Brian Hayes in American Scientist:
This column marks an anniversary: It has been 25 years since I began writing these essays on the pleasures and possibilities of computation. My first columns appeared in Scientific American ; later I wrote for Computer Language and then The Sciences ; since 1993 the column has been happily at home here in American Scientist . (Some of my earlier essays are newly available online at bit-player.org/pubs .)
For my very first column, in October of 1983, I chose as an epigraph some words of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz: “Let us calculate!” In Leibniz’s Latin this exhortation was actually just one word: “Calculemus!” Leibniz was an optimist—he was the model of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss—and he saw a bright future for what we would now call algorithmic thinking. Calculation would be the key to settling all human conflicts and disagreements, he believed. I can’t quite match Leibniz’s faith in attaining world peace through computation, but in my own way I’m an algorithmic optimist too. I see computing as an important tool for helping us understand the world we live in and enriching our experience of life.
When I wrote that first column, the idea of a personal computer was still a novelty, and there was some question what it might be good for. Now the computer is a fixture of daily life. We rely on it to read the news, to keep in touch with friends, to listen to music and watch movies, to pay bills, to play games, and occasionally to get a bit of work done. Oddly enough, though, one thing we seldom do with the computer is compute. Only a minority of computer users ever sit down to write a program as a step in solving a problem or answering a question. In this column I want to celebrate the rewards of programming and computing, and cheer on those who get their kicks out of this peculiar sport. I also have a few words to say about the evolution of tools for programming.
More here.
Pete Lunn and Tim Hartford debate the question in Prospect:
Dear Tim
12th August 2008
These are exciting times to be an economist. The whirligig of international finance has come crunching to a halt. The British housing market inflated until we could hardly bear to watch, then popped in a destructive, sticky instant. The prices of food and oil are yo-yoing on speculative strings. And the textbooks still tell us that markets populated by rational, selfish, independent agents allocate resources efficiently.
Meanwhile, a revolution is under way in economic thought. Behavioural economics is no bell or whistle on the contraption of traditional economics; it is a big departure which will deliver a revolutionary new way of understanding the world. The founding assumptions of orthodox, neoclassical economics—that people can be thought of as rational, selfish and independent—are collapsing under the weight of empirical refutations…
Dear Pete
13th August 2008
I’m disappointed. I had assumed, given your opening paragraph, that you were going to explain how behavioural economics might have predicted the credit crunch and the commodity boom, or offered a new way to regulate banks. That really would have been revolutionary. Instead, you offer the dear old ultimatum game. I was not surprised to read your lop-sided and unconvincing caricature of orthodox economics (“textbooks” are such a convenient straw man), but I was astonished to see you present a caricature of the subject you claim to be championing…
More from both men here.
///
Song of Taste
Gary Snyder
Eating the living germs of grasses
Eating the ova of large birds
…the fleshy sweetness packed
…around the sperm of swaying trees
The muscles of the flanks and thighs of
ppppppp soft-voiced cows
pp the bounce in the lamb’s leap
pp the swish in the ox’s tail
Eating roots grown swoll
ppppppp inside the soil
Drawing on life of living
pp clustered points of light spun
ppppppp out of space
hidden in the grape.
Eating each other’s seed
ppppppp eating
pp ah, each other.
Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread:
…………lip to lip.
From Regarding Wave (New Directions, 1970)
///
From The Telegraph:
The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented and most eccentric in Europe. While the youngest son, Ludwig, became one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, three of his seven siblings committed suicide, and all struggled to grow up in the shadow of their bullying father, Karl. In an extract from his book about the Wittgensteins, Alexander Waugh describes a unique dynasty.
LUDWIG AND PAUL WITTGENSTEIN
In adult life Paul Wittgenstein was far more famous than his younger brother, but nowadays it is the other way round: Ludwig, or Lucki to the family, has become an icon of the 20th century – the handsome, stammering, tortured, incomprehensible philosopher, around whose formidable personality an extraordinary cult developed in the years that followed his death in 1951. At the time of Gretl and Jerome’s courtship, Paul – attractive, neurotic, learned, nature-loving and intense – was 17 and about to sit his final school examinations at the classical Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt. Ludwig, a year and a half younger, was lodging during term-time with a family in Linz where he attended lessons at the Staatsoberrealschule, a semi-classical state secondary school of 300 pupils.
According to the recollection of one of his fellow pupils, the majority of the school’s teachers were mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics; their collars were unkempt, their external appearance exuded uncleanness, they were the product of a proletariat denuded of all personal independence of thought, distinguished by unparalleled ignorance and most admirably fitted to become the pillars of an effete system of government which, thank God, is now a thing of the past.
That pupil – just six days older than Lucki – was Adolf Hitler.
More here.
