This is an anthology of many voices—from Henry David Thoreau, writing from Concord in 1837, to Bill McKibben, the editor of this volume, composing his introduction high in the Yosemite backcountry last year. American Earth contains essays, speeches, and poems by roughly one hundred contributors. Everyone in this book is strong-minded, strong-willed, and strong-stomached, and every piece in this anthology is committed at heart to being useful, instructive, and reasonable. There are no Lear-like screams here, nothing like the final dementia of someone who realizes he’s traded his birthright for nothing.
Most of the authors in American Earth would agree in principle with Wendell Berry when he explains that he doesn’t like having to choose sides in a debate between extremists who believe that returning to nature will save us and extremists who think that technology will. “I would prefer to stay in the middle,” Berry writes, “not to avoid taking sides, but because I think the middle is a side, as well as the real location of the problem.” Since those words were written, twenty-one years ago, the edges have closed in. In the late ’90s, the middle of the debate looked to Julia Butterfly Hill like two years living in the crown of a redwood tree. From the bitter end of the Bush administration, Hill’s middle looks like a surprisingly sweet-natured place, as middling as Thoreau’s cabin outside Concord.
more from Bookforum here.
When Aimé Césaire died in Fort-de-France, Martinique on April 17, 2008, Ségolène Royal and others called for him to be buried in the Panthéon in Paris, alongside Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola. Away from the land of his ancestors, the acclaimed poet and long-time mayor of Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France could be claimed for France. But the obituaries make clear that Césaire’s legacy is both powerful and troubling.
The writer who once celebrated Haiti as the country where “black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world,” stood by, a powerless politician, as his own country turned into an acquiescent neo-colony. He had hoped to make the former colony a full partner in the economic and social benefits of the post-war metropole. It did not work. Harsh economic inequalities, reflected in de facto segregation by color and status no less effective for lack of legal sanction, remained. As late as 1973, Edouard Glissant noted that in Fort-de-France a cinema boasted “la salle de l’élite.” Even now Fort-de-France stagnates in its ongoing role as accommodating child of Mother France, while passive consumerism and cultural dependency stifle local initiative.
more from Boston Review here.
Beautiful Losers — the show, the book, the movement, the movie — is probably the most acclaimed template for crossover between Lowbrow and mainstream, though its impact is more readily observable in the world of commercial graphic design than the Art World. Scene svengali Aaron Rose — whose Alleged Gallery in ’90s Manhattan was the flash point of the BL submovement — has finally completed the documentary component of his marketing Gesamtkunstwerk, and it’s actually very good. The artists mostly come off as nice folks, many struggling with the politics of their commercial success. Between the talking heads, Rose and co-director Joshua Leonard have pieced together bits of archival footage (Mark Gonzales!) into a visually hypnotic montage that echoes the stoner, street-based BL aesthetic.
There’s maybe a little too much echo in other areas. Weren’t punk rock and graffiti art and skateboarding and Tom Waits hobo-beatnik chic and street credibility all over with by 1987? At the absolute latest? And aren’t there hundreds — if not thousands — of little scenes like this all over America, and the world? Layer upon layer of dubious nostalgia separates Beautiful Losers from its alleged subcultural authenticity, and we find ourselves obliviously subsumed by a myth of community, a niche-market simulation of counterculture like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel.
more from the LA Weekly here.
Nicholas Everitt reviews the book by Matt Carter in Philosophy Now:
There is now a very wide range of sound introductory texts in the philosophy of mind. Matt Carter’s new book offers something rather different. His opening six chapters include material which will be very familiar to any student of the philosophy of mind: dualism, behaviourism, materialism, functionalism. But his main concern is to outline and defend the possibility of a computational theory of mind. Three chapters outline in a formal, rigorous way a variety of concepts necessary for understanding what computation is, and the remainder of the book aims to show how this formal machinery might be invoked in an explanation of what the mind is and how it works. Carter’s cautious conclusion is that on the one hand there is no objection in principle to the programme of strong artificial intelligence – ie, that there can be systems which display (and so have) mentality simply in virtue of instantiating certain computer programs – but that on the other hand, our best available programs are ‘woefully inadequate’ to that task.
Carter succeeds admirably in explaining why this might be so. The opening chapters will be fairly simple for philosophy students, but the material thereafter will be almost wholly new, and not available elsewhere in such a user-friendly form. For students of artificial intelligence (AI), the book explains very clearly why the whole artificial intelligence project presupposes substantive and controversial answers to some traditional philosophical questions. The book is a model exercise in interdisciplinarity. It’s also written lucidly, with regular summaries of important points. An Appendix supplies a useful glossary of technical terms.
