Muriatic Acid Poured to get Coloreds Out of the Pool. June 1964.
Civil Rights Movement photograph.
Month: February 2009
The Character of an Education
In 2000, I was in my mid-20s, an embittered grad-school dropout. It was the last thing I could have imagined happening. Halfway through my undergraduate career in America, I got the chance of a scholar's lifetime. I was accepted into Oxford for a full undergraduate degree. It was a dream world I'd entered, and I mean that in the best sense – and in the most forlorn.
Oxford in 1993 was still a pretty medieval place, all things considered. There were no cellphones, nor telephones in rooms. A handful of phoneboxes were scattered among the quadrangles, adequate – I suppose – for the 150 or so students living in College. Every day a little old man, on a bicycle with a basket, came cycling through each of the 41 gatehouses, wheeling the inter-Collegiate post into ten thousand pigeonholes. If you wished to call on a friend, most often you'd call on them, in the Victorian sense: stroll over down the lane, and through the quadrangles, rap on their door, and – oh, yes, I'm in the middle of Sidney's Arcadia now, but we can sit for a cup of tea.
I flew into Gatwick with my Mac Classic on my lap; but out of 70 students in the entering class of my college, only one other student brought a personal computer up with him. For the rest of us, four obsolete PCs – one of them perpetually broken – were crowded into a repurposed storage room, token technology for the college's 150 undergraduates. You were actually encouraged to write all your weekly essays in longhand, to prep you for the speed and stamina you'd need in examinations.
The Bodleian, one of the great libraries of the world, was little better in the technological stakes back then. To its great credit it wasn't remarkably far behind most leading universities of the time. It just had more to deal with. As a national reserve library, it received a copy of every book and journal published in Britain. The library dated to the mid-15th century. The poor librarians had managed to computer-catalogue everything from 1993…back to 1982. For everything else, you'd have to go over to a pair of bookshelves that spanned the entirety of the Reference Room, which held about a hundred black catalogues, each double the size of a Manhattan phonebook, that listed five hundred years of acquisitions.
Here's how you'd get a book. With your coat, you'd stake a claim at one of the hundreds of numbered desks. Then you'd rummage in the catalogues. You'd note your desk number and each of your book requests on a separate slip of carbon paper, and hand your bushel to the front desk. Perhaps four hours later, you'd have your books – except for the one being used by someone else, over at Desk 245-D. So then you'd have to go over and introduce yourself, and negotiate a time-share agreement. Or hover by Desk 245-D, waiting for its occupant to get back from his cup of tea. Gnawing on your fingernails the whole time, as the clock ticked toward the Bodleian's 10:30pm closing, with 40 pages of research still to read before starting your essay due at 9am the next morning.
It was slow. It was inefficient. It was wonderful.
Choose Your Story
I grew up on a dusty, rural road by the lower Colorado River in the Mojave Desert. The occasional ride to the nearest city, Las Vegas, was a two-hour special event. The smog, sprawling stores, slums, and soaring signs of the Strip were the best of urban life that I knew. To this day, visiting the big library at the University of Nevada feels like arriving at the Library of Alexandria and being anointed with knowledge, olive oil, and cool water from a half-functioning drinking fountain. I didn't understand what I was missing until one morning when, as a sixteen year old boy, I landed in Paris. My perspective on Las Vegas changed dramatically, as did my perspective on most things in my life.
There is something about cities that provokes people to make sense of their lives. In the extreme cases of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus, this meant establishing new schools at the edges of Athens. Cities have long provided spaces for public debate and economic exchange to happen in close proximity. If the denseness of the city suffocates the mind (and I am not claiming that it does), then a well cultivated garden placed just outside the city provides a good place from which to criticize what is happening inside.
Multiple Realities and the Nature of Delusion
By Olivia Scheck
When a person is prone to making claims that are clearly inconsistent with facts about the world, we say that he is crazy. His brain has gone haywire, and he is no longer responsive to reason. However, when the person making a plainly unrealistic claim is otherwise rational, this simplistic explanation may seem particularly unsatisfactory. A person suffering from Capgras Delusion, for instance, may show no other signs of mental illness, and yet he insists that someone in his life (usually a close family member) has been replaced by an imposter. Similarly, the Cotard patient may seem perfectly normal, aside from his assertion that he is actually dead and rotting before your eyes. These fascinating cases of monothematic delusion have, despite their rarity, prompted a number of psychologists and philosophers to wonder, “What is the nature of delusion?”