From Scientific American:
Researchers have discovered that the same nerve cells involved in forming memories also are involved in replaying them. The finding, published today in the online edition of Science, provides new insight into how complex memories are laid down in a single neuron (nerve cell) and how neural firing, or communication, patterns created during memory formation are maintained during recall. Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.) showed 13 volunteers—epilepsy patients with therapeutic electrodes implanted in their brains—several five- to 10-second clips from videos such as The Simpsons. The researchers found that a small sample comprising some 50 neurons in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex (memory centers in the brain) fired in distinctive repeatable patterns that differed for each clip.
“The results were quite astounding,” says senior study author Itzhak Fried, director of the U.C.L.A. Health System’s Epilepsy Surgery Program. The same neuron that activated during the original viewing of a specific snippet also fired during recall, and the action began a second or so before the patient reported seeing the clip. That means, Fried says, that “the very neuron that was selectively active during the encoding, during the original viewing, suddenly came to life. It essentially replayed that memory by firing.”
More here.
Friday, September 5, 2008
William Deresiewicz in The Nation:
Like a peddler just arrived in town, or a traveler come from foreign shores, Salman Rushdie spreads before us his magic carpet of stories. Rushdie has been many things–political novelist, national epicist, probing essayist, free-speech icon out of force of circumstance–but he has always been, first and last, a storyteller. As Conrad sought to return to fiction the immediacy of the sailor’s tale–one man entertaining his mates over claret and cigars–so Rushdie seeks to reanimate the printed page with the exuberance and exoticism of legend and fable, fairy tale and myth: the province of the wanderer, the yarn spinner, the bard. More than Ulysses or The Tin Drum, his most persistent models have been the Thousand and One Nights and the Hindu epics, The Wizard of Oz and Bollywood. He doesn’t want to be Joyce; he wants to be Scheherazade. His greatest works engage the tragedies of modern history through the most audaciously archaic of narrative devices. Midnight’s Children hinges on the switching of two babies in the cradle; The Satanic Verses features flying carpets and Ovidian metamorphoses.
More here.
Dexter Filkins in the New York Times Magazine:
Late in the afternoon of June 10, during a firefight with Taliban militants along the Afghan-Pakistani border, American soldiers called in airstrikes to beat back the attack. The firefight was taking place right on the border itself, known in military jargon as the “zero line.” Afghanistan was on one side, and the remote Pakistani region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, was on the other. The stretch of border was guarded by three Pakistani military posts.
The American bombers did the job, and then some. By the time the fighting ended, the Taliban militants had slipped away, the American unit was safe and 11 Pakistani border guards lay dead. The airstrikes on the Pakistani positions sparked a diplomatic row between the two allies: Pakistan called the incident “unprovoked and cowardly”; American officials regretted what they called a tragic mistake. But even after a joint inquiry by the United States, Pakistan and Afghanistan, it remained unclear why American soldiers had reached the point of calling in airstrikes on soldiers from Pakistan, a critical ally in the war in Afghanistan and the campaign against terrorism.
The mystery, at least part of it, was solved in July by four residents of Suran Dara, a Pakistani village a few hundred yards from the site of the fight…
More here.
Jane Perlez in the New York Times:
In April, Mr. Zardari told Ishaq Dar, the finance minister at the time and a member of Mr. Sharif’s party, which has since broken with Mr. Zardari, that he wanted the price the government paid farmers for wheat to be raised substantially as a way of rewarding an important constituency in Punjab Province, the nation’s most populous, according to two participants in the discussion with Mr. Zardari. The government would then have to heavily subsidize the cost of wheat to the consumer.
When Mr. Dar asked Mr. Zardari how he thought the government would pay for the subsidy, Mr. Zardari replied, “Print the notes,” according to the two participants, a government official and an associate of Mr. Zardari’s. In an effort to solve the impasse over the subsidy, it was suggested that Mr. Zardari form a committee of experts.
“ ‘I am the expert,’ ” Mr. Zardari said, according to his associate.
More here. [Thanks to Tasnim Raza.]
///
Night Words
Philip Levine
after Juan Ramon
A child wakens in a cold apartment.
The windows are frosted. Outside he hears
words rising from the streets, words he cannot
understand, and then the semis gear down
for the traffic light on Houston. He sleeps
again and dreams of another city
on a high hill above a wide river
bathed in sunlight, and the dream is his life
as he will live it twenty years from now.
No, no, you say, dreams do not work that way,
they function otherwise. Perhaps in the world
you’re right, but on Houston tonight two men
are trying to change a tire as snow gathers
on their shoulders and scalds their ungloved hands.
