‘How to Be Idle’: Being and Do-Nothingness

Jeffrey Steingarten in the New York Times:

For every hour of the day and night there is a different way of being idle, which is why Tom Hodgkinson has written his book in 24 chapters. At 8 a.m. (”Waking Up Is Hard to Do”), true idlers turn off their alarms, flop over in bed and go back to sleep. Hodgkinson is amazed that we voluntarily buy alarm clocks, which serve nobody but our employers. Nine a.m. is ”the time when someone, somewhere, decided that work should start.” And at 10 a.m. the idler is still sleeping in, living out Dr. Johnson’s incontestable dictum that ”the happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.”

The chief problem with modern life is not work in itself. It is jobs. In 1993 Hodgkinson founded the British magazine The Idler, on whose Web site he succinctly sums up the horrors of having a job: ”With a very few exceptions the world of jobs is characterized by stifling boredom, grinding tedium, poverty, petty jealousies, sexual harassment, loneliness, deranged co-workers, bullying bosses, seething resentment, illness, exploitation, stress, helplessness, hellish commutes, humiliation, depression, appalling ethics, physical fatigue and mental exhaustion.” Yes, that pretty much sums it up. On this we can all agree.

And the solution? Become an idler.

More here.

Hands Across the Himalayas

Michael Elliott in Time Magazine:

Mao_gandhiThe visit to India that starts this week by Wen Jiabao, China’s Premier, is being spun as a celebration of relations between Asia’s giants that are good, and getting better. Whatever the truth of that claim, this much is certain: very soon, meetings between the leaders of China and India will not be of merely regional interest. They will be watched by the whole world.

Combined, India and China account for nearly 40% of the world’s population. Fueled by turbo-charged growth, they are both consolidating their positions as central actors in the international economy. Inevitably, their economic heft will be accompanied by political influence. China is pursuing economic alliances everywhere from Southeast Asia to Latin America; India may well soon have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Taken together, India’s and China’s rise to prominence is the great story of our time.

More here.

Moonage daydream?

Keiji Tachikawa, who was the president of NTT DoCoMo and now is the head of the Japanease space agency announced a 20 years plan that ends in a vision of our moon with humanoid robots inhabitants, all made in Japan:

As part of the plan, Japan would use advanced robotic technologies to help build the moon base, while redeveloped versions of today’s humanoid robots, such as Honda Motor Co. Ltd.’s Asimo and Sonys Qrio, could work in the moon’s inhospitable environment in place of astronauts, he said in a recent interview.

Japan’s lunar robots would do work such as building telescopes and prospecting and mining for minerals, Tachikawa said.

“I see a big role for Japan’s robotics technologies on the moon,” he said. “Japanese robots will be one of our big contributions. If there is work where robots can replace humans, they will.”

More here

The New World Order

Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books:

Bush_george20050714Those of us who opposed America’s invasion of Iraq from the outset can take no comfort from its catastrophic consequences. On the contrary: we should now be asking ourselves some decidedly uncomfortable questions. The first concerns the propriety of “preventive” military intervention. If the Iraq war is wrong—”the wrong war at the wrong time”[1] —why, then, was the 1999 US-led war on Serbia right? That war, after all, also lacked the imprimatur of UN Security Council approval. It too was an unauthorized and uninvited attack on a sovereign state—undertaken on “preventive” grounds—that caused many civilian casualties and aroused bitter resentment against the Americans who carried it out.

The apparent difference—and the reason so many of us cheered when the US and its allies went into Kosovo —was that Slobodan Milosevic had begun a campaign against the Albanian majority of Serbia’s Kosovo province that had all the hallmarks of a prelude to genocide. So not only was the US on the right side but it was intervening in real time—its actions might actually prevent a major crime. With the shameful memory of Bosnia and Rwanda in the very recent past, the likely consequences of inaction seemed obvious and far outweighed the risks of intervention. Today the Bush administration—lacking “weapons of mass destruction” to justify its rush to arms—offers “bringing freedom to Iraq” almost as an afterthought. But saving the Kosovar Albanians was what the 1999 war was all about from the start.

