India Is Colonising Itself

Arundhati Roy and Shoma Chaudhuri in Counter Currents:

There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How do you read the signs? Do you think it will grow more in the days to come? What are its causes? In what context should all this be read?

You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, being reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrializing western countries which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonize ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in Independent India. The secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere. They’ve managed to commandeer the resources , the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now they want the land to make more cars, more bombs, more mines – super toys for the new super citizens of the new superpower…

More here.

Smithsonian 4th Annual Photo Contest Finalists

From Smithsonian Magazine:

We have selected 10 Finalists in each of the five categories—Americana, The Natural World, People, Altered Images, Travel—and you can now view those photographs here.

We plan to reveal the Grand Prize Winner and the five Category Winners in a summer 2007 issue of Smithsonian. Likewise, we will reveal the winners here, on our Web site.

Botanical garden in Slovenia
Damjan Voglar
Ljubljana, Slovenia

2949_2_5185

Shoppers crossing a glass floor
David Mendelsohn
Brooklyn, NY

1677_3_2775

More here.

Meet Mr. Polytope

Tony Rothman reviews King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry by Siobhan Roberts, in American Scientist:

Fullimage_20072594638_846Less than the time needed to open a book is required for a prospective reader to understand that the publishers of King of Infinite Space, Siobhan Roberts’s new biography of geometer Donald Coxeter, have cheerfully absorbed the precepts of Hollywood marketeers: Packaged with enthusiastic blurbs from physicist Freeman Dyson, mathematician John Conway, writers Martin Gardner and James Gleick, and historian Peter Galison, not to mention a foreword by Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter, the whole is designed, much like full-page movie ads in the New York Times, to render harmless slings and arrows hurled by errant reviewers. In this case, though, one can sympathize with the tactic: It’s a safe bet that few people outside of narrow mathematical circles have ever heard the name Donald Coxeter, despite the fact that many mathematicians regard him as the greatest geometer of the 20th century.

Coxeter’s lack of name recognition is only the first challenge Roberts faces…

More here.

Less carbon, more community building

Bill McKibben in the Christian Science Monitor:

Screenhunter_02_apr_01_1721Earlier this month, a draft White House report was leaked to news outlets. The report, a year overdue to the United Nations, said that the United States would be producing almost 20 percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than it had in 2000 and that the US contribution to global warming would be going up steadily, not sharply and steadily down, as scientists have made clear it must.

That’s a pretty stunning piece of information – a hundred times more important than, say, the jittery Dow Jones Industrial Average that garnered a hundred times the attention. How is it even possible? How, faced with the largest crisis humans have yet created for themselves, have we simply continued with business as usual?

The answer is, in a sense, all in our minds. For the past century, American society’s basic drive has been toward more – toward a bigger national economy, toward more stuff for consumers. And it’s worked. Our economy is enormous; our houses are enormous. We are (many of us quite literally) living large. All that “more” is created using cheap energy and hence built on carbon dioxide – which makes up 72 percent of all greenhouse gases.

More here.

Fodor vs. Dennett on Darwinism

Via Political Theory Daily Review, in science blogs Jerry Fodor against Darwinism :

This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I’ve addressed in print before. (see Fodor, 19xx; 19xx). But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was about what happens when you try to integrate Darwinism with an intentional theory like propositional attitude psychology. And then, still further on, it struck me that what the paper was really really about wasn’t the tension between Darwinism and theories that are intentional (with a `t’), but the tension between Darwinism and theories that are intensional (with an `s`).1 The latter is more worrying since Darwinism, or anyhow adaptationism, is itself committed to intensionally individuated processes like `selection for.’ So the claim turned out to be that there is something seriously wrong with adaptationism per se. Having gotten that far, I could have rewritten this as straightforwardly a paper about adaptationism, thereby covering my tracks. But I decided not to do so. It seems to me of interest to chart a route from being suspicious of Evolutionary Psychology to having one’s doubts about the whole adaptationist enterprise.

Daniel Dennett responds:

As often before, Jerry Fodor makes my life easier, this time by (1) figuring out a persuasive reductio ad absurdum argument for my views, (2) absolving me of any suspicion that I’m creating a straw man by resolutely embracing the absurd conclusion, and (3) providing along the way some vivid lessons in How Not to Do Philosophy. The only work left for me to do is (a) draw attention to these useful pedagogical aids, (b) point out the absurdity of Jerry’s expressed position and (c) remind you that I told you so.

The reductio, nicely indented and numbered (though step (v) seems to have vanished), has the startling conclusion:

Contrary to Darwinism, the theory of natural selection can’t explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in biological populations.

