Bruce Bower in Science News:

People making travel plans may unwittingly heed a strange rule of thumb — southern routes rule. In a new experiment, volunteers chose paths that dipped south over routes of the same distance that arched northward, perhaps because northern routes intuitively seem uphill and thus more difficult, researchers suggest.

Volunteers also estimated that it would take considerably longer to drive between the same pairs of U.S. cities if traveling from south to north, as opposed to north to south, says psychologist and study director Tad Brunyé of the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command in Natick, Mass., and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. For journeys that averaged 798 miles, time estimates for north-going jaunts averaged one hour and 39 minutes more than south-going trips, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Memory & Cognition.

“This finding suggests that when people plan to travel across long distances, a ‘north is up’ heuristic might compromise their accuracy in estimating trip durations,” Brunyé says.

Only individuals who adopted a first-person, ground-level perspective treated southern routes as the paths of least resistance, he notes. From this vantage, one moves forward and back, right and left.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

One of the more elegant, and accurate, answers to the question “why are you a Tory?” is “because I am a pessimist”. Tories do not believe in the perfectibility of the human condition. They deal with human nature as it is. Despite often having a determined individualism, they recognise the superior wisdom of institutions and the lessons of tradition. That, in essence, is what Roger Scruton’s latest book is about. It does what it says on the cover: it describes how useful pessimism as a cast of mind is in times when we appear to be ruled by people under the spell of various fallacies of false hope. Worse than that, the effect of other people’s optimism (and I, like Scruton, use that term in a wider than usual sense) on the rest of us is often negative and sometimes downright destructive.

He takes us through various fallacies of false hope, showing how they cause damage. One is the “born free” fallacy, which began with Rousseau. As Scruton says: “We are not born free. Freedom is something we acquire. And we acquire it through obedience.” He goes on to describe our failing education system as one benighted by this fallacy ever since the Plowden report of 1967, which preceded the creation of “education” as a specialist field of study, populated by “experts” who had little or no classroom experience, but plenty of theories: prime among which was Plowden’s “‘proven’ conclusion that education is a process of free exploration and self-development, in which the teacher plays the role not of expert, example or authority, but of adviser, playmate and friend”. Scruton argues that the logical outcome of this nonsense is that if there is failure, neither the pupil or the teacher is to blame for it, and therefore the state should continue to invest in failure, which is probably society’s fault.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Not long ago, Julia Fischer of the German Primate Center in Göttingen was amused to witness two of her distinguished male colleagues preening about a topic very different from the standard academic peacock points — papers published, grants secured, competitors made to look foolish. “One of them said proudly, ‘I have three children,’ ” Dr. Fischer recalled. “The other one replied, ‘Well, I have four children.’

“Some men might talk about their Porsches,” she added. “These men were boasting about their number of children.” And while Dr. Fischer is reluctant to draw facile comparisons between humans and other primates, she couldn’t help thinking of her male Barbary macaques, for whom no display carries higher status, or is more likely to impress the other guys, than to strut around the neighborhood with an infant monkey in tow. Reporting in the current issue of the journal Animal Behaviour, Dr. Fischer and her co-workers describe how male Barbary macaques use infants as “costly social tools” for the express purpose of bonding with other males and strengthening their social clout. Want to befriend the local potentate? Bring a baby. Need to reinforce an existing male-male alliance, or repair a frayed one? Don’t forget the baby.

More here.

The function of theater is to exaggerate life. In doing so, theater dissolves any claims on authenticity. Nothing is real in the theater; there is only commentary. And fabulous outfits. Funnily, this is also the function of punk. Including the outfits. To understand punk as authentic, as untheatrical, is a gross misconception. Flamboyantly adorned protopunk musicians in the 1970s such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan — musicians who overtly referenced theater — had their roots in Weimar cabaret and opera. Punk bands had their roots in Dada and agitprop. The Clash (for example) has much more in common with Awake and Sing! — Clifford Odets’ subversive 1930s play about defiance and youth — than (say) the lazy, grungy cock rock of the ’90s that declared itself punk’s true heir. “Kick over the wall ’cause government’s to fall/How can you refuse it?/Let fury have the hour, anger can be power/D’you know that you can use it?” sang the Clash in “Clampdown.” “If this life leads to a revolution,” Jacob says in Awake and Sing!, “it’s a good life. Otherwise it’s for nothing.”

