24 July 2008
What I'm Reading Lately: Death, Dog Poisoning, Novelty, Flawed Heroes, Psych Experiments, Limiting Generalisations
A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.
>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008):
So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"
"The dogs have often died in great agony.... [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"
There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years.
>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):
"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."
>> Impossible Experiments (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes." (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?) Other never-done experiments.
>> "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.
>> Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?" Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.
>> "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too. Full study (7 pages, PDF).
>> "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."
I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.
The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should.
I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.
(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...)
06:15 Posted in animals , death , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , politics, government and law , pop culture , science and tech , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
23 July 2008
In the Name of Science
Chocolate 'cake' in a mug in a microwave. Don't forget to scroll down to see all the ... evidence.
One researcher's results:
"I mixed the ingredients exactly as ordered, and put it in the microwave. Over the course of five minutes the scents that came from my microwave were: Cooking chicken, old motor oil, cocoa, and burned coffee.
"It took me two tries to get a fork into my leaning monstrosity, and when I bit into it, it was crunchy. I threw it at a wall as hard as I could and it didn't break at all."
Another intrepid researcher substituted Nestle's Strawberry Quick for cocoa powder: "It tastes a little like strawberries, and a little like failure."
14:55 Posted in food and drink , science and tech , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
08 April 2008
Addiction to the Sacred
René Girard and others (particularly, and excellently, James Alison in this post-9/11 essay) talk a lot about how humans use the act of sacralising something or someone -- grief, death, a victim, violence, etc. -- to justify the thing or the one, to make it beyond reproach, to give meaning to a meaningless act, to create unanimity and excitement, and primarily and purposefully, to confer to ourselves by association with the transcendent a heightened sense of identity, stability, and worthiness.
Eric Gans explains the relatonships between sacrifice and 'making sacred': "The word sacrifice contains within itself the paradox of culture. Etymologically to make sacred (sacer + facio), it means both to renounce and to kill. Culture is about renouncing and making sacred, but it is also about killing in the service of these ends."
With this in mind, I was interested to read this in The Economist today, in an article about how science is seeking to explain religious belief as beneficial in an evolutionary framework (the entire article is chock full of intriguing studies and conclusions):
"Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on." [Non-Orthodox Christian or Jewish Americans might find it difficult to understand how practicising one's religion incurs short-term costs ... ]
"On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection. The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.
"To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.
"A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.
"As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."
Other studies mentioned in the article corroborate the idea that, perhaps, belief in a supernatural being (whether it's G-d or a ghost, as in some studies) creates coherence and a sense of security among group members, and leads to increased cooperation, collaboration, and sharing among members of the group. This seems to accord with the Girardian thought that 'making sacred' is a way to create unanimity, stability, shared identity. It says nothing of the possible cost, which Alison addresses in his essay, talking about the response of many to the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on 11 Sept. 2001:
"And immediately we began to respond, and our response is to create meaning. ... As we were sucked in, so we were fascinated. The 'tremendum et fascinosum,' as Otto described the old sacred, took hold of us. ... The old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. And immediately the sacrificial center began to generate the sort of reactions that sacrificial centers are supposed to generate: a feeling of unanimity and grief. ... Phrases began to appear to the effect that 'We're all Americans now' -- a purely fictitious feeling for most of us [in London]. It was staggering to watch the togetherness build up around the sacred center, quickly consecrated as Ground Zero....
"And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel good, and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has deeply sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy's roots in sacrifice. One of the effects of the violent sacred around the sacrificial center is to make those present feel justified, feel morally good. A counterfactual goodness which suddenly takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences. And very quickly of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the militant goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their lives. And then there are those who are with us and those who are against us, the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly people were saying things like 'to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip about celebrities' and politicians' sexual peccadillos. Now we have been summoned into thinking about the things that really matter.'
"And there was fear. Fear of more to come. Fear that it could be me next time. ... Fear and disorientation in a new world order. Not an entirely uncomfortable fear, the fear that goes with a satanic show. Part of the glue which binds us into it. A fear not unrelated to excitement.
"What I want to suggest is that most of us fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity. What I want to suggest is that this, this delight in being given meaning, is satanic. ...
"When I say satanic, I mean this in two senses .... The first sense is the sense I have just described: the fantastic pomp and work of sacrificial violence leading to an impression of unanimity, the same lie from the one who was a murderer and liar from the beginning, the same lie behind all human sacrifices, all attempts to create social order and meaning out of a sacred space of victimization. But the second sense is more important: the satanic is a lie that has been undone. It has been undone by Jesus's going to death exploding from within the whole world of sacrifice, of religion and culture based on death, and showing it has no transcendence at all. ... The pomp has nothing to do with heaven. It has nothing to do with God."
Obviously, religious communes like those referenced in the Economist article are likely not overflowing with pomp and cathartic grief. A religious commune, or religious order, may well survive not by any contrived sense of unanimity and feverish excitement borne of co-opted tragic grief -- after all, that unanimity and excitement doesn't last, and to believe that they do is to believe the lie -- but perhaps they are characterised more often rather by true transcendence, true cooperation and compassion, a unity achieved through struggle rather than unanimity. The similarity I see between the religious communes, as briefly described in the article, and the response to 9/11 that Alison is talking about, is the simple action of making meaning by referencing the sacred and transcendent, and even by actually making sacrifices (or feeling that one is making them), in an effort to feel, by association, that one has value.
As Alison has said, and points out later again in his essay in examining a passage in Luke 13, it's so very easy to feel justified and morally good when we ally ourselves with the transcendent, to adopt a dualistic viewpoint, to see others who differ from us as bad, as 'them,' as 'other.' It's so easy to think that I am privileged and valuable, because of my experience with the transcendent, in a way that you are not. That my life has meaning in a way that yours doesn't.