And yet it isn’t so simple.

More here.

Next stop, Forbidden City

Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books:

‘The poet,’ Gu Cheng wrote in 1987, ‘is just like the fabled hunter who naps beside a tree, waiting for hares to break their skulls by running headlong into the tree trunk. After waiting for a long time, the poet discovers that he is the hare.’ These words turned out to be prophetic; six years later, his terrible and sordid crash against the tree would nearly obliterate what had come before. He had been a major cultural figure in China; now his poems were being read as flashbacks from his death.

He was born in 1956 in Beijing, the son of a well-known poet and army officer, Gu Gong. At 12, he wrote a two-line poem, ‘One Generation’, which was to become an emblem of the new unofficial poetry:

Even with these dark eyes, a gift of the dark night
I go to seek the shining light1

In 1969, the Cultural Revolution sent his family into the salt desert of Shandong Province to herd pigs. The locals spoke a dialect Gu Cheng could not understand, and in his isolation he became absorbed in the natural world: ‘Nature’s voice became language in my heart. That was happiness.’ His favourite book was Jean-Henri Fabre’s 19th-century entomological notes and drawings; he collected insects and watched birds; he wrote poems in the sand with a twig, poems with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’.

More here.

Finnish Technology: Computer Screen Made From Fog

Tracy Staedter in Discovery News:

Fogscreen_zoomA new interactive computer touch screen uses fog as a projection medium instead of glass or plastic.

Such an immersive projection technology could have applications that range from walk-through advertisements to hygienic touch screens in operating rooms, where handling a keyboard or mouse could undermine sanitary conditions.

“The interactive screen is quite new and has not been used anywhere,” said Ismo Rakkolainen, chief technology officer at Seinäjoki, Finland-based Fogscreen, who together with Karri Palovuori of Tampere University of Technology developed the technology.

According to Rakkolainen, other screens made from fog have been developed, but remain non-interactive because the large water vapor particles they employ would create a damp experience for the user.

But Rakkolainen’s Fogscreen is a ceiling-mounted device that sprays a fine mist of tap water particles so small they feel dry to the touch.

The fog is contained to a rectangular shape because it is sandwiched between two layers of flowing air that keep it from dispersing.

More here.

Surviving a lightning strike

Joshua Foer in Slate:

050606_di_ledoux_tnJerry LeDoux is a guy you don’t really want to interview, because interviewing him means having to be near him, and that’s like planting yourself by a dartboard. The stone claw hanging from his neck attests to his grisly encounter with a bear’s jaw at a roadside park in August 1990. (His wife, Bee, brandishes a photo album that documents the mauling before he’s done telling the story.) The Purple Heart on his Navy Seals sniper hat testifies to the three bullets he took in Vietnam. The ugly black mark on his finger is evidence that he once air-nailed it to a floorboard. The scar on his left arm is proof that he accidentally screwed his flesh to the wall. The long knife wound on his hand? “Things happen,” he says. The most improbable of his many accidents is the one that left the least visible evidence—just a few white splotches on his arms and a discoloration near his hairline. But that doesn’t mean it’s easily forgotten. LeDoux rolls up his sleeve to show off a tattoo of a man getting struck by lightning engraved on his left bicep.

All LeDoux remembers about the moment he was struck in August 1999 is that he was standing ankle-deep in a puddle when he was overcome by an intensely bright light. He woke up a half-hour later, 20 feet away, with a vague taste of battery acid in his mouth, he said. The soles of his shoes had melted, his two-way radio had exploded, and several of his teeth had shattered. The medical ID tag he wore around his neck was melted into his chest.

More here.

