V.S. RAMACHANDRAN in The Edge:

Freud once pointed out that the history of ideas in the last few centuries has been punctuated by “revolutions,” major upheavals of thought that have forever altered our view of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. First, there was the Copernican system dethroning the earth as the center of the cosmos. Second was the Darwinian revolution; the idea that far from being the climax of “intelligent design” we are merely neotonous apes that happen to be slightly cleverer than our cousins. Third, the Freudian view that even though you claim to be “in charge” of your life, your behavior is in fact governed by a cauldron of drives and motives of which you are largely unconscious. And fourth, the discovery of DNA and the genetic code with its implication (to quote James Watson) that “There are only molecules. Everything else is sociology”.

If all this seems dehumanizing, you haven’t seen anything yet. Consider the following thought experiment that used to be a favorite of philosophers (it was also the basis for the recent Hollywood blockbuster The Matrix): Let’s advance to a point of time where we know everything there is to know about the intricate circuitry and functioning of the human brain. With this knowledge, it would be possible for a neuroscientist to isolate your brain in a vat of nutrients and keep it alive and healthy indefinitely. Utilizing thousands of electrodes and appropriate patterns of electrical stimulation, the scientist makes your brain think and feel that it’s experiencing actual life events. The simulation is perfect and includes a sense of time and planning for the future. The brain doesn’t know that its experiences, its entire life, are not real.

Further assume that the scientist can make your brain “think” and experience being a combination of Einstein, Mark Spitz, Bill Gates, Hugh Heffner, and Gandhi, while at the same time preserving your own deeply personal memories and identity (there’s nothing in contemporary brain science that forbids such a scenario). The mad neuroscientist then gives you a choice. You can either be this incredible, deliriously happy being floating forever in the vat or be your real self, more or less like you are now (for the sake of argument we will further assume that you are basically a happy and contended person, not a starving pheasant). Which of the two would you pick?

More here.

Also in openDemocracy, a two part list of predictions (and thoughts) for 2006 from 49 diffferent writers, intellectuals and activists, from Neal Ascherson to Slavoj Zizek. Zizek’s is interesting:

When, on 2 November 2004, the Dutch documentary filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by an Islamist extremist (Mohammed Bouyeri), a letter was found stuck into a knife hole in van Gogh’s belly, addressed to his friend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali member of the Dutch parliament known as a passionate fighter for the rights of Muslim women. If there ever was a “fundamentalist” document, this was it.

The true pearl is hidden in the last paragraph, in the form of a challenge to Hirsi Ali – it is a brutal assertion of the wish to die as the proof of one’s truthfulness:

“I challenge you with this letter to prove that you are right. You don’t have to do much for that, Mrs. Hirsi Ali: wish death if you are really convinced that you are right. If you do not accept this challenge, you will know that my Master, the Most high, has exposed you as a bearer of lies. … If you wish death, then you are being truthful”. But the wicked ones “never wish to die, because of what their hands (and sins) have brought forth. And Allah is the all-knowing over the purveyors of lies.” (2:94-95). To prevent myself from having the same wish come to me as I wish for you, I shall wish this wish for you: Master give us death to give us happiness with martyrdom.” (emphasis added)

Here we get an almost imperceptible shift which signals the presence of a perverse economy: from the readiness to die for the truth to the readiness to die as direct proof of one’s truthfulness, which is in fact a motivation to die; from “if you are truthful, you should not fear death” to “if you wish death, you are truthful.” The passage ends in an astonishing taking-over of the other’s wish: “I shall wish this wish for you…” The underlying logic is complex enough: I will do this “to prevent myself from having the same wish that I have for you come to me.”

What can this mean? Is it not that, by wishing death, he is doing precisely what he wanted to prevent; doesn’t he accept the same wish (that of death) that he wishes for her (he wishes her dead)? So the final proclamation should not surprise us:

“This struggle which has burst forth is different from those of the past. The unbelieving fundamentalists have started it and the true believers will end it. There will be no mercy shown to the purveyors of injustice, only the sword will be lifted against them. No discussions, no demonstrations, no petitions: only death will separate the Truth from Lies.”