Alison again:
[I]f we are caught up in the world of giving sacred meanings, then we will be caught up in the world of reciprocal violence, of good and bad measured over against other people, and we will likewise perish. Once again I stress: Jesus [in Luke 13:1-5, and in Mark 13:1ff] will not be drawn into adding to meaning. He merely asks those who come to him themselves to move out of the world of sacred-seeming meaning. What does it mean for us to learn to look at the world through those eyes? ...
"Jesus not only taught us to look away, not to allow ourselves to be seduced by the satanic. He also acted out what the undoing of the satanic meant: he was so powerful that he was able to lose to its need to sacrifice so as to show that it was entirely unnecessary. We are so used to describing Jesus's cross and resurrection as a victory -- a description taken from the military hardware store of satanic meaning -- that we easily forget that what that victory looked like was a failure. So great is the power behind Jesus's teaching and self-giving that he was able to fail, thus showing once and for all that 'having to win,' the grasping on to meaning, success, reputation, life and so on is of no consequence at all. Death could not hold him in, because he was held in being by one for whom death does not exist, is not even the sort of rival who might be challenged to a duel which someone might win. But if death can only get meaning by having victory, if the order of sacred violence can only have meaning if it matters to us to survive, to be, to feel good, at the expense of someone, then someone for whom it doesn't matter to lose is someone who is playing its game on totally different terms, and its potential for giving meaning collapses.
"Here is where I am heading: We can imagine in the abstract something of the power which has nothing to do with death. What is much more difficult is imagining that power incarnated in a human heart and eyes looking at this world. Yet that is what we are talking about. A human heart and eyes so utterly held by the Creator that they speak the Creator's heart about this world. And not just in word, but by a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it, thus enabling creation to be unsnarled from our truncation of it into a violent perversion and trap.
"Now this is what I find difficult. The heart, the desire, that wants to do something like that. What does it want? Why should it do it? Why not leave us to get on with it, stuck in our charades, thinking the world of our meaning and our death? In other words, the very fact of distracting us, by word and deed from being involved in what Merton rightly called 'pseudo events' suggests a desire for us to be something else. The eye that is teaching us to look away from the lure of the sacred is powered by a heart that wants us to be something else. And we learn our desire through the eye of another. Our learning to see through Jesus' eyes will eventually result in us desiring with Jesus' heart -- which is to say, our receiving the mind of Christ. ...
"Jesus not only teaches us to look away, but models what living from utterly non-rivalistic creative power for which death is not, looks like. There is a desire in this. A desire for us not to be trapped in death. And this is where I think I'm going -- something apparently terribly banal, but I think, of earth shattering significance. The person who teaches us to look away and models for us another way of desiring actually likes us. It is only possible to imagine doing something like that for someone you actually like. And Jesus is doing it for all of us who are caught up in the sacred lie -- which is to say, all of us.
"The staggering thing that this means, for me, is that the most extraordinary fruit of contemplation in the shadow of the violence which we are experiencing is this: God likes us. All of us. God likes me and I like being liked. It has nothing to do with whether we are bad or good, indeed, he takes it for granted that we are all more or less strongly tied up in the sacred lie. In teaching after teaching he makes the same point: all are invited, bad and good. Those are our categories, part of the problem not part of the solution, not God's category. God's 'category' for us is 'created' and 'created' means 'liked spaciously, delighted in, wanted to give extension, fulfilment, fruition to, to share in just being.' We are missing out on something huge and powerful and serene and enjoyable and safe and meaningful by being caught up in something less than that, an ersatz perversion of each of those things. And because God likes us he wants us to get out of our addiction to the ersatz so as to become free and happy. "
22:00 Posted in community , girardian anthropology , other people said it , science and tech , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
01 April 2008
Happy 1 April !
Make sure to celebrate by using Google's Custom Time. (And check out their past innovations.)
Also, How Stuff Works: How the Air Force One Hybrid Works
08:57 Posted in science and tech , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
24 February 2008
Obsolete Skills, Like Adjusting Rabbit Ears, Balancing the Tone Arm on a Turntable, and ... Getting to Know Your Neighbors?
Obsolete Skills, which is a wiki (edited by anyone who wants to, whether they are experts on the topic or complete dolts), not only lists them but describes some obsolete, almost-obsolete, and perhaps debatably obsolete skills in lucid detail. Not all of them, though. And some (q.v. previous link) aren't all that obsolete, which is sometimes acknowledged. Many are computer-related, but not all.
06:10 Posted in community , education , lists , pop culture , science and tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13 January 2008
Mathematical Beauty and Trying to Make Meaning
At Overcoming Bias, Eliezer Yudkowsky offers a sequence of numbers (1, 8, 27, 64, 125, ...) and considers the order inherent in it. He considers that one might try to impose order on the sequence, insisting on "neatness and elegance when there isn't any there."
He goes on, speaking of the elegant, inherent order of math, in words that seem to me to apply to many aspects of life (or am I forcing the analogy?):
"Someone who grasped too quickly at order, who demanded closure right now, who forced the pattern, might never find the stable level. If you tweak the table of first differences to make them "more even", fit your own conception of aesthetics before you found the math's own rhythm, then the second differences and third differences will come out wrong. Maybe you won't even bother to take the second differences and third differences. Since, once you've forced the first differences to conform to your own sense of aesthetics, you'll be happy -- or you'll insist in a loud voice that you're happy.
"None of this says a word against - gasp! - reductionism. The order is there, it's just better-hidden. [T]he moral is to reduce at the right time, to wait for an opening before you slice, to not prematurely terminate the search for beauty. So long as you can refuse to see beauty that isn't there, you have already taken the needful precaution if it all turns out ugly."
I know I have experience forcing the pattern, not waiting for the opening but ripping my own with the jagged tools of my preconceptions, assumptions, expectations, blurry vision, distracted listening. I have not listened to the inherent rhythm, I have missed finding the stable place. I've done it when frustratedly working math tests (SATs, GREs, etc.) and I've done it in lots of other non-math ways -- the details are missing from my consciousness but the memory of the feeling of the forced false pattern, and the knowledge of the instability underlying it, lingers ...
