[Warning: graphic images]

[H/t: Jennifer Ouellette]

3QD friends Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:

The first time I entered ChatRoulette—a new website that brings you face-to-face, via webcam, with an endless stream of random strangers all over the world—I was primed for a full-on Walt Whitman experience: an ecstatic surrender to the miraculous variety and abundance of humankind. The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.” Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive—one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.

The site activates your webcam automatically; when you click “start” you’re suddenly staring at another human on your screen and they’re staring back at you, at which point you can either choose to chat (via text or voice) or just click “next,” instantly calling up someone else. The result is surreal on many levels. Early ChatRoulette users traded anecdotes on comment boards with the eerie intensity of shipwreck survivors, both excited and freaked out by what they’d seen. There was a man who wore a deer head and opened every conversation with “What up DOE!?” A guy from Sweden was reportedly speed-drawing strangers’ portraits. Someone with a guitar was improvising songs for anyone who’d give him a topic. One man popped up on people’s screens in the act of fornicating with a head of lettuce. Others dressed like ninjas, tried to persuade women to expose themselves, and played spontaneous transcontinental games of Connect Four. Occasionally, people even made nonvirtual connections: One punk-music blogger met a group of people from Michigan who ended up driving eleven hours to crash at his house for a concert in New York. And then, of course, fairly often, there was this kind of thing: “I saw some hot chicks then all of a sudden there was a man with a glass in his butthole.” I sing the body electronic.

Over at the Boston Globe's excellent blog Brainiac:

Intuition, or apprehension of certain facts or conclusions by the mind alone, sometimes without the intervention of reason, is in theory genderless. But at the website Experimental Philosophy, a professor at the City University of New York, Wesley Buckwalter, presents evidence that men and women intuit different conclusions when faced with the same sets of facts.

One of the examples has to do with a popular subject in X-Phi: intuitions about a person's state of mind in certain situations depending on whether those situations end well or badly. For instance, if a vice president of a corporation goes to his chairman of the board and says, “We are thinking of starting a new program. We are sure that it will help us increase profits, and it will also harm the environment,” and the chairman responds, “I don't care about the environment, I'm only interested in profits. Go ahead,” did the chairman know that his actions would cause harm? What if the new program will help the environment, and the chairman responds in the same way? Did he know that good would follow?

Although the two scenarios are logically the same, test subjects are more likely to say the chairman knew that the harm would happen than that good would occur. (Likewise, they are more willing to place moral blame than praise in the alternate situations.) Buckwalter's contribution is to find, at least in his test sample of 405 men and 340 women, that women are even more likely than men–by a striking amount–to shift their epistemic conclusions depending on the outcome of the scenario.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)

By William Shakespeare

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

[Thanks to Christine Klocek-Lim.]

Peter Lennox keeps chickens, and they have taught him a great deal about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern 'efficiency'.

Peter Lennox in Times Higher Education:

All chickens are not born equal. If a few more philosophers had had a little more empirical interaction with chickens, John Locke may have reconsidered his notion of tabula rasa, the idea of the incipient individual as a blank slate embarking on a course of self-authorship. Chickens are born with certain personality traits, and these endure in a remarkably stable fashion throughout their lifespans (which can be as long as 15 years).

Of course, chickens are not born fully mentally formed – you can watch them learn by discovery, doing, copying and sometimes even adapting and improving. Eventually, older ones end up teaching younger ones. You don't see that in the battery farm, but put some in the garden and you soon do.

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: “pecking order”, “cockiness”, “ruffling somebody's feathers”, “taking somebody under your wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”, “strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clipping someone's wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “to crow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming home to roost”, “don't count your chickens before they're hatched”, “nest eggs” and “preening”.

You'll even see that the boss cockerel tends to take possession of the highest point – the top of the heap. And the longer you watch chickens, the more you think of them as people rather than some strange alien species with feathers, beady eyes and a strange language.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Philip the Second is an afterthought. That's what a college professor once said. We were reading Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. The professor was pointing out the significance of the book's title. Philip II comes at the end, and he's really just the name for an Age, an Age defined by The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World. The beginning of the book is mostly about geography, weather, seasonal migrations of various kinds of animals. Braudel was of the Annales School, a group of historians for whom history ought to be told in the little stories, the ground level (literally), the details of life as it is experienced by the mostly unnamed creatures who toil for their time and then pass away.

