Sughra Raza. Self-portraits on the Roof at Sunrise. January, 2010. Dubai.

Composite of digital photographs.

[Warning: graphic images]

[H/t: Jennifer Ouellette]

3QD friends Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:

The first time I entered ChatRoulette—a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world—I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind. The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.” Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive—one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.

The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else. The result is surreal on many levels. Early ChatRoulette users traded anecdotes on comment boards with the eerie intensity of shipwreck survivors, both excited and freaked out by what they’d seen. There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with “What up DOE!?” A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four. Occasionally, people even made nonvirtual connections: One punk-music blogger met a group of people from Michigan who ended up driving eleven hours to crash at his house for a concert in New York. And then, of course, fairly often, there was this kind of thing: “I saw some hot chicks then all of a sudden there was a man with a glass in his butthole.” I sing the body electronic.

Over at the Boston Globe's excellent blog Brainiac:

Intuition, or apprehension of certain facts or conclusions by the mind alone, sometimes without the intervention of reason, is in theory genderless. But at the website Experimental Philosophy, a professor at the City University of New York, Wesley Buckwalter, presents evidence that men and women intuit different conclusions when faced with the same sets of facts.

One of the examples has to do with a popular subject in X-Phi: intuitions about a person's state of mind in certain situations depending on whether those situations end well or badly. For instance, if a vice president of a corporation goes to his chairman of the board and says, “We are thinking of starting a new program. We are sure that it will help us increase profits, and it will also harm the environment,” and the chairman responds, “I don't care about the environment, I'm only interested in profits. Go ahead,” did the chairman know that his actions would cause harm? What if the new program will help the environment, and the chairman responds in the same way? Did he know that good would follow?

Although the two scenarios are logically the same, test subjects are more likely to say the chairman knew that the harm would happen than that good would occur. (Likewise, they are more willing to place moral blame than praise in the alternate situations.) Buckwalter's contribution is to find, at least in his test sample of 405 men and 340 women, that women are even more likely than men–by a striking amount–to shift their epistemic conclusions depending on the outcome of the scenario.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)

By William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

[Thanks to Christine Klocek-Lim.]

Peter Lennox keeps chickens, and they have taught him a great deal about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern 'efficiency'.

Peter Lennox in Times Higher Education:

All chickens are not born equal. If a few more philosophers had had a little more empirical interaction with chickens, John Locke may have reconsidered his notion of tabula rasa, the idea of the incipient individual as a blank slate embarking on a course of self-authorship. Chickens are born with certain personality traits, and these endure in a remarkably stable fashion throughout their lifespans (which can be as long as 15 years).

Of course, chickens are not born fully mentally formed – you can watch them learn by discovery, doing, copying and sometimes even adapting and improving. Eventually, older ones end up teaching younger ones. You don't see that in the battery farm, but put some in the garden and you soon do.

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: “pecking order”, “cockiness”, “ruffling somebody's feathers”, “taking somebody under your wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”, “strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clipping someone's wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “to crow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming home to roost”, “don't count your chickens before they're hatched”, “nest eggs” and “preening”.

You'll even see that the boss cockerel tends to take possession of the highest point – the top of the heap. And the longer you watch chickens, the more you think of them as people rather than some strange alien species with feathers, beady eyes and a strange language.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Philip the Second is an afterthought. That's what a college professor once said. We were reading Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. The professor was pointing out the significance of the book's title. Philip II comes at the end, and he's really just the name for an Age, an Age defined by The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World. The beginning of the book is mostly about geography, weather, seasonal migrations of various kinds of animals. Braudel was of the Annales School, a group of historians for whom history ought to be told in the little stories, the ground level (literally), the details of life as it is experienced by the mostly unnamed creatures who toil for their time and then pass away.

Wandering through the New York State Museum in Albany, I had the sudden realization that I was exploring a three-dimensional Braudelian space. Here was the attempt to capture, in fragments and chunks, the fine-grained details of life as it was lived in this region — by man, beast, and shrubbery alike — over the last 400 years. The dioramas and models are anachronistic in this digital age, but somehow they work anyway. I'm not entirely sure why they do; perhaps it is best explained in the exhibit of a reconstructed subway train from early in the 20th century. It contains the life-sized model of a young woman riding the A train. A nice-looking girl, she also seems annoyed. Her expression says, “Damn I hate riding this train.” The same thing could be said of the prehistoric mammoth in another scene; he's just cold. Or take the skull of a man from the cemetery of a 19th-century flophouse. His skull is a wreck and the wall description surmises that he probably died from getting his ass kicked too many times. Life was hard. Life is hard still. In being true to that basic fact, the New York State Museum has made low-tech a virtue.