First, though, a little background on existing theories and a brief synopsis of Gallagher’s Multiple Realities Hypothesis:
Traditionally, accounts of delusion have fallen into one of two categories: top-down or bottom-up. Top-down accounts suggest that delusions result from disturbances in high-level understanding. The philosopher and UC Berkeley professor, John Campbell, for example, invokes Wittgentein’s notion of a “framework proposition” – an axiom that is implicitly assumed and never answerable to empirical facts – to characterize delusion. On Campbell’s view, delusions arise when an erroneous belief – such as, “my mother is an imposter” – takes on this type of incontrovertible epistemological status.
On the other hand, according to bottom-up accounts, delusions are not caused by false beliefs, but rather false perceptions. The popular neurologist Vilayanur Ramachandran gives a clear and entertaining bottom-up explanation for Capgras in his TED talk, “A Journey to the Center of Your Mind.” He believes that the Capgras patient’s assertion that his mother has been replaced by an imposter is, in fact, a rational metacognitive response to a peculiar perception. Specifically, Ramachandran proposes that the Capgras patient experiences an abnormal emotional response when looking at his mother, which results from a communicative disconnect between the area of the brain associated with face recognition and the its emotional center. Responding to this lack of affective response, the patient infers that his mother has been replaced by an imposter.
The Little Rock Nine
From factmonster.com:
The Little Rock Nine, as they later came to be called, were the first black teenagers to attend all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. These remarkable young African-American students challenged segregation in the deep South and won.
Although Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in schools, many racist school systems defied the law by intimidating and threatening black students—Central High School was a notorious example. But the Little Rock Nine were determined to attend the school and receive the same education offered to white students, no matter what. Things grew ugly and frightening right away. On the first day of school, the governor of Arkansas ordered the state's National Guard to block the black students from entering the school. Imagine what it must have been like to be a student confronted by armed soldiers! President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to protect the students.
More here.
Realpolitik ambushes Obama, and not just at home: Uzbekistan
Christopher Flavelle in Slate:
President Barack Obama's administration is not yet a month old, and editorialists have already accused the new president of losing his innocence after he was forced to abandon his lofty talk of bipartisanship over the economic stimulus plan. But a touch of partisan politics at home is nothing compared with the ethical predicament now looming in Central Asia, where Obama may soon need to choose either funding a vicious dictator in Uzbekistan or hindering the mission in Afghanistan. Getting into bed with Uzbekistan could be Obama's first ugly but necessary foreign-policy compromise.
On Feb. 3, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the president of the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan, announced that he would close a U.S. air base that the United States opened in October 2001 to supply the campaign in neighboring Afghanistan. Two days after the Kyrgyz announcement, the AP reported that Washington is looking to reopen its air base in neighboring Uzbekistan, which had been shuttered in 2005, to take up the slack.
More here.
Darfur Update
Over at Security Council Report, as Japan takes over the Presidency of the Council:
Key Recent Developments
The situation in Darfur remains dire, with more than 2.5 million people living in internally displaced person (IDP) camps dependent on humanitarian assistance. Attacks against aid workers and their property reached unprecedented levels in 2008. These attacks were mainly attributed to rebel movements, but many incidents also occurred in areas under government control.
UNAMID has now lost 22 personnel, including a peacekeeper that died on 29 December. Violence and ongoing clashes continues to limit UNAMID and humanitarian access to affected populations.
Despite the unilateral declaration of a ceasefire on 12 November by the Government of Sudan, bombing attacks against rebels continue. In his briefing to the Council on 19 December, Under Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, Alain Le Roy, said south and north Darfur had been bombed by the government in late November. After weeks of relative calm the Sudanese army bombed Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) positions in the Muhajeriya area of south Darfur on 13 January. Ground fighting between JEM forces and the government-backed faction of the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement led by Minni Minnawi (SLA/M) was also reported in the area, which hosts a civilian population of 30,000. On 18 January, JEM reportedly took full control of Muhajeriya, SLA/M’s former stronghold. Further government bombing was reported on 24 January. UNAMID reported 3,000 newly displaced as a result of the fighting. Clashes were also reported between the government and rebels on the outskirts of El Fasher in north Darfur on 26 January. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Edmond Mulet briefed the Council on the two situations in closed consultations on 28 January. The Council condemned the increased military activities and called on all parties to cease hostilities. In addition to clashes between the government and rebels, inter-ethnic fighting in other parts of south Darfur has resulted in hundreds of deaths since early December and the displacement of thousands of civilians.
