”.

The present American approach, derived from counterinsurgency doctrine, now presumes that political and economic tactics to pacify the Taliban will prove more effective than military force. But such a politics-first strategy, premised on forging a path toward negotiations with at least some Taliban elements, will require sharp eyesight about the Taliban’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as its place in Afghanistan’s social, tribal and cultural topography.

More here.

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December 19, 2009

Mandates of Heaven

Lewis Lapham in Lapham's Quarterly:

This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly doesn’t trade in divine revelation, engage in theological dispute, or doubt the existence of God. What is of interest are the ways in which religious belief gives birth to historical event, makes law and prayer and politics, accounts for the death of an army or the life of a saint. Questions about the nature or substance of deity, whether it divides into three parts or seven, speaks Latin to the Romans, in tongues when traveling in Kentucky, I’ve learned over the last sixty-odd years to leave to sources more reliably informed. My grasp of metaphysics is as imperfect as my knowledge of Aramaic. I came to my early acquaintance with the Bible in company with my first readings of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Bulfinch’s Mythology, but as an unbaptized child raised in a family unaffiliated with the teachings of a church, I missed the explanation as to why the stories about Moses and Jesus were to be taken as true while those about Apollo and Rumpelstiltskin were not.

Four years at Yale College in the 1950s rendered the question moot. It wasn’t that I’d missed the explanation; there was no explanation to miss, at least not one accessible by means other than the proverbial leap of faith. Then as now, the college was heavily invested in the proceeds of the Protestant Reformation, the testimony of God’s will being done present in the stonework of Harkness Tower and the cautionary ringing of its bells, as well as in the readings from scripture in Battell Chapel and the petitionings of Providence prior to the Harvard game. The college had been established in 1701 to bring a great light unto the gentiles in the Connecticut wilderness, the mission still extant 250 years later in the assigned study of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons and John Donne’s verse. Nowhere in the texts did I see anything other than words on paper—very beautiful words but not the living presence to which they alluded in rhyme royal and iambic pentameter. I attributed the failure to the weakness of my imagination and my poor performance at both the pole vault and the long jump.

I brought the same qualities into the apostate lecture halls where it was announced that God was dead. The time and cause of death were variously given in sophomore and senior surveys of western civilization—disemboweled by Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florence, assassinated in eighteenth-century Paris by agents of the French Enlightenment, lost at sea in 1835 while on a voyage with Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands, garroted by Friedrich Nietzsche on a Swiss Alp in the autumn of 1882, disappeared into the nuclear cloud ascending from Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The assisting coroners attached to one or another of the history faculties submitted densely footnoted autopsy reports, but none of the lab work brought forth a thumbprint of the deceased.

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I Actually Want All Muslims to Die

Over at Ex-Berliner, Jacinta Nandi on a conversation she has with her ex:

My ex came over yesterday and I asked him what he thought about the Minaretten-Verbot.

"What Minaretten-Verbot?" He asked.

"You know," I said, "the Swiss people holding a referendum and deciding to ban minarettes on their towers for no other reason than being totally fucking racist."

"Not everything is racist, Jacinta," he said carefully. "You think everything is racist? But a referendum can't be racist - it's the people's decision. The people have decided."

The thing is, in German the word for referendum is Volksentscheid, the people's decision, so what he said made a bit more sense in German, but I'll be honest, okay, I was looking at him and thinking about trains headed in the direction of Poland.

"Unless the people decide something racist...." I said.

He laughed, then. "It's up to the Swiss to decide," he said. "Maybe they really hate those funny-looking little towers."

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From Aria, Julien Temple's "Donna e mobile"

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The Truths Copenhagen Ignored

Johann Hari in CommonDreams.org:

Discarded Idea Three: Climate debt. The rich world has been responsible for 70 per cent of the warming gases in the atmosphere – yet 70 per cent of the effects are being felt in the developing world. Holland can build vast dykes to prevent its land flooding; Bangladesh can only drown. There is a cruel inverse relationship between cause and effect: the polluter doesn't pay.

So we have racked up a climate debt. We broke it; they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that the compensation offered "won't even pay for the coffins". The cliché that environmentalism is a rich person's ideology just gasped its final CO2-rich breath. As Naomi Klein put it: "At this summit, the pole of environmentalism has moved south."

When we are dividing up who has the right to emit the few remaining warming gases that the atmosphere can absorb, we need to realise that we are badly overdrawn. We have used up our share of warming gases, and then some. Yet the US and EU have dismissed the idea of climate debt out of hand. How can we get a lasting deal that every country agrees to if we ignore this basic principle of justice? Why should the poorest restrain themselves when the rich refuse to?

