3quarksdaily

How to thrive as a fox in a world full of hedgehogs

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The Nobel Prize winning animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz once said about philosophers and scientists, “Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.” Lorenz had good reason to say this since he worked in both science and philosophy. Along with two others, he remains the only zoologist to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. His major work was in investigating aggression in animals, work that was found to be strikingly applicable to human behavior. But Lorenz’s quote can also said to be an indictment of both philosophy and science. Philosophers are the ultimate generalists, scientists are the ultimate specialists.

Specialization in science has been a logical outgrowth of its great progress over the last five centuries. At the beginning, most people who called themselves natural philosophers – the word scientist was only coined in the 19^th century – were generalists and amateurs. The Royal Society which was established in 1660 was a bastion of generalist amateurs. It gathered together a motley crew of brilliant tinkerers like Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Henry Cavendish and Isaac Newton. These men would not recognize the hyperspecialized scientists of today; between them they were lawyers, architects, writers and philosophers. Today we would call them polymaths.

These polymaths helped lay the foundations of modern science. Their discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany and physiology were unmatched. They cracked open the structure of cells, figured out the constitution of air and discovered the universal laws governing motion. Many of them were supported by substantial hereditary wealth, and most of them did all this on the side, while they were still working their day jobs and spending time with their families. The reasons these gentlemen (sadly, there were no ladies then) of the Royal Society could achieve significant scientific feats were many fold. Firstly, the fundamental laws of science still lay undiscovered, so the so-called “low hanging fruit” of science was ripe and plenty. Secondly, doing science was cheap then; all Newton needed to figure out the composition of light was a prism.

But thirdly and most importantly, these men saw science as a seamless whole. They did not distinguish much between physics, chemistry and biology, and even when they did they did so for the sake of convenience. In fact their generalist view of the world was so widespread that they didn’t even have a problem reconciling science and religion. For Newton, the universe was a great puzzle built by God, to be deciphered by the hand of man, and the rest of them held similar views.

Perceptions

Lygia Pape. Divisor, 1968.

Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, 1990 performance.

More here and here.

Monday Poem

Then

If it were then
I’d be seated on the step of the well house 
gazing at peach tree buds and the tales they told
of waiting, swelling, being
listening with the lake at my back 
down and through the steep slope of woods 
across the street. I’d see its gleaming surface 
spark through voids of oaks and the strangling bittersweet 
that climbed and throttled them  ..... if I turned
 
if I turned I’d hear the shouts and splash of swimmers
with muscles like mine, unconsciously prime, no effort just ease,
sounds, raw amplitudes caught in the topology of pink folds 
sprung from the sides of my head like wings —

and there’d be birds, of course, that sing, 
species unknown to me then, just birds, robins at least
—the first I knew specifically by their russet breasts 
pointed out to me by dad, or mom perhaps, 
though by this time that certainty’s as gone as the mist 
that rose at sunrise from that lake

gone

all except the echoing sense of it: 
the ache that clings like the scent of lilac from the bush 
that, not far from the well house at the corner of the drive,
stood its ground against the plow which passed again and again 
heaving its cold load upon it at the curb
never say die, its blooms later sang in spring unison,
lavender blossoms bundled like choirs 
whose songs rose from their bush of pied shadows 
performing sweet chemical chansons for my nose

that day then would have been as young as this but less weighted, 
less fraught, less freighted, less shadow-cast: 
I’d be seated on the well house step inconsiderate of the future 
and unperturbed by the past
.

Jim Culleny
7/28/17

Perceptions

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Ever the Women Watchful, 2017.

New Museum show "Under-Song fro Cipher" here.

More here, and here.

Perceptions

Shirazeh Houshiary. East Window of the Church of St. Martin In the Fields, London. 2008.

More here, here, and here.

Benedictine Dreams (And Some Strange Ideas about Counter-Culture)

bby Leanne Ogasawara

I admit, the only reason I picked the book up off the shelf was because of the photograph of Mont Saint-Michel on the cover.