Now this really is absurd. Silly absurd. Preposterous. It is conclusions like this, built upon such comically slender stilts, that give philosophy a bad name among many scientists.

Controversy over PBS’s “America at a Crossroads”

In the NYT:

For six consecutive nights beginning April 15 PBS will turn over two hours of prime time to “America at a Crossroads,” a series of 11 programs, including Mr. Perle’s, meant to engage debate over contentious post-9/11 issues, from the origins of Islamic fundamentalism to the perceived tradeoffs the United States has made between security and liberty.

Getting past the epithets hasn’t been easy. The series was conceived in 2004 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity that administers federal money for public radio and television, to prove to Congress that public television was worthy of its more than $300 million annual subsidy. Even now Congress is debating the White House’s request to cut public broadcasting’s funds by 25 percent.

The corporation financed the series with $20 million in federal money, an enormous sum for chronically struggling independent filmmakers. But, perhaps inevitably, such a charged project became caught up in the nation’s culture wars.

At a “Crossroads” briefing in New York in March 2004 filmmakers angrily vented concerns that the series was being politically manipulated. Their ire was directed at Michael Pack, then the corporation’s senior vice president for television. He had been brought in the year before to diversify the voices on public television, a mandate that included financing more conservative programming to balance a lineup that his superiors perceived as overly liberal.

Is Wikipedia the New Town Hall?

Pat Aufderheide in In These Times:

The public sphere is the informal part of our lives where we manage the quality of our shared culture. Church, the post office, sidewalks, Starbucks, the water cooler—they are all places in the physical world (or what our digerati friends like to call “meat space”) where people bring along their experience with the media. It is an informally structured set of social relationships, where power can be mobilized against large institutions such as the state and large corporations.

Mass media have acted as a pseudo-public sphere. Broadcast news services were stand-ins for our collective, top-priority concerns of public life. Popular programs were, similarly, pseudo-public culture, distilled examples of how a culture understands itself—or at least as corporate broadcasters would like it to.

Public broadcasting has been a protected, if compromised, zone that provides some higher-quality opportunities for people to learn about each other and their problems, and to share a common cultural experience of consuming the same media. But public broadcasting is still a stand-in for public communication, because it is a mass medium. The broadcasters speak to the many, who then talk to each other.

Can digital media change this? Can new technologies bring media made by, with and for the public? Could pubcasters be part of it?

Patnaik and Stiglitz on India’s Economy and Economic Future

At Columbia University’s Heyman Center for the Humanities, a video of the February 13th discussion between Joseph Stiglitz and Prabhat Patnaik on “An Emergent India: Prospects and Problems“:

A public conversation between Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate economist, and Prabhat Patnaik, perhaps India’s most distinguished left wing economist.

Democracy’s Prophet: How a young 19th-century French aristocrat grasped America’s character

From The Washington Post:

Toq Alexis de Tocqueville is a towering figure in 19th-century political thought, on a par with Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill and more prophetic than either of them. It is therefore a bit confounding to realize that, despite all the books and essays about Tocqueville’s masterpiece, Democracy in America, there was no full-scale biography in English of the man himself.

Now there is. Hugh Brogan’s Alexis de Tocqueville is a magisterial account, 50 years in the making, that follows the precocious French nobleman through the swirling history of post-revolutionary France, the rutted roads of backwoods America, the bewildering comings and goings of different royalist and republican French governments, all the way to Tocqueville’s somewhat controversial final hours in 1859, when the question of his religious convictions at the end remains blurry. If this is not the definitive life, it is only because no such thing is possible. It is surely the authoritative life for our time.

More here.

Was Great Pyramid built from inside out?

From MSNBC:Pyramid2_hmed_11a

A French architect says he has cracked a 4,500-year-old mystery surrounding Egypt’s Great Pyramid, claiming that it was built from the inside out. Scientists have long wondered how the Egyptians placed the Great Pyramid’s 3 million stone blocks, which each weigh about 2.5 tons. Previous theories have suggested that the tomb of Pharaoh Cheops (Khufu), the last surviving example of the seven great wonders of antiquity, was built using either a vast frontal ramp or a ramp in a corkscrew shape around the exterior to haul up the stonework.

But flouting previous wisdom, Jean-Pierre Houdin said advanced 3-D technology has shown that the main ramp used to haul the massive stones to the apex was contained 30 to 50 feet (10 to 15 meters) beneath the outer skin, tracing a pyramid within a pyramid. According to his theory — shown in a computer model — the builders put up an outer ramp for the first 140 feet (40 meters), then constructed an inner ramp in a corkscrew shape to complete the 450-foot-high (137-meter-high) structure.

More here.