John Allen Paulos in The New York Times:

The essayist Alain de Botton has been writing a great deal lately about crushes, those sudden infatuations aroused by the merest of stimuli — the way she subtly rolls her eyes at a blowhard’s pronouncements, her intentional dropping of a glass to attract a waiter’s attention, the way he casually uses his iPhone as a bookmark. In beautiful prose laden with examples, Mr. de Botton describes how attraction can cascade into exultation but, alas, gradually dissolve into disillusionment and a slow vanishing of the mirage. A crush is undeniable, he writes, but barely explicable. That assertion appealed to my own sometimes reductionist mind-set, and I realized that the bare bones of the thesis could be expressed in statistical terms. Let’s begin by imagining a person to be an assemblage of traits. Many are personal — our looks, habits, backgrounds, attitudes and so on. Many more are situational: how we behave in the myriad contexts in which we find ourselves. The first relevant statistical notion is sampling bias. If we want to gauge public feelings about more stringent gun control, for instance, we won’t get a random sample by asking only people at a shooting range. Likewise, a fleeting glimpse of someone, or a brief exchange with him or her, yields just a tiny sample of that person’s traits. But if we find that sample appealing, it can lead to a crush, even if it is based on nothing more than an idealized caricature: We see what we want to see. In the throes of incipient romantic fog, we use what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” calls System 1 thinking — “fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic and subconscious.”

The second relevant statistical notion is Bayes’s theorem, a mathematical proposition that tells us how to update our estimates of people, events and situations in the light of new evidence. A mathematical example: Three coins are before you. They look identical, but one is weighted so it lands on heads just one-fourth of the time; the second is a normal coin, so heads come up half the time; and the third has heads on both sides. Pick one of the coins at random. Since there are three coins, the probability that you chose the two-headed one is one-third. Now flip that coin three times. If it comes up heads all three times, you’ll very likely want to change your estimate of the probability that you chose the two-headed coin. Bayes’s theorem tells you how to calculate the new odds; in this case it says the probability that you chose the two-headed coin is now 87.7 percent, up from the initial 33.3 percent.

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in The New York Review of Books:

In the days since the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) took control of much of northern Iraq, Western leaders and analysts have expressed alarm at what they have called a powerful new form of jihadism. Some have likened ISIS to a new al-Qaeda. Both assessments are wrong. In its rapid advance toward Baghdad, ISIS has already eliminated national boundaries between Iraq and Syria, captured significant arms and weapons caches, caused a spike in global oil prices, reinvigorated ethnic and sectarian conflict across the Arab world, and given Islamic extremism a dramatic new source of appeal among many young Muslims. On June 30, the first day of Ramadan, ISIS also declared that it was reestablishing the “Caliphate,” long an aspiration of other jihadist groups.

Yet despite these accomplishments, ISIS may not be as unusual as it has been described. Nor does it seem primarily interested in global jihad. In many ways, what the group is doing to Syria and Iraq resembles what the Taliban did in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early 1990s. Like the Taliban, ISIS’s war so far has been about conquering territory rather than launching an al-Qaeda-style global jihad or issuing fatwas to bomb New York or London. Although it has attracted some three thousand foreigners to fight for it, ISIS’s real war is with fellow Muslims, and in particular Shias, against whom it has called for a genocidal campaign. Just as the Taliban changed the contours of Islam in south and central Asia so ISIS intends to do the same in the Middle East. ISIS is also seeking territorial control of the central Middle East region. There are several instructive parallels between the two groups. The hardcore forces of ISIS probably number fewer than 10,000 trained fighters; the Taliban never numbered more than 25,000 men—even at the height of the US surge when there were over 150,000 Western troops in Afghanistan and twice that many Afghan soldiers.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Aerial “painting” over Innsbruck, March 2012.

Digital photograph.

Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast:

Mario Götze has the face of a choirboy and the sort of wispy fuzz on his chin that would be derided as “bum fluff” in an unforgiving schoolyard. He also has venom in his striker’s boots, venom with which he delivered death to Argentina in the World Cup final in Rio de Janeiro.

We had had a captivating but goalless 90 minutes of regulation play and were in the game’s supplementary phase. Andre Schürrle, Germany’s winger, ran down Argentina’s left flank and looped a luscious pass to Götze in the 23rd minute of extra time. Götze, the German center-forward, had made his way into a scoring position behind a scrum of defenders, and what he did next was balletic and ruthless: He let the ball come on to his chest, which was tensed to receive it but soft enough to drop the ball to his feet; and as the ball descended, the pace of Schürrle’s pass having been taken off it, Götze whipped it into the Argentine goal. Germany led 1-0. Minutes later, it had won, 1-0.

