From DuckRabbit:

The other day at Language Log there was a post directing us to a philosophically-themed Dinosaur Comic, where T-Rex jubilantly schools philosophers with his deflationary solution to the sorites paradox. I have a number of comments about that, but for now I want to address one aspect of one of the comments there (as you'll see, that will be plenty for today). The commenter, Marinus, after giving an excellent explanation of why the sorites paradox is indeed a real problem in philosophy, suggests that some philosophers, Wittgenstein among them, are committed to the idea that it is impossible for anyone to use a word incorrectly. Marinus does not mention any other such philosophers, and the attribution to Wittgenstein seems like a stretch, or is at least not obvious.

Putting Wittgenstein to one side for now, I can attest that Akeel Bilgrami, following Davidson, has stated explicitly that “normativity is irrelevant to the meaning of words” (“Norms and Meaning”). Here, however, I would like to give some reasons why such talk of using words wrongly is perfectly natural, and, more importantly, can be harmless even by Davidsonian lights. That is, it will seem at first that in helping myself to properly semantic normative considerations, I invite the Platonism which both Davidson and Bilgrami correctly reject. My task will be to show, or at least suggest, that in so doing I issue no such invitation. (Bilgrami actually does qualify his claims somewhat, but not in the way I would prefer. I'll say a bit about this at the end.)

Lynxes and ocelots are members of the cat family…

More here.

From Scientific American:

I’m not your classic “early adopter” when it comes to new electronic gizardry (a word I just made up that means a combination of gizmo and wizardry, with a secondary definition of bird digestion). I’m not even what one ersatz electronics guru referred to as an “early adapter,” although I do sometimes wonder if my purpose in life has been reduced to making sure my various devices are all plugged in correctly. So I’m a bit surprised to be a longtime owner (since February!) of a second-generation Amazon Kindle. The e-reader looks both futuristic and pedestrian, like something Harrison Ford in Blade Runner might be reading from and then bleeding on.

My sister, who travels a great deal for work and is fond of airplane fiction of the Dan Brown and Robin Cook schools, adopted a first-generation model early. Borrowing hers, I was thus able to experiment when I had some travel of my own. I usually take a bunch of books on the road. So I weighed the Kindle against the books—seriously, I put them on a scale—and promptly decided to get one of them there newfangled, thin, low-mass reading machines of my own.

More here.

From Science:

Finding genes that have evolved in humans among our genome's 3 billion bases is no easy feat. But now, a team has pinpointed three genes that arose from noncoding DNA and may help make our species unique. Most genes have deep histories, with ancestors that reach down into the tree of life, sometimes all the way back to bacteria. The gradual increase from the few thousand genes in a bacterium to the tens of thousands of genes in a person came primarily through genome- and gene-duplication events, which created extra sets of genes free to evolve new sequences and new functions. Much of this duplication happened long before humans evolved, though some duplications occurred in the human lineage to create exclusively human twins of existing genes.

But in 2006, geneticists showed for the first time that they could identify truly novel genes. In fruit flies, they came across five young genes that were derived from “noncoding” DNA between existing genes and not from preexisting genes.

More here.

The Two Mothers

A Conversation

The one who cares
is the one you abandon
to the slow germination
of village days.

The other one abandons
her few fallow acres

whose most valued possessions
are beauty & optimism
gods & demons

whose bedroom has become
a shrine to a three speed fan
and singers of renown.

One is the backbone of the shop
ironing (everything
has a perfect crease).

The other gives birth
to a confused offspring – part
bird perhaps, oddly plumed
partly you.

by Adam Aitken

from: Romeo & Juliet in Subtitles;
Brandl & Schlesinger, Sydney, 2000

Noam Chomsky in the Boston Review:

Perhaps I may begin with a few words about the title. There is too much nuance and variety to make such sharp distinctions as theirs-and-ours, them-and-us. And neither I nor anyone can presume to speak for “us.” But I will pretend it is possible.

There is also a problem with the term “crisis.” Which one? There are numerous very severe crises, interwoven in ways that preclude any clear separation. But again I will pretend otherwise, for simplicity.

One way to enter this morass is offered by the June 11 issue of the New York Review of Books. The front-cover headline reads “How to Deal With the Crisis”; the issue features a symposium of specialists on how to do so. It is very much worth reading, but with attention to the definite article. For the West the phrase “the crisis” has a clear enough meaning: the financial crisis that hit the rich countries with great impact, and is therefore of supreme importance. But even for the rich and privileged that is by no means the only crisis, nor even the most severe. And others see the world quite differently.

More here.

Pink Floyd singer Roger Waters narrates short film about West Bank wall built by Israel.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Ammar Ali Qureshi in the Daily Times:

Babur Nama is the action-packed and colourful chronicle of life of Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur (1483-1530) — the daring Central Asian who was the founder of the Mughal Empire in the Indian sub-continent, then called Hindustan. Regarded as the first autobiographical work of a monarch in world history, Babur Nama describes the life of Babur from the time he became ruler, at the age of 11, of Fergana in Uzbekistan, to his struggles and conquests in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Hindustan.