Wandering through the New York State Museum in Albany, I had the sudden realization that I was exploring a three-dimensional Braudelian space. Here was the attempt to capture, in fragments and chunks, the fine-grained details of life as it was lived in this region — by man, beast, and shrubbery alike — over the last 400 years. The dioramas and models are anachronistic in this digital age, but somehow they work anyway. I'm not entirely sure why they do; perhaps it is best explained in the exhibit of a reconstructed subway train from early in the 20th century. It contains the life-sized model of a young woman riding the A train. A nice-looking girl, she also seems annoyed. Her expression says, “Damn I hate riding this train.” The same thing could be said of the prehistoric mammoth in another scene; he's just cold. Or take the skull of a man from the cemetery of a 19th-century flophouse. His skull is a wreck and the wall description surmises that he probably died from getting his ass kicked too many times. Life was hard. Life is hard still. In being true to that basic fact, the New York State Museum has made low-tech a virtue.

More here.

F. W. Dupee in The New York Review of Books:

As a writer of polemical essays on the Negro question James Baldwin has no equals. He probably has, in fact, no real competitors. The literary role he has taken on so deliberately and played with so agile an intelligence is one that no white writer could possibly imitate and that few Negroes, I imagine, would wish to embrace in toto. Baldwin impresses me as being the Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering, defiance, and aspiration. His role is that of the man whose complexion constitutes his fate, and not only in a society poisoned by prejudice but, it sometimes seems, in general. For he appears to have received a heavy dose of existentialism; he is at least half-inclined to see the Negro question in the light of the Human Condition. So he wears his color as Hester Prynne did her scarlet letter, proudly. And like her he converts this thing, in itself so absurdly material, into a form of consciousness, a condition of spirit. Believing himself to have been branded as different from and inferior to the white majority, he will make a virtue of his situation. He will be different and in his own way be better.

His major essays—for example, those collected in Notes of a Native Son—show the extent to which he is able to be different and in his own way better. Most of them were written, as other such pieces generally are, for the magazines, some obviously on assignment. And their subjects—a book, a person, a locale, an encounter—are the inevitable subjects of magazine essays. But Baldwin's way with them is far from inevitable. To apply criticism “in depth” to Uncle Tom's Cabin is, for him, to illuminate not only a book, an author, an age, but a whole strain in a country's culture. Similarly with those routine themes, the Paris expatriate and Life With Father, which he treats in “Equal In Paris” and the title piece of Notes of a Native Son, and which he wholly transfigures. Of course the transfiguring process in Baldwin's essays owes something to the fact that the point of view is a Negro's, an outsider's, just as the satire of American manners in Lolita and Morte d'Urban depends on their being written from the angle of, respectively, a foreign-born creep and a Catholic priest. But Baldwin's point of view in his essays is not merely that of the generic Negro. It is, as I have said, that of a highly stylized Negro, a role which he plays with an artful and zestful consistency and which he expresses in a language distinguished by clarity, brevity, and a certain formal elegance. He is in love, for example, with syntax, with sentences that mount through clearly articulated stages to a resounding and clarifying climax and then gracefully subside. For instance this one, from The Fire Next Time:

Girls, only slightly older than I was, who sang in the choir or taught Sunday school, the children of holy parents, underwent, before my eyes, their incredible metamorphosis, of which the most bewildering aspect was not their budding breasts or their rounding behinds but something deeper and more subtle, in their eyes, their heat, their odor, and the inflection of their voices.

Nobody else in democratic America writes sentences like this anymore. It suggests the ideal prose of an ideal literary community, some aristocratic France of one's dreams. This former Harlem boy has undergone his own incredible metamorphosis.

More here.

From AFP news:

KARACHI — Pakistan overwhelmed athlete Naseem Hamid with a hero's welcome Thursday after she became South Asia's fastest woman by winning the 100-metre race in the regional games in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The 22-year-old clocked 11.81 seconds to clinch gold medal in the race in the South Asian Federation (SAF) Games Sunday, becoming Pakistan's first female athlete to win the sprint in the competition's 26-year history. Naseem was mobbed by hundreds of fans and relatives at Karachi airport, then whisked to a formal reception laid on by the southern province of Sindh.

