From Comedy Central:

From FelixSalmon.com:

So the lunch with Nassim Nicholas Taleb happened, in a rather pretentious little place on 15th Street, which at least was quiet. I arrived brimming with questions, and left with only a few of them answered, but had a great experience all the same.

I think I’m going to do a more formal Q&A with Taleb when both his book and the first reviews are out – probably by email. But here are a few questions I had going in to the lunch, along with any answers that Taleb gave me, if any. They should at least, give an idea of the kind of questions which get raised by his book.

• Are common economic concepts such as cycles or reversion to mean remotely useful or even meaningful? (I asked Taleb this, and got a general reply about all economics being not only useless but also unethical.)
• What does NNT think of Robin Hanson‘s blog, Overcoming Bias? (Taleb says he doesn’t know it. But he should – there’s enormous overlap between the blog and the book. The blogs he likes the most are Arts & Letters Daily and 3 Quarks Daily. He does read newspapers online, but usually through links from these sites. He’s not interested in news, per se.)
• The “Black Swan” of the title comes from the idea that you can’t confirm a statement like “all swans are white” by observing white swans. Similarly, you can’t prove that OJ Simpson is not a murderer by closely observing him all day and seeing him murder nobody. On the other hand, if you give me two paragraphs and tell you they’re anagrams of each other, I’m likely to pick a letter at random, probably something uncommon like W or Q or Z, and count its occurrences in each of the paragraphs. If the occurrences match, I’ll be more likely to believe you. Is there some kind of real confirmation going on here? Or are all such observations largely meaningless unless and until you’ve either falsified the claim or proved it outright? (Taleb: Yes, there is some confirmation going on.)

More here.

Elayne Boosler at The Huffington Post:

We’re Number One!!

The number of children under the age of 17 shot by guns in America every year is greater than the gun-related deaths of children in all the industrialized nations of the world COMBINED.

Here is the population of Japan: 127,463,611.

Here is the number of children killed by guns in Japan every year: 0.

A 2001 Centers for Disease Control (CDC) study found that in homicides among intimate partners, women are murdered more with guns than with all other means COMBINED.

In 2004, guns were most commonly used by males to murder their female partners.

A 2003 study found women living with a gun in the home were almost three times more likely to be murdered than women with no gun in the home.

“If we ban handguns only criminals will have guns.” Well then let’s not have any laws in America at all. No drug laws, no traffic laws, no laws at all, right? Duh.

“Cars kill people!!” Yes, cars kill people when something goes wrong. Guns are MADE to kill people…

More here.

Motoko Rich in the New York Times:

Seven years ago, Moniru Ravanipur, a novelist and short-story writer, was put on trial in her native Iran. Her supposed crime: threatening national security while attending a political conference in Berlin, where she openly discussed her country’s reform movement.

Now she plans to do it again. Ms. Ravanipur, 54, is one of more than 150 writers gathering in New York today for PEN American Center’s third annual World Voices Festival of International Literature, which runs through Sunday.

On Saturday Ms. Ravanipur, who has written eight books but is virtually unknown in the United States, will be speaking on a panel with two other Iranian writers. In an interview last week, she said she planned to discuss how, for example, the government had recently banned repeated use of the verb “to do” because it can have a sexual connotation in Persian.

More here.

Paul Hickson in American Scientist:

For almost a century, astronomers have experimented with the intriguing idea of building telescope mirrors out of mercury. The reason is that it is relatively easy to get a liquid to take on the required parabolic profile—all one needs to do is to place it on a spinning platter—whereas solid mirrors require meticulously grinding the shape from glass. The obvious shortcoming of liquid-mirror telescopes is that they can only point straight up. Fortunately, for many studies this is the best direction to look, because the line of sight passes through the least amount of atmosphere. What’s more, the practice of “drift scanning” with modern CCD detectors circumvents the inability of liquid-mirror telescopes to track a target as it moves across the sky. The author reports the progress his group has made constructing a 6-meter liquid-mirror telescope, and he discusses plans for other instruments of this kind to be built at more suitable sites—perhaps even on the Moon.

More here.

Hermione Lee in the New York Review of Books:

What good is the novel, the long story told in prose? Hegel called the contingent, the everyday, the mutable, “the prose of the world,” as opposed to “the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic.” “Prosaic” can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that “novelists squander ignobly the reader’s precious time.” In late-eighteenth-century Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being published, “only when entertainment was combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or depravity.”

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning “trivial discourse.” Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast, aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel as “a book about nothing,” or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how to live and understand our lives and those of others.

More here.

From FunForever:

You think that books are just for reading? It turns out that many people think different.

Georgia Russell is from Scotland. She uses scalpel instead of a brush or a pen. Her creations look like some fairy-tale creatures. Absolutely unique artist!

More here.

From The New York Times:

More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping. So far, no one can say what is causing the bees to become disoriented and fail to return to their hives. As with any great mystery, a number of theories have been posed, and many seem to researchers to be more science fiction than science. People have blamed genetically modified crops, cellular phone towers and high-voltage transmission lines for the disappearances.

Honeybees are arguably the insects that are most important to the human food chain. They are the principal pollinators of hundreds of fruits, vegetables, flowers and nuts. The number of bee colonies has been declining since the 1940s, even as the crops that rely on them, such as California almonds, have grown.

Genetic testing at Columbia University has revealed the presence of multiple micro-organisms in bees from hives or colonies that are in decline, suggesting that something is weakening their immune system. The researchers have found some fungi in the affected bees that are found in humans whose immune systems have been suppressed by the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or cancer.

More here.

From Nature:

A migraine is not just a headache, it is an über-headache — a pounding, queasy, searing pain that can incapacitate its victims for hours on end. And as if the pain weren’t bad enough, sufferers were also thought to show diminished memory and verbal skills. But new research now suggests that although migraines are sometimes associated with diminished cognitive skills, sufferers may in fact show less memory loss as they age than those who are migraine-free.

More than 28 million people in the United States suffer from migraines, and women are three times more likely than men to have the condition. The cause is still unknown, and different theories have blamed nervous-system malfunctions, chemical imbalances, over-reactive blood vessels, or a combination of factors. Meanwhile, attempts to catalogue the damage wrought by a lifetime of migraine attacks have met with conflicting results. Some studies suggest that migraineurs have poorer memories and less verbal ability than those without the condition, whereas other studies show no difference at all between sufferers and non-sufferers.

Exactly why the migraineurs would be more protected from cognitive decline remains a mystery.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Coastline. 2002.

Acrylic on canvas.

Digital photograph taken in Belmont, MA, April 22nd, 2007.

From The New Yorker:

In this issue, Alec Wilkinson reports on parkour, “a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path.” Part extreme sport and part martial art, this urban pursuit was founded in France by David Belle; practitioners are called traceurs. Spread mostly by videos posted on the Internet, it is growing in popularity in the United States and Europe. Here is some footage of traceurs in motion.

“If parkour has a shrine,” Wilkinson writes, “it is the climbing wall in Lisses, called the Dame du Lac, where Belle played as a teen-ager.” In this clip, Belle and Sébastien Foucan, a childhood friend, demonstrate parkour on the wall and elsewhere.

Footage of David Belle taking a spill illustrates both the danger of the sport and the art of falling well.

To learn more about parkour, visit AmericanParkour.com. For pictures of parkour around the world, visit UrbanFreeflow.com.

In honor of Earth Day, this is from Neatorama:

1. Baobab

The amazing baobab [wiki] (Adansonia) or monkey bread tree can grow up to nearly 100 feet (30 m) tall and 35 feet (11 m) wide. Their defining characteristic: their swollen trunk are actually water storage – the baobab tree can store as much as 31,700 gallon (120,000 l) of water to endure harsh drought conditions.

Baobab trees are native to Madagascar (it’s the country’s national tree!), mainland Africa, and Australia. A cluster of “the grandest of all” baobab trees (Adansonia grandidieri) can be found in the Baobab Avenue, near Morondava, in Madagascar:

More here.

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley in the New York Review of Books:

The idea that negotiations conducted bilaterally between Israelis and Palestinians somehow can produce a final agreement is dead. The world, slowly, is coming to this realization. Its fate was sealed in part because neither side has the ability, on its own, to close the gaps between the positions they have taken. The two parties also lack any sense of trust, but that, too, is not an overriding explanation. If bilateral negotiations have become a fast track to a dead end it is because today neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli political system possesses the requisite degree of coherence and cohesion.

On the Palestinian side, the national movement is undergoing its most fundamental, far-reaching, and destabilizing transformation since Yasser Arafat took it over and molded it in his image over four decades ago. The transformation is more complex than a mere question of succession. It is the metamorphosis that comes with the passing of a man who gradually had become the movement and on whom all serious political deliberation depended. Arafat achieved what, before him, was the stuff of unachievable dreams and, after him, has become the object of wistful nostalgia: the identification of man and nation; the transcendence of party politics; and the expression of a tacit, unspoken consensus.

Competing organizations, leftist and Islamist in particular, challenged him. He faced opposition and dissent within his own Fatah. One after another, Arab countries sought to bend the nationalist movement to their will. But by dint of hard work, personal charisma, and political acumen, and assisted in no small measure by the steady accumulation and astute use of arms and funds, Arafat managed to control Fatah, co-opt the leftists, keep the Islamists at bay and Arab states at arm’s length.

More here.

Claus Jacobsen in Newsvine:

How does someone become a lawless man in the society where he lives, dedicated to destruction?

The best example I have found so far is from the Poetic Edda, a popular source of “cultural inspiration” among the New Right fanatics of Northern Europe. The story of Loki is the story of a high ranking immigrant of Giant origin who has mixed blood with the prime minister of the Nordic gods himself, Odin. Loki has reached the pinnacle of social status for a foreigner in Scandinavia, and he serves as an envoy, a diplomat and a mediator between Ases and Giants. The Ases are, of course, fair haired and beautiful, while the Giants are rough, gloomy and primitive Barbarians. The supernatural weapons of the Scandinavian gods are advanced technology that secures a noble world order, while the magic of the Giants are threatening and subversive demonic powers.

More here.  [Thanks to Mykola Bilokonsky.]

From Gristmill:

Below is a complete listing of the articles in “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

• Stages of Denial,
• Scientific Topics,
• Types of Argument, and
• Levels of Sophistication.

Individual articles will appear under multiple headings and may even appear in multiple subcategories in the same heading.

Stages of Denial

1. There’s nothing happening
   1. Inadequate evidence
      • There is no evidence
      • One record year is not global warming
      • The temperature record is simply unreliable
      • One hundred years is not enough
      • Glaciers have always grown and receded
      • Warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect
      • Mauna Loa is a volcano
      • The scientists aren’t even sure
   2. Contradictory evidence
      • It’s cold today in Wagga Wagga
      • Antarctic ice is growing
      • The satellites show cooling
      • What about mid-century cooling?
      • Global warming stopped in 1998
      • But the glaciers are not melting
      • Antarctic sea ice is increasing
      • Observations show climate sensitivity is not very high
      • Sea level in the Arctic is falling
      • Some sites show cooling

Much more here.  [Thanks to David Wilder.]

Leslie Camhi in the New York Times:

Can an excess of intelligence be a crippling force, creatively? That’s one of the questions haunting “Poison Friends,” a French psychological thriller by the writer and director Emmanuel Bourdieu, opening Friday in New York. In the film, André (Thibault Vinçon), the brilliant ringleader of a band of Parisian graduate students, loves to quote a favorite dictum of the Viennese critic Karl Kraus, on why certain people write. “Because they’re too weak not to write,” he says.

Perhaps only in France could people’s literary impulses appear so widespread and insistent that, according to André, they must be controlled, like a physical itch or a psychological compulsion. It’s difficult to imagine a hero with a more negative view of artistic invention. But to Mr. Bourdieu, André’s hypercritical approach is inspiring.

“I really like characters who are unproductive and even sometimes self-destructive, because they are so demanding of themselves and others,” the director said. “It’s true that, literarily, André produces nothing. But he’s constantly inventing dramas between his friends. So he is creative, as are many pathological liars; he turns ordinary life into theater, though there’s something violent in the fact that he hasn’t asked his actors for their permission.”

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Jonathan Rosen in the NY Times:

In Europe, where the birds are native — Mozart had a pet starling that could sing a few bars of his piano concerto in G major — they still have the power to turn heads. Each fall and winter, vast flocks gather in Rome. They spend the day foraging in the surrounding countryside but return each evening to roost. (Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring,” called the birds reverse commuters.) They put on breathtaking aerial displays above the city, banking in nervous unison, responding like a school of fish to each tremor inside the group.

