…and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge…”

One day after I have celebrated the 60th anniversary of my own nation‘s birth and independence from colonial rule, I cannot refrain from quoting, once again, Nehru’s inimitably beautiful words spoken at India’s independence (a day after Pakistan’s in 1947, and therefore 60 years ago today), as a way of expressing congratulation to my sisters and brothers in that country ineluctably and inexorably forever twinned to my own:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

Nehru’s speech continued here.

Salman Hameed in Science and Religion News:

Science sections of bookstores are lined up with books that have God somewhere in the title (The Language of God, The God Gene, God in the Machine, God’s Equation, etc). Its all about selling books and about getting attention in the media. Astronomers also have a special penchant for this. For example, we have fingers of god – an observational effect that makes clusters of galaxies appear elongated in our direction and to some it seems that cosmic fingers are pointing towards us. Some also described the variations in cosmic background radiation as the fingerprint of Creation. But here is an excellent article in defense of using such metaphors, and it focuses on the Higgs Boson – now also known as the God particle: What’s in a name? Parsing the ‘God Particle’ as the Ultimate Metaphor

In a stroke of either public relations genius or disaster, Leon M. Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, referred to the Higgs as “the God particle” in the book of the same name he published with the science writer Dick Teresi in 1993. To Dr. Lederman, it made metaphorical sense, he explained in the book, because the Higgs mechanism made it possible to simplify the universe, resolving many different seeming forces into one, like tearing down the Tower of Babel. Besides, his publisher complained, nobody had ever heard of the Higgs particle.

More here.  [Photo shows Lederman.]

John Tierney in the New York Times:

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

(Headline meant sarcastically.) Melissa Lafsky over at the NYT Freakanomics blog:

Picking up women has been getting plenty of press these days, leading up to this week’s premiere of the VH1 reality show The Pick-Up Artist. The show follows eight “socially inept” men through an eight-week boot camp on seduction techniques, led by a self-proclaimed Lothario called “Mystery.” The headliner (whose real name is Erik Von Markovik) initially found fame after being profiled in Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, and went on to co-write his own book, How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed: The Mystery Method.

Under particular discussion is a pickup technique that Mystery advocates known as “negging” — a move that involves interjecting an insult during an initial conversation with a woman. The motivation behind the insult is, as Esquire’s A.J. Jacobs puts it, to “lower her self-esteem, thus making her more vulnerable to your advances.” While this tactic has provoked considerable ire, by all accounts from Strauss and his skirt-chasing Svengali, it seems to work.

Meanwhile, the psychologists Steve Stewart-Williams and William F. McKibbin have been researching the topic of men insulting women, publishing a study called “Why Do Men Insult Their Intimate Partners?” in the July Journal of Personality and Individual Differences.

The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.–W.H. Auden “Partition”

In the South Asian subcontinent, August 14th and 15th commemorate events that are joyous, traumatic and shameful all at once. With the displacement of millions and the deaths of hundreds of thousands accompanying independence (and the birth of Salim Sinai), the chaotic birth of the new states on the subcontinent, while not unique in kind, was unprecedented in scale. The very first foreseeable and immanent task of both new states was the protection of minorities, a task neither met with any competence. In the BBC, a report on the two men that cleaved and scarred the subcontinent:

But [Christopher] Beaumont [private secretary to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission] – who later in life was a circuit judge in the UK – is most scathing about how partition affected the Punjab, which was split between India and Pakistan.

“The Punjab partition was a disaster,” he writes.

“Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment.

“The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation.

“Thousands of people died or were uprooted from their homes in what was in effect a civil war.

“By the end of 1947 there were virtually no Hindus or Sikhs living in west Punjab – now part of Pakistan – and no Muslims in the Indian east.

“The British government and Mountbatten must bear a large part of the blame for this tragedy.”

Gabrielle Walker in Discover:

Near the west end of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, buried under the river plain of the Rhône, workers are fitting together the final pieces of the machine that hopes to unlock one of the biggest mysteries of the universe. It has taken over 20 years, $8 billion, and the combined efforts of more than 60 countries to create this extraordinary particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, built and operated by CERN, the European physics consortium.

The “large” in Large Hadron Collider is something of an understatement. “Enormous” is closer: The collider’s underground tunnel carves a circle 17 miles in circumference, traversing the border between Switzerland and France. At four locations it passes through caverns crammed with detectors the size of buildings. In a deliberately constructed rivalry, two of these detectors—along with their armies of scientists, engineers, and technicians—will vie with each other to discover the obscure but wildly important particle known as the Higgs boson.

More here.

Reading Witold Gombrowicz means confronting an artistic vision of extraordinary intensity, withering in its austerity, imperious in its dismissal of convention and cant, solicitous only of the truth, no matter how unpleasant or embarrassing.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act. Action will delineate and define you. You will find out from your actions. But you must act as an “I,” as an individual, because you can be certain only of your own needs, inclinations, passions, necessities. Only this kind of action is direct and is a genuine extricating of yourself from chaos, self-creation. As for the rest: isn’t it mere recitation, execution of a preordained plan, rubbish, kitsch?

