Killian Fox in the Times of London:

When you mention Assam, most people think of tea. Those on more familiar terms with the state – on the “Seven Sisters” peninsula that juts out from the northeast corner of India – will think of its beautiful national parks, abundant wildlife and the vast Brahmaputra river.

Assam is a charming place, as serene as it is lush and green, but it also harbours something so fearsome, so fiendishly powerful, that even the elephants flee from it in terror.

There is nothing at all serene about the bhut jolokia, the hottest chilli on earth. It registers an incredible 1,041,427 on the Scoville Heat Unit scale, more than double the score of the previous world record-holder (the red savina habanero).

It is 200 times hotter than Tabasco sauce. And yet, when you bite into a bhut jolokia, there is no pain at first, only a smoky flavour with an intense, apple-like sweetness. Then, after about 20 seconds, all hell breaks loose. I know this because I was foolish enough to try one.

More here.

Lauren Shaw. St.John River, Maine.

More here.

Posted with the artist’s permission.

Wendy Cadge offers some sound advice in the context of the retrenchment of rights in California, in The Immanent Frame:

There is also tremendous diversity around homosexuality and gay marriage among local religious leaders today…Personal exposure to gay and lesbian people in family networks, seminary contexts, and local congregations was the single most important factor shaping clergy’s supportive opinions. Diversity of opinion about homosexuality and gay marriage was evident not just across groups but within every religious group we studied.

Rather than pointing fingers at African-Americans or people of faith for passing Proposition 8, we who support gay marriage across the country need to recognize two things. First, the vote—52% voted yes and 48% voted no—in California was closer than you would expect based on national public opinion surveys about gay marriage. And second, this diversity of opinion exists within families, communities, churches, and racial and ethnic groups. This will not make those of us who lost the right to marry feel better. This is a loss. But as we make our signs and plan our protests, we must do so in groups that include everyone who supports gay marriage—African Americans, people of faith, and others—rather than pointing fingers. Marriage is not a finite resource. Unfortunately, neither is blame.

The text can be found here and the audio can be heard here.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

[H/t: Beau Willimon]

Via Rodrik, Bob Geldof in the FT:

Just as the crisis has been international because of globalisation, any new reforms will also need to be international. As Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has remarked, a modernised multilateralism must put global development on a par with international finance. The next round of globalisation must be one where economic opportunities and responsibilities are more widely shared.

This moment of flux offers the chance to revive ideas that have been around for some time but have been heavily resisted. First is the Tobin tax. In 1978 James Tobin, the Nobel economist, proposed a tiny tax of 0.5 per cent or less on all foreign currency ex­change transactions to deter speculation and pay for development. Some calculate this tax could yield $375bn (€289bn, £253bn) annually. Even at half that amount, it is on a par with the amount that should already have been directed to development globally. This levy, even if it is cut to 0.005 per cent would limit volatility in small economies whilst generating enormous sums for the poor. It would also cost taxpayers nothing.

Second, we need to institutionalise the means by which profits from carbon trading can be channelled to development. As Germany has already shown, this is a vast market. It involves creating incentives for polluters to pollute less while generating resources for development. It is a smart, painless way to create revenues and jobs while bringing the poor into the global economy. A Europe-wide scheme is planned, but in Washington it should be seized upon as an effective mechanism for growth and development. It, like the Tobin tax, is tax neutral to the consumer while curbing overproduction of carbon dioxide and helping the world’s poorest.

Third, this new round of globalisation must not be accompanied by a return to protectionism. Make Poverty History called for progress on debt, aid and trade. Trade is the area in which the least has been delivered.

Ivan Klima in Eurozine:

In 1967, I worked, together with a number of fellow writers, on the literary weekly Literární noviny, which had become by then a kind of opposition mouthpiece. Above all else, it was our experience with censorship that led us, at the June 1967 Writers’ Congress, to devote so much space to issues of power and methods of suppressing freedom of speech. The speeches made on that occasion came to be viewed as the prelude to the Prague Spring of 1968.

Although Literární noviny acted rebelliously, it could not escape the constraints of the socialist system: it had its due quota of newsprint, and it was distributed by PNS (Postovní novinová sluzba, the postal news service),the only body set up for the purpose. In its advertising, PNS prided itself on importing some 5,000 titles from the Soviet Union and other “friendly” countries. Since Literární noviny was a licensed periodical, the editor received daily reports from CTK (the Czechoslovak Press Agency), including those to which only a privileged minority of functionaries and journalists had access. These reports, duplicated on red paper, usually carried commentaries broadcast by Radio Free Europe, which was otherwise subject to constant jamming, or translations of articles that had appeared in leading west European or American newspapers and magazines and concerned countries of the Soviet bloc. We were granted access to this kind of information so that we could better counteract “enemy propaganda”. We were not minded to counteract it; for us, these “red reports” were a major source of information and knowledge.

