PURETICS...

What Happened?????????

2009-10-01T14:58:00.001+05:30

The Idea Of Pleasure

2009-03-31T16:45:00.000+05:30

Everyone desires to reach a stage of absolute happiness where he is all the time happy. This is defined as a state of NIRVANA which supposedly brings you to an ultimate state of pleasure.

But the terms pleasure and misery cannot be absolutely defined. It is because they are relative terms. To explain this through an example, let us take an example of a man who is accustomed to have stale bread as his daily meal. If his diet is suddenly changed to something like biryani which is better in taste, he will feel a pleasure. His degree of pleasure is in direct proportion to the degree of improvement in the taste of the food. If he is offered still better food, his pleasure increases further and if one day, it is suddenly continued to supply him with stale bread, he will feel misery. This is because, he has obtained a knowledge of something which enhances his pleasure.

On the other hand, if stale bread is the only available food on earth, the terms pleasure and misery will be meaningless as there is no scope for relative comparison. Even if the supply of a wonderful meal is continued over a long period, without any variation in tastes, a man will be bored, as the feeling of pleasure can be derived only through comparison.

Considering another example, if a man feels he is good looking, it is only in comparison with people who are not as good looking as he. If he is sad in this aspect, it is because of people who are better looking than him.

So, a world of absolute happiness is a world where all people are identical in appearance, have equal intelligence as difference in intelligence will again give rise to certain complexes, and in proportion to the difference, degrees of pleasure and misery will begin to surface. Also everyone should have equal power and artistic abilities. To sum up, each and every individual's tastes, behavior, appearance, intelligence and capacity of doing work must be same as each and every other individual.

As everyone will be having the same thoughts, there will be no need for speaking with each other, and as every one will have the same abilities, there will be no question of anyone getting interested in anyone. It is a world devoid of competition and initiative. In short, this world will be of the LIVING DEAD.

‘Cage fights’ And Students

2009-03-24T16:13:00.002+05:30

Dallas: A high school principal and his security staff shut feuding students in a steel cage to settle disputes with bare-knuckle fistfights, according to an internal report by the Dallas Independent School District.
The principal of South Oak Cliff High School, Donald Moten, was accused by several school employees of sanctioning the ‘cage fights’ between students in a steel equipment enclosure in a boy’s locker room, where “troubled” youth fought while a security guard watched, according to the confidential March 2008 report first obtained by The Dallas Morning News.
Such fights occurred several times over the course of two years, the report said.
Moten, who resigned from the district in 2008 while under investigation in connection with
a grade-changing scandal, denies the cage-fight accusations. “That’s barbaric,” he told The Dallas Morning News. “You can’t do that at a high school. You can’t do that anywhere. It never happened.”
But investigators with the district’s Office of Professional Responsibility gathered testimony from two employees at South Oak Cliff High who said they had witnessed students fighting in the cage from 2003 to 2005, among others who heard about the fights.
One employee overheard Moten tell a security guard to take two students who had been at each other for days and “put ’em in the cage and let them duke it out,” the report states, and the practice was so embedded in the school’s culture that one student remarked to a teacher that he was “gonna be in the cage.”
Moten is a former police officer who lied about being kidnapped at gunpoint to get out of work, for which he was given administrative leave. NYT NEWS SERVICE

Social Change @21Cent.........

2009-03-13T17:12:00.000+05:30

The critics of modernity, going back at least to the 19th century, have told us that modern society is hurtling forward, its social ties unraveling behind it, its citizens left unhinged and bewildered. In recent decades, disintegration has remained a persistent image in popular social criticism, from Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Philip Slater's The Pursuit of Loneliness (both published in 1970) to more current entrants such as Judith Warner's 2005 book Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. And now comes the sociologist Dalton Conley tapping into the same trope and, like many before him, presenting the crisis of contemporary society as bearing most sharply, indeed almost exclusively, on the privileged.

The trouble with this long tradition, and particularly with Conley's rendition of it, is that the evidence doesn't support the view that modernity has disoriented all groups in society, much less that it has peculiarly shaken up the privileged. Despite the pervasive image of a postmodern self, fragmented and fractured, the educated have found new ways to knit their lives together. It is the less educated, squeezed on every front, whose lives have become more insecure and unstable in both work and family life.

A professor at New York University, Conley has important articles and books to his credit, and much of his work deals critically with social inequality. His Being Black, Living in the Red is a substantial study of the sources and consequences of racial differences in wealth. The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why is an intriguing analysis of the limited role of genes and family background in accounting for achievement, highlighting instead the role of luck, accident, and the inability of parents with many children to provide opportunities to all of them.

In contrast to his earlier work, however, Elsewhere, U.S.A. is a disjointed dervish of a book that embodies its author's diagnosis of modern life. It is frenetic, disorganized, marred by leaps of logic and digressions galore. Its saving grace is that it challenges us to understand how contemporary social transformations affect the realms of personal life: love, friendships, the sense of self. But to grasp those connections, we have to pay attention to facts that Conley dismisses or ignores.

Amid a welter of kvetchy asides (Conley hates advertisements on movie screens, logos on T-shirts, and people who yak on their cell phones in public), Elsewhere, U.S.A. offers two big concepts to diagnose modern society's ills: the "elsewhere" society, and the "intravidual." "Mrs. and Mr. Elsewhere," workaholic professionals, always feel they should be somewhere else than where they currently are, and so they betray those around them as their mind races ahead to the next encounter, or they look around for a more desirable interaction. The intravidual is the reciprocal of this dissociated society: Rather than an integrated self, the modern person is internally fragmented.

Along with these two big concepts, Conley emphasizes four forces that drive contemporary social change. New technologies create a 24/7, sped-up work life that continuously intrudes on family time. Growing income inequality makes those near the top envious and insecure, leading them to work ever harder. Women's participation in paid work erodes community life, breaks down the boundary between work and leisure, and strains families. And the networked society permits an almost infinite number of selves -- virtual and actual -- as people participate in multiple communities of varying depth and reality, from the anonymous others who "recommend" films on Netflix, to friends of friends on Facebook, to the avatars in virtual social universes.

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Bicameral Mind--Interview With Gregory Cohran

2009-02-17T17:18:00.000+05:30

2Blowhards: Julian Jaynes -- thoughts? Reactions? And what about that "bicameral mind" idea?

Gregory Cochran: I read Jaynes' book years ago and thought at the time that he was deeply, entertainingly crazy. Nowadays, it seems likely that people have changed enough over recorded history to generate noticeable personality differences. That doesn't mean I buy his bicameral mind model: just the idea that people now may have significantly different minds from people then.

2B: One visitor thinks that "the best way to test Jaynes' ideas would be to study some of the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon and New Guinea and see if they are still of 'bicameral' mind." Has anyone bothered to do this?

GC: If someone really believed in bicameralism -- some non-Nebraskan -- sure. I wouldn't myself.

2B: From another reader: "[You say that people will cling to the Blank Slate myth as long as it pleases them to.] The Catholic Church reluctantly stopped believing in the geocentric model of the universe long before there were important practical applications. They had an enormous investment in the geocentric model, but the empirical evidence was too strong. Are you saying that the scientific evidence against the 'Blank Slate myth' will never be strong enough, or that the motivation to cling to the myth is stronger than that for the geocentric model, or perhaps that heresies are suppressed more efficiently nowadays?"

GC: I think people -- some people -- care a lot more about this than anyone ever cared about geocentrism. There are also practical political aspects.

2B: From another reader: "Depiction of trickster gods in West Africa seems a bit positive, at worst morally neutral. In Northern Europe, Loki was a clear-cut villain. Could that contrast come from selection-induced personality differences?"

GC: And yet Bugs Bunny is our hero. I think this line of analysis is about as sound and solid as Citibank.

2B: "I have heard that the wide varieties of thalassemia are the result of reproductive isolation. If populations mixed in Italy, the best ones would be common, and the rest rare. Maybe that was from Cavalli-Sforza? But maybe malarias varied regionally, leading to regional adaptation: there is no best resistance?"

GC: There are lots of places where several hemoglobin mutations (defenses against malaria) co-exist. Modeling suggests that in some cases some variants will eventually be replaced by others, but that process can take a long time -- in some cases far longer than falciparum malaria has existed. Falciparum malaria in Italy (at least in central and northern Italy) is less than 2000 years old: there probably hasn't been time enough for the dust to settle.

2B: "An androgen receptor allele associated with male pattern baldness shows signs of strong selection in some populations. Does the difference have cognitive effects, personality affects, does it increase paternal investment, reduce intergenerational mate competition, socially-mediated personality differences? I have an uh, personal interest in this one."

GC: I have no idea. There are some interesting regional variations in the average activity of the androgen receptor, but the variant linked to baldness is different. I hadn't heard that it looks selected: do you have a reference?

2B: "You say: 'brains have shrunk about 10% over the last 30,000 years, and almost certainly changed in other ways as well.' So, why is that? Is it that we have less need for more generalized brains? Or have genes that lead to more efficient brains predominated? Can we compare brain size between hunters and gatherers (such as are left) or slash and burn types with those who live in complex societies?"

GC: Nobody knows why the human brain has shrunk. It might be increased temperature. There is some indication that the cerebellum has become relatively bigger over this period: this might be a clue. Larger populations would tend to create more mutations, and some might have led to more efficient brains: certainly any change that preserved or improved function while shrinking the brain would be highly favored. As for brain size, Eskimos have larger-than-average brains (and score higher on IQ tests than other hunter-gatherers) while Australian aborigines, Pygmies, and Bushmen have smaller-than-average brains.

2B: "So it turns out that no one has really taken a hard look at interfertility among human population groups. I can't say I'm surprised. What about interbreeding success between dogs? Are there differences? Lions can breed with tigers, but Ligers are infertile, right? So much for the interspecies question. Where intra-species breeding success is at issue, I would assume -- perhaps mistakenly -- that the question would hinge on graduated differences rather than something like on/off. This is why I wonder if there is good data regarding relatively distant dog breeds, which aren't so different from human races."

GC: Female ligers are often fertile, in accordance with Haldane's rule.

As far as I know, all human mixes ever tried have been successful, but I don't think there has been much checking of the rate of miscarriages, measurement of average fertility, etc. There might be a problem or two.

There might also be hybrid vigor. Sometimes the offspring of two particular strains of a plant or animal species are sturdier, healthier, etc than their parents: two populations that have this property with respect to each other are said to "nick." For all we know, there are ethnic groups that have never had members intermarry but would produce really formidable offspring if they ever did.

Of course, the real point of that comment was to suggest an experimental program with, say, 100 ethnic groups, that involved systematically testing interfertility (i.e. making babies) in all 10,000 possible combinations: a vast mating matrix. I would say that we know the results of only one row of that matrix; the Irish and everybody else.

2B: "Of course the elephant in the bedroom is the huge gap between average black and average white IQ. Whites had to grapple with and survive ice age conditions. Blacks didn't. That's the the thinking as to why the gap exists." In other words, is the denial of the idea that substantial differences between population groups exist finally down to people wanting to avoid the black/white IQ difference?

GC: Nobody knows the historical/prehistorical causes of the gap. As for the motivation being a desire to avoid discussing or admitting black/white differences: partly, but there are other drivers, I think.

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What should you do if you are confronted by a terrorist?

2009-02-11T17:04:00.000+05:30

Every citizen should be made to understand that offence is the best form of defense. A terrorist carrying a weapon will use it to bring maximum destruction. The fear factor induced primarily by ignorance is way too advantageous to the terrorist. This myth of an assault rifle being disastrous should be killed and we should realize that it is the man behind the weapon and not the weapon which needs to be addressed. If the man behind the weapon is weak, a state of art weapon is equivalent to that of a block of wood. Soldiers who have had occasion to demonstrate courage under fire would perhaps be the first to accept that almost no one is devoid of fear when bullets fly. An understanding of the real destructive power of the enemy, training, being in a ‘kill or be killed’ situation and the knowledge that ‘offense is the best form of defense’ is what allows soldiers to overcome their fear and do the seemingly impossible. I am not suggesting that we train every citizen to be a soldier, but if we can do just enough so that every citizen is aware of the basics of what is the real capability of the commonly used ‘terror weapons’ and if we can educate them on how to react in adverse situations, we may have done our bit. Well-trained, well-equipped and effective defence and law enforcement agencies are a definite need for any viable democratic society to overcome the scourge of terrorism. What is equally important is a very aware, educated and determined citizenry so that we are not being seen as easy prey in a soft state.

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How your brain creates God ?

2009-02-10T17:14:00.001+05:30

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human. Until recently, science has largely shied away from asking why. "It's not that religion is not important," says Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, "it's that the taboo nature of the topic has meant there has been little progress."

The origin of religious belief is something of a mystery, but in recent years scientists have started to make suggestions. One leading idea is that religion is an evolutionary adaptation that makes people more likely to survive and pass their genes onto the next generation. In this view, shared religious belief helped our ancestors form tightly knit groups that cooperated in hunting, foraging and childcare, enabling these groups to outcompete others. In this way, the theory goes, religion was selected for by evolution, and eventually permeated every human society (New Scientist, 28 January 2006, p 30)

The religion-as-an-adaptation theory doesn't wash with everybody, however. As anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor points out, the benefits of holding such unfounded beliefs are questionable, in terms of evolutionary fitness. "I don't think the idea makes much sense, given the kinds of things you find in religion," he says. A belief in life after death, for example, is hardly compatible with surviving in the here-and-now and propagating your genes. Moreover, if there are adaptive advantages of religion, they do not explain its origin, but simply how it spread.

An alternative being put forward by Atran and others is that religion emerges as a natural by-product of the way the human mind works.

That's not to say that the human brain has a "god module" in the same way that it has a language module that evolved specifically for acquiring language. Rather, some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. "There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired," says Bloom.

Much of that evidence comes from experiments carried out on children, who are seen as revealing a "default state" of the mind that persists, albeit in modified form, into adulthood. "Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

So how does the brain conjure up gods? One of the key factors, says Bloom, is the fact that our brains have separate cognitive systems for dealing with living things - things with minds, or at least volition - and inanimate objects.

This separation happens very early in life. Bloom and colleagues have shown that babies as young as five months make a distinction between inanimate objects and people. Shown a box moving in a stop-start way, babies show surprise. But a person moving in the same way elicits no surprise. To babies, objects ought to obey the laws of physics and move in a predictable way. People, on the other hand, have their own intentions and goals, and move however they choose.

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Unusual

2009-02-06T11:00:00.000+05:30

Unusual blog...

Tricks Of Tears

2009-02-04T15:40:00.000+05:30

I cry when I’m happy, I cry when I’m sad, I may cry when I’m sharing something that’s of great significance to me,” said Nancy Reiley, 62, who works at a women’s shelter in Tampa, Fla., “and for some reason I sometimes will cry when I’m in a public speaking situation.

“It has nothing to do with feeling sad or vulnerable. There’s no reason I can think of why it happens, but it does.”

Now, some researchers say that the common psychological wisdom about crying — crying as a healthy catharsis — is incomplete and misleading. Having a “good cry” can and usually does allow people to recover some mental balance after a loss. But not always and not for everyone, argues a review article in the current issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science. Placing such high expectation on a tearful breakdown most likely sets some people up for emotional confusion afterward.

This call for a more nuanced view of crying stems partly from a critique of previous studies. Over the years, psychologists have confirmed many common observations about crying. It is infectious. Women break down more easily and more often than men, for reasons that are very likely biochemical as well as cultural. And the physical experience mirrors the psychological one: heart rate and breathing peak during the storm and taper off as the sky clears.

When asked about tearful episodes, most people, as expected, insist that the crying allowed them to absorb a blow, to feel better and even to think more clearly about something or someone they had lost.

At least that’s the way they remember it — and that’s the rub, said Jonathan Rottenberg, a psychologist at the University of South Florida and a co-author of the review paper. “A lot of the data supporting the conventional wisdom is based on people thinking back over time,” he said, “and it’s contaminated by people’s beliefs about what crying should do.”

Just as researchers have found that people tend, with time, to selectively remember the best parts of their vacations (the swim-up bars and dancing) and forget the headaches, so crying may also appear cathartic in retrospect. Memory tidies up the mixed episodes — the times when tears brought more shame than relief, more misery than company.

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Success And Ganesha A Superstar ....

2009-01-22T14:42:00.003+05:30

It’s always been a mystery to me that why someone makes it in life and someone does not. It is not as simple as having talent or luck. I think it’s also a lot to do with a subconscious programming not necessarily designed or intended.

Take the example of films...Over the years I have seen umpteen examples of actors and technicians who I thought high of, who didn’t make it and who I thought were mediocre make it to the top. Not that I am an authority but at the point and time of me thinking that, everyone else around me shared the same opinion.

The most simplistic explanation for this is the S word “success”. But what does it really mean? Success is primarily an endorsement of a large number of people that so and so is very very good. But how does one know what so many people are actually thinking? A case in point is Gaddar and Lagaan. Both of them released on the same day and Gaddar is a far superior hit to Lagaan. Today years after their release I did not meet one single person who claimed Gaddar to be his favourite but you will find plenty for Lagaan. So who were the people who loved Gaddar? Did they come quietly from Mars saw the film and went back again?

Jokes apart the people who liked Gaddar most probably would be the so-called masses whose opinions would not matter to the nose-in-the-air critics and the media. So the moment they don’t endorse or keep praising the film the people who liked Gaddar also in time would slowly start being apologetic about liking Gaddar as they will be programmed to think that there is something wrong with them for liking Gaddar.

There was an aunt of mine who just accompanied someone visiting Satya Sai Baba and when she came back she put a huge portrait of his in her house and she claimed that the very fact that so many thousands believe in him is proof enough for her that he is divine. I countered her by saying that if she actually does not believe, and just because she thinks thousands others believe, she also believes, then what if each one of those thousands also were thinking the same like her. In effect this means nothing but a huge collective belief in a lie. Am not talking here about Satya Sai Baba but I am questioning the basis of their belief in him.

Also I could never understand for what reason Kartika is a lesser God than his brother Ganesha. Mythology does not say Kartika is lesser and neither did it say Ganesha is more extra-ordinary. But for some reason Heaven’s PR department propped up Ganesha and played down Kartika. So the moment they promoted Ganesha in such loud profound voices even as illogical as a story of his origin will also be looked up to by the devotees (audience) in awe (Read as in a illogical film also becoming a super-hit).

If anyone in the poor film industry were to tell a story like this the writer will be kicked out for ever. “Young Ganesha was standing guard outside when his mother Parvati is taking a bath Shiva returns and Ganesha stops him and in anger Shiva cuts off the kid’s head. (I think the world can learn a few lessons in brutality from Shiva.) And when Parvati tells him who the kid is, Shiva goes outside cuts an elephant’s head (Are the wild-life people PETA etc listening) and sticks it on his son’s head.” Apart from this and being momma’s boy I couldn’t get what else Ganesha did to get that divine status and of course we never ever bothered to ask about Kartika because we were programmed to ignore him.

For all practical purposes Kartika is better looking, seems smarter (at least he does not have any funny illogical stories around him comparable to those of Ganesha) and also there is no account in mythology of him being less powerful than Ganesha or whatever.

Then why is Ganesha a superstar and why is Kartika not?

Obama's Speech Cut...

2009-01-21T11:28:00.003+05:30

First....
“Today, I say to you that the challenges we face are real,” Mr. Obama said in the address, delivered from the west front of the Capitol. “They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America, they will be met.”

Second...

"whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous."

Third...

“Now there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans,” he said. “Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage.”

Fourth...

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility,” he said, “a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly.”

Fifth..

“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”

Tree Frogs Are Capable Of Gravity-Defying Feats

2009-01-08T17:06:00.001+05:30

Like wall-hugging geckos, tree frogs are capable of gravity-defying feats of the feet. But new research shows that the two species cling to surfaces in markedly different ways.

The "dry" grip of geckos relies on molecular bonds—firm but easily broken—between tiny fibers in the animal's toe pads and the surfaces on which they stand. But scientists found that frogs use a different approach to hold on.

Biologist Jon Barnes of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who led the research, used an atomic force microscope (AFM), which can provide images on the scale of billionths of a meter, to scan the feet of White's tree frogs. To the naked eye, the frogs' toe pads appear patterned with flat-topped, hexagonal cells surrounded by grooves filled with mucus. On closer inspection, however, Barnes discovered that the tops were not flat at all but rather were covered by tightly packed "nanopillars," each with a small dimple in the end, which generate powerful friction against the surfaces they contact.

"The AFM can also be used to measure the stiffness of the outer layer of the foot," says Barnes, who published the findings in The Journal of Experimental Biology. "It turns out to be of the same order as silicone rubber. Soft materials are important, for they allow the pad to achieve close contact, following the contours of the surface to which the frog is adhering."

Although mucus can be a lubricant, for tree frogs the substance—only 1.5 times more viscous (resistant to flow) than plain water—serves as a "wet" adhesive. The reason: the nanopillars and larger structures on the toe pads come in direct contact with surfaces. As a result, the small amount of wet mucus between these protrusions provides adhesive forces.

Tree frogs can climb most surfaces, from sheer leaves to glass, with ease, although they do not fare so well on dry, rough materials—presumably because they cannot produce enough mucus to create a continuous fluid layer beneath their pads on such a surface, Barnes says. "In support of this idea is the fact that adhesion dramatically improves if the rough surface is wet," he notes.

Walter Federle, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge in England who studies adhesion, says the study sheds light on the material properties of frog toes at the microscopic level and clarifies that nanopillars play "an important role in adhesion." But he notes that the exact function of these tiny columns is still unclear.

Research on both geckos and tree frogs has tantalized materials scientists with visions of smart adhesives for human applications. For example, a paper in the March 2008 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface estimated that a car brake equipped with a modest patch of synthetic gecko-grip could stop a 2,200-pound (1,000-kilogram) vehicle traveling 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour in about 16 feet (five meters).

Barnes and his colleagues believe understanding the adhesive properties of tree frog feet could lead to better tire design, and perhaps even a nonslip shoe, although they first need to demonstrate that the adhesion—and, equally important, the rapid disengagement from the surface—is maintained on structures much larger than an amphibian's toe. Another possible application of the work, Barnes says, is the creation of a coating to protect nerves during surgery by holding them delicately out of the way of the scalpel.

The power of happiness

2009-01-07T17:00:00.000+05:30

Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.

The study of more than 4,700 people who were followed over 20 years found that people who are happy or become happy boost the chances that someone they know will be happy. The power of happiness, moreover, can span another degree of separation, elevating the mood of that person's husband, wife, brother, sister, friend or next-door neighbor.

"You would think that your emotional state would depend on your own choices and actions and experience," said Nicholas A. Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard University who helped conduct the study published online today by BMJ, a British medical journal. "But it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people to whom you are not directly connected. Happiness is contagious."
One person's happiness can affect another's for as much as a year, the researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the "infectiousness" of that emotion appears to be far weaker.

Previous studies have documented the common experience that one person's emotions can influence another's -- laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one's spirits. But the new study is the first to find that happiness can spread across groups for an extended period.

When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.

The research follows previous work by Christakis and co-author James H. Fowler that found that obesity also appears to spread from person to person, as does the likelihood of quitting smoking. The researchers have been using detailed records originally collected by the Framingham Heart Study, a long-running project that has explored a host of health issues, to construct and analyze detailed maps of social networks.

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Future As A Present.....

2009-01-03T16:27:00.001+05:30

When time came to an end, the gods decided to run a final experiment. They wanted to be prepared after the big crunch for potential trajectories of life after the next big bang. For their experiment they choose two planets in the universe where evolution had resulted in similar developments of life. For planet ONE they decided to interfer with evolution by allowing only ONE species to develop their brain to a high level of complexity. This species referred to itself as being „intelligent“; members of this species were very proud about their achievements in science, technology, the arts or philosophy.

For planet TWO the gods altered just one variable. For this planet they allowed that TWO species with high intelligence would develop. The two species shared the same environment, but — and this was crucial for the divine experiment — they did not communicate directly with each other. Direct communication was limited to their own species only. Thus, one species could not inform directly the other one about future plans; each species could only register what has happened to their common environment.

The question was how life would be managed on planet ONE and on planet TWO. As for any organism, the goal was on both planets to maintain an internal balance or homeostasis by using optimally the available resources. As long as the members of the different samples were not too intelligent stability was maintained. However, when they became more intelligent and according to their own view really smart, and when the frame of judgment changed, i.e. individual interests became dominant, trouble was preprogrammed. Being driven by uncontrolled personal greed, more resources were drawn form the environment than could be replaced. Which planet would do better with such species of too much intelligence to maintain the conditions of life?

Data analysis after the experimental period of 200 years showed that planet TWO did much better to maintain stability of the environment. Why this? The species on planet TWO had to monitor always the consequences of actions of the other species. If one would take too many resources for individual satisfaction, sanctions by the other species would be the consequence. Thus, drawing resources from the environment was controlled by the other species in a bi-directional way resulting in a dynamic equilibrium.

When the gods published their results, they drew the following conclusions: Long-term stability in complex systems like in social systems with members of too much intelligence can be maintained if two complementary systems interact with each other. In case only one system like on planet ONE has been developed it is recommended to adopt for regulative purposes a second system. For social systems it should be the next generation. Their future environment should be made present both conceptually and emotionally. By doing so long-term stabillity is guaranteed.

Being good brain scientists the gods knew that making the future present is not only a matter of abstract or explicit knowledge. This is necessary but not sufficient for action resulting in a long-term equilibrium. Decisions have to be anchored in the emotional systems as well, i.e. an empathic relationship between the members of the two systems has to be developed. If the future becomes present, it can future be a present.

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

2009-01-03T15:46:00.000+05:30

THE DISCOVERY OF INTELLIGENT LIFE FROM SOMEWHERE ELSE

We're talking about changing everything — not just our abilities, relationships, politics, economy, religion, biology, language, mathematics, history and future, but all of these things at once. The only single event I can see shifting pretty much everything at once is our first encounter with intelligent, extra-terrestrial life.

The development of any of our current capabilities — genetics, computing, language, even compassion — all feel like incremental advances in existing abilities. As we've seen before, the culmination of one branch of inquiry always just opens the door to a new a new branch, and never yields the wholesale change of state we anticipated. Nothing we've done in the past couple of hundred thousand years has truly changed everything, so I don't see us doing anything in the future that would change everything, either.

No, I have the feeling that the only way to change everything is for something be done to us, instead. Just imagining the encounter of humanity with an "other" implies a shift beyond the solipsism that has characterized our civilization since our civilization was born. It augurs a reversal as big as the encounter of an individual with its offspring, or a creature with its creator. Even if it's the result of something we've done, it's now independent of us and our efforts.

To meet a neighbor, whether outer, inner, cyber- or hyper- spatial, finally turns us into an "us." To encounter an other, whether a god, a ghost, a biological sibling, an independently evolved life form, or an emergent intelligence of our own creation, changes what it means to be human.

Our computers may never inform us that they are self-aware, extra-terrestrials may never broadcast a signal to our SETI dishes, and interdimensional creatures may never appear to those who aren't taking psychedelics at the time — but if any of them did, it would change everything.

Why do we write?

2008-12-27T17:00:00.000+05:30

Why do we write? I imagine that each of us has his or her own response to this simple question. One has predispositions, a milieu, circumstances. Shortcomings, too. If we are writing, it means that we are not acting. That we find ourselves in difficulty when we are faced with reality, and so we have chosen another way to react, another way to communicate, a certain distance, a time for reflection.

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write–and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy–I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war. Not war in the sense of a specific time of major upheaval, where historical events are experienced, such as the French campaign on the battlefield at Valmy, as recounted by Goethe on the German side and my ancestor François on the side of the armée révolutionnaire. That must have been a moment full of exaltation and pathos. No, for me war is what civilians experience, very young children first and foremost. Not once has war ever seemed to me to be an historical moment. We were hungry, we were frightened, we were cold, and that is all. I remember seeing the troops of Field Marshal Rommel pass by under my window as they headed towards the Alps, seeking a passage to the north of Italy and Austria. I do not have a particularly vivid memory of that event. I do recall, however, that during the years which followed the war we were deprived of everything, in particular books and writing materials. For want of paper and ink, I made my first drawings and wrote my first texts on the back of the ration books, using a carpenter's blue and red pencil. This left me with a certain preference for rough paper and ordinary pencils. For want of any children's books, I read my grandmother's dictionaries. They were like a marvellous gateway, through which I embarked on a discovery of the world, to wander and daydream as I looked at the illustrated plates, and the maps, and the lists of unfamiliar words. The first book I wrote, at the age of six or seven, was entitled, moreover, Le Globe à mariner. Immediately afterwards came a biography of an imaginary king named Daniel III—could he have been Swedish?—and a tale told by a seagull. It was a time of reclusion. Children were scarcely allowed outdoors to play, because in the fields and gardens near my grandmother's there were land mines. I recall that one day as I was out walking by the sea I came across an enclosure surrounded by barbed wire: on the fence was a sign in French and in German that threatened intruders with a forbidding message, and a skull to make things perfectly clear.