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Vermeer’s painting of a maidservant pouring milk, on loan to the Met from the Rijksmuseum is a work of extraordinary fullness in every respect. This feeling of uncanny amplitude is partly the result of how in the way Vermeer made his own sunlight coursing through a window (a “cool graced light,” in Frank’s O’Hara’s phrase, if ever there was one) acts on bits of earthly surface, affording a kind of extreme visibility to each thing exposed in its path. Light in Vermeer is such a fact of aesthetic experience, so intrinsic to everyone’s appreciation of his art, that it may have blinded us to a great deal else that shows up in the pictures. Neither signed nor dated, on a near-square canvas nearly a foot and a half in either dimension, the picture, for all its grandeur, seems a hinge work of Vermeer’s early maturity. Better known nowadays as The Milkmaid, it’s an anomaly within his output generally, its worked-up surface and culinary subject matter stated comparatively coarsely, a less delicate image overall than the preternatural refinements soon to come. The Met curator and scholar of Dutch art Walter Liedtke places it historically in the company of other paintings, some of them, like the Cavalier and Young Woman in the Frick, in similarly compact formats done around 1657-58, when Vermeer was in his mid-twenties.

more from Bill Berkson at artcritical here.

Buildings, in many ways, represent the opposite of nature. From a modest suburban house to the most majestic skyscraper, a building signals the presence of people in a place, differentiating human spaces from their surroundings. The built environment consists of organized, inert structures that contrast with the wildness, vitality, and constant change of the natural world. Buildings clash with nature in another sense, too — constructing and occupying them takes a substantial toll on the environment. In the United States, the construction industry is responsible for much of the waste that ends up in landfills. The use of buildings — consider the lights, the elevators, the air conditioning — accounts for a healthy fraction of the country’s electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. In recent years, lower impact “green buildings” have crept up in popularity. But a new movement believes that these measures have not gone nearly far enough — that even today’s ecoconscious apartments and offices produce waste and greenhouse gases, while merely scaling back the damage. What we need to do, according to the architects and scientists driving this movement, is fundamentally rethink the concept of a building.

more from Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow at the Boston Globe here.

by Jeff Strabone

Recent catastrophic events have brought renewed attention to the relationship between government and business in the United States. Over the thirty years since Ronald Reagan’s election as U.S. President, the great ideological project of our era has been the narrowing of options in matters of political economy, and their replacement by the mantra that government is bad and all that it does is a restriction of freedom. The most fanatical equate the individual’s freedom to wield his money and property as he will with the freedoms protected by the First Amendment, as if the spending of money were up there with religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition. This movement has reached its apogee, so far, in the government’s refusal to regulate derivatives in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, in the 2010 Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, and in the unregulated hand wielded by BP and others in their deepwater drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico. It is high time for the sun to set on that right-wing dream. Now is the time for a new morning in America, one where we all understand government’s proper role in the market.

Before we can get to that new ideological moment, we will have to see clearly the misunderstandings that the Reagan-era narrowing has yielded. In previous articles for 3QD, I have talked about the futility of lamenting that corporations ‘just don’t get it’. This is the sort of phrase one hears from those who mistakenly think that corporations can be shamed into humanitarian behavior. The more worthwhile consideration, shame being institutionally impossible, is how we can make corporations behave in more tolerable ways that don’t lead to economic collapses and ecological disasters. The problem and the solution are the same and can be summed up in one word: law. The thing we must recognize about corporations is that they will do whatever the law allows. It sounds so simple, yet the implications are vast.

Read more »

Sughra Raza. Dusk on Korangi Road. March 2010.