07:20 Posted in math and numbers , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , other people said it , science and tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
06 January 2008
Miscellany
If you want something to think about, listen to David Weinman's 1-hour presentation on how we classify things, a sort of engaging A/V subset of his book Everything Is Miscellaneous (2006).
Basically, the idea is that the organisation of the physical world* (its taxonomy - how something is either a fruit or a meat, it's either red or blue, etc.) isn't sufficient to organise the world of ideas -- and the online world liberates us in some ways from having to organise ideas in an either/or way. Think metadata, like tags, hyperlinks, mashups.
He covers a lot of overlapping ideas and themes, so I really recommend listening to the presentation if this kind of thing appeals to you.
Just a few excerpts that got my attention, and my responses to them; each green box is a different(ish) idea:
"It used to be that the people who owned the stuff also owned the organisation of it. Now, we do. We own the organisation of it. And so obviously one of the most fertile fields around is developing the tools by which we the user get to organise other people's stuff."
In other words, we get to make our own taxonomy trees, based on what interests us. His example is a university library using a feceted system, where the user can search for books based on century published, then country of birth of author, then gender of author; or the user can browse first by gender, then by language, and so on.
"We're changing the basic idea which used to be, you want to exclude all of the crap, because who has time, and so we have experts who filter and show us what we need to see and they organise it into categories for us, which is takes experts to do. ... Now the best strategy in most instances is include everything. It costs more to delete stuff than it does to save it, which you know from looking in your digial camera folders. ... You don't even know what's in there. In order to go through and delete that, you gotta look at the pictures and make decisions., It's just easier to preserve than delete. So capture everything."
I feel caught between worlds. I love tags and being able to place ideas in multiple categories at once. I hate trying to categorise my print photos in binary categories because of the millions of stupid questions I have to answer for most of the photos: Are photos of our dog "Family" or "Animals," or should I make a new category called "Dogs"? What if the photo is of the dog with the Christmas tree? Does it go in "Xmas" or "Dog"? Do photos of my garden go in "Gardens" or "House"? and so on. My photos are still languishing in cardboard boxes, uncategorised, though I spent about a month last winter working on their taxonomy.)
BUT, having all these photos on my hard drive, taking up space (even if it's space I don't need), leaves me feeling irrationally anxious. Likewise, almost all my bookmarks are in categories, with only a few "miscellaneous" ones, and not having them in categories makes me nervous. Yet I like del.icio.us mainly because a bookmark can belong to not just one category but many categories. (My anxiety surfaces there when I start to generate tag synonyms and realise they're almost infinite.) Likewise again, gmail's non-folder way of handling mail also makes me nervous, even though I can quickly search by someone's name or a topic and actually find the email I'm looking for more easily than with a traditional email file system.
It all feels like so much distracting clutter -- the photos on the hard drive, the multiple bookmarks in multiple categories, the 'hundreds and hundreds' of emails free-floating in my virtual 'all mail' box at gmail. Somehow, "including it all," as Weinman suggests we do, feels the same to me as physically saving every magazine, newspaper, paper photo of any quality, news clipping, recipe, decorating idea photo, etc., that I've ever come across and thought "Oh, that's interesting! I might want that some time" -- it feels the same as saving all those things in big piles throughout my house. I know it's not quite the same -- for one thing, online tools like tags provide enhanced search capability that's absent when one is keeping 8-foot piles of paper in the house -- but to me, it feels roughly the same in terms of mental and perhaps emotional clutter.
Weinman talks a lot throughout the presentation about authority and expertise. A little after the 43-minute mark, he says: "Bugs get driven out of ideas through discussion, through the public negotiation of conversation -- that's where knowledge is."
Mailing lists are the example he gives: "It's very clear that the mailing list itself knows more than any of the experts on it do. ... One of the consequences of this is that we end up having to let infallibility into our notion of knowledge, which has been driven out until now, well, pretty much." He cites Wikipedia here, as a source that he says "becomes more credible because they're willing to admit their lack of credibility, their lack of authority. It's not trying to convince us that it's the world's greatest authority; it's trying to help us know. And the fallibility metadata [Wikipedia's many notices about how an article may have gone wrong -- not neutral, contains weasel words, reads like an ad, etc.] is crucial to that. The question is why you will never see this here" -- as he points to the front page of the New York Times. "And it's because these sources have a vested interest in appearing authoratative."
The reason I pulled this out is because I think it has resonance not only in media but in every sphere of life (religion comes to mind) and in every moment of life (stupid arguments with my spouse come to mind) where the individual or corporate ego has a vested interest in appearing expert, in being right, or even in appearing infallible. It reminds me of the Buddhist notion I am trying very fallibly to live: "Nothing to defend." (I find that keeping in touch with my curious nature helps me to relax those defenses.)
Sidenote: In the Q&A, someone references Jorge Luis Borges' Classification of Animals, which is hilarious.
* Looking to organise your immediate physical world?
20:35 Posted in books and reading , community , media, film, tv, radio , neuroscience, psychology, the mind , pop culture , science and tech , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
30 September 2007
Recent Reading
Recent online reading of interest: of Girard, desire, imitation and fashion; musing on death and life; findings of sloppy science; essays on climate change and human responsibility; the anniversary of Sputnik; and how hypocrisy traps make some of us squirm.
>> Death and the garden, Shelley, not looking out the window, obituary motifs, and thoughts on decay in The glad reaper: Our obituaries editor finds solace in a garden, a correspondent's diary (by Ann Wroe) in The Economist:
"More than I used to, I note the premature browning of leaves and grass, the erosion of statues and stones, the rotting of things. The odd pangs and pains in my own body I now surmise to be Death knocking, or leaving a calling card, with a promise to come back later.
"Is this morbid? Some friends and colleagues think so, joking nervously about 'the Grim Reaper' and 'Grave-Watch', muttering of coffin counts. But to me it is simply part of a continuum: death in life, life in death. Everything in nature springs up, flourishes, dies, springs up again: we do the same. Bodies form and decay all the time. What the spirit does, being outside nature, has the potential to be much more interesting. But since we have forgotten that life, if we ever knew it, we are left with physical dissolution, and we don't like it much."
