by Paul Braterman

In my last post, I said that the right way to undermine creationism is to promote appreciation of the science of evolution, by presenting it in ways that are engaging, enjoyable, and above all personal. In this post, I review two more books that succeed in doing this; Alice Roberts' The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being and Jonathan Tweet's Grandmother Fish.

Grandmother Fish is a book like no other I have seen. It is an introduction to evolution, for adults to read to their pre-school children. It is also much more than that, and comes with well-earned commendations from Stephen Pinker, David Sloan Wilson, and Daniel Dennett.

We start with a delightfully drawn Grandmother Fish, who lived a long, long, long, long, long time ago and could wiggle and swim fast and had jaws to chomp with. At once, this is made personally relevant: “Can you wiggle? … Can you chomp?” We proceed by way of Grandmother Reptile, Grandmother Mammal and Grandmother Ape, to Grandmother Human, who lived a long time ago, could walk on two feet and talk and tell stories, and whose many different grandchildren

could wiggle and chomp and crawl and breathe and squeak and cuddle and grab and hoot and

walk and talk, and I see one of them … right here!

Each stage has its own little phylogenetic tree, with the various descendants of each successive “grandmother” shown as each other's cousins, and there is an overall tree, covering all living things, that anyone (of any age) will find interesting to browse on. Finally, after some 20 pages of simple text and lavish illustration, there are around 4 pages of more detailed information, directed at the adult reading the book, but to which I expect children to return, as they mature, remembering the book with affection, as they surely will, years or even decades later.

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by Mandy de Waal

A South African literary event called 'The Time of the Writer' was to have been a moment of celebration for local writer Zainub Priya Dala. The author's debut novel, called What About Meera, was due to have been launched at the Durban festival.

Instead Dala was nursing injuries after being attacked at knifepoint with a brick and called [Salman] “Rushdie's Bitch!” The attack – which shocked and outraged SA's literary community – happened one day after Dala had expressed an appreciation of Rushdie's work.

ZP Dala – Photo courtesy of BooksLive

“Dala was followed from the festival hotel and was harassed by three men in a vehicle who pushed her car off the road,” a statement by Dala's publishers read. “When she stopped, two of the men advanced to her car, one holding a knife to her throat and the other hitting her in the face with a brick while calling her ‘Rushdie's bitch'. She has been treated by her doctor for soft-tissue trauma, and has reported the incident to the police.”

The author – who is also a therapist who counsels autistic children – said through her publishers that she believed the attack stemmed from her voicing support for Rushdie's writing style. Dala was at a school's writing forum and was asked which writers she admired. She offered a list of writers including Arundhati Roy, and said that she “liked Salman Rushdie's literary style.” After saying she appreciated Rushdie, a number of teachers and students stood up and walked out in protest. The next day Dala was attacked.

After discovering what happened to Dala, Rushdie Tweeted: “I'm so sorry to hear this. I hope you're recovering well. All good wishes.” Dala's response? “Thank you. I have my family and children around me and am recovering.”

SA literary site, www.bookslive.co.za stated that “the assault counts as an extension of Rushdie's complicated history with South Africa.” BooksLive explained that Rushdie “was famously ‘disinvited' from a literary festival in 1988, after the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa was issued against him and his novel, The Satanic Verses.”

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by Ahmed Humayun

Conventional wisdom has it that if you don't like your job or want to pursue your passion or just have a great idea, you should just go ahead and launch a startup, because the barriers to launching a for-profit company or social venture are lower today than they have ever been.

People will cite different reasons to bolster this claim, but the revolutionary impact of the Internet on connectivity is a big one. The Internet makes it easier to identify, access, and sell to potential customers or users. This has all kind of effects, such as increasing the pace of product iteration and the potential to scale quickly. Increased access to local or global labor, and a robust culture and infrastructure of venture capital investment, especially in technology centers such as Silicon Valley, are other reasons cited by those who encourage people to launch companies.

I don't know if it is a good idea for some or even most people to launch a startup- it is easy to get sucked into the hype while significantly understating the risks, effort, skills, and time involved in constructing a successful organization with a working, scalable business model from scratch. This true of any organization, let alone the multi-million or billion dollar entity we all might fantasize about retiring on. It can take many years to build a successful business – some estimates are, perhaps a decade. It all depends on the level of your interest and commitment (Do you really care about an idea?), personal goals (Do you want to build the next Amazon or a company you can sell after a few years?), skills (Do you have the wherewithal to realize your vision, or identify and attract people who do?), your appetite and ability to incur risk, and so on.

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Silicon Valley juggernauts such as PayPal and Palantir, and venture capitalist, says in his book Zero to One, that even if you excel in what you do, it could be much better to join a great, fast growing company than launching one yourself. There is a vast disparity in returns between the tiny minority of the most successful, fast growing companies and the rest of the lot. This matters because:

'differences between companies will dwarf the differences in roles inside companies. You could have 100% of the equity if you fully find your own venture but if you fail you'll have 100% of nothing. Owning just 0.01% of Google, by contrast, is incredibly valuable.' [1]

There are rare circumstances, in other words, that it would make sense for most people to choose an alternative to early-stage Google.

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by Tom Jacobs

The ants are my friends, the ants are my friends, the ants are just blowing in the wind.
—Lorrie Moore

Life is hard and nothing makes any sense. That is a problem. I don’t know everything there is to know, and that is also a problem. These are the bare facts. Impossible to ignore but things that must be ignored if I’m to go about my daily business. I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I’m also happy most of the time. Or at least content.

What I’m trying to say or at least think about is the role of love in understanding. Love is something that is not to be understood but rather just felt and expressed. Understanding, on the other hand, well, that’s a whole other deal. It requires the assemblage of evidence and critical analysis and narrative-building and seeing the pattern in what might seem to be a relatively random collection of things that are of some small interest. Why are these things and not others interesting to me, to you? That’s a tough one, and probably there is no answer. There’s a pattern in the rug, but where is it?

I read somewhere that there was a woman minding her own business somewhere in the Midwest somewhere in the mid-eighties who was watching television in her living room when a small meteor plummeted through her roof and hit her in the arm. A celestial body just intervened into her life and hit her in the arm, producing some fair amount of trauma. Sometimes I feel like this is a good metaphor for what it’s like to be alive. Meteors strike you unexpectedly and you are left to figure out what that means. Was it meant for you? Or did it just happen? Does it matter to even draw the distinction? Probably it doesn’t.

When I think about what I really want in life, about what really matters, I often think of Emerson and Whitman. They are in some subtle ways, very different thinkers. Emerson is the thinker who gives us lines like, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” or “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.” That sort of thing.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

A selection of facts, research and personal encounters involving beavers and their habitat.

In October 2007, an 835-meter long beaver dam was discovered on Google Earth. It remains the longest one found so far. The dam was in the “thick wildness of Northern Alberta”, in Wood Buffalo National Park. In July 2014 someone called Rob Mark, an amateur explorer from New Jersey, managed to reach the dam. He reports that it was incredibly difficult terrain to get through. The mosquitoes in Alberta were much worse than the Amazonian rain forest; they sounded like helicopters and bit through his clothes. When Mark finally got to the dam, a resident beaver announced its displeasure with angry slaps of its flat tail on the water.

It was wonderful and somehow liberating to hear this last detail. To the beaver of course, the effort that had gone into this journey of discovery – the sort that seems to matter a lot of us humans – meant absolutely nothing; it only counted as an intrusion.

But I do understand why Mark made the journey. I've been chasing beavers myself in the conservation areas of Amherst, Massachusetts (where I live). Last year, I designed my summer and fall hikes so as to cover as many beaver ponds as possible: like a traveling salesman trying to cover all customer locations efficiently. One evening, with light fading fast, I was walking along the Fort River, a tributary of the Connecticut. Suddenly, there was a tremendous splash as if a boulder had been thrown from a considerable height into the water. It was October, and with winter fast approaching, the beavers were trying to dam the river. A red maple tree, leaves still clinging to its branches, had been felled. But it wasn't the tree that had caused the splash; the tree had been brought down perhaps a couple of days ago. The deep, explosive noise – impossible though that seemed – was the flat tail of a beaver hitting against the running water! As if to dissuade me from exploring further, the beaver produced yet another equally noisy warning.

Intrigued, I visited Amherst town offices a couple of days later, to ask if someone there had information on beavers in conservation areas. A town official heard me out, but he was concerned: “It would be unacceptable if the Fort River was being dammed as you say. This would flood nearby homes. Beavers change the ground water level so even people with homes that are far away from beaver dams notice flooding in their basements and are puzzled. I need to send my land manager out immediately.” A bearded stranger, who happened to be passing by and had overheard, stopped and said eagerly: “Do you need to take care of beavers? Because I know someone who does a very good job.” In effect he was claiming he knew a Beaver Hitman.

These reactions left no doubt about the beaver's modern status as a pest in residential areas. But there is another kind of status this natural engineer has, and it has to do, among other things, with how well it retains water on the landscape even in periods of drought and creates conditions where diverse types of wildlife can thrive. Let's take a closer look.

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Pi

pi is perfection with a
loose end

three point 1 four and so on
without pattern or closure

the precision of a mandala
drawn by a drunk on two martinis

not scribing wholeness merely
but thinking odd numbers

spouting them while rambling home
disheveled, irrational, unseemly

as the similar square root of 2
at the point of life and infinity

.

by Jim Culleny
3/14/15

by Charlie Huenemann

a family genius, flanked by two other celebrating guardian deities (from UTexas)

“A genius is a god under whose protection each person lives from the moment of his birth.” This is the opinion of Censorinus, a Roman rhetorician of the third century CE. Censorinus tells us that our birthday celebrations are not really about us. Instead, they are banquets of gratitude for our spiritual guardians, or the beings known by the Romans as geniuses. Everybody has one: they are the spirits who make sure we are born, that we survive, that we are protected, and that we flourish. Censorinus writes that our genius “has been appointed to be so constant a watcher over us that he never goes away from us even for a second, but is our constant companion from the moment we are taken from our mother's womb to the last days of our life.” As the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk observes, this makes every birth in fact a double birth – one for us, and one for our guardian genius.

These Roman geniuses are not unique to humans. They also watch over animals, places, households, and even ritualized celebrations like the original Olympics. Exactly how to count them up is hard to say, since each genius is usually one among many different aspects of a god, another face that is shown to a newcomer. And as each god has multiple faces or concerns, each face serves as a different genius for different occasions – as guardians of individuals, their homes, their marriages, their savings, their harvests, and so on. But set the counting issue aside. On our birthdays, according to Censorinus, we are to show particular gratitude to our own genius, the one who has brought us safe thus far:

A Genius is a god under whose protection each person lives from the moment of his birth. Whether it is because he makes sure we get generated, or he is generated with us, or he takes us up and protects us once we are generated, in any case, it is clear he is called our “Gen-ius” from “gen-eration.”… And so we offer special sacrifice to our Genius every year throughout our lives….

This notion of genius is precisely the one to have in mind when we read Emerson: “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim.” In calling upon “whim,” he's certainly not writing about dodging family responsibilities when he feels like waxing philosophical. He is writing about being under another's guidance, like experiencing a kind of demonic possession – though in Emerson's case the demon is reliably good-natured.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Ryoanji Yudofu garden, Ryoanji Temple premises; Kyoto. February 2015

I tremble in anticipation of beginning to write this piece. I want to write about Japan, you see? And I want to write about having traveled to Japan. This, as you may have surmised, is a hopeless task. For Japan is overlain with meaning as umami-like and as un-graspable as the coating of wasabi on your peas. See? I did it already. I gave you a familiar metaphor, and I gave you a visceral sensation to inhabit. Done and dusted, and here I give you Japan in a sealed aluminium foil package. But surely there is more I can say? Surely I can give you many more metaphors to make clear the fact that I do not grasp anything at all.

This, in writing, is not admissible. The least, one has to be able to say, is that one does not find things familiar, and hence one dislikes the place. Hark then to the first of the Great Mughals, Babur telling us how he hates India because it lacks wine, melons, and gardens. I must at least feel like Malinowski, who sits notebook in hand, frustrated and complaining about the Trobrianders, and yet forging along seeking meaning. And yet, I do not want to write of strong likes or dislikes, because my travels produced none.

A friend and I made plans to go to Japan during the Chinese New Year. This was only the beginning of our various confusions. Inspired by Junot Diaz's article where he implores one to visit Fukuoka, we booked tickets instead to Tokyo, and the bullet-train to Kyoto. Also, I ignored how his visions of chicken sashimi did not account for my vegetarianism. I read nothing, I anticipated nothing. Armed with a passport and visa, I set of to conquer the Far East.

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by Brooks Riley

I didn’t buy popcorn, but I got a good seat—a window seat in an arrangement of four seats around a table. The window was large and wide, like a movie screen, and low enough to allow a comfortable view of the passing landscape, from track to sky. The train, a sleek white ICE or Inter City Express, was still idling under the roof of the terminal station, the kind that trains enter in one direction and exit in another. Sitting there in the semi-darkness, I was filled with anticipation. In moments, the train would start to move, nosing out from under the station roof into the daylight. The window would fill with light, and the shot would begin—the longest tracking shot ever

In my years as a film critic, I never made the connection between the tracking shot and trains. Just as most travelers consider a train to be little more than a means of going from point A to point B, I regarded the tracking shot as a means of going from point A to point B, extending the action, nothing more. And when the early film thinkers were tinkering with their theories on the new art form, movement was secondary to montage (Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Vertov and Eisenstein) or the close-up (Béla Balázs). Tracking shots were rare in the early days of cinema, the first one in 1912, in Oscar Apfel’s The Passer-by, followed in 1924 by F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann). Abel Gance, too, tracked about in Napoleon (1927), but in Gance’s piñata of cinematic devices, tracking shots hardly stood out from the other tricks of his trade exploding from the screen in that great epic film.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Some time in 1919, or so the story goes, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was asked whether it was true that only three people in the world understood relativity. Apparently, he thought for a moment and then asked: “Who's the third?” Depending on your mood, that can either sound witty or just plain arrogant, but once you have read his beautiful exposition of the theory, it is difficult to say that reply was unjustified.

Eddington has gone down in history as the man who led the solar expedition to Principe, verified that starlight was indeed deflected by the Sun, just as Einstein had predicted, and hence “proved” the general theory of relativity. That is how he is known, but I think his true claim to fame lies in his deep and intimate understanding of an obscure theory, and the elegance with which he was able to convey his impressions to the public. Eddington had a rare gift for arranging ideas in such a logical and clear order that the progression begins to seem almost inevitable. When you reach the rather surprising conclusion at the end, even though part of you is stunned by the statement, another part is thinking “Well, of course. What else could it possibly be?”

Despite the fact that he was quite a prolific writer and lecturer, for some inexplicable reason his works are not nearly as well known as they deserve to be. Having such an incredible resource available to us, and yet never using it, seems to me a great shame. And so, since to celebrate the centennial of the general theory of relativity, I thought I would walk you through Einstein's (still) revolutionary ideas, with some help from relativity's Other Man.

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by Matt McKenna

A Most Violent Year is a disappointing movie. The performances are good, the cinematography is beautiful, but the film adds up to a lot of nothing. For all the pregnant pauses, for all the threats of violence, and for all the moral conundrums the characters confront, nothing ever… happens. By the time the credits roll, a deus ex machina has ensured that absolutely no lessons are learned nor are any characters fundamentally changed, and the audience is left to wonder why it spent the last two hours watching these characters mill about. The same can be said about the recent hullabaloo involving Hillary Clinton and her use of a personal email account while serving as Secretary of State. What initially appeared to be a juicy political scandal involving Clinton withholding documents from the State Department ended up being, like A Most Violent Year, a major letdown. “Emailgate” therefore has the dubious distinction of being the first non-scandal scandal of the 2016 Presidential election cycle. Even though both A Most Violent Year and emailgate have interesting premises, the execution of each story evades their respective interesting parts and wastes their potential.