Here the situation is pushed to an extreme: there is no symbolic mediation, no symbolic activity – the only thing that separates Truth from Lies is death, i.e., the truthful individual’s readiness and desire to die.

No wonder Michel Foucault was fascinated by Islamic political martyrdom: in it, he discerned the contours of what he called a new “regime of truth” radically different from our Western one, a regime based not on factual accuracy or the consistency of reasoning, but the readiness to die.

This, alas, is what awaits us in 2006 and, one must say, beyond: the struggle between a spurious “culture of life” (the way Christians formulate their refusal of the very core of human creativity) and a “culture of death,” both of which must be rejected in the name of any truly emancipatory politics.

The CIA has a homepage for kids. Patrice de Beer considers the reasons for it and implications of it in openDemocracy.

Millions of children around the world probably got a new computer for Christmas, among other presents. Many will use them to play games dealing – sometimes in a gory way – with crime, war or espionage. But it is difficult to know how many might have hooked up to the Central Intelligence Agency’s website, where a specific “Homepage for Kids” – divided into two sections, for younger and older children – has been designed to appeal to them. Yes, the CIA, like many other United States government departments – including the White House and the FBI – has its own children’s corner to familiarise young American citizens with the intricacies of government and/or to cultivate potential future recruits.

It makes sense: we live in a consumer-driven society where institutions must groom future consumers almost from the cradle to prepare for any product available in the marketplace – including jobs which (since intelligence can be a risky trade) could lead them to their grave.

Foreign Policy looks at Michael Ignatieff’s career move, from academic to member of parliament.

Canadians normally don’t get fired up about foreign policy in their parliamentary elections. Then again, Michael Ignatieff is not a normal candidate. Last fall, the professor left his post as director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy to run for parliament in his native Canada. His new office is in a bare-bones campaign headquarters on an industrial corner in suburban Toronto, where he prepares for the January 23 election. Ignatieff, a Liberal Party candidate who is considered by many to be one of the best minds Canada has ever produced, wants Canada to assume a greater role in world affairs. Americans probably know him best as a “liberal hawk” who supported the Iraq war.

Ignatieff has spent most of his career in Britain and the United States, but he’s hardly a stranger to Canadian foreign policy. His late father, George Ignatieff, was a career diplomat who served as Canada’s ambassador to Yugoslavia, NATO, and the United Nations. He was president of the U.N. Security Council during the 1960s. As an academic, the younger Ignatieff regularly discussed and analyzed Canadian policy. What he sees is a country with potential influence abroad, but little will to exert it.

Gary King, Bernard Grofman, Andrew Gelman and Jonahan Katz have submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court concerning the issue of redistricting in Texas. The brief was submitted on behalf of neither party:

[W]e make the case that districting plans can be evaluated with regard to partisan bias, and that such evaluation is uncontroversial in social science and does not require any knowledge or speculation about the intent of the redistricters.

The key concept, as laid out in the brief, is to identify partisan bias with deviation from symmetry. I’ll quote briefly from the brief (which is here; see also Rick Hasen’s election law blog for more links) and then mention a couple additional points which we didn’t have space there to elaborate on. I’m interested in this topic for its own sake and also because Gary and I put a lot of effort in the early 90s into figuring this stuff out).

Here’s what we wrote on partisan symmetry in the amicus brief:

The symmetry standard measures fairness in election systems, and is not specific to evaluating gerrymanders. The symmetry standard requires that the electoral system treat similarly-situated political parties equally, so that each receives the same fraction of legislative seats for a particular vote percentage as the other party would receive if it had received the same percentage. In other words, it compares how both parties would fare hypothetically if they each (in turn) had received a given percentage of the vote. The difference in how parties would fare is the “partisan bias” of the electoral system. Symmetry, however, does not require proportionality.

