Saturday Poem


Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places,
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“hurry, you will be dead before —–“
(What? Before you reach the morning?
or the end of the poem, is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!…..
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the Sun!

by May Sarton
from Collected Poems 1930-1993

Pakistan: a Hard Country

From The Telegraph:

Pakistan_summary_1861193f The crisis in North Africa and the Middle East has driven Pakistan out of the headlines, but this is surely only a temporary lull. Cursed by nuclear weapons, home to al-Qaeda, victim of several raging insurgencies and notorious for a chronically unstable political structure – most Western experts continue to view Pakistan as the most dangerous country in the world. So this book by Anatol Lieven could hardly be more timely. Lucid and well informed, he deals carefully with all Pakistan’s well-known problems. And one of the joys of this nicely written volume is that it avoids the hysteria and partial judgment that disfigure much contemporary writing on the subject.

Above all, it emanates a deep affection bordering on love for unfortunate, beleaguered, magical Pakistan. Lieven’s research takes him to an army cantonment in Quetta, boar-hunting in the Punjab and to a stay in Taliban-dominated Mohmand Agency on the North West Frontier. Lieven, a former foreign correspondent who is now professor of terrorism studies at King's College, London, talks to just about everybody who counts: farmers, intelligence officers, judges, clerics, politicians, doctors, soldiers, jihadis. In the course of this journey he demolishes the neo-conservative narrative that Pakistan is dominated by a mortal struggle between virtuous modernity and rage-filled Islamist conservatism. He insists that Pakistan is not – as Western intelligence agencies, journalists and think tanks believe – a country on the brink. We needn’t worry too much about its nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands. Pakistan is not about to be taken over by Islamists.

More here.

Otto von Bismarck, Master Statesman

Henry Kissinger in The New York Times:

Kissinger-1300812390028-popup In the summer of 1862, Otto von Bismarck was appointed minister-president of Prussia. His highest previous rank had been ambassador to Russia. He had never held an administrative position. Yet with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganize Central Europe. He had to overcome the obstacle that Germany comprised 39 sovereign states grouped in the so-called German Confederation. All the while, Central European trends were warily observed by the two “flanking” powers, France and Russia, ever uneasy about — and tempted to prevent — the emergence of a state capable of altering the existing European balance of power.

Within nine years, Bismarck untied this knot in what Jonathan Steinberg, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, describes as “the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries.” He overcame the princes of the German states in two wars and rallied them in a third; won over public opinion by granting universal manhood suffrage — making Prussia one of the first states in Europe to do so; paralyzed France by holding out the prospect of agreeing to the French acquisition of Luxembourg, and Russia by a benevolent attitude during the Polish revolution of 1863. Bismarck accomplished all this “without commanding a single soldier, without dominating a vast parliamentary majority, without the support of a mass movement, without any previous experience in government and in the face of national revulsion at his name and his reputation.”

More here.

Death Anxiety Shapes Views on Evolution

Tom Jacobs in Miller-McCune:

ScreenHunter_04 Apr. 02 11.17 It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this knowledge gap, newly published research suggests the key factor isn’t faith per se but rather a benefit it provides that Darwin does not: A sense that our all-too-short lives have meaning.

A Canadian study just published in the journal PLoS ONE finds a strong link between existential angst and reluctance to embrace the theory of evolution. A team of researchers led by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica Tracy report reminders of our mortality apparently inspire antagonism toward this basic scientific precept.

Tracy and her colleagues use the framework of terror management theory, which is based on the seminal theories of anthropologist Ernest Becker. According to this extensively researched school of thought, humans buffer their fear of death “by construing the universe as an orderly, comprehensible, predictable and meaningful place, where death can be literally or symbolically transcended.

More here.

Libya and International Law

Anne Orford in the London Review of Books:

Libya-no-fly-zone

Many aspects of the Libyan situation remain unclear: the scope of the mandate given to UN member states by Security Council Resolution 1973, the broader aims of the intervention, how many civilians have been killed and by whom, and who the rebels represent. One thing, however, seems clear: the international intervention is considered to be legal. International lawyers have agreed with the UK government’s advice that Security Council Resolution 1973 ‘provides a clear and unequivocal legal basis for the deployment of UK forces and military assets to achieve the resolution’s objectives’. Legal experts have been quick to suggest that Resolution 1973 gives authority for any action thought necessary not only to protect civilians, but to protect areas inhabited by civilians.

The constraints imposed on Libyan forces are similarly radical and far-reaching, going well beyond the obligations imposed by general international law on governments responding to insurgencies. The resolution demands ‘the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence’, and bans all flights in Libyan airspace unless their sole purpose is ‘humanitarian’. If the expansive authority granted to international forces and the novel obligations imposed on Libya by Resolution 1973 are sanctioned by international law, what kind of law is this? And does it deserve our fidelity?

More here.

James Gleick on the fascinating quest to understand and wield information

Tim Wu in Slate:

F2525_Gleickinfomration_gif The Bible's human authors are long since dead, along with anyone who knew them. The papers and ink originally used are long gone. Parts may be lost, but most of the text has outlasted not just paper and pen, but cities, governments, entire civilizations, and even many of the languages the text was written in. All decays and turns to dust, but the underlying information survives, immortal in a way different from almost everything else in our experience.

So that's Information. But just what is the stuff? Does it possess traits or properties that you might identify and describe? To answer such questions is James Gleick's goal in The Information, a highly ambitious and generally brilliant effort to tie together centuries of disparate scientific efforts to understand information as a meaningful concept. For a society that believes itself to live in an information age, the subject could hardly be more important. That the project doesn't fully succeed has more to do with the limits of our understanding than with Gleick's efforts.

In The Information the main character is, of course, information itself, or more precisely our understanding of it. That protagonist, over 426 pages, wanders through thousands of years and dozens of places. It starts, like humanity, in Africa, makes a stop in ancient Greece, and spends time in England to witness the writing of the first English dictionaries and Charles Babbage's effort to build a Difference Engine. Along the way our understanding develops, deepens, as information reveals itself bit by bit.

More here.

R.I.P., Manning Marable, May 13, 1950 – April, 1, 2011

SubMALCOLMX-articleInline Larry Rohter in the NYT:

For two decades, the Columbia University professor Manning Marable focused on the task he considered his life’s work: redefining the legacy of Malcolm X. Last fall he completed “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” a 594-page biography described by the few scholars who have seen it as full of new and startling information and insights.

The book is scheduled to be published on Monday, and Mr. Marable had been looking forward to leading a vigorous public discussion of his ideas. But on Friday Mr. Marable, 60, died in a hospital in New York as a result of medical problems he thought he had overcome. Officials at Viking, which is publishing the book, said he was able to look at it before he died. But as his health wavered, they were scrambling to delay interviews, including an appearance on the “Today” show in which his findings would have finally been aired.

The book challenges both popular and scholarly portrayals of Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader, describing a man often subject to doubts about theology, politics and other matters, quite different from the figure of unswerving moral certitude that became an enduring symbol of African-American pride.

It is particularly critical of the celebrated “Autobiography of Malcolm X,” now a staple of college reading lists, which was written with Alex Haley and which Mr. Marable described as “fictive.” Drawing on diaries, private correspondence and surveillance records to a much greater extent than previous biographies, his book also suggests that the New York City Police Department and the F.B.I. had advance knowledge of Malcolm X’s assassination but allowed it to happen and then deliberately bungled the investigation.

“This book gives us a richer, more profound, more complicated and more fully fleshed out Malcolm than we have ever had before,” Michael Eric Dyson, the author of “Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X” and a professor of sociology at Georgetown University, said on Thursday. “He’s done as thorough and exhaustive a job as has ever been done in piecing together the life and evolution of Malcolm X, rescuing him from both the hagiography of uncritical advocates and the demonization of undeterred critics.”

The Power of Ruins

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

ScreenHunter_03 Apr. 01 20.10 “Will it make a beautiful ruin?” That was the question Basil Spence asked about the nuclear power station he was designing in Trawsfynydd, Wales. This was back in the 1960s, but it was forward looking. Spence, an architect (he designed the famous Coventry Cathedral in England), was aware of one simple fact: Nuclear power plants are functional for a relatively short period of time before they are put out of commission and replaced by newer, safer designs and technology. The abandoned plant is filled with radioactivity that makes it unusable for anything for a long time. A cathedral is designed with the idea that it should stand, and function, for a very long time — perhaps beyond time. A nuclear power plant is designed with the knowledge that it must become a ruin, and rather quickly. It is born to die, and then to sit as a corpse, a testimony to the strange and unsettling function it once had.

The human comfort level with nuclear energy has, arguably, increased in the last few decades. But radiation will always be scary. Perhaps our fear is in inverse proportion to our ability to feel or understand the effects of radiation with any immediacy. It is the silence of radiation that is troubling, the invisibility. It is disturbing to think that you could have received a lethal dose of radiation and never know until it is too late, until the body has been corrupted from the inside out. The fear in Japan right now, as the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant continues, is one driven by not-knowing, by the impossibility of knowing exactly what is going on. This ignorance mingles with the realization that silent powers are reshaping the landscape. A nuclear ruin is being born.

More here.

Rare dinosaur footprints in Pakistan

Suhail Yusuf in Dawn:

ScreenHunter_02 Apr. 01 20.01 After leaving the mild winter of Karachi, it was quite difficult to deal with the shivering cold while balancing ourselves on paths made of rocks and pebbles – but we hiked along, eager to reach our destination soon.

When we finally did reach, Sadiq Malkani – the geologist and explorer of the mid Jurassic dinosaurs trackways – was almost shocked to see the amazing site brutally cut down by hydraulic machines recently.

“Look! I discovered two types of dinosaurs’ foot prints on this wall in 2006. The first one belonged to plant eater titanosaurian sauropods and the other was from a carnivore theropod. The theropod tracks were very clear but the local coal miners destroyed this world class site,” he shouted.

‘For the past 160 million years, nature preserved the wonderful dinosaur site for us but we ruined it within hours,’ I thought to myself with immense feeling of cold, despair and fatigue.

More here.

Festo Built An Artificial Bird

Aaron Saenz in Singularity Hub:

The latest addition to the robotic zoo moves so gracefully you can hardly believe it’s a machine. Festo’s Bionic Learning Network has been creating robots based off of nature’s biological secrets for years now, but their SmartBird is a step ahead of the game. Modeled after a seagull, the SmartBird uses a single drive system for flight – but that simple system is enough for the robot to take off, maneuver, and land autonomously. Using Zigbee radio communication, the SmartBird continuously passes information on its flight to an off-board computer that tracks, and improves, its movements. The result is a robot that seems to glide as smoothly and easily as the real thing. It’s pretty amazing to watch it in action. Check out the SmartBird in the video below, followed by an animation that gives you a peak inside its frame. Festo’s biologically inspired engineering may help catapult the field of robotics years ahead.

More here. [Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

re-watching The Wire

6293_omar

A wire taps privacies; it transmits information that’s clear or opaque; it bears whole sentences or fragments; it can close a circuit that connects numerous points of contact; it’s a straight line that’s really a web. If a wire lets cops follow the drugs, everything stays under control of official entities. But, as Lester says, if it lets them follow the money, nobody’s in control. The wire will lead you into complex corruptions at every level of society. The Wire has its own tenacity of consciousness. It won’t let go of things, and every bit at least seems wired to some other bit. Sometimes it carries and connects coherent stories, sometimes not. It’s a dark essay on illusion and delusion. It tells us as often as we can stand to hear it that there are no simple answers, that much of the time we don’t really know to ask the right questions. It dramatizes, sometimes in the bawdiest byplay I’ve ever seen on TV, how we reveal our natures. A melancholy procession of images—city neighborhoods, industrial sites, people at work, street action, weathers—ends the series as it began, in instability, disorientation, uncertainty, and irresoluteness. It welcomes us again, if we need it, to the world of adults and adult-making.

more from W. S. Di Piero at Threepenny Review here.

the recognition of utter loss

TLS_Perry_735705a

“Wanted: Good Hardy Critic”, announced Philip Larkin in a review in 1966, unimpressed by some recent attempts to fill that vacancy. There has certainly been no shortfall in applicants for the job since then, as this weighty and miscellaneous new guide to the Hardy industry amply testifies. Much criticism takes a companionable form these days and Hardy has had his share: Rosemarie Morgan’s book follows a Cambridge Companion (1999), an Oxford Reader’s Companion (2000), and a more recent Companion from Blackwell (2009). Putting “Research” into the title is a sign that this is a book geared to the perceived needs of faculty and graduate students, and its analysis of the current state of play (“Perhaps the most interesting development in recent Hardy and Film criticism has been its fusion with gender studies”, and so on) would certainly be useful to someone working out a topic for a thesis. Undergraduates and other more normal readers – of whom Hardy, thankfully, still has many – might do better with one of the other companion volumes, which find something to say about all the different elements of the oeuvre in a slightly more programmatic way. The Ashgate Research Companion does include some illuminating interpretative essays, including Andrew Radford on Hardy’s humanism and Dennis Taylor, always excellent, on Hardy’s reading of Shakespeare; there is an admirable account of Moments of Vision by Gillian Beer, and a deft study of hands in Hardy by J. Hillis Miller; but the book’s main contribution lies in its very full surveys of the secondary literature, of Hardy on film and in illustrations, its census of Hardy manuscripts, and its extensive bibliography: I imagine it will soon be appearing at the top of reading lists for Masters courses.

more from Seamus Perry at the TLS here.