Leading Rwanda Expert Killed in Buffalo Plane Crash
From the website of Human Rights Watch:
It is with enormous sadness that Human Rights Watch announces the death of our beloved colleague Dr. Alison Des Forges, who was killed in the crash of Flight 3407 from Newark to Buffalo on February 12, 2009. Des Forges, senior adviser to Human Rights Watch's Africa division for almost two decades, dedicated her life to working on Rwanda and was the world's leading expert on the 1994 Rwanda genocide and its aftermath.
“Alison's loss is a devastating blow not only to Human Rights Watch but also to the people of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “She was truly wonderful, the epitome of the human rights activist – principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and to using that truth to protect ordinary people. She was among the first to highlight the ethnic tensions that led to the genocide, and when it happened and the world stood by and watched, Alison did everything humanly possible to save people. Then she wrote the definitive account. There was no one who knew more and did more to document the genocide and to help bring the perpetrators to justice.”
Des Forges, born in Schenectady, New York, in 1942, began working on Rwanda as a student and dedicated her life and work to understanding the country, to exposing the serial abuses suffered by its people and helping to bring about change. She was best known for her award-winning account of the genocide, “Leave None to Tell the Story,” and won a MacArthur Award (the “Genius Grant”) in 1999.
More here. [Thanks to Karen Ballentine.]
Space Collision Called ‘Catastrophic Event’
Vladimir Isachenkov of the Associated Press:
The crash of two satellites has generated an estimated tens of thousands of pieces of space junk that could circle Earth and threaten other satellites for the next 10,000 years, space experts said Friday.
One expert called the collision “a catastrophic event” that he hoped would force President Barack Obama's administration to address the long-ignored issue of debris in space.
Russian Mission Control chief Vladimir Solovyov said Tuesday's smashup of a derelict Russian military satellite and a working U.S. Iridium commercial satellite occurred in the busiest part of near-Earth space — some 500 miles (800 kilometers) above Earth.
“800 kilometers is a very popular orbit which is used by Earth-tracking and communications satellites,” Solovyov told reporters Friday. “The clouds of debris pose a serious danger to them.”
Solovyov said debris from the collision could stay in orbit for up to 10,000 years and even tiny fragments threaten spacecraft because both travel at such a high orbiting speed.
More here.
Has molecular gastronomy reached the plateau of productivity?
Molecular gastronomy was recently chosen as word of the month (not quite sure exactly which month this was). They give the following definition:
the art and practice of cooking food using scientific methods to create new or unusual dishes
This is not the best definition I’ve seen, to be honest. Why should one limit it to new or unusual dishes? When taken to extremes this only results in gimmickery. Strangely enough there are no hits when I search for “molecular gastronomy” at www.askoxford.com, so one might wonder whether they changed their mind? Personally I feel that molecular gastronomy should strive to improve both home cooking and restaurant cooking. That’s also what I tried to convey with my 10-part series with tips for practical molecular gastronomy.
The Webster’s New Millennium dictionary has this definition:
the application or study of scientific principles and practices in cooking and food preparation
This definition includes both the fundamental scientific aspects and the applications of these. But to me it’s too close to “food science”. Where is the enthusiasm? Where is the delicous meal with tempting aromas and textures? As you might know several definitions have been launched over the last couple of years. My favorite definition is still Harold McGee’s (although he does no longer use the definition himself): “Molecular gastronomy is the scientific study of deliciousness”. In my opinion it joins the two worlds which for too long have been separated – the world of science and the world of gastronomy and everything delicious.
It was a German blog post by Benedikt Köhler over at molekularküche (German blog on molecular gastronomy) that made me aware of the Oxford dictionary definition, and he also reminded me of the hype cycle, a term coined by the US based analyst house Gartner (read more about it in the book “Mastering the hype cycle”). It features the following 5 phases shown below and I agree with Benedikt that these terms can also be applied to the rise and fall (and hopefully also resurrection) of molecular gastronomy…
Computers conquer the final frontier in board games
“A lot of people have thought of Go as the last bastion of human superiority over computers, at least as far as board games go,” Hearn said. “Previous to this no one would have imagined that a computer would be able to beat a professional.”
Go is played widely in Asia and holds a far more important position there than chess does in the West, said Elwyn Berlekamp, another mathematician who studies the game, based at the University of California in Berkeley.
The game is played by two players who place black and white stones on a 19-by-19 square board. Players alternate turns placing a stone on the board, and the goal is to encircle another player's stones to the point where she has no moves left.
Because there are about 10^171 possible games of Go, computers applying the same approach that has lead to their superiority in chess and checkers — mapping out every possible move at each point in a game — fail miserably, Hearn said. A chess game has 10^50 possibilities, a checkers game just 10^20.