Ah, Mont Saint-Michel. We had just returned from the legendary floating island, and I had found myself utterly obsessed by the place. A fairy castle rising up out of the mist and waters of the tidal estuary in northern France, the abbey of Mont Saint Michel is sometimes associated with the ancient Breton myth of the submerged cathedral lying underneath the sea. The myth of the sunken cathedral was the inspiration for Debussy's famous piano prelude, La Cathédrale Engloutie. Debussy often frequented Mont Saint Michel, and while the abbey of Mont Saint-Michel never sinks beneath the sea, it does become inaccessible as it is surrounded by waters twice daily. In days past, completely cut off at high tide by the strongest tidal forces in Europe; those strong currents rush in at incredible speed, "like that of a galloping horse," said Victor Hugo.   

Even today, the setting is indescribable. There is a short-story by Guy de Maupassant that I love because it so perfectly captures the magical and magnetic quality that Mont Saint-Michel holds on the imagination; especially on that of the pilgrim; for indeed, it has been a major place of Christian pilgrimage for over a thousand years. 

  The following morning at dawn I went toward it across the sands, my eyes fastened on this, gigantic jewel, as big as a mountain, cut like a cameo, and as dainty as lace. The nearer I approached the greater my admiration grew, for nothing in the world could be more wonderful or more perfect.

Seeing it for the first time last week, I simply could not believe my eyes. We had arrived as the abbey bells were ringing loudly in our ears and the army of day-trippers was pouring out in an endless tide back toward the parking lots to return to their cars and tour buses. 

If you stay on the island overnight, I had read, you will have the place much to yourself after 7pm.

In Favor of Small States – Are Meganations too Big to Succeed?

by Bill Benzon

One of the most interesting effects of the Trump presidency has been the response various cities and states have had to the Trump administration’s blindness to global warming: They have decided to bypass the federal government and go their own way on climate policy, even to the point of dealing with other nations. Thus Bill McKibben states, in “The New Nation-States”:

The real test will come in September next year, when “subnational” governments from around the world gather in California to sign the “Under2 MOU,” an agreement committing them to uphold the Paris targets. Launched in 2015 by California and the German state of Baden-Württemberg, the movement now includes everyone from Alsace to Abruzzo to the Australian Capital Territory; from Sichuan to Scotland to South Sumatra; from Manchester City to Madeira to Michoacán. Altogether: a billion people, responsible for more than a third of the world’s economic output. And every promise they make, sincere or not, provides climate activists with ammunition to hold each government accountable.

Moreover, the number of articles reporting on the weakening of the nation-state as a form of government seems on the rise – I link to a number of them at my home blog, New Savanna.

Thomas H. Naylor, September 14, 2012

This would not be surprising to the late Thomas Naylor, a scholar and activist who taught economics at Duke University, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont and who, as a consultant, advised major corporations and governments in over 30 countries. Naylor believed that nations such as the United States were too large to govern effectively and so should devolve into several smaller states. I am presently working with his estate to edit a selection of his papers and am reprinting one of them below. He completed it on December 3, 2012, a few days before he died from a stroke.

Secession Fever Spreads Globally

We should devote our efforts to the creation of numerous small principalities throughout the world, where people can live in happiness and freedom. The large states… must be convinced of the need to decentralize politically in order to bring democracy and self-determination into the smallest political units, namely local communities, be they villages or cities.
–Hans-Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein, The State in the Third Millennium

Since the re-election of Barack Obama on November 6, 2012, over one million Americans have signed petitions on a White House website known as “We the People” calling for the secession of their respective states from the Union. Contrary to the view expressed by many politically correct liberals, this is not merely a knee-jerk, racist reaction of some Tea Party types to the re-election of Obama, but rather it is part of a well-defined trend. Today there are, in fact, 250 self-determination, political independence movements in play worldwide including nearly 100 in Europe alone, over 70 in Asia, 40 in Africa, 30 or so in North America, and 15 to 20 scattered on various islands scattered around the world. We could be on the brink of a global secession pandemic!

