Human Beings

look at your hands
your beautiful useful hands
you’re not an ape
you’re not a parrot
you’re not a slow loris
or a smart missile
you’re human

not british
not american
not israeli
not palestinian
you’re human

not catholic
not protestant
not muslim
not hindu
you’re human

we all start human
we end up human
human first
human last
we’re human
or we’re nothing

nothing but bombs
and poison gas
nothing but guns
and torturers
nothing but slaves
of Greed and War
if we’re not human

look at your body
with its amazing systems
of nerve-wires and blood canals
think about your mind
which can think about itself
and the whole universe
look at your face
which can freeze into horror
or melt into love
look at all that life
all that beauty
you’re human
they are human
we are human
let’s try to be human

dance!

by Adrian Mitchell

from The Shadow Knows; Bloodaxe Books,
Tarset, 2004

Emanuel Derman in Edge:

Money is human happiness in the abstract, wrote Schopenhauer grimly in the early 19th Century. He then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.

But what is happiness? In The Ethics, written in 1677, Spinoza ambitiously tried to do for the emotions what Euclid did for geometry. Euclid began with “primitives”, his raw material, the elements that everyone understands. In geometry, these were points and lines. He then added axioms, self-evident logical principles that no one would argue with, stating for example that “If equals are added to equals, then the wholes are equal”. Finally, he proceeded to theorems, interesting deductions he could prove from the primitives and the axioms. One of them is Pythagoras’ theorem that relates triangles to squares: the sum of the squares of the sides of right-angled triangle are equal to the square of the hypotenuse.

Spinoza approached human emotions the way Euclid approached triangles and squares, aiming to understand their inter-relations by means of principles, logic and deduction. Spinoza’s primitives were pain, pleasure and desire. Everyone who inhabits a human body recognizes these feelings. Just as financial stock options are derivatives that depend on the underlying stock price, so more complex emotions depend on these three primitives pain, pleasure and desire. Love or hate, then, is pleasure or pain associated with an external object. Hope is the expectation of future pleasure tinged with doubt. Joy is simply the pleasure we experience when that doubtful expectation materializes. Envy is pain at another’s pleasure. Cruelty is a hybrid of all three primitives: it is the desire to inflict pain on someone we love. And so on to all the other emotions …

Figure 1 is a simple diagram I constructed to illustrate Spinoza’s scheme. For Spinoza, good is everything that brings pleasure, and Evil is everything that brings pain. And happiness is good.

More here.

From Science:

Aesop's ancient fable The Crow and the Pitcher tells the story of a thirsty bird who cleverly drops stones into a pitcher of water, raising the liquid's level to quench his thirst. Now, scientists have shown that rooks (Corvus frugilegus), birds from the crow family, can perform a very similar task. The finding suggests that facts may underlie the legend and indicates that corvids, like great apes, have a general understanding of physical rules.

“I had always wanted to see if there was a way to test what the crow did in Aesop's fable,” explains Nathan Emery, a comparative psychologist at Queen Mary, University of London. But he and his graduate student, Christopher Bird of the University of Cambridge, realized they couldn't “ethically deprive a bird of water.” So they devised an experiment that would approximate the challenge facing Aesop's crow. In previous experiments, the two had shown that the rooks, which are not known for using tools in the wild, would nevertheless pick up stones and drop them into a tube in order to make a treat roll out. In the new experiments, Emery and Bird gave each of four rooks (two mated pairs) a clear plastic tube; the tube contained the larvae of a wax moth–the birds' favorite food–floating near the bottom, just beyond the reach of the rooks' beaks.

More here.

Speaking of 3QD people, Morgan Meis over at the Smart Set on Kolakowski:

Leszek Kolakowski died a couple of weeks ago. He was a philosopher, a man of letters, historian of ideas. He lived the 20th-century life. It sucked. But like many a Pole, he made the best of a bad situation. The opening lines of the Polish National Anthem are, after all, “Poland has not perished yet.” Poles know that everything will turn out for the worst. It always does.

