eliminationism

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Evil repels analysis. Poets from the time of Homer have sung of war, but only a monster sings of atrocities. So, too, with journalism and scholarship. We are admonished not to ascribe rational motives to Osama bin Laden or Hitler, or to their followers. To admit of motives is to reduce the moral to the psychological, and thus to the comprehensible, and thus perhaps to the acceptable. Our understanding of unspeakable acts is limited on the one hand to the irreducible moral fact of evil, and on the other to the dynamics of mob psychology — of mass lunacy. But to exclude mass murder from the realm of conscious action offers an exculpation of its own, both to the killers and to ourselves — for how could we, ordinary folk who cherish life, descend to such madness? In this magisterial and profoundly disturbing “natural history” of mass murder, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen calls for an end to such willful blindness. As he did in his celebrated and controversial “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” Goldhagen insists that even the worst atrocities originate with, and are then propelled by, a series of quite conscious calculations by followers as much as by leaders.

more from James Traub at the NYT here.



Saturday Poem

Heaven for Stanley

For his birthday, I gave Stanley a hyacinth bean,
an annual, so he wouldn’t have to wait for the flowers.

He said, Mark, I have just the place for it!
as if he’d spent ninety-eight years

anticipating the arrival of this particular vine.

I thought poetry a brace against time,
the hours held up for study in a voice’s cool saline,

but his allegiance is not to permanent forms.
His garden’s all furious change,

budding and rot and then the coming up again;

why prefer and single part of the round?
I don’t know that he’d change a word of it;

I think he could be forever pleased
to participate in motion. Something opens.

He writes it down. Heaven steadies
and concentrates near the lavender. He’s already there.

by Mark Doty

from School of the Arts; Harper and Collins, NY, 2005

Flies get fright from false memories

From Nature:

News.2009 The seemingly complex phenomenon by which fruit flies (Drosophila) learn from bad experiences has been reduced to the actions of a mere 12 neurons, according to research by a team of UK- and US-based scientists. Manipulating this cluster of cells with a laser, the scientists were able to trick the flies into having associative memories of events they had not actually experienced. Flies learn from smells and other signals in their environment. Conditioning by, for example, electric shocks, can teach them to avoid certain odours.

Previous experiments had shown that a structure in the fly brain called the mushroom body was essential for storing those memories, but the mechanism by which those memories get stored has not been well understood. To examine the mechanism, a team led by the University of Oxford's Gero Miesenböck took advantage of “optogenetics”, a technique in which they use light to activate particular cell types that have been genetically engineered to express a light-responsive protein. When laser pulses hit the brain, cells expressing the light-sensitive protein activate. “It's like sending a radio signal to a city but only those houses with a radios set to the right frequency will get the signal,” says Miesenböck.

More here.

Untamed Heart

From The New York Times:

Cover-500 Jeannette Walls was raised in poverty and hardship by skittish, eccentrically idealistic, profoundly unfit parents. As Rex and Rose Mary Walls caromed between dying mining towns, both of them too willful to hold down a job, their four children slept in cardboard boxes, set themselves on fire, subsisted on margarine and cat food, and, as they grew older, struggled to hide their meager earnings from their father, who cheerfully robbed them to pay for his alcoholic sprees. Anyone who devoured Walls’s incandescent 2005 memoir, “The Glass Castle,” has wondered: How did such untamed characters come to exist in America, in the not-so-distant 1960s and ’70s? Walls’s new book, “Half Broke Horses,” a novelistic re-creation of the life of her maternal grand­mother, Lily Casey Smith, in the first half of the 20th century, told in her grandmother’s voice, gives a partial answer to that perplexing question. Through the adventures of Lily Casey — mustang breaker, schoolteacher, ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider, bush pilot and mother of two — Walls revisits the adrenaline-­charged frontier background that gave her own mother a lifelong taste for vicissitude. “I’m an excitement addict,” Rose Mary Walls liked to tell her children. And yet — can the contours of one woman’s life ever sufficiently explain the life that proceeds from hers?

More here.

On Repressive Sentimentalism

Mark Greif in n + 1:

ScreenHunter_02 Oct. 17 10.42 Gays are our utopian heroes. Many things changed in the twentieth century. No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household. If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed.