A deal based on these real ideas would actually cool the atmosphere. The alternatives championed at Copenhagen by the rich world – carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture – won't. They are a global placebo.

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Enid Blyton and the post-colonial world

Amy Rosenberg in The National:

And then I began to notice that other Indian novelists I met and read about, and writers from other former British colonies (and from Japan, France, Germany, Holland and, of course, Britain itself) also talked often about Blyton, and that they underwent similar transformations whenever they did. They displayed intense nostalgia, as if they’d actually visited the worlds Blyton had created, and they knew they could never return. I heard them saying that, more than any other writer, Blyton had exposed them to the pleasures of fiction. For many, she opened up the English language, saturating the dry lessons learnt in school. She brought them inside an idealised world, the world of the former conquerors; in a funny kind of reversal, that world seemed as exotic as it did quixotic. Kids owned their own islands, ate Christmas goose for dinner, slept outdoors in fields of heather and explored moors and gorse and rocky shores. For a kid, especially a lower-middle class kid, from Calcutta, Delhi or smaller urban centres in India or other parts of the former empire, how could you get more exotic than that?

More here.

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the Brit booze brigade

One of life's oddities is how often a series of genuinely comedic incidents congeals into, if not tragedy, then tragic loss. Robert Sellers certainly has no intention of turning readers' thoughts in that moody direction, but "Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed" probably will, though there's a tremendous amount of unapologetic, unself-conscious fun to be had on the way to introspection. Burton, Harris, O'Toole and Reed were four of the great actors to emerge in postwar British stage and cinema; they also were legendary drunks, who not only pursued their avocation -- it surely was more than a recreation -- in public and without regrets. Today, when what we used to term a "hard drinker" is routinely referred to as a "high-functioning alcoholic," it's difficult to imagine an account of their lives free of judgment or amateur psychoanalysis. Sellers, a drama school grad and former London stand-up comic-turned-film writer and pop culture critic, manages to pull it off. It may be, in fact, that he just loves a great series of stories about fascinatingly intelligent and preternaturally talented men behaving in utterly outrageous ways.

more from Tim Rutten at the LAT here.

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A Rotten Compromise: Obama, Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan

Avishai Margalit in the NYRB blog:

For a war to be just, there must be moral grounds for going to war and moral conduct in the war. Thus, going to war requires having a just cause, whereas correct behavior in the war requires discriminating between combatants and civilians. Obama mentioned both conditions as well as some others. But then there are also conditions that must be met for continuing a war, among them having a reasonable prospect of success. Yet in his Nobel speech, Obama omitted this important condition for continuing the war in Afghanistan. It is not only stupid, but it is also immoral, to go to war, or to continue a war, when there is no prospect of victory. Having the right cause on your side is not enough; your chances of winning are just as important.

As an admirer of President Obama I have listened attentively to his recent speeches on Afghanistan. But at no point has he made a plausible case for how he will win the war. He counts on our taking a leap of faith to support his strategy, but leaps should be reserved for frogs, whereas we should subject our faith to critical thinking.

The main declared objective of the war—defeating al-Qaeda—is not a matter for helmeted marines but for bespectacled bank accountants, computer whiz-kids, and people who can speak the relevant languages. The war in Afghanistan, by now, has very little to do with defeating al-Qaeda. Vice President Joe Biden got it right when he argued that fighting al-Qaeda is not the same thing as fighting in Afghanistan. Moreover, the conflict in Afghanistan bears little relevance to the problem of keeping Pakistan’s nuclear weapons out of the hands of radical Islamists; the Pakistani army is as much of a problem as the Taliban.

Adhering to just war doctrine requires having the right intent for continuing to fight in Afghanistan. Continuing the war out of fear of being accused of not giving the generals the resources they need to finish the job does not count as the right intent.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)

Paul Krugman: Pass the Healthcare Bill

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

Yes, the filibuster-imposed need to get votes from “centrist” senators has led to a bill that falls a long way short of ideal. Worse, some of those senators seem motivated largely by a desire to protect the interests of insurance companies — with the possible exception of Mr. Lieberman, who seems motivated by sheer spite.

But let’s all take a deep breath, and consider just how much good this bill would do, if passed — and how much better it would be than anything that seemed possible just a few years ago. With all its flaws, the Senate health bill would be the biggest expansion of the social safety net since Medicare, greatly improving the lives of millions. Getting this bill would be much, much better than watching health care reform fail.