More here.
John Tierney in the New York Times:
When men and women take personality tests, some of the old Mars-Venus stereotypes keep reappearing. On average, women are more cooperative, nurturing, cautious and emotionally responsive. Men tend to be more competitive, assertive, reckless and emotionally flat. Clear differences appear in early childhood and never disappear.
What’s not clear is the origin of these differences. Evolutionary psychologists contend that these are innate traits inherited from ancient hunters and gatherers. Another school of psychologists asserts that both sexes’ personalities have been shaped by traditional social roles, and that personality differences will shrink as women spend less time nurturing children and more time in jobs outside the home.
To test these hypotheses, a series of research teams have repeatedly analyzed personality tests taken by men and women in more than 60 countries around the world. For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.
These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests.
More here.
From Nature:
The Large Hadron Collider is the latest attempt to move fundamental physics past the frustratingly successful ‘standard model’. But it is not the only way to do it. Geoff Brumfiel surveys the contenders attempting to capture the prize before the collider gets up to speed.
While the LHC gets its protons up to speed, the world’s other heavyweight particle-accelerator is racing to break the standard model first. Since 2001, the Tevatron, located at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, has been accelerating protons and antiprotons at an energy of around 1 tera electron volt.
That’s only a seventh of the eventual top energy of the LHC, but total energy isn’t everything in the hunt for new physics. Collisions that would generate new particles outside the standard model are extremely rare, which means that the longer an accelerator runs and the more data it accumulates, the better its chances of finding something. So for a while, at least, the Tevatron will continue to have a data lead over the LHC. Even by the summer of 2009, the Tevatron will have several times more total data than its new competitor.
And already those data are showing some tantalizing, if tentative, hints of something beyond the standard model. One deviation comes in measurements of a particle known as the strange B (Bs) meson. The Bs is made of a strange quark and an anti-bottom quark, and it is among the heaviest of all mesons. Under a rule known as charge-parity symmetry, the standard model predicts the Bs will decay in the same way as its antiparticle (made of an anti-strange and a bottom quark). But measurements of the two are hinting at a difference in their decays. According to Dmitri Denisov, a spokesperson for the D-Zero experiment at the Tevatron, that difference could be an important clue in the quest for discoveries. It might signal the existence of new, exotic particles, or of previously unknown principles. In any case, says Denisov, “it’s an exciting measurement”.
More here.
Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:
What is it to be English? I should say for a start that to be English is to be mildly embarrassed by the very concept of “identity.” To continue with the paradox for a moment: The English are famous above all for their insularity. That they are located on an island is essential to them. But not an island like Iceland or Samoa; rather, an island that is within swimming distance of the mainland, and thus an island that can be easily invaded, or employed as a base for invasion. Therefore, the insularity of the English has been complicated by two striking anomalies: their ethnic dilution and their history-making propensity for exporting people. Whole continents were settled by English (and Scottish and Welsh and Irish) emigrants, and I have hardly ever visited a country that doesn’t have a sizable English/British cemetery. Then, owing in part to its extraordinary capacity to borrow and assimilate, the English language has become nearly sovereign as a global lingua franca; but there are areas of the nation in which I can barely make out a word that is uttered, and the class and regional aspects of Englishness ensure that England’s sons and daughters are “branded on the tongue,” to make them more readily classifiable by their betters.
The English have a justified reputation for being sturdy and prosaic, yet they have excelled in poetry above all the arts. They are often thought to be shy and retiring and even (by Hollywood especially) affected to the point of effeminacy. Yet few peoples have shown a more frightening and ruthless aptitude for violence. Their fondness for flowers and animals is a national as well as an international joke, yet there is scant evidence of equivalent tenderness in, say, the national cuisine. The general temper is distinctly egalitarian and democratic, even populist, yet the cult of aristocracy and hierarchy is astonishingly tenacious.
When asked by an interviewer if he was English, Samuel Beckett is supposed to have replied, “Au contraire.” The nation whose passport I carry doesn’t even really have a name, except the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is the bureaucratic result of a seventeenth-century compromise. (Northern Ireland is legally part of the United Kingdom but not of Great Britain.) The country can be identified in shorthand as England, Britain, the UK, and — “in very exalted moments,” as Orwell once wrote — Albion.
More here.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Follow the links from Gelman:
David Frum, author of “Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again,” wrote an op-ed in the New York Times yesterday that has some interesting insights and but also suffers from some of the usual confusions about rich and poor, Democrats and Republicans. Overall I think Frum has some interesting things to say but I want to point out a couple of places where I think he may have been misled by focusing too strongly on the D.C. metropolitan area.
