3quarksdaily

Cirque de Calder

Alexander Calder. Circus. 1926-31.

Watch video here. And on YouTube here.

More about the famous Calder Circus, currently on display at the Whitney Museum, New York, here.

Selected Minor Works: Imaginary Tribes #3

The Lomi-Ek

Justin E. H. Smith

To the great benefit of scholarship, an electronic version has finally been made available of Sir Thomas Fudge's 1594 translation of the 15th-century Venetian explorer Girolamo Policarpo's travel report on his detour north of the Silk Road.  Having gone looking for the lost Christian kingdom of Prester John, he wound up instead in the court of the great khan.  Here is a sample of Policarpo's communication to his sponsors back in Venice, as transcribed for me by my assistant, Tanya Vainshtain (who, like so many Eastern European scholars, had resourcefully obtained a username and password for the "STaNS" digital archive at the University of Arizona long before I myself could get around to it, hell, long before I'd even heard of it):

You may take it as fact that there never was a Khan as mighty as the Khan of whom I am about to speak.

Yea, here is how this is so. He wears a necklace of an hundred pearls, pulled from oysters by divers in narrow straits, and he prays on them to his hundred gods.  For he is an idolater.

And his gods have blessed his land, which is called Fu, with mulberry trees that host the eag'rest mealy worms, spinning out the stuff for manufacture of the finest silks in fabricks big as mountains.

And you should know that there are other plants and stones, too, which give spices and salves you assuredly know not, as spodium, yea, and tutty.    

And you may be sure that there is pasturage aplenty for the grazing and chewing of hooved beasts, which in that land produce a musk so strong that, you should know, a Christian could scarce endure it.

You should also know that when the great Khan dies, an hundred of his slaves will be killed, and an hundred of their horses. And they will all be propped up on spikes piercing from arse to mouth 'round a great dining table on which will be served sundry game, as boar, stag, lynx, and coney.

And they will feast for seven days, or until a maggot drops from the great Khan's nostril, whereupon it will be said, you should know, that he be no longer Khan, and was not so mighty withal.

There are several references in the treatise to an inferior people living within the khanate of Fu.  Though their identity remains unclear, many scholars believe them to be the ancestors of today's Lomi-Ek, a group of about 80,000 people speaking a language isolate, with their own autonomous oblast' just to the Northeast of Vuta.  (Wikipedia wrongly identifies them as belonging to the Aral-Ultaic language family.  God knows I'm not going to be the one to make the correction. If I chimed in for every error I found, I would have to quit my job for lack of time.)

Policarpo writes of the Lomi-Ek (in Fudge's rendering): "There never was a people as brutish as the people the Khan takes to him as slaves.  You should know that these people, which are called the Loomey-Ecke ['i Luomecchi', in Policarpo's original], love their horses far more than men should love their horses." Some scholars believe that, whatever the factual basis of Policarpo's report of a mass feast of the dead following the khan's demise, it is highly likely that the Lomi-Ek were regularly sacrificed along with their horses.  Human and equine skeletal remains have been found together in mass graves, some with men buried in full riding regalia and in a mounted position upon their loyal steeds.

"Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran," Tanya was now telling me in her cramped apartment back on Prospekt Vernadskogo after our largely unsuccessful jaunt out East, and after a few shotglasses of Moskovskaya chased by pickled cucumbers and pickled herring, scooped out of recycled jars and shoved down our throats to dull, by way of contrast, the alcohol's jolt, "was once asked why rock stars marry supermodels.  For the same reason, he is reported to have replied, that dogs lick their own balls: because they can."

I didn't know why Tanya was talking about this rock star I'd never heard of, but she seemed intent on going somewhere with it.  I'd been planning to stay in Moscow for just one night as a guest in Tanya's home before continuing back to Indiana. Tanya seemed to have been looking forward to bringing me home with her, and seized upon this opportunity to share her Russian pain.  Vodka, pickled herring, Vladimir Vysotsky barking from the cassette player about Taganka, Magadan, the 1980 Olympics, God knows what.  I knew the routine.  There's no telling how this night will end up, I thought to myself.  We're about the same age. My wife's dead and buried in Davenport, Iowa. We're both compulsive documenters, Tanya and I.  We're both, though in very different ways and for very different reasons, obsessed with her father, and we're both perpetually driven to the verge of emotional collapse by the sense that everything that matters is receding, irretrievably, into the past.

"Just how self-contained can a creature be?" Tanya went on, apparently prolonging the autofellating-dogs routine.  But then she switched tracks as abruptly as she'd started.  "In the Vedic tradition of India," she announced, refilling our shot glasses, "the horse was the victim of a ritual sacrifice that was believed to keep the universe ticking along smoothly.  The horse was itself an embodiment of the cosmos.  It's in the Upanishads.  The Brhadaranyaka, I think.  I'll show you."

Tanya slid a book out from under the couch.  It looked like Hare Krishna material, of which there was by now plenty in the streets of Moscow.  She began to read, translating haltingly, whether from the Sanskrit or from the Russian I don't know: "Dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse. The sun is the eye of the sacrificial horse," and so on, down through the horse's breath, its mouth, its back and belly, its flanks, its ribs, its nostrils.  I lost focus at some point, but tuned back in for the conclusion after nearly every part of the poor creature had been listed and correlated with some feature of the cosmic or terrestrial landscape. "The food in his stomach is the sands," she went on, "the rivers are his bowels, liver and lungs; the mountains, plants and trees are his hairs; when he yawns, it lightens, when he shakes himself, it thunders; when he urinates, it rains; speech is his voice."

"Now the horse is an Asian creature, you know," Tanya was lecturing me, for some unapparent reason, "though those of you who grew up on cowboy-and-Indian movies, and probably even the cowboys and Indians themselves, no doubt think it emerged from a distinctly Western-Hemispheric evolutionary line.  You once had rhinoceroses, and camels, and elephants, and glyptodonts of your own, after all, why couldn't just one creature of equal stature and import have managed to hang on?

"The word for 'horse' in the various Turkic languages extending from Istanbul to western China," Tanya continued, "is 'at', very nearly the most basic and primitive sound a human voice can make.  Vowel, consonant, finish.  And the horse is itself something too basic and primitive from Anatolia to Outer Mongolia to command denotation by any sounds that take as long, or require as complicated an acrobatics of the tongue and teeth and lips, as cheval, or loshad', or Pferd, or even horse.   At: a mere preposition in the language we are speaking now, so basic as to barely even count as a word.

"Now the Lomi-Ek, who as you know speak a language isolate, but who borrowed their word for 'horse' from their Turkic neighbors, have contracted it even further.  For them it is simply 'a'.  In some dialects it is shorter still: just a glottal stop, if you can believe that, without anything before or after it.  For the brief period of contact in the 16th century with the Saffavid dynasty to the southwest, during which Lomi-Ek was written in the Arabic script, 'horse' was spelled with a solitary ayn.  Now this curious spelling would of course never be permitted in Arabic itself, and even the distant Uighurs wouldn't put the script of Mohammed to such odd uses.  But that's the thing about alphabets: no one owns them, least of all God.  Anyway, if we were to transliterate poetry from this period and from the dialect I just mentioned, 'horse' would thus be represented by a mere apostrophe: '.  It barely leaves a trace on paper, yet for the Lomi-Ek it is everywhere."

Tanya was right.  The horse was an important part of Asian life.  The 19th-century Lomi-Ek poet Baraqat Maqöb --briefly canonized in volumes of the literature of the Soviet peoples, only to be removed in the mid-1930s and forgotten until the 2003 publication by Duquesne University Press of an anthology of Great Nationalist Poets of North Asia, where he is hailed in Rosalind Needleman's introduction as a genre-transcending, playful modernist, remarkably anticipating the European avant garde from his distant colonial outpost-- captured in a short poem of 1893 the central place the horse occupied in his own traditional culture:

Lo but I've yet to praise the proud, tall horse ['], Lord of the steppe, who doth desirously snuffle up the Zephyr through volcanic nostrils.   