Kolakowski grew up during the Nazi occupation of Poland and came of age when the Nazis were exchanged for the Soviets. Liberation, in Poland, is the name for a short period of chaos between oppressors. Kolakowski did his best to think with the times. He started out a Marxist — not a ridiculous position for a young anti-fascist to take in those days. It was not, however, a position that any self-respecting Eastern European could hold past the mid-’50s. Kolakowski had some self-respect.

That's where it gets interesting. Never an either/or sort of fellow, Kolakowski opted for nuance. There were things about the socialist mindset that he liked. He also considered himself fundamentally conservative. It's a tricky position, a perfect place from which to be misunderstood by everyone, on every side. For better or worse, Kolakowski was too smart to care.

A. D. James reviews former 3QD writer Affinity Konar's novel The Illustrated Version of Things in T. Sky Reviews and Interviews:

Affinity Konar’s debut novel opens with a mentally-unbalanced young woman being released from an institution because she has just turned eighteen. She moves back in with her aged grandparents and, desperate for a normal life, quickly sets about reassembling her scattered family, starting with her half-brother and her father. She then undertakes a lengthy search for her runaway mother, although her attention soon enough wavers, causing the tenuous quest narrative to drift in and out. (The middlemost chapters more or less drop the plot and read instead like a string of short stories, although this is hardly a complaint: they’re good short stories.)

The overall missing-family arc, however, is of secondary importance. What really drives Konar’s novel is unrelenting wordplay: her restless narrator just can’t leave language alone. Her descriptions and expositions collage diverse types of illogic and jokey rhetoric: surrealistic word salad, parataxis, nonsense poetry, absurdist reductions, malapropisms, metonymy, twee riddles, cartoonish depictions of appalling behavior—and, occasionally, pitch-perfect imitations of Groucho Marx: “The magazine leads me to a neighborhood where people glare over their rosebushes for recreation.”

Compounding the narrator’s own verbal evasiveness is the fact the characters around her speak only in obstructions, constantly arguing and stonewalling by means of one-ups and puns.

G. A. Cohen, perhaps best known for Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense and If You're An Egalitarian, How Come Your'e So Rich?, died yesterday. I remember being annoyed by KMTH when I first read, but the book kept on entering into my thinking, eventually shaping many of the mental habits. He was certainly on of the clearer political thinkers of the era, whether you agreed with him or not. The blog Political Theory — Habermas and Rawls has links to podcasts from the January 2009 conference “Rescuing Justice and Equality: Celebrating the Career of G.A. Cohen.” Also over at Philosophy Bites, an interview with Cohen on The Inequality of Wealth:

In a letter written to a friend in 1917 Ludwig Wittgenstein reported: ‘I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.’ The notion that being a smarter human being and a better person are in the end the same thing is one that Amartya Sen, a Nobel prize-winning economist who has made fundamental advances in welfare economics and the theory of social choice, finds appealing. Citing Wittgenstein’s assertion at the start of the first chapter of The Idea of Justice and referring to it at several points in the book, Sen suggests that reason can do more than help people to achieve their goals. It can also enable them to criticise their goals, and in this way make them better people. In Sen’s view, a smarter world is sure to be a better world. Unlike some rationalists in the past, however, he does not think we need a conception of an ideal world in order to improve the one we live in. One of the recurring themes of The Idea of Justice is to contest the assumption that a theory of ideal justice is either necessary or desirable. Much of the book is a critique of the work of the late twentieth-century American liberal philosopher John Rawls. While Rawls’s work has shaped academic discussion for over thirty years, it has had a negligible impact on political practice, and one of the reasons may be that his theory leaves so little room for politics. For Rawls, justice is a unique set of principles that reasonable people would choose from an imaginary initial position that ensures impartiality. Once these principles have been chosen all that remains is to set the right institutions in place. Conflicts about the scope of basic liberties and the distribution of resources will then be settled by applying the theory, which is a legal rather than political process.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

Australian Aboriginal painting — complex and dazzling patterns of dots, lines and abstract geometrical shapes — are multilayered cultural artifacts whose symbolic visual vocabulary derives from ceremonial sand painting and body decoration, and can be found in petroglyphs that predate Western written language. They act simultaneously on multiple levels: as aerial landscape maps of traditional tribal domains, detailing the precise locations of food, water and other scarce resources necessary for nomadic desert survival; as recountings of mythological Creation stories of the Altjeringa or Dreamtime, when totemic ancestor spirits crisscrossed the world, laying out the structure that makes life possible and gives it meaning; as depictions of ceremonial rituals by which the Dreamtime — which exists as a sort of parallel realm of timeless continual creation underlying phenomenal reality — may be accessed; as operative manifestations of these rituals — i.e., portals to another dimension; and as objects of exquisite beauty. According to their creators, the paintings have further layers still, esoteric spiritual import that is discernible only to the initiated. In fact, for this reason, much of the work in the front gallery of Icons of the Desert — the exhibit focusing on the first couple of years’ worth of work from the Papunya collective — can’t be exhibited in Australia, and is represented in the catalog by blank gray rectangles (though a U.S.-only supplement includes the missing images).

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

One of the epigraphs that punctuate Invented Knowledge is from Pascal: “It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false”. Whether it is natural or not, it would seem that the false – the extravagant, the fantastical, the grandiose – can at times be so seductive that we suspend our critical faculties in its consideration. Ronald Fritze, a historian and dean at Athens State University in Alabama, is concerned about, and clearly fascinated by, the pseudo-histories and pseudo-sciences – the stories of Atlantis, pre-Ice Age civilizations, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and cosmic catastrophes – which, as he argues, developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and are still with us. “The delivery system for pseudohistorians and pseudoscientists of all stripes”, Fritze writes, “now encompasses a charlatan’s playground of film, television, radio, magazines, and the net.” Fritze, a committed positivist, finds them at times dangerous and always a threat to the standards of “objective” history. Recognizing how “tricky” it is to define pseudo-history, Fritze suggests we begin by asking, What is history? – “a vexed question for people living in a postmodernist age”. But apparently not for Fritze. “A simple and elegant definition for history is a true story about the human past”, he tells us, ignoring the epistemological anguish that has troubled historians from well before the arrival of the postmodernists. So, pseudo-history can easily be defined as an untrue story about the past.

more from Vincent Crapanzano at the TLS here.

Remark

We had been a long time busy
a little sad maybe,
preoccupied,
then I said something dry
perhaps you’d call it

and you laughed
in a way
that made me
stop and stare.

Sudden, rich and startling
it turned my head
and such a flood of happiness was there

that here was something I could do.
Something I’d forgotten I could do.

Here, take it from me,
breathe on it
till it shines
and on a darker day
we might see the world more kindly
through it it might light the way.

by Maura Dooley

from Life Under Water; Bloodax, Tarset, 2008

James D. Watson in The New York Times:

The idea that cancer cells may be united in having a common set of molecules not found in most other cells of our bodies was first proposed by the great German biochemist Otto Warburg. In 1924, he observed that all cancer cells, irrespective of whether they were growing in the presence or absence of oxygen, produce large amounts of lactic acid. Yet it wasn’t until a year ago that the meaning of Warburg’s discovery was revealed: The metabolism of cancer cells, and indeed of all proliferating cells, is largely directed toward the synthesis of cellular building blocks from the breakdown products of glucose. To make this glucose breakdown run even faster in growing cells than in differentiated cells (that is, cells that have stopped growing and taken on their specialized functions in the body), the growth-promoting signal molecules turn up the levels of the “transporter” proteins that move glucose molecules into cells.

This discovery indicates that we need bold new efforts to see if drugs that specifically inhibit the key enzymes involved in this glucose breakdown have anti-cancer activity. In the late 1940s, when I was working toward my doctorate, the top dogs of biology were its biochemists, who were trying to discover how the intermediary molecules of metabolism were made and broken down.

More here. (Note: This posting is dedicated to our devoted reader Professor Winnfield J. Abbe who has been saying the same thing to the “Cancer Generals” for several years in multiple comments posted on this blog)

From The National Geographic:

The journey of young Charles Darwin aboard His Majesty's Ship Beagle, during the years 1831-36, is one of the best known and most neatly mythologized episodes in the history of science. As the legend goes, Darwin sailed as ship's naturalist on the Beagle, visited the Galápagos archipelago in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and there beheld giant tortoises and finches. The finches, many species of them, were distinguishable by differently shaped beaks, suggesting adaptations to particular diets. The tortoises, island by island, carried differently shaped shells.

