Years ago when I was suffering from a very painful sore throat, my oldest sister suggested that I drink a “tea” made by boiling a cinnamon stick and a bunch of cloves in some water until the color is rich mahogany. Optional additions include ginger root and cardamoms. It proved to be a most soothing concoction and has become my mainstay in fighting the oft recurring viral attacks we all suffer, especially in the northeastern winters. In a public radio discussion yesterday I heard of a recent study performed in Pakistan, looking at other amazing benefits of cinnamon. Truly exciting!

As for cloves, according to the American Cancer Society website, they “are said to have antiseptic (germ killing) and anesthetic (pain-relieving) properties. Undiluted clove oil is often applied topically to relieve pain from toothaches and insect bites. Some proponents also claim that, taken internally, cloves and clove oil combat fungal infections, relieve nausea and vomiting, improve digestion, fight intestinal parasites, stimulate uterine contractions, ease arthritis inflammation, stop migraine headaches, and ease symptoms of colds and allergies. ” Not to mention it’s use as a fish anesthetic, or claims that clove oil can repel snakes and mosquito, and cure ear aches. Apparently European doctors used to breath through leather “beaks” filled with cloves to ward of the plague (here)! Very impressive range, but there’s still little scientific evidence for most of these. Learn more here.

In the meantime, enjoy your cinnamon toast crunch or sprinkle cinnamon on your granola.

Two recent essays treat the issue of the rationality of political affiliations from very different methodological angles. Both are short pieces intended for lay readers, so it’s probably unfair to take potshots at their simplicity… but I’m going to anyway.

Steven Johnson (author of Emergence) wonders here whether perhaps brain chemistry can explain the tendency of “liberals” to be more sensitive than others to human suffering and more averse to retributive justice: Democrats, a study suggests, “think more” with the amydala (part of the limbic system), the seat of the emotions. Right away, my balderdash-detector buzzes: I can think of many leftist positions (Whig progressivism, Marxism) that we associate with the denial of emotionalism in favor of analytical calculation, and many rightist tendencies that prefer strong, “gut feelings” to logic (nearly all forms of fundamentalism, for instance). Correlating amydala activity to political positions seems quixotic, at the least, to me. But what Johnson giveth, he quickly taketh away: “One thing is certain: evidence of a neurological difference between liberal and conservative brains would not be another instance of genetic determinism, since patterns of brain activity are shaped by experience as much as by genes.” This would seem to retract much of the explanatory power Johnson promised, and we are left with the somewhat tautological conclusion that emotional people’s brains are emotional, however they got that way. At this point Johnson retreats to this position: perhaps people choose their political party by sensing temperamental commonality between themselves and peers of their party, which is interesting but again strongly reductive. As with much neuropsychology, my sense is that the levels of complexity intervening between neurological and social phenomena need far more elaborate treatment.

Louis Menand, in this piece, comes at the issue from the perspective of an intellectual historian reviewing sociological analyses of voting behavior. Menand refers extensively to the work of political scientist Philip Converse, who concluded in a 1964 article “that ‘very substantial portions of the public’ hold opinions that are essentially meaningless.” Menand then provides more figures that bespeak the utter insufficiency of rational choice theory to account for voting behavior: “In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted. …Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman.” Adducing various theories (election results are arbitrary, they are oligarchical struggles amidst the “elite”), Menand finds one with the potential to salvage some civic belief, namely, that voters may respond to irrationally chosen cues, but that these cues are nonetheless accurate heuristics ( a primary example being Mexican-Americans’ support for Carter in ’76 after Ford tried to eat the corn husk of a tamale – a different kind of gut response, I guess). Menand rightly is skeptical of the rather Panglossian heuristic theory, but follows with a pretty unsatisfactory conclusion: “For most people, voting may be more meaningful and more understandable as a social act than as a political act.” Surely the political is always a subset of the social, unless by social Menand means the restricted sense of immediate interpersonal relations. Oddly, in begging the question, he has arrived at a similar black box to Johnson, that of the social roots of behavior, only from the opposite epistemological starting point.

After the last space shuttle blew up some people got conservative and some people got misty eyed. I think it is time to start feeling intrepid again. The chance that NASA will try and get a manned mission to Mars is probably slim. Still, recent successes in the private sector have been pretty inspiring and there are always the pictures from Mars and the surrounding neighborhood to keep the heart jumping. In the end, we may have to rely on some grad students from Texas to get the job done. Such would be the ironies of it all.

Holidaying at the seaside last week I became obsessed with the local bay beach. At low tide we walked endlessly on the ocean floor, marvelling at the bounty of life teeming in the tidal pools; and then the entire scene would transform into a raging sea of crashing waves on a windy evening at high tide. As I described this to my brother later, he wondered why we have never channeled the immense energy of diurnal tides to generate power. Here are some explanations and more about tides.

