It was 1984. I'd been working as a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County for less than a year but already knew I needed something more to round out my life. I'd met mathematicians who ate, slept and breathed theorems and was certain I would never be one of them. So one day I wrote a short story. The title was “Unfulfilled Expectations.” Going through it, you couldn't help wonder whose expectations remained unfulfilled — except , of course, the reader's. It was a story only a mathematician would write.
You'd have to pry it out of my cold dead fingers now to read it, but back then the experience was heady, energizing. I agonized about whether to send it to the New Yorker or the Atlantic. (Thankfully, I never submitted it.) The next year, I wrote a second story, and then, a year or two later, another. I made all my characters as abstract as possible. My reasoning was that just as “x” and “y” are symbols that can be assigned any value, characters, too, should be empty outlines, left for a reader to fill in. It's an indispensable idea in algebra but a terrible one in fiction, as it took me some years to learn.
Around that time, a famous mathematician who also happens to be a renowned bridge player gave a lecture at our department. Afterward, a senior faculty member took me aside to complain about the “terrible” talk. Surprised, I asked him how he knew, since the lecture hadn't been in his field. “He wastes too much time playing bridge, so he can't possibly be good,” came the reply. I thought my colleague was joking until I saw the conviction on his face. That's when I decided to keep my own hobby a secret — after all, I was a professional academic. I wanted tenure.
Laila Lalami reads the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou's Broken Glass, a novel bursting with cultural references and irreverent humour.
From The National:
“In Africa, when an old person dies, a library burns.”
When the Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Hampâté Bâ uttered these words at a Unesco assembly in 1960, he was attempting to draw attention to Africa’s tradition of oral storytelling. Little did he know that his aphorism would turn into one of the most persistent clichés about the continent, one that unfortunately reinforced the erroneous idea that there was no tradition of written literature in Africa prior to European colonialism. Early on in Alain Mabanckou’s new novel Broken Glass (to be published this month in translation from French to English), the proprietor of a seedy bar in Brazzaville, who is referred to only as Stubborn Snail, hears the slogan and derisively responds that it “depends which old person, don’t talk crap, I only trust what’s written down.”
In fact, Stubborn Snail is so sure of the power of the written word that he gives a notebook to his most regular customer, an old schoolteacher nicknamed Broken Glass, and asks him to write his customers’ stories. Broken Glass takes up the challenge, though he quickly warns the reader that “I’m writing this for myself as well, that’s why I wouldn’t want to be in his shoes when he reads these pages, I don’t intend to spare him or anyone else.” One suspects that Mabanckou shares these feelings, that he has no time for pious and well-meaning clichés about Africa, and that he intends to write as irreverently and as freely as he pleases.
The remarkable young student, who modestly explains he has 'quite a thirst for knowledge', secured 22 A grades, one B and a C.
When he filled out his university application forms at home in Rawalpindi there was barely enough space to list his qualifications.
His Cambridge dream came true four months ago when he embarked on a computer science degree course at Trinity Hall. Now he is due to win another place – in the Guinness Book of Records.
Yesterday Ali, 18, explained, perhaps superfluously, that he rather enjoys hard work. He's got even more qualifications in his sights to fulfil another ambition.
'I'm doing my current degree because I love it,' he said. 'But what I want to do for the rest of my life is to be a doctor, so I hope to go on to study medicine.'
Ali, who speaks Urdu, English and Punjabi, sat all the exams within 12 months at Rawalpindi's Roots College International. His entry was organised through accredited boards Ed-Excel and Cambridge International Examinations.
Ali also achieved a top score in the U.S. admissions test and was accepted by most Ivy League institutions, including Harvard and Yale. Apart from core science subjects he is almost entirely self taught. He studied for up to 12 hours a day, using energy drinks to help concentrate.
Sri Lanka, a small teardrop-shaped island off the southern tip of India, has a population of approximately 21 million, with the majority Sinhalese comprising 70 percent of the population, Tamils 18 percent, and Muslims 9 percent.