The older one, the father, is close to tears,
for he’s sure his son, who’s drunk, is laughing
secretly at him for all his failures
as a man and a father, and he is
laughing to himself but because he’s happy
to be alone with his father as he was
years ago in another life where snow
never fell. At last he slips the tire iron
gently from his father’s grip and kneels
down in the unstained snow and unbolts the wheel
while he sings of drinking a glass of wine,
the black common wine of Alicante,
in raw sunlight. Now the father joins in,
and the words rise between the falling flakes
only to be transformed into the music
spreading slowly over the oiled surface
of the river that runs through every child’s dreams.
From The Mercy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)
Michel Rocard in Porject Syndicate:
At first glance, European social democracy appears to be in crisis. Gordon Brown’s slump in the United Kingdom; the brutal shock of Spain’s economic downturn; the difficulties of renewing Socialist leadership in France; the collapse of the center-left coalition in Italy; and severe infighting within Germany’s SPD: all point to social democracy’s seeming inability to seize the opportunity – which the current financial crisis should present – to exert greater influence.
But the simultaneous occurrence and high visibility of these problems is less significant than they appear. Mistakes or clumsiness in governance are not exclusive to the left: Belgium is paralyzed by the threat of break-up, Austria is still looking to cement an unlikely conservative coalition, Poland is struggling to find a steady balance for its numerous reactionary impulses, and the French president is hitting record lows in terms of popularity.
Two factors help to explain current European uncertainties. First, there is the economic and financial crisis that we are only slowly overcoming. Second, there is the way in which the media are covering it. The combination of the two is, I believe, behind the feeling of powerlessness that is now affecting the whole of Europe, and that may appear to characterize social democracy in particular.
Ina Hartwig in the Frankfurter Rundschau (translated in signandsight):
The legendary correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan which was originally intended to be kept under wraps until 2023, has been released by their heirs and edited by Suhrkamp Verlag with appropriate thoroughness. And here they are – almost 200 documents, letters, dedications, telegrams, postcards which open the door onto a huge, difficult relationship between two individuals, who were nothing less than hurled into each others‘ arms by affinity, poetic calling, erotic attraction and mourning for events of the past. The documents date from the period before fame towered over the two poets in a way that seemed more destructive than protective. Indeed the need for protection and the feeling of woundedness thread through their letters like a leitmotif.
“Glorious news” the 21-year old Ingeborg Bachmann writes in a letter to her parents, the “surrealist poet” Paul Celan has fallen in love with her. It is May 1948, Vienna. The 27-year-old Celan, whose parents, Leo and Friederike Antschel, died in a German concentration camp in Ukraine, had fled just a few months earlier from Bucharest, via Budapest, to Vienna. Bachmann, the daughter of a teacher and a former member of the Nazi party, is writing her PhD on Heidegger. Celan, of all people, will write in a letter to Bachmann several years later, that Heidegger‘s choking on his own mistakes is more agreeable to him than the solid Federal German conscience of someone like Heinrich Böll.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
In the LRB:
The expansion of the EU to the lands of the Warsaw Pact did not require much political defence or illustration. The countries concerned were all indisputably European, however the term was defined, and all had famously suffered under Communism. To bring them into the Union was not just to heal an ancient division of the continent, anchoring them in a common liberal-democratic capitalism, but to compensate the East for its misfortunes after 1945, relieving the West of a bad conscience at the difference in fates between them. They would also, of course, constitute a strategic glacis against any resurgence of Russia, and offer a nearby pool of cheap labour, although this received less public emphasis. The uncontentious logic here is not, on face of it, immediately transferable to Turkey. The country has long been a market economy, held parliamentary elections, constituted a pillar of Nato, and is now situated further from Russia than ever in the past. It would look as if only the last of the motives in Eastern Europe, the economic objective, applies – not unimportant, certainly, but incapable of explaining the priority Turkey’s entry into the EU has acquired in Brussels.
Yet a kind of symmetry with the case for Eastern Europe can be discerned in the principal reasons advanced for Turkish membership in Western capitals. The fall of the Soviet Union may have removed the menace of Communism, but there is now – it is widely believed – a successor danger in Islamism. Rampant in the authoritarian societies of the Middle East, it threatens to stretch into immigrant communities within Western Europe itself. What better prophylactic against it than to embrace a staunch Muslim democracy within the EU, functioning as both beacon of a liberal order to a region in desperate need of a more enlightened political model and sentinel against every kind of terrorism and extremism?
Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:
Driving through the hills of northern San Diego County in the evening is lonely. The sun sets due west over the Pacific Ocean, red sinking into blue. There’s the scrub brush and the desert flora, dusty green against brown and beige. The streets are so wide, so empty. Streetlights throw down orange circles at regular intervals, electrified polka dots for nobody. The sound of tires against smooth concrete roads matches the tempo and degree of the light, soft and rounded over the canyons, content barely to exist at all.
