Rafil Kroll-Zaidi in Harper's:

Penguins have lost the ability to taste fish. A South Korean woman’s hair was eaten by a robot, and U.S. conservatives were found to be culturally East Asian. Americans who enter the top 1 percent of earners are less likely to remain there if they are not white. Individualism in the United States was correlated with the rise of white-collar jobs. Hedge-fund managers who look trustworthy attract more clients than managers who look undependable, but the latter generate larger returns. Brides in 1930s Connecticut who were judged agreeable and emotionally stable by their bridesmaids lived longer. U.S. counties in which residents more frequently tweet “bitches,” “haters,” “jealous,” “drama,” “cunt,” “grrr,” “sooo,” “fucked,” and “Mondays” have more heart-disease deaths. The blindfolded lead the nonblindfolded in estimating the severity of everyday impairment caused by blindness. The legs of adult British Columbians cramp in the night twice as often during the summer. Swiss prison guards report contentedness. New Zealanders in a doctor’s office are fourteen times more likely to steal gossipy magazines than serious ones. Dutch chimpanzees who moved to Edinburgh now grunt like locals. Wolf society, not human domestication, gave dogs their social skills.

High school girls who underwent virtual-reality assertiveness training reported less sexual victimization, and college men who took online sexual-violence-awareness tutorials reported committing less rape. Old banned chemicals may be weakening polar bears’ penile bones. Sugary-drink consumption correlates with early menarche. Teen pregnancy rose by 30 percent between 2003 and 2010 in Iraq. Caesarean delivery, vacuum-assisted delivery, maternal fatigue, and violent partners were associated with pain in postpartum vaginal intercourse. Labor augmentation does not cause autism, but Romanian orphanages may. Dutch babies laugh, smile, and cuddle more than American babies. An Arizona toddler mistakenly given scorpion antivenin for methamphetamine poisoning exhibited immediate improvement. Targeted social rejection worsens asthma in popular adolescents. Teen boys who wrongly think themselves fat often grow up to be fat. A woman who received a fecal transplant from her obese sixteen-year-old daughter rapidly became obese herself. Repeated blows to the head were linked to cognitive impairment.

Camponotus fellah ants who become isolated from others walk around continuously, fail to digest their food, and have one tenth the life span of social ants.

More here.

Eric Ormsby in The New Criterion:

What language did Adam and Eve speak in the Garden of Eden? Today the question might seem not only quaint, but daft. Thus, the philologist Andreas Kempe could speculate, in his “Die Sprache des Paradises” (“The Language of Paradise”) of 1688, that in the Garden God spoke Swedish to Adam and Adam replied in Danish while the serpent—wouldn’t you know it?—seduced Eve in French. Others suggested Flemish, Old Norse, Tuscan dialect, and, of course, Hebrew. But as James Turner makes clear in his magisterial and witty history, which ranges from the ludicrous to the sublime, philologists regarded the question not just as one addressing the origins of language, but rather as seeking out the origins of what makes us human; it was a question at once urgent and essential.1 After all, animals do express themselves: they chitter and squeak, they bay and roar and whinny. But none of them, so far as we know, wields grammar and syntax; none of them is capable of articulate and reasoned discourse. We have long prided ourselves, perhaps excessively, on this distinction. But on the evidence Turner so amply provides, we might also wonder whether the true distinction lies not simply in our ability to utter rational speech, but in the sheer obsessive love of language itself; that is, in philology, the “love of words.”

This abiding passion for words, cultivated fervently from antiquity into modern times—or at least until around 1800, in Turner’s view—encompassed a huge range of subjects as it developed: not only grammar and syntax, but rhetoric, textual editing and commentary, etymology and lexicography, as well as, eventually, anthropology, archeology, biblical exegesis, linguistics, literary criticism, and even law. It comprised three large areas: textual philology, theories about the origins of language, and, much later, comparative studies of different related languages.

More here.

What was so special about 9:26:53 am today? Well, the date is 3/14/15 and at that time, the date and time together would have been the same as the first ten digits of Pi: 3.141592653. It is also Albert Einstein's birthday today. Here's Steven Strogatz in The New Yorker:

Pi does deserve a celebration, but for reasons that are rarely mentioned. In high school, we all learned that pi is about circles. Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (the distance around the circle, represented by the letter C) to its diameter (the distance across the circle at its widest point, represented by the letter d). That ratio, which is about 3.14, also appears in the formula for the area inside the circle, A = πr2, where π is the Greek letter “pi” and r is the circle’s radius (the distance from center to rim). We memorized these and similar formulas for the S.A.T.s and then never again used them, unless we happened to go into a technical field, or until our own kids took geometry.