Let us pause, here, for a taste of numbers: Until Götze’s goal, scored with just over six minutes left on the clock, Argentina had not conceded for 457 minutes of play. That is an astonishing spell of impregnability, one that looked set to last through to a penalty shoot-out tonight.

More here.

J. J. Goldberg in Forward:

In the flood of angry words that poured out of Israel and Gaza during a week of spiraling violence, few statements were more blunt, or more telling, than this throwaway line by the chief spokesman of the Israeli military, Brigadier General Moti Almoz, speaking July 8 on Army Radio’s morning show: “We have been instructed by the political echelon to hit Hamas hard.”

That’s unusual language for a military mouthpiece. Typically they spout lines like “We will take all necessary actions” or “The state of Israel will defend its citizens.” You don’t expect to hear: “This is the politicians’ idea. They’re making us do it.”

Admittedly, demurrals on government policy by Israel’s top defense brass, once virtually unthinkable, have become almost routine in the Netanyahu era. Usually, though, there’s some measure of subtlety or discretion. This particular interview was different. Where most disagreements involve policies that might eventually lead to some future unnecessary war, this one was about an unnecessary war they were now stumbling into.

Spokesmen don’t speak for themselves. Almoz was expressing a frustration that was building in the army command for nearly a month, since the June 12 kidnapping of three Israeli yeshiva boys. The crime set off a chain of events in which Israel gradually lost control of the situation, finally ending up on the brink of a war that nobody wanted — not the army, not the government, not even the enemy, Hamas.

More here.

Stewart Wood in The Guardian:

Something strange is stirring in Britain this weekend. It's the sound of Brits being nice about Germany. In tonight's World Cup final in Rio, Germany face Argentina at the end of the most memorable tournament in my lifetime. And it seems pretty clear that, for many of us, Germany is the team we will be cheering. A cynic might say this is just because dislike for Argentina exceeds that for Germany. But that's not what is going on. Germany's football in Brazil (and especially against Brazil) has been exceptional. Wanting Germany to win is based on wanting the best team in the tournament to win.

Dip into the weekend papers, the blogosphere & the musings of the twitterati, and you'll see multiple variants on a similar sentiment: “I can't quite believe it, and I never thought this would happen, but I find myself supporting Germany. Fancy that!”

Usually our praise for German football is similar to our praise for Germans in other spheres of life where they lead the world. We cloak it in begrudging virtues: “efficient”, “clinical”, “ruthless”. Germans are applauded in the language we use to describe well-functioning inanimate objects, such as Mercedes cars, or Miele dishwashers. And characteristics of good cars and dishwashers are, by implication, characteristics of people that you admire in a slightly resentful way.

So we are impressed with Germany, but we don't have any particular affection for it or its people. We have respect for Germany, but we don't want to spend much time there. We applaud Germans' economic success, but we resent their dominance of the European Union. We make lots of jokes at their expense, but we say they have no sense of humour.

More here.

Via Jennifer Ouellette, Matthew R. Francis in Galileo's Pendulum:

Feynman stories that get passed around physics departments aren’t usually about science, though. They’re about his safecracking, his antics, his refusal to wear neckties, his bongos, his rejection of authority, his sexual predation on vulnerable women. Admittedly, that last one isn’t usually spelled out so blatantly. It’s usually framed as “oh, times were different” or “that was just Feynman being himself” or (if the person was at leasttrying to not to let the behavior slide) “he was a flawed human being”. Some simply ignore that side of him entirely. Some will pull out the admirable example of his encouragement of Joan Feynman, his sister, as proof that he couldn’t truly harbor horrible attitudes about women.

The problem is that the facts are against any excuses. Feynman pretended to be an undergraduate to get young women to sleep with him. He targeted the wives of male grad students. He went to bars and practiced a technique that isn’t so different from the reprehensible “game” of the pick-up artists (PUAs).[1] This is all public record, including anecdotes in his own words from his sorta-memoirs Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think?[2]

At Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker quoted from an infamous passage where Feynman describes the evolution of his thinking on disrespecting women. (For an even longer quote, see this one at the Restructure! blog.) Not only did he think this way, he also considered it important enough to describe in detail for his memoirs several decades after the events in question, and not to repudiate it either. As Koerth-Baker says,

To Feynman’s credit, he seems to decide this isn’t something he wants to keep doing. But he never seems to get what was really wrong with the idea and it’s frustrating that he seems to get close to the realization that you can (le gasp!) just treat women like humans, only to swish past it and end up in a pit of vile crap.