More, including a discussion on this criterion for evaluating bias, over at Gelman’s blog.

From despardes.com:

Aparna Sen’s movie ‘15 Park Avenue’ is a touching film with a sensitive subject. “15 Park Avenue” is the address that exists only in the mind of a young schizophrenic girl Mithali. It is on this address her imaginary husband and children live. It is a film that will appeal to selected audience, not the masses. The movie is slow paced and the culmination to the story is open-ended. But it’s a beautiful effort.

It tells the tale of Mithali (Konkana Sen) and her elder sister Anjali (Shabana Azmi). Mithi suffers from schizophrenia. She lives in a delusional world that she conjures up in her imaginations. A part of Mithi’s imaginary world is her husband Jojo and her children who live at 15 Park Avenue. She is searching for the address, but can’t find it anywhere.Mithi was not like this always. Once she was a vibrant girl and worked as a journalist. She was engaged to Joydeep Roy (Rahul Bose), whom she lovingly called ‘Jojo’. During one of her assignments, she was gang-raped by a number of goons. Since then, her dormant schizophrenia became a full-blown malady. Mithi’s mental condition became so far removed from reality that even Joydeep had to turn his back to her. Joydeep is deeply shaken when he sees Mithi’s condition. He decides to help her find ‘15 Park Avenue’.

More here.

From National Geographic:

When you were younger, did a family member ever show you how to find the local grocery store? Members of the ant species Temnothorax albipennis have a similar family tradition, according to a new study. The finding may be the first known example of a teacher-pupil relationship in a nonhuman animal, according to Nigel Franks, a biologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

“While it’s well known that animals will mimic each other, so one animal is learning from another … there’s sort of a two-way street in teaching that defines true teaching,” he said. For example, even though your guide could get to the store faster without you in tow, he or she slowly and patiently taught you the way so that you could one day make the trip on your own. In a similar manner, ants in a T. albipennis colony use a technique known as tandem running to teach each other how to get from the nest to a food stash. Franks and colleague Tom Richardson report the find in tomorrow’s issue of the science journal Nature. (Picture: Worker ants teach others the way to food with a poking and prodding technique called “tandem running.” These ants have been daubed with paint for tracking purposes.)

More here.

Irony is liberation on the cheap; irresponsibility without regret. Puritanism may be too hard to bear; skepticism may be the price demanded by reason; but irony is all too easy. No wonder our infantilizing, attention-deficit, lazy, consumerist times are in love with it. No wonder that the less crafted, less crafty version of McDonagh is found at every studio script conference for the latest thriller or HBO movie. The Puritans make work of play, moderns make play of work, but ironists make nonsense of work and play, seriousness and fun. To be too serious may at times be a sin; and to laugh too much at seriousness may be a greater one. But the ironist laughs at those who laugh at seriousness, somehow thinking this will enable them to recover seriousness without embracing its vices as seen by those who mock it.

more from Salmagundi here.

In Harvard Magazine, a review of the current research on the factors that shape political partisanship and preferences.

Of all the demographic factors in play, religion appears to have made the biggest difference in recent decades. That wasn’t always the case. “In 1954, if you were a regular churchgoer, holding everything else constant, you were equally likely to be Democrat or Republican,” says David King of the Kennedy School. “Now, if you’re a regular churchgoer, you’re overwhelmingly more likely to be a Republican.” A paper coauthored by KSG lecturer Elaine Kamarck, which analyzed statistics from the University of Michigan’s American National Election Survey, shows just how wide the gap between religious and secular voters now yawns. In 1988, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis “fared only two points worse among regular churchgoers than among those who attended church infrequently or not at all,” a difference typical of presidential elections since 1952, the paper states. But since the presidential election of 1992, the difference between these two groups widened dramatically, to nearly 12 points on average.