Return to Hobbit Limbo

Carl Zimmer in The Loom:

Hobbit20headloSo let’s recap: It’s been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive people that some claim belong to a new branch of hominid evolution and skeptics claim were just small humans. We seem to have entered a lull in the flow of new scientific information about Homo floresiensis. The last thing we heard from its discoverers came in March, when they published scans of the Homo floresiensis braincase, which bolstered their case that the skull they found didn’t happen to belong to someone with a birth defect. The skeptics have made various noises about evidence that the fossils are indeed pathological, and thus can’t be the basis for recognizing a new species. They have told reporters about their visits to pygmies who live near the fossil site on the Indonesian island of Flores. But they have yet to publish any of this in a scientific journal, where their claims could be put to some serious scrutiny. For example, you can’t refute the claim that the fossils are a separate hominid species by showing that living pygmies on Flores are very short. You also have to deal with the odd body proportions of Homo floresiensis, such as its long arms. Perhaps these are pathological too, but no one has gone on the scientific record yet.

More here.

You thought you knew how to be a parent? Wrong: it isn’t what you do, it’s who you are

From The London Times:

IN THE late 1990s the US Department of Education undertook a monumental project called the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS). The wide-ranging ECLS data offer a number of compelling correlations between a child’s personal circumstances and its school performance. For instance, once all other factors are controlled for, it is clear that students from rural areas tend to do worse than average. Suburban children, meanwhile, are in the middle of the curve, while urban children tend to score higher than average. (It may be that cities attract a more educated workforce and, therefore, parents with smarter children.) On average, girls show results higher than boys, Asians show results higher than whites, and blacks show results similarly to whites from comparable backgrounds and in comparable schools.

Matters: The child has highly educated parents.
Doesn’t: The child’s family is intact.

A child whose parents are highly educated typically does well in school. A family with a lot of schooling tends to value schooling. Parents with higher IQs tend to get more education, and IQ is strongly hereditary.

More here.

More Creationism vs. Evolution debates

Via Sci Tech Daily, a preview of a debate on evolution vs. creation in 6 days .  .  . with some, er, interesting arguments for the latter.

“Evidence for the Creator God of the Bible

1. Natural law

The Laws of Thermodynamics are the most fundamental laws of the physical sciences.

  • 1st Law: The total amount of mass-energy in the universe is constant.
  • 2nd Law: The amount of energy available for work is running out, or entropy is increasing to a maximum.

This means the universe cannot have existed forever, otherwise it would already have exhausted all usable energy. The 2nd Law implies that no natural process can increase the total available energy of (i.e. ‘wind up’) the universe. So it must have been ‘wound up’; (high available energy) by a Creator ‘outside’ (and greater than) the universe.

. . .

3. Biological changes

Observed changes in living things head in the wrong direction to support evolution from microbe to man (macro-evolution).

Textbook examples of adaptation by natural selection (first described by the creationist Edward Blyth, pre-Darwin) always involve loss of genetic information. Mosquitoes may adapt to a DDT-containing environment by becoming resistant, because some already have the genes for DDT resistance. But overall the population loses genetic information (any genes not present in the resistant ones are eradicated from the population, since the non-resistant mosquitoes killed by DDT cannot pass on genes).”

The Selling of Jeff Koons

“He made banality blue chip, pornography avant-garde, and tchotchkes into trophy art. How Jeff Koons, with the support of a small circle of dealers and collectors, masterminded his fame and fortune.”

Kelly Devine Thomas in Art News Online:

Bubbles_1Earlier this year some of the most powerful players in the art world attended a 50th birthday party for Jeff Koons, the controversial art star who rose to fame in the 1980s. Jeffrey Deitch, who helped bankroll Koons’s ambitious and outsize “Celebration” series and nearly went bankrupt for it in the 1990s, hosted the party at his SoHo gallery, where examples from Koons’s oeuvre were projected on large screens and miniature versions of Balloon Dog, an iconic work, were handed out as party favors.

