3quarksdaily

Trouble at the Heart of Psychiatry’s Revised Rule Book

Edward Shorter in Scientific American:

Major depression was created in 1980 by DSM-III editor Robert Spitzer as an effort to bridge disagreements between psychoanalysts, when they ruled the roost in the American Psychiatric Association, and the rest of the profession, which was becoming increasingly oriented towards biology. As a political construct, major depression included the two forms of depressive illness that previously had been considered as different from each other as measles and tuberculosis: melancholic illness and nonmelancholia. Melancholia, a grave form of depression involving slowed thought and movement, a complete joylessness in life and lack of hope for the future, had always been considered a separate illness. By 1980 the term melancholia had gone out of style and had been replaced by endogenous depression.

The other form of depressive illness that psychiatry had always recognized as separate was an ill-defined aggregation of symptoms of mood, anxiety, fatigue, somatic complaints – and a tendency to obsess about it all – that had been called on occasion neurasthenia, neurotic depression, reactive depression and other terms indicating real illness but not melancholic disease.

So the first artifact the DSM series created was lumping these two forms of depressive illness together. In fact, they are so disparate that the depression term itself should be abandoned.

More here. [Thanks to Louise Gordon.]

Fifth Element Diva Song

Abbas Raza

From Terror Suspect to College Graduate

Amitava Kumar in The Daily Beast:

He will be graduating this Sunday from Trinity College in Connecticut. He is not a very good student. His GPA is only 2.7. Once he was even threatened with expulsion because he had been quarrelling with his wife and had missed classes. He surprised me a few days ago by saying that he wanted to give a speech at his graduation ceremony. Would I read the draft he had written?

There was a further surprise. In what he had sent me, there was mention of his incarceration, in a federal prison in upstate New York, a few months after the events of 9/11. He was suspected of being a terrorist. I had known of this, but I had also found him taciturn and secretive; I was surprised that he was prepared to stand in his blue and gold robes at graduation and read aloud about having been put behind bars.

I will call him Khalid Farooq. He is 34 years old, and grew up in Abbotabad in Pakistan. He arrived in the U.S. on Sept. 5, 2001. Over the year that I have now known him, Khalid had mentioned his arrests—the first only a few days after the September attacks—but the details I was now reading were new to me.

More here.

The Most Comma Mistakes

Ben Yagoda in the New York Times:

If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Comma after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None is correct — unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend. Otherwise, the punctuation should be:

I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend Jessie.

If that seems wrong or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence:

I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.

You need a comma after “movie” because this and only this is Mr. Allen’s newest movie in theaters, and after “Jessie” because she and only she is the writer’s oldest friend.

The syntactical situation I’m talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, “Jessie”) is the only thing in the world described by the identifier (“my oldest friend”), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you’ve come to the end of the sentence). If not, don’t use any commas.

More here.

Anne Boleyn: witch, bitch, temptress, feminist

Hilary Mantel in The Guardian:

As a small child I remember being told by a solemn nun that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand. In the nun's eyes, it was the kind of deformity that Protestants were prone to; it was for Anne's sake, as everyone knew, that Henry VIII had broken away from Rome and plunged his entire nation into the darkness of apostasy. If it weren't for this depraved woman, England would be as holy as Ireland, and we'd all eat fish on Friday and come from families of 12.

Anne Boleyn wasn't exactly a Protestant, but she was a reformer, an evangelical; and the sixth finger, which no one saw in her lifetime, was a fragment of black propaganda directed at her daughter, Elizabeth I. In Elizabeth's reign it was the duty of beleaguered papists to demonstrate that the queen's mother had been physically and spiritually deformed. Hence, not just the extra finger but the "wen" on her throat, which supposedly she hid with jewellery: hence the deformed foetus to which she was said to have given birth. There is no evidence that this monster baby ever existed, yet some modern historians and novelists insist on prolonging its poor life, attracted to the most lurid version of events they can devise.

Anne Boleyn is one of the most controversial women in English history; we argue over her, we pity and admire and revile her, we reinvent her in every generation. She takes on the colour of our fantasies and is shaped by our preoccupations: witch, bitch, feminist, sexual temptress, cold opportunist.

More here.

Hidden Epidemic:  Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.

Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their ribbon-shaped bodies can grow as long as 21 feet. But that’s just one stage in the animal’s life cycle. Before they become adults, tapeworms spend time as larvae in large cysts. And those cysts can end up in people’s brains, causing a disease known as neurocysticercosis.

More here.

Meet India’s sperm donors

Lhendup G. Bhutia in Open:

In the film Vicky Donor, Annu Kapoor plays Dr Baldev Chaddha, a fertility specialist whose sperm bank in New Delhi is close to shutting down because the quality of his donors’ samples is just too poor to impregnate patients. That’s when Vicky Arora, played by Ayushmann Khurrana, comes in. A good-for-nothing lad who lives off his mother’s beauty parlour, his sperm samples rejuvenate Dr Chaddha’s flagging business. Vicky discovers that the quick buck assured by his virility beats the tedium of managing his uncle’s garment store: every single shot of semen fetches him a wad of Rs 500 notes. And this is how Vicky Arora becomes Vicky Donor and starts wanking for a living.

For all the earnest talk of the film’s intention to cast light on an industry cloaked in secrecy and ridden with stigma, its portrayal of the sperm donation business is but a caricature. The industry does exist, but there are no wads of cash being dispensed, donors don’t hang out at Costa Coffee outlets, and they certainly don’t earn enough to buy cars. Indian donors are mostly outstation students living in cramped hostel rooms, sweating to pay their bills and embarrassed by their need to encash what everyone else flushes down the drain. For some donors, it may be pocket money, but for most it’s the room rent or phone bill. And turning donor entails putting their pride at risk. Every commercial ejaculator must pass a strict selection test. Only the best are signed on. The rejects return home unpaid and dejected.

More here.

Rory Sutherland: Perspective is everything

Abbas Raza

fresno

Fresno sits about two thirds of the way down California’s huge Central Valley, which runs almost the entire length of the state, bounded to the west by the coastal ranges and to the east by the Sierra Nevada mountains. This is the most fertile farmland in the United States. The central and nothern parts get plenty of rain, but the southern part, called the San Joaquin Valley, is dry and subject to droughts, though with a few nice months of green in fall and spring. It could not have looked very promising when Fresno first appeared as a small outpost along the San Joaquin River; the expansion of the California Pacific Railroad to Fresno in the 1870s helped, however. And soon enough it became clear that despite the difficulty of the land, the connection to the farming infrastructure being set up to the north, including the railroad, made settling there worthwhile. Dutch and German farmers built irrigation ditches to make the land farmable. They were soon followed by immigrants from Mexico, Armenia, China, and Japan.

Four Ways Happiness Can Hurt You

June Gruber in Greater Good:

Clearly, happiness is popular. But is happiness always good? Can feeling too good ever be bad? Researchers are just starting to seriously explore these questions, with good reason: By recognizing the potential pitfalls of happiness, we enable ourselves to understand it more deeply and we learn to better promote healthier and more balanced lives. Along with my colleagues Iris Mauss and Maya Tamir, I have reviewed the emerging scientific research on the dark side of happiness, and we have conducted our own research on the topic. These studies have revealed four ways that happiness might be bad for us.

1. Too much happiness can make you less creative—and less safe.

Happiness, it turns out, has a cost when experienced too intensely. For instance, we often are told that happiness can open up our minds to foster more creative thinking and help us tackle problems or puzzles. This is the case when we experience moderate levels of happiness. But according to Mark Alan Davis’s 2008 meta-analysis of the relationship between mood and creativity, when people experience intense and perhaps overwhelming amounts of happiness, they no longer experience the same creativity boost. And in extreme cases like mania, people lose the ability to tap into and channel their inner creative resources. What’s more, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has found that too much positive emotion—and too little negative emotion—makes people inflexible in the face of new challenges.

More here.

sci-fi philosophy

The fish pendant, on Dick’s account, began to emit a golden ray of light, and Dick suddenly experienced what he called, with a nod to Plato, anamnesis: the recollection or total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. Dick claimed to have access to what philosophers call the faculty of “intellectual intuition”: the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind screens of appearance. Many philosophers since Kant have insisted that such intellectual intuition is available only to human beings in the guise of fraudulent obscurantism, usually as religious or mystical experience, like Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visions of the angelic multitude. This is what Kant called, in a lovely German word, “die Schwärmerei,” a kind of swarming enthusiasm, where the self is literally en-thused with the God, o theos. Brusquely sweeping aside the careful limitations and strictures that Kant placed on the different domains of pure and practical reason, the phenomenal and the noumenal, Dick claimed direct intuition of the ultimate nature of what he called “true reality.” Yet the golden fish episode was just the beginning.

more from Simon Critchley at the Opinionater here.

perl on sendak

The great popular artists have an instinctive relationship with the audience. That was true of Maurice Sendak, who died on Tuesday at the age of 83. He followed his gut. He kowtowed to no one. He knew that when pop culture really matters, it’s grounded in personal experience—in something the artist feels so strongly that other people cannot help but feel it too. Sendak had been involved with more than 50 children’s books by the time he became a national sensation in 1963 with Where the Wild Things Are. But even after Max in his white pajamas became part of modern mythology, right up there with the Beatle’s Nowhere Man, Sendak refused to take the audience for granted. He was resolutely independent to the end, and he expected the same of the public that had made him famous. There was something of the nineteenth-century reformer about Sendak—an old-fashioned optimism about the capacity of popular art to change public opinion and make the world a better place. He worked hard to provide public theater for children. He took on the subject of homelessness in 1993, with We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, his old familiar cast of adorable child-gremlins now living in hideaways jerrybuilt from cardboard boxes.

A Richer Life by Seeing the Glass Half Full

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Murphy’s Law — “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” — is the antithesis of optimism. In a book called “Breaking Murphy’s Law,” Suzanne C. Segerstrom, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, explained that optimism is not about being positive so much as it is about being motivated and persistent. Dr. Segerstrom and other researchers have found that rather than giving up and walking away from difficult situations, optimists attack problems head-on. They plan a course of action, getting advice from others and staying focused on solutions. Whenever my husband, a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist, said, “It can’t be done,” I would seek a different approach and try harder — although I occasionally had to admit he was right. Dr. Segerstrom wrote that when faced with uncontrollable stressors, optimists tend to react by building “existential resources” — for example, by looking for something good to come out of the situation or using the event to grow as a person in a positive way. I was 16 when my mother died of cancer. Rather than dwell on the terrible void her death left in my life, I managed to gain value from the experience. I learned to apply her lifelong frugality more constructively, living each day as if it could be my last, but with a focus on the future in case it wasn’t. Yes, I saved, but I also chose not to postpone for some nebulous future the things I wanted to do and could, if I tried hard, find a way to do now. And I adopted a very forthright approach to life, believing that if I wanted something badly enough, I could probably overcome the odds against me.

More here.