Desire for what? Why, for a mare! And as he leaps over crag and crevice toward her who's provoked him, he leaves behind a scattered trail of residue that our people call horse-madness.

And the peasant girls will come along, and collect the droplets, and mix them in bowls together with life-giving leaves only they know, and the leaves and the seed will feed the corn.

For our elders say the corn comes from the dead, but those older still say it comes from seed. 

And here we all know horse ['], and we all know corn.  And here all the other words derive from 'horse' ['] and 'corn'.  Here the talk is always 'horse ['] this', and 'corn that'.

Here, indeed, they will tell you that the world itself is a giant horse ['].

I asked Tanya what she thought of Maqöb, but by now she was busy shuffling through a pile of papers and notebooks on the coffee table.  I stretched out on the couch. After some minutes she produced a  yellowed Soviet report, of which I could just make out the year '1963' on the cover.  Something about collective farms in the Lomi-Ek oblast'.  Something about milk yields.  Why does she have this stuff just lying around?  Where are the Alice Munro novels and David Sedaris trifles Helen would have had instead?  Where is the New Yorker? Jesus I miss my wife. 

"What do you think I think?" was her unexpectedly angry response.  "By the 1930s," Tanya set in, "the horse was valued among the Lomi-Ek, of course, though not as a microcosm of the whole of nature.  It was valued for its output.  Thus we learn, and I'm quoting here, that 'the high milk yield of the Lomi-Ek horse is worthy of note. At the Karl Marx experimental farm of the Lomi-Ek Institute of Agriculture the mares produce 1200-1700 kg of marketable milk in a 6-month lactation.' But hold on," Tanya held forth, "this is my favorite part: 'The  Lomi-Ek horse is also worthy of note as a good meat producer; the carcass weight of 6-month-olds is 105 kg, reaching 165 kg by 2.5 years of age and 228 kg in adults..." Tanya stopped reading, I suppose, when she saw my eyes were closed.  My bare feet were in her lap at the other end of the couch.  We stayed like this for some time.

"Can you imagine what violence these horsemeat factories must have done to the Lomi-Ek way of life?" she finally asked.  I opened my eyes.  I didn't know how to answer. I was drunk.  "Everything dies," Tanya replied for me.  "Isn't it better to be sacrificed in the name of cosmic renewal than to have your carcass measured up for meat yield?"  Ty takaya krasivaya, I replied, my Russian finally deciding to come back at just the moment this dithering, eccentric old dame was magically transfigured by the vodka and the hour, and even, somehow, by her odd and interminable cri de coeur for the Lomi-Ek, into someone, if not desirable exactly, at least well-matched with me.  With my limited vocabulary, anyway, telling her she was 'beautiful' would have to do. 

Tanya's face flushed red. I stood up, kissed her forehead, and stumbled to the bathroom.  My head was pounding.  I could feel the herring rising back up towards my esophagus, ready to reappear.  I kicked the toilet seat up and stared into the mirror behind the toilet.  I was rotund, grey and bearded, with fat jowls with ruptured blood vessels.  The very caricature of the tenured fool. When I urinate, it rains, I mumbled to myself.  Speech is my voice.

**

Previous installments in the Imaginary Tribes series may be found here:

Imaginary Tribes #1: The Yuktun

Imaginary Tribes #2: The Yamkut

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith's writing, go to www.jehsmith.com.

Sandlines: Katrina recovery update

Welcome to New Orleans--it is nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina, and your federal tax dollars are asleep on the job. You won’t disturb the slumber of dumb money should you come to Mardi Gras or Jazz Fest, two essential sources of local revenue, where you will register few traces of Katrina's destructive power. Only by venturing beyond the warm embrace of the restored French Quarter, with its familiar old-world charms, can one experience the vast stretches of physical devastation and ruined lives that federal and state monies have yet to address.

Today the City Council and local government paint a prosperous, resilient image of New Orleans. It is, after all, cheaper to spin a hopeful message than to rebuild residential areas, schools, commercial centers and the levees to protect the city against future replays of the tragic storm. In the face of FEMA’s failure, and the less-documented, glacial slowness of the ‘Road Home’ program, the New Orleans power elite are cheerleading the city’s boot-strapped recovery efforts, while playing down remaining needs. This serves both to allure tourists frightened by the lawlessness of the Katrina aftermath and to minimize their own failures in leadership and management of the crisis response.

Hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans area early morning August 29, 2005. The storm surge breached the city's levees at multiple points, leaving 80 percent of the city submerged, tens of thousands of victims clinging to rooftops, and hundreds of thousands scattered to shelters around the country. Three weeks later, Hurricane Rita re-flooded much of the area.

The storm is estimated to have been responsible for $81.2 billion in damage, making it the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. At least 1,836 people lost their lives in Hurricane Katrina and in the subsequent floods, making it the deadliest U.S. hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane. Katrina redistributed New Orleans' population across the southern United States: Houston, Texas had an increase of 35,000 people; Mobile, Alabama gained over 24,000; Baton Rouge, Louisiana over 15,000; and Hammond, Louisiana received over 10,000, nearly doubling its size.

Recovery efforts across the Gulf region are almost wholly driven by volunteer relief and reconstruction agencies, some of them bootstrap operations that did not exist prior to the storm. Many are funded by private donations from churches and community non-profits across the country; others receive a mix of corporate one-time grants and government-stipended volunteer staffers for a few months at a time, who can serve the recovery effort to reduce their college tuition (Americorps and its affiliates: National Civilian Community Corps, Volunteers in Service to America). The most well-known volunteer agency working in the region is Habitat for Humanity, whose slow progress was the subject of a recent NY Times article.

As someone who works on disaster relief programs worldwide, I was invited to come for a month and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various projects in New Orleans and Biloxi, two centers of urban devastation. The experience thus far has been surprisingly positive and inspiring, an unexpected antidote to my entrenched cynicism regarding relief efforts in places like Darfur or Congo, where I typically work.

The aftermath of crisis in New Orleans and Congo, for instance, is surprisingly similar, and I've pondered over some perhaps facile but nonetheless empirical truths about the dynamic of human response to extreme disasters. First there is the universal ineptitude of governments--big or small, inept or adept, rich or poor--to provide adequate protection and succor to victims of major disasters, natural or man-made. The repeated and insistent rejections by US authorities of foreign offers of Katrina assistance, despite appalling need and clear ineptitude on the ground, is a case in point. Some of these offers the USG later humbly accepted, but by then it was far too late. Government officials are the least pragmatic when lives are at stake: expect delays and denial, not action.

Also identical across disasters is the chorus of resignation heard from victims: no one hears our plight, no one will help us, nothing can be done, etc. I suspect this is conditioned by the individualized trauma of loss, a kind of PTSD, for the follow-on symptom or behavior to a crisis onset is often sheer inaction or a very elemental 'just enough' survival impulse. While the flight to safety is one common 'just enough' survival impulse, it is rarely organized and executed collectively, with the interests of all in primary view. The mass looting and predatory behavior in New Orleans mirrors what I've seen in many foreign conflicts where law and order are absent.

Group survival happens all the time in Hollywood, though. Take a movie like Troy: under seige, the community instinctively came together to defend itself. I've never seen such a mindful reaction to unfolding doom in nearly 20 years of disaster and conflict-related work. Crisis atomizes and disarms its victims: it scatters groups, disentegrates families. Communication fails; actions are never collective, but primarily individual. In the aftermath, groups of victims may coalesce to support and protect. We may know there is safety in numbers, but in the midst of crisis we dont behave that way.