The recent edition published by Penguin is based on translation by Annette Sussanah Beveridge (1842-1929) — an orientalist who became famous as a social reformer for promoting women’s education in British India. However, her major contribution has been as a translator of medieval Indian and Central Asian texts from Turkish into English.

Dilip Hiro, the London-based journalist and writer on the Middle East and South and Central Asia, has abridged and edited this new edition. He has also written an introduction and preface to this slim volume, which has reduced the original translation of 300,000 words to one-third the size without impairing the essence and spirit of this masterpiece.

More here.

Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer will no longer be appearing on bloggingheads. They explain why.

Read more »

In the fall of 1936, after a decade of not doing so, this magazine sponsored a poetry prize. Of the 1,800 poems submitted, said the editors of The Nation, “the overwhelming majority were concerned with contemporary social conflicts either at home or abroad.” The winning poem, Wallace Stevens's “The Men That Are Falling,” was an elegy for soldiers recently killed in the Spanish Civil War, which reads, in part:

These stand among the most uncharacteristic lines that Stevens ever published. Coming upon them in the elegantly compressed compass of the new Selected Poems, it's difficult to imagine that the author of a quietly unnerving pentameter like “The river that flows nowhere, like a sea” could have written the line “Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips.”

more from James Longenbach at The Nation here.

The history of America is the history of the automobile industry: it starts in fields and garages and ends in boardrooms and dumps; it starts with daredevils and tinkerers and ends with bureaucrats and congressmen; it starts with a sense of here-goes-let’s-hope-it-works and ends with help-help-help. We tend to think of it as an American history that opens, as if summoned by the nature of the age, early in the last century, when the big mills and factories were already spewing smoke above Flint and Detroit, but we tend to be wrong. The history of the car is far older and stranger than you might suppose. Its early life is like the knock-around life one of the stars of the ’80s lived in the ’70s, Stallone before Rocky, say, picking up odd jobs, working the grift, and, of course, porn. The first automobile turned up outside Paris in 1789, when Detroit was an open field. (The hot rod belonged to the Grand Armée before it belonged to Neal and Jack.) It was another of the great innovations that seemed to appear in that age of revolution.

more from Rich Cohen at The Believer here.

Brad Delong notes that this is the 70th anniversary of the beginning of World War II, and also of Auden's phenomenal poem “September 1, 1939” (first published in October 1939). In my humble opinion, these 99 lines constitute perhaps the finest political poem every written in the English language. Joseph Brodsky used to lecture on the poem with such happiness and insight that we would all walk away even more overwhelmed by Auden. (A decent transcript can be found in Less Than One.) It is the poem I most frequently recite to myself, still.

Auden was unhappy, perhaps even embarrassed by the line “We must one another or die.” Unless I'm mistaken, he once changed it in one version to “We must love one another and die,” which fails, I think. Brodsky suggested that the line really was trying to say “We must love one another or kill,” but then the rhymes fail.

Read more »

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

The negative comments on my previous column (there were many positive ones too) fall neatly into two groups, the attacks on me and the attacks on my ideas.

Let’s do the ad hominem stuff first. More than a few posters declared that while I talk the talk, I don’t walk the walk. Eric issues a challenge: “So Mr. Fish, how about teaching some comp classes yourself?” English Professor is confident that “we can safely assume that Mr. Fish has never actually taught a composition class himself.” Ditto anonymous writing instructor: “I’m sure that Fish is paid too dearly for his opinions here and elsewhere to actually teach composition classes.” Maeve asks, “By the way, when’s the last time you taught a freshman composition class?”

That one’s easy. The last time I taught a regularly scheduled freshman composition class was my last year teaching in a liberal arts college. That was 2004-2005, and in the years before that, when I was the dean, I taught the course every fall. Since 2005, I’ve been a faculty member at a law school where there are no freshmen to teach, so I’ve had to make do with offering a non-credit writing workshop on Mondays; it’s my version of pro bono work and last fall 50 or so students and a few colleagues took advantage of it.

More here.

Quddus Mirza in Himal Southasian:

The Pakistani state no longer forces the country’s artists to comply with stringent political or moral diktats – but it doesn’t have to.

“We live in a postmodern age, everything is simulation, everything is reference, even dictatorships.”
– Dubravka Ugresic

A young man writes a love letter to his fiancé, and adds a line or two about the government of his country. He posts the letter, but soon after dispatching he realises that if it is opened in the censor office, he is going to suffer because of the casual negative remark he made. In order to avoid such consequences, he decides to apply for a job in the censor department, so he can try to get hold of his letter. To his surprise, he does indeed get a position, and thus starts learning his new tasks. Several months later, during the course of normal post-checking, he finally comes across his letter. He opens it and reads the content. But instead of hiding it or throwing it away, he writes a note that the sender of the letter has committed a crime against the state and must be punished.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

In the United States and much of the Western world, when a couple divorces, the average income of the woman and her dependent children often plunges by 20 percent or more, while that of her now unfettered ex, who had been the family’s primary breadwinner but who rarely ends up paying in child support what he had contributed to the household till, climbs accordingly. The born-again bachelor is therefore perfectly positioned to attract a new, younger wife and begin building another family.