He evidently considered it an important part of his life’s story.

And let’s face it: Feynman frequently unkind toward men too. In his memoirs, he tends to spin things to make himself into the smartest one in the room, and to make even his friends look like losers by comparison. Excessive self-deprecation is one thing, but it seems a trifle unfair to take potshots at friends in a medium where they can’t defend themselves.

In my best behavior, I am really just like him
Look underneath my floorboards for the secrets I have hid.

So wrote Sufjan Stevens in his powerful and creepy song “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” While I think Stevens is going for a quasi-Calvinist perspective on human nature — we’re all so fundamentally screwed up that the difference between an ordinary singer and a serial killer is small — the point that we all harbor secrets is a valid one. Feynman’s life — both the bad and good — are more public knowledge than hopefully most of ours will ever be.

More here.

Gary Marcus in the NYT (image by Tim Lahan):

Different kinds of sciences call for different kinds of theories. Physicists, for example, are searching for a “grand unified theory” that integrates gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces into a neat package of equations. Whether or not they will get there, they have made considerable progress, in part because they know what they are looking for.

Biologists — neuroscientists included — can’t hope for that kind of theory. Biology isn’t elegant the way physics appears to be. The living world is bursting with variety and unpredictable complexity, because biology is the product of historical accidents, with species solving problems based on happenstance that leads them down one evolutionary road rather than another. No overarching theory of neuroscience could predict, for example, that the cerebellum (which is involved in timing and motor control) would have vastly more neurons than the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain most associated with our advanced intelligence).

But biological complexity is only part of the challenge in figuring out what kind of theory of the brain we’re seeking. What we are really looking for is a bridge, some way of connecting two separate scientific languages — those of neuroscience and psychology.

Such bridges don’t come easily or often, maybe once in a generation, but when they do arrive, they can change everything. An example is the discovery of DNA, which allowed us to understand how genetic information could be represented and replicated in a physical structure. In one stroke, this bridge transformed biology from a mystery — in which the physical basis of life was almost entirely unknown — into a tractable if challenging set of problems, such as sequencing genes, working out the proteins that they encode and discerning the circumstances that govern their distribution in the body.

Neuroscience awaits a similar breakthrough.

More here.

Laura Hall in The Atlantic (image: flickr/Ray Dumas):

The nomenclature of the early Internet is domestic: home pages, key words, hosts. And in those days, the web was small, knowable. Search engines contained a finite, hand-indexed listing of every website that had been submitted.

In the late 1990s, GeoCities was one of the first sites that let people create webpages of their own. It was organized into topic-based neighborhoods, and those into suburbs, with what were essentially house numbers. Because the service was around so early on, and because it was free, many users found their first taste of internet self-expression there. When Yahoo! shut down GeoCities in April 2009, there was a concerted effort to collect and archive all of the site’s contents.

“The great paradox about these digital communities is that they’re easily kept around forever, and they are even more easily deleted utterly,” said Jason Scott, an Internet advocate and archivist who launched a digital preservation team that year. His Archive Team worked quickly to capture as much of the info as they could, backing it up on the Internet Archive and releasing a torrent of all of the files, and a handful of other sites scraped and reposted what they could.

“When we founded Archive Team, it was in a dearth of recognition that these communities had lasting historical and societal value,” Scott said. “They were considered to be byproducts, like a street corner—thinking of it as the point where two streets collide, rather than being a hangout that when removed, removes the entire community.”

I recently tried to revisit my own first homepage, a wonder of center-aligned blinking text, purple tiled backgrounds, clever “Under Construction” gifs and pixel-art icons I had traded with other GeoCities page owners. But all that remains is a single mention of the username on someone else’s page, a record of my having visited there once. Because of the nature of the sites, none of the archives of GeoCities is 100 percent complete, and it’s difficult to know for sure how much actually still exists; much of the data is simply being stored for a later date, when technology has reached the ability to collate and curate it all.

More here.

Angus Kennedy in Spiked:

At first sight, it might appear that society has taken a markedly positive moral turn over the past 20-or-so years. The example of the Conservative Party’s embrace of gay marriage alone shows how far we now are from the failure of Conservative prime minister John Major’s ‘back to basics’ campaign to restore traditional moral values in the early 1990s. Cultural and political trendsetters champion any number of apparently progressive moral campaigns: against female genital mutilation, child abuse, poverty, inequality, or any imaginable form of discrimination on the grounds of race, sex or disability. On the face of it, we seem to have the good fortune to be living in a new age of tolerance, born of a society confident and firm in its moral values. One of contemporary society’s most prominent features is the wide level of support for non-judgementalism; namely, the idea that we do not have the right as individuals to lay down the law as to how others should live their lives. This moral-sounding sentiment reaches right to the top of society. Earlier this year no less an eminence than UK Supreme Court judge Lord Wilson of Culworth declared that marriage was ‘an elastic concept’ (ie, as empty as a rubber band), that the nuclear family had been replaced by a ‘blended’ variety, and that the Christian teaching on the family has been ‘malign’. The one (ironic) judgement that today’s non-judgemental morality is happy to make is to judge the judgemental and castigate strict moral codes as malign and abusive.

