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19 Apr 10:38

Legendary Composer Leonard Bernstein on the Future of Music, Harvard 1973

by Maria Popova

“A great new era of eclecticism is at hand.”

In the fall of 1972, legendary composer Leonard Bernstein was appointed the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, his alma mater — a position originally created in 1925 to bring celebrated poets as campus residents and student advisors and previously occupied by such luminaries as T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, and Robert Frost. In 1973, Bernstein delivered his sextet of lucid lectures, aimed at an intelligent listened not musically trained but keenly interested in how music works and how to listen to music.

Titled The Unanswered Question, the lectures — covering Musical Phonology, Musical Syntax, Musical Semantics, The Delights and Dangers of Ambiguity, The Twentieth Century Crisis, and The Poetry of Earth — spanned more than 11 hours, all of which are now available online. In 1976, they were transcribed in the eponymous book The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (public library).

Bernstein ends the series with a kind of summation of his credo, one he leaves out — or, rather, modifies and makes less prophetic — in the book:

I believe that a great new era of eclecticism is at hand — eclecticism in the highest sense — and I believe that it has been made possible by the rediscovery, the reacceptance of tonality, that universal earth out of which such diversity can spring. And no matter how serial, or stochastic, or otherwise intellectualized music may be, it can always qualify as poetry, as long as it is rooted in Earth. … I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series — and that there is an equally universal musical syntax, which can be codified and structured in terms of symmetry and repetition; and that by metaphorical operation, there can be devised particular musical languages that have surface structures noticeably remote from their basic origins, but which can be strikingly expressive as long as they retain their roots in Earth.

I believe that our deepest affective responses to these languages are innate ones, but do not preclude additional responses, which are conditioned or learned; and that all particular languages bear on one another and combine into always-new idioms perceptible to human beings; and that ultimately these idioms can all merge into a speech universal enough to be accessible to all mankind; and that the expressive distinctions among these idioms depend ultimately on the dignity and passion of the individual creative voice.

And, finally, I believe that all these things are true, and that [the] “unanswered question” has an answer. I’m no longer sure what the question is, but I do know the answer — and the answer is, “Yes.”

Complement The Unanswered Question with David Byrne on how music works and this lovely vintage guide to the 7 essential skills of listening.

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16 Apr 23:37

Google Street View Hyperlapse

by Becky Stern
16 Apr 23:25

Magnetic Putty Magic

by jeff

Magnetic Putty Magic (Extended Cut) | Shanks FX | PBS Digital Studios from Joey Shanks on Vimeo.

In this episode of SHANKS FX we have some fun with the wonderful weirdness of “Magnetic Putty”.
We used this Putty to create a lot of the Black Hole sequences in our film SCI-FLY.
We now take a 2nd run at experimenting with this “strange matter” to see what new images & sequences can be achieved!!!

16 Apr 23:11

I was just thinking about this, if it had been done yet. Sure enough it has been now I wonder how long before more people exploit this. Computer program writing hundreds of thousands of it's own books.

16 Apr 12:09

Richard Feynman describes the operation of a computer

starstuffharvestingstarlight

incredibly entertaining

16 Apr 11:13

'science' of the gaps

by Admin
15 Apr 11:36

Understanding the conservative mind, without brain scans

by Massimo Pigliucci

by Massimo Pigliucci

Is Nietzsche to be found somewhere between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia? This is just one of a series of intriguing claims I am encountering while reading The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, by my CUNY colleague Corey Robin, a political theorist, journalist and associate professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center.

The context of that specific statement is Robin’s contention that there is a level of coherence among reactionaries across times and places, so that it is possible to draw parallels between the thoughts of people so apparently different from each other as the three mentioned above. But my goal here is not primarily to discuss the details of the book (which I’m still reading, and to which I will likely come back), but rather to use it as a vehicle for a broader discussion of what in philosophy are referred to as levels of analysis.

Let’s begin with something very different from the topic of how conservative minds work. Say that you are interested in the workings of a particular ecosystem, like the Arctic tundra. Pertinent topics of study will include the composition, distribution and abundance of the fauna and flora of the tundra, as well as of the nature of the various species-species interactions, i.e., you’ll be doing population biology and biogeography. It will also be relevant to know things about the local climate, its short term variability, and its long term changes (both past and future). So you’ll engage in a bit of climate science and paleoclimatology. Moreover, you’ll need to develop an understanding of nutrient cycling within the ecosystem, thereby bringing geology and geochemistry into the mix.

There are also a number of scientific disciplines that will likely not cross your mind to engage during your study of the Arctic tundra: quantum mechanics and cosmology, for instance. Why not? Isn’t the tundra a particular type of bio-physical system on a particular planet in a particular solar system in a particular galaxy? Shouldn’t cosmology, therefore, be relevant? And isn’t everything that makes up said ecosystem made of quarks and other subatomic entities, the understanding of which is obviously the province of fundamental physics?

The answer to the latter questions is that while yes, the tundra and everything in it is both made of particles and located in a certain corner of the cosmos, neither level of analysis is informative to the problem at hand, namely the description and understanding of the bio-dynamics characteristic of the Arctic tundra.

This, mind you, isn’t an argument against ontological reductionism (the claim that everything is made of the basic stuff identified by fundamental physics), nor is it a panegyric on behalf of emergent properties. Ontological reductionism may or may not be true, and conversely strong emergentism may not or may hold, and you’d still have no use for quantum mechanics and cosmology when it comes to ecosystem studies. The issue is epistemic, not ontological.

If the case I have just made for the tundra is relatively uncontroversial (as I certainly hope it is!), then we are ready to move to another one that is a bit more complicated and certainly more controversial: the issue of “the conservative mind” with which we began.

Let’s start easy: we can surely agree that conservatives (meaning human beings who expound one version or another of a range of political positions collectively referred to by political scientists and philosophers as conservative, as opposed to progressive) are also made of quarks and located in a particular corner of the Milky Way. And yet, just like in the case of the Arctic tundra, neither quantum mechanics nor cosmology will tell us anything relevant about the conservative mind, yes?

Now let’s zoom in a little. Coming from “above,” so to speak (i.e., zooming onto our problem while descending from a cosmic perspective), we may want to embark on a philosophical analysis of the ideas proposed by conservatives; or (not exclusive) we may be interested in the history and sociology of the conservative movement.

Coming in from “below” (i.e., adjusting our epistemic zoom while ascending from the quantum mechanical level), we could consider the psychology of the conservative mind, or its brain anatomy and physiology, or even inquire as to whether there are “conservative genes” that may help us explain, say, the Red/Blue state divide in the United States of America. Which, naturally, would then lead us to ask how and why such genes evolved in the first place.

I think all these perspectives (i.e., from philosophy, sociology, psychology, neurobiology, genetics, and evolutionary biology) are pertinent, but some much more than others. That is, I argue that some of these approaches will be epistemically significantly more informative than others in terms of the task at hand, to wit, understanding the conservative mind (hint: notice that I am using the term mind here, not brain).

At this point you may want to pause before reading any further, and perhaps place online bets with other Rationally Speaking readers as to which of the above fields I am going to up-play or down-play in what follows...

As you must have realized, we live in a brave new era of brain scans and genomics, so that every claim that comes with an fMRI attached to it (or, less sexy, a high throughput DNA scan), is ipso facto cool and scientifically interesting. [No, I’m not implying that neurobiology and genomics are not actually interesting. Then again, quantum mechanics and cosmology are also interesting, and yet irrelevant to understanding tundras...]

The problem, of course, is in assessing the usefulness of claims made on the basis of these new technologies. For instance, it may be interesting to see which areas of the brain are primarily involved in, say, reading as opposed to talking. But that some areas of the brain underly both activities is a truism: how else did you think you were capable of reading and talking?

Take, for instance, several recent studies showing particular patterns of brain activity during meditation or deep prayer. Skeptics of the more mystical claims made by practitioners of these techniques triumphantly say: “Ah! See? There is nothing transcendental about this stuff, it’s just your brain doing weird things.” True believers retort along the lines of: “I told you so! There really is a transcendental realm that the human brain is uniquely equipped to access!” In reality, of course, the fact that our brains behave in a particular manner when we engage in meditation or prayer says absolutely nothing about the reality, or lack thereof, of any supra-physical realm. That is because we expect to see those very patterns under either scenario, so that the high-tech demonstration of “your brain on prayer” tells us what we already knew: whatever behavior a human being engages in, it’s got to have something to do with his brain.

