David Eagleman in Sentient Developments:

One way to appreciate the slowness of your perception is to compare it to the speed of mechanical devices. Take this incredible, sobering “anatomy of a crash,” as described in an Australian magazine and echoed on Tom Vanderbilt’s blog. With fine-grained temporal resolution, it analyzes what happens when a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan is struck in the driver’s door by another vehicle traveling at 50 kilometers per hour:

0 milliseconds – An external object touches the driver’s door.
1 ms – The car’s door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave.
2 ms – An acceleration sensor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event.
2.5 ms – A sensor in the car’s centre detects crash vibrations.
5 ms – Car’s crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy.
6.5 ms – Door pressure sensor registers peak pressures.
7 ms – Crash computer confirms a serious crash and calculates its actions.
8 ms – Computer sends a “fire” signal to side airbag. Meanwhile, B-pillar begins to crumple inwards and energy begins to transfer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant.
8.5 ms – Side airbag system fires.
15 ms – Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill.
17 ms – Cross-car load path and structure under rear seat reach maximum load.
Airbag covers occupant’s chest and begins to push the shoulder away from impact zone.
20 ms – Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant’s chest away from the impact.
27 ms – Impact velocity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A “pusher block” in the seat moves occupant’s pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts controlled deflation.
30 ms – The Falcon has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occupant experiences maximum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity.
45 ms – Occupant and airbag move together with deforming side structure.
50 ms – Crash computer unlocks car’s doors. Passenger safety cell begins to rebound, pushing doors away from occupant.
70 ms – Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car.
Engineers classify crash as “complete”.
150-300 ms – Occupant becomes aware of collision.

The last line is the zinger. Early studies by Benjamin Libet suggest that the last line should perhaps read as high as 500 ms, although others, such as Daniel Dennett, have correctly pointed out that it is impossible to measure the moment of onset of conscious experience, so the exact timing will never be known.

More here.

My former Ph.D. advisor David Z Albert, and Rivka Galchen, in Scientific American:

Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be indirect—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.

We term this intuition “locality.”

Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one. And this particular upending carries with it a threat, as yet unresolved, to special relativity—a foundation stone of our 21st-century physics.

More here. [Photo shows David Albert in a rather typical expository moment.]

From the recovery.gov website which went live yesterday as the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act went into effect:

Welcome to Recovery.gov

Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.

On Our Way: Read the Bill

The President recently signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. Read the full bill here.

///
Avenue A
Frank O'hara

We hardly ever see the moon any more
so no wonder
it's so beautiful when we look up suddenly
and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges
brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans
your hair over your forehead and your memories
of Red Grooms' locomotive landscape
I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather
jacket Norman gave me
and the corduroy coat David
gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco
heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions
in a vast tragic veldt
that is far from our small selves and our temporally united
passions in the cathedral of Januaries

everything is too comprehensible
these are my delicate and caressing poems
I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past
so many!
but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl
to my equally naked heart
///

Gamal Nkrumah looks at the American University of Cairo Press's ambitous plans to translate Egyptian and Arabic texts into English, and argues that, despite their best efforts, they are falling into bed with imperialism, in Al-Ahram (via signandsight):

We haven't mentioned latest star that AUC Press is enthusiastically promoting as heir to their beloved Mahfouz — Alaa Al-Aswany, author of the best-seller The Yacoubian Building and its sequel Chicago. Like Mahfouz, he is an irreverent social critic. Like Mahfouz he is more popular with Western readers than with his own compatriots.

The AUC Press might not intend to be a Trojan Horse for US imperialism. But nonetheless, neocolonialism inevitably seeps in to the its activities here in Egypt, as Sadat's widow's memoirs and the rather tawdry critique of contemporary Egypt mentioned above demonstrates. After all, who selects the so- called treasures of Egyptian culture to “export”? It is Americans and American-trained Egyptians, who invariably reflect what liberal Americans would like to see Egypt as, to see Egypt become, as the McDonalds and Hollywood culture flood Egypt and deluge Egypt's past? There is no separating culture, economics and politics, alas, despite the best of intentions of the albeit well-meaning and highly sympathetic AUC Press staff.

