We’re back, after a splendid trip.
Visiting Venice and Florence reminds one just how tall the West’s candle once stood, and on returning home it’s hard not to dwell on how very low it has burned. But that’s just the way of the world, I suppose.
Did I miss anything? I have a lot of catching up to do. We’ll be resuming normal operations shortly.
We’ll likely be off the air until sometime around June 21st: the lovely Nina and I are celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary with a little trip to Italy (Venice and Florence). We’ll have scant access to email and the Internet — and it will be nice to take a little break from all that is evanescent and up-to-the-minute, and instead to nourish and refresh ourselves for a little while amongst the ageless treasures of our dying civilization’s highest art and culture. (Also, we wanted to get to Italy one last time before it closes.)
As always, please feel free to browse the archive and category links on the sidebar, or to take our “Random Post” link for a spin.
Arrivederci!
I’ve lived in the Northeast all my life. I like it here. I like the landscape, the culture, and the dramatic cycle of the four seasons (my favorite being autumn). I have no inclination to live anywhere else, and will doubtless make my home here for the rest of my life (unless some combination of ancestral yearnings and American dissolution should one day pull me back to the north of Scotland.)
I was, therefore, a tad chopfallen to learn from Walter Russell Mead this morning that simply by living in New York and Massachusetts I’m destroying the planet.
Story here.
From the website “prosthetic knowledge” comes this cross-section of a marram-grass leaf:
Here’s a nifty invention, at least four years in the making. Wonder how long the deregulating will take?
Today’s Times reported that it is now possible to read almost all of a fetus’s genome simply by taking blood from the mother and saliva from the father. Lurking behind the headlines is an idea, once heartily embraced by Progressive intellectuals: eugenics.
Thanks to certain mid-20th-century events, eugenics nowadays is generally thought of as entirely beyond the pale: on a par with slavery, torture, and child labor. (This is largely because it is a manifestation of what is now officially The Very Worst Thing Of All, discrimination.) Eugenics comes in two forms: the bringing into existence of superior stock through selective mating, and the culling of inferior or unwanted strains through sterilization, birth control, and abortion. (Indeed, the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, made it abundantly clear that her aim was to improve social conditions, and the nation’s human stock, by reducing the number of babies borne by the “unfit”.)
Despite the ostentatious disapproval that greets any whiff of eugenics these days, there is nevertheless an awful lot of culling going on, so it’s pretty clear that it’s not the idea of selective abortions that bothers many people. In particular, the culling of female fetuses seems to be surprisingly popular, both here and abroad. That isn’t eugenics per se, because a) reducing the number of female children does nothing in itself to foster desirable traits or eliminate unwanted ones, and b) the motivation isn’t to improve the community’s human stock, but rather to optimize a private couple’s parenting experience. (This latter motive, which unlike eugenics is based on no altruistic or social goals whatsoever, serves to make sex-based culling even less ethically defensible than eugenics, it seems to me — but people do plenty of it anyway, without evident social opprobrium, or even remorse of conscience.)
So! What will happen when parents can have their fetus’s complete genome in hand for a few drops of blood and spittle? How many of them will bring babies with ghastly, disadvantageous (and more to the point, costly!) hereditary afflictions and deficiencies into the world? Few, I’ll wager. Private choice may soon achieve much of what the old Progressive eugenicists sought to accomplish by government fiat.
Of course, this is only the beginning. Let pass another brief interval, and we will be able not only to read the fetus’s genome with ease, but will also have the ability to modify it as we like — or even to design it from scratch.
Imagine: sitting at a computer screen, the mother and father will select traits from each parent — his nose, perhaps, and her cheekbones — and then sprinkle in custom features taken from a range of available genes on offer from commercial bioengineers. The file representing the finished genome will be uploaded to a manufacturer, who will use the data to generate actual DNA. (This last part is already available — you can send a genome off to have it built for you, and get a little vial of DNA in the mail a few days later.)
Next the mother’s egg will have its nuclear DNA replaced with the customized version, then will be implanted in her womb. (Or maybe not, in a few more years — pregnancy is so inconvenient.) Nine months later, presto! — a bespoke bouncing baby.
Do you think I’m exaggerating what genetic-engineering technology can do, and will soon be able to do? I assure you I am not.