Sindh governor Ishraul Ibaad announced that Naseem would be receive one million rupees (11,777 dollars) from President Pakistan Asif Zardari and half a million rupees from his office. “You have made the nation proud,” said Ibaad. “We are very happy and honoured by your tremendous win and hope that you will not sit on this laurel and win more medals at higher level like Olympics.” Other cash prizes came flooding in — 500,000 rupees from Pakistan's sports ministry, 200,000 rupees from Karachi Mayor Mustafa Kamal and 100,000 rupees from the Pakistan Athletics Federation. Pakistani lawmakers demanded a full-time job and house for Naseem, who comes from Karachi's impoverished slum area of Korangi.

The athlete said she was elated by the reception. “I am on cloud nine,” Naseem told reporters at the airport. “I had forgotten the world for six months and trained really very, very hard under my coach Maqsood Ahmed to achieve this.”

More here. (Note: Thanks to dear friend Salman Ahmed)

From Scientific American:

Every dog owner knows a pooch can learn the house rules—and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness. But our work has suggested that wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups—and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality.

Morality, as we define it in our book Wild Justice, is a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate social interactions. These behaviors, including altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, reciprocity and fairness, are readily evident in the egalitarian way wolves and coyotes play with one another. Canids (animals in the dog family) follow a strict code of conduct when they play, which teaches pups the rules of social engagement that allow their societies to succeed. Play also builds trusting relationships among pack members, which enables divisions of labor, dominance hierarchies and cooperation in hunting, raising young, and defending food and territory. Because this social organization closely resembles that of early humans (as anthropologists and other experts believe it existed), studying canid play may offer a glimpse of the moral code that allowed our ancestral societies to grow and flourish.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

Even by that magazine's lowly standards, The New Republic yesterday published an amazingly ugly, reckless, and at-times-deranged screed from its Literary Editor, Leon Wieseltier, devoting 4,300 words to accusing Andrew Sullivan of being an anti-semite, largely due to his critical (i.e., forbidden) comments about Israeli actions and American neoconservatives. Particularly since the horrific Israeli assault on Gaza, Sullivan has become more critical of Israeli actions and more dubious of uncritical U.S. support. The whole TNR column oozes dark and obvious innuendo but never has the courage to state the anti-semitism accusation explicitly (the last paragraph comes closest). TNR's Jonathan Chait piped up yesterday to embrace most of Wieseltier's premises [“Leon has written what I consider to be a trenchant and persuasive dissection of Andrew's (current) worldview on Israel and the Jewish lobby”], but then — as though he's the Papal arbiter of anti-semitism generously granting absolution — cleared Sullivan of the charge of anti-semitism, instead decreeing him guilty of the lesser crime of “carelessness” for failing to renounce the supposedly bigoted, Jew-hating “provenance” of Sullivan's ideas about Israel and Jews.

So shabby and incoherent are Wieseltier's accusations that they merit little real refutation, and I hope Andrew will resist the (understandable) temptation to elevate and dignify them by lavishing them with lengthy self-defenses. Certain attacks are so self-evidently frivolous that they negate themselves, damaging the reputation of the author and his editors far more than the target of the attack [such was the case with Jeffrey Rosen's trashy, widely scorned and ultimately impotent anonymous hit piece on the intellect and character of Sonia Sotomayor, also published (naturally) by TNR].

More here. [My own take on the odious Wieseltier, from a few years ago, is here.]

Gary Rosen in the New York Times Book Review:

To say that the scientific frame of mind has played an important part in the rise of the West is not exactly controversial. Science always gets its moment in the spotlight in “Whig history,” as historians (dismissively) call grand narratives of political and material progress. In “The Science of Liberty,” the veteran science writer Timothy Ferris makes a more extravagant claim, assigning not a mere supporting role but top billing to the celebrated experimenters and inventors of the past several centuries. As he sees it, the standard account of the history textbooks — with the Renaissance giving rise to the Scientific Revolution and thus preparing the way for the Enlightenment — fails to identify the primary causal relationship. Democratic governance and individual rights did not emerge from some amorphous “brew of humanistic and scientific thinking,” he argues, but were “sparked” by science itself — the crucial “innovative ingredient” that “continues to foster political freedom today.”

Ferris, the author of “The Whole Shebang” and a number of other books about cosmology, usefully reminds us that science was an integral part of the intellectual equipment of the great pioneers of political and individual liberty. John Locke was not just the most eloquent philosophical advocate of the social contract and natural rights. He was an active member of the emerging scientific culture of 17th-century Oxford, and his intimates included Isaac Newton, who likewise was a radical Whig, supporting Parliament against the overreaching of the crown. Among the American founders, the scientific preoccupations of Franklin and Jefferson are well known, but Ferris emphasizes that they were hardly alone in their interests.

