A bunch of frogs gather to watch a video about worms on a cell phone…
Posted by Daily Picks and Flicks on Wednesday, September 24, 2014
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Like Frogs
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we congregate
like frogs before a video of food
piling on— poking, jabbing, jumping
at the mysterious fabric of reality
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Jim Culleny
2/3/16
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by Leanne Ogasawara
“When I was an undergraduate, on my way to first day of quantum mechanics class, I was riding up in the elevator with the professor and several (male) students. The professor kindly informed us that this would be the class that “separated the men from the boys.”
Astronomy is really making the news these days. Except it's not for the reasons one would hope or expect; for the headlines keep rolling in one after the other about “astronomy's snowballing cases of sexual harassment.”
Yikes!
As a woman, obviously, I think matters like this should never be covered up and that process must be put in place in universities to deal with transgressions. In fact, I go a step further and believe that as “exemplars,” anyone who is in a teaching profession should be held up to the very highest moral standards.
Like most women, this is also not something that I am unfamiliar with either.
As an undergraduate at Berkeley in philosophy, I was one of the few women in the program, and I think philosophy has similar kinds of issues as we are seeing in astronomy. Even as an undergraduate it often felt like a kind of “boys club.” In Japan, too, in my twenties, I worked at Hitachi, ostensibly as a translator and interpreter; but in fact, as the only “girl” in the department, I spent all my time answering the phones and serving tea and stapling papers and tidying up.
I didn't stay long…
In many ways, “not staying long” is what has characterized my life.
Progressives, moderates, and even many conservatives are aghast at Donald Trump's populist appeal. As this cantankerous oaf flashes ever brighter in the political pan, they fret that his demagoguery might land him the Republican presidential nomination, and perhaps even carry him all the to White House.
I'm not worried about the prospect of a Hail to the Trump scenario and never have been. As far back as August, I opined on this very website that he has virtually no chance of becoming president. I still believe that. He lost to Ted Cruz in Iowa, just like I said he would. And I'm sticking with my prediction that he'll be done by the Ides of March. Should Trump actually make it to the Oval Office, I'll buy you all plane tickets to Canada, as promised.
That being said, it's certainly worth investigating the Trump phenomenon. After all, how are we to explain the dramatic success of this heinous cretin? How could this man, who is not just a walking punch line, but also thoroughly repulsive in almost every way, be so popular, not just on a silly reality TV show with a dumb catch phrase, but also in the supposedly serious world of presidential politics?
Let’s consider three imaginative works where race is an issue. First we have Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is not American, of course, but English. The character of Caliban, who may not even be human, marks the imaginative space the English used for understanding Africans. The play was written and performed at about the same time as Jamestown, Virginia, as first settled.
Then we move forward two and a half centuries to late 19th Century. America has established itself as an independent nation and fought its bloodiest war, the Civil War, over the status of the American sons and daughters of Caliban. We find Huck Finn fleeing his abusive father by rafting down the Mississippi with a runaway slave. Jim sure isn’t Shakespeare’s Caliban nor is Huck a Prospero. I conclude with a counter narrative from the early 20th Century, an African-American “toast”, as they’re called, about the sinking of the Titanic. Think of such oral narratives as antecedents of rap and hip-hop.
by Sarah Firisen
Anyone can be in charge. Being in charge isn’t the same as being a leader.
We've all known great leaders. People that we’d walk through fire for, but what makes them such great leaders? As the Presidential primary season gets under way, perhaps it’s worth considering what leadership really is. Because despite the inevitable primary bickering over whether a businessman, senator or a governor makes a more effective President, what we’re really looking for is leadership.
Are great leaders born or can these traits be developed? Or is it a combination of the two? People are born with certain natural abilities , but per Malcolm Gladwell’s, Outliers hour rule, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery (this of course probably goes for most things). So does this mean that with enough conscious effort, anyone can be a great leader? I do think that motivation has a part to play. The key word here is “great”. Someone who wants to lead for reasons outside of personal aggrandizement, outside of pure power for power’s sake. Maybe, a person with those core attributes can work towards achieving mastery.
by Brooks Riley
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
by Matt McKenna
by Dwight Furrow
How times have changed! Today, celebrity chefs strut across the stage like rock stars, a whole TV network is devoted to explaining the intricacies of fermentation or how to butcher a hog, countless blogs recount last night's meal in excruciating detail, and competitions for culinary capo make the evening news. We talk endlessly about the pleasures of food, conversations that are supported by specialty food shops, artisan producers, and aisles of fresh, organic produce in the supermarket. Restaurants, even small neighborhood establishments, feature chefs who cook with creativity and panache.
Why this sudden interest in food? As I argue in American Foodie: Taste, Art and the Cultural Revolution, our current interest in food is a search for authenticity, face-to-face contact, local control, and personal creativity amidst a world that is increasingly standardized, bureaucratic, digitized, and impersonal. In contemporary life, the public world of work, with its incessant demands for efficiency and profit, has colonized our private lives. The pressures of a competitive, unstable labor market, the so-called “gig” economy, along with intrusive communications technology make it increasingly difficult to escape a work world governed by the value of efficiency. This relentless acceleration of demands compresses our sense of time so we feel like there is never enough of it. Standardization destroys the uniqueness of localities and our social lives are spread across the globe in superficial networks of “contacts” where we interact with brands instead of whole persons. The idea that something besides production and consumption should occupy our attention, such as a sense of community or self-examination, seems quaint and inefficient—a waste of time. Thus, we lose touch with ourselves while internalizing the self-as-commodity theme and hiving off all aspects of our lives that might harm our “brand”—a homogenized, marketable self. Even our vaunted and precious capacity to choose is endangered, for we no longer choose based on a sensibility shaped by our unique experiences; instead our sensibilities are constructed by corporate choice architects, informed by their surveys and datamining that shepherd our decisions.
by Jonathan Kujawa
I came dangerously close to not becoming a mathematician. Like many people my experiences with math in school left me irritated and bored. I have a poor memory and I'm not a detail oriented person [1]. The arbitrary rules to be memorized and the fiddly and unforgiving nature of calculations made each homework a minefield of point-losing opportunities. And the problems! To “motivate” us with “applications” the problems were meant to be real-world, yet always seemed to involve the patently ridiculous: rectangular pastures, conical barns, spherical cows. I don't know how anyone can refer to such obviously contrived problems as “real-world” with a straight face.
Or, worse, problems were completely devoid of any motivation whatsoever. I have strong memory of having to learn how to multiply together matrices. The rules were clearly designed to maximize the number of calculations required and, hence, the chances of making a mistake. I can't imagine who thought this was a good topic for fifteen year olds. Not a word was said about why we should learn such a thing, or why anyone, anywhere should care. Oh to have known something about how matrices are used in geometry and computer graphics, or to store and manipulate data, or to compute probabilities in Markov processes. Heck, just to point out that it is an example of a “multiplication” where AB and BA are not equal would have been great start!
Of course my experience is the rule, not the exception. Paul Lockhart wrote a fantastic essay in 2002 entitled “A Mathematician's Lament” which captures the situation perfectly. It's requiring everyone to be able to read music and never letting them hear a tune, only saying it will be needed in some unspecified way as a working adult. Or teaching reading using only tax forms and TV repair manuals. Everyone with an interest in math or education should read it. You can read it here. As Lockhart writes,
…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.
So how was my soul saved?
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
Any view important enough to stimulate disagreement is a view that will look to some reasonable others as prohibitively costly, suboptimal, incorrect, or foolhardy. Thus assessing the drawbacks of one's view is where the argument concerning its overall merit begins, not where it ends. Thoughtful people are aware that their views will strike some reasonable others as manifestly rejectable, and consequently, thoughtful people take reasonable criticism not always as an attack on their proposals, but rather as an occasion for thinking and saying more about them. In some instances, the case can be made that the drawbacks of one's view must be borne (because, perhaps, the viable alternatives are yet even worse); in other cases, it might be arguable that the costs of adopting one's view are merely apparent or on the whole insignificant. The point is that it's plainly insipid to proceed as if the fact that an opponent's view is imperfect were a decisive reason to reject it. Showing that an interlocutor's proposal is thoroughly criticizable is never the end of the matter. What must also be shown is that the interlocutor's criticizable proposal is inferior to the other (criticizable) proposals worth considering. And that comparative task requires us to allow our interlocutors to respond to our criticisms.
The trouble is that so much popular political debate seems to presuppose that the only political view worth accepting would be one that could not be reasonably criticized.
by Jalees Rehman
Nearly half a million applications for asylum submitted by refugees were processed by German authorities in 2015, according to the German Federal Office for Refugees and Migration. The number of people who were officially registered in Germany as potential asylum seekers was even far higher-roughly one million in 2015 – which suggests that Germany anticipates an even higher number of official asylum applications for 2016. Chancellor Angela Merkel has defied many critics even in her own party and cabinet by emphasizing that Germany can and will take on more refugees, most of whom are coming from war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. “We can do it!” (“Wir schaffen das!”) was the phrase she used in September of 2015 to convey her optimism and determination in the face of ever-growing numbers of refugees and the gradual rise of support for far right extremist demonstrations and violent attacks by far right extremists on refugees centers in Germany.