It is easy, in such a context, to understand the urge to escape—hence, to dream, and put those dreams in writing. My maternal grandmother, moreover, was an extraordinary storyteller, and she set aside the long afternoons for the telling of stories. They were always very imaginative, and were set in a forest—perhaps it was in Africa, or in Mauritius, the forest of Macchabée—where the main character was a monkey who had a great talent for mischief, and who always wriggled his way out of the most perilous situations. Later, I would travel to Africa and spend time there, and discover the real forest, one where there were almost no animals. But a District Officer in the village of Obudu, near the border with Cameroon, showed me how to listen for the drumming of the gorillas on a nearby hill, pounding their chests. And from that journey, and the time I spent there (in Nigeria, where my father was a bush doctor), it was not subject matter for future novels that I brought back, but a sort of second personality, a daydreamer who was fascinated with reality at the same time, and this personality has stayed with me all my life—and has constituted a contradictory dimension, a strangeness in myself that at times has been a source of suffering. Given the slowness of life, it has taken me the better part of my existence to understand the significance of this contradiction.

Books entered my life at a later period. When my father's inheritance was divided, at the time of his expulsion from the family home in Moka, in Mauritius, he managed to put together several libraries consisting of the books that remained. It was then that I understood a truth not immediately apparent to children, that books are a treasure more precious than any real property or bank account. It was in those volumes—most of them ancient, bound tomes—that I discovered the great works of world literature: Don Quijote, illustrated by Tony Johannot; La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes; the Ingoldsby Legends; Gulliver's Travels; Victor Hugo's great, inspired novels Quatre-vingt-treize, Les Travailleurs de la Mer, and L'Homme qui rit. Balzac's Les Contes drôlatiques, as well. But the books which had the greatest impact on me were the anthologies of travellers' tales, most of them devoted to India, Africa, and the Mascarene islands, or the great histories of exploration by Dumont d'Urville or the Abbé Rochon, as well as Bougainville, Cook, and of course The Travels of Marco Polo. In the mediocre life of a little provincial town dozing in the sun, after those years of freedom in Africa, those books gave me a taste for adventure, gave me a sense of the vastness of the real world, a means to explore it through instinct and the senses rather than through knowledge. In a way, too, those books gave me, from very early on, an awareness of the contradictory nature of a child's existence: a child will cling to a sanctuary, a place to forget violence and competitiveness, and also take pleasure in looking through the windowpane to watch the outside world go by.

Shortly before I received the—to me, astonishing—news that the Swedish Academy was awarding me this distinction, I was re-reading a little book by Stig Dagerman that I am particularly fond of: a collection of political essays entitled Essäer och texter. It was no mere chance that I was re-reading this bitter, abrasive book. I was preparing a trip to Sweden to receive the prize which the Association of the Friends of Stig Dagerman had awarded to me the previous summer, to visit the places where the writer had lived as a child. I have always been particularly receptive to Dagerman's writing, to the way in which he combines a child-like tenderness with naïveté and sarcasm. And to his idealism. To the clear-sightedness with which he judges his troubled, post-war era—that of his mature years, and of my childhood. One sentence in particular caught my attention, and seemed to be addressed to me at that very moment, for I had just published a novel entitled Ritournelle de la faim. That sentence, or that passage rather, is as follows: "How is it possible on the one hand, for example, to behave as if nothing on earth were more important than literature, and on the other fail to see that wherever one looks, people are struggling against hunger and will necessarily consider that the most important thing is what they earn at the end of the month? Because this is where he (the writer) is confronted with a new paradox: while all he wanted was to write for those who are hungry, he now discovers that it is only those who have plenty to eat who have the leisure to take notice of his existence." (The Writer and Consciousness)

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New Conscious Wisdom

2008-12-19T15:10:00.001+05:30

Spiritual exploration and the debunking of religion were other features of the 60s that people have tended to either ridicule or denounce, but we seem to be revisiting those themes as well. Before the presidential campaigns kicked into high gear, David Brooks, a conservative columnist for The New York Times, wrote an essay called "The Neural Buddhists." In it he called arguments defending the existence of God against atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins easy, and predicted that the real challenge would "come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits." He continued: "In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That's bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation."

The phrase "neural Buddhists" calls up the ways in which the conclusions of modern neuroscience and a collection of ancient meditation practices developed in Asia have come to similar experiential and empirical conclusions about a number of things, including the ultimate nonexistence of the individual self or surface social ego. Such ideas, of course, are part of a much broader interest in "mysticism" and "spirituality," themselves, perhaps ironically, markers of that quintessentially modern and eminently democratic turn to the individual as the most reliable source of religious authority and insight.

Significantly, the modern, Western use of those terms — mysticism and spirituality — arose in the middle of the 19th century at the exact moment that science, in the form of an ascending Darwinism, was first seriously challenging institutional religion. This, of course, is a cultural war that is still very much with us in the present debates around religion and science, belief and atheism, creationism and evolution. Add to that volatile mix the violent terrorism of radical Islam, the likely role of modern technology and carbon-burning fuels in global warming and the environmental crisis, and the ability of institutions and governments to monitor our thoughts and words in extraordinarily precise and effective ways, and you have all the ingredients for ... what?

What do neural Buddhists, individualist spiritualities, cultural wars over science and religion and creationism and evolution, a nature-hating technology, the violence of extreme religious belief, and potentially omniscient government surveillance all have in common? They were all core elements in the life and work of the literary prophet Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).

Perhaps not coincidentally, a kind of Huxley renaissance is under way. According to the Los Angeles Times, Brave New World is being made into a film, to be directed by Ridley Scott and produced by George DiCaprio, starring his son, Leonardo. New editions of Huxley's books are in the works, and serious global interest in his writing is on the rise, particularly in Eastern Europe. It is worth returning to Huxley, then, not as he has been for us in the past — the author of the prophetic, dystopian Brave New World — but as he might be for us in the future.

Huxley was an iconic literary figure who embodied many of the tensions and coincidences of our contemporary intellectual scene, particularly those orbiting around those warring twin Titans, science and religion. On the scientific side, Aldous was the grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, the great English defender of Charles Darwin — winner of the first great cultural war over religion and science — and the man who, in 1869, coined the word "agnosticism." Other than Darwin himself, T.H. Huxley, a biologist, probably did more than anyone else to lay the cultural foundation for our present scientific worldview. The results, as is well known but not always admitted, were devastating for traditional religious belief. W.H. Mallock captured the tone in 1878: "It is said that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing," he wrote. "One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying." One can only guess what Mallock would say now.

Aldous's older brother was Sir Julian Huxley, a well-known evolutionary biologist. Sir Julian thought that there is "one world stuff" that manifests both material and mental properties, depending upon whether it is viewed from without (matter) or from within (mind). The mental and the material aspects of reality, in other words, are two sides of the same cosmic coin. Aldous would arrive at a nearly identical position, drawn not from science but from comparative mysticism, and described in his still popular The Perennial Philosophy (1945). His primary inspiration seems to have been Advaita Vedanta, a classical Indian philosophy that captured much of elite Hindu thought and practice in the 19th century and subsequently influenced the reception of Hinduism among American intellectuals and artists in the 20th.

But Huxley was suspicious of gurus and gods of any sort, and he finally aligned himself with a deep stream of unorthodox doctrine and practice that he found running through all the Asian religions, which, he proclaimed in Island (his last novel, published in 1962), was a "new conscious Wisdom ... prophetically glimpsed in Zen and Taoism and Tantra." That worldview — which Huxley also linked to ancient fertility cults, the study of sexuality in the modern West, and Darwinian biology — emerges from the refusal of all traditional dualisms; that is, it rejects any religious or moral system that separates the world and the divine, matter and mind, sex and spirit, purity and pollution (and that's rejecting a lot). Put more positively, Huxley's new Wisdom focuses on the embodied particularities of moment-to-moment experience, including sexual experience, as the place of "luminous bliss."

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Darwinian Dating........

2008-12-10T15:57:00.003+05:30

Now, men and women have probably been a mystery to one another since the time human beings were in trees; one reason people developed so many rules around courtship was that they needed some way to bridge the Great Sexual Divide. By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him. Sure, these rules could end in a midlife crisis and an unhealthy fondness for gin, but their advantage was that anyone with an emotional IQ over 70 could follow them.

Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.

By the time men reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. Small wonder if they initially assume that the women they meet are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex.

But then, when an SYM walks into a bar and sees an attractive woman, it turns out to be nothing like that. The woman may be hoping for a hookup, but she may also be looking for a husband, a co-parent, a sperm donor, a relationship, a threesome, or a temporary place to live. She may want one thing in November and another by Christmas. “I’ve gone through phases in my life where I bounce between serial monogamy, Very Serious Relationships and extremely casual sex,” writes Megan Carpentier on Jezebel, a popular website for young women. “I’ve slept next to guys on the first date, had sex on the first date, allowed no more than a cheek kiss, dispensed with the date-concept altogether after kissing the guy on the way to his car, fucked a couple of close friends and, more rarely, slept with a guy I didn’t care if I ever saw again.” Okay, wonders the ordinary guy with only middling psychic powers, which is it tonight?

In fact, young men face a bewildering multiplicity of female expectations and desire. Some women are comfortable asking, “What’s your name again?” when they look across the pillow in the morning. But plenty of others are looking for Mr. Darcy. In her interviews with 100 unmarried, college-educated young men and women, Jillian Straus, author of Unhooked Generation, discovered that a lot of women had “personal scripts”—explicit ideas about how a guy should act, such as walking his date home or helping her on with her coat. Straus describes a 26-year-old journalist named Lisa fixed up for a date with a 29-year-old social worker. When he arrives at her door, she’s delighted to see that he’s as good-looking as advertised. But when they walk to his car, he makes his first mistake: he fails to open the car door for her. Mistake Number Two comes a moment later: “So, what would you like to do?” he asks. “Her idea of a date is that the man plans the evening and takes the woman out,” Straus explains. But how was the hapless social worker supposed to know that? In fact, Doesn’t-Open-the-Car-Door Guy might well have been chewed out by a female colleague for reaching for the office door the previous week.

The cultural muddle is at its greatest when the dinner check arrives. The question of who grabs it is a subject of endless discussion on the hundreds of Internet dating sites. The general consensus among women is that a guy should pay on a first date: they see it as a way for him to demonstrate interest. Many men agree, but others find the presumption confusing. Aren’t the sexes equal? In fact, at this stage in their lives, women may well be in a better position to pick up the tab: according to a 2005 study by Queens College demographer Andrew Beveridge, college-educated women working full-time are earning more than their male counterparts in a number of cities, including New York, Chicago, Boston, and Minneapolis.

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Magic Of Magicians...Trick Or Science?

2008-12-10T15:10:00.004+05:30

Magicians consider the covert form of misdirection more elegant than the overt form. But neuroscientists want to know what kinds of neural and brain mechanisms enable a trick to work. If the artistry of magic is to be adapted by neuroscience, neuroscientists must understand what kinds of cognitive processes that artistry is tapping into.

Perhaps the first study to correlate the perception of magic with a physiological measurement was published in 2005 by psychologists Gustav Kuhn of Durham University in England and Benjamin W. Tatler of the University of Dundee in Scotland. The two investigators measured the eye movements of observers while Kuhn, who is also a magician, made a cigarette “disappear” by dropping it below a table. One of their goals was to determine whether observers missed the trick because they were not looking in the right place at the right time or because they did not attend to it, no matter which direction they were looking. The results were clear: it made no difference where they were looking.

A similar study of another magic trick, the “vanishing-ball illusion,” provides further evidence that the magician is manipulating the spectators’ attention at a high cognitive level; the direction of their gaze is not critical to the effect. In the vanishing-ball illusion the magician begins by tossing a ball straight up and catching it several times without incident. Then, on the final toss, he only pretends to throw the ball. His head and eyes follow the upward trajectory of an imaginary ball, but instead of tossing the ball, he secretly palms it. What most spectators perceive, however, is that the (unthrown) ball ascends—and then vanishes in midair.

The year after his study with Tatler, Kuhn and neurobiologist Michael F. Land of the University of Sussex in England discovered that the spectators’ gaze did not point to where they themselves claimed to have seen the ball vanish. The finding suggested the illusion did not fool the brain systems responsible for the spectators’ eye motions. Instead, Kuhn and Land concluded, the magician’s head and eye movements were critical to the illusion, because they covertly redirected the spectators’ attentional focus (rather than their gaze) to the predicted position of the ball. The neurons that responded to the implied motion of the ball suggested by the magician’s head and eye movements are found in the same visual areas of the brain as neurons that are sensitive to real motion. If implied and real motion activate similar neural circuits, perhaps it is no wonder that the illusion seems so realistic.

Kuhn and Land hypothesized that the vanishing ball may be an example of “representational momentum.” The final position of a moving object that disappears is perceived to be farther along its path than its actual final position—as if the predicted position was extrapolated from the motion that had just gone before.

More Tools of the Trickery Trade
Spectators often try to reconstruct magic tricks to understand what happened during the show—after all, the more the observer tries (and fails) to understand the trick, the more it seems as if it is “magic.” For their part, magicians often dare their audiences to discover their methods, say, by “proving” that a hat is empty or an assistant’s dress is too tight to conceal a second dress underneath. Virtually everything done is done to make the reconstruction as hard as possible, via misdirection.

But change blindness and inattentional blindness are not the only kinds of cognitive illusions magicians can pull out of a hat. Suppose a magician needs to raise a hand to execute a trick. Teller, half of the renowned stage magic act known as Penn & Teller, explains that if he raises his hand for no apparent reason, he is more likely to draw suspicion than if he makes a hand gesture—such as adjusting his glasses or scratching his head—that seems natural or spontaneous. To magicians, such gestures are known as “informing the motion.”

Unspoken assumptions and implied information are also important to both the perception of a trick and its subsequent reconstruction. Magician James Randi (“the Amaz!ng Randi”) notes that spectators are more easily lulled into accepting suggestions and unspoken information than direct assertions. Hence, in the reconstruction the spectator may remember implied suggestions as if they were direct proof.

Psychologists Petter Johansson and Lars Hall, both at Lund University in Sweden, and their colleagues have applied this and other magic techniques in developing a completely novel way of addressing neuroscientific questions. They presented picture pairs of female faces to naive experimental subjects and asked the subjects to choose which face in each pair they found more attractive. On some trials the subjects were also asked to describe the reasons for their choice. Unknown to the subjects, the investigators occasionally used a sleight-of-hand technique, learned from a professional magician named Peter Rosengren, to switch one face for the other—after the subjects made their choice. Thus, for the pairs that were secretly manipulated, the result of the subject’s choice became the opposite of his or her initial intention.

Intriguingly, the subjects noticed the switch in only 26 percent of all the manipulated pairs. But even more surprising, when the subjects were asked to state the reasons for their choice in a manipulated trial, they confabulated to justify the outcome—an outcome that was the opposite of their actual choice! Johansson and his colleagues call the phenomenon “choice blindness.” By tacitly but strongly suggesting the subjects had already made a choice, the investigators were able to study how people justify their choices—even choices they do not actually make.

The Pickpocket Who Picks Your Brain
Misdirection techniques might also be developed out of the skills of the pickpocket. Such thieves, who often ply their trade in dense public spaces, rely heavily on socially based misdirection—gaze contact, body contact and invasion of the personal space of the victim, or “mark.” Pickpockets may also move their hands in distinct ways, depending on their present purpose. They may sweep out a curved path if they want to attract the mark’s attention to the entire path of motion, or they may trace a fast, linear path if they want to reduce attention to the path and quickly shift the mark’s attention to the final position. The neuroscientific underpinnings of these maneuvers are unknown, but our research collaborator Apollo Robbins, a professional pickpocket, has emphasized that the two kinds of motions are essential to effectively misdirecting the mark. We have proposed several possible, testable explanations.

One proposal is that curved and straight hand motions activate two distinct control systems in the brain for moving the eyes. The “pursuit” system controls the eyes when they follow smoothly moving objects, whereas the “saccadic” system controls movements in which the eyes jump from one visual target to the next. So we have hypothesized that the pickpocket’s curved hand motions may trigger eye control by the mark’s pursuit system, whereas fast, straight motions may cause the saccadic system to take the lead. Then if the mark’s pursuit system locks onto the curved trajectory of the pickpocket’s hand, the center of the mark’s vision may be drawn away from the location of a hidden theft. And if fast, straight motions engage the mark’s saccadic system, the pickpocket gains the advantage that the mark’s vision is suppressed while the eye darts from point to point. (The phenomenon is well known in the vision sciences as saccadic suppression.)

Another possible explanation for the distinct hand motions is that curved motions may be perceptually more salient than linear ones and hence attract stronger attention. If so, only the attentional system of the brain—not any control system for eye motions—may be affected by the pickpocket’s manual misdirection. Our earlier studies have shown that the curves and corners of objects are more salient and generate stronger brain activity than straight edges. The reason is probably that sharp curves and corners are less predictable and redundant (and therefore more novel and informative) than straight edges. By the same token, curved trajectories may be less redundant, and therefore more salient, than straight ones.

Detail on topic..

The Teasing Gap

2008-12-10T15:02:00.001+05:30

A FEW YEARS AGO my daughters and I were searching for sand crabs on a white-sand beach near Monterey. A group of sixth graders descended on us, clad in the blue trousers and pressed white shirts of their parochial school. Once lost in the sounds of the surf, away from their teacher’s gaze, they called one another by nicknames and mocked the way one laughed, another walked. Noogies and rib pokes, headlocks and bear hugs caught the unsuspecting off guard. Two boys dangled a girl over the waves. Three girls tugged a boy’s sagging pants down. Dog piles broke out. In a surprise attack, one girl nearly dropped a dead crab down a boy’s pants.

As they departed in sex-segregated lines, my daughters stood transfixed. Serafina asked me, “Why did that girl try to put the crab in the boy’s pants?” “Because she likes him,” I responded. This was an explanation Serafina and her older sister, Natalie, only partly understood. What I witnessed might be called “the teasing gap.”

Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools. Accused teasers are now made to utter their teases in front of the class, under the stern eye of teachers. Children are given detention for sarcastic comments on the playground. Schools are decreed “teasing free.”

And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke. Marriage counselors encourage direct criticism over playful provocation. No-taunting rules have even arisen in the N.B.A. and the N.F.L. to discourage “trash talking.”

The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. Bullies steal, punch, kick, harass and humiliate. Sexual harassers grope, leer and make crude, often threatening passes. They’re pretty ineffectual flirts. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.

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Is it strange for boys to play with dolls?

2008-12-01T12:19:00.001+05:30

Is it strange for boys to play with dolls? Even for parents who generally shun gender stereotypes, the idea of a boy playing with his dolly seems slightly off. But why?

In a humorous essay for Mothering , Joel Troxell struggles with his wife’s insistence on buying a doll for their one-year-old son Nathan. Though the doll is gender-neutral in shape and dress, Troxell feels the need to compensate for this “affront to his masculinity” by telling Nathan that the doll is actually an operative for the US military, and his neutral facial expression means he’s impervious to fear or pain.

Nathan quickly grows tired of the doll, much to his dad’s secret delight. A few months later, however, Nathan’s mom is back at it, looking for bigger and better dolls. Troxell’s “daydreams of Nathan going first round in the NFL draft [are] replaced by disturbing images of him walking across the stage at graduation, sucking his thumb and carrying his doll.”

The author finds that doll play is still associated with outdated gender roles in his mind. He thinks of playing with dolls as childcare practice for girls (a.k.a. future moms and wives), and toy weapons as encouraging boys to develop the hunting skills they’d need to provide for their families.

Eventually, Troxell learns the benefits of boys with dolls: They teach compassion, sensitivity, and responsibility, as well as a practical knowledge of things like holding and feeding a baby. So in reality, Troxell’s wife points out, giving a boy a doll is giving him practice as a good father and a good person who is ready to care for others.

To the kid, his dolly may later be a source of future embarrassment, much like those ubiquitous naked-in-the-tub pictures. But if the values imbued through playing with a “girl’s toy” hold up, he’ll likely have grown to be well-adjusted enough not to care.

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Mumbai Horror--Criminals are not born, they are made

2008-11-28T12:07:00.002+05:30

Criminals are not born, they are made. What made him turn into a terrorist? Every question of this nature has only one answers - Injustice?I am myself constantly trying to understand this.

1) These 19 year-olds could have been brain-washed. In fact, in any army, many soldiers are brain-washed to "kill-kill-kill". Killing does not come naturally to ordinary soldiers.

2) So the question is, what motivates these brain-washers? A sense of injustice (rightly or wrongly) felt. They find brain-washing young 19 year-olds as an easy way out.

Sure, life is unjust. M.K. Gandhi fought injustice by peace, but did the British leave India because of M. K. Gandhi, or the Indian Army created by Subhash Chandra Bose, or a combination of the two?

The way we are going, I think a nuclear war is imminent, then radiation may kill half the world's population, then the world will come to it's senses for about then next 100 years or so, till it is forgotten. After that, history repeats itself.

What are the chances that a mad world leader with a terminal illness and an atomic bomb, will decide to order his brain-washed 19 year olds to use that bomb?

Or we find Mars or a new galaxy inhabitable, and migrate over there. Suddenly, the world will seem small to the material minded people, and we may live happily for the next 1000 years. People won't fight over galaxies, since there will be plenty to pick. Or even then, to keep up with the Jones, people will kill each other for percieved prized galaxies?

World As I See.....

2008-11-26T17:19:00.002+05:30

You see with the sense of your sight, you hear with the sense of your hearing, you feel with the sense of your touch and all these senses are nothing but the functions of your mind which is nothing but a thought and an idea.

When you close your eyes and go to sleep the world ceases to exist and it comes back to you when you wake up in the morning and it comes back in different shapes and forms to every living being on the planet. It follows that each and every one of us have our own world which cannot be really seen or experienced by anybody else no matter how close they are to us.

This world of each of us is made up of a combination of our own individual experiences, sensibilities and our knowledge and intelligence levels, however small, big and different they might be.

So my world is nothing but a collection of my own feelings and thoughts and ideas and it will be a fallacy for me to think that anybody else can really appreciate them at least in the way I meant them. At best I can hope for a few others to connect to some of my thoughts in their own individual ways.
So as long as I am sure that no one really can understand what I stand for, what is the point of even attempting to make them understand?

Money for me ...........

2008-11-21T12:47:00.002+05:30

Money for me has always been a means and never an end. The important point of money is to identify what you want to do with it. Do you want to make money to secure it, buy properties and leave it for your off-spring or do you want to use it for what you wanted it for?

My grandfather was obsessed with saving money. For hours he used to explain about some recurring deposit scheme or some such thing where if you put Rs.1 Lakh how it will become Rs.5 Lakhs in 7 years and this he used to tell to a person who does not think beyond that day, namely me.

Also there was a cousin of mine Shiva whose father was very rich but used to lead a life style of not even taking his car out, always used to keep it under a tarpaulin cloth and travel in a bus.

One day I asked him what is the point of having money if you don't use it for having a better quality of life. He answered saying that if his grandfather and father thought the same then he probably would not have had any money. I answered 'fine if you grandfather works hard saves and saves and gives it to your father and then he saves and saves and gives it to you and then you save and save give it to Raja and then he saves and saves and gives it to his son and what if Raja gives birth to a son like me. All the earlier four generations will become super big fools, Ha Ha!'

Money for me is potential energy and has no meaning unless it is made kinetic.

I would think in a very simplistic way on a philosophical level the origin of money could be explained in this way. When men in the primitive times used to hunt they were like all other animals. Hunt, eat, sleep, hunt again would have been the cycle.

And some time one among them has an idea of agriculture as in wanting to grow a crop. Now others might not understand or share his vision but he will need them to work for him on the crop. So to compensate them for working for his vision which could go wrong or right was where money has been invented and he pays them with that.

So with the money they got, it becomes their energy which they could choose to make it kinetic in whichever way they individually choose to. But again to enjoy money you first need to enjoy the experience of living a life and also to be able to identify what all life's shop can offer you. For instance you can buy the greatest music system that a shop can offer but you can't buy from life's shop a mind which can actually relish the music which plays from it. That mind, you have to have yourself. If not, having money will just amount to securing yourself fearing poverty or to feel a sense of elation in comparison to others who have lesser money than you. Thus it becomes nothing but a measurement for your own self esteem.

If you have a beautiful rich house others will admire especially those who live in the same street, but you yourself will take it for granted in not more than one day after the interior décor is done and from then on you will be only looking at its faults. Also if you have issues with your wife, the same house will look like a horror house from your point of view as you are approaching it after your days work.

Any way before you guys take off on me on this, the point I am trying to make is that no materialistic things like a music system, a car, a house etc can really give you pleasure unless it enhances the pleasure of your own personal feelings with regard to them in one way or the other.

If you are with a person who bores you it won't make a difference if you are sitting in the JW Marriott Coffee Shop and if you are interested in the person a roadside tea shop also will do wonders.

The point of life is to relish your feelings and money can make a point if and only it helps you achieve that.

I don't care for people who want to make money just to save it as I don't understand the point of trying to prepare for losses and death right from the time of being born. Then what's the point of being born?

Ideas and feelings are the only true wealth anyone can really possess and on that account I have always been rich and I will always be, that is at least for myself. Whether that achieves anything in others perception or not it's not my concern as like I said a million times before "I live for myself".

The Art Of Genius

2008-10-15T12:08:00.001+05:30

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth. Orson Welles made his masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” at twenty-five. Herman Melville wrote a book a year through his late twenties, culminating, at age thirty-two, with “Moby-Dick.” Mozart wrote his breakthrough Piano Concerto No. 9 in E-Flat-Major at the age of twenty-one. In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law. How old was T. S. Eliot when he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (“I grow old . . . I grow old”)? Twenty-three. “Poets peak young,” the creativity researcher James Kaufman maintains. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the author of “Flow,” agrees: “The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young.” According to the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, a leading authority on creativity, “Lyric poetry is a domain where talent is discovered early, burns brightly, and then peters out at an early age.”

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.

The examples that Galenson could not get out of his head, however, were Picasso and Cézanne. He was an art lover, and he knew their stories well. Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career—including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” at the age of twenty-six. Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.

Cézanne didn’t. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

Via-The New Yorker

Reason is simple..

2008-10-06T14:43:00.003+05:30

You----
Why do we fight so often for no reason..?

I----Reason is simple..

You----Whats that?

I----Because fights provide us, to all our sleeping cells to wake up and enjoy life..It releases our surpress thoughts,actions,emotions at one go and make us our body,mind, soul feel relax..

You----What rubbish! I dont think so..I think peace give us much relaxation than anything else..

I----You would not understand as East has never been able to understand West and vice vesa..

You----So do you think this debate have no ends...

I----I dont know,only thing I can say is that ponder at both and make your own opinion...

The Most Perfect Work

2008-09-16T16:37:00.000+05:30

ACCORDING to an ancient legend, the first man was made by Jupiter, the first bull by Neptune, and the first house by Minerva. On the completion of their labors, a dispute arose as to which had made the most perfect work. They agreed to appoint Momus as judge, and to abide by his decision. Momus, however, being very envious of the handicraft of each, found fault with all. He first blamed the work of Neptune because he had not made the horns of the bull below his eyes, so he might better see where to strike. He then condemned the work of Jupiter, because he had not placed the heart of man on the outside, that everyone might read the thoughts of the evil disposed and take precautions against the intended mischief. And, lastly, he inveighed against Minerva because she had not contrived iron wheels in the foundation of her house, so its inhabitants might more easily remove if a neighbor proved unpleasant. Jupiter, indignant at such inveterate faultfinding, drove him from his office of judge, and expelled him from the mansions of Olympus.