Back to conservatism. A few months ago, Julia Galef and I had a nice conversation with Chris Mooney during a Rationally Speaking podcast, focusing on his latest book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality.  The first quibble I have with Chris’s book is the title [1]. While his previous volume, The Republican War on Science, was aptly titled (it was, after all, about the anti-science attitude of the G.W. Bush administration), this one is, I think, unnecessarily contentious: it’s not Republican brains in particular that are of interest, since Republicanism is a specific product of a given time and culture (indeed, modern day Republicans have very little to do with, say, Lincoln-type Republicans), but rather the conservative attitude of which contemporary Republicanism in the United States happens to be a particular instantiation.

Be that as it may, Chris’s book has received much attention because it promises to provide a scientific (as in natural science, particularly neurobiology and genetics) understanding of the problem at hand, rather than a “merely” philosophical, historical, sociological or psychological one. [Of course, if you happen to be a conservative, and in particular a Republican, you will not see what “the problem” is in the first place.]

While Chris is careful to dispel easy accusations of biological reductionism and determinism, he does paint a picture whereby the brain (not, more expansively, the mind) is the main locus of the conservative attitude, and where there is evidence of a genetic basis for conservatism, with a hint of (just-so) scenarios concerning how such attitude may have been engrained in some of us by natural selection in the distant past (say, the Pleistocene, far earlier than the onset of the Grand Old Party).

I do not wish to engage in a detailed critique of specific claims made in the studies that Chris used as the basis of his book. Some of that criticism has been done in thoughtful reviews of the volume (there were also a number of decidedly not thoughtful ones), and at any rate several of those studies are sound, as far as they go. The question I wish to raise is just how far do they, in fact, go in providing us with an understanding of the conservative mind.

Not much, and far less, I think, than the combination of psychological, sociological, historical and philosophical approaches do.

Let’s start with the evolutionary biology. Broadly speaking, there is little doubt that the repertoire of human behavior evolved over a long period of time, and that some of that evolution was adaptive in nature (i.e., the result of a process of natural selection). But readers of this blog should know that I put little stock into many specific evolutionary psychological explanations, for a variety of methodological problems that I do not need to repeat here.

As for the genetics, again, it should certainly be uncontroversial (pace some extreme postmodernists) to claim that genes affect human behavior, but even Chris points out that the amount of variation in the population explained by candidate genes for complex human behaviors (such as homosexuality, and probably even more so the somewhat fuzzy concept of conservatism) is a small fraction of the total. Significantly less appreciated is the point that if genes account for a small percentage of the variation in a given human behavior, then it must be that a large fraction of that variation is due either to the environment or to phenotypic plasticity (i.e., to gene-environment interactions). Which in turn means that evolutionary explanations become marginal at best.

It also means that much of the explanatory power to be found in brain activity is actually dependent on the environment and/or on its interactions with the basic structure of the brain itself. [And a further complication is that brains develop through time and maintain a degree of plasticity throughout one’s life. Yet, for obvious logistical reasons, we don’t have as yet any study using fMRI to track changes in brain activity in response to the bewildering variety of environmental stimuli we all experience from the pre-natal period until we die.]

Which is why the most informative loci of analysis to understand conservatism are the historical-sociological (the broader environment), the philosophical (the conceptual stuff of which conservative ideas are made of), and the psychological. This last one is, of course, connected to the lower level that is the target of neurobiology, but contra what appears to be an increasingly common misconception, psychology doesn’t reduce to neurobiology. Or, to put it another way, neurobiology isn’t psychology done with fMRI, and therefore more “scientific.” That’s because psychology deals with the mind, not just the brain. The mind (I actually prefer to use a verb, minding, because we are not talking about an object) is what the brain does when it interacts with the various layers of the external environment. And these layers are shaped by the history, sociology and philosophy of ideas.

That is why, for instance, it only took me a few pages to find the first interesting statement in Robin’s book: “conservatism is ... the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” One may agree or not with this way of conceptualizing conservatism (i.e., in terms of power struggles), but Robin proceeds to give a detailed political-sociological-historical-philosophical analysis to back it up, and one cannot reject his take on it without engaging in some detail with his analysis.

Along similar lines, Robin writes: “Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality and the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality ... is not the threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom. ... If women and workers are provided with the economic resources to make independent choices, they will be free not to obey their husbands and employers.”

Proceeding from this way of framing the issue, Robin immediately arrives at an interesting analysis of the otherwise highly puzzling fact that libertarians tend to be associated with conservatives, rather than with progressives (or rather than distancing themselves from both): “When the libertarian looks out upon society, he does not see isolated individuals; he sees private, often hierarchical, groups, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees. ... This vision of the connection between excellence and rule is what brings together in postwar America that unlikely alliance of the libertarian, with his vision of the employer’s untrammeled power in the workplace; the traditionalist, with his vision of the father’s rule at home; and the statist, with his vision of a heroic leader pressing his hand upon the face of the earth.”

I am not suggesting that Robin’s analysis is necessarily correct. I am still near the beginning of the book, and I will need time to process his framework and the historical and sociological evidence he brings to the book. But my brain (!) sure started working at a much higher rate than usual even while reading the introduction to The Reactionary Mind, while the same brain seems to have by now developed a dulled response to yet another fMRI scan or just-so story about the very distant evolutionary past of Homo sapiens. And that’s because I think evolution, genetics, and neurobiology are far less explanatory of the conservative (or, for that matter, the progressive) mind than the disciplines that Robin’s book calls upon as resources. This is no slight to the natural sciences in question, no more than the one delivered by the ecosystem ecologist who wisely ignores cosmology and quantum mechanics.

———

[1] Unless he objected to it and the publisher overruled him, which happened to me with Answers for Aristotle...
13 Apr 02:21

Madagascar: Carnet de Voyage (2009)

by noreply@blogger.com (kafkian mood)


Credits

Director: Bastien Dubois
Producers
: Ron Dyens, Aurélia Prévieu
Screenwriter: Bastien Dubois
Director of Photography: Bastien Dubois
Graphic Artist: Pierre-Alain Dubois
Sound Recordist: Cyrille Lauwerier
Editor: Boubkar Benzabat / Bastien Dubois
Sound Editor: Cyrille Lauwerier
Sound Mixer: Cyrille Lauwerier
Foley Recordist: Yohann Angelvy
Foley Artist: Florian Fabre
Production Companies: Sacrebleu Productions / C.R.R.A.V. Nord Pas de Calais (support) / Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC) (support) / Procirep (support) / Angoa-Agicoa (support)

http://www.bastiendubois.com
13 Apr 02:09

Stanley (1999)

by noreply@blogger.com (kafkian mood)


Credits

Director: Suzie Templeton
Writer: Suzie Templeton
Animator: Suzie Templeton
Music written & Performed by: Jonny Templeton & Sam Butterfield
Editors: Tony Fish & SUzie Templeton
Produced at SIADUC
(c) Suzie Templeton 1999

http://suzietempleton.com 
13 Apr 00:04

Let's stop hiding behind recycling and be honest about consumption | George Monbiot

by George Monbiot

We have offshored the problem of escalating consumption, and our perceptions of it, by considering only territorial emissions

Every society has topics it does not discuss. These are the issues which challenge its comfortable assumptions. They are the ones that remind us of mortality, which threaten the continuity we anticipate, which expose our various beliefs as irreconcilable.

Among them are the facts which sink the cosy assertion, that (in David Cameron's words) "there need not be a tension between green and growth".

At a reception in London recently I met an extremely rich woman, who lives, as most people with similar levels of wealth do, in an almost comically unsustainable fashion: jetting between various homes and resorts in one long turbo-charged holiday. When I told her what I did, she responded: "Oh I agree, the environment is so important. I'm crazy about recycling." But the real problem, she explained, was "people breeding too much".

I agreed that population is an element of the problem, but argued that consumption is rising much faster and – unlike the growth in the number of people – is showing no signs of levelling off. She found this notion deeply offensive: I mean the notion that human population growth is slowing. When I told her that birth rates are dropping almost everywhere, and that the world is undergoing a slow demographic transition, she disagreed violently: she has seen, on her endless travels, how many children "all those people have".

As so many in her position do, she was using population as a means of disavowing her own impacts. The issue allowed her to transfer responsibility to others: people at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. It allowed her to pretend that her shopping and flying and endless refurbishments of multiple homes are not a problem. Recycling and population: these are the amulets people clasp in order not to see the clash between protecting the environment and rising consumption.

In a similar way, we have managed, with the help of a misleading global accounting system, to overlook one of the gravest impacts of our consumption. This too has allowed us to blame foreigners – particularly poorer foreigners – for the problem.

When nations negotiate global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, they are held responsible only for the gases produced within their own borders. Partly as a result of this convention, these tend to be the only ones that countries count. When these "territorial emissions" fall, they congratulate themselves on reducing their carbon footprints. But as markets of all kinds have been globalised, and as manufacturing migrates from rich nations to poorer ones, territorial accounting bears ever less relationship to our real impacts.