The German media and right wing populists are currently obsessing about statistics such as the fact that the far right and libertarian party AfD (Alternative für Deutschland – Alternative for Germany) will garner 10% of the popular vote or that the vast majority of the refugees are male and could lead to a demographic gender shift if they remain in Germany. While such statistics serve as an important barometer of the political climate in the German electorate or to prepare for the challenges faced by the refugees and German society in the next years, they do not address the fundamental philosophical questions raised by this refugee crisis. In the latest issue of the popular German philosophy periodical “Philosophie Magazin“, the editors asked philosophers and other academic scholars to weigh in on some of the key issues and challenges in the face of this crisis.
Should we be motivated by a sense of global responsibility when we are confronted with the terrible suffering experienced by refugees whose homes have been destroyed? The sociologist Hartmut Rosa at the University of Jena responds to this question by suggesting that we should focus on Verbundenheit (“connectedness”) instead of Verantwortung (“responsibility”). Demanding that those of us who lead privileged lives of safety and reasonable material comfort should feel individually responsible for the suffering of others can lead to a sense of moral exhaustion. Are we responsible for the suffering of millions of people in Syria and East Africa? Are we responsible for the extinction of species as a consequence of climate change? Instead of atomizing – and thus perhaps even rendering irrelevant – the abstract concept of individual responsibility, we should become aware of how we are all connected.
by Brooks Riley
by Tamuira Reid
I.
I stopped caring about him sometime between January and May, when the weather changed and the leaves came back. He went on that big white pill and couldn't have aged cheese or avocado and I sat at the table in the kitchen, watching him watch me.
The yelling wouldn't stop until he'd had enough, when his eyes no longer felt right in his head and he'd rather lay down than stand there, fist in mouth, cat rubbing against both legs.
He once told me that depression comes in waves but that makes it sound too beautiful. There was nothing good about the bad.
Sometimes we'd try to fight it before it hit. I'd take a shower. He'd shave his face. Vacuum the hallway rug. But it never worked and the top would blow off and it would be hands to throats again, just like that.
Teacups shook in their skin, books fell over on themselves and I wanted to see how it would all play out. Does he get the girl in the end? Or does she leave during a quiet moment, smiling as she turns away. His hand pressed against her like an ear.
“No sooner does man discover intelligence
than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity.”
~ Jacques Yves Cousteau
It's actually kind of difficult to envision this as even being a problem in the first place. It's true that, up until in the first years of this century, there was some discussion of the so-called ‘digital divide', where certain segments of the population would not be able to get onto the ‘Internet superhighway' (another term that has fallen into disuse, perhaps because it feels like we never get out of our cars anymore). These were the segments of society that were already disadvantaged in some respect, where circumstances of poverty and/or geography prevented the delivery of physical and therefore digital services. Less so, those on the wrong side of the divide may have also landed there because of language proficiency or age.
A great man and one of the most significant figures in the history of Pakistan has just died. I consider it my great fortune that I came to know him and the idea of a world without him in it is quite unbearable. Here is what I wrote about him more than 10 years ago on 3QD:
The first time that I met Sahabzada Yaqub Khan about six years ago, he was in Washington and New York as part of a tour of four or five countries (America, Russia, China, Japan, etc.) relations with which are especially important to Pakistan. He had come as President Musharraf's special envoy to reassure these governments in the wake of the fall of the kleptocratic shambles that was Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's so-called democratic government. Samad Khan, or Sammy K as he is affectionately known to friends, invited me over to his apartment to meet his Dad. I had heard and read much about Sahabzada Yaqub and knew his reputation for fierce intellect and even more intimidating, had heard reports of his impatience with and inability to suffer fools, so I was nervous when I walked in. Over the next couple of hours I was blown away: Sahabzada Yaqub was not much interested in talking about politics, and instead, asked about my doctoral studies in philosophy. It was soon apparent that he had read widely and deeply in the subject, and knew quite a bit about the Anglo-American analytic philosophy I had spent the previous five years reading. He even asked some pointed questions about aspects of philosophy which even some graduate students in the field might not know about, much less laymen. Though we were interrupted by a series of phone calls from the likes of Henry Kissinger wanting to pay their respects while Sahabzada Yaqub was in town, we managed to talk not just about philosophy, but also physics (he wanted to know more about string theory), Goethe (SYK explained some of his little-known scientific work, in addition to quoting and then explicating some difficult passages from Faust), the implications of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, and Urdu literature, of which Sahabzada Yaqub has been a lifelong devotee.
More here.
by Brooks Riley
It may seem insulting to my living friends that I find myself revisiting the inanimate ones to try to understand their place in my personal pantheon. Friendship may even be the wrong word for the acquaintance one makes with a work of art. But the attraction is there, just as we are attracted to the singular mix of attributes of a person whom one knows will become a friend. The first time I saw my best friend, it was not in person, but in a thumbnail photograph of her among hundreds, of incoming freshmen at college. There was nothing unusual about that face, but there was a quality I noticed, something ineffable. When I later met that freshman, I recognized her immediately.
I was probably 14 or 15 years old when I first saw the Manet painting. Walking into the gallery where it hung, I was immediately drawn to it. From a distance, it was the dynamism within the frame, the chiaroscuro 20-degree angle slashed across the wide canvas from upper left to lower right, that made me want to move closer. It was also the proto-cinematic framing, heralding the 1.85:1 aspect ratio of modern cinema. The angle was formed by the body of a dead bullfighter, the only event in an otherwise nearly blank, dark canvas with little context. His head, upside down, is closest to us. His feet lie at the other end of the perspective.
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Solar Filaments
the sun's intense but placid
teasing this morning’s fog from the river,
at least from this vantage, sitting as we are
at a perfect distance from its orange firebox
safe from its arcing solar filaments,
the eruptions which suddenly uncoil like snakes
and would reduce me to cinders
with their dragon breath if not for
certain equations like those that render orbits
and the change of state that gives
this river its gray vapor coat
in which it rides its way to the sea
under the cool red blast furnace blaze
of clouds caught in the cup of two slopes
behind the phone pole’s tangle of wires
to the sound of water over the dam
speaking familiar alien tongues,
and footsteps curiously synced to my pace,
and the rhythmic exhalation
of my fog-spilling lungs
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by Jim Culleny
1/19/15
by Claire Chambers
I recently wrote an essay for Dawn on general postcolonial rewritings of Shakespeare's Othello. For the present column, I turn to 
In her essay '”Filmi” Shakespeare', Poonam Trivedi defies accusations of 'bardolatry' and colonial cultural cringe to trace the history of Shakespeare on the Indian big screen. She shows that this history goes back to 1935 and Sohrab Modi's Khoon-ka Khoon, a cinematic rendering of an Indian stage version of Hamlet. Because the British colonizers laid emphasis on an English literary education for the Indians over whom they ruled, there were many filmic adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. Hamlet's blend of politics and metaphysical mystery seems to have proven the most popular of the Bard's plays for Indian auteurs. These directors, according to Trivedi, in the early days of Indian cinema found themselves between the rock of leaving Shakespeare 'pure and pristine' or the hard place of making him entirely 'bowdlerized and indigenized'. By the mid-twentieth century, the most successful adaptations relocated the plays to India in their entirety. Directors 'used' rather than 'abused' the Shakespearean originals, taking ideas from their plots and themes rather than critically writing back to the plays.
The Bengali film Saptapadhi was in 1961 probably the first to namecheck Othello. In it, a pair of starcrossed lovers − a Brahmin boy 
by Yohan J. John
I had two reasons to watch the latest Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, as soon as I was able. Firstly, I knew that despite all the talk of spoiler warnings and respect for “the fans”, I would have to basically avoid the internet until I managed to see it. (There's always some kill-joy on your facebook feed who gets a kick out of giving it all away, or an oaf who does not know what a spoiler is.) Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I wanted to join in the conversation. One of the great things about a pop cultural juggernaut (such as Star Wars, Pope Francis, or the FIFA World Cup) is that a lot of people —friends, family, strangers in bars, members of the chatterati — will be talking about it. Pop cultural mega-events are like Rorschach tests: whether we enjoy them or not, we feel the urge to project onto them our emotions, our theories, our politics, our ideals. By virtue of their popularity, these events bring us together and draw our attention to a common focal point, at which point we can share our projections with each other.
In his book Finite and Infinite Games, James P Carse defines finite games as those that are played for the purpose of bringing play to an end. Infinite games, by contrast, are played “for the purpose of continuing the play”. When we think about games we typically think about the finite sort: their end goal is some victory or end state, at which point the game is over. Wars take the form of a finite game — they aim to bring an end to the adversary's 'play'. Debates takes this form too; their goal is to silence the opponent. A scathing critical review is meant to remove a work of art from the field of aesthetic play. But real conversations, by contrast, are infinite games. Their goal is to enlighten and entertain all the participants. A conversation is an occasion not only to look at a topic, but also to look through a topic, treating it as a prism that can be pointed at self, other, and world. A good conversation never comes to a definitive end; it is simply held in abeyance for a time, to be revisited later or carried on by new participants. The road goes ever on.
What follows are some impressions gleaned from the Star Wars Conversation, and some ideas for how we might carry on the infinite play and entice more people to join in. I'm not sure this will add up to a coherent essay, so feel free to skim, as you would a listicle or an annotated reading list. And by all means, contribute to the conversation in the comments section.