More here.

From Yahoo! News:

French celebrity intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy has been caught red-faced quoting a “Botulist” philosopher who, it turns out, was invented as a joke by a journalist from a satirical weekly.

In his new book, “De la guerre en philosophie” (Making war in philosophy), Levy cites the insights of Jean-Baptiste Botul to show that German philosopher Immanuel Kant was not the bright light that some believe.

He has since discovered, however, that Botul is a fictional character, created as a literary satire by journalist Frederic Pages, who writes for the tongue in cheek Le Canard Enchaine.

Levy admitted he had often quoted Botul's work “The sex life of Immanuel Kant” during public appearances and now in the pages of his latest book.

“As it turns out, it was a hoax,” admitted the author in a statement posted late Monday on the website of his magazine, La Regle du Jeu.

“It was a truly brillant and very believable hoax from the mind of a Le Canard Enchaine journalist, who remains a good philosopher all the same,” said Levy, known by his initials BHL.

“So I was caught, as were the critics who reviewed the book when it came out,” he wrote. “The only thing left to say, with no hard feelings, is kudos to the artist!”

More here.

Emma Brown in the Washington Post:

Fred Morrison, 90, a pilot and carpenter most often credited with inventing that most ubiquitous of backyard toys, the Frisbee, died Feb. 9 at his home in Monroe, Utah. He had lung cancer.

People have been tossing flat, round objects for millennia, and the origins of the Frisbee have been shrouded in conflicting claims and legend. But it was Mr. Morrison who created the flying disc that was eventually marketed to the world, giving rise to a beloved form of egalitarian picnic entertainment and spin-off sports including Ultimate Frisbee, canine Frisbee, freestyle Frisbee and professional disc golf, a sport that's grown large enough that its champions can now make a living on prize money and sponsorships.

Inspiration for Mr. Morrison's flying-saucer toy came in 1937 at a Thanksgiving feast in Southern California. He and his girlfriend, Lucile “Lu” Nay, entertained themselves by tossing a popcorn-tin lid in the backyard. The lid eventually became dented, ruining its aerodynamic potential, and the resourceful couple snatched a cake pan from Mr. Morrison's mother's kitchen.

Cake pans, it turned out, were sturdier and flew better — so much so that one day, when the two were flinging a pan back and forth on the beach, an impressed passerby offered to buy it. The pan had originally cost a nickel, the stranger offered a quarter — and that exchange was enough to whet Mr. Morrison's entrepreneurial appetite.

More here.

Epilogue

….We all live in darkness, kept apart from ech other
by walls easily crossed but full of fake doors;
money drawn for light spending on friends or love
……our arguments
about the inexhaustible don't even graze it
just when it's time to start talking again, and take
a different road to get to the same place.
We have to get used to knowing how
to live from day to day, each one on his own,
as in the best of all possible worlds.
Our dreams prove it: we're cut off.
We can feel for each other,
and that's more than enough: that's all, and it's hard
to bring our stories closer together
trimming off from the excess we are,
yo get our minds off the impossible and on the things
…….we have in common,
and not to insist, not to insist too much:
to be a good storyteller who plays his role
between clown and preacher.

by Enrique Lihn

from The Dark Room and Other Poems;
New Directions Books, 1963

From Time:

Q. Beloved is dedicated to the 60 million who died as a result of slavery. A staggering number — is this proved historically?

A. Some historians told me 200 million died. The smallest number I got from anybody was 60 million. There were travel accounts of people who were in the Congo — that's a wide river — saying, ''We could not get the boat through the river, it was choked with bodies.'' That's like a logjam. A lot of people died. Half of them died in those ships.

Slave trade was like cocaine is now — even though it was against the law, that didn't stop anybody. Imagine getting $1,000 for a human being. That's a lot of money. There are fortunes in this country that were made that way.

I thought this has got to be the least read of all the books I'd written because it is about something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean, it's national amnesia.

Q. You gave new insight into the daily struggle of slaves.

A. I was trying to make it a personal experience. The book was not about the institution — Slavery with a capital S. It was about these anonymous people called slaves. What they do to keep on, how they make a life, what they're willing to risk, however long it lasts, in order to relate to one another — that was incredible to me.