We live in a meganation world under the cloud of Empire, the American Empire. Fifty-nine percent of the people on the planet now live in one of the eleven nations with a population of over one hundred million people. These meganations in descending order of population size include China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia, Japan, and Mexico. Extending the argument one step farther, we note that twenty-five nations have populations in excess of 50 million and that seventy-three percent of us live in one of those countries.

Optimizing Ourselves into Oblivion

by Jalees Rehman

The short story "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" ("An anecdote about the lowering of work ethic") is one of the most famous stories written by the German author Heinrich Böll. In the story, an affluent tourist encounters a poorly clad fisherman who is comfortably napping in his boat. The assiduous tourist accidentally wakes up the fisherman while taking photos of the peaceful scenery – blue sky, green sea, fisherman with an old-fashioned hat – but then goes on to engage the lounging fisherman in a conversation. The friendly chat gradually turns into a sermon in which the tourist lectures the fisherman about how much more work he could be doing, how he could haul in more fish instead of lazing about, use the profits to make strategic investments, perhaps even hire employees and buy bigger boats in a few years. To what end, the fisherman asks. So that you could peacefully doze away at the beach, enjoying the beautiful sun without any worries, responds the enthusiastic tourist.

I remembered Böll's story which was written in the 1960s – during the post-war economic miracle years (Wirtschaftswunder) when prosperity, efficiency and growth had become the hallmarks of modern Germany – while recently reading the book "Du sollst nicht funktionieren" ("You were not meant to function") by the German author and philosopher Ariadne von Schirach. In this book, von Schirach criticizes the contemporary obsession with Selbstoptimierung (self-optimization), a term that has been borrowed from network theory and computer science where it describes systems which continuously adapt and "learn" in order to optimize their function. Selbstoptimierung is now used in a much broader sense in German culture and refers to the desire of individuals to continuously "optimize" their bodies and lives with the help of work-out regimens, diets, self-help courses and other processes. Self-optimization is a routine learning process that we all engage in. Successful learning of a new language, for example, requires continuous feedback and improvement. However, it is the continuous self-optimization as the ultimate purpose of life, instead of merely serving as  a means to an end that worries von Schirach.

She draws on many examples from Körperkult (body-cult), a slavish worship of the body that gradually replaces sensual pleasure with the purpose of discipling the body. Regular exercise and maintaining a normal weight are key factors for maintaining health but some individuals become so focused on tracking steps and sleep duration on their actigraphs, exercising or agonizing about their diets that the initial health-related goals become lose their relevance. They strive for a certain body image and resting heart rates and to reach these goals they indulge in self-discipline to maximize physical activity and curb appetite. Such individuals rarely solicit scientific information as to the actual health benefits of their exercise and food regimens and might be surprised to learn that more exercise and more diets do not necessarily lead to more health. The American Heart Association recommends roughly 30-45 minutes of physical activity daily to reduce high blood pressure and the risk of heart attacks and stroke. Even simple and straightforward walking is sufficient to meet these goals, there is no need for two-hour gym work-outs.

Perceptions

Peter Mungkuri. Ngura Tjilpi (Country for Old Men).

Winner of the inaugural Hadley's Art Prize, 2017.

More here, and here

How to Drink Wine

by Dwight Furrow

The wine world is never short on controversy. Among the most persistent are worries about how wine quality is assessed. Are scores the best way of assessing quality? Why do I disagree with wine critics so much? Why do price and quality often seem unrelated? Are cult wines worth their cost? And what about those florid tasting notes and esoteric descriptors wine critics use that seem to have nothing to do with what I taste?

We need some distinctions to sort out these issues.