ONE WINTER

2008-08-04T17:54:00.000+05:30

ONE WINTER a Farmer found a Snake stiff and frozen with cold. He had compassion on it, and taking it up, placed it in his bosom. The Snake was quickly revived by the warmth, and resuming its natural instincts, bit its benefactor, inflicting on him a mortal wound. "Oh," cried the Farmer with his last breath, "I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel."

The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

2008-08-01T17:58:00.001+05:30

A COBBLER

2008-07-31T17:07:00.000+05:30

A COBBLER unable to make a living by his trade and made desperate by poverty, began to practice medicine in a town in which he was not known. He sold a drug, pretending that it was an antidote to all poisons, and obtained a great name for himself by long-winded puffs and advertisements. When the Cobbler happened to fall sick himself of a serious illness, the Governor of the town determined to test his skill. For this purpose he called for a cup, and while filling it with water, pretended to mix poison with the Cobbler's antidote, commanding him to drink it on the promise of a reward. The Cobbler, under the fear of death, confessed that he had no knowledge of medicine, and was only made famous by the stupid clamors of the crowd. The Governor then called a public assembly and addressed the citizens: "Of what folly have you been guilty? You have not hesitated to entrust your heads to a man, whom no one could employ to make even the shoes for their feet."

O my dear sir,

2008-07-29T17:14:00.001+05:30

A MAN, very much annoyed with a Flea, caught him at last, and said, "Who are you who dare to feed on my limbs, and to cost me so much trouble in catching you?' The Flea replied, "O my dear sir, pray spare my life, and destroy me not, for I cannot possibly do you much harm." The Man, laughing, replied, "Now you shall certainly die by mine own hands, for no evil, whether it be small or large, ought to be tolerated."

Evolution isn’t perfect

2008-07-28T17:44:00.000+05:30

If nothing else, it's a handy expression. A kluge, Gary Marcus explains, is "a clumsy or inelegant - yet surprisingly effective - solution to a problem"; a piece of jerry-rigging, in other words. Nature is rife with them, the human body no less so, and it's a wonder our brains can function in the modern world at all.

That, at any rate, is the burden of this cheerily blasphemous book, which succeeds in sticking it both to the intelligent design lobby and to some of evolution's biggest cheerleaders.
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Marcus's major opponent here, though it is never named, is adaptationism - the supposition that any trait of any organism must be doing something useful or it wouldn't be there.

"Natural selection tends to cause the selection of superlatively well engineered functional designs," say John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, founders of evolutionary psychology. But if that's so, Marcus asks, how come our memories are so bad?

You can search a computer database; you have to wait until your memory is jogged if you want to remember something in particular.

And why are our wills so weak? Pleasure is supposed to guide us for the good of our genes, but there's nothing genetically beneficial about eating 65 ice-creams and getting diabetes.

Come to that, why are we so gullible? Why is our language so vague and ambiguous? Why are we so bad at sticking to plans, or keeping track of how we know what we know, or generally doing any of the things you'd hope to be able to do with a superlatively well-engineered brain?

Because it was a kluge. Evolution doesn't, in fact, tend to perfection: it goes with what works and tinkers with it later. That's why the retinas of vertebrates seem to be installed backwards, giving us all blind spots in the middle of our visual fields. Eyes like that do the job well enough, and there's no way of flipping the retina while preserving decent vision across intermediate generations. So we're stuck with them.

Likewise the mind: our meagre reasoning capacity is an afterthought, spatchcocked on to the ancestral systems that have the reins where practical decision-making is concerned. If only our higher mental functions could dominate; alas, the lizard- brain parts have seniority.

Marcus brings a schoolboyish brio to the table, exulting in rude spoonerisms and littering the footnotes with links to Derren Brown on YouTube - indeed, the whole thing might have been pitched at a teenage readership.

Nevertheless, if a kluge has to answer some urgent need, it would be hard to argue that this book qualifies.

Another man exercised about our evolutionary shortcomings is the physicist Leonard Mlodinow. Having, intriguingly, been a scriptwriter on the television series MacGyver, Mlodinow presumably knows all about kluges. But there's no substitute for doing things properly; observation shows that people habitually overlook the role of chance in their dealings, and Mlodinow tries to set us straight.

Thus, despite a clever camouflage job designed to play up buzz concepts, The Drunkard's Walk is a straightforward elementary course in probability and statistics.

It's quite a good one, too. Mlodinow is a sensitive teacher, taking the edge off the maths with anecdotes and historical vignettes drawn from the field's roots in Renaissance gambling dens. Where numbers can't be avoided, he plucks them from the worlds of finance and baseball.

And his moral - that we are all taking a drunkard's walk through life, bounced hither and yon by random forces, and that a little light maths instruction should aid acceptance of this fact - is commendable.

The biggest problem is Mlodinow's oddly old-geezerish persona. He makes winking reference to the relative attractiveness to women of Tom Cruise and Danny DeVito, as if Cruise hadn't jumped the shark and DeVito all but vanished from view.

There's outmoded talk about picking up brunettes in bars and a jocular allusion to Nixon. At one point he harrumphs: "Calculating the gross motion of heavenly bodies...is a simple task performed today by precocious high school students as music blares through their headphones." Headphones, indeed. Whatever next?

It must be admitted that Mlodinow lectures well. Once it's over, though, you do half-expect him to tell you to get off his lawn. Perhaps his ancestral systems are giving him gyp.

Male Lust Is Blind.......?

2008-07-25T17:39:00.000+05:30

Men have long been accused of judging women on looks alone, but even the plainest Jane can get their hormones raging, a study has found.

Research involving a group of male students found that their levels of the hormone testosterone increased to the same extent whether they were talking to a young woman they found attractive – or to one they didn't fancy much at all.

After 300 seconds alone in the same room as a woman they had never met before, and in some cases did not find particularly attractive, the men's testosterone levels of the hormone had shot up by an average of around eight per cent.
The study's authors believe the rise in testosterone may be an automatic and unconscious reaction that has evolved in man when faced with a woman, to prepare him for possible mating opportunities.

The rising levels may then fuel more visible changes in male behaviour that occur in the presence of a woman, including a squaring of shoulders, an upright posture, and greater use of hands - and even, it is suggested, a flaring of the nostrils.

The rise in the male hormone may also be the reason why men are more likely to tell women exaggerated stories about their job, career, education and earnings, the researchers believe. The study, published in the journal Hormones and Behaviour, involved 63 male students aged 21 to 25 who were not aware of the purpose of the study.

Their testosterone levels were measured with saliva samples and they were then taken to another room by a researcher under the guise of being there to solve a sudoku puzzle.

In the same room another man or a woman appeared to be solving a similar puzzle, but he or she was in fact acting as the so-called stimulus.

The women were chosen on the basis of being moderately attractive for the student population.

The researcher then made the excuse that he did not have the correct puzzle for the participant and left the room to get it. The two were then left alone to wait together for five minutes. The stimulus people were told to engage in friendly conversation in a natural manner, or allow long pauses if the man elected not to talk.

After five minutes, the experimenter returned with the correct puzzle, and then left the room with the stimulus person.

Fifteen minutes later, the experimenter returned to collect the puzzle from the man, and to take a second saliva sample. Comparison of the saliva tests showed that testosterone levels rapidly increased by an average of 7.8 per cent after the five minute contact with a woman.

Men who were rated as more aggressive or dominant types had gone up even higher. The results also show that testosterone levels did not change when they were in the room with another man.

The men were also asked to rate the attractiveness of the woman in the room, and the results show that the testosterone increase was not influenced by the perceived attractiveness of the women.

Leander van der Meij, who led the study at the University of Groningen in Holland, said: "We found a testosterone increase after only five minutes of exposure to a woman. Our results suggest that the increase in testosterone levels that we found, may be an automatic male response that activates receptors in organs and the nervous system to prepare the human body for mate attraction."

The researchers believe the results suggest that one of the ultimate functions of testosterone may be to attract mates. One way it may do that is by orchestrating changes in appearance and behaviour that may increase their attractiveness.

Continue reading..

A Horse and an Ass

2008-07-24T17:35:00.000+05:30

A Horse and an Ass were travelling together, the Horse prancing along in its fine trappings, the Ass carrying with difficulty the heavy weight in its panniers. "I wish I were you," sighed the Ass; "nothing to do and well fed, and all that fine harness upon you." Next day, however, there was a great battle, and the Horse was wounded to death in the final charge of the day. His friend, the Ass, happened to pass by shortly afterwards and found him on the point of death. "I was wrong," said the Ass:

"Better humble security than gilded danger."

The Frogs As A King

2008-07-23T17:18:00.000+05:30

The Frogs were living as happy as could be in a marshy swamp that just suited them; they went splashing about caring for nobody and nobody troubling with them. But some of them thought that this was not right, that they should have a king and a proper constitution, so they determined to send up a petition to Jove to give them what they wanted. "Mighty Jove," they cried, "send unto us a king that will rule over us and keep us in order." Jove laughed at their croaking, and threw down into the swamp a huge Log, which came down splashing into the swamp. The Frogs were frightened out of their lives by the commotion made in their midst, and all rushed to the bank to look at the horrible monster; but after a time, seeing that it did not move, one or two of the boldest of them ventured out towards the Log, and even dared to touch it; still it did not move. Then the greatest hero of the Frogs jumped upon the Log and commenced dancing up and down upon it, thereupon all the Frogs came and did the same; and for some time the Frogs went about their business every day without taking the slightest notice of their new King Log lying in their midst. But this did not suit them, so they sent another petition to Jove, and said to him, "We want a real king; one that will really rule over us." Now this made Jove angry, so he sent among them a big Stork that soon set to work gobbling them all up. Then the Frogs repented when too late.

Better no rule than cruel rule.

Paying attention is a more important skill than you might think

2008-07-22T17:02:00.001+05:30

IN THE FAST-PACED, distraction-plagued arena of modern life, perhaps nothing has come under more assault than the simple faculty of attention. We bemoan the tug of war for our focus, joke uneasily about our attention-deficit lifestyles, and worry about the seeming epidemic of attention disorders among children.

The ability to pay careful attention isn't important just for students and air traffic controllers. Researchers are finding that attention is crucial to a host of other, sometimes surprising, life skills: the ability to sort through conflicting evidence, to connect more deeply with other people, and even to develop a conscience.

But for all that, attention remains one of the most poorly understood human faculties. Neither a subject nor a skill, precisely, attention is often seen as a fixed, even inborn faculty that cannot be taught. Children with attention problems are medicated; harried adults struggle to "pay attention." In a sense, our reigning view of attention hasn't come far from that of William James, the father of American psychological research, who dolefully asserted a century ago that attention could not be highly trained by "any amount of drill or discipline."

But now scientists are rapidly rewriting that notion. After decades of research powered by fresh advances in neuroimaging and genetics, many scientists are drawing a much clearer picture of attention, which they have come to see as an organ system like circulation or digestion, with its own anatomy, circuitry, and chemistry. Building upon this new understanding, researchers are discovering that skills of focus can be bolstered with practice in both children and adults, including those with attention-deficit disorders. In just five days of computer-based training, the brains of 6-year-olds begin to act like adults on a crucial measure of attention, one study found. Another found that boosting short-term memory seems to improve children's ability to stay on task.

It is not yet known how long these gains last, or what the best methods for developing attention may turn out to be. But the demand is clear: Dozens of schools nationwide are already incorporating some kind of attention training into their curriculum. And as this new arena of research helps overturn long-standing assumptions about the malleability of this essential human faculty, it offers intriguing possibilities for a world of overload.

"If you have good attentional control, you can do more than just pay attention to someone speaking at a lecture, you can control your cognitive processes, control your emotions, better articulate your actions," says Amir Raz, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University who is a leading attention researcher. "You can enjoy and gain an edge in life."

. . .

Attention has long fascinated humankind as a window into the mind and the world in general, yet its workings have historically been murky. Eighteenth-century scientists, who considered unwavering visual observation crucial to scientific discovery, theorized that attention was a "pooling" of nervous fluid. Later, Victorian scientists eagerly probed the limits and vulnerability of attention, treating the subject of their inquiry with a mix of puzzlement and admiration. "Whatever its nature, [attention] is plainly the essential condition of the formation and development of mind," wrote Henry Maudsley in the early 1830s.
Continued...

Viagra Race...

2008-07-18T17:14:00.000+05:30

Athletes looking for a performance boost are increasingly turning to a little blue pill more usually taken for its off-the-field benefits: Viagra.

Some sports authorities say the drug is now finding a following among athletes. It isn't clear how many might be taking it in hopes of improving athletic performance, but stashes of the drug have reportedly been found among some professional athletes.

The World Anti-Doping Agency is currently studying Viagra's effects on athletes, but hasn't yet banned it. Experts are divided over whether it actually offers athletes an edge.

"It's possible," said Anthony Butch, director of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory at the University of California Los Angeles, a WADA-accredited facility.

Viagra, also known as sildenafil, is manufactured by Pfizer Inc. It was originally developed as a heart drug; its use as a treatment for erectile dysfunction was only accidentally discovered.

The drug works by increasing the effects of nitric oxide, which makes blood vessels expand. That should theoretically allow blood cells to travel to the lungs more efficiently and to also receive more oxygen. It may also improve heart function.

Viagra is also approved to treat pulmonary hypertension, a condition where the lungs' blood vessels tighten. Doctors have used the drug experimentally to treat pregnant women with high blood pressure and to ward off jet lag.

But whether Viagra makes athletes faster, higher or stronger is uncertain.

"Just because you have more nitric oxide doesn't mean that you are going to be a better athlete," Butch said. "If you have all the nitric oxide you need, and if you generate more from Viagra, it's not clear what effect that would have."
Some studies show advantage

Still, some preliminary studies have shown that cyclists taking Viagra improved their performances by up to 40 per cent. "If you have more oxygen going to your muscles, that's more energy and that makes you a better athlete," said Dr. Andrew McCullough, a sexual health expert at New York University School of Medicine. "Even if it only gives you a 10 per cent increase, in peak athletes, that is enough to win," he said.

McCullough said Viagra is only likely to help athletes like runners, cyclists or skiers — sports where endurance and speed are key. Viagra does not work directly on muscles, so will not make athletes physically stronger.

Athletes often mistakenly assume that a drug will work in their bodies the same way it does in sick people. For instance, in people with lung problems who take Viagra, the drug widens their blood vessels so they can absorb more oxygen.

Athletes taking Viagra might hope that the drug will expand their already normal-sized vessels to give them extra lung capacity. But some experts say that's unlikely.

"Viagra corrects problems in people who are in a challenged or diseased state," said Ian McGrath, a professor of physiology at the University of Glasgow. In normal people, the body's own regulating system is not so easily superseded by drugs, and taking Viagra may be useless, McGrath said.

Still, if Viagra does give athletes an unfair advantage, they will be able to take it at the upcoming Beijing Olympics without worry, since it is not on the list of prohibited medicines.

McGrath said taking Viagra could theoretically help people breathe better in heavily polluted cities, like the Chinese capital. "If you have some sort of illness from pollution, then Viagra might help," he said.
No spikes in lab tests

Many scientists at laboratories that conduct drug testing say they haven't noticed a suspicious spike in samples containing Viagra. "We see it as much as we see ibuprofen or aspirin or antibiotics that are not prohibited," said Christiane Ayotte, director of a WADA-accredited laboratory in Canada. "Athletes may be taking it, but they may be taking it for non-doping purposes," she said.

Ayotte thinks it would be unrealistic to ban Viagra. "Are athletes going to have to submit therapeutic-use exemptions for Viagra?" she asked. "That would be quite humiliating."

Other doctors hypothesized that Viagra's more well-known effects on men's sex lives might be the ultimate explanation for any enhanced athletic abilities.

"It could be that athletes are taking Viagra and then having vigorous sexual activity," said Dr. Gerard Varlotta, director of sports rehabilitation at New York University's Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. Varlotta doubted that Viagra itself could improve an athlete's performance.
Read more..

A SNAKE's Hole

2008-07-17T18:20:00.000+05:30

A SNAKE, having made his hole close to the porch of a cottage, inflicted a mortal bite on the Cottager's infant son. Grieving over his loss, the Father resolved to kill the Snake. The next day, when it came out of its hole for food, he took up his axe, but by swinging too hastily, missed its head and cut off only the end of its tail. After some time the Cottager, afraid that the Snake would bite him also, endeavored to make peace, and placed some bread and salt in the hole. The Snake, slightly hissing, said: "There can henceforth be no peace between us; for whenever I see you I shall remember the loss of my tail, and whenever you see me you will be thinking of the death of your son."

No one truly forgets injuries in the presence of him who caused the injury.

Do Monkeys Understand Money?

2008-07-16T17:19:00.000+05:30

Money is a powerful force in human life and affairs. Its very power gives pause to those who look to evolution for full explanations of human behavior, because money has not existed long enough to have influenced evolution. By some estimates, money only goes back a couple thousand years, which is too short even to have influenced human evolution.
Still, one can get some clues as to how evolution prepared us for money from the burgeoning research that seeks to present animals with economic choices. To gain perspective on human financial decisions, one may ask, what would monkeys do?

Keith Chen and Marc Hauser at Yale University taught monkeys about resources that bear a strong resemblance to money. Monkeys don't care about money, per se, but they do care about marshmallows. (This already is a difference of gigantic proportions in that monkeys must learn about resource-exchange using something that is already a primary reinforcer - food - whereas humans can extend the range of their motivations to secondary reinforcers.) A resource (marshmallows) exchange task was introduced whereby pressing a lever would give another monkey a marshmallow; hence this was a task that involved a bit of altruism. Not only were monkeys taught about the game. Two specific monkeys were conditioned (entrained), such that one always pulled the lever for his monkey partner (thus being a very generous partner) and the other never pulled the lever for his partner (stingy). Then they let these conditioned monkeys play the game with other monkeys. Monkeys that played with the highly generous monkey figured it out and quickly took advantage of him. Monkeys that played with the stingy monkey also figured it out quickly and subsequently shunned or were aggressive toward him.

Thus, monkeys can at least understand and respond effectively to the difference between a generous provider and a tightwad. Still, the fact that these differences had to be done with marshmallows instead of a more abstract representation of value (which is what money is) suggests a limited capacity to use or understand money.
Other studies have shown that monkeys take any handout above zero that is offered to them in a version of what, in humans, is called the Ultimatum Game. In the Ultimatum Game, one person is designated the Proposer (who thus offers the ultimatum) and the other becomes the Responder (who decides whether to take it or leave it). The Proposer offers an amount of money to the Responder out of a total amount that the Proposer has been given by the experimenter - usually this is $10. The whole game involves the Proposer offering the Responder an amount, which the Responder has the option to accept or reject. Accept the split and both sides get what was offered; reject it and both sides get no money at all. This obviously not an evenly matched game. The Proposer has the power to make the ultimatum. All the Responder can do is either take whatever is offered or say no, which is costly to both players.

When humans play this game, the Responders will sometimes refuse offers that they deem too low. Depending on the person and the circumstances, people tend to refuse offers below 20% of the total. Monkeys, however, have no such scruples, and will take anything above zero.

You can look at the monkeys' responses in different ways. One way is that they are not bothered with issues of pride, self-esteem, and fairness. After all, a human is humiliated to accept a tiny share, especially if he or she expected an equal split. They know that the other person could have divided the pay equally and perhaps should have - but chose instead to claim the lion's share for self and offer only a measly sop. Monkeys apparently either do not understand that they should be embarrassed, or they do not care.

Yet another way of looking at it is to suggest that monkeys are actually pretty smart. Economists continue to scratch their heads at the results of studies with the Ultimatum game. They assume that people are basically oriented to maximize their own profits. If you and someone else worked equally to earn $100, and that person has the power to divide it and chooses to offer you only one dollar while keeping $99 for self, well, you are still better off with one dollar than with nothing. Hence economic rationalists find it slightly scandalous that people ever refuse any offer. Economists think that if people were true to financial logic, they would act more like monkeys.

Thus, when monkeys play, they behave as economists would have humans do - they accept any offer above zero. This means that, although rational (they have more when they leave the game than when they entered), monkeys are not sensitive to issues of fairness. Humans most certainly are. Humans feel all kinds of self-conscious emotions when they receive more than they think they ought to receive. Not always, of course, but it happens.

Other work suggests that monkeys do not have a fully developed sense of fairness. There are signs that they are acutely sensitive to getting less than their fair share, such as if they see another monkey getting more than they get. If you have two dogs and give one a biscuit treat, the other will look at you with a mixture of expectancy and indignation. Getting less than your fair share is called being underbenefited, and many animals seem to have that.
But a fully developed sense of fairness means that you are uncomfortable with being overbenefited as well. That is, it bothers you to get more than your fair share. Here is where humans seem to part company with other creatures.

What happens when monkeys overbenefit from an exchange - do they experience guilt, embarrassment, shame, or try to rectify the situation? Apparently not.

This may be why humans embraced money, because it allows for trade of resources on the basis of equity, which is subject to exchange rates. That is, imagine that I ask you to paint my living room walls; then by the virtue of the fact that I wanted you to paint my walls, I may not be skilled at or want to paint your walls. But I can repay you in another currency, namely money. In this way, humans can correct overbenefits in a manner that is separate from the original payment (in this case, wall painting).

Humans' emphasis on fairness can be seen in other instances as well. One important study showed that people will spend their own money to punish others who do wrong. In these studies, even at a cost to themselves, people were willing to inflict harm on those who took advantage of others.

So maybe Adam Smith, that seer of economic truths, was right after all when he wrote, "Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that."

Reflection Of Dog

2008-07-15T18:14:00.002+05:30

A DOG passing over a stream on a plank saw his reflection in the water.

"You ugly brute!" he cried; "how dare you look at me in that insolent way."

He made a grab in the water, and, getting hold of what he supposed was the other dog's lip, lifted out a fine piece of meat which a butcher's boy had dropped into the stream.

Who Are Better?We Or They?

2008-07-14T18:04:00.002+05:30

Over a hundred centuries ago in a dusty corner of Mother Africa, human evolution may have leaped instead of crawled. Do the remains of Boskop Man foreshadow the future of humanity? And if so, why aren't these ultimate humans here now, instead of us?
The path of human evolution has been anything but a straight line from past to present. Much like a growing tree or a flowing river, branches and tributaries appear off the main trunk and either thrive, or taper off and peter out. When the game is survival of the species, evolutionary adaptations are mercilessly judged by nature, red in tooth and claw.

Evolution is also punctual in character. Change is often sudden, provoked by a beneficial mutation or a rapid change in the environment. When we look at the human family tree, all of the aforementioned trends can be seen. Neanderthal Man appears, thrives for a time in the glaciated terrain of prehistoric Europe, then fades out just as modern man appears on the scene. Further back in time, a plant-eating hominid called Australopithecus Boisei branched out from the main Australopithecine line. Robust in frame with huge teeth and mighty jaws, A. Boisei was perfectly adapted for lush, tropical conditions with abundant flora... until the climate changed and the flora died off. The gentle giants did likewise.

Specialized adaptations like the Neanderthal's ruggedness and A.Boisei's plant-eating were exceptions to the general trend of human evolution - that being an increase in brain size and a corresponding reduction in jaw size. This trend is coded in our genes, but is still subject to the influences of environment and mutation. This brings us to a group of skulls and skeletal remains found in the early years of the 20th century, in a part of South Africa known as Boskop. Could it be that in this isolated African backwater, a genetic mutation appeared that jumped human evolution ahead... not just by a page or two, but by several chapters?

"A scientific analysis of the Boskop fossils, "Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence," was recently published by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, neuroscientists from the Dartmouth Brain Engineering Laboratory. A more poetic reflection on Boskop Man entitled "Man of the Future" was written in 1958 by science writer Loren Eiseley as a chapter of his larger volume, "The Immense Journey". It makes for intriguing reading, as the following excerpt indicates:

"The man of the future came, and looked out among us once with wistful, if unsophisticated eyes. He left his bones in the rubble of an alien land. If we read evolution aright, he may come again in another million years."

Was Boskop Man, a man out of time... stranded in a rough, predatory world without the tools needed to master it. Or is there another possibility, one which demands you open your mind to things that fly in the face of what we've so far taken for granted.

What if the Boskopoids not only survived, but thrived? What if they used their advanced intelligence to "leave the cradle", as it were. Where would they go? Well, the universe is a big place. If they left Earth for bigger and better things, one might assume they would leave as little trace of themselves as possible out of respect for their more primitive yet upcoming cousins - us."

Continue reading..

The Goods and the Ills

2008-07-12T17:51:00.000+05:30

ALL the Goods were once driven out by the Ills from that common share which they each had in the affairs of mankind; for the Ills by reason of their numbers had prevailed to possess the earth. The Goods wafted themselves to heaven and asked for a righteous vengeance on their persecutors. They entreated Jupiter that they might no longer be associated with the Ills, as they had nothing in common and could not live together, but were engaged in unceasing warfare; and that an indissoluble law might be laid down for their future protection. Jupiter granted their request and decreed that henceforth the Ills should visit the earth in company with each other, but that the Goods should one by one enter the habitations of men. Hence it arises that Ills abound, for they come not one by one, but in troops, and by no means singly: while the Goods proceed from Jupiter, and are given, not alike to all, but singly, and separately; and one by one to those who are able to discern them.

A BAT

2008-07-11T17:50:00.000+05:30

A BAT who fell upon the ground and was caught by a Weasel pleaded to be spared his life. The Weasel refused, saying that he was by nature the enemy of all birds. The Bat assured him that he was not a bird, but a mouse, and thus was set free. Shortly afterwards the Bat again fell to the ground and was caught by another Weasel, whom he likewise entreated not to eat him. The Weasel said that he had a special hostility to mice. The Bat assured him that he was not a mouse, but a bat, and thus a second time escaped.

It is wise to turn circumstances to good account.

Weird Facts

2008-07-10T17:38:00.001+05:30

In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand.

It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.

A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.

More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

Horses can't vomit.

The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.

If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die. If you keep your eyes open by force, they can pop out.

Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants.

Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.

If the government has no knowledge of aliens, then why does Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, implemented on July 16, 1969, make it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any contact with extraterrestrials or their vehicles?

A Lion once fell in love

2008-07-09T17:17:00.000+05:30

A Lion once fell in love with a beautiful maiden and proposed marriage to her parents. The old people did not know what to say. They did not like to give their daughter to the Lion, yet they did not wish to enrage the King of Beasts. At last the father said: "We feel highly honoured by your Majesty's proposal, but you see our daughter is a tender young thing, and we fear that in the vehemence of your affection you might possibly do her some injury. Might I venture to suggest that your Majesty should have your claws removed, and your teeth extracted, then we would gladly consider your proposal again." The Lion was so much in love that he had his claws trimmed and his big teeth taken out. But when he came again to the parents of the young girl they simply laughed in his face, and bade him do his worst.

Love can tame the wildest.

Sorrow is always the twin sister of joy...

2008-07-08T17:36:00.000+05:30

SOME FISHERMEN were out trawling their nets. Perceiving them to be very heavy, they danced about for joy and supposed that they had taken a large catch. When they had dragged the nets to the shore they found but few fish: the nets were full of sand and stones, and the men were beyond measure cast downso much at the disappointment which had befallen them, but because they had formed such very different expectations. One of their company, an old man, said, "Let us cease lamenting, my mates, for, as it seems to me, sorrow is always the twin sister of joy; and it was only to be looked for that we, who just now were over-rejoiced, should next have something to make us sad."

Animal Psychology

2008-07-07T17:28:00.002+05:30

For animals that live in social groups, and that includes humans, blindly following a leader could place them in danger. To avoid this, animals have developed simple but effective behaviour to follow where at least a few of them dare to tread – rather than follow a single group member.

This pattern of behaviour reduces the risk of imitating maverick behaviour of an individual as the group recognise that consensus is better than following someone that goes it alone.

The study was carried out at the University of Leicester, by Ashley J. W. Ward now at the University of Sydney and in collaboration with David J. T. Sumpter of Uppsala University; Iain D. Couzin of Princeton University; Paul J. B. Hart of the University of Leicester and Jens Krause of the University of Leeds. It is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

Dr Ward, formerly of the University of Leicester, led the study. He said: “Social conformity and the desire to follow a leader, regardless of cost, exert extremely powerful influences on the behaviour of social animals, from fish to sheep to humans.