Mapping the Rift

Raja Shehadeh in Guernica:

On the verge of arrest, a Palestinian lawyer and author recounts the flight from arrest of an ancestor active during the Ottoman years.

Palestinemap “They’re coming to arrest you,” Hanan, my sister-in-law, called to warn me in her strong, matter-of-fact voice. “Samer is on his way.” My mother had just called Hanan in a panic to dispatch my brother to my aid, convinced that the Palestinian security police would be at my door any minute. She was frantic. An anonymous official from the office of the Attorney General had rung her to ask about me because they did not have my phone number. Prudently, she refused to reveal it. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him,” he had menacingly said before hanging up. I wasted no time. I quickly put on thick underwear, tucked my toothbrush in a pocket and pulled on an extra sweater, prison survival tips learned from experienced security detainees I had represented in the past in Israeli military courts. Jericho, the site of the new Palestinian security prison and the old Israeli military government headquarters, can get very cold at night. On that evening of September 18, 1996, I sat huddled in the courtyard of our new house and waited for the knock on the door, trying to pretend I was neither worried nor angry.

Those first years of the transitional rule of the Palestinian Authority were strange times.

More here.

Affectiva technology taps into people’s emotions

From PhysOrg:

Affectivacof Computers may soon understand people better than their spouses do, courtesy of innovations from startup Affectiva that expand on groundbreaking sensing research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Affectiva co-founder and MIT professor Rosalind Picard showed off the fledgling firm's feelings-sensing applications at a Web 2.0 Expo that ended Thursday in San Francisco. “Feelings are complicated,” she said. “Now, we can begin to measure them and learn.” Affectiva enables computers powering websites to scan imagery for , , and that provide clues to to anything from film scenes, to game action or ads.

“It is getting past wishful thinking and wondering to understanding what is really going on, and that makes it much more actionable,” Picard told AFP. “We all have trouble reading emotional cues when we are on the Web,” she continued. “Everybody who has been there for a while has been misunderstood at some time.” People with Web cameras connected to computers were invited to try the technology by viewing a set of ads online at an “Interactive: Analyze Your Smile” page at forbes.com. Picard provided a glimpse at a “Q Sensor” that can be strapped to a wrist or ankle to assess when people are excited or bored. The sensor measures electricity being conducted through the skin to determine arousal. A research version of the Q Sensor was available, with a consumer model due out by the end of the year. “There are therapists using this, there are parents using this, we had a lawyer buy one the other day to measure his own stress,” Picard said as she pointed to a Q Sensor on her wrist. “Anywhere there is emotion, there is an application.”

More here.

Friday Poem

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

by Wislawa Szymborska

from Monologue of a Dog
translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh

Why War Is Never Really Rational

Scott Atran in the Huffington Post:

ScreenHunter_01 Apr. 01 11.16 For despite the popular delusion that war is, or ought to be, primarily a matter of political strategy and pragmatic execution, it almost never is. Squaring the circle of war and politics, morality and material interests, is not just Obama's or America's quandary, it is a species-wide dilemma that results from wanting to believe with Aristotle that we humans are fundamentally rational beings, when in fact recent advances in psychology and neuroscience strongly indicate that Enlightenment philosopher David Hume was right to say that “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.”

Models of rational behavior predict many of society's patterns, such as favored strategies for maximizing profit or likelihood for criminal behavior in terms of “opportunity costs.” But seemingly irrational behaviors like war — in which the measurable costs often far outweigh the measurable benefits — have stumped thinkers for centuries. The prospect of crippling economic burdens and huge numbers of deaths doesn't necessarily sway people from their positions on whether going to war is the right or wrong choice. One possible explanation is that people are not weighing the pros and cons for advancing material interests at all, but rather using a moral logic of “sacred values” — convictions that trump all other considerations — that cannot be quantified.

As Darwin noted in The Descent of Man, and Sun Tzu millennia before in The Art of War, the brave person is the one who is often intensely moral, undismayed by danger and demonstrably willing to kill and die for his beliefs. In the competition between groups of genetic strangers, such as empires and nations or transnational movements and ideologies, the society with greater bravery will win, all things being equal. Consider the American revolutionaries who, defying the greatest empire of the age, pledged “our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor” in the cause of “Liberty or Death,” where the desired outcome was highly doubtful.

How many lives should a leader be willing to sacrifice to remove a murderous dictator like Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein?

More here.