How do we know anything about the Earth’s past climate? Discussions about climate change—its extent, its causes, and what to do about it—often hinge on what we know about our planet’s temperature history. Climate scientists and policymakers routinely talk about the Earth’s “global mean temperature” and compare today’s temperature to a record dating back hundreds of thousands of years. But where does that record come from? And what does it even mean for a single figure to represent the temperature of our entire planet, with its regional diversity and dynamic atmosphere? Scientists have devised ingenious techniques to peer into our planet’s past temperature record, but the picture they give us is a blurry one.

If today you decided that you wanted to know how the climate changes at a certain location, say the base of the Statue of Liberty, you could put a thermometer there and record a measurement at noon every day—or at the beginning of every hour or second, if you want finer resolution. This would ensure that you have a thorough record of fluctuations in temperature at that particular site, from this day forward.

Thanks to scientists (and scientifically-minded amateurs), we have such temperature records dating back more than two centuries for some particular sites. But in discussions of global climate change, the figure of interest is not just the temperature at the feet of Lady Liberty—no single site is wholly representative of the Earth’s complicated climate system—but rather a number representing the Earth’s temperature as a whole. This figure is often cited but rarely explained.

more from The New Atlantis here.

Fr. Ranhilio Callangan Aquino offers this odd juxtaposition in the Manila Standard Today (Philippines) (for Sophie Schulte-Hillen):

‘Britain’s Got Talent” is the United Kingdom’s answer to “American Idol.” Simon Cowell also sits as judge and he is also referred to there as “the nasty Simon.” When Paul Potts, a salesman, announced that he was going to sing opera, it was not really incredulity that registered on the judges’ faces, just a dismissive “Oh, God…”. But as Paul sang the first bars of Nessun Dorma it became clear that here was someone who was not to be dismissed nonchalantly. As he took the song to its climax many in the audience wiped their cheeks, and the lady-judge shed tears unabashedly. Simon put it best when by calling the rendition “a breath of fresh air.” So why does Nessun Dorma appeal in an age of punk and metal?

If an aria from Puccini’s Turandot propelled Potts to stardom almost overnight—although he did figure in several singing events prior to this competition—then indeed Nessun Dorma is a classic, as The Illiad is a classic, as is Macbeth, as is a Bach fugue! Poll Pots won because he sang a beautiful aria beautifully. That is a truth-claim, and the common riposte: beautiful to you, not to me, is just naïve, if not uneducated. I am not saying that whoever dislikes Puccini is a boor (although that might very well be the case); I am saying that whoever recites with unction that well-worn refrain: good to you, not to me; beautiful for you, not for me, should be more reticent about exhibiting intellectual bankruptcy!

Gadamer dwelt on the subject of whether there can be a claim to truth absent the method of scientific inquiry. Do works of art, for example, make a claim to truth? Quite clearly, what truth there might be in a work of art will be different from the truth that astronomers tell us after receiving photos from the Hubble telescope—and even in this respect, we must be warned that they are not just reading, but always interpreting.

Over at Princeton University Press:

A strong “Kantian” strand is visible in much contemporary political theory, and even perhaps in some real political practice. This strand expresses itself in the highly moralised tone in which some public diplomacy is conducted, at any rate in the English-speaking world, and also in the popularity among political philosophers of the slogan “Politics is applied ethics.” Slogans like this can be dangerous precisely because they are slickly ambiguous, and this one admits of at least two drastically divergent interpretations. There is what I will call “the anodyne” reading of the slogan, which formulates a view I fully accept, and then there is what I will call the “ethics-first” reading.

The anodyne reading asserts that “politics”—meaning both forms of political action and ways of studying forms of political action—is not and cannot be a strictly value-free enterprise, and so is in the very general sense an “ethical” activity. Politics is a matter of human, and not merely mechanical, interaction between individuals, institutions, or groups. It can happen that a group of passengers in an airplane are thrown together mechanically when it crashes, or that a man slipping off a bridge accidentally lands on a tramp sleeping under the bridge. The second of these two examples is a salutary reminder of the role of contingency and of the unexpected in history, but neither of the two cases is a paradigm for politics.