At its core, the bill would do two things. First, it would prohibit discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of medical condition or history: Americans could no longer be denied health insurance because of a pre-existing condition, or have their insurance canceled when they get sick. Second, the bill would provide substantial financial aid to those who don’t get insurance through their employers, as well as tax breaks for small employers that do provide insurance.

More here.

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The Heidegger in All of Us

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Every 10 years or so, Heidegger's Nazism bursts into public consciousness again. Often, this happens with the publication of a book. The most cataclysmic of these bursts was probably the publication of Victor Farías' Heidegger and Nazism, in 1987. Farías' book took the Nazi accusations to a new level. Previously, it had been possible to discuss Heidegger's Nazism as a political misstep, the naïve blunderings of a philosopher trying to deal with the real world. Farías showed that the relationship was far deeper, that Heidegger's thinking was infected with Nazi thinking and that Heidegger was well aware of that fact. Admirers of Heidegger accused Farías of oversimplifying and conducting a witch hunt. Fancy persons in France wrote elegant essays explaining the importance of Heidegger's thought and the infinite complexity of the relation between thought and politics.

A boring war raged on for decades. But let us be honest, friends — Farías was more or less correct. Over time, the fact of Heidegger's Nazism and its integral relationship to his thinking has sunk in. This brings us to the present, and to the English-language publication of Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. If Farías provided the nails to Heidegger's coffin, Faye has come along in the role of Big Hammer. Carl Romano, in his essay "Heil Heidegger!" in The Chronicle Review, sums up the situation following the publication of Faye's book with the following:

How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there's a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance.

The coffin is sealed.

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sugar ray

This is an ambitious portrait of an American legend. Ray Robinson was not just a prizefighter. He was an extraordinary fighter. Someone once said: “There was Ray Robinson. And then there were the top 10.” He was certainly the greatest prizefighter I ever saw. But Wil Haygood has written more than a simple chronicle of a sports career. He wants to place Robinson as a central figure in the rise of urban African-Americans in the 20th century. At the peak of his success, in the 1940s and ’50s, Robinson epitomized the tough grace and style and confidence of an entire generation. He would display those qualities all over the United States and Europe. Haygood chooses to tell this tale, in part, as a kind of prose ballad. In lyrical language, he traces the life of Robinson from his birth in Detroit in 1921 as Walker Smith Jr. to his truest home, in Harlem, on the great glittering island of Manhattan, to California, where he died in 1989.

more from Pete Hamill at the NYT here.

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Medic by John Nichol and Tony Rennell

From The Telegraph:

Only one thing can be braver and more terrifying than going into battle, and that is going into battle without a weapon. This moving and inspiring book is about the medics who enter the battlefield moments behind the fighting troops in order to bring back the casualties. By the end of it, one can only feel one emotion in contemplating the incredible professionalism and self-sacrifice of the Royal Army Medical Corps: awed admiration.

The history-writing team of John Nichol – the former RAF pilot shot down and captured in the first Iraq war – and the journalist Tony Rennell have already produced excellent books on Second World War escapees and rear-gunners, but this covers the British Army medics from the First World War right up to today’s conflicts.

More here.

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Patricia Highsmith, Hiding in Plain Sight

From The New York Times:

Patricia Highsmith said of herself, “I am always in love. . . .” Yet at her memorial service in Tegna, Switzerland, in 1995, there were no lovers from the past, and there was no lover to mourn her in the present. The service was filmed, which Highsmith would have liked, because although reclusive, she was interested in posterity. Such display also allowed Highsmith to hide in plain sight (as her hero Edgar Allan Poe put it in “The Purloined Letter”) the fact that all her relationships had failed. Highsmith had died in a hospital alone, and the last person to see her was her accountant. Highsmith was obsessed with taxes.

There had been so many lovers, usually women, but men, too, including Arthur Koestler, who had the good sense to give up. Highsmith was attractive to men and to women, until her diet of alcohol and cigarettes (she hated food) raddled her beauty. Men never fired her imagination, except in her fiction, where her males, especially Tom Ripley, are versions of herself. It was women she wanted, and she found them in bars, on boats, at parties and, best of all, in settled relationships with other people.

More here.

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December 18, 2009

John Patrick Diggins, 1935-2009

Paul Berman in TNR:

The death of my friend Jack Diggins has led me to look up my edition of Montaigne in search of the essay on friendship, and I am amazed to see what is there. The essay catalogues and describes the various types of intimate relationships that Montaigne notices in the old Greek and Roman authors--sexual relationships between men and women, and between men and boys; the family relationships of parents and children, and between siblings; the relationship of marriage. And among those several kinds of intimacy, friendship looms in Montaigne's eyes as the purest and best. He means friendship between two equals--or rather, between equal men, since Montaigne for some reason imagines that women are incapable of forming a proper friendship.

