2013 June 12-20

Interval to move from Germany to England

Lockheed Martin
Human Universal Load Carrier
(HULC)



NASA
NASA X-1 exoskeleton







Photo: Bettina Strauss
Daniel Dennett

INFphoto.com

Big Data: Google

Google X Labs built the world's largest artificial neural network. It watched YouTube videos for a week and learned all about cats. Then it learned to recognize voices and interpret Google StreetView images. The work could boost Google Glass, Google image search, and even Google web search.

>> more





Big Data: SAP

SAP likes Big Data.
The SAP HANA platform
uses a new generation of
columnar databases resident
in memory and running on
multicore processors.

>> more






Swarmageddon

America braces for a plague
of billions of flying bugs.
University of Connecticut
biologist John Cooley:
"The people who say that it's
gross are probably the same people who are quite happy
to catch the subway in
Manhattan in close proximity
to a million-plus cockroaches.
Give me cicadas any day."

2013 May 23

The murder in London is a horror, but the Sun has reacted (above) in the best British tabloid tradition.
My take on the crime: The suffering of Muslims offers no excuse for it, of course, but the ideology of jihad and the tradition of halal slaughter don't exactly head off the danger of such bloodshed.

Pennies From Heaven
Michael Saler

Internet prophets predict that machines will soon outstrip humans and uplift us all to nerd nirvana. Skeptics are welcome to take a $25,000 course at Singularity University in Silicon Valley.

  To Save Everything, Click Here
  By Evgeny Morozov

Evgeny Morozov aims to debunk the belief that all problems can be fixed through logic and data. He was raised in Belarus during the waning years of the Soviet Union. The vogue for turning everyday activities into computer games that spit out token rewards has for him an unpleasantly familiar ring.

Internet zealots envision the internet as an autonomous entity with its own inherent logic and development. This ideology is a religion. Its proselytizers seek to reconfigure life by eliminating its bugs with their new tools. But not all bugs are bugs. Some bugs are features.

Morozov: "Technological amnesia and complete indifference to history remain the defining conditions of contemporary Internet debate."

  Who Owns the Future?
  By Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier is a repentant Silicon Valley pioneer. He sees danger in its ideology of freedom and empowerment. Information only appears to be free on the internet. In reality, users give personal data to companies and get services in return. The companies turn this data into Big Data and sell it to advertisers. They are getting filthy rich as they fob off users with treats.

Lanier says capitalism can survive only by monetizing all information. To balance the information economy, anyone who provides information that supports a profitable enterprise should receive a micropayment. We would have to pay for browsing online, but we would also be paid in turn with pennies from heaven.

AR Beware Neosoviet seduction by data-driven rationalism (DDR) but build out the information economy so that I can live on pennies from heaven — Thus spake Zaross.

"In American popular culture and opinion, Iran remains the embodiment of an extremist Islam that is no more rational than ... the Salafi extremism of Al-Qa'ida and the Taliban."

Three Nuggets
Daniel Dennett

1 Free Will

Free will is the most difficult and the most important philosophical problem confronting us today. It's important because of the longstanding tradition that free will is a prerequisite for moral responsibility. Our system of law and order, of punishment, and praise and blame, promise keeping, promise making, the law of contracts, and criminal law all depend on one notion or another of free will.

Neuroscientists, physicists, and philosophers say that science has shown us that free will is an illusion. They don't shrink from the implication that our systems of law are built on foundations of sand. In fact, there is nothing we have learned from neuroscience that undercuts the foundation for both the law of contract and criminal law. We don't have ultimate responsibility because our choices are always in some ways the result of things we didn't choose.

2 New Atheism

Spokespeople for religion chastise the new atheists for attacking the most simplistic forms of religious belief and leave their most intellectually subtle versions untouched. There's a smidgen of truth in that, but they bring it on themselves by changing the rules and shifting the goalposts. I have made a concerted effort over the years to understand sophisticated philosophical theology and have never come up with anything that I thought could sit in the light of day and be defended.

3 Philosophy

If I go to a scientific conference I come away with a bunch of new things to think about. If I go to a philosophy conference I may come away just having learned four more wrinkles in the debate about something philosophers have been thinking about for all my life.

The history of philosophy is a history of very tempting mistakes made by very smart people, and if you don't learn that history you'll make those mistakes again and again. One of the ignoble joys of my life is watching very smart scientists reinvent second-rate philosophical ideas.

AR DD near enough verbatim

2013 May 22

Richard Wagner was born 200 years ago today. Regarded as one of the greatest Germans of all time, he divides Germans as much as he delights them. Die Welt cultural commentator Manuel Brug: "Only Jesus, Napoleon, and Hitler have had more written about them."

>> more

UK — EU
Gideon Rachman

Euroskeptics claim that the euro crisis will lead to a more federal EU. But divisions within Europe are widening. Most EU countries outside the EZ will stay there. A United States of Europe is not inevitable.

Lord Lawson says the real economic opportunities for Britain now lie in emerging markets, and will be better exploited if the UK withdraws from the EU. But Britain still sells a lot more to Europe than to emerging markets. Norway and Switzerland are outside the EU, and to get access to the EU single market they have to accept rules they have no say in making. This is a bad deal for them.

Lord Lawson says EU membership has led British industry to miss opportunities in Asia. But German manufacturers have done very well exporting to China from inside the EU. And if Euroskeptics find the bureaucrats of Brussels high-handed, they should try Beijing. China would find it easier to push the British around if they left the EU, the world's largest trading bloc.

Other BRIC countries are no better. European law may be annoying, but it is a lot better than the Indian or Russian legal systems. The idea that Britain can do better in Asia by leaving the EU is absurd.

AR Forget emulating the USA with a USE. Perhaps a People's Republic of Europe?

Proving the hardest Weil conjecture won Pierre Deligne the 2013 Abel Prize

The Color of Money: Reclaiming our Humanity
WPC 14, Seattle, WA, April 10-13, 2013

Paul Gorski: "I got married. I participated in an oppressive tenure system at my university. I used big banks. These are some of the things that make me a racist, a sexist, and a heterosexist."

>> more

2013 May 21

Finished rereading The Stillborn God: Lilla is too indulgent of old theological confusions for my taste. After a good run-up to the Third Reich, his account falls apart and ends in confusion. The old ideas just don't work for Globorg — see Coral for a new account of the more recent years.

EU — UK
Financial Times

Berlin plans limited EU treaty changes to streamline EZ decision making. Angela Merkel is unhappy with the slow pace of EZ banking union but doesn't want to give the UK an opening to renegotiate the terms of its EU membership. David Cameron had planned to derail EZ reform to repatriate powers from Brussels.

Tools For Thinking
Daniel Dennett

1 Use your mistakes

Whenever you make a mistake, take a deep breath and then examine it ruthlessly and dispassionately. Savor your mistakes, delight in uncovering what led you astray. Then you can set them behind you and go on to the next big opportunity. Scientists make their mistakes in public so that everybody can learn from them. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else's experience, and not just your own. You can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it. People love it when somebody admits to making a mistake, and they love pointing out mistakes.

2 Respect your opponent

If there are obvious contradictions in your opponent's case, then you should point them out. If there are hidden contradictions, you should expose them to view and then dump on them. But don't overdo it. The thrill of the chase encourages uncharitable interpretation, which gives you an easy but irrelevant target. The best antidote I know for poor targeting is to (1) rephrase the target position as clearly and fairly as you can, (2) list any points of agreement, (3) mention anything you have learned, and (4) only then go ahead and rebut or criticize the position. Your targets will appreciate it.

3 The "surely" klaxon

When you're reading arguments, look for "surely" in the text and check each occurrence. The word "surely" marks the edge of what the author is sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. The author makes a judgment call and has plumped for bald assertion, anticipating agreement. This is where you might find a "truism" that isn't true.

4 Answer rhetorical questions

Develop a sensitivity for rhetorical questions in any argument or polemic. They represent an author's eagerness to take a short cut. A rhetorical question is not meant to be answered. That is, the author doesn't bother waiting for you to answer since it's supposed to be obvious. But try to find a less obvious answer. If you find a good one, surprise your interlocutor with it.

5 Employ Occam's razor

A modern form of this old rule of thumb is: Don't multiply entities beyond necessity. Don't concoct a complicated theory if you can find a simpler one that works as well. But extensions of the principle are sometimes met with disagreement. Turning it into a metaphysical principle or fundamental requirement of rationality is ludicrous. It's just an old saying, like: Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

6 Don't waste your time on crap

Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you criticize anything big or difficult, don't waste time hooting at the crap. Go after the good stuff or leave it alone. We can agree that there is a great deal of deplorable, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. So concentrate on the best stuff you can find, not the dregs.

7 Beware of deepities

A deepity is a proposition that seems both important and true, and profound, but does so by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth and the devastating importance and thinks: Wow, that's profound. Here's a deepity: Rowan Williams described his faith as "a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark".

AR Good man, Dan.

2013 May 20

Rereading The Stillborn God by Mark Lilla.

Much of my perspective in the orange, green, and yellow chapters of Coral seem to me now to fall in the shadow Lilla cast and hence invite more insightful thought and elaboration. For example, I should discuss Hobbes and Rousseau, say more about Kant and Hegel, quote Schleiermacher and Troeltsch. But a new edition will soon turn into a new book, with a more academic orientation. Then my hopes of wider sales will evaporate. Ah, the perils of authorship.

Storyline
Donald Miller

I started Storyline after I’d accomplished all my goals and still wasn’t happy. I’d become a New York Times bestselling author and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before. So I began researching what really makes people happy and content. I found that it has nothing to do with fame or money and everything to do with the health of our relationships and our interest in our own work. Serving people rather than trying to impress them is the foundation. So I created a life plan for myself, then shared it with others and found that it helped them heal and recover from a life of pursuing success. Now I consider it my life's work. It fills my life with a deep sense of meaning.

