The Brain-Chilling, Shrimp-Caressing, Lamppost-Sized, NSFW Organ Hiding In A Whale’s Mouth

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

CCM-diagramThis is a story about the discovery of an organ that measures twelve feet long and four inches wide. You might well assume that this is old news. After all, how could something the size of a lamppost go unnoticed by anatomists? And yet, in fact, it’s only just come to light.

The discovery emerged out of a blood-drenched confusion. Alexander Werth, an anatomist, was standing on an ice sheet miles off the coast of Alaska’s North Slope. He was watching Inupiat whale hunters dismember bowhead whales they had caught in the Bering Sea. This government-sanctioned hunt is one of the best opportunities for whale anatomists to get hold of fresh tissue from the animals.

To take apart the head of a whale, the hunters would slice off the lower jaws and the tongue, which could be as big as a minivan. They would then climb onto the roof of the whale’s mouth and cut away the baleen–the hair-like growths that the whale used in life to filter small animals from the water. On the roof of the mouths of bowhead whales, Werth and his colleagues noticed something strange: a peculiar rod-like organ stretching down the midline of the palate.

It had never been described in the bowhead before. What made the organ particularly peculiar was that, as the Inupiat cut the whales apart, it poured forth huge amounts of blood. Why, the scientists wondered, should a bowhead whale have an organ in the roof of their mouth? And why should it be so bloody?

More here.

A Review of Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave

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Laura Miller in Salon:

Deraniyagala had been vacationing with her family in a seaside hotel near a national park when, through a terrace window, she saw the sea rising rapidly past its familiar bounds. With her husband, Steve, she grabbed Vikram, 8, and Malli, 5, and rushed out the door and up the drive. They jumped in a passing jeep, but soon the wave overwhelmed even that. The last time Deraniyagala saw her husband’s face, he was looking in horror at something over her shoulder. Then the jeep overturned, and for Deraniyagala the next few hours were chaos, violence and filthy water, the tsunami tossing her miles inland and then sucking her out again. Just before she would have been swept out to sea, she grabbed an overhanging branch and felt the ground materialize under her feet. She never saw her family again.

“Wave” is Deraniyagala’s account of this nightmare, but the tsunami itself only takes up a handful of this spare, radiant book’s pages. The rest is what came after, months in that darkened room contemplating suicide, then a period of getting drunk every day and conducting a demented campaign of harassment against the Dutch family to whom her brother rented her parents’ house. Deraniyagala, an economist at the University of London and Columbia University, had been living with Steve and the boys in London, but she wasn’t able to set foot in their English house for two years.

The extremity of Deraniyagala’s story seizes the attention, but it’s the beauty of how she expresses it that makes it indelible. Who knew that the ranks of academic economics harbored a writer of such extraordinary gifts? Deraniyagala grasps that seemingly unteachable truth: just how much you can (and should) leave out when you have given your reader the one detail that will make your world real to her. “Wave” is a small, slender book, but it is enormous on the inside.

The narrative arc of “Wave” follows the evolution of Deraniyagala’s grief. At first, she alternates between rage and numbness. In the hospital where victims gathered after the wave receded, she turns away from a weeping boy, silently fuming, “You stayed alive in that water because you are so fucking fat. Vik and Malli didn’t have a chance. Just shut up.” At her aunt’s house, she recalls “pieces of me hovered in a murky netherworld, timeless day after timeless day.”

Once she crawled out of bed, Deraniyagala initially recoiled from anything likely to remind her of the past: “I panicked if I saw a flower. Malli would have stuck it in my hair. I couldn’t tolerate a blade of grass. That’s where Vik would have stamped.” On an errand with a friend, she looks at the hundred-rupee note in his hand and thinks, “The last time I saw one of those, I had a world.”

Was Wittgenstein Right?

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Paul Horwich over at the NYT's The Stone:

The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy — what is special about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed, and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely insightful answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues within the subject — concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and religion among them — a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others.

Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment — certainly not many professional philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely, his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.

Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.

Winning at Argument

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Lo Cole ArgumentWe’re currently finishing work on the manuscript for our forthcoming book, Why We Argue (And How We Should), so we’ve been thinking a lot recently about argumentation. We’ve been especially concerned with how arguments can go wrong. When evaluating an argument, one of the central questions to ask is whether the stated premises support the proposed conclusion. When the premises fail to provide the right kind of support for the conclusion, we often call the argument (and its form) fallacious. Fallacies are so pervasive precisely because they are cases in which it looks as if the stated premises provide propose support for a proposed conclusion, but in fact they don’t. Take, for example, a simple textbook fallacy, that of asserting the consequent:

If Bill’s a bachelor, Bill is male.

Bill is male, therefore Bill is a bachelor.

The trouble with an argument of this form is that it presents an invalid inference — the premises, if true, don’t guarantee the truth of the conclusion. So even were the premises and the conclusion true, the proposed argument fails. Note that the failure is a matter of the proposed argument’s form rather than its content. The objective of fallacy detection in the formal mode is to reveal cases in which the truth of the stated premises fail to provide the proper kind of support for the conclusion.

In the formal mode, we also can identify different degrees in which premises provide support for a conclusion. The highest degree of support that premises can provide for a conclusion is the guarantee of its truth, given the truth of the premises. Arguments that manifest that feature are called deductively valid. But note that deductive validity does not depend on the stated premises actually being true. That is, with a valid argument, the conclusion is guaranteed to be true, if the premises are true. Accordingly, an argument can be deductively valid even if every one of its stated premises is false.

Thus we require an additional metric of formal success. It would seem that an argument that is both deductively valid and has premises that in fact are all true would be bombproof. Such arguments are called deductively sound. Notice that deductive soundness encompasses deductive validity in that every sound argument is valid. A deductively sound argument is a deductively valid argument that has true premises. Since a deductively valid argument is one that guarantees the truth of its conclusion provided that its premises are in fact true, it should be no surprise that deductive soundness is often considered the gold standard for argumentative success. Every deductively sound argument actually establishes the truth of its conclusion. Who could ask for more than that?

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Curating Creativity

by Jalees Rehman

For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Library of Babel

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The British-Australian art curator Nick Waterlow was tragically murdered on November 9, 2009 in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. His untimely death shocked the Australian art community, not only because of the gruesome nature of his death – Waterlow was stabbed alongside his daughter by his mentally ill son – but also because his death represented a major blow to the burgeoning Australian art community. He was a highly regarded art curator, who had served as a director of the Sydney Biennale and international art exhibitions and was also an art ambassador who brought together artists and audiences from all over the world.

After his untimely death, his partner Juliet Darling discovered some notes that Waterlow had jotted down shortly before his untimely death to characterize what defines and motivates a good art curator and he gave them the eerily prescient title “A Curator’s Last Will and Testament”:

1. Passion

2. An eye of discernment

3. An empty vessel

4. An ability to be uncertain

5. Belief in the necessity of art and artists

6. A medium— bringing a passionate and informed understanding of works of art to an audience in ways that will stimulate, inspire, question

7. Making possible the altering of perception.

Waterlow’s notes help dismantle the cliché of stuffy old curators walking around in museums who ensure that their collections remain unblemished and instead portray the curator as a passionate person who is motivated by a desire to inspire artists and audiences alike.

The Evolving Roles of Curators

The traditional role of the curator was closely related to the Latin origins of the word, “curare” refers to “to take care of”, “to nurse” or “to look after”. Curators of museums or art collections were primarily in charge of preserving, overseeing, archiving and cataloging the artifacts that were placed under their guardianship. As outlined in Thinking Contemporary Curating by Terry Smith, the latter half of 20th century witnessed the emergence of new roles for art curators, both private curators and those formally employed as curators by museum or art collections. Curators not only organized art exhibitions but were given an increasing degree of freedom in terms of choosing the artists and themes of the exhibitions and creating innovative opportunities for artists to interact with their audiences. The art exhibition itself became a form of art, a collage of art assembled by the curators in a unique manner.