Traditional society choked this down—some more progressive parts of it did, anyway—by attributing same-sex love to brain chemistry, or a gay gene, and an eternal sexual identity that must be rigid and ineluctable. It hypothesized three millennia of men and women who must have been closeted, before they had such wonderfully enlightened friends and neighbors as we are. Only in this restricted way could society understand homosexuality without gayness threatening to reveal more new choices.

The utopians among us held our peace.

More here.

Advice for America as it faces the end of empire (from the entity formerly known as the British Empire)

Kate Hahn in McSweeney's:

ScreenHunter_01 Oct. 17 10.32 Get obsessed with celebrities, even more than you are now. What gaping hole inside myself was I trying to fill that I had to bend entire nations to my will when I just could have lain by the pool all day reading the tabs? That's what my spiritual advisor Angelica—her office is over the chip shop—made me realize. Don't even miss the bloody battles with Raj followers anymore. I'd rather speculate on what's going to happen on Dr. Who or look at pictures of Billy Piper on holiday.

Yeah, she's bloody worth crying speechlessly over isn't she? Oh, you're shedding tears for your lost ideals? You say you pissed away your Manifest Destiny? Yes, yes, I understand. All right then, if it will make you feel any better I'll, as Angelica says, share. Don't tell the Persian Empire this but when I first retired, I used to flat out bawl for hours. I'd whinge on about England and pith helmets. Didn't know what to do with myself. I felt as scattered as those tapas plates they serve here instead of a proper meal. Used to sit in my room in the dark and order Chinese.

Oh, bollocks. Sorry. Don't moan. You're not the only one hates those Mandarin bastards. Heard of the Boxer Rebellion? That empire tried to kill me but now if I want a good pool noodle I've got no choice but to buy it from them. Those buggers have import/export locked up.

More here. [Thanks to Nikolai Nikola.]

Plants Perform Quantum Computation

David Biello in Scientific American:

ED1D1446-E7F2-99DF-3CBF8B2F66C0C5D4_1 Plants soak up some of the 1017 joules of solar energy that bathe Earth each second, harvesting as much as 95 percent of it from the light they absorb. The transformation of sunlight into carbohydrates takes place in one million billionths of a second, preventing much of that energy from dissipating as heat. But exactly how plants manage this nearly instantaneous trick has remained elusive. Now biophysicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that plants use the basic principle of quantum computing—the exploration of a multiplicity of different answers at the same time—to achieve near-perfect efficiency.

Biophysicist Gregory Engel and his colleagues cooled a green sulfur bacterium—Chlorobium tepidum, one of the oldest photosynthesizers on the planet—to 77 kelvins [–321 degrees Fahrenheit] and then pulsed it with extremely short bursts of laser light. By manipulating these pulses, the researchers could track the flow of energy through the bacterium's photosynthetic system. “We always thought of it as hopping through the system, the same way that you or I might run through a maze of bushes,” Engel explains. “But, instead of coming to an intersection and going left or right, it can actually go in both directions at once and explore many different paths most efficiently.”

In other words, plants are employing the basic principles of quantum mechanics to transfer energy from chromophore (photosynthetic molecule) to chromophore until it reaches the so-called reaction center where photosynthesis, as it is classically defined, takes place.

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

Friday, October 16, 2009

Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark Tank?

Denis Dutton in the New York Times:

Hirst-shark Since the endearingly witty Marcel Duchamp invented conceptual art 90 years ago by offering his “ready-mades” — a urinal or a snow shovel, for instance — for gallery shows, the genre has degenerated. Duchamp, an authentic artistic genius, was in 1917 making sport of the art establishment and its stuffy values. By the time we get to 2009, Mr. Hirst and Mr. Koons are the establishment.

Does this mean that conceptual art is here to stay? That is not at all certain, and it is not just auction results that are relevant to the issue. To see why works of conceptual art have an inherent investment risk, we must look back at the whole history of art, including art’s most ancient prehistory.

It is widely assumed that the earliest human art works are the stupendously skillful cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet, the latter perhaps 32,000 years old, along with a few small realistic sculptures of women and of animals from the same period. But artistic and decorative behavior emerged in a far more distant past. Shell necklaces that look like something you would see at a tourist resort, as well as evidence of ochre body paint, have been found from more than 100,000 years ago. But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are much older even than that. I have in mind the so-called Acheulian hand axes.

More here.

