Man Arrested at LHC Claims He’s From the Future

Lhc_aprilfool I love this image of the future. Nick Hide in CNet:

A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had travelled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.

The LHC successfully collided particles at record force earlier this week, a milestone Mr Cole was attempting to disrupt by stopping supplies of Mountain Dew to the experiment’s vending machines. He also claimed responsibility for the infamous baguette sabotage in November last year.

Mr Cole was seized by Swiss police after CERN security guards spotted him rooting around in bins. He explained that he was looking for fuel for his ‘time machine power unit’, a device that resembled a kitchen blender.

Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I’m here to stop it ever happening.”

[H/t: Ajay Chaudhary]



Derrida: An Autothanatography

200px-Derrida_main Marco Roth in n+1:

A man's death from pancreatic cancer at the age of seventy-four will not change any of this nor resolve old disputes. Death is not a metaphor, although there certainly exists a powerful rhetoric of death and nothing calls up rhetorical excess like death. And yet I want to mourn Derrida in a way that I've never felt about public figures or writers. I want to make hyperbolic claims about the end of an era: the last great generation of intellectuals, Derrida and Edward Said in the last year. They are passing. We couldn't grasp them when they lived. Will we even bother now they're dead? That's a selfish fear behind an odd sentiment. Does complexity matter? And to whom? Especially now when we prefer certainty, loyalty, iterability, and information (preferably the kind that confirms what we know already), when Bernard Lewis and Bernard Henri Levy are the house intellectuals of choice? How good those two must feel to know that they've at least lived long enough to see their ideological enemies buried.

Only an American would pair Said and Derrida as representatives of a hope for the future of thinking and education that was always more than just fashionable theory, although fashion itself is a decayed form of hope. The fashion for theory and the words “Orientalism” and “Deconstruction” was as much a result of intelligent, angry and alienated Americans fastening on to a promise without quite grasping the training and the commitment to lonely thinking through a fixed tradition required to make it a reality. Despite its rapid politicization, “theory” in America or la pensée 68 in France, was not going to change the world (if by world we mean government). Theory, however, could and did change individual lives. Briefly, it redeemed difficulty and especially a discomfort some people felt intuitively about subject and object, language and self. Those people who felt they stood on shaky foundations suddenly had a home for their native anti-foundationalism. They too could become theorists. Think of it as a job creation program for all intellectual nerds, outcasts and misfits, people whose kind of intelligence meant that they weren't even comfortable around most other intelligent people. The betrayal by the American system of higher education of those who'd enrolled enthusiastically in these job placement programs is a sad but minor footnote to the history of the 1990s. I don't mean the dwindling number of jobs for French, German, and philosophy PhDs or the corporatization of the University, although that's part of it. The betrayal began before, when those who showed glimmers of interest in theory were led to think that their curiosity would be nurtured into knowledge by a series of occasional course offerings and visiting instructors who rarely stayed long enough to ground a program. Instead of finding themselves in an academy, however, these students found themselves in the agora, fighting for money, time, attention, and space against better organized guilds. Theory did not, in itself, corrupt the young. The siege mentality surrounding theorists and theory did.

the cleanest race

CleanestRacecvrfinal_small

On my first visit to Pyongyang in 1979, handlers and interviewees repeatedly spoke of the North Koreans’ constant need to be on guard against “impure elements.” The unfamiliar term, puzzling at first, turned out to mean the country’s enemies. The implication was that the North Koreans themselves were pure. Indeed, as B.R. Myers argues in his provocative and important new book, a childish fantasy of purity is at the core of the ideology that the North Korean regime has used so effectively to control its people. It is a doctrine that, according to Myers, owes relatively little to Marxism-Leninism, or to Confucianism. It is, rather, “an implacably xenophobic, race-based worldview derived largely from fascist Japanese myth.” Like Japan’s Hirohito, the late North Korean President Kim Il Sung was popularly portrayed as the parent of an unsophisticated “child race whose virtues he embodied.” Each of the two rulers “was associated with white clothing, white horses, the snow-capped peak of the race’s sacred mountain, and other symbols of racial purity.” Each was “joined with his subjects as one entity, ‘one mind united from top to bottom.’ ” Each was “the Sun of the Nation,…the Great Marshal…whom citizens must ‘venerate’…and be ready to die for.”

more from Bradley K. Martin at TNR here.

to save something from the flood which catches us by surprise

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Tadeusz Różewicz is a poet of dark refusals, hard negations. He is a naked or impure poet (“I crystallize impure poetry,” he writes), an anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful it may be. He scorns the idea of the poet as prophet and speaks from the margins—a stubborn outsider. “A poet is one who believes / and one who cannot,” he declares. He dwells in uncertainties and doubts, in the insecure, gray areas of life—skepticism is his native mindset—and strips poetry down to its bare essentials: words alone on a page. He is bracingly clear and shuns the floridities—the grand consolations—of the traditional lyric. His characteristic free-verse style is a non-style, a zero-sum game. “I have no time for aesthetic values,” he says. Rather, he treats modern poetry as “a battle for breath” and writes with an anxious, prolific, offhanded urgency. He is wary and intense, a bemused seer of nothingness. I consider him the Samuel Beckett of modern Polish poetry.

more from Edward Hirsch at VQR here.

genius was a god

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When a modern person thinks of artistic genius, they imagine an individual. Some have quantified genius by standardized exams – for example, the I.Q. test – but most know a genius by his work. The Brothers Karamazov is proof that Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a genius. Be it Shakespeare, Mozart, or Michelangelo, the man of genius is epoch-making because his work acutely affects history and seems to redefine our basic categories of human potential. Yet in our common imagination, the artistic genius is not only an individual of excellent output, but an individual of a certain disposition. The man of genius is exceptional in intelligence, originality, and creativity. While free from all that restrains the average person, he bears the greatest burden of all: the burden of being him.

more from Michael Toscano at Curator here. (h/t bookforum)

the first beautiful hints

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In middle school my friends and I enjoyed chewing on the classic conundrums. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Easy — they both explode. Philosophy’s trivial when you’re 13. But one puzzle bothered us: if you keep moving halfway to the wall, will you ever get there? Something about this one was deeply frustrating, the thought of getting closer and closer and yet never quite making it. (There’s probably a metaphor for teenage angst in there somewhere.) Another concern was the thinly veiled presence of infinity. To reach the wall you’d need to take an infinite number of steps, and by the end they’d become infinitesimally small. Whoa. Questions like this have always caused headaches. Around 500 B.C., Zeno of Elea posed a set of paradoxes about infinity that puzzled generations of philosophers, and that may have been partly to blame for its banishment from mathematics for centuries to come. In Euclidean geometry, for example, the only constructions allowed were those that involved a finite number of steps. The infinite was considered too ineffable, too unfathomable, and too hard to make logically rigorous.

more from Steven Strogatz at The Opinionater here.

a literally ecumenical humanity, idiosyncratic and in reciprocal contact

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We know what Giambattista Tiepolo looked like, because he put himself in so many of his frescoes. There he is in 1726 at the age of thirty, with his wonky nose and his ironic trembly lips and his lively scared eyes, standing beside the furious figure of Jacob on the wall of the Patriarch’s Palace in Udine. And there he is again twenty-seven years later, beside his son Domenico, the eyes a little sadder, the lip a bit more tremulous, on the ceiling of the Prince-Bishop’s palace staircase at Würzburg, the matchless Treppenhaus, which for two centuries was the largest fresco in the world and is still one of the most beautiful. But about what Giambattista Tiepolo thought we have scarcely a clue. “Of all the greats of painting Tiepolo was the last one who knew how to keep silent”, declares Roberto Calasso in this superbly ambitious, quirky, sometimes querulous, sometimes lyrical and finally persuasive essay. It is no disability that Calasso should be famous as an imaginative and painstaking explorer of myth rather than as a historian of art. For it takes a close reading of those enormous frescoes to make Tiepolo declare himself to us in the same way as Kafka was made to speak in K. and the dusty lumber of Greek myth was shined up in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. There is perhaps no other way to rescue Tiepolo from the condescension of posterity and to reinstall him in the high culture of the West.

more from Ferdinand Mount at the TLS here.

The planet-hackers are coming

From MSNBC:

Earth Should we put more pollutants into the air to keep Earth's temperature down? How about covering polar ice with reflective panels to cut down on melting? Or putting a giant umbrella in space to shade the planet? Some of the ideas for easing Earth's warming trend may sound crazy – but in a newly published book titled “Hack the Planet,” Eli Kintisch says scientists may have no choice but to give them a try. The only thing crazier than geoengineering is what we're doing now to the atmosphere by continuing to dump carbon dioxide into it,” he told me.

Kintisch, a staff writer for the journal Science, delves into the flip side of the global climate issue: If we're in the beginning stages of a radical warm-up in global temperatures, caused in part by greenhouse-gas emissions, what can we do about it? One part of the answer is to reduce those emissions. Scientists, engineers and policymakers are working on strategies to do that. We could see cleaner cars, less carbon-intensive energy sources, and perhaps carbon-curbing legislation as well. But some researchers say that still won't be enough. Some of the less crazy ideas for hacking the planet might still have to be put into effect. That's why Kintisch calls geoengineering “a bad idea whose time has come.”

More here.

High noon in the middle east

From Prospect Magazine:

Grenade “Netanyahu thinks he is the superpower,” remarked Bill Clinton bitterly in 1996, “and we are here to do whatever he requires.” Today, as the Americans and the Israelis refuse to budge on the fraught issue of settlements in East Jerusalem, this statement rings truer than ever. US-Israeli relations are at a historic low. But the current standoff is about much more than settlement-building. Underlying it is Washington’s concern that Netanyahu’s repeated gestures of provocation—like the establishment of Jewish heritage sites in the Palestinian territories—are drawing the region towards a conflict unprecedented since 1948. And this time there is a nuclear dimension.

The widely-reported Israeli “insult” to the US—publishing tenders for the construction of apartments in the contested territory of East Jerusalem just as Vice President Joe Biden was in the country announcing peace talks—was considered so audacious that Obama’s tough response has been largely supported, even in overwhelmingly pro-Israel America. The same was the case for Clinton in 1996. This time, however, US-Israeli differences run far deeper. The muffled drums of war have been gathering volume in the middle east for some time, and Obama is seizing the chance to send a clear message: that the US will not be drawn into conflict by the Israelis.

More here.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Can Apple Maintain Status as Religion of the ‘Creative Class’?

Andy Jordan over at the blog Digits of the WSJ:

Apple’s core following has traditionally been the creative class. They are graphic designers and artists, and they constitute a “church” of sorts.

“When you find other Mac users, they’re so happy to find other people, it’s like the underdog,” says Peter Isgrigg, Product Manager at Apple specialist Tekserve in Manhattan, and self-proclaimed Mac fanatic, and subject of my new video on Apple’s cult-like status.

“When you’re in a minority and you find other people in that minority group, you tend to latch on to them and you tend to find a source of pride, or positivity in that uniqueness, and I think that’s where a lot of Mac users get that fantatacism,” Mr. Isgrigg says.

Apple in a sense cultivated this “underdog” or creative-class status to successfully market its products. Consider Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign, or its ubiquitous Apple vs. PC ads featuring a young, hip Justin Long.

Apple has also not discouraged a religion-like following of its products. The notion is reinforced by the messianic aspect of founder Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple to save the company, and has done so several times.

There’s also the popular perception among devotees that Apple is “good” and competitors like IBM, Microsoft, and now even Google are “evil.” In the 1984 Mac commercial, “IBM was Big Brother; it represented this dystopian technological future where people were being damned by technology, and the Mac was the technology of liberation, of individual creativity and freedom,” says Leander Kahney, Editor of cultofmac.com.

With the release of the iPad, the question is whether Apple can maintain this “underdog” or special status.

It’s ultimately about who we are.

Tariq-ramadan-190

DKK: I’m fascinated by your attraction to Nietzsche as a student. You wrote your dissertation on him, and I can certainly understand the appeal of his engagement with suffering, as well as the eventual affirmation that you find in his work. But what attraction was there for you in Nietzsche’s wrestling with nihilism and his characterization of the implosion of Christianity?

TR: You know, many people misunderstand this, because they think that I was coming to Nietzsche because he was very critical towards Christianity, and that, as a Muslim, I was very happy when he said, “God is dead.” It’s exactly the opposite, in fact. I read Nietzsche for other reasons. I read everything that was published. I had to do this. I wanted to add to the concept of suffering in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which was Nietzsche as a historian of philosophy. Because he was, as Heidegger said, the last metaphysician. And he took a very strong and critical look at everything which was coming out of the Western tradition. But he was distorting Socrates, Hegel, and even Schopenhauer and other scholars.

more from Tariq Ramadan at The Immanent Frame here.