Digital photograph, with slight embellishment.

Note: Abbas, this one's a challenge for you. Next Monday you have to tell me exactly where this picture is taken, and from what vantage point!

Q: Tuna roll? Or a nut?
A: No, sir, away! A papaya war is on!
Q: Murder for a jar of red rum?
A: No, cab. No… tuna nut on bacon!
Q: Laminated E.T. animal?
A: I’m a lasagna hog, go hang a salami.
Q: Do geese see God?
A: God lived, devil dog.
Q: He did, eh?
A: No, Devil lived on.
Q: Devil never even lived!
A: A Santa dog lived as a devil God at NASA.
Q: Was it a car or a cat I saw?
A: Senile felines.
Q: So, cat tacos?
A: Step on no pets.
Q: Borrow or rob?
A: No, I told Ed “lotion.”
Q: Are Mac ‘n’ Oliver ever evil on camera?
A: No, Mel Gibson is a casino’s big lemon.
Q: Won’t lovers revolt now?
A: No, Sir, panic is a basic in a prison.
Q: Name now one man.
A: No, I tan at a nation.
Q: I’m a pup, am I?
A: Egad! A base tone denotes a bad age.
Q: Dammit, I’m mad!
A: No evil shahs live on.
Q: Are we not drawn onward to new era?
A: No sir, prefer prison.
Q: Ah, Satan sees Natasha!
A: As I pee, sir, I see Pisa!
Q: Did I cite Operas Are Poetic? I did.
A: Egad! An adage!
Q: May a moody baby doom a yam?
A: Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.
Q: Now do I repay a period won?
A: Red rum, sir, is murder.
Q: Some men interpret NINE memos?
A: Semite times.
Q: Won’t I panic in a pit now?
A: Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!
Q: Lisa Bonet ate no basil?
A: Rats at a bar grab at a star.
Q: I, man, am regal; a German am I?
A: Bar an arab.
Q: Live, O Devil, revel ever! Live! Do evil!
A: In words, alas, drown I.
Q: Bombard a drab mob?
A: A man, a plan, a cat, a ham, a yak, a yam, a hat, a canal-Panama!

Inspired by Justin's recent musings, I compiled this 50-line “conversation” from a list of palindromes.

Editor's Note: In the spirit of The New Yorker's popular caption contest, we will be presenting original cartoons done for 3QD by the very talented Robert Pichler. Unlike The New Yorker, we are not running a real contest, but just for fun, we encourage you to suggest captions in the comments area.

Anil Ananthaswamy in New Scientist:

IT'S the ultimate sleeper agent. An energy field lurking inactive since the big bang might now be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

In the late 1990s, observations of supernovae revealed that the universe has started expanding faster and faster over the past few billion years. Einstein's equations of general relativity provide a mechanism for this phenomenon, in the form of the cosmological constant, also known as the inherent “dark energy” of space-time. If this constant has a small positive value, then it causes space-time to expand at an ever-increasing rate. However, theoretical calculations of the constant and the observed value are out of whack by about 120 orders of magnitude.

To overcome this daunting discrepancy, physicists have resorted to other explanations for the recent cosmic acceleration. One explanation is the idea that space-time is suffused with a field called quintessence. This field is scalar, meaning that at any given point in space-time it has a value, but no direction. Einstein's equations show that in the presence of a scalar field that changes very slowly, space-time will expand at an ever-increasing rate.

Now Christophe Ringeval of the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium and his colleagues suggest that a quintessence field could be linked to a phase in the universe's history called inflation. During this phase, fractions of a second after the big bang, space-time expanded exponentially. Inflation is thought to have occurred because of another scalar field that existed at the time. But what if a much weaker quintessence field was also around during inflation?

Étienne Balibar argues that it is in The Guardian:

Within a single month, we have witnessed Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece announcing his country's possible default, an expansive European rescue loan offered to him on the condition of devastating budget cuts, soon followed by the “downgraded rating” of the Portuguese and Spanish debts, a threat on the value and the very existence of the euro, the creation (under strong US pressure) of a European security fund worth €750bn, the Central European Bank's decision (against its rules) to redeem sovereign debts, and the announcement of budget austerity measures in several member states.

