Peaks

From The New York Times:

ArunLate in this quietly mesmerizing novel, set in a Himalayan hill town in the north of India, Anuradha Roy describes the crystalline beauty of the peaks in winter, viewed long after the haze of the summer months and the fog of the monsoon, held in secret for those who choose to brave the cold: “After the last of the daylight is gone, at dusk, the peaks still glimmer in the slow-growing darkness as if jagged pieces of the moon had dropped from sky to earth.” In the mountains, one of Roy’s characters observes, “love must be tested by adversity.” It’s the inherent conflict in human attraction — the inescapable fact that all people remain at heart unknown, even to those closest to them — that forms the spine of the novel. In marrying a Christian, the narrator, Maya, has become estranged from her wealthy family in Hyderabad. But after six happy years together, her husband has died in a mountaineering accident. Rather than return to her parents, she seeks refuge in Ranikhet, a town that looks toward the mountains that so entranced her husband. Overcome with grief, she stows away his backpack, recovered from the scene of the accident, and refuses to inspect its contents. She can’t bear to know the details surrounding his death.

In Ranikhet, Maya settles into a routine: teaching at a Christian school; spending time with her landlord, Diwan Sahib; and observing the sometimes comic rhythms of the village and its army garrison. Roy manages to capture both the absurd and the sinister in even minor characters, like a corrupt local official who embarks on a beautification plan that includes posting exhortatory signs around town. (One, meant to welcome trekkers, is vandalized to read “Streaking route.”) His crusade, inspired by the Sing­aporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, who embraced caning as a punishment, also includes the persecution of a simple-­minded but harmless herder. Of course, a sedate world exists only to be shaken, and soon enough the town is disturbed from all sides.

More here.

A Dirty Twist on Beating the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Mg21428663.900-1_300Michael Marshall in New Scientist:

In the prisoner's dilemma, if both players keep quiet, each gets a brief sentence. But if one betrays the other, the snitch gets off scot-free while their partner suffers a long sentence. If both players betray each other, each gets a medium sentence. As a united pair, players do better if they both keep shtum. But crucially, if criminal A thinks B won't blab, it is in A's best interest to snitch, as he will then walk free – at B's expense.

The dilemma has obsessed economists for over 50 years because it helps to explain why individuals sometimes don't cooperate even when it is in their combined best interests to do so. Even climate change negotiations can be thought of as a prisoner's dilemma: no country wants to pay the cost of cutting emissions (keep shtum) if everyone else is going to keep on emitting (snitch).

The game becomes interesting when the same two partners play it over and over again. The way to minimise jail time under these conditions is usually to “play nice”: don't snitch, on the assumption that your partner won't either, and if they betray you then snitch on them in the next round, as a warning. So essentially, the best strategy is to collaborate.

Now, William Press at the University of Texas at Austin says he has uncovered a strategy to win that is not collaborative. And players who adopt his strategy end up spending much less time in prison than their opponents – in collaborative games, both players end up spending roughly equal time in prison.

Why Are We Abandoning the Afghans?

AP120323155180a_jpg_470x420_q85Ahmed Rashid in the NYRB blog:

What will Afghanistan look like in 2014, after a dozen years of occupation, more than 2,800 NATO soldiers killed, and an expenditure of $1 trillion? If the participants in this week’s NATO summit in Chicago are to be believed, what they will leave behind is little more than a series of fortresses in enemy territory: Kabul and the other major cities will be protected by Afghan forces, while the countryside falls back into the hands of the Taliban. NATO leaders all but acknowledged that much of Kandahar and Helmand provinces—where 30,000 US marines had launched “the surge” two years ago to root out the Taliban—would quickly revert back to Taliban control once the Americans left.

President Barack Obama has said that the promise to end combat operations by next summer and withdraw all Western troops by 2014 is “irreversible.” In other words, whatever happens on the ground when authority is handed over to the fledgling, largely illiterate, and drug infested Afghan army will not stop US and NATO forces from going home. The 350,000-strong Afghan army and police will be downsized by 100,000 men—not because they are not needed on the battlefield, but because the West will not pay for their upkeep. “Are there risks involved in it? Absolutely,” Obama conceded while winding up the summit.

