Month: August 2016

The Cattle

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Microfiction from the excellent current special issue of 91st Meridian, edited by Shabnam Nadiya and Daisy Rockwell:

“How are cattle born?” The teacher asked.

“When the cattle sprout legs, the cattle are born,” the child replied.

“Wrong,” the teacher said. The teacher recited the following from the textbook, “No one is born as cattle. Instead, first, one gets fifteen years of education, a job, a wife, a car and a television set. Then, in due course, as a child is born, a household is set up.

“Together, progress is dutifully achieved.

“Thereafter, horns begin grow on the head.

“Or else,

“They work in a factory or a field. Or even at a university or an office.

“They labor and struggle against difficulties.

“Together, they dream up revolutions.

“For all this too, as a reward, horns sprout on the head.

Hearing this, the child was overcome with sorrow.

“Is there any way to avoid becoming cattle oneself?” he asked the teacher.

“I don’t know,” replied the teacher as he scratched the tip of his horns.

Much more here.

Would You Be Happier With a Different Personality?

Posted on by Azra Raza

Scott Barry Kaufman in The Atlantic:

Lead_960Americans spend billions of dollars each year on books and seminars claiming to help people change their personalities. These books are built on the assumptions that personality can change, and that changing personality is good: Altering the basics of who you are will make you a better, healthier, happier person. Last week, I wrote about how the latest science of personality suggests that personality can indeed change—either through natural maturation, new responsibilities, or intentional strategies. But would changing your personality actually make you happier? Recently, a series of studies in Australia looked to see whether changes in personality (regardless of the cause) were associated with increases in life satisfaction. The series drew on the country’s HILDA Survey (Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia), which annually assesses the personality, life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect of a large, nationally representative sample of Australia’s population. In one of the studies, researchers examined the data from 11,104 Australians, ages 18 to 79, over the course of four years. They found that increases in extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness were all associated with increased life satisfaction, whereas increases in neuroticism were associated with decreased life satisfaction.

Another study, conducted on more than 8,000 Australians, found that personality changes during this same time period occurred as often as changes in socio-economic factors, such as income, unemployment, and marital status. Together, these two studies add to a growing body of literature suggesting that personality changes are related to changes in life satisfaction, and that personality change can even be a better predictor of life satisfaction than many of the external variables that are normally considered in economic models of happiness.

More here.

on ‘the operation of grace’

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Operation-of-grace-198x300Martyn Wendell Jones at Open Letters Monthly:

In the world of letters, overt religiosity can seem an offense against taste. Gone are the days of Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, and Reinhold Niebuhr; in their place have stepped artists, writers, and intellectuals of faith who, in the words of novelist Doris Betts, “whisper” rather than “shout.” Faith is a private affair; its public mandate for the individual believer is discomfiting, especially to those who have no truck with it. Ours is an age of pronounced religious anxieties.

It’s refreshing, then, to find someone whose personal faith is an aesthetic and intellectual enablement rather than an encumbrance. Gregory Wolfe, editor of the quarterly journalImage, is unabashedly Catholic, but ideologically nonpartisan. (Though he came of age under the tutelage of William F. Buckley at the National Review, he left a career in political commentary behind during the Reagan administration to dedicate himself to culture and the arts.) His book The Operation of Grace contains editorial statements for issues of the journal as well as essays and public addresses; their historically and culturally wide-ranging reflections are focused through Image’s guiding themes of art, faith, and mystery.

The pieces collected here are loosely arranged by topic; the six groupings of chapters include headings such as “Art Speaks to Faith,” “Christian Humanism: Then and Now,” and “Scenes from a Literary Life.” A portrait of Wolfe emerges in his treatments of current events, historically diverse literary figures, and theology. He is no mystic longing for another world; nor is he a staid cleric with his collar starched.

more here.