The Blind Locksmith Continued: An Update from Joe Thornton

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Joe1 I’ve written a few times here about the ongoing work of Joe Thornton, a biologist at the University of Oregon and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Thornton studies how molecules evolve over hundreds of millions of years. He does so by figuring out what the molecules were like in the distant past and recreating those ancestral forms in his lab to see how they worked. I first wrote about his work looking at how one molecule in our cells evolved from one function to another (here, here, and here). [Update: These links are now fixed.]

Most recently, I wrote in the New York Times about his latest experiment, in which he and his colleagues found that the evolution from the old function to the new one has now made it very difficult for natural selection to drive the molecule back to its old form. Its evolution has moved forward like a ratchet.

Thornton’s new work turned up last week on a web site run by the Discovery Institute, a clearinghouse for all things intelligent design (a k a the progeny of creationism). Michael Behe, a fellow at the Institute, wrote three posts (here, here, and here) about the new research, which he pronounced “great.”

This is the same Michael Behe who, when Thornton published the first half of this research, declared it “piddling.”

Why the change of heart? Because Behe thinks that the new research shows that evolution cannot produce anything more than tiny changes. And if evolution can’t do it, intelligent design can. (Don’t ask how.)

I pointed out Behe’s posts to Thornton and asked him what he thought of them. Thornton sent me back a lengthy, enlightening reply.

More here.

Show us your loo before you woo

Rhys Blakely in The Times of London:

Toilet-India_509904a Courtship can be an intricate business in India, but the mothers of the northern state of Haryana have a simple message for men who call on their daughters: “No toilet, no bride.”

The slogan – often lengthened in Hindi to “If you don't have a proper lavatory in your house, don't even think about marrying my daughter” – has been plastered across villages in the region as part of a drive to boost the number of pukka facilities. In a country where more households have TV sets than lavatories, it is one of the most successful efforts to combat the chronic shortage of proper plumbing.

That is probably partly because of the country's skewed sex ratio, with 8 per cent more men than women, leading to a “bride shortage”. Woman generally have also become more vocal in their resentment at having to relieve themselves outside, giving brides more leverage in premarital bargaining.

In India it is estimated that more than 660 million people still defaecate in the open – a big cause of a host of diseases, from diarrhoea to polio. It is women, activists say, who suffer the most.

More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

gypsy mansions

Gypsy_couch

TIMOSORA, ROMANIA Like Saint Petersburg before she was operated on for her three-hundredth, the brie-colored streets and decaying facades have a dusty continuity. Against this backdrop, the Roma build their Disneyland. Forced by the Communists to settle in the ’60s, they have embraced a style of permanent renovation. Their mansions, in primary colors, stick like fingers in the dead dictator’s eye. But this provokes nothing beyond tourists snapping photos and locals shaking their heads. “How do you think they pay for them?” they ask me and then spit. Gypsy mansions are confusing. Though they are decorated with wild variation, their structural similarities are apparent. The mansion plans are essentially standardized: All rooms branch off a central corridor, and none have direct access to any others; but there the standardization ends, and this is not so surprising. Mansions are primarily structures of one-upmanship; eternal construction sites of dubious habitable value (they are often abandoned, though this could be because the settlement policies went with the Communists) that rise as barometers of personal (male) status, they are intensely decorated sheds with few interior complications.

more from Lev Bratishenko at Triple Canopy here.

what beck did

502px-AaronBeck

In the basement of Aaron Beck’s house, nine miles northwest of downtown Philadelphia, in a dimly lit, dusty, concrete-walled room dedicated to his archives, there sits a pink plastic box containing patient notes from a 40-year-old case of psychotherapy. Beck, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, has short-cropped white hair, sharp blue eyes, and, at 88, a hunched and shuffling gait. He has been a practicing psychiatrist for 59 years. Among the thousands of patients Beck has treated during this time, this case rates as persistent but uncomplicated. The patient was in his mid-40s and had a good career, a loving wife, four beautiful children, and a trove of close friends. Privately, however, he struggled with an acute tendency toward self-criticism. He was of the type that can’t help but interpret neutral events as harsh reflections on his personal worth. He was forever searching for approval, and forever anticipating disapproval. When the patient’s treatment began—the earliest notes date from the mid-1960s—the dominant psychotherapeutic approach in the United States was psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud had made his first and only visit to this country in 1909, and in the half century that followed, his approach to mental suffering took firm hold of American psychiatry, splintering into a multitude of camps but always retaining a focus on the unconscious mind, the central feature of Freudian analysis.

more from Daniel B. Smith at The American Scholar here.

Hamilton

Richard Brody in The New Yorker:

It is, on its surface, a simple movie—it tells the story of a young unmarried mother who is about to go on vacation with her family and wants her child’s father to visit before she leaves—but it is told with a visual poetry, a sense of behavioral nuance, a sense of place, and a sculpting of space and time that are rare in movies anywhere, let alone an American independent film made for a pittance. “Hamilton” has received some terrific reviews, and can be downloaded or streamed from Amazon, but hasn’t gotten the release or the attention it deserves.

[Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

Something always happens in Juárez

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In the PM newsroom, across from faded purple and brown-striped cubicles where reporters sit amid tacked-up centerfolds and layouts for the day’s cover story of a gun-shot man discarded in a ditch, two men, a photographer and assistant editor, listen to the strains of a narcocorrido drifting from a police scanner. The vague shrill discord of accordions and a brass band echoes in the glass office until a burst of distortion shatters the ill-begotten melody and imposes a staticky silence. They know in the expanding quiet that someone will die tonight. When and where the execution will happen they cannot say yet. Perhaps in five minutes on a dirt lane beneath power lines heavy with dangling sneakers; perhaps in an hour in a van swerved to a stop, the spewed rocks and dust still unsettled even after the gunfire has ceased and neighbors come to peer with accustomed caution through barred windows; perhaps after nightfall on the stony ground of a hill beneath sheets of laundry that when billowed by winds will rise like theatrical curtains to display the vast expanse of Juárez—its gated homes where dogs bark and loll in the heat, its tree-lined streets where kids play pick-up soccer games, and the dirt lanes stretching toward barbed wire fences that block entrance to the state of Texas just beyond the muddy band of the Rio Bravo.

more from J. Malcolm Garcia at VQR here.

Romantic heroes: here’s to you, Mr Rochester

From The Telegraph:

JaneEyre_1502103c He was the second man I fell in love with, was Mr. Rochester. The first was Rhett Butler but that was only because I met him first. Dashing, charming and incredibly sexy as Butler is, Mr. Rochester – and his great dane, Pilot – walked into my life, and blew him out of the water forever. So it comes as no surprise to me that when surveyed by Mills and Boon, the nation's readers voted Charlotte Bronte's Mr Rochester the most romantic character in literature. The true hero, you see, has to have more than charm and dash. Those things are all very well, and fine for having a flirtation with, but if he is to get a real hold of your heart, then he must hurt it a bit, make it bruise and bleed. True, heart-stopping, emotion-wrenching, all consuming hero-power comes from a whole range of qualities, not all of them instantly, or even ongoingly, lovable. And Mr. Rochester (isn't it funny how seldom he is referred to as Edward) has unlovable qualities in spades.

But, reader, I loved him (to paraphrase Miss Bronte).

More here.

Friday Poem

Great Big Tree

May I be a great big tree
so big I can’t see those taking shelter under me,
a deep green conical figure wrapped in serenity
Just as I dangle my bare feet in the water
may my roots joyfully draw
from an unknown subterranean current

May I be such a great big tree
that those who look at me
will naturally feel peace and repose

Yet may my luxuriating branches and leaves
whisper to a breeze like stray hair
May they awaken before anyone else in the rosy glow of morning
May their blue shadows be cast on earth
spreading like a trailing lace skirt
May my thoughts be kind
May my thoughts be refreshing
The tree will not move
The tree will not speak
yet may it be a ladder heavenly children ascend and descend

If someone comes and rests by me at the height of day
I will provide deep shadow and infinite comfort

On a stormy day
I will be even greater, more stalwart
I will firmly anchor my roots in the great earth and will not sway
Yet my sap will flow smoothly
even my incised wounds will issue forth a refreshing scent
Soon I will whisper a smiling song
When night arrives I will dissolve into darkness
unbeknownst to people
may the song alone become invisible ripples

by Kiyoko Nagase

translation: Takako Lento
from Ooi naru jyumoku; Publisher
Sakurai Shorten, Tokyo, 1947

THE NOT-SO-ANGRY EVOLUTIONIST

From MSNBC:

