On the first day of Christmas my Mommy gave to me, my very own Nintendo Wii

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This Christmas season I totally shocked my friends and family in a way that I probably haven’t managed to since I announced I was moving in with a man I had known for a few weeks (I married him in the end.) Seemingly, I reversed myself on a topic on which everyone, myself included until recently, thought I was resolute. My husband still hasn’t quite forgiven me for my change of course and was totally unmoved by my rationale. I bought my daughters a Wii for Christmas. For many years they have bemoaned the fact that, apparently, they are “the only children that don’t have a Wii or a DS.” Actually, I think that may actually be true, at least if our family, friends, extended family and acquaintances are anything to go by. My original feelings on the subject, which do still hold fast for the DS and many other video gaming systems, is that children spend far too much time on these things, to the detriment of imaginative play, outdoor play and reading. I hate nothing more than seeing children who can’t seem to go for an hour at a time without playing on a device, sitting at the dinner table disengaged from the conversations around them, not able to find any other way to amuse themselves whether they’re alone or with friends. My children expended quite a bit of debating energy trying to persuade me that the Wii is different; it involves physical participation, it’s a more social gaming system, and based on some research and informal polling on my Facebook page, I came to the conclusion that they did have a point. But ultimately, this wasn’t really what finally pushed me over the Amazon edge to the purchase of a Wii console and assorted games. What really caused me to rethink my previously intransigent position on gaming devices were the articles and books I’ve read recently, in the course of my innovation-related reading, about the educational virtues of gaming and most especially, the place of fun in learning.

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Monday Poem

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
………………………………………… –Bob Dylan

Eclipse

at a wall on a corner of the world
I’m still waiting for Godot as mullahs
and priests go by in the robes
of their pride incensing and
murmuring. I’m thinking
burn-poles and bombs and wonder
how many gods must there be
in the world before too many
people have died

down the ages they come and go
hot and promising as new stars
then collapse and freeze
unyielding and grasping
as black holes

the latest on the block,
intent upon eclipsing Christ
who subsumed Yahweh
who buried a pantheon of Ba’als
who defeated the sea god Yam
who rose fresh and dripping
from fathoms of the unfathomed
is on the tragic course
of those before who
by fatwa or inquisition
by crusade, by imposition
with unwarranted holy assurance
and a fire-in-the-belly mission
marked their highways to heaven
in blood

isn’t it good for the world
that this one’s not triune
since one god over-reaching
is all it takes to leave
a million mothers weeping
…………………..
it takes just one
with a new moon of magic
to eclipse the light of earth
with a teaching

by Jim Culleny;
Jan 13, 2009

Spartacus and Pulling Gods

This is your very breakable brain on NFL Sunday.

I opened an otherwise innocuous copy of a magazine the other day, and my shoulders leapt up in a shudder. Couldn’t help it. I was being confronted by the snout of a tiger snake, a closeup snapped from a low angle, so that a good third of the son of a bitch’s body seemed to be hovering off the ground—coiled, tense, about to strike. I have no idea if tiger snakes are poisonous, but that didn’t matter: before my conscious brain could react the fear had already shivered outward from somewhere in my own reptile brain. The same thing happens if I dream about sitting in a tall swaying tree or imagine cleaning windows on a skyscraper. Brrr. Obviously I’m in no danger from a picture or fantasy, but again, the frisson is a reflex, uncontrolled behavior when I glimpse something potentially perilous.

Broken helmets Shudders like that don’t have to be inborn instinct, either; they can be the result of conditioning, too, something learned over time from the coupling of vivid images and nauseous stimuli. All of which is to say that I’m starting to feel the same snaky shivers, subtle but growing, each time I sit down to watch football nowadays. Not quite to the point of having to look away yet, but I’m always slightly relieved when someone just runs out of bounds, and I don’t chuckle anymore when the body count gets too high on gang tackles. The worst are kickoffs and punts, when bodies hurtle in from crazy angles, whipping around like bats. I feel the snags because with every hit I can imagine—sometimes practically hear—the splat of the players’ brains inside their helmets.

Head injuries have dogged the National Football League since its very early days, since even before facemasks. But, donning the proud mantle of tobacco scientists everywhere, the NFL’s experts refused to admit until just a few months ago that it wasn’t a coincidence so many former players ended up with neurological damage by the time they turned fifty. The word going around is that a few skeptical medical men in charge of the NFL’s official investigation into the matter, a team led by one Dr. Ira Casson, had been dismissing the link between concussions and cognitive difficulties. Casson seemed obviously full of crap, and after Congress hog-piled onto the issue to scold the league, the NFL finally dismissed Casson and reevaluated the evidence. It was damning. In one study, coroners discovered that twelve of thirteen former NFL players had a buildup of a plaque in their brains—a plaque—called tau, a snarl of protein that disrupts neuronal function and that has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Many of the NFL players died in their forties; another autopsy revealed the beginning of tau tangles in an 18-year-old.