“The decision of whether to follow the lead of another individual is a fundamental problem for grouping animals - leadership in an animal social group may be assumed by an individual (or individuals) which exhibit a directional preference according to the habitat information it holds. This may be information about, for example, the location of food or a predator’s whereabouts. In such cases, the benefits to followers of acquiring this information may be significant, but whilst information is a valuable commodity, simple acceptance or ‘blind copying’ could result in a string of ill-informed decisions. Thus group members should exercise a degree of discrimination with regards to whom they follow.”

The team investigated how animals use the behaviour of others to make more accurate movement decisions, especially when it isn’t possible to identify which individuals possess pertinent information? One plausible answer is that animals in groups only respond when they see a threshold number of fellow group members perform a particular behaviour.

Dr Ward added: “Our experiments examined whether groups of fish could be led by replica individuals of the same species. We explored following behaviour both in a neutral situation and in a potentially dangerous situation where the subject fish had to be persuaded to swim past a model of a predatory fish. That the test fish regarded the model predator as a threat was confirmed by our control experiments, where fish showed a strong aversion to the predator model. Despite this, solitary test fish were prepared to follow a replica leader towards the predator model, suggesting that an isolated member of a social species will pay almost any cost to stick close to a ‘friend’. When test fish were in larger groups of 4 and of 8 fish, however, the picture was very different: a solitary replica leader was ignored. Instead, it required 2-3 replica leaders to influence these larger groups.

“By adopting this ‘quorum response’, where subjects are prepared to follow a leader only when a threshold number of individuals behave in a particular way, animals can reduce the likelihood of spreading non-adaptive following behaviour. Whereas a single, maverick individual may act irrationally in a given situation, it is far less likely that two individuals will act so strangely.”

The researchers say that in order to benefit fully from information transfer, animals - and this would include humans - may have to follow quorum rules to filter out maverick behaviour.

The researchers conclude: “The reason why this study is important is that while quorum responses have been shown in invertebrates, like ants, bees and cockroaches, this is the first time (as far as we know) that it has been shown in so-called higher animals with relatively complex brains. The quorum decision rule is simple, but extremely effective, and it has important implications for human decision-making. In fact some of the group who have worked on the fish research have recently shown that groups of humans can be persuaded to take group decision guided by just one informed individual.

“We chose to test quorum decision-making with fish because they're easier to work with, but although we tend to think that we are more complex than fish in our decision-making, the reality is that we're more similar to them than we may choose to admit!

“Much human action is driven by simple decision rules and our work illustrates how those rules are common throughout the animal kingdom. A better understanding of this decision-making mechanism in humans and other animals helps us understand how people behave in crowds and shows why sometimes people in groups do apparently stupid things, such as stand in the street and stare skyward when there’s nothing to see, just because someone else is doing it.”

Source: University of Leicester

Soul For Sale

2008-07-05T11:45:00.000+05:30

A New Zealand man has put his soul up for auction to the highest bidder, noting that it is "a merry old soul" rather than a "funk soul brother" but that he would "would like to think there is a bit of funk in there somewhere."

Walter Scott, 24, put his soul up for sale on New Zealand Internet auction site TradeMe, and so far has received more than 100 expressions of interest.

Bids in the auction, which was to close Thursday, had reached $189 late Wednesday.

Scott said he had been thinking about selling his soul for ages.

"I can't see it, touch it or feel it, but I can sell it, so I'm going to palm it off to the highest bidder," he said.

It was in "pretty good nick" except for a rough patch six years ago when he reached the legal drinking age, he said.

Advice from a lawyer was that the winning bidder would not be entitled to anything but Scott's soul and would not be able to own or control him in any way, he said.

The successful bidder will receive a framed deed of "soul ownership," Scott said.

TradeMe business manager Michael O'Donnell said the auction complied with the site's rules because a physical object — the deed of ownership — would change hands.

"I think he has entered into the spirit of the (online) community (and) he's also responded to our request to have a physical thing for sale and he's put together a nice looking deed for ownership," O'Donnell said.

"He's answered the questions in a straightforward manner and with humor and personally. I think it's unlikely that anyone's going to be misled by that auction," he told the Stuff Web site.

In 2001, 20-year-old U.S. university student Adam Burtle tried unsuccessfully to sell his soul on auction Web site eBay.

Bidding had reached $400 before the auction was pulled from the site, with the company ruling something tangible needed to swap hands.

Last month an Australian man sold his entire life including his house and a trial at his job after the break up of his five-year marriage for $383,200.

Gas For Sex

2008-07-04T17:41:00.000+05:30

Around the time gas shot past $4 a gallon, Nevada brothel owner Bobbi Davis decided she had to do something.

So, starting this week, visitors to her Shady Lady Ranch in remote eastern Nevada get $50 of free gas for every $300 they spend on, well, you know what. Spend four hours with one of the brothel's "shady ladies," and the next $200 of gas is on her.

"High gas prices affect everything," she said, lamenting a recent drop in business from the truckers and tourists who regularly make the long trek to her brothel, located near Death Valley and 130 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

Nevada's 28 legal brothels, a relic of the state's silver mining past, are mainly limited to rural areas under strict license restrictions.

"And we're pretty far from everything," she said.

Add the Shady Lady Ranch to the growing list of economic casualties of the global oil shock, which is exacting a particularly heavy toll on rural Americans. The high cost of filling up affects everyone, of course. But in small towns and rural areas, the pain is much more acute.

The price of oil, the main ingredient in gasoline, closed at a new record this week on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The caricature of the pickup-driving farmer isn't far off the mark. Out in the hinterland, people tend to own older and less fuel-efficient vehicles, drive significantly longer distances and earn substantially less than urban dwellers. Their vehicles are more than a year older - and they put several thousand more miles on them every year - than those of their city counterparts, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration.

Also, public transit is non-existent in most rural areas.

And the roads they travel in their pickups and SUVs are a lot windier and hillier than what you find in suburbia.

"It hurts them more, for sure," said Fred Rozell, director of retail pricing at the Oil Price Information Service, which tracks fuel prices.

Across the United States, Americans are now spending an average of 4 percent of household income on gasoline. It's less in the wealthy counties around major cities, such as New York, where the figure is closer to 2 percent.

Four percent is not a record. In 1981, after the oil shocks of the late seventies, that number hit 4.5 percent, according to forecaster Global Insight.

But in some of the poorest pockets of the country, such as the Mississippi Delta, the share of income a family spends at the pump now exceeds 16 percent, according to a recent OPIS survey. The company identified 13 rural counties where families are spending more than 13 percent of their income on gas. Five are in Mississippi, four in Alabama, three in Kentucky and one in West Virginia.

High gas prices are forcing the rural poor to make tough choices. That can mean doing without some of the things most people take for granted, including food, medical attention and, sometimes, the drive to work, said Cindy Anderson, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio University.

"They're struggling to deal with high gas prices when they already don't have enough to spend," explained Anderson, an expert on the rural poor of Appalachia.

"Many of them are doing without some of the things they are used to."

There are also secondary effects of the gas crisis. Some food banks, where many rural dwellers go in tough times, are failing to meet rising needs because donors aren't making the long drive to give food and recipients can't afford to get there, Anderson said.

"The overall picture is pretty bad," she said. "These are people who often have no savings and no backup plans."

High gas prices have compounded an already tough environment for rural America. Anderson said the decline of farm and factory jobs has left many rural areas on the margins of economic viability.

At the Shady Lady Ranch, Tuesday was Day One of the gas promotion. So far, so good, Davis said. Five new customers asked for, and received, the gas special.

"No brothel has been doing this, so I thought we'd give it a try and see how it works," she said.

Self-help is the best help

2008-07-03T17:42:00.000+05:30

A LARK had made her nest in the early spring on the young green wheat. The brood had almost grown to their full strength and attained the use of their wings and the full plumage of their feathers, when the owner of the field, looking over his ripe crop, said, "The time has come when I must ask all my neighbors to help me with my harvest." One of the young Larks heard his speech and related it to his mother, inquiring of her to what place they should move for safety. "There is no occasion to move yet, my son," she replied; "the man who only sends to his friends to help him with his harvest is not really in earnest." The owner of the field came again a few days later and saw the wheat shedding the grain from excess of ripeness. He said, "I will come myself tomorrow with my laborers, and with as many reapers as I can hire, and will get in the harvest." The Lark on hearing these words said to her brood, "It is time now to be off, my little ones, for the man is in earnest this time; he no longer trusts his friends, but will reap the field himself."

Self-help is the best help.

Confused Father

2008-07-02T17:29:00.001+05:30

A MAN had two daughters, the one married to a gardener, and the other to a tile-maker. After a time he went to the daughter who had married the gardener, and inquired how she was and how all things went with her. She said, "All things are prospering with me, and I have only one wish, that there may be a heavy fall of rain, in order that the plants may be well watered." Not long after, he went to the daughter who had married the tilemaker, and likewise inquired of her how she fared; she replied, "I want for nothing, and have only one wish, that the dry weather may continue, and the sun shine hot and bright, so that the bricks might be dried." He said to her, "If your sister wishes for rain, and you for dry weather, with which of the two am I to join my wishes?'

The Crow

2008-07-01T16:58:00.000+05:30

A CROW was jealous of the Raven, because he was considered a bird of good omen and always attracted the attention of men, who noted by his flight the good or evil course of future events. Seeing some travelers approaching, the Crow flew up into a tree, and perching herself on one of the branches, cawed as loudly as she could. The travelers turned towards the sound and wondered what it foreboded, when one of them said to his companion, "Let us proceed on our journey, my friend, for it is only the caw of a crow, and her cry, you know, is no omen."

Those who assume a character which does not belong to them, only make themselves ridiculous.

The Dancing Monkeys

2008-06-30T17:25:00.001+05:30

A PRINCE had some Monkeys trained to dance. Being naturally great mimics of men's actions, they showed themselves most apt pupils, and when arrayed in their rich clothes and masks, they danced as well as any of the courtiers. The spectacle was often repeated with great applause, till on one occasion a courtier, bent on mischief, took from his pocket a handful of nuts and threw them upon the stage. The Monkeys at the sight of the nuts forgot their dancing and became (as indeed they were) Monkeys instead of actors. Pulling off their masks and tearing their robes, they fought with one another for the nuts. The dancing spectacle thus came to an end amidst the laughter and ridicule of the audience.

A CAT IN LOVE....

2008-06-27T17:17:00.000+05:30

A CAT fell in love with a handsome young man, and entreated Venus to change her into the form of a woman. Venus consented to her request and transformed her into a beautiful damsel, so that the youth saw her and loved her, and took her home as his bride. While the two were reclining in their chamber, Venus wishing to discover if the Cat in her change of shape had also altered her habits of life, let down a mouse in the middle of the room. The Cat, quite forgetting her present condition, started up from the couch and pursued the mouse, wishing to eat it. Venus was much disappointed and again caused her to return to her former shape.

Nature exceeds nurture.

Fall Into The Water.....

2008-06-26T17:09:00.000+05:30

AN ASS, carrying a load of wood, passed through a pond. As he was crossing through the water he lost his footing, stumbled and fell, and not being able to rise on account of his load, groaned heavily. Some Frogs frequenting the pool heard his lamentation, and said, "What would you do if you had to live here always as we do, when you make such a fuss about a mere fall into the water?"

AN ANT

2008-06-25T17:59:00.000+05:30

AN ANT went to the bank of a river to quench its thirst, and being carried away by the rush of the stream, was on the point of drowning. A Dove sitting on a tree overhanging the water plucked a leaf and let it fall into the stream close to her. The Ant climbed onto it and floated in safety to the bank. Shortly afterwards a birdcatcher came and stood under the tree, and laid his lime-twigs for the Dove, which sat in the branches. The Ant, perceiving his design, stung him in the foot. In pain the birdcatcher threw down the twigs, and the noise made the Dove take wing.

The Lolita Effect________________

2008-06-24T17:22:00.001+05:30

She played the CD over and over, tossing her hair and wiggling her hips in imitation of those photos, oblivious to the innuendo but aware that she was doing something daring and rebellious. What, I thought, am I going to do when she's 13?

Reading The Lolita Effect five years later, I wonder why that episode even stands out in my memory. To hear M. Gigi Durham tell it, young girls are gasping for air in an ocean of sexual imagery. As early as kindergarten, they are being coached to dress and vamp by Bratz dolls that look like strippers, Disney heroines shaped like centerfolds, teeny-bopper Web sites that glorify "hot" girls -- even products like kid-sized thong underwear and pink, plastic pole-dancing kits. Meanwhile, teenage models in ads directed at adults pose in pigtails, sucking on lollipops. "Childishness is sexy, these messages imply," Durham writes. "Ergo, children -- especially little girls -- are sexy."

Sure, it's all just entertainment, as savvy kids will tell you. But Durham argues that the images, so well crafted and so pervasive, seep into our consciousnesses, making the sexual objectification of girls seem normal. Durham calls this the "Lolita effect," which she links to a host of social ills by presenting a disturbing (and soon wearying) litany of statistics about eating disorders, teen pregnancies, battery, child pornography, forced prostitution and rape.
From her first sentence (" The Lolita Effect begins with the premise that children are sexual beings") to numerous descriptions of herself as "pro-sex" and "pro-media," Durham takes pains to show that she is no prude or censor. But she sees a vast gulf between healthy female sexuality and the one dictated by "hooker chic," which is all about turning boys on with the public display of girls' bodies (thin, of course, yet voluptuous). Why, Durham asks, can't girls' sexuality be about their own pleasure? And why must teenage girls, in particular, live in fear of slipping over the delicate line "between acceptable hotness and unacceptable sluttiness"? Girls should be allowed to say no to virginity pledges and to "Girls Gone Wild," Durham argues. But she does not develop a clear definition of healthy sexuality, beyond describing it as "inclusive, diverse, and affirming" and unyoked from commerce.

Occasionally, Durham goes too far in marshalling her evidence. She blames the Lolita effect for the murders of women in Basra who were wearing makeup and displaying other "unIslamic behavior." And her reluctance to sound like a censor keeps her from even suggesting that parents limit their children's exposure to pop culture; absent from The Lolita Effect is any notion that girls might spend some time reading good books or jumping rope or playing ball.

Still, I accept Durham's premise that no one is immune from the media's influence, and her book offers dozens of helpful, specific ideas for rendering it less potent. Durham calls (rather optimistically, given the economic and political climate) for media-literacy education in the K-12 curriculum. She writes wisely that there's no point in trying to force girls to reject the Lolita effect outright. But we can raise questions and present different interpretations of the images that surround us.

Elementary schoolgirls, for example, might be asked, Why do you think the girl in this picture is wearing hardly any clothing? Older girls might consider how words and images work together to convey messages. If Cosmopolitan were namedSleazy or Trashy, would we read its cover image differently? We can help children see that the fashion, beauty and fitness industries -- along with the mass media that need their ads -- depend on purveying titillating, unrealistic pictures of what it means to be "hot."

As my daughter hurtles toward adolescence, I am grateful for such strategies. It's good to know I can do something more useful than shout "You'll wear that out of the house over my dead body!"

Via--Washington Post

'Human Mind'

2008-06-23T18:00:00.000+05:30

It is essential to analyze the human mind with our own minds’. It seems apparent that this aspect poses as a negative variable to such a study, but don’t we know best as to what using the human mind is like? We most apt for carrying out self-examination, hence we are most suited to analyzing the dual nature of our own minds.

In his book called 'Human Mind', Professor Robert Winston added his thoughts on the tests in question and delivered his interpretation as such:

When a patient was asked orally ‘What job would you like to do?’, his reply was 'I want to be a technical artist' because he would be using the left side of his brain where his language centre would be located. When the patient was asked the same question in writing and asked to reply through Scrabble letters, he would form the words ‘car racer.’

Basically it was observed that the patient's right-brain had developed its own pleasures and desires. This then brings the question: "Do we all have dual-personalities in our brain? Does one of these sides survive without a language because it does not have a language center?"

Logic or Reason and Intuition or Emotion

As the word "dual" implies there are two components of the human mind, as there are also two hemispheres of the human brain. Many individuals have summed up a collaboration between these dualities. We have realized that our mental divisions consist of {logic or reason}, and {intuition or emotion}. Moreover our brain is divided into the left and right hemispheres. Studies conclude that when specific mental tests were carried out people who were more engaged in rational logical thought had more activity or domination in the left hemisphere of their brain.

Nevertheless, when experiencing strong emotions the right brain sparks more rapidly. There a many resources for study on this subject and results appear to be quite consistent. Indeed there seems to be a connection between mental/emotional states and the hemispheric dominance of brain wave activities. So it seems as though our brains' twofold structure relates directly to the dual nature of the human mind.

It's All About Hemispheric Dominance

Each one of these components appears to integrate into the minds of almost all human beings with variation on the possibility of combinations. This leads to an excess in human personalities, in part depending on the extent of hemispheric dominance. These combinations are separated into three distinct types of mixtures based on which part of the hemispheres dominates.

Most of us are dominated by either the left brain or the right brain, and only a minority are dual brained. Dual brained (Dual minded) people’s thought processes are dominated by neither hemisphere, but are evenly balanced between both hemispheres. We must take into consideration that we use both hemispheres commonly, thus the designation of dominance only measures where someone's brain activity occurs most successively, not exclusively.

This is very important because being left brain dominant, for example, does not mean someone uses only their left brain because it only means that left brain usage is higher than right brain usage.

The Types of Brain Dominance

The 3 types of brain dominance can be labelled as L-dominant, R-dominant, and D-dominant.

- L-dominant represents the Left-brain dominant individuals: Someone who is L-dominant has the personality type of someone who spends most of their mental energy on logic focused rational thought. The essence of their brain activity occurs in the left side of their brain and logic is their primary filter. Those on the far end of this type can sometimes seem cold or even emotionless.

- R-dominant represents Right-brain dominant individuals: On the other hand R-dominant personalities show more brain activities in the right hemisphere and mean that these type of people are more emotional. They usually look at life through the filter of their passions. Those at the extreme end of this personality type might sometimes seem too emotional or even irrational, most especially to the L-dominant.

- D-dominant represents Dual-brain dominant individuals: D-dominant individuals are people whose personality is made up of a balanced blend of both mental components. Their minds are dominated neither by logic, nor by emotions. Tests conclude these types of people use their brain hemispheres equally, and they view life through both logical and intuitive filters. D-dominants are hemispherically balanced.
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Food-tampering charge ...

2008-06-22T11:41:00.000+05:30

A former restaurant cook has pleaded guilty to a food-tampering charge alleging he inserted hairs in a steak before giving it to a dissatisfied customer. Ryan Kropp, 24, of West Bend, was fired along with another cook after the incident Feb. 23 at the Texas Roadhouse restaurant.

Kropp was charged in Washington County Circuit Court with a felony of placing foreign objects in edibles, carrying up to 3 1/2 years in prison.

After his guilty plea Thursday, Judge James Muehlbauer scheduled sentencing Aug. 12.

The criminal complaint said that when a manager asked a customer how his steak was, the customer said it was somewhat overdone, although he had almost finished eating it and refused an offer of a new steak.

But the manager insisted on having Kropp prepare a new steak the way the customer wanted it, medium rare, so that he could take it home.

The customer called the restaurant and police after finding hair as he was eating the steak the next day.

According to the complaint, a second kitchen worker told police Kropp had put a slit in the cooked steak and pushed something inside, then stated, "These are my pubes," referring to pubic hair.

Kropp told police he put a few of his facial hairs on the steak, saying he was angry the customer sent the other steak back and thought he was "just trying to get free stuff," the complaint said.

A phone number for Kropp had been disconnected when The Associated Press tried to reach him for comment Thursday night.

Musical hallucinosis.........

2008-06-20T17:45:00.000+05:30

It can be irritating to get a catchy song stuck in your head. Imagine if the music sounded so real that you were sure it was coming from a stereo, and the tune never went away.

This is what it's like to suffer from musical hallucinosis, a mysterious condition that usually strikes elderly people with poor hearing. Ramon Mocellin, a psychiatrist at Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia who treats patients with the disorder, tells New Scientist about the condition.

Are people with the condition mentally ill?

Hallucinations, which simply put are perceptions without a stimulus, can be symptoms of mental illness. Auditory hallucinations, in particular hearing voices, are one of the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia. It is, however, the nature of the hallucinations and the patient's understanding of them that point to the underlying problem.

In this group of patients, the experience of hearing music when there is no external source of music is often accompanied by some degree of understanding that these experiences are not "real", that they originate from their own mind. In schizophrenia, or other mental illnesses, hallucinations are experienced as real, in the external world.

Unfortunately, as most people would equate hearing or seeing things that are not there with mental illness, many people with these symptoms do not seek help because of the shame and stigma that continues to surround mental illness of any type.

What kind of music do sufferers hear?

Musical hallucinosis may take any number of forms. It is very common for the music or songs to be familiar or have special significance to the individual experiencing them.

One elderly man, who was quite deaf, reported hearing familiar hymns or songs from his early adulthood. He initially felt they originated from the next-door neighbour's record player, but soon realised they were not real and was able to ignore them.

On the other hand, an elderly woman with severe hearing loss described experiencing religious hymns sung out of tune in a grating and screaming voice.

Sometimes small portions of single songs can be heard in a repetitive manner, as if from a tape loop. Other people have described hearing indistinct music, as if from far away.

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Strange Fruit

2008-06-19T17:01:00.000+05:30

The Great Hall at the University of Reading is a lively piece of Victoriana: a broad neo-Romanesque structure suggestive of a nave, with a concave arched ceiling of gilt-edged rectangular sections painted a pastel green and decorated with rosettes.

The uniformity of its architectural style contrasts with the people I can see under its roof. Perhaps 200 students are at work here, and my guess, from their faces, is that between them they could trace their ancestry to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the far east and perhaps the Indian subcontinent.

These observations collide with Kenan Malik's insistence in his new book, Strange Fruit, that there is no such thing as race: that it is nothing more than a social construct, having little to do with biology. It is true that the history of racial thinking is mostly an odious embarrassment. And using the idea of race as an assertion of abrupt or clear genetic boundaries between peoples is wrong. All of humanity shares the same genes, and we can all happily and successfully interbreed. And, contrary to the pronouncements of some well-known public figures, there is no evidence that human groups differ in the genetic factors that cause intelligence or even cognitive abilities in general. But we mustn't take this to mean that there are no differences among us. Variants of our shared genes do differ among human groups. If my ancestors were from the far east, I would have the epicanthal fold of skin above my eyes so distinctive of peoples from that region. Were I able to trace my ancestry to the Ethiopian highlands, it is likely that I would have a wiry frame and sinewy muscles. And were my ancestors from the Tibetan plateau, it is likely that my body shape would be good at conserving heat. I could go on; and the list could contain far more than morphological characters—just think, for example, of who carries genes to protect against malaria or to digest milk proteins as adults.

These are all genetic differences. In fact, if we measure large numbers of genetic markers from populations around the world and then use them to form clusters, we get back groupings that bear a striking resemblance to what have conventionally been recognised as the major racial groups on the planet: Europeans and western Asians, Africans, people from the Americas, eastern Asians, and Australasians.

Biologists confronted with this kind of clustered genetic variability in other species routinely refer to the groupings as variants, types, gentes, races and even sub-species. These are imprecise terms, but they capture the sense that suites of genetic characters or markers vary or cluster in similar ways among populations. Put another way, give me the suites of characters and I can predict at a better than chance level what group or region the sample comes from. There is no reason to exclude humans from this. It is what I was doing with the faces in the tranquil setting of the Great Hall.

Malik knows these facts about our genetics, but wants to insist that, unless "race" corresponds to absolute boundaries, it is a useless and damaging concept. But to deny what everybody knows and to swap the word race for something less politically charged like "group" is just an act of self-denial and certainly no more accurate than the dreaded "r" word. It is also patronising—I would like to think we are all grown up enough to accept the facts and ready ourselves for the deluge to come. I say deluge because the more we measure, the more genetic differences we find among populations; and no kinds of difference can be absolutely ruled out (to be clear, there is no reason to expect Caucasians will do well out of this). We may in future need a language, and maybe even a new ethics, to discuss the new genetics. But that is another story.

Why go on about these differences? Because they tell us something startling about our species, with an important bearing on the predicament we find ourselves in and which Malik writes about—how to live in a multicultural world.

We are a very young species. At about 100,000 to 150,000 years old, maybe less, we have just flickered into an existence that could go on—if we are an average species—for 8-10m years. We are not yet out of our nappies. Without going into the details, there are only two ways we could have amassed the genetic differences we have while still in this toddlerhood. One is that different races have been good at keeping to themselves since we spread around the world after walking out of Africa 70,000 years ago. Physical separation would have allowed many random differences to accumulate between groups. But this could only have occurred if inter-group migration were very low. It could also reflect active avoidance, something suggested by the growing sense among anthropologists that human history can best be understood as constant attempts by different group to annihilate each other.

The second way humanity could have achieved its genetic variation would be if natural selection has acted strongly on human populations, promoting different traits in different groups. I say "strongly" because the differences have been produced in a short time, and natural selection has had to work against the homogenising influences of migration and interbreeding. This is why we can be sure that when we see so-called "adaptive" differences, they tell us we are staring at people who have been selected to be very good at some challenge their environment throws at them, be it conserving heat, protecting the eyes from wind-blown sand, fighting off malaria or being able to digest milk proteins. These are not accidental differences.

Moreover, even after the ravages brought by the waves of expanding agriculturalists beginning about 10,000 years ago, followed more recently by the great imperial conquests of the last 800 to 900 years, humans still speak about 7,000 distinct languages. You don't get that by hanging out with each other.

So we are a species with a short but intense history of living in relatively isolated groups. We are also a species that invented a new and powerful way of life—called co-operation. Or, more to the point, it is what evolutionary biologists call "indirect reciprocity": the ability to behave co-operatively towards people unrelated to you and with no expectation of immediate "repayment." We help people in distress, we return items of value, we may even put our wellbeing or lives at risk for others, and we have a sense of fairness that we and others ought to behave this way. Our co-operation allows us to have a division of labour and exchange—someone mends the fishing nets while another collects coconuts—and the specialisation this allows is almost certainly responsible for our rapid spread around the world.

No other species does anything like this. The co-operative hunting seen among male chimpanzees is largely done among bands of (genetic) brothers. Ants co-operate, and they are capable of raising sophisticated armies, and of deploying them in complex ways against other ant armies. But ants are effectively genetic clones of each other and so don't mind giving aid or even their lives to help the collective.

Co-operation among unrelated humans is a different matter. If you help someone and they don't help you back, you lose. Co-operative societies can soar to great heights, but they can cost you dearly, as when cheats take the spoils of co-operation without returning the benefits. This means that humans have evolved sensitive mechanisms to discriminate between people likely to share their co-operative values from those that do not.

Trust, the topic of Marek Kohn's book of the same name, is what arises from this discrimination—and Kohn rightly recognises that trust promotes both self-interest and the common good. As individuals, we toil to build reputations as a way of advertising our trustworthiness and of attracting like-valued people. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the importance of co-operative social systems to our psychology and social behaviour. If trust is the fuel of our co-operation, reputation is the currency with which we buy it. Apes, dolphins and ants don't feel shame or engage in honour killings.
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Can a Night Owl Become a Morning Person?

2008-06-17T17:14:00.001+05:30

When I told my friends I had found a way to transform myself into a morning person, they responded in one of two ways. The night people leaned in as if I were about to reveal the location of a stash of pirate gold. The morning people simply regarded me with pity and wonder. "I just don't understand why it's so hard," said one friend, a Danish medical student. "I can get up anytime I want."

This sort of smugness is prevalent among morning people, who count among their ranks Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, nearly every American president, and even Jesus. (See Mark 1:35: "And in the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed.") Night people are stuck with psychopaths like Adolf Hitler and Juan Arreola, the guy in Pennsylvania who nearly killed his girlfriend's 2-year-old last year, explaining to a judge, "I'm not a morning person."

I'd always been a night owl, but for years I'd longed to defect to the other side. In my fantasies, I was a Fortune 500-type who threw off the covers at 5 and engineered a hostile takeover by 7. Instead, I generally stayed up until 1:30 in the morning, reading magazines or clicking aimlessly through Wikipedia, waking up grumpy and remorseful at 9:30, if not later. Over the years I'd tried all the usual tactics—multiple alarms, earlier bedtimes, lab-rat levels of caffeine—and nothing had worked.
When I left my office job and started freelancing, things got worse. One day, after crawling out of bed at 10:30, I decided enough was enough. I needed help. So, I called up a battery of doctors and sleep researchers and put the question to them: Can a night person rewire herself to fall asleep at a reasonable hour and jump out of bed in the morning like a farmer with chickens to feed?