Says Daniel Pipes, of all people: “Naguib Mahfouz is one of those authors, like Norman Mailer or Salman Rushdie, whose biography and political views sometimes overshadow his fiction. Although Mahfouz fills a decidedly smaller stage than Mailer or Rushdie (the Arab- speaking world rather than the English-speaking one), he dominates it far more thoroughly than any novelist here.” But the so-called sages of Stockholm are notorious for dishing out their prizes, especially the literary one, for spurious political reasons, and the fact that Mahfouz, the first Arab to get one, was considered by the Islamists an apostate is no coincidence. The fact that Mahfouz is the jewel in the AUC's crown is also no coincidence. It's he who made them and they, in turn, who made him. The relationship is in an uncanny manner the mirror image of Egyptian-American relations in all their complexity.

Doug Henwood in The Left Business Observer

From Wikipedia:

Slavery in the United States began soon after English colonists first settled Virginia in 1607 and lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865. Before the widespread establishment of chattel slavery, much labor was organized under a system of bonded labor known as indentured servitude. This typically lasted for several years for white and black alike, and it was a means of using labor to pay the costs of transporting people to the colonies.^[1] By the 18th century, court rulings established the racial basis of the American incarnation of slavery to apply chiefly to Black Africans and people of African descent, and occasionally to Native Americans. A 1705 Virginia law stated slavery would apply to those peoples from nations that were not Christian.^[2] In part because of the success of tobacco as a cash crop in the Southern colonies, its labor-intensive character caused planters to import more slaves for labor by the end of the 17th century than did the northern colonies. The South had a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the population.^[1] Religious differences contributed to this geographic disparity as well.

From 1654 until 1865, slavery for life was legal within the boundaries of much of the present United States.^[3] Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there were a small number of white slaves as well. The majority of slaveholding was in the southern United States where most slaves were engaged in an efficient machine-like gang system of agriculture. According to the 1860 U.S. census, nearly four million slaves were held in a total population of just over 12 million in the 15 states in which slavery was legal.^[4] Of all 8,289,782 free persons in the 15 slave states, 393,967 people (4.8%) held slaves, with the average number of slaves held by any single owner being 10.^[4][5] The majority of slaves were held by planters, defined by historians as those who held 20 or more slaves.^[6] Ninety-five percent of black people lived in the South, comprising one-third of the population there, as opposed to 2% of the population of the North.^[7] The wealth of the United States in the first half of the 19th century was greatly enhanced by the labor of African Americans.

More here.

Slavenka Drakulic, author of How We Survived Communism and Even Laugh, in eurozine:

It was the first day of spring with gusts of a cold wind blowing strongly as I walked down Mariahilfer Strasse in Vienna. It so happened that I overheard the conversation of three youngsters walking along. They spoke in Serbian about an event where also some Bosniaks and Croats were present. What drew my attention was not their language per se, you hear plenty of it in the subway and the streets of Vienna nowadays. It was an expression one of them used. “I did not expect there to be so many people who speak our language,” he said. It was apparent to me that by “our language” he did not mean one particular language such as Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. On the contrary, the point was that the young man said “our language” on purpose, i.e. instead of naming that language by its proper name which would have been the politically correct thing to do. This is because “our language” is usually the expression refugees and immigrants – or, for that matter, a mixed group of people from former Yugoslavia meeting abroad – use as the name for their different languages of communication.

From The Guardian:

Pakistani novelists writing in English – long overshadowed by literary giants from neighbouring India – are now winning attention and acclaim as their country sinks into violence and chaos. Tales of religious extremism, class divides, dictators, war and love have come from writers who grew up largely in Pakistan and now move easily between London, Karachi, New York and Lahore. Since the publication of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist two years ago, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a new wave of Pakistani fiction is earning critical acclaim at home and around the world.

Last year came Mohammad Hanif's first novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes – a dark comedy about the Islamic fundamentalist rule of General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s – and Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, which is set in modern Afghanistan. Two keenly anticipated works are due out in the UK in the coming weeks: Kamila Shamsie's fifth, and reputedly finest, novel, Burnt Shadows, and a collection of short stories by Daniyal Mueenuddin, who was compared with Chekhov when some of the tales were previously published in the New Yorker. “Some of us have been writing for many years but suddenly we've had four or five novels coming out together and that's created a buzz,” said Shamsie, whose latest work is an ambitious story that starts off in Second World War Japan and moves to post-9/11 Afghanistan. “Indian writing has been established for 25 years or more, since Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie's book, published in 1981). Pakistani writing is very much in its infancy.

