Reverence : Nuisance
Meena Kandaswamy

On walls of reception counters
and staircases of offices, hospitals, firms
and other ‘secular’ institutions –
pictures of Hindu Gods are painted…
so that casual people walking in (or up or down)
fear to spit on the adorned walls.

But still looking around or climbing:
you can always find the work done
an irregular red border underlining the walls
owing so much to betel juice and spit.

And on cheap roadside compound walls
that don’t bear ‘Stick No Bills’ messages or
cinema and political posters — the Gods once again
are advertised. And captioned with legends that read
‘Do Not Urinate’. And yet, the Gods are covered with
layers of smelly urine – they don’t retaliate.

Tolerance is a very holy concept.

Or like someone said,
the Caste Gods deserve
the treatment they get.

from: Touch; Peacock Books, Mumbai 2006

From The Root:

Traditional proverb: Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. In Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working And How There is a Better Way For Africa, former Goldman Sachs and World Bank employee Dr. Dambisa Moyo adeptly posits that no matter how many billions of dollars Western associations and governments funnel into Africa, it will not reduce or solve the problem of poverty in Africa. Economic development in Asia and Latin America has been more successful than anything seen in Africa.

Moyo’s idea is not exactly original. Criticizing Western (read: white) benevolence to Africans has become sport among the black intelligentsia. What the author succeeds at in Dead Aid, however, is uniting these arguments together for the first time in an accessible work. In this age of financial crisis and the wake of the G-20 summit, Dead Aid is a worthwhile contribution to the debate on economic relief. The book also provides valuable information about the status of existing aid programs.

More here.

From Scientific American:

If people told you that they wanted to have a perfectly good leg amputated, or that they have three arms, when they clearly do not, you would probably think that they are mentally disturbed. Psychiatrists, too, long considered such conditions to be psychological in origin. Voluntary amputation, for example, was regarded as a fetish, perhaps arising because an amputee's stump resembles a phallus, whereas imaginary extra limbs were likely to be dismissed as the products of delusions or hallucinations.

These bizarre conditions—named body integrity and identity disorder (BIID) and supernumerary phantom limb, respectively—are now believed to have a neurological basis, and a growing body of literature suggests that such body awareness disorders occur as a result of abnormal activity in the right superior parietal lobule (SPL). This brain region integrates different types of sensory information and processes it further to generate an internal model of the body. Two forthcoming studies provide strong evidence that the gross distortions of body image experienced in both conditions do indeed occur as a result of SPL dysfunction.

More here.

For Chris Schoen 🙂

Sandra Tsing Loh in The Atlantic:

Back in 1983, Fussell—author of the renowned book The Great War and Modern Memory—argued that although Americans loathe discussing social class, this relatively new, rugged country of ours did indeed have a British-style class system, if less defined by money than by that elusive quality called taste. To be sure, Fussell’s universe is somewhat passé, in that its population is almost exclusively white (with the Mafia thrown in for color), and the three “classes” in his opening primer conform to clichés we might think of as Old-Money Wasp, Midwestern Insurance Salesman, and Southern Trailer Trash. The top classes, according to Fussell (with a hint of Nancy Mitford), drink Scotch on the rocks in a tumbler decorated with sailboats and say “Grandfather died”; Middles say “Martooni” and “Grandma passed away”; Proles drink domestic beer in a can and say “Uncle was taken to Jesus.”

The still-fresh guilty pleasure of the reading, however, comes from the insistent unspooling, with an almost Ptolemaic complexity, of Fussell’s cocktail-party-ready argument. (I picture him in rumpled tie elbowing his laughing-head-into-her-hands hostess while he gestures breezily with a glass of chardonnay—white wine itself being much classier in 1983 than now.)

More here.

Click here for much bigger, more detailed graphic.

From The New York Times:

In her compelling 2005 book, “Lipstick Jihad,” the journalist Azadeh Moaveni chronicled the underground youth culture in Tehran at the turn of the millennium, writing about teenagers who embraced an “as if lifestyle,” acting as if their country were not under the control of hard-line mullahs, as if they were allowed to hold hands on the street, blast rock ’n’ roll at parties, read censored books, speak their minds, challenge authority, wear too much lipstick. Ms. Moaveni argued that grass-roots changes in Iran — from the spread of illegal satellite dishes and illegal video dealers to the popularity of blogging — would eventually alter the trajectory of that country’s history, while the demographic ascendance of a younger generation would transform the nation from below.

Ms. Moaveni’s new book, “Honeymoon in Tehran,” which describes the fallout that the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have on Iran, paints a far less optimistic portrait of the country. It depicts the author’s own struggles to make a home for herself in Tehran — where she fell in love, married an Iranian and gave birth to a boy — and her realization that she could no longer pursue a career as a journalist and raise a family there. It is a book that uses the author’s own experiences as a prism by which to view political developments in Tehran, a book that leaves the reader with an indelible portrait of the author’s family and a highly personal picture of Iran’s social and political evolution.

More here.