More here.

F. W. Dupee in The New York Review of Books:

As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals. He probably has, in fact, no real competitors. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto. Baldwin impresses me as being the Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering, defiance, and aspiration. His role is that of the man whose complexion constitutes his fate, and not only in a society poisoned by prejudice but, it sometimes seems, in general. For he appears to have received a heavy dose of existentialism; he is at least half-inclined to see the Negro question in the light of the Human Condition. So he wears his color as Hester Prynne did her scarlet letter, proudly. And like her he converts this thing, in itself so absurdly material, into a form of consciousness, a condition of spirit. Believing himself to have been branded as different from and inferior to the white majority, he will make a virtue of his situation. He will be different and in his own way be better.

His major essays—for example, those collected in Notes of a Native Son—show the extent to which he is able to be different and in his own way better. Most of them were written, as other such pieces generally are, for the magazines, some obviously on assignment. And their subjects—a book, a person, a locale, an encounter—are the inevitable subjects of magazine essays. But Baldwin's way with them is far from inevitable. To apply criticism “in depth” to Uncle Tom's Cabin is, for him, to illuminate not only a book, an author, an age, but a whole strain in a country's culture. Similarly with those routine themes, the Paris expatriate and Life With Father, which he treats in “Equal In Paris” and the title piece of Notes of a Native Son, and which he wholly transfigures. Of course the transfiguring process in Baldwin's essays owes something to the fact that the point of view is a Negro's, an outsider's, just as the satire of American manners in Lolita and Morte d'Urban depends on their being written from the angle of, respectively, a foreign-born creep and a Catholic priest. But Baldwin's point of view in his essays is not merely that of the generic Negro. It is, as I have said, that of a highly stylized Negro, a role which he plays with an artful and zestful consistency and which he expresses in a language distinguished by clarity, brevity, and a certain formal elegance. He is in love, for example, with syntax, with sentences that mount through clearly articulated stages to a resounding and clarifying climax and then gracefully subside. For instance this one, from The Fire Next Time:

Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.

Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one's dreams. This former Harlem boy has undergone his own incredible metamorphosis.

More here.

From AFP news:

KARACHI — Pakistan overwhelmed athlete Naseem Hamid with a hero's welcome Thursday after she became South Asia's fastest woman by winning the 100-metre race in the regional games in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The 22-year-old clocked 11.81 seconds to clinch gold medal in the race in the South Asian Federation (SAF) Games Sunday, becoming Pakistan's first female athlete to win the sprint in the competition's 26-year history. Naseem was mobbed by hundreds of fans and relatives at Karachi airport, then whisked to a formal reception laid on by the southern province of Sindh.

Sindh governor Ishraul Ibaad announced that Naseem would be receive one million rupees (11,777 dollars) from President Pakistan Asif Zardari and half a million rupees from his office. “You have made the nation proud,” said Ibaad. “We are very happy and honoured by your tremendous win and hope that you will not sit on this laurel and win more medals at higher level like Olympics.” Other cash prizes came flooding in — 500,000 rupees from Pakistan's sports ministry, 200,000 rupees from Karachi Mayor Mustafa Kamal and 100,000 rupees from the Pakistan Athletics Federation. Pakistani lawmakers demanded a full-time job and house for Naseem, who comes from Karachi's impoverished slum area of Korangi.

The athlete said she was elated by the reception. “I am on cloud nine,” Naseem told reporters at the airport. “I had forgotten the world for six months and trained really very, very hard under my coach Maqsood Ahmed to achieve this.”

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Salman Ahmed)

From Scientific American:

Every dog owner knows a pooch can learn the house rules—and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness. But our work has suggested that wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups—and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality.

Morality, as we define it in our book Wild Justice, is a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate social interactions. These behaviors, including altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, reciprocity and fairness, are readily evident in the egalitarian way wolves and coyotes play with one another. Canids (animals in the dog family) follow a strict code of conduct when they play, which teaches pups the rules of social engagement that allow their societies to succeed. Play also builds trusting relationships among pack members, which enables divisions of labor, dominance hierarchies and cooperation in hunting, raising young, and defending food and territory. Because this social organization closely resembles that of early humans (as anthropologists and other experts believe it existed), studying canid play may offer a glimpse of the moral code that allowed our ancestral societies to grow and flourish.

More here.