Now all of this will cost money, of course. Not everyone will be able to afford it. And the babies that issue from this process will of course possess all of the innate advantages that a first-rate genome can provide. It seems reasonable to expect, then, that there will be rather a divergence between those who can afford to have their babies this way, and those who can’t.
Should be interesting.
This looks promising: touchscreens that can create 3-D buttons as needed.
From NASA: a little historical item about a previous transit of Venus.
OK, last item about Wisconsin: for those of you who hadn’t followed the recall campaign, here’s a video clip that should help to explain what happened there yesterday.
The Dow shot up 286 points today.
Have a look at some impressive photos of yesterday’s astronomical event, here.
Sorry to harp on politics, but the Walker victory in Wisconsin yesterday was an important inflection point, and this recent piece by economist Walter Williams underscores its significance so clearly and straightforwardly that I’m going to reproduce it here in full.
Why was Wisconsin so important? Because the tragedy-of-the-commons effect described here by Williams is amplified and accelerated by the toxic relationship between public-sector unions and the politicians they buy.
Our nation is rapidly approaching a point from which there’s little chance to avoid a financial collapse. The heart of our problem can be seen as a tragedy of the commons. That’s a set of circumstances when something is commonly owned and individuals acting rationally in their own self-interest produce a set of results that’s inimical to everyone’s long-term interest. Let’s look at an example of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon and then apply it to our national problem.
Imagine there are 100 cattlemen all having an equal right to graze their herds on 1,000 acres of commonly owned grassland. The rational self-interested response of each cattleman is to have the largest herd that he can afford. Each cattleman pursing similar self-interests will produce results not in any of the cattlemen’s long-term interest — overgrazing, soil erosion and destruction of the land’s usefulness. Even if they all recognize the dangers, does it pay for any one cattleman to cut the size of his herd? The short answer is no because he would bear the cost of having a smaller herd while the other cattlemen gain at his expense. In the long term, they all lose because the land will be overgrazed and made useless.
We can think of the federal budget as a commons to which each of our 535 congressmen and the president have access. Like the cattlemen, each congressman and the president want to get as much out of the federal budget as possible for their constituents. Political success depends upon “bringing home the bacon.’ Spending is popular, but taxes to finance the spending are not. The tendency is for spending to rise and its financing to be concealed through borrowing and inflation.
Does it pay for an individual congressman to say, “This spending is unconstitutional and ruining our nation, and I’ll have no part of it; I will refuse a $500 million federal grant to my congressional district’? The answer is no because he would gain little or nothing, plus the federal budget wouldn’t be reduced by $500 million. Other congressmen would benefit by having $500 million more for their districts.
What we’re witnessing in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and other parts of Europe is a direct result of their massive spending to accommodate the welfare state. A greater number of people are living off government welfare programs than are paying taxes. Government debt in Greece is 160 percent of gross domestic product. The other percentages of GDP are 120 in Italy, 104 in Ireland and 106 in Portugal. As a result of this debt and the improbability of their ever paying it, their credit ratings either have reached or are close to reaching junk bond status.
Here’s the question for us: Is the U.S. moving in a direction toward or away from the troubled EU nations? It turns out that our national debt, which was 35 percent of GDP during the 1970s, is now 106 percent of GDP, a level not seen since World War II’s 122 percent. That debt, plus our more than $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities, has led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade our credit rating from AAA to AA+, and the agency is keeping the outlook at “negative’ as a result of its having little confidence that Congress will take on the politically sensitive job of tackling the same type of entitlement that has turned Europe into a basket case.
I am all too afraid that Benjamin Franklin correctly saw our nation’s destiny when he said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.’
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
James Lileks weighs in, so to speak, on the soda-ban ruction.
In which it is demonstrated once again that “Second-In-Command of al-Qaeda” is the world’s most dangerous job.
Here’s Gary Taubes in Sunday’s New York Times, writing about the flimsy case for restricting dietary salt. (Mayor Bloomberg, take note.)
With the Walker recall election on the morrow — widely regarded as a key American battle in the bitter ideological conflict now convulsing all of the West — here’s a piquant item from Mark Steyn. Excerpt:
[I]n 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.