Our most important and obvious source was, however, the very reality in which we lived.

Dragan Klaic in signandsight:

Always when in Moscow I think of Walter Benjamin and his “Moscow Diary”, a record of love, pain and misery in a shabby city. In the past weeks I had been reading his “Memories of a Berlin Childhood” and the evening before I had eaten in a cafe Dona Clara in Maloya Bronya, decorated with his 1920 Berlin photos. So I imagined how I would explain present-day Moscow to the ghost of Walter Benjamin, were he to come down and sit with me here in the back seat of the Mitsubishi 4×4.

What would Benjamin want to know and how would he analyse the latest twists of the post-communist transition? When Benjamin came to Russia in December 1926, pursing his erotic fascination for the Latvian poetess Asja Lacis, Russia had abandoned its New Economic Policy, a brief flirt with small-scale capitalism, and was sliding into the long, cruel night of cultural destruction and terror. Benjamin’s peregrinations through Moscow’s streets and courtyards mark the traces of an old city, soon to be erased to make place for the huge edifices of Stalinist architecture. The Berlin writer saw that the communist project was hopelessly stuck, just like the Mitsubishi in traffic.

Now, 82 years later, Russia is about to take leave of the Putin-era prosperity, shored up by high energy prices, and to slide, with the rest of the world, into the turmoil of protracted economic recession. Stability, prosperity and the 7% annual rise of the GNP has brought little progress to this distant Moscow periphery other than a few Western cars, some small-scale consumerism, patched up kiosks, countless construction sites and street repairs that only exacerbate traffic congestion.

Over at his weblog:

I was not expecting any substantial agreement on international regulatory coordination or any semblance of a new Bretton Woods, so I am not disappointed on that score.  What I was looking for were three things: (i) coordination on fiscal stimulus; (ii) a commitment to provide more liquidity support, as needed, to prevent a further spread of the crisis to emerging nations; and (iii) a clear commitment not to engage in trade protection, with a monitoring mechanism to ensure the pledge is being observed.

How does the statement do in these regards?  So-so.  There is no coordination in the fiscal arena, the promises made to emerging markets are vague, and even though there is a clear statement on protection and export subsidization, there is no monitoring or enforcement mechanism.

What about the longer-term issues? The fundamental dilemma of financial globalization is that regulation and supervision remains national while financial markets are international.

Disquisitions about public intellectuals usually conclude that they ain’t what they used to be. Subtitles from recent books on the topic include A Study of Decline and An Endangered Species? Indeed, the major point of debate is dating the precise start of the decline and fall. For some critics, Götterdämmerung started in the 1950s; for others, the 1930s. More-curmudgeonly writers place the date earlier, stretching back to the heyday of John Stuart Mill or even the death of Socrates.

The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that “the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it’s all ‘gotcha’ commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible.” David Frum complains that “the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are … absorbing.” David Brooks laments, “People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers.”

But these critics fail to recognize how the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing has partially reversed a trend that many cultural critics have decried — what Russell Jacoby called the “professionalization and academization” of public intellectuals.

more from The Chronicle Review here.

Fifty years before van Gogh began doing his night paintings, Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in the opening chapter of Nature: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!”

The brilliance of the MoMA exhibit, which has been organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (where it will go after it closes in New York on January 5), is that it captures what Emerson regarded as the miraculous, letting us see how van Gogh’s painting technique evolved over the course of the 1880s.

Van Gogh’s fascination with the night began with his “Twilight, Old Farmhouses in Loosduinen” (1883) and “Lane of Poplars at Sunset,” painted a few months later in 1884. The flat brushwork in these paintings is unremarkable, but the orange sun nearing the horizon in “Lane of Poplars at Sunset” hints at the change about to come in van Gogh’s work. A year later in “The Potato Eaters,” the direction in which van Gogh was headed becomes evident and so, too, does the fact that he was in the process of changing the sentimental approach to rural life that was so central to such French paintings as Jean-Francois Millet’s “The Sower” and Jules Breton’s “The Feast of St. John.”

more from Dissent here.