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"If you could be any character in literature, who would you choose?"

2008-06-16T14:23:00.000+05:30

"If you could be any character in literature, who would you choose?" Given that I write about books for a (hardscrabble) living, I could see that she expected me to name some obvious literary heavyweight, such as Odysseus, Prince Genji, or Huckleberry Finn — all of whom flashed through my mind as good answers. Instead I paused for a moment, put on my most sardonic look, and huskily whispered into the microphone, "Bond, James Bond." It brought down the house.

Of course, people thought I was kidding. And, of course, I wasn't.

Having just read Devil May Care, by the novelist Sebastian Faulks "writing as Ian Fleming," and recently enjoyed Casino Royale, Bond's latest cinematic adventure, I don't see any reason to change my answer. It is a truth universally, if seldom publicly, acknowledged that virtually every American male, from puberty onward, would love to be 007. He's got the best toys, attracts gorgeous women, and wins at every game, be it golf, baccarat, or — in Devil May Care — tennis. Such (arguably) shallow benefits might be sufficient to explain part of Bond's appeal. But there's something even more primordial to his mythic glamour.

What, after all, is a man's deepest wish? Freud talked about "honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women" — and Bond certainly encompasses all those. Still, that libidinal litany can be boiled down to a single desire, half hidden in the shadowy reaches of the male psyche and more clearly delineated in world mythology: As Joseph Campbell would say, men long to be heroes. No doubt about it. And yet I think the masculine ego also hungers for something a bit more noirish, if you will. At least some of the time, guys want to be thought of as … dangerous. While it's gratifying to be called a hard-working professional or a good provider, those admirable traits don't make our hearts beat quicker. By contrast, to overhear oneself described as "a man not to be trifled with" — that's quite another matter.

Our institutions, as Foucault used to remind us, are designed to instill order and discipline, to create team players and salarymen, to compel our unruly hearts to abide by timetables and deadlines. But what man dreams of being safe and respectable, or, God forbid, prudent? No wonder women fall for outlaws. Surely the most distinctive if subtle thrill in all of James Bond occurs near the opening of the film of Live and Let Die. As the secret agent boards a plane bound for New York, we see the clairvoyant Solitaire methodically turning over one tarot card after another. As she places each down on the table, she speaks a single emotionless phrase. "A man comes … he travels quickly … he comes over water … he will oppose." And then, after the briefest of pauses: "He brings violence and destruction."

Indeed, he does, for the cards never lie. Bond famously possesses a license to kill, but in some ways he also embodies license itself, the spirit of anarchy and transgression. No rules apply to 007. He lives beyond good and evil, outside the confining strictures of the biblical commandments. Like the medieval figure called Vice or the Renaissance Lord of Misrule, James Bond turns the world upside down. He sounds an "everlasting no" to the smugly arrogant and powerful, cocks a snook, as the British say, at those full of messianic ardor and contempt for ordinary human beings. In a Bond book or film, the megalomaniac mastermind — Blofeld, Rosa Klebb, Hugo Drax — always comes up with the perfect plan, carefully worked out to the last detail. Said evil mastermind also possesses expert henchmen, a high-tech lair, and seemingly infinite resources. World domination or world destruction is just within his (or sometimes her) grasp. The countdown has started; nothing can go wrong.

But that pesky and strangely persistent British agent keeps popping up to cause a bit of bother. Only when it's too late do Goldfinger or Mr. Big or Dr. No realize that Bond isn't just an operative of MI6; he is Siva, destroyer of worlds, bringer of chaos. At the end of a Bond movie, the impregnable fortress is in ruins, the beautiful plan in tatters, the invincible villains all dead.

While he may thus act like a scourge of God, Bond hardly looks like a Tamerlane or Conan. The first words we think of when we describe James Bond — at least the 007 of the films — are suave, debonair, cosmopolitan. All those are shorthand for Bond's supreme personal characteristic, what Renaissance courtiers always aspired to exemplify: sprezzatura. That is the ability to perform even the most difficult task with flair, grace, and nonchalance, without getting a wrinkle in your clothes or working up a sweat. Bond not only is cool, he always looks cool, at ease in his skin, at home in the world. Whatever his surroundings, he's the best-dressed guy in the room.

Again, the innate urbanity and smoothness is certainly emphasized in the films, which clearly aim mainly for spectacle, the visually dazzling. While American action-movie heroes tend to be grungy (think of Bruce Willis in the Die Hard series), Bond is consistently elegant, conserv-atively dressed in beautifully cut suits. Little wonder that David Niven — the very exemplar of British savoir-faire — was considered for the original screen role. Significantly, when asked once to explain the appeal of his books, Ian Fleming first mentioned his use of luxury brand names. The secret agent's casual shirts weren't just cotton, they were Sea Island cotton. Thus began the promotion of high-end products by their association with Bond. You can actually own the stuff that dreams are made of. Right now you can buy, from Turnbull & Asser, expensive replicas of the evening shirt and tie worn by Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. Till recently, Pierce Brosnan regularly appeared in magazine advertisements for Omega watches. Long ago, an Aston Martin became every boy's fantasy car after 007 drove one in Goldfinger.

Bond is, in fact, a connoisseur in the largest sense: He is one who knows. The omnicompetent 007 can handle himself with utter confidence in a casino or on a golf course, at a shooting range or on a ski slope. He can drive a tank or fly an airplane or bet all his chips on the turn of a card and win. In Bond's world, the hotels are always five star, the Bollinger properly chilled, and the bespoke suits created on Jermyn Street or in Italy by Brioni.

Of course, the Bond women are also a connoisseur's choice. Like the spy who loves them, they are more than just seductive; they look as if they had just emerged from the sea, perfect in every way, eroticism incarnate. One after another, though, each gladly accepts her role as what the French call "le repos du guerrier" — the warrior's rest. Bond's sexual electricity is such that even a lesbian like Pussy Galore (in Goldfinger) inevitably ends up in his bed. A woman I know, trying to explain the visceral attractiveness of the first actor to play Bond, put it this way: Most men are boys; Sean Connery is a man.

Bond, then, is utterly glamorous, but not just in the usual urbane, film-star mode. He is also glamorous in the old connotation of delusively alluring, not to be trusted, a false enchantment that hides a trap. In a heartbeat, Bond can switch from rakish playboy to Rambo; alternately, he can strip off a frogman's suit to reveal a white dinner jacket underneath. Fleming's hero is always more than he appears to be.
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Butterfly Effect

2008-06-15T18:13:00.002+05:30

SOME SCIENTISTS SEE their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the "butterfly effect," the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz's suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly's wings.

Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

In the 2004 movie "The Butterfly Effect" - we watched it so you don't have to - Ashton Kutcher travels back in time, altering his troubled childhood in order to influence the present, though with dismal results. In 1990's "Havana," Robert Redford, a math-wise gambler, tells Lena Olin, "A butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. They can even calculate the odds."

Such borrowings of Lorenz's idea might seem authoritative to unsuspecting viewers, but they share one major problem: They get his insight precisely backwards. The larger meaning of the butterfly effect is not that we can readily track such connections, but that we can't. To claim a butterfly's wings can cause a storm, after all, is to raise the question: How can we definitively say what caused any storm, if it could be something as slight as a butterfly? Lorenz's work gives us a fresh way to think about cause and effect, but does not offer easy answers.

Pop culture references to the butterfly effect may be bad physics, but they're a good barometer of how the public thinks about science. They expose the growing chasm between what the public expects from scientific research - that is, a series of ever more precise answers about the world we live in - and the realms of uncertainty into which modern science is taking us.

. . .

The butterfly effect is a deceptively simple insight extracted from a complex modern field. As a low-profile assistant professor in MIT's department of meteorology in 1961, Lorenz created an early computer program to simulate weather. One day he changed one of a dozen numbers representing atmospheric conditions, from .506127 to .506. That tiny alteration utterly transformed his long-term forecast, a point Lorenz amplified in his 1972 paper, "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"

In the paper, Lorenz claimed the large effects of tiny atmospheric events pose both a practical problem, by limiting long-term weather forecasts, and a philosophical one, by preventing us from isolating specific causes of later conditions. The "innumerable" interconnections of nature, Lorenz noted, mean a butterfly's flap could cause a tornado - or, for all we know, could prevent one. Similarly, should we make even a tiny alteration to nature, "we shall never know what would have happened if we had not disturbed it," since subsequent changes are too complex and entangled to restore a previous state.

So a principal lesson of the butterfly effect is the opposite of Redford's line: It is extremely hard to calculate such things with certainty. There are many butterflies out there. A tornado in Texas could be caused by a butterfly in Brazil, Bali, or Budapest. Realistically, we can't know. "It's impossible for humans to measure everything infinitely accurately," says Robert Devaney, a mathematics professor at Boston University. "And if you're off at all, the behavior of the solution could be completely off." When small imprecisions matter greatly, the world is radically unpredictable.

Moreover, Lorenz also discovered stricter limits on our knowledge, proving that even models of physical systems with a few precisely known variables, like a heated gas swirling in a box, can produce endlessly unpredictable and nonrepeating effects. This is a founding idea of chaos theory, whose advocates sometimes say Lorenz helped dispel the Newtonian idea of a wholly predictable universe.

"Lorenz went beyond the butterfly," says Kerry Emanuel, a professor in the department of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT. "To say that certain systems are not predictable, no matter how precise you make the initial conditions, is a profound statement." Instead of a vision of science in which any prediction is possible, as long as we have enough information, Lorenz's work suggested that our ability to analyze and predict the workings of the world is inherently limited.

But in the popular imagination, that one picturesque little butterfly became a metaphor for the surprising way that long chains of events unfold. A SmartMoney.com market analysis from 2007 cites Lorenz, then suggests that hypothetical problems at Sony could affect a string of shippers, retailers, and investors: "One butterfly, in this case a Japanese butterfly, sets off the entire chain." Even applied to society, rather than nature, such claims merit skepticism.

That we imagine the butterfly effect would explain things in everyday life, however, reveals more than an overeager impulse to validate ideas through science. It speaks to our larger expectation that the world should be comprehensible - that everything happens for a reason, and that we can pinpoint all those reasons, however small they may be. But nature itself defies this expectation. It is probability, not certain cause and effect, that now dictates how scientists understand many systems, from subatomic particles to storms. "People grasp that small things can make a big difference," Emanuel says. "But they make errors about the physical world. People want to attach a specific cause to events, and can't accept the randomness of the world."

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"No melon, thank you."

2008-06-14T12:02:00.000+05:30

One mother who still considers Marcel waves as the most fashionable way
of dressing the hair was at work on the job.

Her little eight-year-old girl was crouched on her father's lap,
watching her mother. Every once in a while the baby fingers would slide
over the smooth and glossy pate which is Father's.

"No waves for you, Father," remarked the little one. "You're all beach."

"Were any of your boyish ambitions ever realized?" asked the
sentimentalist.

"Yes," replied the practical person. "When my mother used to cut my hair
I often wished I might be bald-headed."

Congressman Longworth is not gifted with much hair, his head being about
as shiny as a billiard ball.

One day ex-president Taft, then Secretary of War, and Congressman
Longworth sallied into a barbershop.

"Hair cut?" asked the barber of Longworth.

"Yes," answered the Congressman.

"Oh, no, Nick," commented the Secretary of War from the next chair, "you
don't want a hair cut; you want a shine."

"O, Mother, why are the men in the front baldheaded?"

"They bought their tickets from scalpers, my child."

The costumer came forward to attend to the nervous old beau who was
mopping his bald and shining poll with a big silk handkerchief.

"And what can I do for you?" he asked.

"I want a little help in the way of a suggestion," said the old fellow.
"I intend going to the French Students' masquerade ball to-night, and I
want a distinctly original costume--something I may be sure no one else
will wear. What would you suggest?"

The costumer looked him over attentively, bestowing special notice on
the gleaming knob.

"Well, I'll tell you," he said then, thoughtfully: "why don't you sugar
your head and go as a pill?"--_Frank X. Finnegan_.

United States Senator Ollie James, of Kentucky, is bald.

"Does being bald bother you much?" a candid friend asked him once.

"Yes, a little," answered the truthful James.

"I suppose you feel the cold severely in winter," went on the friend.

"No; it's not that so much," said the Senator. "The main bother is when
I'm washing myself--unless I keep my hat on I don't know where my face
stops."

A near-sighted old lady at a dinner-party, one evening, had for her
companion on the left a very bald-headed old gentleman. While talking to
the gentleman at her right she dropped her napkin unconsciously. The
bald-headed gentleman, in stooping to pick it up, touched her arm. The
old lady turned around, shook her head, and very politely said: "No
melon, thank you."

A man went on a trip with a fox, a goose and a sack of corn

2008-06-14T11:40:00.001+05:30

A man went on a trip with a fox, a goose and a sack of corn. He came upon a stream which he had to cross and found a tiny boat to use to cross the stream. He could only take himself and one other - the fox, the goose, or the corn - at a time. He could not leave the fox alone with the goose or the goose alone with the corn. How does he get all safely over the stream?

Ans...............

Take the goose over first and come back. Then take the fox over and bring the goose back. Now take the corn over and come back alone to get the goose. Take the goose over and the job is done!

Like chocolate and wine, friendship is one of the great pleasures in life?

2008-06-13T17:23:00.001+05:30

Now, a number of scholars are seeking to shore up friendship in a surprising way: by granting it legal recognition. Some of the rights and privileges restricted to family, they argue, should be given to friends. These could be invoked on a case-by-case basis - eligibility to take time off to care for a sick friend under an equivalent of the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. Or they could take the form of an official legal arrangement between two friends, designating a bundle of mutual rights and privileges - literally "friends with benefits," as Laura Rosenbury, a law professor at Washington University, puts it. One scholar even suggests giving friends standing in the tax code, allowing taxpayers to write off certain "friend expenditures."

Such changes, proponents say, could contribute to a shift in how our society values personal relationships. In part, they say, the point is to acknowledge that society has already changed: as more people are living outside of marriage, friendships have become the primary relationships on which many Americans rely. But a broader aim is to recognize the universal social and psychological benefits of friendship, which rival those of other relationships, notably marriage, that receive active state support. New laws could elevate friendship's status, recasting it as an essential part of our lives, rather than a luxury often sacrificed to other priorities.

Changes of this kind would "allow you to say, these are people who matter deeply to me," said Rachel Moran, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of the thinkers in favor of friendship law. "I want that to count, not only in my own intimate life, but in the eyes of the law."

Most of the scholars in this nascent movement are part of a larger push to challenge the privileged status of marriage. They believe society would be better off supporting a broad spectrum of relationships, rather than exalting one kind above the rest.

And this, in turn, has led to some of the movement's strongest opposition. Critics charge that marriage deserves its special status, and that friendship, a fundamentally different kind of relationship, does not warrant the same kind of recognition and support. Other skeptics hold that friendship should stay outside the law for its own sake - do we really want friends with red tape?

"There is an ethos that if something is important, the law should be on the scene," says Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia. "I think we should resist that urge."
Like chocolate and wine, friendship is one of the great pleasures in life that turn out to be good for you, too. (And unlike those goodies, there's no caveat about moderation.) Research indicates that friendship boosts both physical and mental health, especially among the elderly, a growing demographic. One Australian study from 2006 suggested that close friendships did more to increase longevity than did family relationships.

Abundant research confirms that friendship, with its shared confidences and laughter, enhances health by reducing stress. Social connections are associated with stronger immune systems and less vulnerability to infectious disease. One factor in women's greater life expectancy may be their comparatively robust social support networks and intimate female friendships.

The boons of friendship extend to society at large. A 2004 study based on Gallup poll data found that employees who have a "best friend" at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Ethan Leib, a law professor at the University of California at Hastings, points out that friends save the state money by providing care and services during illness and emergencies.

Yet the state has never pursued a role in supporting friendship, the way it has, understandably, in the case of marriage. Spouses get income tax breaks and an array of other rights and privileges. They are eligible to take leave from work to provide care under the Family and Medical Leave Act; to make medical decisions on each other's behalf in the event of incapacitation; and to bring suits for wrongful death on each other's behalf, among other rights. They are also granted immunity from testifying against each other in court.

Over the past few decades, the laws governing marriage and family have shifted. In the 1960s and 1970s, a series of landmark reforms made marriage a radically different institution: women were granted equal rights within marriage, "illegitimate" children were granted legal rights, and no-fault divorce made dissolving a marriage much easier. More recently, a number of states have created civil unions and domestic partnerships.

In the view of some analysts, though, the reforms haven't gone far enough - the law now needs to catch up to the society it helped to shape, in which many more people live outside marriage. The reforms made marriage fairer and less compulsory, and they have even begun to recognize committed romantic relationships between members of the same sex. But for the most part, the law hasn't acknowledged the other types of important relationships that people can form.

"If the law decides to support some relationships, why not others that similarly involve care and support?" asks Washington University's Rosenbury. "What is it about marriage or marriage-like relationships - that is, relationships that are assumed to have sex in them?"
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Reconsiderations: 'The Great Transformation'

2008-06-12T17:56:00.000+05:30

To his devotees, Polanyi showed the free market to be the enemy of humanity in "The Great Transformation." It was an alien form of social organization, he argued, created in 18th-century England only by state action propelled by ideologues. By displacing the natural social state — an idyllic system of mutual obligations that bound and protected individuals — the free market brought inequality, war, oppression, and social turmoil to just and peaceful societies.

"The Great Transformation" has attained the status of a classic in branches of sociology, political science, and anthropology. Stacks of it await undergraduate initiates each year in college bookstores. Citations to the work continue to accumulate in scholarly articles. Yet in economics the work is unknown — or, when discussed, derided. Thus the cruel irony of the term "social sciences."

It is understandable that Polanyi believed that free markets would lead to political and social collapse. Born in 1886 in Vienna and raised in Budapest, he had, by 1944, witnessed World War I, the Russian Revolution, revolution and terror in his native Hungary, hyperinflation in Austria and Germany in the 1920s, the collapse of the international gold standard, the Great Depression, the rise of Nazism, the New Deal, and World War II — an era of unrest unprecedented in the modern world. The book begins portentously, "Nineteenth-century civilization has collapsed."

Polanyi identified four pillars of this dying civilization — the international balance of powers, the gold standard, the liberal state, and the self-regulating market economy. By 1944 these all seemed to have been swept away. But, in truth, the first three were derivative of the fourth, the self-regulating market — the true fundament of this civilization. "The Great Transformation" of the title, Polanyi believed, was the imposition of the free market, an imposition that in turn spawned these other institutions, which in turn produced the collapse of 19th-century civilization. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, Polanyi suggested, were the monster children of the free market.

History has not been kind to these prognostications. Free-market capitalism is a resilient and stable system in much of the world — particularly in English-speaking countries. It is the policy of world bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It is conquering vast new domains in places such as China, Eastern Europe, and India. International trade barriers have been substantially reduced. The gold standard is gone, but has been replaced by floating exchange rates, set by market forces. Better monetary management has greatly reduced business cycle severity. Between the traditional enemies of Western Europe — Germany and France — all is gemütlich.

Further, while free market capitalism has its troubles, radical alternatives no longer beckon. The meliorist liberalism of John Maynard Keynes has proven sounder than the millennialist fervor of Polanyi. Measured by the success of markets, 19th-century civilization seems to be enjoying a renaissance.

The great puzzle of Polanyi's book is thus its enduring allure, given the disconnect between his predictions and modern realities. The fans of Polanyi seem to be responding to his general belief that markets corrupt societies, and his assertion that free market economies are a shocking recent departure from a socially harmonious past. His great criticism is that by breaking the social connections between individuals, by reducing everyone to an isolated atom, markets create inequalities that previously did not exist.

But Polanyi was no better a historian than a prognosticator. Indeed, the more we learn of history, the more evident it is that the free market was not an 18th-century innovation, but one of mankind's oldest social institutions. Medieval England, for example, had elaborate free markets in goods, labor, capital, and land. Forget groaning serfs, over-weaning lords, the lash of the whip; think private property, wage labor, market incentives, and social mobility. By 1200, a large class of landless laborers worked for cash, bought their food in markets, and rented their dwellings. The free market indeed has some claim to be the natural habitat of modern people, not a perverse and unnatural innovation. (We have evidence for extensive markets long before the time of Christ: in the Roman Empire, in ancient Greece, and in ancient Babylon.)

The Industrial Revolution in England did not represent a trade-off between gains for plutocrats and the horrors of poverty and unemployment for the poor. Instead, the greatest beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution were the unskilled; this truly great transformation reduced the terrible inequalities that existed since at least the Middle Ages. The elaboration of the modern credit nexus eventually produced cyclical unemployment, but the Industrial Revolution also reduced the enormous annual shocks to income pre-industrial workers endured because of harvest successes and failures.

It is probably true, as Polanyi asserts, that hunter-gatherer and shifting cultivation societies were more egalitarian than later market societies. But he hopelessly romanticizes that world: "The Great Transformation" makes pre-market societies seem like a band of idyllic Christian brothers endlessly extending the helping hand, to background choruses of "Kumbaya."

More dispassionate analysis by anthropologists writing since 1944 has shown that such communities were generally violent and sexist, with significant status differences, often including systems of slavery. Tight community bonds did not prevent assaults, murder, and sexual violence from being commonplace. In some societies, elaborate witchcraft superstitions led to lives lived in fear of denunciation and death. Recent accounts of the hill tribes of Papua New Guinea, the Ache of Paraguay, the Bushmen, the Hadza of Tanzania, and the Yanomamö show complex mixtures of compassion and cruelty, sympathy and indifference. This is no pre-market Garden of Eden.

Polanyi's popularity thus represents the triumph of yearning and romanticism over science in disciplines like sociology. "The Great Transformation" ultimately offers more insight into the nature of the professoriat than it does to societies they study.
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Conscience is deeper..............

2008-06-10T17:45:00.001+05:30

"I feel safer down here among the Christian savages along Narragansett Bay than I do among the savage Christians of Massachusetts Bay Colony," wrote Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, shortly after his exile from polite society in 1635. Williams was one of the great heretics of what Europeans deemed a new world, not least because he bothered to learn the languages and customs of those he found already living there. He knew the Native Americans he admired were not Christians in any doctrinal sense, but he believed they lived according to a spirit of brotherly love more fully than the Puritans of Massachusetts from whom he'd fled. Martha Nussbaum argues that Williams's friendships with Narragansett leaders in Rhode Island left him with the kind of nuanced understanding of tolerance that would become the bedrock of American religious freedom--and, what's more, liberty of conscience. What is the distinction? Religion is a set of beliefs, ideas, rituals or customs. Conscience is more fundamental: the faculty of searching for the beliefs, ideas, rituals or customs that make up religion or, for that matter, the rejection of religion. Conscience is "precious," she says, whether it's exercised or not, an insight she credits Williams with recognizing long before John Locke--due, in large part, to Williams's fascination with the non-Christian savages he encountered in the process of colonizing their land.
Was Williams romanticizing the Native Americans he met, mostly leaders like himself who surely grasped the value of good relations with a powerful newcomer to their territory? Undoubtedly. Does Nussbaum, a professor of law, philosophy and divinity at the University of Chicago, take a similarly rosy view of what she calls "the lesson of the first Thanksgiving," "a distinctively American combination of principles" she refers to throughout Liberty of Conscience as "the tradition"? (emphasis mine) Surely. After all, "the tradition" hasn't had much staying power, as she demonstrates in chapters on anti-Mormonism, anti-Catholicism and even, quite recently, a Supreme Court hostile to the religious customs of Native Americans. The tradition isn't yet traditional, but Nussbaum's book, a fundamentally flawed but wise consideration of the subtle distinctions between "freedom" and "equality," may help cultivate it in years to come.

Meanwhile, Founding Faith--a new book by Steven Waldman, a former religion reporter--is the sort of carefully crafted crowd pleaser that trades Williams's liberty of conscience for the solace of centrism. "The Founding Faith," Waldman writes, "was not Christianity, and it was not secularism. It was religious liberty--a revolutionary formula for promoting faith by leaving it alone." Here we see the implications of the fine line Nussbaum draws between "freedom" and "equality." The former, on its own, can collapse into the sort of bland theism announced by an original catchphrase of Beliefnet, an online religion portal created by Waldman in 1999 and recently sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp: "Everyone believes in something." In political terms, such a sentiment results in the banal cold war faith of President Eisenhower, who dispensed with the Constitution's Establishment Clause with the curt declaration that "our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith--and I don't care what it is."

Religious freedom protects one's right to believe, but too often it has been interpreted as doing no more than that, and not just by sleepy executives who prefer golf and war to the subtleties of civil liberties. "An 'establishment of religion,'" Nussbaum reminds us--that which was forbidden to the federal government by the First Amendment--"means that government has put its stamp of approval on some particular religion or group of religions, creating an official orthodoxy." It's a short leap from Waldman's implicit contention that government ought to promote faith to the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist's judicial notion of "nonpreferentialism," which holds that while government cannot favor one religion over another, it can certainly favor religion in general. Nonpreferentialism is itself an orthodoxy: call it religionism.

That idea didn't die with Rehnquist. Justice Antonin Scalia sharpened Rehnquist's point by arguing in a dissent in McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky (2005) that government may favor monotheistic religion, and Justice Clarence Thomas is ready to write off the Establishment Clause as it applies to the states altogether, arguing in a concurring opinion in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004) that while the federal government can't establish religion, states can. If one follows Thomas's logic, widely shared by evangelical conservatives, there is nothing stopping Texas from declaring itself Baptist territory--a prospect foreshadowed in the official platform of the Texas GOP, which declares the United States a Christian country.

How do we avoid that slide into Christian nationalism, from the centrism of Waldman to the monotheistic prejudice of Rehnquist and Scalia to the blatant Christian favoritism on display in President Bush's faith-based initiatives agenda? Waldman thinks he has a solution: "extremists" on both sides should admit that everybody is a little bit wrong and a little bit right. Conservatives should stop accusing separationists of being antireligion. Separationists should stop being so, well, separationist. Conservatives should stop claiming the founders were all Christians. Liberals should stop claiming the founders were all deists.

Much of Founding Faith, in fact, is dedicated to providing capsule biographies of the founders that in the end reveal nothing so much as the religious eccentricity of the Revolutionary era, when all the old ways were subject to re-examination and reconstruction, most famously in Thomas Jefferson's cut-and-paste Bible. Jefferson deleted all of Christ's miracles, making of the Messiah an ordinary man. (It's an iconoclastic impulse lost on the annual Congressionally sponsored National Prayer Breakfast, the program of which so violently wrenches out of context Jefferson's views on Jesus that it makes a President accused in his own day of atheism sound like a holy roller.) Benjamin Franklin, whom Waldman dubs "the Puritan New Ager," was also a Bible cutter, snipping Mary out of the Apostle's Creed; as for the "Angry Unitarian" John Adams, he emerges in Waldman's short portrait as deeply conflicted about the role of religion in the new nation.

But the relationship between the "spiritual journeys" of the founders, as Waldman describes the stories he tells, and contemporary governance is a mystery, unless you're an adherent of Waldman's "Founding Faith," otherwise known as the myth of origins: as a thing was created, so its essence forever remains.

More at:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080609/sharlet

James Watson does not have a high IQ.?

2008-06-09T18:21:00.001+05:30

James Watson has long assumed a certain special status among American scientists. The molecular biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for, as the Swedish Academy put it in its announcement for the prize, "their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." Watson and his British colleague Crick are remembered popularly for identifying the elegant and unexpected "double helix" three-dimensional structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly known as DNA. Watson's important contribution to this uncanny discovery was to define how the four nucleotide bases that make up DNA—guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A) and thymine (T)—combine in pairs to form its structure. These base pairs turn out to be the key to both the structure of DNA and its various functions. In other words, Watson identified the language and the code by which we understand and talk about our genetic makeup.

I have been among those who have long held Watson in high regard for several reasons. First of all, the discovery of DNA's three-dimensional structure was counterintuitive; it was an ingenious act of deduction, using models made of cardboard and paste with an exacto knife and a straight edge. How Watson and Crick, working at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, became the first scientists to identify this elusive structure is the stuff of drama, especially when we recall that Watson was just 25 years old when he and Crick published their findings in the journal Nature on April 25, 1953.