So it’s fair to ask: Why do mathematicians care so much about pi? Is it some kind of weird circle fixation? Hardly. The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach. Even young children get this. The digits of pi never end and never show a pattern. They go on forever, seemingly at random—except that they can’t possibly be random, because they embody the order inherent in a perfect circle. This tension between order and randomness is one of the most tantalizing aspects of pi.

Pi touches infinity in other ways. For example, there are astonishing formulas in which an endless procession of smaller and smaller numbers adds up to pi. One of the earliest such infinite series to be discovered says that pi equals four times the sum 1 – + – + – + ⋯. The appearance of this formula alone is cause for celebration. It connects all odd numbers to pi, thereby also linking number theory to circles and geometry. In this way, pi joins two seemingly separate mathematical universes, like a cosmic wormhole.

But there’s still more to pi.

More here.

Questlove at The New York Times:

Sonic Youth has never had a reputation for shying away from unpleasantness in the search for truth and beauty, and the book does the same, opening with a scene in drizzly São Paulo, as the band played its last show together and Gordon and Moore’s marriage finally fully unraveled. “My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet ­Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it,” Gordon writes. “I don’t think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.” From here she takes the reader into her childhood. The organization of the book is as unconventional as you’d expect from an artist like Gordon (the first chapter is titled “The End”), and I’m a sucker for unconventional organization, especially early on, when you’re trying to pick up a rhythm as you read it. The chapters are short, no more than three or four pages, short enough that you might call them songs. They jump around a bit but run roughly chronologically. Gordon recalls growing up in Rochester, N.Y., and moving to Los Angeles when her ­sociologist father took a job at U.C.L.A. She paints a cleareyed portrait of her mother, who stayed at home and struggled to stay creative. She ­remembers her charismatic and mentally ill older brother, Keller — “brilliant, manipulative, sadistic” — her closest companion in childhood, “the person who more than anyone else in the world shaped who I was, and who I turned out to be.”

more here.

Charlie Kurth in Aeon:

But just how bad is anxiety, really? Is it just an unpleasant feeling to work through, or something worse? According to a very distinguished tradition, one that stretches all the way back through the Stoics and Aristotle to Plato, it is worse. Much worse. When we’re anxious, we fret and ruminate in ways that don’t just distract us, but consume us. What’s more, because anxiety tends to be so unpleasant, we act impulsively – doing whatever we think will make the feeling go away. For these reasons, the classical consensus has it that such emotions are to be avoided.

Immanuel Kant suggested an even graver problem with anxiety: it is incompatible with virtue. For Kant, the virtuous individual is someone who has brought ‘all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control’; therefore, he writes in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), the ‘true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind’. But when we’re anxious, our minds are anything but tranquil. We lack the rational control that’s distinctive of virtue: it is emotion, not reason, that determines our behaviour. That’s bad. This picture of anxiety as a dark and pernicious force certainly has illustrious supporters. Even so, I believe that it is mistaken. It goes against the grain to say this, but anxiety can be a good thing. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that it is central to our ability to successfully navigate moral and social life. I won’t go as far as to say that we need more of it, but we should cultivate it. Worry is important; we should get it right.

More here.

David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago,” the book begins. “It's eight hundred thousand words long.”

We live, of course, in a diaristic era. This April, Heidi Julavits will publish “The Folded Clock,” which uses the diary as a source of revelation and reflection; meanwhile, Karl Ove Knausgaard has become a lightning rod for his 3,600-page autobiographical “My Struggle” (the fourth volume is due out in the U.S. in early May).

Manguso's intent, however, is different — not to re-create her diary but to meditate on it, as both artifact and pathology. There is nothing in “Ongoingness” about the decision to come to Los Angeles, first in 2010 and then again, after moving back to New York, in 2013. There are no proper nouns, no names, few reference points other than the obsessive weight of the diary itself.

As she acknowledges in the early pages, “I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it.”

more here.