More here.

Scott Horton in Harper's:

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.

Neely’s comprehensive account runs to roughly 15,000 words. It was compiled by law students at the University of California at Davis and can be accessed here. Three things struck me in reading through the account.

First, Neely and other guards had been trained to the U.S. military’s traditional application of the Geneva Convention rules. They were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned. This placed the prison guards under unjustifiable mental stress and anxiety, and, as any person familiar with the vast psychological literature in the area (think of the Stanford Prison Experiment, for instance) would have anticipated produced abuses.

More here.

Stanley Grant at CNN:

Tuba Sahaab looks nothing like a warrior. She is a slight girl of 11, living in a simple home in a suburb of Islamabad. But in Tuba's case, looks are deceiving.

With her pen, Tuba is taking on the swords of the Taliban. She crafts poems telling of the pain and suffering of children just like her; girls banned from school, their books burned, as the hard-core Islamic militants spread their reign of terror across parts of Pakistan.

A stanza of one of her poems reads: “Tiny drops of tears, their faces like angels, Washed with blood, they sleep forever with anger.”

Tuba is not afraid to express her views. Of the Taliban forcing young girls out of the classroom, she says: “This is very shocking to hear that girls can't go to school, they are taking us back to the Stone Age.”

Less than two hours from Tuba's home, the Taliban have control. The one-time holiday destination of the Swat Valley is now a no-go zone. Curfews are in place at all times. Militants kill with impunity.

Human rights activists and people on the ground in Swat Valley speak of a place called “slaughter square” where the Taliban leave the bodies of their victims with notes saying “do not remove for 24 hours.” No one touches the corpses out of fear of reprisals.

More here.

In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s exhilarating victory, many on the Left are wondering how much of their agenda he’ll fight for, and as the early exaltations cool, progressives and militant liberals are staking positions, mustering arguments, and searching for the pressure points necessary to impel President Obama to hold war crimes trials for the Bush administration’s most appalling deeds. How far President Obama is willing to go in battling the inertia of a political culture that never seems willing to confront the sins done in its name is not yet clear, but the early signs don’t look promising. As Newsweek recently reported, “Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration.” As far back as July, Cass Sunstein, an informal Obama advisor, set off progressive alarms by warning The Nation magazine that war crimes prosecutions against the Bush administration might set off a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, and that only the most “egregious” crimes should be pursued. Faced with such early hedging, those dedicated to pursuing war crimes against American officials must fight a two-front war: the first against those timid moderates within the center-left who shy away from the political costs of war crimes prosecutions, and the second against the reactionary nationalism of the American right, which still needs to be persuaded as to the moral necessity of such a campaign.

more from 3QD friend, the big-brained Alan Koenig, at the CUNY Advocate here.

See also the comment from the Dollars and Sense blog by Larry Peterson, about 1/6th of the way down.

Round I:

[Harvey]: In the United States, any attempt to find an adequate Keynesian solution has been doomed at the start by a number of economic and political barriers that are almost impossible to overcome. A Keynesian solution would require massive and prolonged deficit financing if it were to succeed. It has been correctly argued that Roosevelt’s attempt to return to a balanced budget in 1937-8 plunged the United States back into depression and that it was, therefore, World War II that saved the situation and not Roosevelt’s too timid approach to deficit financing in the New Deal. So even if the institutional reforms as well as the push towards a more egalitarian policy did lay the foundations for the Post World War II recovery, the New Deal in itself actually failed to resolve the crisis in the United States. The problem for the United States in 2008-9 is that it starts from a position of chronic indebtedness to the rest of the world (it has been borrowing at the rate of more than $2 billion a day over the last ten years or more) and this poses an economic limitation upon the size of the extra deficit that can now be incurred. (This was not a serious problem for Roosevelt who began with a roughly balanced budget).