The two 3QD summer interns for 2012

Dear Readers and Applicants,

I must confess that I am extremely gratified by the number of amazingly talented and intelligent and fascinating young persons from four continents who applied for our internship. I feel sad that I can only take a maximum of two people but I would like to express my gratitude also to all the other remarkable individuals in the excellent pool of candidates: thank you so much for making the effort to apply. I am sorry that it didn't work out this time but I am glad that I got to know you a little bit, and I want to assure you that it was not necessarily a matter of any applicant being "better" than any other, it is just that I was looking for some specific skills and experience in certain areas. I wish you the best and hope that we have the opportunity to work together sometime in the future.

And now without further ado here are the two 3QD interns for summer 2012:

Henry Molofsky

Proudly hailing from Washington, DC, Henry now lives in Connecticut where he studies philosophy and music at Wesleyan University. He has previously worked at the nationally syndicated public radio program Afropop. He has also spent time studying and being a middle-school English teacher's assistant in Israel. He writes a lot of essays, which sometimes he'll admit he enjoys, but he also enjoys running in the woods, playing crazy parties with his top-40 cover band, and banging on West-African drums with nearly-correct technique. And he is a pianist.

Zujaja Tauqeer

Zujaja is a DPhil student researching military power and medical aid in Pakistan at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. A graduate of Brooklyn College, she will study medicine at Harvard Medical School after completing her DPhil. Born in Lahore, Zujaja left Pakistan with her family to escape persecution against Ahmadi Muslims, and someday, when she's finally out of the classroom, she hopes to return there and work to create an equitable and sustainable healthcare system.

Welcome Zujaja and Henry and get ready for June 18th! You are now Associate Editors of 3QD. And thanks once again to all the brilliant people who applied.

Yours,

Abbas

Public Access to Publicly Funded Research: it’s only fair

by Bill Hooker

Attention Conservation Notice: this post is here to ask you to sign a petition asking the White House to make all publicly funded research publicly available. Read on for background, or go straight to the petition.

You paid for it -- this is about research funded by tax dollars.

You don’t own it -- the majority of research is still published under the subscription model, with authors transferring copyright to the publisher.

You can’t even read it -- unless you have access through a subscribing institution, such as a university library, it will cost you around $30-$40 per paper to read the research you funded. The same goes for the researchers whose salaries you also pay: either their institution pays millions of dollars per year in subscriptions, or they pay the same $30-$40 per paper to access the work they need to build on. And no matter which institution they work at, they don’t have access to everything they need. Not even Harvard can afford full access.

That’s not right.

It’s not right, but some vested interests like it that way and are spending plenty of lobbying dollars trying to keep it that way. Recently, though, researchers and the public have been pushing back.

The Cost of Knowledge Boycott coincided with the withdrawal of the RWA, universities are canceling subscriptions, editors are resigning from the boards of toll-access journals, and there has been a good deal of mainstream media coverage.

It’s important that we push back. We, meaning everyone -- whether you’re a patient who wants to take control of their own healthcare, a backyard scientist who wants to know more about how the world works, or a taxpayer who wants their investment in research to yield the maximum return, it’s in your interests to stand up and tell the government that all research funded by all federal agencies should be publicly available. It is high time we took back the science we paid for.

The US government funds a lot of research. I mean, a lot. Counting just the research budgets over $100 million, we have the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health & Human Services, Homeland Security and Transportation; the Environmental Protection Agency; NASA; and the National Science Foundation. Of all those agencies, only the NIH (which is just one part of HHS) has a public-access policy.

All of that research is paid for by taxes. All of that research should be publicly available. That’s the premise and the promise of this petition to the White House:

We petition the obama administration to:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

If the petition reaches the signature threshold (25,000 in 30 days), the government will respond. This is a crucial time in the access debate, and a key point at which to let the Obama administration know, as they weigh priorities in the runup to the election, that this issue matters to everyone. The petition was prompted by meetings with the President's Science Advisor, in which the clear message was that the administration will be receptive to a strong display of broad public support.

So please sign the petition, and ask everyone you know to do the same.

Oh, and it’s important to point out: you don’t have to be a US citizen to sign. That’s appropriate, because science is an international enterprise.

If you would like more information:

some context, and a blog, from the petition organizers
the campaign has a Facebook page and a Twitter handle (@access2research)
Wikipedia is a pretty good place to start if you are unfamiliar with Open Access
Mike Taylor got mad, and he did something about it; it’s entertaining and informative to follow along as he blogs about the infuriating inefficiencies in research publishing. Much of this post is cribbed from Mike's blog.
I don’t know who is behind the satirical Twitter account @FakeElsevier, but they talk a lot of sense in amongst the one-liners
Michael Nielsen gave up tenure to write a book that covers all of this and more; it’s called Reinventing Discovery, and you can watch a TED talk or read an essay by way of introduction to its themes and content.

The Inner Lives of Animals

by Namit Arora

It is often said that humans are the only animals to use symbols. So many other claims of human uniqueness have fallen away—thoughts, emotions, intelligence, tool use, sense of fairness—what's so special about symbols, you ask? I share your skepticism, dear reader, and in the next few paragraphs I'll tell you why.

Let's begin by clarifying what "symbol" means here. One way to do this is to contrast symbols with signs. A sign, such as a red light, a grimace, a growl, or a thunderstorm, signifies something direct and tangible, making us think or act in response to the thing signified. Issuing and responding to signs is commonplace in Animalia. A symbol, on the other hand, is "something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention". A symbol allows us to think about the thing or idea symbolized outside its immediate context, such as the word "water" for the liquid, "7" for a certain quantity, and "flag" for a community. What is symbolized doesn't even have to be real, such as God, and herein lies the power of symbols—they are the building blocks of abstract and reflective thought. Evidence of material symbols used by humans dates back at least 60-100K years, when burial objects and decorated beads start to appear in archaeological finds. Linguistic symbols were almost certainly in use long before then.

According to Susanne Langer, symbols serve "to liberate thought from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world; and that liberation marks the essential difference between human and nonhuman mentality ... Words, pictures, and memory images are symbols that may be combined and varied in a thousand ways." It is only through symbolic thought that we imagine the past or the future—mental time-travel, including episodic memory, requires the use of symbols. Indeed, language is really a system of symbolic communication, combining words (which are symbols) and syntax. If non-human animals lack symbols, what and how do they really think?

Do Animals Live Only in the Moment?

If it's true that we are the only species that uses symbols, then nonhuman animals (henceforth animals), including intelligent problem-solvers, live purely in the moment and perceive only their immediate environments. They follow habit and reflex, have at best associative feelings and emotional states, and cannot think about anything in the past or the future, nor wilfully imagine fond objects they cannot see. For instance, per this view, a hungry dog cannot imagine in her mind a food bowl, nor imagine her pup that died yesterday (because this needs a mental image, i.e., a symbol for the bowl and the pup), nor plan with intent for a future event. Sure, past events may impact animal moods in the present—as from a beating a dog may have received—but the dog would not be able to recall the face or the location of the beater in her mind, until he reappears in person and awakens associative feelings. A lack of symbols would also imply that animals have no consciousness, if we assume that consciousness needs at least a minimal "awareness of self", which is an abstract, symbolic idea. Animals like birds and mammals then, implies this view, live entirely in a state of "momentary sentience". They do little more than feel pleasure and pain, act out of instinct, and respond to signs using the physical abilities that evolution has granted them.

Could this portrait be true? As support for this "no symbols" model of the animal mind, defenders claim that animals display no actual evidence of symbol use. But how solid is this claim? Can we reliably say that symbols are not being used in some cases? For instance, take the mating dance ritual of Blue-footed Boobies, during which the male gives the female "a small stone or stick. He then tips his beak, tail, and wing tips to the sky and whistles." If there were any symbolic import in the stone vs. the stick, or its size and weight, or in the type of whistle, how would we know it? When a chipmunk stashes away nuts for the winter, is that purely instinctive or is a certain symbolic conception of a cold, nutless future mixed in? Do elephants invest a certain amount of symbolism in mourning their dead? There may well be no symbolic import in these examples, but if there were some, how would we know?

Then there is the vast range of non-visual expression in the animal world, such as alarms calls and smells, where symbols may exist but to which we are usually oblivious. For instance, vervet monkeys, writes James R Hurford, "use a 'bark', a 'cough' or a 'chutter' to communicate the presence, respectively, of a leopard, an eagle, or a snake. There is nothing (as far as we know) inherently leopardlike in a bark, or inherently barklike in a leopard. It seems more reasonable to grant that the vervets are using genuinely arbitrary symbols", especially since the calls do not follow a stimulus-response mode and depend on context; the calls are likelier if one's own offspring need protection rather than unrelated juveniles, or if a female needs to be impressed. Prairie dogs have dozens of unique alarm calls for different predators, including "different ones for humans with or without guns." Perhaps all this is one hundred percent biological programming untainted by symbol use, but how do we know for sure? Herein lies a genuine epistemological problem. How do we know the inner experience of animals like chipmunks, monkeys, and elephants, each with its unique and frequently prodigious capacities of sight, smell, memory, taste, sound, locomotion, spatial cognition, echolocation, geomagnetic navigation, and more?

One reason to be skeptical of the "no symbols" model of animal minds is based on a consideration of the astonishing problems many animals solve to survive and the complex social behaviors they actually display. Is all that possible without any symbols? Some of it may be but some may not be. Can a baboon order, classify, and track over a lifetime its complex social-hierarchical relations with hundreds of individuals without symbolic concepts about them? Mary Midgley adds, "Many animals move continually from one food source to another, often with their young to provision, and sometimes with responsibility for a whole pack or herd. They have to be able to think how long this or that will last, or when it will recur. If they had not enough memory and anticipation of order to fit their plans into the probable train of events, with alterations for altered circumstances, they often could not survive."

In recent decades, experiments and systematic observations have seriously questioned the "no symbols" model. We now know that many animals, including chimpanzees, whales, dolphins, and even African Grey parrots, at least have the capacity for symbol use. The behavior of the bonobo in Susan Savage-Rumbaugh's video is a great argument for why symbol use is likely continuous with other animals. Three years ago a chimp "jolted the research community by providing some of the strongest evidence yet that nonhumans could plan ahead". At least one study describes how Capuchin monkeys were taught the use of certain symbols. While evidence for a capacity does not constitute evidence for its active use, these findings are notable. Does evolution commonly provision unused capacities?

In fact, a range of studies have revealed animal behaviors that, in humans, involve symbol use. Some birds "can recall past events and use the information to plan for the future". Many species "show behavioral manifestations of different features of episodic memory". Tool-using beavers have "been observed gathering material they need before starting to build, which shows forethought." The ability to correctly order numerical quantities exists in many species. Flexible and contextual deceptive behaviors, such as playing-dead to escape certain types of predators, are practiced by some birds and mammals. Behaviors suggesting metacognition—the knowledge of what one knows—have been detected in rats. Pigs are apparently capable of "visual perspective taking, which is the ability to assume what the other [weaker pig] sees and to adjust one's own behavior accordingly", suggesting "a degree of theory of mind". Several species have passed the mirror self-recognition test—including magpies, which belong to a distant evolutionary lineage from us—even as many other animals may get more of their "sense of self" from better developed aural, olfactory, tactile, and other sensory information. While not conclusive, these findings are significant enough to have thrown wide open the big question: What can we justifiably say about the inner lives of animals?

