Ex-Pedophile Shares Tips On How To Make Your Kids Less Attractive

The Right Words

After months in the far north
they return, like snow buntings,
in a blizzard of wings. I did not
think they could thrive in icy climes
but here they are, searching the wrackline
for drifted seed. When they turned pale,
fell between a rock

and a barren place, they lay
deep in a corrie in a nest lined
with sheep’s wool, fur
from a mountain hare.
And down from a ptarmigan
conferring resilience
its chameleon gift.

by Kathryn Daszkiewicz

From Lensculture:

David Lynch is endlessly creative, and his artistic output is usually quite bizarre and surreal. Lynch's latest project is as a photographer and collaborator with musician, artist and producer Danger Mouse. Together, they've created a multimedia installation that is now on display in Los Angeles.

Fifty of Lynch’s photographs are mounted on aluminum panels that seem to float on the gallery walls, converging with the moody rhythms of the music from Danger Mouse's latest album, Dark Night of the Soul.

The collaboration began when Danger Mouse, who has been a fan of Lynch’s for many years, approached the filmmaker about a possible project. The artists worked together and were inspired by each other— Lynch making photographs influenced by the original songs that Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse were creating.

More here.

From The City Journal:

In the summer of 2008, wheat and corn prices shot up across the globe. Pundits provided seemingly convincing explanations: grain was becoming scarce and thus more expensive because mainland Chinese were changing their eating habits and needed lots of it to feed their cattle—or perhaps because fear of oil shortages, combined with ecological fads, was leading consumers to adopt corn-based ethanol. Yet one year later, the Chinese are eating basically the same food as last year (feeding habits change very slowly), ethanol production is more or less at the same level, but the price of grain and corn on the Chicago market is back down again. How to explain the volatility of prices when production levels remain essentially the same?

The reason: grain or corn prices may at any point in time be driven more by speculation than by actual harvests. The rule applies to all transactions on financial markets, including oil, stocks, and derivatives. This is one of many examples that Rama Cont offers to describe how the real economy and the financial markets follow different rationales. In the short term—which can mean several years, in practice—the connection can be tenuous at best and difficult to model. If the connection were closer, Cont would know: he is at the forefront of the new science of financial modeling.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who's Counting column at ABC News:

When a modern Western country whose economy is based on science and technology adopts an absurdly medieval law, one would think that this would be a news story of at least moderate size.

Oddly though, almost no attention has been paid in the United Stares to the passing last month of a bill establishing a crime of blasphemy in Ireland.

Approved by the Irish parliament, it states: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding 25,000 euro.”

Furthermore, “a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”

Even if I weren't the author of a book entitled “Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up,” I would find this bill abysmally wrong-headed.

More here.

The first rule of Breakfast Club is that you totally talk about Breakfast Club. And then you shout some about Breakfast Club, and do some truly awful dancing about Breakfast Club, and then you cry. But mostly you talk. In 1985, when The Breakfast Club was originally released, this was a fairly radical notion. Throughout the early 1980s, in movies like Porky’s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and dozens of similar knock-offs, Hollywood depicted teens as raging hedonists devoted to the pleasures of the body. They practiced oral sex on carrots, they hired hookers, they got stoned before class, they drank themselves into happy oblivion. Even in John Hughes’ sweet-as-frosting Sixteen Candles, debauchery hovers in the margins. In The Breakfast Club, however, he broke completely with contemporary standards. Sure, there’s a scene where everyone gets stoned, and a couple of chaste kisses at the end, but the pursuit of pleasure is no longer the narrative engine driving this movie. Nor is romance, nor even the desire to assume grown-up responsibilities. Generous humanist that he was, Hughes was that rare adult who took teenagers just as seriously as they take themselves, and the result was a movie in which the five main characters – the brain, the jock, the princess, the criminal, and the basket case — pursue nothing more compelling than self-awareness and the public revelation of thoughts and feelings once consigned to diaries and psychologist offices.

more from The Smart Set writers (including myself) here.

“My country is my family,” writes Ricky Rice as he concludes his apologia pro vita sua — a.k.a Victor LaValle’s massive, heroically strange new novel, “Big Machine” (Spiegel & Grau: 378 pp., $25). “I like America.” There’s something both dissonant and grin-tuggingly candid in his plainspoken admission. Ricky, after all, is an ex-(more or less) heroin addict; a onetime cash mule; an itinerant janitor who’s cleaned the toilets in several of upstate New York’s less-than-glamorous train stations; a now-chaste former serial impregnator of women; and one of the few child escapees of the charismatic religious cult led by three (weird) sisters called the Washerwomen. Not to mention all the bizarreness and violence that pack these pages. Yet, even as we’d half-expect any patriotic sentiment of his to be along the lines of, say, Allen Ginsberg’s “America” — “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing” — his proclamation seems just right. That “like” is perfect — a modest verb in place of the chest-thumping “love.” For a book with a dazzling array of flashy moving parts — secret societies, backstories toggled for maximum effect, angels and demons, suicide squads recruited from among the homeless — the language is more effective for being low key.

