Via Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, Alex Tabarrok offers a reason as to why those who were right about the financial crisis and the Iraq war from the beginning get so little media attention, over at Marginal Revolution.

The answer is media incentives.  It wasn’t just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong.  The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher.  So what does the American public want to hear now?

The public wants to hear why they weren’t idiots.  And who better to explain to the public why they weren’t idiots than experts who also got it wrong?

Richard Dawkins and PZ Meyers discuss their trip to the screening of Ben Stein’s documentary defending intelligent design, Expelled.

Sean Carroll discusses the incident over at Cosmic Variance:

When Chris [Mooney] and Matt [Nisbet] talk to the PZ/Dawkins crowd, they do a really bad job of understanding and working within the presuppositions of their audience — exactly what framing is supposed to be all about. To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt that such a contest is going on. But it’s not all that is going on, and it’s not the only motivation one might have for wading into discussions of science and religion.

There is a more basic motivation:  telling the truth.

Even Paula Varsano, translator of In Praise of Blandness (2004), one of the several Jullien tomes expertly published by Zone Books, voices some of the concerns that arise in scrutinizing the corpus of this singular professor at the Université Paris Diderot and director of the Institut de la Pensée Contemporaine. “Recognized professionally as a sinologist,” writes Varsano in her preface, “Jullien has frequently and publicly asserted that he came to this field not out of a passion for things Chinese but out of a desire to gain a clearer perspective on the roots of his own tradition as found in Greek philosophy. He describes his lifelong foray into Chinese philosophy as a ‘never-ending detour.’” Varsano properly notes that Chinese thought provides Jullien with an ideal vantage from which to view the Western philosophical tradition from the outside, becauseWestern thought’s Indo-European syntax and etymology didn’t shape Chinese philosophy, Western civilization didn’t influence China until modern times, and the field abounds in classic texts that can be confronted directly.

more from Bookforum here.

ONE NIGHT SOME years ago, I tried to explain to my husband why it was that our future kids would be black kids. No matter how light or dark their skin turned out, no matter how coarse or cooperative their hair, chances were they would be black in the eyes of this racialized world, and I needed him to be prepared for that. So that they could be prepared for it.

He looked at me like I was crazy. Then he shot back, “They’re going to be half-white too, you know.” And as occasionally happens in our mixed-race marriage, I saw the canyon of America’s race divide open up between us, right there on the sofa. “There is no such thing as half-white,” I said, and I suddenly felt exhausted.

I am black; my husband is white. We live in a small town where llamas easily outnumber black people.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

In New Humanist, Toby Saul on Kingsley Amis’ defense of alcohol.

You can often hear alcohol being compared (unflatteringly) with other drugs. Usually along the lines of “Why do we kill ourselves and other people with legal alcohol, when we should be killing ourselves and other people with legal coke, MDMA, glue, whatever?” One answer might be that no other intoxicant has ever come close to gathering about itself such a weight and variety of cultural endeavour. Nor has any other drug succeeded in inspiring so many inventive and variegated ways to be mixed and presented to the enthusiast. Not even hashish, with its umpteen strains and baroque rituals, pipes and paraphernalia and assorted tat, has ever come within a whisker of evolving a similar deep-rooted cultural patrimony.

Amis proves this point with a bracingly comprehensive list of cocktails, though some will be of more practical use than others. There are handy recipes for imperishable classics such the Dry Martini, the Bloody Mary and the Old Fashioned, but why not get back to your Anglo-Saxon roots (if you possess them) with Cock Ale?

Herbert Simon once said, “..in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”  Apparently, this also holds true for bees, in the NYT.

Much has been made about the waggle dance, a fox trot of sorts that foraging honeybees do to tell their hive mates when they have found a good food source. The dance — a zigzagging figure eight maneuver performed in the hive — provides cues as to the direction and distance of the trove of flowers so the other bees can locate it.

There is only one problem: Many bees seem to ignore the information. Instead, researchers in Argentina have found, the bees rely on their own memories of where to find food.