Begin by distinguishing two distinct objects of evaluation.*   First, there is the process by which we become aware of the aesthetic properties of the wine. This is the process of appreciation, and the object of attention is an experience which is of course guided by the wine.  Secondly, instead of evaluating the experience of wine, we could evaluate the wine itself. This might sound odd. How can I gain access to a wine without experiencing it? And indeed, sometimes there would be no difference between my evaluation of the experience and my evaluation of the wine. However, sometimes there is an important difference because each is focused on a different kind of value. When we focus on evaluating an experience we are focused on intrinsic value, the value of an experience independently of how it is used or for what purpose. We enjoy experiences not because they are useful for some purpose but because they are good in themselves. By contrast, we can evaluate a wine for its instrumental value in causing our experience.  Wine is good if it brings about an experience that we enjoy.

Here is why this is an important distinction, although I will use something less esoteric than wine as an example. Most of us value cars because they get us where we want to go. Some people value cars because they are fast and can win a race. In both cases the value of the car is instrumental and there are reasonably objective criteria for evaluating cars as a means of transportation. But some people value cars because they like to drive them or look at them. This is also instrumental value but in these cases the car is useful at causing an aesthetic experience.

Perceptions

Raphaël Krafft. A Reporter Becomes a Smuggler. March, 2017

"French radio reporter Raphaël Krafft traveled the world for 20 years reporting on war and conflict. From the Gaza Strip to the Balkans to the Iraq War, he’d witnessed suffering and met countless desperate people, but he’d never intervened in their lives.

Until 2015, that is, when Raphaël started covering the refugee crisis in France, and saw how his own country treated people fleeing wars in the Middle East and Africa.  

France closed its borders that year, denying migrants and refugees entry. Many people who did manage to make it into the country – including families with children – ended up living on the streets in camps with no access to bathrooms or running water.  

That October, Raphaël took a trip to the French-Italian border to report on how refugees were trying to sneak in, and how France was trying to keep them out.

..."

More here and here.

It's a Kodak Moment -- But Will it Last?

by Carol A Westbrook

I came across an old photo from about 1915, which had the names, "Anna, Rose, Mother" penciled on the back. The photo demonstrated that my grandmother, Anna, had a sister, Rose, which was also the name of the grandmother of a newly discovered DNA relative. We were second cousins--and a new branch of the family was discovered! I was pleased to find this old picture that had been kept for so long in a box in the attic.

How much we treasure our old family photos! They bring us our forebears, as well as old memories. But photos do more than preserve family memories. Since the beginning of civilization we have relied on permanent images to document lineage, leadership, historical events, wars, battles, and, of course, the news of the day. These relationships reinforce the foundation on which society is built.

Before photos, we had hand-painted portraits, sculptures, carvings and tomb paintings for these vital functions. These media were long lasting but not always accurate, not to mention difficult. Photography made it so much easier.

The invention of photography was truly a revolution, because it made permanent records available to everyone. The ruling class no longer had a monopoly on their memories, or on how history was to be interpreted.

Photography was invented by Daguerreotype in 1839, but it wasn't until Kodak introduced the Brownie camera in 1901 that it was available to all. Technology evolved rapidly, from the simple, instant Polaroid, to complicated single-lens reflex cameras with lenses, filters and flash attachments. Film photography allowed us to make slides and home movies. Life was full of Kodak moments, and we tried to capture them all.

We took pictures. We put them in albums to share with friends; we hung them on walls; we documented births, graduations, weddings and everything in between. And we kept them for posterity in a box in the attic. Haven't you noticed that your most vivid memories are the ones that were captured on home movies and photographs? Mine are.

Monday Poem

TV, Bronx News 6/30/17

Gun again.
In this case a pissed-off
former employee
with a not-so-extraordinary
sense of personal privilege 
to take life by right, 
which in the American zeitgeist
has become popular as
an act of self expression afforded
by liberty through an amendment to law 
lucrative to private sector arms interests
who live by death through means of tiny explosions
of sulfur and saltpeter mixed with charcoal
which send chunks of lead by click of triggers
into the boney meat of flesh and blood
to end the only real thing 
anyone ever has

Jim Culleny
6/30/17
.

perceptions

Deborah Turbeville. The Bath House, c 1975.