These clues from the Galápagos led Darwin (immediately? long afterward? here the mythic story is vague) to conclude that Earth's living diversity has arisen by an organic process of descent with modification—evolution, as it's now known—and that natural selection is the mechanism. He wrote a book called The Origin of Species and persuaded everyone, except the Anglican Church establishment, that it was so.

Well, yes and no.

More here.

In April of 1932, an unlikely literary débutante published her first book. Laura Elizabeth Ingalls Wilder was a matron of sixty-five, neat and tiny—about four feet eleven—who was known as Bessie to her husband, Almanzo, and as Mama Bess to her daughter, Rose. The family lived at Rocky Ridge, a farm in the Ozarks, near Mansfield, Missouri, where Wilder raised chickens and tended an apple orchard. She also enjoyed meetings of her embroidery circle, and of the Justamere Club, a study group that she helped found. Readers of The Missouri Ruralist knew her as Mrs. A. J. Wilder, the author of a biweekly column. Her sensible opinions on housekeeping, marriage, husbandry, country life, and, more rarely, on politics and patriotism were expressed in a plain style, with an occasional ecstatic flourish inspired by her love for “the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.” A work ethic inherited from her Puritan forebears, which exalted labor and self-improvement not merely for their material rewards but as moral values, was, she believed, the key to happiness. Mrs. Wilder, however, wasn’t entirely happy with her part-time career, or with her obscurity. In 1930, she sat down with a supply of sharpened pencils—she didn’t type—to write something more ambitious: an autobiography.

more from Judith Thurman at The New Yorker here.

This time every summer I begin to suspect myself of going soft and becoming optimistic and sentimental. The mood passes, I need hardly add, but while it is upon me, it amounts to a real thing. On the first weekend of every August, in Palo Alto, Calif., the Japanese community opens the doors of its temple and school in order to invite guests and outsiders to celebrate the Obon Festival. Ancestor-oriented celebrations are not exactly my thing, but there is a very calm and charming way in which the Japanese use this particular moment in the lunar calendar to remember those who have preceded them and to make the occasion a general fiesta. (I suppose the nearest regional equivalent would be the Mexican Day of the Dead.) The clement weather allows the wearing of the lighter yukata, or summer kimono, and the staging of the Bon Odori dance, in which all can join, to the soft rhythm of taiko drums. For the rest of the time, the yagura, or wooden scaffold, is the center of a sort of fairground, in which stalls and raffles compete for custom with the sellers of sake and Japanese beer and with an amazing teriyaki buffet.

more from Slate here.

(h/t Jason Wilson)

The Next Superpower

On the much-publicised full moon
festive youths and families gorge

on overpriced moon-cakes
to celebrate mid-autumn. How

very poetic. Not all that far away
the plants’ wastes flow

to choke the Yangtze. I can’t
appreciate the taste of the cakes,

their severe sweetness. The Chinese
cherish the stuff. This, they say,

is a beloved tradition. I can’t
remember ever loving anything

resembling one. You can’t finish
yours, and stroll onto the balcony

Read more »

Diane Ackerman in Orion Magazine:

AT DAWN, the world rises out of darkness, slowly, sense-grain by grain, as if from sleep. Life becomes visible once again. “When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can’t think anymore,” Claude Monet once lamented. “More light!” Goethe begged from his deathbed. Dawn is the wellspring of more light, the origin of our first to last days as we roll in space, over 6.684 billion of us in one global petri dish, shot through with sunlight, in our cells, in our minds, in our myriad metaphors of rebirth, in all the extensions to our senses that we create to enlighten our days and navigate our nights.

