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.

I remember a typical instance: at a certain moment, he reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a well-thumbed newspaper clipping, apologized several times for even bothering to bring it up, and then read from it a report that I had expressed my regrets at the death of Frank Zappa. Then, very politely, he suggested that it was inappropriate for a head of state to express regret at the death of a foreign rock musician, when so many of our domestic giants had passed away without a word of commiseration from me appearing in the papers.

What was I to do in such an absurd situation? The proper response would have been to stand up and say, “Václav, this meeting is over.” But I can almost never carry anything like that off, maybe once in two hundred years. Instead, I said something about how Zappa had taken an interest, right after the revolution, in what was happening in our country,[5] how he had helped us, and how ungratefully we had behaved toward him, and I explained that Agence France-Presse had come to me for a comment and it would have been absurd to refuse them, and that it wasn’t my fault that of all my many comments on the deaths of various people, the newspapers chose to run this one. I could have been right a thousand times over, but what good was being right when, simply by stooping to an explanation, I had made a fool of myself? Everyone knows that in a country that is still working hard for its place in the sun, I’m not going to risk a war between the president and the prime minister over an expression of regret.

more from the NYRB here.

Consciousness is an aspect of brain function, and the cat’s brain looks rather like a scaled-down version of mine. That doesn’t apply to the insects. A cicada’s tiny brain is nothing like a human’s. I doubt they can “hear” the racket they make, even though it triggers impulses to act in certain ways. Consciousness must have emerged somewhere on the evolutionary ladder, somewhere between the cicada and the cat, perhaps. But that’s a guess. Nor can I be sure of the origins of my own consciousness. I started out as a brainless clump of cells, a fertilised egg, cognitively more primitive than that orange microbeast traversing the page, let alone the cicadas. As an adult, I carry the same genetic material as the egg, but otherwise we have nothing in common. The egg wasn’t conscious. Consciousness has happened on the journey from egghood to personhood. But how and why?

Such questions lead us to the great enigma, the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness: how does the objective, physical activity of the brain create the private, subjective qualities of experience? For some philosophers the question is unfathomably deeper than that; not so much how does the brain produce consciousness, but how can it? How can three pounds or so of jellified fats, proteins and sugars possibly be identified with the ineffable “raw feels” of awareness: the taste of beer, the sound of cicadas, the redness of red?

more from Prospect Magazine here.

Some of these poems, with their irregular and persistent rhymes and impersonal tone, seem to owe more to the Elizabethans and early ballads than to Olson’s sprawling, abstract, wildly discursive poetry and his notions of what he termed “projective verse.” The lessons from Olson are there, but assimilated, and poems like “The Rick of Green Wood,” “The Hide of My Mother” and “On the Debt My Mother Owed to Sears Roebuck” are as distinctly American and austere and lovely in design as a Shaker cabinet. One can almost smell the freshly planed maple:

For a point of etiquette,
when I observed she was digging
the neighbor’s English Privet,

I said, it grows in abundance here.

As a matter of fact, she had it,
I thought I saw a rabbit,
that’s why I came over here.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Andrea Zittel’s current exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary Gallery, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA:

The first comprehensive United States survey of the work of American artist Andrea Zittel, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s investigation of fundamental aspects of contemporary domestic and urban life in Western society. The exhibition features approximately 21 living units and environments, including two site-specific installations that examine Zittel’s working process as an artist, designer, engineer, consultant, and advocate, as well as activities she brings together in her work and practices under her corporate identity, A-Z Administrative Services. Co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, the exhibition is curated by Contemporary Arts Museum Curator Paola Morsiani and The New Museum Curator Trevor Smith. MOCA’s presentation is coordinated by MOCA Curator of Architecture & Design Brooke Hodge.

Jerry Saltz on Andrea Zittel in The Village Voice here.

Bill Miller at DeSmogBlog:

Ric Oberlink, spokesman for Californians for Population Stabilization, said although global warming is very serious, it is a “subset” of the overpopulation problem: “If we had half as many people, we wouldn’t have much of a climatic warming problem.”

Many have noted America’s disproportionate impact on greenhouse emissions and rightly called for cutbacks, Oberlink told Cybercast News Service , but it’s hypocritical to say Americans consume too much, and then say it doesn’t matter how many Americans there are.

Oberlink criticized environmental groups for not addressing population growth: “It’s easier to single out targets like Big Oil and Big Detroit instead of calling for changes in personal behavior or taking on a tough issue like population growth with its concomitant connection to volatile issues like immigration or access to birth control.”

(picture shows housing).

More here.

