Month: October 2008
Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Studies
Michael M. Hughes in AlterNet:
The space resembles a clean, warm, but decidedly offbeat living room. The lighting is spare and soft, emanating from two lamps. A bookshelf holds a variety of picture books and well-known spiritual and psychological classics like Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Above the books sits a wooden sculpture of Psilocybe mushrooms. Behind the couch are a Mesoamerican mushroom stone replica and a statue of a serene, seated Buddha. An eye-popping abstract expressionist painting hangs on the wall, an explosion of color and intersecting lines.
This isn’t a metaphysical retreat center in San Francisco, or the Manhattan office of a New Age therapist-cum-shaman. Lundahl’s first psychedelic experience is taking place in the heart of the Behavioral Biology Research Center building at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus in Southeast Baltimore, in a room affectionately referred to by both the scientists and the volunteers as the “psilocybin room.” She’s taking part in the first study of its kind since the early ’70s — a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonized and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.
More here.
Call Centers Are Fodder For India’s Pop Culture
Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post:
In a training session at a suburban call center, groups of fresh-faced Indian recruits jettison their Indian names and thick accents and practice speaking English just like the Americans do. They have hesitant conversations with imaginary American customers who complain angrily about their broken appliance or computer glitch.
The instructor writes “35 = 10” on the board, as though he is gifting the recruits with a magic mantra.
“A 35-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian’s,” he explains, and urges the agents to be patient with the callers.
That is a scene from “Hello,” the first Bollywood movie about the distorted and dual lives of India’s 2 million call-center workers. When it debuted this month, many in the audience cheered and laughed at such scenes, which pandered to the reigning stereotypes about those on both ends of the transcontinental, toll-free helpline — the dumb American customer and the smart, but fake, Indian call-center agent.
More here.
Running on Empty: The Consequences of America’s Insolvency
Michael Blim
Don’t let the good news fool you: the United States is bankrupt. We will be spending the next 25 years in a rolling Chapter 11. It will be painful.
Because we are currently the center of the world economy, and our currency is king, we can continue to indebt ourselves by borrowing money from the world, or simply by printing it. Because the dollar is the world’s trade and reserve currency, our neighbors accept it more readily than they would the currency of other bankrupts nations. But debts and money are promises to pay, and short of bombing our creditors into the Stone Age, they will be paid sooner or later.
Before discussing the possible consequences entailed in getting ourselves out of the immediate economic crisis, let’s look at some facts. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times (October 15, 2008) reports that financial losses beginning with the sub-prime mortgage debacle are estimated currently by the International Monetary Fund at $1.4 trillion dollars, an amount equivalent to 10% of US gross domestic product. Since Europeans participated in the massive debt pyramiding of the world economy originated by American and British banking houses, the direct hit for the United States thus far equals less than the full 10% loss, though more of the loss surely falls on us than the Europeans.
The United States according to the Treasury Department currently carries another $13.7 trillion dollars in debt, $10 trillion of which is government debt, held in the main by foreign governments, their firms and banks, and by our wealthiest classes via trusts, hedge funds, other investment vehicles. The current collapse is something of a climax as well as acceleration of the larger debt crisis that has been festering for almost two generations. Since the end of the Second World War, the world economy has needed dollars for trade and development, and finally for its enormous economic expansion. With the rise of China in the eighties, the demand for dollars soared, and the Federal Reserve, Treasury and US banks and investment firms obliged by creating the loans, bonds, and finally in the case of the Treasury the species necessary for growth.
Under the terms of the great shell game that is capitalism, as long as the world economy grew, and as long as the United States could lead or at least keep up, political and corporate leaders were free to imagine that the debts of today would be paid by growth tomorrow.
One problem, however, remained: with the world awash in dollars, and their number reaching fantastic proportions with the issuance of new debt and the creation of new debt instruments of the sort discussed by the media these past months, their value began to slip. Those dollar promises became more expensive to pay off, and the promise holders were receiving less in recompense.
Then, as by now everyone knows, people holding sub-prime mortgages began to default on their payments, and panic among bondholders holding securities based on the mortgages ensued, driving down the value of the bonds themselves. Housing prices, having been driven up by a flood of speculative investments, once again dollar-making investments on borrowed money, began to decline. The massive indebtedness of America, governments, citizens, banks, and firms, was exposed, and the panic spread more widely. Like the child’s game of musical chairs, each creditor now is desperately trying to avoid being left standing without a chair.
As the financial storm has hit, the American “debt dam” proved itself to be a New Orleans levee. Debts have poured over and out of it at all points. The balance sheets of US banks, firms, governments and citizens are inundated with debt. Frantic patching is occurring, though the damage caused – especially if the storm brings an economic cold front of recession and unemployment behind it will be massive.
What of the promises the debt and all of those dollars represent? The world, our massive creditor, will doubtless work hard to make us pay. Dollar devaluation and/or high inflation may cheat them of their total sum. But devaluation and/or high inflation will rob us of some significant portion of our standard of living.
And the greater degree to which the crisis, the adjustments, devaluation and/or inflation undermine the American economy, the more likely that we like other great debtor nations will be forced to sell off big chunks of our economic assets to pay off those trillions of dollars of promises.
This is what Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the biggest economy in the world could look like.
Perceptions
On the hysteria of partial disorder: A short rant
People tell me that I dress rather sloppily. I’m not that guy with the crisply ironed trousers and perfectly knotted tie, and it was only when I started to study architecture that I realized why.
Nothing sets me quite on edge as much as things that aspire to be perfect but fall short. Crisp trousers? What about that microscopic fray at the bottom right corner of the left pant? And that tie? The little tail is sticking out just enough to make me want to take a pair of shears to it. The desire to attain perfection inevitably magnifies the ways in which the aspirant falls short, in a kind of asymptotic frustration.
This, for me, was the ultimate failing of modernism in architecture and design. An architecture of purity? Designing with purity in mind in a fundamentally impure world is idiotic. And whether this purity is in concept, form, or physical execution is irrelevant. The best architects understand that we live in a conceptually, formally, and physically messy world.
Architecture requires elasticity, in concept and particularly in materials. Rigidity and singular interpretation detract tremendously from the success of a project, which should be more experiential than psychic.
In his brilliant Mon Oncle (1958), Jacques Tati explores the difficulties in living in a Modernist world, where post-industrial manufacturing and reproduction lead to spaces (he primarily looks to the domestic) that are inhospitable to the charms and lifestyle of the traditional class. The main character, Tati’s signature Monsieur Hulot, is constantly trying to spend time with his nephew, whose upper-middle class, corporate parents are the guardians of a cartoonish Modernist kingdom.
While Hulot, who lives in an old stone building in a typical provincial town center, stumbles about, ever the antediluvian buffoon, it is his sister and her husband that perform the hysteria of partial disorder, running around trying to mediate and tame the increasingly out of control level of minimalism and malfunctioning technology they’ve surrounded themselves by.
The most touching moments of the film occur when their son and Tati are scolded for trying to live, rather than subjugate themselves to their environment. Those scenes remind me of Zaha Hadid’s r
esponse to the reception of her Z.Island, a kitchen so obviously meant for the “warm takeout in your spaceship microwave” set that even the designer herself told a roomful of fans and press that she wouldn’t know how functional it was as she doesn’t cook much. Classic. The kitchen itself could have been a prop of the film; in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Mon Oncle was its inspiration.
Now more than ever, evidenced by designers like Hadid, contemporary designers more concerned with the Next Big Thing than with functionality are descendents of Modernists like Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. Purity and concept trump usability, and innovation is only thought of in terms of complexity. I recently went to an exhibition of young architects showing new architectural materials that confirmed that this mentality has been unfortunately and effectively passed to the next generation of designers. The materials were slick, and were all derived from synthetic polymers with more syllables than are altogether reasonable. Tellingly, imagining them in terms of application was difficult and disappointing. Like the glass houses and urban plans from the mid-20th century Modernists, these materials would, metaphorically, crumble if they were to crumble. There is no ability to accommodate wear, and any mistakes in detailing are instantly noticeable and cringe-worthy.
Unfortunately, in addition to serving theory, many architects design more for photographers and magazines than the client. Pictures of buildings like Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (pictured at right) or Philip Johnson’s Glass House, or any of the high-gloss enameled and plastic architecture of the present reveal that these buildings perform for the camera. Anyone who has visited any of these sites knows that what you get is quite different, and can be quite disillusioning.
Accepting a certain kind of disorder and natural decay are paramount to good design, particularly in architecture, and it is the concern of an ever-decreasing number of designers. It leads to the kind of buildings that age with grace and evolve with time—not those whose illusion is so easily shattered. It’s sad to see that such obvious and accurate criticisms such as Tati’s, articulated fifty years ago, have fallen on such deaf ears.
Support your favorite steampunk jazz ensemble
Secret Society played 3QD’s second annual ball and were amazing. Lindsay updates us on what’s been happening with them.
Secret Society fans will be excited to learn that the band is poised to record its first studio album, Infernal Machines, in mid-December.
You can download live recordings of the 18-piece steampunk jazz ensemble here, for free. It’s all original material, composed by my partner, DJA, and performed by some of the most talented young jazz musicians in New York.
SecSoc is doing a fall fund drive to defray recording costs. If you’d like to contribute, please click here.
Number and Numbers
John Kadvany reviews Alain Baidou’s book in Notre Dame Philosphical Reviews (via bookforum):
Like many philosophers, Alain Badiou relies on technical systems of mathematical logic as a foundation for philosophical exploration. Donald Davidson used Tarski’s theory of truth for formal languages to ground his approach to natural language semantics. Modal logic is frequently used to discuss problems of necessity, time, or belief. W. V. O. Quine made the reduction of mathematics to set theory a paradigm of “ontological commitment,” such that an idealized formalization of physical science identified the entities needed to ensure the theory as fundamentally “real.” Indeed, Badiou’s project is exactly in this Quinean mode, with set theory his preferred tool. While Badiou’s set-theoretic interpretations are not typical of those found in Berkeley or Princeton, the overall strategy is nonetheless “analytic.” Hence one’s response to Number and Numbers, and a similar earlier book, Being and Event, will depend on a) the philosophical narrative laid over the mathematics, and b) the treatment of the mathematics vis à vis the interpretation.
This review follows those two themes. But first a word on intellectual context. Badiou is one of several French philosophers pilloried by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1998). Sokal, of course, authored the sham 1996 Social Text article, concocted as a meaningless essay in high lit-crit-theoretic style, and buttressed by facile, often bogus or inconsistent, appeals to quantum physics or relativity, all undetected by the editors. The hoax was widely reported in the popular press and Sokal has since continued his manic crusade, though with much less panache and success. One of Sokal’s “tests” for intellectual value is whether one can detect a difference in meaning if key words are interchanged, say “being” and “other,” or “mediation” and “reification,” or whatever — sort of a Turing test for intellectual quality. For Badiou in Fashionable Nonsense, Sokal and Bricmont, as they so often do, just selectively quote him, rhetorically ask the reader if it makes sense (of course not, devoid of context), and then go on. The second trick could be applied to Number and Numbers, perhaps with some honesty, but I think ultimately unfairly, as explained below. Badiou’s ontological narrative is allusive, poetic, and deeply metaphorically inspired by his understanding of modern set theory. And Sokal’s “reversal” test also fails. Badiou’s vision is a wholly consistent one, built indeed from a stimulating historical account of the treatment of number by Gottlob Frege, Guiseppe Peano, Richard Dedekind, and Georg Cantor.
Why read a dictionary? Because it’s there.
Ammon Shea in The Guardian:
I find myself subject to the entire range of emotions and reactions that a great book will call forth from its reader. I chuckle, laugh out loud, smile wistfully, cringe, widen my eyes in surprise, and even feel sadness—all from the neatly ordered rows of words and their explanations. All of the human emotions and experiences are right there in this dictionary, just as they would be in any fine work of literature. They just happen to be alphabetised.
I keep paper and pen by my chair so that I can write down the things in the dictionary that I find interesting. After the first hour I realize that I’ve been writing down far too much, and that if I continue taking notes at this rate I’ll never finish reading. But there is just so much in the dictionary that I wish were in my head, and I read with the constant knowledge that I’m passing by things that later I’ll want to know. The answers to questions that I’ve had for years and the answers to questions that I never knew I had are coming up constantly.
These are some of the pleasures of reading the dictionary, and they are indeed sublime. The frustrations are considerably more pedestrian. After the first three hours of reading I have the kind of headache that makes life feel unfair. It is a pounding that keeps pace with my heartbeat, as though I had a second heart, located in the lower-left back part of my head, the sole purpose of which is to pump tiny spasms of pain, rather than blood.
Authenticity and the South Asian political novel
Amitava Kumar in The Boston Review
I was anxious about my response to The White Tiger. No, not only for the suspicion about the ressentiment lurking in my breast, but also because I was aware that I might be open to the same charge of being inauthentic. My own novel Home Products, published last year, has as its protagonist a journalist who is writing about the murder of a young woman. The case is based on a well-known murder of a poet who had an illicit relationship with a married politician. Kidnapping and rape and, of course, murder, feature quite frequently in the novel’s pages. By presenting these events through a journalist’s eye, I tried hard to maintain a tone of observational integrity. At some level, realism had become my religion.
