In the NYT:

Tata Motors today took the covers off the world’s cheapest car — the Nano.

Over the past year, Tata has been building hype for a car that would cost a mere 100,000 rupees (roughly $2,500) and bring automotive transportation to the mainstream Indian population. It has been nicknamed the “People’s Car.” Over the course of the New Delhi Auto Expo, which began this week, anticipation had grown to fever pitch.

With the theme from “2001: A Space Odyssey” playing, Ratan Tata, chairman of Tata Motors drove the small white bubble car onto Tata’s show stage, where it joined two others.

They are not concept cars, they are not prototypes,” Mr. Tata announced when he got out of the car. “They are the production cars that will roll out of the Singur plant later this year.”

The four-door Nano is a little over 10 feet long and nearly 5 feet wide. It is powered by a 623cc two-cylinder engine at the back of the car. With 33 horsepower, the Nano is capable of 65 miles an hour. Its four small wheels are at the absolute corners of the car to improve handling. There is a small trunk, big enough for a duffel bag.

In American Scientist, Gilbert Harman reviews Margaret A. Boden’s Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science:

In her latest book, the lively and interesting Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, the relevant machine is usually a computer, and the cognitive science is usually concerned with the sort of cognition that can be exhibited by a computer. Boden does not discuss other aspects of the subject, broadly conceived, such as the “principles and parameters” approach in contemporary linguistics or the psychology of heuristics and biases. Furthermore, she also puts to one side such mainstream developments in computer science as data mining and statistical learning theory. In the preface she characterizes the book as an essay expressing her view of cognitive science as a whole, a “thumbnail sketch” meant to be “read entire” rather than “dipped into.”

It is fortunate that Mind as Machine is highly readable, particularly because it contains 1,452 pages of text, divided into two very large volumes. Because the references and indices (which fill an additional 179 pages) are at the end of the second volume, readers will need to have it on hand as they make their way through the first. Given that together these tomes weigh more than 7 pounds, this is not light reading!

Boden’s goal, she says, is to show how cognitive scientists have tried to find computational or informational answers to frequently asked questions about the mind—”what it is, what it does, how it works, how it evolved, and how it’s even possible.” How do our brains generate consciousness? Are animals or newborn babies conscious? Can machines be conscious? If not, why not? How is free will possible, or creativity? How are the brain and mind different? What counts as a language?

Also in The Wilson Quarterly, Benjamin Barber:

Why, as a nation, are we so obsessed with competition, so indifferent to cooperation? For starters, competition really is as American as apple pie.  America has always been deeply individualistic, and individualism has presumed the insularity and autonomy of persons and, thus, a natural rivalry among them. Capitalism also embraces competition as its animus, and America is nothing if not capitalistic. Even the American understanding of democracy, which emphasizes representation and the collision of interests, puts the focus on division and partisanship. There are, of course, democratic alternatives. Systems of proportional representation, for example, aim to ensure fair representation of all parties and views no matter how numerous. But our system, with its single-member districts and “first past the post” elections, is winner take all and damn the hindmost, a ­set­up in which winners govern while losers look balefully on, preparing themselves for the next battle.

This has never been more so than in this era when politics has, in Jonathan Chait’s recent portrait in The New Republic, become “an atavistic clash of partisan willpower,” with Christian Right pitted against the Netroots Left in a polarized media environment defined by hyperbolic talk radio and the foolish excesses of the blogosphere. Moderation, cooperation, compromise, and bipartisanship are lame reflections of a pusillanimous past and of a “pathetic and exhausted leadership” incapable of winning elections.

Via Delong, Karol Boudreaux and Tyler Cowen in The Wilson Quarterly:

On the charitable side, part of microcredit’s appeal lies in the fact that the lending institutions can fund themselves once they are launched. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, explains that you can begin by investing $60 billion in the world’s poorest people,   “and then you’re done!”

But can microcredit achieve the massive changes its proponents claim? Is it the solution to poverty in the developing world, or something more ­modest—­a way to empower the poor,    particularly poor women, with some control over their lives and their ­assets?

