October 25, 2008
Sean Carroll on Hyperion
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll has a couple of interesting posts on the seeming collapse of the wave function and Saturn's moon Hyperion:
One of the annoying/fascinating things about quantum mechanics is the fact the world doesn’t seem to be quantum-mechanical. When you look at something, it seems to have a location, not a superposition of all possible locations; when it travels from one place to another, it seems to take a path, not a sum over all paths. This frustration was expressed by no lesser a person than Albert Einstein, quoted by Abraham Pais, quoted in turn by David Mermin in a lovely article entitled “Is the Moon There when Nobody Looks?“:
I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I looked at it.
The conventional quantum-mechanical answer would be “Sure, the moon exists when you’re not looking at it. But there is no such thing as `the position of the moon’ when you are not looking at it.”
Nevertheless, astronomers over the centuries have done a pretty good job predicting eclipses as if there really was something called `the position of the moon,’ even when nobody (as far as we know) was looking at it. There is a conventional quantum-mechanical explanation for this, as well: the correspondence principle, which states that the predictions of quantum mechanics in the limit of a very large number of particles (a macroscopic body) approach those of classical Newtonian mechanics. This is one of those vague but invaluable rules of thumb that was formulated by Niels Bohr back in the salad days of quantum mechanics. If it sounds a little hand-wavy, that’s because it is.
The vagueness of the correspondence principle prods a careful physicist into formulating a more precise version, or perhaps coming up with counterexamples. And indeed, counterexamples exist: namely, when the classical predictions for the system in question are chaotic. In chaotic systems, tiny differences in initial conditions grow into substantial differences in the ultimate evolution. It shouldn’t come as any surprise, then, that it is hard to map the predictions for classically chaotic systems onto average values of predictions for quantum observables. Essentially, tiny quantum uncertainties in the state of a chaotic system grow into large quantum uncertainties before too long, and the system is no longer accurately described by a classical limit, even if there are large numbers of particles.
Some years ago, Wojciech Zurek and Juan Pablo Paz described a particularly interesting real-world example of such a system: Hyperion, a moon of Saturn that features an irregular shape and a spongy surface texture.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 05:20 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
The Met’s take on John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic.”
In the New Yorker, Alex Ross reviews this production of John Adams' opera:
I first heard John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945—while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. In the course of chronicling the first production of “Atomic,” at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, I had arranged to visit the Trinity site, and brought with me the composer’s computer realization of his score. An eerie trip ensued. Even as the hot gleam of the highway gave way to desolate roads and fenced-off military zones, Adams’s characteristic musical gestures—the rich-hued harmonies and bopping rhythms that have made repertory items of “Harmonielehre,” “Nixon in China,” and “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”—disintegrated into broken clockwork rhythms, acid harmonies, and electronic noise.
Rehearsals for the première revealed “Atomic” to be not only an ominous score but also an uncommonly beautiful one. Scene after scene glows with strange energy. There is an inexplicably lovely choral ode to the bomb’s thirty-two-pointed explosive shell, with unison female voices floating above lush string-and-wind chords and glitterings of chimes and celesta. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the atomic project, and Kitty, his brilliant, alcoholic wife, sing sumptuous duets over an orchestra steeped in the decadent glamour of Wagner and Debussy. Oppenheimer’s central aria, a setting of the John Donne sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” has a stark Renaissance eloquence, its melody a single taut wire. The night of the countdown is taken up with a hallucinatory sequence of convulsive choruses, lurching dances, and truncated lyric flights. After the first run-through with singers and orchestra, it seemed clear that “Doctor Atomic” was Adams’s most formidable achievement to date.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 05:12 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
A Day at elBulli: A Conversation
Over at NYPL Live, an audio conversation with Ferran Adrià, Corby Kummer and Harold McGee:
No one can get into elBulli, Ferran Adrià’s restaurant on the northeast coast of Spain. But plenty of people certainly try: every year, the restaurant receives over two million requests for only 8,000 seats during the six months it is open. For the other six months, Adrià, who is proud to be called the “Salvador Dali of the Kitchen," travels, dreams, and creates at his "food laboratory" in Barcelona, called elBulli Taller, where his team includes a chemist and an industrial designer who also design plates and serving utensils to go with the food. No wonder, as Corby Kummer wrote in The Atlantic, “making the twisty two-hour drive from Barcelona for a dinner that ends well into the wee hours has become a notch on every foodie's belt—perhaps the notch, given the international derby to get reservations.”
For mortals who won’t be making the trip soon—or who didn’t hit the lottery last year in the German contemporary-art exhibition Documenta, which flew two people at random per day to el Bulli to experience "the exhibition" that is dinner at elBulli—Adrià has given the world A Day at elBulli: An Insight into the Ideas, Methods and Creativity of Ferran Adria. This is the first book to take a behind-the-scenes look at the restaurant whose sources and methods every ambitious chef wants to know. It shows a full working day from dawn until the last late-night guests leave, using photographs, menus, recipes and diagrams that reveal the restaurant’s preparations, food philosophy, and surroundings.
What have the rest of us been missing?
Posted by Robin Varghese at 05:09 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
The God Delusion at Work: An Indian Travel Diary
Meera Nanda in Economic and Political Weekly:
"New cars smell the same in India as they do in the US”, was the first thought that came to my mind as I took my seat in my nephew’s new Hyundai sedan in which he had come to pick me up from the Chandigarh airport. It was the first of August and I had just arrived in India for a short visit. My home- town was my first stop. New cars in India may have the same leathery-plasticky smell as new cars every-where, but they look like nothing else in the world. The car that I was riding in, like the tens of thousands that roll out of auto-showrooms everyday all over India, was bedecked in red ribbons and had a garland of fresh marigolds strung around the number plates. The top of the front window had two swastikas and an “Om” painted on it in red colour. The drivi ng-wheel had the “auspicious” red string tied to it. The Ganesh idol on the dashboard had the residue of burnt incense in front of it.
My nephew told me that he was coming straight from the temple where he had taken his car for a vahan puja, a brand new Hindu ritual invented to bless the new vehicles that are clogging the Indian roads these days. This being his first car – and the object of his loving devotion, at least for now – my nephew told me that he wanted to do something really, really, special for it. That is why, he told me, he took it to the temple where he had to shell out some serious cash for the ceremony, instead of getting a free puja which his dealership had offered as a part of the incentive package. “What”? My ears pricked up. I must have sounded incredulous: “Car dealers offer free pujas? Do they have pundits on their staff now? Car dealerships have become new temples or what?”
My nephew looked at me as if to ask where I had been all these years! This is nothing new, he said. Knowing how popular vahan pujas are, more innovative car-dealers throw in free pujas for their customers.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 05:06 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Saturday Poem
///
...From an epigram by Plato
A Way to Make a Living
James Wright
When I was a boy, a relative
Asked for me a job
At the Weeks Cemetary.
Think of all I could
have raised that summer,
That money, and me
Living at home,
Fattening and getting
Ready to live my life
Out on my knees, humming,
Kneading up docks
And sumac from
Those flawless clerks-at-court, those beautiful
Grocers and judges, the polished
Dead of whom we make
So much.
I could have stayed there with them.
Cheap, too.
Imagine, never
To have turned
Wholly away from the classic
Cold, the hill, so laid
Out, measure by seemly measure clipped
And mown by old man Albright
The Sexton. That would have been a hell of
A way to make a living.
Thank you, no.
I am going to take my last nourishment
Of measure from a dark blue
Ripple on swell on ripple that makes
its own garlands.
My dead are secret wine jars
Of Tyrian commercial travelers.
Their happiness is a lost beginning, their graves
Drift in and out of the Mediterranean.
One of these days
The immortals, clinging to a beam of sunlight
Under water, delighted by delicate crustaceans,
Will dance up thirty-foot walls of radiance,
And waken,
The sea shining on their shoulders, the fresh
Wine in their arms. Their ships have drifted away.
They are stars and snowflakes floating down
Into your hands, love.
From: Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (1990).
///
Posted by Jim Culleny at 08:40 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
Five Fallacies of Grief: Debunking Psychological Stages
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.
So annealed into pop culture are the five stages of grief—introduced in the 1960s by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross based on her studies of the emotional state of dying patients—that they are regularly referenced without explication. There appears to be no evidence, however, that most people most of the time go through most of the stages in this or any other order. According to Russell P. Friedman, executive director of the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and co-author, with John W. James, of The Grief Recovery Handbook (HarperCollins, 1998), “no study has ever established that stages of grief actually exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss.... No matter how much people want to create simple, bullet-point guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are no stages of grief that fit any two people or relationships.”
Friedman’s assessment comes from daily encounters with people experiencing grief in his practice. University of Memphis psychologist Robert A. Neimeyer confirms this analysis. He concluded in his scholarly book Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (American Psychological Association, 2001): “At the most obvious level, scientific studies have failed to support any discernible sequence of emotional phases of adaptation to loss or to identify any clear end point to grieving that would designate a state of ‘recovery.’”
Nevertheless, the urge to compress the complexities of life into neat and tidy stages is irresistible. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud insisted that we moved through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson countered with eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (infant); autonomy vs. doubt (toddler); initiative vs. guilt (preschooler); industry vs. inferiority (school-age period); identity vs. role confusion (adolescent); intimacy vs. isolation (young adult); generativity vs. stagnation (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (older adult). Harvard University psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg postulated that our moral development progresses through six stages: parental punishment, selfish hedonism, peer pressure, law and order, social contract and principled conscience.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:47 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
Mr. Wizard
From The New York Times:
John Updike is the great genial sorcerer of American letters. His output alone (60 books, almost 40 of them novels or story collections) has been supernatural. More wizardly still is the ingenuity of his prose. He has now written tens of thousands of sentences, many of them tiny miracles of transubstantiation whereby some hitherto overlooked datum of the human or natural world — from the anatomical to the zoological, the socio-economic to the spiritual — emerges, as if for the first time, in the completeness of its actual being.
This isn’t writing. It is magic. And it’s not surprising that the author who practices it should be drawn repeatedly to the other, darker kind, though it is often masked in droll comedy. In the 1960s, surveying the field in the literary rat race, Updike put a hex, collectively, on the Jewish novelists (Bellow, Mailer, Malamud, Roth) then looming as his chief competition. He invented a wickedly funny composite parody, Henry Bech, whom he entraps in a web of debilitating spells, from hydrophobia to sleep-anxiety. At one point Bech squanders the best part of a work morning on the toilet, “leafing sadly through Commentary and Encounter,” journals not often hospitable to Updike’s own fiction. Lest we, or his rivals, miss the drift, Updike afflicts Bech with the cruelest curse of all, writer’s block, which leaves him unable to begin, much less finish, his next novel. “Am I blocked? I’d just thought of myself as a slow typist,” Bech weakly jokes to Bea, his current emasculating Gentile mistress, who has supplanted her even more emasculating sister in Bech’s bed. “What do you do,” Bea sneers in reply, “hit the space bar once a day?”
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Seven hundred friends, and I was drinking alone
Hal Neidzviecki in the New York Times:
I used Facebook to create an “event” and invite my digital chums. Some of them, of course, didn’t live in Toronto, but I figured, it’s summer and people travel. You never know who might be in town. If they lived in Buffalo or Vancouver, they could just click “not attending,” and that would be that. Facebook gives people the option of R.S.V.P.’ing in three categories — “attending,” “maybe attending” and “not attending.”
After a week the responses stopped coming in and were ready to be tabulated. Fifteen people said they were attending, and 60 said maybe. A few hundred said not, and the rest just ignored the invitation altogether. I figured that about 20 people would show up. That sounded pretty good to me. Twenty potential new friends.
On the evening in question I took a shower. I shaved. I splashed on my tingly man perfume. I put on new pants and a favorite shirt. Brimming with optimism, I headed over to the neighborhood watering hole and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Eventually, one person showed up.
More here. [Thanks to Husain Naqvi.]
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:32 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
October 24, 2008
Should Women Rule?
Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic Monthly:
I have accorded former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers the apparently unusual honor of actually reading her book, Why Women Should Rule the World, and I will now discuss it, whether you want me to or not.
By "you," I mean the surly female ur-reader who long ago elected to ignore the encroaching continent of women's- studies tomes. Forget the male ur-reader. At this point, I doubt a man exists who would dive eagerly into a book about women's superior leadership qualities. As to which men should, well, if there remains even one male executive in Canton, Ohio, unaware that hiring a qualified, well-liked, profit-driven female is a good thing, I say let him slump gloomily in business class with his Chivas and Clive Cussler, because his skyrocketing cholesterol ("Cholesterol? What's cholesterol?") will soon fell him anyway.
To be gender-neutral where one can, it is fair to note that the genre of Important Unread Books -- by authors with weighty resumes who seem to be on every TV talk show, and in every Barnes & Noble window display, gazing boldly, hands on hips -- is apparently not limited to women. In response to my puzzled query as to why I'd seen Myers's book mentioned everywhere but read almost nowhere, a (male) friend of mine in publishing wrote:
I'd say the Myers book sounds like the female equivalent of what we in the bookstore business (my former occupation) used to call Father's Day Books, e.g. anything by David Halberstam and/or about a Founding Father. Do people buy these books? Sure -- they make great, heavy Father's Day gifts. Do people read them? Er -- I don't have any exact figures, but I imagine more than a few of them are holding up wobbly Black & Decker work benches right now.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 02:40 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Taleb: The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Financial Regime Change?
Robert Wade in The New Left Review:
The downward spiral of credit contraction is being driven by a pervasive collapse of trust in the entire structure of financial intermediation that underpins capitalist economies. With debt levels running high and the economic climate worsening, many enterprises in the real economy must be close to bankruptcy; hence lenders and equity buyers are staying out of the market. Governments have therefore moved to stabilize credit markets by taking steps to encourage buyers to re-enter the market for securities—most notably the us Treasury, with its $700 bn bail-out scheme. Several European states have moved to steady the banking sector, with Ireland, Greece, Germany, Austria and Denmark guaranteeing all savings deposits in early October 2008. Competition rules have been set aside, as governments foster mega-mergers. In the uk, the recent merger of hbos and Lloyds tsb creates a bank with a 30 per cent share of the retail market.