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The Girl From Lahore

by Maniza Naqvi

421083_10150568582228551_140969401_nI search for you– you’re lost somewhere, somewhere beyond my realm. I listen to the sound of distant thunder—or is it— I wonder fireworks for a celebration? Or an explosion or gunshots targeted for yet another murder? The drum roll for a roll call—the toll to be tallied up by Dawn: Zaidi, Abbas, Raza, Jaferi, Naqvi, Abidi, Mehdi, Kazmi, Haider, Husain, Hasan, Husnain, Sadquain, Saqlain, Kazmain, Rizvi.

In this city torn by violence, where my neck hurts from stiffening in fear and anxiety when a motorbike with two riders comes abreast to my car—at traffic lights—and as I panic about what’s next, I wonder if I’ll see the bullet coming, in a country where so many are killed every day, where those with names like mine are being singled out to be targeted, shot dead.

In this city—I stand in the cool night—with the sea breeze kissing my face– mussing my hair, I look out at the half lit city across the mangroves and I spread my arms out as wide apart as I can and shout out as if to the entire city and to nobody—“I love you!”

In this city why is it that I am a stranger now, that I never see you, in this town where everyone seems to have my name. The city, which captures my imagination, the place which I think I know intricately, where I pine to be—the place where I want to be the better—good and loveable me—is the place I never wanted to stay in when you had wanted me. But was there ever a question of Shi’a and Sunni between us? Never, right? No matter now, a matter of detail, like a miniscule amount of arsenic in water, so many years ago. But in truth there were so many other excuses. Me. And you.

And all this time, I ran away, expecting that you would stay—be the one I returned to. I was the one who was supposed to return and you were the one who was supposed to have stayed for me. I remained faithful—did you stay with me?

In this city, this time as the mangroves trilled with sound in the early mornings I sat and talked about language and tales with Intezar Hussain, Kishwar Naheed, Iftikhar Arif and I.A Rahman. I chattered away. At the edge of the breakwaters of the Arabian Sea, across mangroves and the busy happy sounds of literature’s festivities, at Beach Luxury Hotel— I sat at a lunch table across from Steve Inskeep, sharing his modestly served helping of makai ki roti and a too spicy saag. Here—there, we were Steve Inskeep and me, well I’ll be damned—away from our circle, Logan, away from the early morning “traffic backed up on the inner loop to the beltway”, here we are, discussing Karachi. Back there, we share a zip code and a circle, and a loop and I am used to listening to his voice on the radio telling me of news of places including this one here, my home in that home—while I foam at the mouth with Extreme Clean, toothbrush in hand at seven a.m every weekday. And here, because I’ve written Mass Transit and that book called On Air, of Naz soliciting stories in a late night talk show, here I was the Karachi Literature Festival to talk about a book of short stories, by Karachites—Karachi-walas, here I was in conversation with Steve Inskeep.

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Monday Poem

Burning Bush

At twenty I danced the tops of walls
Najinsky of the double top plate

bent in-two like an onion shoot
unbending up through an earthen gate

lifting sticks to be put in place
nailing their tails held against my boot

walking the wires of gravity’s net
as a spider commands the filament web

hung in the crotch of the jamb of a door
between one post and its lintel head

From the crow’s nest of my wall-top perch
poised to get the next piece set

in air as clear as a baby’s thoughts
surveying homes unlived-in yet

fresh-footed, balanced, without a clue
assessing my recent work and worth:

shadows of studs plumb and true
lying like bars across up-turned earth

Sweatskin slickkening in the light
breath as sure as the bellows of god

biceps built by the truth of weight,
muscles doing their natural jobs:

arms of sinew, bone and grit
reaching to haul the next board up

to be lifted and laid wall to ridge
and fixed by hammer blows on steel

fueled by blasts of a burning bush
in the orchard of god that has ever spun

like the fire that made big Moses reel
the burning bush we call the sun

.
by Jim Culleny
2/22/13

Walking, Dublin (Sat, 23rd February, 2013)

By Liam Heneghan

Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sanymount Green Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower. Ulysses, James Joyce.