>> Girard and the world of fashion: The Forces of Beauty and Desire in Fashion Imitation:
"It would hardly be controversial to mention beauty and desire in the same sentence. We desire to be beautiful, to own beautiful objects, to be with beautiful people. ... Our daily experiences assure us that desiring something is a conscious, spontaneous act. The things we desire are the things we have chosen. But what if this is not the case? What would this mean for a theory of beauty?
"Rene Girard ... views desire as something that is formed in the relationships people have with each other rather than as something found within individuals themselves. Perhaps more importantly, he stresses that imitation underlies the relationships in which desire is created. ... As an example, my best friend who is more beautiful than me wants to buy a dress. The theory of mimetic desire says that I also want the dress, not because I believe it to be a beautiful dress but rather because it is a dress that is desired by my beautiful friend.
"Two important points emerge from this scenario. The first is that my desire to have the dress is a direct response to the way in which I compare myself unfavourably with my friend. Moreover, by owning the dress she likes, I hope to take on the qualities I admire in her but perceive to be lacking in myself. In essence, I am trying to become my friend when I copy her desires. As Girard states, 'aware of a lack within ourselves, we look to others to teach us what to value and who to be.' Desire is therefore about self-identity. Advertising can be seen to exploit this insight."
>> I didn't read this but heard it yesterday on NPR's Weekend Edition: Khrushchev, Schorr Look Back on Sputnik. On the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the world's first human-made satellite, Sergei Khrushchev, the son of then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and Dan Schorr, who was then Moscow Bureau chief for CBS News, talk with Scott Simon about its significance. I don't know why, but my attention was riveted as I listened to the interview.
>> Also worth listening to, Scott Simon's reflections on the Larry Craig case: What makes Scott squirm:
"It's the exultation among so many that another hypocritical politician has been exposed. ... There are those who believe Mr. Craig deserves his humiliation because he's a hypocrite ... I guess by now I have seen enough of life that I prefer to see someone as a real, complicated human being ... Human life, including sex, abounds with hypocrisy, faithlessness, carelessness, and people who say 'I love you' when they only mean, 'I want you.' People who say 'My spouse doesn't understand me,' when they really mean, 'My spouse knows me too well.' Most adults can supply their own examples. ... I wonder if people who applaud Larry Craig's arrest ... really want to arm the police with a moral license to set traps that catch people in hypocrisy. That's the kind of trap that most of us would step into someday."
>> Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic (1993-2003), writes about the morality of environmental and political choices in his op-ed piece, Our Moral Footprint, in the NYT.
Havel's essay seems a response to current Czech Republic president (since 2003) Vaclav Klaus's op-ed of June 2007, What is at risk is not the climate but freedom, in the Financial Times, in which Klaus says that "the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now ... [is] ambitious environmentalism. ... This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."
Havel eventually asserts, as does Klaus, that the climate and the Earth are not at risk, but Havel's take on it is markedly different from Klaus's:
"The end of the world has been anticipated many times and has never come, of course. And it won’t come this time either. We need not fear for our planet. It was here before us and most likely will be here after us. But that doesn’t mean that the human race is not at serious risk. As a result of our endeavors and our irresponsibility our climate might leave no place for us."
Before he gets there, he more pointedly contends:
"It is also obvious from published research that human activity is a cause of change; we just don't know how big its contribution is. Is it necessary to know that to the last percentage point, though? By waiting for incontrovertible precision, aren't we simply wasting time when we could be taking measures that are relatively painless compared to those we would have to adopt after further delays? ... We can't endlessly fool ourselves that nothing is wrong and that we can go on cheerfully pursuing our wasteful lifestyles, ignoring the climate threats and postponing a solution. ...
"I’m skeptical that a problem as complex as climate change can be solved by any single branch of science. Technological measures and regulations are important, but equally important is support for education, ecological training and ethics -- a consciousness of the commonality of all living beings and an emphasis on shared responsibility."
>> Sloppy Science Studies: Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis in the WSJ. I'm almost to the point of not believing any scientific study, even replicated ones, certainly not based on summaries reported in the mainstream media, and I probably don't know enough science or remember enough statistics to trust my own judgment reading the original studies. (Of course, why should I believe this guy's findings, either?):
"Dr. [John] Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye. ...
"These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. 'There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims,' Dr. Ioannidis said. 'A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.' The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined."
Update, 4 Oct 2007: Related to this: "The facts never speak for themselves, which is why scientists need to 'frame' their messages to the public," an article by Matthew C. Nisbet and Dietram A. Scheufele, in The Scientist.com:
"The dominant assumption is that ignorance is at the root of conflict over science. According to this traditional 'popular science' model, the media should be used to educate the public about the technical details of the issue in dispute. Once citizens are brought up to speed on the science, they will be more likely to judge scientific issues as scientists do and controversy will go away. The facts are assumed to speak for themselves and to be interpreted by all citizens in similar ways. ...
"... Arguments in favor of the popular science model are not very scientific. In fact, they cut against more than 60 years of research in the social sciences, a body of work that suggests citizens prefer to rely on their social values to pick and choose information sources that confirm what they already believe, often making up their minds about a topic in the absence of knowledge. A second challenge to the popular science model is that in today's media world, by way of cable TV and the Internet, the public has greater access to quality information about science than at any time in history, yet public knowledge of science remains low. The reason is that a small audience remains attentive to science coverage, but the broader public literally tunes out, preferring other media content."
14:25 Posted in books and reading , death , earthcare and environment , education , finance and business , girardian anthropology , math and numbers , politics, government and law , science and tech , theology, spirituality, philosophy , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
21 September 2007
What I'm Reading: Dangerous Love, Signaling Status, and Errors in Planning
I read (present tense) these essays and articles, save them to talk (write) about, and then realise the effort all that thinking and writing will be. I don't have energy for it this week, but I think the original links are worth reading, so I'm passing them along with sparse annotations. Count your blessings.