The twenty-six-year civil war in Sri Lanka has become one of the world’s forgotten conflicts, despite leaving 70,000 people dead, as estimated by numerous media sources. After several failed attempts at a viable peace agreement—including a six-year Norway-brokered ceasefire that ended in January 2008—Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has put all his weight behind a massive military onslaught to defeat the LTTE. Military spending has swelled to about 20 percent of the national budget and, unlike past governments, the Rajapaksa administration has given the military its full support to defeat the LTTE.
But a military operation alone, however successful it may be, will not bring a lasting peace to Sri Lanka. In 2007, the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) claimed its first major victory since it launched its current military offensive in mid-2006 by wresting control of the Eastern Province from the LTTE. Now after a series of crucial military victories by the SLA, the government says that it is on the verge of defeating the LTTE and ending a conflict that has left the country’s economy in shambles.
Darwin's teachings have been caricatured and grossly distorted. Social Darwinism, which turned his biological theory into a sociopolitical one to justify eugenics, harmed his reputation. But Darwin was an early opponent of slavery and, precisely because he identified a common origin in nature, he did more than anybody to debunk the notion that different races belong to different species.
Herein should lie Darwin's appeal to the right: The English naturalist gave scientific validity to the revolutionary idea that order can be spontaneous, neither designed by nor beholden to an all-powerful authority. The struggle for existence that drives natural selection according to Darwin has nothing predetermined about it. In fact, he maintained that the presence of certain habits, values and institutions, including religion–themselves part of man's adaptation to the environment–can impact evolution. The instinct of sympathy, for instance, drives some stronger members of the human species to help weaker ones, thereby mitigating the struggle for existence.
It is fascinating that conservatives who advocate for a spontaneous order–the free market–in political economy and decry social engineering as a threat to progress and civilization should resent Darwin's overwhelming case for the idea that order can design itself. In an essay in the British publication The Spectator, the conservative science writer Matt Ridley reflects on the paradox that the left has claimed Darwin even though leftist political ideas contradict his basic teaching: “In the average European biology laboratory you will find fervent believers in the individualist, emergent, decentralized properties of genomes who prefer dirigiste determinism to bring order to the economy.”
Daron Acemoglu on the crisis in a Center for Economic Policy Insight:
The risk that the belief in the capitalist system may collapse should not be dismissed. After all, the past two decades were heralded as the triumph of capitalism, so their bitter aftermath must be the failure of the capitalist system. It should be no surprise that I disagree with this conclusion, since I do not think the success of the capitalist system can be found in or was based upon unregulated markets. As I mentioned above, what we are experiencing is not a failure of capitalism or free markets per se, but the failure of unregulated markets – in particular, of unregulated financial sector and risk management. As such, it should not make us less optimistic about the growth potential of market economies – provided that markets are based on solid institutional foundations. But since the rhetoric of the past two decades equated capitalism with lack of regulation, this nuance will be lost on many who have lost their houses and jobs.
The risk that we face is one of an expectational trap – consumers and policymakers becoming pessimistic about future growth and the promise of markets.
A backlash is thus inevitable. The question is how to contain it. Yet the policy responses of the past several months have only made matters worse. It is one thing for the population at large to think that markets do not work as well as the pundits promised. It is an entirely different level of disillusionment for them to think that markets are just an excuse for the rich and powerful to fill their pockets at the expense of the rest. But how could they think otherwise when the bailouts have been designed by bankers to help bankers and to minimise damage on those responsible for the debacle in the first place?
It’s my audacious hope that a man born and raised between opposing dogmas, between cultures, between voices, could not help but be aware of the extreme contingency of culture. I further audaciously hope that such a man will not mistake the happy accident of his own cultural sensibilities for a set of natural laws, suitable for general application. I even hope that he will find himself in agreement with George Bernard Shaw when he declared, “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.” But that may be an audacious hope too far. We’ll see if Obama’s lifelong vocal flexibility will enable him to say proudly with one voice “I love my country” while saying with another voice “It is a country, like other countries.” I hope so. He seems just the man to demonstrate that between those two voices there exists no contradiction and no equivocation but rather a proper and decent human harmony.