Only thoughts reached by walking have value.Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche

In 1987 I saw him for the first time. I was crossing Central Park in the back seat of a Hyundai being driven by my wife, V. The traffic stalled a moment and I looked across to the oncoming traffic, also stalled, and saw my doppelgänger in the back seat of the opposite car. Our jaws — both of which had a rufous-coloured carpeting of beard — dropped simultaneously, and simultaneously we were whisked away a few moments later by the renewed flow of traffic to live out our lives in opposite directions. Those paths crossed again yesterday, a quarter century later. I saw him strolling down Rathmines Road Lower in Dublin carrying his bags of shopping. We were both alone, both on foot, both now with long white hair, and both gray bearded. We performed a furtive mutual inspection, then, though it was barely perceptible, shuddered, before taking off once again to complete our lives elsewhere. There are directions beyond sensible reckoning in which a person may fly or drive or walk, so it is unlikely, even if we both were to live another hundred years, that we will encounter each other again. PraegerWalk0001_28

I set out recently to walk towards Dublin city center with a destination but no especial route in mind. The point of departure was my childhood home in Templeogue Village — until the 1950s fairly discrete from Dublin city — and the destination was the city center where I was to meet some friends at the Market Bar later in the evening. En route I wanted to inspect the “country home” of the Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865 – 1953) in Rathgar. In fact, I am back in Dublin for a couple of weeks to sift through the Praeger archives at the Royal Irish Academy in Dawson St. In the course of my previous investigations on Praeger — an author of over 800 papers and 20 books on Irish natural history — I had learned that he had maintained a rock garden in his Rathgar home. I wanted to see if this rockery persisted in some form. Three points: Templeogue, Zion Road in Rathgar, and the Market Bar triangulated the route, though the passage was determined by the limits of my endurance (I am, after all, a man of 49 years), and my vague interest in punctuality (though friends in a Dublin pub tend to find things to do whilst waiting on an errant party member). As is the tradition among Irish naturalists, I sustained myself with a bar of chocolate.

An aside and a dedication before we depart: the inspiration of my career as a walker is my maternal grandfather William Nolan (29 Sept 1885 – 16 Dec 1967). Even at 80 he would walk the six or so miles from Xavier Avenue in Dublin’s North Strand, to Templeogue Village to visit his daughter, my mother, and her young family. Perhaps it is merely an extrapolation from a photograph I’ve seen of him striding along O’Connell Street with my mother, but when I think of him, which is still often, he is walking out of the house at 2 Xavier Avenue. Behind him, but looming high above that truncated street, is the train into Connelly Station. In the days when I was brought there (being four or less), passengers would wave to children who played in the streets far below. I don’t know, of course, what his attitude to walking was, but there were certainly easier ways of getting around Dublin in the 1960s if mere commuting was one’s sole priority, than striking out on foot from the city center. I may write some other day of his decline in health but there is a sadness to that tale, that I’d prefer not to have cut into this happier recollection.

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On Being Busy

by Quinn O'Neill

792px-Workers_Welfare_at_a_Royal_Ordnance_Factory-_Life_at_Rof_Bridgend,_January_1942_D6232I’ve been busy lately, much busier than I’d like to be. A natural night owl, I’ve been forcing myself out of bed before the sun comes up and relying on caffeine to achieve normal levels of functioning. There’s seldom more than a cup of coffee standing between me and an embarrassing display of torpor that would see my glassy eyes staring blankly through my computer screen and drool puddling on the desk in front of me. I’ve mostly been occupied by things that don’t even interest me and it’s been over six months since I’ve read a book for pleasure or personal interest.