Since then, I have wondered whether my choice of the journalist as a protagonist is not itself a symptom of an anxiety about authenticity. Was it the worry of an expatriate Indian, concerned about losing touch with the society he took as his subject? To invest in an aesthetic of observation and reportage was to build banks against the rising tide of that worry. I know now that this worry informs my reading of all novels about India.
For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the nonresident Indian. If you were dealing in invented details, it hardly mattered when you mixed up names and dates. But now, more than magical realism, it is the painstaking attempt at verisimilitude that clearly betrays the anxiety about authenticity. This condition is more subtle. It has limited fiction’s reach, keeping writers to what they know.
Science Saturday: Tribes and Prejudices
tanpinar on istanbul (from 1962)
A few days ago, a friend whom I love dearly and always find to have attractive ideas asked me, “What do you think is the most difficult cause in our artistic endeavours?” I was first caught unawares and answered, with a slackness of thought, “Never mind! All causes are difficult. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have called them by the name of cause. The fact that we separate them from other problems is also self-explanatory.” My friend knows me a little. He realised that I was, as my students sometimes like to say, letting go of it. It was the truth.
He had come to me early in the morning and taken me to the Yildiz Park. We were walking underneath a sweet blue sky that refuted all we knew about the winter season. Barren trees resembling imaginary palisades rather than tarnished silver, vibrant green cypresses and pines booming forward like deep cello tunes amidst the silence, and the deep blue, sparkling sea that beckoned us to climates unknown had suddenly fascinated me. But my friend wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe he had an inherent ability to take on two tasks at once with the same vigour.
more from Eurozine here.
Obama Runs Constructive Criticism Ad Against McCain
Obama Runs Constructive Criticism Ad Against McCain
more from The Onion here.
huge
We cannot see farther into the universe because the big bang happened only 14 billion years ago and light from distant regions has not had enough time to reach Earth. Yet subtle clues are beginning to reveal some of the properties of the regions of space hidden beyond our cosmic horizon. Our world appears to be only a small part of a “multiverse,” an expanse vastly larger than the visible universe, and for the most part completely different from it.
To account for what we do see, cosmologists invented a theory many years ago called “inflation,” in which a brief, ultra-accelerated expansion of the early universe stretched space to a size far greater than what we observe. Inflation explains why, despite the violence of the big bang, the universe appears to us uniform and smooth, and the theory has made predictions confirmed by measurements of subtle variations in the radiation left over from the big bang. But inflation does not really make the universe more uniform — just huge. If inflation is correct, then the billions of light-years that our telescopes probe are a mere dot on a far vaster canvas.
more from Seed here.
Sunday Poem
///
From the Air
Laurie Anderson
Good evening. This is your Captain.
We are about to attempt a crash landing.
Please extinguish all cigarettes.
Place your tray tables in their
upright, locked position.
Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees.
Your Captain says: Put your head in your hands.
Put your hands on your hips. Heh heh.
This is your Captain–and we are going down.
We are all going down, together.
And I said: Uh oh. This is gonna be some day.
Standby. This is the time.
And this is the record of the time.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.Uh–this is your Captain again.
You know, I’ve got a funny feeling I’ve seen this all before.
Why? Cause I’m a caveman.
Why? Cause I’ve got eyes in the back of my head.
Why? It’s the heat. Standby.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane.
There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.From Big Science, 1982
///
Civic Virtues: Gore Vidal’s Selected Essays
From The Nation:
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. has always enjoyed a healthy appreciation of his own, indeed remarkable, wit and talent. So have most other people, though approbation of his moral character has perhaps been less close to universal. His successes–bestselling novels, Broadway plays, screenplays, two enchanting memoirs and five decades of scintillating literary and political criticism–would be tedious to chronicle (and superfluous in the Age of Wikigooglespace). But what do they add up to? Is he famous for some more enduring reason than… being famous?
He grew up in the penumbra of fame. His maternal grandfather, T.P. Gore, was more or less heroic: blind, Oklahoma’s first senator and a friend of Bryan and Darrow, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. His father, Gene Vidal, was an All-American football player, World War I aviator, friend of Lindbergh and Earhart and founder of TWA. His mother later married that socialite of socialites Hugh Auchincloss, who would later become Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s stepfather as well. In the vast attic of his grandparents’ house in Rock Creek Park were thousands of books. Up there and downstairs, reading to his grandfather, he acquired an education. At school–he attended St. Alban’s, like his younger cousin Albert Arnold Gore–he picked up Latin and fell in love with a godlike fellow student, who died a few years later, young and still perfect, on Iwo Jima. As told in Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest, it is one of the most stirring love stories in recent literature.
