Philip Johnson’s Glass House

Philip Kennicott in the Washington Post:

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Your first thought on approaching Philip Johnson‘s 1949 Glass House is that it has the same problems as a very small bikini. Would my life look good in this? Could it stand the exposure? And what kind of major reformation to my habits and vices would it take to fit into this thing?

Fortunately, it had some storage.

The house, which opens to the public Saturday as a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, is austere, but not threatening. It is one of the great monuments of modernism in America, by one of this country’s longest-lived and most influential architects. Johnson, who built some of the slickest skyscrapers to grace the New York skyline (his curvaceous “lipstick” building on 53rd Street is still dangerously pretty), also helped define the cleanest lines of the International Style. The Glass House, a picture of which graces almost every book on 20th-century American architecture, was just that: a rectangular pavilion of steel supports and glass walls, with a brick “core” that contains a small bathroom and a fireplace.

More here.



Podcasts–Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer

Sarah Zupko posts in PopMatters:

Chris Salewicz’s book, Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, is the most in-depth and in-the-know look ever at Strummer, a genuine rock and roll legend, as well as the history of the Clash. Pop these podcasts into your pod-like musical device or stream them right here. Then head over to Amazon post-haste and pick up this essential book for any music fan.

In the first installment, beginning with news of Strummer’s death, Salewicz remembers Joe’s drive, humor, and constant internal conflict.

Joe Strummer died on the birthday on an ex. When she woke up, my first words to her were “Joe Strummer’s dead!” Her response was similar to Salewicz’s, except for the alcohol. From one of the excerpts.

This is how I heard about Joe’s death: Don Letts, the Rastafarian film director who had made all the Clash videos, called me at around 9:30 on the evening of December 22, 2002.

“I’ve got to tell you, Chris: Joe’s died—of a heart attack.”

I poured a large glass of rum and stuck Don’s documentary about the group, Westway to the World, in the VCR. I called up Mick Jones, who in between sobs was his usual funny self, telling me how glad he was he’d played with Joe at the benefit for the Fire Brigades Union five weeks before.

“I don’t even know what religion he was,” Mick said.

“Some kind of Scottish low-church Presbyterian,” I suggested.

“Church of Beer, probably,” laughed Mick, tearfully.

35,000-Year-Old Mammoth Sculpture Found in Germany

In southwestern Germany, an American archaeologist and his German colleagues have found the oldest mammoth-ivory carving known to modern science. And even at 35,000 years old, it’s still intact.

From Spiegel:

Screenhunter_10_jun_22_1559Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. It is believed to be the oldest ivory carving ever found. “You can be sure,” Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, “that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years.”

In total, five mammoth-ivory figurines from the Ice Age were newly discovered at the site of the Vogelherd Cave in southwestern Germany, a site known to contain primitive artefacts since it was excavated in 1931 by the Tübingen archaeologist Gustav Reik. Over 7,000 sacks of sediment later, archaeologists were again invigorated by the discoveries.

Among the new finds are well-preserved remains of a lion figurine, fragments of a mammoth figurine and two as-yet-unidentified representations. These, the University of Tübingen Web site explains, “count among the oldest and most impressive examples of figurative artworks from the Ice Age.”

More here.

Dangerous Ideas: A Pinker-Dawkins Sandwich

John Brockman at Edge.org:

Screenhunter_05_jun_22_1546Screenhunter_09_jun_22_1550  The 2006 Edge Question — “What Is Your Dangerous Idea” — has now been published in book form in the US and the UK. The question was posed by Steven Pinker, who wrote:

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

For the book version, Steven Pinker has written the Preface and Richard Dawkins wrote the Afterword. I am pleased to present both pieces below just in time for the start of the summer reading season.

Click here to read Pinker’s intro and Dawkins’s afterword.

Getting Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

From Scientific American:

Atul Gawande is a Boston-area ­surgeon, a staff writer for the New Yorker and a MacArthur Fellow. His first book, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award. In this collection of 12 original and previously published essays adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine and the New Yorker, Gawande focuses on performance. “What does it take to be good at something?” he asks. In response, he gives three core requirements for success in medicine or any field that involves risk and responsibility: diligence, ingenuity and “doing right.” He illustrates each of these qualities with dramatic stories, from hand washing in hos­pitals to inoculating four million Indian children against polio. (Gawande is master of the telling anecdote—no small thing.) He concludes that it is the human qualities that are most important: monitoring and improving clinical performance would do more to save lives than advances in laboratory knowledge.

More here.

Older siblings are smarter

From Nature:

Sibs Eldest sibblings are, on average, 2.3 IQ points more intelligent than their younger brothers and sisters, says a study of Norweigan kids. And it’s not necessarily being born first that makes the difference — it’s being raised as the eldest child.

It has been proposed for some time that, on average across a population, first-borns are more intelligent than their younger brethren. There are more first-born sons in prominent positions than might be expected, for example. And some studies have shown a link between birth order and intelligence: the later born, the less smart the child. But the reasons behind this trend, and even whether it’s real, have been hotly debated. Families with low-intelligence children tend to be large (perhaps a big brood leaves little time for helping with homework), so the observation that sixth-born children aren’t very smart, for example, could just be a side effect of this, critics have said.

More here.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb responds to Tyler Cowen

Robin posted this review of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb a week ago. Taleb responds to the review at his own website:

Nassim20nicholas20taleb_3I -The Grass, not the Trees

First, the empirical & logical mistakes:

“Oddly, Taleb’s argument is weakest in the area he knows best, namely finance. Only on Wall Street do people seem to give proper credence—not too much, not too little—to very unlikely events (…) Stock and bond markets offer simple ways to bet on black swans. (…)These investments pay off precisely when the rest of the market does not anticipate the scope for surprise. Yet “long-shot” strategies are well-studied, and they do not yield extra profit.”

A brief summary of what I will discuss next:

1) Selling long shots have yielded (monstrous) extra losses since those selling them (credit, options) go bust periodically. Saying “long-shot” strategies (…)do not yield extra profit” requires removing too many “outliers” from the data and confining the studies to a narrow subset of instruments. In my analysis in TBS I took a long history of all the businesses that depended on a large move: derivatives, credit instruments, bank loans, reinsurance. Betting against large deviations in type-2 randomness does not pay.

2) The market may be collectively able to guess type-1 variables, like the number of beans in a jar, not price instruments that depend on a single unpredictable large event.

The results Cowen refers to may holds solely in a very narrow subset of index options (not stock options), which requires excluding the crash of 1987, and ignoring the impact of the errors.

More here.

Pakistan’s Got Talent: Mohammad Kashif Memon!

Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:

Maybe it is his innocent looks, decent demenor, earnest and serious expression, and the sense (as one blogger put it) that he had walked in from his lunch break just for this audition (notice the white socks, and the workday clothes). Kashif is not the first Pakistani to appear in American reality shows that are all the rage these days. There was a Pakistani lady who was extremely unlucky in Deal or no Deal. Earlier another Pakistani (who was much more lucky) actually won the title in Funniest Mom in America. Of course, there are far more Indians who appear on these shows and some like the 17-year old Sanjaya became a phenomenon on American Idol. (Although Sanjaya became a story unto himself, it may well be that Kashif is riding the same wave of interest in South Asian stuff that Sanjaya was.)Anyhow, what is interesting is that Kashif Memon seems to be creating a buzz on the blogsphere. Rickey, who seems to follow these things far more closely than I do, is a great fan of Kashif and is rooting for him. Sepia Mutiny and its readers seemed much less impressed. There are a number of others who make you wonder why they take these shows as seriously as they do!

More here.  [Thanks to Shabbir Kazmi.]

Thursday, June 21, 2007

The Mayors of New York and London

Jaffer Kolb, a writer from New York now living in London, considers how the men appointed as political leaders of these two world cities have left their mark, and evaluates Ken Livingstone’s legacy. [Jaffer is, of course, also a 3QD contributor.]

From the Debate London website of The Architecture Foundation:

JafferWith a common history and language, not to mention shared world city-status and innumerable expatriates, New York and London are clearly interconnected and, as a result, oft-compared. So when New Labour announced the creation of a Mayor for London along with the establishment of the Greater London Authority, it came as no surprise that pundits looked to New York’s mayoralty as a model of what might come with London’s new system of government.

Looking back, New York’s mayors are a notorious bunch. Outspoken and dynamic figures like Fiorello LaGuardia, John Lindsay and Ed Koch paved the way for community activist David Dinkins, iron-fisted Rudolph Giuliani and, most recently, savvy businessman Michael Bloomberg. These mayors recall an era of cigar-chewing, cut-throat leadership that is equal parts myth and romance. London’s response? Ken Livingstone, a mayor colourful in his own right and once known as Red Ken for his hyper-left wing tendencies.

Livingstone’s antics, including the infamous instance in which he posted a billboard announcing England’s rising unemployment figures across from Margaret Thatcher’s offices at Westminster on the roof of the Greater London Council building, were argued to have led to the GLC’s dissolution in 1986. He famously lost Labour’s backing during the mayoral elections of 2000, eventually running as an independent against Tony Blair’s highly vocal derision. He won the election, of course, and in so doing has set a precedent for London’s mayors that equals, if not exceeds the force of New York’s dynamic figureheads.