The US and NATO long ago abandoned any pretense that that they are trying to build a modern, democratic state in Afghanistan. But the lackluster meeting in Chicago showed just how far support for the Afghan mission has eroded in recent months. Now, even limited aims—like working infrastructure, a functioning civil service and judiciary, and basic economic stability—will be difficult to realize. Clearly there is a rush for the exits by Western leaders, but there is no Plan B to address worsening battlefield conditions and political crises if they occur.

Diamond jubilee: writers reflect on growing up Elizabethan

From The Guardian:

Hilary-Mantel-001Hilary Mantel

I count myself less a child of the Elizabethan age than a child of the 1944 Education Act, which gave a free grammar school education to those selected at 11. It was bad in that it wrote off most children as second-class. But it was a golden chance for a few, and it is what has made my life different from the lives of my eloquent foremothers. They were storytellers but I could become a writer. At the age I was studying Hard Times and Great Expectations they were minding looms; “mill girls,” they were called, even when they had left girlhood behind. My cousin, 10 years my senior, was the first in our family to have a secondary education. But at 16 she needed to get out and earn, so she became a secretary. In 1970, my way was clear to university and whatever lay beyond. I try not to idealise those days. I don't forget the intense pressure and anxiety, the furiously competitive nature of my schooling, the need not to let my family down; and also the difficulty of moving between classes. I find it hard to decide whether Britain is less divided now. It's still true that you are judged as soon as you open your mouth. If you are asked: “Where do you come from?” it's because you're not white or have a regional accent. Those whose accent is heard as neutral are seen to come from a social class, not a place. Geography does not define or limit them. If no one enquires after your origins, it means you hold, unquestioned, the centre ground in life.

When I left university in 1973 I was already married; that was early, but not unthinkably early for those days. I graduated into the Womb Wars. “First comes love, then comes marriage / Then comes the baby in the baby carriage.” In the 1970s, when a young woman was interviewed for a job, she was asked when she hoped to wed. “And when do you plan to start your family?” If you admitted you had such plans, you wouldn't get the job. If you disclaimed them, up would go the eyebrow. “What! A pretty girl like you! Of course you'll want to get married!” It is hard now to convey how demeaning this exchange was to all concerned: the more demeaning, because both parties saw it as perfectly normal. It drove many of us into the women's trades, the “caring professions,” ill-paid and low-status. It used to be routine to recommend that a clever girl became a teacher, “because it's something to fall back on”. I think the assumption was that if you were bright, then in the course of time your husband would probably leave you. I have great admiration for those who can sustain a teaching career, but there was something profoundly depressing about the idea that women were a sort of recycling facility; girls grew up and taught girls who taught girls, and so on to the crack of doom.

More here.

Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World

From The New York Times:

VenterIn the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs — bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house. Each of the bugs will have a mission. Some will be designed to devour things, like pollution. Others will generate food and fuel. There will be bugs to fight global warming, bugs to clean up toxic waste, bugs to manufacture medicine and diagnose disease, and they will all be driven to complete these tasks by the very fibers of their synthetic DNA. Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war. When Venter was growing up in San Francisco, he would ride his bicycle to the airport and race passenger jets down the runway. As a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he spent leisurely afternoons tootling up the coast in a dinghy, under a hail of enemy fire.

What’s strange about Venter is that this works — that the clarity he finds when he is hurtling through the sea and the sky, the dreams he summons, the fantasies he concocts in his most unhinged moments of excess actually have a way of coming true.

More here.

Saturday Poem

New Mexican Mountain

I watch the Indians dancing to help the young corn at Taos
pueblo. The old men squat in a ring
And make the song, the young women with fat bare arms, and a
few shame-faced young men, shuffle the dance.