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.

If not for Mad magazine, there might never have been (in no particular order) 1960s youth culture, underground comics, Wacky Packs, “Laugh-In,” “Saturday Night Live,” R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or an age of irony, period. Mad, which began in 1952 as a comic book that parodied “serious” comics as well as American popular culture, with an emphasis on television, movies and advertising, was conceived and originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93), a Brooklyn-born comic-strip artist, writer and editor. Kurtzman was the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor. If this seems like hyperbole, all you have to do is read The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams Comic­Arts, $40), Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle’s insightful, entertaining and profusely illustrated (with rare images of original work) biographical monograph, which chronicles almost everything Kurtzman accomplished — and that was quite a lot.

more from Steven Heller at the NY Times here.

In Endcliffe Park

A speck of dust no weightier than a thought
must have touched dead water.
I did not see what started it, but watch the ring
expand as though the pool is shaping O!
while I stand with the same exclamation
widening through me —

Could the Porter Brook, this autumn park,
the fallen and the falling leaves,
this calm pool and the weir beyond, the onrush
to Stinky Bob steaming on his bench in the sun,
all the snags and graces with which things go downhill,
be best regarded not as material
but one long, complex thought of Autumn
on this sector of the planet in its circuit round the sun,
a beat in that catchy theme
The Way Things Are?

And, more usefully, as I watch that circle spread
and these words begin enlarging on a momentary calm,
might we consider what arises in our minds
as nothing other than water, sky, trees, seasons,
and we who see ourselves as moving through the world
are better seen as receptacles, hosts
of the being that moves through us,
the pool in which its dust is registered and spread?

by Andrew Grieg

from This Life, This Life; Bloodaxe Books,
Northumberland, 2006

From Scientific American:

For centuries, Shakespeare skeptics have doubted the authorship of the Stratfordian Bard's literary corpus, proffering no fewer than 50 alternative candidates, including Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe and the leading contender among the “anti-Stratfordians,” Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. And for nearly as long, the Shakespeare skeptics have toiled in relative obscurity, holding conferences in tiny gatherings and dreaming of the day their campaign would make front-page news. On April 18, 2009, the Wall Street Journal granted their wish with a feature story on how U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens came to believe (and throw his judicial weight behind) the skeptics.

Stevens's argument retreads a well-worn syllogism: Shakespeare's plays are so culturally rich that they could only have been written by a noble or scholar of great learning. The historical William Shakespeare was a commoner with no more than a grammar school education. Ergo, Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare. For example, Stevens asks, “Where are the books? You can't be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home. He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries, he never was shown to be present at any major event—the coronation of James or any of that stuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

It is hard to believe today that there was a time when securing Pelican Island, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon were controversial decisions denounced as a federal land grab inimical to states’ rights and economic growth. Of course every generation has its own idea of progress, beauty and necessity. What made Theodore Roosevelt a conservationist hero was his conviction that pelicans, 2,000-year-old redwood trees and ancient rock formations belonged to future generations of Americans as well as to the past. Weighed against eternity, what were the arguments of mining magnates, plume hunters, local businesses and assorted congressmen? From the time he became president, in 1901, until he left office 100 years ago, Roosevelt saved over 234 million acres of wild America.

How a city-born child of privilege became one of the greatest forces in American conservation is the subject of Douglas Brinkley’s vast, inspiring and enormously entertaining book, “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.” The subtitle is telling — the crusade for America, not “wild America” — because for Roosevelt, living forests and petrified forests, bird preserves and buffalo ranges were essential for the country’s survival as a moral and military power.

More here.

Carl Zimmer at Yale: Environment 360:

In 1997, Arthur Weis found himself with an extra bucket of seeds. Weis, who was teaching at the University of California at Irvine at the time, had dispatched a student, Sheina Sim, to gather some field mustard seeds for a study. When Sim was done with her research, Weis was left with a lot of leftover seeds. For no particular reason, he decided not to throw the bucket out. “We just tossed it in a cold, dry incubator,” said Weis.