Income inequality and Democratic voting
Frum writes: “As a general rule, the more unequal a place is, the more Democratic; the more equal, the more Republican.” At least at the state level, it’s not so clear. Below is a map of the states with high income inequality (in dark colors) and low inequality (in light colors), revealing high-inequality Democratic states such as California and New York but also high-inequality Republican states such as Texas and Arizona, with the most unequal states being those with high immigration. Overall, the Democrats’ vote share by state is slightly correlated with income inequality, but much less than the correlation with income itself. It is in the rich states, but not consistently the unequal states, that Democrats are doing best:
Robert Taylor in Dissent:
The broader political picture in Europe does not suggest that social democracy has rediscovered its former winning ways. In Italy the left suffered a humiliating defeat in the April general election, with the dramatic return to power in Rome of that disreputable right-wing demagogue Silvio Berlusconi. The ruling British Labour Party under Gordon Brown has some of the worst public opinion ratings since the days more than a quarter of a century ago when it was led by the left-winger Michael Foot.
The Danish Social Democrats lost heavily in their country’s general election last year and polled little more than one in five of the votes cast. Across much of central and eastern Europe—with the exception of Hungary—the outlook is not much better. In some of those countries the parties of social democracy are neither in government nor, in some cases, such as in Poland, do they even constitute the main parliamentary opposition. The two most powerful political leaders in Europe are both firmly on the democratic right—Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Only Norway, in the Nordic region once dominated by social democrats, has a Labor government. Social democrats may be members of coalitions in Germany, Belgium, Holland, Bulgaria and Lithuania but they are not the dominant partners in those arrangements.
The demise of European social democracy has come suddenly and perhaps unexpectedly. As Roger Liddle from Policy Network, the New Labour think tank that organized the Hertfordshire conference, has pointed out, as recently as 2000 no fewer than eleven out of the then fifteen European Union member states had social democratic or center-left prime ministers. Today there are only four.
In less than 7 hours, the LHC gets switched on at 9 a.m. CEST. The live webcast can be found here. Cosmic Variance, the blog from which I probably learn the most, is live blogging the event. Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian:
What, I want to know, do half the world’s particle physicists hope to achieve by triggering a machine called a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to drive two beams of particles in opposite directions around this 27km ring at 99.9999991% of the speed of light, steering the beams at four points during their circuit into head-on collisions with enough energy to recreate in miniature the cosmic circumstances that existed one trillionth of a second after the big bang?
Everything conspires against understanding. The European Organisation for Nuclear Research is confusingly known by its French acronym Cern, for instance. But that’s nothing. Cern’s scientists also hope to find extra dimensions, perhaps as many as 10, coiled up in microscopic loops. (I look back on that last sentence wondering what the hell it means.) They hope to create called a Higgs boson, which is a particle that hasn’t existed since a split-second after the big bang and yet which, physicists hypothesise, was fundamental, billions of years ago, for the establishing the nature of reality. A Nobel prize-winner called the Higgs boson “the God particle”, but every expert I speak to says that this term has no theological import, but is a silly, misleading piece of nomenclature. So thank you, Nobel laureate Leon M Lederman, for muddying further already murky waters.
Discombobulatingly, I read that only 5% of the universe is made of matter that scientists understand. A further 25% is so-called “dark matter”, which clusters around galaxies, and the remaining 70% is even more enigmatic “dark energy”, which drives the expansion of the universe. Or so scientists claim. But hold on: if scientists only understand 5%, how can they posit anything about the remaining 95%? Aren’t they, then, only slightly less ignorant than me? Won’t you let me hold on to that dream? Please?
Jonathan Haidt at Edge:
Turiel’s description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. (“Your dog is family, and you just don’t eat family.”) From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder’s ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.
When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label “elitist.” But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?
More here. [Thanks to Pablo Policzer.]
It was a daring political move that the exiled Niccolo Machiavelli, his career in ruin, made in 1512 from his family farm south of Florence. He had sent a short treatise, “The Prince” (Il Principe), as an offering of counsel to the most powerful man in Florence, Lorenzo (called “the Magnificent”) de Medici, the man who himself had ordered Machiavelli’s dismissal and exile. The cover letter is as masterly as the treatise. “Take this little gift,” Machiavelli wrote, “in the spirit I send it, and if you read it diligently you will discover in it my urgent wish that you reach the eminence that fortune and your other great qualities promise you.”
Renaissance sycophancy aside, it is held that this letter was Machiavelli’s pitch for employment with the Medici family. He closed by citing his reduced condition and couching a veiled plea, “And . . . you will realize the extent to which, undeservedly, I have to endure the great and unremitting malice of fortune.” It is an irony and a contradiction that “The Prince,” the classic handbook on power politics and the guide to gaining and maintaining that power, should have owed its birth to the collapse of the author’s political career.
more from the WSJ here.
Ross writes at a time when the atonal revolution has given way to a pluralism that rejects the high modernist concept of “progress” in art. As Ross writes, too much that was valuable and popular but not, formally speaking, new or radical in the twentieth century (Puccini, Copland, Sibelius, for starters) ended up not being taken as seriously as it deserved to be.
After all, music is not science, never mind if certain composers around midcentury liked to dress up like physicists and imagine themselves conducting experiments in sound in laboratories in Paris or Princeton. We have revived many of the musical ideas that had been discarded. There is, in fact, almost an A-B-A shape—a classic sonata form—to the century as Ross recounts it, beginning with Strauss and Mahler, moving through Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Boulez and Stockhausen, and arriving at symphonic-scaled, historically omnivorous works by Osvaldo Golijov and operas by Steve Reich, who once said a model for composers in the late century should be John Coltrane. “The music just comes out,” as Reich put it. “There’s no argument. There it is.” Exactly.
more from the NYRB here.
Mick Jones It was pretty crazy when we arrived in Japan. I’d flown there from New York, having stopped off in Alaska, and when I got there Paul was wandering around the foyer, Joe was upset and something had gone on with Topper in the elevator. It felt very strange – we were chased around as if we were the Beatles or something, with lots of screaming and people throwing presents to us. It was beautiful.
On our way to New Zealand after Japan we stopped for an afternoon in Australia and were all thrown out of the hotel for playing our music too loud. We’d only stopped off there for a couple of hours, yet we managed to get banned from the best hotel in Sydney.
In Thailand we only did one gig, but ended up staying for two weeks after Paul got ill. It was on the photo shoot for the Combat Rock cover, and Paul jumped in what he thought was a puddle but was actually some kind of black mud with loads of flies in it. He was in an old colonial-style hospital with a tropical disease. Joe and I got friendly with some monks who wore orange robes and we took them to see Paul in hospital, and they were really excited because he had a shower in his hospital room. Then the monks started coming to the hospital to have showers, loads of them queueing up to get in the shower.
more from the Sunday Times here.
ON WEDNESDAY, HUNDREDS of feet below ground in Europe, a proverbial switch will be pulled on the Large Hadron Collider, a new multibillion dollar machine designed to smash subatomic particles together at immense speeds. The device could help physicists rewrite the rules of the universe. It could also, just possibly, do something else: create a tiny black hole that would result in the end of all life as we know it.
Most scientists are confident that the danger is vanishingly small, and a number of research papers have concluded the experiment is safe. But are the potential gains to science really worth even a tiny risk of eradicating the earth? This question, writ large, is the province of a group of scholars who study potential global catastrophe. At the center of their work lies an almost unanswerable question: How should we deal with very unlikely threats that also carry the potential to extinguish human civilization?
This past July, specialists convened in Oxford, England, for the first Global Catastrophic Risks Conference. The group included philosophers, physicists, and sociologists; aside from the huge particle accelerator, they looked at the threat of massive asteroid collisions, gamma ray bursts from supernovas that could sterilize the planet, man-made nanobots that could replicate and consume the earth’s surface, and out-of-control artificial intelligence.
more from Boston Globe Ideas here.
///
Hummingbirds
Ruth Stone
Driving the perfect fuel, their thermonuclear wings,
into the hot layer of the sugar’s chromosphere,
hummingbirds in Egypt
might have visited the tombs of the Pharaohs
when they were fresh in their oils and perfumes.
The pyramids fitted,
stone slab against slab,
with little breathers, narrow slits of light,
where a few esters, a sweet resinous wind,
might have risen soft as a parachute.
Robbers breached the false doors,
the trick halls often booby traps,
embalming them in the powder of crushed rock.
These, too, they might have visited.
The miniature dagger hangs in the air,
entering the wild furnace of the flower’s heart.
From Ordinary Words (Paris Press, 1999)
//
From Science:
What does a crowded bus have to do with your ability to learn math? If you can tell by a quick glance whether more people are in the front or the back, chances are you had an easier time with numbers in school, a new study reveals. Success in mathematics has already been linked to factors such as short-term memory. Many experts also suspected a role for the approximate number system (ANS), a sort of mental sense that allows us to judge the relative quantities of various objects, such as people in the front or back of a bus. But no one had studied the extent to which this ability varies in people, or whether it relates to math proficiency.