In addition to its waggle moves, which provide location information, a dancing bee carries the odor of the flowers it visited. And flower scents have a known effect on bees: if the insects haven’t been foraging for a few days, the scent spurs them to resume, often at a food source they have visited before.

So the question for Walter M. Farina of the University of Buenos Aires, with colleagues Christoph Grüter and M. Sol Balbuena, was what happens when the dance creates a conflict: The dancer provides information about a new location, but the flower odor reminds the watching bees about food that they remember is at another location. What do the watching bees do?

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

It is not your father’s design exhibit! A design exhibit at MoMA 50 years ago would have been a study in restraint. This one, “Design and the Elastic Mind,” is more like a study in exuberance. It is also massive, essentially infinite, in scope. The entire known universe is now subject to design, from the molecular level to the deepest reaches of outer space to every aspect of our own bodies. This show, in its essence, is about the fact that we can design anything and everything. We merely have to think it and we can affect it, our ideas immediately become something we can activate and use.

This does raise one sticky question in the age-old tension between design and art. Ever since at least Kant, we’ve been told that one essential characteristic of art is its uselessness. Kant called the aesthetic realm the realm of “purposiveness without a purpose.” He meant that in aesthetics we get to explore the relationship between our ideas and what they actually produce without being held to account for it. That is the “play” of art. It’s the chance to experiment in that hazy zone between the world as it is given to us and the world as we project upon it. This sense of art as being free from the demands of use is also there in the art for art’s sake movement, and in much of 20th-century Modernism and the avant-garde. Modernism demanded to explore and solve problems in form purely for the reason that they were problems in form. “Art is art,” said Ad Reinhardt, “and everything else is everything else.” The 20th-century avant-garde wanted to monkey around at the limits of reason and sensibility for the sheer sake of it.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Al Hicks was standing outside an old mine in the Adirondacks, the largest bat hibernaculum, or winter resting place, in New York State. It was broad daylight in the middle of winter, and bats flew out of the mine about one a minute. Some had fallen to the ground where they flailed around on the snow like tiny wind-broken umbrellas, using the thumbs at the top joint of their wings to gain their balance. All would be dead by nightfall. Mr. Hicks, a mammal specialist with the state’s Environmental Conservation Department, said: “Bats don’t fly in the daytime, and bats don’t fly in the winter. Every bat you see out here is a ‘dead bat flying,’ so to speak.”

They have plenty of company. In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter. Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as at sites in Massachusetts and Vermont. Whatever is killing the bats leaves them unusually thin and, in some cases, dotted with a white fungus. Bat experts fear that what they call White Nose Syndrome may spell doom for several species that keep insect pests under control. Researchers have yet to determine whether the bats are being killed by a virus, bacteria, toxin, environmental hazard, metabolic disorder or fungus. Some have been found with pneumonia, but that and the fungus are believed to be secondary symptoms.

More here.

From Science:

We humans can do all sorts of things other animals can’t. Take language, for example–an ability researchers have long chalked up to our big and specialized brains. But size isn’t everything, according to a new study, which suggests that important changes in the brain’s wiring played a key role in language evolution. Back in the 19th century, neuroanatomists identified small regions of the human brain–such as Broca’s area in the frontal cortex and Wernicke’s area in the temporal cortex–and linked them to language. (Other, smaller-brained primates have regions that roughly correspond to these areas, but they appear to serve other functions.) More recently, scientists have found that language ability is not just isolated in discrete brain areas but requires close communication between them. For example, patients with damage to the brain’s arcuate fasciculus, which consists of multiple bundles of nerve fibers that connect Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, have severe difficulty speaking and understanding others. And a number of recent studies suggest that the brains of humans are wired somewhat differently than those of other primates.