Bernard Condon and Nathan Vardi in Forbes:

It would have been nice to have cash on hand to meet margin calls, but Harvard had next to none. That was because these supremely self-confident money managers were more than fully invested. As of June 30 they had, thanks to the fancy derivatives, a 105% long position in risky assets. The effect is akin to putting every last dollar of your portfolio to work and then borrowing another 5% to buy more stocks.

Desperate for cash, Harvard Management went to outside money managers begging for a return of money it had expected to keep parked away for a long time. It tried to sell off illiquid stakes in private equity partnerships but couldn't get a decent price. It unloaded two-thirds of a $2.9 billion stock portfolio into a falling market. And now, in the last phase of the cash-raising panic, the university is borrowing money, much like a homeowner who takes out a second mortgage in order to pay off credit card bills.

Johann Hari in The Independent:

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed's smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned. In the swankiest new constructions – like the vast Atlantis hotel, a giant pink castle built in 1,000 days for $1.5bn on its own artificial island – where rainwater is leaking from the ceilings and the tiles are falling off the roof. This Neverland was built on the Never-Never – and now the cracks are beginning to show. Suddenly it looks less like Manhattan in the sun than Iceland in the desert.

Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]

Elaine Glaser in New Humanist:

In the pre-modern era, there was no distinction between sciences and the arts. They were intertwined enterprises. In his famous 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge University CP Snow lamented the fact that, as a result of increasing specialisation, they now occupied entirely different spheres.

This set off a debate that has been raging ever since. But in recent years it’s taken some odd twists. Science, even among the most literary and philosophical of public intellectuals, has taken ascendancy over the arts as the more dominant discipline. And Snow’s two cultures have been replaced by a new dichotomy – between science and religion. Meanwhile the humanities, floundering somewhere in between, are in danger of being lost in the maelstrom.

In that first, ground-breaking lecture, Snow condemned scientists for their “self impoverishment” which resulted from their dismissal of the literary and artistic culture, and then denounced members of the literati for being Luddite in their attitude to science. His argument was ostensibly a plea for intellectual unity and educational reform. At times, however, his complaint about the two-cultures-divide became particularly a complaint about the lack of public understanding of science.

Mark Buchanan in Physics World:

This is how discovery works: returns on research investment do not arrive steadily and predictably, but erratically and unpredictably, in a manner akin to intellectual earthquakes. Indeed, this idea seems to be more than merely qualitative. Data on human innovation, whether in basic science or technology or business, show that developments emerge from an erratic process with wild unpredictability. For example, as physicist Didier Sornette of the ETH in Zurich and colleagues showed a few years ago, the statistics describing the gross revenues of Hollywood movies over the past 20 years does not follow normal statistics but a power-law curve — closely resembling the famous Gutenberg— Richter law for earthquakes — with a long tail for high-revenue films. A similar pattern describes the financial returns on new drugs produced by the bio-tech industry, on royalties on patents granted to universities, or stock-market returns from hi-tech start-ups.

What we know of processes with power-law dynamics is that the largest events are hugely disproportionate in their consequences. In the metaphor of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007 best seller The Black Swan, it is not the normal events, the mundane and expected “white swans” that matter the most, but the outliers, the completely unexpected “black swans”. In the context of history, think 11 September 2001 or the invention of the Web. Similarly, scientific history seems to pivot on the rare seismic shifts that no-one predicts or even has a chance of predicting, and on those utterly profound discoveries that transform worlds. They do not flow out of what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “normal science” — the paradigm-supporting and largely mechanical working out of established ideas — but from “revolutionary”, disruptive and risky science.

All of which, as Sornette has been arguing for several years, has important implications for how we think about and judge research investments. If the path to discovery is full of surprises, and if most of the gains come in just a handful of rare but exceptional events, then even judging whether a research programme is well conceived is deeply problematic. “Almost any attempt to assess research impact over a finite time”, says Sornette, “will include only a few major discoveries and hence be highly unreliable, even if there is a true long-term positive trend.”

This raises an important question: does today’s scientific culture respect this reality? Are we doing our best to let the most important and most disruptive discoveries emerge?

Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books:

When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen. In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can “let the past be past”—whether or not we can “get beyond it and look forward.” Torture, for Dick Cheney and for President Bush and a significant portion of the American people, is more than a repugnant series of “procedures” applied to a few hundred prisoners in American custody during the last half-dozen or so years—procedures that are described with chilling and patient particularity in this authoritative report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.^[2] Torture is more than the specific techniques—the forced nudity, sleep deprivation, long-term standing, and suffocation by water,” among others—that were applied to those fourteen “high-value detainees” and likely many more at the “black site” prisons secretly maintained by the CIA on three continents.

Torture, as the former vice-president's words suggest, is a critical issue in the present of our politics—and not only because of ongoing investigations by Senate committees, or because of calls for an independent inquiry by congressional leaders, or for a “truth commission” by a leading Senate Democrat, or because of demands for a criminal investigation by the ACLU and other human rights organizations, and now undertaken in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Poland.^[3] For many in the United States, torture still stands as a marker of political commitment—of a willingness to “do anything to protect the American people,” a manly readiness to know when to abstain from “coddling terrorists” and do what needs to be done. Torture's powerful symbolic role, like many ugly, shameful facts, is left unacknowledged and undiscussed. But that doesn't make it any less real. On the contrary.