Lisa Jardine at the Financial Times:

We may not have entirely endorsed his contemporary Anthony Wood’s unkind assessment of Aubrey as “a shiftless person, roving and magoty-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed”. But neither did we take Scurr’s care to listen to his personal authorial voice.

Aubrey was born in north Wiltshire in 1626, to a gentry family whose precarious finances collapsed after his father’s death. He attended Oxford as a gentleman-commoner during the 1640s at the height of the English civil war, when the university was the headquarters of Charles I and besieged by the Commonwealth forces. The intellectual, social and emotional upheaval Aubrey experienced in his early years presaged a lifetime of disruption and disturbance, exacerbated by his frequent need to prevent his creditors from catching up with him.

He had an irrepressible urge to record everything around him that took his attention. His curiosity matched the intellectual ferment of the times. He was, wrote his friend George Ent, one “whose boundlesse mind/Scarce within Learnings compasse is confin’d”. He was an early Fellow of the Royal Society, a restless and insatiable pursuer of fragments of material and written culture from the past, and an inveterate compiler of obscure information. As Scurr has written, he was “an antiquary, collecting remnants of history to save them from the deluge of time.

more here.

Paul Tullis in The New York Times:

Jane Goodall was already on a London dock in March 1957 when she realized that her passport was missing. In just a few hours, she was due to depart on her first trip to Africa. A school friend had moved to a farm outside Nairobi and, knowing Goodall’s childhood dream was to live among the African wildlife, invited her to stay with the family for a while. Goodall, then 22, saved for two years to pay for her passage to Kenya: waitressing, doing secretarial work, temping at the post office in her hometown, Bournemouth, on England’s southern coast, during the holiday rush. She had spent her last few days in London saying goodbyes and picking up a few things for the trip at Peter Jones, the department store in Chelsea. Now all this was for naught, it seemed. The passport must have fallen out of her purse somewhere. It’s hard not to wonder how subsequent events in her life — rather consequential as they have turned out to be to conservation, to science, to our sense of ourselves as a species — might have unfolded differently had someone not found her passport, along with an itinerary from Cook’s, the travel agency, folded inside, and delivered it to the Cook’s office. An agency representative, documents in hand, found her on the dock. “Incredible,” Goodall told me last month, recalling that day. “Amazing.”

Excited and apprehensive, she boarded the ship, the Kenya Castle, with her mother and uncle, and together they inspected the vessel, circling its decks, looking out the porthole in the room she would occupy for the better part of a month. Then her family departed, and at 4 in the afternoon, the ship cast off. Twenty-four hours later, as most of the passengers were suffering from seasickness on their traverse across the Bay of Biscay, Jane Goodall was at the prow of the ship — “as far forward as one could get,” she wrote to her family. Her letter also recorded, in a detailed manner that foreshadowed the keen observational skills she would bring to her research as well as the literary bent she would deploy in reaching a broad audience, how the sea changed color as the bow rose and fell with the waves. “The sea is dark inky blue, then it rises up a clear transparent blue green, and then it breaks in white and sky blue foam. But best of all, some of this foam is forced back under the wave from which it broke, and this spreads out under the surface like the palest blue milk, all soft and hazy at the edge.”

More here.

Hello,

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

On the right is a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

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

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Notes Of A Grand Juror
2. Abandoned Footnotes: The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm
3. Brown Pundits: Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…
4. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: Abandoning Ukraine
5. Los Angeles Review of Books: The Limits of Muslim Liberalism
6. Pandaemonium: Assimilation vs. Multiculturism
7. Religious Left Law: The Highlander Folk School: A Civil Rights Movement Halfway House
8. The Philosopher's Beard: The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income
9. U.S. Intellectual History: How the CIA Bought Juan Rulfo Some Land in the Country

We'll announce the three winners on March 23, 2015.

Good luck!

Abbas

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

Corey Robin in Salon:

Facebook can be a weird place on Martin Luther King Day. Some of my friends post famous passages from MLK’s speeches. Others post statistics on racial inequality. Still others, mostly white parents, post photographs of their children assembled in auditoriums and schoolyards. These are always hopeful images, the next generation stirring toward interracial harmony. Except for one thing: nearly everyone in the photos is … white.

In her public school this year, my first-grade daughter learned that Daisy Bates helped integrate the Little Rock schools. She knows that Ella Baker, someone I’d never heard of till I went to college, was part of the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, her school has a combined black and Latino population of 15 percent, down from nearly 30 percent just seven years ago.