MAVIS GALLANT’S MAGIC TRICKS

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Prose-MavisGallant-800Francine Prose at The New Yorker:

I feel a kind of messianic zeal, which I share with many writers and readers, to make sure that Gallant’s work continues to be read, admired—and loved. One can speculate about the possible reasons why she is not more universally known. Though her work appeared regularly and for decades (from the nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-nineties) in The New Yorker, where it attracted a loyal and enthusiastic readership, Gallant, who died in 2014, never became quite as popular, as widely recognized, or as frequently celebrated as any number of writers who published as regularly in the magazine during roughly the same period of time.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that she was a Canadian short-story writer, born in Montreal, in 1922, living in Paris, where she worked initially as a journalist, writing in English, and publishing in the United States. It was hard for any country to claim her, to make her a public figure (which she would have resisted) or for readers to classify her as one thing or another. Things (including books) are always easier to describe when they are like something else, and it was Gallant’s great strength and less-than-great public-relations problem that her work is so unlike anyone else’s. What one extracts from what (little) Gallant has said about her life is the central fact of her wanting to do what she wanted, which was to write.

more here.

Remembering Abbas Kiarostami

Posted on by Morgan Meis

KiarostamiPhillip Lopate at The American Scholar:

On July 4, a great artist and a remarkable human being, Abbas Kiarostami, died—unnecessarily, as it turns out. I knew him slightly, having interviewed him several times and written about him often. He was, to my mind, not simply the greatest Iranian filmmaker but one of the two or three greatest filmmakers alive (and now I have to amend that last word). Although his name barely registered on the American public, he was a revered figure on the international art film festival circuit. He began making short films about children, having been invited to start the filmmaking branch of the Kanoon Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Iran. From these shorts he graduated to superb feature films, such as Homework, Close-Up, Where Is My Friend’s House, And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees, and The Wind Will Carry Us, which combined neorealist humanism in the tradition of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Satyajit Ray, with a formalist rigor (choreographed long-duration shots) and a playful, postmodernist self-referentiality. In a sense, he solved the dichotomy between fiction and documentary. His films were gifted with patient observation and curiosity about ordinary people; there were always humorous bits, they breathed naturally, and they were healthy for you—that is, they made me feel engrossed, suspenseful yet at peace, when watching them.

more here.

An Alternative Form of Mental Health Care Gains a Foothold

Posted on by Azra Raza

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

ALTSPYCHCOVER-blog427Some of the voices inside Caroline White’s head have been a lifelong comfort, as protective as a favorite aunt. It was the others — “you’re nothing, they’re out to get you, to kill you” — that led her down a rabbit hole of failed treatments and over a decade of hospitalizations, therapy and medications, all aimed at silencing those internal threats. At a support group here for so-called voice-hearers, however, she tried something radically different. She allowed other members of the group to address the voice, directly:

What is it you want?

“After I thought about it, I realized that the voice valued my safety, wanted me to be respected and better supported by others,” said Ms. White, 34, who, since that session in late 2014, has become a leader in a growing alliance of such groups, called the Hearing Voices Network, or HVN. At a time when Congress is debating measures to extend the reach of mainstream psychiatry — particularly to the severely psychotic, who often end up in prison or homeless — an alternative kind of mental health care is taking root that is very much anti-mainstream. It is largely nonmedical, focused on holistic recovery rather than symptom treatment, and increasingly accessible through an assortment of in-home services, residential centers and groups like the voices network Ms. White turned to, in which members help one another understand each voice, as a metaphor, rather than try to extinguish it. For the first time in this country, experts say, psychiatry’s critics are mounting a sustained, broadly based effort to provide people with practical options, rather than solely alleging abuses like overmedication and involuntary restraint. “The reason these programs are proliferating now is society’s shameful neglect of the severely ill, which creates a vacuum of great need,” said Dr. Allen Frances, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Duke University.

More here.