He makes a number of acute and touching observations about friendship. But what strikes me is that, in selecting an example of friendship at its finest, he has chosen his own friendship with Étienne de la Boétie, who was the author of a famous treatise on politics. La Boétie's treatise is called Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. It presents the case for liberty and against tyranny. And it proposes an immortal observation -- namely, that tyranny depends on ordinary people agreeing to submit. This observation has sufficed to keep la Boétie's treatise in print during the last 450 years. Montaigne's essay on friendship turns out to be, in short, a reflection on a very specific kind of friendship--a friendship between intellectuals: in this case, between a literary man and a political philosopher.

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It's a terrible way to start a story about Christmas

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The first sentence of A Christmas Carol is "Marley was dead: to begin with." It's a terrible way to start a story about Christmas. But A Christmas Carol isn't great because it's a great story. In fact, A Christmas Carol is a flimsy story. The characters are mostly clichés. Scrooge is a parody of miserly behavior. He is not only against Christmas, he is against love. He is also against charity, kindness, and even heat, preferring to keep his coal locked up rather than warm the office with it. Scrooge lives in darkness and gloom. "The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold."

In contrast, Tiny Tim — the blessed little cripple and son of Scrooge's employee — seems to bear no resentment to the world at all. His love for everyone knows no bounds, despite the fact that Scrooge has done everything in his power to keep the Cratchit family in misery. God bless us, every one, and so forth.

Then Scrooge has some bad gravy, a nightmare about three ghosts, and he spends Christmas Day in a hysterical fit sending turkeys all about the city and giving everyone raises. He's so happy not to be dead (as the third ghost suggested he soon would be) that he has a chuckling fit and bursts into tears, perhaps having gone insane. An unbelievable asshole but a day ago, Scrooge is now the picture of human kindness. I, for one, don't buy it.

More Scroogish stuff here.

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the man formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen

In 2009 we were in Denmark witness to a rather unusual and spectacular literary incident. The Danish author Claus Beck-Nielsen declared himself dead in 2001. A year later he was resurrected as the nameless director of the art factory Das Beckwerk, the mission of which was to continue the life and work of Claus Beck-Nielsen. In 2003, accompanied by the performance artist Thomas Skade-Rasmussen Strøbech, he journeyed to Iraq under the name "Nielsen" with the stated aim of establishing democracy in the war-ravaged country. Their trip resulted in a series of newspaper articles and TV programmes. Subsequently, the man formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen wrote the book Selvmordsaktionen (The suicide mission, 2005) about the journey. In 2006 the pair travelled together again with a similar project, this time to the USA; Suverænen (The sovereign) was published in 2008, with Das Beckwerk credited as the author. The book, which is promoted as a novel, is largely about Thomas Skade-Rasmusse, and describes among other things elements of his friend's private life. Skade-Rasmussen, who, to make things even more confusing, also works under a number of pseudonyms, sued Das Beckwerk in 2009; in his opinion, the man formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen had invaded his private life and made public sensitive and private information. Confused? With good reason. Essentially, a fictional character is suing the novel's author! This has never before been seen in Denmark – and probably nowhere else either.

more from Andreas Harbsmeier at Eurozine here.

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mina loy's pseudonymania

Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy. While the actress Myrna Loy starred in the “The Thin Man” films, the Modernist poet Mina Loy was busying herself with the avant gardes of Italian Futurism, Dada, and to a lesser extent American Surrealism. The confusion is recurrent. Yes, their names are similar and yes, they were contemporaries, but the mix-up makes an even deeper sense given the two Loys' shared elegance, and the Platonic rightness of imagining the poet ordering and lining up a sequence of martinis while in the company of William Powell. In point of fact, Mina Loy was not even Mina Loy. Born in England as Mina Gertrude Löwy, our Loy dropped the “w” and the umlaut early, undoubtedly a step in becoming what Marjorie Perloff calls a “deracinated cosmopolite”—she would spend the least amount of time in the country of her birth, opting instead for Germany, Italy, Mexico, France, and finally the United States. While Myrna Loy played on screen with Asta the pedigreed dog, our Loy played with a mongrel language, and she started those games with her name. In her poems she would call herself Imna, Nima, Anim, Ova, and Gina, and later in life her autograph’s surname read Lloyd. One of her fiercest advocates, Roger Conover, refers to Loy’s “pseudonymania.”

more from Jessica Burstein at Poetry here.