A Most Violent Year stars Oscar Issacs in the role of Abel Morales, the eye-rollingly honest owner of Standard Oil who attempts to run his business on the up-and-up despite the moral bankruptcy of his corrupt industry. Standard Oil's competitors don't appreciate Morales' success, however, and decide to intimidate him by hijacking his company's trucks and beating the drivers without mercy. There's an interesting story to be told under this premise, perhaps one that shows how Morales must figure out how to keep his employees safe in an environment where being on the right side of the law is both a business risk for himself and a health risk for his employees. But that is not what the film is about. Instead, the film's primary conflict centers around Morales' difficulties in securing a bank loan to buy a fuel oil terminal and obtain dominance in the industry. The safety of his drivers is only relevant to the plot insofar as that if the drivers start carrying weapons and engage their attackers in armed conflict, Morales' bank might back out of the loan. In terms of drama, this poses a problem: it's hard to care about the truck drivers' safety because the protagonist doesn't care about it. At the same time, it's hard to care about Morales' struggle to secure a loan and buy an oil terminal because–come on–it's a loan to buy an oil terminal.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” –Voltaire

In heaven, there will be no more sea journeys, says Virgil. For much of human history, to journey by ship across open waters was thought of almost as an act of transgression. It was something requiring great temerity and audacity. It was therefore something not to be taken lightly.

Crossing boundaries, such journeys often ended in ruin.

Shipwrecked.

German philosopher Hans Blumenberg explored the seafaring metaphor in his dazzling essay Shipwreck with Spectator. Utterly exquisite in its historical details; the writing is incredibly evocative.

Metaphors are Blumenberg's main philosophical project. According to Blumenberg, so fundamental to philosophy are they that they stand in for truth. He says:

The relevance of absolute metaphors, their historical truth . . . is pragmatic in a very broad sense. By providing a point of orientation, the content of absolute metaphors determines a particular attitude or conduct [Verhalten]; they give structure to a world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real. (Paradigms, 14)

That is to say, metaphors light up for us an irreducible and untranslatable truth about the “totality of the real.”

What about shipwrecks then? What is it about the metaphor of being shipwrecked that lights up our understanding of being? Or putting it another way, what essential elements of being human are being illuminated by this metaphor according to Blumenberg?

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by Eric Byrd

Orlando's biography spans five centuries but I think Woolf endows but two, the sixteenth and the nineteenth, with a full measure of her erudite brio and critical fantasy. Nothing in the novel surpasses the Renaissance fantasia of the first chapter – sixty pages of enchanting, festive, parti-colored prose. Orlando opens his/her eyes on the “Merrie” England young Yeats found in Spenser – the “indolent, demonstrative” England where men “still wept when they were moved, still dressed themselves in joyous colours, and spoke with many gestures.” The novel's conception as a tribute to Vita Sackville-West, as a semi-private jeu d'esprit, recalls that Elizabethan coterie classic, the Arcadia with which Sir Philip Sidney entertained his sister and beguiled his exile from court. Queen Elizabeth is the age's monstre sacré :

At the height of her triumph when the guns were booming at the Tower and the air was thick enough with gunpowder to make one sneeze and the huzzas of the people rang beneath the windows, she pulled him down among the cushions where her women had laid her (she was so worn and old) and made him bury his face in that astonishing composition — she had not changed her dress for a month — which smelt for all the world, he thought, recalling his boyish memory, like some old cabinet at home where his mother's furs were stored. He rose, half suffocated from the embrace. ‘This', she breathed, ‘is my victory!'— even as a rocket roared up and dyed her cheeks scarlet.

The Great Frost freezes birds in midair, herds on the roads, ploughmen in their fields, and “bird-scaring boys” struck stark in the act, “one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed, upon a hedge.”

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