Thumos, Terror and Houellebecqian Temperatures

Posted on by Katrin Trüstedt

by Katrin Trüstedt

Achilles ThymosThe assumed Islamist terror attack in Munich two weeks ago that was part of a series leading to claims that “terrorism has now reached Germany” turned out to be something else: the shooter actually targeted ‘immigrants', and carried out his attack on the fifth anniversary of the 2011 Norway attacks conducted by his hero Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist and self-declared fascist. Because the shooter had Iranian parents, people jumped to conclusions, but then became increasingly confused – not only as to whether to call this act an act of terrorism or a killing spree, but also whether to link it to an Islamist, or rather, a right-wing ideology. What makes the reaction to this particular shooting interesting is the incapacity of getting the story straight. While the drive to create a narrative with a clear distinction between some kind of ‘us' and some kind of ‘them' was obvious enough in the shooting, the specific contents of that opposition confused the attempts to make it fit an expected pattern.

The recent obsession of certain right-wing intellectuals in Germany with the idea of thumos is an interesting example where the position of a ‘we' standing up against a ‘them' seems more important than the actual content of that opposition, and the position, moreover, turns out to be somehow informed by what it opposes. While these intellectuals rally to reaffirm a thumos which is supposed to mean something like wrath or rage and connotes an invigorating vitality, one cannot help but suspect that such thumos is exactly what its advocates see in the Muslims they work so hard to distinguish themselves from. Many former workers who now favor the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) do have legitimate anger, since the social democratic parties – like their equivalents in other European countries – have been neglecting them. Marc Jongen, one of the AfD's chief ideologues, on the other hand, philosophizes and elevates (or rather diverts) this anger into a value in and of itself, without the burden of actual issues. The anger, now thumos, is nobilitated as a philosophically deep temper with an ancient Greek term. Thumos should not be appeased – with, say, political interventions that actually solve a problem – but rather fueled and raised to a permanent level of tenseness. Jongen, formerly an assistant to German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, claims to speak for the bourgeois AfD supporters with a higher education who actually make up the majority of AfD voters.

The apparent lack of a certain level of thumos, of an inner force that Western Culture exhibits, became a subject, interestingly enough, in the context of the so-called refugee crisis. Faced with an imaginative ‘horde' of eager young Muslim men ‘overrunning' this country, apparently Western civilization started worrying about their state of thumos tenseness. Those cultivating these worries probably felt confirmed by representatives of the German economy insisting these highly motivated refugees eager to work are not only welcome here but actually much needed. This also goes for the demographic development, as Germany is a quickly aging population that does not produce enough offspring. It was against such a background that the thumos discourse evolved.

Read more »

The brain’s I: science and the lived world

Posted on by Katalin Balog

by Katalin Balog

This is the second of a series of four essays on understanding the mind. You can read part 1 here.

Archangel-gabrielThe mind's relation to the physical world is a hard thing to understand. The difficulty comes in no small part from the fact that there are two, radically different ways of going about it: one is to look within, to understand oneself (and by extension, others) as a subject, a self; the other, to look “out”, at the world so to speak. The first method is subjective, humanistic, and is essentially tied to a particular point of view. I can sense my frustration trying to come up with the right phrase. I know what that kind of thing feels like. I think I understand what it feels like for you as well, but only because of the familiarity with my own case. The second method is objective, it is based on observation of body, behavior and brain, and it is accessible to anyone, irrespective of their personal idiosyncrasies or their point of view. Its best embodiment is the scientific method. How the subjective fits in with the objective is one of the most vexing questions both in philosophy and life.

HeadwBrain_editedIn the first part of this series of essays, I have looked at how a subjective, humanistic understanding of the mind comes under pressure from science. In the present essay and the next I look at the flip side of these hostilities: the pushback in some quarters of the humanist camp against science and objectivity. In the last, I will look at the prospects of a peaceful coexistence between the two sides.

I. Two worlds

The first major clash between the subjective and the objective approach didn't revolve around the mind directly; it concerned the world. In the 17th and 18th century, Galileo and Newton brought about a monumental change in the way we understand the physical world. According to the new physics, all physical change can be explained completely in terms of certain quantified properties of matter in motion – properties such as size, shape and velocity. The fact that these features were quantifiable allowed for a mathematical formulation of the laws of nature. The view of the physical world that emerged is mechanistic; in an only slightly misleading metaphor, it implies that the physical world is a vast machine, its movements and changes described by precise law. This is a shocking view, come to think of it.