I.
Range of Desire: In the Military, I Learned to Love Women and Guns by K.G. Schneider, who is also a librarian. Evocative:
"Guns, I am told, are dangerous. But women are dangerous, too. A woman can rip your heart from your chest and drop it like a child discarding a candy wrapper, or stand in front of you, a disdainful smile on her face, tossing your heart from one hand to another while your blood drips through her fingers. It is much worse when your heart is not left behind.
"No one explains the cruelest trick of life. You are happy, and life is good, and the years roll on, until you wake up one night, terrified, because you realize that the worse thing that can ever happen to you is for something to happen to her, and there is no way to avoid that eventual tragedy other than dying first, which is almost as frightening. It is all infinitely worse because she is a woman and the logic of your heart insists there is nothing better than a woman, particularly this woman. You are caught in this conundrum; your attention to detail failed you miserably and completely, way back when it was still possible to leave. So you lie fretting in the dark while your beloved breathes in and out in the night air, and you sense the entrapment of desire, the very danger of life itself.
"Compared to that, a gun is harmless."
II.
Conspicuous Consumption and Status Signaling: Politically Incorrect Paper, a continuing series, at Marginal Revolution. The argument is made, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data and a National Bureau of Economic Research study, that "Blacks and Hispanics [in the U.S.] devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable Whites. We demonstrate that these differences exist among virtually all sub-populations, that they are relatively constant over time, and that they are economically large."
As Tabarrok clarifies in the comments, by "blacks and hispanics" they mean "people of low income," including whites.
Lots of (Girardian) suggestions in the comments for how to explain this, mostly based on 'signaling,' how we choose to convey our status to others, and how we choose to enhance others' perception of our worth, sometimes using very different actions to convey the same idea (dressing expensively to enhance a perception of our income, dressing down to convey that our status is so high that we don't have to signal -- although this can be a signal in and of itself). As some commenters note, an expensive but unnecessary higher education, McMansions, eating out, high-end tech items, and other 'visible goods' are not included as 'conspicuous consumption' in the study. (Commenter 'hipparchia' does a nice job teasing the details from the 'shoe' data.)
Related: 'Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.' -- Christopher Lasch
III.
Planning Fallacy at Overcoming Bias, about how we think things will take less time than they do. More studies, and more explanations:
"A clue to the underlying problem with the planning algorithm was uncovered by Newby-Clark et. al. (2000), who found that:
* Asking subjects for their predictions based on realistic "best guess" scenarios; or
* Asking subjects for their hoped-for "best case" scenarios...
"...produced indistinguishable results.
"When people are asked for a 'realistic' scenario, they envision everything going exactly as planned, with no unexpected delays or unforeseen catastrophes -- the same vision as their 'best case'.
"Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the 'worst case'.
"Unlike most cognitive biases, we know a good debiasing heuristic for the planning fallacy. ... Just use an 'outside view' instead of an 'inside view'."
Briefly, the 'inside view' is to consider all aspects of the task and plan based on those. The 'outside view' "is when you deliberately avoid thinking about the special, unique features of this project, and just ask how long it took to finish broadly similar projects in the past."
I rarely err in this way when predicting task timeframes; in fact, I am usually ahead of schedule for getting places and doing things. I don't take the outside view, though; I just factor in delays, laziness, bathroom and meal breaks, outside interruptions, technical difficulties, traffic, and so on when I plan. I hate being in a hurry, I like wiggle room -- and I make plans to avoid the first and have plenty (or at least a little) of the second, which amount to the same thing: leisure. I thought most people operated this way.
20:50 Posted in books and reading , consumption , finance and business , girardian anthropology , pop culture , science and tech , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13 September 2007
The Problem is You
From Scott Adams at The Dilbert Blog:
"This is one of those 'everything you need to know about human beings' situations. Any incompatibility between a human and the world is seen as proof that the world is screwed up."
His examples are Justin Timberlake, who is very successful commercially but whom Scott Adams hears as a 'shockingly untalented guy,' and his own Dilbert cartoon strip, which is also commercially successful and about which, everyday, 'people e-mail or leave comments in various blogs telling me that Dilbert sucks.' Those people 'look at the incompatibility between my commercially successful art and their sense of humor and conclude there's something terribly wrong with me. The e-mail I have NEVER received goes like this: "I do not enjoy Dilbert, but since many people do, I assume the problem is on my end. Something is wrong with me and I am just writing to let you know I am defective."'
He invites readers to 'describe the last time you disagreed with a popular opinion, about anything, and concluded that the problem is with you?'
Update, 15 Sept. 2007: The more I think about this, the more I wonder how it accords with the studies showing that people have a strong tendency to comform, which would lead one to believe that if my view differs from others, I will change my view, not assume others are wrong. People (like me) seem to exhibit both behaviours from time to time: sometimes we think we're right and will defend our opinion beyond reason, while other times we see everyone else acting in some way that indicates they all have the same view, so we do the same thing, even if our view is different. I wonder if there is one underlying basis for both kinds of action -- conforming to others' opinions or rejecting others' opinons -- and if so, how it operates.
My initial thoughts are that it seems to me that a Girardian might suggest that which action is chosen would depend on which action seems to confer to us more sense of being, more positive identity; and a Buddhist might suggest something similar, that the selected action is the one that seems to give us more ground rather than pull ground out from under us. In either case, we'd chose the action that makes us feel more solid.
When we conform, we choose to belong, and that's one way of experiencing identity, ground, and solidity. When we rebel, on the other hand, we choose to reject belonging, and that could bring us ground, solidity, and identity in at least two ways: we reject belonging to one group but perhaps imagine that we belong to another (absent) group, one that's 'the opposite' of the one we reject, and so we still have the experience of belonging, even if it's imagined and not immediate; or, we gain identity, ground and solidity from not belonging, from seeming to reject the group, from seeming to have our own original thoughts, which we feel are ours alone and not derived from others.
