Michelle Legro in Lapham's Quarterly [h/t: Elatia Harris]:

They called him “fat boy,” this seventeen-year old apprentice in the studio of Florentine painter Verrocchio who would receive care packages from his step-father, a pastry chef. The bastard son of a Florentine notary and a lady of Vinci, the boy’s doting step-father gave him a taste for marzipans and sugars from a very young age. The apprentice would receive the packages and devour them so quickly—crapulando, it was called, or guzzling—that the master felt the need to punish him, instructing the boy to paint an angel in the corner of a baptism of Christ, a mediocre painting which hangs in the Louvre for because it includes the first work of Leonardo da Vinci.

After three years as an apprentice, twenty-year old Leonardo took a job as a cook at the Tavern of the Three Snails near the Ponte Vecchio, working during the day on the few commissions his master sent his way and slinging polenta in the evenings. Polenta was the restaurant’s signature dish, a tasteless hash of meats and corn porridge. The other cooks at the Three Snails cared little about the quality of the food they served, and when in the spring of 1473, a poisoning sickened and killed the majority of the cooking staff of the tavern, Leonardo was put in charge of the kitchen. He changed the menu completely, serving up delicate portions of carved polenta arranged beautifully on the plate. However, like most tavern clientele, the patrons preferred their meals in huge messy portions. Upset with the change in management, they ran Leonardo out of a job.

Much like a modern struggling artist, Leonardo da Vinci was in his daily life a line cook, tavern keeper, and chef-for-hire. “My painting and my sculpture will stand comparison with that of any other artist,” he wrote in a humble introduction to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan, by way of a job application. “I am supreme at telling riddles and tying knots. And I make cakes that are without compare.”

Janny Scott in the New York Times:

At just 34, and in what her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, describes in a foreword to the book as “the extreme stages of grief,” Mrs. Kennedy displays a cool self-possession and a sharp, somewhat unforgiving eye. In her distinctive breathy cadences, an intimate tone and the impeccable diction of women of her era and class, she delivers tart commentary on former presidents, heads of state, her husband’s aides, powerful women, women reporters, even her mother-in-law.

Charles DeGaulle, the French president, is “that egomaniac.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is “a phony” whom electronic eavesdropping has found arranging encounters with women. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, is “a real prune — bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.”

The White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, loved to pick up the phone and say things like “Send all the White House china on the plane to Costa Rica” or tell them they had to fly string beans in to a state dinner. She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.”

More here.

David Bellos in The Independent:

Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn't an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary. In fact, at bottom, it doesn't deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before. It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments. Drawing on the already established patterns of matches between these millions of paired documents, Google Translate uses statistical methods to pick out the most probable acceptable version of what's been submitted to it.

More here.

Prayaag Akbar in the Sunday Guardian:

There is a certain recklessness that comes attached to a life lived in poverty. At least, this is how it seems to those of us lucky enough to escape that fate. Every day we see poor people take unfathomable risks: scurrying blind across four lanes of uncaring traffic to save a few seconds; walking, in Bata chappals, through a lake of stinking, stagnant rainwater instead of around it; hanging off a train with two toes and two fingers for grip instead of waiting for the next one; cycling on the wrong side of a dark road. And all the while the rest of us, the privileged few, surround ourselves with items from a growing list, rubber gloves, safety belts, hand sanitisers, jock straps, bicycle helmets, wet wipes, air bags, construction hats. On the subcontinent – perhaps everywhere, who knows? – the trappings of safety and the badges of privilege are too often one and the same.

For much of Mohammed Hanif's frenetic new novel, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti, it seems he is trying to convey this recklessness born of destitution.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

UCLA life scientists have identified for the first time a particlular gene's link to optimism, self-esteem and “mastery,” the belief that one has control over one's own life — three critical psychological resources for coping well with stress and depression. “I have been looking for this gene for a few years, and it is not the gene I expected,” said Shelley E. Taylor, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and senior author of the new research. “I knew there had to be a gene for these psychological resources.” The research is currently available in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and will appear in a forthcoming print edition. The gene Taylor and her colleagues identified is the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR). Oxytocin is a hormone that increases in response to stress and is associated with good social skills such as empathy and enjoying the company of others.