Since the 1970s, many cognitive ethologists and other specialists who study animals have challenged old orthodoxies about animal minds, including many implications of the "no symbols" model. This has invited accusations of naïve anthropomorphism from some who appeal to "reason" and "parsimony" (as if these weren't eternally corruptible human constructs. Their accusations in fact remind me of the "relativism" bogey). To be fair, it is also true that many animal lovers tend to inflate or misrepresent the capacities of animals; our folk stories, animated cartoons, and casual talk routinely assign human-like thought to them. Though we share a lot in common, humans are clearly not the same as other animals, who almost certainly don't sit around and argue about their models of the human mind. Having said that, how deeply does one's head have to be buried in the sand to defend the "no-symbols" model today, versus one that is more elastic and non-binary on the question of symbol use and is better able to account for observed animal behaviors?

A model, for instance, that embraces a gradualist and nonlinear evolutionary approach to animal minds, and permits many species some symbols both inside and out, giving them a certain sense of time, episodic memory, and intent. (Arguably, we too use lots of prelinguistic symbols that remain inside, and of which we are only partly aware. Human social and sexual relations, for instance, abound in subterranean and primordial symbols of power and desire—all part of the substrate in which our newly learned and linguistic symbols likely take hold.) Migratory cranes and whales have navigation skills far superior to anything humans possess, but this does not mean humans have zero navigation sense. Likewise for symbol use. Where humans have the crane-like advantage is in our ability to "learn massive numbers of arbitrary symbols" and to give expression to them (in art, ritual, language, etc.)—adaptations fueled by our more complex social lives.

Frans de Waal writes, "There will always be tension between those who view animals as only slightly more flexible than machines and those who see them as only slightly less rational than human beings." The problem of other minds is even worse across the species barrier. Science may never be able to settle whether animals use symbols in their inner lives, or whether they live entirely in the moment. We're stuck with reasoned interpretation of carefully observed behavior. And at the end of it, long after running the animals through our speciocentric hoops, if certain behaviors leave room for doubt about their symbolic content, why not give animals the benefit of the doubt? As JM Coetzee puts it, "Why should it be the doubters who always get the benefit of the doubt?"

__________________________

This essay was motivated by an exchange on another 3QD thread with my friend, Chris Schoen, to whom I'm grateful for that discussion.

Monday Poem

My breathing system seems to be:
these lungs within; without: those trees
……………………….. —Inspiration.

Conjoined

There are mountains in this pic of withered leaves—
as from a satellite

and voids

in shadows they recede

but I see
brittle peaks

bright spines
curling from dead stems
dry as earth desiccated by the practices
of men:

light filaments
that have broadcast life and breath:

sucked dioxide carbon in,
transmuted it like alchemists then
expired it as oxygen

dry lungs of trees
alveoli complements

sister lungs as close and tight as twins; consider:

when that one dies
this one withers
.

by Jim Culleny
5/15/12

Withered Leaves

Ed Bilous: 21st Century Music Man

by Randolyn Zinn

Ed Bilous, the composer and teacher, met me the other day at Juilliard where he has created the Center for Innovation in the Arts. Last month he was awarded the William Schuman Chair at Juilliard and you will be able to watch a video of his stirring speech at the end of this interview where he makes the case for re-imagining our educational system with the arts placed at the center of the curriculum.

Ed and I met In the early 1980s when we were teaching artists together at Lincoln Center Institute--the aesthetic education program that matches artists with schoolteachers to prepare students for seeing productions of dance, theater and music.

Randolyn Zinn: What year was that exactly…?

Ed Bilous: Had to be between ‘81 and ’83. I was working on my PhD at Juilliard at the time.

RZ: Just think, no cell phones or Internet. The extent of personal technology were our SONY Walkmans and telephone answering machines with tiny reel-to-reel tapes inside. You couldn’t dial in for your messages from outside the house.

EB: That’s right.

RZ: So how did you become so adept with technology and its interface with music?

EB: Technology has always been a part of music making. The shift from harpsichord to piano was largely a technological revolution, as was the creation of the organ. When you think about early composers a thousand years ago, their resources were fairly undeveloped, basically just primitive string and wind instruments. Bit by bit, technological changes brought them to life in a way that allowed far more expressivity and creativity until we got the kind of instruments we see in the orchestra today. The transformation from harpsichord to piano is amazing. The harpsichord doesn’t really have dynamics; you play loud or you play soft, but you can’t really achieve a crescendo. Having that ability with the piano transformed music making and a whole new kind of playing and composing. Trumpets went from just being bugle-like things, cones of brass, to instruments with valves that allow all kinds of sophisticated chromatics and articulation. So…technology has always been a part of music.

I got interested in music listening to the Beatles and watching them change from being a simple rock band of four guys playing electric guitars and drums to what they accomplished in the recording studio via technology. That was all I needed to set me off. My life has been one steady outgrowth from that early bit of inspiration.

RZ: I’m wondering if this intersection of music with computer and video challenges the classical music world’s status quo. Their mission, or a large part of their mission, seems to be about sustaining the musical canon in its historically intact form.

EB: You’re right, it does. What we’ll be doing in the Center is not only doing new works that use technology, but also devising productions of master works by looking at them through the new lens of technology. I’ll give you an example of how we have recreated an older work using technology.

There‘s the wonderful Bach Chaconne, one of the most famous pieces ever written and certainly the most famous piece for solo violin. Some musicologists believe the piece was based on a hymn. There is a study and a recording of this work in which we hear the solo violin perform the piece with a vocal part mysteriously woven through like a ghost-like presence that doesn’t appear in Bach’s score, but the musicologist that created this version believes the vocal line is implicit, or sort of buried in the score.

So what we did was to have a solo violin on stage performing the piece as written and then a pre-recorded vocal part that was triggered by a dancer who did a solo with the violinist. The vocal track was triggered by hand gestures so that the recording of the voice sort of wafted through the audience via speakers surrounding the hall. On the one hand, it was a perfectly beautiful performance by the violinist that Bach would have been happy with--we didn’t change any of the notes—and then this other element was mysteriously woven through in a very magical way through the use of technology.

We also did an interesting production of a work by Pérotin, a 12^th century composer (1160—1225). While notated, his music doesn’t really have much beyond text and pitches, so if there was some instrumental accompaniments and doublings in his day, it’s not clear from the score what they might have been or how it sounded, so it’s up to the performers’ interpretations. Most of the time it’s done as a cappella singing or with organ. We performed some of his works with vocalists doubled with electronic sounds surrounding the hall that were triggered, again, by choreography.

RZ: Could you explain what the Yamaha Disklavier does?

EB: It’s a wonderful instrument. A single Disklavier is basically a grand piano, and Yamahas’s latest, newest models are competitive on the highest level with every other piano manufacturer, fabulous-sounding traditional instruments that you could put onstage at Carnegie Hall and play Brahms.

But what’s really wonderful is that they come in pairs with a variety of options. On the first of the two, sensors under the keys and pedals register and store every bit of motion that happens as the performer plays: all the fingerings, all the phrasing, all the pedal work, whether legato or staccato, and so on. Then all that info is sent via the Internet to the twin piano and those exact motions of the first are recreated through certain mechanisms so you see the keys and the pedals move on the twin instrument.

RZ: It’s really a ghostly presence to see those keys moving without a player.

EB: Yes. When I learned of these instruments and saw their potential, I had an idea to do a piece by John Cage that requires several pianos. I set up one pianist participating in Tokyo, one in Los Angles, and the third one in New York. The pianists in Tokyo and L.A. were playing -- you could see them on a video screen--and the twins of their instruments were in New York where the audience watched the keys and pedals moving. It was a little like being at a séance.

RZ: Do most of the Center’s projects stem from music and musical impulses?

EB: Yes. Students of Music and Composition seem to have a more direct connection with technology – and I don’t want to seem prejudicial here -- but more connection than I’ve seen with actors and dancers. I don’t know why that is. Students will come to Juilliard as violinists or pianists or composers with composing software loaded on their computers. Dancers and actors might edit their performances on FinalCut or iMovie, but their creative impulses don’t begin there – or not that I’ve seen. That could change.

While dance might look somewhat different from 50, 100, or 300 years ago, musicians today couldn’t pick up an instrument created 300 years ago and play it. The fingering is different, the tuning, the manner in which one plays has changed dramatically with technology…as I mentioned before about the differences between the harpsichord and the piano. By the nature of their trade, musicians are forced to stay in touch with machines in a way that a dancer or an actor is not.

RZ: Because, for actors and dancers, their bodies are their instruments.

EB: That’s right.

RZ: What do you teach at Juilliard? And will your course load change now that you’re the director of the Center for Innovation in the Arts?

EB: I started teaching Intro level Music Theory in the Drama, Dance and Music programs at Juilliard after earning my PhD there. Then I became the Chairman of the Music Theory department, but 15 years in, it became clear to me that the school needed to have technology offerings if we were going to really prepare young musicians for careers in the 21^st century. So I got permission from the school and a substantial donation early on to build a music technology center in 1993, which very quickly caught on and was in high demand with the students. When the school built the extension and the new addition, we created the new music technology center and a multi-media black box theater that we now oversee, the Willson Theatre, named after Meredith Willson. I also teach art in education and classes in interdisciplinary work in technology.

RZ: So is Juilliard leading the way with this new Center?

EB: Now we are. In the 1970s there were other schools with music technology. Our new center is interdisciplinary. It’s not at all about research and development; it’s project-oriented. We pull creative people together and light the spark to send them making new work.

RZ: Will the Center have its own roster of students?

EB: It will draw from all departments. My personal goal is to try and create a special certificate program where a student could be an actor, dancer or musician and have something akin to a minor or an emphasis doing interdisciplinary work and work with technology.

RZ: Can you do interactive performances within in the building?

EB: Absolutely.

RZ: Do only faculty at Juilliard get to participate or will you cast a wider net?

EB: We’ve always involved artists outside the building, especially filmmakers or visual or multimedia artists because we don’t have those kinds of artists here in the building, so that’s been a natural. We reach out to alumni who have gone on to create careers that are a little broader and use skills and technology that are outside the classical purview. I do think it’s important to cast, as you say, a wider net. Also, we now have the capability via the Internet to collaborate with artists all over the world, and likewise, to share our work with artists elsewhere.

RZ: Say a student in the drama department wants to spearhead a project, is that possible?

EB: Yes, in fact there are 2 such proposals from drama students on my desk right now.

RZ: Does the Center offer a pre-determined season and/or allow for spontaneous laboratory projects within the school year?

EB: That’s the million dollar question. We do have two fixed concert programs: one in November, eVirtuosos, focusing on music and technology, and then in April InterArts, featuring interdisciplinary work. The dream is to use our wonderful new black box theater as a lab space so students can go in and play and explore without the pressure of creating something that must be performed -- or maybe it could go on to be performed. But our students are so incredibly busy; we’re working on how to figure out ways to open up windows of opportunities for them. The Willson Theater was designed specifically for these multimedia interdisciplinary works.

RZ: Does the Willson have its own technical director?

EB: It does, plus a sound engineer, lighting engineer, a whole team, and of course, Internet access.

RZ: So I noticed upstage center a projection screen that rolls down. Is that the only place available for a screen?

EB: No, in fact, we’ve used multiple projection surfaces in other areas.