Though Watson would tell me during our recent interview that he had a rather low IQ, as proof that IQ tests aren't really that important, he enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was merely 15 and earned his B.S. in zoology there in 1947 at the age of 19 and a Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University at age 22. He was 34 when he won the Nobel Prize. Not too shabby for a guy with a "low" IQ.

Watson's youth and a certain absent-minded professorial quirkiness made him an American hero, the symbol of American enterprise and intelligence. What's more, unlike Crick, or Einstein, say, Watson was an American born and bred: His discovery, coming at the height of the Cold War, would be hailed as attesting to American genius and the unrivaled potential of the free market system versus communism. The intrigue over allegations that Watson and Crick made unauthorized use of the seminal work on X-ray diffraction by Rosalind Franklin, a brilliant scientist who died before the Nobel Prize committee made its decision, only made Watson's story all the more titillating.

And Watson—never camera shy or publicity averse—contributed to the power of his own myth first by writing "Molecular Biology of the Gene," a 1965 textbook that, updated, remains enormously popular today, and, three years later, "The Double Helix," an account of the dramatic story of his discovery that also contained startling and scandalous revelations of petty tensions, jealousies and rivalries among scientists whom we all had assumed were motivated primarily by the pursuit of truth. Watson's book did nothing less than deconstruct the myth of the scientist as secular saint, laboring away in a laboratory for knowledge's sake at the service of mankind. (One scientist summed up Watson's view of the scientific profession as "with malice toward most and charity toward none.") But Watson's account also made his quest to determine the structure of DNA gripping and exciting, one of science's greatest and most compelling triumphs. Though he was a professor at Harvard University at the time—he taught there from 1956 to 1976—the Harvard University Press refused to publish the book because of its tell-all nature. A commercial press published it instead, it became a best-seller and Watson's celebrity only grew.

In 1989, such was the power and force of Watson's reputation and his place in the history of science that he was named the head of the Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, a position he held until 1992, when he resigned because of what he said was his opposition to NIH's intention to patent gene sequences; others suggested his ownership of stock in biotechnology companies posed a possible conflict of interest. In 1994, Watson became president of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (he had been its director since 1968), a lavishly funded and idyllic center on Long Island for the advanced study of genomics and cancer that in 1998 created the Watson School of Biological Sciences. In 2004, he became Cold Spring's chancellor.

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I shot a duck

2008-06-08T19:36:00.000+05:30

A Yankee lawyer went duck hunting in eastern North Carolina. He shot and dropped a bird, but it fell into a farmer's field on the other side of a fence. As the lawyer climbed over the fence, an elderly gentleman asked him what he was doing. The lawyer responded, "I shot a duck and it fell in this field, I'm going into retrieve it."
The old farmer replied. "This is my property, and you are not coming over here."
The indignant lawyer said, "I am one of the best trial attorneys in the U.S. and, if you don't let me get that duck, I'll sue you and take everything!
The old farmer smiled and said, "Apparently, you don't know how we do things here in North Carolina. We settle small disagreements like this with the NC Three-Kick Rule."
The lawyer asked, "What is the NC three-Kick Rule?"
The Farmer replied. "Well, first I kick you three times and then you kick me three times, and so on, back and forth, until someone gives up."
The Yankee attorney quickly thought about the proposed contest and decided that he could easily take the old southerner. He agreed to abide by the local custom.
The old farmer slowly climbed down from the tractor and walked up to the city feller. His first kick planted the toe of his heavy work boot into the Yankee lawyer's groin and dropped him to his knees. His second kick nearly wiped the man's nose off his face. The barrister was flat on his belly when the farmer's third kick to a kidney nearly caused him to give up.
The Yankee lawyer summoned every bit of his will and managed to get to his feet and said, "Okay, you old redneck southerner, now it's my turn."
The old North Carolina farmer smiled and said, "Naw, I give up. You can have the duck."

How can religious people explain something like this?

2008-06-06T17:13:00.000+05:30

The modern era flatters itself that human beings can now know and shape almost everything about the world. But an event like the Indonesian earthquake exposes much of this for the hubris that it is.

Perhaps we have talked so much about our civilisation's potential to destroy the planet that we have forgotten that the planet also has an untamed ability to destroy civilisation too. Whatever else it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at least reminded mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face of nature. The scale of suffering that it has wreaked - 20,000 deaths and counting - shows that we share such dangers with our ancestors more fully than most of us realised.

An entirely understandable reaction to such an event is to set one's face against any large questions that it may raise. But this week provides an unsought opportunity to consider the largest of all human implications of any major earthquake: its challenge to religion.

A few days after the 9/11 attacks on New York, I had dinner with the Guardian's late columnist Hugo Young. We were still so close to the event itself that only one topic of conversation was possible. At one stage I asked Hugo how his Catholicism allowed him to explain such a terrible act. I'm afraid that's an easy one, he replied.

We are all fallen beings, Hugo declared, and our life in this world is a vale of tears. So some human beings will always kill one another. The attack on New York should therefore be seen not as an act of God, but as an act of fallen humanity. Then he paused, and added: "But I admit I have much more difficulty with earthquakes."

Earthquakes and the belief in the judgment of God are, indeed, very hard to reconcile. However, no religion that offers an explanation of the world can avoid making some kind of an attempt to fit the two together. And an immense earthquake like the one that took place off Sumatra on Sunday inevitably poses that challenge afresh in dramatic terms.

There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week: why did it happen?

As with previous earthquakes, any explanation of this latest one poses us a sharp intellectual choice. Either there is an entirely natural explanation for it, or there is some other kind. Even the natural one is by no means easy to imagine, but it is at least wholly coherent.

The tsunami took place, say the seismologists, because a massive tectonic rupture on the sea bed generated tremors through the ocean. These unimaginable forces sent their energy coursing across thousands of miles of water, resulting in death and destruction in a vast arc from Somalia to Indonesia.

But what do world views that do not allow scientists undisputed authority have to say about such phenomena? Where do the creationists stand, for example? Such world views are more widespread, even now, than a secularised society such as ours sometimes prefers to think.

For most of human history people have tried to explain earthquakes as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Even as the churches collapsed around them in 1755, Lisbon's priests insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the catastrophe that would kill more than 50,000 of their fellow citizens.

Others, though, began to draw different conclusions. Voltaire asked what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. Did Lisbon really have so many more vices than London or Paris, he asked, that it should be punished in such a appalling and indiscriminate manner? Immanuel Kant was so amazed by what happened to Lisbon that he wrote three separate treatises on the problem of earthquakes.

Our own society seems to be more squeamish about such things. The need for mutual respect between peoples and traditions of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas broadcast seems to require that we must all respect religions in equal measure, too. The government, indeed, is legislating to prevent expressions of religious hatred in ways that could put a cordon around the critical discussion of religion itself.

Yet it is hard to think of any event in modern times that requires a more serious explanation from the forces of religion than this week's earthquake. Voltaire's 18th-century question to Christians - why Lisbon? - ought to generate a whole series of 21st-century equivalents for all the religions of the world.

Certainly the giant waves generated by the quake made no attempt to differentiate between the religions of those whom it made its victims. Hindus were swept away in India, Muslims were carried off in Indonesia, Buddhists in Thailand. Visiting Christians and Jews received no special treatment either. This poses no problem for the scientific belief system. Here, it says, was a mindless natural event, which destroyed Muslim and Hindu alike.

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The Bluffer's Guide to wine and grapes

2008-06-05T17:23:00.000+05:30

Apart from rocket science, there are very few activities that require you to be a rocket scientist to enjoyably and intelligently take part. Yet, in this age of specialization, things often seem more complex than they really are.

Take wine, for example. The drink itself hasn't changed drastically since neolithic Iranians began fermenting grapes some six or seven thousand years ago - certainly not as much as rocket science has evolved over that period. And yet there's a real stigma associated with wine - that we can never know enough about it to take part in even a water-cooler discussion on the merits, or lack, say, of merlot. We certainly don't feel as wine savvy as the person with whom we're drinking it, and nowhere near as well-versed about it as the one who's serving, or selling, it to us.

But, you say, some people go to wine schools for years to become oenology and viticulture experts, stewards and sommeliers. How can I compete with that sort of dedication? Well, you can't. But that doesn't mean you have to curl your tail between your legs at dinner parties, either. To be a rocket scientist, at some point you actually have to make the things go up and down. To pass yourself off as a semi-knowledgeable wine connoisseur, you have only to talk a good game. Ready?

Wine: What is it? Essentially, and for the purpose of this course, wine is fermented grape juice to which someone has added yeast. The yeast reacts with the grapes' natural sugars to produce alcohol (and heat and carbon dioxide, but don't worry yourself about this). There are other significant elements, such as acids, which balance sugar and alcohol, bring out fruit flavours and help the wine age, and tannins, which add to the colour, taste and body, but a little knowledge of these areas can go a long way to causing you embarrassment; it's best to leave these machinations to those who really

care. Never speak of them again.

Where does wine come from? Four countries - France, Italy, Spain and the U.S. - produce and consume more than half of the world's wine. If you understand the global oil diaspora, and can imagine Italy, France and Spain as sort of a vintner's Middle East, it should all make sense. Except relatively few people die in the name of wine, chiefly because Americans aren't nearly as fussy about it as they are about oil.

If it's almost all from those four countries, why confuse me with all these regions? Relax. This is similar to how your car mechanic keeps you below him in the automotive hierarchy - by adding details that aren't important but will make you feel foolish for not understanding them. "You blew a rod," he might say, or "your head gasket needs replacing," or "your stabilizer-bar links are shot." What is he really telling you? Your car is broken and needs repairs. And what do you want? A car that runs. Likewise, you simply want a wine that tastes good. Do you care whether it's made from nebbiolo or tempranillo grapes? That's like passenger-side air-bags - who really cares? That said, you should learn the names of the seven basic grapes, because they're going to come up a lot. Three of them - chardonnay, riesling and sauvignon blanc - are white, while the rest - cabernet sauvignon, merlot, pinot noir and syrah (or shiraz) - are, um, the other one - red. These seven account for about three out of every four bottles of wine you're likely to come across, so they're worth memorizing.

How will that help? If you're in a restaurant and your dinner companion says, "How about a shiraz?" you might counter with, "Sure, or we could try a cabernet," suggesting that, rather then being simply acquiescent, you really have an opinion. If you have to pick something from the wine list, stick with an Italian or French red, and choose one from the upper end of your price range. "I had this one last week," you might lie, "and it was excellent." If the one you then receive isn't excellent, or even if it is, counter with, "Hm, this batch doesn't seem to have the same legs" (or "isn't as rustic/clean/subtle/pronounced/firm/delicate" [just pick one]). Remember, the trick isn't in knowing what you're talking about but sounding like you do.

OK, but what about all these adjectives? Which ones should I use? What do they all mean? They're generally used to describe the look, smell and texture of a wine, with terms such as "nutty," "jammy," "oaky" or "plummy." It's important to remember that wine growers don't actually put nuts or jam or plums in their wines. These are just words used to compare a wine to something with which people can relate, and you can make up your own with impunity.

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Sex is the greatest thing in the world...?

2008-06-04T16:47:00.001+05:30

Years ago, a bunch of us were sitting around drinking when I heard a friend murmur two sentences I have never forgotten. "You know, guys, sex is the greatest thing in the world." He paused and we were all about to nod in agreement. He was, after all, a noted and knowledgeable ladies' man. Unexpectedly, though, he then added, with infinite wistfulness: "But it's just not that great."

There, in that gulf between the reality and the dream, lies the domain of pornography, the sex industry and the masturbatory fantasy -- of Viagra and the midlife crisis. Our Western myths of love are seldom about fulfillment; they are all about yearning. In Plato's Symposium we are told that the gods divided the original ball-like human beings in two, and that we consequently spend our lives searching for the other half who will complete us. So-called romantic love, which first blossomed in 12th-century France, revels in passion delayed, forbidden or otherwise thwarted. Its real theme is desire.

But for the Western imagination, the East has long represented an escape from this pervasive sexual unhappiness. Baudelaire spoke of tropic realms of "luxe, calme et volupté"; Hawaii and Tahiti once beckoned as Edens of innocent voluptuousness. From the 18th century on, the Orient, in general, seemed a perfumed garden, offering the tender attentions of geishas, bare-breasted island girls and pretty boys. Here, amid erotic graciousness, the darkness of sin was unknown. And yet, even this scented, sensual wonderland turned out to have its guide, its bible: The Kamasutra, sometimes subtitled "The Hindu Art of Love."
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The title alone summons visions of exceedingly ambitious sexual postures. Yet the real Kamasutra is even more fascinating than its myth. In his "biography" of this Sanskrit classic, James McConnachie starts by exploring the philosophical and historical background of its 3rd-century text. "Kama" is the Sanskrit word for sexual pleasure or delight; a "sutra" is "a scholarly treatise designed to compress knowledge into a series of pithy maxims." The Kamasutra itself is a work of consolidation or reclamation, since its author, Vatsyayana, tells us that he was building on seven earlier treatises about love (all now lost). It was intended "to be a contribution to the great scientific project of the era: the composition of authoritative studies of all aspects of human behaviour and understanding." Other treatises were devoted to dharma -- a word associated with law, justice, duty and principle -- and artha, which covered worldly success.

Under the Gupta dynasty, 3rd-century India developed a highly aesthetic urban culture, and Vatsyayana's intended readers were young men about town, who frequented the theater, practiced the arts and lived playboy lives devoted to pleasure. His treatise (or shastra) is divided into seven "books." In Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar's 2002 translation, these are: General Observations, Sex, Virgins, Wives, Other Men's Wives, Courtesans, and Erotic Esoterica. Full of details from contemporary life, The Kamasutra is highly dramatic and has been likened to an extended play. It also strives to establish sex as a humane activity, a cultivated art that rejects both confining Buddhist morality and unchecked sexual aggression.

In the notorious Book Two, Vatsyayana describes 64 kama-kalas, or ways to make love. Surprisingly, these are not 64 positions, notes McConnachie, "but simply a kind of grand total of the categories into which Vatsyayana divides the different moods and modes of lovemaking. Theorists, Vatsyayana says, divide sex into eight different topics, namely 'embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, the positions, moaning, the woman playing the man's part, and oral sex.' As each of these modes of sex is supposed to have eight different particular manifestations, there are thus sixty-four ways in which a man or woman could be said to be having sex in its broadest sense." But, as McConnachie emphasizes, "the kama-kalas are not just tools for successful love making," they also "lie at the heart of what constitutes an educated man."
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Dark, Perhaps Forever

2008-06-03T17:33:00.000+05:30

Mario Livio tossed his car keys in the air.They rose ever more slowly, paused, shining, at the top of their arc, and then in accordance with everything our Galilean ape brains have ever learned to expect, crashed back down into his hand.

That was the whole problem, explained Dr. Livio, a theorist at the Space Telescope Science Institute here on the Johns Hopkins campus.

A decade ago, astronomers discovered that what is true for your car keys is not true for the galaxies. Having been impelled apart by the force of the Big Bang, the galaxies, in defiance of cosmic gravity, are picking up speed on a dash toward eternity. If they were keys, they would be shooting for the ceiling.

“That is how shocking this was,” Dr. Livio said.

It is still shocking. Although cosmologists have adopted a cute name, dark energy, for whatever is driving this apparently antigravitational behavior on the part of the universe, nobody claims to understand why it is happening, or its implications for the future of the universe and of the life within it, despite thousands of learned papers, scores of conferences and millions of dollars’ worth of telescope time. It has led some cosmologists to the verge of abandoning their fondest dream: a theory that can account for the universe and everything about it in a single breath.

“The discovery of dark energy has greatly changed how we think about the laws of nature,” said Edward Witten, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

This fall, NASA and the Department of Energy plan to invite proposals for a $600 million satellite mission devoted to dark energy. But some scientists fear that might not be enough. When astronomers and physicists gathered at the Space Telescope Science Institute recently to take stock of the revolution, their despair of getting to the bottom of the dark energy mystery anytime soon, if ever, was palpable, even as they anticipate a flood of new data from the sky in coming years. When it came time for one physicist to discuss new ideas about dark energy, he showed a blank screen.

The institute’s director, Matt Mountain, said that dark energy had given this generation of astronomers a rare opportunity, and he admonished them to use it wisely.

“We are placing a large bet,” Dr. Mountain said, “using our credibility as collateral, that we as a community know what we are doing.”

But many stressed that it was going to be a long march with no clear end in sight. Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University told them, “In spite of the fact that you are liable to spend the rest of your lives measuring stuff that won’t tell us what we want to know, you should keep doing it.”

Scuffling in the Dark

Through myriad techniques and observations, cosmologists have recently arrived, after decades of strife, at a robust but dark consensus regarding a cosmos in which stars and galaxies, as well as the humans who gawk at them, amount to barely more than a disputatious froth. It was born 13.7 billion years ago in the Big Bang. By weight it is 4 percent atoms and 22 percent so-called dark matter of unknown identity — perhaps elementary particles that will be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider starting up outside Geneva this year. That leaves 74 percent for the weight of whatever began causing the cosmos to accelerate about five billion years ago.

As far as astronomers can tell, there is no relation between dark matter, the particles, and dark energy other than the name, but you never know. Some physicists are even willing to burn down their old sainted Einstein and revise his theory of gravity, general relativity, to make the cosmic discrepancies go away. There is in fact a simple explanation for the dark energy, Dr. Witten pointed out, one whose tangled history goes all the way back to Einstein, but it is also the most troubling.

“Dark energy has the somewhat unusual property that it was embarrassing before it was discovered,” he said.

In 1917, Einstein invented a fudge factor known as the cosmological constant, a sort of cosmic repulsion to balance gravity and keep the universe in balance. He abandoned his constant when the universe was discovered to be expanding, but quantum physics resurrected it by showing that empty space should be foaming with energy that had the properties of Einstein’s constant.

Alas, all attempts to calculate the amount of this energy come up with an unrealistically huge number, enough energy to blow away the contents of the cosmos like leaves in a storm before stars or galaxies could form. Nothing could live there.

Dr. Witten and other physicists used to think this conundrum “would somehow go away.” Something was missing in physicists’ understanding of physics, the logic went. The constant was really zero for deep reasons that, when revealed, would lead physicists closer to an understanding of what they call “the vacuum,” that is to say, the structure of reality.

“It seems now that the answer is not really zero,” Dr. Witten said.

Read more..

The ‘death of God’

2008-06-02T17:30:00.000+05:30

The most boring question to ask about religion is whether or not the whole thing is “true”. It’s a measure of the banality of recent discussions on theological matters that it is precisely this matter which has hogged the limelight, pitting a hardcore group of fanatical believers against an equally small band of fanatical atheists.

We’d be wiser to start with the common-sense observation that, of course, no part of religion is true in the sense of being God-given. There is naturally no holy ghost, spirit, Geist or divine emanation. Dissenters from this line can comfortably stop reading here, but for the rest of us the subject is henceforth far from closed. The tragedy of modern atheism is to have ignored just how many aspects of religion continue to be interesting even when the central tenets of the great faiths are discovered to be entirely implausible. Indeed, it’s precisely when we stop believing in the idea that gods made religions that things become interesting, for it is then that we can focus on the human imagination which dreamt these creeds up. We can recognise that the needs which led people to do so must still in some way be active, albeit dormant, in modern secular man. God may be dead, but the bit of us that made God continues to stir.

It was our 18th-century forebears who, wiser than us in this regard, early on in the period which led to “the death of God” began to consider what human beings would miss out on once religion faded away. They recognised that religion was not just a matter of belief, but that it sat upon a welter of concerns that touched on architecture, art, nature, marriage, death, ritual, time — and that by getting rid of God, one would also be dispensing with a whole raft of very useful, if often peculiar and sometimes retrograde, notions that had held societies together since the beginning of time. So the more fanciful and imaginative of thinkers began to do two things: firstly, they started comparing the world’s religions with a view to arriving at certain insights that transcended time and place, and secondly, they began to imagine what a religion might look like if it didn’t have a god in it.

In the early, euphoric days of the French Revolution, the painter Jacques-Louis David unveiled what he termed “A Religion of Mankind”, a secularised version of Christianity which aimed to build upon the best aspects of the old, discredited tenets. In this new secular religion, there would be feast days, wedding ceremonies, revered figures (secularised saints) and even atheistic churches and temples. The new religion would rely on art and philosophy, but put them to overtly didactic ends: it would use the panoply of techniques known to traditional religions (buildings, great books, seminaries) to try to make us good according to the sanest and most advanced understanding of the word.
Unfortunately, David’s experiment never gathered force and was quietly ditched, but it remains a striking moment in history: a naive yet intelligent attempt to confront the thought that there are certain needs in us that can never be satisfied by art, family, work or the state alone. In the light of this, it seems evident that what we now need is not a choice between atheism and religion, but a new secular religion: a religion for atheists.

What would such a peculiar idea involve? For a start, lots of new buildings akin to churches, temples and cathedrals. We are the only society in history to have nothing transcendent at our centre, nothing which is greater than ourselves. In so far as we feel awe, we do so in relation to supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its denizens the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be inconsequent next to the spectacle of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no more compelling repository of our veneration than our brilliant and morally troubling fellow human beings.

A secular religion would hence begin by putting man into context and would do so through works of art, landscape gardening and architecture. Imagine a network of secular churches, vast high spaces in which to escape from the hubbub of modern society and in which to focus on all that is beyond us. It isn’t surprising that secular people continue to be interested in cathedrals. Their architecture performs the very clever and eternally useful function of relativising those who walk inside them. We begin to feel small inside a cathedral and recognise the debt that sanity owes to such a feeling.

Pythagoras was a kind of myth-magnet?

2008-06-01T12:05:00.000+05:30

Poor old Pythagoras is slipping away from us. He was always a shadowy figure in Western thought -- his followers were secretive and he himself wrote nothing, as far as we know. Even in his own time and place, the Greek cities of southern Italy in the seventh century B.C., Pythagoras was a kind of myth-magnet. Over time a large body of thought about him developed, though it was based on precious little evidence. Then, in the second half of the 20th century, Pythagoras became yet more mysterious.

In 1962, the Swiss scholar Walter Burkert -- using a close reading of earliest written accounts of what Pythagoras was supposed to have said to his followers -- published a monumental debunking of the Pythagorean tradition. Fellow scholars were persuaded that what little they thought they knew about Pythagoras was probably wrong.

Corbis
Until then, it had been said that there were two sides to Pythagoras -- which is a little ironic, given his presumed association with triangles. He had a religious side as the miracle-working leader of a cult that believed in the transmigration of souls (that "the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird," as Shakespeare's Malvolio puts it in "Twelfth Night"). And Pythagoras had a "scientific" side: He was a pioneering mathematician and philosopher who regarded geometry and numbers as the keys to the universe's harmonious structure.

Only the first side emerged intact from Burkert's scrutiny. The picture of Pythagoras as a mathematician and philosopher was a "mistake," Burkert said, an error resulting largely from the eagerness of self-styled "Pythagoreans" in later centuries to attribute their work to the master himself.

It now seems that Pythagoras did not invent the notion of mathematical proof after all. (Bertrand Russell and Arthur Koestler thought he did, which is why they both proclaimed him the West's most influential thinker.) Nor did he discover the theorem that bears his name -- that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. It was known a thousand years earlier in Mesopotamia. He may have noted a link between some harmonic intervals in the music of his time and certain simple numerical ratios. But there is no reason to think he was the first to do so.

Still, even if the old Greek magician himself did not have much to do with it, Pythagoreanism played a sometimes important role in Western science before Newton, especially in astronomy, as Kitty Ferguson illustrates in "The Music of Pythagoras," an engaging survey of the ideas that have been thought of as Pythagorean.

For example, Plato's "Timaeus," with its account of a creator fashioning the world out of basic geometrical shapes, reflected the ideas of Plato's friend Archytas of Tarentum, a mathematician who regarded himself as a Pythagorean. "Timaeus" was the basis for most cosmology in the West for the first 12 centuries of the Christian era.

In the early 17th century, the astronomy of Johannes Kepler was suffused with Pythagorean themes, including the Pythagorean "music of the spheres." In ancient times it was much discussed why this sound, allegedly made by the heavenly bodies as they whiz through space, cannot be heard by human ears. Aristotle wryly noted that humans cannot hear it because there is no such sound.

In general, Ms. Ferguson's theme is that Pythagoras himself is responsible for the notion that numbers reveal hidden patterns in nature and that this notion amounts to a fundamental principle in science. It is indeed likely that Pythagoras regarded simple numbers and ratios as the keys to the universe; this much survives the skeptical thrust of recent scholarship about him.

Ms. Ferguson is familiar with the scholarship, but it is not clear that she has grasped its significance. Pythagoras' interest in numbers was primarily mystical, with little scientific content. He was concerned more with numerological symbolism (four was justice, for example, and five was marriage) than with measuring things. And the hope that it is possible to provide a unified account of the universe, using quantitative tools, is fundamentally Greek rather than specifically Pythagorean. The idea is found, in crude forms, in Pythagoras' immediate predecessors, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes.

Ms. Ferguson closes her book with a hurried meditation on the threats to the conception of an orderly universe that are allegedly posed by 20th-century math and science. Were the Pythagoreans -- or, we might as well say, the Greeks -- correct to assume that there are comprehensible patterns in the universe? Or has that turned out to be a false hope? Ms. Ferguson skips briskly through quantum mechanics, chaos theory, set theory and more, wondering whether they show, in their sometimes surprising and always complex claims, that the universe is not rational after all.

Continue reading..

Could Sky's Colour Change?

2008-05-30T17:34:00.000+05:30

SCIENTIST Tim Flannery has proposed a radical solution to climate change which may change the colour of the sky.

But he says it may be necessary, as the "last barrier to climate collapse."

Professor Flannery says climate change is happening so quickly that mankind may need to pump sulphur into the atmosphere to survive.

Australia's best-known expert on global warming has updated his climate forecast for the world - and it's much worse than he thought just three years ago.

He has called for a radical suite of emergency measures to be put in place.

The gas sulphur could be inserted into the earth's stratosphere to keep out the sun's rays and slow global warming, a process called global dimming.

"It would change the colour of the sky," Prof Flannery told AAP.

"It's the last resort that we have, it's the last barrier to a climate collapse.

"We need to be ready to start doing it in perhaps five years time if we fail to achieve what we're trying to achieve."
Prof Flannery, the 2007 Australian of the Year, said the sulphur could be dispersed above the earth's surface by adding it to jet fuel.

He conceded there were risks to global dimming via sulphur.

"The consequences of doing that are unknown."

'Cutting emissions not enough'

Professor Flannery, who spoke at a business and sustainability conference in Parliament House today, said new science showed the world was much more susceptible to greenhouse gas emissions that had been thought eight years ago.

Regardless of what happened to emissions in the future, there was already far too much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, he said.

Cutting emissions was not enough. Mankind now had to take greenhouse gases out of the air.

"The current burden of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is in fact more than sufficient to cause catastrophic climate change," Prof Flannery said.

"Everything's going in the wrong direction at the moment, timelines are getting shorter, the amount of pollution in the atmosphere is growing.

"It's extremely urgent."

'Use eBay to plant forests'

As well as the global dimming plan, Prof Flannery said carbon should be taken out of the air and converted into charcoal, then ploughed into farmers' fields.

Wealthy people should pay poor farmers in tropical zones to plant forests - possibly through a direct purchase scheme like the eBay website.

And all conventional coal-fired power stations - which did not have "clean coal" technology - should be closed by 2030.

Capturing carbon emissions from coal-fired power stations and storing it underground - called carbon capture and storage (CCS) - was a good idea, Professor Flannery said.

He urged Australia to dramatically fast-track CCS research and give the technology to the Chinese, who are building the equivalent of one new coal-fired power station a week.

Prof Flannery said while the Rudd Government was doing more to tackle climate change than its predecessor, it was still "nowhere near enough."

He called on the Government to remove the means test on the $8000 rebate for domestic solar panels introduced in last week's budget.

"It's probably the bureaucrats getting in the way, we all know that sort of policy is not going to work," he said.