Ronald Thiemann, professor of theology at the Divinity School, says people of faith may be drawn to conservative politics because Republicans have been better at articulating religious issues. That wasn’t the case during the 1960s, he says, when liberal Jews and Christians stood united for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Yet in the 1980s, when Republicans—and particularly the religious right—mobilized around the issue of abortion, religious liberals lost their voice. “I don’t think that people on the more [religiously] liberal side quite knew how to think about these new emerging realities,” Thiemann says. As the Bible Belt evolved into a Republican stronghold after the 1960s, the Republican Party came to be seen as the party of religious voters, especially evangelical Protestants.

Via Words Without Borders, Zara Houshmand on performing Iranian theatre in the United States.

[The New York audience] missed the simple, poignant poetry of the dialogue. And they missed entirely the most critical element of the performance that makes ta’ziyeh [the traditional Iranian passion plays that portray the historical beginnings of Shi’ite faith] in its native environment such an emotionally overwhelming experience: their own role as participants at an event not just reenacted but relived in a catharsis of communal mourning.

Curiously, this aspect of a situated event, where external circumstances lend heightened meaning to the action on stage, is a common feature of Iranian theatre in its many manifestations. It is operative not only when ta’ziyeh occurs in its natural setting, heralded by processions of flagellants, but also when the very act of staging a play becomes a political statement, or when the strategy for getting a scene past the censors itself steals the scene. The New York audience did in fact get a taste of this, though not through any religious experience. The welcome they gave to the ta’ziyeh performers was surely heightened by knowledge that the program had very nearly missed cancellation, and last-minute changes were frantically made when performers were denied or kept waiting for visas as a separate drama played out between the Great Satan and the Axis of Evil.

That the Lincoln Center performances were touted as the first Iranian theatre to be seen in the U.S. since the revolution ignores the extremely varied Iranian émigré theatre active here and the constant traffic of individual artists between the U.S. and Iran. It also sidesteps the fact that, since the revolution, theatre groups from Iran have been well represented at festivals in Europe. Sadly, we are the ones isolated in assuming others’ isolation.

In all of these works Greenfort demonstrates that he is less interested in animals per se than in an expanded notion of ecology, one that encompasses cultural history and sociopolitics as well as natural resources. It is also apparent that he plays with notions of ecology at the level of the site, appropriating strate­gies from site-specific art. To make the fox portraits, for instance, the artist created a shelter for his camera out of materials found nearby. Greenfort often makes use of resources that derive from and draw attention to his immediate environment, gently pushing viewers toward a more reflexive understanding of the world around them.

The artist’s interest in ecology becomes even more apparent in works that do not contain such obvious natural references. An example of this is BONAQUA Kondensationswürfel (BONAQUA Condensation Cube), 2005, which references Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube, 1963–65. As in Haacke’s work, a clear box is partially filled with water, creating a sealed environment that evaporates or condenses as the room temperature changes. However, Greenfort’s box is filled with BonAqua, a branded drinking water marketed by Coca-Cola, thereby opening up Haacke’s closed system to issues such as the privatization of public resources.

more from Artforum here.

From The Village Voice:

Erbil, Iraq —There’s an AK-47 leaning next to the couch at ZEEN women’s center and radio station in this capital of the autonomous region of Kurdistan. Layla Ali, 30, ZEEN program director and fitness instructor, sits with one of her hosts on a couch just inches from the rifle and never bats an eye. “Here in Kurdistan, there is a lot of violence against Kurdish women,” Ali says in delicate English. She’s an Iranian Kurd by birth, a swimmer by training, and superbly educated by Iraqi standards, lending a quiet confidence to her words. Asked who is perpetrating this violence, she doesn’t hesitate: “Men, of course. Husbands, brothers, fathers, managers. All men.”

Abuse drives many Kurdish women to suicide, says Ali. “Here in Kurdistan, most women, when they want to kill themselves, they burn themselves. I don’t know why.” “We try to find solutions,” Ali says of ZEEN, an eight-hour-a-day operation that broadcasts call-in programs, news, and music—all for and by Kurdish women—to this 10,000-year-old city of 1.2 million and its surrounding villages. “When a lady burns herself, on the radio we talk about why, about what must we do to solve this problem.”