For the recovery efforts in New Orleans and Biloxi, volunteer mobilization has been massive, attracting Americans and internationals from all walks of life. This outpouring of support in the form of citizen sweat equity, mostly provided by outsiders, has been the primary service model among relief and recovery agencies operating in the region. As one homeowner in the Gentilly area of East New Orleans joked, "We Rebels doin' nothin'--only Yankees comin' to fix this mess... ."

But the fact that Katrina recovery, such as it is, has been largely achieved through short-term, unskilled volunteer labor provided by outsiders invites a critique often directed at aid agencies working in developing countries: a vertical charity model (from haves to have-nots) is more efficient at providing a feel-good experience for volunteers than it is at meeting beneficiary needs. In other words, by refusing to engage the politics of suffering by denouncing perpetrators, exposing official corruption, failure or hypcrisy, and pursuing justice for victims, aid agencies become complicit with the causes of suffering they are there to address. The alternative--to provide succor to victims while exposing and denouncing the causes of their plight--may be confrontational, even politically dangerous, but it is this approach that won Doctors Without Borders the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.

Having worked for Doctors Without Borders for many years, my conviction that the traditional charity model of most relief work perpetuates the power inequities responsible for suffering (thus making it a sweet-smelling means of maintaining the status quo), was unquestioned as I arrived in New Orleans for this review. I'll share with you some of the ways that conviction has since been questioned by the quality of the recovery work seen here, and its novel use of Fortune 500 companies to finance the effort.

I'm evaluating a national volunteer-based, community development network based in Atlanta GA, called Hands On Network. The Hands On operational model is curiously apolitical: it is built on volunteer community service aimed at a variety of social problems, but it refrains from shaping or interpreting the experience it provides for the volunteers who come through its doors. Illiteracy among inner city youth, for instance, is a need that is met with volunteer tutoring programs--the phenomenon itself is not branded as a failure of public education, or a manifestation of institutionalized discrimination, or any other political interpretation.

Precisely by avoiding the activism informed by a politicization of socio-economic disparity in many American cities, Hands On is able to attract volunteers from across the political spectrum, from all walks of life. Their exclusive focus on service ('Be the Change' is their motto) has, in recent years, allowed Hands On to forge relationships with a number of corporations seeking to expand the limits of Corporate Social Responsibility beyond simple wealth redistribution in support of  a given social or environmental cause. Hands On takes willing CEOs and their army of drones and marshals them all into direct community service.

When Katrina hit, Hands On had no affiliates in the Gulf area, no existing relief program or prior experience in disaster response, but wanted to see what could be done. Several volunteers piled into cars and drove towards the storm's epicenter, Pass Christian and Pascagoula, Mississippi. In the months that followed, the agency was able to establish operational bases in both cities, mobilize its national network of affiliates, and secure corporate donations of several million dollars.

Volunteers began pouring in (they house, feed and equip squads of 50 to 120 volunteers a day), and basic recovery projects began to take shape, resulting in two distinct operations: Hands On New Orleans and Hands On Gulf Coast in Biloxi. Unlike Habitat, they do not build new homes but focus on evacuees seeking to return who lack the means and knowledge to begin the reconstruction process. There is currently a six-month waiting list for their services in the areas of central and eastern New Orleans where they focus their efforts.

Rehabilitation of schools, public spaces (debris removal and murals--see photo above) such as parks, playgrounds and roads, and the gutting and de-molding of private homes form the bulk of their activities today, almost 20 months after the storm. Corporations such as Home Depot, Timberland, Target, and Cisco have contributed funds and spent weeks at a time working in projects organized by Hands On. Entertainment figures like Usher or the cast of The Guiding Light (yes, the soap opera) have come to participate and contribute, even to shoot footage and film episodes using Katrina recovery as a backdrop.

Not prone to celebrate the flowering of a social conscience among CEOs, rap stars or soap opera stars, I continue to wonder at how quickly I've come to qualify the impact of Hands On programming as positive and uniquely vital to Katrina recovery. But I've been looking at their work for almost a month now--meeting beneficiaries, talking to volunteers, corporate and non-profit partners, and debating with Hands On staff--and have gathered a lot of first hand evidence of their impact. Although a number of technical issues remain, it is genuinely uplifting to see how a bootstrap operation built on a dubious alliance between ordinary volunteers and corporate largesse can result in tangible improvements for the people whose lives were ruined by Katrina and the federal failure that followed.

Posted by Edward Rackley at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 29, 2007

recently discovered Flaubert letter

I was setting to work on the 6th volume of St Augustine—I had just awoken. It was after three. My mother brought me Mme. de Maupassant’s letter—we left—heat terrible in Rouen—I had the carriage ready very quickly, I got the shaft on while Eugène went for the horses. At the port, across from the Guillaume-Lion gate, a man on horseback in summer pants and black tails passed by and I took him for Alphonse Karr. At the top of the rise we went into a tavern, my mother and I, Au jeune Ermite, where I had a grog with kirsch; Eugène a glass of cider—(We’d been there to see the church, in a hackney-coach with Max, the winter before my Father, Caroline and had a few little glasses.) We said almost nothing the whole trip—the left horse was galloping, I watched its head—

more from Paris Review here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

decisive vote

Henri IV, France's most popular king (1553-1610), was a model centrist in his day, which means that he often seemed a model of indecision. During the course of his life, he converted between Protestantism and Catholicism no fewer than five times. But, over the years, he learned how to deploy this apparent indecision for maximum political effect, tacking deftly between camps and finally uniting the country behind him.

It is fitting, then, that Henri IV is the great hero of today's model French centrist--and surprisingly effective political gadfly--François Bayrou (who comes from the king's native province of Béarn and has written a popular biography of him). Although Bayrou came in third in the initial round of France's presidential election last Sunday, he seems paradoxically to have gained more stature and prominence in defeat than Nicolas Sarkozy or Ségolène Royal have done in victory. Bayrou has cannily exploited his own apparent indecision--his refusal to endorse either candidate in the second round election on May 6--to become not king himself, but the closest France has had to a kingmaker in a long time.

more from TNR here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

First Chapter from Lee Iacocca's latest book:

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

More here.  (Thanks to my friend Ilyas Haider in Tehran)

Posted by Azra Raza at 05:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Yeah it's a parasite — but in a good way

From MSNBC:

Parasites are by definition bad for you. Some, such as malaria, can kill. Others, like microbes known as Wolbachia that are found in more than one-fifth of all insects, often make female hosts less fertile. Now scientists discover parasites can evolve surprisingly rapidly to become helpful instead of harmful. The typically nasty Wolbachia can make females more fertile instead of less, a study reveals. They're not doing it out of the goodness of their non-existent hearts — they boost host fertility to better spread themselves in nature. For instance, Wolbachia parasitizes a worm that in turn parasitizes humans, and this worm already depends on Wolbachia in order to produce young.

Wolbachia are bacteria that insects get only from their mothers. They can display a bewildering diversity of additional effects, such as turning males to females, causing infected females to reproduce without males and triggering vicious cycles of increasing female promiscuity and male sexual exhaustion. The presence of these parasites also often carries a toll on their victims — for instance, cutting down the number of eggs that females produce.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 05:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

FLAT EARTH: The History of an Infamous Idea

Christopher Hart on Christine Garwood's book, in the Sunday Times:

Up until 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, everyone believed the earth was flat. Since then, everyone has known better. In fact, as Christine Garwood demonstrates in this quirky and highly entertaining slice of intellectual history, both these statements are false. The Ancient Greeks knew very well that they lived on a globe, while the Flat Earth News ceased publication only in 1988.

Not the least attractive thing about Garwood’s study is her criticism of modern scientists whose arrogant assumption that the present always trumps the past only flatters their self-esteem. She dismisses “supposed Christian closed-mindedness” as a post-Enlightenment myth. The Church was at the forefront of intellectual and scientific discovery for centuries. Indeed, it’s really quite stupid and credulous of us now to believe that most medieval people thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the world. They could see as well as you or I that a ship disappears over the horizon after a few miles, or that during a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth on the moon is round. Duh. There was “no mutiny of flat-earth sailors on the Santa Maria”.

Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Archimedes, Ptolemy, St Augustine and Bede were all firm “globularists”, in Garwood’s pleasing neologism, while Newton refined things still further by showing that we really lived on an “oblate spheroid” (the earth bulges in the middle, to you and me). As with scientology, belief in alien abduction, or wildly overpriced face creams containing such bogus substances as “micro-oils”, for real stupidity you need a dash of dodgy modern science.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 03:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

How Chicago became the blues capital of the world

Katy June-Friesen in Smithsonian Magazine:

In June, Chicago will host its 24th annual blues festival—six stages, free admission—in Grant Park. Today Chicago is known as the "blues capital," but the story behind this distinction began some 90 years ago. In the early 1900s, Southern blacks began moving to Northern cities in what would become a decades-long massive migration. Chicago was a place of promise, intimately linked to recurrent themes in blues songs—hope for a better life, for opportunity, for a fair shake.

This year's festival honors piano player Sunnyland Slim, who died in 1995 and would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Giant in stature and voice, Sunnyland was a formidable personality on Chicago's blues scene, and his journey to the city somewhat parallels the history of the blues. Beginning around 1916, millions of African Americans migrated from the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the rural South to cities like Detroit and Chicago, where burgeoning industry and loss of workers to World War I promised jobs. For many, including musicians, Memphis was an important stop on this journey, and Sunnyland spent more than a decade there before moving to Chicago in the early 1940s.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 03:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Islamic Democrats?

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine:

In his 2005 Inaugural Address, President Bush traced out the logic of a new, post-9/11 American foreign policy. “For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny,” he declared, violence “will gather . . . and cross the most defended borders” — i.e., our own. Therefore, he announced, “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Thus was born the Freedom Agenda; and Egypt occupied the bull’s-eye on this new target. Egypt was an authoritarian state that had supplied much of the leadership of Al Qaeda. It is also the largest nation in the Arab world and, historically, the center of the region’s political and cultural life. Progress in Egypt’s sclerotic political system would resonate all over the Islamic world. The nearly $2 billion a year in military and economic aid that the U.S. had been providing since the Camp David accords in 1979 offered real leverage. And Egypt’s early experience of democratic government (from 1922 to 1952), mostly under British occupation, and its lively community of democratic and human rights activists gave political reform a firmer foundation than it had elsewhere in the Arab world.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 03:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Missing News of the Missing Methane

Carl Zimmer in his always excellent blog, The Loom:

Here's a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn't: a new study indicates that plants don't release lots of methane gas.

You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas--perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere.

The result was big news for several reasons. It was a surprise just in terms of basic biology--scientists have been studying the gases released by plants for a long time, and so it was surprising that they could have missed such a giant belch. Making the matter of pressing interest was methane's ability to trap heat in the atmosphere. Suddenly plants became a much bigger player in the global warming game...

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A Conversation with David Sedaris

Lania Knight in The Missouri Review:

Interviewer: I've heard you say that you're not the funny person in your family. Amy's funny. Your brother's funny. When did you figure out that you were funny?

Sedaris: Oh, I'm not really. I can do things with paper sometimes, if you give me some time. But no, I'm observant. I know how to tell a story. You meet some people who don't know how, and they'll say, "It was me and Philip and Elizabeth, and we were at dinner. No, wait, wait, 'cause Mark was there. Was Mark there? Or did Mark come later? I think Mark came later, with Tony . . ." And the audience is already gone. Hugh and I argue about storytelling. He'll say, "Now, that's not true. You left out half the room. . ." He's talking about people who didn't contribute to the story. I would get rid of a lot, so we can move there quicker.

Interviewer: Is writing plays with your sister Amy similar to writing your own essays and stories?

Sedaris: No. When you're writing a story, it's completely private. You're struggling with it on your own. The way my sister and I work on a play is like this: three weeks before opening, we get together with a cast; we have a script, we read the script out loud and then throw the script away. And then say, "Fuck. We're opening in three weeks."

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Freedom of rights management

Musicians have been badgering Apple to sell their music without copy protection for years, so why, wonders Wendy M Grossman, is it changing its tune now?

From The Guardian:

It's a mystery that Apple won't talk about. Independent artists have been complaining for years that Apple was deaf to their requests to include their music at the iTunes Music Store without applying digital rights management (DRM) software. Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in his February 6 essay Thoughts on Music that the company had no choice but to use DRM to protect songs sold via iTunes because the record companies insisted on it. Complain, he said, to Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI, who control 70% of the world's music. No answer, still, to the artists who wanted their music released DRM-free.

A few weeks ago, EMI blinked and agreed to release its catalogue in near-CD quality (256kbps AAC format), DRM-free, via iTunes for a premium price (99p per track). The DRM-free offerings will be available next month. Just like that.

Was that difficult to implement? Apple declined to discuss the decision, the technical complexity involved, or anything beyond Jobs's essay.

Scott Cohen, founder of the digital distribution service The Orchard, says the change is "not technically complicated". What is complicated, he says, is the many different versions required to service digital stores, from iTunes to mobile phone downloads. There are only three basic file formats in use - AAC, MP3 and WMA - but, he says, details like bit rates and the metadata identifiers are different for each store. There are 63 variants for mobile devices alone, and overall there are hundreds. Cohen notes, though, that the really hard work is marketing the music.

The reversal makes it even less understandable why independent artists who want to release their music via iTunes but without DRM have been unable to do so.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 28, 2007

The alcoholic vervets of St. Kitts

Via Majikthise:

[Thanks to Margit Oberrauch and Asad Raza.]

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Paternalistic Democratization's Logical Next Step?

The neocon Ernest Lefever offers an answer, in The Weekly Standard.

BECAUSE OF AND in spite of Hollywood films like The African Queen and television shows like Tarzan, tropical Africa south of the Sahara and north of the Zambezi is terra incognito for most Americans. Some cling to fragments of the "noble savage" myth advanced by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who argued that in an idyllic "state of nature" uncorrupted by civilization, people are innocent, happy, and brave.

Others accept the opposing myth promulgated by Thomas Hobbs that in a "State of Nature," there are "no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worse of all, persistent fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Neither myth reflects the real tropical Africa that I saw in the 1960s while there researching three books on U.S. policy. Almost everywhere I saw poverty, corruption, and a retreat from the rudimentary rule of law established by the British and French colonial powers.

As Kempton Makamure, a political opponent of President Mugabe, wrote recently in Zimbabwe's Financial Gazette, "It is entirely possible that conflicts within independent states in Africa have caused more privation, deaths and stalled development than the colonial rule they have replaced."

Posted by Robin Varghese at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007)

For Russians, music is more than an art; it is their soul and hence their politics. Just picture the ragged remnants of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra under siege from the Nazis painfully tuning up to play Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony for radio broadcast in the darkest days of the war, or the years in which the visit of Russian players (including Rostropovich) to the West became the one bright point of contact in the bitter Cold War. Music wasn't a substitute for life in the old Soviet Union; it was life.

Which is why Stalin took such a close and oppressive interest in it, and why figures such as Mstislav Rostropovich, who died yesterday, are so important not just to music but to history. Like his great friend and mentor, the composer Dimitri Shostakovich, Rostropovich lived through the decades of post-war oppression by Stalin and his immediate successors.

more from The Independent here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

herbert

Herbert's solution to the restraints forced on him by one totalitarian regime or another was always to evolve personae—favoring historical figures, as in the famous "Elegy of Fortinbras," dedicated to Milosz; and, later, Mr. Cogito. Had history not backed him into a corner, I doubt he would have employed this imaginary friend's services, which are, after all, conceptual; as a result, the poems that feature him as a speaker are both more patently absurd and more erratic than the rest. "Mr. Cogito and Pure Thought" ends on this buoyant, negative note:

when he is cold
he will attain the state of satori

and he will be as the masters recommend
vacant and
astonishing

Herbert rescues this antic poem with the unexpected pairing of apparent and impalpable opposites. He never forgets the advice given at the Café des Poètes to the desperate Orpheus by a bourgeois gentleman in Cocteau's Orphée: You must astonish us.

more from Bookforum here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Towering anachronisms?