More here, and here.

perceptions

Otobong Nkanga. Alterscape: Playground. 2005-2015.

Materials: eucalyptus leaves, parrafin wax, a table, white shirts, singed and gilded, the sound of opera, a vaporizor,

a tree branch, ashes.

More here, here, and here.

The tyranny of things and how virtual reality will set us free

by Sarah Firisen

Recently, I dropped my iPhone on the sidewalk. I have a case with a bumper on it, but even so, I guess it hit the sidewalk in just the wrong way and, the next thing I knew, I had a $130 trip to the Apple store in my immediate future. Now clearly, like many thing iPhone, Apple could quite easily make a shatterproof screen. We have shatterproof windshields after all. They could also make water resistant phones (as other companies do), but then think of all that lovely lost income from phones dropped in the toilet or tangled up in bedding and put through the washing machine - yeah, I’ve done that as well. The trip to the Apple store was quick and pretty painless, they’re a well oiled machine with a steady incoming stream of people with pretty similar issues to mine. It would be interesting to stand there for a few hours and try to count how many people come in with either cracked screens or water logged phones, I bet it’s high.

The “things” we can’t live without; for most of us, our phones are pretty high on that list. And so of course Apple, as happens in a capitalist society, exploits this need, some might say addiction. And of course, our phones are not the only screens we’re addicted to: TVs, laptops, tablets, Fitbits, Apple Watches, and more.

Magic Leap, the most incredibly secretive and highly anticipated startup in the VR/AR (virtual reality/augmented reality) space seems, at least from its demo videos, to be working on a product that could, in principle, do away with all these screens. There will certainly be a headset of some sort to begin with, but it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where we’re all wearing contacts lenses instead. Then you can not only have a screen that you can’t smash or drop in the toilet, you could have many of them, at once. Every screen, devices beyond screens, could, at least in theory, be replaced overnight. If I was a company producing laptops, or TV screens, I might be a getting a little nervous. And while I realize that there is a whole social dimension, and probably legal and moral ones, around whether we want a world where people can be looking at virtual screens (unbeknownst to those around them) at any point, we sort of almost live in that world now. 15 years ago our current levels of smartphone usage was unthinkable, but it turns out that these technologies have a way of worming themselves into our daily lives and suddenly the unimaginable becomes the impossible to live without.

I recently ran a workshop on emerging technology and virtual/augmented reality was one (or two) of the technologies we looked at.

Kenan Malik Asks Some Questions about Culture and Its Appropriation

by Bill Benzon

Back on June 14 Kenan Malik published an op-ed, In Defense of Cultural Appropriation, in The New York Times. I liked it; it was a good piece. But, said I to myself, he’s going to catch hell for it. And he did.

Three days later he posted a series of replies on Twitter, starting with this:

One of the more endearing traits of cultural appropriation warriors is their belief that only they have read and thought about the issue. 1/

— Kenan Malik (@kenanmalik) June 16, 2017

He then posed a series of tasks and questions for the “cultural appropriation warriors”. I’ve decided to post some replies as a means of teasing out some of the implications of those prompts. I’ve put Malik’s statements in boldface while my elaborations are in ordinary text.

1 Define a culture (‘Western culture’, ‘black culture’, etc)

One might try to define Western culture as a geopolitical entity that has its origins in ancient Greece (philosophy, math) and Israel (religion), continues in Europe and then spreads to the Americas starting with European exploration, conquest, and colonization at the end of the 15th Century. That, for example, is more or less the scope of a two-semester art history course I took during my freshman year of college some decades ago. But in what sense is that all ONE culture?