While this is an issue which affects all post-industrial countries, it is especially pertinent in the United Kingdom, where the difference between our domestic and international impacts is greater than that of any other major emitter. The last government boasted that this country cut greenhouse gas emissions by 19% between 1990 and 2008. It positioned itself (as the current government does) as a global leader, on course to meet its own targets, and as an example for other nations to follow.

But the cut the UK has celebrated is an artefact of accountancy. When the impact of the goods we buy from other nations is counted, our total greenhouse gases did not fall by 19% between 1990 and 2008. They rose by 20%. This is despite the replacement during that period of many of our coal-fired power stations with natural gas, which produces roughly half as much carbon dioxide for every unit of electricity. When our "consumption emissions", rather than territorial emissions, are taken into account, our proud record turns into a story of dismal failure.

There are two further impacts of this false accounting. The first is that because many of the goods whose manufacture we commission are now produced in other countries, those places take the blame for our rising consumption. We use China just as we use the population issue: as a means of deflecting responsibility. What's the point of cutting our own consumption, a thousand voices ask, when China is building a new power station every 10 seconds (or whatever the current rate happens to be)?

But, just as our position is flattered by the way greenhouse gases are counted, China's is unfairly maligned. A graph published by the House of Commons energy and climate change committee shows that consumption accounting would reduce China's emissions by roughly 45%. Many of those power stations and polluting factories have been built to supply our markets, feeding an apparently insatiable demand in the UK, the US and other rich nations for escalating quantities of stuff.

The second thing the accounting convention has hidden from us is consumerism's contribution to global warming. Because we consider only our territorial emissions, we tend to emphasise the impact of services – heating, lighting and transport for example – while overlooking the impact of goods. Look at the whole picture, however, and you discover (using the Guardian's carbon calculator) that manufacturing and consumption is responsible for a remarkable 57% of the greenhouse gas production caused by the UK.

Unsurprisingly, hardly anyone wants to talk about this, as the only meaningful response is a reduction in the volume of stuff we consume. And this is where even the most progressive governments' climate policies collide with everything else they represent. As Mustapha Mond points out in Brave New World, "industrial civilisation is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning".

The wheels of the current economic system – which depends on perpetual growth for its survival – certainly. The impossibility of sustaining this system of endless, pointless consumption without the continued erosion of the living planet and the future prospects of humankind, is the conversation we will not have.

By considering only our territorial emissions, we make the impacts of our escalating consumption disappear in a puff of black smoke: we have offshored the problem, and our perceptions of it.

But at least in a couple of places the conjuring trick is beginning to attract some attention.

On 16 April, the Carbon Omissions site will launch a brilliant animation by Leo Murray, neatly sketching out the problem*. The hope is that by explaining the issue simply and engagingly, his animation will reach a much bigger audience than articles like the one you are reading can achieve.

(*Declaration of interest [unpaid]: I did the voiceover).

On 24 April, the Committee on Climate Change (a body that advises the UK government) will publish a report on how consumption emissions are likely to rise, and how government policy should respond to the issue.

I hope this is the beginning of a conversation we have been avoiding for much too long. How many of us are prepared fully to consider the implications?

www.monbiot.com


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12 Apr 10:48

YOU THINK YOU ARE A CONSUMER BUT MAYBE YOU HAVE BEEN CONSUMED

by Adam Curtis
screens

One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't then it's bad.

But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do. Ever since the economic crisis in 2008, millions of people have accepted cuts in all sorts of things - from real wages and living standards to benefits and hospital care - without any real opposition.

The cuts may be right, or they may be stupid - but the astonishing thing is how no-one really challenges them.

I think that one of the reasons for this is because a lot of the power that shapes our lives today has become invisible - and so it is difficult to see how it really works and even more difficult to challenge it.

So much of the language that surrounds us - from things like economics, management theory and the algorithms built into computer systems - appears to be objective and neutral. But in fact it is loaded with powerful, and very debatable, political assumptions about how society should work, and what human beings are really like.

But it is very difficult to show this to people. Journalists, whose job is to pull back and tell dramatic stories that bring power into focus, find it impossible because things like economic theory are both incomprehensible and above all boring. The same is true of "management science". Mild-mannered men and women meet in glass-walled offices and decide the destinies of millions of people on the basis of "targets" and "measured outcomes".

Like economics it pretends to be neutral, but it isn't. Yet it's impossible to show this dramatically because nothing happens in those glass-walled offices except the click of a keystroke that brings up another powerpoint slide. It's boring - and it's impossible to turn it into stories that will grab peoples imaginations - yet hundreds of peoples' jobs may depend on what is written on that slide.

modern

I want to do a series of posts that will go back and reveal the forgotten roots of some of this fake objectivity that surrounds us today. They will be a series of stories that show how over the past fifty years both the political Right and the Left have gnawed away at the idea of objective truth. Sometimes almost colluding together to help bring about today's uncertainty and confusion about where power and influence really lies in our society.

The first is an odd story - with a very strange character at its heart. It is about how in the 1950s the richest man in the world, an oil billionaire in Texas, invented a new form of television journalism. It pretended to be objective and balanced but in fact it was hard core right-wing propaganda. It was way ahead of its time because, in its fake neutrality, it prefigured the rise of the ultraconservative right-wing media of the 1990s - like Fox News, with its copyrighted slogan, "Fair and Balanced"

The billionaire was called H. L. Hunt - Haroldson Lafayette Hunt. He made his fortune in the early 1930s by getting hold of one of the biggest oil fields in America - in the pine forests of East Texas. He was a ruthless, driven man and from early on he became absolutely convinced that he had superhuman qualities that made him different from other humans.

Here is a picture of Mr Hunt which gives you a sense of his conviction about himself.

hunt

 

From the 1920s onwards Hunt was a bigamist. He married two women and raised two families that were oblivious of each other. He told his second wife, Frania, that he was called Major Franklyn Hunt. There was a rocky moment when his picture was on the front page of all the Texas papers because of his spectacular oil deal. Frania asked Hunt if that was him - he told her no, that it was his uncle who had been so clever.

two hunts

Hunt was part of a group of extreme right-wing oil men in Texas who had enormous influence because of their wealth. There is a brilliant book written about this group - The Big Rich by Bryan Burrough. Burrough describes how they had first risen up in the 1930s because they loathed President Roosevelt - "a nigger-loving communist", as one oil man called him. They were convinced that Roosevelt's New Deal was really run by Jews and communists - or "social vermin" as they politely put it.

A Texas congressman called Sam Rayburn summed up this group of right-wing oil men. "All they do is hate" - he said.

After the Second World War H L Hunt did two things. He added another, third, family to his bigamist's collection. And he also turned to the new medium of television to promote his ultraconservative views. In 1950 he wrote a pamphlet putting forward the idea of what he called an "Educational Facts League" - its purpose, Hunt wrote:

"will be to secure a impartial presentation of all the news through all the news channels concerning issues of public interest"

It would, said Hunt, be an organization where ordinary Americans would be supplied with the true facts of political life.

Hunt announced that the organization would be called "Facts Forum" - and he found a man called Dan Smoot to be its public face. Smoot had been an FBI agent - and he was smooth and reasonable. Starting on radio, but then moving to television, Smoot presented a show called Facts Forum which every week would give you, the audience, a balanced presentation of the facts behind the news. Very reminiscent of the later catch-phrase on Fox News - "We Report, You Decide".

facts forum

In fact this declaration of balance and fairness was rubbish. Smoot would begin by presenting the left or liberal viewpoint on a subject in a dull, bland way. Then would enthusiastically put forward the alternative, or what Hunt called, the "constructive" view. This view was simple - all government was bad, business should be left alone - and anyone who disagreed was a communist trying to take over the world. And was probably a Jew as well.

The programmes were radically skewed to promote an ultraconservative agenda while pretending to be neutral and balanced.

There was lots of implied racism in the shows. In his book Bryan Burroughs quotes from one episode where Smoot argued against fair employment legislation - and said:

"Remember that the negroes when first brought to America by Yankee and English merchants were not free people reduced to slavery. They were merely transferred from a barbaric enslavement by their own people in Africa to a relatively benign enslavement in the Western Hemisphere."

Facts Forum became a successful media enterprise - with two syndicated radio shows and three TV shows produced from their own studios in New York. They were backed up by books and pamphlets paid for by Hunt. One was called "We Must Abolish the United Nations" - written by Joseph Kamp. His previous "balanced" books had included one called "Hitler Was a Liberal".