“This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to report a gene associated with psychological resources,” said lead study author Shimon Saphire-Bernstein, a doctoral student in psychology in Taylor's laboratory. “However, we wanted to go further and see if psychological resources explain why the OXTR gene is tied to depressive symptoms. We found that the effect of OXTR on depressive symptoms was fully explained by psychological resources.” At a particular location, the oxytocin receptor gene has two versions: an “A” (adenine) variant and a “G” (guanine) variant. Several studies have suggested that people with at least one “A” variant have an increased sensitivity to stress, poorer social skills and worse mental health outcomes. The researchers found that people who have either two “A” nucleotides or one “A” and one “G” at this specific location on the oxytocin receptor gene have substantially lower levels of optimism, self-esteem and mastery and significantly higher levels of depressive symptoms than people with two “G” nucleotides.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good. The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect. His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behavior. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually,” Dr. Dunbar said. “That’s why we got interested in it.” And the findings fit well with a growing sense that laughter contributes to group bonding and may have been important in the evolution of highly social humans. Social laughter, Dr. Dunbar suggests, relaxed and contagious, is “grooming at a distance,” an activity that fosters closeness in a group the way one-on-one grooming, patting and delousing promote and maintain bonds between individual primates of all sorts.

Excruciating
In five sets of studies in the laboratory and one field study at comedy performances, Dr. Dunbar and colleagues tested resistance to pain both before and after bouts of social laughter. The pain came from a freezing wine sleeve slipped over a forearm, an ever tightening blood pressure cuff or an excruciating ski exercise. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, eliminated the possibility that the pain resistance measured was the result of a general sense of well being rather than actual laughter. And, Dr. Dunbar said, they also provided a partial answer to the ageless conundrum of whether we laugh because we feel giddy or feel giddy because we laugh.

More here.

James Longenbach in The Nation:

By the time T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis on September 26, 1888, he had been preceded in this world by a brother and four sisters, the eldest of whom was nineteen years his senior. Inevitably, great care was lavished on the youngest Eliot; he had five mothers. Or perhaps six. Next door to the Eliot house on Locust Street lived Abigail Adams Eliot, Eliot’s grandmother, who had grown up in Washington, DC, and could recall clearly her great-uncle, the second president of the United States, after whose wife she had been named.

Great things were expected of the youngest Eliot, and a crucial part of his genius was to have achieved greatness in forms that no one in his family was fully equipped to countenance. Simultaneously, he fulfilled and decimated their expectations, constructing a life that allowed his family to admire his achievement only inasmuch as they were also bewildered, incapable of helping themselves to the side dish of self-congratulation that usually accompanies the main course of familial pride. The author of The Waste Land and Four Quartets secured the loyalty of his admirers (as well as the unshakable attention of his detractors) in precisely the same way.

Daniel Kahneman in Edge:

The marvels and the flaws that I'll be talking about are the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking. It's a topic I've been thinking about for a long time, a little over 40 years. I wanted to show you a picture of my collaborator in this early work. What I'll be trying to do today is to sort of bring this up-to-date. I'll tell you a bit about the beginnings, and I'll tell you a bit about how I think about it today.

This is Amos Tversky, with whom I did the early work on judgment and decision-making. I show this picture in part because I like it, in part because I like very much the next one. That's what Amos Tversky looked like when the work was being done. I have always thought that this pairing of the very distinguished person, and the person who is doing the work tells you something about when good science is being done, and about who is doing good science. It's people like that who are having a lot of fun, who are doing good science.

We focused on flaws of intuition and of intuitive thinking, and I can tell you how it began. It began with a conversation about whether people are good intuitive statisticians or not. There was a claim at the University of Michigan by some people with whom Amos had studied, that people are good intuitive statisticians. I was teaching statistics at the time, and I was convinced that this was completely false. Not only because my students were not good intuitive statisticians, but because I knew I wasn't. My intuitions about things were quite poor, in fact, and this has remained one of the mysteries, and it's one of the things that I'd like to talk about today — what are the difficulties of statistical thinking, and why is it so difficult.