Here in his Diary, Gombrowicz proves as demanding of himself as he is of the world he recreates in his novels, stories, and plays. A relentless opponent of hypocrisy, pretension, and the romantic attitude toward life, he castigated the dehumanization rampant in the world around him.

more from Context here.

Peter Pesic in American Scientist:

“Music is a science,” wrote the great composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1722, “which should have definite rules; these rules should be drawn from an evident principle; and this principle cannot really be known to us without the aid of mathematics.” David J. Benson’s book Music: A Mathematical Offering gives the latest and fullest view of music in the light of mathematics. A professor of mathematics at the University of Aberdeen as well as a keen amateur singer, Benson has assembled a fascinating variety of topics that make his book a uniquely rich source, whether for classroom use, reference or self-study. He has constructed the different sections that flow from his general introduction to be independent, allowing readers to follow their own interests and predilections.

This book goes into mathematical details that many general accounts avoid, and here Benson deserves special praise for his skill and clarity. He does expect his readers to be familiar with standard college calculus, but he always presents his arguments with enough helpful explanation, good examples and exercises to put his audience at ease.

More here.

August is the Mississippi of the calendar. It’s beastly hot and muggy. It has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.

August is when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Anne Frank was arrested, when the first income tax was collected, when Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe died. Wings and Jefferson Airplane were formed in August. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour debuted in August. (No August, no Sonny and Cher!)

August is the time when thugs and dictators think they can get away with it. World War I started in August 1914. The Nazis and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact in August 1939. Iraq invaded Kuwait Aug. 2, 1990. August is a popular month for coups and violent crime. Why August? Perhaps the villains assume we’ll be too distracted by vacations or humidity to notice.

more from Slate here.

From the BBC:

More here.

In 1934, 13 years before the British withdrew from the subcontinent, a group of Indian writers met at a London hotel with a Chinese name. Among those attending the meeting at the Nanking hotel were people who wrote in Urdu, English, and Bengali, and together they drafted a manifesto for a future Indian literature, one that would locate writing at the heart of social change.

The Progressive Writers’ Association, the group formed at that meeting, could not have foreseen the extent of the social change that would face their members in the coming decades.
Some writers were forced to take on new nationalities as their homeland was violently divided. Ahmed Ali, author of the novel Twilight in Delhi, was coming back to India from China in 1947. He found himself unable to disembark at Delhi and had to fly on to Karachi and a new life as a Pakistani. Sahir Ludhianvi, a poet whose lyrics found a mass audience through Bombay films, made the journey in the opposite direction, moving from Pakistan to India in 1949. Almost all the writers of the PWA discovered that the post-colonial nations they had wrested from the empire were only nominally free, still divided by hierarchies of power and wealth.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

During the YouTube forum with the Democratic presidential candidates in July, the first question about health care came from two middle-age brothers in Iowa, who faced the camera with their elderly mother. Not everybody with Alzheimer’s disease has two loving sons to take care of them, they said, adding that a boom in dementia is expected in the next few decades. “What are you prepared to do to fight this disease now?” they asked.

The politicians mouthed generalities about health care, larded with poignant anecdotes. None of them answered the question about Alzheimer’s. Science hasn’t done much better. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s and no way to prevent it. Scientists haven’t even stopped arguing about whether the gunk that builds up in the Alzheimer’s brain is a cause or an effect of the disease. Alzheimer’s is roaring down — a train wreck to come — on societies all over the world. People in this country spend more than a $1 billion a year on prescription drugs marketed to treat it, but for most patients the pills have only marginal effects, if any, on symptoms and do nothing to stop the underlying disease process that eats away at the brain. Pressed for answers, most researchers say no breakthrough is around the corner, and it could easily be a decade or more before anything comes along that makes a real difference for patients.

More here.

Wang Ningde. Some Days No.7. 2001.

Gelatin silver print.

More on this influential contemporary Chinese artist here, here, and here.

Via Organizations and Markets, Stephan Kinsella over at the Ludwig von Mises blog favorably surveys the case against intellectual property:

The most recent study I’m aware of is reported in my post Do Patents Discourage Innovation? Yeah. But So What.: Boston University Law School Professors (and economists) Michael Meurer and Jim Bessen conclude (as summarized by Patently-O):

“the pair has compiled a tremendous amount of economic data regarding patents and companies who patent. … Meurer & Bessen’s bottom line: On average, the patent system is bad for innovation. They agree innovator firms often profit from their own patents. However, the pair’s data shows that the innovator firms are also the ones most likely to be targeted by other patent holders. (litigation, licensing, etc.) In today’s system, they find, the disincentives created by other people’s patents outweighs the incentives to build your own portfolio. I.e., on average, the patent system discourages innovation.”