The lean-muscled young men are naked to the narrow loins,
their breasts and backs daubed with white clay,
Two eagle-feathers plume the black heads. They dance with
reluctance, they are growing civilized; the old men persuade them.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed;
the beating heart, the simplest of rhythms,
It thinks the world has not changed at all; it is only a dreamer,
a brainless heart, the drum has no eyes.

These tourists have eyes, the hundred watching the dance, white
Americans, hungrily too, with reverence, not laughter;
Pilgrims from civilization, anxiously seeking beauty, religion,
poetry; pilgrims from the vacuum.

People from cities, anxious to be human again. Poor show how
they suck you empty! The Indians are emptied,
And certainly there was never religion enough, nor beauty nor
poetry here … to fill Americans.

Only the drum is confident, it thinks the world has not changed.
Apparently only myself and the strong
Tribal drum, and the rockhead of Taos mountain, remember
that civilization is a transient sickness.

by Robinson Jeffers
from The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry
Park Lane Press, 1996

very much not a toady

Burrow_06_12

In 1591 Spenser was granted a pension of £50 a year by Queen Elizabeth. This was around three times the annual income of many schoolmasters. After his death in 1599 he was regularly described as England’s ‘arch-poet’ or ‘the prince of poets’. His body was interred next to Chaucer’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. The Faerie Queene had a formative influence on Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats, and was read throughout the eighteenth century, when it played a central part in the Gothic revival. Nonetheless Spenser is now high on the list of great poets that nobody reads. Just about the only thing that Karl Marx had in common with Philip Larkin was a loathing for Spenser. Marx described him as ‘Elizabeth’s arse-kissing poet’. Larkin as an undergraduate wrote: ‘Now I know that the Faerie Queene is the dullest thing out. Blast it.’ The history of Spenser scholarship suggests that Larkin and Marx are not alone. Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson are treated to biographies every few years – or every few minutes, it seems, in the case of Shakespeare – but the last major biography of Spenser appeared in 1945. Earlier biographies of the poet did him no favours: they suggested that he was a servile panegyrist of Elizabeth, while also accepting the myth that sprang up shortly after Spenser’s death, which presented him as unfairly neglected by his contemporaries and by the Crown. Was Spenser really that most unappealing of creatures, a neglected toady?

more from Colin Burrow at Literary Review here.

Ahmed Rashid’s Af-Pak

Vijay Prasad in Himal:

Prashad_AfPak_coverIt is always a delight to read Ahmed Rashid, as his highly informative material comes packaged in crisp prose (perhaps under the lasting influence of Derek Davies, the flamboyant editor of the Far East Economic Review and a very capable stylist). What is less pleasurable is his claustrophobic political vision, which gets more and more airless with each of his books. I remember reading with great pleasure Rashid’s The Resurgence of Central Asia (1994), written when Rashid was in full flower at, among others, the Far East Economic Review, and a decade after he had returned from the hills of Balochistan, where he had gone with his comrades from the London Group, including Najam Sethi, to join the armed struggle. Rashid’s superb reporting from Afghanistan informed his book, Taliban (2000), which became a primer on that movement after 9/11. Its partner volume, Jihad, appeared in 2002, and took the story of political Islam further north into Central Asia. Rashid’s next major book, Descent into Chaos (2008), took his work in a different direction. It was a book of great melancholia, worrying that both Pakistan and Afghanistan were on the precipice of disaster. In that book, Rashid laid the onus firmly on the Pakistani elite and on his friend, Afghan president Hamid Karzai. The US received a free pass, coming off as an honest actor trying its best to defeat the remnants of the Taliban.

There is a reason why Rashid frequently tells the reader of the recently released Pakistan on the Brink to go back and read Descent into Chaos. The former book lays out the argument that is simply brought up to date here. It was inDescent into Chaos that Rashid made his point that the Pakistani military had pulled the wool over American eyes, leading the US to believe that it was the only force that stood between the current ‘peace’ and a future Taliban-ruled Af-Pak. Now, in Pakistan on the Brink, Rashid suggests that the US has pulled the wool away, seen things clearly, and decided to act in northern Pakistan (largely through the drone program) and elsewhere without coordinating with the Pakistani military.