This seems reasonable to me, but maybe I'm over thinking it. :-)
14:30 Posted in community , science and tech , silliness and humour , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
11 September 2007
Worst Cars, Best Lines
Why are some of the funniest, most skilled writers ("Pulitzer Prize-winning," in fact) creating copy for Time magazine's list of 50 Worst Cars?
"Actually, at 1,100 lbs and 145 in. long, the Crosley Hotshot was a minor hunk of junk, but at least it was slow and dangerous. A wondrously mangled and compacted Hotshot can be glimpsed in the 1961 driver's ed scare film Mechanized Death." (Crosley Hotshot, 1949) (But it's so darned cute and snouty.)
"It took the drivers at Road and Track 32 seconds to reach 60 mph, which would put the Dauphine at a severe disadvantage in any drag race involving farm equipment." (Renault Dauphine, 1956)
"It was also a lovely little coupe, which made the moment when the suspension mounts punched through the stressed-skin monocoque all the more pathetic." (Lotus Elite, 1958)
"... giving it a top speed of only 50 mph, assuming you had that kind of time. Its unique feature was the rear-facing bench seat, which meant passengers could watch in horror as traffic threatened to rear-end this rolling roadblock of a car." (Zunndapp Janus, 1958) (1958 -- great year for cars!)
"A vehicle that promised to revolutionize drowning ... Its single greatest demerit -- and this is a big one -- was that it wasn't particularly watertight. " (Amphicar, 1961)
"The 3.0-liter Triumph V8 was a monumental failure, an engine that utterly refused to confine its combustion to the internal side." (Triumph Stag, 1970)
"The interior looked like a third-world casino. ... Here we are approaching the nadir of American car building .... Or, it would be the nadir, except for the abysmal 1980 Chrysler Imperial, which had an engine cursed by God." (1971 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron Two-Door Hardtop)
"The only Bricklin I ever sat in caught on fire and burned to the axles. This is notably ironic, since the car's creator -- the smooth-talking Malcolm Bricklin -- didn't include an ashtray or lighter in the car, to discourage smoking. Despite its hand-removing, 100-lb. gullwing doors, the SV1 was supposed to exemplify the safer car of the future." (Bricklin SV1, 1975)
"The Trabant was East Germany's answer to the VW Beetle -- a 'people's car,' as if the people didn't have enough to worry about." (Trabant, 1975)
"In the disco days of the 1970s, even supercars were cocaine-thin. Meet the Aston Martin Lagonda, a four-door exotic that lived on dinner mints and hot water." (Aston Martin Lagonda, 1976)
"Few car projects were more maledicted than the DMC-12. By the time Johnny Z. got the factory in Northern Ireland up and running -- and what could possibly go wrong there? -- the losses were piling up fast." (De Lorean DMC-12, 1981)
"There was a time when 90 horsepower was a lot, and that time was 1932." (Camaro Iron Duke, 1982)
"Everything that could leak, burn, snap or rupture did so with the regularity of the Anvil Chorus. The collected service advisories would look like the Gutenberg Bible." (Maserati Biturbo, 1984)
"Malcolm Bricklin, he of the Bricklin SV1, wouldn't be satisfied until he had forced every American to walk to work. ... Built in Soviet-bloc Yugoslavia, the Yugo had the distinct feeling of something assembled at gunpoint. Interestingly, in a car where 'carpet' was listed as a standard feature ... (Yugo GV, 1985)
"At the time, Ford argued that many of its customers -- ranchers, farmers, um, tugboat enthusiasts -- needed a vehicle this big with over 10,000-lb. towing capacity." (Ford Excursion, 2000)
"I was in the audience at the Detroit auto show the day GM unveiled the Pontiac Aztek and I will never forget the gasp that audience made. Holy hell! This car could not have been more instantly hated if it had a Swastika tattoo on its forehead. ... With its multiple eyes and supernumerary nostrils, the Aztek looks deformed and scary, something that dogs bark at and cathedrals employ to ring bells. (Pontiac Aztek, 2001)
"One struggles to think of a worse vehicle at a worse time." (Hummer H2, 2003)
14:18 Posted in finance and business , lists , pop culture , science and tech , other people said it | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
10 September 2007
The dogs sat in front of the humans and stared at them
Dogs seem to have an innate connection with humans. Even before they are weaned from their mothers and socialised with people, they understand how to communicate with us.
In an experiment in Budapest, wolves were raised from puppies, fed with bottles, taught to walk on a leash and respond to commands: "After a few months the researchers had the young wolves and a group of young dogs attempt the same task. First both groups were taught to remove a piece of meat from a container. After a while, the investigators closed the containers. While the young wolves kept trying to get to the food, the dogs stopped immediately, sat down in front of their human trainers and stared at them."
Yup. (See photo.)
More intelligent dog tricks here.
20:25 Posted in animals , science and tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
05 September 2007
Ordinary Evil
Richard Beck is doing a series on Everyday Evil. Check it out.
Yesterday's post was The Fundamental Attribution Error, which is that humans tend to "overestimate dispositional factors over situational factors in explaining human behavior. Phrased another way, we tend to see the things going on inside of a person (e.g., traits, personality, motives, desires) as more important than the forces outside of the person (e.g., context, social pressures) in determining behavior. Basically, we downplay the power of context and situation." This leads to overestimating "the strength of our character. That is, we tend to apply labels to ourselves, seeing ourselves in Platonic terms. We see ourselves adjectivally. As a 'kind' of person. A good father. A good husband. And so on."
Today's is about the famous Stanford Prison Study, conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 (more on SPS). Zimbardo started with a group of non-pathological (per psychological testing), apparently normal college-age male participants, whom he randomly assigned to be either guards or prisoners. The guards went through an orientation on how to be a guard, while the prisoners were arrested and imprisoned. It was supposed to be a two-week study but "the guards had become so sadistic in their treatment of the prisoners that, due to ethical and safety concerns, the study was terminated" in 6 days.