The Master of Historical Fiction

Waverley

“There are some writers who have entirely ceased to influence others, whose fame is for that reason both serene and cloudless, are enjoyed or neglected rather than criticised and read. Among them is Scott. Yet there are no books perhaps upon which at this moment more thousands of readers are brooding and feasting in a rapture of silent satisfaction. The Antiquary, The Bride of Lammermoor, Redgauntlet, Waverley, Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian — what can one do when one has finished the last but wait a decent interval and then begin again upon the first…” This was the opening of an essay by Virginia Woolf on The Antiquary, in The New Republic in December 1924, a century after the publication of Redgauntlet, Walter Scott’s last indisputably great novel. It is now almost two centuries since the first of his novels, Waverley, was published in 1814. Sadly, it’s probable that the claim made in the third sentence no longer holds good. Woolf’s “common reader” has, it seems, deserted the first master of the historical novel, ironically at a time when the genre is more fashionable than it has been for more than 100 years. All six of last year’s Man Booker shortlist were set in the past, with the winner, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall as far back as the 16th century.

more from Allan Massie at The Standpoint here.

Is white the new black?

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Glenn Beck excels at expressing adventurous thoughts in memorable language, but he outdid himself when, one morning last summer, he offered a diagnosis of President Obama. He said, “This President, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don’t know what it is.” (The context was one of the summer’s most entertaining reality shows—the one starring the black Harvard professor and the white police officer who arrested him.) In September, Beck sat for an interview with Katie Couric, and she asked him a deceptively simple question, which had been posed by a Twitter user named adrianinflorida: “what did u mean white culture?” Whatever adventurous thoughts this query inspired, Beck did not seem eager to share them. “Um, I, I don’t know,” he said. Finally, after two minutes of temporizing, he arrived at a nonresponsive response that was both honest and sensible: “What is the white culture? I don’t know how to answer that that’s not a trap, you know what I mean?” Often, the most appropriate answer to that question is a joke, or a series of jokes. In 2008, a canny young white Canadian named Christian Lander started a blog called “Stuff White People Like,” which soon became a best-selling book bearing the same title; it listed a hundred and fifty of white people’s favorite things, from recycling to the Red Sox. (This magazine made the list, too, at No. 114.)

more from Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker here.

The PhilPapers Surveys of Philosophers

David Bourget and David Chalmers on their survey of philosophers in PhilaPapers:

The PhilPapers Survey was a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views. (It was originally called “The Philosophical Survey”, but we have retrospectively retitled it for reasons given below.) What follows are some thoughts on the conception and design of the survey, including responses to some feedback regarding the survey. We will discuss the results separately.

Why a survey of philosophers' philosophical views? We decided to do this in part because like many philosophers, we have an interest in the sociology of philosophy, and we were interested to see some hard data about this sociology. We are also interested in the experimental use of online tools as a method of philosophical communication. Using the PhilPapers technology to execute a survey of philosophical views plays into both of these interests.

Some findings:

A priori knowledge: yes or no?

Accept or lean toward: yes662 / 931 (71.1%)
Accept or lean toward: no171 / 931 (18.3%)
Other98 / 931 (10.5%)

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Accept or lean toward: Platonism366 / 931 (39.3%)
Accept or lean toward: nominalism351 / 931 (37.7%)
Other214 / 931 (22.9%)

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Accept or lean toward: objective382 / 931 (41%)
Accept or lean toward: subjective321 / 931 (34.4%)
Other228 / 931 (24.4%)

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

Accept or lean toward: yes604 / 931 (64.8%)
Accept or lean toward: no252 / 931 (27%)
Other75 / 931 (8%)

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

Accept or lean toward: externalism398 / 931 (42.7%)
Other287 / 931 (30.8%)
Accept or lean toward: internalism246 / 931 (26.4%)

A Media That Looks Away

5379.kamal Hartosh Singh Bal in Open the Magazine:

I see an injustice. Even as the Indian media, rightly so, has been filled with reports of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi being questioned by the Supreme Court appointed Special Investigation Team, an event in Canada has gone unreported. The recent visit of Kamal Nath, Union minister of road transport and highways, to the country triggered the ire of Sikhs who have not forgotten his role in the 1984 massacres, when he was part of a mob that set afire two Sikhs within sight of Parliament at Rakabganj Gurdwara.

Surely the events in Canada were worth at least one news story, to say nothing of attracting the attention of India’s otherwise frenzied TV anchors. Robert Oliphant, Canadian MP and co-chair of the Canada-India forum of MPs, was quoted saying he chose not to attend a reception for Kamal Nath once he learnt of the man’s questionable character and allegations against him. Jack Layton, leader of the New Democrat Party, which controls two provinces in the country, issued a press release: ‘The New Democratic Party of Canada is concerned that a divisive and controversial Indian politician, Kamal Nath, has been invited to Canada… Out of respect for the Canadian Sikh community, I am urging my caucus not to attend events featuring Kamal Nath.’

Where, in all this, were the liberal South Asian voices from North America that were so easily mobilised against Narendra Modi? Why is there no coverage of the charges against Kamal Nath?

[More on the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms can be found here.]

Who’s the Daddy?

Dnapaternity Catherine Nixey in More Intelligent Life:

Precise statistics on human infidelity are hard to come by. What evidence there is tends to indicate that human lovebirds are little better than their feathered counterparts. In 1970 a group of researchers looking into blood groups tested the blood types of inhabitants in a block of flats in Liverpool. They were startled to see that their results indicated a paternal discrepancy of 20-30%. Thinking, perhaps unfairly, that this might be something to do with Liverpudlians, they moved south and repeated the test, only to find similar results. In 1984 a group of scientists in Nottingham looked at women seeking fertility treatment because their husbands were sterile. Despite their husbands’ sterility, 23% of the women managed to become pregnant before receiving treatment.

Other studies have produced a more comforting picture. Recent research in Sweden and Iceland found rates of non-paternity between 1% and 2%. But while these figures may be reassuring in one sense, scientifically they are far from comforting. The disparity between them is enormous. Clearly large-scale, randomised testing is needed to find reliable average levels of non-paternity. The results would not just be interesting but useful in areas such as heritable diseases. There’s just one problem: such tests could be a source of considerable distress. As a result, much of the information that is available on paternity has emerged, like the 1970 Liverpool study, as a by-product of studies with other aims.

Now, the sale of over-the-counter tests may mean that large-scale testing will occur anyway. It is a prospect that many genetics, religious and parenting associations have reacted to with alarm. Their anxiety is the same as that of the reluctant researchers: they fear that such tests will sow doubt and discord. Prashant Patel would disagree. “These tests do not create problems within families,” he says. “The problems are there already.”

Will Columbia-Trained, Code-Savvy Journalists Bridge the Media/Tech Divide?

Columbia-at-night-660x387 Eliot Van Buskirk in Wired:

The Columbia program, which will accept its first 15 students (tops) in the Fall of 2011, seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly-important IT professionals whose web and digital savvy are crucial to any form of news gathering, reporting and delivery. Everyone knows the problem: Users really don’t know what to ask developers for (or how), and developers have no real idea what their software will need to do in the hands of the users.

“The IT Department [at a news organization] comes up with software programs that the journalists don’t use; the journalists ask for software that is computationally unrealistic,” said Julia Hirschberg, professor of computer science at the Columbia’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. “We aim to produce a new generation of journalists who will understand both fields.”

Bill Grueskin, academic dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, told us that although students generally know their way around the web by virtue of being young, creating these sorts of powerful new tools requires a different, deeper skill set — one that, to date, has been missing from university journalism and technology departments and underrepresented in the field at large to a damaging extent.

“Some people coming out of high school or college possess technical savvy, but more often than not, the skill set is bordered by an ability to use Wikipedia, Facebook and Gmail,” said Grueskin, noting that while Columbia journalism students are taught to edit multimedia and maintain websites, “almost all of those skills rely on using existing software or programs to do digital journalism. We hope and expect that graduates of this program will be more able to innovate and create the solutions the news business so sorely needs.”