More here.

A Walk Through Manchester

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We are in the last days of the city guide. At least in the way we’ve come to know it: landmarks, street names, architecture. Some theologians still talk about the soul, but define it not as entity or essence, rather the sum of all our networks, all our interactions. I see talk of cities going the same way. Future city guides will be as much about virtual maps and apps as iconic buildings. Manchester has always been a futuristic city. It defined – in its massive mills and opulent office buildings – what an industrial city should look like. In recent years it has blazed a trail in urban regeneration. As Owen Hatherley puts it: Manchester has always been a futuristic city. It defined – in its massive mills and opulent office buildings – what an industrial city should look like. ‘What other cities have dabbled in with piecemeal ineptitude, Manchester has implemented with total efficiency’. In the next decade, I expect this city to show us what a virtual metropolis feels like. Already in Manchester, you can sign up for ‘data walks’ at weekends, attempting to discover (through smartphones and other portable devices) the unseen digital structures and networks between, below, beyond and beside the streets and buildings. But Niklaus Pevsner’s classic approach (county by county, building by building) probably has five years, ten if we’re lucky, and bricks-and-mortar Manchester is well worth a look.

more from Michael Symmons Roberts at Granta here.

heavy breeding

Aurochs_NEW_final

In 1920, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively, began a two-decade breeding experiment. Working with domestic cattle sought out for their “primitive” characteristics, they attempted to recreate “in appearance and behavior” the living likeness of the animals’ extinct wild ancestor: the aurochs. “Once found everywhere in Germany,” according to Lutz Heck, by the end of the Middle Ages the aurochs had largely succumbed to climate change, overhunting, and competition from domestic breeds.1 The last aurochs herds died out in the Polish-Lithuanian Union, where a documented population persisted under royal protection in Mazovia until the middle of the seventeenth century. Historical descriptions of these animals identified the aurochs as similar to domestic oxen, but entirely black, with a whitish stripe running down the back.2 More distant accounts emphasized their ferocity and imposing size. Julius Caesar described the aurochs of Germania as an elephantine creature prone to unprovoked attack.

more from Michael Wang at Cabinet here.

The Economic Costs of Fear

0e0b7ab6124863d4ad23304470a2e814.portraitBrad DeLong in Project Syndicate:

The S&P stock index now yields a 7% real (inflation-adjusted) return. By contrast, the annual real interest rate on the five-year United States Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS) is -1.02%. Yes, there is a “minus” sign in front of that: if you buy the five-year TIPS, each year over the next five years the US Treasury will pay you in interest the past year’s consumer inflation rate minus 1.02%. Even the annual real interest rate on the 30-year TIPS is only 0.63% – and you run a large risk that its value will decline at some point over the next generation, implying a big loss if you need to sell it before maturity.

So, imagine that you invest $10,000 in the S&P index. This year, your share of the profits made by those companies will be $700. Now, imagine that, of that total, the companies pay out $250 in dividends (which you reinvest to buy more stock) and retain $450 in earnings to reinvest in their businesses. If the companies’ managers do their job, that reinvestment will boost the value of your shares to $10,450. Add to that the $250 of newly-bought shares, and next year the portfolio will be worth $10,700 – more if stock-market valuations rise, and less if they fall.

CommentsIn fact, over any past period long enough for waves of optimism and pessimism to cancel each other out, the average earnings yield on the S&P index has been a good guide to the return on the portfolio. So, if you invest $10,000 in the S&P for the next five years, you can reasonably expect (with enormous upside and downside risks) to make about 7% per year, leaving you with a compounded profit in inflation-adjusted dollars of $4,191. If you invest $10,000 in the five-year TIPS, you can confidently expect a five-year loss of $510.

CommentsThat is an extraordinary gap in the returns that you can reasonably expect. It naturally raises the question: why aren’t people moving their money from TIPS (and US Treasury bonds and other safe assets) to stocks (and other relatively risky assets)?