Late in the afternoon of April 27, 1987, a secret visitor was smuggled into the White House. A helicopter swooped low and onto the landing pad. At the Diplomatic Entrance, Chief of Staff Howard Baker and National-Security Adviser Frank Carlucci greeted former president Richard Nixon. They escorted Nixon inside and up a private elevator to the second floor, the residence quarters of the White House, now occupied by Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Nixon had not set foot in the residence since August 9, 1974, the day he resigned from the presidency. Reagan and Nixon had known each other for years. After Reagan entered the White House, Nixon would send him occasional private notes, often flattering and unctuous. “Pat and my reactions were the same: ‘Thank God for Ronald Reagan,’” Nixon wrote in early 1981, after Reagan had granted a pardon to Mark Felt, the former associate director of the F.B.I., who had been convicted of approving illegal break-ins for surveillance. (Nixon did not know at the time that Felt had been Deep Throat, an agent of Nixon’s downfall.) At the end of 1981, Nixon wrote Reagan a note saying, “I like and admire [Poland’s Lech] Walesa, but in my book, Time missed the boat: President Reagan should have been Man of the Year.” Now Nixon was back.
How can you say that evolution is “true”? Isn’t that just your opinion, of no more value than anybody else’s? Isn’t every view entitled to equal “respect”? Maybe so where the issue is one of, say, musical taste or political judgement. But when it is a matter of scientific fact? Unfortunately, scientists do receive such relativistic protests when they dare to claim that something is factually true in the real world. Given the title of Jerry Coyne’s book, this is a distraction that I must deal with. A scientist arrogantly asserts that thunder is not the triumphal sound of God’s balls banging together, nor is it Thor’s hammer. It is, instead, the reverberating echoes from the electrical discharges that we see as lightning. Poetic (or at least stirring) as those tribal myths may be, they are not actually true.
Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin. There's a website and a facebook page, naturally (no pun intended). It's impossible to overstate how much the naturalistic view of life that Darwin ushered in has shaped our world. Olivia Judson in the NYT on the great man:
Before the “Origin,” similarities and differences between species were mere curiosities; questions as to why a certain plant is succulent like a cactus or deciduous like a maple could be answered only, “Because.” Biology itself was nothing more than a vast exercise in catalog and description. After the “Origin,” all organisms became connected, part of the same, profoundly ancient, family tree. Similarities and differences became comprehensible and explicable. In short, Darwin gave us a framework for asking questions about the natural world, and about ourselves.
He was not right about everything. How could he have been? Famously, he didn’t know how genetics works; as for DNA — well, the structure of the molecule wasn’t discovered until 1953. So today’s view of evolution is much more nuanced than his. We have incorporated genetics, and expanded and refined our understanding of natural selection, and of the other forces in evolution.
But what is astonishing is how much Darwin did know, and how far he saw.
He is a wolf that lit out for the high timber at first sight of me rounding out his wife's belly. But it didn't take too many tough winters to drive his range downward to the sheep. My mother's breath on my neck is the name I know him best by on mornings when I could freeze dark the windows with a whisper, watching for just a sight of him passing. ///
George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda, was also her most controversial. Few had a problem, upon its publication in 1876, with its portrayal of yearning and repression in the English upper class. But as Eliot's lover, George Henry Lewes, had predicted: “The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody.”
Deronda was the first of Eliot's novels to be set in her own period, the late 19th century, and in it she took on what was a highly unusual contemporary theme: the position of Jews in British and European society and their likely prospects. The eponymous hero is an idealistic young aristocrat who comes to the rescue of a young Jewish woman and in his attempts to help her find her family is drawn steadily deeper into the Jewish community and the ferment of early Zionist politics.