For me, the torturous restraining devices became a hook on which to say what it was like in personal terms. I knew about them because slaves who wrote about their lives mentioned them, and white people wrote about them. There's a wonderful diary of the Burr family in which he talks about his daily life and says, ''Put the bit on Jenny today.'' He says that about 19 times in six months — and he was presumably an enlightened slave owner. Slave-ship captains also wrote a lot of memoirs, so it's heavily documented.

There was a description of a woman who had to wear a bell contraption so when she moved they always knew where she was. There were masks slaves wore when they cut cane. They had holes in them, but it was so hot inside that when they took them off, the skin would come off. Presumably, these things were to keep them from eating the sugar cane. What is interesting is that these things were not restraining tools, like in the torture chamber. They were things you wore while you were doing the work. Amazing. It seemed to me that the humiliation was the key to what the experience was like.

More here.

From Nature:

Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence. This was not the case for patients with tumours removed from the frontal regions of the brain. “Self-transcendence used to be considered just by philosophers and crank new age people,” says co-author Salvatore Aglioti, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Sapienza University of Rome. “This is the first really close-up study on spirituality. We're dealing with a complex phenomenon that's close to the essence of being human.”

The authors pinpointed two parts of the brain that, when damaged, led to increases in spirituality: the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus. These areas at the back of the brain are involved in how we perceive our bodies in spatial relation to the external world. The authors of the study in the journal Neuron, say that their findings support the connection between mystic experiences and feeling detached from the body. “The most surprising part was the rapidity of the change,” says Urgesi. “This discovery shows that some complex personality traits are more malleable than previously thought.”

More here.

Dave Zirin in The Nation:

Nuance is the mortal enemy of essayist Christopher Hitchens. Whether it's his rapturous support for Bush's Iraq invasion or his best-selling dismissal (God is NOT Good) of religion, Hitchens will always eschew a surgical analysis for the rhetorical amputation. Beneath the Oxford education, he has become Thomas Friedman in an ascot, with all the subtlety of a blowtorch.

Now Hitchens has turned his attention to sports and the ensuing essay in Newsweek, called “Fool's Gold: How the Olympics and other international competitions breed conflict and bring out the worst in human nature” is everything you might fear. I'm no fan of the politics that surround the Olympic games but when Hitchens takes out his dull saw, nothing connected to sports is spared.

More here. In defense of Hitchens, I also present somethin written by the Roman physician Galen a couple of thousand years ago, and unearthed (for me, I mean) by Justin E. H. Smith:

All natural blessings are either mental or physical, and there is no other category of blessing. Now it is abundantly clear to everyone that athletes have never even dreamed of mental blessings. To begin with, they are so deficient in reasoning powers that they do not even know whether they have a brain. Always gorging themselves on flesh and blood, they keep their brains soaked in so much filth that they are unable to think accurately and are as mindless as dumb animals.

Perhaps it will be claimed that athletes achieve some of the physical blessings. Will they claim the most important blessing of all: health? You will find no one in a more treacherous physical condition… Their sleep is also immoderate. When normal people have ended their work and are hungry, athletes are just getting up from their naps. In fact, their lives are like those of pigs, except that pigs do not overexert or force feed themselves…

More here.

Excellent summary of the many types of overwhelming evidence for evolution:

Nisha Susan in Tehelka:

One of the annoying things about contemporary South Asian writing is the lack of memorable characters. Where are the people who leap off the page and lodge themselves under your skin? Where are the characters whose names you remember? Part of the problem is the locating of narrative within a thin shell of geopolitical significance. Post 9/11, much of our literature has suffered from the ‘Angst in the Time of’ syndrome. Young Pakistani writer HM Naqvi breathes life and urgency into the tiresome subgenre with his energetic, rich turn of phrase and a memorable trio of young men in New York around 9/11.

Neither cynicism nor affectation taints his description of the loss of innocence suffered by AC, Jimbo and our hero Chuck — all Pakistanis — first generation, second generation and expatriate respectively. From the first page Naqvi plunges you into the clubs, the happy pursuit of dope, sex and glorious hangover food. Naqvi is skilled at capturing the sensory states of very young men: the ravenous hunger and enjoyment of food, the complicated lives within cliques, the still larger-thanlife presence of parents. He has a gift for painting the ‘scene’, understood in the ordinary literary sense or in the sense of revelry. With the air of a banquet he presents clubs, dinners at AC’s sister’s home as well as hospital lobbies. Largely, these spectacles grow out of his wonderful descriptions of faces and bodies.

More here.