[Delong]: [W]e can see that here we have an internationalized version of Fama's Fallacy. If we forced Harvey to actually construct on argument here, he might be able to: he might say that deficit financing means that the U.S. government borrow from somewhere, that Americans don't have the savings to finance deficit spending, and that foreigners' willingness to buy U.S. Treasury bonds is tapped out because of massive borrowing earlier in this decade. And it is at this point that we draw on neoclassical economics to save us–specifically, John Hicks (1937), “Mr. Keynes and the Classics,” the fons et origo of the neoclassical synthesis. Hicks's IS curve gives us a menu of combinations of levels of production and interest rates at which private investment spending and public deficit spending are financed out of the flow of savings. When the level of production is higher, private savings are higher–and thus the combination of private investent and deficit that can be financed is bigger. When the level of production is lower, private savings are lower–and thus the combination of private investment and deficit that can be financed is lower. Any level of deficit can be financed if the interest rate is such that the deficit plus the private investment spending equals the savings that come out of the incomes generated by the corresponding level of output. The question is thus not can government deficit spending be financed–for it can–the question is at what interest rate will financial markets finance that deficit spending.

Read more »

Whittling
Coleman Barks

John Seawright's great uncle Griff Verner
spent much of his last days whittling neck-yokes
for his chickens to wear so

they couldn't get through the wide slat divisions of
his yard fence. There are other possible
solutions to this problem, but eggs have

yolks, and Griff Verner's chickens had yokes, and he
himself had that joke-job in a bemused
neighborhood that watched every move.

Somewhere there's a crate of Griff's chicken yokes, I hope,
as there's a wild shoebox of vision-songs
stashed by a poet whose name we don't know yet,

nor the beauty and depth of his soulmaking, hers. Griff's
white pine, Rembrantian fowl-collars may
have also served as handles to wring their

necks with when Sunday demanded. John's grandmother's
Methodist house had only two books in it, the Holy
Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs. When it rained,

there wasn't much to do indoors, and on Sundays nothing, no
games, no deck of cards, no dominoes. Of course, no
television. I grew up in a house with no

television in the 1940's and on into the mid-50's. We were
in education. Sometimes at night there would
be five different people in four different

rooms reading five different books. John says once
his mother caught Sam and him playing cards
on the floor. She snatched up the deck and said,

“Well, you can play cards in jail.” There's always chores to
do in the methodical world, no spare time to waste or
kill. Throw those idle gypsy two-faces

in the trash. Let them find other haphazard palms to occupy.
John's father could carry on a side conversation with
him while typing a sermon. John remembers how as a

child he would sit and talk with his dad and watch him do
those two word things simul-manu-larynxactly
together in the after-dinner Friday night office.

Griff Verner's whittling comes when you're not spry
enough to chase chickens but take some interest
in the public's consternation with oddness.

Hugh Gusterson reviews Natural Security: A Darwinian Approach to a Dangerous World, edited by Raphael D. Sagarin and Terence Taylor, in American Scientist:

I mainly learned from this volume that evolutionary theory can have a strangely narcotic effect on the brains of otherwise intelligent people, leading them to take quite bizarre positions. Take, for example, Bradley A. Thayer’s argument in chapter 8 that “Islamic fundamentalist terrorism may be considered a male mating strategy.” Thayer, a senior analyst in international and national security affairs at the National Institute for Public Policy, does acknowledge that there are a wide variety of causes for such terrorism. But he also argues that it is no coincidence that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis, because Saudi Arabia practices polygamy, leaving many young males desperate for mates. According to Thayer, the 9/11 hijackers killed themselves in a spectacular effort to “increase their attractiveness as mates.” Leaving aside the question of why he would expect the murdering of thousands of innocent civilians to make someone sexually attractive, one might reasonably object that killing oneself is not a very promising reproductive strategy.

But Thayer has already thought of this: He points out that the hijackers were promised 70 virgins in the afterlife. He does not tell us whether the laws of natural selection also apply in heaven. He does, however, opine that the hijackers’ siblings, with whom they share genes, will also be rendered more attractive as mates. Like so much in this book, this is stated as self-evident fact, with no supporting evidence required. Did anyone check to see whether the hijackers’ siblings found themselves fighting off marriage proposals?

More here.

Eric Bailey interviews Noam Chomsky for the Sri Lanka Guardian:

Eric: In regards to the very top leadership of the LTTE, do you think it might be more healthy or harmful for Sri Lanka to create its own Nuremburg trials to try these top Tiger leaders?