The sheer monopoly power of such new financial conglomerates is likely to prompt a stronger regulatory response. Another key area to watch in terms of gauging the robustness of governmental responses is the market for Over the Counter (otc) derivative contracts—which Warren Buffet famously described in 2003 as ‘financial weapons of mass destruction’. Buffet went on to say that, while the Federal Reserve system was created in part to prevent financial contagion, ‘there is no central bank assigned to the job of preventing the dominoes toppling in insurance or derivatives’. In the event that more regulation of the otc market is implemented—even in the minimal form of requiring the use of a standard contract format and registration of the details of each contract with a regulatory body—Brooksley Born will have some satisfaction. She was head of the Chicago Futures Trading Commission in the late 1990s, and proposed in a discussion paper that the otc market should come under some form of regulation. Alan Greenspan, sec Chairman Arthur Levitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin were so angry at her for even raising such an idea that they sought Clinton’s permission to have her fired; in January 1999 she duly resigned for ‘family reasons’.
by the banks’ demise.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:27 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
From Edge:
DANIEL KAHNEMAN: I want to tell you a bit of straight psychology that I find very exciting, that I found more exciting this year than I had before, and that in some ways is changing my view about a lot of things in psychology. There are two big things happening in psychology today. One, of course, is everything that's got to do with the brain, and that's dominating psychology. But there is something else that is happening, which started out from a methodological innovation as a way to study memory, and we've always known, that's the idea of the notion of association of ideas, which has been around for 350 years at least.
We know about how associations work because we have one thought, and when it leads to another‚windows and doors and things like that, or white and black‚and we have our ideas of associations, and it's always been recognized as important and interesting. But our view of how associations work has been changed in a profound way by a technical innovation, which is something that happens a great deal in psychology and I suppose in all sciences. This innovation is the following: If, for example, you hear the word "sick", there are few associations that come to mind. But there are a number of other things that you can do, that are little more refined. You can present words, and measure the amount of time that it takes people to read the words. Or you can measure words and non-words, and the task is to decide whether they're a set of letters, or a word, or a non-word, and it's the ease with which words are recognized as words as against non-words. I'll begin by focusing on reaction time, because that's the simplest one.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 02:22 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
so far, the 21st century sucks
Let’s be honest—this new millennium, so far it’s been a huge disappointment. It was preceded by a false alarm (the Y2K rollover), was cursed by hanging chads (the Florida recount), and has been held hostage ever since by the ministry of fear, with Americans meekly removing their shoes for the privilege of flying in airplanes charging fees for pillows and blankets. It’s been seven years since 9/11, no follow-up attack has stabbed our shores, and yet the front pages of so many papers resemble the end is near signs toted by bearded prophets that were once a staple of New Yorker cartoons. The decade has traveled from bin Laden’s cave to the Dark Knight’s Batcave in a jagged thrust of clenched force and unleashed chaos. Even an unforeseen blossom of good news, such as the declining death toll in Iraq, seems almost incidental in the log stream of general lousiness. Journalism used to perform a higher civic function than it does today, so spanked up is it with gaffes, gotchas, spin-doctoring, celebrity pimping, crisis-mongering, minnow-brained punditry, drama criticism practiced from under the troll bridge (usually at the expense of Democrats—Al Gore’s sighings during the debate with George Bush, Hillary Clinton’s “cackle”), and instant amnesia. To watch archive footage of TV reporters from the black-and-white era with their measured intonations and ashen visages—before everybody burst into Michael Kors orange—is to crack open the crypt on a more responsible, somber, and, yes, duller era, when journalists still conducted themselves as a priestly caste serving the needs of an informed citizenry, as opposed to catering to cud-chewing dolts. Those days are gone and there’s no point in mourning them, the Walter Lippmanns and similar wise men (and women) having proved worse than useless when the Vietnam War sawed the country into two with its lies and delusions. But the intelligent drone of old-school journalism served to extend a support bridge through national trauma, the term “anchorman” symbolic of the media’s role in securing coverage of the news with weight and authority, a fixed point in a sea of raging foam. Now it’s all raging foam, a steady, indiscriminate diet of excitation to keep us permanently on edge.
more from Vanity Fair here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (4)
reality and its other among conservative pundits
My husband called it first. Then, a brilliant, 75-year-old scholar and raconteur confessed to me over wine: ‘I'm sexually attracted to her. I don't care that she knows nothing.’Finally, writer Robert Draper closed the file on the Sarah Palin mystery with a devastating article in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine: ‘The Making (and Remaking) of McCain.’
McCain didn't know her. He didn't vet her. His campaign team had barely an impression. In a bar one night, Draper asked one of McCain's senior advisers: ‘Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?’
The adviser thought a moment and replied: ‘No, I don't know.’
Blame the sycamore tree.
more from the National Review Online here. (via Daily Dish)
Kathryn Jean Lopez's weird denunciation of her own columnist here.
more explanation of the in-fighting and implosion here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:33 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (5)
the latest from dr. doom
Early Friday Morning Update: Yesterday Thursday I gave a speech in London (see video below) arguing that markets were in sheer panic and becoming literally dysfunctional and unhinged. I also made the point that policy makers may soon be forced to close financial markets as the panic selling accelerates.Indeed, we have now reached a point where fundamentals and long term valuation considerations do not matter any more for financial markets. There is a free fall as most investors are rapidly deleveraging and we are on the verge of a a capitulation collapse. What matters now is only flows - rather than stocks and fundamentals - and flows are unidirectional as everyone is selling and no one is buying as trying to buy equities is like catching a falling knife. There are no buyers in these dysfunctional markets, only sellers and panic is the ugly state of this destabilizing game.
And while panic and destabilizing market dynamics is the driver of financial markets even economic fundamentals are awful as investors are finally realizing that a severe US and Eurozone and G7 and emerging markets and global recession is coming and will be deep and protracted.
more from RGE Monitor here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?
Posted by Abbas Raza at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (5)
Police fear riots if Barack Obama loses US election
Catherine Ellsworth in The Telegraph:
Law enforcement officials say the intense public interest and historic nature of the vote could lead to violent outbreaks if people are unhappy with the results, encounter problems casting their ballots or suspect voting irregularities.
Police departments say they cannot rule out disorder and are mobilising extra forces and putting SWAT teams on standby.
In Oakland, near San Francisco, police will have tactical squads, SWAT teams and officers trained in riot control on standby.
"We always try to prepare for the worst," said Oakland police department spokesman Jeff Thomason.
"This election is going to mark in history a change in the presidency: you're going to have a woman in the presidency or an African American as president. I think everybody around here is voting for Obama, so if he gets in the White House everybody's going to be happy.
"But we'll have our SWAT teams on standby and traffic teams here, so if something goes off we'll organise and take care of the problem."
There have also been internet rumours about plans for protests or civil disobedience by supporters of Democratic candidate Barack Obama if he is beaten by Republican rival John McCain on November 4.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (13)
Friday Poem
///
The Buried Rib Cage
Eve Grubin
Eve slipped from its arced ridge—
the only body part
you don't
......do evil with:
the eye, the hand,
might beg
......corruption;
the ribs are modest
shy crests, ticklish,
............an open fan,
not quite sexual, yet not puritan:
delicate accordian
..................—yawn, moan—
Soul breathes through the comb.
From Morning Prayer (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005)
Posted by Jim Culleny at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
October 23, 2008
Robert Hughes - American Visions
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Offshore Wind May Power the Future
Emily Waltz in Scientific American:
The waters of the Jersey Shore may soon become home to the nation's first deepwater wind turbines. New Jersey officials recently announced the state would help fund an initiative by Garden State Offshore Energy to build a 350-megawatt wind farm 16 miles (26 kilometers) offshore. The state wants by 2020 many more of these parks, at least 3,000 megawatts worth, or about 13 percent of the state's total electricity needs.
"This is probably the first of many ambitious goals to be set by states," says Greg Watson, a senior advisor on clean energy technology to the governor of Massachusetts. "Three thousand megawatts is significant. With that you're able to offset or even prevent fossil fuel plants from being built."
The federal government is about to open up to wind energy development vast swaths of deep ocean waters, and states and wind park developers are vying to be the first to seize the new frontier. Wind parks in these waters can generate more energy than nearshore and onshore sites, they don't ruin seascape views, and they don't interfere as much with other ocean activities.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Brothers share wife to secure family land
Sara Sidner at CNN:
Amar and Kundan Singh Pundir are brothers. Younger brother Amar breaks rocks in a mine for a living. Kundan farms their small piece of inherited land. They live in a beautiful but remote hillside village in the clouds of Himachal Pradesh, India.
Both aged in their forties, the two brothers have lived together nearly their whole lives. They are poor and share just about everything: Their home, their work and a wife.
"See we have a tradition from the beginning to have a family of five to 10 people. Two brothers and one wife." Kundan says.
They practice what is known as fraternal polyandry -- where the brothers of one family marry the same woman. Why? Tradition and economics.
Life is hard here. The village is precariously perched on the side of a very steep hill about 6,000ft up. Most of the villagers survive off tiny plots of cropland.
In this difficult terrain there isn't enough land to go around. So, instead of finding separate wives and splitting up their inherited property, the brothers marry the same woman and keep their land together.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
ice cream and horror
Omar began his tour d'horreur as the black sheep of a prominent Pakistani family. He was not conventionally ambitious. He went to college in America and graduate school in England, but couldn't bring himself to become an academic. Upon returning to Pakistan, he failed the civil service exam (to the amusement of his father, a diplomat) and took a job teaching high school, which he did for almost ten years, though he found it boring. Mostly he did what he loved-he watched movies. All kinds, from mainstream Bollywood epics to obscure second- and third-tier Hollywood films to the indigenous outpourings of Lollywood, Pakistan's own film industry. And he ate ice cream.He ate a lot of ice cream. Having gone to college in Boston in the 1980s, the heyday of the independent ice cream store, he had acquired a taste for natural flavors and organic ingredients, as well as admiration for the "smoosh-in" (the original ice-cream-and-candy-bar hybrid). But the ice cream back home was brightly colored, generic, and tasteless. Worse, the ice cream shops in Islamabad were aimed squarely at children, complete with Mickey Mouse murals. One day Omar decided to try his hand at making ice cream for himself. When the results were encouraging, he thought about selling it to others, and in August 1995 he and his younger brother Ali opened a makeshift business out of their parents' Islamabad home. It would not be safe for children. They called it the Hotspot.
more from Bidoun here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
more on the kundera dust up
However much we are inundated with bad news, it never ceases to surprise us. This time it came with the Czech weekly Respekt, which reported that in 1950 Milan Kundera informed the police on a person who was later sentenced to 22 years in prison. It came as a shock to me not because – like so many others – I admire Kundera as an author of novels and essays; I also know him personally. I have corresponded with him for several years on the subject of publishing Slovak translations of his French books. Respecting Kundera's privacy, up until now I have been discrete about our correspondence and personal contact. The events of the last days have changed my position on this.The way the affair has been presented to the world public is mind-boggling. The fact that Kundera himself learned about the allegations from the press is another great failure of journalistic decency. The insensitivity and arrogance of the authors of the article that provoked the scandal left me horrified. They start dramatically: "Milan Kundera has always carefully covered his tracks. He has given no interviews for the past quarter of a century. He visits his native country only incognito."
more from Eurozine here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
rothko
While Dan Rice slapped brushloads of rabbitskin glue onto the cotton duck canvas, further loads would slop down, warm and pungent, on his head and shoulders. Mark Rothko teetered on a ladder above, heavy as a bear and notoriously cackhanded, rushing his handiwork so that the two of them could cover the entire stretch of fabric before the size cooled. Moving on to another canvas almost nine feet high, the workers might swap places, with Rice getting to rain down on Rothko. The residues that ran off them as they showered afterwards would have been tinted maroon: as a personal variant on standard procedure, Rothko liked to feed pigments into the pan on the hot plate, as his sheets of glue dissolved. That way, the stretched canvas would have a character – a complexion, at least – from the very outset, even before the two of them applied similarly coloured resinous primers to support the upper layers of brushwork. A complexion, a disposition, a bias; this object that Rice had hammered together for him, out of wood and coarse cloth bought at an awnings supplier on the Bowery, would bristle with an inbuilt material resistance.
more from the TLS here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
3 Quarks Daily is looking for 3 New Columnists
Dear Reader,
Here's your chance to say what you want to the international audience of highly educated readers that 3QD has! Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back, or even completely quit, their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments, and so we are looking for three new voices for our Monday columns. We cannot pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.
You would have a column published at 3QD every fourth Monday. It should generally be between 1000 and 2500 words and can be about any subject at all. To qualify for a Monday slot, please submit a sample column to me by email (s.abbas.raza at att.net) as an MS Word-compatible document, which I will then circulate to the other editors, and we will let you know our decision fairly quickly after we have a vote on it a fews days after November 15th. If you are given a slot on the 3QD schedule, your sample can also serve as your first column. Feel free to use pictures, graphs, or other illustrations in your column. Naturally, you retain full copyright over your writing.
To browse previous columns, go to our Mondays page.
Several of the people who started writing at 3QD have gone on to get regular paid gigs at well-known magazines. Even those who have not, have written to me saying that it has been a uniquely rewarding experience. If you have a blog or website of your own, please help us to spread this invitation by linking to this post. (This means you, Sean, Jennifer, Lindsay, Norm, Andrew, etc.)
The deadline for sample submissions is November 15, 2008, so start writing!
All best,
Abbas
Posted by Abbas Raza at 08:04 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)
Writers' rooms: Elizabeth Jane Howard
From The Gaurdian:
I moved into this room 20 years ago and spent the first five years fighting desks that weren't right in some way. Eventually I had this one made - right size, filing cabinets and drawers in the right place - and it's made such a difference. I write on an Apple Mac, but still can't help thinking of technology as something of an enemy. I'm much fonder of things like the meat skewer paper knife given to me by my old and beloved agent AD Peters. He sent them to all his clients, but I'm probably one of the last to still use it.
My chair is one of the ugliest I've ever seen. But it is comfortable and moves around. I've long looked for a graceful chair that was any use and did once try one of those Swedish designs where you half kneel. But all that happened was my knees got exhausted and I couldn't stop thinking "I am in this extraordinary chair" when I should have been concentrating on writing.