Turning Scientific Perplexity into Ordinary Statistical Uncertainty

Cosma Shalizi in American Scientist:

9781107644458iD. R. Cox published his first major book, Planning of Experiments, in 1958; he has been making major contributions to the theory and practice of statistics for as long as most current statisticians have been alive. He is now in a reflective phase of his career, and this book, coauthored with the distinguished biostatistician Christl A. Donnelly, is a valuable distillation of his experience of applied work. It stands as a summary of an entire tradition of using statistics to address scientific problems.

Statistics is a branch of applied mathematics that studies how to draw reliable inferences from partial or noisy data. The field as we know it arose from several strands of scholarship. The word “statistics,” coined in the 1770s, originally referred to the study of the human populations of states and the resources those populations offered: how many men, in what physical condition, with what life expectancies, what wealth and so on. Practitioners soon learned that there was always variation within populations, that there were stable patterns to this variation and that there were relations between these variables. (For instance, richer men tended to be taller and live longer.) Another component strand was formed when scientists began to systematically analyze or “reduce” scientific data from multiple observers or observations (especially astronomical data). It became obvious from this research that there was always variation from one observation to the next, even in controlled experiments, but again, there were patterns to the variation. In both cases, probability theory provided very useful models of the variation. Statistics was born from the weaving together of these three strands: population variability, experimental noise and probability models. The field’s mathematical problems are about how, within a probability model, one might soundly infer something about a given process from the data the model generates, and at the same time quantify how uncertain that inference is.

Applied statistics, in the sense that Cox and Donnelly profess, is about turning vexed scientific (or engineering) questions into statistical problems, and then turning those problems’ solutions into answers to the original questions. The sometimes conflicting aims are to make sure that the statistical problem is well posed enough that it can be solved, and that its solution still helps resolve the original, substantive dilemma—which is, after all, the point.

Rather than spoiling any of Cox and Donnelly’s examples, I will sketch one that recently came up in my department.

More here.

Shadows Meet The Clouds, Gray On Gray, Like Dusty Charcoal On An Ashen Brow, Nation’s Poets Report

From The Onion:

ScreenHunter_19 Jun. 01 16.23According to a growing consensus of U.S. poets, shadows—inky sharp as a raven's beak—meet the sullen bloat of clouds, their hues a pallid loam, each a dancer, each alone, like dusty charcoal on an ashen brow.

Citing both the ageless gloom of morning and a weary sun, its astral luminescence wrapped in arid gauze, the nation's poets told reporters this week that doubt lingers in the frail minutes of a young dawn, adding that said doubt was a heathen doubt—a father's doubt—untouched by faith.

Multiple verse-writing sources also confirmed vapors, milky white vapors of shallow breath from a child's lips.

“I take the cloth of fog, I drape it over—gently, like a midwife—the memory of one broken holy Friday,” poet K. Martin Echols said during a press conference Tuesday. “Hallowed be regret, and hallowed be my hands across the table where we ate, where we wept, where we fought the laws of bliss like lovers.”

“For what is the sound of hope? For what is the mind's moment of fulfillment?” added poet Willow Marks. “For what is—?”

Coming just weeks after U.S. poets announced that poplar leaves, heavy with the dread of autumn's looming song, danced in trembling half-step—one two one two—an overwhelming majority of verse writers affirmed to reporters Tuesday that Michael /Michael / there is a quickness in the dreaming of the bird, Michael / the bird that plucked your silver ring from the moss and kept it bright through passing storms.

More here.

Questioning Willusionism

EddynahmiasEddy Nahmias interviewed by Richard Marshall, in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: You’re thinking about free will and you argue that we need to be careful about what we think free will is and what it entails. To some, determinism is the opposite of free will, and it seems to be a bad thing. Determinism seems to imply the end of responsibility and stops us from being able to make our own choices. But you think that folk don’t always think determinism is a bad thing. You say they make a distinction between determinism and reductionism, epiphenomenalism and/or fatalism, which people think is threatening, and determinism that doesn’t imply these things. So can you say what your evidence is for saying that people don’t always think determinism is a bad thing?