RZ: Great. So could performers carry small screens on their bodies, say?

EB: That’s right.

RZ: Or costumes that can display projected images?

EB: Yes. Honestly, I’m a little weary seeing a string quartet with a video projected overhead. Hearkens back to the days of silent movies. The idea of making projection surfaces as flexible as the ensemble itself is part of the vision.

RZ: What happens in the summer?

EB: The school shuts down. I want to create a summer program for students interested in collaborating on multimedia projects. The goal is to create a 4 -6 week program from May until June to develop work, and then when we pick up in September we could start rehearsing in earnest with a performance date in March.

RZ: Has the Center come about because of your own compositional interests? And how do you think your work will be affected by what you’re doing here?

EB: I think it’s fair to say that the Center exists because of my work and the fact that I had persuaded the President of Juilliard Joseph Polisi and the Board that an understanding of technology is essential for educated artists today, even if they don’t use it; just to know it’s out there is important. It would be like a composer that understands how to write for strings and brass but doesn’t know what woodwinds are capable of.

But a lot of the energy for this movement comes from the students themselves. They say, gee, we’d like to go to Juilliard for all the usual reasons, but we also don’t want to miss out on these other technological opportunities at these other universities. Our goal was to make sure we could offer those same opportunities, if not go beyond them.

RZ: Are you worried that students will leave behind certain key understandings in their studies?

EB: I’m not worried, but there are some faculty members who are and I understand their position. For example, it’s difficult enough for a young pianist or violinist to develop the skill and artistry needed to be in the front of the pack, meaning that they not only get heard and seen, but make a living too. So there are many faculty members that believe that while this technology stuff is interesting, it’s a diversion from practice time, from focusing on the basic canon.

RZ: You’re doing the rebellious stuff.

EB: (laughs) We are kind of off in the corner of the building here, where the irreverent stuff happens.

RZ: I notice the office we’re meeting in today is called The Play Room.

EB: Yes. You know, in the Drama and Dance divisions there are so many opportunities for the students to play and put on masks, but in the Music division it never happens.

RZ: Not even in the Jazz program?

EB: Well, even so, the Jazz division is very rigorous and disciplined. In the Classical Music division, you wake up and your hours are organized from September through May. What you do with your instrument is extremely regimented. The thought that you might wander into a space, explore and try things out, feeling free to make mistakes…music students just didn’t have those kind of opportunities here. So in establishing our environment in the Center for creativity, The Play Room is a space where students know they can come in and play, just like when they were children.

RZ: Ed, you’ve found a way to be rebellious and respectful at the same time.

EB: (laughs) It’s been a balancing act.

RZ: What are you doing now in your own work?

EB: Right now I’m developing a piece that’s been in the works for some time that uses women’s voices, an assortment of instruments and new media. The piece is based on the Gospel According to Mary Magdalene, a Gnostic gospel. There are a couple of venues possible for the premiere, but nothing’s settled, so I can’t speak specifically about dates. It’s apiece that been very close to my heart for some time, not only for spiritual reasons and philosophical interests of mine, but also for the musical possibilities.

RZ: You’re working on something else, too…inspired by Facebook?

EB: Yes, my credit there is “conceived and produced by…”. It’s a concert based on a photojournalist Teru Kuwayama, who was embedded with the Marines in Afghanistan where he took photographs on his iPhone of soldiers, the war environment, and villagers, and created a blog, Basetrack.org, in which soldiers can communicate with their families, but in a collective manner. It become so popular that it replaced all traditional means of communications between soldiers and their families. I think they’ve tracked 5 millions hits on the website.

When I became acquainted with the blog, I realized that there was a work of art in it, even though it was a work of journalism. We reached out to him and I asked if we could take his images and some of the text on Facebook and adapt it for a staged performance. He agreed, and in March we did a concert on our series Beyond The Machine. The piece features two actors speaking text posted from the blog, photos and film as the set design, and a musical ensemble in the middle playing a score that tied it all together. We’re exploring possibilities to perform it again at the UN. We’re also having some conversations with people in Washington, as well as the possibility of taking it on tour to military bases.

RZ: So your thoughts on technology in regards to teaching….

EB: I think media education should be less about data transference than the creation of new work.

RZ: Thanks, Ed. This has been great.

EB: Thank you, Randolyn.

Here's the video of Ed's inspiring speech about our educational system, re-imagined with art placed at its dynamic center.

**** For more on Ed and to listen to his music go to: http://edwardbilous.com/Edward_Bilous.html

Reading Lolita in Kashmir

by Rafiq Kathwari

As a boy, I stole
into grandpa’s study.

An art merchant,
he loved books

with gilded edges,
Aristotle to Zola

all stuck together
in the humidity.

I snuck Lo out
to his black Chevy,

rifled for dirty bits,
steering her away

for a spin,
teen tunes swirling

in my head. ‘I want
to hold your hand.”

We hovered
over a valley

ringed
by sharp mountains,

white turbans on peaks.
Lake Dal,

in the hem,
polished by a soft breeze.

A paisley-shaped river
sobbed through a dazed valley:

Amputated
tree trunks screamed,

reams of plastic
choked icy streams.

Barbed wire
hedged the Shalimar

Tongas and Toyotas
jammed the bazaars.

An ancient Sufi shrine
oddly gutted,

its rich lattice-work lost.
New architecture

showed no awe
for nature.

Half- widows wailed,
clawed at mass graves,

yearning
for their disappeared.

Nightingales
sang of joy, not sorrow.

At Zero Bridge,
lilacs by bunkers bloomed.

A fighter jet
sound-boomed—

startled stray dogs
howled.

In Grandpa’s black Chevy,
Lolita slipped from my lap

as we returned from
a foreboding odyssey.

Rafiq Kathwari is a guest poet at 3 Quarks Daily.

perceptions

Robert Irwin. Slant/Light/Volume.

More here, here, and here.

Coordinates: how symbols talk to geometry

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Like the rest of us poor mortals, wandering in constant confusion between things and the names for things, bewitched by language and unable to resist it, mathematicians and physicists are constantly struggling with their representations and yet entirely reliant upon them to grasp the world.

Many of the fundamental intuitions that we start to describe the world with are geometric or spatial: this is a point; this is another point; walk in this direction to get from the first point to the second; this is the path a particle takes. If we want to make this precise, to describe and classify and manipulate and compute, we need to be able to make these statements precise. The simple act of drawing a pair of coordinate axes on a flat surface and using pairs of numbers to describe points is extraordinarily powerful, yoking algebra and symbolic manipulation to geometry and spatial intuition, and it unlocks for us a language within which to watch spatial and temporal processes unfold. Similarly, describing points on the surface of the Earth by pairs of numbers (latitude and longitude are the most common) allows us to specify locations relative to other locations, to calculate distances and trajectories and to describe and communicate quantities that vary across the surface of the Earth, like weather patterns and temperatures.

But in picking a particular representation we've done a certain violence to the geometric structure we started with, by forcing an arbitrary layer of description on top. We might have decided to describe points relative to axes at right angles, like so:

But we could equally well have rotated the axes, or shifted the center, or chosen axes that were at other angles, like so:

Similarly, the standard way to describe points on the surface of the Earth is by their distance from the equator (i.e. latitude) and their distance from a line perpendicular to the equator and passing through Greenwich (longitude), but I could choose to describe places by how far away they are from my house and in which direction relative to some local landmark. And this is how we generally give directions locally.

And so, now that we've introduced a way of describing space, we have to be careful that we don't get led astray by our representations, and that we keep separate the convenient descriptors that we use and the spatial and physical quantities that we're trying to describe. Depending on our system of representation, the particular coordinates attached to London and New York might vary dramatically. But our calculation of the physical distance between them shouldn't depend on how we've chosen to represent them.

Physicists and mathematicians have developed a lot of theory to derive and explain which quantities are physically meaningful (e.g. the distance between London and New York) and which quantities are simply consequences of the particular representation that we have chosen (e.g. the longitude of New York). This is often not trivial. For example, as Einstein famously found, the distance in space between events will be calculated differently by observers moving at different velocities (a form of coordinate dependence), but there is a quantity called the interval that combines the distance and time between events that all observers can agree on.

Once we have our coordinate systems and some notion of which quantities are physically meaningful and which aren't, we also have to figure out how to transform quantities from one coordinate system to another. This is both true of the accidental quantities, like the particular labels associated to points (which will depend on the particular coordinate system), and the essential ones, like the distance between points. The rules to calculate these essential quantities might depend on the particular coordinate system but the quantities that result from applying the rules shouldn't. So, for example, if we want to calculate the distance between two points, and our coordinate axes are perpendicular, we can just add the sums of the squares of the distances along each coordinate axis (this is Pythagoras' theorem). On the other hand, if our coordinate axes are at some other angle to each other, the distance calculation becomes more complicated (but some other computation might become simpler).

This is a general trope, and is a common strategy for attacking physical problems. Just like certain philosophical problems are intractable in the language of the Middle Ages and immediately transparent in modern language, the right choice of coordinate system can make a problem trivial to solve¹.

Geometric ideas and spatial intuition are very valuable. Few people immediately grasp the meaning of a set of equations or symbols, and often when we say we understand something, we mean that we have a mental picture of it. We've used the introduction of symbolic representation to bring the computational machinery of algebra to geometry, but this step also opens up the possibility of going the other way, and attaching space and geometry to problems that are framed symbolically. The “spaces” that emerges in these situations are more abstract than physical space, but they carry with them many of the same structures -- abstractions of geometric notions like distances, directions and trajectories. And many physical and mathematical problems share the same deep structure, one that is obscured by their particular representation but revealed by the abstract geometric structure underlying them (I will resist the temptation to draw some mystical neo-Platonic moral from this). The dual movement, from algebra and symbols to geometry and pictures and back is a fundamental pattern of mathematical thought and is almost always fruitful. If you've ever graphed a relationship (say the population of a country over time, or how the production of a country varies with its population), you've already taken advantage of the transformation from symbolic relationships into geometrical ones.

Studying the geometric structures associated with sets of equations that describe physical systems is particularly productive. As an example, consider the venerable favorite of the physicist: the pendulum. The structures underlying the behavior of a pendulum are ubiquitous²; roughly, they are the model for things that go round and round, or show repeated behavior.

So we start our pendulum off and let it swing. A convenient way to describe its position is by the angle it makes as it swings. Once we let the pendulum go, the angle will decrease from a maximum value to zero (in the center), then increase to the same maximum value on the other side and then return. When the angle is zero the pendulum will be going at its fastest, and when the angle is at its greatest the pendulum is stationary. This is a common pattern underlying oscillatory behavior. If this isn't intuitive, think of a swing –- the swing is fastest in the middle and hangs in the air at the ends before it changes direction. Similarly, the sun is moving north at its fastest during the vernal equinox and comes to a halt before changing directions during the solstice.

So Let's say we plot these two things against each other: the position of the pendulum is on the x-axis and its speed is on the y-axis. If we take the idealized pendulum, which never stops, we'll find that they form a circle, moving from zero speed and maximum angle, to maximum speed and zero angle. For a more realistic pendulum, which eventually comes to a stop, we'll see it spiral into the center, eventually settling to zero speed and zero angle.