I work from about 10 in the morning to 1.30. I used to have another stint in the late afternoon, but I'm now 85 and one session a day seems enough.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:39 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Jacking into the Brain--Is the Brain the Ultimate Computer Interface?
From Scientific American:
The cyberpunk science fiction that emerged in the 1980s routinely paraded “neural implants” for hooking a computing device directly to the brain: “I had hundreds of megabytes stashed in my head,” proclaimed the protagonist of “Johnny Mnemonic,” a William Gibson story that later became a wholly forgettable movie starring Keanu Reeves. The genius of the then emergent genre (back in the days when a megabyte could still wow) was its juxtaposition of low-life retro culture with technology that seemed only barely beyond the capabilities of the deftest biomedical engineer. Although the implants could not have been replicated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology, the best cyberpunk authors gave the impression that these inventions might yet materialize one day, perhaps even in the reader’s
own lifetime. In the past 10 years, however, more realistic approximations of technologies originally evoked in the cyberpunk literature have made their appearance. A person with electrodes implanted inside his brain has used neural signals alone to control a prosthetic arm, a prelude to allowing a human to bypass limbs immobilized by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or stroke. Researchers are also investigating how to send electrical messages in the other direction as well, providing feedback that enables a primate to actually sense what a robotic arm is touching. But how far can we go in fashioning replacement parts for the brain and the rest of the nervous system? Besides controlling a computer cursor or robot arm, will the technology somehow actually enable the brain’s roughly 100 billion neurons to function as a clandestine repository for pilfered industrial espionage data or another plot element borrowed from Gibson?
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Thursday Poem
///
After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics
W.H. Auden
If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and-so's,
Futility and grime,
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do,
Or the atoms in our brains.
Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
About a universe
Wherein a lover's kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one's neck.
Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel
For, year after year, it repels
An ageing suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.
Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths - but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?
This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for,
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.
It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude's extremes
Really become a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing Nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.
///
Posted by Jim Culleny at 01:02 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
October 22, 2008
How a disastrous marriage drove Emily Post to etiquette
Laura Shapiro in Slate:
Nearly half a century after her death, we finally get to meet the woman who invented American good manners. Or tried to. Nowadays people who suspect their public behavior is making them look boorish don't shudder with embarrassment—they gleefully display the evidence on YouTube. But we weren't always like this, as Laura Claridge's Emily Post makes clear. Straight through the Jazz Age, the Depression, World War II, and the early '50s, Emily Post handed down rules of social behavior guaranteed to be authentic insignia of the upper class, and the nation kept begging for more. People loved her gracious air of certitude, whether she was advising on the proper wedding outfit for a second marriage (gray, with a small, matching hat) or how to manage telephone use when six neighbors had to share the same line. ("The rule of courtesy when you find the wire in use, is to hang up for three minutes before signaling. If there is an emergency, you of course say 'Emergency!' in a loud voice, and then 'Our barn is on fire.' ") Like Freud and Betty Crocker, the name "Emily Post" became shorthand for authority itself.
But her charmed perspective on what she called "best society" disintegrated soon after she died in 1960 and not just because the all-gray wedding pretty much fell from favor.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Ukraine After the Orange Revolution
Alexander J. Motyl in Harvard International Review:
Ukraine is supremely fortunate that the Orange revolutionaries did not attempt to introduce fundamental, comprehensive, and rapid change. Had they tried, they would have failed, and Ukraine’s population—saddled with broken institutions and violence-prone elites—would have been far worse off today than it is and would have had far fewer prospects for meaningful reform than it now has. Historical record shows that revolution as a “great leap forward” results in countries falling flat on their face, as China witnessed in the early 1960s. The shock therapy endorsed by Western economists at the Cold War’s close appeared to work in Poland only because Poland had already undergone evolutionary change since 1956. When applied to Russia by Boris Yeltsin’s weak democratic regime, shock therapy failed and instead helped create a super-presidential regime that ultimately made Putin’s return to authoritarianism possible.
There are four reasons that revolutions as massive transformations fail. First, changing a country fundamentally, comprehensively, and rapidly requires enormous financial, coercive, and bureaucratic resources that revolutionaries, as outsiders, usually lack. The only revolutionary transformations that may have come close to achieving their goals have been imposed from above by brutal dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin or by occupying armies ruling over prostrate countries, such as post-World War II Germany or Japan.
Second, massive change always generates massive opposition that requires equally massive applications of force and violence to overcome. Democrats and reformers generally prefer to avoid such violence. However irresistible the temptation, democrats would be well advised to eschew revolutionary rhetoric because they always make bad revolutionaries who cannot deliver. On the other hand, populations should be wary of authoritarians promoting revolution, precisely because they make good revolutionaries and can deliver.
Third, projects of massive change require calculating the consequences of thousands of interrelated minor changes—a task beyond the intellectual or political abilities of any leadership.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Why Krugman Won The Nobel
The very brilliant Avinash Dixit (© voxEU.org)in Vox:
The traditional theory of international trade was cast in the traditional framework of microeconomic theory, namely perfect competition. Differences among countries in their endowments of factors of production and in their technologies explained trade. A relatively labour-abundant country would have a comparative advantage in producing goods that required relatively more labour in their production, and would export these goods so long as the country did not have an even greater bias toward consuming exactly the same goods. The outcome, as so often with perfectly competitive markets, was efficient resource allocation; each nation stood to gain from trade.
By the early 1970s, this picture was increasingly thought to be anachronistic. Trade in perfectly competitive markets, where thousands of producers of cloth in England and wine in Portugal traded their goods, seemed a poor model of trade with two or three giant firms making aircraft or computers. Voices for protectionism are always looking for arguments they can voice; they could now claim that traditional theorems on gains from trade did not apply to this modern reality. A new theory for this new world was needed.
Krugman was the undisputed leader of the group that took on this task. To quote and paraphrase Stephen Jay Gould (The Flamingo’s Smile, pp. 335, 345), Krugman has won his just reputation because he grasped the full implication of the ideas that predecessors had expressed with little appreciation of their revolutionary power. He had the vision to make the idea work in two ways, using it to make new discoveries and by recognising its implications as a far-reaching instrument for transforming general attitudes.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)
There's Nothing the Matter with Kansas
Andrew Gelman in The Wichita Eagle:
[T]hough, Kansas has consistently voted Republican for more than 70 years, and a look at exit poll data shows that the richer you are in the state, the more likely you are to vote Republican. In 2004, George Bush received half the vote of low-income Kansans, but more than 80 percent of the vote of those in the state whose incomes were higher than $100,000.
And Kansas is far from unique. Over the past decades, rich voters have remained consistently more Republican than voters on the lower end of the income scale. At the national level, if poor people were a state, they would be "bluer" even than Massachusetts; if rich people were a state, they would be about as "red" as Alabama, Kansas, the Dakotas or Texas. Further data comes from the political contributions of top executives and the richest Americans, who favored Bush over John Kerry 3-to-1 in 2004.
The myth of rich Democrats and poor Republicans is sustained in part by the electoral map, which shows -- for real -- that Democrats are now winning in the rich states such as Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut. But winning rich states is not the same as winning rich voters.