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Friday Poem

Telephoning in the Mexican Sunlight

Talking with my beloved in New York
I stood at the outdoor public telephone
in Mexican sunlight, in my purple shirt
Someone had called it a man/woman
shirt. The phrase irked me. But then
I remembered that Rainer Maria
Rilke, who until he was seven wore
dresses and had long yellow hair,
wrote that the girl he almost was
"made her bed in his ear" and "slept him the world."
I thought, OK this shirt will clothe the other in me.
As we fell into long-distance love talk
a squeaky chittering started up all around,
and every few seconds came a sudden loud
buzzing. I half expected to find
the insulation on the telephone line
laid open under the pressure of our talk
leaking low-frequency noises.
But a few yards away a dozen hummingbirds,
gorgets going drab or blazing
according as the sun struck them,
stood on their tail rudders in a circle
around my head, transfixed
by the flower-likeness of the shirt.
And perhaps also by a flush rising into my face,
for a word -- one with a thick sound,
as if a porous vowel had sat soaking up
saliva while waiting to get spoken,
possibly the name of some flower
that hummingbirds love, perhaps
"honeysuckle" or "hollyhock"
or "phlox" -- just then shocked me
with its suddenness, and this time
apparently did burst the insulation,
letting the word sound in the open
where all could hear, for these tiny, irascible,
nectar-addicted puritans jumped back
all at once, as if the air gasped.

by Galway Kinnell

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What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?

Peter Singer published this three years ago yesterday, in the New York Times Magazine:

What is a human life worth? You may not want to put a price tag on a it. But if we really had to, most of us would agree that the value of a human life would be in the millions. Consistent with the foundations of our democracy and our frequently professed belief in the inherent dignity of human beings, we would also agree that all humans are created equal, at least to the extent of denying that differences of sex, ethnicity, nationality and place of residence change the value of a human life.

With Christmas approaching, and Americans writing checks to their favorite charities, it’s a good time to ask how these two beliefs — that a human life, if it can be priced at all, is worth millions, and that the factors I have mentioned do not alter the value of a human life — square with our actions.

More here.

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Concerning EM Forster

From The Telegraph:

EM Forster was once asked why he wasn’t more open about being homosexual, even at the cost of living abroad. After all, the French novelist André Gide had done it. Forster’s answer came quickly: “Gide hasn’t got a mother.” It’s a beautifully Forsterian answer, funny, glum and putting human considerations in front of ethical principles. Forster attempted high ethical debate in his novels, but discovered a human story could almost always make him think twice. Frank Kermode has turned a series of Cambridge lectures on Forster into a short but instructive book, adding a series of unordered reflections on aspects of Forster, which he calls a “causerie”. There is no key to Forster, apart from the general one of being an English liberal, and always being ready to retreat from and apologise for most intellectual positions. Which is a fairly unassailable intellectual position, as someone in the act of apology is always in.

Forster is caught for all time in his comments on the death of D H Lawrence. T  S Eliot found them inadequately serious: “Unless we know exactly what Mr Forster means by ‘greatest’, ‘imaginative’ and ‘novelist’, I submit that this judgment is meaningless.” Forster wrote that he, indeed, couldn’t explain what he had meant by the words and moreover couldn’t explain what ‘‘exactly’’ meant. Eliot, he said, “duly entangles me in his web”, but “there are occasions when I would rather be a fly than a spider and the death of D H Lawrence is one of these”. It’s a marvellous comment, both genuinely humble and a terrific stroke of one-upmanship.

More here.

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The year in science

From MSNBC:

Top breakthrough: It took 15 years for researchers to reconstruct the skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an apparent human ancestor unearthed in Ethiopia in 1994. The results were surprising: Ardi's image didn't look like a cross between an African ape and early hominids such as Australopithecus afarensis (represented by another famous skeleton, nicknamed Lucy). Rather, her skeleton was structured for upright walking as well as climbing, with long, curving fingers suited for grasping tree branches.

The message was that apes as well as humans have changed significantly since Ardi's heyday to adapt to their particular evolutionary niches. Anyone who still thinks that "humans evolved from apes" will have to shift their paradigm.

....

The other nine: Science doesn't rank the other items in its list of top 10 breakthroughs - but here they are, as they were listed in the journal.

Pulsars in the gamma-ray sky: NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a new wave of pulsars.

How plants get a rush: Scientists are learning how ABA receptors help plants get through stressful times.