David Hockney understood that light and that tempo. He came to Los Angeles for the light. He came also for the space, the open space just sitting there, waiting for the light to come upon it. It was the solution to a formal problem: Where do you go from Abstract Expressionism?
For Hockney, you go to Southern California.
More
The Anima Dannata, or Damned Soul, is not Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s most ambitious work, but the carved marble, produced in 1619 when Bernini was just 22, is a defining work of his long career. A broad-browed, boldly featured man appears frozen in an instant of simultaneous ecstasy and horror — mouth agape, face strained, hair electrified — as he faces the dread his sins have earned him. Somehow, Bernini managed to pack in the drama and emotion one finds in his better-known sculptures — David, which he produced just a few years later, and TheEcstasy of St. Theresa — but while those other sculptures benefit from bodily pose and the setting of scene to construct the narrative behind their drama, Damned Soul pulls off the implication of narrative while working only from the armpits up. It is one of Bernini’s allegorical busts, standing a total of 38 centimeters.
more from the LA Weekly here.
Burhan Wazir reviews Balti Britain: A Journey Through the British Asian Experience in The National:
This British Asian boom arrived at a celebratory time in British history. Many Londoners were enjoying a post-election cigarette after Labour’s systematic destruction of the Conservative party at the polls. In Tony Blair, Child of the Sixties, the country had its first post-war prime minister. His predecessor, John Major, had extolled the virtues of cricket; Blair idolised football. Honest John listened to classical music and jazz. Blair’s musical taste was a typically contemporary pastiche: punk (Sham 69), faux-soul (Simply Red) and American rock (Bruce Springsteen). London was feeling good.
Elsewhere in the country, however, “Cool Britannia” was a mirage increasingly failing to address festering differences between communities. In Britain’s northern inner cities, the spectre of drugs, crime and prostitution (allegedly controlled by Asian gangs) was taking hold. These inequalities were violently exposed in May, June and July of 2001, an election year, when riots ignited in the major Northern cities of Leeds, Bradford, Burnley and Oldham. In Bradford alone, 300 police officers were injured and nearly as many rioters arrested. Damage to the city was estimated at around £7 million (Dh47.5m).
The following year marked more dire milestones for both the Labour Party and race relations in the UK. The British National Party, campaigning on a platform alleging widespread reverse racism in favour of swarms of asylum seekers, won three seats on the Burnley council. It was the party’s biggest electoral victory in more than 20 years. During election week, one resident of Burnley, when asked why he’d voted for the BNP, succinctly put it to this writer when he said, “Cos they wanna get rid of Paki scum like you.”
In his new history of the British Asian experience, Ziauddan Sardar, author of Why do People Hate America? and Desperately Seeking Paradise: Journeys of a Sceptical Muslim, forcefully outlines the challenges facing second generation communities. The book takes its name from a Birmingham fast-food creation involving a variety of fiery spices, vegetables and meats. Sardar takes balti to be a symbol of the British Asian diaspora: a fusion of nationalities and sects who, due to economic hardships, resettled in the UK.
More here.
Like most authors, Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant were naturally preoccupied with the possible impact of their work on posterity; yet neither of them ever imagined that their sentimental partnership might itself become an inspirational model for future generations. Unlike that other famous literary couple to whom they are often compared – Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – they were not inclined to be smug about their association, idealizing it as the superior union of free spirits; on the contrary, they soon came to view their life together as an unmitigated disaster, one from which they made protracted, if unsuccessful, attempts to extricate themselves.
So what is it that makes de Staël and Constant so interesting as a couple? Contemporaries would have replied unhesitatingly that their genius for brilliant conversation shone most brightly when they were in each other’s company, that one could not claim to have known either of them, unless one had seen them performing together. This double-act dimension of the relationship is unfortunately lost for us, as are all but a few of the many letters they exchanged over the years. In a spirited “dual biography”, Renée Winegarten retraces the evolution of the partnership in an attempt to place it on firmer ground; unsurprisingly, perhaps, this comparative exercise brings to light more differences than similarities between the two protagonists.
more from the TLS here.
This Might Be Real
Sarah Manguso
How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?
What about reality interests you?
How long can you live?
Were you there when I said this might be real?
How much do you love?
Sixty percent?
Things that are gone?
Do you love what’s real?
Is real a partial form?
Is it a nascent form?
What is it before it’s real?
Is it a switch that moves and then is ever still?
Is it a spectrum of cross-fades?
Is what’s next real?
When it comes will everything turn real?
If I drink enough tea to hallucinate, is that real?
If I know I’m waiting for someone but I don’t know who, is he real?
Is he real when he comes?
Is he real when he’s gone?
Is consequence what’s real?
Is consequence all that’s real?
What brings consequence?
Is it what’s real?
Is it what turned everything to disbelief, the last form love takes?