Clearly, this is only the beginning of the crisis. The euro is the weak link in the chain, and so is Europe itself. There can be little doubt that catastrophic consequences are coming.

In response, the Greek protests have been fully justified. First, we have been witnessing a denunciation of the whole Greek people. Second, once again the government has betrayed its electoral promises, without any form of democratic debate. Lastly, Europe did not display any real solidarity towards one of its member states, but imposed on it the coercive rules of the IMF, which protect not the nations, but the banks.

The Greeks were the first victims, but they will hardly be the last, of a politics of “rescuing the European currency” – measures which all citizens ought to be allowed to debate, because all of them will be affected by the outcome. However, to the extent that it exists, the discussion is deeply biased, because essential determinations are hidden or dismissed.

In its current form, under the influence of the dominant social forces, the European construction may have produced some degree of institutional harmonisation, and generalised some fundamental rights, which is not negligible, but, contrary to the stated goals, it has not produced a convergent evolution of national economies, a zone of shared prosperity. Some countries are dominant, others are dominated. The peoples of Europe may not have antagonistic interests, but the nations increasingly do.

Pierre Wagner in Eurozine:

Analytic philosophy has a complex history of more than one hundred years and this movement is so variegated that it can hardly be characterized by a single feature. Most of those who have tried to do so either were not aware of its diversity or considered only some part of its history. For example, it is sometimes believed that analytic philosophy is committed to a thoroughly anti-metaphysical stance. Such a belief may be rooted in some of the famous pronouncements of the logical empiricists, in the philosophical method put forward by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, or in the fact that some of the works of early analytic philosophy due to Russell and Moore – two of the founding fathers of the movement – have usually been interpreted as reactions against Bradley's metaphysics and other versions of the British idealism of the time. Other facts, however, which support a completely different view, should not be overlooked. For one thing, Russell's theory of the proposition and his logical atomism, as well as his philosophy of logic, clearly had metaphysical implications. For another, the logical empiricists' anti-metaphysical crusade, which had been forceful in the twenties and the thirties, began to run out of steam in the sixties. At that time, other prominent figures of analytic philosophy were much less prone to reject any form of metaphysics as fundamentally unclear or unscientific: Quine's famous criterion of ontological commitment had already been formulated in a paper which appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, Strawson had published his Individuals. An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, and Kripke's semantics for modal logic would soon arouse a wave of metaphysical thinking about the existence of possible worlds. Today, metaphysics is a well established and respected important part of analytic philosophy – indeed, one of its main divisions – although the style of the authors who take part in it is, to be sure, not really akin to the one Hegel or Bergson used in their writings.

Over at Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov reviews Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age:

In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned “Drunken Pirate,” on MySpace. The photo showed Snyder wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, and the university accused her of promoting underage drinking. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger tells the story in his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Snyder lost control over the photo when it was indexed by Google and other search engines: “the Internet remembered what Stacy wanted to have forgotten.”

Snyder’s story, and others like it, motivate Delete’s plea for “digital forgetting” (though it turned out that the university had other reasons to deny Snyder her certificate, including poor performance). According to Mayer-Schönberger, we have committed too much information to “external memory,” thus abandoning control over our personal records to “unknown others.” Thanks to this reckless abandonment, these others gain new ways to dictate our behavior. Moreover, as we store more of what we say for posterity, we are likely to become more conservative, to censor ourselves and err on the side of saying nothing.

For people like Snyder, Mayer-Schönberger proposes a creative remedy: enable users to set auto-expiry dates on information. Thus, Snyder’s “drunken pirate” photo could disappear from the Internet in time for her to receive the teaching certificate. Even if a third-party discovered the photo, Snyder could adjust its expiration date and destroy all digital copies—including those cached by search engines—with a few clicks. Were she to appear in someone else’s photo, Snyder would be able to negotiate the proper expiration date for this photo with the photographer.