And speaking of the bounty of tidal flats (we had some phenomenally delicious oysters) and the effects of the full moon on ocean tides, here’s a quote from Worldwide Gourmet about oysters: “In love, you know, shellfish are your allies,” said Brillat-Savarin. Full of iodine, phosphorus and trace elements, oysters are stimulants and have always been a symbol of femininity. It is said that at the time of the full moon, oysters secrete an aphrodisiac hormone – but do you dare ask your fishmonger if he knows when his oysters were collected?”

I wonder what the oysters are like in the Bay of Fundy where the highest tides occur in the world.

This year’s New York Film Festival will assemble a pretty great lineup, including new movies from Almodovar, Alexander Payne, Hou Hsou-Hsien, Zhang Yimou, Mike Leigh, Agnes Jaoui and, for good measure, Jean-Luc Godard. Catch some at the one of the best places to see a flick in the city, the Walter Reade Theater. Here’s a review of what’s coming.

In keeping with Battleground God, there’s this. This Ethical Philosophy Selector offers a set of questions. “These questions reflect the dilemmas that have captured the attention of history’s most significant ethical philosophers. Answer the questions as best you can. When you’re finished answering the questions, press ‘Select Philosophy’ to generate your customized match of ethical philosophers/philosophies. The list orders the philosophers/philosophies according to their compatibility with your expressed opinions on ethics.”

My results, which left me horrified at least by the position of Ayn Rand (too high), Bentham (too high), and the Epicureans (too low):

1. John Stuart Mill (100%)
2. Kant (99%)
3. Prescriptivism (78%)
4. Jean-Paul Sartre (71%)
5. Aquinas (68%)
6. Ayn Rand (66%)
7. Jeremy Bentham (63%)
8. Aristotle (61%)
9. Epicureans (60%)
10. Spinoza (45%)
11. Stoics (45%)
12. Ockham (40%)
13. St. Augustine (38%)
14. Nel Noddings (34%)
15. Plato (33%)
16. David Hume (26%)
17. Nietzsche (24%)
18. Thomas Hobbes (13%)
19. Cynics (3%)

Today Translations’ site lists the most untranslatable words, as measured by a poll of a thousand professional translators and interpreters it conducted for the BBC. “Plenipotentiary” won as the most untranslatable English word. The winner among foreign language words is “ilunga [a Tshiluba word for a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time. Note: Tshiluba is a Bantu language spoken in south-eastern Congo, and Zaire].”

However, Lanuage Log is skeptical. “The thing that puzzles me, though, is where Zilinskiene [head of Today Translations] turned up 1,000 linguists who know Tshiluba vocabulary. I’m beginning to get the feeling that this survey might have been a class project in one of Zilinskiene’s Problematics courses…”

“Can your beliefs about religion make it across our intellectual battleground? In this activity you’ll be asked a series of 17 questions about God and religion…The aim of the activity is not to judge whether these answers are correct or not. Our battleground is that of rational consistency.” To test whether or not your religious belief cuts the logical mustard, click here.

A collection of Eqbal Ahmad’s writings on South Asia has recently been released. You can find reviews of Between Past and Future: Selected Essays on South Asia here and here.

Eqbal Ahmad was a remarkable figure who lived a phenomenal life. A brief biography and selected articles are available here and here.

“In May, the White House announced that George W. Bush would deliver five weekly speeches intended to shore up support for his Iraq policies. How many of the five did he deliver before abandoning the effort?

(a) One.
(b) Two.
(c) Three.
(d) Four.

Answer: (a)”

One question in an amusing if predictable Bush quiz from the current New Yorker. Also check out this obliquely related but fairly thrilling profile of the Olympic experience of the Iraqi soccer team, from the same organ.

In the wake of the theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream yesterday, here’s a short review of recent thefts of major artworks from Scotland on Sunday.

I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately and this has provided an occasion to reappreciate the Avalanches’ 2002 record, Since I Left You. It is a modern classic, and one of the few pieces of music I’ve heard that uses the potential of sampling technology as the basis for a new formal art. As with most formally brilliant aesthetic output, repeat auditions reward the listener with previously unnoticed features. Their sound has tremendous density and a symphonic tendency for elements to fade in and out of conscious hearing: the horse’s whinny that has structurally replaced the hip-hop horn, the sunken counterpoint to a haunting piano riff, the celebrated use of the bassline from Madonna’s “Holiday.” Additionally, I love the Avalanches’ internationalism: they’re Australian djs who happily circumnavigate in search of cool sounds. They also invent a space in which the listener (temporarily) becomes a global citizen, travelling the world and thinking contrapuntally. In short, a work of genius. If you want an accurate review try here.

A great thing about the world wide web is that people do things like this. There is no better reason to brush up on your Latin than Catullus’ delightful hendecasyllables. Coleridge’s ode to those syllables (from Matthison) can be found here.