Imagine yourself transported back to the ancient world – Sparta, Jerusalem, Rome, wherever. Would you be able to function? Chances are you can’t speak the language, and whatever culture is, language is surely a big part of it. But assume that whatever magical power took you there also gave you command of the local language, would you be comfortable with the customs, the food, clothing, housing, social structure? What if, in the magic of transport, you ended up a slave? Is slavery essential to Western culture or merely contingent?

I began to have my doubts about “Western culture” when I learned that those Greek sculptures and temples in pristine white marble had not, in fact, been white. They’d been painted in shades of blue, red, green, yellow, and so forth. They’d have been rather gaudy, even, you know, “Oriental”. Whoops! Not so “Western” after all.

How Does Sleep Deprivation Affect the Brain?

by Jalees Rehman

How many hours of sleep does the average person require? The American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society recently convened an expert panel which reviewed over 5,000 scientific articles and determined that sleeping less than 7 hours in adults (ages 18-60) was associated with worsening health, such as increased obesity and diabetes, higher blood pressure as well as an increased risk of stroke and heart disease. In addition to increasing the risk for illnesses, inadequate sleep is also linked to impaired general functioning, as evidenced by suppressed immune function, deficits in attention and memory, and a higher rate of errors and accidents. Since at least one third of adults report that they sleep less than 7 hours a day (as assessed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a survey of 444,306 adults), one can legitimately refer to insufficient sleep as a major public health issue. Even though insufficient sleep and other sleep disorders have reached epidemic-like proportions affecting hundreds of millions of adults world-wide, they are not adequately diagnosed and treated when compared to medical risk factors and conditions. For example, in most industrialized countries, primary care physicians perform annual blood pressure and cholesterol level checks, but do not routinely monitor the sleep duration and quality of their patients.

One reason for this may be the complexity of assessing sleep. Checking the blood cholesterol level is quite straightforward and provides a reasonably objective value which is either below or above the recommended cholesterol thresholds. However, when it comes to sleep, matters become more complicated. The above-mentioned expert panel acknowledged that there can be significant differences in the sleep requirements of individuals. Those who suffer from illnesses or have incurred "sleep debt" may require up to 9 hours of sleep, and then there are also significant environmental and genetic factors which can help determine the sleep needs of an individual. The average healthy person may need at least seven hours of sleep but there probably groups of individuals who can function well with merely 6 hours while others may need 9 hours of sleep. Then there is also the issue of the sleep quality. Sleeping for seven hours between 10 pm and 5 am has a higher quality of sleep than sleeping between 6 am and 1 pm because the latter will be associated with many more spontaneous awakenings and interruptions as well as less slow-wave sleep (a form of "deep sleep" characterized by classical slow wave patterns on a brain EEG recording during sleep). Unlike the objective cholesterol blood test, a true assessment of sleep would require an extensive sleep questionnaire asking details about sleep history and perhaps even recording sleep with activity monitors or EEGs.

Another reason for why insufficient sleep is not treated like other risk factors such as cholesterol and blood pressure is that there aren't any easy fixes for poor sleep and the science of how poor sleep leads to cognitive deficits, diabetes and heart disease is still very much a topic of investigation.

Monday Poem

Blots

In inkwell times when quills were used
(ends of sharpened feathers split
which above a writer's work twitched
as when a bird would scratch an itch)
we scratched our hieroglyphs in night-black licks
pausing intermittently to dip the split quill's end
into wells candlelit in nights as black as pitch

We coaxed from shades what they might think.
We spilled their tells upon a page
by sucking spells from pots of ink.

To unmask what we thought it was about
we scribbled convoluted ropes with knots.

We now imagine we've come far:
we scratch our licks with keyboard clicks
to spread fresh algorithmic tropes;
divining printed-circuit blots
we gaze at screens of Rorschach strokes
.

Jim Culleny
3/4/17

Painting: Jackson Pollock

Perceptions

Unknown artist. Ganga hiding in the feet of Lord Krishna, to escape the wrath of Radha.