In school, white children are taught to be conscious of race and racism in a way I never was when I was as a kid in the 1970s. Yet they go to schools that are in some respectsmore segregated now than they were in the 1970s. In 1972, under Richard Nixon, 36 percent of black students in the South attended white-majority schools. By 2011, under Barack Obama, that number had plummeted to 23 percent. In every region of the country, a higher percentage of black students go to nearly all-minority schools than was the case in 1988. The same is true of Latino students in the South, the West and the Midwest.

Microsoft Word recognizes the word “desegregate.” It doesn’t recognize “resegregate.”

The way we live now is not reflected in the way we talk. Or type.

Maybe this gap between our words and deeds is a sign of vitality and promise. Shouldn’t our language always be one step ahead of our actions? Shouldn’t our children learn concepts in school that challenge realities they see in society? Maybe. Or maybe we’re forcing children to talk about inequities in school that we wouldn’t dare touch, much less transform, in society at large.

More here.

3QD friend Mark Blyth testified before the U.S. Senate Budget Committee yesterday. Here is his statement:

Good Morning Chairman Enzi, Ranking Member Sanders, and Members of the Committee.

My name is Mark Blyth and I am the Eastman Professor of Political Economy at the Watson Institute for International Studies and Brown University in Providence RI. I am also the author of a book entitled Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press 2013) a book, which oddly just received a national award in Germany, the country most associated with budgetary austerity. Given that irony is not a German national trait, it might be the case that even the Germans are re-thinking their stance on balanced budgets. As I shall show you today, it’s really not working out so well in Europe and it would be a disaster if it were tried here too.

And yet balancing the budget as a matter of principle is intuitive. After all, you can’t spend more than you earn. It is also appealing. After all, people want more money in their pockets rather than less, so spending ‘other people’s money’ now so that they would have less in the future because of debt interest repayments seems to be the height of folly. But balancing the budget because of these arguments is also folly. While they are intuitive, these arguments are systematically wrong, because they are based upon two faulty analogies: one drawn between households firms and states and another between savings always being good and spending always being bad. I begin by taking each in turn before giving more specific examples.

The flaw in the first analogy is that the national or federal government’s budget is nothing but the sum of the budgets of the households and firms that comprise it. This is wrong, and for the United States of America in particular, it is absurd.

First, national governments do not have income in the same way individuals have income. Rather, individuals only have income by virtue of the existence of the government. Think of earning a buck in a job. What makes that possible is not just the labor contract, but also the existence of property rights, courts, police, roads, airports, education, and a host of other state provided functions. Don’t believe me? Go look at Somalia’s rate of job growth. With no state to protect both parties to the transaction, it’s hard to make a buck.

More here. And here is video in which Mark's testimony starts at the 46:20 mark.

Melanie Moran in Medical Xpress:

Where in your brain do you exist? Is your awareness of the world around you and of yourself as an individual the result of specific, focused changes in your brain, or does that awareness come from a broad network of neural activity? How does your brain produce awareness?

Vanderbilt University researchers took a significant step toward answering these longstanding questions with a recent brainimaging study, in which they discovered global changes in how brain areas communicate with one another during awareness. Their findings, which were published March 9 in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge previous theories that hypothesized much more restricted changes were responsible for producing awareness.

“Identifying the fingerprints of consciousness in humans would be a significant advancement for basic and medical research, let alone its philosophical implications on the underpinnings of the human experience,” said René Marois, professor and chair of psychology at Vanderbilt University and senior author of the study. “Many of the cognitive deficits observed in various neurological diseases may ultimately stem from changes in how information is communicated throughout the brain.”

Using graph theory, a branch of mathematics concerned with explaining the interactive links between members of a complex network, such as social networks or flight routes, the researchers aimed to characterize how connections between the various parts of the brain were related to awareness.

More here.