The birds are beloved by tourists and reviled by locals — understandably, since the droppings cover cars and streets, causing accidents and general disgust. A flock of starlings is euphoniously called a “murmuration,” but there is nothing poetic about their appetites. Their ability to focus both eyes on a single object — binocular vision — allows them to peck up stationary seeds as well as insects on the move. In the countryside outside Rome, they feast on olives. Like us, the birds are enormously adaptable but what we admire in ourselves we often abhor in our neighbors.

Photographs by Richard Barnes.

More here.

Charles McGrath in the NY Times:

Ben Jonson wrote: “Greatness of name in the father oft-times helps not forth, but overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The shadow kills the growth.” This Oedipal principle applies to all sorts of professions, but few more so than the literary one. It’s not unheard of for the child of an author to try his hand at writing. Stephen King’s two sons are writers, and so is one of John Updike’s. Hilma Wolitzer’s daughter Meg is a novelist, as is Anita Desai’s daughter Kiran, whose second book just won the Booker Prize — an award that has so far eluded her mother. But writers’ offspring tend to go into the family business with far less regularity than, say, the children of doctors or lawyers, and it seldom happens that over the long haul, and in the deepening shade, the younger equals or outstrips the elder — the way that Anthony Trollope, to take a famous example, bested his mother, Fanny.

The exception these days is the curious writerly firm of Amis & Amis, founded by Kingsley, who died in 1995, and now run by his son Martin. Kingsley Amis, an indelible figure in British letters, is the subject of an immense and sympathetic new biography by Zachary Leader (published this month in the United States) that has already caused a stir in England both by reminding readers of how funny Kingsley could be and because of its frankness about his personal life. (Leader is a friend of Martin’s, who encouraged him to write the book and put no restrictions on him.) Martin, meanwhile, who published his first novel when he was just 24, has recently brought out his 10th, “House of Meetings,” and at 57 is arguably writing better than Kingsley was at the same age. He is a more daring and inventive novelist than his father — unafraid in “London Fields,” for example, to wheel out the whole tool chest of postmodern tricks — and in books like “Money,” about a would-be filmmaker spiraling out of control on both sides of the Atlantic, nearly as funny but on a much bigger canvas.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Tahmima Anam’s stunning novel A Golden Age lays bare a mother’s ordeal in the gulf between the two Pakistans, says Clemency Burton-Hill.
Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan and full of questions about its identity. ‘What sense did it make,’ its people wonder in this novel, ‘to have a country in two halves, poised on either side of India like a pair of horns?’ For Rehana Haque, a young Urdu-speaking widow born in the western ‘horn’ but living in 1971 in the Bengali East, the chasm dividing Pakistan has long been metaphorical as well as geographic. It was to the West that her two small children had been sent in 1959 after she lost a court appeal to keep them. This loss defines Rehana’s life. When war comes in 1971, she discovers that, for all her inability to ‘replace her mixed tongue with a pure Bengali one’, it is the East that is now ‘home’; it is Bangladesh for which she will make the greatest sacrifices.

A Golden Age is a stunning debut. Anam writes of torture, brutality, refugees and desperation, but she also writes of love and joy, food and song. There is a moment when Rehana cannot make out her own feelings – ‘it could have been a smile, or it could have been a grimace,’ she thinks. ‘And the tickle in her throat could have been a chuckle or it could have been tears. It was mixed up: sad; funny; unfunny.’ This is an apt description of the novel itself.

More here.

Michael Shermer in The Scientific American:

The war in Iraq is now four years old. It has cost more than 3,000 American lives and has run up a tab of $200 million a day, or $73 billion a year, since it began. As Bush explained in a speech delivered on July 4, 2006, at Fort Bragg, N.C.: “I’m not going to allow the sacrifice of 2,527 troops who have died in Iraq to be in vain by pulling out before the job is done.” We all make similarly irrational arguments about decisions in our lives: we hang on to losing stocks, unprofitable investments, failing businesses and unsuccessful relationships. If we were rational, we would just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward and then decide if the investment warrants the potential payoff.

The psychology underneath this and other cognitive fallacies is brilliantly illuminated by psychologist Carol Tavris and University of California, Santa Cruz, psychology professor Elliot Aronson in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (Harcourt, 2007). Tavris and Aronson focus on so-called self-justification, which “allows people to convince themselves that what they did was the best thing they could have done.” The engine driving self-justification is cognitive dissonance: “a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent,” Tavris and Aronson explain. 

More here.