More here.

The CIA’s torture teachers

Mark Benjamin in Salon:

Screenhunter_04_jun_21_1917_2There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military’s secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to “reverse-engineer” techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military’s use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA’s use of such tactics — working in close coordination with the military — until now has remained largely unknown.

According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

still peeling his onion

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Günter Grass has said elsewhere that the success of the Third Reich was in dividing and subdividing responsibility for evil to such a degree that, while most adults in the country bore some responsibility, very few felt that anything much was their fault at the time. That sense of responsibility came to them afterwards, and usually in silence.

This magnificent and profoundly human book caused a considerable stir on its publication in Germany last year, due to its exact statement of the part the young Grass played in the Second World War, and its attempt to establish the responsibility he bore afterwards.

more from The Telegraph here.

scruffy, careless, brazen and kind

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I am loyal to my native city, but can see why people sneered when Liverpool was declared the European Capital of Culture for 2008. Of course it has some grand old buildings, world-class museums and a fine classical orchestra. But these are not what Liverpool stands for in the national imagination. In the eyes of the outside world it remains a city of slums and car thieves, overrated comedians and tiresome insularity. As the banner says at Anfield, home to one of our brave yet underachieving football teams, “We’re Not English, We Are Scouse”….

It is scruffy, careless, brazen and kind. This city has soul. It knows how to throw a party. For all that it’s heavy, it is extravagantly welcoming to anyone without airs and graces. After all, it has been entertaining sailors for centuries. If you want a quiet life, then don’t choose Liverpool. But if you’re on board for the mind-scrambling adventures of an unknowable, violent, tragicomic, globalised 21st-century world, here is a city that knows no other state of being.

more from The New Statesman here.

apocalyptic thoughts

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In 2004 Modern Art Oxford staged an installation of Mike Nelson’s ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’. On the upper floor of the gallery a steep hill of sand had been built. On top of this dune was a replica of an old wooden shack, based on Robert Smithson’s ‘Partially Buried Woodshed’ (1970). The whole was designed to create anxiety and uncertainty. Yet visitors to the exhibition lingered on the edge of the sand, reluctant to return to reality. The sand cast a spell. The visitors may have been reminded of pleasant days at the seaside in their childhood. This impression was reinforced by people who, entering the shack above, waved cheerfully to those of us down on the fringe of the dune, as though on holiday.

How we read environments depends on our own situation. For instance, those who live in filthy environments long for clean places, which may vary, given that a Western city may be muckier than a village in a dwindling Amazonian forest. Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (1516) talks of the selling of meat in a market-place where ‘the filth and ordure thereof is clean washed away in the running river […] lest the air by the stench thereof, infected and corrupt, should cause pestilent diseases’. By such imaginings we learn something of Utopia but perhaps more about the state of London in the time of Henry VIII. These days we would hesitate to pollute More’s running river. Similarly we would be unhappy to read the notice that once stood on a pier on the Isle of Wight saying: ‘Do not drop your rubbish on the pier. Throw it in the sea.’ Sensibilities change with technology.

more from Frieze here.

Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini

From Powell’s Books:

Book_4 Since opening Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini: The Essential Reference approximately an hour ago, I’ve raved about it (and practically drooled on it) to seven people now. I haven’t actually tested any of the recipes yet — although I’m planning to as soon as possible — but their names alone: Salad of Crunchy Artichoke and Endive with Honeyed Lemon, Oven-Crisped Large Oyster Mushrooms, and Cranberry-Glazed Long Red Italian Radishes, to cite a few — are making me hungry.

Elizabeth Schneider really does seem to have created the ultimate reference guide for vegetables, and I should know — those books are amongst my favorite cookbooks, as a vegetarian. (Though the stars of these recipes are vegetables, many also include meat.) At 777 pages, with tons of gorgeous color photography, any vegetable you can think of — really, I dare you — has its own loving tribute, plus quite a few that I, at least, had never heard of — African horned cucumber, anyone? Chickweed? Tindora? Besides the photographs for easy visual identification, Schneider lays out the history and provenance of the vegetable, its basic use, selection, storage, and preparation information (which is detailed and thorough), and then lists several recipes, which manage to be both elegant and generally simple.

More here.