Via-news.com

Game-Play

2008-05-29T17:34:00.000+05:30

Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It's not that he has lost interest—just that he's no longer working his way up the greasy pole. He's got to the top. He heads his own guild, has 20,000 gold pieces in the bank and wields the Twin Blades of Azzinoth; weapons so powerful and difficult to acquire that other players often (virtually) follow Mogwai around just to look at them. In his own words, he's "e-famous." He was recently offered $8,000 for his Warcraft account, a sum he only briefly considered accepting. Given that he has clocked up over 4,500 hours of play, the prospective buyers were hardly making it worth his while. Plus, more sentimentally, he feels his character is not his alone to sell: "The strange thing about this character is that he doesn't just belong to me. Every item he has he got through the hard work of 20 or more other people. Selling him would be a slap in their faces." As in many modern online games, co-operation is the only way to progress, with the most challenging encounters manageable only with the collaboration of other experienced players. Hence the need for leaders, guilds—in-game collectives, sometimes containing hundreds of players—and online friendships measured in years. "When I started, I didn't care about the other people. Now they are the only reason I continue."

When Mogwai isn't online, he's called Adam Brouwer, and works as a civil servant for the British government modelling crisis scenarios of hypothetical veterinary disease outbreaks. I point out to him a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line "The best sign that someone's qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status." Is there anything to this? "Absolutely," he says, "but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview." How, then, does he explain his willingness to invest so much in something that has little value for his career? He disputes this claim. "In Warcraft I've developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I've enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people's intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task."

It's an eloquent self-justification—even if some, including Adam's partner of the last ten years, might say he protests too much. You find this kind of frank introspection again and again on the thousands of independent websites maintained by World of Warcraft's more than 10m players. Yet this way of thinking about video games can be found almost nowhere within the mainstream media, which still tend to treat games as an odd mix of the slightly menacing and the alien: more like exotic organisms dredged from the deep sea than complex human creations.

This lack has become increasingly jarring, as video games and the culture that surrounds them have become very big news indeed. In March, the British government released the Byron report—one of the first large-scale investigations into the effects of electronic media on children. Its conclusions set out a clear, rational basis for exploring the regulation of video games. Since then, however, the debate has descended into the same old squabbling between partisan factions. In one corner are the preachers of mental and moral decline; in the other the high priests of innovation and life 2.0. In between are the ever-increasing legions of gamers, busily buying and playing while nonsense is talked over their heads.

The video games industry, meanwhile, continues to grow at a dizzying pace. Print has been around for a good 500 years; cinema and recorded music for around 100; radio broadcasts for 75; television for 50. Video games have barely three serious decades on the clock, yet already they are in the overtaking lane. In Britain, according to the Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association, 2007 was a record-breaking year, with sales of "interactive entertainment software" totalling £1.7bn—26 per cent more than in 2006. In contrast, British box office takings for the entire film industry were just £904m in 2007—an increase of 8 per cent on 2006—while DVD and video sales stood at £2.2bn (just 0.5 per cent up on 2006), and physical music sales fell from £1.8bn to £1.4bn. At this rate, games software, currntly our second most valuable retail entertainment market, will become Britain's most valuable by 2011. Even books—the British consumer book market was worth £2.4bn in 2006—may not stay ahead for ever.

Continue reading..

The Spirit of Gravity

2008-05-28T17:04:00.004+05:30

My mouthpiece--is of the people: too coarsely and cordially do I talk for Angora rabbits. And still stranger soundeth my word unto all ink-fish and pen-foxes.

My hand--is a fool's hand: woe unto all tables and walls, and whatever hath room for fool's sketching, fool's scrawling!

My foot--is a horse-foot; therewith do I trample and trot over stick and stone, in the fields up and down, and am bedevilled with delight in all fast racing.

My stomach--is surely an eagle's stomach? For it preferreth lamb's flesh. Certainly it is a bird's stomach.

Nourished with innocent things, and with few, ready and impatient to fly, to fly away--that is now my nature: why should there not be something of bird-nature therein!
Not, to be sure, with the love of the sick and infected, for with them stinketh even self-love!

One must learn to love oneself--thus do I teach--with a wholesome and healthy love: that one may endure to be with oneself, and not go roving about.

Such roving about christeneth itself "brotherly love"; with these words hath there hitherto been the best lying and dissembling, and especially by those who have been burdensome to every one.

And verily, it is no commandment for to-day and to-morrow to LEARN to love oneself. Rather is it of all arts the finest, subtlest, last and patientest.

For to its possessor is all possession well concealed, and of all treasure- pits one's own is last excavated--so causeth the spirit of gravity.

Almost in the cradle are we apportioned with heavy words and worths: "good" and "evil"--so calleth itself this dowry. For the sake of it we are forgiven for living.

And therefore suffereth one little children to come unto one, to forbid them betimes to love themselves--so causeth the spirit of gravity.

And we--we bear loyally what is apportioned unto us, on hard shoulders, over rugged mountains! And when we sweat, then do people say to us: "Yea, life is hard to bear!"

But man himself only is hard to bear! The reason thereof is that he carrieth too many extraneous things on his shoulders. Like the camel kneeleth he down, and letteth himself be well laden.

Especially the strong load-bearing man in whom reverence resideth. Too many EXTRANEOUS heavy words and worths loadeth he upon himself--then seemeth life to him a desert!

And verily! Many a thing also that is OUR OWN is hard to bear! And many internal things in man are like the oyster--repulsive and slippery and hard to grasp;-
So that an elegant shell, with elegant adornment, must plead for them. But this art also must one learn: to HAVE a shell, and a fine appearance, and sagacious blindness!

Again, it deceiveth about many things in man, that many a shell is poor and pitiable, and too much of a shell. Much concealed goodness and power is never dreamt of; the choicest dainties find no tasters!

Women know that, the choicest of them: a little fatter a little leaner-- oh, how much fate is in so little!

Man is difficult to discover, and unto himself most difficult of all; often lieth the spirit concerning the soul. So causeth the spirit of gravity.

And especially that I am hostile to the spirit of gravity, that is bird- nature:--verily, deadly hostile, supremely hostile, originally hostile! Oh, whither hath my hostility not flown and misflown!

Thereof could I sing a song--and WILL sing it: though I be alone in an empty house, and must sing it to mine own ears.

Other singers are there, to be sure, to whom only the full house maketh the voice soft, the hand eloquent, the eye expressive, the heart wakeful:-- those do I not resemble.--

2.

He who one day teacheth men to fly will have shifted all landmarks; to him will all landmarks themselves fly into the air; the earth will he christen anew--as "the light body."

The ostrich runneth faster than the fastest horse, but it also thrusteth its head heavily into the heavy earth: thus is it with the man who cannot yet fly.

Heavy unto him are earth and life, and so WILLETH the spirit of gravity! But he who would become light, and be a bird, must love himself:--thus do.

Not, to be sure, with the love of the sick and infected, for with them stinketh even self-love!

One must learn to love oneself--thus do I teach--with a wholesome and healthy love: that one may endure to be with oneself, and not go roving about.

Such roving about christeneth itself "brotherly love"; with these words hath there hitherto been the best lying and dissembling, and especially by those who have been burdensome to every one.

And verily, it is no commandment for to-day and to-morrow to LEARN to love oneself. Rather is it of all arts the finest, subtlest, last and patientest.

For to its possessor is all possession well concealed, and of all treasure- pits one's own is last excavated--so causeth the spirit of gravity.

Almost in the cradle are we apportioned with heavy words and worths: "good" and "evil"--so calleth itself this dowry. For the sake of it we are forgiven for living.

And therefore suffereth one little children to come unto one, to forbid them betimes to love themselves--so causeth the spirit of gravity.

Almost in the cradle are we apportioned with heavy words and worths: "good" and "evil"--so calleth itself this dowry. For the sake of it we are forgiven for living.

And therefore suffereth one little children to come unto one, to forbid them betimes to love themselves--so causeth the spirit of gravity.

And we--we bear loyally what is apportioned unto us, on hard shoulders, over rugged mountains! And when we sweat, then do people say to us: "Yea, life is hard to bear!"

But man himself only is hard to bear! The reason thereof is that he carrieth too many extraneous things on his shoulders. Like the camel kneeleth he down, and letteth himself be well laden.

Especially the strong load-bearing man in whom reverence resideth. Too many EXTRANEOUS heavy words and worths loadeth he upon himself--then seemeth life to him a desert!

And verily! Many a thing also that is OUR OWN is hard to bear! And many internal things in man are like the oyster--repulsive and slippery and hard to grasp;-

So that an elegant shell, with elegant adornment, must plead for them. But this art also must one learn: to HAVE a shell, and a fine appearance, and sagacious blindness!

Again, it deceiveth about many things in man, that many a shell is poor and pitiable, and too much of a shell. Much concealed goodness and power is never dreamt of; the choicest dainties find no tasters!

Women know that, the choicest of them: a little fatter a little leaner-- oh, how much fate is in so little!

Man is difficult to discover, and unto himself most difficult of all; often lieth the spirit concerning the soul. So causeth the spirit of gravity.

He, however, hath discovered himself who saith: This is MY good and evil: therewith hath he silenced the mole and the dwarf, who say: "Good for all, evil for all."

Verily, neither do I like those who call everything good, and this world the best of all. Those do I call the all-satisfied.

All-satisfiedness, which knoweth how to taste everything,--that is not the best taste! I honour the refractory, fastidious tongues and stomachs, which have learned to say "I" and "Yea" and "Nay."

To chew and digest everything, however--that is the genuine swine-nature! Ever to say YE-A--that hath only the ass learnt, and those like it!--

Deep yellow and hot red--so wanteth MY taste--it mixeth blood with all colours. He, however, who whitewasheth his house, betrayeth unto me a whitewashed soul.

With mummies, some fall in love; others with phantoms: both alike hostile to all flesh and blood--oh, how repugnant are both to my taste! For I love blood.

And there will I not reside and abide where every one spitteth and speweth: that is now MY taste,--rather would I live amongst thieves and perjurers. Nobody carrieth gold in his mouth.

Still more repugnant unto me, however, are all lickspittles; and the most repugnant animal of man that I found, did I christen "parasite": it would not love, and would yet live by love.

Unhappy do I call all those who have only one choice: either to become evil beasts, or evil beast-tamers. Amongst such would I not build my tabernacle.

Unhappy do I also call those who have ever to WAIT,--they are repugnant to my taste--all the toll-gatherers and traders, and kings, and other landkeepers and shopkeepers.

Verily, I learned waiting also, and thoroughly so,--but only waiting for MYSELF. And above all did I learn standing and walking and running and leaping and climbing and dancing.

This however is my teaching: he who wisheth one day to fly, must first learn standing and walking and running and climbing and dancing:--one doth not fly into flying!

With rope-ladders learned I to reach many a window, with nimble legs did I climb high masts: to sit on high masts of perception seemed to me no small bliss;--

--To flicker like small flames on high masts: a small light, certainly, but a great comfort to cast-away sailors and ship-wrecked ones!

By divers ways and wendings did I arrive at my truth; not by one ladder did I mount to the height where mine eye roveth into my remoteness.

And unwillingly only did I ask my way--that was always counter to my taste! Rather did I question and test the ways themselves.

A testing and a questioning hath been all my travelling:--and verily, one must also LEARN to answer such questioning! That, however,--is my taste:

--Neither a good nor a bad taste, but MY taste, of which I have no longer either shame or secrecy.

"This--is now MY way,--where is yours?" Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way." For THE way--it doth not exist!

Thus spake Zarathustra.

What has happened has happened !

2008-05-27T17:31:00.001+05:30

Jo beet gayi so baat gayi

Jeevan may ek sitatra tha,

Mana woh behad pyara tha

Woh toot gaya toh toot gaya.

Amber ke aanan ko dekho,

Kitne iske tare toote,

Kitne iske pyare chhoote.

Jo chhot gaye phir kahan mile

Par poocho toote taron ka,

Kab amber shok manata hai,

Jo beet gayo so baat gayi.

What has happened has happened !

In your life there was a star,

Agreed that it was bright and beautiful.

If it has broken today it is broken !

Look at the courtyard of the sky,

How many of its stars break away from it,

How many of its stars leave it and go away.

But of all the stars and loved ones the sky loses,

Have you ever seen the sky mourn for them !

What has happened has happened !

Let us not mourn for the absence of loved ones.

In life, life happens. What happens, happens.

Link---BIG B

Obama asks graduates for sacrifice

2008-05-26T18:00:00.001+05:30

In an insistent call to public service and a personal tribute to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Senator Barack Obama challenged graduates of Wesleyan University yesterday to "work side by side to take on the common challenges that confront all of humanity."

Stepping in for the ailing Kennedy, who was scheduled to deliver the university's commencement address before he was diagnosed with a brain tumor last week, Obama told an audience of several thousand to "be unified in service to a greater good," a cause he described as synonymous with the Kennedy family.

Kennedy, who in January endorsed Obama in a symbolic passing of the political dynasty's progressive mantle, was represented by his wife, Vicki, and his stepdaughter, Caroline Raclin, a member of this year's graduating class.

Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said it was an honor to "pinch-hit" for Kennedy, whom he called "one of my personal heroes and a hero to his country."

"Surely if one man can achieve so much and make such a difference in the lives of so many people, then each of us can do our part," Obama said of Massachusetts' senior senator. "Surely if his service and his story can forever shape America's story, then our collective service can shape the destiny of this generation. At the very least, his living example calls us to try."

Under cloudless blue skies before a supportive crowd that punctuated his words with warm applause, Obama recalled his own decision as a college graduate to work for a small group of churches as a neighborhood organizer in Chicago for "$12,000 a year plus $2,000 for an old, beat-up car," and how the experience gave him purpose and direction. Students, Obama said, owe it to themselves and those less fortunate to serve the common good.(SPEECH OF THE DAY)

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My Love, Darling, Sweetheart, Pumpkin, etc

2008-05-23T17:40:00.000+05:30

Bernie was invited to his friend's home for dinner. Morris, the host, preceded every request to his wife by endearing terms, calling her Honey, My Love, Darling, Sweetheart, Pumpkin, etc.

Bernie looked at Morris and remarked," That is really nice. After all these years that you have been married, you keep calling your wife those pet names."

Morris hung his head and whispered," To tell the truth, I forgot her name three years ago."

East lacks civilization and the West lacks culture.

2008-05-22T17:34:00.000+05:30

A Warrior's Tale - has just been published by Dai Smith. He charts Williams's passage from the Welsh border country, where his father was a railway signalman, to Cambridge and then adult education, a vocation he chose, along with New Left colleagues Richard Hoggart and EP Thompson, for political motives. In a rare moment of disillusion, he told me that the difference between teaching adults and students in the 1950s was like "teaching doctors' daughters rather than doctors' sons". But he never doubted that any Labour government worth its salt would invest massively in "institutions of popular culture and education", and lambasted them all, from Attlee to Wilson, for failing to do so.

"Culture is ordinary," Williams wrote in a pioneering essay, and his own life was a case in point. He saw his transition from Black Mountains to Cambridge spires as in no sense untypical. Right to the end, he regarded the politically conscious rural community in which he was reared, with its neighbourliness and cooperative spirit, as far more of a genuine culture than the Cambridge in which he held a professorial chair and that he once acidly described as "one of the rudest places on earth". Working-class Britain may not have produced its quota of Miltons and Jane Austens; but in Williams's view it had given birth to a culture that was at least as valuable: the dearly won institutions of the labour, union and cooperative movements.

Since Williams's death in 1988, culture, one might claim, has become more ordinary than ever. Not in the sense that Milton is sold in supermarkets, though Austen has been sprung from college libraries into film and television. In the teeth of the Jeremiahs, Williams never ceased to argue for the progressive potential of the media. But he believed that these vital modes of speaking to each other should be wrested back from the cynics who exploited them for private gain. His prescription for dealing with the Murdochs of this world was bracingly free of his usual circumspection: "These men must be run out."

The real sense in which culture since Williams's death has become more ordinary has little to do with Dante or Mozart. One of Williams's key moves was to insist that culture meant not just eminent works of art, but a whole way of life in common; and culture in this sense - language, inheritance, identity, religion - has become important enough to kill for. Dante and Mozart may be elitist, but they have never blown the limbs off small children.

The political currents that topped the global agenda in the late 20th century - revolutionary nationalism, feminism and ethnic struggle - place culture at their heart. Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced. In this sense, culture has become part of the problem rather than the solution, as it was for Matthew Arnold and FR Leavis. In traditional forms of political conflict, working people have proved most inspired when what was at stake was not just a living wage but (like the mining communities) the defence of a way of life. The political demand our rulers find hardest to beat is one that is cultural and material.

Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its murky depths. Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilisation as synchronous. This is what the German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared that "every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism". For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the resources to create it. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state.

These days the conflict between civilisation and barbarism has taken an ominous turn. We face a conflict between civilisation and culture, which used to be on the same side. Civilisation means rational reflection, material wellbeing, individual autonomy and ironic self-doubt; culture means a form of life that is customary, collective, passionate, spontaneous, unreflective and arational. It is no surprise, then, to find that we have civilisation whereas they have culture. Culture is the new barbarism. The contrast between west and east is being mapped on a new axis.

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The art of integrity

2008-05-21T17:47:00.001+05:30

To paraphrase Shakespeare's Falstaff, "honor pricks us on." And although Sir John famously concludes "I'll none of it," the reality is that for most people, honor is more than a "mere scutcheon." Many colleges have honor codes, sometimes elaborated into complex systems: The list includes small colleges (e.g., Gustavus Adolphus, Haverford), large universities (e.g., the University of Virginia, Texas A&M), Ivies like Dartmouth and Princeton, sectarian institutions like Brigham Young, science-tech (Caltech) as well as liberal-arts (Reed) colleges, and, with particular solemnity, the three military academies. The code at West Point is especially terse and predictably directive: "A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do." The first "three commandments" — thou shalt not lie, cheat, or steal — speak for themselves. Of particular interest for our purposes, however, is that fourth admonition: "nor tolerate those who do." (Sure enough, Prince Hal shows himself true to this martial virtue when he eventually — and for many of us, hurtfully — turns away from Falstaff, showing that as king he disowns Fat Jack's dishonorable behavior.)

Doesn't it stand to reason that everyone would be intolerant of violators? After all, when someone lies, cheats, or steals, it hurts the rest of us while making a mockery of society itself (cue Immanuel Kant, and his categorical imperative). The "fourth commandment" should, therefore, be altogether logical and hardly need specifying. The problem for theorists — if not for the "naturally intolerant" — is that blowing the whistle on liars, cheaters, or thieves is likely to impose a cost on the whistle-blower, while everyone else benefits from her act of conscience. Why not mind your own business and let someone else do the dirty work? Isn't that why we have police: to, as the word suggests, police the behavior of others, at least in part so we don't have to do so ourselves?

A conceivable explanation is that if no one else perceives the transgression or, similarly, if no one else is willing to do anything about it, then perhaps the miscreant will get away with it, whereupon everyone — including you — will be worse off. In short, turning in a violator could be a simple act of self-aggrandizement, if the cost of doing so is less than the shared penalty of keeping silent. Another possibility, of course, is that people are indeed predisposed to ignore code violations, which is precisely why the "fourth commandment" exists — because otherwise malefactors would be tolerated. Yet another, and of particular interest to evolutionists, is that people are, at least on occasion, inclined to do things that are detrimental to their personal benefit so long as their actions are sufficiently beneficial to the larger social unit.

That process, known as "group selection," has a long and checkered history in biological theory. Since natural selection should consistently reward selfish acts, how to explain the existence of morality that induces people to behave, as Bertolt Brecht puts it in The Threepenny Opera, "more kindly than we are"? These days, evolutionary explanations lean heavily on kin selection (also known as inclusive fitness theory, whereby apparent altruism at the level of bodies can actually be selfishness playing itself out at the level of genes), and on reciprocity, essentially "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." But there is also the possibility that beneficent acts are biologically generated by a payoff enjoyed by the group, of which the altruist is a member. At one point in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin gave impetus to the group selectionists:

"Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, … an increase in the number of well-endowed men and advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another."

But just because Darwin said it doesn't make it true. The problem is that even if people "well endowed" with morality provide their "tribe" with an "immense advantage," those same people run the risk of being immensely disadvantaged within their group if such endowment equates to spending time, energy, or money on behalf of others, or running risks that help the larger social unit while hurting the altruist. As a result, although group selection — along with its companion concept, "the good of the species" — was uncritically accepted for about a century, it has been deservedly out of favor for several decades, displaced by the understanding that selection operates most effectively at the lowest possible level: individuals or, better yet, genes.

Or does it? Maybe reports of group selection's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Various mathematical models now suggest that under certain stringent conditions, selection could (at least in theory) operate at the level of groups. Some of the most promising formulations involve so-called multilevel selection, in which natural selection operates in simultaneous, nested baskets: among genes within individuals, among individuals within groups, among groups within species, and presumably among species within ecosystems, among ecosystems on the planet Earth, and (why not?) among planets in galaxies, and galaxies in the universe.

Received wisdom these days is that if a behavior is costly for the individual, it is unlikely to evolve, regardless of whether it is beneficial for the group or the species. Nonetheless, even if we grant that group selection has probably been inconsequential when it comes to changing gene frequencies, that does not mean that selection at the group level hasn't been instrumental in shaping human psychology, producing some pro-social tendencies via cultural evolution rather than its genetic counterpart. And so we return to honor codes, violators thereof, and those who turn them in.

Notably, along with the fertile mathematical modeling, there has been a flurry of experimental simulations by economists and social psychologists showing that under certain conditions, people are inclined to engage in "third-party punishment." That is, they will punish cheaters, even at distinct cost to themselves.

If two people are playing, say, prisoner's dilemma, and one cheats ("defects," in game-theory terminology), the other may well defect in turn; that is the basis of the celebrated "tit for tat" strategy, which is selfish, or at least self-protective, and therefore not perplexing. Especially interesting for those of us who contemplate honor systems, however, are those third-party simulations in which an observer is given the chance to reward or punish defectors. To an extent that has surprised most biologists, third-party punishment is doled out quite enthusiastically, with the self-appointed adjudicators willingly absorbing a cost in order to police the behavior of others.

Devotees of group selection (some of whom evidence an almost religious zeal, perhaps because they have been wandering in the biological wilderness since the mid-1960s) have seized on these results as demonstrating how human moral psychology may well have been shaped by an urge to benefit one's group, even at substantial personal expense. Such behavior can also be explained, however, by what evolutionary theorists call the "three R's": reputation, reciprocation, and retribution. Be moral, and your reputation will benefit (and thus, your fitness); you might also profit from the reciprocal morality of others. And if you are seen as immoral, you run the risk of painful retaliation. A parallel suite of inducements could generate third-party punishment, including an inclination to turn in honor-code violators, even if, paradoxically, society also takes a dim view of the "snitch" or "stool pigeon."

That raises the problem of who administers the rebuke to code violators. Ideally it should be everyone, but that simply opens the opportunity for yet more defection, on the part of individuals who stand back and let others do the dirty work.

One answer is for punishment to be meted out not only toward defectors, but toward anyone who refrains from punishing them. Next step, then, is to punish those who won't punish those who defect, and so on, ad infinitum. In the close-formation battle phalanxes favored by the Roman legions, each foot soldier carried a sword in his right hand and a shield in his left. Hence, each legionnaire depended on the man alongside to provide protection via the other's shield. Desertion in battle was a capital offense, with punishment to be administered on the spot; moreover, anyone who failed to kill a deserter was himself subject to immediate death! ("A legionnaire will not run away during battle, nor tolerate those who do." Nor will he tolerate those who tolerate those who do.)

There are other responses to observing a cheater, including being more likely to cheat oneself, that may go a long way toward explaining all the officially orchestrated intolerance of cheating. Bad enough if one man breaks ranks and runs; worse yet if that induces everyone else to do the same. Consider a familiar circumstance in which the transgression, and the penalty for tolerating a transgressor, are both considerably less drastic: how difficult it is to wait at a crosswalk when all those around you are jaywalking.

The consistent results of third-party-punishment experiments — willingness or eagerness to enforce group norms, even when doing so is costly to the "enforcers" — can be seen as revealing something nasty and spiteful about people: They will go out of their way, even enduring personal financial loss, just to be mean to someone else. But in addition to this glass-half-empty interpretation, there is a half-full counterpart. The fact that people will punish a cheater in a so-called public-goods situation, even if doing so may be costly, is evidence for a kind of altruism. By maintaining social norms at their own cost, "punishers" are unpaid policemen, making a kind of selfless citizen's arrest.

Although such behavior is admittedly rare at crosswalks, it is clear that people are readily inclined to turn on cheaters, as anyone who has ever bridled at the boor who breaks into line at a ticket window or supermarket checkout can readily attest. In those cases, and unlike jaywalking, code violations impose a disadvantage on those who wait responsibly in their queue. Yet, even here, it is tempting to swallow one's annoyance and hope that someone else will step up and enforce the norm for everyone else. There is much to be said for having such enforcers around, not only because the possibility of someone's acting on the cadet's fourth commandment probably makes cheating less likely in the first place, but also — and not least — because someone else is thereby charged with the task.
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Wild Ideas Of The Greeks

2008-05-19T17:29:00.002+05:30

What do George W. Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton have in common? Their higher education began with posture photos, in the nude or underclothes. Both will have been required on first arriving – the one at Yale, the other at Wellesley – to strip for three snaps: front, back and side views. It was standard practice in the East Coast colleges of their time, confirmed to me by three distinguished United States academic friends of the relevant age. Yes, they all had to submit.

Officially, the idea was that the pictures would reveal which students needed remedial treatment for poor posture. In reality, the project was to correlate the students’ undergraduate posture with their success or failure in later life. As the evidence accumulated, it would become possible to predict the Presidential chances of each year’s intake. He’s got what it takes, has she? All this from a momentary glimpse of the person whose future (together perhaps with all our futures) is at risk if a wrong diagnosis is made. Professor W. H. Sheldon of Columbia University, the éminence grise behind these programmes, was eventually disgraced and his research project abandoned. The ultimate inspiration had been Francis Galton, the eugenicist founder of Social Darwinism, who proposed a similar photo archive for the entire British population. We should be grateful to our present masters for confining their identity card scheme to mug shots with our clothes on.

It is an ancient dream, this idea of an instant diagnosis of someone’s character or skills:

"Black hair announces cowardice and great craftiness, excessively yellow and pale white hair, such as the Scythians and Celts have, reveals ignorance and clumsiness and wildness, and that which is gently yellow points towards an aptitude for learning, gentleness, and skill in art. Unmixed fiery hair like the flower of a pomegranate is not good, since for the most part their characters are beastlike and shameless and greedy. Legs which are very hairy with thick black hair indicate slowness at learning and wildness. Those whose loins and thighs have lots of hair separately from the other parts of the body are very lascivious."

Tosh, you may say – and rightly. A good half of Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul, edited by Simon Swain, some 332 pages, is filled with the stuff, in ancient Greek and Latin, medieval Arabic, and modern English translation. A huge effort (and considerable Leverhulme funding) has gone into this beautifully produced, collaborative project on ancient Greek physiognomy and its reception in medieval Islamic society. Does the other half, on the history and interpretation of this massive repository of tosh, redeem the enterprise?

In part it does – but how large a part may depend on your interests. The index, a paltry eight and a half pages, has no entry for “hair” to help a curious reader discover why lots of hair on their loins and thighs would signify lasciviousness: the reason, to be found in an Arabic version of the Greek treatise just quoted, is that it matches the hair distribution found in billygoats. Those 332 pages are largely taken up by different versions, or partial versions, of the same lost treatise: one Greek version, one Latin, and two Arabic (both newly edited for this volume), all of it translated into English for the first time. The centre of attention, the writer of the lost treatise and so the ultimate originator of most of the material under study, is Polemon of Laodicea (cad 88–144), a leading figure in the politics and literature of the period known as “the Second Sophistic”.

What survives of Polemon’s original Greek is just one sentence: “Eyes that are moist and shine like pools reveal good characters”. This fragment is neither indexed nor quoted as such anywhere in Swain’s massive tome. It does occur, almost verbatim, in one of the texts printed, a later Greek adaptation of Polemon’s book by Adamantius the Sophist (third or fourth century ad), where it is followed by the explanation “For such are the eyes of children”. A tiny footnote, easy to overlook, is the only indication readers are given that this is the Master’s voice. The index does have an entry “Polemon’s Physiognomy, general: eye, importance of”, but no contributor to the volume wonders about the destructive implications for physiognomy of the Rousseauesque thought that children might start life innately good. Physiognomy, by the very meaning of the word, claims to be the art of discerning the underlying and unalterable “nature” (in Greek, the physis) one is born with. So if the eyes of children reveal good character, all those nasty traits which physiognomy loves to discern in grown-ups must have been acquired some time after birth. In which case, physiognomy is impossible!