Psychologist Justin Halberda of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues tested the ANS in 14-year-olds. The 64 children watched a computer screen that flashed split-second images of blue and yellow dots in various ratios. A handful aced the test; they could easily identify the more abundant color in ratios as fine as 9:10. Others had trouble with ratios as low as 2:3. “We were surprised to see this very wide variation,” Halberda says.
The researchers were even more surprised to see how strongly the acuity of the ANS correlated with the students’ test scores, going as far back as kindergarten. The ANS explained a whopping 28% to 32% of the variation of third-grade performance on two national tests, called the TEMA-2 and WJ-RCALC, for example. “This was really astounding,” Halberda says. The relationship held even when they controlled for IQ, spatial reasoning, short-term memory, and 13 other factors, the team reports online this week in Nature. It’s not clear exactly how the ANS might improve skill in formal mathematics; possibly it helps one judge whether an answer to a math problem is even plausible.
More here.
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:
New Zealand is home to 2,065 native plants found nowhere else on Earth. They range from magnificent towering kauri trees to tiny flowers that form tightly packed mounds called vegetable sheep. When Europeans began arriving in New Zealand, they brought with them alien plants — crops, garden plants and stowaway weeds. Today, 22,000 non-native plants grow in New Zealand. Most of them can survive only with the loving care of gardeners and farmers. But 2,069 have become naturalized: they have spread out across the islands on their own. There are more naturalized invasive plant species in New Zealand than native species.
It sounds like the makings of an ecological disaster: an epidemic of invasive species that wipes out the delicate native species in its path. But in a paper published in August in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dov Sax, an ecologist at Brown University, and Steven D. Gaines, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, point out that the invasion has not led to a mass extinction of native plants. The number of documented extinctions of native New Zealand plant species is a grand total of three. Exotic species receive lots of attention and create lots of worry. Some scientists consider biological invasions among the top two or three forces driving species into extinction. But Dr. Sax, Dr. Gaines and several other researchers argue that attitudes about exotic species are too simplistic. While some invasions are indeed devastating, they often do not set off extinctions. They can even spur the evolution of new diversity.
More here.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Robert von Hallberg in The Boston Review:
It is unusual for lyric poets to inquire into civic bonds, and poets have rarely been pulled to the bosom of the American polity (Whitman is the grand exception). Indeed, there is a familiar literary tradition of configuring politics—as Ezra Pound did—as a contest between reasons of state and individual autonomy. Yet in recent years the most distinguished political poems have all engaged precisely the issue of what holds citizens together in a community, and with what consequences, intended and otherwise. In particular Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Frank Bidart, C. K. Williams, and Robert Pinsky have produced important and surprising explorations of contemporary civic solidarity.
None of my poets provides a comprehensive account of solidarity, nor are they analyzing the policies now being debated in the presidential campaign—about health care, schools, the housing market, timetables for Iraq, or fair trade. But each is alert to the ambiguities of pragmatic politics, alive to just those moments when public-policy debate cracks open and reveals an inadequately considered principle—about globalism, patriotism, democratic complicity, war on civilians, and carceral responsibility—at play in our political lives.
More here.
Charles Taylor in The Immanent Frame:
Almost everyone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of five hundred years ago is that they lived in an “enchanted” world, and we do not; at the very least, we live in a much less “enchanted” world. We might think of this as our having “lost” a number of beliefs and the practices which they made possible. But more, the enchanted world was one in which these forces could cross a porous boundary and shape our lives, psychic and physical. One of the big differences between us and them is that we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other. We are “buffered” selves. We have changed.
This is not a mere “subtraction” story, for it thinks not only of loss but of remaking. With the subtraction story, there can be no epistemic loss involved in the transition; we have just shucked off some false beliefs, some fears of imagined objects. Looked at my way, the process of disenchantment involves a change in sensibility; one is open to different things. One has lost a way in which people used to experience the world.
Disenchantment in my use (and partly in Weber’s) really translates Weber’s term “Entzauberung,” where the key kernel concept is “Zauber,” magic. In a sense, moderns constructed their own concept of magic from and through the process of disenchantment. Carried out first under Reforming Christian auspices, the condemned practices all involved using spiritual force against or at least independently of our relation to God. The worst examples were things like saying a black mass for the dead to kill off your enemy or using the host as a love charm. But in the more exigent modes of Reform, the distinction between white and black magic tended to disappear, and all independent recourse to forces independent of God was seen as culpable. The category “magic” was constituted through this rejection, and this distinction was then handed on to post-Enlightenment anthropology, as with Frazer’s distinction between “magic” and “religion.”
The process of disenchantment, involving a change in us, can be seen as a loss of a certain sensibility that is really an impoverishment (as against simply the shedding of irrational feelings).