An exhibition titled "Ganga: A River of Life and Eternity", celebrating the river Ganges, currently at the National Museum, Delhi, envisioned and curated by Shakeel Hossain.

More here and here.

Congratulations Shakeel!

WHO CRACKED THE CASE OF KURU?

by Genese Sodikoff

The story of kuru is a classic one in anthropology and medicine. Called the "laughing death" in the Australian newspapers, the disease swept over the Fore population of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands over the course of the 20^th century, peaking in the late '50s and early '60s.

Victims experienced body aches and instability at first.  They'd become emotionally labile, trembling and laughing involuntarily.  Gradually, they lost control of bodily functions and the ability to swallow or stand.  Their bodies wasted away, immobile until death, which could occur anytime between six months to a year after the onset of symptoms. 

For decades, scientists were stumped as to how it spread. The usual signs of an infectious agent were not apparent, yet people were dying by the hundreds every year.  The disease struck mostly adult women and young children.  Women died of kuru at approximately three times the rate of men, leaving hamlets bereft of mothers and wives.  It was a "demographic emergency," explains anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, who began research among the South Fore people at the height of the kuru epidemic in the early 1960s. As she describes in her 1979 book, Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, the Fore blamed the deaths on malevolent sorcery. They believed sorcerers were pushing them toward the brink of extinction. 

I have been writing here about the anthropology of zoonosis, disease that spills over from animal to human.  Zoonotic diseases interest me in part because they trouble our sense of species boundaries, or reproductive and even immunological divides. The lines of class difference (Mammalia, I mean) sometimes seem thinly sketched. 

Kuru was not zoonotic–-quite the opposite.  It was a disease borne of cannibalism.

Working On The Blockchain Gang, Part 1

by Misha Lepetic

"These are the guys that were 
too tough for the chain gang."
 ~ Bomber

Back in the mists of time, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, the promise of an open, decentralized, disaggregated network seemed to stretch limitlessly past the horizons of doubt and cynicism. Most iconically, John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace began with the stirring, uh, rejection: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Suffice to say, this stern invocation has not aged well. For one thing, Barlow's declaration is merely concerned with governments, and doesn't mention corporations. Perhaps this was because Barlow delivered these remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1996, and the matter required a certain deference. Perhaps he was under the sway of the idea - fashionable at the time - that history had indeed ended, with democracy and neoliberalism the unquestioned victors. Perhaps corporations, and capital generally, were not such a matter of concern twenty years ago as they are today. Nevertheless, in only a few years, the Wild West promise of the Web led to the giant pile-on of capital that would fuel the first dotcom bubble and its subsequent collapse, around 2001. 

The resurrection of internet entrepreneurship following that first, intemperate bender resulted in a different model, with a somewhat subtler promise. ‘Web 2.0', as it was popularized circa 2004, was premised on the idea that information was no longer static, and that participants could interact with content, and that content could be assembled, on the fly, for a specific viewer. A bit further behind the scenes, Web 2.0 benevolently assumed a rich ecosystem of application programming interfaces that would allow for seamless communication of data requests between platforms that were burgeoning with information. You can think of an API as recipe book for how to interact with a given site's data, or a membrane that allows certain requests and not others. 

So our notion of the Web was abstracted upwards, from scrappy libertarians doing whatever they wanted in some curiously disembodied space, to one that was more about to giving platforms the freedom they needed to interact with one another. This had several consequences (and I realize that I am being very simplistic here, but bear with me for the sake of the subsequent argument). On the one hand, the stage was set for the evolution of social media networks, which are more or less the ne plus ultra of Web 2.0. On the other, and inseparable from the first, was the growth of the vast and unregulated infrastructure that tracked users' online behavior.

If you believe Western Civilization is oppressive, you will ensure it is oppressive

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Philosopher John Locke's spirited defense of the natural rights of man should apply to all men and women, not just one's favorite factions.