Ali pauses. Her wide, dark eyes are sad. When she speaks, it’s in a pillow-soft tone. “We want to teach girls to not kill themselves.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

When strolling alongside a busy city street on a smoggy summer day, it may seem as if the multiplicity of taxis streaming by might provide a respite from the exhaust-choked air. Instead new research from London reveals that taxi rides take a toll on your lungs as well as your wallet.

In fact, taxi cabins expose drivers and riders to more air pollution than any other form of transportation, according to the results of a survey by Surbjit Kaur and her colleagues at the Imperial College London. Armed with particle detectors, volunteers measured their pollution exposure as they took a total of 584 trips by taxi, car, bus, bicycle or just plain walking on Marylebone Road in central London and surrounding areas over the course of three weeks in April and May of 2003.

Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:

Nothing is funny in Diamond’s songs. They can be inexplicably grave and mysteriously worded, even at their sunniest and most catchy. The best ones sound like the pleas of a love-struck man from another place—perhaps a small Eastern European city—who has an unusual gift for melody but who grew up not speaking English. “ ‘I am,’ I said, to no one there, and no one heard at all, not even the chair,” is a typically opaque lyric. Diamond’s new album, “12 Songs,” which was produced by Rick Rubin, exhibits both his chivalrous approach to romance and his awkwardly phrased enthusiasms, qualities that have been evident since the start of his forty-five-year career. Happily, Rubin reins in Diamond’s floridity more than any other producer he has worked with since the sixties, highlighting the weird mixture of guilelessness and gravitas at the center of his work.

Diamond, who grew up in Brooklyn, began writing songs and making records in the late nineteen-fifties, while attending New York University on a fencing scholarship.

More here.  [For Azra, Sughra and Samina Raza.]

Michael Rosenwald in Smithsonian Magazine:

Robert Webster is the world’s preeminent expert on avian influenza. A virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, he helped create the first widespread commercial flu vaccine decades ago. It was Webster who discovered that birds were likely responsible for past flu pandemics, including the one in Asia in 1957 that killed about two million people. Perhaps Webster’s greatest contribution to science is the idea that global influenza epidemics begin when avian and human flu viruses combine to form a new strain, one that people lack the ability to fight off.

For all those reasons, Webster is in great demand as governments worldwide try to stave off a possible epidemic of influenza, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the great pandemic of 1918-1919, which killed at least 40 million people. Smithsonian dispatched Michael Rosenwald to catch up with Webster and report on the scientist whom one expert has called an “international treasure.”

More here.

Shaoni Bhattacharya in New Scientist:

India is missing about 10 million daughters since the widespread use of ultrasound, estimates a new study.

Over the last 20 years, about 10 million female fetuses may have been selectively aborted following ultrasound results in India, suggest Prabhat Jha at the University of Toronto, Canada, and colleagues.

Their study of 1.1 million households across India reveals that in 1997, far fewer girls were born to couples if their preceding child or children were also female. “There was about a 30% gap in second females following the birth of any earlier females,” Jha told New Scientist.

When the firstborn child was a daughter, the sex ratio for second children among the 134,000 births in 1997 was just 759 girls for every 1000 boys. For a third child, just 719 girls were born per 1000 boys, if both the older children were girls. However, if the eldest children were boys, the sex ratios for the second and third child were about 50-50.

Based “on conservative assumptions” the gap in births equates to about 0.5 million missing female births a year, says the team. Assuming the practice has been common in the two decades since ultrasound became widely available, this adds up to 10 million missing girls.

“Female infanticide of the past is refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise,” says Shiresh Sheth of the Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai, India, in a commentary accompanying the study in The Lancet.

More here.