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What’s Wrong With America? We’re Cowards

by Evert Cilliers

Seal Before I tell you how I'm a coward, and how Dick Cheney is a coward, and how President Obama is a coward, and how everyone in America is a coward, I want to suck you into my story by starting on a positive note.

To wit: I have a failsafe strategy for when I'm gobsmacked by the exceptionalism of our incompetent institutions, like the Fed missing the bubble, our intelligence services not nixing the visa of the Explosive Gonads Bomber, our incompetent pols giving an incompetent Wall Street the right to ruin us again in a few years, the Senate letting Joe Liebermann take one last bite out of the healthcare bill, or the CIA putting out the welcome mat for a triple agent who's about to blow them up. And then there's Obama asking ex-Presidents Clinton and Bush to help Haiti, when Bush destroyed Haiti's democracy in 2004 and Clinton's been trying to turn the country into a sweatshop.

I've got this default setting that stops me from foaming at the mouth in Sartrean nausea and grinding my teeth into Heideggerian nothingness. Here's what I do: I sit myself down and zen in on how much I still love our failed state of America, and how there are things about America that are actually exceptional.

Freedom of speech. MLK. Geeks. The internet (invented by the Pentagon). Entrepreneurs. Paul Krugman. Elizabeth Warren. Steve Jobs. Our generosity to disaster victims. 24/7 innovation. Matt Taibbi. John Cassavetes.The Great Gatsby. Flash drives. Sylvia Plath. Wallace Stevens. A can-do attitude that once landed us on the moon.Andy Warhol. Bob Dylan, still doing it.A Streetcar Named Desire.The Decemberists. Warren Buffett.My Fair Lady.New York women who don't take crap from men like women do in other countries yet give better blowjobs than women in other countries. And Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.

Meditating on these things of wonder and beauty helps. Especially these days.

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Sunday, January 17, 2010

The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

Shakespearepicture What if Shakespeare wrote The Big Lebowski? Adam Bertocci gives it a go, in case you haven’t read this already.

[Enter LEBOWSKI, on a cart. Exit BRANDT]

LEBOWSKI

Marry, sir!—You be Lebowski, I be Lebowski, ‘tis a wondrous strange comedy of errors. But I am a man of business, as I imagine you are; tell me what you’d have me do for you.

THE KNAVE

Sir, I possess a rug, that, i’faith, tied the room together—

LEBOWSKI

You sent Brandt a messenger on horseback; he inform’d me. Where is my fitting?

THE KNAVE

They sought thee, these two gentlemen—

LEBOWSKI

I shall repeat; you sent Brandt a messenger on horseback; he inform’d me. Where is my fitting?

THE KNAVE

Then thou art aware ‘twas thy rug, sir, that was the target of this crime.

LEBOWSKI

Was it I, sir, who urinated on your rug?

[H/t: Darcy James Argue]

Jyoti Basu, 1914-2010

Basu In The Hindu:

Mr. Basu was India’s pre-eminent Communist leader, and one of post-independence India’s greatest and most respected mass political leaders. He was the last of the nine founding Polit Bureau members and India’s longest-serving Chief Minister.

Mr. Basu was a man of immense charisma, and one whose faith in the people was unflinching. He lived a full life, characterised by struggle and by successes in government that few other political leaders in India have been able to match. He was immaculate in dress and bearing, a person of extraordinary personal discipline, and, well into his 80s, known for the briskness of his stride, and for consistently outpacing the security guards who accompanied him.

A byword for intellectual, political and personal integrity and for a straightforward, self-assured and imperturbable style in politics, Mr. Basu made a profound, long-term difference to the large, populous and strategically important State that was his first priority and commanded his best efforts. As has been widely noted, his enduring legacy as Chief Minister of West Bengal between 1977 and 2000 includes land reforms, accountable governance, functioning panchayat institutions, and the creation of a stable atmosphere of communal harmony and secularism.

However, those who remember him chiefly as India’s longest-serving Chief Minister are likely to underestimate his long experience in the crucible of struggle: as a trade union organiser, as a popular agitator, and as a revolutionary fighter – starting, as was typical for his generation, as a freedom fighter and courageously facing and overcoming state-sponsored repression and intolerance in independent India as well. They are likely also to underestimate the inner resources of one of the most attractive and gifted mass political leaders that India, or indeed any country, has seen over the past half century.

Haiti – A Historical Timeline

From The Root:

Ouverture 1492 – Dec. 5, Columbus lands on a large island he names Isla Española (Spanish Island), later changed to Hispaniola. It is inhabited by Taino and Arawak Indians.