Storyline is basically a company that helps people tell better stories with their lives. Through conferences, websites, and individualized training, we create life plans and career paths for people who want to live meaningful lives. What we all want most is a deep sense of meaning. When we find that, our emotional health stabilizes and we can enjoy life, regardless of our life circumstances. Every human being is searching for a deep sense of meaning and yet we're all chasing success.

Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It's like finding a current in a river that carries you through life. And we begin to experience it when we have three things:

1 A project to work on that captures our passions and in some way serves others
2 A community, family, or partner to share love with
3 A redemptive perspective on our suffering

If we have those three things, we experience a deep sense of meaning. It sounds simple but it works.

AR Unusually for a live feed, I found this piece needed almost no editing. So it must be good.

Scotland
Angus Roxburgh

Most Scots oppose leaving the EU. For them, UKIP might as well be named English Independence Party. Scotland can avoid the risk of being cast out of the EU by voting for independence from the UK before the English get the chance to vote on Europe.

Scotland will hold a referendum in September 2014 to decide whether to stay in the UK. A poll shows 36% of Scots support independence from the UK now (with 44% opposed), but 44% do (with 44% still opposed) if it looks like the UK will leave the EU.

With Nigel Farage and the "swivel-eyed loons" riding high in the English charts, Scots now have to consider passport controls and currency exchanges along the Tweed. Scots wait a lifetime for a referendum, and then two of them come along at once.

Islam
Mohsin Hamid

Islam is not a race, yet Islamophobia has racist characteristics. Most Muslims are born into their religion, but there are more than a billion variations of lived belief among people who call themselves Muslim. Islamophobes refuse to acknowledge these variations.

Lived religion is an individual thing. Very few people of any faith live their lives as literalist interpretations of scripture. Many people have little or no knowledge of scripture at all. Many others choose to interpret what they know in ways that fit their own moral sense of what is good. Still others live their lives divorced from any sense of faith.

People say my novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about a man who becomes an Islamic fundamentalist. He is a Pakistani student at Princeton. When he gets his dream job in New York, he exclaims, "Thank you, God!" That's the only real hint that he's religious. He doesn't quote scripture, he drinks and has sex out of marriage, and he could have secular views. And yet he calls himself a Muslim, and is angry with US foreign policy, and grows a beard. That leads people to read him as an Islamic fundamentalist.

Taylor Swift scooped 8 out of her 11 nominations at the Billboard music awards in Las Vegas,
including top artist and top Billboard 200 album for Red.

Saul Bellow
The Novelist
The Husband
The Father

PA
Police hustled UKIP leader
Nigel Farage to safety in
Edinburgh after protesters
 shouted "UKIP scum off our streets!"

Google Worth
$300 000 000 000
FT











AP
Tories Rebel
David Cameron told Tories
years ago to "stop banging
on about Europe".

Now, while he is in the US,
about 114 Conservative MPs
voted in Parliament for an
amendment to the Queen's
Speech regretting the lack
of a bill promising an
EU referendum.

Labour and Lib Dems voted against the amendment, and
it was defeated by 272 votes
to 130. Cameron had ordered
his ministers to abstain but
told backbenchers they were
free to vote for it.















NASA
On May 13, a big flare erupted from the Sun, shown here on
the left edge.

2013 May 19

Syria
Bashar al-Assad

There cannot be a unilateral solution in Syria. The rebels are hundreds of different groups and bands. Each group has its local leader. We can't discuss a timetable with a party if we don't know who they are. Many are linked to foreign countries and cannot make a decision for themselves. They say they don't want a dialog with the Syrian state. Believing that a political conference will stop terrorism on the ground is unreal. In any case, to resign would be to flee.

The west lies and falsifies evidence to engineer wars. People from Hezbollah and Iran have been coming and going in Syria since long before the crisis. Intervention is a clear probability, especially after we've managed to beat back armed groups in many areas of Syria. As for excessive force, the issue is not the extent of the force used or the type of weapon but the nature and extent of the terrorism we have suffered, and thus what is a proper response.

Israelis In Golan
Daniella Cheslow

When Israel allegedly bombed weapons sites in Syria in early May, the Israeli government reacted coolly to Syrian threats of war and said Bashar al-Assad was too beleaguered to retaliate. But Israelis in the Golan Heights think differently. Alonei Habashan community manager Israel Bar: "We've lived here quietly for years, and all the sudden we feel threatened."

Elisha Yelin was among the young pioneers who founded Kibbutz Merom Golan, on the Syrian border, soon after Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967. On the night of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Yelin told me all the women and children were evacuated and the men were driven off to fight at the front. A Syrian division blazed into the Golan Heights, then stopped to wait for a second division to catch up. That delay cost Syria the Golan.

Yelin drove me down to the border crossing between Syria and Israel. Israel Radio played tape of Syria's minister of information saying the Golan Heights belong to Damascus. Yelin looked at the Syrian flag flying high: "I have no problem with the Syrian flag. This is a sign of government, of control, of something you can trust. I will be afraid if there will be no Syrian flag."

2013 May 18

Big Data

Big Data is the next big thing. It promises both total control and the logical management of our future lives. An estimated 2.8 ZB of data was created in 2012, with a predicted volume of 40 ZB by 2020. This exponential growth doubles every two years.

Google and Facebook are giants of Big Data. But many other organizations are analyzing all this data. Memory is cheap, so new computers can analyze a lot of data fast. Algorithms create order from chaos. They find hidden patterns and offer new insights and business models.

>> more

Billion-Euro Brain

At a TED conference in Oxford in 2009, Henry Markram announced a plan to deliver a sentient hologram within a decade. He hoped to wipe out all mental disorders and create a self-aware AI. And he said he would do all this by building a complete model of a human brain and running it on a supercomputer. In January 2013, the European Commission awarded him a billion euros to try.

>> more

On Dictionaries
David Skinner

Far Side cartoon: I'm a magazine editor, and the galley of an article comes back from a proofreader with a word circled and a comment in the margin like "Does this word exist?" Usually the word is simple and its meaning is obvious. Yes, of course it exists. There it is, on the page.

Or the reader asks, "Is this word in the dictionary?" I like dictionaries and use them often. But no dictionary contains every word in the language. New fields constantly generate words that aren't in a dictionary. Foreign words appearing in English are left out too. Words are invented all the time.

Some readers see dictionaries as legal code for language with verdicts on spelling and meaning and grammar. Others see them as less. A person of wide reading rarely needs their help. If you write for a living, you might occasionally stop and see what the dictionary has to say about a word. The lexicographer has boiled the entry down to basics, but you ask yourself if a given sense matches yours.

A committed writer should be wary of substituting a lexicographer's sense of a word for his own. There is always much more to know about a word than what a dictionary can tell you. A good writer tries to avoid saying what has already been said. Nothing worth writing is written from a dictionary.

On Autism

Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, a successful businesswoman, and one of our most astute interpreters of autism.

>> more

2013 May 17

ER Want Brexit
Philip Stephens + AR

On the question of Europe, David Cameron is in office but not in power. The Eurosceptic Right (ER) is bundling him along the path to Brexit. British voters are cool on the EU and stone cold on the EZ. The
UKIP-ER line is that British troubles are down to Johnny Foreigner.

Brexit would be a hard blow to the EU as well as the UK. But the German and other EU governments have their own red lines. They can offer Britain assurances about the future, but they can't just let a member opt out of things it finds inconvenient. That way lies madness.

Some in the ER would consider staying in the EU on radically different terms. But the terms challenge such basic EU tenets as free movement of people, the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, and the single market. Britain's partners can only say No.

Cameron must win the next election to deliver on his pledge. Labour looks weak and its poll lead is soft. Ed Miliband could be pushed into promising a referendum too. A Labour government might well lose it. So even in opposition, the ER could get Brexit.

Brexit
Vince Cable + AR

British Conservatives should know better. Global companies will ponder the wisdom of staying or investing in a country where they can expect years of debate over whether to tear up Britain's main trade and investment network.

A soft exit would keep access to the single market in return for a payment, like Norway. The UK would face the same regulations but have no vote in shaping them.

A hard exit from the single market would put the UK behind the same tariff wall as Turkey or Ukraine.

The net costs of EU membership are tolerable. So why should Britain leave the EU? Conservatives care about the City of London. They dislike EU financial services regulation, despite the crisis of 2008.

Mommy Merkel
Dirk Kurbjuweit

After eight years as chancellor, Angela Merkel defines an era.

Chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück says we are living in a second Biedermeier era. The first began in 1815 and ended in 1848. The era featured conservative monarchies in Germany. The Biedermeier style of the period furniture symbolizes a quiet, homey torpor. But revolution broke out in 1848, and by 1871 a new nation state was born.

Merkel is no absolutist monarch, but she has silenced dissent in Germany and created a torpid republic. She has built a cosy home and Germans seem to like it. The German economy is growing and incomes are rising. This nationalization of outlook is a hallmark of the Merkel era. The chancellor endorses European solidarity but not eurobonds.

Merkel would like other Europeans to learn from Germany. Thus Germany can extend its influence in the world. This attitude goes down well with German voters: Defend homeland values by working hard to enjoy a quiet life. The second Biedermeier era is even more Biedermeier than the first. As chancellor, Merkel quickly became Mommy.

Why not sit back and enjoy life with Mommy? Two reasons:
1 We need conflict and commotion to stay awake.
2 There's still plenty worth changing in Germany.

Against Empathy
Paul Bloom

Empathy is an instinctive mirroring of others' experience. Psychopaths lack empathy. Simon Baron-Cohen equates empathy erosion with evil. Maybe we should go for global empathic consciousness. But wait:

1 Empathy needs an identifiable victim. Psychologists asked subjects how much money they would give to help develop a drug that would save the life of one child, and asked others how much they would give to save eight children. The answers were about the same. A third group was told a child's name and age, and shown her picture, then donated far more.

2 Empathy doesn't help in politics. Politicians fight over whom we should empathize with. Liberals argue for gun control by focusing on the victims of gun violence. Conservatives point to the unarmed victims of crime. Liberals in favor of federal safety regulations invoke injured employees. Conservatives talk about small businessmen bankrupted by petty rules.

3 Empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. It can drive a lust for retribution heedless of consequences. People were asked how to punish a company for making a vaccine that killed a child. Some were told a big fine would make the company work harder on safety. Others were told a big fine would discourage it from making the vaccine, so lead to more deaths. Most wanted a big fine anyway.

Our best hope for the future is to see that even if we don't empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love. Empathy will have to yield to reason in future.

Karl Marx
Jonathan Sperber

Karl Marx had good ideas and bad ones. We should separate them. The bad include the labor theory of value, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the Hegelian view of human history as inevitable progress, for Marx from from slavery to communism. The good:

1 Ideas and their political movements are closely tied to social structures and their economic interests. Marx got the idea from Hegel.

2 Ostensibly free and voluntary market exchanges contain elements of domination and exploitation. Marx got the idea from Hegel.

3 A capitalist market economy isn't an automatically self-regulating system but periodically has crises. The latest one was in 2008.

AR I added the Hegel references.

2013 May 16

Japan Is Back
Financial Times

Japan grew faster than other G7 countries in 2013 Q1. Prime minister Shinzo Abe came to power in December and flooded the economy with cash. The yen has fallen by about 20% since he took over, and the stock market is up 70% in six months. Preliminary data show a real GDP increase of 0.9%, or 3.5% annualized, so Japan has outpaced the US, where Q1 GDP grew by an annualized 2.5%. Analysts say Abenomics has accelerated the recovery.

AR A lesson for all Austerians here.

Google All Access
TechCrunch

Google has launched an on-demand subscription music service with web and mobile interfaces. It features millions of songs to play, recommendations, charts and playlists, and instant radio stations.

Everything from your Google Music locker is automatically pulled into Google Play Music All Access. Everything else an artist has on All Access is listed beneath your content and plays at a tap.

All Access is among the news at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Google launched its music locker service two years ago. Now Google Play users have a choice to stream rather than download.

The Next 100 Years
John Gray + AR

The next 100 years may too closely resemble the last 100 for comfort. We still don't have world peace or global government. Geopolitical rivalries merely have new players and higher stakes.

The dwindling significance of Europe as a global player is a fact. The European project produced 40 years of peace and prosperity. But austerity policies have plunged the southern half of the continent into a state of permanent depression. On the geopolitical map, Europe doesn't exist.

Russia too is less important. Today it boasts only natural resources. The country is ruled by spy services and organized crime. Russia is an extractive state, like China and India. Any new prosperity is distributed narrowly within a small elite.

Upheaval in the Arab world was fueled by the financial crash, which raised food prices. The cost of buying off mass discontent in Arab countries is rising. Oil-producing countries need high oil prices to fund public spending. Saudi Arabia heads off unrest with repression and spending programs.

Renewable energy may undermine the global stranglehold of the oil cartel. Higher oil prices boost other energy sources. Russia and Mideast producers depend on oil and will face crises. The United States has renewable energy, domestic oil and gas, and other sources of wealth, and so will emerge stronger.

The United States may rebound as a major manufacturing economy. It remains the global haven for capital. With huge inequalities of wealth, an endangered middle class, and many poor people, American capitalism is flawed. Yet Americans can cope better with low growth than any other people.

Without growth, the tacit compact on which democracy is based may break down. When the social product shrinks, issues of distribution become politically explosive, particularly if people see government working to transfer wealth to the few. Authoritarian regimes are also at risk, as in China.

Demographic factors are at work. The population of many poorer countries will rise, but many societies are aging fast. In Europe, Japan, and the United States, debt is left for future generations. When the next generation is smaller and poorer than the last, the pyramid scheme stops.

The Chinese government relies on growth to head off mass unrest. Corruption and elitism have hollowed out the state. Order could break down if the rate of growth falls for a few years in a row. But China is not going the way of the former Soviet Union. The idea that China has replaced the Soviet Union in a bipolar world is incorrect. China has returned to the role it played several centuries ago, as has India.

Democrats say their values are universal. Slavery and persecution are bad. Freedom and tolerance are good. But democracy can also work against human rights and universal values. Globalization has helped billions of people, but volatile global markets leave them as insecure as ever. We need new ideas.

AR My cut of a long text has changed its tone and tendency so far Gray may not recognize it.

Quantum Bayesianism
Hans Christian von Baeyer + AR

Physicists have grappled with quantum paradoxes for about a century. Quantum theory is still considered bizarre, a powerful recipe book for building gadgets but impossible to understand. Confusion about the meaning of quantum theory makes people think what it seems to be telling us about our world is irrelevant to everyday life and too weird to matter.

Quantum Bayesianism (QBism, "cubism") combines quantum theory with probability theory to recast the paradoxes and make them look less troubling. QBism recasts the the wave function as a mathematical tool that any observer can use to assign their justified belief that a quantum system will have a specific property. So the wave function reflects an individual's epistemological state.

AR This, more or less, has been my take for many years. If I were a young student again, I would study the view properly and map it to foundational work in modal logic. But I think von Baeyer in his account has confused subjective perspectives with personal and mental ideas that mess up the view. In my take, quantum mechanics reflects the logical necessity to model nature from within, to leave a part called the future unknown. But "cubism" is cute.

Prime Proofs
Lisa Grossman

A number p is prime if it's indivisible by anything but 1 and p. Twin primes are pairs of prime numbers such that their difference from each other is 2, so they are a distance of 2 apart. The twin prime conjecture states that there are infinitely many such pairs.

A new proof affirms the easier conjecture that there are infinitely many primes that have a neighboring prime a finite distance d away, for some d larger than 2. Yitang Zhang has shown that there is an infinite number of prime pairs for which d is at most 70 million. Now we only need to cut d down to 2 to prove the twin prime conjecture.

The Goldbach conjecture is that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two primes. Harald Helfgott has now proved a related problem: the odd Goldbach conjecture, which states that every odd number above 5 is the sum of three primes.

AR No one said math was easy.

US Navy
Northrop Grumman X-47B UCAV makes historic flight from CVN-77 USS George H.W. Bush.

Doubleday
Dan Brown's Inferno
has lifted Dante's Inferno
to the top of UK retailer Waterstones' poetry
bestseller list.

Brown: "Dante has had enormous influence on the Christian view of hell."

Brown's Inferno
is released today.

HELLO!
Peaches Geldof
with son Phaedra

AR Phaedra? Phaedrus!

AFP
Chinese Wing Loong drone



AP
U.S. Reaper drone

Photo: J.T. Huber
Fairyflies are tiny wasps that lay their eggs inside the eggs of bugs, beetles, flies, and so on. Tinkerbella nana (above) is the smallest known insect: 7 males could line up in 1 mm.








Richard Feynman
A new viral video








Psycho vs. Psycho
The Observer

The British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology calls for a "paradigm shift" on mental health to change the psychiatric model of mental distress as treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP has "fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions" of psychiatric diagnoses.

DSM-5 is coming soon.

Austerity in the UK
Then and Now

Reuters
Syria is awash in arms and rife with divisions. Hardline Islamists are fierce and effective rebel fighters. Violence will continue if the regime falls. Chaos, criminality, and warlordism beset the liberated areas. We should resist calls to supply the rebels with heavier weapons.

Photo: Dan Courter
Dan Brown releases
Inferno next week

Dante's Divine Comedy has three acts: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso. Nicholas Lezard recommends a cartoon version of Dante's Inferno.

Benoît Mandelbrot
Father of long tails




Pankaj Mishra
Against the Brahmins




U.S. Department of Defense
Annual Report to Congress
Military and Security
Developments Involving the
People's Republic of China
2013

Photo: Eddie Mulholland
UKIP leader Nigel Farage




AP

Public Intellectuals
A.C. Grayling

People who are alert and engaged, who are eager to debate, and who have some expertise to offer, drive the public conversation.

Some public intellectuals have a committed political stance. Others try to occupy neutral ground. The danger is that people who emerge on the strength of expertise in a specialty are seen as oracles on everything else.

Public intellectuals have intelligence and engagement, and they speak out. Their ideas are the cogs of history, and drive its progress.




Quantum Gravity and LIGO
Freeman Dyson has doubts

i
UKIP leader Nigel Farage

2013 May 15

Brexit: Con
Charles Grant

Many British eurosceptics and European federalists say there's no point in the UK staying in the EU but outside the EZ. They say the EZ will set the agenda for the EU.

But a UK government can still reshape the EU. The scope of the EU goes beyond the EZ to include the single market, competition, trade, energy, transport, climate, the environment, farming, fishing, regional development, overseas aid, foreign policy, defense, enlargement, justice, and home affairs. The UK would have more clout in these areas if it:

1 Improved its economic performance
2 Strove to maintain the authority of the European Commission
3 Did a better job of making friends in the EU
4 Grasped that the EU has commitments as well as rules
5 Took the initiative and showed leadership where it has expertise

Brexit: Lab
Seumas Milne

David Cameron has not shot the UKIP fox with his promise of an EU referendum by 2017. The rise of UKIP is a xenophobic response to austerity and impotence.

British opponents of the EU lampoon Europe but are happy to bow down to the United States and the City of London. Their agenda after leaving the EU would be to protect the financial interests that led to crisis and ditch the social benefits that most British people like about the EU. An EU exit would risk unleashing a carnival of reaction, xenophobia, attacks on social rights, and lurches to the right.

The British EU debate has largely ignored the progressive case for change that is central to the struggle for change in Europe. The EU has entrenched a failed neoliberal model of capitalism with deregulation, privatization, and enforcement of corporate power over employment rights. Its undemocratic and dysfunctional structures have been exposed by the EZ crisis and the imposition of austerity.