This residuum of people who still cling to traditional ideas of morality and concepts like duty are routinely denigrated by the right-thinking as intolerant ‘bigots’ or dismissed as reactionary religious rednecks. Society’s apparent moral confidence is betrayed to a degree by its own level of intolerance towards the supposedly morally intolerant and overly judgemental. Would there be a need for today’s moral crusades against child abuse or FGM to be quite so shrill and knee-jerk were they reflective of a society genuinely confident and secure in what is right and what is wrong? A morally confident society might not need to be on such a high-state of moral alert against the dangers supposedly posed to the social fabric by cases such as the black Christian couple in Derby whom Derby Council denied the right to be foster carers because of their belief that homosexuality is a sin.

More here.

William T. Vollmann in Bookforum:

“WE HAD REACHED THE CROSS ROADS before noon and had shot a French civilian by mistake. . . . Red shot him. It was the first man he had killed that day and he was very pleased.” So far, this incident, and the style in which it is told, would be appropriate for either Redeployment or The Corpse Exhibition, two new works of fiction about the Iraq war, the first by Phil Klay, a former marine who served in Iraq during the surge, and the second by Hassan Blasim, an Iraqi filmmaker and writer who moved to Finland as a refugee in 2004. In fact it comes from a late Hemingway story called “Black Ass at the Cross Roads.” The setting is France, sometime after D-day, when the Nazis are fleeing. The narrator’s business is to kill them as they go by. By the standards of the Iraq war, he turns out to be a bleeding heart. Even after his contingent ambushes a half-track “full of combat S.S.,” the worst of the worst, he feels uncomfortable about keeping souvenirs from their corpses: “It’s bad luck in the end. I had stuff for a while that I wished I could have sent back afterwards or to their families.”

Of course, Hemingway was no career soldier; he was a writer and therefore, never mind his tough-guy stuff, a professional sensitive. But he was around war enough to be grieved, hardened, enlightened, and damaged by it, and to write about it movingly. This essay is not about him except insofar as he can be a foil to the other two writers under discussion. I need not discuss either his greatness or his glaring faults except to say in regard to the former that he surely remains a natural standard of comparison for modern war literature, which is why I mention him now, and in regard to the latter that (excluding much mawkishness about gender relations) sentimentality rarely figures high on his list of official sins.

More here.

Joost Hiltermann in the NYRB (photo: Kamaran Najm/Metrography/Corbis):

[W]hile the Kurds believe Kirkuk’s riches give them crucial economic foundations for a sustainable independent state, the city’s ethnic heterogeneity raises serious questions about their claims to it. Not only is Kirkuk’s population—as with that of many other Iraqi cities, including Baghdad itself—deeply intermixed. The disputed status of its vast oil field also stands as a major obstacle to any attempt to divide the country’s oil revenues equitably. To anyone who advocates dividing Iraq into neat ethnic and sectarian groups, Kirkuk shows just how challenging that would be in practice.

The definitive loss of Kirkuk and the giant oil field surrounding it could precipitate the breakup of Iraq, and while the present government in Baghdad is in no position to resist Kurdish control, a restrengthened leadership might, in the future, seek to retake the city by force. For the Kurds, the sudden territorial gains may also not be the panacea they seem to think they are. The Kurdish oil industry is still much in development, and if the Kurdish region loses access to Baghdad’s annual budget allocations without a ready alternative, it is likely to face a severe economic crisis. Moreover, the same jihadist insurgency that has enabled Kurdish advances in the disputed territories is also a potent new threat to the Kurds themselves. So the taking of Kirkuk poses an urgent question: how important is Iraq’s stability to the Kurds’ own security and long-term aims?

More here.

Jacob Siefring at The Quarterly Conversation:

As a writer-statesman, Aimé Césaire belongs in a small category of twentieth-century writers that includes Léopold Sedhar Senghor, Václav Havel, Winston Churchill, and probably a dozen others. This remarkable man from Martinique, who died in 2008 at age ninety-five and was the author of a score of plays, essays, and volumes of poetry, served for an astonishing fifty-six consecutive years as mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly. Perhaps because his contribution bridged literary and political domains, Césaire’s mark on the ideological climate of France’s former colonial empire remains quite palpable today. Students coming of age across the francophone world learn his name and read his oft-anthologized verses.