One day this month, 30 years ago, John Simon Ritchie, otherwise known as Sid Vicious, woke up dead. He had spent the previous evening shooting heroin in celebration of his release from Riker's Island after an assault charge. Sometime during the night, his heart stopped. He was 21 years old.
No one can say exactly when Punk Rock was born and exactly when it died. Still, the death of Sid is as good an endpoint as any. Sid Vicious was punk. He couldn't play the bass much and could barely hold a tune. He was a drunken dope fiend given to fits of violence who, most likely, killed his girlfriend — the now-famous Nancy — with a stab to the gut. In short, unbeatable credentials.
Sid's swan song, his final fuck you to the world the rest of us live in, was his cover of Frank Sinatra's classic “My Way.” Sid starts the song with a deep-voiced, cracking, mocking parody of Sinatra. After the first stanza, the music kicks in and Sid switches to the whiny snarl that was his signature.
Sinatra's original song (written by Paul Anka as Frank's final apologia after a rough and tumble career) had something of a punk rock spirit itself. It's the song of a tough guy who, at the end of it all, is rather proud of himself for sticking to his guns. And he knows that you’re proud of him, too.
Okay, so this has been posted once before at 3QD, but since I have now finally managed to upload the interview to YouTube, I thought I'd give it another go:
There’s an international battle going on. The prize is height, width, rotation. Its weapons are not guns, nor tanks, nor arrows. The weapons of this battle are wheels. Ferris wheels.
This year, Germany will unveil the Great Berlin Wheel. Upon its completion, the wheel will be 606 feet high — as high as two football fields are long, as high as three Niagara Falls. It will be taller than what’s currently the tallest Ferris wheel in the world, the Singapore Flyer, a soon-to-be-disappointing 541 feet high. This year, China also plans to unveil the Beijing Great Wheel. At an awesome 682 feet high, it will be taller than both the Great Berlin Wheel and the Singapore Flyer (which only debuted as the world’s tallest Ferris wheel last year).
China has, in fact, built wheels in six cities since the start of the new millennium.The Great Dubai Wheel, at 607 feet, is set to enthrall visitors to Dubailand some time in 2009.There’s the Great Orlando Wheel in Florida (400 feet), and Australia’s four-story-high Southern Star, which just opened last month. There are whispers that a Great Wheel might hit Mumbai, though no one can say when. Or how tall.
In August of 2008, Iraq officials unveiled plans for the Baghdad Eye. Its inspiration — the 440-foot London Eye, built in 1999 — was the instigator of all this recent wheel-mania. At a proposed 650 feet, the Baghdad wheel would soar above the London Eye and most of its competitors, giving locals and visitors alike a spectacular view of the city.
Oh, child! thou art a little slave: And all of thee that grows, Will be another's weight of flesh,–But thine the weight of woes Thou art a little slave, my child And much I grieve and mourn That to so dark a destiny My lovely babe I've borne.
– The Slave Mother's Address to her Infant Child
If childhood was a special time for enslaved children, it was because their parents made it so. They stood between them and slaveholders who sought to control them psychologically and to break their wills to resist. Parents also looked out for their children's physical well-being. Frederick Douglass recalled how his mother came to his rescue after the cook Aunt Katy refused to give him bread. His mother's intercession taught him that he “was not only a child, but somebody's child.” He remembered that being upon his mother's knee, at that moment, made him prouder than being a king upon a throne.”
Enslaved parents had an unusually heavy responsibility, for they not only had to survive, but they also had to ensure that their children survived under conditions that were tantamount to perpetual war between slaveholders fighting to control their chattel while the bond servants were struggling to free themselves from the control of others. The African heritage was an important factor in how enslaved mothers and fathers guided their children through the strife. This chapter examines the place of children in the slave family and community, the conditions surrounding their birth, the attitudes of enslaved children toward their parents and siblings, and the attitudes of slaveowners toward their youthful chattel.