The details of the proposal are a little implausible, but then, Delete is more a romanticist rebellion against technology than a how-to manual. The focus of the rebellion is technologically enhanced remembering, and Delete is an impassioned call for less of it.

From Wired:

Bat Bombs

Toward the end of World War II, the Air Force was looking for a better way to burn Japanese cities to the ground. A dental surgeon contacted the White House, and suggested strapping small incendiary devices to bats, loading them into cages shaped like bombshells and dropping them over a wide area.

According to the plan, millions of bats would escape from the bombshells as they parachuted toward earth, and the flying mammals would find their way into the attics of barns and factories, where they would rest until the charges they were carrying exploded. In the early 1940s, a test with some armed bats went awry, and they set fire to a small Air Force base in Carlsbad, New Mexico. After that accident, the project was turned over to the Navy, which continued it for more than a year. During that time, the Marines conducted a successful proof of concept at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, where they released bats over a mock-up of a Japanese city. The critters were able to start quite a few fires.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world. An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old linguist draws on a range of sources in the book to show language reflecting the society in which it is spoken. In the process, he explains why Russian water (a “she”) becomes a “he” once you have dipped a teabag into her, and why, in German, a young lady has no sex, though a turnip has.

What's your new book about in a nutshell?

It's about why the world can look different in other languages. I try to explain why in the race to ascribe to our genes all the fundamental aspects of language and thought, the immense power of culture and nurture has been grossly underestimated.

More here.

The Fat Lady

“Can’t talk,” I say, doing 85. “Can’t hear
or talk.” I snap shut the phone,
cut him off, hold the dead phone
to my ear like a hankie-wrapped
ice-pack to a contusion. I slow to 70;
the fat lady I cut off at the onramp
shouts through both our closed windows
so wide her mouth’s all teeth and
tongue and dark and her Jesus-fish
and troop loop ride away, I-95 rushing
up too superreal like a movie-promo
before digital got finesse. Green highway
signs only tell how to get where you
already know to go. Used car lots
flash by like jewelers’ windows;
last pale sheets of sun dribble away
as evening finds its shape against
the things of the ground,
loses shape becoming night—

She was tired of sad modern endings.
She was tired of modern sadness and ennui.
She narrated things calmly and swiftly
like an easy-running stream
beneath the racing jumping flux—
unnatural this hum of narration,
the way the sun’s unnatural—unreal—
she wanted 19th Century endings—
believably happy wives—
turn the radio louder…
the problem might be she calls herself “she”…

so they bleed, I’m toothing
dry skin off my lips, dropping the phone
on the car floor under the brake—
oil refineries are nets and
scaffolding and tinker toys set
far back from the road—and everywhere,
tire-tread shorn from truck-wheels,
collars and cuffs ripped free
and never swept up, washed up
along and leaning against and kissing
at the median strip, jumps up
to twang the chassis—I duck down,
pick up the phone, the car sways,
I hit redial, can’t stop choking—
“Look,” I say. “I won’t say sorry.
It’s nothing either of us did. Can’t we
just move on from here?”—“Can’t talk,”
he says, hangs up. No static. Smooth
techno-silence like a moral that’s
big, bigger than the road is fast.

How his hair lifts and falls. Ahead,
an explosion: brake-lights
sequentially burn back at her,
smoke pouf becomes a skein
they all drive through: an
18-wheeler’s tire has blown
apart and now the truck limps
shedding tread that minivans,
Hyundais, Escapes, H2s, swerve
to avoid, graceful conga
line of cars.
She saw this driving
along, the veins of her breasts
the same blue as old roads, the cars
drag their red lights, movable
puddles, behind them. The injured
truck clunks along the shoulder
toward the rest-stop ramp, tire
clinging to the back wheel rim
coming loose, whapping, slapping,
whacking the ground, like a wife
pounding her pillow, alone all night.

by Daisy Fried
from The Manchester Review,
Issue 4, February, 2010