Photo and slow motion video (slowed down by a factor of ten) made last week. There was not enough light to use a high shutter speed to freeze the huge, hummingbird-like hawk moth and this was the best I could do. Notice the very long proboscis it uses to feed.
by Eric Bies
Birds talk in Chaucer. Three of his twenty-four Tales of Caunterbury practically center on speaking beaks, and a long poem preceding these, the Parlement of Foules, may have been written with no better motive than the trial and joy of Englishing chirps and squawks. We are told up front in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” that “beestes and briddes koude speke and synge,” a rather no-nonsense preamble to permitting Chauntecleer and Pertelote (a rooster and a hen) their colloquy on dream hermeneutics in a Jungian tongue, and though the word “auspice” hadn’t yet been coined in Chaucer’s day, the Latin from which it springs—auspex, literally “birdwatcher”—would have been familiar enough. Still, one never finds Chaucer’s birds articulating an oracular shape: there is nothing in them, really, to watch for. They resemble instead the simple, good-natured birds of Assisi, who helped form the first eager audience for an Umbrian friar’s itinerant preaching—birds of the same sort Henry David Thoreau mentions in the fifteenth chapter of Walden:
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
Although there is no evidence that the bird could communicate any further than the touch of its twiggy toes upon the writer’s shoulder, such a touch was enough. Had the sparrow tipped out from the end of Chaucer’s quill, however, it may have ventured to ask how the writing was going. For hadn’t Mr. Thoreau gotten it into his head, seated in his cabin at Walden Pond, to put pencil to paper and compose a book? Read more »
by Pranab Bardhan
All of the articles in this series can be found here.
After LSE I have seen Jean Drèze mostly in India, usually in conferences in Delhi and Kolkata, and at Amartya Sen’s home in Santiniketan (where he used to stay whenever the two of them were writing books together). The Kolkata conferences were the annual ones that Amartya-da used to organize for some years, held usually at the Taj Bengal five-star hotel, which Jean would refuse to stay in. While others would take the 2-hour flight from Delhi to Kolkata, Jean would take the 24-hour train in the crowded second-class compartment. Then he’d call me and often stay with me in my Kolkata apartment. If Kalpana was around and it was winter she’d warm the bath water for him and arrange a comfortable raised bed for him; but Jean would refuse even those minor luxuries, and insist on taking cold showers and sleeping on the floor.
During his days at the Delhi School of Economics faculty he’d stay in a nearby jhuggi or slum (with his newly-married activist wife, Bela Bhatia). Soon he became an Indian citizen and started devoting more of his time to social activism and less on teaching. He left Delhi and was first in Allahabad, and now for some years in Ranchi. But much of the time he’d be on the road, walking, biking, and occasionally in crowded trains and buses. Once I remember getting a long email from him describing his walking trip (padayatra) to one of the poorest villages in Kalahandi, Odisha. He had heard of near-starvation conditions there. As he was walking he saw a man carrying a headload of vegetables, going to the marketplace several miles away. He started walking along and talking to him (probably in Hindi, which Jean speaks much better than I do) and found out that the man had not eaten anything for the previous day or so, and was hoping to eat after he sold his vegetables in the market. At one point Jean offered to carry the head load at least part of the way to the market. The man emphatically refused, but Jean kept on nagging. After some time the man yielded, but when Jean tried to take the load on his head, it felt so heavy, Jean wrote to me, that he almost fell on the ground—just to think that this wiry little man was carrying it for miles with no food over the previous day! Read more »
by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)
A little while ago my friend Bethany requested that I write an essay on the following topic: “Can/should pedantry be reconstituted as a virtue, maybe particularly for women.” I filed it away on my list of possible future essay ideas, but like a previous topic suggested by this same crafty, devilish friend, it got stuck in my brainpan and has been rattling around in there ever since. I’ve decided to fish it out and look at it, if only to stop the infernal racket.
First of all, I have to confess that I already have a dog in this fight. I am definitely a pedant, and a pretty irritating one at that, so I have a vested interest in rehabilitating the practice of nattering on about arcane ephemera and correcting people’s grammar (unasked). It would be convenient for me if it suddenly became cool to know—and to trumpet one’s knowledge of—all the African capitals, say, or what an anusvāra in Sanskrit is, or what economic and political pressures led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.[1]
But then I started wondering: is it possible to be a pedant without being an asshole? I’m not sure I’m ready to sign up for the latter. The word “pedantic” is clearly pejorative; a pedant is defined as someone “who excessively reveres or parades academic learning or technical knowledge” (Oxford English Dictionary, a.k.a. The Pedant’s Bible). The word has been in use in English, essentially as an insult, since the late 16th century. When my friend asked me to consider reconstituting pedantry “as a virtue,” she clearly had this history in mind. Would it be possible to tease apart the erudition from the obnoxiousness implied in the word “pedantic”? Read more »
by Charlie Huenemann
Justin E. H. Smith’s recent book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning (Princeton UP 2022) has received plenty of notice here on 3 Quarks Daily, and for good reason. Smith’s books and essays always remind us that, no matter how bizarre and ironic some recent damn thing is, we are always part of a long anthropological history of bizarre irony, and indeed the harder you look the more bizarre and ironic it all gets. At least, I think that is one of the main vibes of 3QD: seeing where we are in some map of the strange natural/cultural universe.
There are plenty of books complaining about the evils of the internet, and to be sure Smith offers four complaints: it is addictive, it warps human lives through algorithms, it is ruled by corporate interests, and it serves as a universal surveillance device. There is enough evidence, both objective and anecdotal, that too much time on the internet turns one’s brain into a Twitter slushie that leaves one in no condition to meditate upon difficult problems, but instead only to scroll and click and scroll and click at digital gewgaws, feeling empty and alone, a terrible feeling one then tries to escape with more scrolling and clicking.
Moreover, all this clicking and scrolling is not merely worthless distraction, but serves corporations that fatten themselves on our data. Smith shares the term “data cow,” and we need only to read it to imagine an industrial dairy production facility in which humans are milked for their attention, our children wailing in the distance. The genius of The Matrix was to depict this grim fact with brutal clarity: you are a battery powering an information economy that runs on you as raw supply. Sure, you get tasty illusions as recompense, and have fun with that. Read more »
a moment is a poet’s cliché of a singular blur
tentative as an airborne bubble
hard as hammer-blow to thumb
moment: the smallest thing able to contain an unimaginable universe
…………… a universe able to imagine the smallest thing
as instantaneous as the passage of dust motes and Himalayas
as ephemeral and solid as those —as exquisite, as cruel
here is one now: .. joy . . . gone
here is one now:… pain .. gone
………………. as swift as that, as if a bullet grazing an ear,
………………. as if a celestial flash in a thunderstorm
………………. brief as a thought spark instantly forgotten in regret
………………. as if love lost and won again
tiny as a lepton crammed with . . . . next
Jim Culleny
07/26/22
by Mark Harvey
I’m not sure what Americans were like in the 18th and 19th century, but they have to have been a lot tougher, less whining, less self-important and paradoxically more exceptional without thinking they were exceptional than Americans of today.
Even Americans born well into the 20th century had a stoic quality and a modest sense of their own importance that seems to have been washed out of our culture. Not many WWII veterans left, but the ones I’ve met spoke about their battles at Normandy or in the South Pacific as just something that needed to get done. The people I knew who lived through The Great Depression said it was tough but made light of their own hardships.
Much of our citizenry today resemble loud spoiled children, whining and whingeing at every inconvenience, and trotting out opinions on the most complex matters—with zero formal training or any in-depth research. I fear that to other countries we look like one of those screaming toddlers having a fit in a very public place. Sort of an international cringe.
The recent melt-down over gas prices is a prime example of American petulance. Does the increase in gas prices affect the average American family? Yes it does. Are the fits over gas prices in proportion to the issue and do most Americans understand how gas prices are set? No and no. Read more »
by Mike Bendzela
Over thirty years ago, my then-partner-now-spouse, Don, began planting heritage apple trees on the small farm where we are tenants, in an attempt to partially restore the historical orchard of Herbert W. Dow, traditional Maine farmer and cider-imbiber.
Herbert’s original, handwritten map of the apple trees he grew out back was still in a desk in the house when Don moved here in the 1970s; so, we have been able to research and replant some of the old varieties Herbert grew. We decided we would tend the trees “organically,” or something equivalent, because, you know, toxic chemicals and all that, and we would sell rare apples to local markets.
This organic ideal did not last long, however. Little did we know what nature had in store for us.
Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, whose view profoundly influenced Charles Darwin, declared that “all nature is at war, one organism with another.”
The greater choke the smaller, the longest livers replace those which last for a shorter period, the more prolific gradually make themselves masters of the ground.
The belief that having “dominion” over nature exempts the husbandman from this Darwinian fray is romanticized claptrap. Raising any crop requires a farmer to tend simultaneously to the needs of a hospital and slaughterhouse. What follows is a compendium of just a few of the horrors baked into your apple pie. Read more »
Sughra Raza. Untitled, ca 2008.
Pencil drawing on aerogramme.
by David Greer
“If mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” —E. O. Wilson
“[Rachel] Carson may have won a battle, but not the war.” —Dave Goulson, Silent Earth
January 31, 2019
Though it’s close to noon high on a mountain about fifty miles west of Mexico City, the oyamel firs alongside the trail in the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve are covered in shadow, and something else besides. Their branches appear to sag beneath the weight of dark unmoving masses like swarms of bees multiplied many times over, so thick on the trees that the needles of the firs are entirely invisible.
As the winter sun approaches its zenith, its first rays strike the firs and warmth starts to creep into the clearings between the trees. Myriad wings, orange and black, begin to tremble. Soon afterwards, a few random butterflies disengage from the swarms and lift lazily into the air. Within minutes, the sky between the treetops is speckled with butterflies lazily twisting and turning as if stretching from a long night’s sleep. Their numbers quickly swell, the fluttering of wings now loud as the patter of gently falling rain, an incongruous sensation to experience on a trail beneath a cloudless sky. Read more »
by Fabio Tollon
Machines can do lots of things. Robotic arms can help make our cars, autonomous cars can drive us around, and robotic vacuums can clean our floors. In all of these cases it seems natural to think that these machines are doing something. Of course, a ‘doing’ is a kind of happening: when something is done, usually something happens, namely, an event. Brushing my teeth, going for a walk, and turning on the light are all things that I do, and when I do them, something happens (events). We might think the same thing about robotic arms, autonomous vehicles, and robotic vacuum cleaners. All these systems seem to be doing something, which then leads to an event occurring. However, in the case of humans, we often think of what we do in terms of agency: when we do perform an action things are not just happening (in a passive sense). Rather, we are acting, we are exercising our agency, we are agents. Can machines be agents? Is there something like artificial agency? Well, as with most things in philosophy, it depends.
Agency, in its human form, is usually about our mental states. It therefore seems natural to think that in order for something or other to be an agent, it should at least in principle have something like mental states (in the form of, for example, beliefs and desires). More than this, in order for an action to be properly attributable to an agent we might insist that the action they perform be caused by their mental states. Thus, we might say that for an entity to be considered an agent it should be possible to explain their behaviour by referring to their mental states. Read more »
by Brooks Riley
by Carol A Westbrook
We live in an artificially-colored world, filled with added color in our homes, our clothing, our toys, our hair and even our food! We take this plethora of colors for granted. By comparison, the natural world is bland and almost monotone, except for small patches of brightly colored flowers or birds.
Ever since prehistoric times, man has had the urge to add color to his surroundings by expressing himself in paintings. Imagine a caveman picking up a charred piece of wood from his fire and drawing a picture on the cave wall. Later he added colors made from colored clays and stones that he picked up near the cave…and so painting begins. Some of the oldest of these ancient paintings were located deep in caves so carefully hidden that they lie undisturbed for millenia. One of the most famous of these are the paintings in the caves of Lascaux, in Southwestern France, depicting over 2,000 figures of animals and men, as shown in this detail of a bison colored with red ochres.
The Lascaux cave art was created over 17,000 years ago, using paint made from local sources.
The colored clays used to paint the cave walls were iron-containing rocks and clays known as ochres. Ochres are ubiquitous, as iron is the fifth-most abundant element in the earth. The colors of ochre stones vary from muted yellow to browns and reds; no doubt the caveman artist tried burning his colored stones and found that he created even more colors. This is due to reduction of the iron ore within the stone, resulting in the production of iron oxide or rust. The caveman’s paint colors, or his palette, included yellow ochre, red ochre, raw umber, raw Sienna and burnt Sienna. Burnt Sienna? No, this is not the name of a color derived from burning the medieval town of Sienna, but rather from burning a brown stone found near Sienna, which when burnt gives and even darker brown. Read more »
by David J. Lobina
In my series on Language and Thought, I defended a number of ideas; to wit, that there is such a thing as a language of thought, a conceptual representational system in which most of human cognition is carried out (or more centrally, the process of belief-fixation, or thinking tout court, where different kinds of information – visual, aural, information from memory or other held beliefs – are gathered and combined into new beliefs and thoughts); that the language of thought (LoT) is not a natural language (that is, it is not, for instance, English); that cross-linguistic differences do not result in different thinking schemes (that is, different LoTs); that inner speech (the writers’ interior monologue) is not a case of thinking per se; and that the best way to study the LoT is through the study of natural language, though from different viewpoints.
In the following two posts, I shall change tack a little bit and consider an alternative approach (as well as some alternative conclusions), at least on some rather specific cases (see endnote 1). As pointed out in the already mentioned series on the LoT, the study of human thought can be approached from many different perspectives; central among these is to study the “form” or “shape” thought has through an appropriately-focused analysis of language and linguistic structure – my take – a position that raises the big issue of how language and thought at all relate.
And in considering the relationship between language and thought, it is often supposed that the rather sophisticated cognitive abilities of preverbal infants and infraverbal animal species demonstrate that some form of thought is possible without language. That is, that thought does not depend upon having a natural language, given that many non-linguistic abilities are presumably underlain by a medium other than a natural language. Read more »
Trout seen through the surface of a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol, last week.
by Andrea Scrima
This past spring, I found myself sitting, masked, at a wooden desk among a scattering of scientific researchers at the Museo Galileo in Florence. Next to me was a thick reference book on the history of astronomical instruments and a smaller work on the sundials and other measuring devices built into the churches of Florence to mark the cyclical turning points of cosmic time. The gnomon of Santa Maria del Fiore, for instance, consisted of a bronzina, a small hole set into the lantern ninety meters above that acted as a camera oscura and projected an image of the sun onto the cathedral floor far below. At noon on the day of the solstice, the solar disc superimposed itself perfectly onto a round marble slab, not quite a yard in diameter, situated along the inlaid meridian. I studied the explanations of astronomical quadrants and astrolabes and the armilla equinoziale, the armillary sphere of Santa Maria Novella, made up of two conjoined iron rings mounted on the façade that told the time of day and year based on the position of their elliptical shadow, when all at once it occurred to me that I’d wanted to write about something else altogether, about a person I occasionally encountered, a phantom living somewhere inside me: the young woman who’d decided not to leave, not to move to Berlin after all, to rip up the letter of acceptance to the art academy she received all those years ago and to stay put, in New York. Alive somewhere, in some other iteration of being, was a parallel existence in an alternative universe, one of the infinite spheres of possibility in which I’d decided differently and become a different woman.
Not long before this, a friend in Graz had told me that she’d been born on American soil and so, theoretically at least, was an American citizen. She’d never lived there, however, and this was her ghost, her own parallel existence. In July of 1950, her parents had sailed from Bremerhaven to New York on the United States Army Transport W.G. Haan, a ship of displaced persons that had been reacquired by the Navy and enlisted in the Military Sea Transportation Service. Their intention was to emigrate; they’d applied for their visas, all their papers were in order, and yet they were refused entry and caught in limbo for more than a year before being sent back to Europe. My friend was born in this limbo, on Ellis Island. Read more »
by Pranab Bardhan
All of the articles in this series can be found here.
Among other things London School of Economics is associated in my mind with bringing me in touch with one of the most remarkable persons I have ever met in my life, and someone who has been a dear friend over nearly four decades since then. This is Jean Drèze.
