An article adapted from Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t, in the NYT Magazine [h/t: Jennifer Ouellette]:

Amitava Kumar in the NYT's India Ink:

When the travel writer Trevor Fishlock went to my hometown of Patna, a journalist greeted him by saying, “Welcome to hell.” A few days later, that particular journalist, who had been zealous in his defense of the freedom of the press, was beaten unconscious.

I read the above story in a piece by Norman Lewis titled “Through the Badlands of Bihar.” But it is not only Western visitors like Mr. Fishlock and Mr. Lewis who portray Patna thus. If you have been keeping track of recent Bollywood movies, the badlands of Bihar have become fertile ground for reaping cinematic violence.

I am writing a book about Patna where I want to present what the people who live there think about it. A part of me believes that Patna might be the victim of bad press. Did you know, for instance, that somewhere in the dark recesses of history, Patna produced the best opium?

I remember making this discovery when I stood on a treadmill in a steamy gym in Florida. Bending down, I looked at what had drawn my attention. The picture in the glossy magazine left open on the treadmill showed swarthy, dhoti-clad men at work in an immense hall, arranging in neat lines circular mounds of — what?

The text above the picture offered a clue: “Connoisseurs, he says, argue as to the source of the finest opium. Some say the best opium comes from Patna, India, along the southern bank of the Ganges.”

Anything good is so rarely said about Patna that my seldom-exercised heart burst with joy. I stole the magazine from the gym. And on returning home, I cut out the picture and the text and stuck it in my notebook.

That was 12 years ago. I have unearthed my notebook now because I have been seized by a simple idea. I am currently in Patna to see my parents. I would like to post flyers on the city’s busy roads that ask, “Does the best opium still come from Patna?”

Jan Breman in New Left Review [h/t: Tunku Varadarajan]:

The largest port on the Arabian Sea, Karachi today has a population over 20 million, on a par with Mumbai, and ranks as the world’s eighth biggest city. Commanding the north-east quadrant of the ocean, with a hinterland stretching up the Indus Valley to Afghanistan, it has been the principal entry-point for US arms and supplies in the ‘war on terror’, while refugees—and heroin—have flowed in the opposite direction. From the bloodstained birth of Pakistan with the Partition of British India, the city’s explosive growth has more often been fuelled by the ‘push’ of geopolitical, agrarian and ecological crises than by the ‘pull’ of economic development. Life in its sprawling katchi abadis, or ‘unpaved settlements’, has much in common with that of other giant undercities, such as Mumbai’s, with the exception that violence plays a significantly greater role here. The vast majority of Karachiites are not only entangled in competition with each other, in a desperate struggle for survival, but must also contend with a brutal climate of aggression fuelled by gangsterized political groupings, the most influential of which also control the armed force of the state. In what conditions do its inhabitants live and what could drive increasing numbers of newcomers to try to survive here?

On the eve of Independence in 1947, the seaport of Karachi had fewer than half a million inhabitants, mostly Hindus, living within the old city walls or in fishing villages along the coast. The British had built up the docks and warehouse districts, constructed a military cantonment and laid out tree-lined streets for themselves to the south of the ‘native’ city, areas still known as Clifton and Defence. Partition led to an exodus of some of the city’s Hindus to India, and the arrival from that country of a much larger number of Muslims: around half a million Urdu-speaking Mohajirs (refugees), who abandoned property and possessions south of the new border to flee to what was now the capital of Pakistan.

The phrase comes up again and again as I sift through dozens of Soviet documents of the period. By 1986 the ardent years of the Space Age were of course over, its most notable vestiges a few space stations orbiting Earth, but the embers still retain a beguiling, and decidedly nostalgic, glow. In East Berlin especially there has always been a great habitation of the sky: the television tower in Alexanderplatz, often beheaded by fog, the stately socialist buildings lining Karl Marx Allee, In East Berlin especially there has always been a great habitation of the sky . . . the less elegant prefabricated tower blocks farther east . . . That same summer of ’86 I crossed Checkpoint Charlie and in a bookstore on Friedrichstrasse, one of East Berlin’s most important arteries, I met my friend Stefan. Born in Moscow, where he lived until the age of eight, he spoke, among other things, about his Russian grandfather Ivan Ivanovich Bryanov, who in the late fifties and early sixties had been doctor to the Soviet cosmonauts, endeavouring to cure them of their more terrestrial ailments.

more from Chloe Aridjis at Granta here.