What made the guards so sadistic? Beck suggests three things: Power Differentials; In-Group versus Out-Group psychology; and Group Conformity.
Immediately I am reminded of the constituents of a faith community -- usually it consists of a powerful minister &/or a group of leaders who are privvy to information and who make the important decisions, and a flock; proud and defined membership in a privileged group (often seen as the ones 'going to heaven'); and lots of written and unwritten 'rules' about how the group should behave. Somehow, these three conditions aren't enough to create conditions for sadism (in the powerful) and depression (in the 'prisoner' population), because most churches (in my experience, anyway), while they have their problems, don't have this particular problem -- perhaps, I think in my most cynical moments, because there is another condition that serves as a check on outright dominance and sadism and instead routes it, often, into neurosis. My bias tells me that testosterone, flowing freely in 18-22-yr-old males, might have something to do with the exaggeration and opportunism of the power structure, but that really is just bias.
One of the questions posed on the SPS site is:
What prevented 'good guards' from objecting or countermanding the orders from tough or bad guards?
According to Beck's ideas (mine, too), it's not as simple as a matter of good and bad guards. As I have quoted many times, "If only [my emphasis] there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart" (Alexander Solzhenitsyn). The propensity for doing good or evil deeds is part of each human 's identity; our actions, and perhaps even our intentions, are evoked by the context -- cultural forces, individual circumstance, personal experience, etc. -- in which we find ourselves.
Beck's next post will address what makes humans vulnerable to the pressure to commit atrocities.
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
(quote from Zimbrano's book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007))
09:55 Posted in books and reading , community , crime , girardian anthropology , pop culture , science and tech , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this
01 July 2007
Current Reading
1. Report on field trip to the Creation Museum. By epidemiology professor Tara Smith.
Bottom line: "I was a bit surprised that they really didn't even try with the science. Sure, they threw in a few scientific-looking displays and videos, and dressed up their employees to look like paleontologists in the field, but overall, the place was just a Christian camp without the pretense of scientific evidence. After all, if we can't trust human reason, why bother with the scientific method anyway?"
What intrigued me: There was a short film called "The Last Adam" that detailed "the history of sacrifice in Christianity from the beginning up to Jesus. (It included a strange interview with a rather bitter Mary about God using her son as a sacrificial lamb. Weird)."
2. I recently read Mehmet Oz's Healing from the Heart: A Leading Heart Surgeon Explores the Power of Complementary Medicine.
Bottom line: The book is not well edited, rambling and repeating, and focuses the discussion of complementary medicine strongly on the subject of heart disease and people who need heart transplants. (I'm glad I got it from the library and didn't buy it.) Most disappointingly, in the chapter on religion ('Spiritual Will'), Oz perpetuates as scientifically proven the effectiveness of blind, distant intercessory prayer to heal, largely on the evidence of Randolph Byrd's study. Prayer studies, including Byrd's, are often criticised as unscientific -- data sets too small; probability of outcomes due to chance too large; outcome differences not statistically significant; studies not replicated, not peer-reviewed, not really blind; etc. -- and yet they are commonly touted in the culture as evidence that intercessory prayer works. Prayer may work in this way -- to effect the specific outcome desired by the pray-ers -- but studies, including Byrd's, haven't shown that it does. That Oz would cite these studies as proof calls into question, for me, some of his other assertions. That said, the book is easy to read, the case studies as well as the information about cardiac symptoms and surgery are for the most part interesting, and Oz succinctly presents information about and examples of the complementary treatments: hypnosis, meditation, prayer, music therapy, acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicines, vitamins, nutrition, yoga, massage, guided imagery, reflexology, and energy healing (such as reiki).
What intrigued me:
"Searching through many seemingly conflicting doctrines, I have found that the great teachers urge us to let go of our attachments chiefly in two realms of life -- the same areas that I see wreaking havoc on my patients. The first is our love of the world, our passion for physical things, our unsatisfied desires that often lead to suffering. The second is the selfishness that justifies our negative thoughts and emotions towards others. Anger, contempt, hatred -- these keep us chained to our lower selves. True freedom lies in overcoming these base loves and choosing to follow a higher path." (p. 145)
3. Article: "Breast Cancer, Out of the Dark: Maverick researchers pursue the idea that lights at night increase the risk of a disease" by Richard Monastersky in the Chronicle of Higher Education (via Aetiology).
Bottom Line: "When women are exposed to light at night, their bodies don't secrete as much melatonin, and tumors can grow unchecked. ... One way melatonin appears to work its magic is by protecting cells from a dietary danger called linoleic acid (which is not to be confused with linolenic acid). In modest quantities, linoleic acid is a nutrient that our cells need for growth. But humans now consume many times more of this polyunsaturated fatty acid than they did in prehistoric times ...."
What intrigued me: I don't sleep well at night, whether lights are on or off; in fact, I sleep best in early morning, when light is coming into the room. I've tried to change this pattern many times over 25 yrs to no avail. Maybe I should take melatonin supplements? I'm already reducing polyunsaturated fats. Which reminds me of this: "What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease." -- George Dennison Prentice (American newspaper editor and journalist, 1802-1870)
19:05 Posted in books and reading , health and medicine , science and tech , theology, spirituality, philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
21 May 2007
Handy Climate Change Guide
The handy New Scientist "Climate Change: A Guide for the Perplexed" succinctly refutes or explains the 26 most common climate change myths and misconceptions, such as: Chaotic systems are not predictable, They predicted global cooling in the 1970s, CO2 isn't the most important greenhouse gas, The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming, We are simply recovering from the Little Ice Age, Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming.
15:51 Posted in earthcare and environment , pop culture , science and tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
18 April 2007
Life is Not Safe
In the wake of the shootings this week at Virginia Tech, I think what Dr. Russ Federman, director of counseling at the University of Virginia, said on NPR's All Things Considered this afternoon is worth repeating here. He was responding to interviewer Michele Norris, who had asked him, in retrospect, what lesson can we learn about how to handle students whose behaviour raises red flags for other students, administrators or teachers.