It’s seems respectable in Western society to be really busy. People who show up to work early, work long hours, come in on the weekends, and take their work home with them are described in flattering terms; they’re dedicated and hard working. The on-the-go, life-in-the-fast-lane way of living has been glamourized and marketed to us like fast food and squeezable tubes of yogurt. It’s not good for us, not as individuals and especially not as a civilization.

“I wish I hadn’t worked so hard” is a common regret of the dying. Palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, says that she heard this from every male patient that she cared for. Women also had this regret, she explains, but were less likely to have been the breadwinners, since her patients were of an older generation. The men regretted missing their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship for life on “the treadmill of a work existence”.

When we devote all of our time to one thing, we necessarily neglect other things and some of them are bound to be important. It may be our health or our family and friends, or we may lose touch with what’s going on in the world around us.

At the risk of looking like a slacker, I recently perused news items on my computer at work. Reading a headline, I announced to a colleague that it been 1000 days that Bradley Manning had been in jail without trial. “Who’s that?” she responded. She hadn’t heard of him or seen the Collateral Murder video. It seems a lot of people haven’t. Manning’s taken a huge risk and already paid a hefty price, because, as he put it, “I want people to see the truth … regardless of who they are … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” With a heavily biased media and a well-distracted public, truth is disappointingly impotent.

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Foucault’s Plague

by Misha Lepetic

“Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist.”
~Guy Debord

What happens when a vision is so compelling that it becomes a nightmare? Is there ever a way out, let alone on the terms that the nightmare itself has set? These are oftentimes the questions that accompany any lengthier reading of Michel Foucault. But, as the saying goes, could reading his charismatic writing nevertheless be “necessary but not sufficient?” So, in all fairness, let’s begin with an icon.

Presidio-modelo2Foucault’s notion of the Panopticon has attained the cultural status of a meme (heaven knows I fell for it a long time ago), but popular understanding has actually eroded the point of Foucault’s characterization of Bentham’s (in)famous prison design. It’s true that the Panopticon is a devilishly clever surveillance machine, but Foucault uses it as part of a much broader programme, that of re-conceptualizing the very nature of power. But as enticing as it is, let us set aside the Panopticon for the moment; there is another example that gives us equally fascinating insights into how Foucauldian power can be spatially conceptualized.

Early on in Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975, Foucault describes the conventional, reductive view of power: it restricts, penalizes, excludes, or exiles us when we transgress. There is only so much power to go around, and what of it there is, is jealously guarded. But Foucault wants us to think of power in completely the opposite way: as a force, or perhaps even more appropriately, as an interest, that seeks to include, observe, and continuously generate knowledge. This knowledge, in turn, creates more power. It is a generative model of power, and to illustrate it, he draws upon the difference between how society has historically dealt with two kinds of threats to public health, namely lepers and plagues.

In the former case, power was exercised in the conventional sense: lepers were excluded from the rest of society, forced to wear bells around their necks to warn of their approach, and driven into quarantined colonies. In order to emphasize the finality of this act, those about to be cast out were “regularly accompanied by a kind of funeral ceremony during which individuals who had been declared leprous were declared dead [and which they themselves had to attend]” (p43-4, 53). This practice, which saw the leper exiled, dispossessed, and literally declared dead, persisted until the early eighteenth century.

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A Terrible Beauty: Mat Collishaw

by Sue Hubbard

He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Extract from ‘Easter’, 1916, W B Yeats

Duty-Free-SpiritsSmallWhen we meet to discuss his work we have to decamp from the pub in Camberwell, which is both Mat Collishaw’s studio and stylish home, to a local café, as his apartment has been let out to a well known London store for a shoot and is full of rampaging children. But before we leave he shows me his new paintings. At first glance they appear to be abstract, constructed on a modernist grid, though the lines, in fact, are folds, creases left in the small square wraps of paper used to sell cocaine. These wraps have been torn from glossy magazines; there’s a woman’s foot in a high-heeled shoe resting on a glass table, and adverts for Fendi and Gucci. The subtext seems to be that these aspirational trappings are the spectral presence of an endless illusion that functions much like an addiction to drugs. You’re always left wanting more. The work is about debasement; the debasement of modernist painting as a form and as a result of the recent financial excesses that have led to the current economic crisis. This tension between the beautiful and the abject, between the promise of a possible paradise and the profane is central to all Mat Collishaw’s work. As the Marquis de Sade once said: “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image”.