The line, probably John Cage’s most famous statement, appears three times over in his book Silence, which Wesleyan University Press has reissued in a smart fiftieth anniversary edition that also coincides with the centenary of the author’s birth. A self-devouring paradox, Cage’s modest avowal neatly draws attention to the impossibility of saying nothing, for once a frame of communication has been set up, be that frame a book or a musical score, a sheet of paper mounted in a gallery space or a performance scheduled in a concert hall (and Cage worked in all these media), emptiness will speak. It does so in 4’ 33”, probably Cage’s most famous musical statement, which, being entirely silent, offers clear proof that nothing is never simply nothing. The piece is the vanishing point towards which Cage’s forebears Webern and Satie were tending in their reduction of means; it is a space within which members of the audience can react, and others hear that reaction; it is an invitation to pay attention to what is normally unvalued (perhaps the sound of air conditioning or traffic outside); it is a provocation; it is a joke; and, perhaps ideally, it is an opportunity to listen to silence as keenly as we listen to (other) music.

more from Paul Griffiths at the TLS here.

Walk down Brighton Beach Avenue and you’ll see that between the glossy stores selling Russian speciality foods there are now cheap but buzzing Turkish hairdressers, Indian groceries, Chinese nail parlours. These are the newest immigrants, the ones just off the boat. Russians have stopped coming in big numbers – there’s just a steady stream known as the ‘J-1s’. J-1s are non-immigrant visas issued to students. Many try to extend their visas into more permanent ones, and the term ‘J-1’ has become a synonym for pretty Russian girls allegedly desperate to stay in America. ‘You must come to such-and-such a party,’ Little Russia Romeos tell me, ‘it’ll be full of J-1s.’ The J-1s live in crowded apartments, sleep on mattresses and are regularly ripped off by landlords. A few lucky ones get to help Bella sell flowers: she gives them free board at her house and they babysit the kids in return. One of them, Oksana, a psychology student in Lvov, was at Cosmos carrying bouquets in a basket like Eliza Doolittle. She was born in 1992, and is bemused by Little Russia. ‘It’s so Soviet. Or what I imagine the Soviet Union was like. Lvov is so much more European and modern.’

more from Peter Pomerantsev at the LRB here.

There's Nothing More

There’s nothing more
erotic than

one red

Chilean plum
slumbered in

the brown palm
of the curved

hand of the right
man.
.
.
by Wendy Videlock
from Poetry, Vol. 191, No. 4, January

From The Independent:

A gloriously uplifting tale has crossed my desk, and there's so much guff and depressing nonsense in the news just now that I thought it only decent and proper to report it. At St Cuthbert and St Matthias Church of England Primary School in Earls Court, West London, yesterday afternoon, Lady Borwick, deputy mayor of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, opened a new library. It was the culmination of an inspirational campaign by school governors.

From MSNBC:

Physicists say they have “teleported” quantum information farther than ever before. This kind of teleportation isn't quite what Scotty was “beaming up” on television's Star Trek, but it does represent a kind of magic of its own. While Star Trek's teleporters transport people from place to place instantaneously, quantum teleportation sends information. A team of scientists from Austria, Canada and Germany say they beamed the quantum state of a particle of light from one island to another 89 miles (143 kilometers) away. “One can actually transfer the quantum states of a particle — in our case a photon — from one location to another location without physically transferring this photon itself,” explained physicist Xiaosong Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. To do this, the researchers started out with three particles: one particle to be teleported, and two “entangled” particles. Entanglement is one of the most bizarre implications of the theory of quantum mechanics, which governs the physics of tiny particles. When two particles are entangled, they become connected in such a way that, even if separated over vast distances, an action performed on one affects the other.

In the recent experiment, all three photons started out on the island of La Palma, one of the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain. One of the entangled photons was then sent through the air 89 miles to the Canary Island of Tenerife. Since the particles were entangled, when a measurement was made of the quantum states of the two particles on La Palma, it affected the particle on Tenerife, too, allowing the first particle to be essentially re-created in a new location without traversing the distance. [Stunning Photos of the Very Small] This achievement beat the previous quantum teleportation distance record of 60 miles (97 kilometers), reported by a Chinese research group months ago. It represents a significant step toward establishing a “quantum Internet” that could allow messages to be sent more securely, and calculations to be completed more quickly, scientists say.