Federman replied: "The lesson is that we pay closer attention to student behaviour, the lesson is that we get as much involved as we can, at the same time being mindful of students' rights. And that leaves us with a grey area."
He commented further on that grey area:
"I think we would like to think that violence and tragedy is avoidable. We would like to think that we get up each day and we go out into the world and we experience a day of safety and relative stability. And if things go haywire, we'd like to find ways of preventing that in the future, such that if we can prevent it in the future, we can feel less anxious about life. But I think the reality is that human behaviour is not always predictable. And the ways in which we can control an individual's behaviour, when they have their own legal rights as adults, is limited."
When I heard this, I thought not only of the massive desire to understand and predict (and possibly control) deviant, violent human behaviour -- such as we are seeing in the media and in our own personal conversations and thoughts about the Virginia Tech killings now (why did he do it? what prompted it? could teachers, administrators, parents, the system etc., have prevented it? and so on)* -- but also of the desire to understand and predict nature, to avoid natural disasters, and, underlying both of these urges, the desire to find an explanation for anything "bad" that happens not only in our own lives but in everyone else's life (but especially in our own). We tend not to look for explanations for "good" things that happen: "I lived another day! How could that be? What was I doing to cause that?" or "I didn't have a car wreck on the way home. Wonder why?" It sounds ridiculous because we don't generally think that way.
I'd like to underscore Dr. Federman's implication that violence and tragedy are not avoidable, and neither are natural disasters, freakish accidents, illness and injury, birth defects, and simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can prevent and avoid these things some times, by being cautious, by being careful (and care-full), by thinking and planning, even by seeking to prevent them and applying ourselves to the task. And maybe that's what makes us think that it's possible to completely avoid violence, tragedy, and so on. But it's not possible. And, as psychologist Alfred Adler said, "The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions." I'm not an Adler fan but I agree with the quote. We can work so hard at protecting ourselves and those we love against anything potentially injurious that we end up not so much living life as watching it pass by from inside our snug, protective shell.
We can't avoid or prevent "bad" things from happening because there is randomness. There is coincidence. There is genetics. There is luck, and fate. There is cause and effect in layers so complex that we don't understand it, even when we think we do -- we can posit this based on systems of cause and effect that weren't understood 100, 50, 10 years ago and which are better understood now (leeches? venesection? sun revolves around Earth? -- although millions of Americans still believe this), but even for something as simple-seeming as the effect of food on health, there are all kinds of conflicting 'cause and effect' hypotheses.
And we can never really feel less anxious about life, because it always ends the same way, and we are always aware that we are tending towards that end, that one wrong move could be our last move. Even if that move is simply taking a luxury boat cruise. Or driving through a Boston tunnel. Or being born of parents with AIDS in Africa. Or going to German class at your college one spring morning.
(* I'm not speaking here of the questing for answers by those actually involved in or personally affected by the shooting spree. That seems to me part of the process of grief.)
20:50 Posted in crime , death , health and medicine , pop culture , science and tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
20 March 2007
Jets More Fuel-Efficient Than Prius?
Philip Greenspun says that the double-decker Airbus A380, which started flying to the U.S. yesterday, is more fuel-efficient than a Toyota Prius. If you have to travel 8,000 nautical miles and if only one person occupies the Prius.
"The plane can carry 81,890 gallons of fuel and flies 8000 nautical miles, i.e., it burns approximately 10 gallons of fuel per nautical mile or 9 gallons per statute mile. The plane can seat 850 people if configured as an all-economy ship, so the mpg per person is approximately 95 (assuming the plane is fully loaded, which most planes seem to be these days). The Prius gets around 45 mpg in real-world driving and, though it can seat 5, is typically occupied by one person."
He also notes that based on "an analysis of overall per-passenger-mile transportation cost, including capital investment and labor costs," the Boeing 747 was "the cheapest form of transportation period." Cheaper than walking? Bicycling?
Of course, no one is going to take an Airbus for a 20 mile commute to work, and no one is going to drive a Prius from the U.S. to France, so it's a bit of an apples and oranges comparison; but there are times when I am choosing a mode of transportation for a 1,500 mile trip. I have assumed -- or perhaps been told -- that airplanes are the least fuel-efficient way to go. Now I wonder what the mpg for a smaller plane (holding only 150 or 300 passengers, say), going a shorter distance (spending more time as a percentage of the whole trip taxiing, taking off, and landing), might be.
11:02 Posted in consumption , earthcare and environment , finance and business , science and tech , travel and place | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
16 March 2007
Half Human, Half Not
Scott Adams, again, commenting on news of the viability of interspecies breeding:
"The thing that worries me the most is that now I have a new wrong thing to say when someone shows me their baby. It's already hard enough to resist saying, 'It looks like Yoda.' Now I have to worry about not saying, 'It looks half human and half pug.' I don't have that kind of self-control, and it's probably because I'm at least one-fourth Chihuahua. [Note to my Mom: I mean on Dad's side.]"
Yeah.
09:32 Posted in animals , science and tech , silliness and humour | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this
08 March 2007
RIP Jean Baudrillard, 1929-2007
Resources on Baudrillard (I mentioned him in a blog entry yesterday):
^ Remembrance of Baudrillard by Mark Poster, 'a professor at the University of California at Irvine who was Baudrillard's friend and editor,' on NPR (listen with Real Audio or Windows Media Player). I wanted to hear more about what he thought about the concept of consumption, but the interview ended after the topic was mentioned. I'll have to read a book! (Then again, I might not.)
^ Obituary in the NYT: Jean Baudrillard, 77, Critic and Theorist of Hyperreality, Dies
^ London Telegraph obit -- quite extensive
^ Associated Press Obituary in the International Herald Tribune: French philosopher Jean Baudrillard dies
^ Extensive entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
^ Biography at the European Graduate School. Also bibliography, online