Read more »

Eight basic laws of physics, and one that isn’t

Posted on by Paul Braterman

by Paul Braterman

GodfreyKneller-IsaacNewton-1689Michael Gove (remember him?), when England's Secretary of State for Education, told teachers

“What [students] need is a rooting in the basic scientific principles, Newton's Laws of thermodynamics and Boyle's law.”

Never have I seen so many major errors expressed in Newton via Wikipedia in so few words. But the wise learn from everyone, [1] so let us see what we can learn here from Gove.

From the top: Newton's laws. Gove most probably meant Newton's Laws of Motion, but he may also have been thinking of Newton's Law (note singular) of Gravity. It was by combining all four of these that Newton explained the hitherto mysterious phenomena of lunar and planetary motion, and related these to the motion of falling bodies on Earth; an intellectual achievement not equalled until Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

Above, L, Isaac Newton, 1689. Below, R, Michael Gove, 2013

GoveTelegraphhaswarnedIn Newton's physics, the laws of motion are three in number:

1) If no force is acting on it, a body will carry on moving at the same speed in a straight line.

2) If a force is acting on it, the body will undergo acceleration, according to the equation

Force = mass x acceleration

3) Action and reaction are equal and opposite

So what does all this mean? In particular, what do scientists mean by “acceleration”? Acceleration is rate of change of velocity. Velocity is not quite the same thing as speed; it is speed in a particular direction. So the First Law just says that if there's no force, there'll be no acceleration, no change in velocity, and the body will carry on moving in the same direction at the same speed. And, very importantly, if a body changes direction, that is a kind of acceleration, even if it keeps on going at the same speed. For example, if something is going round in circles, there must be a force (sometimes, confusingly, called centrifugal force) that keeps it accelerating inwards, and stops it from going straight off at a tangent.

Then what about the heavenly bodies, which travel in curves, pretty close to circles although Kepler's more accurate measurement had already shown by Newton's time that the curves are actually ellipses? The moon, for example. The moon goes round the Earth, without flying off at a tangent. So the Earth must be exerting a force on the moon.

Read more »

On Pokémon GO and Psychogeography (and Philip K. Dick)

Posted on by Yohan John

by Yohan J. John

ControlThere's no real downside to engaging with pop culture. If you happen to get into the latest craze, you can participate in collective joy. If it doesn't quite move you, you can join in with the 'haters' and engage in a different but no less enjoyable communal experience. Either way, you can be part of the Conversation, analyzing the meaning of the mass experience from as many perspectives as possible. So it was in the spirit of social participation that I decided to start playing Pokémon GO. I wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was about.

In the US, Pokémon GO now has more users than Twitter. And it only took them a few weeks to achieve this. Part of the draw of Pokémon seems to be nostalgia. The original game was introduced by Nintendo for the Game Boy in 1995. Since then it has morphed into a media empire, spanning anime, trading cards, toys and all manner of swag. The basic concept behind the game is quite simple: each player (or “Pokémon Trainer”) travels around a virtual world looking for Pokémon — cute “pocket monsters” with whimsical names like “Pikachu”, “Meowth” and “Bulbasaur”. The trainer captures a Pokémon by chucking a magical ball at it — it seems to work a bit like that spectre-snatching toaster from Ghostbusters. Various in-game resources must be used to 'level-up' the trainers and 'evolve' the Pokémon. The Pokémon trainers then compete in vicarious battles, pitting their Pokémon against each other.

No doubt nostalgia (or retromania) is a powerful cultural force these days, but I suspect that it was only the initial impetus for Pokémon GO's popularity. After all, many of the current players are kids who are too young to remember the early Pokémon games and TV shows (plus curious adults like me who were a little too old for them when they first came out). I suspect that Pokémon GO works because its gameplay combines some of the most powerful elements in modern gaming in a package that requires little or no skill.