1503 – First Africans brought to Hispaniola for labor after pleas from a Spanish priest who wants to save the Indians from extinction.

1592 – Spanish governor executes Queen Anacaona, the last Taino chief.

1659 – First official settlement on Tortuga (off the coast of Haiti) by French buccaneers who hunt wild cattle and by pirates who attack ships sailing from South America to Europe.

1664 – French West India Company takes control of Western third of the island and names it Saint-Domingue.

1670 – First French settlement on the main island, named Cap Francois, later Cap-Français and now Cap-Haitien, the second largest city in Haiti. Settlers grow cacao, coffee, tobacco and indigo and begin importing slaves as labor.

1685 – Louis XIV enacts the Code Noir, which regulates the treatment of slaves and sets obligations for owners. Corporal punishment is allowed, sanctioning brutal treatment.

1697 – Spain formally cedes the Western third of the island to France via the Treaty of Ryswick.

1749 – Port-au-Prince is founded.

More here.

The Education of a British-Protected Child

Sameer Rahim in The Telegraph:

Book In June 1958 William Heinemann published a first novel by a Nigerian radio producer called Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart was immediately recognised for its subtle portrayal of tribal life in Igboland, the area of south-east Nigeria where Achebe was born and raised. After 52 years that book has become a classic of world literature. In an essay in Achebe’s new book, The Education of a British-Protected Child, the author reflects on the appreciative letters he has received from readers of all backgrounds. “In spite of serious cultural differences,” he writes, “it is possible for readers in the West to identify, even deeply, with characters and situations in an African novel.”

The novel’s title is taken from Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” At the novel’s centre is the village of Umuofia and its strongest personality, Okonkwo. We see his life destroyed by a series of calamities, the most significant of which is the British arrival in Igboland. He is impotent when his son abandons his tribal religion to attend a mission school. When it emerges that the British have brought not only a religion, but also a government and a queen, Okonkwo’s refusal to compromise leads to his tragic end.

More here.

Quantum theory via 40-tonne trucks

Marcus Chown in The Independent:

ScreenHunter_04 Jan. 17 12.18 In the mid-1980s, I was lucky enough to be taught by Feynman as a student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Before arriving at Caltech, I had watched a BBC TV Horizon programme about the man. For 50 minutes, the camera simply focused on Feynman while he talked engagingly about his life, his children and his father, who had no formal education but had nevertheless infected Feynman with a deep curiosity about the world. Unusually, my mum watched the whole thing, declaring when it was finished: “What an interesting man.”

Now my mum had no interest whatsoever in science, and I was forever trying to explain to her why, for instance, people in Australia did not fall off the other side of the world. So when I arrived at Caltech, I had an idea: plucking up my courage, I knocked on Feynman's office door and asked, nervously, whether he would write to my mum.

He did. “Dear Mrs Chown,” he wrote. “Please ignore your son's attempts to teach you physics. Physics is not the most important thing. Love is. Richard Feynman.”

It wasn't quite what I had expected. It is not every day, after all, that the world's greatest living physicist announces that physics is not the most important thing. But I was not discouraged. Although my attempt to explain science to my mum had ended in abject failure, I persisted in trying to communicate the fun things I had learnt at Caltech, eventually becoming a science writer.

More here.

Todd Shea reports from Haiti

UPDATE: Donations can be made for Todd's organization's work in Haiti here.

3QD friend Todd Shea arrived in Haiti from Pakistan a couple of days ago to assist in managing the relief effort. Today he has filed this report via Facebook:

Dear Friends,

ScreenHunter_03 Jan. 17 11.30 I'm sad to report that the situation in Haiti is acute and worsening-people are beginning to get even more desperate and frustrated. The leadership of the Government of the U.S. and its partner nations are “forming up” great things that will take shape in a week or so down the road, but they really need to quickly work through the current paralyzing logistical challenges with harder work and innovative and dramatic re-thinking of the fundamentally flawed, incomplete and inadequate “fly mostly into one airport, then organize and deliver a huge majority of critical aid into one central point and fan out from there” train wreck of a strategy that is not reaching the majority of Haitians in time to avoid major conseuences and an unacceptable level of after-event mortality and morbidity. The collective official response should have been completely on-track by today. As usual, many big shots are failing to think selflessly and share their financial, operational resources with smaller but super-effective agencies- acting like they are the only game in town and the smaller agencies are merely a nuisance underfoot that should just be ignored. This attitude is is not helping anyone. Quite frankly, I would have thought some of them would have learned an important lesson from other disasters where some of the same mistakes were made.