More here.

Hello,

The period for nominating entries is now over.

To browse the full list of nominees and then vote, go here.

Voting will end on Friday, September 14, at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Good luck to all!

Best,

Abbas

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Voting ends on September 14 at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on September 17, 2012. Winners of the contest will be announced on or around September 24, 2012.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

PLEASE BE AWARE: We have multiple ways of detecting fraud such as multiple votes being cast by the same person. We will disqualify anyone attempting to cheat.

Cheers,

Abbas

In New York magazine (via Doug Henwood):

Bhaskar: I can understand the appeal, I really can. He's absolutely dripping with charisma, and his speech last night articulated the Obama line stronger than Obama ever could. Of course, he oozes with a certain unnerving creepiness, but I think that response has more to do with my status as a guy skeptical of used-car salesmen rather than my status as a socialist.

What was interesting about the speech and what “the boy from Hope, Arkansas” has always done well is mix a populist appeal, talking about shared prosperity and equal opportunity in the broad strokes, but actually delivering austerity quite well on the specifics. He did work to reform welfare, and he was a deficit hawk, yet somehow, Clinton manages to maintain the authenticity to present himself as a friend to the poor and downtrodden. It's the beautiful sophistry of the Third Way.

Reihan: I was particularly struck by his reference to the structural component of unemployment, an idea that has had a lot of postcrisis resonance for neoliberals who insist that a robust employment recovery might be beyond reach due to skills deficits, etc. — an idea that President Bush's CEA chair Edward Lazear, oddly enough, has recently challenged. Anything that set off your alarm bells?

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 3 AM Magazine: Awakening Benjamin
2. 3 AM Magazine: Imagining god creating poppies
3. 3 Quarks Daily: On Eating Animals
4. 3 Quarks Daily: The Bhagavad Gita Revisited
5. 3 Quarks Daily: What Kind of Perspectivist is Nietzsche?
6. Big Think: The Moral Significance of Sex Workers and People With Disabilities
7. Bleeding Heart Libertarians: Recharting the Map of Social and Political Theory: Where is Government? Where is Conservatism?
8. Devil’s Analysis: Insrutable Reality
9. Early Modern Thought Online: Is ‘nothing’ relative? (IX): How Leibniz should have posed the ‘ultimate why-question’
10. Engaging Science: Beyond Turf Wars
11. Evolving Thoughts: Metaphysical Determinism 
12. Experimental Philosophy: Factive Verbs and Protagonist Projection
13. FauxPhilNews: Kripke resigns as report alleges that he faked results of thought experiments
14. Flickers of Freedom: Freaks and Geeks and Ordinal Proportionality
15. Language Goes on Holiday: And you may say to yourself, “My God, what have I done?”
16. Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness: Morality of Drone Strikes Response
17. Meditations Hegeliènnes: Kritik des unreinen Gedankes
18. Michael D. Stark: Faith and Uncertainty
19. Opinionator: Are We Ready for a “Morality Pill”?
20. Opinionator: The Moral Hazard of Drones
21. Orexis Dianoētikē: Is Kierkegaard’s Present Age Our Own?
22. Orienteringsforsok: Meaning and Mortality
23. Philosophical Pontifications: The Chinese Nation and the Scattered Brain
24. Philosophy, etc.: Singer’s Pond and Quality of Will
25. Philosophy Sucks!: Cognitive Access: The Only Game in Town
26. Poetry as Socio-proctology: Joshua Greene & Kant’s sick joke
27. Problems of Life: If panpsychism is true, then vegans are screwed
28. Ratio Juris: Toward a Philosophically Sound & Bioethically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law
29. Reason to Stand: Crash course on existentialism with Sartre
30. The Immanent Frame: Love’s Ladder’s God
31. The Philosopher’s Beard: Democracy is not a truth machine
32. The Philosophy of Poetry: A Time for Beauty, A Time for Disfigurement
33. The Philosophy of Poetry: Prophecy and Abstraction in a Passionless Age
34. Tang Dynasty Times: Ai Weiwei and “Das Ding”
35. Tomkow: A Few Short Steps to the Gallows
36. Tom Paine’s Ghost: Atheist Morality: Ratcheting Forward
37. TTahko: The Philosophical Significance of the Higgs “Discovery”
38. Waggish: Galen Strawson, Buddhist Philosophy, and Radical Self-Awareness
39. Words, Ideas, and Things: The Heterosexual Redefinition of Marriage
40. Yeah, OK, But Still: What “Self” Are We Failing to Discover?