The Prospects for Homo economicus

From Scientific American:

Sa Imagine that your child’s private school tuition bill of $20,000 is due and the only source you have for paying it is the sale of some of your stock holdings. Fortunately, you got in on the great Google godsend and purchased 100 shares at $200 each, for a total investment of $20,000, and the stock is now at $400 a share. Should you realize your net gain by selling half of your Google stock and paying off your bill? Or should you sell off that Ford stock you purchased ages ago for $40,000 at its current value of $20,000?

If you are like most people (myself included), you would sell your Google stock and hang on to your Ford stock in hopes of recovering your losses. This would be the wrong strategy. Why would you sell shares in a company whose stock is on the rise, and hang on to shares in a company whose stock is on the decline? The reason, in a phrase, is “loss aversion,” and the psychology behind it does not fit the model of Homo economicus, that figurative species of human characterized by unbounded rationality in decision making.

More here.

Volunteers wanted for trip to ‘Mars’

From CBC News:

The European Space Agency is looking for people who would like to go on a pretend trip to Mars — for about a year and a half.

The 520-day experiment involves a crew of six living in sealed modules at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow.

Screenhunter_03_jun_21_0316Promising a program “as close to a real Mars mission as possible,” the space agency plans to simulate a 250-day trip to Mars, 30 days to experience the planet and 240 days to make it back home.

Weightlessness and radiation are not included, but the simulated out-of-planet experience offers isolation, confinement, crowding, lack of privacy, high workload, boredom with available food, and limited communication with family, friends and mission control.

Still keen? You might be just what the agency needs if you are:

  • Between ages 25 and 50.
  • In good health.
  • Highly motivated.
  • Fluent in either English or Russian, preferably both.
  • No taller than six-foot-one (185 cm).
  • Experienced in medicine, biology, engineering and the like.
  • A non-smoker with no addictions.
  • Willing to be a medical and psychological test subject.
  • A national and resident of a select list of countries — including Canada.

People with mental disorders, special diets, those considered too fat or too thin, or currently in jail need not apply.

More here.  [Thanks to Pablo Policzer.]

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The Islamist challenge to secular Bangladesh

Nicholas Schmidle in the Boston Review:

Last December, Shahidul sparked a nationwide furor and reinvigorated a long-standing debate in Bangladesh. Four weeks before the parliamentary elections scheduled for January 22 (but later postponed), his party signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Awami League, one of the nation’s two mainstream parties and traditionally its most secular one. The agreement stipulated that Shahidul’s Khelafat Majlish would team up with the Awami League for the elections. If they won, the Awami League promised to enact a blasphemy law, push legislation to brand the Ahmadiyyas as non-Muslims, and officially recognize the fatwas issued by local clerics. The deal outraged secularists across the country. “Khelafat Majlish is a radical Islamist militant group which is against the spirit of the Liberation War,” said the Anti-Fundamentalism and Anti-Militant Conscious Citizens’ Society in a written statement. “By ascending to power through a deal with a section of fundamentalist militants, the Awami League… will never be able to create a secular Bangladesh.”

The Western media had been predicting similar things for years. In January The New Republic suggested that, “Left unchecked, Bangladesh could become another Afghanistan—a base for regional terrorism.”

But the prospects for Bangladesh, a country roughly the size of Minnesota, with 170 million inhabitants, are not nearly as certain as such reports would suggest. Islamist parties have multiplied over the past decade and public support for them has grown. Yet Bangladeshi society remains overwhelmingly secular, even militantly secular. And while the Islamists have grabbed headlines, the secularists are holding their own in an intense power struggle.

More here.

Antonio Taguba and the Investigation of Abu Ghraib

To channel Brad DeLong: why, oh why have we been ruled by these creeps? Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker:

If there was a redeeming aspect to the [Abu Ghraib] affair, it was in the thoroughness and the passion of the Army’s initial investigation. The inquiry had begun in January, and was led by General Taguba, who was stationed in Kuwait at the time. Taguba filed his report in March. In it he found:

Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees . . . systemic and illegal abuse.

Taguba was met at the door of the conference room by an old friend, Lieutenant General Bantz J. Craddock, who was Rumsfeld’s senior military assistant. Craddock’s daughter had been a babysitter for Taguba’s two children when the officers served together years earlier at Fort Stewart, Georgia. But that afternoon, Taguba recalled, “Craddock just said, very coldly, ‘Wait here.’ ” In a series of interviews early this year, the first he has given, Taguba told me that he understood when he began the inquiry that it could damage his career; early on, a senior general in Iraq had pointed out to him that the abused detainees were “only Iraqis.” Even so, he was not prepared for the greeting he received when he was finally ushered in.

“Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!” Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, “I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting.”