Among the high-profile museum directors, curators, artists, and collectors in the room that night were Koons’s longtime New York dealer Ileana Sonnabend, with whom he has worked on and off since 1986; Larry Gagosian, who recently began showing Koons’s new works and is now producing his “Celebration” sculptures; Robert Mnuchin, chairman of C&M Arts, which hosted a comprehensive Koons exhibition last May; and dealer William Acquavella.

More here.

How the Web changes your reading habits

Gregory M. Lamb in the Christian Science Monitor:

Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop. Far more is in store.

Take “Hamlet.” A decade ago, a student of the Shakespeare play would read the play, probably all the way through, and then search out separate commentaries and analyses.

Enter hamletworks.org.

When completed, the site will help visitors comb through several editions of the play, along with 300 years of commentaries by a slew of scholars. Readers can click to commentaries linked to each line of text in the nearly 3,500-line play. The idea is that some day, anyone wanting to study “Hamlet” will find nearly all the known scholarship brought together in a cohesive way that printed books cannot.

More here.  [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]

Blast of sound turns liquid to jelly

Celeste Biever in New Scientist:

A burst of high-frequency sound waves is enough to turn a range of oily liquid mixtures to jelly. Because the reaction is reversible, it could be used to remotely control the viscosity of liquid shock absorbers in cars or of lubricants in robotic joints, or to temporarily solidify fuels and paints so they don’t leak during transport. Engineers may one day even use the technology to make building dampers that absorb energy from external forces, prolonging a structure’s life and preventing a catastrophic event such as an earthquake from destroying it.

Gels are semi-solid mixtures that consist of a liquid trapped within the pores of a continuous network of chain-like molecules. They are usually created by adding an acid to a liquid with a solid suspended in it, known as a sol, or illuminating a sol with a flash of UV light.

More here.

Individual brain cells ‘recognize’ famous people

From MSNBC:Cat

Even a casual reader of fan magazines can recognize pictures of Halle Berry or Jennifer Aniston, no matter how the stars are dressed or wearing their hair. Now a surprising study suggests that individual brain cells can do the same thing. The work could help shed light on how the brain stores memories, an expert said. When scientists sampled brain cell activity in people who were scrutinizing dozens of pictures, they found some cells that reacted to a particular famous person, landmark, animal or object. In one case, a single cell was activated by different photos of Berry, including some in her “Catwoman” costume, a drawing of her and even the words, “Halle Berry.”

More here.

“How would you like to be attached to the Red Army?”

“A cameraman at Yalta tells what it was like to spend a few days in claustrophobic luxury with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt—and to be offered a job by Joseph Stalin.”

Robert Hopkins in American Heritage:

Feat_1_3We were flying over the Black Sea when I woke up at seven o’clock on the morning of February 3. I learned that we would be landing at Saki in the Crimea and would continue by car to Yalta, 90 miles away.

When our plane touched down, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov was there to meet us. He remembered me from the Teheran Conference and greeted me in a friendly fashion. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already landed. The President and my father arrived a few minutes later in the President’s plane, The Sacred Cow. Also on the plane were his daughter, Anna Boettiger, Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Ambassador to the U.S.S.R. Averell Harriman and his daughter, Kathy, and Maj. Gen. Edwin M. (“Pa”) Watson, the President’s military aide.

Soviet soldiers in dress uniforms lined both sides of the runway. They snapped to attention as the President’s plane landed, and a Russian military band struck up. When the President was installed in a jeep and was talking to my father, I used some of my small supply of precious four-by-five-inch color film to photograph them.

More here.

Radiosurgery: The Cyberknife

CyberknifeCyberKnife is an entirely new approach to stereotactic radiosurgery because it can deliver targeted radiation to anywhere in the body, while minimizing exposure to surrounding normal tissue. It offers all of the advantages of radiosurgery, but without the need for a metal head frame.

With sub-millimeter accuracy, CyberKnife can be used to treat tumors, cancers, vascular abnormalities and functional disorders. Best of all, it achieves surgical-like outcomes without surgery or incisions.