What can we do with this picture of the pendulum? More precisely, how can we use this space that we've described the pendulum's behavior in. Note that one direction in this space represents position and the other represents velocity³, so this space isn't a physical space. As a start, observe that we don't need more quantities to predict where the pendulum is going. Given its position and how fast and in what direction it's moving, we can predict where it's going to be next. So a two-dimensional abstract space is sufficient. This is what physicists mean when they talk about the dimension of a system.

How could we express our prediction of the system's behavior? Let's go back to our picture and at each point draw a little arrow describing the direction in which the system would move if it were to be that point, with the length corresponding to how fast it would move. Again, we're using geometric language, but we're describing the pendulum in a more abstract space. Each “point” is a combination of position and velocity and each direction is a mixture of changes in position and changes in velocity. Going “right” means changing position and not velocity, going “up” means changing velocity and not position and the intermediate directions are combinations of changes. The mathematical term for this set of arrows in this abstract space, which describes how the system will change, is a “differential equation”, and the way we'd usually solve this equation is by starting the system off at a point, following the arrow at that point a little bit to get to a new point and a new arrow, and repeating. Computers do this very well, once they are given coordinates to work with (and appropriate encouragement).

So far we've taken a physical system and, by plotting some of its aspects against each other, represented it in some abstract space. What if we take this space seriously, as a geometric object in its own right? The aspects of the system that we've used to enter into this space are coordinates (here, position and velocity), describing points in the space, and we can start to ask the same sorts of questions as we did before. Are these good coordinates? Are there other representations that would serve our purposes better? Are there fundamental relationships in this space that must be preserved, relationships between points or along the paths the system takes? As one might imagine, these are all very useful questions. For example, as with our calculations on physical space, looking for good coordinates is often the way to solve differential equations: with certain sets of coordinates the behavior of the system looks very simple and its paths can be described very easily.

Once you start to look for them, abstract spaces are everywhere. For a very different example, consider a set of pictures of faces. Say we're taking low resolution pictures of faces with a 100x100 pixel camera. Each picture consists of a set of 10,000 numbers, with each number corresponding to the color at a particular point⁴ . The space of face pictures can be thought of as a geometric space, too, with 10,000 coordinates corresponding to the 10,000 points in each picture. Rather than the two-dimensional space that the pictures are representing, we now have a 10,000 dimensional space and each picture is a single point in this space. And, again, we can start to ask geometric questions. For example, is there a meaningful notion of distance in this space, perhaps based on how similar two pictures are. We can also start to interrogate our coordinates. For example, if I was describing a face (or a picture of a face) to you, I'd be unlikely to give you a list of color values at each point. Instead, I might give you a “value” for hair color, another one for nose shape and a third for hair style. This is another coordinate system. In theory, if I wanted to describe the face completely, I'd need to give you many more coordinates; for example, these few coordinates don't tell you whether the face has freckles and what the position of particular freckles are. But here we've packed most of the information into the first few coordinates (nose-shape, eye-color); this is unlike in the list-of-pixels set of coordinates, where any given subset of coordinates (values of pixel color in the middle of the face, for example), is relatively uninformative. This is another possible criterion for what makes a coordinate system valuable; if there's some underlying structure in the space, then capturing as much of that structure as possible in the first few coordinates is often a good way to proceed, especially if we don't care about exactly representing points in the space (here, faces) but rather, just want to represent them approximately and efficiently for some particular task (for example, I don't need to know the exact pattern of freckles on someone's face to identify them). And there exist procedures going the other way: given a set of points in some space, represented by some coordinate system, how do we find a new coordinate system that efficiently captures the location of a point using only a few coordinates⁵.

A number of people tell me they loved geometry in school, and seem puzzled and somewhat sad that their later mathematical education seems to have degenerated into a series of symbolic manipulations and computations. To a large extent, this is a consequence of the particular topics chosen for high school mathematics and of the fact that many math classes are taken as preparation for calculations in introductory physics or economics. But geometry doesn't disappear, and the grand currents of geometric thought multiply and spread out as one goes further, running through much of modern mathematics. One of the most exhilarating intellectual moments is when a profusion of symbols and equations suddenly resolves itself into a simple moment of underlying geometric intuition, a picture that seems both profound and inevitable. And for whatever reason, the intuition of space, seemingly one of the most primitive and concrete intuitions we have, reveals itself hidden behind our most abstract thoughts.

------------------------------------------------

1How this happens, and which coordinate systems should correspond to which problems is a fascinating subject, and one that involves its own mathematical machinery. As an example, many problems that involve multiple interacting components in one coordinate system separate into a series of simpler non-interacting subproblems in the right coordinate system. It is hard to exaggerate how useful this idea has been.

2I should note that I'm talking about an idealized pendulum that has been displaced only a small amount from its center. See the Wikipedia page on “harmonic oscillator” if you're curious. At times it can seem like most of an undergraduate physics education is encountering harmonic oscillators in increasingly abstract contexts.

3I'm being sloppy with units.

4Or, if this picture is in color, each of the 10,000 points has three numbers. The three numbers are often the values of red, green and blue at that point. But note that this is a particular set of coordinates used to describe the (abstract) space of colors, and there exist other coordinate systems, adapted for different purposes, and formulas for moving between them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_space , for example.

5For a fun illustration of this using faces, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigenface

Monkey Fire

by Mara Jebsen

I met a tipsy older lady in a place;

She said, "Honey, it doesn't really come clear

'til you're sixty." But she wouldn't say

what. The television was blaring

about chimpanzees. Some journalist

had likened our president to a chimp.

Meanwhile, a chimp named Travis

was reported to have sipped

wine; and more recently tea, laced with Xanax,

before his "unprecedented

killing spree." The reporters said Travis

"had no history of violence," but one of

my students, who'd grown up in T's town

knew a guy Travis had attacked-back

when they were kids. The bartender, Gene

checked it on his i-phone, and there were photos

of the owner--or should I say "mother?" snuggled

up tight with the chimp, before bed.

It's a modern tragedy, they said (Travis

is dead now) and there's such vague pity

and unlocalized outrage that I can't figure out

what I'm thinking.

Yesterday I sat kind of across from Justin

Timberlake. He had juice. I was eating

a Cuban sandwich. I wanted to tell him

that my sisters adore his albums; that he cracked

me up in his leotard when he danced on SNL,

and that I really wasn't sure about his clothing

line idea, but Jessica Biel was there

and I didn't have the nerve. Can any

of this really come clear, when you're

sixty? The lady was ripping pages

out of a magazine from Sotheby's. She said,

"You want em?" " I took the good art out."

and I took them gently from her

because it seemed polite. She'd left

La Misericorde, which is a man

in a suit, whose head is an eyeball, and near him

is a fire, on a strange blue plain. The caption says

Magritte shows the modern man, confronted

by fetish, desire, the unknown. There's a squarish

object in the great, healthy fire—but its not

at all clear what's burning.

Saadia Toor and "The State of Islam"

by Omar Ali

Saadia Toor is an assistant professor of sociology and social work at the City University of New York and recently published a book about Pakistan titled The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War politics in Pakistan. She states that the book grew out of her PhD thesis (a doctoral thesis in developmental sociology titled “"The Politics of Culture and the Poetics of Protest: Pakistani Women and Islamisation, 1977-1988."). The book’s official blurb states:

The State of Islam tells the story of the Pakistani nation-state through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, in order to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the rise of militant Islam across the world. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam, and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined political realm, The State of Islam is a Gramscian analysis of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. The author uses the tools of cultural studies and postcolonial theory to understand what is at stake in discourses of Islam, socialism, and the nation in Pakistan...

She also states that:

I wanted to subvert this discourse by highlighting the complexity of Pakistan’s history and the primacy of people’s struggles within it, as well as the role of the US-aligned establishment (and, at key junctures, liberals) in quashing these struggles and the alternate political and cultural visions they embodied.

It is indeed possible to write a good work of history that is also a subtle work of socialist (or other) propaganda and that appeals to the author’s in-group while reaching a larger audience. But this takes a lot of skill and experience and Ms Toor, unfortunately, is unable to manage this feat. In her youthful enthusiasm for her version of the socialist cause (a cause she formally joined by becoming a member of the Pakistan workers and peasants party or Mazdoor Kissan Party, while back in Pakistan researching her PhD thesis) leads her to shoehorn every event into an academic-Marxist narrative that owes more to to Tariq Ali and fashionable Wesern academic prejudices than to the actual history of Pakistan. Of course, it is possible for youthful enthusiasm to produce a great book (John Reed’s “Ten days that shook the world” comes to mind) but unfortunately, this is not that book.

This is not to say the book has nothing of value. Far from it. While the viewpoint of the author is not as rare in the West as she implies (analysis similar to the author’s is regularly published in the London Review of Books (Tariq Ali), the New York Times (Pankaj Mishra), the New York Review of Books (Mishra and others) and constitutes dominant/mainstream opinion in the fields of culture studies, critical theory, postcolonialism and even South Asian history) there is a tendency in the mass media to reduce Pakistan (and not just Pakistan..they are not only shooting at Yossarian) to a few soundbites. And these days the favored soundbites are indeed about Islamic fanatics and terrorism. In this always simplified world, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that Pakistan is a country of 200 million people and they do have a history (and not just as Pakistan, some of them being older than Pakistan). One part of that history is cultural history and and it is this history that forms the core of Saadia Toor’s book. She has done real research in this area and anyone reading the book will find out many new details about the language movement in Bengal and the progressive writer’s association and its suppression by the state. The role of the cold war in these culture wars and how communism and anti-communism were deployed to resist US influence or to beg for more of it are also front and center in the book. There are quotes from the protagonists and detailed references to half-forgotten episodes. Anyone interested in Urdu literature in particular will find the book and its anecdotes fascinating and enlightening. Though the author is sympathetic to other languages and their struggles within Pakistan in principle, the focus is almost entirely on Urdu literature.

The book also highlights the role played by the left-wing in Pakistani politics and the Left’s harsh suppression by the military-bureaucratic elite. The scale of left wing organization may never have been as great as its fans (or the state) imagined, but there is a story there and Ms Toor tells it in greater detail than most. In all this, it’s a very interesting book and one that Pakistanis of a particular class and age will want to have in their library. Unfortunately for the author’s political beliefs, that class is not the proletariat but the super-elite, but if that's how it is with cultural history so be it.

But while the book contains a wealth of anecdotes about the cultural and political history of Pakistan, it is damaged by her determination to not only impose a generally left wing lens on her story, but to impose a particular Western left wing lens in which no one except the West and their organized left wing opponents have any agency. She is unwilling to accept that events like partition, military takeovers and the rise of Islamist forces in Pakistan may have aspects that do not neatly fit into a dichotomy of evil Western imperialism and heroic left wing resistance to the same.

Working backwards from a particular leftist critique of the “war on terror” (one which insists on seeing all Western actions as conspiracies against the working class and all resistance to such actions as the fight-back of the proletariat) Ms Toor is quick to attack any narrative that distracts from this schema. Partition and the religious terms in which the demand for Pakistan were couched are an inconvenience in this regard and she is determined to pre-empt any such distraction. So she insists that “the ideology of Muslim nationalism that underpinned the demand for Pakistan embodied an ethnic and not a religious nationalism”. What does that even mean? Were the Muslims of India a separate ethnicity from their neighboring Hindus and Sikhs? It seems that the main motivation for this strange assertion is the urge to shoot down any notion that religion (and particularly Islam) may have had something to do with partition.