To see whether the arcuate fasciculus had been rewired over the course of human evolution, a team led by anthropologist James Rilling of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, turned to a relatively new technique called diffusion tensor imaging. The scans showed dramatic differences between humans and the other primates. Although the arcuate fasciculus in all three species was hooked up to the frontal cortex–including with Broca’s area in humans–only in humans did the arcuate fasciculus extend deeply into language-associated areas of the temporal cortex, such as Wernicke’s area. The authors conclude that the evolution of specialized language areas in the human brain was accompanied by the addition of major new wiring via the arcuate fasciculus. The net effect was that Wernicke’s area, which is associated with understanding word meaning, became strongly connected with Broca’s area, which plays an important role in the construction and understanding of sentences.

More here.

S. Abbas Raza in n + 1:

A military dictatorship is a military dictatorship, and a democracy is a democracy. And the latter is always automatically better than the former. It is safer to agree with this statement and to look at every particular complex political situation through the lens of this cliché than to risk having one’s liberal-democratic credentials questioned. But as a friend of mine once remarked, “All arguments for democracy in Pakistan are theoretical. For dictatorships, the greatest argument is the actual experience of Pakistani democracies.” Very similarly, another friend recently commented that “There are of course no theoretical arguments for a dictatorship, only practical ones.” In the case of Pakistan, the last two civilian democratic governments were sham democracies, and while I by no means support everything Pervez Musharraf has done, especially recently, there are various things for which his government deserves praise. Moreover, while George W. Bush may have gotten almost everything else wrong, his Pakistan policy has been basically sound.

More here.

Kathleen Petyarre. Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming.

More on this Aboriginal artist here and here.

North Carolina Tar Heels

Roy Williams is soft. His hands look manicured. They have never pulled tobacco from the dirt. He has never gutted a fish fresh from the sea. Soldiers shoot soft men in the back rather than follow them into battle. Williams should look out. He should watch his back. But junior forward Tyler Hansbrough is a 2-ton bull in baby-blue shorts. When he broke his nose last year, he saw red. He charged. His horns went down and gored opposing players. I would fight with this man. I would die for him. If a bullet met him, I would cradle his head till he left this earth. After the platoon’s soldiers shoot Roy Williams in the back, they’ll follow Sergeant Hansbrough into combat. Hansbrough and UNC charge to the Elite Eight.

more from McSweeney’s here.

I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence.

There are many ways in which science can return us to and enrich the art of literature. We could consider human natures and minds as understood by science and as represented in literature, not just as seen through the approved lenses of race, gender, and class, but in terms, for instance, of the human life history cycle, or social cognition, or cooperation versus competition. Or we could develop multileveled explanations that allow room for the universals of human nature, and for the local in culture and history, and for individuality, in authors and audiences, and for the particular problem situations faced in this or that stint of composition or comprehension.

more from The American Scholar here.

All theater is magic. Even the most naturalistic of productions seek to deceive us into supposing that the stage we see is really someplace else: a cluttered living room, a sterile doctor’s office, a grimy inner-city diner. But few things can be so spellbinding as a play whose director shrugs off literalism and chooses instead to wave the wand of imagination. That’s what happens in the production of “The Tempest” currently being presented by Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project, in which Patrick Swanson takes Shakespeare’s tale of a ship run ashore on an enchanted isle and turns it into a 19th-century magic show. I’ve reviewed many memorable Shakespeare productions in this space, but Mr. Swanson’s “Tempest,” like the “King Lear” that he mounted for Actors’ Shakespeare two seasons ago, ranks very near the top of my list.

more from the WSJ here.

It seems that the spectre than haunts Europe is that of 1968. Alain Badiou in The New Left Review:

Sarkozy has now finally finished off the cadaverous form of Gaullism over which Chirac presided. The Socialists’ collapse had already been anticipated in the rout of Jospin in the presidential elections of 2002 (and still more by the disastrous decision to embrace Chirac in the second round). The present decomposition of the Socialist Party, however, is not just a matter of its political poverty, apparent now for many years, nor of the actual size of the vote—47 per cent is not much worse than its other recent scores. Rather, the election of Sarkozy appears to have struck a blow to the entire symbolic structuring of French political life: the system of orientation itself has suffered a defeat. An important symptom of the resulting disorientation is the number of former Socialist placemen rushing to take up appointments under Sarkozy, the centre-left opinion-makers singing his praises; the rats have fled the sinking ship in impressive numbers. The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties?