Mock monopoles spotted: An elusive phenomenon, involving materials that have only a north or a south magnetic pole, is created in the lab using special materials. Magnetic monopoles have figured in the debate over the Large Hadron Collider's safety as well as in episodes of "The Big Bang Theory."

The stuff of longevity: Drugs such as rapamycin are being targeted for animal studies that eventually could lead to life extension for humans.

Our icy moon revealed: NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite crashes into the moon to find fresh evidence of water ice.

The return of gene therapy: Gene therapy has suffered setbacks over the past 20 years, but this year researchers reported success in treating maladies such as X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, Leber's congenital amaurosis and "bubble boy" disease.

Graphene takes off: Single-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms are the hot new thing in materials science, potentially opening the way for graphene transistors that can outdo silicon.

Hubble reborn: The Hubble Space Telescope gets its final scheduled upgrade from shuttle astronauts and emerges working better than ever.

First X-ray laser shines: SLAC's Linac Coherent Light Source was fired up for the first time in April, beginning a series of experiments that will use X-rays to probe structures on the atomic scale. Check this item to look back at my tour of SLAC while the LCLS was under construction.

More here.

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And what if we had 16 fingers?

Richard Dawkins in New Statesman:

If you have overdosed on Darwin this anniversary year, the great man himself is partly to blame: he was inconsiderate enough to publish On the Origin of Species when he was exactly 50. The resulting coincidence of sesquicen�tennial with bicentennial was bound to excite the anniversary-tuned antennae of journalists and publishers. Anniversaries are arbitrary, of course, dependent on the accident of our having ten fingers. If we had evolved with eight instead, we would have to suffer centenaries after only 64 (decimal) years, and style gurus would prate about the changing fashions of octaves instead of decades.

Incidentally, it is not far-fetched that we might have evolved a different number of fingers. The pentadactyl limb (five digits on each) has become a shibboleth of vertebrate zoology, and even animals such as horses (which walk on their middle fingers and toes) or cows (two digits per limb) have lost the extra digits from a five-fingered ancestor. But the lungfish-like group of Devonian fishes from which all land vertebrates are descended included species with seven (Ichthyostega) or eight (Acanthos�tega) digits per limb. If we were descended from Acanthostega, instead of from an unsung five-fingered cousin of the same fish, who knows what feats of virtuosity pianists might now perform with 16 fingers? And would computers have been invented earlier, because hexadecimal arithmetic translates more readily than decimal into binary?

Historical accidents of this sort are rife, contrasting with the illusion of good design to provide some of our most convincing evidence that evolution happened.

More here.

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Finally Tonight, Jesus...

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Twitlit: The twitterature revolution

Tim Walker in The Independent:

This Christmas, among the Harry Potter parodies and pub-quizzable miscellanies that litter the humour shelves in Waterstones, you'll find at least four titles that were either "crowdsourced" on Twitter, or written in chapters of 140 characters or less.

The World According to Twitter: Crowd-sourced Wit and Wisdom from David Pogue (and His 350,000 Followers) is the work of The New York Times technology writer Pogue, who asked his Twitter followers questions ranging from "What's your greatest regret?" to "What's the best bumper sticker you've seen lately?", then collected the best of their responses and published 2,524 of them in book form.

"Compose the subject line of an email message you really, really don't want to read," goes the first request. The responses include "To my former sexual partners, as required by law" and "Your Dad is now following you on Twitter". To the prompt "Add 1 letter to a famous person's name; explain", witty users replied with "Malcolm XY: Civil rights activist, definitively male", and "Sean Penne: Starchy, overcooked actor/activist".

More here.

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December 17, 2009

A Magic Number?

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

Imagine how useful it would be if someone calculated the minimum population needed to preserve each threatened organism on Earth, especially in this age of accelerated extinctions.

A group of Australian researchers say they have nailed the best figure achievable with the available data: 5,000 adults. That’s right, that many, for mammals, amphibians, insects, plants and the rest.

Their goal wasn’t a target for temporary survival. Instead they set the bar much higher, aiming for a census that would allow a species to pursue a standard evolutionary lifespan, which can vary from one to 10 million years.

That sort of longevity requires abundance sufficient for a species to thrive despite significant obstacles, including random variation in sex ratios or birth and death rates, natural catastrophes and habitat decline. It also requires enough genetic variation to allow adequate amounts of beneficial mutations to emerge and spread within a populace.

More here.