 

hitler book

Here is a wonderful documentary profile of H. L. Hunt. It was made in 1968. By now his first wife had died, the second had got fed up and moved away, and Hunt was now left with only his third wife - Rita Ray.

You get a very good sense of Hunt's obsessive drive to promote his conservative views - sending out endless pamphlets, training young men and women to become part of his League of Youth Freedom Speakers, and even insisting that his whole family sit at the dinner table to listen to one of his new radio shows. It was called LIFELINE. Again Hunt was ahead of his time - because the show fused right-wing anti-communism with fundamentalist religion.

What you don't see is the tragedy of Hunt's life - his eldest son Hassie. He had originally followed his father into the oil business, but had then become violent and paranoid. Hunt had tried his own treatment - bringing in lots of women for Hassie to have sex with. But what had worked for the father didn't do much for the son. Doctors tried ECT - but that didn't work. In the end Hunt was persuaded to let them give Hassie a prefrontal lobotomy and his son spent the rest of his life wandering the Hunt estate like a strange ghost.

At the end of the film Hunt and his wife get up in their living room and sing together "We're just plain folks". It's very spooky. And it's not true.

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Hunt's Facts Forum was the model for much of what was later to come with the rise of the right in the media in the 1990s - both in radio and TV. But Hunt didn't just shape the future of the right, he also had a profound effect on the way the Left too attacked and corroded the idea of objectivity and neutrality in journalism.

It happened because of some pieces of paper that were found in the jacket pocket of Jack Ruby - the man who shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Two of them were scripts from Hunt's radio programme called LIFELINE. The third had a telephone number of one of Hunt's sons.

Many of Lifeline's programmes had attacked John F. Kennedy as a communist dupe who was destroying America - and Jack Ruby had apparently been outraged by such vicious propaganda against Kennedy.

Then it was discovered that a full page advertisement placed in the Dallas Morning News on the day of the assassination had been partly paid for by another of Hunt's sons - Bunker Hunt. It was surrounded by a black, threatening border - and was titled sarcastically "Welcome Mr Kennedy to Dallas"

welcome to dallas

Like his father, Bunker Hunt was an ultraconservative - and the advertisement was placed under a title that echoed Facts Forum. It was called "The American Fact-Finding Committee" who described themselves as "An unaffiliated and non-partisan group of citizens who wish truth". And it accused JFK of all sorts of treasonous acts against America - including:

"Why have you ordered your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on communists, fellow-travellers and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?

We DEMAND answers to these questions, and we want them NOW."

As a result newspapers across America attacked Hunt's operations for creating the "climate of hate" in Texas that might have contributed to the President's death. And Hunt and his sons became targets in the FBI investigation that would then become part of the Warren Commission.

And it got worse. In 1967 the ambitious District Attorney in New Orleans, Jim Garrison, opened a new investigation into Kennedy's killing. Garrison started talking about how there had been a conspiracy that might have included certain unnamed Texas oilmen.

Hunt's head of security managed to get hold of a diagram drawn out by Garrison's team where "H L Hunt" was at the heart of a complicated network of lines drawing connections between the Dallas police, Ruby, Oswald, plus all kinds of small-time players in Dallas. And although Garrison's investigation folded in 1969 - it, and its diagrams, became the template for the growing conspiracy theories from the left.

One of the earliest - and most powerful - expressions of this was a film called Rush To Judgement made in 1967 by a left wing filmmaker called Emile de Antonio and a lawyer-turned-investigator called Mark Lane. De Antonio is a fascinating character - he came out of the avant-garde art world, and had worked with Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg - and he shared their knowing distrust of the media world of two-dimensional images that was then becoming so prevalent.

Rush to Judgement sets out to propose an alternative explanation for Kennedy's assassination. At the heart of this other story is the idea that there is a group of powerful, shadowy men in Texas who used their wealth and power to create a distorted fiction - Oswald the lone nut - to disguise their conspiracy. A fiction that the public then believed.

The film interviews a whole host of extraordinary bit players from the Texas world and builds up a very powerful mood of uncertainty and suspicion. Underlying this is a message that says these hidden forces in America will never allow you to know the truth. Which means that what you are told by the media may be a lie. That you are being manipulated.

Just as H. L. Hunt himself was gnawing away at the idea of objectivity and truth through his own TV programmes, so too were the left also using a demonic caricature of H L Hunt to do the very same thing. He and other shadowy figures, the left said, will never let you know the truth.

jfk

Here is a section of the Rush To Judgement film. It had its world premiere in 1967 on BBC television - broadcast for an hour and a half at prime time. The section starts with the presenter in the studio introducing it - and framing how the viewer should interpret it. Then I have cut straight to the latter part of the film - which is all about how intertwined Jack Ruby was with the Dallas police and establishment.

It is long, but I have left it like that deliberately, because I think it is important to see how Emile de Antonio uses a particular technique to persuade you that he is presenting the real truth. The interviews are held long, and an archive interview with the Dallas police chief is used repeatedly to counterpoint them. It has a cumulative power that feels real and also feels like it is allowing you to judge the characters. That technique would rise up and become central to many of the more mainstream liberal documentaries of the last thirty years.

But it is also very much a technique borrowed from avant-garde cinema and in that sense is as artificial a language as anything you see on Fox News.

We report. You decide.

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Mark Lane went on to help write a film in 1973 called Executive Action. It was about how a group of Texas oilmen kill President Kennedy. It was the same idea that resurfaced in Oliver Stone's JFK. But the best, and earliest, caricature of Hunt is in the film Billion Dollar Brain - also made in 1967. It was written by Len Deighton and directed by Ken Russell. The villain is a raving right-wing Texas oilman called General Midwinter who runs an organisation called Crusade For Freedom - modelled on Facts Forum and Lifeline - and wants to use his giant computer to bring down the Soviet Union.

Here's a short clip of General Midwinter in full-on Hunt mode.

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But H L Hunt was far more than a caricature right-wing nutbag. The roots of so much of the distrust of the media today lie back with him and his ideas - with his Facts Forum in the 1950s and the strange role he played in Dallas in the 1960s.

In later posts I want to trace how what Hunt started, spread out from the dark pine forests of East Texas and began to develop into a much more powerful force undermining the idea of neutrality and objectivity in our age.

watching fox
10 Apr 02:45

Luminaris (2011)

by noreply@blogger.com (kafkian mood)


Credits

Idea/ Animator / Director:
Juan Pablo Zaramella
Writer: Juan Pablo Zaramella / Gustavo Cornillón
Director of Photography: Sergio Piñeyro
Assistant Director: Sol Rulloni
Pre- Production: Silvina Cornillón
Producers: Sol Rulloni / Mario Rulloni
Executive Production: Juan Pablo Zaramella
Additional Animation: Mariano Bergara / Becho Lo Bianco / Lucila Las Heras / Sergio Piñeyro
Art and Design: Juan Pablo Zaramella
Art Assistant: Diana Rascovschi
Constructors: Ciro Paz Osorio / Diana Rascovschi / Sebastian Hojnadel / Adrian Vasquez Cast: Gustavo Cornillón / María Alché / Luis Rial
Composition and Digital Art: José Leon Molfino / Alejo Villarino / Roberto Connolly / Mario Rulloni / Peque Varela
Rotoscoping: Federico Molfino
Sound: Diego Gat / Alejo Villarino
Sound Mix: Diego Gat / Tauro Digital
Sound Music: “Lluvia de Estrellas” (Osmar Maderna, 1948), played by Orquesta Típica Sans Souci
Recording and Editing: Mauro Ruda
Production: Katia Ivandic
Recorded at: Estudios ION
Production Company: JPZtudio
08 Apr 13:49

Wikileaks releases trove of secret US cables

Whistleblowing website publishes 1.7 million US documents from 1973 to 1976, including many written by Henry Kissinger.
04 Apr 01:56

TA 03 Apr 13: Women and the Armed Forces

Women in combat - Laurie Taylor explores gender and the military in the light of the US decision to allow women into the frontline of battle. He talks to Anthony King, Professor in Sociology at the University of Exeter; Christopher Coker, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck College.
04 Apr 01:54

Jeu des Coudes / Elbowing (1979)

by noreply@blogger.com (kafkian mood)



Credits 

Director: Paul Driessen        
Producer: Hubert Tison
Original Music: Normand Roger        
Editor: Jacques Leroux        
Sound Design: Normand Roger
Sound Mixer: Michel Descombes
Camera operator: Claude Lapierre / Jean Robillard
Animator: Paul Driessen
Assistant Animators: Bernard Landry (as Ferry) / Diane Payette
Production Companies: Société Radio-Canada
03 Apr 05:21

Pauliteiras de Malhadas - "La Portuguesita"

by MPAGDP

PROJECTO 605
Gravado em Malhadas a 2 de Abril de 2013
Realização: Tiago Pereira
Som: Carla Pinto
Informante: Catarina Alonso
"Malhadas, uma aldeia das terras de Miranda do Douro, sempre foi conhecida pelos seus pauliteiros.
Mas há cerca de um ano, um grupo de raparigas decidiu juntar-se e experimentar dançar a chamada dança dos paus. Algumas amigas juntaram-se a elas e assim surgiu o Grupo de Pauliteiras de Malhadas, não só para mostrar o que é dançar bem, de boa vontade e com garra, mas também para mostrar que apesar de ser uma dança de guerra associada aos homens, as meninas também são capazes de a fazer brilhar!

