From The Economist:

By the standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN‘s new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

More here.  [Thanks to Felix E. F. Larocca.]

Lisa Zyga in Physorg.com:

In an adapted version of the Harry Potter video game, players lift boulders and throw lightning bolts using only their minds. Just as physical movement changed the interface of gaming with Nintendo’s Wii, the power of the mind may be the next big thing in video games.

And it may come soon. Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel “biofeedback” games developed by its partners.

Several other companies – including EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo – are also developing technology to detect players´ brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games.

The technology is based on medical technology that has been around for decades. Using a combination of EEGs (which reveal alpha waves that signify calmness), EMGs (which measure muscle movement), and ECGs and GSR (which measure heart rate and sweating), developers hope to create a picture of a player´s mental and physical state. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which monitors changes in blood oxygenation, could also be incorporated since it overcomes some of the interference problems with EEGs.

More here.  [Thanks to David Gassoway.]

Paul Salopek in National Geographic:

After I was arrested and imprisoned in Darfur, an American soldier told me, shaking his head in disgust, “You fly over this place and all you see is miles and miles of nothing.” But that was an outsider’s delusion. Every outcrop and plain was parsed by unseen tangents, lines, ghostly demarcations. They portioned off the claims of tribes, individuals, clans. They bulged and recoiled according to war and season. No-go zones encircled water holes. Certain unseen lines, masars, dictated the migration routes of nomads. There was nothing haphazard about any of this. To cross one line or to venture too far from another might invite retribution, even death. And that was the ultimate line of them all in the Sahel: the one between knowing and ignorance.

The Sahel itself is a line.

The word means “shore” in Arabic, which implies a continental margin, a grand beginning and a final end. Stretching across northern Africa roughly along the 13th parallel, the Sahel divides—or unites, depending on your philosophical bent—the sands of the Sahara and Africa’s tropical forests. It is a belt of semiarid grassland that separates (or joins) Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world’s poorest, most disempowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely on to life there. And for 34 days in Darfur we joined their ranks.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Meera Nanda in New Humanist (reprinted at Eurozine):

Today’s generation of Indian upper and middle classes are not content with the de-ritualised, slimmed-down, philosophised or secular-humanist version of Hinduism that appealed to the earlier generation of elites. They are instead looking for “jagrit” or awake gods who respond to their prayers and who fulfill their wishes – the kind of gods that sociologists Rodney Starke and Roger Finke, authors of Acts of Faith, describe as “personal, caring, loving, merciful, close, accessible […] all of which can be summed up in a belief that Œthere is someone up there who cares’.” The textual or philosophical aspects of Sanskritic Hinduism have by no means diminished in cultural prestige: they continue to serve as the backdrop of “Vedic sciences” (as Hindu metaphysics is sold these days), and continue to attract a loyal following of spiritual seekers from India and abroad. But what is changing is simply that it is becoming fashionable to be religious and to be seen as being religious. The new elites are shedding their earlier reticence about openly participating in religious rituals in temples and in public ceremonies like kathas and yagnas. If anything, the ritual dimension is becoming more public and more ostentatious.

Not only are rituals getting more elaborate but many village and working-class gods and goddesses are being adopted by the middle classes, business elites and non-resident Indians – a process of Sanskritisation that has been called a “gentrification of gods”. Worship of local gods and goddesses that until recently were associated with the poor, illiterate and lower castes is finding a new home in swank new suburbs with malls and multiplexes. The enormous growth in the popularity of the goddess called Mariamman or Amma in the south and Devi or Mata in the rest of the country is a case in point.

The natural question is why? What is fuelling this middle-class devotion to “lesser” gods, traditionally associated with the unlettered?

At their best politicians can be hugely entertaining. All, though some more consciously than others, are by nature performers. They can affect anger, indignation and sensitivity at will. Inevitably, however, their repertoire changes over the centuries. Until 1850 or so, politicians occasionally fought each other in a duel. Death was uncommonly the result, but a delighted public could often count on a serious wound or two. William Pitt took on George Tierney, while Charles James Fox was wounded by William Adam. In the latter contest, Fox jokingly remarked that he would certainly have been killed but for the fact that his opponent had been using government powder.

The duel in question in this book was fought in 1809 between Lord Castlereagh and George Canning. Both were members of the Duke of Portland’s Cabinet. One was Secretary of State for War and the other was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Since each of them should have been directing all his efforts towards the destruction of Napoleon Bonaparte, their attempts to kill each other were relished. It suggested that their priorities had become somewhat blurred. Both men had gallons of Irish blood in their veins, but some further explanation seemed necessary.

more from Literary Review here.

If Craig Venter is the iconic scientist of the early 21st century, what conception of science does he embody? Belligerent, innovative, ambitious and entrepreneurial, he is an emblem of the radical changes in American scientific life, and especially in the lives of biomedical scientists, over the past thirty years or so. The intense relationship between biomedical science and capital is substantially new, and so is the texture of much scientific practice in the area, including the pace of work, the funds required to do the work, the instrumental production and processing of inconceivably large amounts of scientific information, and the institutional configurations in which biomedical science now happens. At the same time, Venter expresses sentiments about science that could scarcely be more traditional, even romantic. A ruggedly freebooting individualist, contemptuous of authority and of bureaucracy, he revives an old conception of scientific independence and integrity in an age when the bureaucracies that allegedly block the advance of science are as much academic and non-profit as they are commercial. When academic bureaucracies are said to protect intellectual orthodoxies, when cumbersome and politicised government bureaucracies harbour cults of personality, and when corporate bureaucracies build on business models that stultify both science and commercial growth, the only person you can trust is an edgy hybrid of self-confessed ‘bad boy’ and self-advertised humanitarian who thinks he has a spoon long enough to sup with all the institutional devils and sacrifice his integrity to none. The imaginative development of new institutional forms appropriate to the new science, the new economy, and a newly emerging moral order is made to depend on a unique individual. Later this year, when ‘boot up’ inevitably happens, he will – according to some conceptions of the thing – have created life. If you trust Craig Venter, he will, like his predecessor in the life-creating business, see that it is good.

more from the LRB here.

Saint Francis of Assisi should have done something about Easter. It was this medieval visionary who had the idea of making a crib at Christmas time, who celebrated the animals in the stable and forged a link between the religious and popular midwinter festivals. Christmas imagery in Christian art has a joy and Franciscan realism that makes it attractive whatever your beliefs. But Easter is divisive; for the irreligious – or, let’s face it, any child – there’s a bizarre dichotomy between eggs and bunnies and the guy on the cross. This is not a great time of year for Christian public relations. Who but a steadfast believer wants to be asked to mourn among the chocolates?

On the other hand, Christians have art on their side. Great paintings depict every moment in the story of the Passion from the Agony in the Garden to the Flagellation to the Lamentation and beyond.

more from The Guardian here.

A Guardian video: “In an investigation carried out by GuardianFilms for Channel 4, we uncover how thousands of Iraqis employed at $10 a day by the US to take on al-Qaida are threatening to go on strike because they say they have been used by the ‘Americans to do their dirty work’ and haven’t been paid.”

Olivia Judson has a series of interesting posts on mutation over at her NYT blog The Wild Side:

Mutations that alter proteins have been linked to specific changes in a huge number of traits in organisms from bacteria to humans. Yet the proportion of a genome that contains the instructions to make proteins is tiny; in humans, it may be less than 2 percent. So there’s a lot of other DNA that will experience mutations. The question is, what might such mutations do?

Here’s one possibility. We know that some of that 98 percent is involved not in making proteins, but in regulating where and when the genes they are made from will get switched on. The biology of this gets pretty complicated — but what it amounts to is that most genes have an elaborate control region — a set of on/off switches officially known as cis-regulatory elements. When the right switches are on, the protein gets made; when they are off, it doesn’t. So mutations to the switches can alter how the protein is deployed. Then, the protein stays the same shape as it was before, but instead of being made in, say, just the liver, it starts being made somewhere else as well.

Also see here and here.  Also her television documentary based on her book Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex seems quite entertaining.  Here is a segment.

From The Washington Post:

This handsome trade paperback honors the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart, one of the most widely read and beloved novels of our time. It’s a true modern classic — translated into 50 languages, taught in high schools around the country, studied in college history and anthropology classes. What makes it so popular?

First off, there’s its plain, dignified English. Achebe portrays the Ibo (now Igbo) world of late 19th- and early 20th-century Nigeria with honesty about its sometimes harsh character as well as respect for its traditions. His mostly declarative sentences — leavened with occasional Ibo words and phrases — eschew the emotional, preferring to describe rituals and practices rather than judge them. Only at the very end does he allow irony into his story, and that, appropriately enough, enters with the white missionaries who gradually undermine the indigenous culture. But for most of its narrative, the simple, noble diction of Things Fall Apart recalls that of the medieval Norse sagas, which memorialize a similar world of farmer-warriors (“There was a man named Thorkil Thorkilson . . .”) The closest modern equivalent might be Hemingway describing a bullfight. The novel opens this way:

“Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.”

More here.

From Science:

Money does seem to buy some happiness–studies show that rich folks are a little more upbeat than the poor. But the wealth-happiness connection is weak, and economists struggle to explain why, for example, the U.S. population has not become happier as it has become more affluent. One possibility is that people simply don’t spend their extra money in ways that lead to lasting cheer. Social psychologist Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, wanted to find out what kind of spending really does make people happy. So she and colleagues surveyed 109 UBC students. Not surprisingly, most said they would be happier with $20 in their pocket than they would with $5. They also said they’d rather spend the money on themselves than on someone else. Wrong move. When Dunn’s team gave 46 other students envelopes containing a either $5 bill or a $20 bill and told them how to spend it, those who shelled out on others (donating to charity or giving a gift) were happier at the end of the day than those who blew it on themselves (to pay a bill or indulge in a treat).

Two more surveys mirrored these results. Dunn’s team polled 16 employees of a Boston company before and after they received bonuses of various sizes, and they gathered data on income, spending, and happiness from 632 people across the United States. In both groups, happiness correlated with the amount of money people spent on others rather than the absolute amount of the bonus or income.

Dunn says the results “confirmed our hypothesis more strongly than we dared to dream.” The effects of altruistic spending are probably akin to those of exercise, she notes, which can have immediate and long-term effects. Giving once might make a person happy for a day, but “if it becomes a way of living, then it could make a lasting difference,” she says. She hopes the finding might someday spur policymakers to promote widespread philanthropy that could make for a more altruistic–and happier–population.

More here.

..
39
Hilda Doolittle

We have had too much consecration,
too little afirmation.

too much: but this, this, this
has been proved heretical,

too little: I know, I feel
the meaning that words hide;

they are anagrams, cryptograms,
little boxes, conditioned

to hatch butterflies…

More on H.D.

..

Lena Corner in The Independent:

My raison d’être,” says American psychotherapist Jo Ellen Gryzb, “is simply to make people a little less nice.” It’s been her mission ever since she found herself huddled in her bedroom with her husband one Christmas, whispering about how on earth they were going to get rid of their house guests. “I had no idea how to tell them they had overstayed,” she says. “I was a complete walkover.”

Gryzb returned to work at Impact Factory, a personal-development agency, and found herself in conversation with colleague Robin Chandler, who had similarly spent his holiday tiptoeing round friends and family. “I know what our problem is,” declared Gryzb. “We’re suffering from the nice factor.”

The pair set about devising a workshop designed to harden us up and cut back on excessive manners; an etiquette class in reverse, if you like. It has been so successful that they are now bringing out a book entitled The Nice Factor: The Art of Saying No.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan:

The Arabic world nakbah, denoting “catastrophe” best describes what George W. Bush and his American-Taliban administration has wrought in Iraq — and, as a result, what it has meant for the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died as a result of Bush’s failed attempt to violently reorder the politics of the Middle East; 4 million have been displaced from their homes; more than 4,000 American troops have been killed and some 60,000 maimed in a war that smart estimates suggest will cost the U.S. economy $3 trillion — it currently costs America $12 billion a month to maintain an occupation whose time-frame remains open-ended. The Financial Times reported today that the war has already cost the average American household of four (like mine) $16,000 in taxes.

And this blood-drenched disaster has done absolutely nothing to advance U.S. strategic interests; on the contrary, it has dramatically debilitated U.S. strategic influence by graphically demonstrating not the extent, but the limits of American military power. The “shock and awe” mantra that the U.S. media so dutifully chanted at the war’s commencement sounds like a pretty sick joke now.

More here.

Speaking of Cosma, he goes to town on Satoshi Kanazawa:

…Some of those people, owing to those tastes, pursue careers in academic research; the problem for them is that they are not actually very good at what they are supposed to do, which is come up with novel, insightful, important, precise, and accurate findings.  Suppose that you are such a person, and that you do not want to switch to some other line of work to which you might be better suited.  What to do?

Perhaps the best thing which could happen to you would be to run across a new and controversial theory which speaks to you at a deep level, both intellectually and temperamentally.  If you are what William James called “tender-minded”, like Teilhard de Chardin, then Medawar has already mapped out your trajectory, though nowadays the Templeton Foundation would likely be involved.  If instead you are what James called “tough-minded” — “materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, sceptical” — then edification-through-obfuscation is not an option, but it wouldn’t even occur to you.  Instead, you take your theory and you write papers about it, where you make claims about lots of hot-button topics, especially sex and current political controversies.  The papers seem to carry the signs of rigor, but are actually deeply fallacious — maybe you see this, but are so convinced the conclusions are right you don’t care, or maybe you’re so convinced of the conclusions you can’t see the errors.  (There is some peer-reviewed venue where you can publish almost arbitrarily sloppy papers, so getting into print won’t be a problem.)  Then — and this is the key — you start promoting your papers, and find that more salacious and provocative your spin on them, the bigger the response…

Ladies, gentlemen, and distinguished others, I give you Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics, the Fenimore Cooper of sociobiology, a man who has leveraged an inability to do data analysis or understand psychometrics into an official blog at Psychology Today, where he gets to advocate genocidal nuclear war as revenge for 9/11.  He seems to mean it, rather than be fukayaming.

His argument — to the extent that it is an argument and not just a wish-fulfillment fantasy — has to do with his earlier attempt to explain “why most suicide bombers are Muslims”.  Leave to one side whether his attempted explanation is coherent, two things strike one on reading that. 

Via Cosma Shalizi, here’s a tool that “tracks the flow of oil money in US politics. Click on the search tools below to find out which companies are pumping their dirty oil money into politics, who is receiving it, and how it correlates to key climate, energy and war votes.”  My preference ordering over the Democratic presidential candidates seems to nicely be negatively correlated to the amount of money received.

Dean Christopher in Discover Magazine:

4  Although famously monogamous, female Adélie penguins slip away from their mates occasionally to couple with unattached males. They exact a fee (pdf) for such a dalliance—stones to bolster their nests—not unlike certain people.

5  Some talented penguin teasers can get a gift even without putting out. Again, not unlike certain people.

6 Barbary macaques have a distinctive way to get their mates to make a sperm donation: yelling. If the female does not shout, the male almost never climaxes.

7 How do we know this? German primatologist Dana Pfefferle watched a group of macaques, counting the females’ yells and the males’ pelvic thrusts. She says this work is “quite weird, but it’s science.”

8  Here in the US of A, that kind of stuff ends up on YouTube.

Gabriel Lafitte on the revolt in Tibet, in openDemocracy:

The Tibetan revolt of March 2008, like those of 1959 and 1987, will be crushed by the overwhelming might of the Chinese military. No match could be more unequal: maroon-clad nuns and monks versus the machinery of oppression of the global rising power. In recent months, fast-response mobile tactical squads whose sole purpose is to quell the people have been overtly rehearsing on the streets of Tibetan towns for just what they are now doing.

What is the point of revolt if it is almost certainly suicidal?

This uprising has many uniquely Tibetan characteristics. At street level, a favourite item seized from Chinese shops was toilet-rolls – hardly the usual target of looters. Not that Tibetans, over millennia, have felt much need for the paper rolls, or even for the basics of the Chinese cuisine such as soy sauce. What the Tibetans did with the loo paper was to hurl it over power lines, instantly making Lhasa, and other Tibetan towns, Tibetan again. Right across the 25% of China that is ethnically and culturally Tibetan, the unrolled toilet paper looks like wind horses, the white silken khadag [or kata] scarf with which Tibetans greet and bless each other. As all Tibetans know, they carry their message on the wind: victory to the gods!

That is what this revolt is about: making Tibet Tibetan once more.

Against Happiness is not a cultural critique, it’s a love letter to Wilson’s own emotional state. As the book progresses, the potential audience gets smaller and smaller. It opens talking to all Americans, but by the second chapters he has narrowed his focus to “we melancholics,” and later to “melancholic intellectuals.” By the end he’s just curled up with his aloneness, and we somehow stumbled into his interior monologue.

He sees himself as apart from and superior to all others, referring to the American culture with a sinister “they.” “They haunt the gaudy and garish spaces of the world and ignore the dark margins… They adore the Lifetime channel. They are happy campers. They want God to bless the world. They want us to ask them about their children… They join Book-of-the-Month clubs and identify with sympathetic characters.” These happy types are to be despised and avoided. Wilson turns away from America to take long walks in the woods and contemplate dead sparrows. “I must admit then that regardless of my own efforts to take flight through many escapes America offers, my basic instinct is toward melancholia – a state I must nourish. In fostering my essential nature, I’m trying to live according to what I see as my deep calling. Granted, it’s difficult at times to hold hard to this vocation, this labor in the fields of sadness.”

more from The Smart Set here.

Johns also talked about art in different ways from the Abstract Expressionists. Barnett Newman once claimed that if “read…properly my work would mean the end of all state capitalism and totalitarianism.” But in a sketchbook note from the early Sixties, Johns wrote, “Take an object, do something to it. Do something else to it.” At a time when the collectors John and Dominique de Menil commissioned Mark Rothko to paint monumental triptychs for their nondenominational chapel in Houston (1965–1966), Johns decided that “looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church.”

Whereas Rothko’s floating expanses of dark color seemed to offer the possibility that art can provide transcendental spiritual experience, Johns’s work was down to earth. A flag or target by Johns is a real object occupying a real space, which the artist made by using certain procedures in a certain order. In his paintings you don’t find anything that Johns didn’t deliberately put into them—and that the viewer can’t see that he put into them. This is the moral center of his art. It doesn’t lie, it doesn’t deceive, and it doesn’t signify anything other than what the viewer can see in front of his eyes.

more from the NYRB here.