That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble’ is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called “adolescence’ that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you’re 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents’ health-insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called “retirement’ that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one-third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.
The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life, and it’s been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying ever longer in “school’ (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by 100 Greeks? No wonder they’d rather stick it to the Germans. But the thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely 42 Germans will be able to do it?
Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.
Read the rest here.
My friend G. Orcalimbo Jones (be sure to listen to the live stream of his radio show on WOMR, Fridays at 9 P.M.) has sent us a nifty item: a continuously zoom-able display of our Universe at all scales.
Seen this way, scale itself seems to become a linear dimension of its own.
Have a look here.
The infantilization of America, and the accelerating subordination of a free people to self-righteous, moralizing, totalitarian bureaucratic busybodies, continues apace. Here.
In a rare online moment over the holiday weekend, I ran across an article in the Daily Mail about how our Department of Homeland Security, in its restless hunt for loquacious malefactors, scans the Internet for alarming words. The article lists scores of examples.
I noted with interest, though, that the list is published on the paper’s website as an image, rather than as text — presumably because the editors of the Mail didn’t want Janet Napolitano and a posse of DHS bruisers paying them a visit in the wee hours. (After all, if a few words from the list are enough to attract attention, publishing the whole thing in a crawler-indexable form would surely be catnip.)
It seems to me that our guardians are casting rather a wide net. Here are some of the words and phrases they’re keeping an eye out for:
cops
drill
swine
initiative
incident
mitigation
facility
response
leak
cloud
biological
collapse
plume
gas
burn
recall
wave
resistant
lightening [sic]
sick
pork
strain
port
smart
border
enriched
relief
dock
erosion
I suppose I could, without much strain, close out this post with some remarks that would showcase a few of these words in a perfectly innocuous way, just to highlight what some might see as an erosion of our privacy under this cloud of constant surveillance. (You’ll recall that I have a certain facility for such tomfoolery.) But I’m resistant to the idea: it wouldn’t be very smart; there might be an unwelcome response (I could end up in the dock!) — and I doubt any of our readers would be enriched by it. But if you want to ‘drill down’ into the list, you can do so here.
As for me, I’ll just have a glass of port and call it a day. I’m so tired I’m about to collapse.
This space will be mostly quiet for the next few days, as the lovely Nina and I occupy ourselves with spring cleaning, houseguests, and Memorial Day revelry.
Enjoy the holiday weekend!
Singularity University‘s Peter Diamandis talks about the SpaceX Falcon launch. Here.
Our reader The Big Henry has been sending along some engaging science-related links lately, and he’s just sent me another. This one has to do with the possibility that “biophotons” — light quanta emitted within living cells — may be a channel for some sort of information transfer.
I’ve never heard anything about this until just now (this is something quite distinct from conventional bioluminescence). Learn more here.
From Brad Templeton’s blog: flying telepresence drones as medical first-responders. Here.
Here’s an item that should come as no surprise to anyone:
Religion Is a Potent Force for Cooperation and Conflict, Research Shows
The article discusses a paper by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges that describes religion as strongly fostering cooperation within human social groups, as a means of competing more successfully against other groups. We read:
Across history and cultures, religion increases trust within groups but also may increase conflict with other groups, according to an article in a special issue of Science.
“Moralizing gods, emerging over the last few millennia, have enabled large-scale cooperation and sociopolitical conquest even without war,” says University of Michigan anthropologist Scott Atran, lead author of the article with Jeremy Ginges of the New School for Social Research.
“Sacred values sustain intractable conflicts like those between the Israelis and the Palestinians that defy rational, business-like negotiation. But they also provide surprising opportunities for resolution.”As evidence for their claim that religion increases trust within groups but may increase conflict with other groups, Atran and Ginges cite a number of studies among different populations. These include cross-cultural surveys and experiments in dozens of societies showing that people who participate most in collective religious rituals are more likely to cooperate with others, and that groups most intensely involved in conflict have the costliest and most physically demanding rituals to galvanize group solidarity in common defense and blind group members to exit strategies. Secular social contracts are more prone to defection, they argue. Their research also indicates that participation in collective religious ritual increases parochial altruism and, in relevant contexts, support for suicide attacks.