We've been hearing for a while about the cultural divide between Wal-Mart Republicans and Starbucks Democrats. A more accurate description of voters distinguishes more subtly between rich and poor. Among upper-middle-class and rich voters, rich states go Democratic while poor states go Republican. But among lower-income voters, rich and poor states do not vote differently. The differences between "red states" and "blue states" are real, but these differences occur among rich voters, not poor voters.
What is going on? Why is it the rich, not the poor, who seem to be voting based on cultural factors?
Posted by Robin Varghese at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Lannan Readings & Conversations: Isabel Allende
With Michael Silverblatt:
Isabel Allende was born in Peru and raised in Chile. Her acclaimed first novel, The House of Spirits, was called "Nothing short of astonishing," by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of eight novels, most recently Inés of My Soul, mapping the early years of the conquest of the Americas through the experiences of Inés Suárez, a seamstress condemned to a life of toil, who flees Spain to seek adventure in the New World. Allende has also written a collection of stories, four memoirs, and a trilogy of children's novels. Her most recent memoir, The Sum of Our Days, recalls the last 13 years of family life in the wake of her daughter's tragic death. Allende uses feminist terms to describe her history of the California Gold Rush. Her writing has always been a stand against patriarchy, her characters the people marginalized by American history: women, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 06:33 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Wednesday Poem
///
"The laws of the universe regarding love are as useless as
string theory in tying up loose ends, Dude."
...............................................--Roshi B.
The Mathematician in Love
William John Macquorn Rankine
I.
A mathematician fell madly in love
With a lady, young, handsome, and charming:
By angles and ratios harmonic he strove
Her curves and proportions all faultless to prove.
As he scrawled hieroglyphics alarming.
II.
He measured with care, from the ends of a base,
The arcs which her features subtended:
Then he framed transcendental equations, to trace
The flowing outlines of her figure and face,
And thought the result very splendid.
III.
He studied (since music has charms for the fair)
The theory of fiddles and whistles, --
Then composed, by acoustic equations, an air,
Which, when 'twas performed, made the lady's long hair
Stand on end, like a porcupine's bristles.
IV.
The lady loved dancing: -- he therefore applied,
To the polka and waltz, an equation;
But when to rotate on his axis he tried,
His centre of gravity swayed to one side,
And he fell, by the earth's gravitation.
V.
No doubts of the fate of his suit made him pause,
For he proved, to his own satisfaction,
That the fair one returned his affection; -- "because,
"As everyone knows, by mechanical laws,
"Re-action is equal to action."
VI.
"Let x denote beauty, -- y, manners well-bred, --
"z, Fortune, -- (this last is essential), --
"Let L stand for love" -- our philosopher said, --
"Then L is a function of x, y, and z,
"Of the kind which is known as potential."
VII.
"Now integrate L with respect to d t,
"(t Standing for time and persuasion);
"Then, between proper limits, 'tis easy to see,
"The definite integral Marriage must be: --
"(A very concise demonstration)."
VIII.
Said he -- "If the wandering course of the moon
"By Algebra can be predicted,
"The female affections must yield to it soon" --
-- But the lady ran off with a dashing dragoon,
And left him amazed and afflicted.
Posted by Jim Culleny at 02:15 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
table matters
Excellent new food and drink magazine. (full disclosure: it was started by my editor at the Smart Set, Jason Wilson and features the writing of my brilliant and lovely and desperately-tragically-wrong-about-way-the-books-should-be-arranged-in-the-apartment wife Stefany Anne Golberg).
The syphilitic dipsomaniac poet Paul Verlaine wrote a most wonderful description of decadence:
I love this word decadence, all shimmering in purple and gold. It suggests the subtle thoughts of ultimate civilization, a high literary culture, a soul capable of intense pleasures. It throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones. It is redolent of the rouge of courtesans, the games of the circus, the panting of the gladiators, the spring of wild beasts, the consuming in flames of races exhausted by their capacity for sensation, as the tramp of an invading army sounds.Don't we all want our food to be like bursts of fire and panting gladiators? Proponents of meat-eating often hold decadence up as their banner. They imply that no one who really loved food, who loved life, would decline meat. This puts vegetarians on the defensive. Their bulwark is the claim that meat-eaters are selfish, or that vegetarian food needn't be (maybe even shouldn't be) decadent because it is morally superior. But just on the horizon is a vegetarianism all shimmering in purple and gold.
more from Shuffy's Veg-O-Matic column here.
more from Table Matters here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)
lost Stanisław Lem work discovered
An uncompromising NKVD man named Utterly Inadvisabiladze, a brave Soviet spy Dementiy Dogsonov, who's lost his eye trying to spy on the imperialists through the keyhole, an ideological communist Avdotia Niedoganina, brilliant academician Michurenko (student of Lysurin), and above all Stalin - as always superhumanly intelligent and inhumanly smiling. These are the main characters of a satirical piece by Stanisław Lem, which the author himself for half a century thought missing.Lem, who gained worldwide recognition for his SF novels, wrote it in the late 1940s, at the height of Stalinism, when people were being imprisoned or even executed for far lesser trespasses. Twenty years later, in the 1960s, writer Janusz Szpotański received a very special literary prize for his unpublished musical satire The Silent and the Honkers - three years in prison.
more from Gazeta Wyborcza here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
death
The philosopher Bernard Williams once wrote a paper, “The Makropulos Case,” in which he argued that eternal life would be so tedious that no one could bear it. According to Williams, the constancy that defines an eternal self would entail an infinite desert of repetitive experiences, lest the self be so altered as to be emptied of any definition. That is why, in the play by Karel Capek from which Williams takes his title, the three-hundred-and-forty-two-year-old Elina Makropulos, having imbibed the elixir of eternal life since the age of forty-two, chooses to discontinue the regimen, and dies. Life needs death to constitute its meaning; death is the black period that orders the syntax of life.In “Death with Interruptions” (translated, from the Portuguese, by Margaret Jull Costa; Harcourt; $24), José Saramago, a writer whose long, uninterrupted sentences are relative strangers to the period, has produced a novel that functions as a thought experiment in the Capek/Williams field. (His novel makes no explicit allusion to either.) At midnight on one New Year’s Eve, in a nameless, landlocked country of about ten million inhabitants, Death declares a truce with humanity, a self-interruption, so as to give people an idea of what it would be like to live forever.
more from The New Yorker here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (4)
Quote Interesting
From The Telegraph:
They say that Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the last person to have read everything. By the time he died there were too many books, they suggest, for any single brain to engage with. "They", as usual, are wrong. There were already millions of books in Europe by the year 1500, just half a century after the first printed page flew from the first press. To read a million books in a lifetime you would have to read 40 a day for 70 years. I couldn't even smoke half that many cigarettes for half as long before giving up and it takes a lot longer to read a book than to smoke a cigarette, let me tell you.
Philosophers, wits, novelists, cooks, poets, essayists, herbalists, mathematicians, builders, poets and divines had poured out more thoughts in that first 50 years than had been committed to paper or vellum in the previous thousand. And the rate only continued to increase as it approached this century's dizzyingly insane levels of oversupply. With so much flowing from so many different human brains, who can be bothered to read it? Not I, sir and madam, not I. It's all I can do to peruse the side of a packet of breakfast cereal without distraction from radio, television or phone. I have no doubt you are in the same case. You would dearly like to suck intellectual and metaphysical juice from the fruity flesh of the world's best thinkers and writers but the treetops are all out of reach and it would be too much of a fag to go and fetch a ladder. If only someone would pick, pulp and squeeze that fruit for you.