In 1981, singer, actress Olivia Newton-John is performing in a musical video for her song “Physical.” Olivia Newton-John is in the gym, not sweating, wearing headband and leotard, doing aerobics. Why is she not sweating? To answer this question, we need to reverse it and ask: Why are we not wearing a headband and leotard? And why are we sweating?

Then, I think, the meaning is clear. We are sitting in front of the TV, being couch potato, watching the illusion of nudity—which is the leotard—and the symbolism of discipline: the headband. She is doing all the work for us. She is getting physical.

With that in our minds, today we are going to do an upper-body workout with weights and the machines. OK!

more from McSweeney’s here.

Odette England in lensculture:

The Ishihara Color Test is the most common clinical test for red-green color vision deficiencies in humans. It comprises 38 plates, each containing a circle of dots randomized in color and size, which form a number that is visible to people with normal color vision. However, the number in the dots is invisible, or difficult to see, for those with a red-green color vision defect. But, like mirages and memories, the Ishihara numbers are just optical phenomena. Each shows an image of things elsewhere, where refraction and reflection coexist and, to some extent, can be captured on camera.

My project, Attentional Landscapes, undertakes quasi-scientific experiments by photographically stripping and manipulating intended meaning and function.

More here.

Martha Nussbaum in The Boston Review:

On August 16, 2008, Martha Nussbaum—University of Chicago professor and Boston Review contributing editor—became a bat mitzvah. Part of the ceremony is the d’var Torah: a talk by the bat mitzvah on a section of the Torah portion (parashah) and the haftarah (pl. haftarot, a biblical reading accompanying a thematically related Torah portion). Nussbaum’s talk is reproduced here.

When we are babies, we are very needy and we experience a great deal of pain. We long to be held and comforted. We long for a world in which every pain is nullified, every separation suspended by an embrace. That means that we want to be the center of the universe. Because, after all, the only way we would ever get immediate relief of every pain would be to turn others into our slaves. At first, our only awareness of others is as dimly seen forces that minister to our needs. When they do so, they can be sort of loved. (I say “sort of,” because it is not really love when an infant welcomes the breast or runs to be comforted.) When they do not minister to our needs, when they obstinately go their own separate way and fail to meet some imperative of nurture or holding, we feel rage. We want people to be the way we need them to be. Freud called the infant “His Majesty the Baby” for good reason: babies, like kings, do not understand that other people are real; they just want to rule them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, commenting on the tendency of small children to make slaves of their parents, saw here a major threat to the very idea of a social order based on justice and political equality.

The personal call for comfort, in its infantile form, is sheer narcissism. Unreformed, it will surely defeat any thought of justice, since it does not even involve the understanding that other people are real.

More here.

From the London Review of Books:

Noam Chomsky called for people to vote for Obama ‘without illusions’. I fully share Chomsky’s doubts about the real consequences of Obama’s victory: from a pragmatic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will make only some minor improvements, turning out to be ‘Bush with a human face’. He will pursue the same basic policies in a more attractive way and thus effectively strengthen the US hegemony, damaged by the catastrophe of the Bush years.

There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with this reaction – a key dimension is missing from it. Obama’s victory is not just another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all the pragmatic calculations and manipulations that involves. It is a sign of something more. This is why an American friend of mine, a hardened leftist with no illusions, cried when the news came of Obama’s victory. Whatever our doubts, for that moment each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.

In The Contest of Faculties, Kant asked a simple but difficult question: is there true progress in history? (He meant ethical progress, not just material development.) He concluded that progress cannot be proven, but we can discern signs which indicate that progress is possible.

More here.

Mathematicians develop computer proof-checking systems in order to realize century-old dreams of fully precise, accurate mathematics.

Julie Rehmeyer in Science News:

The one source of truth is mathematics. Every statement is a pure logical deduction from foundational axioms, resulting in absolute certainty. Since Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, you’d be safe betting your life on it.

Well … in theory. The reality, though, is that mathematicians make mistakes. And as mathematics has advanced, some proofs have gotten immensely long and complex, often drawing on expertise from far-flung areas of math. Errors can easily creep in. Furthermore, some proofs now rely on computer code, and it’s hard to be certain that no bug lurks within, messing up the result.

Bet your life on Wiles’ proof of Fermat? Many mathematicians might decline.

Still, the notion that mathematical statements can be deduced from axioms isn’t hooey. It’s just that mathematicians don’t spell out every little step. There’s a reason for that: When Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead tried to do so for just the most elementary parts of mathematics, they produced a 2,500-page tome. The result was so difficult to understand that Russell admitted to a friend, “I imagine no human being will ever read through it.”