Dawkins Newsweek may call Dawkins “the angry evolutionist,” but in his latest book, Dawkins at least makes an attempt to lower the temperature. He reserves his harshest words for “history-deniers” who refuse to accept the evidence for evolution, comparing them to Holocaust-deniers or hypothetical “ignoramuses” who insist the Roman Empire never existed because they weren't around to see the Caesars. Dawkins traces the investigation step by step, including the fossil record and the latest DNA evidence as well as the small-scale changes we see in bacteria, dog breeds and even the size of elephant tusks. All the clues point to nature as the perpetrator of biological change, using “weapons” such as climate and predation. Some mysteries are still unsolved, however. Dawkins cited four of his favorites last week during a talk at the University of Washington:

The origin of life: It might surprise some of Dawkins' critics to hear that he offers no explanation for what kick-started life in the first place. “That is a complete mystery,” he said. Scientists have plenty of suspects to check out, however.

The origin of sex: Dawkins said scientists are also puzzling over “what sex is all about” – in evolutionary theory, that is. After all, sexual reproduction isn't strictly necessary for the evolutionary process to do its thing. Some researchers surmise that sex arose to help weed out harmful mutations or provide more options for propagation.

The origin of consciousness: Where does subjective consciousness come from? Dawkins sees this as the “biggest puzzle” facing biology. Scientists have their ideas, and one of the latest ideas is that consciousness serves as the Wi-Fi network for an assortment of “computers” inside your brain.

The rise of morality: What drives us to do good, even for people we don't even know? The expectation of reciprocity provides a partial explanation, but “it doesn't account for the extremely high degree of moral behavior that humans show,” Dawkins said. He surmises that altruism might have arisen as a “mistaken misfiring” of neural circuits involved in calculating the mutual give and take among kin.

More here.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

The Death March

Ghaemi 3QD friend, Hadi Ghaemi of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, over at PBS Frontline (via Andrew Sullivan):

More than a hundred detainees have been on trial for the past two months in what have been widely condemned by human rights organizations as “show trials” without minimal adherence to standards of due process and fair trials. The defendants are a mixture of well-known personalities, regular street protesters, and a small group who were detained before the election and accused of connections with opposition groups.

The inclusion of the latter group, arrested in April 2009, well before the June 12 election, in trials connected with post-election unrest has been somewhat of a mystery until now. The first set of death sentences was issued against this group, which includes three people accused of having communications with a small pro-Monarchist group known as Anjoman Padeshahi Iran and one person accused of making contacts with the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization.

It appears the prosecutor intentionally threw these cases in among the post-election defendants to establish a precedent for bringing the charge of Moharebeh [“taking up arms against God”] in the mass indictments. By condemning these four defendants to death, the Judiciary has set the stage for justifying further execution sentences against ordinary protesters as well as well known politicians, journalists, and dissidents who are also on trial.

The four defendants sentenced to death are not guilty of any violent actions and their indictments clearly state that the Intelligence Ministry arrested them “before they could engage in any action.” Even under the existing laws, they could not be sentenced to death in fair trials. However, by using them as a front in a public relations ploy to justify death sentences in post-election trials, the government is pursuing two goals. First, the government is aiming to instill fear among reform-oriented Iranians, and raising the cost of participation in further protests, by signaling its power and determination to apply the death penalty at will. The second intent is to lay the groundwork for further political executions by desensitizing the broader population to state-sponsored violence.

An Interview with Fawad Khan

Artlogbus Over at Artlog:

How do you feel about making something horrific aesthetically appealing? Do you feel conflicted in any way by making a profit off of a terrible reality

Khan: Most of my artistic practice is hardly ever about making a profit. When I make wall paintings, it feels like a non-precious act, knowing the work is living only for a certain time in a certain setting. On the other hand, making work in this vain forces the message of the work to be extremely precious in it’s limited existence. I suppose I’m using institutions and galleries as a forum for discourse. Of course there is the market, both through my gallery and through art fairs, which has helped me grow as a young artist…I don’t denounce that either; I think it’s flattering to have a collector want your artistic voice in their respective collection.

What is the experience of painting these scenes like for you? Is it therapeutic in any way? What is the process that you go through while working on your art?

Khan:Surprisingly, very therapeutic. One could go crazy thinking of all the injustice and violent acts (of all sorts, not just car bombs) taking place currently, not just in the Middle East, but all over the world. As artists, we live within this public and we are allowed to have a voice or stance. With my work, I suppose it is a way to get a sense of aggression out. My process usually starts with a conceptual idea. Then I gather reference material…often times, I shoot my own. After that, I spend most of the time in the studio working.