And here’s another recent study about how patents harm innovation: Patents Chilling Effect on Science, reporting that:

“The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently conducted a survey on the effect of patenting on the sciences. The results are frightening: 1/5th or more of all research projects in the United States are being chilled by patent holders. The sheer amount of research being canceled because of licensing issues is astounding, but at the same time many of these researchers hold their own patents and therefore contribute to the problem.”

Steven Poole’s re-tagged us with the “Five Blogs that Make You Think” meme. Since I’ve already done it, I’m not going to revisit the meme (I guess we’re inocculated now). I did like Steven’s intro, since it does raise the issue of why despite the problems with the concept of “memes” it still persists in an almost self-confirming way, albeit self-consciously so.

As they say in the exciting new language of the internets, I’ve been “tagged with a meme”. Actually it first happened a few months ago, but I forgot about it, possibly having decided to take a stand against Meme Fascism, and possibly also because I don’t believe in memes anyway, since arguably the idea of a “meme” encodes a denial of individual agency and creativity, shored up by an annoyingly defective analogy with evolution. “Meme” is just another pseudoscientific attempt to explain culture (or rather to explain it away), destined (I hope) for the garbage bin of terminological fashion just as soon as William Gibson stops using it. You can imagine how it only compounds my irritation to realise that I used it myself in the post immediately below this one. It’s almost like the word “meme” is some kind of evil virus of the mind.

In the LRB, Henry Siegman on the Mid-East peace process:

[A]ll previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

From lensculture.com:

 

JR is a young French photographer who has become a hero to many people who encounter his work. He doesn’t use his real name, because most of the work he does is illegal. JR makes provocative black-and-white photos, and enlarges them into very large billboard size prints. Then, with a friend or two, under cover of the night, he illegally pastes these photos onto large walls in very public urban spaces. His illegal work has been celebrated by several outlets of mainstream media, and he has been granted official, authorized exhibitions of his photographs in prominent places in Paris and Amsterdam in recent years.

This summer, JR was invited to show his work at the international photo festival in Arles, France, where he covered the walls of a large roofless warehouse with his images to the amazement and delight of thousands of photography lovers.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Vishnu’s Crowded Temple
by Maria Misra.

Misra, who teaches modern history at Oxford, has undertaken an ambitious project. She attempts to telescope more than 150 years of India’s history into this book and tries to show, as she tells us in its closing pages, ‘how India has developed its peculiar form of modernity, the most striking feature of which is its highly atomised, fragmented and diverse citizenry’. At the heart of her book are the sections on the two men seen as central to the story of modern India: Mahatma Gandhi, the most prominent leader of the nationalist movement and known as the father of the nation, and his protege, Jawaharlal Nehru, who went on to become India’s first Prime Minister. Misra is unfairly harsh on Gandhi, seeing him as idiosyncratic, traditionalist and with a gift for combining political shrewdness with a sense of self-promotion and opportunism.

She has unmixed admiration for Nehru, who she sees as the opposite of Gandhi in many ways: ‘He differed from Gandhi in the most important question of the age: modernity. While Gandhi romanticised the Indian past, both real and imagined, Nehru was in love with the future. Gandhi decried the Raj as the harbinger of modernity, while for Nehru it was the detested heart of the ancien regime. Nehru was a technophile, a religious agnostic, cosmopolitan in his tastes and an instinctive internationalist; the Mahatma was the opposite.’ The template of pluralism that is the key to India’s enduring democracy, Misra argues, was conceptualised and laid out by Nehru. And she sees that – and the foresight and vision that implies – as his biggest contribution. ‘Nehru’s goal was to make a virtue of India’s variety by creating the world’s first self-consciously multicultural modern nation state.’

More here.

What would grim old Hobbes have to say about my attempts to dignify him by making him a cryptic teacher of human dignity? I frankly have my doubts—though, if he spoke the truth about the soul and the body, he is not now turning over in his grave. To be sure, the arguments I advance in the last five paragraphs are not those of Hobbes, and I doubt whether he would agree that the claim of natural rights already implies the presence of something dignified that rises above life’s material preconditions. Yet I also suspect that Hobbes would regard himself a true patron of human dignity, by helping to secure peace and justice, through his sound moral teaching.

Be this as it may, which is to say, leaving Hobbes in peace and claiming the argument for myself, I am now in part content. For I believe I can see in the natural right of self-preservation a foundational human dignity, one that points toward, as it safeguards, the higher dignity of realized humanity. Though I persist in believing that there is more dignity in human achievement than in human possibility, more dignity in noble self-sacrifice than in base self-aggrandizement or even mere self-assertion, more dignity in defending rights than in exercising or even claiming them, I am convinced that any doctrine of natural human rights rests on a prior presupposition of natural human dignity, and thus serves to support the basic dignity of human being as such.

more from The New Atlantis here.