I think it was in the middle-1980’s Nick Stern at LSE introduced me to Jean. I have known Nick since he was a student of Jim Mirrlees at Oxford. Once when I was teaching in Delhi Nick and my Cambridge classmate Christopher Bliss (both of them teaching at Oxford at that time) came to talk to me about any suggestion I had about an Indian village they might pick which they then wanted to study intensively. I remember telling them to choose a village that had been surveyed before so that they had some benchmark information, and directed them to the Agro-Economic Research Center of the Delhi School of Economics which over many decades carried out village surveys in different parts of north India. They finally chose a village, Palanpur, in western UP about 200 kilometers from Delhi, which had been surveyed by the Center. Over the last 50 years they and their team have studied this village intensively and repeatedly, which is quite a unique achievement in the interface of development economics and economic anthropology. Read more »
by Martin Butler
Although by no means the only ones, two models of human beings and their relation to society are prominent in modern social and political thought. At first glance they seem incompatible, but I want to sketch them out and start to establish how they might plausibly be made to fit together.
The first one I’ll call the cultural model. It is based on the truism that human beings are the products of the particular traditions and histories of their society, and is a relativistic view since it allows for no trans-cultural standards against which cultures can be compared. The key features of this model are its historical nature and the fact that it is essentially social, in that individuals can only be fully understood with reference to the culture in which they were raised. All cultures have a history and evolve over time, and cultures only exist in groups of individuals; you can’t have your own personal culture.
To fully understand a culture it’s necessary to get to know the specific patterns of life within it, and these can’t be captured by abstractions or generalisations. You might, for example, say that culture X is Christian but that doesn’t actually tell you very much about how life is lived in that culture. This does not mean that human beings are completely malleable since we can accept that human nature exerts limits on what it’s possible for a person to be, and of course individuals within a culture can be very different. However, according to this model, culture leaves a major and indelible mark. There will, of course, be huge variation, but I think it’s important to note that typically gender and gender roles, bonds of kinship, religious belief (or lack of it) and rituals of various kinds are pivotal in shaping the identity of most cultures. The stereotypical image of a traditional culture is ethnically homogeneous with a well-established shared way of life, strong bonds of kinship and well-defined gender roles, all of which are supported by a set of widely held beliefs (usually religious) along with the general acceptance of a particular historical narrative.
The second model is the enlightenment model. The ideas that form the core of this model have been around for a long time but they found a particularly clear expression in European philosophy of the 18th century. This model gives centre stage to reason and free-will, and sees individuals and their rights as the starting point and building blocks of society, rather than the products of society. Read more »
by Jochen Szangolies
The arbor porphyriana is a scholastic system of classification in which each individual or species is categorized by means of a sequence of differentiations, going from the most general to the specific. Based on the categories of Aristotle, it was introduced by the 3rd century CE logician Porphyry, and a huge influence on the development of medieval scholastic logic. Using its system of differentiae, humans may be classified as ‘substance, corporeal, living, sentient, rational’. Here, the lattermost term is the most specific—the most characteristic of the species. Therefore, rationality—intelligence—is the mark of the human.
However, when we encounter ‘intelligence’ in the news, these days, chances are that it is used not as a quintessentially human quality, but in the context of computation—reporting on the latest spectacle of artificial intelligence, with GPT-3 writing scholarly articles about itself or DALL·E 2 producing close-to-realistic images from verbal descriptions. While this sort of headline has become familiar, lately, a new word has risen in prominence at the top of articles in the relevant publications: the otherwise innocuous modifier ‘general’. Gato, a model developed by DeepMind, we’re told is a ‘generalist’ agent, capable of performing more than 600 distinct tasks. Indeed, according to Nando de Freitas, team lead at DeepMind, ‘the game is over’, with merely the question of scale separating current models from truly general intelligence.
There are several interrelated issues emerging from this trend. A minor one is the devaluation of intelligence as the mark of the human: just as Diogenes’ plucked chicken deflates Plato’s ‘featherless biped’, tomorrow’s AI models might force us to rethink our self-image as ‘rational animals’. But then, arguably, Twitter already accomplishes that.
Slightly more worrying is a cognitive bias in which we take the lower branches of Porphyry’s tree to entail the higher ones. Read more »
Anneliese Hager. Untitled. ca. 1940-1950