They also identify what they call the “backfire effect,” which dooms many efforts to broker peace. In many studies that Atran and Ginges carried out with colleagues in Palestine, Israel, Iran, India, Indonesia and Afghanistan, they found that offers of money or other material incentives to compromise sacred values increased anger and opposition to a deal.
… This dynamic is behind the paradoxical reality that the world finds itself in today: “Modern multiculturalism and global exposure to multifarious values is increasingly challenged by fundamentalist movements to revive primary group loyalties through greater ritual commitments to ideological purity.”
We’ve been making this point here for years: religion is a strongly adaptive feature of human social and cognitive architecture, an innate propensity for which is almost certainly the result of the action of group-level selection in our evolutionary history. As I’ve argued in these pages, I suspect (with sadness, given that I’m an unbeliever myself) that secularism is strongly maladaptive for human groups (see this post, and the comment thread here, for example).
The authors of the linked article nevertheless express hope that a better understanding of this dynamic may enable negotiators to work around it:
But Atran and Ginges also offer some insights that could help to solve conflicts fueled by religious conviction. Casting these conflicts as sacred initially blocks standard business-like negotiation tactics. But making strong symbolic gestures such as sincere apologies and demonstrations of respect for the other’s values generates surprising flexibility, even among militants and political leaders, and may enable subsequent material negotiations, they point out.
I doubt it. Have, for example, the West’s repeated prostrations before the global Ummah brought us anything but contempt? Have they brought us any closer to harmony in the Middle East? It hardly seems that way. Nor have well-intentioned pow-wows between the leaders of incompatible faiths ever achieved much of anything at all, so far as I can make out — as predicted by Pollack’s Law of Interfaith Dialogue (as first articulated back in May 2010):
To the extent that dialogue between any two religions is necessary, it is unproductive, and to the extent that it is productive, it is unnecessary.
I see no reason to imagine this principle will be superseded anytime soon.
Here’s an interesting item:
“Good’ Cholesterol Not So Good After All, New Study Shows
The revelation that high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, is the “good cholesterol’ has suffered a major blow. A meta-study involving over a hundred thousand participants used two different strategies to see if genetic mutations that increased levels of HDL also decreased risk for heart disease. In both cases the answer was a resounding no. The researchers were shocked when they saw the data. Now it’s their turn to shock HDL proponents and drug companies looking to cash in on the HDL craze.
The study, which was published recently in The Lancet, is causing quite a stir in the field. As Dr. James de Lemos, from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, told the New York Times, “I’d say the HDL hypothesis is on the ropes right now.’ Dr. de Lemos was not involved in the study.
So what’s the story here? How is it possible that LDL/HDL dichotomy has propagated so powerfully through conventional wisdom that even the CDC refers to them as “good’ and “bad’ cholesterols and pharmaceutical companies like Abbot Laboratories are working hard to get in on the HDL cash cow?
Past studies have shown that much of what increases our risk for heart disease, like obesity, lack of exercise, smoking, and insulin resistance, is correlated with low HDL. It was a logical conclusion, then, that by increased HDL levels we could decrease those risks. But correlation doesn’t mean causation, and the takeaway conclusion from the current study is that decreased HDL is simply a sign of increased risk for heart disease but the level of HDL doesn’t actually affect heart disease.
Next, perhaps: LDL doesn’t cause heart disease, either.
A few months ago one of our readers reader kindly sent me a copy of The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. I finally got around to reading it, and recommend it to you all.
Here’s the publisher’s summary over at Amazon:
For eighteen years, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith have been part of a team revolutionizing the study of politics by turning conventional wisdom on its head. They start from a single assertion: Leaders do whatever keeps them in power. They don’t care about the “national interest’””or even their subjects””unless they have to.
This clever and accessible book shows that the difference between tyrants and democrats is just a convenient fiction. Governments do not differ in kind but only in the number of essential supporters, or backs that need scratching. The size of this group determines almost everything about politics: what leaders can get away with, and the quality of life or misery under them. The picture the authors paint is not pretty. But it just may be the truth, which is a good starting point for anyone seeking to improve human governance.
The central idea is hardly a new one: that the best approach to reverse-engineering the behavior of politicians is to assume that their primary motivation, and the criterion according to which all their decisions are made, is the acquisition and retention of power. But what the authors have done with this book is to use this idea to build a consistent quantitative and predictive model, based on the relative sizes of three coalitions: the general “selectorate”, a much smaller group of “influentials”, and most important of all, the “essentials”: that collection of individuals who must be kept happy in order for the leader to retain his grip on power.
The authors did particularly well, I thought, in their analysis of how different sorts of governments (as characterized by their relative coalition sizes) interact with each other, particularly as regards war and foreign aid. That chapter alone was worth the price of admission.
As is always the case with these ‘here’s-the-big-new-idea-that-explains-everything’ books, I found myself disagreeing with some of the tendentious conclusions and recommendations the authors presented in the final chapter — but I understand that everybody’s got an axe to grind, and none of it was enough to seriously detract from what I think was a very insightful and useful intellectual effort. Go and get a copy.
Attention, readers: Radio Derb is back. John Derbyshire, following his defenestration by National Review, has dusted himself off and taken his weekly podcast over to Taki’s.
So far, there are three new installments. Have a listen here. And speaking of Derb, here’s a recent essay of his, also at Taki’s: Ridding Myself of the Day.
From time to time in these pages we have noted the accelerating caponization of the Western male, as the grand project to bring the sexes into complete convergence somewhere deep in distaff territory continues apace.
Fortunately, there are still a few pockets of resistance.
Here’s a novel approach to implementing coordinated behavior in a non-hierarchical “swarm” of autonomous machines:
Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour.
It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process called quorum sensing. This works by constantly releasing signalling molecules into the environment while at the same time measuring the local concentration of these molecules.
This concentration rises as more creatures join the local population and so is an effective measure of population density. When the concentration rises over some threshold level, it triggers a different behaviour such cell division, pathogen production and nest building.
Now [Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge] say a similar approach provides a robust way to synchronise humanoid robots. The ideal approach to synchronisation is for each robot to have access to every other robot’s position. Instead, the quorum sensing approach gives, each robot access to a global variable such as the average position or average clock time. Each robot can also change this variable because it contributes to the average.
The idea is that if each robot attempts to synchronise with this global average, the swarm as whole should keep good time.
This insight seems applicable to much more than the dancing robots shown in the linked article. For example, the movement of the center of gravity of social and cultural trends over time surely involves some “quorum sensing” on the part of individuals, followed by “attempts to synchronize with this global average”.
Remember Colin Quinn? That Brooklyn comedian who was on Saturday Night Live for a while? I happened to be looking at Twitter just now and watched him destroy whatever was left of his professional life.
In response to the news that the majority of babies born in the USA are now non-white, he emitted this:
Just read white birth rates overtaken by other races in the U.S.? Please let that be somebody’s idea of a sick joke! #rightorwrong
…followed by this:
Nothing against anybody else but this is kind of..our country. Yes or no?
… and, fatally, this:
I’m not a racist who believes in white privelege [sic] but I do believe very strongly in white power.
Stick a fork in him.
Attention, teens: if you need some help answering the call of the wild, then make your way to Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition, now running at Ottawa’s Museum of Science and Technology.
The exhibit includes floor-to-ceiling photos of nude toddlers, children, teens and adults, and an array of heated, flavoured and textured condoms rolled over wooden dildos. There’s also a ‘climax room’ with a round, low, leather bed, red curtains, a video screen showing animations of aroused genitals, and the voice of a man describing an orgasm.
Next to close-up photos of adult genitals are video screens using animations to explain masturbation.
Attendees are asked to write their own words for penis and vagina on a digital screen, and slang-terms like c— and pussy for female genitalia and c— for male body parts, are displayed above it in large letters.
There are listening stations with pre-written questions and push button audio answers.
Next to a printed question asking, ‘Why do many boys always want to have anal sex?’ sexologist Jamy Ryan responds that not all boys want to do it, but: “If you are comfortable trying that activity, go ahead and do it. It could be fun for you, but if you are not, you don’t really have to do it.”
Next to a question about pregnancy, the recording assures listeners that abortions are available at medical clinics and at 14 years old, you don’t need to tell your parents.
Seems to me the staid Great White North has changed a bit since I left in 1956. All for the better, I’m sure.
As if the news out of Washington D.C. weren’t already depressing enough, here’s an especially sad item: Chuck Brown, the “Godfather of Go-Go”, has died at age 75.
As noted here, I was lucky enough to do a record with Chuck long ago, and the lovely Nina and I saw him play just last summer at the bandshell near our home here in Brooklyn.
At the time of his death Chuck Brown was, by any honest measure, the funkiest man alive. I’m sorry he’s gone.
For those of you who might enjoy it, here’s a five-part interview with Thomas Sowell on the role of intellectuals in modern democracies. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)
Churchill said this, once upon a time:
The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength.
Spoiler: Dr. Sowell thinks they tend to gum things up, too, if you don’t keep an eye on them.
Ever since seeing Fantasia as a boy, I’ve been fascinated by animated renderings of music. Poking around online today I found two very different animations of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #6. Both are complete mappings of the musical score onto a scrolling visual display, and so both express the same information. I can’t decide, though, which one I think does a better job of communicating visually the flow and interplay of the composition’s several voices.
The comparison is not ideal, because the first clip animates the concerto’s first movement, and the second one animates the third. Also, the first clip features a far better performance than the second, which is obviously the output of a computer playing a programmed version of the score.
Both animations use vertical position to indicate pitch, and scroll horizontally through the score so that the notes currently being played are always in the center of the screen. Both renderings also color-code the individual musical voices. And there the similarities end.
The first animation, which is graphically far more sophisticated, uses colored circles to represent each note, strung along lines that mark off the half-dozen or so separate voices. As each note is struck, it appears as a circle whose initial size indicates the duration of the note. Each circle shrinks at the same rate, so that it has just shrunk to zero by the time the next note is struck. The circles bubble up on the right side of the screen, have their moment in the sun, then rush off to the left — solid before they are struck, and hollow afterwards. The visual effect is lively and effervescent, and in particular the vertically stacked circles that mark off the quarter-note pulse throughout most of the piece have a beautifully propulsive effect. It’s a marvelous piece of work.
The second animation is far simpler, but clearer too: it’s a simple graphic representation of exactly the same sort that one might see on a MIDI display of the score. The notes are horizontal bars, with vertical position representing pitch, and horizontal extension representing duration. As each note plays, it is is highlighted, then goes dark again. That’s it! There’s none of the fancy eye-candy we had in the first clip: the expansion and contraction of the horizontal scale as the circles approach the center, the changing sizes of the circles to represent the lifespan of each note, the passage from solid to hollow circles as each note is played — but the eye is much better able to follow the representation of each note, and to connect the visual input with the music. As much as I admired the creative ingenuity of the first animation, I found the second to be more effective in bringing eye and ear together in a unitary experience.
Have a look. Which do you like better?
(Also: was Bach a genius, or what?)
Oh, and lest we forget: here’s another way of doing this sort of thing.
I’ve mentioned “exponentially advancing technology” a lot lately. Think I was kidding?
Here’s a poignant item from the Daily Mail: a P-40 Kittyhawk lost in the Sahara 70 years ago has just been discovered, preserved in the sands.
Our reader Henry has sent along a thought-provoking item about a mechanism by which complex systems can bootstrap themselves into existence: autocatalytic sets. The idea is particularly intriguing in its metaphorical generality, and its applicability may well extend beyond chemistry to social and political domains as well.
Have a look. An explanatory article is here, the scientific paper mentioned in the article is here, and a Wikipedia entry on the subject is here.
The big news of the day is that President Obama, after years of reticence on the topic, has just announced that he supports same-sex marriage.
I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt Romney, and although a majority of blacks oppose legalizing same-sex marriage (the latest poll I’ve seen reported 55% opposed and 42% in favor), I doubt that this will cost Mr. Obama much, if any, of his lock on the black vote.
Interestingly, Mr. Obama also said that although he personally approves of same-sex marriage, he thought that decisions about its legality should be left to the States. (Indeed, this just happened yesterday, with North Carolina voters rejecting the idea by a wide margin.) I mention this because I can’t think, offhand, of any other examples of Mr. Obama endorsing this sort of federalism; it isn’t generally his style at all.