La Portuguesita é um lhaço amoroso que fala sobre uma rapariga.
Todos os lhaços terminam com uma música intitulada Rosas, durante a qual os pauliteiros executam uma dança sem paus; vários pauliteiros dizem tratar-se da dança triunfal que os soldados fariam após o combate.
Tal com a letra varia de informante para informante, também acontece ser diferente de lugar para lugar.
Letra:
Al lhugar de la portuguesita
Hija mia de miu laranjal / Naranjita de su laranjal
A rolar-se
A bolber-se
A rolar ne l laranjal I no laranjal"
Texto do Grupo de Pauliteiras de Malhadas

Cast: MPAGDP

Tags:

01 Apr 22:30

Q: Is Murphy’s law real?

by The Physicist

Physicist: The mathematical statement of Murphy’s Law, as used in scientific communities, is tremendously complex.  But the common form, “everything that can go wrong will”, is fairly accurate and more than sufficient for most applications.

The short answer is: yes, Murphy’s Law is real.  There are a lot of basic logical reasons for this.  For example; nothing lasts forever, so eventually every part of every machine will eventually break down.  Or, because being in traffic involves spending more time getting from place to place, you can expect to spend disproportionately more time in traffic than not.  But, as you’ve no doubt noticed, using logic and random chance alone it’s impossible to explain away the preponderance of horrible happenstances that show up seemingly without pause, everywhere, at all times.

“Coincidences” like that are a strong indication that a physical law is in play.  We can clearly see that Murphy’s law is both real, and unfairly applied to people colloquially known as “clumsy”.  Robert Oppenheimer, in addition to some entirely forgettable work he did in physics, pioneered research into Murphy’s law but studying his own unfortunate condition.  Bob’s affliction was first brought to the attention of his colleges when it was noticed that when he was in the lab, everyone’s muffins and buttered scones were 42% more likely to land upside-down.  Even sandwiches with particularly binding peanut-butter were more likely to open on the way down.

(Left) Murphy, the discoverer of "Murphy's Law" shown here after a flossing incident.  (Right)

(Left) Wilhelm Murphy, the discoverer of Murphy’s Law, shown here suffering from complications after a gum-chewing incident. (Right) Oppenheimer, extended and modernized our knowledge of Murphy’s Law.  This the only known picture of Oppenheimer with his eyes open.

Oppenheimer, after he was politely asked not to work in the laboratories, made several starling discoveries such as the fact that Murphy’s Law is “recursive”, “pessimistically optimal”, and “robustly unfair”.  The recursive nature of the Law is one of the more obvious.  It says, in effect, that Murphy’s Law can’t be out-smarted.  For example, washing you car is almost certain to make it rain. However if your intention is to make rain, then washing your car will probably just make someone slip and fall.

Oppenheimer was involved in one of the better examples of Murphy Recursion.  During a celebration of his accomplishments and “clumsiness”, some of his fellow scientists constructed a lever attached to a prop chandelier, such that when Oppenheimer walked in and inevitably pulled the lever the chandelier would drop.  However, they forgot to take into account the recursive nature of Murphy’s Law, and the lever didn’t work.  Of course, had they tried to take Murphy Recursion into account, something else would have gone wrong.

Many people known to be “unlucky” or “followed by a black cloud of misfortune” are the sad victims of the fact that Murphy’s Law is demonstrably unfair.  This is the essential reason behind why computer problems only exist until you try to show someone else.  The range of “what can go wrong” varies wildly from person to person.  For Roy Sullivan (for example) being struck by lightning is something that can go wrong (and did go wrong seven times).  Despite specifically trying to avoid storms and clouds, he could barely leave his house without some lightning bolt setting him on fire.

So, Murphy’s Law is certainly very real, and can even be measured qualitatively.  However, it can’t be anticipated or taken into account.  We can only wait for terrible, unfortunate things to happen, and hope that they won’t be too bad.

28 Mar 01:40

Myriahedral maps showing the near contiguity of Earth's continents and oceans (J. van Wijk) [550x612]

27 Mar 10:32

Why Github and Stack Overflow are the wrong tools for democracy

26 Mar 11:50

Orquestra de Foles - Chula/ Fado Português

by MPAGDP

PROJECTO 600

Gravado a 25 de Março no Auditório do Grupo Cultural e Desportivo dos Trabalhadores do BES
Realização: Tiago Pereira
Som: Telma Morna e Diogo Vargas

Cast: MPAGDP

Tags:

26 Mar 08:59

CLICK, PRINT, GUN: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE 3D-PRINTED GUN MOVEMENT

26 Mar 05:29

Capitalism in Crisis: Richard Wolff Urges End to Austerity, New Jobs Program, Democratizing Work

by mail@democracynow.org (Democracy Now!)
Richard_wolff

As Washington lawmakers pushes new austerity measures, economist Richard Wolff calls for a radical restructuring of the U.S. economic and financial systems. We talk about the $85 billion budget cuts as part of the sequester, banks too big to fail, Congress’ failure to learn the lessons of the 2008 economic collapse, and his new book, "Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism." Wolff also gives Fox News host Bill O’Reilly a lesson in economics 101. [includes rush transcript]

25 Mar 12:38

That Time Houdini Threatened to Shoot All the Psychics

by Daniel Loxton

Harry Houdini portraitAs a magician, Harry Houdini was a trickster pretty much by definition—and, of course, a good one. He was quick to turn mere happenstance to his advantage (as when he commanded the rain to stop and begin again at a Fourth of July party)1 and to turn people’s assumptions against them. Sometimes, the results of such trickery were simple delight. Sometimes, as in his exposures of fraudulent psychics, his craftiness served the public good. On other occasions, Houdini’s performances had more tragic consequences. Such was his own assessment of mentalism performances he gave earlier in his career, in the guise of a medium:

At the time I appreciated the fact that I surprised my clients, but while aware of the fact that I was deceiving them I did not see or understand the seriousness of trifling with such sacred sentimentality and the baneful result which inevitably followed. To me it was a lark. I was a mystifier and as such my ambition was being gratified and my love for a mild sensation satisfied. After delving deep I realized the seriousness of it all. As I advanced to riper years of experience I was brought to a realization of the seriousness of trifling with the hallowed reverence which the average human being bestows on the departed, and when I personally became afflicted with similar grief I was chagrined that I should ever have been guilty of such frivolity and for the first time realized that it bordered on crime.2

Which brings us to another deception that was “a lark” and yet “bordered on crime”: the time that Houdini, according to his lifelong pal Joseph Rinn, conspired to issue a pseudonymous, implied, hoaxed threat against materializing mediums (the subset of psychic performers who purport to be able to summon ectoplasmic manifestations of the spirits of the dead). I must confess that I found this story quite funny on first read—and yet, schadenfreude aside, it also strikes me as a deeply unethical example of skeptical activism.

The story, as Rinn recalled it 50 years after the fact (relying in part upon a newspaper clipping that I have not yet been able to lay my hands on) went like this. In 1896, Houdini and Rinn were chatting in New York City about a recently publicized marriage that one medium had performed between a prominent medical doctor and the materialized spirit of his dead fiancé. Not altogether surprisingly, “Skeptics denounced the marriage as preposterous,” Rinn remembered. Houdini was no exception.

“It was a pure fake—nothing else,” he [Houdini] said hotly. “Mediums always say they that they require darkness to materialize a spirit, yet this stunt, it is stated, was performed in bright sunlight. Those crooked mediums are getting so bold that we should do something to throw a scare into them.”

I agreed, and Houdini and I drew up a letter that we sent to the New York Mercury. It read:

To the Editor of the New York Mercury:

As I frequently attend spiritualistic seances, where materialized spirits are said to come out of a cabinet, I wonder if I would be breaking any law if I fired a pistol shot at one of these figures and a dead body was found on the floor.
D. G.3

This bit of lighthearted terrorism was no joke for the practitioners of the psychic trade. According to Rinn,

This letter, when published, created consternation among spiritualists, especially mediums, and for fully six months no medium advertised that he was giving materializing seances, for fear some fanatic might be tempted to fire a shot at a cabinet spirit. During that period only flowers were materialized.4

At this stage of my research I’m forced to rely upon Rinn’s recollection regarding the impact of the hoax, but it is certainly plausible that he and Houdini would have created a stir. After all, “grabbers” and other interfering members of séance audiences were hazards of the trade for materializing mediums—and as mediums were frequently fleecing their clients, these disruptions carried the threat not only of financial loss but of violence. A few years before Rinn and Houdini’s hoax, another American medium had been stabbed during a séance, according to confessed medium Julia E. Garret:

She had been frequently exposed, but always came out all right, as Spiritualists are ready to excuse anything a medium does so long as she claims that it is spiritual. One night, however, while playing spook she came out to a young doctor, claiming to be his sister, or some other relative. He, wishing to prove whether she was mortal or spirit, thrust a surgeon’s knife into her leg. She nearly died from the effects of the wound, and, in fear, gave up the business.5

Audience interference was (and is) such a constant danger that institutionalized customs grew up to protect this type of psychic performer, as ex-medium M. Lamar Keene explained in the 1976:

Usually there is present at every materialization seance a “cabinet attendant,” who is actually the medium’s bodyguard. Spiritualists explain his or her role as that of protecting the medium from malicious intruders who might try to grab the ectoplasm and thereby cause the poor medium grave injury, even death. (Heartbreaking stories were told to the faithful about mediums who had suffered internal hemorrhages and writhed on the floor in agony after some heartless nave grabbed their ectoplasm. The official dogma was that rude touching of ectoplasm caused it to recoil into the medium’s body with savage force–like being hit in the gut by a giant rubber band.) Anyway, the cabinet attendant or keeper was there to discourage any tampering with the ectoplasm—and also, in many cases, to provide the ectoplasm.6

Personal Reflection

So what are we to make of Rinn and Houdini’s hoax? We may perhaps assure ourselves that the materializing subset of the fraternity of mediums were more-or-less uniformly fraudulent. But does that imply that anonymous death threats—even oblique ones—are an acceptable tactic? Even setting aside the fact that death threats are serious crimes in most countries, I viscerally recoil from that idea. Surely we all do? And yet, in less extreme cases, we may all see grey more often than we should. It’s so easy and so human to regard moral urgency as the gauge for the rightness of our actions. That tendency is responsible for much of the evil in the world (and I think, for the deepest and most grotesque).

A better test is to ask, would this same action or tactic or rhetoric seem acceptable to us if we were the target—my family, or my cause, or my community, or my religious demographic? Skeptics are not immune today to threats or violence; nor were they immune in Rinn and Houdini’s day. Rinn himself said, “After several attempts on my life, I was compelled to carry a pistol for protection.”7 In 1891, Rinn’s skeptical collaborator Winfield S. Davis (a key player in an early skeptical activism and investigation scene centered on New York City) received a threat described by the New York Times:

When Winfield S. Davis went to his printing office in Nassau Street yesterday morning he found awaiting him three anonymous letters and a box wrapped in brown paper. The letters threatened him with bodily injury unless he kept to himself for the future his skeptical ideas about modern Spiritualism. He opened the box and found what was intended to pass for an infernal machine.

It had a compartment filled with matches, which were perhaps to be lighted by a sandpaper-lined cover moved by a clock spring. A fire-cracker fuse, starting in the match box, extended into cups filled with grey and pink powder. Packed in a cylinder below the saucers was a mass that looked like a mixture of sand and coal dust.8

Davis tested the materials, and determined that the device was non-functional. It was—like Rinn and Houdini’s letter—a hoax intended to frighten.

References:

  1. Houdini, Harry. A Magician Among the Spirits. (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books, 2002.) p. 245–246
  2. Ibid. p. xi
  3. Rinn, Joseph. Sixty Years of Psychical Research. (The Truth Seeker Company, 1950.) p. 122
  4. Ibid.
  5. Garret, Julia E. Mediums Unmasked: An Exposé of Modern Spiritualism by an Ex-Medium. (Los Angeles, H. M. Less & Bro., 1892.) p. 55
  6. Keene, M. Lamar and Allen Spraggett. The Psychic Mafia. (New York: Dell, 1977.) p. 95
  7. Rinn. (1950.) p. 233
  8. “Money for Spirit Tests. Mr. Davis Challenges All Comers to Prove Themselves Mediums.” The New York Times. March 1, 1891
25 Mar 11:30

Jacob Appelbaum TERENA Networking Conference 2012

25 Mar 11:17

Where did the love come from? Inclusive fitness vs. group selection

by Eric Bolo, Evolutionary Games Group
Altruism is widespread in the animal world, yet it seems to conflict with the picture of nature “red in tooth and claw” often associated with Evolution. One solution to this apparent paradox is to remember that the unit of selection is never the individual itself but the genes  it carries. Thus, altruism may be explained [...]...

Nowak Martin A., Tarnita Corina E., & Wilson Edward O. (2010) The evolution of eusociality. Nature, 466(7310), 1057-1062. DOI: 10.1038/nature09205  

The evolution of eusociality
25 Mar 04:10

Mystery of Prince Rupert’s Drop at 130,000 fps

by adafruit


Mystery of Prince Rupert’s Drop at 130,000 fps.

24 Mar 22:15

Q: Why doesn’t life and evolution violate the second law of thermodynamics? Don’t living things reverse entropy?

by The Physicist

Physicist: In very short: nope.

The second law of thermodynamics is sometimes (too succinctly) stated as “disorder increases over time”.  That statements seems to hold true, what with all of the mountains wearing down, machines breaking, and the inevitable, crushing march of time.  But living things seem to be an exception.  Plants can turn dirt (disordered) into more plants (order), and on a larger scale life has evolved from individual cells (fairly ordered) to big complicated critters (very ordered).

However, there are a couple things missing from the statement “disorder increases over time”, such as a solid definition of “disorder” (it’s entropy) and the often-dropped stipulation that the second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems.

Creatures, both in the context of growing and reproducing, and in the context of evolution are definitely not closed systems.  Doing all of that certainly involves an increase in order, but at the expense of a much greater increase in disorder elsewhere.  Specifically, we eat food which, with all of its carbohydrates and proteins, is fairly ordered, and produce lots of heat, sweat, and… whatnot.  Food, and air, and whatnot are what make living things “open systems”.

Whatnot.

Whatnot.

If a creature could take, say, a kilogram of non-living, highly disordered material and turn it into a kilogram of highly ordered creature, then that would certainly be a big violation of the second law of thermodynamics.  However, people (for example) consume along the lines of about 30 to 50 tons of food during the course of a lifetime.  Some of that goes into building a fine and foxy body, but most of it goes into powering that body and fighting degradation (blood and skin and really everything wears out and needs to be replaced).  So, about 0.15% (give or take) of that food matter is used to build a body, and 99.85% is used for power and to fight the entropy drop involved in body construction and temporarily holding back the horrifying ravages of time.

When compared to the entropy involved with turning food into the many, many bodies that make up a species, evolution is barely an afterthought.  In fact, the entropy (as used/defined in thermodynamics) of most animals (by weight) is all about the same.  A person and a mountain lion have about the same entropy as each other, simply because we weight about the same.

The big exception is photosynthesizing plants.  They really can turn a kilogram of inert, high-disorder dirt, air, and water into a kilogram of low-disorder plant matter.  But, again, they’re working with a bigger system than just the “plant/dirt/air/water system”.

There's a huge drop in entropy between the incoming sunlight

There’s a huge increase in entropy between the incoming sunlight and the outgoing heat that’s radiated away from the Earth.

Sunlight is a bunch of high-energy photons coming from one direction, which involves relatively little entropy.  A little later that energy is re-radiated from the Earth as heat, which is the same amount energy spread over substantially more photons and involves a lot more entropy (relatively).  This huge increase in entropy, between the incoming sunlight and the outgoing heat, is the “entropy sink” that makes all life on Earth possible (with just a handful of exceptions).  In particular, green plants take a tiny amount of the sunlight that hits the Earth and turns some of the energy into sugars and other useful plant-ey material.  It all eventually turns into heat and radiates away, but instead of doing it all at once it does it through a few links in the food chain.

You can think of this huge sunlight-to-re-radiated-heat increase in entropy like water going over a waterfall, and life as being like a hydro-electric dam.  It all ends up at the bottom of the falls, but sometimes it can do some interesting stuff (life and other useful mechanical work) on the way.