Using x-ray image cameras and computer technology similar to that used for cruise missile guidance, the CyberKnife locates the tumor in the body. A computer program then evaluates the unique shape and location of the tumor to determine exactly how each of 1200 or more beams of radiation will target the tumor.

An x-ray source located on the CyberKnife’s robotic arm delivers concentrated beams of radiation to the tumor from multiple positions and angles without damaging healthy surrounding tissue.

More here and here.  [Thanks to Tariq Khan.]

The Upcoming Elections in Germany, The Sick Man of Europe

Michael Naumann looks at the upcoming German elections in OpenDemocracy, one which the SPD is most likely to lose.

“After the shock of the SPD’s election defeat in North Rhine-Westphalia, Schröder attempted to restart his stuttering governmental motor by calling for a vote of confidence in the Bundestag. In what seems like voluntary political suicide, at least four members of Schröder’s cabinet or his SPD contingent have either to abstain or tell their boss that he has lost their confidence. Only by ‘losing’ does Schröder have a chance of ‘succeeding’ in his aim of fighting a premature general election.

It looks like a constitutional gimmick – and it may in fact be unconstitutional. The final decision to call for re-elections rests with Germany’s president, Horst Köhler, a man installed by the majority votes of the conservative members of an assembly made up of representatives from the Bundestag and all Länder parliaments. It is the only political power of relevance the president possesses. He may in fact decide, that in reality, Schröder’s majority in the Bundestag is stable, which would prolong the government’s life until scheduled elections in September 2006.

Against this constitutional reality is a psychological one: the vast majority of Germans seem already to be getting used to the prospect of the CDU’s candidate for chancellor, Angela Merkel, becoming Germany’s first female head of government by the end of 2005. The likelihood is a short campaign of four to five weeks, with voting in mid-September.”

New ABC Reality Show: 3 White, Conservative Christian Families Will Choose which “diverse” family moves in next door

Via Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise, ABC will air a new reality show, Welcome to the Neighborhood.

“[O]ne of seven diverse families will win a beautiful dream home on a perfect suburban cul-de-sac in Austin, Texas. But in order to win the luxuriously furnished and opulently appointed house, they must first win over the very people who will be most affected by the ultimate decision — the next-door neighbors.

During the process, relationships become strained, fears are confronted, secrets are revealed, expectations surpassed and the inner-workings of all of the competing families are exposed.

But with every encounter with these families, the opinionated neighbors’ pre-conceived assumptions and prejudices are also chipped away, and they learn that, while on the outside we may appear different, deep inside we share many common bonds. The judges find themselves learning to see people, not stereotypes.

The three neighborhood families who will be judging the competing families all love their quiet, picturesque community and are used to a certain kind of neighbor — one who looks and thinks just like them. It will be up to this watchful group to decide who should move into the dream house next door and who should be sent packing.”

Discussions of the show (here and here) veer towards outrage, disgust, and shock.  Interestingly, Focus on the Family has also condemned the show.

“But Movie Guide’s Ted Baehr said the Christian contestants will be the ones people love to hate. . .

‘Anyone who is portrayed as a minister of the Gospel,’ he said, ‘is treated as someone who is backward, a redneck, prejudiced, uncouth.'”

It goes on to encourage:

“‘Find out who the advertisers are and contact the advertisers,’ he said. ‘That’s the best way to impact a television program or series.’

But he cautions: Be careful that in your calls to ABC and its sponsors you don’t become the stereotype you’re protesting.”

(Hat tip: Dan.)

Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian

From the BBC:

Amartya2On Night Waves this evening Robert Hanks talks to Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen about his new book, the Argumentative Indian, which proposes that there is an India far more diverse and accommodating than many descriptions from outsiders suggest. Sen argues that this atmosphere of tolerance and secularism supports a healthy argumentative tradition and climate for debate which, in turn, has much to offer the current debate around democracy.

Audio clip here.  [Thanks to Lara Inis.]