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something beautiful that might have been

Millions and millions of lives were lost in the war, many of them under terrible circumstances. And millions have been lost since then. But it is the destruction of one precious life, of an extraordinary young woman whom we have come to know through her most intimate thoughts, that brings out the full horror of this ghastly waste. Of all the entries in her journal, one sticks in my mind more than any other. It was written on October 25, 1943. Hélène is gripped by anxiety at the thought that she might not be there when her fiancé returns:

more from Ian Buruma at the NYRB here.

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flies in cloudy amber

The Pipers were an exciting looking couple, he tall and thin with the ascetic physiognomy of an Old Testament prophet, she with the schoolgirl athlete’s body and Dutch doll face poeticized by John Betjeman. Between them, in half a century of married life, they did very many things very well, producing pictures and stained glass, books and magazines, operas and ballets; they brought up four children, travelled and ran a famously hospitable household and productive garden on “simple life” principles. When they met at Ivor Hitchens’s seaside cottage in Suffolk in 1934, Piper was a committed member of Ben Nicholson’s avant-garde Seven and Five group and had started to write book and exhibition notices for the Saturday Review. Already in his thirties and married to a fellow art student, with a spell in the family firm of solicitors behind him, he was in a hurry to get on with the business of being an artist; lately down from Oxford, Myfanwy Evans had returned to London where her father had a chemist’s shop in Jermyn Street. Their courtship produced Axis, a magazine devoted to abstract art, and a future together as highbrow modernists seemed assured until Piper was sent as an official war artist to paint Coventry Cathedral and other damaged or threatened buildings.

more from Ruth Guilding at the TLS here.

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Thursday Poem

A Busy Man Speaks

Not to the mother of solitude will I give myself
Away, not to the mother of art, nor the mother
Of the ocean, nor the mother of the snake and the fire;
Not to the mother of love,
Nor the mother of conversation, nor the mother
Of the downcast face, nor the mother of the solitude of
    death;
Not to the mother of the night full of crickets,
Nor the mother of the open fields, nor the mother of Christ.

But I will give myself to the father of righteousness, the
    father
Of cheerfulness, who is also the father of rocks,
Who is also the father of perfect gestures;
From the Chase national Bank
An arm of flame has come, and I am drawn
To the desert, to the parched places, to the landscape of
    zeros;
And I shall give myself away to the father of righteousness,
The stones of cheerfulness, the steel of money, the father of
    rocks.

by Robert Bly

from Contemporary American Poetry;
Penguin Books, 1962

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Logic made fun

From Salon:

Of the most celebrated graphic novels recently published, R. Crumb's illustrated version of the Book of Genesis is atypically serious and David Mazzucchelli's "Asterios Polyp" is the most artistically sophisticated, but "Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth," by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou (illustrated by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna), is surely the most fun. This comes as a bit of a surprise, since the book's subject -- analytical philosophy's search for the foundations of mathematics in the early 20th century -- is hardly the stuff that frolics are made of. Still, amusement and cerebration, mixed in exactly the right proportions, can result in a delightful cocktail; Jostein Gaarder's fantasy novel cum philosophy primer, "Sophie's World," proved how popular the blend can be, and "Logicomix" has followed its example onto the bestseller lists.

What "Logicomix" niftily demonstrates is how well the graphic novel form is suited to mounting sprightly explanations of abstract concepts. Thinkers often employ concrete metaphors as tools to convey difficult ideas -- the "infinite hotel" of mathematician David Hilbert, for example, an establishment that, although full, always has room for another guest. In "Logicomix," Hilbert's paradox is further visualized by a character checking into an actual hotel and drawing arrows on the posted floor plan. That character is the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the scene is played for laughs with Russell's bemused new bride shaking her head and a German porter exclaiming "They are crazy, these Britons!"

More here.

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South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering

From Scientific American:

Why discuss this topic now that the cold war has ended? Because as other nations continue to acquire nuclear weapons, smaller, regional nuclear wars could create a similar global catastrophe. New analyses reveal that a conflict between India and Pakistan, for example, in which 100 nuclear bombs were dropped on cities and industrial areas—only 0.4 percent of the world’s more than 25,000 warheads—would produce enough smoke to cripple global agriculture. A regional war could cause widespread loss of life even in countries far away from the conflict.

Regional War Threatens the World
By deploying modern computers and modern climate models, the two of us and our colleagues have shown that not only were the ideas of the 1980s correct but the effects would last for at least 10 years, much longer than previously thought. And by doing calculations that assess decades of time, only now possible with fast, current computers, and by including in our calculations the oceans and the entire atmosphere—also only now possible—we have found that the smoke from even a regional war would be heated and lofted by the sun and remain suspended in the upper atmosphere for years, continuing to block sunlight and to cool the earth. India and Pakistan, which together have more than 100 nuclear weapons, may be the most worrisome adversaries capable of a regional nuclear conflict today.