EN: As you say, determinism is often presented as the opposite of free will (if that’s what ‘determinism’ meant, it’d be silly to debate whether it is compatible with free will). But people understand ‘determinism’ in many ways, and it’s not always clear how it is meant to threaten free will. In my dissertation I used a metaphor of a many-headed monster – if we can distinguish, and take on, the various heads one by one, we can see more clearly what the threats are supposed to be and how they might each be confronted (hopefully, it is not a hydra that will grow back two heads for each we cut off). We also learn more about free will and responsibility by seeing more clearly what exactly it contrasts with- what we are free from (hint: it does not really make sense to say we are free from determinism).

Determinism is sometimes presented to mean that the past and laws control us or that our actions are pre-determined, as if someone planned them. But it should not be anthropomorphized in these ways. The Big Bang did not plan our lives, and it didn’t really cause what we do in any useful sense of ‘cause’. Determinism should also not be confused with fatalism, the idea that certain things (like your actions, or Oedipus’ sleeping with his mom) will happen no matter what – that is, no matter what you want or try to do (or no matter what Oedipus tries to do to avoid his fate). Quite the opposite – determinism suggests that what happens in the future depends on what happens in the past and what we do in the present. Finally, determinism should not be confused with what I call bypassing – the idea that our conscious mental activity is not causally relevant to our decisions and actions. Determinism does not mean that our minds don’t matter.

Science is Not About Certainty: A Philosophy of Physics

Bk_503_rovelli630A conversation with Carlo Rovelli in Edge:

We teach our students: we say that we have some theories about science. Science is about hypothetico-deductive methods, we have observations, we have data, data require to be organized in theories. So then we have theories. These theories are suggested or produced from the data somehow, then checked in terms of the data. Then time passes, we have more data, theories evolve, we throw away a theory, and we find another theory which is better, a better understanding of the data, and so on and so forth.

This is a standard idea of how science works, which implies that science is about empirical content, the true interesting relevant content of science is its empirical content. Since theories change, the empirical content is the solid part of what science is. Now, there's something disturbing, for me as a theoretical scientist, in all this. I feel that something is missing. Something of the story is missing. I've been asking to myself what is this thing missing? I'm not sure I have the answer, but I want to present some ideas on something else which science is. This is particularly relevant today in science, and particularly in physics, because if I'm allowed to be polemical, in my field, in fundamental theoretical physics, it is 30 years that we fail. There hasn't been a major success in theoretical physics in the last few decades, after the standard model, somehow. Of course there are ideas. These ideas might turn out to be right. Loop quantum gravity might turn out to be right, or not. String theory might turn out to be right, or not. But we don't know, and for the moment, nature has not said yes in any sense.

I suspect that this might be in part because of the wrong ideas we have about science, and because methodologically we are doing something wrong, at least in theoretical physics, and perhaps also in other sciences.

Andromeda on Collision Course with the Milky Way

Milkywaycollision-630It's headed straight for us: Ron Cowen in Nature:

It’s a definite hit. The Andromeda galaxy will collide with the Milky Way about 4 billion years from now, astronomers announced today. Although the Sun and other stars will remain intact, the titanic tumult is likely to shove the Solar System to the outskirts of the merged galaxies.

Researchers came to that conclusion after using the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2010 to painstakingly track the motion of Andromeda as it inched along the sky. Andromeda, roughly 770,000 parsecs (2.5 million light years) away, is the nearest large spiral galaxy to the Milky Way.

Roeland van der Marel and Sangmo Tony Sohn, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, announced the findings today at a NASA press briefing in Washington DC. The results will be reported in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal1–3.

“We’ve been able to extract dynamical information about Andromeda that has been hidden from astronomers for a century,” says van der Marel.

For decades, scientists have known that Andromeda is falling towards our home Galaxy at a rate of 110 kilometres per second and that the two might eventually collide as a result of their mutual gravity. But because astronomers could easily measure Andromeda’s velocity only along the line of sight to Earth, no one could be sure whether the future encounter would constitute a major merger, a near-miss or a glancing blow.