Your wish has been answered. There has never been a collection like Advanced Banter. Look in vain for the obvious, the banal and the platitudinous. On every page you will marvel at "what oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed".
A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend. A successful woman is one who can find such a man.
LANA TURNERBiologically speaking, if something bites you, it's more likely to be female.
DESMOND MORRISA woman is like a tea bag. It's only when she's in hot water that you realise how strong she is.
NANCY REAGAN Although sometimes also attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.A man can sleep around, but if a woman makes 19 or 20 mistakes she's a tramp.
JOAN RIVERS
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 05:29 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
October 21, 2008
et tu kundera?
Mr Kundera, a recluse for decades, insists that he had no involvement in the affair and is baffled by the document. Communist-era records are not wholly trustworthy. But a statement from the Czech archives says it is not a fake; the incident (if it happened) could help explain why Mr Kundera, then in trouble with the authorities, was allowed to stay at university even though he had been expelled from the Communist Party.True or not, the story echoes themes of guilt, betrayal and self-interest found in Mr Kundera’s own work, such as “unbearable lightness” (dodged but burdensome responsibility). In “The Owner of the Keys”, a play published in 1962, the hero kills a witness who sees him sheltering a former lover from the Gestapo.
As Mr Kundera himself has written so eloquently, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Under totalitarianism, fairy tales good and bad often trumped truth. Some heroes of the Prague Spring in 1968 had been enthusiastic backers of the Stalinist regime’s murderous purges after the communist putsch of 1948.
more from The Economist here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:58 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
appiah likes philosophy
more from Big Think here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:48 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
art jerk
Martin Kippenberger seems to have been a bit of an asshole. I’m not making a judgment, just an observation. Some of my best friends are assholes. I never actually met Kippenberger during his fabled L.A. sojourns in the early ’90s, but, given his epic drinking and insatiable anti-authoritarianism, we probably wouldn’t have found much to argue about. And Kippenberger’s assholism is no secret — in fact, it was central to his oeuvre, as well as being the reason his work hasn’t received as much attention as it merits. When you do stuff like buy a gray monochrome painting by one of your former art heroes, screw legs into its stretcher bars and display it as a coffee table — as Kippenberger did with a Gerhard Richter in 1987’s Modell Interconti — feelings are going to get hurt.
more from the LA Weekly here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Tuesday Poem
///
Alexandria, 641 A.D.
Jorge Luis Borges
Since the first Adam who beheld the night
And the day and the shape of his own hand,
Men have made up stories and have fixed
In stone, in metal, or on parchment
Whatever the world includes or dreams create.
Here is the fruit of their labor: the Library.
They say the wealth of volumes it contains
Outnumbers the stars or the grains
Of sand in the desert. The man
Who tried to read them all would lose
His mind and the use of his reckless eyes.
Here the great memory of the centuries
That were, the swords and the heroes,
The concise symbols of algebra,
The knowledge that fathoms the planets
Which govern destiny, the powers
Of herbs and talismanic carvings,
The verse in which love's caress endures,
The science that deciphers the solitary
Labyrinth of God, theology,
Alchemy which seeks to turn clay into gold
And all the symbols of idolatry.
The faithless say that if it were to burn,
History would burn with it. They are wrong.
Unceasing human work gave birth to this
Infinity of books. If of them all
Not even one remained, man would again
Beget each page and every line,
Each work and every love of Hercules,
And every teaching of every manuscript.
In the first century of the Muslim era,
I, that Omar who subdued the Persians
and who imposes Islam on the Earth,
Order my soldiers to destroy
By fire the abundant Library,
Which will not perish. All praise is due
To God who never sleeps and to Muhammad,
His Apostle.
Translated by Stephen Kessler
///
Posted by Jim Culleny at 08:01 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (6)
Art and Commerce Canoodling in Central Park
From The New York Times:
The wild, delirious ride that architecture has been on for the last decade looks as if it’s finally coming to an end. And after a visit to the Chanel Pavilion that opened Monday in Central Park, you may think it hasn’t come soon enough. Designed to display artworks that were inspired by Chanel’s 2.55, a quilted chain-strap handbag, the pavilion certainly oozes glamour. Its mysterious nautiluslike form, which can be easily dismantled and shipped to the next city on its global tour, reflects the keen architectural intelligence we have come to expect from its creator, Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born architect who lives in London.
Yet if devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional. It’s not just that New York and much of the rest of the world are preoccupied by economic turmoil and a recession, although the timing could hardly be worse. It’s that the pavilion sets out to drape an aura of refinement over a cynical marketing gimmick. Surveying its self-important exhibits, you can’t help but hope that the era of exploiting the so-called intersection of architecture, art and fashion is finally over.
The pavilion, made of hundreds of molded fiberglass panels mounted on a skeletal steel frame, was first shown in Hong Kong in February. From there it was packed up in 55 sea containers and shipped to Tokyo, closing there in July and heading to New York, where it will be on view through Nov. 9. Chanel is paying a $400,000 fee to rent space in the park and has made a gift of an undisclosed amount to the Central Park Conservancy as part of the deal.
More here. (Note: This is for my nephew Jaffer).
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:08 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Not coming to terms with the past
From The Guardian:
Katie Price, eat your heart out. The real celebrity of last week's Frankfurt Book fair was the Nobel laureate, Günter Grass. He was doing the rounds last week to talk about his new book, Die Box, another voyage into autobiography following 2006's Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion). And the 81-year-old author (October 16 was his birthday) was swamped, buried in the attention. Photographers swarmed, fans were tearful to have met him, his publishers, gathered from around the world, were starstruck. Cosily dressed in a brown corduroy suit, nattily matched with a brown jumper, Grass took it all in his stride, happy to fit in a 10-minute chat if he could do it while puffing on his pipe. We headed outside so he could smoke; by the time we made it out of the hall, I had been elbowed and shoved aside by the human train which followed him all over the fair. He chuckled and found a space in which to conduct the interview, done under the eyes of a circle of fans, a couple of ready-to-pounce photographers and his publicist, who helped out when he couldn't quite express what he was trying to say in his extremely impressive English.
He was good-natured about the attention, but relieved it was almost over. "I only come when I have a reason, and I'm only here for two days, which is enough." His reason was the recent publication of Die Box, out in August in Germany but not due in English until at least the end of next year. In it Grass takes up the story of his life from where he left it at the end of Peeling the Onion, beginning with the publication of The Tin Drum at the age of 31, which catapulted him to the forefront of European fiction.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
There's a sewage crisis, so hold your nose and think hard
Johann Hari in Slate:
Every day, you handle the deadliest substance on earth. It is a weapon of mass destruction festering beneath your fingernails. In the past 10 years, it has killed more people than all the wars since Adolf Hitler rolled into one; in the next four hours, it will kill the equivalent of two jumbo jets full of kids. It is not anthrax or plutonium or uranium. Its name is shit—and we are in the middle of a shit storm. In the West, our ways of discreetly whisking this weapon away are in danger of breaking down, and one-quarter of humanity hasn't ever used a functioning toilet yet.