Chomsky: I frankly doubt it because the Nuremburg trials, if they were serious, would have to avoid the profound immorality of the actual Nuremburg trials. Remember, the actual Nuremburg trials were trials of the defeated, not of the victors. In fact, the principle of the Nuremburg trials was that if the Allies had committed some crime, it wasn't a crime. So, for example, the German war criminals were not accused of bombing urban, civilian targets because the Allies did more of it than the Nazis did, and Nazi war criminals like submarine commander Dönitz was able to bring as defense witnesses, American and British counterparts who testified that they had done the same things so these automatically became non-crimes. In other words, a war crime is defined as something you did and we didn't do and that turns the trial into a sham. It has been a sham since. The Chief Justice at Nuremburg, Chief Robert Jackson, the American Chief Prosecutor, he made very strong statements at Nuremburg, admonishing the judges there that, as he put it, “we are handing the defendants a poison chalice and if we sip from it (meaning if we carry out crimes like theirs) then we must be subject to the same punishment.” Of course, nothing like that has happened or is even conceivable. Jackson said, “If we don't do this it means that the trial was a farce.” Well we haven't done it so that means the trial was a farce, even though the guilty were maybe the most guilty criminals in modern history. So a Trial modeled on Nuremburg would not be a good thing at all. It would simply be a trial of the defeated and that only engenders further hatred, anger, and promises an ugly conflict. An honest trial, which tries everyone, might be conceivable, but my guess is that it's probably not a good idea, just as it wasn't carried out in the countries that I mentioned.

More here.

Chuck Squatriglia in Wired:

Red Bull Racing has put together a sweet animated video explaining the new rules Formula 1 has adopted for the 2009 season. Even if you aren't into F1, it's cool to see.

Formula 1 has adopted the most sweeping changes in the sport's history in an effort to increase overtaking and bring down the astronomical costs involved in racing. As we told you a couple of weeks ago, the new rules have significantly changed how the cars look. The rules effect everything from aerodynamics to tires to the number of engines each team can use during the season, which spans 17 races over 9 months.

Sebastian Vettel runs through what it all means and how it all works….

Stanley Fish in the New York Times:

That of course is the key question. Are academics different, and if so, in what ways, and to what extent do the differences legitimate a degree of freedom not enjoyed by the members of other professions? These and related questions were debated in Urofsky v. Gilmore (2000). In that case professors from a number of state colleges and universities in Virginia contended that their right of academic freedom was infringed by a law requiring state employers to gain permission from a supervisor before accessing sexually explicit materials on state-owned computers. Judge Wilkins, writing for the majority, treated the complaining professors as employees rather than as possessors of a special right, and observed that “It cannot be doubted that in order to pursue its legitimate goals effectively, the state must have the ability to control the manner in which its employees discharge their duties.” The professors had anticipated this reasoning and maintained that even if the law was “valid as to the majority of state employees, it violates the First Amendment freedom rights of professors at state colleges and universities.” Or, in other words, we understand the legal point, but it doesn’t apply to us, for we’re different.

More here.

From The Root:

Presidents Day was once a rude interruption to Black History Month, a reminder of whose terms we were on. This Presidents Day I find myself celebrating.

There are cynical luxuries that come with being black in this country, like the ability to shrug off the dime-store rites of patriotism. We've seen America through a perpetually raised eyebrow, the yeah, whatever perspective that comes with the terrain on our side of American history. And here lies Presidents Day. Like July 4th, Thomas Jefferson and NASCAR— it comes awash in the crimson, white and navy trimming meant to remind us of our blessed status as Americans.

For most of my life, Presidents Day has been—aside from a day off—a crass interruption, a retaining wall built into Black History Month to ensure that we don't forget whose terms we're operating on. Even the name lacks purpose—there's no weighty adjective to highlight why a president warrants a holiday; no devotion to, say, those commanders in chief who were assassinated or who led the nation through particularly trying times. Years ago it was known as Washington's Birthday, which virtually guaranteed that some black people would give the notion the stiff-arm because honoring the first president means you are simultaneously celebrating a slaveholder.

But, as with all else concerning this country, it's not that simple. Black history and Presidents Day share an ancestral link in Abraham Lincoln. There was, in the receding tides of black history, a point when many of us admired him. Carter G. Woodson, who understood Lincoln's flaws better than most, nonetheless chose February for his inaugural “Negro History Week” because both Lincoln and Frederick Douglass were born that month.

More here.