A great dialogue.

Ellen Meiksins Wood reviews Quentin Skinner’s Hobbes and Republican Liberty in the LRB:

The essence of the ‘republican’ idea as Skinner outlines it here is that liberty is the absence of dependence, and that the mere presence of arbitrary power, whether or not it is exercised in ways that limit the freedom of action, is enough to transform the status of free men into that of slaves. Liberty, in other words, can be lost even in the absence of actual interference. The very existence of arbitrary power, however permissively or even benignly it may be exercised, reduces men to servitude; and free individuals can exist only in free states. The roots of the republican idea are traceable to ancient Rome and to the revival of republicanism in Renaissance Italy. Something like this conception of what it means to be a free man, Skinner argues, became especially prominent in England in the 1640s in opposition to the Crown’s assertion of its discretionary, and hence arbitrary, prerogative rights; and it would give rise to ‘republican’ classics in the writings of Milton, James Harrington and Algernon Sidney.

Hobbes’s three major works of political philosophy, The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan, were designed, Skinner tells us, in direct opposition to parliamentary and radical writers. As the conflict between Parliament and Crown took its course, and his own circumstances changed, he refined and modified his arguments. Elements was not published until 1650, but was privately circulated in 1640, when Parliament was finally convened by Charles I for the first time in 11 years, and members of the Short Parliament were vociferously denouncing the king’s attacks on liberty. Later that year, Hobbes fled to Paris in fear that his absolutist views might put him in danger. He would remain in self-imposed exile for 11 years. His revision of Elements was printed in Paris in 1642, and in 1647 the new version was published in extended and revised form as De Cive. It was the final defeat and execution of the king in 1649 that provoked Hobbes to compose his classic Leviathan. This was, he wrote, ‘a work that now fights on behalf of all kings and all who, under whatever name, hold regal rights’ – an objective which, as Skinner demonstrates, could as easily serve Cromwell as hereditary kings.

Michael Gorra’s review  in the TLS:

The key to this rich, provocative and not entirely accessible collection of essays lies in a little piece from 2007, reprinted here from the New Statesman. “Anti-Fusion” lays down an aesthetic that governs Amit Chaudhuri’s recent second career as a musician, and points towards a set of possibilites for the anglophone Indian fiction in which he made his name, a way to push aside the pop postmodernism with which, in his view, it is too often associated. The usual assumption is that fusion music “comprises a departure, scandalous or liberating, from the canonical music traditions”. But Chaudhuri argues that those traditions are themselves “hybrid forms”, and most creative when most restless: when, in trying to incorporate the new, an inherited form sustains an “inner tension between domestication and accommodation”. For him most “fusion” music lacks that inner tension. There might be a face-off between the different traditions on which it draws, but they do not quite manage to transform one another. Too often “the Eastern and Western elements in fusion have a designated static quality that they do not in their own contexts”. So Chaudhuri speaks on behalf of dialectic, not fusion; on behalf of quarrel and assimilation, and not the kind of multi-culti celebration that often winds up confirming our “unexamined beliefs about identity and where we come from”.

Still, Chaudhuri doesn’t quite call for a sense of perpetual flux. He is certainly interested in how newness enters the world. But he is drawn to older things too, and in particular to a conception of modernity that he sees as threatened by the succeeding idea of globalization. A globalized postmodernity excludes as much as it includes, and Chaudhuri is particularly troubled by the way indigenous high culture gets lost in the organizing narratives of postcoloniality and cultural studies. His sense of this has perhaps a touch of caricature. He writes here as an academic responding to the interpretative fictions of other academics, and overemphasizes the degree to which the university has put its weight on the side of popular culture. So I in turn will simplify his own views. He may like Bollywood, but he loves Tagore, and believes there is something wrong with a critical practice that has forgotten the profound moment of cultural dialectic called the Bengal Renaissance. There is more in the past than one thinks to help or enable an Indian writer’s encounter with the West.

The audio is available over at NYPL Live.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s “rock-star philosopher,” and Slavoj Žižek, the Slovanian “Elvis of cultural theory,” will scrutinize the totalitarianisms of the past as well as those of the future, as they argue for a new political and moral vision for our times and investigate the limits of tolerance.

Does the advent of capitalism cause more violence than it prevents? Is there violence in the simple idea of the neighbor? asks Zizek in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections.

Are human rights Western or Universal? How is it that progressives themselves-those who in the past defended individual rights and fought fascism-have now become the breeding ground for new kinds of dangerous attitudes? asks Lévy in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against New Barbarism.

///

Sit
Vikram Seth

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.

You’re twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.

No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I’ll

Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

……………………………………..

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.

This twenty minutes’ rendezvous will make my day:

To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,

Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

///

From The New York Times:

TROY, N.Y. — On a hillside overlooking this college town on the banks of the Hudson, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has erected a technological pleasure dome for the mind and senses. Eight years and $200 million in the making, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, or Empac, resembles an enormous 1950s-era television set. But inside are not old-fashioned vacuum tubes but the stuff of 21st-century high-tech dreams dedicated to the marriage of art and science as it has never been done before, its creators say — 220,000 square feet of theaters, studios and work spaces hooked to supercomputers.

Within its walls, the designers say, scientists can immerse themselves in data and fly through a breaking wave or inspect the kinks in a DNA molecule, artists can participate in virtual concerts with colleagues in different parts of the world or send spectators on trips through imaginary landscapes, and architects can ponder their creations from the inside before a single brick or two-by-four has been put in place. It opens for business on Oct. 3 with a three-week gala of performances including classical music, virtual reality rides, symposiums and celebrations. Some scientists dream of eventually using the new center to create a version of the “Star Trek” holodeck where humans can interact with life-size “synthetic creatures” who live only in a computer. Others plan to teach surgery by doing virtual procedures or taking doctors on tours through models of actual hearts and circulatory systems.

“What you do is a function of what you want to do,” said Shirley Ann Jackson, a physicist and president of Rensselaer since 1999. In terms of scale and the combination of performance and research at a university, “Nothing can be compared to this,” she said. “To our knowledge, there is nothing else like it.”

More here.

Kelly McCallum.

More about this exceptional goldsmith and jewelry designer here.

Her “Dust to dust” collection here.

Thanks to Jaffer Kolb for finding me this beautiful work.

///
Slamdunk
Yusef Komunyakaa

Fast breaks. Lay ups. With Mercury’s
Insignia on our sneakers,
We outmaneuvered the footwork
Of bad angels. Nothing but a hot
Swish of strings like silk
Ten feet out. In the roundhouse
Labyrinth our bodies
Created, we could almost
Last forever, poised in midair
Like storybook sea monsters.
A high note hung there
A long second. Off
The rim. We’d corkscrew
Up & dunk balls that exploded
The skullcap of hope & good
Intention. Bug-eyed, lanky,
All hands & feet . . . sprung rhythm.
We were metaphysical when girls
Cheered on the sidelines.
Tangled up in a falling,
Muscles were a bright motor
Double-flashing to the metal hoop
Nailed to our oak.
When Sonny Boy’s mama died
He played nonstop all day, so hard
Our backboard splintered.
Glistening with sweat, we jibed
& rolled the ball off our
Fingertips. Trouble
Was there slapping a blackjack
Against an open palm.
Dribble, drive to the inside, feint,
& glide like a sparrow hawk.
Lay ups. Fast breaks.
We had moves we didn’t know
We had. Our bodies spun
On swivels of bone & faith,
Through a lyric slipknot
Of joy, & we knew we were
Beautiful & dangerous.

//

From The Guardian:

From Portnoy’s Complaint to American Pastoral, Philip Roth’s jostling alter egos have provided the literary world with some of the great masterpieces of the past half-century. Here, as he celebrates his 75th birthday, the novelist talks to Robert McCrum about losing friends, living alone and why the next book will be his last.

It was the last weekend of summer – the Democratic convention looming; a late heatwave baffling the chills of fall – when I drove upstate from New York City to meet Philip Roth at home in northwest Connecticut. It’s like Switzerland round here – sparkling streams; plush, manicured properties; perfect meadows – with countless American flags advertising an air of patriotic entitlement. Roth’s remote grey clapboard house, dating to the revolution, is high on a hill down a quiet country road, not hard to find, but some miles from the nearest village, which is really a nothing place with two antique stores.

The tall figure who emerges from among the apple trees in greeting wears grey tracksuit bottoms and a long-sleeved grey sweatshirt that makes me think of prison garb in some progressive correctional regime. Before I find the composure to take in the burning intensity of his expression, the smooth grey features and interrogative tilt of the head, reminiscent of an American eagle, my first impression is that Philip Roth looks as much like a Supreme Court judge on furlough as one of his country’s most admired writers. In his own words, from the opening of The Ghost Writer, you could ‘begin to understand why hiding out twelve hundred feet up in the mountains with just the birds and the trees might not be a bad idea for a writer, Jewish or not… Purity. Serenity. Simplicity. Seclusion. All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the gruelling, exalted, transcendent calling.’ Like his hero Zuckerman, Roth seems to have thought, ‘This is how I will live.’

More here.

From Scientific American:

In some ways, intelligence is very simple. “It’s something that everybody observes in others,” says Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia. “Everybody knows that some people are smarter than others, whatever it means technically. It’s something you sense in people when you talk to them.” Yet that kind of gut instinct does not translate easily into a scientific definition. In 1996 the American Psychological Association issued a report on intelligence, which stated only that “individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought.”

To measure these differences, psychologists in the early 1900s invented tests of various kinds of thought, such as math, spatial reasoning and verbal skills. To compare scores on one type of test to those on another, some psychologists developed standard scales of intelligence. The most familiar of them is the intelligence quotient, which is produced by setting the average score at 100. IQ scores are not arbitrary numbers, however. Psychologists can use them to make strong predictions about other features of people’s lives. It is possible to make reasonably good predictions, based on IQ scores in childhood, about how well people will fare in school and in the workplace. People with high IQs even tend to live longer than average. “If you have an IQ score, does that tell you everything about a person’s cognitive strengths and weaknesses? No,” says Richard J. Haier of the University of California, Irvine. But even a simple number has the potential to say a lot about a person. “When you go see your doctor, what’s the first thing that happens? Somebody takes your blood pressure and temperature. So you get two numbers. No one would say blood pressure and temperature summarize everything about your health, but they are key numbers.”

More here.

From The Telegraph:

“Luvvie” is a tired old word yet it conjures a stereotype that most of us recognise, one that Lord Attenborough fits to perfection. There was a time when no showbusiness award ceremony was complete without the climactic appearance of “Dickie”, envelope in hand, eyes glistening behind his spectacles, declaiming a speech that commemorated the achievements of Larry Olivier or little Johnny Mills.

To an extent, this autobiography upholds the public image. Its title is a pure exhalation of luvviedom – so much so that one suspects irony – and within its pages are eulogies to the “new dawn” heralded by Tony Blair (like all luvvies, “Dickie” is a lifelong Labour supporter who believes that true passion for the arts cannot thrive within a Tory breast); to Princess Diana, whom Attenborough coached in public speaking and adored for her gift of “empathy”; to Nelson Mandela and, in muted form, to Mandela’s disgraced ex-wife Winnie (her “violent and sadistic streak”, he writes, was “triggered” by time spent in solitary confinement).

There are also several references to being “reduced to tears” by the generosity of colleagues.