The voting round of our philosophy prize (details here) is over. Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 20, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Warscapes: Cold Remains in Greenland
2. The Philosopher's Beard: The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income

3. 3 Quarks Daily: My Grandmother's Democratic Party (Part 2)
   

4. Brown Pundits: Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…

5. Pandaemonium: Assimilation vs. Multiculturism

6. Los Angeles Review of Books: The Limits of Muslim Liberalism
7. 3 Quarks Daily: The Evil That Republicans Do
8. U.S. Intellectual History: How the CIA Bought Juan Rulfo Some Land in the Country
9. Abandoned Footnotes: The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm
10. 3 Quarks Daily: The Undocumented Journey North, Through Mexico
11. Proof I Never Want To Be President: It's Not a Competition
12. 3 Quarks Daily: Free-Floating Anxiety, Teens, and Security Theatre
13. 3 Quarks Daily: Notes Of A Grand Juror
14. U.S. Intellectual History: The Culture Wars Are Dead, Long Live the Culture Wars!
15. Religious Left Law: The Highlander Folk School: A Civil Rights Movement Halfway House
16. 3 Quarks Daily: Delhi: the City of Rape?
17. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: Abandoning Ukraine
18. U.S. Intellectual History: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Charlton Heston
19. Jezebel: The Cops Don't Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
20. Scientia Salon: Why not Cynicism?

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

Nimmi Gowrinathan in Guernica:

Jeya’s daughter is nine days old, unnamed, when I meet her in Sri Lanka. Miniscule compared to my chunky little boy, born only a few months earlier, she squirms beneath pink netting as I gingerly reach in to hold her hand. I don’t need to see her, Jeya says, turning away. That day, I was a human rights researcher, and I wondered what fresh trauma I would cause in the pursuit of documenting her story. Jeya’s daughter was born of rape. Half Singhalese, half Tamil. Half soldier, half civilian. She entered her world when a vicious cycle of violence had come full circle. They say the war is over now, the country is at peace. Discreetly positioned inside a church, sitting across from Jeya, I’m restless, intimately familiar with the pangs of guilt that interrupt my work and jar my sense of self. The last time I was here, I was a humanitarian worker. Then, at least, I could have carefully placed a tiny Band-Aid over the details of her damaged life. Now, I am intervening into local lives with only the promise of social justice in hand. I am an ill-equipped spy, sent to retrieve the most repressed memories from a repressed people. The stories will, at worst, incite a directionless moral outrage on behalf of the people, and at best, brand their government an international pariah. I am relieved Jeya will talk to me, as I have come looking for Victims of rape (Survivors, in aid parlance), but so far had only encountered Witnesses and Rumors. From inside the electrified fence of her internment, Jeya didn’t know which day the war ended. They never told us. Or maybe they did. None of us understood Singhalese.

It is a war the West knows little about, though its fighters became infamous around the globe.

More here.

Dale Peck in Book Forum:

IT'S BEEN YEARS SINCE I took Muay Thai; years, too, since I thought much about Stanley Crouch. Nevertheless, this was my obvious point of entry to Jonathan Gottschall’s The Professor in the Cage, which the author describes as “part history of violence, part nonfiction Fight Club, and part tour of the sciences of sports and bloodlust.” In fact, The Professor in the Cage is a straightforward work of popular science bookended by what Gottschall himself calls a “memoir stunt”: One day in his late thirties, Gottschall, a “cultured English professor,” decided to join the mixed-martial-arts gym that had opened across the street from his campus office, with the ultimate goal of engaging in at least one professional fight. By Gottschall’s account, the decision was motivated by dissatisfaction with his job as an adjunct teaching freshman composition, but the subsequent narrative complicates this explanation. Gottschall refers to his 2012 fight as “the culmination of a [two-year] journey,” yet he seems to have been “fascinated by fighting,” at least since the mid-’90s, when he watched a video of the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s inaugural bout, between Teila Tuli and Gerard Gordeau. At the end of that twenty-second bloodbath, “Gordeau left the cage with . . . one of Tuli’s front teeth broken off inside his foot.” Gottschall likens the experience to watching porn for the first time. He was “sickened” by the spectacle but “couldn’t look away,” and “in the ensuing months I frequently visited the video store, where I guiltily lurked through the section that included UFC tapes.” Finally there is the admission that “from grade school through high school, I attracted bullies.” But lest you pity the younger Gottschall, he hastens to tell readers: “I probably would have behaved the same way if I’d had the fangs and the claws for it. I wasn’t a good kid, just a weak one. In high school I occasionally managed to identify someone even weaker and more isolated than me, and I did my small part to make his life even harder and sadder than it already was.”

In college he “hit the weights,” building himself into “a 210-pound heavyweight who could bench-press more than 300 pounds”; afraid that strength alone wasn’t enough, he “took up karate” and studied it for more than fifteen years.

More here.