Thanks to electricity, night doesn’t last as long now, nor is it as dark as it used to be, so it’s hard to imagine the terror of our ancestors waiting for daybreak. On starless nights, one can feel like a loose array of limbs and purpose, and seem smaller, limited to what one can touch. In the dark, it’s hard to tell friend from foe. Night-roaming predators may stalk us. Reminded of all our delectable frailties, we become vulnerable as prey. What courage it must have taken our ancestors to lie down in darkness and become helpless, invisible, and delusional for eight hours. Graceful animals stole through the forest shadows by night, but few people were awake to see them burst forth, in twilight or moonlight, forbidding, distorted, maybe even ghoulish or magical. Small wonder we personalized the night with demons. Eventually, people were willing to sacrifice anything—wealth, power, even children—to ransom the sun, immense with life, a one-eyed god who fed their crops, led their travels, chased the demons from their dark, rekindled their lives.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Ivan Klima grew up knowing exactly what freedom was. Freedom was the opposite of his childhood. In 1941, when Klima was 10, his father was sent on the first Nazi transport to Terezin, the “fortress ghetto” north of Prague, and the family followed. Klima remained in Terezin for the duration of the war. He had, he says, not been aware that his parents were Jewish until Hitler came to power. “Anyone who has been through a concentration camp as a child,” he once wrote, “who has been completely dependent on an external power which can at any moment come in and beat or kill him and everyone around him – probably moves through life at least a bit differently from people who have been spared such an education. That life can be snapped like a piece of string – that was my daily lesson as a child.” There were other lessons, too, though; lessons in survival, lessons in escape. Klima had only one book with him in Terezin, The Pickwick Papers . He read it over and over, and transported himself daily to the world of Sam Weller and Nathaniel Winkle. Freedom was established in his mind as storytelling.

He started to write while in the camp, aware that any page he finished could be his last, and found that the trick of escape worked even better. He wrote plays and made his own puppets to perform in them, and then stories about the girls he fancied, daydreams about his first loves. The sense of liberation he found in these made-up sentences never left him. “I have always pursued inner freedom,” Klima tells me now, at his home in Prague. “I have never been censored.”

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Last year the National Debt Clock in New York City ran out of digits. The billboard-size electronic counter, mounted on a wall near Times Square, overflowed when the public debt reached $10 trillion, or 10¹³ dollars. The crisis was resolved by squeezing another digit into the space occupied by the dollar sign. Now a new clock is on order, with room for growth; it won’t fill up until the debt reaches a quadrillion (10¹⁵) dollars.

The incident of the Debt Clock brings to mind a comment made by Richard Feynman in the 1980s—back when mere billions still had the power to impress:

There are 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.

The important point here is not that high finance is catching up with the sciences; it’s that the numbers we encounter everywhere in daily life are growing steadily larger. Computer technology is another area of rapid numeric inflation. Data storage capacity has gone from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, and the latest disk drives hold a terabyte (10¹² bytes). In the world of supercomputers, the current state of the art is called petascale computing (10¹⁵ operations per second), and there is talk of a coming transition to exascale (10¹⁸). After that, we can await the arrival of zettascale (10²¹) and yottascale (10²⁴) machines—and then we run out of prefixes!

More here.

In More Intelligent Life Magazine, Brian Cathcart looks at the issue:

One day last year a daughter of Earl Spencer (who is therefore a niece of Princess Diana) called a taxi to take her and a friend from her family home at Althorp in Northamptonshire to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. She told the driver “Stamford Bridge”, the name of Chelsea’s stadium, but he delivered them instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, nearly 150 miles in the opposite direction. They missed the game.

Such stories are becoming commonplace. A coachload of English schoolchildren bound for the historic royal palace at Hampton Court wasted an entire day battling through congested central London as their sat-nav led them stubbornly to a narrow back street of the same name in Islington. A Syrian lorry driver aiming for Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, turned up 1,600 miles away in the English east-coast town of Skegness, which has a Gibraltar Point nearby.

Two complementary things are happening in these stories. One is that these people are displaying a woeful ignorance of geography. In the case of Stamford Bridge, one driver and two passengers spent well over two hours in a car without noticing that instead of passing Northampton and swiftly entering the built-up sprawl of London, their view continued to be largely of fields and forests, and they were seeing signs for Nottingham, Doncaster and the North. They should have known.

The other is more subtle. Everybody involved in these stories has consciously handed over responsibility for knowing geography to a machine. With the sat-nav on board, they believed that they did not need to know about north or south, Spain or England, leafy Surrey or gridlocked Islington. That was the machine’s job. Like an insurance company with its call centre or a local council with its bin collections, they confidently outsourced the job of knowing this stuff, or of finding it out, to that little computer on the dashboard.