On trips to Africa and India we have talked to lenders, borrowers, and other poor people to try to understand the role microcredit plays in their lives. We met people like Stadile Menthe in Botswana. Menthe is, in many ways, the classic borrower. A single mother with little formal education, she borrowed money to expand the small grocery store she runs on a dusty road on the outskirts of Botswana’s capital city, Gaborone. Menthe’s store has done well, and she has expanded into the lucrative business of selling phone cards. In fact,     she’s been successful enough that she has built two rental homes next to her store. She has diversified her income and made a better life for herself and her daughter. But how many borrowers are like Menthe? In our judgment, she is the exception, not the norm. Yes, microcredit is mostly a good thing. Very often it helps keep borrowers from even greater     catastrophes, but only rarely does it enable them to climb out of ­poverty.

Glenn Loury and Joshua Cohen discuss over at bloggingheads.tv:

From NoUtopia:

The Clod and the Pebble
William Blake

“Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds Heaven in Hell’s despair.”

So sang a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

“Love seeketh only Self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

From Science:

The single-celled creatures known as protozoans are primitive, exotic, and sometimes just plain weird, resembling animals, plants, or a combination of both. Researchers now report that one animal-like, parasitic protozoan relies on a biochemical pathway that is strikingly plantlike. The discovery could open up a new method of attacking protozoans that cause diseases such as malaria. Parasitic protozoans are extremely difficult to control because their animal-like biologies are often very similar to those of their hosts. As a result, drugs that target these parasites all too often damage the cells of the patient. Hoping to make headway, a team led by microbiologists Kisaburo Nagamune and L. David Sibley of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, took a close look at the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that causes the disease toxoplasmosis.

First, the scientists tried comparing biochemical pathways that they identified in the parasite with those of animals to better understand their function. “When we found few similarities, we thought these animal-like protozoans might not be all that they seemed,” says Sibley. So the team compared the biochemical pathways of Toxoplasma with those of plants. It found that the two had a lot in common. Of particular interest was abscisic acid, a hormone that in plants controls stress responses and dormancy. When the researchers disrupted abscisic acid production using a commonly available herbicide, the parasites inside animal cells in culture remained inactive even after reaching numbers that would normally have led to a violent mass exodus. The reason, the team argues, is that abscisic acid is controlling the shift from dormancy to active growth in protozoans, much as it does in plants. The same herbicide saves mice infected with Toxoplasma, the researchers report tomorrow in Nature.

More here.

From Nature:

India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh has announced unprecedented funding for science education and research, saying it is a top priority for his government. He has announced a range of schemes to attract students and replenish government agencies’ shrinking pool of scientific personnel. “We are planning to fund 30 new Central Universities, five new Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology,” Singh said. In the next five years, he added, India will also be launching 1,600 polytechnics, 10,000 vocational schools and 50,000 skill-development centres. One million schoolchildren will receive science innovation scholarships of 5,000 rupees (US$130) each over the next five years, and 10,000 scholarships of 100,000 rupees per year will go to those enrolling on science degree courses.

“We need a quantum jump in science education and research,” Singh said. “This agenda can no longer wait. The time has come for action, and I assure you of my highest personal commitment.” Singh said a plan for implementing the proposals will be devised in the next six months. Funding the schemes has required a fivefold increase in the education budget for 2007–12.

More here.

If you decide to follow Robin’s prescription for sanity (see 2nd post below), here’s some stuff to listen to. Compiled by George Petros:

Over the course of 13 years I collected the tracks comprising this compilation. Most came from LPs and 8-Tracks that I found in thrift stores and at garage sales all across America. Some came from the LP collections of Joseph Lanza, author of Elevator Music; Steven Blush, author of American Hardcore; Athan Maroulis, proprietor of Stardust Records; and the illustrator Jim Blanchard. Some came from various Lounge-style CDs issued in the mid-90s.

I edited tracks in Peak on a G4. There was no “cleaning up” of the sound; I eliminated only the most blatant scratches and pops. Although many tracks came from beat-up vinyl, or from fragile 8-Tracks, or from umpteenth-generation cassettes, or from out-of-print budget CDs, the sound quality is generally good. Unfortunately, many songs didn’t make it in due to their damaged fidelity.

I was searching for druggy and/or exotic Pop songs reinterpreted by contemporaneous Easy Listening artists, from 1966 through 1971. A few compositions herein pre-date that era, but the performers presented them in the pseudo-psychedelic style of the day.

Go here to listen.

Via Lindsay at Majikthise, Chalmers Johnson pans Charlie Wilson’s War:

One of the severe side effects of imperialism in its advanced stages seems to be that it rots the brains of the imperialists. They start believing that they are the bearers of civilization, the bringers of light to “primitives” and “savages” (largely so identified because of their resistance to being “liberated” by us), the carriers of science and modernity to backward peoples, beacons and guides for citizens of the “underdeveloped world.”

Such attitudes are normally accompanied by a racist ideology that proclaims the intrinsic superiority and right to rule of “white” Caucasians. Innumerable European colonialists saw the hand of God in Darwin’s discovery of evolution, so long as it was understood that He had programmed the outcome of evolution in favor of late Victorian Englishmen. (For an excellent short book on this subject, check out Sven Lindquist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes.”)

When imperialist activities produce unmentionable outcomes, such as those well known to anyone paying attention to Afghanistan since about 1990, then ideological thinking kicks in. The horror story is suppressed, or reinterpreted as something benign or ridiculous (a “comedy”), or simply curtailed before the denouement becomes obvious. Thus, for example, Melissa Roddy, a Los Angeles film-maker with inside information from the Charlie Wilson production team, notes that the film’s happy ending came about because Tom Hanks, a co-producer as well as the leading actor, “just can’t deal with this 9/11 thing.”

David Jay Brown in Scientific American:

Current studies are focusing on psychedelic treatments for cluster headaches, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), severe anxiety in terminal cancer patients, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcoholism and opiate addiction. New drugs must pass three clinical milestones before they can be marketed to the public, called phase I (for safety, usually in 20 to 80 volunteers), phase II (for efficacy, in several hundred subjects) and phase III (more extensive data on safety and efficacy come from testing the drug in up to several thousand people). All the studies discussed in this article have received government approval, and their investigators are either in the process of recruiting human subjects or have begun or completed research on human subjects in the first or second stage of this trial process.

Psychedelic drugs affect all mental functions: perception, emotion, cognition, body awareness and one’s sense of self. Unlike every other class of drugs, psychedelic drug effects depend heavily on the environment and on the expectations of the subject, which is why combining them with psychotherapy is so vital.

“Psychedelics may be therapeutic to the extent that they elicit processes that are known to be useful in a therapeutic context: transference reactions and working through them; enhanced symbolism and imagery; increased suggestibility; increased contact between emotions and ideations; controlled regression; et cetera,” says psychiatrist Rick Strassman of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, who from 1990 to 1995 performed the first human study using psychedelic drugs in about 20 years, investigating the effects of DMT on 60 human subjects.

Benazir Bhutto’s death is just the latest evidence of the disastrous legacy of western involvement in the country’s politics.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Last week the portrait of Benazir Bhutto as the last great hope for democracy in Pakistan had barely received its finishing touches in the world media when it was muddied by accusations that the former prime minister had sponsored jihadists in Afghanistan and India-held Kashmir.

Neither assertion is without a measure of truth. Yet both obscure the major events that have rendered Pakistan unstable, even ungovernable, for at least two generations: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979; the American decision to turn Pakistan into the frontline state for a global anti-Soviet jihad; and, more recently, the Bush administration’s corralling of Pakistan into the so-called war on terror.

Like many Asian countries, Pakistan stumbled from primeval chaos into postcolonial life, with an army as its strongest institution – which grew even more formidable after enlisting on the US side in the cold war. Six decades later, it is possible to see how in a less exacting climate Pakistan could have moved durably to civilian rule, as happened in Taiwan and Indonesia, two other pro-American dictatorships frozen by the cold war.

Such, however, was the scale and intensity of the CIA’s programme to arm the Afghan mujahideen that it couldn’t but retard political processes in Pakistan. General Zia-ul-Haq, who faced disgrace domestically and internationally after his execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, abruptly became a prestigious ally in Washington and London. Emboldened by American patronage, Zia brutally suppressed all opposition, which included some of the country’s greatest writers and artists.

More here.  [Thanks to Michael Blim.]

One view that I am writing against in this book, ironically, is the belief that Darwin and the theory of evolution have no place in the social sciences, especially in the study of human social and economic behavior. Whereas scientists are up in arms about attempts to teach creationism and Intelligent Design in public school biology classrooms (see my book Why Darwin Matters), and are distraught by the dismal state of science education and the lack of acceptance of Darwin’s theory (less than half of Americans believe that humans evolved)¹¹, most scientists — especially social scientists — have resisted with the emotional intensity of a creationist any attempts to apply evolutionary thinking to psychology, sociology, and economics. The reason for this resistance — understandable at the time — was the equation of evolutionary theory with Social Darwinism and especially the extreme hereditarian views that led to enforced sterilization of the mentally retarded in America, and to the Nazi eugenics program that led to the Holocaust. As a consequence, post-World War Two social scientists steered a wide course around any attempts to employ evolutionary theory to the study of human behavior, and instead focused almost exclusively on socio-cultural explanations.

A second view that I am writing against is the theory of Homo economicus, which holds that “Economic Man” has unbounded rationality, self-interest, and free will, and that we are selfish, self-maximizing, and efficient in our decisions and choices. When evolutionary thinking and modern psychological theories and techniques are applied to the study of human behavior in the marketplace, we find that the theory of Homo economicus — which has been the bedrock of Traditional Economics — is often wrong or woefully lacking in explanatory power.

More here.

Via Andrew Gelman, a tool to see how close the candidates are to you.

This post against bi-partisanship by Jim Johnson, I agree with (via Crooked Timber):

[W]hy should we endorse bi-partisanship? That is a fundamentally anti-democratic response. Here I am persuaded by argument by political theorists who, following Joseph Schumpeter (whose conception of democracy is, despite common caricatures, neither a ‘realist’ nor ‘minimalist’), insist that robust competition is crucial to a healthy democracy. For instance, Ian Shapiro* suggests that competition has two salutary effects: (i) it allows voters to throw out incumbents (known more appropriately as ‘the bastards’) and (ii) it pressures the opposition to solicit as wide a range of constituencies as they are able. Given these effects, Shapiro suggests quite pointedly:

If competition for power is the lifeblood of democracy, then the search for bi-partisan consensus … is really anticompetitive collusion in restraint of democracy. Why is it that people do not challenge legislation that has bi-partisan backing, or other forms of bi-partisan agreement on these grounds? It is far from clear that there are fewer meritorious reasons to break up the Democratic and Republican parties than there are to break up AT&T and Microsoft.”

Now the final sentence does not follow; we need not break up any particular party and, insofar as they are essential mechanisms of political coordination, that might be self-defeating. What is wanted is vigilance against bi-partisanship and the sort of collusion it embodies.

Olivia Judson in the New York Times:

This week, I want to look at a figure in the history of biology: Alfred Russel Wallace. January 8th was his birthday. And 2008 is the 150th anniversary of one of the most important events in the history of biology. In 1858, Wallace wrote to Charles Darwin from the Moluccan Islands, in what is now Indonesia, where he was collecting birds, beetles, butterflies and anything else he could catch. The letter contained a manuscript in which Wallace outlined the idea of evolution by natural selection.

To celebrate this event and what it led to — of which, more in a moment — I decided to visit Wallace’s portrait in London’s National Portrait Gallery, a Who was Who in paintings, photographs, statues and busts. I hurried past an anemic young prince in doublet and hose, and shot through the large gallery of Empire where Queen Victoria is presenting a Bible to a kneeling (and anonymous) African, to arrive in the smaller gallery of Victorian science and technology

More here.

From Harvard Gazette:

By activating multiple fluorescent proteins in neurons, neuroscientists at Harvard University are imaging the brain and nervous system as never before, rendering these cells in a riotous spray of colors dubbed a “Brainbow.” The technique is described in the cover story of the Nov. 1 issue of the journal Nature by a team led by Harvard’s Jean Livet, Joshua R. Sanes, and Jeff W. Lichtman.

Brainbow allows researchers to tag neurons with roughly 90 distinct colors, a huge leap over the mere handful of shades possible with current fluorescent labeling. By permitting visual resolution of individual brightly colored neurons, this increase should greatly help scientists in charting the circuitry of the brain and nervous system.

“In the same way that a television monitor mixes red, green, and blue to depict a wide array of colors, the combination of three or more fluorescent proteins in neurons can generate many different hues,” says Lichtman, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Center for Brain Science in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “There are few tools neuroscientists can use to tease out the wiring diagram of the nervous system; Brainbow should help us much better map out the brain and nervous system’s complex tangle of neurons.”

More here.

Gail Tsukiyama in Ms. Magazine:

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
by Xiaolu Guo

We immediately recognize the alienation of 23-year-old Zhuang Xiao Qiao, known as Z to Westerners who can’t pronounce her name, as she arrives in London for a year to study English. Frightened and alone, her broken English no help when seeking housing from Arab landlords with equally limited language skills, Z finds London a “refuge” camp. Her parents, who own a shoe factory in rural China, believe their daughter will “make better life through Western education.” What she will also receive is an education in love.

Z soon sees that “the loneliness in this country is something very solid, very heavy.” In a city where everything is new and foreign, where the most precious reminders of her old life are gone, she gradually makes a place for herself, a process Guo cleverly describes through Z’s steadily improving English. Word by word, month by month, her insight into this new culture grows until, at the cinema, she meets an older Englishman, a part-time sculptor, and embarks on a relationship that will change the way she sees the world.

What begins as a blossoming of love, sex and freedom gradually finds Z questioning the different ways in which each views their life together. Their relationship unravels when his growing need for solitude and his lack of commitment conflict with the closeness and community for which Z yearns. The collective society she left back in China values family and tradition; this Western concept of individuality and living only in the moment is hard for Z to understand. She is left to reconcile their essential difference: “‘Love,’ this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved.’…Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite….In Chinese, Love…has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.”

More here.

Recently, I have been posting a number of music videos. I can only hope that you are listening to them using either good headphones or some other hifi equipment. It would be a terrible shame if you are hearing the music through the always-tinny and inadequate speakers of your laptop! Anyhow, here we go again:

Over at Reset, an extended debate between Nadian Urbanati, Michael Walzer and Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor on Islam, the Left, and Tariq Ramadan (via Normblog). Urbanati:

The philosophy of dialogue is based on these premises, both of which manicheanism radically rejects. To resume our main topic, on this rejection is based radicalism, both inside the Islamic culture and inside the Western one. The politics of “block thinking” – or the assumption that there are monolithic and hence unchangeable cultures — is risky since it tends to thrust all the members of the culture in question (be it Islamic and Western) into the arms of those radical minorities that do really want their culture to be a unitary block under their leadership. Positions such as those endorsed by Paul Berman (which I would define as one of Manichean Occidentalism) in addition to being reductionist and somehow deceptive is also politically dangerous since that it may unwillingly help the cause of Osama bin Laden’s extremism. Goankar and Taylor write that the best “antidote” to “block thinking” must be found precisely in the concept of Walzer’s “internal criticism”, hence in the invitation to thinking that within every society or group or culture there do however exist principles, forms of expression, words, ideas or symbols that allow people to start criticising or reforming or questioning some given representative interpretations of their own culture.

Walzer:

What should Western leftists be doing with regard to Islam today? We should be strong critics of jihadist radicalism—and since we are, most of us, infidels and secularists, we are bound to be disconnected critics, focused on issues like life and liberty, which have universal resonance. We should befriend Muslim critics of religious zealotry, both inside Muslim countries and in exile, and try to understand the reasons for their critique and the experience out of which it comes. We should be happy to talk to Islamic intellectuals and academics—though we are not bound to “dialogue” with people whose public position is that we should be killed (or who make apologies for the zealots who hold that position). We should be tolerant of Islam in exactly the same way that we are tolerant of Christianity and Judaism—even as we maintain a general critique of, or skepticism about, religious belief. We should be connected critics of Western intellectuals who make excuses for religious zealotry and crusading fervor (Paul Berman provides an excellent model of how to engage in this critique).

Taylor:

I consider the Berman-type position both incredibly imperceptive and extremely dangerous. It ignores a) the incredible diversity of Islamic modes of devotion and spirituality; b) that the present jihadism is only one form of these, and very dubious from the standpoint of Koran and Hadith (that you become a ghazi killing women and chilfdren, or a shaheed by killing yourself in order to kill women and children), c) that this jihadism is a modern amalgam in which the faith is mainly lived out in the register of modern identity politics of the polarized kind, complete with the identification of a radically opposed enemy, and in the language of honour, humiliation, annihilation of the enemy, etc, leaving no place for the God who is always addressed in the Koran as “the compassionate, the merciful” (al raham, al rahmin), d) that people can get recruited in and out of this amalgam depending on the prevailing climate of group conflict, e) that the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric serves to entrench the feeling of an all-englobing conflict, and hence tends to facilitate the recruitment of believing Muslims into the jihadist amalgam. In other words Huntington is helping Bin Laden’s recruitment drive, as is the whole gang of neocon numbskulls running the Us.