Peter Buchanan in Harvard Design Magazine:

Is the tall building an anachronism? Does it, like sprawling suburbia and out-of-town shopping malls, seem doomed to belong only to what is increasingly referred to as “the oil interval,” that now fading and historically brief moment when easily extracted oil was abundant and cheap? The answer is probably “Yes,” particularly for the conventional freestanding, air-conditioned, artificially lit tower that guzzles vast amounts of energy and is built for short-term profit out of high-embodied-energy materials, many of them petroleum derivatives. Such buildings are utterly contrary to the requirements of times of increasingly insecure and dwindling oil supplies, in which even the United States must one day embrace the quest for more sustainable lifestyles and forms of development. Energy-wasteful buildings also offend values held by more and more people.

Nevertheless, such buildings continue to be built, and more are proposed, particularly for boom cities like Dubai and many in China. Yet the contrived sculptural forms and vulgar flashiness of so many of the towers there and elsewhere suggest rather desperate attempts to enliven a tired and dying type. Even towers by superior architects, like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, proposed for the Ground Zero site in New York, seem vapid. And the gigantism of towers proposed by Renzo Piano for London and Foster for Moscow register as brutally intrusive and inappropriate. All these seem last-fling sunset effects from a waning era when, beside the defects listed, towers helped create dismal cities and aptly symbolized their extreme economic and social inequalities.

But ironically, the green agenda and quest for sustainability, the death knell of these kinds of towers, might reinvent and reinvigorate the tall building. Reaching up into fresh air and abundant daylight, tall buildings cry out to be naturally lit and ventilated, bringing energy savings, healthier conditions, and more personal environmental control. Touching tall buildings is abundant ambient energy in the form of sunlight and wind, only a little of which needs to be harvested to serve all their energy needs. Various European architects are now investigating towers that accelerate wind past or through them to drive turbines and towers big enough for water- and waste-recycling systems, with “gray” water from hand-washing use to flush toilet, and even “living machines” processing sewage on site.1

Picture shows 30 St.Mary Axe, London.

More here.

Posted by Sughra Raza at 09:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

cold turkey

Justin Droms in Good Magazine:

This might be the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth, I think an hour later as I try a fingerful of vegan mayonnaise. Some “analogues,” as Vegan Action describes these food substitutes, taste a little off to the recovering meataholic. The mayonnaise, for one, tastes like vinegar-flavored Jell-O, and if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Hey, I’d really like to eat some cat vomit,” then vegan ham is for you. Others, however, are borderline outstanding. Vegan steak is flat-out convincing, and minimizes the time I’ll spend staring at ground beef in the grocery store (although, like vegetarian Indian cuisine, it maximizes the time I’ll spend in the bathroom). Vegan chicken nuggets are the best; though they’re filled with a grainy meal, the crispy outside is just like the real deal, especially if drenched in a half-gallon of ketchup.

“I am not a violent person, but when my fiancée orders the surf and turf, I’m one bean sprout away from Frisbeeing her plate through a window.”

More here.

Posted by Sughra Raza at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Evian criminals

Daniel Gross at Slate:

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle spotted a hot new food trend in the Bay Area. Instead of offering diners a choice of still or sparkling bottled water with their (inevitably) locally grown delectables, trendoid restaurants such as Incanto, Poggio, and Nopa now offer glorified tap water. Sustainable-dining pioneer Chez Panisse has also joined the crowd, tossing Santa Lucia overboard for filtered municipal water, carbonated on-site. The reason: It takes a lot of energy to create a bottle of water and ship it from Europe to California. And so of-the-moment bistros can boost their enviro cred by giving away tap water instead of selling promiscuously marked-up bottled water. "Our whole goal of sustainability means using as little energy as we have to," Mike Kossa-Rienzi, general manager of Chez Panisse, told the Chronicle. "Shipping bottles of water from Italy doesn't make sense."

Chez Panisse's decision to swap Perrier for public water highlights how quickly the culture surrounding food, drink, and the environment has shifted. Not long ago, bottled water represented the height of urban sophistication. Today, bottled water is just another cog in the carbon-spewing, globe-warming industrial machine. There is a growing conflict between those who want to drink clean, pure water and those who want to breathe clean, pure air.

More here.

Posted by Sughra Raza at 09:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Poem of the week

From TLS:

On Shakespeare's birthday, April 23, Buckingham Palace announced the award of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry to James Fenton.

On February 17 last year, the TLS published three poems by Fenton, including "Memorial", which was originally commissioned by the BBC to honour journalists and their colleagues killed while covering wars. As a young man Fenton was himself a foreign correspondent, and was present at the fall of Saigon to the Vietcong in 1975. His experiences in Cambodia lie behind the long poem Dead Soldiers (1981)  

Memorial

We spoke, we chose to speak of war and strife --
    A task a fine ambition sought --
And some might say, who shared our work, our life:
        That praise was dearly bought.

Drivers, interpreters, these were our friends.
    These we loved. These we were trusted by.
The shocked hand wipes the blood across the lens.
        The lens looked to the sky.

Most died by mischance. Some seemed honour-bound
    To take the lonely, peerless track
Conceiving danger as a testing-ground
        To which they must go back

Till the dry tongue fell silent and they crossed
    Beyond the realm of time and fear.
Death waved them through the checkpoint. They were lost.
        All have their story here.


JAMES FENTON (2006)

Posted by Sughra Raza at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Animals in the depths of the sea

From Science.reading:

On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface, or at most to altitudes of a hundred meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: with an average depth of 3800 meters, the oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where life can develop. And the deep sea, which has been immersed in total darkness since the dawn of time, occupies 85% of ocean space, forming the planet’s largest habitat. Yet these depths abound with mystery. The deep sea is mostly uncharted—only about 5 percent of the seafloor has been mapped with any reasonable degree of detail—and we know very little about the creatures that call it home. Current estimates about the number of species yet to be found vary between ten and thirty million. The deep sea no longer has anything to prove; it is without doubt Earth’s largest reservoir of life.

More amazing picture here. (Thanks to Yasser Haider).

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Portrait of a Lady

From The New York Times:

In her short story "The Fullness of Life," Edith Wharton wrote that a woman's life is like "a great house full of rooms," most of which remain unseen: "and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes." In spite of the many books written about Wharton and her work, it is Hermione Lee's determination to provide an unprecedented tour of all the rooms in Edith Wharton's mansion.

This is a daunting undertaking: Edith Wharton was formidable, multifaceted, guarded and phenomenally busy. Between 1897 and 1937, the year of her death, she published at least one book a year. Altogether she wrote 48. Her posthumous reputation has suffered somewhat in comparison with that of her friend Henry James (as Lee points out, "to this day it is still rare for a book or an essay or a talk on Wharton not to mention James," though "this has not worked the other way"), but Wharton is a literary master — or mistress — in her own right. While only a handful of her books are still widely read, her finest fictions — including "The House of Mirth," "The Custom of the Country," "Ethan Frome" and "The Age of Innocence" — remain as affecting and engrossing today as when they first appeared (when many of them were best sellers), unsentimental illuminations of America in a time of social transition and rich explorations of the unspoken human heart. Moreover, as Lee's biography makes clear, Wharton was also significant as a designer, decorator, gardener, traveler and philanthropist, making her prolific literary production but a part of her life's work.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 27, 2007

Street Installations

Via Reddit.com:

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 08:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Deresiewicz on James

William Deresiewicz reviews Clive James' Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts, in The Nation.