It was in the years immediately following the Second World War that Césaire began to emerge as a major voice in French poetry. When his “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (“Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”) was published in France in 1939, it brought no great acclaim to the author; but in 1947 Bretano’s and Bordas reprinted it in New York and Paris, fronted by a new introduction from André Breton. The previous year, France’s premier literary publisher, Gallimard, had published the poetry collection Les Armes miraculeuses (The Miraculous Weapons). The year 1948 saw Solar Throat Slashed (Soleil cou coupé) brought out in a limited press run by a small avant-garde publisher.

more here.

David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

What Greer is arguing for is a kind of environmental absolutism. In her view, the country, the planet even, is not beyond saving, but only if we open up our way of thinking. We need to know more, so we can understand where we are and how to move ahead. To highlight this, she spends much of the book crafting a series of capsule histories — of the ecosystem, the settlement of Cave Creek, the timber industry, Australian botany — that offer context that is both immediate and longer term.

“Every day, as we write labels for the boxes where we sow our freshly gathered seed, we do homage to dead white men,” she writes, a deftly ironic double entendre meant to comment on both her efforts at propagation and the hegemony of generic names for plant life.

A similarly pointed bit of humor emerges in her account of the discovery, in 1893, on what would later be her property, of the biggest cedar anyone had then seen. “Confronted with this botanical marvel,” she writes of the two men who found the tree, “the only thing they could think to do was cut it down.” The joke, however, was on them; sent to the Crystal Palace in London, where it was to be displayed “for perpetuity,” the tree was destroyed when the structure burned in 1936.

more here.

Bettany Hughes at The New York Times:

The name Seneca brings a particular image to mind: a gaunt, half-naked old man, glaring wildly, his veins open, his lifeblood seeping into the small bath beneath him after he was forced to commit suicide. Painted by Rubens, memorialized by Dante in his first circle of hell, gilded into medieval manuscripts alongside Plato and Aristotle, Seneca has come to represent the perils of proximity to absolute power. The central question of James Romm’s “Dying Every Day” is this: When we confront this tragic Roman wordsmith, tutor to the emperor Nero (and, some argue, the power behind that terrible throne), who stares back at us? Is it a tyrannodidaskalos, a tyrant-teacher? Is he the ultimate exemplar of Stoicism, a would-be philosopher king? Or is Seneca simply an accretion of history, a phantom constructed to fit our ravening for heroes, for antiheroes and for the sensational in the stories of antiquity?

Teasing out these conundrums, Romm, the James H. Ottaway Jr. professor of classics at Bard College, gives us a fresh and empathetic exploration of a man who, tantalizingly, seems destined to stay just out of reach.

more here.

A NYC restaurant investigated why its service seems to have gotten slower since 2004, over at craigslist [h/t: Dan Balis] (image from wikimedia commons):

2004:

Customers walk in.

They gets seated and are given menus, out of 45 customers 3 request to be seated elsewhere.

Customers on average spend 8 minutes before closing the menu to show they are ready to order.

Waiters shows up almost instantly takes the order.

Food starts getting delivered within 6 minutes, obviously the more complex items take way longer…
Customers are done, check delivered, and within 5 minutes they leave.

Average time from start to finish: 1:05

2014:
Customers walk in.

Customers get seated and is given menus, out of 45 customers 18 requested to be seated elsewhere.

Before even opening the menu they take their phones out, some are taking photos while others are simply doing something else on their phone (sorry we have no clue what they are doing and do not monitor customer WIFI activity).

7 out of the 45 customers had waiters come over right away, they showed them something on their phone and spent an average of 5 minutes of the waiter's time. Given this is recent footage, we asked the waiters about this and they explained those customers had a problem connecting to the WIFI and demanded the waiters try to help them.

Finally the waiters are walking over to the table to see what the customers would like to order. The majority have not even opened the menu and ask the waiter to wait a bit.

Customer opens the menu, places their hands holding their phones on top of it and continue doing whatever on their phone.

Waiter returns to see if they are ready to order or have any questions. The customer asks for more time.

Finally they are ready to order.

Total average time from when the customer was seated until they placed their order 21 minutes.

Food starts getting delivered within 6 minutes, obviously the more complex items take way longer.

26 out of 45 customers spend an average of 3 minutes taking photos of the food.

More here.