A Talk with Philip Zimbardo at Edge:

“…little is known about the psychology of heroism.  There’s a scant body of empirical literature, and most of it consists of interviews with people weeks, months, or decades after they have done a heroic deed.  Much of the first work on heroism came from interviewing Christians and others who helped Jews during the Holocaust.  Nobody asked the question “did anybody help?” until 20 years later. People helped in every country,where the lives of Jews were on the Nazi stake. However, the main response that researchers got during interviews with these people was, “it wasn’t special.”  Regardless of what they did, or where they did it, or how they did it, these heroes typically said, “I am not a hero. I did what had to be done. I can’t imagine how anybody in that situation who wouldn’t do it.”  Some of these heroes tended to be more religious than not, and tended to have parents who had been active in various kinds of causes. However, many more  religious people with socially-politically active parents did nothing to help.”

Known simply as the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo’s study is one of the most famous experiments in social psychology and remains, along with Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments, one of the most shocking.   But that was just the beginning of the story.

More here.

Joan O’C. Hamilton in Stanford Magazine:

Every Stanford dorm seems to have that creative, go-to person. The felt-pen caricaturist who embellishes the hallway white board . . . the infuriatingly smart kid who cuts class to make posters for Big Game and still aces the midterm . . . the only one you’d trust to design the T-shirt.

“I was that guy,” Dennis Hwang, ’01, says with a grin. And in a near-perfect—not to mention lucrative—pairing of right and left brain (he graduated with a degree in art and a minor in computer science), Hwang is still that guy. Webmaster manager for the search engine powerhouse Google, Hwang is the “Google doodler”—the cartoonist who embellishes the firm’s wide-eyed typographic logo. With tens of millions of people viewing Google’s home page daily, the guy who used to design Burbank and Cardenal’s dorm shirts is, in CNN ’s words, “the most famous unknown artist in the world.”

Here are some wonderful Hwang-Google-doodles:

Louis Braille’s Birthday
January 4, 2006

Leonardo’s Birthday
April 15, 2005

More here.

Kara Platoni in Stanford Magazine:

Among the many enduring passions of Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming is only the one with the most pages.

In 1957, a lanky, bespectacled college student named Donald Knuth caught a glimpse of a beautiful stranger through a window and fell deeply in love. The object of his affection blinked enticingly back at him. It was an IBM Type 650, one of the earliest mass-produced computers and the first Knuth had ever seen. Although computer science wasn’t even really a science yet, Knuth was a goner.

As he would later muse in a memoir, “There was something special about the IBM 650, something that has provided the inspiration for much of my life’s work. Somehow this machine is powerful in spite of its severe limitations. Somehow it is friendly in spite of its primitive man-machine interface.” Knuth saw it as his passport to the new, man-made landscape of computer science, a world he would never tire of exploring.

…Before young Donald met the IBM 650, he was a physics major from Milwaukee at the Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve). His interest in physics was a departure from a long-contemplated career in music: he played the organ, tuba, saxophone and sousaphone. Then one day, having missed the bus to band practice, he unraveled an extra-credit math problem so difficult that his professor had promised an automatic A in the course to anyone who solved it. By the year’s end, he was the math major with the highest GPA in his class. Knuth published two scientific papers as an undergraduate, not counting his debut article that devised a system of weights and measures for Mad magazine. (Basic unit of force: the whatmeworry.)

More here.

From Nature:

If you’re in the market for an antioxidant to keep your body young and healthy, new research suggests you’d be much better off with oranges than vitamin C tablets. Although vitamin C is best known for its protection against scurvy and, possibly, the common cold, fruits rich in vitamin C are also powerful antioxidants that protect cellular DNA from being damaged by oxidation. But do vitamin C pills on their own have the same protective effect as fruit? Serena Guarnieri and a team of researchers in the Division of Human Nutrition at the University of Milan, Italy, designed a simple experiment to find out.

The team gave test subjects a single glass of blood-orange juice, vitamin-C-fortified water, or sugar water to drink. The blood-orange juice and the fortified water had 150 milligrams of vitamin C each, whereas the sugar water had none. Blood samples were taken from the test subjects 3 hours and 24 hours after their drink. Unsurprisingly, blood plasma vitamin C levels went up after drinking both the juice and the fortified water. The blood samples were then exposed to hydrogen peroxide, a substance known to cause DNA damage through oxidation. The damage was significantly less in the samples taken from volunteers who had ingested orange juice, in both the samples collected 3 hours after consumption and 24 hours after the drink. Unsurprisingly, the sugar water had no protective effect. But neither did the vitamin-C-fortified water. Vitamin C is provided in a matrix in fruits with many other beneficial substances and all of these may interact with each other.

More here.