Here's the bottom line: If things don't start improving very rapidly, then life and limb-threatening infections and deadly dehydration and unnecessary conflict will likely emerge within the affected population on a scale that has the potential of becoming rampant and widespread, resulting in more death and injury that could still be avoided, though time is fast running out. The current path to giving Haiti the relief it desperately needs is simply taking way too long in developing in order to be a reasonable and defensible short term emergency strategy. Each country should, by now, be realizing that it is very much the correct option would be to stage multiple and overwhelmingly robust and well managed multi-national supply lines and helicopter sorties using locations and bases other than Port Au Prince Airport, particularly from the Dominican Republic through the border near Jumani, D.R. It's 7-10 hours by road (depending on the kind of vehicle and size of the load), but it's a darn good road compared to the roads in the Pakistan earthquake affected areas that I've been traveling on for the past four years. Distributing aid from several points over a more widespread area can reach far more people far more quickly.

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Dork: The Adventures Of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese

From Spicezee Bureau:

Robin-Varghese ‘Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese’ by Sidin Vadukut is nothing less than delightful. The incredible adventures of the protagonist – Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese is sure to keep you in splits.

A stupendously naïve but academically gifted young man, Robin graduates from one of India’s best business schools with a Day-Zero job at the Mumbai office of Dufresne Partners, a mediocre mid-market management consulting firm largely run by complete morons.

Through a stunning series of blunders, mishaps and inadvertent errors, Robin begins to make his superiors rue the day they were driven by desperation into hiring him. To make matters worse, Robin realises that his mad, passionate, one-sided relationship with batchmate Gouri Kalbag might be over before it even started. Robin Varghese With things going spectacularly wrong, will he manage to achieve his short-term goal of being promoted to Associate in under a year, and beat the record set by Boris Nguyen at Dufresne’s Vietnam office?

Published by Penguin, the book is the hilarious story of Robin, super-dork and unlikely corporate hero, for all of those who’ve ever sat depressed in cubicles and wanted to kill themselves with office stationery.

[Okay, so I modified the actual cover of the bookshown here in the 2nd picturejust a little! I think it looks better with Robin's real face on it. No?]

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America

From The Guardian:

Barack-Obama-Inaugural-Me-001 In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called “Absolut No ­Label”. The company's global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that “For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside that really matters.”

A few months later, Starbucks opened its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This “stealth Starbucks” (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with “one-of-a-kind” fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes – all to help develop what the company called “a community personality.” Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: “inspired by Starbucks”. Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice-president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the same piece of retail space, “This one is definitely a little neighbourhood coffee shop.” After spending two decades blasting its logo on to 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.

More here.

The Out-of-Sight Mind

From The New York Times:

Brain Invisible forces that control our behavior have inspired our best story­tellers, from Euripides to Steven Spielberg. Whether we’re yanked around by jealous gods, Oedipal urges or poltergeists, the idea that we feel powerless to direct our own actions has a visceral appeal, one exploited by Shankar Vedantam in “The Hidden Brain,” his exploration of the unconscious mind.

Most previous popular treatments of subliminal forces haven’t been data driven. Vedantam, who until recently wrote the Department of Human Behavior column for The Washington Post, hopes to fill that gap. His entertaining romp through covert influences on human behavior began as a series of columns, and true to its genesis, it reads as vivid reportage overlaid with a sampling of science. Ranging widely from the role of social conformity in violence to snapshots of racial and gender prejudice, Vedantam draws expansive arcs between findings from social psychology and the nation’s sensibilities and voting patterns. “Unconscious bias reaches into every corner of your life,” he writes, thanks to a “hidden brain” generally inaccessible through introspection. As with crop circles, all we see are the traces left by covert attitudes, never the perp at the scene of the crime.

More here.

mortal bliss

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A few decades ago, philosophers, economists and scientists didn’t pay much attention to happiness. They left that to the likes of comedian Ken Dodd, who famously sang that it was “the greatest gift that I possess”. Today, however, the lyrics of that chirpy ditty are virtually indistinguishable from the key claims of positive psychology – the flourishing “new science of happiness”. “Don’t count my money, count my happiness,” sang Dodd, explaining that “Happiness is nothing but a frame of mind,” something he “thanks the Lord” for. His lyrics may be folksy in style but the content encapsulates the essence of positive psychology. In 1998, the discipline was more or less unknown, until Martin Seligman, the then president of the American Psychological Association, began promoting the message that psychology needed to get over its historic obsession with what made people feel bad and start thinking about what made them feel good instead. His 2002 book, Authentic Happiness, became an international bestseller. But perhaps more significant, politically, was Lord Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005). Layard is not a psychologist but an economist, and his service as the the British government’s “happiness tsar” has taken positive psychology beyond influence to the heart of power. Its prescriptions lie behind a range of measures, from the huge increase in NHS-funded cognitive behavioural therapists to the forthcoming provision of mental health co-ordinators in Job Centres.

more from Julian Baggini at the FT here.