Continuing with this theme, she also condemns Rushdie for calling Pakistan “a place insufficiently imagined” and she does so on the basis that ALL nationalisms are “a discourse of power and as such always deeply contested”. But while that is true enough as far as it goes, it is not hard to imagine that there CAN be nationalisms that are “insufficiently imagined”. Nationalism is elastic, but it is not infinitely elastic. The distance from imagination to actual state may be greater or smaller and in some cases the problems to be solved may be overwhelming. Pakistan, in this sense, was insufficiently imagined. Muslims in India lived all over India (though with some concentrations in the East and West) and spoke dozens of languages and followed multiple sects and so on…to take some of them (and not even the ones most threatened by any Hindu majoritarianism) and unite them into a unified state whose halves were separated by a thousand miles and a large gulf of culture and language did prove to be “insufficiently imagined”. Whether the remaining Pakistan can sufficiently imagine a Pakistani nationalism that does not involve suppressing smaller nationalities and imposing a fascist version of Islam as a unifying force remains to be seen, but is hardly beyond question. But Ms Toor is extremely sensitive to the possibility that such questions are being raised on behalf of “Western imperialism and the war on terror” and will have none of it. She goes so far as to suggest that “the contentious debates among Pakistani intellectuals over what constituted Pakistani nationalism should be seen as reflecting the vibrant and dynamic nature of the politico-ideological field in Pakistan” , which sound suspiciously like too much pleading.

But let us leave partition and the ideology of Pakistan aside. These are contentious issues and ones that Westernized Pakistani intellectuals find especially difficult to deal with because “the academy” does not provide a good ready-made analysis that can “save the appearances”. The task is not beyond the resources of a good dialectician, but has not been satisfactorily performed yet, so let us not fault this book for failing to provide a satisfactory solution. What is problematic is that this ideological bias continues to undermine the book's later portions as well.

After tackling parition, Ms Toor also insists on fitting every twist and turn of subsequent Pakistani politics into a simplified version of cold war politics. This is not to say that cold war politics had no impact on Pakistani politics. In fact, people like Wali Khan have implied that the very creation of Pakistan was a part of imperial and cold war politics (this is the thesis that the Pakistan movement was mainly a British plot to protect their empire and that eventually Pakistan was created as a way to weaken potentially socialist India and to create an Islamic buffer state against Soviet expansion towards the “warm waters”..one may regard this as the anti-paknationalist version of partition). There is also ample evidence that the United States spent money to support Islamist politics as a way to counter communism (there is also evidence that the Soviet Union spent money to support communists); and the effort to find and exterminate communists under every bed was indeed a daily priority of the US embassy and its agents.

This cold war lens also caused the US to look kindly upon the military-bureaucratic elite in Pakistan and to encourage it to suppress every mass movement that arose in the country. These cold war priorities also caused the US to look the other way during massacres in Bangladesh in 1971 and to contemplate intervening on Pakistan’s side in its war with India. But Ms Toor presents this history with the emphasis entirely on US machinations, as if its collaborators in Pakistan had no ambitions, needs or plans of their own. In actual fact, the military bureaucratic elite in Pakistan figured out very early that US assistance could be arranged if they were seen to be fighting the demon of communism and they made sure the US embassy was always aware of the communist threat and their heroic (and expensive) efforts to combat this threat.

Jinnah himself was not blind to the possibilities and dangled the anti-communist bait in front of every interested Western visitor. The following account is from a book by Margaret Bourke-White and I am quoting at some length because I think it is remarkably prescient about many things:

..(Jinnah said) "Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion."

I ventured to suggest that the term "democracy" was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind?

"Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning," said Jinnah. "It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat -- our obligation to the poor."

This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific.

"Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century."

This mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has other relics of the Middle Ages besides "social justice" -- the remnants of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do about that? .. "The land belongs to the God," says the Koran. This would need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer, would be just the person to correlate the "true Islamic principles" one heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation's laws. But all he would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because "the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy."

What plans did he have for the industrial development of the country? Did he hope to enlist technical or financial assistance from America?

"America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America," was Jinnah's reply. "Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed" -- he revolved his long forefinger in bony circles -- "the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves." He leaned toward me, dropping his voice to a confidential note. "Russia," confided Mr. Jinnah, "is not so very far away."

This had a familiar ring. In Jinnah's mind this brave new nation had no other claim on American friendship than this - that across a wild tumble of roadless mountain ranges lay the land of the BoIsheviks. I wondered whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored buffer between opposing major powers. He was stressing America's military interest in other parts of the world. "America is now awakened," he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. "If Russia walks in here," he concluded, "the whole world is menaced."

This trend to ask for American money in the name of fighting communism continued and intensified as time went on. The US was happy to oblige and used its resources to promote such thinking, but the attraction was mutual and highly profitable for the Pakistani elite. Ms Toor presents one side of this equation well (i.e. the American interest in “anti-communist” Pakistan) but has little grasp of the Pakistani elite’s own vigorous interest in this matter. An interest that can be seen, for example, in multiple documents where Pakistani generals and administrators stress the “communist threat” in East Pakistan, especially to Western audiences.

Finally, her insistence that “progressive politics” and the attempt to counter such politics is the central defining feature of Pakistani history and remains so to this day is also taken further than events can justify. While it is true that the influence of the left in the intelligentsia was out of all proportion to their organizational or political strength, this situation was not unique to Pakistan. It is easy to forget that for most third world countries, the left was the default intellectual position in the era of decolonization. Socialism’s attraction as an ideal was powerful in the West and it was augmented in the colonies by its association with anti-colonial struggles. But once they became independent, it did not take long for the ruling elites to move to a very different position in practice if not in theory (in theory, elements of left wing thought would crop up in the personal conversations of feudal lords and bureaucratic elites in our own social circle in surprising places). The influence of left wing politics in Pakistan in short was not negligible, but hardcore communist organizations were a small presence to begin with and were suppressed early and never really recovered. The fact that left wing slogans continued to be used with good effect until Bhutto’s time does not mean that Pakistan was ever at the door of socialism of the Soviet or Chinese variety. At the same time, the growth of Islamist politics (encouraged in some forms, but not all by the US) also had its own internal dynamics and was not just a cold war plot against socialism. A truly insightful history of Pakistani politics can be written from a left wing point of view, but Ms Toor’s understanding of Pakistani politics is almost entirely of the type promoted in the trendier Western universities and lacks a necessary sense of proportion. Very minor events (a strike in Pearl Continental Hotel in Karachi, for example) are given significance well beyond their actual impact. Some idea of this lack of balance from can be gleaned from Ms Toor’s “notes from the field”, written while doing some of this research and published in the Cornel University South Asian newsletter, where she states

“..up until the counterrevolution/coup of General Zia ul Haq in 1977, documented to have been orchestrated largely by the American Foreign office and particularly the CIA in response to the growing strength of the working class movement in Pakistan…”

Tariq Ali can probably come up with such a howler with a straight face, but even he would be hard pressed. The one things that was completely missing from the scene when Zia overthrew Bhutto was any sign of “the growing strength of the working class movement in Pakistan”. This fact is easily confirmed by reading any other account of Zia’s overthrow of Bhutto but the desire to find hardcore left wing politics at the heart of Pakistani politics is so strong that it overwhelms any other information Ms Toor may have on this subject. Left wing politics in Pakistan has had a large (but declining) cultural impact and has had wider political impact because their ideas have penetrated mainstream parties and the public imagination, but the organized Leninist side of the left has never been very big and does not threaten to become so today. To add their story to the story of Pakistan is a necessary service, but this book blows the struggle and the influence of the hardcore left out of all proportion to reality and is frequently in the category of “not even wrong”. I have no doubt that it will be favorably received in the Western academy, where demand for such writing seems infinite, but to use this book as a guide to Pakistani politics would be almost as useful as using Bill Ayer’s writings as a guide to American politics. A lot of interesting research has gone into this book and it does have value, but in the end it is spoiled by its “Tariq Ali worldview” and that is a tragedy.

Envy, or, The Last Infirmity

Sven Birkerts in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

It was the face of F. Murray Abraham playing Antonio Salieri in Milos Forman's film adaptation of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus that finally touched me off. Who knew that envy had so many expressions, that it was such a great subject? Why hadn't I gotten it before? I had seen Amadeusseveral times over the years, but this is how it is with movies, with books, with everything — you need the eyes to see what is to be seen. But even so, how could I still have thought that it was about Mozart. About — what does "about" even mean? Centering on? Mapping to? Representing? Mozart in the film has nothing to do with the Mozart of artistic imagination or our received notions of greatness. He is a silly little grasshopper, a buffoon, even though sublime melodies are seen to issue from his every pen stroke. He very clearly cannot help his genius; it has been stuffed into him like an irrepressible filling. I never understood: how could the man, the boy-man, be such a fool? It made no sense. At least not if Amadeus was viewed as his movie, about him. But the other night — it took this long — I got that I'd been dense. Amadeus was about Salieri, first to last, and if Mozart came across as he unflatteringly did, it was because Salieri cast him so in his rancorous memory. The gulf between Mozart's personality and his gift was what his rival saw, what his jealous rage projected.

More here.

Against the Infantilization of the Natural History Museum

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

It has often struck me that no greater misfortune can befall a natural history museum than for it to come into enough money for renovations. These typically take the form of interactive screens displaying 'fun facts' directed at eight-year-olds, and they require the removal of anything that reeks of the past, which is to say also the removal of the very idea of natural history, in favor of some eternally present, unceasingly entertaining, Chuck E. Cheese-like arcade.

Just think about it: what kind of adult goes to a nature museum these days? I mean an adult who does not have some child in tow: a child, it is presumed, in need of perpetual edification? I mean a proper, auto-edifying, end-in-him-or-herself adult. These days, museums that are not about art are about nature, nature is about science, science is about education, and education, as we know, is for the kids, insofar as they, finally, are the future.

Art for the grown-ups, then; nature for the kids. But education must be fun, so out with the rancid body parts in formaldehyde with calligraphic labels in Latin; in with the touch screens that tell you, as if you did not already know this since the age of two or so, that dinosaurs are birds, that Pluto is no longer a planet, and, in case you forgot this for a fraction of a second, that learning is fun. But all this thoroughly and disgustingly ideological rebranding requires money, which, as I've already suggested, the best museums of natural history do not have.

More here.

Mathematicians Come Closer to Solving Goldbach's Weak Conjecture

Davide Castelvecchi in Scientific American:

One of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics is also among the easiest to grasp. The weak Goldbach conjecture says that you can break up any odd number into the sum of, at most, three prime numbers (numbers that cannot be evenly divided by any other number except themselves or 1). For example:

35 = 19 + 13 + 3
or
77 = 53 + 13 + 11

Mathematician Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, has now inched toward a proof. He has shown that one can write odd numbers as sums of, at most, five primes—and he is hopeful about getting that down to three. Besides the sheer thrill of cracking a nut that has eluded some of the best minds in mathematics for nearly three centuries, Tao says, reaching that coveted goal might lead mathematicians to ideas useful in real life—for example, for encrypting sensitive data.