Where humans falter, computers can sometimes prevail. A group of mathematicians and computer scientists believe that with new proof-validation programs, the dream of a fully spelled-out, rigorous mathematics, with every deduction explicit and correct, can be realized.

More here.

“The key to a con is not that you trust the conman, but that he shows he trusts you. Conmen ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable.”

Paul J. Zak in Psychology Today Blogs:

When I was in high school, I took a job at an ARCO gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. At the time, I drove a 1967 Mustang hotrod and thought I might pick up some tips and cheap parts by working around cars after school. You see a lot of interesting things working the night shift in a sketchy neighborhood. I constantly saw people making bad decisions: drunk drivers, gang members, unhappy cops, and con men. In fact, I was the victim of a classic con called “The Pigeon Drop.” If we humans have such big brains, how can we get conned?

Here’s what happened to me. One slow Sunday afternoon, a man comes out of the restroom with a pearl necklace in his hand. “Found it on the bathroom floor” he says. He followed with “Geez, looks nice-I wonder who lost it?” Just then, the gas station’s phone rings and a man asked if anyone found a pearl necklace that he had purchased as a gift for his wife. He offers a $200 reward for the necklace’s return. I tell him that a customer found it. “OK” he says, “I’ll be there in 30 minutes.” I give him the ARCO address and he gives me his phone number. The man who found the necklace hears all this but tells me he is running late for a job interview and cannot wait for the other man to arrive.

Huum, what to do? The man with the necklace said “Why don’t I give you the necklace and we split the reward?” The greed-o-meter goes off in my head, suppressing all rational thought. “Yeah, you give me the necklace to hold and I’ll give you $100” I suggest. He agrees. Since high school kids working at gas stations don’t have $100, I take money out of the cash drawer to complete the transaction.

You can guess the rest.

More here.

This year we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth.

Planet Finance seemed to spin faster, too. Every day $3.1 trillion changed hands on foreign-exchange markets. Every month $5.8 trillion changed hands on global stock markets. And all the time new financial life-forms were evolving. The total annual issuance of mortgage-backed securities, including fancy new “collateralized debt obligations” (C.D.O.’s), rose to more than $1 trillion. The volume of “derivatives”—contracts such as options and swaps—grew even faster, so that by the end of 2006 their notional value was just over $400 trillion. Before the 1980s, such things were virtually unknown. In the space of a few years their populations exploded. On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships.

more from Vanity Fair here.

I admit, I don’t spend a lot of time comparing English to Finnish. Someone far more qualified than me has, tho — that’s Tero Ykspetäjä, a science-fiction fanzine editor and recent guest blogger at Jeff Vandermeer’s Ecstatic Days. In addition to posting about about science fiction in Finland, he came up with the Top Five Reasons Finnish Is Cooler Than English.

1. Finnish is more equal. We don’t have gender-specific personal pronouns, there’s just “hän” meaning both “he” and “she”. This is sometimes a problem for translators, but otherwise pretty neat. It also means we don’t have a language-related problem with people who don’t identify either as a he or a she, and maybe are therefore a little better equipped to treat them more normally in other respects too. If you want, feel free to borrow the word from us. We don’t mind.
2. We have more letters than you do. Your little alphabet ends with z, but we also have å, ä, and ö. And no, those aren’t umlauts. They are totally different letters that just look like a and o with umlauts. And more is naturally better.

more from the LA Times here.

There are two ways to talk about the new Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $45), edited by Christopher Reid. The first is to approach Hughes’s correspondence as an illuminating aesthetic record, the clearest insight we’re likely to get into the mind of a poet viewed by some critics as one of the major writers of the 20th century. The second way is to discuss, well, “It.” “It,” of course, is what Hughes called “the Fantasia,” the swirling, ­decades-long hoo-ha brought about by his relationship with Sylvia Plath: their brief, difficult marriage; their separation due to Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill; and Plath’s suicide shortly thereafter. “It” ultimately involved a series of bitter clashes over Plath’s legacy, the occasional illicit removal of the surname “Hughes” from her tombstone (by aggrieved “Bell Jar” fans), a series of disputed biographies, at least one lawsuit, endless critical appraisals, re­appraisals and re-­reappraisals, a lame song by Ryan Adams (“I wish I had a Sylvia Plath,” Adams croons, apparently unaware that they don’t come in six-packs) and the inevitable film featuring Gwyneth Paltrow flopping around with Daniel Craig. “It” is a big deal.

more from the NY Times here.

Instead of the weekly presidential radio address of the past, Barack Obama will be recording a video address each week which will be available on YouTube. This is the first: