by Joy Icayan

I was home sick when the news of the Japan earthquake came in. I could only hear the television from the other apartment talking about something huge, because the local reporters started referring to CNN, when normally the news would be comfortably confined to local political bickering and showbiz chutzpah. It was on Twitter when I later learned about the magnitude of the earthquake’s damage, and the extent of the tsunami reports, which have also reached certain provinces of my country. In Facebook, a close friend in Tokyo sent us a picture of a burning building and said that while there still small tremors now and then, she was at least physically safe.

And as in every calamity, there was the usual phenomenon in social networking sites—the exchange of information, call for prayers, the expressions of worry, and then there were the more worrying status updates and messages—fairly decent people starting to justify the earthquake as an act of God, or much more worryingly, as something the people over there deserved, although in very very subtle tones.

PZ Myers, better known in the science blogging world as Pharyngula has compiled several Facebook messages of people saying that the Japan earthquake was due revenge for Pearl Harbor.

Psychologist Melvin Lerner first discussed the just world phenomenon in 1980 in “The Belief in a Just World: A Fundamental Delusion”. The just world phenomenon explains the need to see the world as orderly, predictable and just, that people get what they deserve. It is the belief that good things happen to good people, and bad things to bad people. It is why we can afford to think that the poor are lazy, because really if they were not lazy, they wouldn’t be poor, or why we think rape victims are somehow deserving because they dress up rather provocatively. It’s why we feel pity for children with terminal cancers—those poor things, and yet scoff at gay men who get HIV, if you hadn’t been so slutty… if you hadn’t been gay…

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

The second shift began any like other: The usual checklist of procedures and some brief drive-bys of high value sites. Then, he could pretty much relax until just before the end of the shift. The long blocks of time were what made this such a great job for a college student. When he was diligent, he was effectively getting paid to study. When he wasn't so diligent, he was getting paid for doing very little. Not a bad gig, but lately his time at work had drifted more and more into the latter category. He had gradually begun working more and studying less. How many semesters had it been since he took a full load? He had forgotten why he was in school and wasn't really sure about anything anymore. He hoped he could get past whatever was holding him back, but he wasn't sure what that was exactly. Why for example, had he suddenly begun avoiding his academic advisor as though he had leprosy?

He was unscrewing the top of his thermos of coffee when the phone rang. This in itself was startling because that phone hardly ever rang. Surely the ringer was muted by cobwebs. It was his boss: A tenant in the upscale apartments near the beach had not been heard from in several days. Family members were concerned and could he meet the city police at the apartment and open the front door so they could have a look? So much for that problem set.

He drove the company pickup to the apartment complex where he met a squad car. The officers introduced themselves and they all went up to the apartment. They knocked several times. No answer. He reached for the pass key and waited expectantly for a signal from the officer in charge who paused a few more seconds and then nodded. He could practically feel the key flipping the tumblers in the lock as he opened the door to let them in. The stench of decaying flesh billowed out of the entrance and held them in place for a second. All three of them uttered their preferred expletives at the same time as they exhaled. The death of a total stranger was still a bit unnerving, and the prospect of a lot of paperwork was suddenly inescapable.

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by S. Abbas Raza

The Egetmann pageant and parade took place in the South Tyrolean wine-making town of Tramin this past Tuesday, on the day before Ash Wednesday, as it has every odd-numbered year since 1591. I was there and can report that it completely lived up to its reputation for spectacular Alpine zaniness. The parade comprises horsedrawn carriages and many huge floats pulled by tractors depicting or representing medieval trades (cobbler, fishmonger, blacksmith, etc.) and they somehow manage to make each one into a debauched frolic of some sort with lots of schnapps being drunk by those on board as well as being passed out to the crowd lining the town streets to watch. There are participants whose only job, it seems, is to annoy the spectators by smearing them (and their clothes) in black grease, rotten fish, flour, hay, water, wine, corn, and other messy stuff. This, plus the fact that only the men of Tramin, who conveniently have a reputation for macho drunken fighting even among the rougher mountain peasants in these parts, take part in the parade (about half dressed in drag), gives the event a slightly scary, dark edge, especially for children and, at least this time, a slightly confused and nervous Pakistani.

Here's a description of some of the main elements of the parade from the official website:

The parade is opened by the trumpeter, followed by farmers on horseback and their labourers and by farmers brandishing long whips (‘Ausschnöller’). These are then followed by the stewards whose job it is to keep the route of the pageant clean and free of obstruction. Behind them come all the rest of the farmers with their ancient implements for working the land, accompanying a cart containing seed-corn (symbolically depicted by wood-shavings, hay and dust). In turn these are followed by the central character, the Egetmannhansl, a dummy in a black jacket, top hat and white gloves travelling in an open carriage, accompanied by his servant. In front, next to the driver sits the bride, transforming the parade into a marriage procession. As in Shakespeare’s time, female characters can only be played by men dressed up as women!

It is strictly forbidden for the bride to quench her thirst by drinking wine; instead she is allowed to drink as much schnapps as she wants!

Behind the nuptial carriage come the councillors, the local dignitaries, each with a symbolic object: the Book of Protocol, a ladder, an umbrella, and two candlesticks (each composed of a wooden stick with a corn-cob as a candle). This group of dignitaries, dressed in black with top hats, is preceded by the town-crier.

The parade passes through the streets of Tramin, stopping at every fountain, where the ladder is erected and the councillor with the umbrella climbs up and opens it. The town-crier climbs half-way up the ladder and reads the Egetmann’s offer of marriage from the Protocol. The other two councillors remain at either side of the ladder with their candlesticks. Each sentence of the Protocol is cheered by the people present.

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by Michael Blim

“…When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”

–Newton Minow, Former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, May 9, 1961

Kennedy Administration nostalgia is all the rage. For the next three years, we can count back by fifty years to our heart’s content, regardless of how banal or bloody the event, to a time when something happened then that could be used as a moral lesson now in the seemingly endless winter of our discontent.

I am using the Kennedy rhetorical ploy here with less reverence and more irony than currently in play. After all, how can one prattle on about the moral lesson of Vietnam without acknowledging that nothing was learned, and instead that Vietnam marked the moment in the postwar world when America took empire seriously on the road? Or that Kennedy’s sixties marked the high point of generalized American prosperity — not its beginning, but its last great act before the end?

Still Newton Minow’s Kennedy Administration condemnation of America’s television programming still possesses the ring of truth, even if by now we are so inured to the medium’s fearsome banality. Though a lifetime corporate lawyer and well-connected politico, as FCC Chair in 1961, Minow had something else important to say, and that he actually said it then shows us how far the profession of law has declined over the past 50 years:

“…the people own the air. And they own it as much in prime evening time as they do at six o'clock Sunday morning. For every hour that the people give you — you owe them something. And I intend to see that your debt is paid with service.”

Fancy that: “the people own the air.” Doubtless Rupert Murdoch believes, in addition to thinking that it is okay for Fox News to be a political party, that he owns the cognitive and auditory spaces in our brains. Reformers like Minnow not only insisted on regulating private broadcasters but also sponsored the growth of National Education Television and its transformation into the Public Broadcasting Service (1970).

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by Tom Jacobs

…our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.

–Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)

DIALECTICAL THINGS

The fourth floor of the New-York Historical Society houses the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, a collection encompassing over 40,000 objects spanning from prehistorical to 21^st century New York. By adopting an “open storage” policy, the NYHS has opened what would otherwise be a warehouse to the public, so that the miles of shelved artifacts that would normally be languishing unseen in a storage area on the fourth-floor can now be observed (albeit, without placards or captions). Unless one consults the computer databases, one is left pretty much on one’s own to make sense of what one is seeing. This can be a productive scene of fascination, recognition, and misrecognition.

A few years ago I spent a long afternoon browsing through the glass-enclosed cases of objects ranging from a remarkable collection of apple peelers, Tiffany Lamps, American Indian pottery, a cot that George Washington slept on during the Revolutionary War (and which still bears something like his sweat stains), and various objects of historical interest that people found on the ground while walking the farms of northern Manhattan in the early 20^th century. It’s hard not to lose all sense of space and time as one leans over and into the cases trying to see at closer range some subtle and possibly revelatory detail (Washington’s sweat stains, for instance). Eventually I came upon a display of objects collected from the streets in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. A shoe, a pack of cigarettes, a few scraps of letterheaded paper, a fireman’s oxygen tank, bits of twisted metal of inscrutable but portentous provenance. Unexpectedly, and even against my better judgment, I found myself overwhelmed by a wash of powerful and contradictory feelings: sadness, anger, nationalism, and perhaps most of all: a deeply-felt connection to a moment in history and to the lives lost in the event (and to one in particular). I felt weepy. Actually weepy. I cried a little bit. In the presence of this display, material objects turned unsettlingly fluid, potent, and peculiar. Twisted metal was transformed into a startlingly beautiful artifact evoking an incoherent mixture of thought and feeling. A pack of cigarettes became excessively and strangely resonant, overdetermined, both sacred and completely mundane. While undeniably potent, this encounter left me wondering whether these transformations of matter into emotion and idea were warranted, useful, or dangerous. It led me to consider how it is that we do (and how we should) understand the meaning and significance of these types of experience?

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To the Members of the Royal Society:

'Tis with much Relish Regret that we announce the final and utmost Demise, yea, the certain and irreversible Decline, which the Latins call corruptio and which, being English'd, is the Corruption or Passing-Away of the corporeall Substance; the throwing off of the Mortal Coil, the giving up of the so-call'd Ghost, the final separation of the immaterial Soule, leaving, where it had once been, naught but a stinking and rotten Corpse; the Departure, the Egress, the Going: yea, I say, the DEATH of Dr. J^us. Smith, FRS, this Tues-Day last at his Home in Dulwich, having succumb'd to the Gout.

He is surviv'd by his Wife, Mary, and a Dozen of Children, not counting three Bastards, a Half-Wit, and one that is evidently a Changeling. His first Wife, Anne, died many years hence under suspicious Circumstances, when she, so 'tis said, slipt upon the Rind of a Fruit of the Mousa Tree, lately call'd by the Hottentotical name of Banana (Dr. Smith had been raising up this Fruit of the Torrid Zone right here in grey England, by means of an oven capable of regulating its own Heat, by the Light of Phosphorus channel'd thro' a powerfull Lamp, and othersuch alchemick Machinations), and she landed, poor Anne did, squarely upon her Skull. The servants present reported a strange comick Effect of this sad Event: tho' distraught to see their Mistress so suddenly despatch'd, they could not help but snicker at the very Improbabilitie of Slipping upon the Rind of this foreign Fruit. Experiments were subsequently perform'd within the Scientifickall Society to determine the precise Cause of the Banana's comœdickall Virtù, tho' we confess it remains to this day a great Mysterium.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

To our surprise, our February 3 Quarks Daily post has generated a good deal of comment from those who identify as New (or “Gnu”) Atheists, nearly all of it critical. It’s not that we don’t like criticism– we are philosophers, and criticism is our business. Our surprise rather derives from the way in which much of the criticism has been targeted. In fact, it seems to us that much of the criticism is mistargeted. Criticism that misses its mark is not a kind of criticism; it’s no criticism at all. And we’re happy to be criticized. So we’d like to clarify.

Our post began with a statement of fact. Reasonable Atheism is not yet available, yet we have been charged with accommodationism. What we failed to note is that shortly after Prometheus Books distributed a catalog announcing the publication of Reasonable Atheism, we received a handful of emails decrying our forthcoming book as accommodationist drivel. The author of one email characterized accommodationism as consisting in the very thought that religious believers are owed respect. In the first paragraph of our original post, we encapsulated the charge of accommodationism as it was brought in these emails. These provided the occasion for thinking about the charge of accommodationism.

We have been criticized for not citing our sources. For the record, most of the emails we received came from people who did not include surnames. Who are these people? We have no idea. And we’d like not to encourage them. Yet some critics have assumed that if we have been charged with accommodationism, and then have sought to respond to that particular way of wielding the charge, it must be that we believe that New Atheists are in some sense guilty of… well… something.

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by Edward B. Rackley

While other countries are rediscovering people power and casting out dictators, Haiti is allowing them back. ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier came and went last January; Aristide now has a passport and may return any moment. If Baby Doc’s mute visitation was a desperate bid to correct a country’s freefall, his affect conveyed the opposite: an unreadable face and inchoate gestures of a now pitiful, once grandiose despot. Aristide’s return will be neither silent nor impassive.

So ended 2010 in Haiti, surely the country’s worst year since independence in 1804. The massive quake in January, then Hurricane Tomas, followed by a crippling epidemic of cholera. The year ended with a rocky electoral contest, still unresolved. These unwelcome malheurs conspired to attract the gaze of international media, holding it momentarily. Other spectacles now crow for our attention. Eclipsed by Libya and her neighbors, Haiti’s grip remains tenuous, its silence ominous. Jokes about the depths to which it has sunk—now a platform for foreign dignitaries so low even Sarah Palin can step up—would be funny if they weren’t true.

Leveled to rubble in January 2010, Port-au-Prince is gradually reconstituting itself, but progress will be painfully slow. The city was already mired in failed urban policies long before the catastrophic shudder; the flight of human capital among the political class only advanced as Haiti’s crisis deepened. Today’s void means easy access for anyone of means seeking political office, including pop singers at home and abroad (Michel Martelly and Wyclef). Haiti’s exhausted political class requires new blood, but where are the viable candidates? Popular elections rarely mean the collective interest is served; instead, a leader’s wish becomes his followers’ command. State-sponsored thuggery is a Haitian specialty.

To a new arrival, as I recently was, the obstacles confronting the average Haitian appear to stack up, layer by layer, to a point of monolithic immobility.

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by Misha Lepetic

By now the scrappiness of the emerging economies’ entrepreneurial class has become a recognized trope of the folklore of globalization. Starting with Muhammad Yunus’s initial investments in the microfinance concept, to Tata Motors’ Nano, Western observers are being treated to an ever-increasing flow of news celebrating how doughty innovators are operationalizing elegant solutions to sticky problems that developed nations have, for many decades now, attempted to solve with boatloads of aid money, much of which was eventually misspent, misappropriated or outright stolen by its recipients, their governments and/or various inexperienced or misguided middlemen.

Now, augmented by the newly formulated war-cries of sustainability and climate change, these kinds of innovations and the drive behind them seem to be taking on even greater importance. In these neo-liberal, post-regulation end-times, the narrative tells us: Let a thousand flowers bloom. But what is it that we really see, and will we get what we expect?

Before we can understand what our expectations might be, we should ask about measurement, since what and how we choose to measure ultimately reflects back to us the criteria for its success. In the language of business and the capital markets, there are narrowly defined criteria that determine success factors, such as return on investment, cost of goods sold, and depreciation and amortization of tangible and intangible assets. Some of these criteria are little more than fictions spurred on by tax considerations, but each plays a crucial role in whether a firm decides to make an investment in new product development, how it may choose to commercialize this development, and most importantly, at what point it will consider the product a success, or withdraw it from the marketplace.

There are, of course, serious lacunae here. Currently accepted practices do not compel firms to take into account factors such as waste stream management, or greenhouse gas production, or carbon footprint. Nor do relevant regulatory bodies consistently provide incentives, such as tax write-offs or R&D subsidies, that would serve to introduce these exogenous costs into mainstream financial decisionmaking.

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by Quinn O'Neill

Science and technology play increasingly important roles in our lives. Advances in medicine, transportation, and communications have made life a lot easier but at the same time contribute to new problems like pollution, habitat loss, and dwindling resources. Our best chances for overcoming these problems may also lie in science and in an improved understanding of our natural world.

Most people probably realize that understanding science is important – at least for scientists – but scientists as well as members of the public may not fully appreciate the importance of understanding the Nature of Science (NOS) – that is, the nature of scientific knowledge and the processes that generate it. We’re so accustomed to science being part of our lives that we take for granted that everyone knows what it is. But they don’t. Studies have shown that NOS misconceptions are prevalent among high school and college students and even among teachers (Lederman, 2007).

Many people view science as a body of rigid, unchangeable facts and it’s hard to blame them – after all, most of us learned science as if this were the case. We were given text books and lectured to as if to say “here’s what we know, it’s all true, just memorize it”. Of course, much of the content of text books, at least at high school and undergraduate levels, is fairly basic and well-established, but learning it from a book or a lecture doesn’t teach us much about the scientific process.

So what is science then? Nova Education recently asked Dr. William McComas, a prominent researcher in science education, and he provided a very nice answer. Here are some of the key points:

• Science produces, demands and relies on empirical evidence
• Experiments are not the only route to knowledge
• Science uses both inductive reasoning and hypothetico-deductive testing
• Scientists make observations and produce inferences
• There is no single step-wise scientific method by which all science is done
• Science has a creative component
• Observations, ideas and conclusions in science are not entirely objective
• Historical, cultural and social influences impact the practice and direction of science
• Scientific knowledge is tentative, durable and self-correcting

I have nothing to add to McComas's explanation, except that I think it's really important for people to understand. Why? Because NOS misconceptions may underlie rejection of science and because the nature of science is also essentially the nature of progress.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Where does the environmental movement get its moral force? There are any number of practical reasons to care about, say, global warming, given that a world with a dramatically different climate will probably be dramatically less comfortable for us. But this is quite different from the set of reasons usually advanced by environmental advocates. These center around preserving the environment for its own sake and limiting human impact on the natural world. And they typically seem to be making a strong ethical claim. Humans have spoiled a once pristine natural world; humans, through greed, have upset the natural balance. Implicit in this narrative is a warning that, depending on your preference, is Promethean or Edenic: we have reached too far in our attempt to escape our natural state and must now bear the consequences.

These are unusual arguments. Most of our moral intuitions and behavior is founded on relationships to other moral subjects. And there is a very strong and compelling moral reason to address global warming that does involve humans. A changing climate will affect and is affecting the livelihood of millions of people and these people are disproportionately poor and vulnerable. Our moral obligation to mitigate the effects of warming on the environment can be seen to stem from our obligation to other human beings.

This argument makes no reference to the natural or to preservation as an intrinsic good. It also involves a complex mix of factors to be weighed against each other. We are obligated to help preserve the environment because of our obligation to help give people a decent quality of life, but there are many other ways this can be carried out. For example, making people richer and giving them lifestyles closer to those in the developed West would also have the same effect, but this might act against the preservation of the environment. Given that we rarely see these sorts of debates in the environmental movement, it seems that the impact on people is not the primary motivation.

So what about moral arguments that are not centered on humans? Do we have more than practical and aesthetic motivations to preserve the climate as it is now?

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by Robert P. Baird

A little over a month ago I asked Mahmood Mamdani if he’d be willing to have a conversation about Ugandan politics in advance of the presidential elections here. Often described as the intellectual heir of Edward Said, Mamdani has attracted praise, scorn, and much international attention for his richly detailed and often stridently contrarian analyses of contemporary African events. He is the author, most recently, of Saviors and Survivors, a critical and controversial analysis of the Save Darfur Coalition.

Mamdani is one of the most acute observers of African events working today, and he has a deep and complicated personal relationship to Uganda’s recent political history. Born in Kampala to Indian Muslim parents, he was exiled (along with the rest of the country’s Asian population) by Idi Amin in 1972. He earned a Ph.D from Harvard in 1974 and has taught at universities in Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa, and the U.S. Currently he is a professor of anthropology and government at Columbia University and the director of the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) in Uganda. He and his wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair, split their time between Kampala and New York.