Read more »

If I Were a Man

Posted on by Elise Hempel

by Elise Hempel

DSC00188-001There's an innocent-looking little white ornamental tree in my neighbor's front yard which blocks your view when you're trying to turn from C Street onto Polk. You must crouch at the wheel and peer through the small open space beneath its lovely overhang to see another car coming from the left. Because this sweet little tree had already caused one accident and one near-accident, and because the tree's owner isn't friendly and approachable enough to tell her that her tree is a hazard, I decided recently to call the police.
Here, in condensed form, is the conversation between me and the male officer:

Me: Hi. I'm not sure I'm calling the right place, but there's a tree in my neighbor's yard – a little white ornamental tree – that blocks our view when we're trying to make a turn onto Polk Street. We're on C Street. There's already been one accident, and just now another one almost happened….

Officer: I know the tree you're talking about. I live in the neighborhood. I've never had a problem with it.

Me: Well, I can't see around it, and neither can my boyfriend. There's already been an accident, and a guy on a motorcycle almost got hit just now….

Officer: Are you in a car or an SUV when you're trying to turn?

Me: A car, but it doesn't matter. My boyfriend drives a truck and can't see around the tree. You can't see around it when you're walking either.

Officer: I've never had a problem with it, Ma'am, but I'll send an officer out to determine if it's a hazard.

Me: I'm telling you: It is a hazard. You can't see around it. We're afraid to turn there, and I'm afraid there'll be more accidents….

Officer (in anger): Ma'am! I said I'll send someone out to make that determination!

And then the click of the phone as he hung up on me. At first came puzzlement and disbelief, and then an anger that soon turned to a familiar sick feeling in my stomach. And then, even though I had started the day in a good mood, I was suddenly in tears at the kitchen window. I had imagined, before I made that call, that I would get a thank you from the police – thanks for letting us know, for being a good citizen, for helping us keep our streets safe. But instead I had been dismissed – almost before my first sentence was out of my mouth, almost immediately. I felt terrible, and now, so quickly and easily, full of self-doubt. What had I done wrong? Had I pushed too hard? Had I interrupted him and not been aware of it? Should I have been more quiet and polite?

Read more »

A Rubber Band and Two Pens

Posted on by Max Sirak

by Max Sirak

Today, we're going to talk about opposites. FullSizeRender

We're all smart here, right? I mean, this isn't a site for dumb people. The banner at the top of every 3qd page says: Science, Arts, Literature, Politics, Gossip, and Philosophy. Even a casual scroll down the posts of any given day lets the reader know this is a place for ideas. And, I'm not ashamed to admit, there have been times when I've clicked on an article and ended up in over my head. It's cool. It happens.

But, I digress. Opposites. I'm sure all of us can agree opposites need each other to survive. Superheroes needs villains. Who would Batman be without his panoply of wrong doers? A rich dude with a bunch of toys. Who would Superman be without Lex Luther? A nerdy reporter, I guess.

You can also see this in other places. “Up” implies “down.” “Left” balances “right.” “Light” creates “dark.” Essentially, as soon as we begin describing what something is, we, by nature, draw lines around what it is not. If all the stuff over here is “good,” then everything else over there is “not-good.”

Simple, yeah?

Read more »

Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry: Seven Better Products We Didn’t Need But Now Can’t Live Without

Posted on by Carol A Westbrook

by Carol Westbrook

“Our house will never have that old people smell!” my husband said when he discovered Febreze. Yes, it's true! Using highly sophisticated chemistry (described below), Febreze truly eliminates odors, not just mask them with scent like air fresher. This was when I realized that the 1960's promise made by DuPont was being fulfilled, “Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry!” I've put together seven of my favorite products that chemistry has improved, excluding the obvious true advances in medicine, electronics, energy and so on. Instead, I've highlighted products we probably did not even need, but now can't live without. Who made them, and how do they work? Fig 1 Better things