More here.

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The 9th Annual Year in Ideas

From the New York Times Magazine:

Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world. To offer a nonalphabetical option for navigating the entries, this year we have attached tags to each item indicating subject matter. We hope you enjoy.

More here.

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What Is the Speed of Thought?

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

Morse’s invention debuted just as researchers were starting to make sense of the nervous system, and telegraph wires were an inspiring model of how nerves might work. After all, nerves and telegraph wires were both long strands, and they both used electricity to transmit signals. Scientists knew that telegraph signals did not travel instantaneously; in one experiment, it took a set of dots and dashes a quarter of a second to travel 900 miles down a telegraph wire. Perhaps, the early brain investigators considered, it took time for nerves to send signals too. And perhaps we could even quantify that time.

The notion that the speed of thought could be measured, just like the density of a rock, was shocking. Yet that is exactly what scientists did. In 1850 German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz attached wires to a frog’s leg muscle so that when the muscle contracted it broke a circuit. He found that it took a tenth of a second for a signal to travel down the nerve to the muscle. In another experiment he applied a mild shock to people’s skin and had them gesture as soon as they felt it. It took time for signals to travel down human nerves, too. In fact, Helmholtz discovered it took longer for people to respond to a shock in the toe than to one at the base of the spine because the path to the brain was longer.

More here.

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Elizabeth Streb Ensemble

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The Confessions of a Groveling Pakistani Native Orientalist

Pervez Hoodbhoy in CounterPunch:

Here ye, Counterpunch readers! The victory of Native Orientalists – the ones which the late Edward Said had warned us about – is nearly complete in Pakistan. It has been led by “the minions of Western embassies and Western-financed NGOs” and includes the likes of “Ahmad Rashid, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Najam Sethi, Khaled Ahmad, Irfan Hussain, Husain Haqqani, and P.J.Mir”. Thus declares Mohammad Shahid Alam, a professor of Pakistani origin who teaches at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachussetts. [CounterPunch, 2 Dec 2009]

I ought to be thrilled. Now that I am a certified foreign-funded agent/orientalist/NGO-operator who “manages US-Zionist interests”, a nice fat cheque must surely be in the mail. Thirty six years of teaching and social activism at a public university in Pakistan – where salaries are less than spectacular – means that additions to one’s bank balance are always welcome.

But what did I do to deserve this kindness?

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 03:51 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)

December 16, 2009

Nice is Overrated: The Lesson of House, M.D.

Mélanie Frappier in The Philosopher's Magazine:

Is House simply a “raving lunatic”, or is his obnoxious behaviour a symptom of a more serious condition? We could paraphrase House (in “The Socratic Method”) and answer: “Pick your specialist, you pick your symptoms. I’m a jerk. It’s my only symptom. I go see three doctors. The neurologist tells me it’s my pituitary gland, the endocrinologist says it’s an adrenal gland tumor, the intensivist…can’t be bothered, sends me to a witty philosopher, who tells me I push others because I think I’m Socrates.”

Socrates? If there was someone ancient Greeks thought was a pest, it was he. He was probably a stonemason by trade, but Socrates clearly preferred to spend his time discussing philosophy, nagging others with questions about truth, beauty, and justice. He didn’t write anything himself, yet the oracle at Delphi declared, “No one is wiser.” Bright young Athenians, like Plato and Xenophon, were Socrates’ “ducklings” and immortalized him as the main character of their dialogues.

Because Socrates neglected his work in favour of philosophy, he was poor. Unable to properly provide for his children, Socrates was pursued throughout the city by his sharp-tongued wife, Xanthippe. While Xanthippe is remembered as the only person to have ever won an argument against Socrates – much as Cuddy is the only one who can sometimes bend House’s will – her admonitions had only a moderate influence on her strong-headed husband.

Like House, Socrates showed little empathy when engaging people in philosophical debates. While, unlike House, Socrates valued friendship, people were quick to point out that discussions with him were as “pleasant” as a stingray’s electric discharge. Arguably such unpleasantness was justified, because Socrates believed himself to be on a godly mission to show people that they didn’t know anything. Part of this mission was to undo the work of the Sophists, who, according to Plato, taught the art of winning arguments for the sake of winning arguments rather than achieving the truth.

Why stun and confuse people with ironical questions, if afterwards you only insult them and reject their solution? The answer lies in the so-called Socratic method.

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