The story of civilization has been the story of separating you from your waste. British investigative journalist Rose George's stunning—and nauseating—new book opens by explaining that a single gram of feces can contain "ten million viruses, one million bacteria, one thousand parasite cysts, and one hundred worm eggs." Accidentally ingesting this cocktail causes 80 percent of all the sickness on earth.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:43 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Chomsky says pick the lesser of two evils
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:43 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies
Michael M. Hughes in AlterNet:
The space resembles a clean, warm, but decidedly offbeat living room. The lighting is spare and soft, emanating from two lamps. A bookshelf holds a variety of picture books and well-known spiritual and psychological classics like Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Above the books sits a wooden sculpture of Psilocybe mushrooms. Behind the couch are a Mesoamerican mushroom stone replica and a statue of a serene, seated Buddha. An eye-popping abstract expressionist painting hangs on the wall, an explosion of color and intersecting lines.
This isn't a metaphysical retreat center in San Francisco, or the Manhattan office of a New Age therapist-cum-shaman. Lundahl's first psychedelic experience is taking place in the heart of the Behavioral Biology Research Center building at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus in Southeast Baltimore, in a room affectionately referred to by both the scientists and the volunteers as the "psilocybin room." She's taking part in the first study of its kind since the early '70s -- a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonized and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:41 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Call Centers Are Fodder For India's Pop Culture
Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post:
In a training session at a suburban call center, groups of fresh-faced Indian recruits jettison their Indian names and thick accents and practice speaking English just like the Americans do. They have hesitant conversations with imaginary American customers who complain angrily about their broken appliance or computer glitch.
The instructor writes "35 = 10" on the board, as though he is gifting the recruits with a magic mantra.
"A 35-year-old American's brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian's," he explains, and urges the agents to be patient with the callers.
That is a scene from "Hello," the first Bollywood movie about the distorted and dual lives of India's 2 million call-center workers. When it debuted this month, many in the audience cheered and laughed at such scenes, which pandered to the reigning stereotypes about those on both ends of the transcontinental, toll-free helpline -- the dumb American customer and the smart, but fake, Indian call-center agent.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 04:36 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (6)
October 20, 2008
Running on Empty: The Consequences of America’s Insolvency
Michael Blim
Don’t let the good news fool you: the United States is bankrupt. We will be spending the next 25 years in a rolling Chapter 11. It will be painful.
Because we are currently the center of the world economy, and our currency is king, we can continue to indebt ourselves by borrowing money from the world, or simply by printing it. Because the dollar is the world’s trade and reserve currency, our neighbors accept it more readily than they would the currency of other bankrupts nations. But debts and money are promises to pay, and short of bombing our creditors into the Stone Age, they will be paid sooner or later.
Before discussing the possible consequences entailed in getting ourselves out of the immediate economic crisis, let’s look at some facts. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (October 15, 2008) reports that financial losses beginning with the sub-prime mortgage debacle are estimated currently by the International Monetary Fund at $1.4 trillion dollars, an amount equivalent to 10% of US gross domestic product. Since Europeans participated in the massive debt pyramiding of the world economy originated by American and British banking houses, the direct hit for the United States thus far equals less than the full 10% loss, though more of the loss surely falls on us than the Europeans.
The United States according to the Treasury Department currently carries another $13.7 trillion dollars in debt, $10 trillion of which is government debt, held in the main by foreign governments, their firms and banks, and by our wealthiest classes via trusts, hedge funds, other investment vehicles. The current collapse is something of a climax as well as acceleration of the larger debt crisis that has been festering for almost two generations. Since the end of the Second World War, the world economy has needed dollars for trade and development, and finally for its enormous economic expansion. With the rise of China in the eighties, the demand for dollars soared, and the Federal Reserve, Treasury and US banks and investment firms obliged by creating the loans, bonds, and finally in the case of the Treasury the species necessary for growth.
Under the terms of the great shell game that is capitalism, as long as the world economy grew, and as long as the United States could lead or at least keep up, political and corporate leaders were free to imagine that the debts of today would be paid by growth tomorrow.
One problem, however, remained: with the world awash in dollars, and their number reaching fantastic proportions with the issuance of new debt and the creation of new debt instruments of the sort discussed by the media these past months, their value began to slip. Those dollar promises became more expensive to pay off, and the promise holders were receiving less in recompense.
Then, as by now everyone knows, people holding sub-prime mortgages began to default on their payments, and panic among bondholders holding securities based on the mortgages ensued, driving down the value of the bonds themselves. Housing prices, having been driven up by a flood of speculative investments, once again dollar-making investments on borrowed money, began to decline. The massive indebtedness of America, governments, citizens, banks, and firms, was exposed, and the panic spread more widely. Like the child’s game of musical chairs, each creditor now is desperately trying to avoid being left standing without a chair.
As the financial storm has hit, the American “debt dam” proved itself to be a New Orleans levee. Debts have poured over and out of it at all points. The balance sheets of US banks, firms, governments and citizens are inundated with debt. Frantic patching is occurring, though the damage caused – especially if the storm brings an economic cold front of recession and unemployment behind it will be massive.
What of the promises the debt and all of those dollars represent? The world, our massive creditor, will doubtless work hard to make us pay. Dollar devaluation and/or high inflation may cheat them of their total sum. But devaluation and/or high inflation will rob us of some significant portion of our standard of living.
And the greater degree to which the crisis, the adjustments, devaluation and/or inflation undermine the American economy, the more likely that we like other great debtor nations will be forced to sell off big chunks of our economic assets to pay off those trillions of dollars of promises.
This is what Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the biggest economy in the world could look like.
Posted by Michael Blim at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)
Perceptions
Pedro Meyer. Plantation El Centro. California. 1987-1995.
More on this master Mexican photographer here, here, and here.
The T2F gallery in Karachi has an upcoming show of Pedro Meyer's Heresies Project.
Posted by Sughra Raza at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Recent Comments
CriticalMassI on We need slaves to build monuments
Elatia Harris on We need slaves to build monuments
Steven Augustine on We need slaves to build monuments
Baby on Saturday Poem
Wade Nichols on Police fear riots if Barack Obama loses US election
Wade Nichols on so far, the 21st century sucks
Jared on reality and its other among conservative pundits
PeteChapman on reality and its other among conservative pundits
Elatia Harris on We need slaves to build monuments
reader on Five Fallacies of Grief: Debunking Psychological Stages
Steven Augustine on We need slaves to build monuments
j on Wednesday Poem
blah on Police fear riots if Barack Obama loses US election
Dave Ranning on so far, the 21st century sucks
Jared on so far, the 21st century sucks
reader on Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?
Abbas Raza on TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
hnd on Police fear riots if Barack Obama loses US election
Evan on reality and its other among conservative pundits
Wade Nichols on so far, the 21st century sucks
Kirk Petersen on reality and its other among conservative pundits
ollie on Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?
Wade Nichols on Police fear riots if Barack Obama loses US election
nzuckerman on Police fear riots if Barack Obama loses US election
nzuckerman on Police fear riots if Barack Obama loses US election