Yet Entirely Up to You, Darling ought really to lay the luvvie joke to rest. For one thing, Attenborough loathes being called “Dickie”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In his new novel, “Indignation,” Philip Roth withholds a crucial piece of information — and that’s an understatement — until about a quarter of the way through. This placement seems to me right on the borderline of fair game for reviewers, and not to tell it would misrepresent the book. (A more alert reader than I was might figure it out simply by looking at the table of contents.) Still, it seems mean to spoil a strategic surprise for folks who like that kind of thing. So in case you want to head for the exit now, I’m going to vamp for a couple of paragraphs of harmless generalities and evasive plot summary before getting specific. Roth has a couple more surprises, too (which you might see coming but probably won’t), and I promise not to get anywhere near those. Anyhow, isn’t it surprising enough that Roth, now 75, has just published his third novel in three years?

Well, at this point, maybe not. Since “Sabbath’s Theater” in 1995, Roth has written eight novels, including two general-consensus masterworks — “American Pastoral” (1997) and “Everyman” (2006) — the conclusion of his long Zuckerman saga (last year’s “Exit Ghost”) and a half-dozen other exceptionally strong books. And in “Indignation,” his power and intensity seem undiminished. I generally prefer Roth’s short, devastating sex-and-mortality novels — “Every­man,” “Exit Ghost,” “The Dying Animal” (2001) — to his larger social/political/historical excursions — “American Pastoral,” “The Human Stain” (2000), “The Plot Against America” (2004) — although I admit the big books are more fun to read, since they offer a richer menu of topical distractions from what’s ultimately in store for each of us. “Indignation,” set during the Korean War in a small, conservative Ohio college — hat-tippingly named Winesburg — has something in common with both Rothian modes. It evokes a nasty period of America’s social history (you know, as opposed to all those idyllic ones), but like Roth’s two previous novels, it’s also ruthlessly economical and relentlessly deathbound.

More here.

We have all heard at school about the archaic smile and we have seen it in museums on Kouroi and Korai. Yet, we very rarely see laughter depicted in ancient Greek sculpture, while in other cultures we come across laughing representations of gods (for instance, the laughing Buddha). This is an observation made by Yannis Tsividis, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York, who addressed it as a question to distinguished archaeologists, art historians, classical philologists, curators, and historians of ideas. Their answers, which were immediately and very kindly given, are published here. (Unfortunately we did not have an equally forthcoming response from Greek scholars).

more from Eurozine here.

Two weeks before the 2004 Democratic caucuses in Iowa, a political advertisement aired on Des Moines television stations, paid for by the Club for Growth, a Washington, D.C.-based political action committee. The television spot featured a white-haired couple demanding Howard Dean “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” Fun fact: The Club for Growth’s president, Jonathan Baron, served previously as Communications Director for former U.S. House Majority Whip Tom Delay (R-Texas) and as Communications Director for former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle. Though short-lived, the ad garnered a considerable amount of attention on blogs and in politically minded books.

But that’s not why the ad intrigued me in those lonesome, tension-fraught days following the election. I was despondent about the outcome, but the ad caught my interest for a single, highly personal reason: My feelings were hurt. Why? I drink lattes. A lot of them.

more from The Morning News here.

The toxic yet vacuous phrase “self-indulgent” was often used by the detractors of David Foster Wallace (as if it isn’t self-indulgent to write anything at all). Another accusation, that Wallace was overly cerebral, misses the point completely. As a writer, the guy was as large-hearted as he was big-brained. Don Gately, the recovering narcotics addict in Infinite Jest, is one of the most compassionately drawn and convincingly real characters in contemporary fiction, close in intention, conception, and articulation to a latter-day Leopold Bloom.