I started reading Cultural Amnesia on my way down to the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, the professional organization of literary academics. Nothing in a long time has focused my discontent with academic life more pointedly than James's assertion that "Vienna was the best evidence that the most accommodating and fruitful ground for the life of the mind can be something more broad than a university campus." In James's cosmology, the university is the infernal (and infertile) counterpart to the paradise of the cafe. Humanism means interconnection, and the cafe gives that interconnection social form. Academia necessitates specialization and incessantly discourages intellectual breadth (now more than ever, no matter how much lip service is paid to "interdisciplinarity"). The academic conference, where small groups of identically specialized professionals meet to debate narrow questions of interpretation and doctrine, is the cafe's demonic double.

But James's evocation of Viennese cafe society is elegiac, and not just because that society was destroyed by Hitler. James, too, has been a denizen of cafes, but he has haunted them alone. Friedell and Polgar and Altenberg were sitting on the table, not around it. Though James's life has been richly social, as he hints from time to time, still, "most of [my] listening was done by reading." For a host of reasons--the expansion of universities, of suburbs and of telecommunications, to name three--the kind of face-to-face intellectual-artistic life that Vienna exemplified, and that flourished in other twentieth-century cities, simply no longer exists. James's answer to this bereavement is the book itself. Here is the cafe he has created in his mind, a convocation of voices that respond to one another across the barriers of language, outlook, expressive form and, most of all, time.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

James on Zweig

The latest adapted excerpt from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia is of the great and sadly increasingly forgotten Stefan Zweig.

"Heart-warming hours" sounds less corny in German: herzliche Stunden. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) had a house in Salzburg, and from the terrace he could see across the border into Germany, to the heights on which the exterminating angel perched, gathering its strength. If Hitler had looked in the other direction, he would have seen, on Zweig's terrace, everything he was determined to annihilate, and not just because it was Jewish. There were plenty of gentiles who came to see Zweig. But they were all infected with Kulturbolschewismus, the deadly international disease that presumed to live in a world of its own: the disease that Hitler, in his role as hygienist, had a Pasteur-like mission to eradicate.

Zweig (1881-1942) is a fitting coda to this project, because his life, work, exile, and self-inflicted death combine to sum up so much of what has gone before, which is really the story of the will to achievement in the face of all the conditions for despair.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 04:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unger Joins Brazilian Government

Dani Rodrik informs us that Roberto Unger has been appointed to the post of minister in the Brazilian government.

It seems like stuff out of a dream. My Harvard Law School colleague Roberto Mangabeira Unger, at once the most erudite and impenetrable man I know, has just been appointed a minister by President Lula in Brazil. Roberto will be heading a new ministry called, improbably, “the special secretariat for long-term actions.” His task: to draw out a long-term strategy for Brazilian government and society.

I taught a course called “One Way or Many” with Roberto for three years, and he has been one of my two most important sources of inspiration in recent years. He is not an easy man to follow, and I have often joked that it took me the whole three years to understand what he was saying in our course.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pretty good getting, for a gal that came up the hard way

At the Totten Foundation, a scholarly establishment on the Upper West Side, a professor of English bids farewell to a young lady who has been assisting him in his research. “Make no mistake,” he says, “I shall regret the absence of your keen mind. Unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body.”

I have always taken these lines to be the high-water mark of American Cartesianism. When we consider the duality of body and mind, we assume that the two can be trusted to get along; that our minds can go about their noble business without being diverted by the physical forms in which they are encased. This theory holds firm up to the exact point at which it bumps into Barbara Stanwyck. It is to her that those regretful words are spoken. The movie is “Ball of Fire”—released in 1941, directed by Howard Hawks, written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, and starring Stanwyck as a night-club chanteuse called Sugarpuss O’Shea.

more from The New Yorker here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

if I was not myself, I would arrest myself

To the academic world's small population of postmodernists, Slavoj Zizek - a shambling, rambling Slovenian philosopher - is a folk hero. At any lecture podium, any time, anywhere, he will emit hazy clouds of gaseous theory with the speedy intensity and comic riffs of Bill Hicks.

He seemed to emerge fully formed from the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia with an ec lectic magpie-philosophy, rapidly spewing out books and essays on everything from opera to the use of torture in the TV series 24. Zizek is the biggest box-office draw postmodernists have ever had, their best punch at the bestseller lists. The press fawns upon him; he has been called an "intellectual rock star"; and, according to a recent profile in the New Yorker, Slovenia has a "repu tation disproportionately large for its size due to the work of Slavoj Zizek".

more from The New Statesman here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

chicago's party

So, is The Dinner Party great art? Well, not by the standards of today's art world. It's too middlebrow, too literal, and its earnestness is out of step with today's endlessly self-ironizing sensibility. And its pudendal imagery, once radical, looks silly and heavy-handed today. But as an emphatically populist work with a clear set of political and educational imperatives, The Dinner Party has held its ground. It's nervy, ambitious, uncompromising, and—unlike most recent art, feminist or otherwise—truly original.

more from Slate here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More Debates on The Black Swan

Here's an interesting discussion between Nassim Taleb and Andrew Gelman on Taleb's The Black Swan. First, Gelman's criticisms:

The book is about unexpected events ("black swans") and the problems with statistical models such as the normal distribution that don't allow for these rarities. From a statistical point of view, let me say that multilevel models (often built from Gaussian components) can model various black swan behavior. In particular, self-similar models can be constructed by combining scaled pieces (such as wavelets or image components) and then assigning a probability distribution over the scalings, sort of like what is done in classical spectrum analysis of 1/f noise in time series. For some interesting discussion in the context of "texture models" for images, see the chapter by Yingnian Wu in my book with Xiao-Li on applied Bayesian modeling and causal inference. (Actually, I recommend this book more generally; it has lots of great chapters in it.)

That said, I admit that my two books on statistical methods are almost entirely devoted to modeling "white swans." My only defense here is that Bayesian methods allow us to fully explore the implications of a model, the better to improve it when we find discrepancies with data. Just as a chicken is an egg's way of making another egg, Bayesian inference is just a theory's way of uncovering problems with can lead to a better theory.

Next, Taleb responds to Gelman:

[Gelman] On page 127-128, Taleb discusses the distinction between uncertainty and randomness (in my terminology, the boxer, the wrestler, and the coin flip). I'd only point out that coins and dice, while maybe not realistic representations of many sources of real-world uncertainty, do provide useful calibration. Similarly, actual objects rarely resemble "the meter" (that famous metal bar that sits, or used to sit, in Paris), but it's helpful to have an agreed-upon length scale. We have some examples in Chapter 1 of Bayesian Data Analysis of assigning probabilities empirically (for football scores and record linkage).

N[assim] – The way I see it is that a framework that accepts no metaprobabilities is defective, period. This is where a Bayesian like you will never accept the difference “Knightian nonKnightian”. The only one I accept is qualitative: ludic/nonludic.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace

From The New Republic:

You go to war with the press you have. This was certainly not war in the Jimi Hendrix era. Iraq was lethal, and no outsider could get around. The women, available everywhere in Vietnam, were off-limits here. There would be no romance, no high war writing. Instead it was all alien and remote. In these books, Iraq is hunkered down and hidden, its people and ways and language inaccessible to the writer-adventurers. (France had left its language behind in Vietnam, which provided Western writers with a kind of entry into the culture.) In Iraq the outsiders were on their own, captives of the Green Zone, of the "minders" and the interpreters.

It was hard, practically impossible, to bond with the place. Shiism was not waiting to be deciphered or understood; Moqtada Al Sadr had no time, and no desire, to explain the origins of his worldview, his noble pedigree, the high clerical tradition of his family, to the American journalists in the bubble of the Republican Palace. It was enough for him that his devoted followers knew the magic of his lineage. The reclusive Ali Al Sistani, in his modest home on a lane in Najaf's souk, kept the invading power -- and the press that came with it -- at bay. In one of my favorite anecdotes of Iraq, an American diplomat of considerable sway asked an Iraqi interlocutor what the term hawza meant -- the word for a Shia study group and academic circle. "It's amazing," the Iraqi academic answered. "You send a huge army to this country, but you don't know the most rudimentary thing about its life."

We had made our way into a land that had been hermetically sealed to outsiders.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 07:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

MacKinnon: ‘Women are not human’

From The Harvard Gazette:

Women are not in charge. Worldwide, it is men — not their gender counterparts — who have power over families, clans, villages, cities, and nations. That may not seem like a new message. But lawyer, feminist author, and international equal rights advocate Catharine A. MacKinnon gives it a new subtlety, adds legal context — and even includes a ray of hope. MacKinnon, who once taught at Harvard Law School, is a professor of law at the University of Michigan and one of the most widely cited legal scholars in the English language. She visited the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study last week (April 19) to deliver the annual Maurine and Robert Rothschild Lecture: “Women’s Status, Men’s States.”

MacKinnon — tall, regal, and with a gift for precise talk — has star power, and drew 250 people to a jammed Radcliffe Gymnasium. At Radcliffe, MacKinnon could just as well have called her lecture “Are Women Human?” In case you wondered, the answer to that question is no — perhaps to be expected in a book that includes an essay titled “Rape as Nationbuilding.” In legal terms, women are not human, according to MacKinnon, who discovered that fact while parsing the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 1948 United Nations document defines what a human is, and what people are universally entitled to — but fails to explicitly recognize women, and their “full human status in social reality,” said MacKinnon.

Being human first requires being “real to power,”

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 07:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

April 26, 2007

six quarks and three leptons

And there are many answers to the question of how much longer this Russian-doll game will continue. If one is to be absolutely honest, none is reliable, although at least there is a fascinatingly stringent basic system, from whose hat all the currently known subatomic particles can be pulled: the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. It knows six quarks and three leptons (with their respective anti-particles and neutrinos) as well as four bosons which mediate the forces between particles. All these particles and their combinations – christened with nice little names like Charm, Pion and Kaon – are well defined within the model, whose clairvoyant powers border on the magical. And yet particle physicists are not entirely satisfied with their construction kit, because it has a few gaps in it which prevent them from sleeping at night.

more from Ulrich Woelk on the origin of things at Sign and Sight here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

slip of the tongue?

WHO IS PETER HANDKE? He is the strongest, most inventive writer to have emerged in German literature since, well, Günter Grass. Handke, like Grass, is a great prose stylist. But unlike Grass, or any other novelist of note for that matter, Handke is also one of the most prominent defenders of the late Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, a fact that made Handke the most controversial writer in Europe throughout the spring and early summer of 2006. The most controversial, that is, until the media eruption unleashed by Grass’s confession buried Handke’s actions and statements under a deep wash of newspaper ink.

What exactly had Handke done? Milosevic was on trial for war crimes, including genocide in Bosnia for overseeing the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, when he died in his prison cell in The Hague on March 11, 2006. Handke spoke at his funeral in Belgrade one week later, when Milosevic’s coffin was displayed in the Museum of the Revolution before an overflow crowd of some 20,000 radical Serb nationalists.

more from The American Scholar here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

5 Blogs That Make Me Think

Peter Klein over at the very interesting blog Organizations and Markets tagged us as one of 5 blogs that make him think. To play along, my 5 (Abbas, Azra and Morgan will probably not overlap much):

DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal

Cosmic Variance

Majikthise

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and

Three-Toed Sloth (when Cosma has enough free time to post).

Posted by Robin Varghese at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A Letter on Rape in Prisons

David Kaiser in the New York Review of Books:

To the Editors:

Jason DeParle's thoughtful and wide-ranging overview of American incarceration policy and its consequences hardly mentions rape in detention. Yet this is not a rare or trivial part of life behind bars. Neither is it, as some believe, an inevitable one.

Prisoner rape has been largely ignored: by journalists, advocates, policymakers, and researchers. The available data therefore, especially on its frequency, are not very good. Still, it is possible to have some notion of the problem's magnitude. Recent studies of prisons in four midwestern states suggest that approximately 20 percent of male inmates are pressured or coerced into unwanted sexual contact; approximately 10 percent are raped. Rates of sexual abuse in women's facilities, where the perpetrators are most likely to be male staff, seem to vary more by institution but are as high as 27 percent of inmates.

Since the US now incarcerates more people than any other country, both relative to population and in absolute terms, these percentages translate into horrifying real numbers.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

31 Different Ways To Lace Shoes

From Ian's Shoelace Site:

Whilst mathematics tells us that there are more than 2 Trillion Methods of feeding a lace through the six pairs of eyelets on an average shoe, this section presents a (somewhat more realistic) typical cross-section of traditional and alternative lacing methods that I've either found or created or that have been sent to me by web site visitors.

The selection is limited to those methods that I considered worthy of devoting the time required to create instructions, either because they are widely used, have a particular feature or benefit, or just because I like the way they look.

Lacing Technique - Method 1 - Shorter Laces:

1. The lace runs straight across the bottom (grey section) and emerges from both bottom eyelets.

2. Cross the ends over and feed into the 4th set of eyelets up the shoe (skip past 2 sets of eyelets).

3. Both ends now run straight up and emerge from the 5th set of eyelets.

4. Cross the ends over and feed into the 2nd set of eyelets up the shoe (skip past 2 sets of eyelets).

5. Both ends now run straight up and emerge from the 3rd set of eyelets.

6. Cross the ends over, feed under and emerge from the top set of eyelets (skip past 2 sets of eyelets).

Many more here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

More on The Black Swan

Niall Ferguson in The Telegraph:

It was predictable. Cho Seung-Hui was a taciturn, moody loner. Four of his professors expressed concerns about the content of his work or classroom conduct. After complaints by two female students, the campus police and a college counsellor tried to have him committed to a mental institution. But a doctor didn't agree with the judge that he presented a danger to others. And guns are easy to buy in America (though banned on Virginia campuses). As a result 33 people are dead.

Journalists' efforts to explain the Virginia Tech massacre perfectly illustrate one of the central points of an idiosyncratically brilliant new book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin/Allen Lane). Having been completely caught out by some random event, we human beings are wonderfully good at retrospectively predicting it. In reality, however, Cho was what Taleb calls a "Black Swan".

Why a black swan? Taleb's starting point is what philosophers call the problem of induction. Suppose you have spent all your life in the northern hemisphere and have only ever seen white swans. You might very well conclude (inductively) that all swans are white. But take a trip to Australia, where swans are black, and your theory will collapse. A "Black Swan" is therefore anything that seems to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 05:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dani Rodrik wins the first Albert O. Hirschman Prize

From the SSRC:

The Hirschman Prize is awarded annually by the Social Science Research Council to scholars who have made outstanding contributions to international, interdisciplinary social science research, theory, and public communication, in the tradition of Albert Hirschman. A professor at Columbia, Yale, Harvard and for many years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Hirschman pioneered the field of economics and politics in developing countries, particularly Latin American development. Author of such classic works as The Strategy of Economic Development; Exit, Voice, and Loyalty; and The Passions and the Interests, Hirschman has long been acclaimed for his creative, interdisciplinary approach to academic research...

“Professor Rodrik’s research is distinguished by analytical and empirical rigor, combined with a critical attitude toward policy orthodoxy,” said Eichengreen, who led the Hirschman Prize selection process from a field of 31 nominees. “While an economist by training, Rodrik takes a broad interdisciplinary view of problems of international trade and economic development, paying careful attention to their social, political, and historical dimensions—very much in the Hirschman tradition,” he noted.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hitchens Weighs in, Now On The Religion Debate

In Slate, excerpts from Hitchens' God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:

The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)

The Namesake: A Review

From Ego: 

The movie adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake is out all over since March 9th. True to form, Mira Nair has done it again- the movie is a cinematographic treat, from the moment it opens in Calcutta. The scenes of Ashok, and then Ashima, going about their lives and how they decide on their arranged marriage are breathtakingly real. Equally true to life and haunting are their initial scenes set in New York.

Tabu as the mother Ashima is resplendent in her sarees in Calcutta, inspirational yet entertaining as the outspoken wife/mother everywhere else, and manages to carry the story (which has been shifted to rest a bit more on her shoulders than in the book) from start to end. Irfan Khan, as the father Ashok, brings a haunting quality to his character and is a real pleasure to watch as usual. Kal Penn, who seems to revel in this more serious role, plays Gogol very convincingly, slipping into the various ages and situations dexterously. The other actors are also all true to their roles – namely Sahira Nair as Sonia Ganguli, Zuleikha Robinson as Moushumi Mazumdar and Glenne Headley as Lydia Ratliff.

Mira Nair directs the camera to capture every detail, every nuance superbly. The movie is threaded with various sexual encounters, sometimes more graphic than what Lahiri wrote but quite unforgettable for their lyrical, sensual treatment. Even where there is no overt nakedness, as when Gogol first encounters the grown-up Maushmi, the audience can feel the heat.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

End of the Melting Pot?

From Harvard Magazine:

In 1986 after receiving amnesty under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, Jorge Montes began looking for a good place to raise his family. He settled on Gainesville, Georgia, a small manufacturing city outside Atlanta, because it reminded him of his hometown in Mexico. He and his wife could afford a decent house on his truck driver’s wages, and the schools were good. His son studied hard and became the star kicker on the Gainesville High School football team, winning the admiration of native residents.

In Gainesville, where immigrant labor has reinvigorated the poultry-processing industry, nearly 30 percent of the 30,000 inhabitants today are foreign-born Mexicans. The speed of change has strained public resources and stoked native resentment, threatening the goodwill that greeted earlier newcomers like the Montes family. Letters published in local newspapers accuse immigrants of “taking over”—of burdening schools and welfare agencies, lowering wages, spreading crime, and “refusing to learn English.”

Will the current tide of poor, low-skilled Hispanic labor migrants (legal or not) gradually blend into the American mainstream like their European predecessors? Or will they remain a growing but segregated population, marginalized by race, class, language, and culture?

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 25, 2007

A Journalist For Whom There Were Not Enough Words

Henry Allen in the Washington Post:

David Halberstam was out to save the world back in the '60s and '70s when a lot of smart people believed that journalism would save the world, and Halberstam was just the man to lead the way, a big, bombastic man with big shoulders and features and a face full of furious wonder and realization.

As it turned out, the world didn't agree with the smart people, and a journalistic heyday passed. But Halberstam never stopped working.

On Monday, at 73, with more than 20 books and a Pulitzer Prize on his shelf he was still at it, traveling to an interview in California when he died in a car crash.

He saw journalism as a calling, like later reporters who took him as a model in the mightiness of their efforts. He did not see it as a mere opportunity, like some of the cool-seeking, educated young people who wanted to go to high-end dinner parties and be serious and indignant like Halberstam, to have a house like his on Nantucket, to be Halberstam. He was that kind of star for a while. (The problem was, they couldn't find everything in the world Very Important in the Halberstamian mode, everything from war to fishing for blues off Nantucket. They were too ironic, too Doonesbury.)

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Cheney's Nemesis

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (via the excellent Mtanga):

America's pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us -- and that still pisses Hersh off.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Way We Age Now

Medicine has increased the ranks of the elderly. Can it make old age any easier?

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

Why we age is the subject of vigorous debate. The classical view is that aging happens because of random wear and tear. A newer view holds that aging is more orderly and genetically driven. Proponents of this view point out that animals of similar species and exposure to wear and tear have markedly different life spans. The Canada goose has a longevity of 23.5 years; the emperor goose only 6.3 years. Perhaps animals are like plants, with lives that are, to a large extent, internally governed. Certain species of bamboo, for instance, form a dense stand that grows and flourishes for a hundred years, flowers all at once, and then dies.

The idea that living things shut down and not just wear down has received substantial support in the past decade. Researchers working with the now famous worm C. elegans (two of the last five Nobel Prizes in medicine went to scientists doing work on the little nematode) were able to produce worms that live more than twice as long and age more slowly by altering a single gene. Scientists have since come up with single-gene alterations that increase the life spans of Drosophila fruit flies, mice, and yeast.

These findings notwithstanding, scientists do not believe that our life spans are actually programmed into us.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 08:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Book teaches boys how to be 'Dangerous'

From CNN:

Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

In these frenzied, media-saturated times, the lure of a simpler past is more powerful than ever.

That may explain the success of "The Dangerous Book for Boys," a deliberately retro tome that has become the publishing sensation of the year in Britain.

Exuding the brisk breeziness of Boy Scout manuals and Boy's Own annuals, "The Dangerous Book" is a childhood how-to guide that covers everything from paper airplanes to go-carts, skipping stones to skinning a rabbit.

It spent months on British best-seller lists, has sold more than half a million copies and took the book of the year prize at last month's British Book Awards.

The book will be published in the United States May 1, allowing American boys -- but not their sisters -- to learn how to play marbles, make invisible ink, send Morse code and build a tree fort.

"I wanted to do the kind of book that we had lusted after when we were kids," said Conn Iggulden, who co-wrote the book with his younger brother Hal.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 08:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Samurai Song by Robert Pinsky

From Poetry International Web:

Samurai Song

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted my sleep.

See video of Pinsky reciting the poem here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 05:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

paul berman on bush, iraq, and magic hegelianism

IN THE CASE of Iraq, I think that several distinct ideological elements contributed to the undoing of the administration’s best hopes. The Bush administration’s conversion to the idea of upending the sixty-year-old policy came late, and the conversion felt awkward to the president and his top advisers. The White House took a long time to learn how to express the new, democratic intentions, and inarticulateness, combined with the administration’s preference for manipulating public opinion, instead of presenting honest arguments, proved to be a disaster all by itself, with a thousand dismal consequences: no one believed a word out of Washington, there were fewer allies than necessary, and so on. And then, having hurriedly adopted the idea of pursuing a new policy in the Middle East, the administration ended up proclaiming a Bush Doctrine that turned out to be incoherent—a doctrine aiming at a democratic goal, but using means that were, often as not, better suited for other purposes.

The administration was in the grip of a belief in magic Hegelianism, which is to say, End-of-History-ism, which allowed the administration to believe that, once Saddam had been removed, democracy was going to emerge without anyone’s having to make much effort.

more from Dissent here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

i am a strange loop

Hofstadter’s principal thesis is that we ourselves, qua conscious beings, are “emergent self-referential structures”. I Am a Strange Loop thus revolves around two main ideas: the idea of an emergent phenomenon and the idea of self-reference, or of a “strange loop” to use Hofstadter’s technical term.

A strange loop is a phenomenon that involves reference to itself. An artwork, a thought, or a sentence may twist back on to itself and self-refer. Thus, the sentence “this very sentence is written in English” is self-referential, because it refers not to any old sentence, but to itself. A more surprising example explored by Hofstadter (which does not employ the demonstrative expression “this very”) is the sentence “‘preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence’ preceded by itself in quote marks yields a full sentence”. (Think about that for a moment.) Many other self-referential phenomena are discussed throughout the book, including self-videotaping videos, self-proving mathematical proofs, Escher’s self-referential paintings, etc.

more from the TLS here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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