Mamdani graciously agreed to an interview, but by the time we met in his purple-walled office at the MISR, the uprising in Egypt had become all-engrossing. I decided to take the opportunity to get his early thoughts about the revolutions in North Africa. (As it happened, the Feb. 18 presidential elections in Uganda saw Yoweri Museveni extend his twenty-five-year rule over Uganda with 68% of the vote, despite widespread and credible allegations of bribery and vote-rigging.)

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

The perils of writing about Ramanujan, as I did in my last 3QD column, is that there will always be those who insist that a better educated Ramanujan would have been a worse mathematician. One response is to say that by the same token a worse educated Euler would have been a better mathematician, an argument that to my knowledge has never been made, another is to relate a remarkable story that parallels the tale of Ramanujan. A story that is reasonably well known within the world of chess but has somehow escaped the attention of the world outside.

In the telling of the story much of what I quote is borrowed from several sources, the most important being a compilation by Edward Winter. The material available is insufficient to piece together a life but it is enough to outline the story. In 1929, a man from Sargodha in Punjab arrived in England, part of the entourage of a Nawab. He had learnt chess in the Indian way, the modern form played in the West had some significant modifications, and he finished last in the first tournament he played. He learnt from the experience and within months went on to win the British Chess Championship, repeating the feat in 1932 and 1933. He also played top board for Britain in three chess Olympiads registering impressive performances against some of the top players in the world. His one game against the Cuban world champion Jose Raul Capablanca was a victorious masterpiece, and is counted among the great games of all times. And then in 1933 he disappeared, headed back to what is today Pakistan with his patron, never to play competitive international chess again.

The talented chess player and writer Reuben Fine, a contemporary, has written of him:

The story of the Indian Sultan Khan turned out to be a most unusual one. The “Sultan” was not the term of status that we supposed it to be; it was merely a first name. In fact, Sultan Khan was actually a kind of serf on the estate of a maharajah when his chess genius was discovered. He spoke English poorly, and kept score in Hindustani. It was said that he could not even read the European notations.

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A Simple Ontology

It may be that a flower’s petals
are held to stems by thought
and the wind is a counter-thought
that plucks petals from stems,
shifts them across a field
and sets them softly upon the grass
to repose in contemplative resolution
next to the notion of a grub-pulling crow

For all I know the wind itself may be
a palpable bright idea,
something about motion
and the abhorrence of vacuums
something about coming and going,
about ferocity, about stillness
about war and the absence of war

Maybe the moon is the concept of fullness,
loss, abatement, regeneration from slivers,
hope at the hour of the wolf, the opposite of
darkness at the break of noon, the
upside of shadow

For all I know Descartes may have had it right
and this, from horizon to horizon, may be
a simple ontology, an inherent
daisy chain of ideas
chasing its tail

Anyway, one idea
conceived in this synapse nest
is to harvest thought from thought
under a perception of blue
while the conception of breeze
riffles the hint of hair
and I place them like dreams of plums
into the essence of basket
and give them with the intention of love
to my belief in the natural
thought of you

by Jim Culleny
Feb.26, 2011

by George Wilkinson

Cells across the tree of life are built with very similar components: A wall to keep everything in, DNA which stores the genome, and RNA and protein which take care of the mechanics and metabolism. These components are heavily interdependent, and it is an ongoing puzzle how the modern cell emerged from the prebiotic chemistry of early earth. (See Wikipedia here ). There are two major approaches to try to bridge this gap. The first is to try to synthesize biotic compounds from a soup of plausible precurors, as in Miller and Urey’s “lightning experiment.” [Miller shown performing the experiment in photo on the right.] The converse approach is to scrutinize living organisms for hints of their ancestors, specifically the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA).

RNA was likely to be among the very first of the modern information polymer classes to emerge, because RNAs can do the jobs of genome storage (now done mainly by DNA) and enzymatic action (now done mainly by protein). Proteins might have come second, and DNA last. So how did DNA take over the job of genome storage?

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