I don’t think an essay more hilarious than “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — Wallace’s account of a botched vacation on a cruise ship — has been written. It ranks with Twain and will endure as long as people want to laugh. His essays often brought forth a sense of exuberant joy, with their meanderings and addictive, often imitated footnotes and mock-scholarly sensibility. Yet Wallace’s fiction also portrays terrible mental darkness, especially what doctors call “major depression.” Wallace’s father told The New York Times that his son suffered from this disease for years, leading to two recent hospitalizations before his apparent suicide.

more from The Smart Set here.

///
Workingman’s Blues #2
Bob Dylan

There’s an evenin’ haze settlin’ over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down
Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak
The place I love best is a sweet memory
It’s a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad

My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf
Come sit down on my knee
You are dearer to me than myself
As you yourself can see
I’m listenin’ to the steel rails hum
Got both eyes tight shut
Just sitting here trying to keep the hunger from
Creeping it’s way into my gut

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

Now, I’m sailin’ on back, ready for the long haul
Tossed by the winds and the seas
I’ll drag ‘em all down to hell and I’ll stand ‘em at the wall
I’ll sell ‘em to their enemies
I’m tryin’ to feed my soul with thought
Gonna sleep off the rest of the day
Sometimes no one wants what we got
Sometimes you can’t give it away

Now the place is ringed with countless foes
Some of them may be deaf and dumb
No man, no woman knows
The hour that sorrow will come
In the dark I hear the night birds call
I can hear a lover’s breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

Well, they burned my barn, they stole my horse
I can’t save a dime
I got to be careful, I don’t want to be forced
Into a life of continual crime
I can see for myself that the sun is sinking
How I wish you were here to see
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?

Now they worry and they hurry and they fuss and they fret
They waste your nights and days
Them I will forget
But you I’ll remember always
Old memories of you to me have clung
You’ve wounded me with words
Gonna have to straighten out your tongue
It’s all true, everything you have heard

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

In you, my friend, I find no blame
Wanna look in my eyes, please do
No one can ever claim
That I took up arms against you
All across the peaceful sacred fields
They will lay you low
They’ll break your horns and slash you with steel
I say it so it must be so

Now I’m down on my luck and I’m black and blue
Gonna give you another chance
I’m all alone and I’m expecting you
To lead me off in a cheerful dance
Got a brand new suit and a brand new wife
I can live on rice and beans
Some people never worked a day in their life
Don’t know what work even means

Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind
Bring me my boots and shoes
You can hang back or fight your best on the front line
Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues

///

From The Guardian:

A Turkish court has banned internet users from viewing the official Richard Dawkins website after a Muslim creationist claimed its contents were defamatory and blasphemous. Adnan Oktar, who writes under the pen name of Harun Yahya, complained that Dawkins, a fierce critic of creationism and intelligent design, had insulted him in comments made on forums and blogs. According to Oktar’s office, Istanbul’s second criminal court of peace banned the site earlier this month on the grounds that it “violated” Oktar’s personality. His press assistant, Seda Aral, said: “We are not against freedom of speech or expression but you cannot insult people. We found the comments hurtful. It was not a scientific discussion. There was a line and the limit has been passed. We have used all the legal means to stop this site. We asked them to remove the comments but they did not.”

Oktar, a household name in Turkey, has used hundreds of books, pamphlets and DVDs to contest Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 2006 his publishers sent out 10,000 copies of the Atlas of Creation, a lavish book rejecting evolution on every one of its 800 pages. Dawkins, one of the recipients, described the book as “preposterous”. On his website the British biologist and popular science writer said he was at “a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the breathtaking inanity of the content”. It is the third time Oktar and his associates have succeeded in blocking sites in Turkey. In August 2007 Oktar persuaded a court to block access to WordPress.com. His lawyers argued that blogs on the site contained libellous material that it was unwilling to remove. Last April he made a libel complaint about Google Groups, which was subsequently blocked.

He failed to ban Dawkins’ book The God Delusion in Turkey after a court rejected his claims that it insulted religion. The God Delusion has provoked strong criticism from believers for insisting on the hypocrisy and unreliability of scripture and for lampooning creationists.

More here.