We ended up studying something that we call “heuristics and biases”. Those were shortcuts, and each shortcut was identified by the biases with which it came. The biases had two functions in that story. They were interesting in themselves, but they were also the primary evidence for the existence of the heuristics. If you want to characterize how something is done, then one of the most powerful ways of characterizing the way the mind does anything is by looking at the errors that the mind produces while it's doing it because the errors tell you what it is doing. Correct performance tells you much less about the procedure than the errors do.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Is consequentialism in ethics a form of moral opportunism? Is torture always wrong? What about punishing the innocent? Philip Pettit, who recently gave the 2011 Uehiro Lectures on 'Robustly Demanding Values', discusses some common criticisms of consequentialism in conversation with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast

Listen to Philip Pettit on Consequentialism

“As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1957, “Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking.” What leads us here, Macdonald asks, to the banal, boxed trifles of popular journalism? What, exactly, is to be gained by a three-hundred-word once-over of “World News”? Do we seek, as Macdonald concedes to be Time’s singular benefit, “practice in reading”? Perhaps we crave immersion in a warm bath of facts, to “have the little things around, like pets,” to collect “them as boys collect postage stamps.” Macdonald spent years laboring in the fact-friendly Luce empire as a writer at Fortune, no doubt watching his paragraphs hacked apart, the perfect verb sacrificed on the altar of snappiness, the clauses chopped into the staccato anti-rhythms of “readability.” Buy it if you like, was Macdonald’s position. But don’t call it edification. If the pointless accumulation of facts was taken to be some sort of mental tonic, and time spent with The Ed Sullivan Show assumed to be wasted (you could have been reading Time!), Macdonald blamed a particularly American reverence for the scientific method. What happens in a three-minute nightly news segment is in some sense subject to verification and thus accorded a certain respect: true trash over untrue trash.

more from Kerry Howley at Bookforum here.

A ll month she had been practicing, standing for hours in front of the bathroom mirror in her tiny Shanghai flat, delicately gripping a chopstick sideways between her teeth as her supervisor had instructed her, and, by dint of some nimble dental gymnastics with it, learning how to smile in precisely the way that China High-Speed Railways had officially demanded of their new stewardesses. Make an Eight-Teeth Smile: that was the phrase; that was the order. It took work: long hours, aching jaws, but gradually this pretty artifice of sincerity and amity became second nature to her—such that by June 30, the eve of the 90th anniversary of the founding of her country’s Communist Party (the Youth League of which she was a proud member), the 20-year-old Huang Yun had her Eight-Teeth Smile and her welcome face finally down pat and was nervously ready for her big day. She stood before her approving parents in the doorway, primed to go: her back ramrod-straight, just like the soldiers outside the Forbidden City—who, unlike her, never smiled—her makeup flawless, her purple-and-white uniform impeccably ironed, her yellow-and-blue silk scarf neatly tied, her pumps gleaming, her cap, with its tiny red railroad badge, tilted forward just so.

more from Simon Winchester at Vanity Fair here.

Moving away became less possible in the post-war Communist era. Hungary changed its name to the People’s Republic of Hungary in 1949. “The only kind of photography approved by the state was Socialist Realism,” the text tells us, and we again are looking at grand vistas of workers in factories and farmers in the fields, photographs that are more symbolic than lyrical, more state-sanctioned that individual. In the mid-1950s, the republication of Kata Kálmán’s Tiborc (1937), which documented the poverty of the countryside in the 1930s, encouraged new social documentary work in the period, most notably the series by Peter Korniss on Romanian peasants in the 1960s. But as the years move on, the galleries get smaller and the subject matter, aside from Fejes’ “Wedding,” loses its imaginative force. In the end, I doubted the whole concept of Hungarian photography despite the show’s premise. But then this is the point. “Eyewitness” is as much about Hungary as is about European history, and the long struggle between World War I and the formation of the European Union. The exhibition is also an archive of war and ritual, portraits and advertisements, all held together in a kind of black-and-white, dreamlike state that pushes the past farther away. As I left the show, I was reminded of the protagonist in Italo Calvino’s short story “Adventures of a Photographer,” who concludes, “perhaps true, total photography . . . is a pile of fragments of private images, against the creased background of massacres and coronations.”

more from James Polchin at The Smart Set here.