Morgan Meis on Jonathan Franzen's Farther Away in The Smart Set:

From his usage of words like “passion,” “obsession,” and “love,” it's obvious Jonathan Franzen thinks birdwatching is neither pathetic, nor, more importantly, is it harmless. For Franzen, birdwatching is a big deal. Paying attention to birds can change you. It can transform your sense of self and the world. Franzen knows this because it happened to him.

Many of the essays in Franzen's book therefore touch on the subject of watching birds. A couple of essays are explicitly about birdwatching, which Franzen has done in Cyprus, on an island in the South Pacific known as Masafuera, and in China, among other places. Franzen has become a defender of the birds. He is appalled by the killing of birds and by the destruction of their natural habitat. He laments with great pathos the lusty shooting of migrant birds that is a favorite pastime of the people of Malta. But what does it mean, this birdwatching, and why does Franzen keep coming back to the theme of birds over and over in his essays?

I wonder if Franzen's special feeling for the birds is related to the evolutionary quirks of bird morphology. As everyone knows by now, birds are the modern descendants of the dinosaurs. Over long eons, the dinosaurs sprouted wings and feathers and took to the air. In so doing, they shed much of their fearsome nature. Even the hunting birds of today — the eagles and hawks — while fearsome to the small rodent upon whom they might swoop, are so elegant and lovely in flight that it is difficult to associate them with the fierce brutality of the dinosaur. The change from dinosaur to bird is a change from something terrible to something refined. Consider as well the bones of the bird. A bird will fly. In order to fly, that bird must be, literally, light as the air. The bones of the bird have thus become porous and slight things over millions of years of evolution. In becoming birds, the dinosaurs took on a lightness, a fragility that has characterized them ever since. This fragility is very important to Franzen. It is the central factor in his transformation into a bird lover.

From The Paris Review:

“I was born in a house with the television always on.” The lyric comes from “Love For Sale,” a song penned by David Byrne and recorded on the Talking Heads album True Stories, but the same could be said for where I grew up, in suburban Philadelphia. My dad watched television even when cooking dinner, which seemed crazy to me: minding an open flame while keeping one eye on some “reality” courtroom drama—not sure you can rightfully call those staged screamfests real. Judge Judy was such a constant presence, she feels like a family friend. I hear her gravelly voice chewing some idiot out and smell Dad’s stir-fry.

Our house was small enough that, unless I played music, I couldn’t escape the tube’s empty murmuring, not even in my room, which abutted my parents’. As a teenager, then, it made sense that I’d fall in love with the Talking Heads song “Found a Job,” from their 1978 album More Songs About Buildings and Food. David Byrne, the band’s vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter, doesn’t so much sing as sing-narrate the story of a couple, Bob and Judy, who are frustrated while watching television because “nothing’s on tonight.” Byrne as narrator intrudes upon this domestic scene like one of those omniscient charlatans on infomercials—But wait! There’s a solution to their problem!—suggesting they “might be better off … making up their own shows, which might be better than TV.”

More here.

Raghu Karnad in n+1:

There’s no picture more traumatic to the Indian imagination than that of thousands of people crammed into trains, fleeing for their lives. Flash back to 1947, when trains crossing between West Pakistan and north India steamed out of their stations filled with refugees and arrived at their destinations filled with corpses. The migrating dead were Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who—stranded on the wrong side of the religious partition of British India, learning that it was now open season on their community and property—took flight for the border. About a million never made it. So (sixty-five years ago to the day), as India awoke to sovereignty and democracy, the sight before its eyes was a snarl of minority terror, slaughter, and trains.

This was the image that much of India had to suppress, and a few provocateurs predictably stoked, on August 15 this year. It should have been another drowsy Independence Day, a mid-week chance to sleep in while the monsoon shook the last drops out of its watering-can. Instead, at Bangalore’s City Station, thousands of people pressed into emergency trains leaving for distant Guwahati, the latter a transport hub for the seven small states in India’s out-flung northeastern limb.