Colin Vaines, Patrick Marber, Sam Taylor-Wood, Joe Wright, and Philip French eulogize Minghella in The Guardian. Philip French:

Anthony Minghella was one of our greatest filmmakers. When I first met him he looked like an elderly art student. Later, shorn of his beard, his disappearing hair cut to the skull, he came to resemble a cheerfully confident Buddhist monk.

Our first meeting was in Cannes in 1992, at a lunch given by Sam Goldwyn Jr for the out-of-competition screening of Minghella’s second movie, Mr Wonderful, a charming, lightweight romantic comedy set in New York’s blue-collar Italian-American milieu, which he understood well from his own background in Britain. I had admired his broadcasting writing, especially a BBC radio play called Cigarettes and Chocolate, in which Juliet Stevenson had appeared (as she did in his first movie Truly Madly Deeply), and thought his Made in Bangkok, an attack on the exploitation of the third world by European tourists, one of the best things to appear in the West End during the Eighties.

On a personal level, I was immediately struck by his charm, modesty and gifts as a conversationalist. At that time I thought him a talented miniaturist, part of the tradition David Lean had been criticising in a controversial speech at Cannes a few years before, when he took British film-makers to task for parochialism and lack of large-scale vision. When in 1996 I saw The English Patient, I realised Minghella was now carrying the torch for ambitious, visionary cinema that had once been upheld by Michael Powell and Lean.

From The Nation:

Win or lose, whatever happens next, Barack Obama is now established as one of those rare, courageous teachers who leads the country onto new ground. He has given us a way to talk about race and our other differences with the clarity and honesty that politics does not normally tolerate. Whether this hurts or helps his presidential prospects is not yet clear, but he has done this for us and it will change the country, whatever the costs to him.

His words should discourage the media frenzy of fear-driven gotcha. His speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday may also make the Clintons re-think their unsubtle exploitation of racial tension. But nobody knows the depth or strength of the commonplace fears streaming through the underground of public feelings. No one can be sure of what people will hear in Obama’s confident embrace, beckoning Americans in all their differences, leaving out no one, to a better understanding of themselves.

More here.

…
Please Call Me by My True Names
Thich Nhat Hanh

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

..

From Scientific American:

A salamander’s limbs are smaller and a bit slimier than those of most people, but otherwise they are not that different from their human counterparts. The salamander limb is encased in skin, and inside it is composed of a bony skeleton, muscles, ligaments, tendons, nerves and blood vessels. A loose arrangement of cells called fibroblasts holds all these internal tissues together and gives the limb its shape. Yet a salamander’s limb is unique in the world of vertebrates in that it can regrow from a stump after an amputation. An adult salamander can regenerate a lost arm or leg this way over and over again, regardless of how many times the part is amputated. Frogs can rebuild a limb during tadpole stages when their limbs are first growing out, but they lose this ability in adulthood. Even mammalian embryos have some ability to replace developing limb buds, but that capacity also disappears well before birth. Indeed, this trend toward declining regenerative capacity over the course of an organism’s development is mirrored in the evolution of higher animal forms, leaving the lowly salamander as the only vertebrate still able to regrow complex body parts throughout its lifetime.

Humans have long wondered how the salamander pulls off this feat. How does the regrowing part of the limb “know” how much limb is missing and needs to be replaced? Why doesn’t the skin at the stump form a scar to seal off the wound as it would in humans? How can adult salamander tissue retain the embryonic potential to build an entire limb from scratch multiple times? Biologists are closing in on the answers to those questions. And if we can understand how the regeneration process works in nature, we hope to be able to trigger it in people to regenerate amputated limbs, for example, and transform the healing of other major wounds.

More here.

Okay, so I am new to the YouTube game. Freddy‘s birthday was yesterday (yes, right on the vernal equinox), but I couldn’t get the video stuff figured out in time. Anyhow, here it is: