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Photographs from the fall of the Berlin Wall

2009-11-10T23:23:00.003-05:00

More at Big Picture.

Congress has 237 millionaires

2009-11-10T22:02:00.002-05:00

Story here.

Deploying the undeployables

2009-11-10T19:48:00.001-05:00

Dahr Jamail and Sarah Lazare write:

As the Obama administration debates whether to send tens of thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan, an already overstretched military is increasingly struggling to meet its deployment numbers. Surprisingly, one place it seems to be targeting is military personnel who go absent without leave (AWOL) and then are caught or turn themselves in.

Hidden behind the gates of military bases across the U.S., troops facing AWOL and desertion charges regularly find themselves in the hands of a military that metes out informal, open-ended punishments by forcing them to wait months -- sometimes more than a year -- to face military justice. In the meantime, some of these soldiers are offered a free pass out of this legal limbo as long as they agree to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq -- even if they have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In August 2008 at TomDispatch.com, we reported on the deplorable conditions at the 82nd Replacement Barracks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There, more than 50 members of Echo Platoon of the 82nd Airborne Division's 82nd Replacement Detachment were being held while awaiting AWOL and desertion charges. Investigations launched since then -- in part in response to our article -- have revealed that the plight of members of Echo Platoon is not an isolated one. It is, in fact, disturbingly commonplace on other bases throughout the United States. And it is from these "holdover units," filled with disgruntled soldiers who have gone AWOL, many of whom are struggling with PTSD from previous deployments in war zones, that the military is hoping to help meet its manpower needs for Afghanistan.

The rest here.

A manuscript page from Philp Roth's The Anatomy Lesson with his corrections

2009-11-10T18:48:00.003-05:00

[via]

A hastily scrawled insult

2009-11-10T15:02:00.001-05:00

Reuters (via NYT):

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologised to the mother of a British solider killed in Afghanistan after she complained publicly that the condolence note he sent her was hard to read and full of spelling errors.
In a regular news conference on Tuesday, Brown expressed his regret for any distress caused to the mother of 20-year-old Jamie Janes, and blamed his poor handwriting.
"I apologised to Jacqui Janes yesterday for any mistakes that had been made," he said.
"The last thing on my mind was to cause any offence to (her) and I think people know me well enough to know that it would never be my intention ... to cause any grief to a grieving mother.
Janes had called the handwritten note, which appeared to mis-spell her son's surname, a "hastily scrawled insult."

The rest of the story here.

Opinions on 1989

2009-11-10T14:58:00.000-05:00

From AL Daily:

1989 was the biggest year in world history since 1945. It changed everything, says Timothy Garton Ash ... The Soviet Union, observes Josef Joffe, was the first empire ever to die in its bed ... A tyranny set in stone, writes Roger Kimball ... It was never a foregone conclusion, Anne Applebaum insists ... Berlin was the centerpiece of the Cold War, Fred Kaplan reminds us ... We still have duties to revolutionaries, says Christopher Hitchens ... Richard Cohen finds it hard not to give Reagan credit ... Never has so great a revolution been won so swiftly and peacefully, says Ross Douthat ... The end of the only world I ever knew, says Stefan Theil ... Gorbachev only wanted to the door an inch or two, writes George Jonas, but the wind caught it ... First U.S. envoy to united Germany was Robert Kimmit ... Communism took power away from the people, says Boris Johnson, but they took it back ... A Polish view from Adam Michnik ... Realists wrongly thought only war could defeat the Soviet Union, says James Carroll ... Communism had to die, says Rupert Cornwall ... The Wall showed Kennedy’s weakness, says Donald Kagan ... It was Reagan’s dovish side that did it, argues Peter Beinert ... the world changed, says Victor Sebestyen, on that wonderful night in Berlin ... I promised the Warsaw Pact countries not to intervene in their affairs, says Mikhail Gorbachev ... The world turns, but it should not forget, writes Conrad Black ... Communism was a dark comedy for Guy Sorman ... The will of the people, says James Baker, is the final arbiter ... Gorbachev’s reforms, like those of some Tsars, came too late, says Mitchell Cohen ... It’s good Gorbachev was weak, says Lech Walesa ... A grotesque tyranny, says Doug Bandow ... The GDR made citizens into prisoners, writes Henry Kissinger ... The Left wanted to pretend nothing had happened, writes John Vinocur ... For Robert Fulford, Communism was a great con game ... The Wall can still be felt, like a phantom limb, says Michael R. Meyer ... Reagan’s speech was crucial, argues James Mann ... Intellectual walls remain, says Roger Scruton ... One of history’s finest moments, says Matt Welch ... Punk Rock helped tear down the Wall, says Tim Mohr ... Where is Russia today? asks Jonathan Brent ... The spoils of victory did not go to the U.S., argues Andrew Rawnsley, so much as to Europe ... NYT Op-Ed editors asked nine poets to remember the Fall of the Wall.

Coffee and placebo effects

2009-11-10T14:48:00.001-05:00

From Neuroskeptic:

The authors took 60 coffee-loving volunteers and gave them either placebo decaffeinated coffee, or coffee containing 280 mg caffeine. That's quite a lot, roughly equivalent to three normal cups. 30 minutes later, they attempted a difficult button-pressing task requiring concentration and sustained effort, plus a task involving mashing buttons as fast as possible for a minute.

The catch was that the experimenters lied to the volunteers. Everyone was told that they were getting real coffee. Half of them were told that the coffee would enhance their performance on the tasks, while the other half were told it would impair it. If the placebo effect was at work, these misleading instructions should have affected how the volunteers felt and acted.

Several interesting things happened. First, the caffeine enhanced performance on the cognitive tasks - it wasn't just a placebo effect. Bear in mind, though, that these people were all regular coffee drinkers who hadn't drunk any caffeine that day. The benefit could have been a reversal of caffeine withdrawl symptoms.

Second, there was a small effect of expectancy on task performance in the placebo group - but it worked in reverse. People who were told that the coffee would make them do worse actually did better than those who expected the coffee to help them. Presumably, this is because they put in extra effort to try to overcome the supposedly negative effects. This paradoxical placebo response reminds us that there's more to "the placebo effect" than meets the eye.

Finally, no-one who got the decaf noticed that it didn't actually contain caffeine, and the volunteer's ratings of their alertness and mood didn't differ between the caffeine and placebo groups. So, this suggests that if you were to secretly replace someone's favorite blend with decaf, they wouldn't notice - although their performance would nevertheless decline. Bear that in mind when considering pranks to play on colleagues or flatmates.

Video: How people count money in different cultures

2009-11-09T00:20:00.001-05:00

How People Count Cash? - Awesome video clips here
[via Marginal Revolution]

Video: Trailer for The Carter

2009-11-09T00:09:00.000-05:00

Growing pot on Indian reservations

2009-11-05T14:22:00.003-05:00

Joel Millman in the WSJ:

Cultivating marijuana in Indian country represents a new twist in the decades-old illicit drug trade between Mexico and the U.S., the world's largest drug-consuming market. For decades, Mexican drug gangs grew marijuana in Mexico, smuggled it across the border, and sold it in the U.S. But in the past few years, they have done what any burgeoning business would do: move closer to their customers.

Illicit pot farms, the vast majority run by gangs with ties to Mexico, are growing fast across the country. The U.S. Forest Service has discovered pot farms in 61 national forests across 16 states this year, up from 49 forests in 10 states last year. New territories include public land in Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, Alabama and Virginia.

The area where Mexican gangs seem to be expanding the fastest is on Indian reservations. In Washington state, tribal police seized more than 233,000 pot plants on Indian land last year, almost 10 times the 2006 figure. Pot seized on Washington's reservations accounted for about half of all pot seized on both private and public land last year. Police are finding pot farms on reservations stretching from California to South Dakota.

"These criminal organizations are growing in Indian country at an alarming rate," says Chief Smith. "The [growers] on our reservation were sent directly from Mexico."

At Chief Smith's reservation, police found trash piles that included crushed Modelo-brand beer cans and tortilla packages. They also recovered cellphones with a flurry of calls to and from Michoacán, Mexico -- an important drug-producing state. One grow in Washington state's Yakama Reservation featured a makeshift shrine to Mexico's unofficial patron saint to smugglers, Jesús Malverde, complete with votive candles and a photograph of the mythical figure.

The rest here [h/t Issamu].

The 'end of history' reconsidered

2009-11-05T11:55:00.002-05:00

An interview with Francis Fukuyama in New Perspectives Quarterly:

Francis Fukuyama: The basic point -- that liberal democracy is the final form of government -- is still basically right. Obviously there are alternatives out there, like the Islamic Republic of Iran or Chinese authoritarianism. But I don't think that all that many people are persuaded these are higher forms of civilization than what exists in Europe, the United States, Japan or other developed democracies; societies that provide their citizens with a higher level of prosperity and personal freedom.

The issue is not whether liberal democracy is a perfect system, or whether capitalism doesn't have problems. After all, we've been thrown into this huge global recession because of the failure of unregulated markets. The real question is whether any other system of governance has emerged in the last 20 years that challenges this. The answer remains no.

Now, that essay was written in the winter of 1988-89 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I wrote it then because I thought that the pessimism about civilization that we had developed as a result of the terrible 20th century, with its genocides, gulags and world wars, was actually not the whole picture at all. In fact, there were a lot of positive trends going on in the world, including the spread of democracy where there had been dictatorship. Sam Huntington called this "the third wave."

It began in southern Europe in the 1970s with Spain and Portugal turning to democracy. Then and later you had an ending of virtually all the dictatorships in Latin America, except for Cuba. And then there was collapse of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern Europe. Beyond that, democracy displaced authoritarian regimes in South Korea and Taiwan. We went from 80 democracies in the early 1970s to 130 or 140 20 years later.

The rest here.

Claude Lévi-Strauss obituary

2009-11-04T22:27:00.002-05:00

Maurice Bloch in the Guardian:

The fame of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has died aged 100, extended well beyond his own subject of anthropology. He was without doubt the anthropologist best known to non-specialists. This is mainly because he is usually considered to be the founder of the intellectual movement known as structuralism, which was to have such influence, especially in the 1970s. He was one of those French intellectuals – like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur – whose influence spread to many other disciplines because they were philosophers in a much broader sense of the word than the academic philosophers of the British and American tradition.
As a result, these French writers have seemed more stimulating to some Anglo-Saxon thinkers, working in intellectually more imaginative, but perhaps less rigorous, areas such as literature, history or sociology than the home-grown product. Yet it is something of an irony that Lévi-Strauss should have been thought of in this way, as he considered himself, above all, a technical anthropologist, and he was a little surprised, if not also a little suspicious, of the enthusiasm for structuralism manifested by students of literature and others. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that he relished the literary fame that his work acquired, especially for his 1955 book Tristes Tropiques.

The rest here.

The continuing interest in Lionel Trilling

2009-11-04T21:50:00.002-05:00

D.G. Myers in Commentary:

Why the persistent fascination with Lionel Trilling? An English professor, literary critic, and one-book novelist, Trilling continues to generate interest three decades after his death, while his contemporaries—Newton Arvin, Cleanth Brooks, F.O. Matthiessen, Philip Rahv, Yvor Winters—go quietly into obscurity. Two new books by academics of distinction—one with a long career and the other at the outset—wrestle with Trilling’s legacy only three years after Gertrude Himmelfarb named Trilling as the summit of The Moral Imagination in her book of that title three years ago. Just last year, an unfinished novel called The Journey Abandoned appeared in print for the first time and was the occasion of essays everywhere, including in these pages,¹ just as the New York Review of Books reissued The Liberal Imagination, his best-known -volume, in a “classic” edition.