1. Super Glue ©

Super Glue delivers what its name promises: it can stick almost anything together with a bond so strong that a 1-inch square can hold more than a ton. Besides household projects and repair, it's an effective skin adhesive for cuts, and those nasty dry-skin cracks you get on your hands in the winter. The myth is that Super Glue, or cyanoacrylate (C5H5NO2) was created as surgical adhesive for WWII field hospitals. In reality, it was invented by Goodrich in 1942 as a potential plastic for gunsights; it was rejected because its annoying property of sticking to everything made it impossible to fabricate. Fast forward to 1951, when it was rediscovered by scientists Harry Coover and Fred Joyner at Eastman Kodak, who recognized its potential as a glue. Initially it was used industrially, but in the 1970s it was introduced as a consumer project that rapidly took off.

Cyanoacrylate is a small molecule that binds to itself creating long chains, or polymers, when exposed to water–including water vapor in the air. The polymers are extremely strong acrylic plastics that rapidly bind whatever they contact when polymerizing. Unlike many adhesives, Super Glue cures almost instantly and can stick your fingers together before you can wipe it off. For obvious reasons it is packaged in small, one-use containers.

Read more »

Poem

Posted on by Rafiq Kathwari

India is Blinding Young Kashmiri Protestors…
The Guardian UK 18 July 2016

“They asked for it,”
a family friend tweets,
“#AccheDin are here again.”

Go fuck yourself
I want to shout back, our blindness
an affront to our clear seeing,

remembering the last time
I saw this dear friend, not virtually,
but at the Oberoi where her rose-

tinted cat eye designer glasses sat
on her nose like an army
tank deployed by Delhi in Kashmir,

chunky, stolid, demanding notice.
Should I feed her books about Hindu
rulers and Muslims subjects

in South Asia’s northernmost region
to nurse her #MannKiBaat and
#CowRaksha? Will she still praise

the pump action pellet gun
which is really a 12-gauge shotgun,
“crowd dispersal techniques”

India uses in its integral part?
But my friend will just take off
her glasses and shut her eyes.

by Rafiq Kathwari, whose debut collection, In Another Country, is available here.

War Complex

Posted on by Maniza Naqvi

by Maniza Naqvi

Donald-hillary-800The job entitled and wealthy are all set to win the election in November. And keep things exactly the same. Fool us again. Shame on us. The way things are run, it makes no difference who becomes President. It doesn't matter. And, either of them would oil the machinery churning out Gold Star families.

Mr. Trump voices banning Muslims. Mrs. Clinton voted bombing them. Mr. Trump questions why nuclear weapons are built. Mrs. Clinton doesn't. Mr. Trump would build a wall against migrants from Mexico. Mrs. Clinton was part of the Government that deported more migrants than any time before in the history of this country. Mrs. Clinton supports the wall built in Palestine. Mr. Trump opposed the war in Iraq. Mrs. Clinton voted for it. Words are cheap. Deeds mean death. And to think they will be voted in by people who have suffered most by these deeds, in this country.

Makes no difference who becomes President. Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. Except that Hillary Clinton has more experience selling weapons and war. And all Trump does is talk about building stuff and he plagiarizes and distills the last fifteen years of State sanctioned and widely shilled hate speech. Yes he does. He simply repeats and champions the narrative and words already out there endorsing hate and selling of those wars. All he does is to shout out loudly all that's already been said, to make the case for endless war. He says it all unvarnished without nuance from podiums for a Presidential campaign. No, neither of these choices are Russia's fault. And yes, Bernie Sanders, by not choosing the path he pointed towards, and heading an Independent party, has missed a historic opportunity. No matter, because he has awakened millions of young people and they will not accept his choice or follow his lead to back away from this path. They will most probably vote for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

Read more »

Georgiana Houghton: Spirit Drawings. The Courtauld Gallery

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

“Wonderful scribble-scrabbles”