The weak Goldbach conjecture was proposed by 18th-century mathematician Christian Goldbach. It is the sibling of a statement concerning even numbers, named the strong Goldbach conjecture but actually made by his colleague, mathematician Leonhard Euler. The strong version says that every even number larger than 2 is the sum of two primes. As its name implies, the weak version would follow if the strong were true: to write an odd number as a sum of three primes, it would be sufficient to subtract 3 from it and apply the strong version to the resulting even number.

More here.

Experiment, Evidence, and Theory

Continue reading here.

Can you identify?

Laura Miller in Salon:

The news of recent research documenting how readers identify with the main characters in stories has mostly been taken as confirmation of the value of literary role models. Lisa Libby, an assistant professor at Ohio State University and co-author of a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, explained that subjects who read a short story in which the protagonist overcomes obstacles in order to vote were more likely to vote themselves several days later. The suggestibility of readers isn’t news. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel of a sensitive young man destroyed by unrequited love, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” inspired a rash of suicides by would-be Werthers in the late 1700s. Jack Kerouac has launched a thousand road trips. Still, this is part of science’s job: Running empirical tests on common knowledge — if for no other reason than because common knowledge (and common sense) is often wrong.

A far more unsettling finding is buried in this otherwise up-with-reading news item. The Ohio State researchers gave 70 heterosexual male readers stories about a college student much like themselves. In one version, the character was straight. In another, the character is described as gay early in the story. In a third version the character is gay, but this isn’t revealed until near the end. In each case, the readers’ “experience-taking” — the name these researchers have given to the act of immersing oneself in the perspective, thoughts and emotions of a story’s protagonist — was measured. The straight readers were far more likely to take on the experience of the main character if they weren’t told until late in the story that he was different from themselves. This, too, is not so surprising. Human beings are notorious for extending more of their sympathy to people they perceive as being of their own kind. But the researchers also found that readers of the “gay-late” story showed “significantly more favorable attitudes toward homosexuals” than the other two groups of readers, and that they were less likely to attribute stereotypically gay traits, such as effeminacy, to the main character. The “gay-late” story actually reduced their biases (conscious or not) against gays, and made them more empathetic. Similar results were found when white readers were given stories about black characters to read.

More here.

Pencil vs Camera

From The Telegraph:

Belgian artist Ben Heine blends photography and pencil sketches to create imaginary scenes. He explains: "I find a location, do a drawing, then take a photo to combine with the drawing.

One piece, Pencil Vs Camera 57, was created in London last year and features model Caroline Madison lying in the street with a bird swooping down on her.

More here.

Sunday Poem

Still Life
... —static: from the Latin sto, stare, to stand.

Once there were four green apples arranged
In a simple pyramid on a white china plate.

Once a painter rendered them on a cheap canvas
That was left hanging in the kitchen of the house

She bought soon after a truck plowed through
The windshield of the car her husband was driving.

In the remodeled kitchen that still let in a draft,
After toast and tea, she would stand before the frame.

From the shadow limning the apples’ bottom edges
She could almost hear a low hum, the static of objects

Pulled through time, the slight hiss of their resistance,
The one sound when everything is standing still.
.

by H.L. Spelman

wildwood flower

Morgan Meis

Dila Ther Ja Yaar Da Nazara

Morgan Meis

sonnet 110

Morgan Meis

Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric

Marjorie Perloff in the Boston Review:

The national (or even transnational) demand for a certain kind of prize-winning, “well-crafted” poem—a poem that the New Yorker would see fit to print and that would help its author get one of the “good jobs” advertised by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs—has produced an extraordinary uniformity. Whatever the poet’s ostensible subject—and here identity politics has produced a degree of variation, so that we have Latina poetry, Asian American poetry, queer poetry, the poetry of the disabled, and so on—the poems you will read in American Poetry Review or similar publications will, with rare exceptions, exhibit the following characteristics: 1) irregular lines of free verse, with little or no emphasis on the construction of the line itself or on what the Russian Formalists called “the word as such”; 2) prose syntax with lots of prepositional and parenthetical phrases, laced with graphic imagery or even extravagant metaphor (the sign of “poeticity”); 3) the expression of a profound thought or small epiphany, usually based on a particular memory, designating the lyric speaker as a particularly sensitive person who really feels the pain, whether of our imperialist wars in the Middle East or of late capitalism or of some personal tragedy such as the death of a loved one.

More here.

Notes from Iceland

Justin Erik Halldór Smith in his blog:

I am in Iceland for the first time in many years, for no better reason than that Icelandair offers extended stopovers on transatlantic flights at no additional cost. I cross the Atlantic as casually as one might take the subway from borough to borough, but now that I am here, again, in Reykjavik, it seems to me that, if we have to fly at all, stopovers in Iceland should not just be possible, but mandatory. They make it all make sense.

This basalt island, really only a side-effect of the volcanic eruptions of only one segment of the vast Mid-Atlantic Range (which also includes something called the 'Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone', where by contrast I hope never to find myself): this island, I say, is not all that far from the Faeroes, which are in turn a short hop to the Hebrides, and from there another shorter one to mainland Scotland. In the other direction, there is really only a channel, and not open ocean, separating Iceland from Greenland, and again a smaller one separating Greenland from Baffin, and Baffin from Labrador.

A series of small hops then, brings one from Europe to North America, and even in the absence of archaeological evidence it is not hard to understand why, when Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in the 1530s, local Iroquois ran out to greet the ship with furs in hand, ready, to all appearances, to resume a well established trade.

More here.

Mussolini’s diaries and the “treasure of Dongo”

John Gooch in the Times Literary Supplement:

Soon after Benito Mussolini and his long-time mistress Claretta Petacci were shot dead on April 28, 1945, questions began to be asked. They continue to this day. Who ordered the shooting? Claims and counter-claims echo across the years: the smart money is now on Luigi Longo, later leader of the Italian Communist Party, who never talked. Why were they shot? The guesses run the gamut from inter-partisan disputes to the bizarre claim that they were shot under orders – direct or indirect – of the British because they knew of a secret collection of wartime correspondence between Mussolini and Churchill whose existence could never be made public. Many Italians still believe in this carteggio, though the documents that are now in official custody in Rome are palpable forgeries. And what happened to the “treasure of Dongo” that Mussolini was supposedly carrying with him when he was captured on the west side of Lake Como? The locals seem to have made the most of the windfall: according to one report, “For days afterwards empty banknote wrappers skittered across the fields like dry leaves”. Stories of unrecovered treasure kept resurfacing for years, but when a couple of ammunition boxes dredged from the lake were opened in 1993 in the presence of the dictator’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, all they contained was ammunition.

More here.

How Neuroscientists and Magicians Are Conjuring Brain Insights

Mariette DiChristina in Scientific American:

We were at the Neuromagic 2012 conference held May 7 to 10, 2012, on San Simón, also appropriately named the Island of Thought, on the north Atlantic coast near Vigo, Spain. Organized by Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of the Barrow Neurological Institute, the talks were intended to advance an intriguing area of brain study that encompasses attention and awareness, aspects of perception, and, ultimately, consciousness research. More about this research area is in their book,Sleights of Mind, which came out in 2010. (An excerpt, “Mind Over Magic?“, by Martinez-Conde and Macknik, who are advisors for Scientific American Mind, appeared in that magazine’s November/December 2010 issue. They also wrote “Magic and the Brain: How Magicians ‘Trick’ the Mind” for Scientific American.)

Why are scientists working with sleight-of-hand artists? Their tricks, honed through the decades, have revealed that people respond to certain situations in specific ways. Like detectives looking for new leads to solve a mystery, scientists can mine magicians’ knowledge for ideas to test in the lab. And for the magicians, understanding principles about the brain—that is, why a trick works the way it does—can suggest new ways to advance their art as they develop new tricks or improve existing ones. (The article, “What Can Magicians Teach Us about the Brain?”, provides some more background and a November 2008 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper coauthored by neuroscientists and magicians.)

More here.

The Demonic Trilling

Edward Mendelson in the New York Review of Books:

It is hard to recall now the enormous prestige of Lionel Trilling as a literary and social critic during the postwar years. The Liberal Imagination (1950), his first collection of essays, is said to have sold more than 70,000 hardback copies. For the first and last time, a literature professor enjoyed the public eminence normally reserved for an economist like John Kenneth Galbraith or a sociologist like David Riesman. Trilling was a quietly dominating figure, sensitive, sensible, and reassuring in his emergence from 1930s radicalism and his nuanced Freudianism. His essays served as a form of national therapy. Writing about Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, for example, he guided readers away from the political certainties of the 1930s and toward the difficult complexities of “ambiguity and error” that they must learn to accept if they wanted to fulfill their generous liberal intentions.

For Adam Kirsch, in Why Trilling Matters, Trilling’s authority still survives as a source of courage: “In the last twenty years, when writers have lamented the decay of literature’s confidence and authority, they have often turned, as if by instinct, to Trilling as the emblem of those lost virtues.” Kirsch’s central insight, however, is that Trilling wrote with an artist’s authority, not a teacher’s:

Trilling’s authority…is itself a literary achievement—not a privilege of cultural office or a domineering assertion of erudition and intellect, but an expression of sensibility, the record of an individual mind engaged with the world and with texts.

Trilling’s constant theme, he adds, was “the conflict between the artist’s will and the demands of justice.”

More here.

X-JET

Abbas Raza

How Reliable Are the Social Sciences?

Gary Gutting in the New York Times:

Public policy debates often involve appeals to results of work in social sciences like economics and sociology. For example, in his State of the Union address this year, President Obama cited a recent high-profile study to support his emphasis on evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores. The study purportedly shows that students with teachers who raise their standardized test scores are “more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods and save more for retirement.”

How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions? The question is important because media reports often seem to assume that any result presented as “scientific” has a claim to our serious attention. But this is hardly a reasonable view. There is considerable distance between, say, the confidence we should place in astronomers’ calculations of eclipses and a small marketing study suggesting that consumers prefer laundry soap in blue boxes.

A rational assessment of a scientific result must first take account of the broader context of the particular science involved. Where does the result lie on the continuum from preliminary studies, designed to suggest further directions of research, to maximally supported conclusions of the science? In physics, for example, there is the difference between early calculations positing the Higgs boson and what we hope will soon be the final experimental proof that it actually exists.

More here.

A portrait of the artist as a brooding young woman...

From The Independent:

Gwendoline Riley was finishing her first novel at the age that most of us were sleeping in, bunking off, or congregating around a pint at the student union bar. Turning her university dissertation into her debut, Cold Water (2002) she signed a two-book deal at the age of 22. Since then, she has accumulated a hipster-ish following and several literary awards (Somerset Maugham Award, the Betty Trask Award, a John Llewellyn-Rhys Memorial prize shortlisted nomination). "So at 33, with her fourth novel, Opposed Positions (Jonathan Cape, £14.99) freshly under her belt, you'd imagine Riley would be living the garlanded life that a critically-acclaimed young novelist ought to be. Or at the very least, she should be settled into a comfortable existence, with heating and hot water and the odd shopping splurge.