From The New York Times:

When Hollywood turns to medicine, accuracy generally heads for the hills. But the creators of the new action thriller “Contagion” went to unprecedented lengths to fact-check their story of a destructive viral pandemic, retaining a panel of nationally renowned virologists and epidemiologists as consultants. The intent was to infuse the usual hyperbole with an extra frisson: This is the way it could really happen. Be very afraid.

You have to applaud the effort, for the movie does indeed offer a procession of dead-on accurate scenes that not only could happen but, in many cases, have already happened. Still, the whole thing is an improbable caricature, with 100 action-packed Hollywood minutes veering far from reality. You can still be very afraid if you want, if a contagious apocalypse happens to be your thing. But it’s not going to happen this way. “Contagion” begins modestly and realistically enough, with a cough. Gwyneth Paltrow, a midlevel executive for an international corporation, gets sick on her way home from a business trip. She coughs from Hong Kong through a layover in Chicago and on to Minneapolis, producing clouds of a deadly Asian virus and leaving infectious droplets on everything she touches. She is the pandemic’s index case, and her napkins, used tissues, drinking glasses and three-ring binder are all vectors of disease.

More here.

Waste

Who beside my mother knew
a cabbage stalk stripped of its leafage
contains more goodness than mere garbage?
Her quick sure knife would pare away
the fibrous husk, rough with leaf-stumps,
slice off the watery rootward end,
and bring to light a white, damp cone –
the cabbage-heart.
Raw, this secret tidbit dipped in salt
would crunch up sweetly pungent,
more tenderly succulent than turnip.
She always gave the cabbage-heart to us,
splitting it lengthwise to fairshare
its flavours if more than one of us were near.
To my sisters and me this chewy nugget
was nothing much – by-product of cooking
routinely salvaged and eaten
not to waste.

Almost discarded memory – I strip it and retrieve
so late a faintly bitter spike of realisation:
how she would have relished the cabbage-hearts
she always gave to us.

by Lionel Abrahams
PIW, © 2004

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants.

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll!

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Patricia Churchland, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Why should we care about Kant?
2. Brains: Has Molyneux's Question Been Answered?
3. Evolving Thoughts: More on phenomena
4. PEA Soup: Scanlon on Blame, Part 3: Criminal Blame and Meaning
5. PEA Soup: Williams, Thick Concepts, and Reasons
6. Philotropes: Singer's problem for heroes
7. Sprachlogik: Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modality
8. The Kindly Ones: Demarcation's revisited demise
9. Tomkow: Self Defense

We'll announce the three winners on or around September 19, 2011.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

Hello,

The voting round of our philosophy prize (details here) is over. A total of 444 votes were cast for the 37 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Common Sense Atheism: The Goal of Philosophy Should Be to Kill Itself
2. Philosophy Bro: David K. Lewis' “On The Plurality of Worlds”: A Summary
3. The Kindly Ones: Demarcation's revisited demise
4. Philotropes: Singer's problem for heroes
5. Rust Belt Philosophy: Spoken like a man who's never been poor
6. Sprachlogik: Sketch of a Way of Thinking about Modality
7. 3 Quarks Daily: What do we deserve?
8. 3 Quarks Daily: Subjective Consciousness: A Unique Perspective
9. The Constructive Curmudgeon: The Empathy Machine: An Unfinished Essay
10. The Philosophy of Poetry: The Glimpse of Recognition
11. The Philosopher's Beard: Morality vs Ethics: The Trolley Problem
12. Tomkow: Self Defense
13. Fledgling Philosophy: Potential and Possession: a Common Conflation
14. Old Translations: Epistemic Trust and Understanding in a Model of Scientific Knowledge
15. Sola Ratione: William L. Craig's knockdown argument
16. Yeah, OK, But Still: Art, Ethics and Christmas
17. PEA Soup: Williams, Thick Concepts, and Reasons
18. The Consternation of Philosophy: Disgust, Magical Thinking, and Morality
19. Specter of Reason: Merry Christmas, or, Ryle's Idiotic Idea
20. Evolving Thoughts: More on phenomena

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Patricia Churchland for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here in the next days.

Good luck!

Abbas