Another interesting question, what with a Mormon standing as Mr. Obama’s opponent this fall: what percentage of supporters of same-sex marriage would object to the legalization of polygamous marriages? On what principled basis can they do so?
My, so many interesting things afoot in the Gulf and environs lately! Much to think about:
— The ongoing game between AQAP and the Saudis…
— …in particular, between Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri and Mohammed bin Nayef (little brother Abdullah Asiri having already sacrificed his life in vain on that score);
— That Fahd al-Quso was probably painted by the mole that got the upgraded package, no doubt with Saudi assistance;
— That Lil’ Squinty has been putting his feet down in the Tunbs, which is calculated to make the Emirates edgy and annoy the Saudis;
— That al-Asiri’s previous venture was thwarted in Abu Dhabi;
— That PETN is such damnable stuff: hard to detect and you don’t need much of it;
— That there is no question about which of the two Gulf powers AQAP and their pals in the Horn seem to willing to make common cause with, though they make strange bedfellows…
And that’s all just for starters. It’s enough to make your head spin.
As depressing as presidential campaigns are, they can be entertaining, too, as long as you enjoy forms of entertainment that don’t cheer you up. President Obama just gave us a good example with his latest promotional offering, The Life of Julia, which chronicles a faceless, solitary woman’s journey “forward” from cradle to grave, apparently without family or friends, as a dependent ward of the welfare state and grateful consumer of its “free” benefits. At every step, the reader is reminded that it is Mr. Barack Obama from whom all of Julia’s blessings flow (even though, at the later stops along her timeline, Mr. Obama will have been out of office for decades) — whereas Mitt Romney’s Dickensian aim is to grind the poor, helpless gamin to dust in the gears of his soulless capitalist machine.
As you’d expect, this item has evoked a lively response from the Right. For sheer entertainment value it would be hard to top Iowahawk’s riposte, which you can have a look at here.
There’s a sad front-page article in today’s New York Times about frontotemporal dementia, a family of degenerative brain diseases that gradually destroy not only various skills and cognitive functions, but also the essential nature of a patient’s personality. These diseases are stark reminders that what we are — that all of what we are — is a transient pattern woven in the matter of the world, a dance of atoms and energy that persists briefly, then subsides.
What is constant in all of this? What gives continuity to the “self” that connects yesterday to today to tomorrow, that makes promises today that must be kept days or months or years hence? Nothing, it seems, but the dance. The “dancers”, the individual atoms and molecules and cells and squirts of neurotransmitters — those come and go; what carries our past forward into the present and the future is nothing more than a dynamic and ephemeral configuration, like the waves of the ocean or the Great Red Spot.
These personality-annihilating illnesses are so particularly heartbreaking because they attack and destroy one of our most cherished illusions, the foundation upon which we orient ourselves in relation to others: the grounding of individual personhood in the continuity of identity. Our institutions, and indeed the social instincts from which these institutions arise and take their form, assume this continuity as their axiomatic bedrock — but as these diseases demonstrate, the ground is not so stable, and for the person whose spouse simply is no longer the person she married, the effect is surely as devastating, and as terrifying at the most primordial level, as an earthquake.
Here’s a remarkable critter: a plant-animal chimera called Elysia chlorotica. Once it has dined on enough algae to prime its photosynthetic pump, it lives on nothing but sunlight, and never needs to eat again. Amazing.
More photos here.
Many years ago I stumbled across a book called The Descent of Woman, by Elaine Morgan. It was the first I’d ever heard of something called the “aquatic ape hypothesis”, which claims that certain features of the human body — our hairless skin, our bipedalism, and some other things you can read about here — suggest that our species spent a transitional period in its evolutionary history living in the water.
I thought it was an interesting idea, and was actually quite besotted with it for a while. It never gained anything like mainstream acceptance, though (upon briefly meeting Stephen Jay Gould some time later, I asked him about it, whereupon he rolled his eyes and said “Oh God, that awful book” and proceeded to rattle off a series of devastating objections, many of which you can read at the article linked above).
I hadn’t heard anything about it for a very long time, when today I was walking down the street and saw a man sporting a t-shirt that advertised “The Museum of the Aquatic Ape”. I went home and looked it up, and sure enough, there really is such a place — or a strange little website, anyway. I hardly know what to make of it.