Not so. Riley's lifestyle seems starkly at odds with her dust-jacket achievements. Over the five years it has taken to write Opposed Positions, Riley says she has had severe problems rubbing two pennies together. There have been unnerving moments of penury, wondering where the next subsistence cheque will be coming from. The cheques eventually came in the shape of tax credits, or literary grants, or summer school work, but it was far from the charmed life we imagine for our up-and-coming literary stars.

More here.

Point of Return

From The New York Times:

“Whose house is this?”

The first four words of Toni Morrison’s new book greet — or assail — us before the story even begins. They’re from the epigraph, which quotes a song cycle written by the author some 20 years ago and therefore, it seems safe to say, not originally intended for this book, but an indication, perhaps, of how long its themes have been haunting her. And “haunting” is a fitting word for the lyric itself, in which a speaker professes to lack both recognition of and accountability for the strange, shadowy, dissembling domicile in which he finds himself. The atmosphere of alienation makes the song’s final line even more uncanny: “Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?”

Thus the stage is set for “Home”: on the basis of its publisher’s description a novel, on the basis of its length a novella, and on the basis of its stripped-down, symbol-laden plot something of an allegory. It tells the story of Frank Money, a 24-year-old Korean War veteran, as he embarks on a reluctant journey home. But where — and what — is home? Frank is already back from the fighting when we meet him, a year after being discharged from an integrated Army into a segregated homeland. Since then, he has wandered the streets of Seattle, “not totally homeless, but close.” He has gambled his Army pay and lost it, worked odd jobs and lost them, lived with a girlfriend and lost her, and all the while struggled, none too successfully, against the prospect of losing his mind.

More here.

Saturday Poem

Always

I am not jealous
of what came before me.

Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth,
to start our life!

by Pablo Neruda

Mother Natures: On Elisabeth Badinter

Jennifer Szalai in The Nation:

The Good Mother ideal is examined by the French feminist Elisabeth Badinter in her latest book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. Badinter, a 68-year-old mother of three grown children, is utterly uninterested in writing about the personal experience of mothering. Last year she was voted “the most influential intellectual” in France, and she seems never to have wallowed in maternal guilt, choosing to dissect it instead with chilly precision.

In 1980 she wrote L’Amour en plus, a history of mother love, in which she described how maternal “selfishness and indifference” were the norm until Rousseau and the Romantics put the “reign of the child king” at the center of European family life. The book opens with some startling police statistics from 1780. Out of 21,000 infants born in Paris that year, more than 19,000 were dispatched to wet nurses in the countryside, where—if they were lucky enough to survive the treacherous journey—they would be tightly swaddled and left to stew in their excrement for hours; hung up on a nail by their swaddling bands to keep them out of reach of barnyard animals; and fed a diet of pap when the wet nurse had trouble with her milk supply. More than half of those children died before the age of 2.

Historians have commonly argued that such displays of maternal indifference were due to the crushing levels of infant mortality in the eighteenth century: a mother would stop herself from becoming too attached to an infant who might die. Badinter, however, takes her cue from medical historians such as Edward Shorter and reverses the lines of causality: “It was not so much because children died like flies that mothers showed so little interest in them,” she writes in L’Amour en plus, “but rather because the mothers showed so little interest that the children died in such great numbers.” The 10 percent of children who stayed at home to be breast-fed by their mothers or by live-in wet nurses were about twice as likely to live. To believe that high mortality rates were the cause rather than the result of maternal indifference is, for Badinter, a sentimental fantasy that “prevents us from condemning” mothers and keeps our mythology of mother love heart-warming and pristine.

Such sang-froid wends its way through The Conflict, which includes the same ghastly statistics, but here Badinter brings them up at the end, after devoting most of the book to denouncing what she calls “ecological motherhood,” which is essentially the attachment parenting promoted by Dr. Sears: breast-feeding, cloth diapering, co-sleeping. “Eco-biological prejudices” and “the vilification of chemicals” have “put motherhood squarely back at the heart of women’s lives” by making childcare an all-consuming activity that only a mother can do.

Essentialism

A conversation with Bruce Hood in Edge:

I've reached a crossroads in my research and in the questions I'm now starting to ask. Part of that was driven by some insight and realization about the direction I was taking, and part of it was also driven by changes in economic circumstances. Notably, the reduction in funding in this country has impacted upon my field quite dramatically (behavioral sciences). The way that that has impacted is that there's far less money to fund research, so the competition to get funding has become very acute. Now we have to justify with a view to application. In the past you could just go off on a flight of fancy studying the things that were of intrinsic interest.

But now we have to steer our grant applications towards potential application, and certainly we have to write a substantial proportion of the proposal to deal with impact, public engagement. And that's across the board. As I said, if this had been five, ten years ago, there would have been some resistance to that, but increasingly now the research councils feel that we, as a public body funded by taxation, need to be called to account in terms of what we're doing with the money, the taxpayers' money.

This has led me to start thinking more about what I do in terms of its tangible application in the real world? That's the external influences that have been shaping the sorts of questions I'm starting to ask now.

There's been a growing awareness that there have been a lot of problems with the way that psychological research has been going on in the past, very much lab-based type of work. There has been a general issue in the experimental method, what you typically do is you hone in on a question, and you try to refine that question by removing all the extraneous variables to try and make it as clean as possible. But then that does raise the question, to what extent? And does what you eventually find actually have real relevance or validity to the external world? Because in many senses, the complexity of the external world might be part of the problem that the brain is trying to solve.

How Economists have Misunderstood Inequality

Brad Plumer interviews James Galbraith, in the Washington Post:

Brad Plumer: You bring together a lot of new data on inequality in the book across a variety of countries, from the United States to Europe to China to Latin America. What’s different about what your book discovers?

James Galbraith: One thing we found is that there are common global patterns in economic inequality across different countries that appear to be very strongly related to major events affecting the world economy as a whole. The most important have been changes in financial regimes and changes in systems of financial governance. It made a big difference when the Bretton Woods system ended in 1971. The debt crisis of the 1980s made a big difference. The debt crisis of the 1980s made a big difference. It made a big difference in 2000 when the NASDAQ crashed and interest rates were reduced These things all had global repercussions, and they affected inequality around the entire world in different ways.

BP: And this isn’t how many economists have looked at inequality, correct?

JG: No. The most unconventional thing in this book is about how inequality relates to macroeconomic performance and financial factors. The discussion of inequality tends to be heavily dominated by a marketplace perspective that stresses individual-level characteristics like the demand for skill. Economists have always classified this as a microeconomic problem. ... But when something’s happening at the same time around the world, in different countries that are widely separated, that’s a macro issue. There was a global movement toward higher inequality as a result of the financial stresses that the world is under.

What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?

Jared Diamond reviews Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in the NYRB:

There is no doubt that good institutions are important in determining a country’s wealth. But why have some countries ended up with good institutions, while others haven’t? The most important factor behind their emergence is the historical duration of centralized government. Until the rise of the world’s first states, beginning around 3400 BC, all human societies were bands or tribes or chiefdoms, without any of the complex economic institutions of governments. A long history of government doesn’t guarantee good institutions but at least permits them; a short history makes them very unlikely. One can’t just suddenly introduce government institutions and expect people to adopt them and to unlearn their long history of tribal organization.

That cruel reality underlies the tragedy of modern nations, such as Papua New Guinea, whose societies were until recently tribal. Oil and mining companies there pay royalties intended for local landowners through village leaders, but the leaders often keep the royalties for themselves. That’s because they have internalized their society’s practice by which clan leaders pursue their personal interests and their own clan’s interests, rather than representing everyone’s interests.

The various durations of government around the world are linked to the various durations and productivities of farming that was the prerequisite for the rise of governments. For example, Europe began to acquire highly productive agriculture 9,000 years ago and state government by at least 4,000 years ago, but subequatorial Africa acquired less productive agriculture only between 2,000 and 1,800 years ago and state government even more recently. Those historical differences prove to have huge effects on the modern distribution of wealth.

A Nobelist's Novel Museum

Ron Gluckman in the Wall Street Journal:

This museum honors a work of fiction, its exhibits and artifacts reflecting events that never took place, except in the imagination of the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. In perhaps his most ambitious creation, possibly the world's only museum of its kind, the writer has taken literature on a course that is remarkably novel.

Yet the Museum of Innocence is also a genuine institution and, after more than a decade of planning, a huge triumph for Mr. Pamuk. The author not only curated the displays but collected all the items, grouped in 83 numbered panels, one for each chapter of his 2008 book, "The Museum of Innocence."

That novel focused on the protagonist, Kemal, who, much like Mr. Pamuk, scavenged similar items for the fictitious museum of the book's title. In the real museum there is a potpourri of whimsical displays—a skull with a fly on the side, a ceramic heart noticeably broken, ceramic sheep in front of an old Turkish movie poster—alongside banks of photographs of old Turkish celebrities, antique watches, rows of toy dogs. Some describe it as a spectacular example of self-indulgence, but a cheerful Mr. Pamuk termed it a showcase of ordinary life in Istanbul. He seemed elated to play out the grand riddle—what came first, book or museum?

"I conceived both the novel and the museum together," he insisted during a private tour a few days after the museum's April 28 opening. Reaction to the long-delayed museum was largely positive, and a general sense of relief swept Istanbul. Even die-hard fans had wondered if it would ever open.

More here.

Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict

Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges in Science (registration required):

Abstract:

Religion, in promoting outlandish beliefs and costly rituals, increases ingroup trust but also may increase mistrust and conflict with outgroups. Moralizing gods emerged over the last few millennia, enabling large-scale cooperation, and sociopolitical conquest even without war. Whether for cooperation or conflict, sacred values, like devotion to God or a collective cause, signal group identity and operate as moral imperatives that inspire nonrational exertions independent of likely outcomes. In conflict situations, otherwise mundane sociopolitical preferences may become sacred values, acquiring immunity to material incentives. Sacred values sustain intractable conflicts that defy “business-like” negotiation, but also provide surprising opportunities for resolution.

Read full paper here.

The Mathematician’s Obesity Fallacy

Michael Moyer in Scientific American:

As I write, this interview with mathematician Carson C. Chow is the number-one most-emailed story on theNew York Times Web site. Chow, a researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, had no experience in the health sciences before he came to study the problem of why so many Americans are overweight. “I didn’t even know what a calorie was,” he says.

This kind of outsider’s perspective can be invaluable when attacking a problem as difficult and entrenched as the epidemic of obesity in the U.S. Chow relates the story of starting work at the institute—a division of the National Institutes of Health—and finding a mathematical model created by a colleague that could predict “how body composition changed in response to what you ate.” The problem, as Chow describes it, was that the model was complicated: “hundreds of equations,” he told the Times. “[We] began working together to boil it down to one simple equation. That’s what applied mathematicians do.”

And what did Chow’s simple model reveal about the nature and causes of obesity? Basically, that we eat too much. “The model shows that increase in food more than explains the increase in weight.” Food in, fat out. Simple enough to be captured in a single equation.

Unfortunately Chow’s outsider’s perspective on the obesity crisis isn’t really an outsider’s perspective at all: it is the physicist’s perspective.

More here.

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