There is something peculiar in this. After all, liberal anti-Communism, the cause Trilling was most closely identified with, is no longer relevant. The Soviet Union outlived him by just a decade and a half, and those who claim the present-day mantle of liberal anti-Communism, like the journalists Peter Beinart and Paul Berman, have had an exceptionally clumsy time of it. There is no liberal anti-Islamism to speak of. Those who now declare themselves liberals (“a word primarily of political import,” Trilling wrote, “but its political meaning defines itself by the quality of life it envisages”) are more impatient to prosecute Bush-administration officials than the war on terror.

What is more, the style of literary criticism practiced by Trilling—and by Irving Howe, whose long friendship with Trilling is lovingly detailed in Edward Alexander’s book Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe—might itself share some of the blame for its current dreadful state. The rise of “literary theory” in the late 70s entailed the “reduction of literature to politics,” Harold Fromm charged in Academic Capitalism and Literary Value (1991), and since then critics have been “more interested in political goals than intellectual activity or aesthetic response.” The same might have been said of Trilling (and Howe).

As a literary man, Trilling was the sworn enemy of the so-called New Critics—his chief rivals to preeminence in the literary criticism of the time—who sought to disconnect literature from an external reality and study poems only in relation to what R. P. Blackmur, one of their more articulate spokesmen, called “the analyzable features of the forms and techniques of poetry.” The effect was to sever literature from any relation to politics.

The rest here.

The Bolaño industry

2009-11-04T16:05:00.003-05:00

Horacio Castellanos Moya in Guernica:

The key idea is that for thirty years, the work of García Márquez, with its magical realism, represented Latin American literature in the imagination of the North American reader. But since everything tarnishes and ends up losing its luster, the cultural establishment eventually went looking for something new. It sounded out the guys in the literary groups called McOndo and Crack, but they didn’t fit the enterprise—above all, as Sarah Pollack explains, it was very difficult to sell the North American reader on the world of iPods and Nazi spy novels as the new image of Latin America and its literature. Then Bolaño appeared with his The Savage Detectives and his visceral realism.

“Nobody knows for whom it works” is a phrase that I like to repeat, but it’s also a coarse reality that has struck me again and again in life. And not only me, I’m sure of that. Let’s continue. The stories and the brief novels of Bolaño were being published in the United States very carefully and tenaciously by New Directions, a very prestigious independent publisher with a modest distribution, when all of a sudden, in the middle of negotiations for The Savage Detectives, appeared, like a bolt from the blue, the powerful hand of the landlords of fortune, who decided that this excellent novel was the work chosen to be the next big thing, the new One Hundred Years of Solitude, if you will. And it was written, what’s more, by an author who had died a little earlier, which facilitated the process of organizing the operation. The construction of the myth preceded the great launch of the work. I quote Sarah Pollack:
“Bolaño’s creative genius, compelling biography, personal experience of the Pinochet coup, the labeling of some of his works as Southern Cone dictatorship novels, and his untimely death from liver failure on July 15, 2003, at the age of fifty contribute to ‘produce’ the figure of the author for U.S. reception and consumption, and in doing so, anticipate the reading of his work that is propagated in this country.”

The rest here.

'The Life and Times of a Soviet Capitalist'

2009-11-04T15:46:00.001-05:00

Irakli Iosebashvili in Guernica:

His father was dead and his family was poor, so he began looking for ways to make money as soon as he left the army. Eventually, he would make incredible amounts of it. What was an incredible amount of money in the Soviet Union? A good paycheck in those days, the Soviet nineteen seventies, was about two hundred rubles per month. This was the province of the privileged few—usually generals and professors, two professions that remained dear to the Communists throughout their seven decades in power. Two hundred a month put meat on the table three times a week, bought a dress or two a year for your wife, took your family on a Black Sea cruise in September, and even gave you enough left over to make a small deposit in Sberbank, the country’s one and only savings bank. It was a magical number, more than most citizens could aspire to, yet enough within the realm of possibility for anyone to imagine what spending that money would feel like.

My father-in-law didn’t make two hundred rubles a month. In a good month, he pulled in about two thousand rubles. In a really good month, three times that amount. He owned a car at a time when there were so few cars in Tbilisi, people would identify him as “Misha—you know, the one with the car.” His wife, a few years after they were married, developed the habit of standing shoeless and dumping all of the gold he had given her around her bare feet to see if it would cover them, and it usually did. He wore fedoras from Turkey and sheepskin coats bought in the Baltics, bell bottoms and shiny boots with big heels. His little girls wore sundresses from China and shoes from Yugoslavia—home to the best shoe manufacturers behind the Iron Curtain—and each girl had a full set of magic markers from Italy. At home, there were always guests, and so much food that nobody except his mother-in-law, who set the table, remembered what color the tablecloth was.

And that was all you could spend your money on in the Soviet Union: food, whatever clothes the smugglers brought in, and a single car. Only one, because otherwise somebody might take an interest in where a man who is registered as a—let’s see here, comrade—a factory worker, with nary a general or academician in the family, was getting it all. And then nothing would help you—not your cousin in the Party, not your gangster friends or the cops you paid off on a monthly basis.

The rest here.

Standing up to Israel

2009-11-04T15:23:00.001-05:00

Gideon Levy in Haaretz:

Before no other country on the planet does the United States kneel and plead like this. In other trouble spots, America takes a different tone. It bombs in Afghanistan, invades Iraq and threatens sanctions against Iran and North Korea. Did anyone in Washington consider begging Saddam Hussein to withdraw from occupied territory in Kuwait?

But Israel the occupier, the stubborn contrarian that continues to mock America and the world by building settlements and abusing the Palestinians, receives different treatment. Another massage to the national ego in one video, more embarrassing praise in another.

Now is the time to say to the United States: Enough flattery. If you don't change the tone, nothing will change. As long as Israel feels the United States is in its pocket, and that America's automatic veto will save it from condemnations and sanctions, that it will receive massive aid unconditionally, and that it can continue waging punitive, lethal campaigns without a word from Washington, killing, destroying and imprisoning without the world's policeman making a sound, it will continue in its ways.

Illegal acts like the occupation and settlement expansion, and offensives that may have involved war crimes, as in Gaza, deserve a different approach. If America and the world had issued condemnations after Operation Summer Rains in 2006 - which left 400 Palestinians dead and severe infrastructure damage in the first major operation in Gaza since the disengagement - then Operation Cast Lead never would have been launched.

The rest here.

On Kierkegaard's distinction between depression and despair

2009-11-04T00:16:00.001-05:00

Gordon Marino in the NYT's Happy Days:

All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin. And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has become passé. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to the museum of antiquated ideas. Yet I think that the great and highly quirky Dane could help us to retrieve a distinction that has been effaced.

These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional help for your depression. While despair used to be classified as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized and folded into the concept of clinical depression. If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube video, he would certainly complain that we, who have listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders, between depression and despair.

There is abundant chatter today about “being spiritual” but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished everything on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact, a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he warns, “Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.”

The rest here.

A 1978 interview with John Updike in Zagreb

2009-11-03T19:30:00.003-05:00

In the New Yorker:

Radeljković: Mr. Updike, I would like to ask you about your actual process of writing. Do you have a fixed schedule? How do you do it, actually?

Updike: Well, the schedule is semi-fixed. I try to write in the morning and then into the afternoon. I’m a later riser; fortunately, my wife is also a late riser. We get up in unison and fight for the newspaper for half an hour. Then I rush into my office around 9:30 and try to put the creative project first. I have a late lunch, and then the rest of the day somehow gets squandered. There is a great deal of busywork to a writer’s life, as to a professor’s life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don’t do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum. But I’ve never been a night writer, unlike some of my colleagues, and I’ve never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think that pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. So, I try to be a regular sort of fellow—much like a dentist drilling his teeth every morning—except Sunday, I don’t work on Sunday, and there are of course some holidays I take. I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there’s this panicky feeling that this is me and I must make it better. A good deal of time is spent actually rewriting, rereading what you have written.

The rest here.

How did Keats speak?

2009-11-03T17:13:00.001-05:00

Caleb Crain in the NYT:

So the movie Keats does talk the way the real Keats wrote. But does he talk the way the real Keats talked? Like most moviegoers, I expect early-19th-century characters to speak in sentences more carefully and elaborately structured than the ones I usually hear, but my expectation may be an artifact of the recording technology then available. Georgian English has been preserved only via the written word, and in the act of transcription, spoken errors may be amended — hemming and hawing edited, false starts pruned and simple phrases joined into complex ones. Keats himself was aware of the problem; a friend once charged that in “Endymion,” “the conversation is unnatural and too high-flown.” Indeed, although Wordsworth, a fellow Romantic, called for poetry written in “the language really spoken by men,” the diction and grammar in Keats’s poems is far from workaday.
Perhaps this is because Keats was self-conscious about his everyday speech. In August 1818, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine accused him of “Cockney rhymes,” pointing out that he matched thorns with fawns and higher with Thalia. In poems that he inserted in his letters, he rhymed shorter with water and parsons with fastens. The pattern suggests that he suffered from nonrhoticity — the tendency to drop “R” sounds from the ends of syllables and words. As well he should have, the scholar Lynda Mugglestone wrote in 1991, noting that nonrhoticity was part of “then-current educated usage.” In fact, Mugglestone observed, Blake had rhymed lawn with morn, and Tennyson was to rhyme thorns and yawns.

The rest here.

Justifying postgraduate work in philosophy

2009-11-03T14:03:00.002-05:00

Simon Blackburn in THE:

This week many academics must have been delighted to get a message such as this, decisively showing how the Government really does care about education.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has recently launched a review of postgraduate provision in the UK ... its principal areas of investigation will be:
- to assess the competitiveness of UK institutions in the global market;
- to assess the benefits of postgraduate study for all relevant stakeholders;
- to assess the evidence about the needs of employers for postgraduates;
- and to examine levels of participation, in terms of who undertakes postgraduate study, and whether barriers affect the diversity of participation.
The university intends to submit comments, and I have been asked to seek your views ...
My initial response was probably not robust enough. It is written as if from a philosophy faculty, but I hope and trust it might serve as a template for others.
Dear BIS,
(1) Our postgraduate philosophy education is primarily vital in ensuring the quality of the incoming stream of future teachers of philosophy. These provide the continuing educational resource for very acute and educated people to flow into very diverse channels of administration, business and other branches of employment, including what used to exist as and be known as "public service", before that fell into the hands of people unable to conceive of it as anything other than a cornucopia of opportunities for corruption. If these last are your "stakeholders", then we probably cannot convince them that we are of use to them, any more than music, art, literature or history could.
(2) Our future teachers will, in turn, educate philosophy graduates who can flourish in business: there have been many examples. But we don't think that you should pay slavish attention to what business people, especially those who believe themselves fit to judge things about which they know nothing, say are their "needs" because we do not have any confidence that without more philosophy than most of them possess, they have the least idea what those needs are. We merely note that conceptions of need that have given us such outstanding examples of business expertise as British Leyland, Rover and RBS seem strange instruments with which to assess institutions that enabled such legacies as those left by Bacon, Locke, Hume and Wittgenstein. We are, to adapt one minister's words, intensely relaxed about having assisted the country to this filthy rich legacy.

The rest here.

Doubting evolution

2009-11-03T13:41:00.006-05:00

Daniel Dennett and Philip Kitcher respond to Nicholas Wade's review of Dawkins' The Evidence for Evolution in the NYT.

Daniel Dennett:

What is going on at The New York Times? Why is it so bizarrely respectful of those who doubt evolution? In recent years The Times has published three preposterous Op-Ed articles by evolution-doubters (Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Michael J. Behe and Senator Sam Brownback). These no more deserved space in The Times than the opinions of flat-earthers or trance-channelers. In the wake of Judge John E. Jones III’s decision in the Dover, Pa., case that intelligent design is a religious viewpoint that may not be taught in public schools, one would think The Times would finally recognize that the intelligent design campaign is a hoax and dishonest to the core, and stop giving it respectability in its pages.

Philip Kitcher:

The crucial point is that, as Dawkins appreciates, the distinction between theory and fact, in philosophical discussions as in everyday speech, can be drawn in two quite distinct ways. On the one hand, theories are conceived as general systems for explanation and prediction, while facts are specific reports about local events and processes. On the other hand, “theory” is used to suggest that there is room for reasonable doubt, whereas “fact” suggests something so amply confirmed by the evidence that it may be accepted without debate.

Opponents of evolution slide from supposing that evolution is a theory, in the first sense, to concluding that it is (only) a theory, in the second. Any such inference is fallacious, in that many systematic approaches to domains of natural phenomena — like the understanding of chemical reactions in terms of atoms and molecules, and the study of heredity in terms of nucleic acids — are so well supported that they count as facts (in the second sense).

The rest here.

Novel Chess

2009-11-03T11:48:00.002-05:00

Here.

D. Graham Burnett and W. J. Walter in Cabinet:

A chessboard consists of sixty-four squares commonly designated by alphanumeric coordinates (a-h across the x-axis and 1-8 up the y-axis). If one were to replace the numerical assignations with a continuation of the alphabet (running, for instance, i-p up the y-axis), each square would be designated uniquely by a two-letter coordinate that we will call a “tuple.” Now imagine setting up a simple computer program that knows the rules of chess—nothing more. It knows, for instance, all the moves that are makeable by a given piece, and it can keep track of a chessboard (updating what pieces are on which squares as moves are made). Suppose further that this program takes directions for making moves in the form of a pair of “tuples”—namely, one letter-pair designating the coordinates of a square occupied by a movable piece, and then a second letter-pair designating the coordinates of a square to which that piece can be legitimately moved (including squares where it would capture an opposing piece). 
We now have everything in place to convert two texts into a game of chess: we simply feed the program the two novels, asking it to play one text as “white” and the other as “black”; the program searches through the white text until it finds the first tuple corresponding to a movable piece (in the case of an opening move, either a pawn or a knight), and then, having settled on the piece that will open, continues searching through the text until it encounters a tuple designating a square to which that piece can be moved. When it has done so, the computer executes that move for white, and then goes to the other text to find, in the same way, an opening move for black. And so it goes: white, black, white, black, until—quite by accident, of course, since we must suppose that the novels know nothing of chess strategy (and our program cannot help them, since it knows only the rules of the game)—one king is mated. 

Such a set up would be close (there turn out to be interesting differences, but put that aside for now) to permitting two monkeys to play chess against each other by giving each a keyboard and permitting them to jump about on them: send the resulting string of letters to our program, and it scans this string of gobbledygook for tuples that constitute legitimate moves, makes them, and voilà, monkey chess. 

The rest here.

English as universal language

2009-11-03T11:15:00.002-05:00

John McWhorter in World Affairs:

Even if the world’s currencies are someday tied to the renmimbi, English’s head start as the lingua franca of popular culture, scholarship, and international discourse would ensure its linguistic dominance. To change this situation would require a great many centuries, certainly too long a span to figure meaningfully in our assessment of the place of English in world communications in our present moment.
And notice how daunting the prospect of Chinese as a world language is, with a writing system that demands mastery of 2,000 characters in order to be able to read even a tabloid newspaper. For all of its association with Pepsi and the CIA, English is very user-friendly as the world’s 6,000 languages go. English verb conjugation is spare compared to, say, that of Italian—just the third-person singular s in the present, for example. There are no pesky genders to memorize (and no feminine-gendered tables that talk like Penelope Cruz). There are no sounds under whose dispensation you almost have to be born as a prerequisite for rendering them anywhere near properly, like the notorious trilly rˇ sound in Czech.
Each language is hard in its own way. Try explaining to a foreigner why, if you get a busy signal, you might say, “I’ll try her tomorrow,” but you can also say, “Tomorrow I turn 25,” without using the will to indicate the future. But as a language all people are required to learn, would it really be better to have one like Russian, with three genders, fiercely subtle and irregular verb marking, and numbers so hard to express properly that Russians themselves have trouble with them?
There are those who worry not only that English will become primus inter pares, but that it will finally eat up even the last remaining 600 languages as well. But this stretches the imagination, to be sure. As long as there are Japanese people meeting and raising children in Japan, amidst a culture in which Japanese is enshrined as the language of not only speech but education, literature, and journalism, it is hard to conceive even of the first step toward the day when a child raised in Osaka would speak English and think of Japanese as a language his parents spoke when they “didn’t want me to understand.” Eyak is one thing, but the languages spoken by substantial populations and well entrenched in writing are another.