Torture is at the heart of the deadly politics of national security.

More here.

Lizzie Buchen in Wired:

Size matters in particle physics: The bigger the machine, the more violently physicists can smash atoms together and break open the deepest mysteries of the subatomic world. But a revolutionary new technology could eventually render some gargantuan particle accelerators passé.

Using simulations, a team of German and Russian physicists have pioneered a new technique for particle acceleration, called proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration (PWFA). The technique may one day allow machines a fraction of the size of today's accelerators to create the highest-energy particles ever.

“This could be a major step forward,” says Allen Caldwell of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, coauthor of the study, which appeared in Nature Physics Sunday. “The dream is that it will lead to much more compact — and therefore much cheaper — electron accelerators.”

Progress in particle physics is contingent on the power of particle accelerators, and as particle colliders grow, the price tag and bureaucratic hurdles grow with them. Government pocketbooks are becoming increasingly tight — in December both the U.S. and the U.K. pulled out of the proposed $7 billion International Linear Collider, which may never actually be built. So to continue searching for answers to physics' greatest questions — dark matter, extra dimensions, supersymmetry — physicists may have to find a fundamentally new way to accelerate particles. Caldwell and his colleagues hope proton-driven PWFA will pave the way.

More here.

As a boy I owned, and kept in a drawer containing my personal treasures, a pamphlet entitled Pipes and Pipemen. On the cover was a drawing of a bouffant-haired man (this was the mid-Seventies) puffing on a pipe with eyes half-closed in rapture. Inside was some purple stuff about ‘the pleasures of the briar’, followed by a list of all the men who’d won the Pipe Smoker of the Year award. I knew some of these men, and their pipes, from watching children’s television. There was the bucolic broadcaster Jack Hargreaves (Pipe Smoker of the Year 1969), who was apparently a very important player at Southern Television, but who was always dressed as though about to go fly-fishing. When, as a panellist on the programme How!, it was his turn to explain some scientific curiosity to his audience of eight- to fourteen-year-olds, there would be a good few seconds of preliminary pipe-puffing – very relaxing for Jack, but very tense-making for us children as we fretted: ‘Is he ever going to take that thing out of his mouth and begin?’

more from Granta here.

I suspect that many professional philosophers, including ones such as myself who have no religious beliefs at all, are slightly embarrassed, or even annoyed, by the voluble disputes between militant atheists and religious apologists. As Michael Frayn points out in his delightful book The Human Touch, the polite English are embarrassed when the subject of religion crops up at all. But we have more cause to be uncomfortable. The annoyance comes partly because of the strong sense of deja vu. But it is not just that old tunes are being replayed, but that they are being replayed badly. The classic performance was given by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, written in the middle of the 18th century. Hume himself said that nothing could be more artful than the Dialogues, and it is the failure to appreciate that art that is annoying. In the Dialogues, there are three principal characters. The first is Philo, a religious sceptic, whose voice is clearly that of Hume himself. Cleanthes is an apologist whose stock in trade is the argument that design is evidence of the existence of a deity: the familiar argument that the delicate and wonderful adjustments of nature irresistibly point to the existence of a divine architect – all nature declares the Creator’s glory.

more from the Times Higher Education here.

BY THE SPRING of 1844 Henry David Thoreau had accomplished almost nothing. He was 26 years old and had spent the better part of his life more or less adrift. In the seven years after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau tried to support himself in a variety of ways, as a teacher, tutor, writer, surveyor, and as a general handyman. He lived for a time with his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and later in New York City with Emerson’s brother, only to return to Concord to reside once again with his own family. Then, in the summer of 1845, Thoreau built a solitary cabin at Walden Pond, and set about the great venture in simplified living for which he would become famous. Over the course of the next two years – some of the most productive of Thoreau’s life – he recorded meticulous observations of nature in his journal, revised the manuscript of his first major work, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” and completed the first draft of his magnum opus, “Walden, or Life in the Woods.”

more from The Boston Globe here.

The Armful
Robert Frost

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

From Nature:

Researchers in China today announced a discovery that challenges a canonical belief in reproductive biology: that women are born with a set number of immature egg cells, called oocytes, which become depleted with age. In a paper in Nature Cell Biology,¹ the Chinese team reports that it has found precursors to oocytes in adult mice. When the researchers transplanted those cells into sterilized mice, they produced offspring — a finding that feeds into an ongoing debate about the limits of mammalian fertility.

“It provides a smoking gun,” says Jonathan Tilly of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the work but has previously published evidence that new eggs can be formed in adult mice in a series of argument-sparking papers.² Although the current work hasn't settled the question, Tilly says, it represents an addition to the “critical mass of data” suggesting that old ovaries can produce new eggs, a finding that some say could have implications for fertility medicine.

More here.