Wesley Yang in The Boston Globe:

Three years ago, a pharmaceutical heiress made Poetry magazine, the venerable monthly that discovered T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, the richest literary journal in the history of the world. The sum of $175 million, given by Ruth Lilly, made the subject of poetry into news fit to print in just about every newspaper in America.

The sum’s vastness enticed some poets into imaginative flight. The poet Rafael Campo rhapsodized in an opinion piece in the Globe that a ”Poetry Palace” built with the gift might come to house ”factory workers and firefighters, immigrants, and descendents of slaves,” and that ”such a rich community of poetry-lovers could truly repair this broken planet.” In the London Independent, Campbell McGrath had a more modest but (as it turns out) no less fanciful wish: ”I hope that, as much as possible, Poetry will find a way to call up individual poets and say, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but we’re going to give you money.”‘

Of course, some in the literary world have declined to get caught up in the excitement. ”We have thousands of very bad poets in the USA. There are also 20 or so good ones,” writes eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom in a recent e-mail. ”All that money should be used to fight poverty and illness here and abroad.”

The coverage, by turns dutiful and bemused, threw into sharp relief the wider culture’s neglect of poetry. That so many could hope for so much from Ruth Lilly’s gift-about as much as it cost to make ”Waterworld”-showed how humble are the art form’s worldly expectations.

More here.

Philip Ball in Nature:

Thanks to political tensions easing in Lebanon, archaeologists have finally managed to locate the sites of ancient Phoenician harbours in the seaports that dominated Mediterranean trade thousands of years ago.

By drilling out cores of sediment from the modern urban centres of these cities, geologists have mapped out the former coastlines that the sediments have long since buried. From this they have pinpointed the likely sites of the old harbours, and have marked out locations that, they say, are in dire need of exploration and conservation.

The modern cities of Tyre and Sidon on the Lebanese coast were once the major launching points of the seafaring Phoenicians. They were to the ancient world what Venice, Shanghai, Liverpool and New York have been in later times: some of the greatest of the world’s ports, and crucial conduits for trade and cultural exchange. From the harbours of the Phoenician cities, ships carried precious dyes and textiles, soda and glass throughout the Mediterranean and beyond.

More here.

David Biello in Scientific American:

The solar system beyond Neptune is a dark and mysterious place. It is also crowded. Besides Pluto and its moon Charon, there are planetesque chunks of rock and ice like Sedna and the recently discovered 2003UB313 as well as a host of asteroids and comets in the Kuiper belt and beyond. Determining which of these objects constitute new planets and which do not remains controversial work currently under review by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Some astronomers have even argued that Charon deserves to share the planet title since it is roughly half the ninth planet’s size and might have a similar atmosphere.

But new observations, reported today in Nature by Amanda Gulbis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues prove that Charon lacks an atmosphere and therefore lacks one potential criterion for planet status. “I think having an atmosphere is a key component,” Gulbis says. “Our findings show that it doesn’t have an atmosphere. I would say that Charon is definitely not a planet.”

More here.

The Boston Review’s new Democracy Forum now has responses to Barry Posen’s outline of an Exit Strategy from Iraq from Barbara Bodine, Jospeh Biden, and others, as well as a response to these by Posen.

Helena Cobban’s response:

Barry Posen is right to make the case for a substantial withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq (though I continue to argue for a withdrawal that, unlike his, is complete, speedy, and generous to Iraqis and other non-Americans financially and politically). He is right to diagnose the present situation as, essentially, one of a “stalemated counterinsurgency.” And, crucially, he is right to argue that the longer the administration delays making a public commitment to a substantial drawdown of troops, the greater the political and financial costs. Having said that, however, the course he advocates remains deeply unsatisfactory—even unrealistic. This is for two main reasons: first, Posen misreads key aspects of the situation inside Iraq, in particular the role that Iran already plays in its politics; second, he almost completely ignores broader trends in a global political system of which Iraq—both the country and the issue—is nowadays a part.