23 Mar 01:42

Disobedience Succeeds Essence

by Massimo Pigliucci

by Steve Neumann

There is much that life esteems more highly than life itself... — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Jean-Paul Sartre distilled his existentialism into the maxim “existence precedes essence.” He meant that the human being has no predetermined nature, divinely-ordained or otherwise, and that each human being is solely responsible for defining herself. Sartre said that the first principle of (his) existentialism is that “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

University of Washington psychology professor David Barash recently published a nice meditation on the notes of consonance between evolution and existentialism in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Barash ultimately concludes that a 

...philosophy of “human meaning’ can coexist quite well with a science of “genetic influence.” 

Happily, Barash’s notion of human meaning includes the idea that, even though we are completely natural creatures shaped by evolutionary processes, we still retain a unique human freedom. I say happily because Barash doesn’t conclude that humans have contra-causal free will, nor does he jump to the opposite, fatalistic conclusion that no matter what we do, the outcome will be the predetermined same, so why bother. His idea of human agency is roughly the same as mine. As he says:

Within a remarkable range, our evolutionary bequeathal is wildly permissive.

I like Barash’s word choice of “wildly” here. Ironically, though much of my free time is spent thinking about how to persuade people that the difference between us and other animals — even dogs — is a difference of degree and not of kind, I often worry about us forgetting how dissimilar we are to all other animals, at least in one significant regard: that is, freedom. And what I like most about Barash’s article is the notion of freedom as the freedom to disobey. As Agent Smith puts it to Neo in the second Matrix film:

Smith: I killed you, Mister Anderson, I watched you die — with a certain satisfaction, I might add. And then something happened; something that I knew was impossible, but it happened anyway: you destroyed me, Mister Anderson. Afterward, I knew the rules, I understood what I was supposed to do but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was compelled to stay, compelled to disobey. And now here I stand because of you, Mister Anderson, because of you I’m no longer an agent of the system, because of you I’ve changed — I’m unplugged — a new man, so to speak, like you, apparently free.

Neo: Congratulations.

Agent Smith disobeyed his programmed nature and found out what he really wanted: in his case, the destruction of the Matrix (and of all life, unfortunately). Barash also specifically argues for a type of contra-natural disobedience:

On the basis of evolutionary existentialism, I would therefore like to suggest the heretical and admittedly paradoxical notion that, in fact, we need to teach more disobedience. Not only disobedience to political and social authority but especially disobedience to some of our troublesome genetic inclinations.

Disobedience has a long history in the human species. Even the ancient Hebrews, it can be argued, intuited the need for disobedience by sneaking the wily, skeptical serpent into their creation story. They had their god include the serpent in that paradisal garden, where his new and naive human creations were within arm’s reach of the fruit of both god-like knowledge and immortality. Now, the common Christian response is that God wanted his creations to have the possibility of disobedience — that is, free will — to freely love Him or reject Him, and which would presumably have more authenticity thereby. But I don’t think having the freedom of disobedience need be interpreted in terms of love, in a religious context or not. Disobedience, in my opinion, is first and foremost a route to knowledge, particularly self-knowledge. And it’s self-knowledge the existentialists have traditionally been most concerned with, seeing how it leads to one’s having the ability to define oneself. But Sartre (and existentialists in general) countenances an extreme freedom of the will as the driver behind the quest for self-knowledge, so much so that he assigns ultimate responsibility — and blame. As he says:

If people throw up to us our works of fiction in which we write about people who are soft, weak, cowardly, and sometimes even downright bad, it’s not because these people are soft, weak, cowardly, or bad; because if we were to say... that they are that way because of heredity, the workings of the environment, society, because of biological or psychological determinism, people would be assured.

As a quick aside, I think it’s interesting to note here that Sartre brings up this particular objection back in the cultural backdrop of 1946. It sounds more like the pejorative Twinkie Defenses of the late 1970’s and onward. But I digress. Sartre goes on to say that

...when the existentialist writes about a coward, he says that this coward is responsible for his cowardice... he’s like that because he has made himself a coward by his acts.

From a certain perspective, this is undeniably true: a human being can’t become anything without acting in some sense; but the real crux of the issue is how responsible the individual is, if at all, for who she has become. Like Barash, I think existentialism of a certain strain is compatible with our condition as evolved biological animals. And it’s the idea of disobeying our nature that gives us both the opportunity and the freedom to become what we want. As Nietzsche put it in an early fragment (1872), “Homer’s Contest”:

When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something that separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: “natural” qualities and those properly called “human” are indivisibly grown together. Man, in his highest and most noble capacities, is wholly nature... Those of his abilities which are awesome and considered inhuman are perhaps the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity... can grow.

Here, as I see it, the concept of “humanity” is the result of the exploitation of the “wildly permissive” freedom bequeathed us by our evolutionary history, as Barash notes. The individual human being needn’t be metaphysically free in the existentialist’s sense in order to cultivate her animal nature. And while it may be prudent to assign a certain degree of responsibility for the way people “create” themselves, I don’t agree that the coward, for instance, has made himself into a coward on purpose, so to speak. So, for me, something like cowardice isn’t necessarily a fault of the individual so much as the result of a weak will. And I think one’s will can be educated and strengthened, because even the weak-willed individual has, thanks to the evolutionary bequeathal, the freedom to disobey his essence. Of course, the question is exactly how does that happen — how does the weak-willed person educate and strengthen his will? Traditionally, various modes of asceticism have been employed. But there is also a good amount of simple luck involved: one may or may not be exposed to an array of interpersonal and environmental experiences that likewise may or may not sway one’s motivation to do or not do something conducive to educating or strengthening one’s will. 

In a note from 1887 Nietzsche had this to say about asceticism:

I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening...

To make asceticism natural again is to expropriate it away from its religious roots, where the goal was to tame the human animal and make it obedient to both celestial and terrestrial authority, and now to use it to educate one’s will by imposing restraints on one’s genetically-influenced impulses. So, in a sense, making asceticism natural again involves paradoxically making one’s nature obedient in some ways in order to disobey that nature in other ways. And these other ways relate to the existential quest for human meaning and self-creation. I suppose you could also look at it as a more refined type of asceticism: instead of bludgeoning one’s entire natural endowment into submission, one can pick and choose which impulses to quash and which ones to amplify. And even if one’s life circumstances are stifled or constricted, one still possesses the capacity for disobedience, or what we might call “revolt” in Albert Camus’ parlance. 

In Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, we see that the absurd Greek hero is  condemned to “ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight”; and Camus explicitly ties Sisyphus’ plight to that of the proletarian worker of his day. Revolt or “scorn” at circumstances is still possible even if one has no hope for a different future. And while Camus seems to believe that even freedom from creating meaning in one’s life is a good thing when seen in a certain light, I think you could also argue that the hour where Sisyphus contemplates his fate, which is what Camus says interests him most, is the timeless moment in which meaning can be created. Our own Sisyphean disposition can allow us to contemplate all kinds of strategies and “games” while toiling at moving one’s rock to the top of the mountain. In fact, in a way we could play with the existentialist’s own phrasing and say that one is condemned to be creative. Consider this: the human brain is a veritable whim-generating machine; we can’t stop thoughts from occurring to us, nor can we stop thinking altogether. When Camus says that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” and that therefore we must “imagine Sisyphus happy,” I would say that it is precisely the brain’s propensity for spontaneous activity that is the source of the human — and even animal — impulse to play

What is play? The essence of play is, to my mind, the compulsion to experiment and explore; or, in other words, to revolt and discover. Not only does play merely pass the time, but the imagination can create worlds within worlds. Consider what the human imagination has produced thus far: philosophies, religions, artistic vistas, staggering technologies, etc. As William Blake noted: “what is now proved was once only imagined.” The act of imagining something new does a certain violence to what already exists: it destroys, betrays or at least dispenses with what has already been established. In a sense, the imagination disobeys the essence of what already exists, the accumulated and codified mores that are generally accepted. Combining the imagination and a revised asceticism involves a great deal of courage: the courage to disobey interpersonal, cultural, and biologically-determined patterns of thought and behavior, thereby incurring or inviting the wrath and opprobrium of one’s milieu — and possibly even of Nature herself.

And psychological harm is not the only danger: just as Nietzsche said that life oftentimes values more than existence itself, one may very well lose one’s life through stratagems of disobedience. But isn’t the value of one’s life, the meaning of one’s life, more important than the mere duration of it? Essence doesn’t precede existence, and neither does existence precede essence; they’re contemporaneous and they grow or perish together. But disobedience, properly executed, succeeds both essence and existence. 

I’ll leave you with our modern-day, popular culture Sisyphus, Neo, near the end of the final installment of The Matrix Trilogy:

Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something, for more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom, or truth — perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception, temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose — and all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself. Although, only a human mind can invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson, you must know it by now. You can’t win, it’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why — why you persist??