Weis is glad they did. When a severe drought struck southern California, Weis realized that he could use the extra bucket of seeds for an experiment. In 2004 he and his colleagues collected more field mustard seeds from the same sites that Sim had visited seven years earlier. They thawed out some of the 1997 seeds and then reared both sets of plants under identical conditions. The newer plants grew to smaller sizes, produced fewer flowers, and, most dramatically, produced those flowers eight days earlier in the spring. The changing climate had, in other words, driven the field mustard plants to evolve over just a few years. “It was serendipity that we had the seeds lying around,” says Weis.

Weis is convinced that his experiment is just a harbinger of things to come. Global warming is projected to drastically raise the average global temperature, as well as producing many other changes to the world’s climate, such as more droughts in California. And in response, Weis and other researchers contend, life will undergo an evolutionary explosion.

“Darwin thought evolution was gradual, and that it would take longer than the lifetime of a scientist to observe even the slightest change,” says Weis, who is now at the University of Toronto. “That might be the average case, but evolution can also be very rapid under the right conditions. Climate change is going to be one of those things where the conditions are met.”

Over at Snag Films:

Second Skin takes an intimate look at three sets of computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by online virtual worlds. An emerging genre of computer software called Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, allows millions of users to interact simultaneously in virtual spaces. Of the 50 million players worldwide, 50 percent consider themselves addicted. From individuals struggling with addiction to couples who have fallen in love without meeting; from disabled players whose lives have been given new purpose to gold farmers, entrepreneurs and widows, Second Skin opens viewers’ eyes to a phenomenon that may permanently change the way human beings interact.

Jeremy Scahill in The Nation:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince's companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq. One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting “illegal” or “unlawful” weapons into the country on Prince's private planes. They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies. The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.

These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct.

More here. [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi. Photo shows Erik Prince.]

Ethan Remmel in American Scientist:

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a baby, or how a young child’s perceptions and introspections might differ from those of an adult? Reading Alison Gopnik’s new book, The Philosophical Baby, is probably the closest you will ever come to knowing.

Gopnik is a leading developmental psychologist, an expert on philosophy of mind and an excellent writer. What distinguishes this book from others on children’s cognition is the author’s emphasis on philosophical issues such as consciousness, identity and morality. She argues that the psychological study of children provides a rich source of insight into these issues, one that philosophers have traditionally overlooked.

Within developmental psychology, Gopnik is perhaps best known for promoting (with Henry Wellman, Andrew Meltzoff and others) the “theory theory”—the idea that children construct implicit causal models of the world (theories) using the same psychological mechanisms that scientists use to construct explicit scientific theories. In other words, children are like little scientists—or, as Gopnik prefers to put it, scientists are like big children. The focus in this book is broader. Gopnik argues that although young children’s thinking may seem illogical and their play functionless, their imagination and exploration actually reflect the operation of the same powerful causal learning mechanisms that enable our uniquely human achievements in areas such as science or art.

More here.

Steven Johnson in Time:

Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

More here.

Jenny Diski in the London Review of Books:

In 2001, Armin Meiwes, a computer technician from Rotenburg in Germany, advertised on the Cannibal Café website for someone to have dinner with. He received numerous replies, but some withdrew when he responded and he considered others not serious enough. Eventually he invited Bernd Brandes for dinner. The plan was that Armin and Bernd would dine on Bernd’s severed penis, to be bitten off at the table for the occasion (this failed and it had to be cut off). Bernd found it too chewy, he said, so Armin put it in a sauté pan, but charred it and fed it to the dog. Later, Armin put Bernd in the bath (to marinate?), gave him alcohol and pills, read a science fiction book for three hours and then stabbed his dinner guest in the throat, hung him upside down on a meat hook in the ceiling, as any good butcher would, and sliced him into manageable portions. The world was agog at the news of the German cannibal and his two trials, at the first of which he was found guilty of manslaughter (no law against cannibalism in Germany, and his ‘victim’ had consented, volunteered actually, to being killed and eaten) and sentenced to eight years. He was retried on appeal for first-degree murder on the grounds that Bernd might not have been in a position to consent once his penis had been severed and the blood loss taken its intellectual toll. Armin Meiwes was given life. So far so goggable, but then Meiwes gave a TV interview and explained, ‘I sautéed the steak of Bernd, with salt, pepper, garlic and nutmeg. I had it with Princess croquettes, Brussels sprouts and a green pepper sauce,’ and you begin to see, as the suburban lace curtain drifts into place, that the reality of cannibalism could be far less interesting than the idea of it. I think it’s the Princess croquettes in particular that cause the disappointment.

More here.