However, a new mathematical approach called a Monte Carlo simulation has changed everything. In a Monte Carlo simulation a computer plays numerous random games of Go, but applies knowledge from previous games to future games. This allows the computer to rule out huge swaths of real estate on the Go board and concentrate its computing power on the best moves, Hearn said.
Professional Go players know their reign will soon end.
How the Crash Will Reshape America
The historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has noted that in some respects, today’s crisis most closely resembles the “Long Depression,” which stretched, by one definition, from 1873 to 1896. It began as a banking crisis brought on by insolvent mortgages and complex financial instruments, and quickly spread to the real economy, leading to mass unemployment that reached 25 percent in New York.
During that crisis, rising industries like railroads, petroleum, and steel were consolidated, old ones failed, and the way was paved for a period of remarkable innovation and industrial growth. In 1870, New England mill towns like Lowell, Lawrence, Manchester, and Springfield were among the country’s most productive industrial cities, and America’s population overwhelmingly lived in the countryside. By 1900, the economic geography had been transformed from a patchwork of farm plots and small mercantile towns to a landscape increasingly dominated by giant factory cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo.
How might various cities and regions fare as the crash of 2008 reverberates into 2009, 2010, and beyond? Which places will be spared the worst pain, and which left permanently scarred? Let’s consider how the crash and its aftermath might affect the economic landscape in the long run, from coast to coast—beginning with the epicenter of the crisis and the nation’s largest city, New York.
On the Firebombing of Dresden
Taylor:…The Dresden attack was directly linked to the conduct of the war elsewhere — in this case on the Eastern Front. In Feb. 1945, Dresden was a major transport and communication hub less than 120 miles from the advancing Russians. The aim of the bombing was quite deliberately to destroy the center of the city, thereby making the movement of German soldiers and civilians impossible.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: And in that, it was quite effective.
Taylor: There were other targets too. Berlin was also seen as essential to continuing German resistance and was heavily bombed on Feb. 3. Raids on Dresden and Chemnitz were delayed by bad weather. And ultimately, only the Dresden raid was successful — horribly so as the 25,000 or more casualties bear witness. This was, in fact, a clear-cut case where maximum destruction was the central aim of the attack. There can be no question that the presence of many refugees was factored into the Allies' calculations. A Feb. 1, 1945 memorandum specifically noted the huge tide of refugees passing through the eastern German cities as a “plus point,” chillingly adding that attacking these cities would “result in establishing a state of chaos in some or all of these areas.”
Sunday Poem
For Saundra
Nikki Giovannii wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-boppingthen my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked – do you ever write
tree poems – i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed that the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green – no trees grow
in manhattanthen, well, i thought the sky
i'll do a big blue sky poem
but all the clouds have winged
low since no-Dick was electedso i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supplyperhaps these are not poetic
times
at all
Fault Lines: Turkey East to West
From lensculture:
photography and text by
George Georgiou
Turkey is a strategically important nation, poised geographically and symbolically between Europe and Asia. But the tensions at the heart of Turkey are becoming increasingly severe. A struggle is taking place between modernity, tradition, secularism, Islamism, democracy and repression — often in unlikely and contradictory combinations. Usually these tensions and our gaze are focused almost exclusively on Istanbul, the Kurdish issue, or religion, ignoring the far deeper complexities of a large country searching for a modern identity.
While living in Turkey for four-and-a-half years, I was surprised at how quickly change was taking place: landscapes, towns, and cities reshaped, an extensive road network under construction, town centers “beautified,” and large apartment blocks springing up at a rapid rate around every town and city. Almost always, the architecture and infrastructure follow the same blueprint. Cities are becoming carbon copies of each other.
More here.
flannery and the backwards chicken
Brad Gooch opens “Flannery,” his biography of Flannery O’Connor, with a lost moment: an account of how when O’Connor was 5, the Pathe newsreel company sent a cameraman to her home in Savannah, Ga., to film a chicken she had trained to walk backward. Such an image highlights O’Connor’s lifelong fascination with birds, but most telling is that even at this age, she was elusive, standing just outside our grasp. “O’Connor’s screen debut,” Gooch writes, “exists in all its fragility in a Pathe film archive. . . . For all of four seconds, O’Connor, a self-possessed little girl, is glimpsed in glaring afternoon light, a wisp of curls peeking from beneath her cap, calmly coping with three chickens fluttering in her face.” Here we have a stunning metaphor for not only her writing but also her existence: brief, glancing, almost impossible to pin down.
more from the LA Times here.
Darwin, Rock Star?