I’m not sure if they have quite captured the full humor potential here but it is worth taking a look at the first Islamic version of Onion Magazine. By the way, this site was brought to my attention by Alan Koenig of Doghead. If there is a better place for analysis and insight into the policy twists and turns of the Iraq war I don’t know what it is, though Ackerman’s Iraq’d is always worth reading. And, if you don’t know of Juan Cole you have your head in the sand on the matter.

In 1956, Benjamin Lee Whorf published Language, Thought, and Reality, which he concluded with the following.

“Actually, thinking is most mysterious, and by far the greatest light upon it that we have is shown by the study of language. This study shows that the forms of a person’s thought are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is conscious. These patterns are unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language–shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. His thinking itself is in another language–in English, in Sanskrit, in Chinese.”

A year later, Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures and launched the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics and, well, a bunch of fields, effectively destroying claims such as Whorf’s and inaugurating one of the most successful research projects in modern science.

But now comes this.

“[A]re there concepts in one culture that people of another culture simply cannot understand because their language has no words for it?

No one has ever definitively answered that question, but new findings by Dr. Peter Gordon, a bio-behavioral scientist at Teachers College, Columbia University, strongly support a “yes” answer. [Details of the study will appear in the Thursday, August 19, issue of the journal Science.] Gordon has spent the past several years studying the Pirahã, an isolated Amazon tribe of fewer than 200 people, whose language contains no words for numbers beyond “one,” “two” and “many.” Even the Piraha word for “one” appears to refer to “roughly one” or a small quantity, as opposed to the exact connotation of singleness in other languages.

What these experiments show, according to Gordon, is how having the right linguistic resources can carve out one’s reality. ‘Whorf says that language divides the world into different categories,’ Gordon said. ‘Whether one language chooses to distinguish one thing versus another affects how an individual perceives reality.’

When given numerical tasks by Gordon in which they were asked to match small sets of objects in varying configurations, adult members of the tribe responded accurately with up to two or three items, but their performance declined when challenged with eight to 10 items, and dropped to zero with larger sets of objects. The only exception to this performance was with tasks involving unevenly spaced objects. Here, the performance of participants deteriorated as the number of items increased to 6 items. Yet for sets of 7 to 10 objects, performance was near perfect. Though these tasks were designed to be more difficult, Gordon hypothesizes that the uneven spacing allowed subjects to perceive the items as smaller ‘chunks’ of 2 or 3 items that they could then match to corresponding groups.

According to the study, performance by the Piraha was poor for set sizes above 2 or 3, but it was not random. . .” (read on)

One of the reasons that some philosophers and, indeed, common sense itself, finds it difficult to accept Dennett’s naturalism, though it is clearly correct, is that Dennett’s naturalism is anti-intuitive. We feel as if our experience of the world and all its chance, will, and complexity cannot jibe with any version of determinism. Of course, it turns out that determinism and meaning, freedom, chance, etc., are fully compatible. But, dammit, it still seems like the aren’t anyway. An interesting place to try and re-train your intuition is a website Dennett mentions in Freedom Evolves. There you can play the game Life, where a simple arrangement of ‘cells’, given simple rules and made to be ‘live’ or ‘dead’, generate something very complicated and autonomous out of something that isn’t. Try playing it. You’ll wonder why you ever thought that that ghost was running stuff in your head in the first place. We are mechanisms friends, but very cool ones, and it is going to be OK.

“James’ [Surowiecki] book [The Wisdom of Crowds] goes in two directions as regards actual policy suggestions. As regular CT [Crooked Timber] readers will be expecting, I don’t really agree with either of them, but one is very much more interesting than the other.”

Daniel Davies reviews The Wisdom on Crowds over at Crooked Timber. It’s worth a read.

“My found-through-Craigslist inventory runs deep. My last two apartments. My dining room table. My living room couches. My futon. Red Sox tickets. Freelance writing assignments. I sold my car through the service. Do you Craigslist? OK, it doesn’t quite have the ring of the now-classic ‘Do you Yahoo?’ pitch line, but tech investors would do well to keep their eyes on Craigslist.org, the San Francisco-based international swap meet. Craigslist began as a daily e-mail sent out by founder Craig Newmark in 1995 and is now a motley collection of want ads and personals, with a little space left over for rants. Most of those ads are free, so the site has never seemed to have much of a business model.” Article here from Business 2.0.

“In a new book, ‘Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism’ (Princeton University Press), Timur Kuran, professor of economics and law and the King Faisal professor of Islamic thought and culture at the University of Southern California, looks at the cluster of ideas known as Islamic economics. This concept, he notes, is a 20th-century one, developed in India before independence, when many Muslims worried that they would become an oppressed minority in a Hindu-ruled state. Some feared that Muslims might be so marginalized that they would lose their identity.” Interesting article from the New York Times, via Arts and Letters Daily.