When the British left India in 1947, they left a complicated legacy behind. On one hand, Indians had suffered tremendously under oppressive British rule for more than 250 years. On the other hand, India was fortunate to have been ruled by the British rather than the Germans, Spanish or Japanese. The British, with all their flaws, did not resort to putting large numbers of people in concentration camps or regularly subjecting them to the Inquisition. Their behavior in India had scant similarities with the behavior of the Germans in Namibia or the Japanese in Manchuria.

More importantly, while they were crisscrossing the world with their imperial ambitions, the British were also steeping the world in their long history of the English language, of science and the Industrial Revolution and of parliamentary democracy. When they left India, they left this legacy behind. The wise leaders of India who led the Indian freedom struggle - men like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar - understood well the important role that all things British had played in the world, even as they agitated and went to jail to free themselves of British rule. Many of them were educated at Western universities like London, Cambridge and Columbia. They hated British colonialism, but they did not hate the British; once the former rulers left they preserved many aspects of their legacy, including the civil service, the great network of railways spread across the subcontinent and the English language. They incorporated British thought and values in their constitution, in their educational institutions, in their research laboratories and in their government services. Imagine what India would have been like today had Nehru and Ambedkar dismantled the civil service, banned the English language, gone back to using bullock cart and refused to adopt a system of participatory democracy, simply because all these things were British in origin.

The leaders of newly independent India thus had the immense good sense to separate the oppressor and his instruments of oppression from his enlightened side, to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Nor was an appreciation of Western values limited to India by any means. In the early days, when the United States had not yet embarked on its foolish, paranoid misadventures in Southeast Asia, Ho Chi Minh looked toward the American Declaration of Independence as a blueprint for a free Vietnam. At the end of World War 1 he held the United States in great regard and tried to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Conference. It was only when he realized that the Americans would join forces with the occupying French in keeping Vietnam an occupied colonial nation did Ho Chi Minh's views about the U.S. rightly sour. In other places in Southeast Asia and Africa too the formerly oppressed preserved many remnants of the oppressor's culture.

Yet today I see many, ironically in the West, not understanding the wisdom which these leaders in the East understood very well. The values bequeathed by Britain which India upheld were part of the values which the Enlightenment bequeathed to the world. These values in turn went back to key elements of Western Civilization, including Greek, Roman, Byzantine, French, German and Dutch. And simply put, Enlightenment values and Western Civilization are today under attack, in many ways from those who claim to stand by them. Both left and right are trampling on them in ways that are misleading and dangerous. They threaten to undermine centuries worth of progress.

Perceptions

Ann Hamilton. The Event of a Thread, 2012-2013. Park Street Armory Show, NY.

More here, here, and here.

Walking by White House Where He Lies.

by Maniza Naqvi

Why does this President lie in the White House? Because they all did. And because they all will. But this one lies because the last few didn't do it with the finesse that has normally been typical of the White House. The last few didn't do it with the sophistication of those before them. The last few were unvarnished, bumbling liars, blatant, impertinent, cloying, open, transparent liars.  So they lied and each and every one of them took us to war, like every one of them, before them had done. And even though the lies were called out and everyone knew they lied, yet these men continued to lie and because of their lies millions of people died, uncounted, unaccounted for, as if they never mattered, as if they never existed. As if they simply were vaporized.

Now we have the newest liar. So what is the problem? And those who claim to call him out, claim they have caught him out, they are exactly those who have known the lies all along, the lies of all the others, and have tolerated them. Till now. Why? Because this liar's lies, bite into theirs.  These catchers of lies, they lie too, oh yes they do, clear as day those lies lie in their quaint expressions claiming integrity with a few hokey hee-haws of lordy, lordy, lordy me. Liars. I wish there were tapes. How I wish I could tape all their mouths shut. Perhaps then the wars and its machinery of opiates, micro breweries, cannabis,TV and weapons would end.