Most of the indigenous groups in that region (“Northeasterners” to the rest of us) have facial features and skin-tones that make them look more like South-East Asians than what we think of as Indians—a matter they’re rarely allowed to forget when they live away from home. In recent weeks, two situations had set the dismal categories of “Muslims” and “Northeasterners” (or in the nasty demotic, “chinkies”) against each other. First, there was a spike in the decades-old persecution of Muslim Rohingyas by the Burmese-majority state of Myanmar. Shortly afterward, violence flared up between indigenous Bodo and migrant Muslim communities in Assam, the largest of the northeastern states, which led to Muslim groups agitating in cities like Bombay. Eventually, in Bangalore, tales of Muslim rage quivered with hyperbole. Skull-capped goons were banging on doors, warning that when Ramadan ended, the blood of Northeasterners would mingle in the streets with blood of the goats. By Independence Day, thousands were crammed into trains, apparently fleeing for their lives.

In the American vision of urban apocalypse, Hope and Doom ride in cars: orders to evacuate lead to a grid-lock on the interstate (in one car, the hero’s wife and daughter are in danger). India doesn’t have enough highway to serve widespread terror; our Horsemen ride the trains.

From Natuure:

Ewan Birney would like to create a printout of all the genomic data that he and his collaborators have been collecting for the past five years as part of ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. Finding a place to put it would be a challenge, however. Even if it contained 1,000 base pairs per square centimetre, the printout would stretch 16 metres high and at least 30 kilometres long. ENCODE was designed to pick up where the Human Genome Project left off. Although that massive effort revealed the blueprint of human biology, it quickly became clear that the instruction manual for reading the blueprint was sketchy at best. Researchers could identify in its 3 billion letters many of the regions that code for proteins, but those make up little more than 1% of the genome, contained in around 20,000 genes — a few familiar objects in an otherwise stark and unrecognizable landscape. Many biologists suspected that the information responsible for the wondrous complexity of humans lay somewhere in the ‘deserts’ between the genes. ENCODE, which started in 2003, is a massive data-collection effort designed to populate this terrain. The aim is to catalogue the ‘functional’ DNA sequences that lurk there, learn when and in which cells they are active and trace their effects on how the genome is packaged, regulated and read.

After an initial pilot phase, ENCODE scientists started applying their methods to the entire genome in 2007. Now that phase has come to a close, signalled by the publication of 30 papers, in Nature, Genome Research and Genome Biology. The consortium has assigned some sort of function to roughly 80% of the genome, including more than 70,000 ‘promoter’ regions — the sites, just upstream of genes, where proteins bind to control gene expression — and nearly 400,000 ‘enhancer’ regions that regulate expression of distant genes (see page 57)¹. But the job is far from done, says Birney, a computational biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, UK, who coordinated the data analysis for ENCODE. He says that some of the mapping efforts are about halfway to completion, and that deeper characterization of everything the genome is doing is probably only 10% finished. A third phase, now getting under way, will fill out the human instruction manual and provide much more detail.

More here.

Ramin Jahanbegloo in Eurozine:

It has been three years since the Iranian Spring, yet its aftershocks are still strongly reverberating in Iran and in the world. With hindsight, the Iranian civic movement of June 2009 stands out as a pivotal moment in modern Iranian history. What started as an uprising against the rigged presidential elections and the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad turned into a mass struggle for civil liberties and the removal of the theocratic regime in Iran. The demonstrations were not simply a reaction to the unfair election but were based on years of built up frustration, dissatisfaction and anger at the repressive rule of the Islamic Republic. As a young, nonviolent and civil movement for change within Iranian society, the Green Movement was an historic battle for the establishment of an accountable and lawful government. As the movement developed, it became increasingly clear that the fraudulent elections had given the Iranian people an opportunity not only to defend what few democratic rights they had, but also to attempt to lay the new foundations for a truly democratic Iran. The more the Green Movement grew and gained momentum, the closer the Islamic Republic seemed to crumbling and coming to an abrupt end.

It is important to highlight that the Green Movement, specifically with regard to its democratic beliefs, did not suddenly materialize in the aftermath of the fraudulent elections. Over the past 20 years Iran has been going through a major political and societal evolution, as its increasingly young population became more educated, secular and liberal. This generational gap has divided Iranian society between essentially conservative and reformist groups and brought liberal ideals to the forefront of political discussions. The Green Movement was arguably a manifestation of the changing political, social and cultural attitudes that have been slowly emerging among Iran's intellectuals, students, women activists and its young population generally.