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Foreign reporters armed and ready to attack Kenya

Kenyans have in the last few weeks been outraged by the flood of negative coverage the country has received ahead of the elections. Veteran reporter Michael Holman offers this satirical examination of the activities of foreign correspondents in the country.

Michael Holman in Kenya's Nation:

BrownKenya was braced at the crossroads on Saturday amidst growing concern that the demand for clichés is outstripping supply.

Critical elections loom, say senior diplomats, and there is a pressing need not only for clichés, but for colourful phrases, authentic quotes and fresh sources. Without urgent action, warned a senior taxi driver, this strategic east African nation with close ties to the West, risks being driven to the brink of an uncertain future.

Analysts and observers, however, joined diplomats in dismissing fears that coverage of the forthcoming poll will be threatened by a shortage of clichés.

“Lessons have been learnt,” said a UN spokesman, and a strategic stockpile has been built up since the last time Kenyans went to the ballot box. With the help of an emergency airlift, which includes consignments of anecdotes and first person accounts, both chilling and inspiring, reporters will be able to do justice to a crucial test of democracy/a slow motion tragedy/a land gripped by tension.

“We are now prepared for any eventuality,” said the spokesman. “Our monitors have registered an early demand for 'fears rising', 'key ally', 'strategic partner' and 'ethnic violence', and fresh deliveries will arrive within days.”

“Tribal rivalries’, and ‘ethnic violence’ is also proving popular, the UN official added, as are ‘bloodstained machetes’, ‘pangas and rungus’, and ‘mindless violence’ ‘Bitter memories’ is also in great demand.

More here.

The Perils of Perfection

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Evgeny Morozov in the NYT:

“WHEN your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting” is the reassuring slogan greeting visitors at the Web site for LivesOn, a soon-to-launch service that promises to tweet on your behalf even after you die. By analyzing your earlier tweets, the service would learn “about your likes, tastes, syntax” and add a personal touch to all those automatically composed scribblings from the world beyond.

LivesOn may yet prove to be a parody, or it may fizzle for any number of reasons, but as an idea it highlights the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley today: what could be disrupted should be disrupted — even death.

Barriers and constraints — anything that imposes artificial limits on the human condition — are being destroyed with particular gusto. Superhuman, another mysterious start-up that could enliven any comedy show, promises to offer, as its co-founder recently put it, an unspecified service that “helps people be superhuman.” Well, at least they had the decency not to call it The Übermensch.

Recent debates about Twitter revolutions or the Internet’s impact on cognition have mostly glossed over the fact that Silicon Valley’s technophilic gurus and futurists have embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity. If they have their way, no individual foibles would go unpunished — ideally, technology would even make such foibles obsolete.

Even boredom seems to be in its last throes: designers in Japan have found a way to make our train trips perpetually fun-filled. With the help of an iPhone, a projector, a GPS module and Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, their contrivance allows riders to add new objects to what they see “outside,” thus enlivening the bleak landscape in their train windows. This could be a big hit in North Korea — and not just on trains.

The world’s fastest-growing continent: Aspiring Africa

From The Economist:

ScreenHunter_129 Mar. 03 16.02Celebrations are in order on the poorest continent. Never in the half-century since it won independence from the colonial powers has Africa been in such good shape. Its economy is flourishing. Most countries are at peace. Ever fewer children bear arms and record numbers go to school. Mobile phones are as ubiquitous as they are in India and, in the worst-affected countries, HIV infections have fallen by up to three-quarters. Life expectancy rose by a tenth in the past decade and foreign direct investment has tripled. Consumer spending will almost double in the next ten years; the number of countries with average incomes above $1,000 per person a year will grow from less than half of Africa’s 55 states to three-quarters.

Africans deserve the credit. Western aid agencies, Chinese mining companies and UN peacekeepers have done their bit, but the continent’s main saviours are its own people. They are embracing modern technology, voting in ever more elections and pressing their leaders to do better. A sense of hope abounds. Africans rightly take pride in conferences packed with Western bankers keen to invest in their capital markets (see article). Within the next few months MasterCard will have issued South Africans with 10m debit cards. Even the continent’s politicians are doing a bit better, especially in economic management and striking peace deals. Average GDP growth is humming along, at about 6%. Governance is improving: our correspondent visited 23 countries to research this week’s special report and was not once asked for a bribe—inconceivable only ten years ago.

More here.

What lies behind religious homophobia

Mark Dowd in The Guardian:

Former-cardinal-Keith-OBr-008I approached a director at Channel 4 back in 2000 with a proposal for a documentary on homosexuality and the Roman Catholic church. I had a simple pitch. “I want to show why my church is so anti-gay.”

“And why is your church so anti-gay?,” came back the obvious question. “Because it is so gay,” I replied.

A furrowed brow invited further exposition. I then spelt out the logic. We interviewed clerics and ex-seminarians in the UK, US and Rome and uncovered a huge irony: the very institution that teaches that the homosexual orientation is “intrinsically disordered” attracts gay candidates for the priesthood in numbers way in excess of what one would expect, based on numbers in society at large. One seminary rector based on his own experience told me the number was at least 50%.

Gay Catholics like me will appreciate another irony with the news of Cardinal Keith O'Brien's resignation: that the very man whose trenchant rhetoric on the subjects of gay adoption and marriage has been brought down by accusations of improper same-sex behaviour from no less than four men who crossed his path in the 1980s, either as a seminary rector or as archbishop of Edinburgh. His decision not to participate in the papal conclave is not to be taken as an admission of guilt and he contests the accusations made against him. Nevertheless, it does raise some general questions about a possible relationship between the tone of anti-gay rhetoric and the identities of those who engage in such high-octane language on same sex attraction.

More here.

The Mommy Worry Wars

From Slate:

The punishing epicenter of anxiety obsession is women’s fertility and pregnancy. Women who have trouble conceiving often believe that their own distress is making it harder to conceive. And who can blame them, when even fertility centers urge them to create a “stress-free environment.” And of course, with pregnancy, the worry doesn’t end—it’s just beginning. Scattershot reports link anxiety to miscarriage or preterm birth with random speculation, as in: Will Kim Kardashian’s divorce stress hasten the birth of her baby? Will emotional symptoms during pregnancy cause developmental delays? A finding here, an anecdote there—women can easily get the wrong idea.

And the reigning impression is wrong: The weight of evidence suggests that moderate levels of stress and anxiety do none of the things we fear. They seem not to affect whether women are able to conceive, whether they carry the fetus to term, or whether their kids reach normal developmental milestones. (If anything, some maternal stress during pregnancy seems to make kids mature a little faster.) This doesn’t mean, of course, that women with anxiety shouldn’t seek care and support. But they should do so for their own sakes—not because distress will ruin their shot at motherhood or somehow damage their fetuses.Take fertility. In 2011, British psychologists pulled together data from 14 studies of in vitro fertilization. In each study, researchers asked women to assess their emotional distress, anxiety, or depression. Then they followed them through a single cycle of fertility treatment to see whether they got pregnant or not. The smaller individual studies arrived at disparate results, but the meta-analysis rolling up all the findings, which included over 3,500 women and appeared in the BMJ, was fairly definitive: Women’s emotional state before IVF bore no relationship to whether the treatment worked. In other words, women with more extreme levels of anxiety or depression were just as likely to get pregnant after a single cycle as women with milder levels. “It was a great relief,” said psychologist Jacky Boivin, who has counseled women struggling with infertility for years and who led the meta-analysis team.

More here.