Small wonder that many Darwinian-minded observers of human mating customs have long contended that serial monogamy is really just a socially sanctioned version of harem-building. By this conventional evolutionary psychology script, the man who skips from one nubile spouse to another over time is, like the sultan who hoards the local maidenry in a single convenient location, simply seeking to “maximize his reproductive fitness,” to sire as many children as possible with as many wives as possible. It is the preferred male strategy, especially for powerful men, right? Sequentially or synchronously, he-men consort polygynously.

More here.

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!

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on September 8, 2009. Winners of the contest, as decided by Daniel C. Dennett, will be announced on September 22, 2009.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

Cheers,

Abbas

P.S. If you notice any problems, such as a nominee is missing from the list below, please leave a comment on this page. Thanks.

BEWARE: We have various independent ways of keeping track of attempts at voting multiple times, which I am deliberately not revealing publicly. Any attempts at fraud will be thoroughly investigated, and anyone caught trying to vote multiple times will be instantly disqualified. I don’t think I really need to say this, but there are always a couple of bad eggs who will try!

Ladan Boroumand in Dissent:

In a clumsy remake of an old-time Stalinist show trial, a pale and underfed individual with a distraught gaze recites more or less convincingly a story whose plot is ever the same: A self-told tale of (highly improbable) contacts with American or Israeli agents is put forward as “evidence” of the hapless defendant’s nefarious desire to topple the Islamic Republic.

This treatment is not reserved for oppositionists alone. On the contrary, prosecutors have administered it liberally over the years to former mid- or even high-ranking regime cadres who made the mistake of daring to question some higher-up’s wisdom or claim to command. On April 23, 1982, for instance, the confession of former IRI foreign minister and broadcasting chief Sadeq Ghotbzadeh aired on Iranian state television. He accused himself of plotting a military coup against Ayatollah Khomeini, an alleged crime for which he would be shot that September. A few days later, the highest-ranking Shi’a ayatollah, Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, was given a text to read on television “proving” his connivance with Ghotbzadeh. Shariatmadari’s real “crime” was his disapproval of political rule by the clergy, but the trumped-up confession gave the IRI the legal fig leaf that it needed to silence the ayatollah and keep him under house arrest until his death in 1986.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I've always been suspicious of the birds. Maybe it's because they are always spying on us from above. The ancients understood that the birds were in cahoots with powerful forces. They poked about in bird entrails trying to find messages from the heavens, omens from hell. They wondered whom the birds were working for. Poor Prometheus was punished for the simple and humane act of giving fire to mankind. It is no accident that he was punished with the torture of an eagle eternally feasting on his liver. The birds will always sell us out for a pittance.

Our latest humiliation at the hands of our feathery friends comes in the unexpected realm of art criticism. The birds, it seems, enter any arena if there is the chance of making us look like fools.

Here's what happened. Shigeru Watanabe (a psychologist at Keio University in Tokyo and possibly a man in league with the birds) set up a nefarious experiment. Watanabe showed children's paintings to pigeons; a panel of adults had deemed each work either good or bad. He trained the pigeons to distinguish between them with a system of tasty rewards. When the pigeons pecked correctly, he gave them some seed. Later, he presented 10 paintings to the birds they had never seen. Five of these paintings had been deemed good by humans, five bad. The pigeons recognized the good paintings as “good” twice as often as they recognized the “bad” paintings. In short, they came off as pretty good critics. There are those (names withheld) writing for major publications who might do markedly less well. Given these results, Watanabe claims, “pigeons are capable of learning the concept of a stimulus class that humans name 'good' pictures.”

More Leave a comment

September 22, 2009, NOTE: The winners have been announced here.

September 11, 2009, NOTE: The list of nine finalists can be seen here.

September 8, 2009, NOTE: The list of twenty semifinalists can be seen here.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

In May of this year we announced that we would start awarding four prizes every year for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Professor Steven Pinker, on June 21st. We have decided to do the prize in philosophy next, and here's how it will work: we are now accepting nominations for the best blog post in philosophy. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add upto three wildcard entries of their choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Professor Daniel C. Dennett, who, we are very pleased, has agreed to be the final judge. Professor Dennett will also write a short comment on each of the winning entries.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

* * *

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. 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.

* * *

The winners of the philosophy prize will be announced on September 22, 2009. Here's the schedule:

Today:

• The nominating process is hereby declared open. Please nominate your favorite blog entry in the field of philosophy by placing the URL for the blogpost (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old from today. In other words, it must have been written after August 23, 2008.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!

August 31, 2009

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date, so there is only a week to submit nominations.
• The public voting will be opened immediately afterwards.

September 7, 2009

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

September 22, 2009

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Graham Little. Untitled. 2005.

Colored pencil and gouache on paper.

More here and here.