GH jpegEngland, for the Victorians, was a very different place to the irreligious, multi-cultural country we have become. Then we believed ourselves to be a ‘great' Empire that would, forever ‘rule the waves'. It was a society where the majority still believed that God created the world in seven days, yet one in the midst of huge technological change where rural communities were leaving the land to work in Blake's ‘dark satanic mills', powered by new-fangled machines that threatened their traditional way of life. Steam, speed and noise came to represent modernity. It was a time of social rigidity as well as social upheaval, where the rich man sat back comfortably in his castle, while the poor man doffed his cap obsequiously at the gate. Fuelled by privilege, hypocrisy and secrets – as was evident in the treatment of women and children and its hidden sexual practices – Victorian society had not yet seen Europe torn apart by two World Wars. Yet death was an ever-present threat. It hovered over childbirth and the lives of infants who might, at any moment, be snatched away by infectious disease. That the Victorians were obsessed with death is, therefore, hardly surprising.

It's against this backdrop, along with the loosening of the bonds of the Anglican Church, the shifts in intellectual thought and the new range of scientific innovations that spiritualism took hold. Séances and mediums became popular as a way of making contact with the departed. It would be easy for us to mock spiritualism as a bit of irrational 19th century jiggery-pokery conducted by the unscrupulous, in darkened rooms swirling with miasmas, in order to extract money from the naive and malleable. But its popularity was more significant than that. The 19th century developed an especial interest in animal magnetism, in madness and criminality, as well in an attempt to discern where the real self resided, exemplified in Robert Louis Stevenson's celebrated novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The studies of Frederic W.H. Myers (1843-1901), the Cambridge scholar who founded the Society for Psychical Research were, in many ways, precursors to Freud's later investigations into the unconscious. In his posthumously published Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death, Myers discussed ideas of creative genius with special reference to automatic drawing, which, he suggested, sprung from the ‘subliminal' as opposed to the ‘supraliminal' of normal consciousness. Spiritual mediums used trance and automatism to tap into this psychic reservoir. According to Myer artistic inspiration came from a ‘subliminal uprush' when combined with a ‘supraliminal stream of thought' – an idea that would later be developed in the language of James Joyce and the art of Surrealists such as André Breton.

Read more »

Surprises of the Faraday Cage

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Lloyd N. Trefethen in Siam News:

ScreenHunter_2143 Aug. 08 17.04Nearly everyone has heard of the Faraday cage effect. So when I needed to learn about it, I assumed it would be a matter of looking in some standard physics books, maybe the ones I’d studied as an undergraduate. This was the beginning of a journey of surprises.

The Faraday cage effect involves shielding of electrostatic and electromagnetic fields. A closed metal cavity makes a perfect shield, with zero fields inside, and that is in the textbooks. Faraday’s discovery of 1836 was that fields are nearly zero inside a wire mesh, too. You see this principle applied in your microwave oven, whose front door contains a metal screen with small holes. The screen keeps the microwaves in, while allowing light, with its much smaller wavelength, to pass through.

The essence of the matter can be captured by a two-dimensional model (see Figure 1), where the cage is approximated by a circle or a line of dots representing cross-sections of wires all at the same voltage (connected somewhere in the third dimension). To keep things simple, we focus on electrostatic fields – the Laplace equation.

Let me explain how I got interested in this problem. André Weideman and I were finishing a survey of the trapezoidal rule for periodic analytic functions, which we’d been working on for eight years [5]. We knew the mathematics of that problem: if ff is analytic and periodic and you add up sample values at equispaced points, you get an exponentially accurate approximation to its integral. Intuitively, sinusoidal oscillation in one direction corresponds to exponential decay in the direction at right angles in the complex plane. A contour integral estimate of Fourier coefficients exploits this decay to prove exponential accuracy.

To enrich our survey, I thought we should comment on the analogy between this mathematics of the trapezoidal rule and that of the Faraday cage. It seemed obvious the two must be related – it would just be a matter of sorting out the details.

More here.