Neo: Because I choose to.
21 Mar 23:47

Alfred Russel Wallace

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work of Alfred Russel Wallace, a pioneer of evolutionary theory. Born in 1823, Wallace travelled extensively, charting the distribution of animal species throughout the world. This fieldwork in the Amazon and later the Malay Archipelago led him to formulate a theory of evolution through natural selection. In 1858 he sent the paper he wrote on the subject to Charles Darwin, who was spurred into the writing and publication of his own masterpiece On the Origin of Species. Wallace was also the founder of the science of biogeography and made important discoveries about the nature of animal coloration. But despite his visionary work, Wallace has been overshadowed by the greater fame of his contemporary Darwin. With: Steve Jones Emeritus Professor of Genetics at University College London George Beccaloni Curator of Cockroaches and Related Insects and Director of the Wallace Correspondence Project at the Natural History Museum Ted Benton Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex Producer: Thomas Morris.
21 Mar 05:20

Who’s responsible for the obesity epidemic?

by Massimo Pigliucci

by Massimo Pigliucci

There is no question that we are in the midst of an obesity-related health crisis. The numbers are staggering and keep getting worse every year. The current situation in the United States is hard to believe: one third of adults are clinically obese, and so is one fifth of all children; a whopping 24 million Americans are affected by type II diabetes, usually the result of a poor diet. And the numbers are getting worse in much of the rest of the developed world as well. This is going to cost a lot in terms of lives, pain and suffering, and of course financially, to the nation as a whole. It’s a good question to ask ourselves who bears responsibility for all this, and the answer is not at all obvious or simple.

The New York Times has recently published a long, fascinating article by Michael Moss (author of the forthcoming Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us) on the relationship between the food industry and the obesity epidemic. Yeah, I know, the first time I heard of someone blaming McDonald’s instead of its customers for their bad eating habits I too thought “oh c’mon,” but that was the same reaction many had when the tobacco industry began to be blamed for the health problems caused by smoking, and nobody’s laughing dismissively at that any more.

Before we proceed, let me warn the reader that this post is going to be largely about the sins of the food industry, but this doesn’t mean I don’t think other actors bear responsibility. Indeed, I’ll make the case by direct analogy with smoking by way of a very personal experience: my father died in 2004, aged 69. He got hit by four primary cancers in the span of five years or so, survived the first three, got killed by the last one. The ghastly and eventually lethal sequence — which ruined the last several years of his life and likely significantly shortened the time he had to spend on earth — was very likely the result of his life long habit as a heavy smoker. Do I blame the tobacco industry for his death? You bet, and I’ve got well established evidence to back me up on that, from their sneaky advertising tactics to their purposeful campaigns of addiction to augment their customer base. But I also blame my father. At some point in his life, well before the onset of his first cancer, he was well aware of the risks posed by smoking, but he ignored them and never looked for help. He paid a high price for it, and so did our family.

So, yes, personal responsibility pretty much always plays some role in human decisions. But it would be naive to the utmost degree — given the available evidence — to think that the food industry doesn’t bear some, likely even a great part, of the blame as well. And when we talk about responsibility we also usually talk about punishment and regulation, which means that what Moss is arguing in his article and book is literally worth billions of dollars.

Moss begins with the recounting of a high level meeting of major players in the food industry which could have been a game changer but, tragically, wasn’t. The meeting took place on April 8, 1999 at the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury, featuring 11 people — just 11 individual human beings — who controlled most of the food companies in the United States. The meeting was called as a way to analyze and perhaps preemptively react to the first serious suggestions of a link between processed foods and obesity that were beginning to be advanced at the time. That was when the words “obesity epidemic” started to be used by politicians, health officials and the press.

The first speaker — according to Moss’s reconstruction of the event — was Michael Mudd, a Kraft Vice President who gave a lengthy presentation at the end of which he drew the parallel everyone was dreading: the one between processed food and cigarettes. He quoted Kelly Brownell, a Yale professor of public health, as saying: “As a culture, we’ve become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. And we could make a claim that the toll taken on the public health by a poor diet rivals that taken by tobacco.” Ouch.

Mudd must have been an uncharacteristically idealistic industry insider, as his goal was to put industry scientists in the service of figuring out what was causing the epidemic, and eventually establish a code guiding the nutritional aspects of the products and the marketing strategies of the companies. Yeah, right. The second speaker was one Stephen Sanger, at the time, head of General Mills. His response effectively killed the meeting and any serious effort by the industry to police itself. Among other things, he said: “Don’t talk to me about nutrition, talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.” End of story, beginning of tragedy.

The rest of the article in the New York Times is made of a series of brief sketches, presumably illustrating the bulk of Moss’s book and his contention that what he found “over four years of research and reporting, was a conscious effort — taking place in labs and marketing meetings and grocery-store aisles — to get people hooked on foods that are convenient and inexpensive.”

I will mention briefly only one of these sketches, concerning a former Coca-Cola director, Jeffrey Dunn. In 2001 Dunn was tasked with exploring the marketing of coke in poor and vulnerable markets, like New Orleans in the US, and Brazil. The question he and his colleagues were driven to answer was “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?” During an exploratory trip to Brazil, Dunn had an epiphany, realizing that poor people in Brazilian favelas needed a lot of things, but most certainly coke wasn’t one of them. He went back to headquarters and attempted to steer the company toward a more, ethical strategy, for example, stopping the marketing of its products in public schools. He was soon fired.

The interesting point of these stories, I think, is that they put the issue of responsibility in a different perspective from the simplistic “nobody’s putting a gun to your head” emphasis on personal choice. And they do so in a way that is somewhat parallel to the issue of smoking and the tobacco companies, as we have seen.

Certainly people are at least in part responsible for what they choose to do, be that smoking known harmful substances or eating crap that is likely to make their lives shorter and more miserable. But certainly an exception ought to be made in the case of children, who are simply not equipped with the rational decision making tools of adults. And it is most certainly no accident that both big tobacco and big junk food go after children so intensively.

But I think there is an even broader issue at play here. Those who put an emphasis on personal responsibility — even in the case of adults only — are making an assumption that is equivalent to that of complete rational agency and full access to information in classical macroeconomics. An assumption that is obviously mistaken for pretty much the same reasons it is mistaken when used as the basis for economic theory.

Ever since the invention of marketing it has clearly been the case that consumers are systematically misled and kept in as much ignorance as possible about the ill effects of what they consume. So the idea that people can just look up stuff and figure out what to do or not to do is naive and dangerous. More importantly, though, it is the suggestion that people are, or even approximate, rational agents that is clearly mistaken.

Never mind the obvious fact that one third to one half of Americans believe in all sorts of pseudoscientific notions (ghosts, astrology, creationism) that should’t appeal to an even approximately rational individual. There is much research in cognitive science showing that human beings rely on all sorts of flawed heuristics for their decision making processes, rarely slowing down to inform themselves, critically analyzing the available information, and arriving at the best decision compatible with the latter. And of course marketing companies know this all too well. After all, the very idea of marketing started (much earlier than in the period so fascinatingly depicted in the television series MadMen) when Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays came to the United States and began a highly successful career as a consultant on how to sell pretty much everything to people, regardless of whether it was good for them or not.

Which brings us to the third actor: regulatory agencies. A lot of Americans hate the whole idea of regulation, to the point of embracing in great numbers obviously oxymoronic notions like that of “self-regulation” (would you apply that to thieves and murderers, I wonder?), and there have been interesting discussions regarding the wisdom and scope of governmental paternalism. But contra popular opinion, the actual discussion isn’t about whether the private sector (including the tobacco and junk food industries) as well as individual behavior should be regulated, but rather about the extent to which it makes sense to do so. (Clear examples of regulation that few people could reasonably argue against: seat belts and motorcycle helmets for individuals; the nuclear power industry.)

This is a classic example of a balancing act among conflicting values. We do want to keep a viable market of innovative, varied and affordable products for the public, which means that we don’t want to overdo it in the regulation department. At the same time, as a society we have an obligation to protect consumers (especially children), particularly when we know that many of them do not have the tools to make even approximately rational decisions and that they are actively being misled by the industry. This doesn’t mean that I endorse New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent ban on large soda drinks, for instance (that one does seem to me to cross the line), but I would, as an example, endorse higher taxes for those same drinks, which could be used both to discourage consumers (especially the most vulnerable and poor among them) as well as to recover funds that can be redirected toward balancing the long term health care costs inevitably caused by the consumption of those products. There is no magic bullet here, and an ethically sensible, evidence-based approach is the only way to go. But please don’t fall into the vicious trap of automatically blaming the victims.