The concept makes sense, the problem it addresses is real, and Columbia is capable of taking on the challenge. But we were most fascinated by the technologies these professors hope their graduates will contribute.

Previously Unknown J.D. Salinger Letters Discovered

Image-64230-galleryV9-klhr Marc Pitzke in Speigel Online:

Until now, very few people knew about the existence of these letters, which SPIEGEL ONLINE has had the opportunity to read and analyze at length. They offer rare insights into Salinger's isolated world, fill in gaps in his life's story, uncover the private side of the myths surrounding his character — and reveal the astonishing warmth with which he kept up an old wartime friendship, even long after disappearing from public life.

This in itself is a surprise for a man who experts have always seen as a difficult misanthrope. “He was very much a loner,” the British critic Ian Hamilton wrote in his famous monograph “In Search of J.D. Salinger,” quoting a former fellow student of the author. “I don't think he gave himself to others, nor did he consider that others had much of value to offer him.” Hamilton's 1988 work, currently out of print and yet a standard work to this day, helped shape Salinger's image as a misfit. Another contemporary quoted by Hamilton describes Salinger in the following way: “Generally he had no friends or companions.”

The Kleeman letters contradict this impression. In them, Salinger sounds melancholy, almost gentle. He tells his friend about his new puppy, a husky. In 1961, he writes that he was “saddened” by Hemingway's suicide. He complains about his children growing up and describes himself as a “perennial sad sack.” “He was very humble,” Kleeman says about Salinger. “He was emotional and warm.”…

The letters, written with a typewriter and signed “Jerry,” “Yours, Jerry” or “Best always, Jerry,” span a period between 1945 and 1969. In the first letter, written during the war, Salinger simply identifies “Germany” as the return address. The return address on most of the other letters is “Windsor, Vt.,” where the post office for the nearby village of Cornish in New Hampshire, where Salinger lived beginning in 1953, was located.

Declan Kiely, the curator of the Morgan Library, a museum in New York that will exhibit some of Salinger's letters starting this week, has appraised Kleeman's letters and is convinced that they are genuine. He estimates that they are worth at least $60,000. “We would love to have those,” says Kiely. Kleeman, who lives on a veteran's pension, has locked away his treasure into a bank safe for the time being.

Salinger's written legacy is relatively small — and carefully protected. Any letters that have become known until now are kept in the archives of the Library of Congress, as well as a few US universities, including Harvard and Princeton. Salinger's private life was so important to him that he copyrighted the content of his letters, even beyond his death.

Wednesday Poem

The Simple Purification

Student, do the purification.

You know that the seed is inside the horse-chestnut tree,
and inside the seed there are the horse-chestnut blossoms, and
….the chestnuts, and the shade.
So inside the human body there is the seed, and inside the seed
….there is the human body again.

Fire, air, earth, water, and space—if you don't want the secret
….one,
you can't have these either.

Thinkers, listen, tell me what you know of that is not inside
…..the soul?
Take a pitcher full of water and set it down on the water—
now it has water inside and water outside.
We mustn't give it a name, lest silly people start talking
…..again about the body and the soul.

If you want the truth, I'll tell you the truth:
Listen to the secret sound, the real sound, which is inside you.
The one no one talks of speaks the secret sound to himself,
and he's the one who has made it all.

by Kabir

Fruits and Veggies Help Just a Little in Decreasing Cancer Risk

From Scientific American:

Fruits-and-veggies-cancer_1 Despite decades of entreaties from the World Health Organization (WHO) and mothers alike to eat more fruits and vegetables, a new study has found that these dietary additions appear to do little to decrease the overall likelihood of getting cancer. The recommendation that people eat at least five servings (about 400 grams) of fruits and veggies each day, espoused by the WHO since 1990, was based on studies that found a link between higher intakes of these foods and lower risks for cancer and other diseases.

Since the 1990s, however, evidence from large studies has been mounting that the protective effects of these foods against cancer in particular might be modest—if it exists at all. (Other research has continued to show that diets high in fruits and vegetables are important for preventing conditions such as obesity and cardiovascular disease.) A new report, analyzing cancer incidence in 478,478 men and women ages 25 to 70 over more than eight years in 10 European countries, found “a very small inverse association between the intake of total fruits and vegetables and cancer risk,” the researchers concluded.

More here.