The other, complementary half of the book consists of six interpretative essays, three on Antiquity (around 200 pages) and three on Islam (less than 100). All are impressive, especially the longest: 105 wonderfully acute and original pages by George Boys-Stones on the ancient philosophers’ dealings with physiognomy. My focus here is on the editor’s contribution, which aims to situate Polemon and his Physiognomy in its original historical context.

More at:http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3930776.ece

Money Can Buy Happiness?

2008-05-18T12:34:00.000+05:30

Money doesn’t buy happiness, but success does.Capitalism, moored in values of hard work, honesty, and fairness, is key.

On July 23, 2000, a forty-two-year-old forklift operator in Corbin, Kentucky, named Mack Metcalf was working a 12-hour nightshift. On his last break, he halfheartedly checked the Sunday paper for the winning Kentucky lottery numbers. He didn’t expect to be a winner, of course—but hey, you never know.

Mack Metcalf’s ticket, it turned out, was the winner of the $65 million Powerball jackpot, and it changed his life forever. What did he do first? He quit his job. “I clocked out right then, and I haven’t been back,” he later recounted. In fact, his first impulse was to quit everything, after a life characterized by problem drinking, dysfunctional family life, and poorly paid work. “I’m moving to Australia. I’m going to totally get away. I’m going to buy several houses there, including one on the beach,” he told Kentucky lottery officials.

Metcalf never worked again. But he never moved to Australia. Instead he bought a 43-acre estate with an ostentatious, plantation-style home in southern Kentucky for more than $1 million. There, he spent his days pursuing pastimes like collecting expensive cars and exotic pets, including tarantulas and snakes.

Trouble started for Metcalf as soon as he won the lottery. Seeing him on television, a social worker recognized him as delinquent for child support from a past marriage, resulting in a settlement that cost him half a million dollars. A former girlfriend bilked him out of another half million while he was drunk. He fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism and became paranoid that those around him wanted to kill him. Racked with cirrhosis of the liver and hepatitis, he died in December 2003 at the age of forty-five, only about three years after his lottery dream had finally come true. His tombstone reads, “Loving father and brother, finally at rest.”

Did millions of dollars bring enduring happiness to Mack Metcalf? Obviously not. On the contrary, those who knew him blame the money for his demise. “If he hadn’t won,” Metcalf’s former wife told a New York Times reporter, “he would have worked like regular people and maybe had 20 years left. But when you put that kind of money in the hands of somebody with problems, it just helps them kill themselves.”

So what’s the moral of the story? Is money destined to make us miserable? Of course not. Mack Metcalf’s sad case is surely an aberration. If you hit the lottery, it would be different. You would give philanthropically and do all kinds of fulfilling things. Similarly, if your career suddenly took off in a fantastic way and you earned a great deal of money, you would get much happier. And what is true for the parts must also be true for the whole: When America experiences high rates of economic growth, it gets happier. America is not a nation of Mack Metcalfs, and money is a smart first strategy for attaining a higher gross national happiness.

Right?

You’ve heard the axiom a thousand times: Money doesn’t buy happiness. Your parents told you this, and so did your priest. Still, if you’re like me, you would just as soon see for yourself if money buys happiness. People throughout history have insisted on striving to get ahead in spite of the well-worn axiom. America as a nation has struggled and striven all the way to the top of the world economic pyramid. Are we suffering from some sort of collective delusion, or is it possible that money truly does buy at least a certain amount of happiness?

Americans have on average gotten much richer over the past several decades than they were in previous generations. The inconvenient truth, however, is that there has been no meaningful rise in the average level of happiness.

In 1972, 30 percent of Americans said they were very happy, and the average American enjoyed about $25,000 (in today’s dollars) of our national income. By 2004, the percentage of very happy Americans stayed virtually unchanged at 31 percent, while the share of national income skyrocketed to $38,000 (a 50 percent real increase in average income).

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We exist, therefore intelligent life in this universe is possible..?

2008-05-17T11:11:00.000+05:30

The Fermi Paradox probably doesn't need much introduction; first proposed by Enrico Fermi, it's one of the big puzzlers in astrobiology. We exist, therefore intelligent life in this universe is possible. The universe is big; even if life is rare, it's very unlikely that we're alone out here. So where is everybody? Why can't we hear their radio transmissions or see gross physical evidence of all the galactic empires out there?

If you aren't familiar with the Fermi Paradox, click that Wikipedia link above. Truly, it's a fascinating philosophical conundrum — and an important one: because it raises questions such as "how common are technological civilizations" and "how long do they survive", and that latter one strikes too close to home for comfort. (Hint: we live in a technological civilization, so its life expectancy is a matter that should be of pressing personal interest to us.)

Anyway, here are a couple of interesting papers on the subject, to whet your appetite for the 21st century rationalist version of those old-time mediaeval arguments about angels, pin-heads, and the fire limit for the dance hall built thereon:

First off the block is Nick Bostrom, with a paper in MIT Technology Review titled Where are they? in which he expounds Robin Henson's idea of the Great Filter:

The evolutionary path to life-forms capable of space colonization leads through a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier. (I borrow this term from Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University.) The filter consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. You start with billions and billions of potential germination points for life, and you end up with a sum total of zero extraterrestrial civilizations that we can observe. The Great Filter must therefore be sufficiently powerful--which is to say, passing the critical points must be sufficiently improbable--that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. At least, none that we can detect in our neck of the woods.

The nature of the Great Filter is somewhat important. If it exists at all, there are two possibilities; it could lie in our past, or in our future. If it's in our past, if it's something like (for example) the evolution of multicellular life — that is, if unicellular organisms are ubiquitous but the leap to multicellularity is vanishingly rare — then we're past it, and it doesn't directly threaten us. But if the Great Filter lies between the development of language and tool using creatures and the development of interstellar communication technology, then conceivably we're charging head-first forwards a cliff: we're going to run into it, and then ... we won't be around to worry any more.

But the Great Filter argument isn't the only answer to the Fermi Paradox. More recently, Milan M. Ćirković has written a paper, Against the Empire, in which he criticizes the empire-state model of posthuman civilization that is implicit in many Fermi Paradox treatments.
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Information Cannot Disappear Permanently....

2008-05-16T16:57:00.002+05:30

The findings, reported in the 20 May issue of Physical Review Letters, are good news for quantum mechanics, because they support the idea that information cannot disappear permanently. But, by calling singularities into question, they spell trouble for relativity. If black holes are not singularities, then the continuum of spacetime described by Einstein must be only an approximation, says Ashtekar. That's not necessarily a bad thing. "[It] opens the door to a lot of new explorations," Ashtekar says. "They may lead to physics beyond Einstein."

The team's work is particularly fascinating because it provides a mathematical basis for actually looking into black holes, says astronomer Kimberly Weaver of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Black holes are such mysteries that this may be the only way we're going to be able to know what's going on inside them," she says. Weaver says astronomers will be looking for evidence that black holes evaporate. If so, "we might be able to see information coming out, and that would be really exciting."

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How do we perceive a rainbow?

2008-05-15T17:51:00.001+05:30

How do we perceive a rainbow? And does everyone perceive a rainbow in the same way? These seemingly simple questions can reveal some interesting features of the human brain. For instance, is the “striped” appearance of the rainbow—the seven distinct bands of color that we see—a construct of our higher mental processes, or do the mechanics of human color vision determine it at a very early perceptual level? If your language does not have separate words for “blue” and “green” (and many languages, including Welsh, do not), do you perceive these shades as more similar than a speaker of English?

Searching for answers to these questions, in recent years many scientists have concluded that speakers of languages that label color in ways distinct from those used in English may see a different rainbow from that of English speakers. Recent studies have claimed that language processing is automatically involved in perceptual decisions about color in the brains of adults, even when hues are visible only briefly (100 milliseconds) or when decisions do not require participants to name colors verbally. Moreover, these effects are language-specific, so speakers of Russian or Korean show a different pattern of responses to color than speakers of English.

A recent study in PNAS by researchers at the University of Surrey challenges this view, however. It suggests an intriguing and novel account of color categorization in infants. In this study 18 English-speaking adults and 13 four-month-old infants were shown a colored target on a colored background. Adults were faster to initiate eye-movements toward the target when the target and background colors came from different color categories (for example, blue target, green background) than when both target and background were the same color (such as different shades of blue).

How Babies See Color

This discrimination advantage for different-category compared to same-category judgments is called Categorical Perception (CP). It is now clear that the effect in adults is language-driven. For instance, healthy, right-handed adults only show CP selectively when colors are presented to the right visual field. It is generally accepted that CP occurs because colors presented to the right visual field preferentially access language-processing areas located in the left hemisphere.

The authors of the new article agree with the current general consensus that CP in adults depends on privileged access to language areas in the left hemisphere. They also agree that the precise color terms that are represented in language are culturally transmitted during childhood and that there has been no “nativist,” or innate, pre-linguistic partitioning by the visual processing pathways into innate color categories in the left hemisphere. This idea fits with their data demonstrating that four-month-old infants showed no hint of CP when targets were presented in the right visual field. Because these infants have not yet acquired language, it is unsurprising that they do not show language-driven category effects in the left hemisphere.

So far, so predictable. What is striking, however, is that the same four-month-old infants did show a CP effect in the right hemisphere, exactly the reverse of the effect shown by adults. When a green target appeared on a green background in the left visual field (which has preferential access to the right hemisphere), infants were significantly slower to move their eyes toward the target than when a blue target appeared on the same green background. The authors claim that their results provide some evidence for pre-linguistic partitioning of color categories in four-month-old infants, but only from stimuli that preferentially access the right hemisphere. Such a result provides some empirical evidence for the existence of an innate pre-linguistic category boundary between blue and green.

If infants show an initial innate organization of color into precise categories in the right hemisphere of the brain, does such organization persist into adulthood? The answer to this question appears to be, “no, it does not.” Even when the dominant left-hemisphere system is suppressed by a concurrent task that prevents access to verbal codes in the left hemisphere, (see here and here, or cannot be reached in split-brain patients—people who have had the connection severed between their two hemispheres?no trace of categorical organization in the right hemisphere remains. If the present results are really evidence of some pre-linguistic, and possibly innate categorical organization in the right hemisphere, the pre-linguistic system is not merely overshadowed in the process of language learning. Rather, it is completely obliterated. In this case, the power of language to shape our cognitive categories must be enormously strong, and Whorf’s controversial views about the relationship between language and thought would appear to have been vindicated.

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The “ghost video”

2008-05-15T17:46:00.001+05:30

A mysterious, glowing, white blob was captured on videotape June 15, 2007, by a security camera at a courthouse in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While the court personnel who first saw the baffling image didn’t know what to make of it, others soon offered their own explanations. As might be expected, that it had been a ghost was among the most popular—possibly of a man killed there in 1985.
The “ghost video” became a nationwide hit and has been viewed over 85,000 times on the YouTube Web site (see www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWHRnjFCgd4&NR=1).

"Kalt? Kalt?"

2008-05-14T09:35:00.002+05:30

The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade. Bundled up in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge of the Baltic Sea, off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they see a tall, well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.

"Kalt? Kalt?" one of them calls out. The man gives a polite but vague answer, then turns and dives into the waves. After swimming back and forth in the 40-degree water for a few minutes, he emerges from the surf and jogs briefly along the shore. The wind is strong, but the man makes no move to get dressed. Passersby continue to comment and stare. "This is one of the reasons I prefer anonymity," he tells me in English. "You do something even slightly out of the ordinary and it causes a sensation."

Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.

SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.

Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.

Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.

The reason the inventor of SuperMemo pursues extreme anonymity, asking me to conceal his exact location and shunning even casual recognition by users of his software, is not because he's paranoid or a misanthrope but because he wants to avoid random interruptions to a long-running experiment he's conducting on himself. Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's like to live in strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one of the happiest people I've ever met.

In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.

Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.

Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.

Wine Psychology

2008-05-13T17:27:00.001+05:30

In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money.

One of the studies was devised by Robin Goldstein, a food writer, to try to isolate consumers from outside influence so they could simply judge wine by what’s in the glass. He had 500 volunteers sample and rate 540 unidentified wines priced from $1.50 to $150 a bottle. The results are described in a new book, “The Wine Trials,” to be published this month by Fearless Critic Media.

The book wraps the results in a discussion of marketing manipulations and statistical validity, but a brief article in the April 7 issue of Newsweek magazine, naturally, seized on the book’s populist triumphs: a $10 bottle of bubbly from Washington state outscored Dom Pérignon, which sells for $150 a bottle, while Two-Buck Chuck, the cheap Charles Shaw California cabernet sauvignon, topped a $55 bottle of Napa Valley cabernet.

“Their results might rattle a few wine snobs, but the average oenophile can rejoice: 100 wines under $15 consistently outperformed their upscale cousins,” the article exulted.

Two caveats are in order here. First, it turns out that the results of the tastings are more nuanced than the Newsweek article let on. In fact, the book shows that what appeals to novice wine drinkers is significantly different from what appeals to wine experts, which the book defines as those who have had some sort of training or professional experience with wine. The experts, by the way, preferred the Dom Pérignon.

Second, there is, of course, no such thing as the “average oenophile,” as Newsweek put it. Most people in the wine trade understand that consumers have any number of reasons for their buying decisions, whatever their psychological and financial state. Some are reassured by easy-to-understand labels with friendly animals. Others want only naturally produced wines or bottles with a modest carbon footprint. Some are status-seekers and score-chasers, while others are contrarians, or only drink red wine.

But assuming for the moment that it’s true that most drinkers prefer the cheap stuff, why does anyone bother buying $55 cabernet? One answer is provided by a second experiment, in which presumably sober researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Business School demonstrated that the more expensive consumers think a wine is, the more pleasure they are apt to take in it.

The researchers scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices as they administered tiny tastes of wine, measuring sensations in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses apparently register. The subjects were told only the price of the wines. Without their knowledge, they tasted one wine twice, and were given two different prices for that wine. Invariably they preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

“Forget those blurbs about bouquets, body and berries,” one newspaper account crowed. “A meticulous new study found that the more people think a wine cost, the more they like it. And the less they think it cost, the less they like it.”

Big surprise. Sommeliers all over know that the hardest wine to sell in a restaurant is the cheapest bottle on the list. “Yeah, clients don’t want to be embarrassed in front of a date, so they don’t order the cheapest wines,” said Fred Dexheimer, the wine director of the BLT restaurant group. The fact is, the correlation between price and quality is so powerful that it affects not just our perception of wine but of all consumer goods.

“It’s not just about wine, it’s about everything!” said Prof. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the book.
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Hitler was a fascinator ?

2008-05-12T18:29:00.001+05:30

Things Diana Mosley Told To
Philip Ayres

I WAS WORKING at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire for a few weeks in the early spring of 1990. I’d flown across alone from Virginia after staying with friends on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. Chatsworth is the home of the Dukes of Devonshire. The house is open to the public most days. I was there to carry out the first descriptive analysis of the eight-eenth-century library of Lord Burlington, the neo-Palladian architect earl. This work materialised as “Burlington’s Library at Chiswick”, published in 1992 by the leading journal in its field, Studies in Bibliography (University of Virginia; http://etext. virginia.edu/bsuva.sb), and later it formed a part of my work on classicism and culture in eighteenth-century England, published as a book by Cambridge University Press in 1997. A generation after Burlington died, his library was transferred from his London home, Chiswick Villa, to Chatsworth as a result of a marriage joining the two families, and it has remained part of the Chatsworth library ever since.

Renting a car at Heathrow, I drove directly up to Bakewell, a couple of miles from Chatsworth, paid for a three-week stay at a homely bed-and-breakfast place I’d booked from America, hung my clothes in the closet and drove across the hill through the mist and drizzle and down to the big house. It was freezing cold and there were just one or two cars in the parking lot, with no one walking about.

If you are carrying out any research here, you register, and then they show you to a room in the basement. The books or manuscripts you wish to consult are brought down to you. No one works in the library itself, which is up on the second storey, part of the tour of the house (visitors can look into it, but not walk into it). They gave me Burlington’s 1743 library catalogue to work from, and by using that I could ask to see any of the books it listed, but I found it quite impractical to make an efficient study of Burlington’s library from the basement.

On the second day the Duchess of Devonshire came down with an assistant to make some photocopies, and spoke to me.

She asked what I was working on, and where I came from. I told her. “Well, you must stay with us, then,” she said very kindly. Though I had nothing formal with me to wear to dinner, I should have accepted on the spot, but instead I explained that I’d paid a deposit and was committed to staying in the town. I could have cancelled there easily enough, but I was expecting a call to that number from a party in Germany, my wife, to whom I’d sent the number before leaving Virginia—she was planning to visit me in Derbyshire, and I didn’t have her telephone number with me to ring her and give her a different number, so I was stuck with the joint in town.

When I explained to the Duchess that I was preparing a detailed descriptive analysis of Lord Burlington’s library from his 1743 catalogue and the books themselves, she arranged for me to work up in the library instead of down in the basement. I was told by the curator that it was the first time in years that any visitor had worked up there. It’s a beautiful library, restrained baroque, with exquisite bookcases and desks including one that was Burlington’s own. I worked at that desk, with the books from his Chiswick library all around me. I could examine them, make all my notes and photograph examples of the beautiful bindings. It was pleasant work. Down the other end visitors would peer in: “Oh look! Somebody’s reading in there ...”

For lunch I’d buy sandwiches and eat in the gardens, exploring the rhododendron walk, the yew maze, the river bank and the deer park. At the bookshop I’d flip through the stuff they had.

There were several books about the Mitford sisters. One of these sisters was Deborah Mitford, now the Duchess of Devonshire and mistress of Chatsworth, whom I’d just met. I knew something about a couple of the others from their books, or from books about them (like David Pryce-Jones’s book on Unity Mitford, aka “Hitler’s girlfriend”), but I didn’t know much about the one whose pictures most took my eye, Diana Mitford, later Diana Guinness, subsequently Diana Mosley, married to Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists during the 1930s. She had been described as “the most beautiful woman in the world”. I was curious to know more about her because of her looks. The photos were from the 1930s.

In between periods of research I started reading about the Mosleys and their love affair with National Socialism. Diana, like Unity, was often in Germany. Hitler was witness at her wedding to Mosley. Just how well did she know Hitler? Then I read that she was also friends with the Goerings and the Goebbels.

I was thinking about this side-reading while I was photographing the Burlington bindings. Lord Burlington was a man of impeccable and studied taste in every detail of his life and work, from the houses he designed to the bespoke mathematical instruments he used to design them, and one expects and finds a style of considerable elegance in the bindings of his books. His binder was Thomas Elliott, also binder to the Harleian Library.

I was reading how they locked her up after the war broke out, her own account of that. They stuck this beautiful woman in a rat-hole where the female warders treated her with the kind of sadism I guess envy exacerbates. They didn’t exactly tie her up, but you get the picture.

I didn’t have a copying stand and I didn’t have a flash, so I was flirting with failure by hand-holding my Olympus OM1 and photographing under reading lamps the books I chose to illustrate for my article, using a macro lens, fast transparency film, and exposures of 1/250th of a second to obviate camera-shake, with correspondingly large aperture settings. Luck was with me because they all came out sharp. I didn’t know much about bindings of that sort. However pretty, they’re not exactly my idea of exciting.

After many months of mistreatment they let this gorgeous girl out because she was no longer perceived to be a public danger. She hadn’t been punished because of conviction of crime, but for constituting a public danger. You could maybe call her a public enemy. They hadn’t broken her spirit or changed her views. Several years later she and her husband went to live in France, in a house built for one of Napoleon’s generals, called “Le Temple de la Gloire”. They were in the Windsors’ circle, which must have been depressing.

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"Ticket, please"

2008-05-09T17:47:00.001+05:30

Three engineers and three accountants were traveling by train to a conference. At the station, the three accountants each bought tickets and watched as the three engineers bought only one ticket.
"How are three people going to travel on only one ticket?" asked an accountant.
"Watch and you'll see", answered an engineer.
They all boarded the train. The accountants took their respective seats, but the three engineers all crammed into a rest room and closed the door behind them. Shortly after the train departed, the conductor came around collecting tickets. He knocked on the restroom door and said, "Ticket, please".
The door opened just a crack and a single arm emerged with a ticket in hand.
The conductor took it and moved on.
The accountants saw this and agreed it was a quite clever idea. So, after the conference, the accountants decide to copy the engineers on the return trip and save some money (being clever with money, and all that). When they got to the station, they bought a single ticket for the return trip. To their astonishment, the engineers didn't buy a ticket at all.
"How are you going to ride without a ticket"? said one perplexed accountant.
"Watch and you'll see", answered an engineer.
When they boarded the train, the three accountants crammed into a restroom and the three engineers crammed into another one nearby. The train departed. Shortly afterward, one of the engineers left his restroom and walked over to the restroom where the accountants were hiding. He knocked on the door and said, "Ticket, please."

Consumerism An Ethic?

2008-05-08T17:23:00.001+05:30

Barber argues that the new ethic of capitalism is one of ‘infantilisation’: money today is to be made in maintaining adults as needy children, who stuff down dumbed-down films, saccharine food and video games. While in the early stages of capitalism it benefited the capitalist system for everybody to save their pennies, now it benefits the system for us to splurge every penny and borrow more. While in the time of Franklin people were encouraged to restrain themselves and reinvest, now, says Barber, we are encouraged to act on every immediate whim, to be the grasping child in a sweet shop unable to say no.

Barber is very worried about infantilisation. He uses the word ‘puerile’ a lot, not just in one chapter title but at times every few pages or so (p171 discusses the ‘puerile ways in which we think about who we are in terms of what we buy’; p174 mentions the ‘puerile [beer] ads featuring hot girls’). He contrasts our infantile consumption with the responsible and upright bourgeois gent, and finds us wanting. He says that while early capitalism encouraged the virtues, with the working man’s ‘robust notion of agency and a spirited grittiness’, now capitalism encourages the vices. One of the solutions he broaches is a rejuvenation of the work ethic, ‘a revolution that is more like a restoration of the situation under which capitalism has historically been most successful’.

The book captures well the grotesque features of contemporary capitalism, in which genuine needs go unmet and false needs are splurged and indulged. Barber’s formulation of this paradox – ‘the needy are without income and the well-heeled are without needs’ – is a neat one, and he portrays the decadent and senseless ends to which human time and resources are put. More on advertising than on aid; more on plastic surgery than on cancer surgery; more on Viagra than on tackling AIDS.

Yet Barber is wrong to call consumerism an ethic, or to present the current culture as an all-out celebration of stuff. There is no contemporary Benjamin Franklin singing the praises of video games and junk food; there are no respected books urging you to splurge all your pennies. All the respectable books say the same thing as Barber about consumerism, with their titles such as ‘Enough’!, ‘Affluenza’! or ‘The Paradox of Choice’. (Indeed, authors like the sound of ‘Affluenza’ so much that there are two books and one film by the same name.)

The sources Barber quotes as evidence of what he calls the ‘religion of selfishness’ include: a Porsche advert, a book subtitled ‘the capitalist pig guide to investing’, and the 1987 film Wall Street (which had the clear moral lesson that greed is not good). In actual fact, the celebration of consumerism that Bell identified – the 1960s revelling in personal liberation and sensation – is long gone. In the 2000s, man is uptight and anxious, consuming plenty but often guiltily, searching out the low-carbon, low-calorie, organic, fair-trade option from the supermarket shelves.

What happened to work?

If consumerism is emphasised more in our culture than production, play more than work, this is not only because consumption is what Western capitalism needs now – it is also because the production side of life is so lacking in ideological justification. Contrary to what Barber suggests, modern life is not just one long video game. Consumers work, do they not, before they can consume?

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Gross National Happiness

2008-05-07T17:28:00.001+05:30

Who’s happier, on average — conservatives or liberals? This is a major theme in my new book, and I’m going to post on this question here for a few weeks.

Several years ago I would have told you that liberals have the happiness edge. Regardless of our personal political views, when most academics like me think of an “average conservative,” I have found we tend to conjure up an image of something like the American Gothic: grim, puritanical, and humorless.

Until relatively recently it seemed that the evidence more or less backed up this impression. For example, in one study in the Journal of Research in Personality, Berkeley researchers traced the political ideology and world view of people in their early twenties back to the personalities they had exhibited as toddlers — recorded by their preschool two decades earlier.

The “liberal” young men had these principal traits as babies: resourcefulness in initiating activities, independence and autonomy, and pride in accomplishments. Liberal young women had similarly happy characteristics. In contrast, as babies the conservatives had been easily offended, immobilized under stress, brooding and worried, and suspicious of others. Conservative young women had cried the most easily.

There are a few reasons one might take issue with the study’s conclusions:

All of the study participants, for instance, lived in the San Francisco Bay Area (which by itself would make a conservative of any age emotionally rigid and prone to weeping). But this study reinforced the stereotype that conservatives are naturally less happy than liberals.

What the actual data on self-assessed happiness show, however, is that conservatives have a substantial happiness edge, at least by the time they grow up.

For three decades, the General Social Survey has asked a nationwide sample of adults, “Taken all together, how happy would you say you are these days? Would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Here is a representative sample of the results:

• In 2004, 44 percent of respondents who said they were “conservative” or “very conservative” said they were “very happy,” versus just 25 percent of people who called themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” (Note that this comparison uses unweighted data — when the data are weighted, the gap is 46 percent to 28 percent.)

• Adults on the political right are only half as likely as those on the left to say, “At times, I think I am no good at all.” They are also less likely to say they are dissatisfied with themselves, that they are inclined to feel like a failure, or to be pessimistic about their futures.

• It doesn’t matter who holds political power. The happiness gap between conservatives and liberals has persisted for at least 30 years. Indeed, the difference was greater some years under Bill Clinton than it was under George W. Bush. Democrats may very well win the presidency in 2008, and no doubt many liberals will enjoy seeing conservatives grieving out about that — but the data say that conservatives will still be happier people than liberals.

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The purpose of laws?

2008-05-05T17:47:00.004+05:30

I'm quite agree when Amit Varma says:
"The purpose of laws, I think you’d agree, is to protect the rights of individuals, and to punish those who infringe them. Every law that exists should serve these ends. But there is a category of laws, not just in the US but in India and everywhere else, that punish what are called “victimless crimes.” They are used to prosecute people who have harmed no one. They come about because of the universal human tendency to impose our preferences on others. And there is nothing we try to impose as much as our morality."

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Guess who?

2008-05-03T11:46:00.001+05:30

A guy walks into a post office one day to see a middle-aged, balding man standing at
the counter methodically placing "Love" stamps on bright pink envelopes with hearts
all over them. He then takes out a perfume bottle and starts spraying scent all over
them.

His curiosity getting the better of him, he goes up to the balding man and
asks him what he is doing. The man says "I'm sending out 1,000 Valentine cards
signed, 'Guess who?'"

"But why?" asks the man.

"I'm a divorce lawyer," the man replies.

"Mate Value"

2008-05-02T17:53:00.001+05:30

A new study out of the University of Texas argues that beautiful women want it all when it comes to picking a mate.

In fact, the more beautiful a woman is, the higher her standards.

But, perhaps surprisingly, the study did not find that to be the case when it comes to men. It takes more than being a hunk for a man to want everything. He must also have status and the potential to be a good provider before he is likely to demand the best.

On the surface it sounds like just another study showing that men are different from women, as if we didn't already know that. But this is a serious effort to delve into an area that has been largely ignored by scientists: How a woman's own attractiveness influences her preferences when she picks a mate.

The broad hypothesis "that high mate-value women want it all has never been comprehensively tested," the study claims.

What it boils down to is that a woman who has it all, wants it all, said psychologist David Buss, lead author of the study in the current issue of Evolutionary Psychology. Buss and psychologist Todd Shackelford of Florida Atlantic University studied 107 couples who had been married less than a year to learn what both the men and the women wanted most in a mate.

Psychologists call it "mate value," and it's different for men and for women, which may explain why the study produced different results for the two genders.

"Physical attractiveness is a more important component of women's mate value than of men's," Buss said in an e-mail. "Status, economic prospects, and other attributes linked with resource acquisition are more important components of men's than of women's mate value. So this leads to the prediction that men high in status and resources will elevate their standards, just as physically attractive women elevate their standards."

There is an evolutionary basis for these differences, the researchers contend. Humans, like all other animals, are most concerned about reproduction and passing their genes on to their children. Physical beauty gives a woman more leverage — or mate value — when it comes to picking a man. And men have more appeal if they are likely to be good providers.

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