The rest here.

Great cities

2009-11-03T10:50:00.002-05:00

Tunku Varadarajan reviews The Great Cities In History edited by John Julius Norwich:

The world has, for much of its history, been a place of fragments. During the Middle Ages, many cities were so far-flung as to be virtually unknown to each other. Cairo, Palermo, Benin, Angkor and the Incan capital of Cuzco were "great" but only in isolation. And greatness, often, was a product of the imagination. Timbuktu's aura, we learn, was built partially on a mythical reputation spread by word of mouth. During the 14th century, its ruler, Mansa Musa, went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he generously dispensed gold to the faithful. Thereafter writers and diplomats traveled to the supposed source of this largess, only to be disappointed.
How did cities arise in the first place? Hunting and gathering had kept people apart; so, as Mr. Norwich writes, "towns and cities could be said to be born of agriculture." It was farming that united man in critical numbers and durable structures, resulting in "the world's first city" in Mesopotamian Uruk.

Until the modern age, the success of a city relied largely on firm top-down management and a people's ability to live in close contact without an excess of bloodshed. Many of the pre-modern cities that make Mr. Norwich's cut—Istanbul, Athens, Baghdad from the eighth century to the 13th—tolerated cultural and religious diversity, even while making use of slave labor and imposing strict order on all that vibrant flourishing beloved by social-studies teachers.

The rest here.

Why modern art is easier to 'get' than experimental music

2009-11-03T10:42:00.002-05:00

Philip Ball in Prospect:

One difference between the avant-garde in classical music and in visual art, however, is that late 20th-century music was apt to defy these organising principles, while visual art did not. Although some viewers may fret that they cannot understand what is in front of them, it takes no more cognitive effort to “see” a painting by Mark Rothko than it does to look at wallpaper. The fact we can see the painting at all as a coherent object gives our interpretive mind something to work on, even if we come up with nothing more than a vague sense of beauty, serenity or absurdity. Music can defy even this basic sort of cognitive parsing: it can refute our efforts to find coherence, rather as if a video artist were to present us with unstructured static. Even Jackson Pollock’s chaos is contained—but sound is at once everywhere and constantly shifting.

Many musicologists accept a definition of music as “organised sound.” Yet sound is structured into music not on paper, nor even in the mind of the composer, but in the mind of the listener. Music is sound in which the organisation must be audibly perceptible to a listener, not just theoretically present. And there are some universal principles that come into play in differentiating music from mere noise. For example, melodies that move in small steps tend to sound unified and “good,” while ones with large and frequent jumps between high and low notes are liable to seem fragmented and harder to make out. Regular rhythms also contribute to coherence, while erratic ones often confuse us. Tonality creates a hierarchy of pitch and a sense of “place” in the musical scale. But it’s not just tonal music that uses these cognitive aids: they are found in other musical traditions the world over.

The composer’s job is to manipulate the expectations that these principles produce—enough to avoid predictability and create a lively musical surface, but not so much as to lose coherence. Out of the interplay between expectation and reality comes much of music’s capacity to excite and move us. But what happens if these rules are undermined? In Boulez’s Structures I or Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII, say, there is no discernible rhythm, and the melody line, if one can call it that, is as jagged as the Dolomites. In this situation, it is hard to develop any expectations about the music, and this absence of an audible relationship between one note and the next cuts off a key channel of musical affect.

The rest here.