Child-rearing practices among African Americans had roots in their traditional customs; motherhood, however, took on two unique characteristics for enslaved women in the United States, First, because of an accepted pattern of matrilineal or matrifocal families in traditional African societies, many African women reared children without help form the Fathers. Moreover, the disproportionate number of men taken by salve traders left many women with dependent children to care for and a grater portion of the work, ordinarily completed by men, to perform. The women managed with the help of other women. Like their sisters in Africa, many American slave women adjusted to patenting without spouses due to circumstances beyond their control such as imbalances in the sex ratio and the propensity of slaveowners to sell men separately. Second, motherblood–an honorable status in African society–was no longer an exclusive matter between a woman and her partner once enslaved in North America. Parents viewed their children as family, while owners often saw them as chattel with profit-making potentials.
A “J'accuse” by Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb over on Facebook, consider joining as an expression of disgust, if you're so disgusted and want to express via facebook:
Make bankers accountable for the mess! They got rich HIDING RISK and put INNOCENT people in this mess.
Join the “two horsemen” (Nouriel and Nassim) in extracting justice for the small guy.
Mission Statement: At Davos 2009, one of the 2 horsemen was quoted as saying that people like Robert Rubin, who received over $100 million serving as chairman of New York-based Citigroup Inc.'s executive committee, need to be punished for their failure to understand the risks their institutions were taking. He said that unless Rubin and others like him are made to mandatorily return their bonuses or are given some other punishment, the system that regrettably emerges is one “in which it’s the worst of capitalism and socialism, a situation in which profits were privatized and losses were socialized. We taxpayers have the worst.”
“This will stand as the biggest government-sponsored scam in history”. Bankers are way ahead; they MISPREPRESENTED their risks; the small guy is paying the price.
We cannot live in a society without accountability.
See the interview with them on CNBC, an interview so surreal that Krugman compares it to this Monty Python skit:
A year ago I predicted that losses by US financial institutions would be at least $1 trillion and possibly as high as $2 trillion. At that time the consensus such estimates as being grossly exaggerated as the naïve optimists had in mind about $200 billion of expected subprime mortgage losses. But, as I pointed out then, losses would rapidly mount well beyond subprime mortgages as the US and global economy would spin into a most severe financial crisis and an ugly recession. I then argued that we would then see rising losses on subprime, near prime and prime mortgages; commercial real estate; credit cards, auto loans, student loans; industrial and commercial loans; corporate bonds; sovereign bonds and state and local government bonds; and massive losses on all of the assets (CDOs, CLOs, ABS, and the entire alphabet of credit derivatives) that had securitized such loans. By now writedowns by US banks have already passed the $1 trillion mark (my floor estimate of losses) and now institutions such as the IMF and Goldman Sachs predict losses of over $2 trillion (close to my original expected ceiling for such losses). But if you think that $2 trillion is already huge, our latest estimates RGE Monitor (available in a paper for our clients) suggest that total losses on loans made by U.S. financial firms and the fall in the market value of the assets they are holding will be at their peak about $3.6 trillion.
What happens to levitation, one of the great imaginative figures of art and literature, in the transition from a religious culture to the disenchanted universe of modern science? What becomes of ecstasy, rapture, ascension, transcendence, grace when these give way to “space oddity”: man enclosed in a tin can floating far above the world? Is the cosmonaut a prophet of the erotic future, avatar of man’s stellar renaissance, as Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke once imagined? Or is he like Nietzsche’s madman, proclaiming as Gagarin himself was rumored to have said: “I don’t see any God up here”?
It was 1984. I'd been working as a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County for less than a year but already knew I needed something more to round out my life. I'd met mathematicians who ate, slept and breathed theorems and was certain I would never be one of them. So one day I wrote a short story. The title was “Unfulfilled Expectations.” Going through it, you couldn't help wonder whose expectations remained unfulfilled — except , of course, the reader's. It was a story only a mathematician would write.