Carl also discusses Darwin and Darwin-mania in Time:
It's only fitting to recognize the accomplishments of a great biologist. But there's a risk to all this Darwinmania: some people may come away with a fundamental misunderstanding about the science of evolution. Once Darwin mailed his manuscript of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life to his publisher, the science of evolution did not grind to a halt. That would be a bit like saying medicine peaked when Louis Pasteur demonstrated that germs cause diseases.
Today biologists are exploring evolution at a level of detail far beyond what Darwin could, and they're discovering that evolution sometimes works in ways the celebrated naturalist never imagined. “The biological problems we're dealing with are much more complex,” says Massimo Pigliucci, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “That said, it's a lot of fun. I'm not complaining.”
Recalling The Satanic Verses
Rumor has it that before publication, Rushdie was speaking of his novel, still in-progress, to a few people at a dinner at Edward Said's. When he got to the part about the story of Mahound, Eqbal Ahmad reportedly blurted out something like, “Are you mad? He'll kill you!” referring to Khomeini. Years later, when someone at the dinner brought up this near-prophetic remark to Rushdie, he allegedly replied, “Eqbal was wrong. I'm still alive.”
Lawrence Pollard in the BBC:
It must be both the most talked about and the least read book of recent times. Since it came out in 1988 The Satanic Verses has seemed more a principle to be argued over than a book to discuss.
From the very first call for it to be banned – made by Indian MP Syed Shahabuddin – its critics have proudly announced they didn't have to read it to know it was wrong.
And anecdotally, as I have been sitting re-reading the book, many colleagues have come up and admitted they had either bought it but never opened it or started and given up. So what is it like?
The Satanic Verses is three stories, told in three styles, threaded together in one novel.
In the first story, two contemporary Indians fall out of an exploding aeroplane and survive. One seems to become an angel floating around London, the other grows horns and cloven hoofs.
In another story a poor Indian girl of great beauty, surrounded by butterflies, leads a pilgrimage of Muslim villagers into the Arabian Sea, where they drown.
And in the third, most controversial strand, a prophet founds a religion in the desert. Although this story makes up only 70 of the 550 pages of the novel, it is the part which provoked the furious reaction we now call the Satanic Verses controversy.
Flying Blind
From The New York Times:
LORDS OF FINANCE The Bankers Who Broke the World
By Liaquat Ahamed
“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.” So wrote the great economic iconoclast John Maynard Keynes in an essay titled “The Great Slump of 1930,” published in December of that year. Thirteen months had passed since the crash of 1929; the world was living, in Keynes’s words, in “the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history.” I shuddered when I read this quotation in “Lords of Finance,” a magisterial work by Liaquat Ahamed, a veteran hedge fund manager and Brookings Institution trustee. A grand, sweeping narrative of immense scope and power, the book describes a world that long ago receded from memory: the West after World War I, a time of economic fragility, of bubbles followed by busts and of a cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression.
The “delicate machine” Keynes referred to was of course the global economy. By 1930, when he wrote his essay, the West was in bad shape. A combination of divisive postwar politics, a refusal to abandon economic orthodoxy and a series of policy errors by the world’s four most important central banks — the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the German Reichsbank and the Banque de France — had led to the near collapse of capitalist economies in the West. “Industrial production had fallen 30 percent in the United States, 25 percent in Germany and 20 percent in Britain,” Ahamed writes. “Over 5 million men were looking for work in the United States, another 4.5 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain.”
And yet — and this is why I shuddered — it was also a moment not unlike the one we’re living through now.
More here.
IR theory for lovers: a valentine’s guide
Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:
To begin with, any romantic partnership is essentially an alliance, and alliances are a core concept on international relations. Alliances bring many benefits to the members (or else why would we form them?) but as we also know, they sometimes reflect irrational passions and inevitably limit each member's autonomy. Many IR theorists believe that institutionalizing an alliance makes it more effective and enduring, but that’s also why making a relationship more formal is a significant step that needs to be carefully considered.
Of course, IR theorists have also warned that allies face the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment: the more we fear that our partners might leave us in the lurch (abandonment), the more likely we are to let them drag us into obligations that we didn't originally foresee (entrapment). When you find yourself gamely attending your partner’s high school reunion or traveling to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner every single year, you’ll know what I mean.
Realists have long argued that bipolar systems are the most stable. So if any of you lovers out there are thinking of adding more major actors to the system, please reconsider. As most of us eventually learn, trying to juggle romantic relationships in a multi-polar setting usually leads to crises, and sometimes to open warfare. It's certainly not good for alliance stability.
More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]