More here.
Monster Tag Team
From Science:
Astronomers taking a second look at a distant galaxy have found it is actually a pair of colliding galaxies, each harboring a supermassive black hole at its center. The existence of the black holes, which were fully formed less than 2 billion years after the big bang, suggests that these giant objects could have been common in the early universe. If so, they must have had a bigger impact on the evolution of galaxies than previously thought, and they might have influenced the origin of life on distant planets.
Ever since the first black hole, Cygnus X-1, was discovered, astronomers have been adding to the rolls of these strange cosmic objects, whose tremendous gravity can capture even light. The heavyweights of the group are supermassive black holes, which cram masses equaling a million suns or more into a space much smaller than our solar system. These monsters are supposed to take billions of years to form, because they accumulate all matter or objects unfortunate enough to pass too close–including other black holes. Supermassive black holes not only shape their host galaxy but also can determine its potential habitability, depending on whether they form quietly or flood the vicinity with lethal radiation and destructive jets of ionized gas.
More here.
Nawakille: A Squash Town
This is a truly amazing story in the world of sport. As I’ve written here before, I once had the chance to play one game of squash with Gogi Alauddin in Lahore, who was rated #2 in the world at the time. He told me we would play a long game to 21 points. If I scored a single point, he would buy me dinner. Predictably (in retrospect), I lost 21-0 in the worst drubbing of my life. He barely had to move to completely crush me in every point. And yes, I had to buy dinner as well.
Faisal Irfan Mian at All Things Pakistan:
The small village of Nawakille (pop. few thousand) outside the frontier city of Peshawar in Pakistan boasts something that no other in the world can. Over the last half century, the village that does not have a single squash court, has produced six world number ones in the sport. In fact, since 1950 the six between them have won 29 British Opens (the Wimbledon of squash) and 14 World Opens (which started only in 1975).
This is an incredible story that just happens to be a sport story. If the sport of squash had a bigger profile in world sport, there would have been movies made on this subject. For now, a writeup in this blog will have to suffice. While the British whiled away their time guarding the Khyber pass, they decided to relieve their boredom by building a few outdoors roofless squash courts. In the heat and direct sunlight, it was difficult to play a game with one of the highest cardiovascular work rates. But try telling that to the Pathan warriors.
Hashim Khan, the first of the lot, become a ball-boy at the Peshawar British Army Officers club and practiced with the broken balls tossed out by the officers. When the officers would retreat indoors in the 100 degrees heat and the squash court was empty, it would be “Hashim vs Hashim” in the court according to his biography. He got good enough to be the Pakistan champion by 1949 and somehow got enough sponsorship to get to the British Open in 1951. He was 34 years old at the time (Borg retired from Tennis at 26). In the warm up tournament he beat the four time British Open champion Mahmoud El Karim conceding just six points. The British press called it a “flash in the pan”, expecting for order to be restored, but Hashim went on to beat Mahmoud in the Open final 9-5, 9-0, 9-0, and then continued to win the tournament six out of the next seven years.
More here. [Photo shows Jansher Khan and Jahangir Khan.]
Bonus video:
Tim Minchin: If You Open Your Mind Too Much…
Reversal of Fortune
Describing how ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, and sheer incompetence have left the U.S. economy on life support, the author puts forth a clear, commonsense plan to reverse the Bush-era follies and regain America’s economic sanity.
Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:
We are in the midst of micro-economic failure on a grand scale. Financial markets receive generous compensation—in the form of more than 30 percent of all corporate profits—presumably for performing two critical tasks: allocating savings and managing risk. But the financial markets have failed laughably at both. Hundreds of billions of dollars were allocated to home loans beyond Americans’ ability to pay. And rather than managing risk, the financial markets created more risk. The failure of our financial system to do what it is supposed to do matches in destructive grandeur the macro-economic failures of the Great Depression.
Economic theory—and historical experience—long ago proved the need for regulation of financial markets. But ever since the Reagan presidency, deregulation has been the prevailing religion. Never mind that the few times “free banking” has been tried—most recently in Pinochet’s Chile, under the influence of the doctrinaire free-market theorist Milton Friedman—the experiment has ended in disaster. Chile is still paying back the debts from its misadventure. With massive problems in 1987 (remember Black Friday, when stock markets plunged almost 25 percent), 1989 (the savings-and-loan debacle), 1997 (the East Asia financial crisis), 1998 (the bailout of Long Term Capital Management), and 2001–02 (the collapses of Enron and WorldCom), one might think there would be more skepticism about the wisdom of leaving markets to themselves.
More here.