Labour should back a referendum. Ed Miliband has argued for comprehensive EU reform. He needs to go a lot further to prevent the nationalist right dictating the EU agenda.

2013 May 14

Improve European Union
David Cameron

All Conservative cabinet ministers agree that we should be spending the next period improving the EU and improving our relations with the EU and then putting that choice to the British public in a referendum. That is our policy.

The speech I made on Europe had a very good reception from the business community in Britain, who support it by and large, and a very good reception right across the Conservative party and Conservative supporters. It also had a reasonable reception in Europe, with a number of key European players recognizing this was a legitimate agenda. That's a good start to the process.

AR I agree: Work to improve the EU. Let the UK be a good neighbor.

Dark energy
Stephen Battersby + AR

Dark energy makes up more than two-thirds of the universe, but we have no idea what it is or where it comes from. Caltech physicist Sean Carroll: "Nature has not been ready to give us any clues yet."
What we know so far:

1 Dark energy pushes. Space seems to be expanding ever faster, as if repelled by antigravity.

2 There's a lot of it. We can see how much matter there is in the universe, and the CMB from 12 Ts after the big bang lets us work out the total density of matter plus dark energy. About 68% of the universe (or 1 nJ/m^3) is dark and repulsive.

3 It's mysterious. As space expands there is more and more of it, pushing against the fading gravity of the rest. Maybe it's weird stuff called quintessence.

If dark energy keeps going, the stars and galaxies will accelerate off into the distance, leaving us in the dark. If it gets stronger, we might even be shredded in a Big Rip. We guess the dark energy density is fairly stable.

The Dark Energy Survey aims to look for signs of dark energy over a wide swathe of the sky. It will see lots of supernovas pumping out photons that are more or less redshifted by cosmic expansion. This lets us plot expansion over time and gives us a sky map of a few hundred million galaxies. Sound waves in the infant cosmos herded vast superclusters of galaxies that we can measure to work out a better history.

If photons interact with dark energy, it could rotate their polarization as they fly across the universe. The Planck team plans to measure the polarization of CMB photons. Carroll: "It is conceivable they will announce they have detected quintessence."

On Templeton
Sean Carroll

The John Templeton Foundation (JTF) supports research into the "Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality" and likes to promote the idea that science and religion are gradually reconciling.

Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last five hundred years.

In my view, we have a responsibility to get the word out. And when we blur the lines between science and religion, we do the world a grave disservice. Religious belief exerts a significant influence over how the world is currently run. Understanding the fundamental nature of reality is a necessary starting point for productive conversations about morality, justice, and meaning.

The JTF has done its best to spread the impression that science and religion get along just fine. This impression is false. But if anyone is tempted to award me the Templeton Prize, I will totally accept it!

AR Keep dreaming, Sean.

2013 May 13

Ministerial Mutiny
The Guardian

Former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind accused Conservatives pushing for an amendment to the motion welcoming the Queen's speech that laments the absence of an in/out referendum on EU membership of "showing very poor judgment".

AR Grammar: Rifkind accused (Conservatives pushing for (an amendment to (the motion welcoming (the Queen's speech)) that laments (the absence of (an in/out referendum on EU membership)))) of ...

Quantum Computer Quicker
Jacob Aron + AR

D-Wave sells quantum computers. They use an adiabatic approach on qubits to allow exponential speedup. But to be truly quantum, the qubits must be entangled. Tests of the D-Wave device show indirect evidence for entanglement.

Catherine McGeoch has shown that a D-Wave computer can beat regular machines. D-Wave hardware is designed to solve the traveling salesman problem, which lies behind many practical applications.

McGeoch ran the problem on a D-Wave Two computer, which holds 439 qubits in superconducting niobium loops, and also ran it using three leading algorithms running on a high-end PC. She gave each system roughly half a second to find the best solution to a version of the problem, and repeated the trial with 100 different versions. She then did the experiment for problems involving even more variables and a more complicated equation.

The D-Wave machine was much faster. It found the best solution every time within half a second. The three regular algorithms struggled to keep up for problems with more than 100 or so variables. The best of the three, CPLEX, had to run for half an hour on the largest problems.

Doctor Who?
Liel Leibovitz + AR

The BBC TV series Doctor Who has aired going on 800 episodes since it began in 1963. The Doctor, a member of a superior race called the Time Lords, occasionally slips into a new body, acquiring a new face and a new personality. Eleven actors have played him thus far.

Doctor Who was created by Sydney Newman, who was born in Toronto to Russian Jewish immigrants. Newman worked with the Canadian National Film Board and spent World War 2 making propaganda films. He eventually got a job at the BBC. In 1963, a few months after his arrival, he came up with the idea for the Doctor Who series.

Newman's hero is wildly intelligent and intergalactically cosmopolitan, with a biting sense of humor and a commitment to putting things right. He is constantly wandering, never at home. His relation is not to space but to time. Once he said his family sleeps in his mind, a haunting intimation of loss.

The Doctor is surrounded by a host of warlike species who view him as pesky and effete yet oddly omnipotent. Most celebrated among these baddies are the Daleks, crackly-voiced aliens who trundle around in armored turrets with little guns sticking out of them. Their creator was Terry Nation, who recalled the wartime terror of watching Germany led by a murderous maniac and who gave Daleks the catchphrase: "Exterminate!"

With this timeless conflict of the canny Jew versus the canned Nazis, Doctor Who ran for 26 seasons, finally fading away in 1989. By 2005, the British were ready for more. All the old enemies were back for another run, but new and more terrifying foes joined the party, making the Jewish theme even more obvious.

Chief among them was the Silence, a religious order devoted to ancient prophecies. Their terrifying quality is that people forget them immediately after seeing them. They travel the world with the sole purpose of assassinating the Doctor, lest he answer the oldest question in the universe. Recall that Exodus chestnut in which the creator says no man shall see his face and live: Doctor Who?

How To Make Sex Boring
Lisa Levy + AR

Alain de Botton is the author of How To Think More About Sex, an amusing little study of contemporary assumptions about sex, marriage, and relationships, regarded strictly from the point of view of a bored, married, middle-aged man who dabbles in philosophy and fancies himself an intellectual.

The man does not interrogate what a queer theorist might call heteronormative practices and he never explores any type of relationship outside of monogamous marriage. In fact his book utterly lacks imagination and a sense of curiosity. It might be the most boring book ever written about sex.

On eros: "The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence."

The only stands on show are against pornography and for adultery. The author advocates censorship of the internet but likes a bit of nookie on the side: "That a couple should be willing to watch their lives go by from within the cage of marriage, without acting on outside sexual impulses is a miracle of civilization and kindness for which they ought both to feel grateful on a daily basis."

AR Thumb firmly down.

2013 May 12

Syrian Somalia
CNN

The conflict in Syria is dragging in the entire region. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is now more vulnerable than ever. Analysts say Syria is in danger of becoming the next Somalia. But Syria would be worse. Its religious and ethnic fault lines extend across borders in every direction. Somalia never had chemical weapons, missiles, or modern armor. And Somalia never hosted a vicious struggle between Sunnis and Shiites. Why Syria suddenly looks more dangerous:

1 Israel
Israelis look on anxiously. They have not admitted carrying out air strikes, but they need to prevent the transfer of advanced missiles to Hezbollah. Assad has a history of not retaliating against Israel. But in weakening the Assad regime, Israel may strengthen well organized and potent jihadist groups.

2 Sectarianism
Syria has descended into sectarian horror. Moderates have been sidelined. The Free Syrian Army coexists with a strong Sunni jihadi element. The regime is mobilizing irregular Alawite militia and Hezbollah fighters. The Syrian opposition sees Iran and Hezbollah everywhere.

3 Existential Endgame
The Syrian regime is launching counterattacks against areas controlled by rebel factions. Assad relies on shabiha loyalists with an existential stake in the regime's survival. Some say give the rebels more missiles and communications and pick off regime forces from the air.

4 Chemical Weapons
For much of last year, Obama's "red line" seemed largely hypothetical. But as the regime grows more desperate and control of chemical weapons more difficult, it seems chemical agents have been used. How much, of what, by whom?

5 Refugees
Iraq: Weapons cross border for Syrian resistance, Syrian and Iraqi jihadists cooperating.
Turkey: Hosts 322,000 Syrian refugees, with another 100,000 clamoring to cross.
Jordan: Trying to cope with 450,000 Syrian refugees in makeshift camps.
Lebanon: Hosts 455,000 Syrian refugees. Salafists declare jihad against Syrian regime.

The United States and Russia are calling for an international conference. Secretary of State John Kerry: "The alternative is that Syria heads closer to the abyss, if not over the abyss and into chaos."

Political Philosophy
Michael Sandel

Freedom of speech is essential to democratic life. We can develop our human capacities more fully if we participate in self-government and deliberate about important public questions. Participating in self-government is character building. When we concern ourselves with public affairs and take responsibility for the fate of the community as a whole, we exercise faculties that would otherwise lie dormant.

Economics presents itself as an autonomous science. Economists often assume that markets don't touch or taint the goods they exchange. But the market mechanism changes the meaning of an activity and crowds out other attitudes and norms. We need to ask whether people making deals are acting voluntarily or are coerced by their circumstances, and whether what they do is degrading. We have to reason together in public about the right way to value goods.

Justice is a virtue of social institutions. Other virtues to do with community, fellow feeling, solidarity, self-government, and the scope and quality of public deliberation may all have a bearing on justice. What counts as a good society embroils us in questions of virtue and the good life.

Brain Bites
Slate

Brain surgery requires at least two frightening qualities in its practitioners: the will to make forcible entry into another person's skull, and the hubris to believe you can fix the problems inside.
— Luke Dittrich

Brain images of twin girls joined at the head reveal a bridge between the thalamus of one girl and the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus joins the neural loops that create consciousness. The sensory input that one girl receives might cross that bridge to the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.
— Susan Dominus

A professor of psychosomatics gave a lecture with two halves. In the first, he showed images of fleas, lice, people scratching, and the like. The second half showed soft down, baby skin, and bathers. Video cameras recorded the audience. People were scratching themselves much more during the first half than during the second.
— Atul Gawande

We are our connectomes. Our unique selves are etched into the wiring of our brains. Connectomes are forever being molded and remolded by life experience. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. Advances in brain science and computer simulations of neural networks may mean a cure for death.
— Evan R. Goldstein

When a criminal stands in court today, the legal system asks whether he is to blame. This is the wrong question to ask. The choices we make arise from our neural circuitry, and we have no meaningful way to tease the two apart. The more we learn, the more complicated blame becomes.
— David Eagleman

Through studies of split-brain patients, neuroscientists regard the healthy brain as two different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. When the primary cable is cut, information presented to one hemisphere goes unnoticed in the other.
— David Wolman

To keep a donor's organs viable, the respirator is left on and the heart keeps beating until the surgeon removes the organs. Brain death is an artificial distinction constructed on an unsound conceptual foundation. Perhaps brain-dead patients aren't really dead at all.
— Gary Greenberg

2013 May 11

Batterers
Paul W. Ragan

Men who use abuse to control a woman are termed batterers. They have been studied for the presence or absence of alcohol or drug abuse, whether or not the violence is intrafamilial or extends outside the family, the presence or absence of criminality, and the presence or absence of personality disorders.

They often grow up in families fraught with strife, conflict, neglect, and violence. The theory is that early life experiences cause developmental arrest of their psychological maturation and personality formation. They are left with deep emotional needs they feel totally inadequate to satisfy. Their self-concept is so impaired and their self-esteem so low that they feel unable to compete in the adult game of attracting and keeping a mate. When their attempts are met by failure, their moral impairment and lack of empathy coupled with unbridled anger and rage drive them to brutal sadism.

Muslims
Lawrence Rosen

Anne Norton denies that Islam and the west are involved in a clash of civilizations. She agrees with Jacques Derrida that Islam is "the other of democracy" because Muslim states could retain their distinctiveness while promoting democratic values.

Norton recognizes that valid differences of orientation exist. But she sees options for addressing the differences presented by a Muslim minority in a western country. One could defer to their distinctiveness. Or the majority could try to nudge "them" in the direction of being more like "us". Or one could try to move "us" closer to "them". She prefers the third option.

Common ground is not always easy to find. But perhaps if we just pretend to be receptive to our Muslim neighbors and no one disrupts our mutual inattention, we can all go about our separate lives, ignorant of our differences. Perhaps we can trust that all troublesome distinctiveness will drop out of the equation. But many will suspect that this is neither the most likely nor even the most desirable outcome.

Muslims appreciate the need for camouflage in the face of suspicion. But living as a chameleon may be harder now that we all notice each other noticing each other. Anonymity is stifling. We may avoid the clash at the cost of a diminished civilization.

Music
Will Self

Alex Ross: "In the classical field it has long been fashionable to fence music off from society, to declare it a self-sufficient language."

Ross assumes a dichotomy between high and low art that leads him into reformulating the position he seems to renounce. The fact of Hitler's undoubted musicality torments Ross. Hitler was indeed a great music lover. He loved Wagner's music. The real shocker is that Alex Ross still believes there can be something morally ennobling about music.

Stalin had narrow but by no means vulgar musical tastes. A frequent attendee at the Bolshoi, he also listened to classical music on the radio, sang folksongs with a fine tenor voice, and audited every single recording made in the Soviet Union, writing judgements on the sleeves. Ross reads Shostakovich's Fourth and Fifth symphonies to refute the idea that music is a non-representational art form. He detects sarcasm and irony in many pieces Shostakovich composed during the early Stalin years.

The problem for classical music in the age of the dictators remains the same one that classical music retains to this day: it remains an art form tainted by association with vertiginous social hierarchies.

Ross offers a fascinating narrative of classical music under the tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin. But developments in compositional theory were irrelevant to what music was saying, or being made to say. Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message."

Brains
Eric Banks

Daniel Dennett says specialists can try talking to others: "To explain their position under these conditions helps them find better ways of making their points than they had ever found before."

Dennett presents intuition pumps to help us think more clearly, or with more insight, about such topics as consciousness, free will, meaning, and intentionality. Intuition pumps condense a complex technical scenario into a vivid story that makes a point. But we should beware of over-inflation. A flawed intuition pump, like Occam's Broom, sweeps inconvenient facts under the rug.

Douglas Hofstadter is best known for his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Together with Emmanuel Sander, he now teases out the paradoxes and contradictions of analogy, which is vastly more complex than we tend to assume. When we try to make sense of an experience, we do so using a quick cognitive shorthand, forging analogies between the latest and past experiences.

The magic of analogical thinking is its odd recursiveness. Analogy as a rhetorical device is an almost endless source of such entanglements. Analogies can be creative, or mere wordplay.

2013 May 10

Say No To UK EU Referendum
Polly Toynbee

Half of all Tory MPs want out of the European Union now. David Cameron says he can win "fundamental reform" in Europe. His claim that it "is in Britain's interest to remain the country that is uniquely well connected to the world" is now the thin blue line between his party and UKIP.

Cameron has deliberately fudged. The UK will get no opt-outs, and any universal reforms must be small enough not to need treaty change. No one wants any referendums until the crisis is over. Austerity leaves rich Germany angry at paying for poor nations, and poor voters outraged at the cuts.

Voters who want out can vote for a party that wants out. Reasons to stay in are clear. US banks and financiers only stay in the City as a gateway to the EU. Japanese companies stay to trade in the EU. Trade with the EU from outside means obeying the rules with no say on them.

Labour is staunch on staying in Europe. Hold the line and hope to win through honesty and conviction. That way lies democratic legitimacy. If Labour fails to change the conversation and make the economy, growth, and jobs the great decider in 2015, it will have failed anyway.

Warbots
Christopher Coker

War and humanity have evolved together from the beginning. But humans are fallible. Drone pilots sit at their consoles for hours analyzing video streams and suffer cognitive overload. Neuroscientists are being called in to help.

The systems will become more autonomous. By 2015, drones will be able to detect nearby aircraft and avoid them. They will soon process their own video streams and dock unaided with tankers for flight refueling. The pilots will be supervising robots.

Legal and moral debates about drones forget the speed of war. The digital world is outpacing human neural processing capabilities. Neurons for empathy and compassion in the prefrontal cortex are bypassed under stress. Moral behavior emerges from slow processes.

The US military plans to program machines with moral heuristics to serve as a conscience. Empathy and compassion will be beyond them, but they will be consistent. The reduction of inhumanity will balance the loss of humanity.

DARPA says it is blending the best of man and machine.

Neurohumanities
Alissa Quart

Neurohumanities (NH) may save the arts. Combining neuroscience with art offers instant credibility.

UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë, a neuroskeptic, sees the trend as a reaction to postmodernism. He argues that NH is a rejection of the critical theory that dominated the American humanities until the Sokal affair in 1996. Physics professor Alan Sokal submitted a spoof paper on science to Social Text, then revealed all to show the editors had no clothes. As critical theory dies, NH and literary Darwinism are growing.

Critical theory made a fetish of haze and ambiguity and what Noë calls "an allergy to anything essentialist". NH offers mastery and is highly reductive. Neuroscience is now the way to explain almost all human behavior.

London professor Semir Zeki, with the Institute of Neuroesthetics in London and UC Berkeley, organized a study in which 10 people were shown 300 paintings while their heads were in a functional MRI machine. They were asked to label the paintings as neutral, beautiful, or ugly. The paintings they thought were beautiful led to increased activity in their frontal cortex, while the ugly paintings led to a similar increase in their motor cortex. Zeki's latest paper: "The neural sources of Salvador Dali's ambiguity"

Literary Darwinism recently scored against feminism. Jonathan Gottschall compared over 1400 folktales from a range of cultures to examine the claim "that European tales reflect and perpetuate the arbitrary gender norms of western patriarchal societies" and found biosocial norms that all cultures perpetuate.

Noë says the NH trend reduces people and culture to things "to be manipulated or made marketable".

AR I know Alva Noë. See my Amazon review of his book Out of Our Heads.

2013 Ascension Day

Japan
David Pilling

Japan's new prime minister Shinzo Abe is ending 15 years of stagnation. Stock market gains have added nearly $1.5 trillion to the market capitalization of Japanese companies. Toyota tripled its net profits last year and sales at large retailers have posted their biggest gains in 20 years. The central bank predicts economic growth of 2.9% for 2013. As to why, two catalysts stand out:

1 The 2011 tsunami was a shock. The Japanese headed off a crisis by cutting energy consumption. Concern about energy caused businesses already full of complaints to talk of a mass exodus.

2 China's economy overtook Japan's in 2010. Beijing is pressing claims to the Japanese-administered Senkaku islands known as Diaoyu in China. Japan's new sense of purpose might be its reply.

Abe responded to the slogan "rich country, strong army" that rallied Japan after 1868. In Washington in February he said: "Japan must stay strong, strong first in its economy, and strong also in its national defense." After years of drift, Japan is reviving.

Israel and Syria
Amos Harel + AR

For decades, Syria was Israel's most feared enemy. But Syria cannot match Israel militarily and has found new ways to circumvent IDF superiority. The regime has focused on defensive weapons that can hinder an Israeli attack through the Golan Heights. And it supports Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.

The strategy persuaded Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Both sides maintained a balance of deterrence. But the balance was wrecked by the Arab Spring. Suddenly, Israel stopped being afraid of Arab strength and began to be worried about Arab weakness. In Syria, revolt became civil war.

A quick end to the Syrian war would be a problem for Israel. A failed state along the border is harder to deter than a police state. If the Syrian opposition wins, it will quickly be dominated by jihadists.The longer the fighting continues, the more the regime is weakened. It looks like win-win.

Israel will act if Syrian weapons go to Hezbollah or fall into the hands of extremist rebels. IDF generals tend to take advantage of tactical opportunities. So far, Syria has not retaliated. Analysts believe the Syrian regime has no room to move. Retaliation would let the IDF destroy the Syrian air force.

Israel should consider the possibility of an Iranian or Lebanese response. Hezbollah is deeply involved in the civil war in Syria. Iranian Revolutionary Guard units are also present. Analysts say Syria's allies are too busy helping Assad fight for his survival and won't waste time on clashes with the IDF.

Moths Hear Bats
Zoologger

Greater wax moths have good hearing. They are also a pest. They grow up in beehives and eat beeswax. Adult moths gather in trees, where males sing high-pitched sunset songs to females.

Their predators are bats. While the male moth's calls range from 90-95 kHz, bats echolocate at over 100 kHz, and some bats can squeak at over 200 kHz.

Researchers tested the hearing of 20 adult greater wax moths by playing sounds and measuring the moths' tympanal membrane vibrations and auditory nerve signals.

Each sound was at 90 dB, less loud than most bat squeaks. All the moths' tympanal membranes vibrated strongly to 300 kHz sounds, and 15 of the 20 also showed strong neural signals.

The moths need to detect bat calls quickly to survive. A sensor with a faster response time will respond to higher frequencies. The moths' tympanal membranes are unusually thin.

2013 May 8

Israel Gambles
Foreign Policy

Israel's recent attacks risk retaliation and further destabilization of its neighborhood. The first attack sought to deny the transfer of arms that could alter the balance of power between Israel and Hezbollah. Iran provides Hezbollah with funding and weaponry. Syria serves as a transit route for Iranian forces and weapons. Israeli strategists are gambling on three things:

1 Syria will not respond. Israel is a whipping boy for Arab regimes seeking to distract attention from their own failures, and Assad is too embattled to risk escalation. The Syrian opposition charges that Assad has failed to protect Syrian soil. If Assad becomes desperate, he may attack Israel.

2 Hezbollah will not retaliate. Since 2006, Israel's border with Lebanon has been quiet. But now Hezbollah forces are fighting beside Assad and have lost popularity in the Arab world. Israel striking at Hezbollah's weapons damages its credibility. They may be tempted to react.

3 The Syrian regime will collapse. For Israel, the only thing worse than Assad's regime in Syria would be chaos in Syria. The country would become an incubator of jihad on Israel's border. Jihadists might use Syria's arsenals against Israel. The border would again be a war zone.

Israel alone can't resolve the chaos and uncertainty in Syria and Lebanon. Washington must act.

Mideast Catastrophe Looms
Fawaz A. Gerges

The Syrian struggle has not only spread into neighboring lands but is now a battlefield for Israel and Iran. The conflict is in danger of escalating into a regional war pitting Iran and Hezbollah against Israel, other regional powers, and the West.

Israeli involvement embarrasses the Syrian armed opposition because it not only puts them on the same side as Israel but also reinforces President Bashar al-Assad's claim that the struggle in Syria is a wider conspiracy spearheaded by Israel and its regional allies and Western powers.

Iran is unlikely to retaliate directly against Israel. Israel and its allies would have the upper hand. But it is likely to deepen its involvement in Syria to support Assad. Only a political solution can prevent a wider catastrophe in the Mideast.

No Referendum Now
David Cameron

From a letter to John Baron, MP, dated April 30:
"I completely understand the serious case you make for legislation. You know, however, that this Government's legislative programme is founded on the Coalition Agreement which did not include legislating in this Parliament for an In-Out referendum. For the Government to be able to bring forward the type of legislation you propose, we would require the agreement of our Coalition partners which, as things stand, is not forthcoming."

Brood II
The Independent

Billions of cicadas will overrun the eastern United States this spring. After 17 years underground, they will crawl out of the earth in search of sex. The 25 mm bugs will make a big noise, up to 94 decibels, as the males sing for mates. After a few weeks, they will die and their offspring will go to ground.

The males will come out first and climb up trees to grow wings and sing. When a female comes close, the male changes his song, does a dance, and mates. Each mated female lays 600 or so eggs on a branch. The offspring fall out of the trees and burrow into the earth, to emerge in 2030.

The mass emergence overwhelms predators. Ordinary cicadas come out every year around the world, but these are red-eyed magicicadas, unique to the US east coast. This year's invasion, Brood II, is one of the bigger ones. Experts estimate there are 30 billion cicadas lurking underground.

2013 May 7

CORAL is due for a new edition, with estimated release date 2014. The Right Reverend and Right Honorable Baron Williams of Oystermouth, a.k.a. Dr. Rowan Williams, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury and now Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, says it's "a lively, provoking and hugely original essay" but feels the need for a more focused conclusion. I see scope to add cameos on medieval theology, imperial China, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, late German Protestantism and the Frankfurt school, existentialism and postmodernism, quantum mysticism and possible worlds, Sloterdijk bubbles, computational mathematics, the rise of Facebook and Twitter, and more besides. I guess the page count will rise to 400, but the main change will be a new summary and conclusion.

Brits Envy Germany
Carsten Volkery + AR

British socialists have long admired the German social market economy with its system of giving workers a say in corporate decision-making, its state-owned savings banks that promote public welfare, and its small and medium enterprises that plan for the long term.

Now the Conservative-Liberal coalition is using at German ideas to get the British economy growing again. It has launched apprenticeships for businesses to train their own employees, a new state-owned business bank to give loans to small and medium enterprises, and credit guarantees for exports.

The rethink began after the 2008 financial crash. The British economy was heavily reliant on banking and has yet to recover, but the German economy rebounded quickly. Manufacturing accounts for 21% of GDP in Germany but only 11% in Britain.

Labour Party leader Ed Miliband likes to talk about responsible capitalism. After learning how the German Sparkassen operate, he wants to set up similar regional banks if he is elected PM. He is also considering Mitbestimmung to add worker representatives to company boards. The British introduced the system in Germany after WW2.

The Enlightenment
Ollie Cussen

New Atheists brought the Enlightenment back to life. They traced all that was worth defending in our world to rationality, science, secularism, and democracy.

In 1784, Immanuel Kant saw the Enlightenment as humanity learning to think for itself, the start of a slow but inexorable triumph over myth and superstition. Some 20 years later, Hegel blamed the Enlightenment for sacrificing spirituality and tradition at the altar of reason and absolute freedom. Historians since then have failed to break the stalemate between Kantians and Hegelians.

Anthony Pagden argues that the Enlightenment was distinctive not for holding the humanities hostage to reason but instead for recognizing our common humanity. Cosmopolitanism arose as a way for humans to live together in harmony instead of killing each other. He imagines that without the Enlightenment, Europe could have been conquered by the Ottomans and converted to Islam. The Enlightenment discovered a timeless truth that had been obscured by religion.

Enlightened cosmopolitanism rejects religion as having any role to play in human understanding and organization. It is a hopeless model for modern global governance.

AR I think it's quite a good one.

2013 May 6

Britain's obsession with "punching above its weight" in the international arena is one cause of its pitiable present condition. Overblown and ill-configured defense forces, continuing post-imperial involvements around the globe, obsession with pomp and ceremony, and a surfeit of absurd institutions from the Knights of the Garter to the Lord Privy Seal, hold Britain back.

The United Kingdom could soon fragment. If Scotland becomes independent and Northern Ireland looks toward Eire, the rump state of Britain will no longer be Great. Perhaps this is an opportunity to revamp the state from top to bottom. Reducing the role of the monarchy, replacing the House of Lords with an elected chamber, and introducing a written constitution would be a start.

The most reasonable destiny for Britain thus reduced is as a member of a Nordic community including the Scandinavian states and others, and perhaps embracing Germany too. But the European Union needs an overhaul. Not before the fiscal showdown with the southern states finds a convincing resolution should the British public relax its Euroskepticism.

Thatcher vs. UKIP
Lord Renwick of Clifton + AR

Margaret Thatcher's critique of the European Union has become commonplace today. Hyper-bureaucracy, lack of accountability, over-regulation, and the stifling of job creation and enterprise should worry all member states. She would say Europe today is failing its citizens.

Today she would make a huge effort to change the EU from within before abandoning it. She would not resist further EZ integration, recognizing that Germany is determined to impose much greater discipline on the other participants.

But she would launch a crusade with Angela Merkel, the Dutch and Swedish prime ministers, and some of the East Europeans to change the direction of EU policy to foster growth and jobs and restore competitiveness. She would do so with such zest that UKIP would be roadkill.

2013 May 5

Happy Easter?
The Atlantic

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's decision not to attend today's Coptic Easter mass was no surprise. It follows a Brotherhood fatwa prohibiting Muslims from wishing Christians a happy Easter, because Muslims deny that Jesus was killed or crucified, whereas wishing Christians a merry Christmas is permissible, because Muslims accept that he was born.

The Easter ruling contrasts with the Brotherhood's otherwise vacuous approach to interpreting sharia. In 2012, Brotherhood leader Farid Ismail said sharia "means peace, security, equality, citizenship, freedom, and giving rights for people despite their religion or ethics or color or sex" but declined to be more specific. Brotherhood local governor Saad al-Husseini: "Everything I'm doing is sharia!"

By keeping its sharia vague, the Brotherhood prevents internal fissures from emerging that could undermine its power. The Brotherhood frames its views in sharia terms only when it seeks to justify theocratic ideas on which its cadres broadly agree, such as opposition to alcohol, bikinis, and Easter.

Kierkegaard
Jeffrey Frank

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was born 200 years ago today. For all his existential exertions, he will forever be associated with the "leap of faith" he made to live with the absurd idea that Jesus was simultaneously divine and yet much like other young men of his time.

Kierkegaard found the subjects he cared most about were hard to discuss. So he found a new way to do so, letting his various pseudonymous "authors" say what a pedagogical doctor of theology could not. Perceptive readers got the idea without being told explicitly what it was.

This technique is familiar today. Political candidates know that telling voters precisely what they stand for is asking for trouble. There are more effective ways to air their views. For Kierkegaard, subjectivity is truth. He became drawn to the mystery of silence.

American Umpire
David Allen

The United States has a complicated relationship with imperialism. It spread the gospel of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness less with gunboats than with missionaries and money men.

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman sees not an American empire but a story of how democratic capitalism and the armed strength of American ideals built a world order more just than any in history. The United States cooperated in building the United Nations and led efforts to create international peace organizations and international law.

Americans enforced the law. They took on this responsibility because their domestic experience taught that an institution sometimes has to step in to keep order. In the early republic, the federal government was seen as an umpire between the states. This idea filtered through the history of the United States at home and abroad.

But the United States cannot be seen as a neutral arbiter. International politics has no umpires, only players strong and charismatic enough to impose their idea of what the rules should look like.

2013 May 4

Sack The Toffs
Daily Mail

The Conservatives must break the impression they are "privileged and out of touch" if they are to stand a chance of winning the next UK general election, says former party leadership contender David Davis: David Cameron should stop surrounding himself with fellow Old Etonians and show he understands the concerns of ordinary people.

UKIP kippt UK
Andrew Grice

The UK Independence Party emerged as a serious nationwide threat to Britain's three main parties after making unexpectedly big gains in local elections. BBC projected share of the national vote: Labour 29%, Conservatives 25%, UKIP 23%, Liberal Democrats 14%, others 9%.

UKIP supports withdrawal from the European Union. It now expects more than 100 councillors across the country. UKIP leader Nigel Farage: "This is a real sea-change in British politics. The people who vote for us are rejecting the establishment and quite right too. I don't think these votes are going away quickly."

Conservative MP John Baron urged David Cameron to table a bill in the next parliamentary session for an in/out referendum on Europe after the 2015 general election.

UKIP Clowns
The Guardian

Conservative MP Kenneth Clarke said UKIP has "fruitcakes, loonies, waifs, and strays" in its ranks and among its supporters. He added: "The political class are regarded as having got us into a mess. It's very tempting to go for a collection of clowns or indignant, angry people who promise that somehow they'll allow you to take revenge against the people who caused it."

UKIP leader Nigel Farage admitted his party was overstretched in vetting its 1,700 candidates.

UK Independence Party: "The European Union seemed a good idea in the 1970s but it's gone very, very wrong. Brussels has become a bureaucratic monster, strangling us all in red tape and massive waste. It's not just Britain that wants out of the EU. Many other Europeans would vote to leave, if given the chance."

Suicides
New York Times

Suicide rates among middle-aged Americans have risen sharply. Baby boomers facing years of economic worry and with easy access to prescription painkillers may be vulnerable.

More Americans now die of suicide than in car accidents. In 2010 there were 33,687 road traffic deaths and 38,364 suicides. From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among people aged 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30%. Most suicides are men, by a ratio of over 3 to 1. Rates for men in their 50s jumped by nearly 50%.

Rutgers University sociologist Julie Phillips: "The boomers had great expectations for what their life might look like, but I think perhaps it hasn't panned out that way."

Violence
Adrian Raine

A low resting heart rate is a characteristic of aggressive and violent behavior and reflects a lack of fear. Mothers who smoke or drink during pregnancy are 2-3 times more likely to give birth to a child who will grow up to be violent. Lead exposure early in life damages the brain and increases the likelihood of adult crime. Men with cavum septum pellucidum are more likely to be psychopathic and criminal. The amygdala is shrunken by 18% in adult psychopaths and functions more poorly in psychopaths during moral decision making. Children lacking fear of punishment were more likely to be convicted 20 years later.

Bombs
André Glucksmann

A pitiless new day is dawning. A generation that tamed the threat of nuclear war now faces the human bomb. The revelation of 9/11 is that human bombs claim the power to strike anywhere, anyhow, any time. A traditional war, however savage, comes to an end. Terrorist war knows no cease-fire. For the show of force it substitutes the show of hatred. Nourished by its own atrocities, it is inextinguishable. A contagion of hatred moves like a plague. Soon we may view the last century with nostalgia, despite Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Terrorists strive to mix these two ingredients into new cocktails of horror.

JP  An Israeli official says air strike targeted Syrian weapons shipment headed to guerrillas in Lebanon; Syrian chemical weapons facility not targeted.

Intel
FT

New Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, 52, joined Intel in 1982 as an engineer and managed a "fab" that fabricates processor chips. Pundits speculate that Intel will focus on this side of its business. Intel makes 80% of all CPUs sold for PCs, but that market slumped 14% in Q1 as consumers turned to tablets and smartphones. Krzanich says Intel is well placed to expand into mobile markets.





Porn Studs
The Guardian

The journal Porn Studies debuts next spring. A call for papers solicits submissions for "the first dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to critically explore those cultural products and services designated as pornographic". The journal is open to work from sociologists, criminologists, technologists, and experts in cultural, media, and gender studies.

DD
Deanna Durbin
1921—2013

Her first screen kiss in 1939
made global headlines

NYT
Dan Dennett has been in troubled waters with his yacht Xanthippe: "But I do know what I'm doing!"

2013 May 3

Less Is More
Nils Klawitter + AR

Berlin social psychologist Harald Welzer points out that if everyone on Earth used the resources that Westerners do, we would need three planets. He accuses economists of seeing the world in terms of maximizing consumption. He wants to phase out the "totalitarian consumerism" that inflames desires people never knew they had.

British economist Tim Jackson is an expert on sustainable development and a professor at the University of Surrey. He calls capitalism a "gluttony machine" that asks us "to spend money we don't have on things that we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about".

Economists have largely disregarded the environmental consequences of growth. Their benchmark of prosperity is gross domestic product. GDP does not factor in the overexploitation of resources, the destruction of biological diversity, air pollution, noise, soil degradation, or poisoned groundwater.

A wealth model built on chronic growth is no longer everyone's goal. But can we have prosperity without growth and growth without environmental damage? How can a shrinking economy work? A German parliamentary commission spent two years on these questions. It has now presented its report.

Oldenburg economist Niko Paech advocates a shrinking economy and preaches a new frugality. He attacks our "autistic faith in progress" and wants less material, less energy, less waste, and less pollution. The parliamentary commission finds growth with declining resource consumption nowhere at present.

Heidelberg economist Hans Diefenbacher has developed a national prosperity index that treats the negative impacts of economic activity as a reduction in welfare. The parliamentary commission used the index in a new way of measuring growth with an indicator called W3 based not only on wealth but also on social indicators.

David Bowie
Ian Buruma

Rock music involves a lot of posing. No one did it better than David Bowie. Born in 1947 in London and raised in a dreary suburb, young David was roused by American rock and roll. His pop career took off when Lindsay Kemp taught him to dance and introduced him to Kabuki. Bowie became a great poseur.

David and his wife Angela had a polymorphous perverse marriage. Androgyny was central to Bowie's freakish image in two movies. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) stars Bowie as a space alien. Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (1983) casts him as an army officer in a Japanese POW camp during WW2.

British rock in the 1970s became very camp. Bowie created his most famous role, Ziggy Stardust, as a kind of alter ego. Ziggy was a rock-n-roll messiah from outer space who is torn apart by his fans. Bowie moved on and started quoting Nietzsche on the death of God. But he never lost his sense of humor.

Bowie moved to Berlin and created some of his best music. His voice deepened and the lyrics darkened. By 2004, it looked as if it was over. He was married to Iman and they lived in New York. Then he made another album, The Next Day, announced on his 66th birthday. It is a highly professional album.

Translating Tolstoy
Kevin Mahnken

The translations of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (known as PV) span the golden age of Russian literature. It is easier to list the canonical prose authors they have neglected (Turgenev and Nabokov) than all of those they have translated. From the war against Napoleon to the heyday of Communism, the PV project is unique.

The husband and wife team works in two steps. Larissa makes a literal English rendition of the original, and Richard shapes the words into literary English without anachronisms. Now at last they have reached the end of Lev Tolstoy's major writings.

A hundred years ago, Constance Garnett was the main Russian interpreter of her generation. Her translations of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were landmarks. But Vladimir Nabokov loathed her treatment of Tolstoy. He said the mortal sin of the translator was to sacrifice "absolute accuracy" for readability: "The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase."

Russian writers thought Garnett churned out her translations with a meat grinder. All that came out was the insipid narrative voice of Constance Garnett. Nabokov: "The person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language has only one duty to perform, and this is to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text."

Larissa: "We want to recreate Tolstoy in English. We want to bring the English reader to Tolstoy, not Tolstoy to the English reader."

Richard cites the FitzGerald translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Robert Graves tried to correct its distortions but made it dull: "And then you go back to FitzGerald and it sings. It sings the wrong song, but it sings. These are some of the ironies of translation."

AR I imbibed Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky via Garnett. Now I must start again with PV.

2013 May 2

Simplify your life to get a fresh feeling back into your day. I trashed more old papers and smashed a few old crocks today to clear up the clutter. The outlook is improving.

Live Long And Prosper
Douglas Heaven

A mechanism that controls aging has been identified in the hypothalamus. Researchers have used it to change the lifespan of mice.

The hypothalamus is the interface between the brain and the rest of the body, and is involved in controlling our automatic responses, hormone levels, sleep-wake cycles, immunity, and reproduction.

Dongsheng Cai at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and his colleagues noticed that aging mice produce increasing levels of nuclear factor kB (NF-kB), a protein complex that plays a big role in regulating immune responses. NF-kB is barely active in the hypothalamus of young mice but becomes very active in old mice.

The team tested three groups of mice: group 1 was given gene therapy that inhibits NF-kB, group 2 had gene therapy to activate NF-kB, and group 3 was left to age naturally. Group 3 lived between 600 and 1000 days, group 2 all died within 900 days, and group 1 lived for up to 1100 days.

The mice that lived longest also remained mentally and physically fit for longer. Post-mortem exams showed they had many chemical and physical qualities of younger mice.

NF-kB reduces the level of the gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) produced by the hypothalamus. GnRH levels regulate egg production and fertility. The team gave another group of mice daily injections of GnRH for several weeks. These mice lived longer too, by similar lengths of time.

GnRH injections also resulted in new neurons in the brain. When injected into the hypothalamus, GnRH reversed widespread aging decline in other brain regions too. The injections even delayed aging in the mice in NF-kB group 2 that would otherwise have aged quickly. No mice showed serious side effects.

We could see drugs that slow aging in the next 20 years.

AR Too late for me then.

Social Psychology
Gary Marcus

Is social psychology in crisis? Diederik Stapel committed fraud in at least 54 scientific papers. Ap Dijksterhuis found that thinking about a professor before taking an exam improves your performance, while thinking about a soccer ruffian makes you do worse, but his finding may be weak or wrong.

Many key results of social psychology have been endlessly replicated, like the Milgram effect, where subjects apparently administered electrical shocks strong enough to injure others, simply because they'd been asked to do it. People are still extending that result. In one recent study, experimenters found that people would shock robots under similar circumstances.

Something positive has emerged. For years, it was difficult to publish a direct replication, or a failure to replicate an experiment, in a good journal. Now, the scientific culture has changed. Leading researchers in psychology have announced major efforts to replicate previous work, and to change the incentives so that scientists can do the right thing without feeling they are wasting time.

Perspectives in Psychological Science is accepting submissions for a new section of each issue devoted to replicability. Social Psychology is planning a special issue on replications of key results in social psychology. Other journals in neuroscience and medicine are making similar efforts.

2013 Mayday

AR The Roman calendar, with its year count going back to 1 CE, is a great way to remind us that time, the dimension of human experience, goes beyond our personal experience. That the old Romans saw fit to christen the calendar with a human sacrifice was no more than a reflection of the times. They could hardly have imagined how much bad metaphysics that gesture would lead to.

Once upon a time, I packed all my essential papers into a big silver case I called the ark of the covenant. I then moved to Germany, where I condensed the stuff in the ark and enriched it with new stuff. The process led to my production of this year's Coral bomb. Today I sealed a new condensate of essential stuff in a set of eight boxes I call the core archive. The boxes are surfaced in crimson linen, like quality books, and contain a critical mass of texts and images. Together they form a cuboid, with a volume of rather less than a fifth of a cubic meter, holding the accumulated wealth of my first sixty years. If fortune smiles, I shall let the Coral bomb trigger data fusion in the core archive and live happily ever after.

Iraq
Arwa Damon, CNN

Sectarianism has returned with a vengeance in Iraq. Observers fear that tensions between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq could escalate into war. Tensions are higher now than they have been for years. The Sunni minority is demonstrating more actively against the predominantly Shia government.

The conflict in Syria adds fuel to the fire. Iraq and Syria are battlefields for a power struggle between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. The Iraqi security forces are seen as protecting Shias and targeting Sunnis. The government was built on sectarian lines and has failed to forge a national identity.

AR A shooting war of Gulf states versus Iran would not only be as hideous as the Iran-Iraq war during the Reagan years but also impact us all via the price of oil.

Baltic Recovery
Martin Wolf + AR

Austerians say a financial crisis is a mark of moral turpitude, to be redeemed only by suffering. Latvia was hit by the crisis, recovered, and is now blooming. Is it?
 

 
When financial apocalypse hit, the Balts pegged their currencies and embraced austerity. A rescue package was negotiated for Latvia in 2008, with support from the European Union, the IMF, the Nordic countries, and others.

Latvia achieved a public surplus of 0.8% in 2012. But its GDP shrank by 25% from 2007 Q4 to the trough and then grew by only 16% to 2012 Q4, for a net shrinkage of 12% over 5 years. The cumulative 5-year loss of output was 43% for Estonia, 77% for Latvia, 44% for Lithuania. The Latvian population shrank by 7.6% in the 5 years to the end of 2012 and the unemployment rate was still 14%.

Latvia suffered one of the biggest depressions in history. It is recovering. But the Balts had four huge advantages:
1 Latvian labor costs per hour, in 2012, were a quarter of the EZ average.
2 The Baltic economies are small and open. External adjustment is a more potent alternative to
    domestic stimulus than in larger economies.
3 Foreign-owned banks play a central role in the Baltic economies.
4 The Balts prefer an EU destiny to Russian domination. Other EU countries are less committed.

Latvia may be a model for tiny countries, but it is not one for Europe.

Daniel Dennett
Jennifer Schuessler

Daniel Dennett may be America's greatest living philosopher. At 71, he is the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has presented himself for decades among his philosophical colleagues as a ruthless slayer of metaphysical fancy. He is famous in public for his blunt-talking atheist activism: "There's simply no polite way to tell people they've dedicated their lives to an illusion."

Dennett studied at Harvard with W. V. O. Quine and at Oxford with Gilbert Ryle. He says the mind is a collection of computerlike information processes, the self is a center of narrative gravity, and the elusive quality of subjective conscious experience is an illusion. If he had to do it all over again, he says, he'd still rather tackle free will and consciousness as a philosopher than as a scientist. That way, he says, he can think about all the cool theories and lab experiments without ever having "to do the dishes".

AR A fine philosopher in the gadfly tradition of Socrates.

The Art of Bravery
Salman Rushdie

If you know where to look, it is easy to find forbidden work online. But artists are in increasing danger, and not just artists. Rising numbers of journalists are being killed in pursuit of their work.

Violent and authoritarian regimes don't like the glare of negative publicity. If you can make them sufficiently uncomfortable, they frequently respond by setting people free or ceasing arrests.

Authoritarian rulers have an inflated sense of themselves and don't like being deflated. It is all the more important to continue to deflate them. Courageous people poke fun from inside these societies.

The desire for story is very deep in human beings. We are the only creature in the world that tells stories. Sometimes those are true stories and sometimes those are made up stories. The larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, are part of the way in which we conduct the discourse of our lives.

Free expression is the right from which all other rights are derived. If you can't articulate ideas and if you can't articulate critiques of other peoples' ideas, then you're powerless. Authoritarian regimes increase their power by preventing people from expressing themselves.

AR Is it just me, or is SR getting rather self-important?

King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and his Queen Maxima

AR Is there any end to the human appetite for such daft old pomp?

National
L'Hydroptère, a wind-powered hydrofoil racing yacht designed by Alain Thébault, can sail at 100 km/h

ITER









MT
A new biography

AP
Dalia Grybauskaite
President of Lithuania

THU
Stephen Schwarzman





Wikimedia
Grand Auditorium,
Tsinghua University

THU in Top Universities










Bank of England
New UK £5 note

Departing Bank of England Governor Sir Mervyn King: "Sir Winston Churchill was a truly great British leader, orator, and writer. Above that, he remains a hero of the entire free world. His energy, courage, eloquence, wit, and public service are an inspiration to us all."

 New Statesman

When Martin Amis worked on the NS as literary editor in the late 1970s, he was baffled by the political commitment of Christopher Hitchens and James Fenton.




The Ring

Richard Wagner thought the status of art had reached a pinnacle in ancient Greece but collapsed into vulgarity and silliness in his day. The artist of the future would fuse the genius of Beethoven and Shakespeare into the new form of musical drama.

World Thinkers 2013
Prospect

1
Richard Dawkins
2
Ashraf Ghani
3
Steven Pinker
4
Ali Allawi
5
Paul Krugman
6
Slavoj Žižek
7
Amartya Sen
8
Peter Higgs
9
Mohamed ElBaradei
10
Daniel Kahneman

Trident
Nuclear Doom
On Tap

England
"God for Harry, England,
and Saint George!"
Henry V



Getty
Bundesverteidigungsminister
Thomas de Maizière
greets troops in Mali

US Nukes

The Obama administration will spend $10 billion on upgrading nuclear bombs stored in Europe. Nearly 200 B61 gravity bombs stockpiled for use against the Soviet Union will get new tail kits to turn them into guided weapons for delivery by stealthy F-35 fighter-bombers. The Life Extension Program will produce B61 Mk12 bombs with 50 kiloton tactical yield. East European states welcome the bombs to deter Russia.

Eco Motors
VW engineer Rolf Hofbauer
invented the 2-stroke OPOC (opposed piston, opposed
cylinder) motor years ago.
Now Eco Motors founder Peter Hofbauer and others
are investing $200 million
to build them in China.

DF-21D
Red China has deployed DF-21D
anti-ship ballistic missiles that can take out US aircraft carriers near Taiwan. This will counter US Navy assets that Taiwan relies on in case of a crisis.

RED CHINA
Military Might



The Real Karl Marx

2013 April 30

Graphene
Tomas Palacios

Graphene is a one-atom thick layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Electrical currents move faster in graphene than in any other known material. Graphene is also the best thermal conductor we have. It is much lighter and stronger than steel. The "2D" layers are transparent and flexible.

The first application for graphene is probably as a replacement for indium selenide in solar cells. After that, we may see products such as cell phones integrated into the likes of the clothes and pieces of paper. Another direction is transparent displays. We could embed electronic displays almost everywhere.

We are working on how best to manufacture graphene. Several techniques look promising. Samsung recently made a single layer of graphene 75 cm in diameter. We hope to make graphene in the same way we print newspapers, in a roll to roll process. This will transform the economics of the industry.

Memory Implants
Jon Cohen

Theodore Berger, at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, has designed silicon chips that work like memory neurons. He wants to restore the ability to create long-term memories in people whose brains have suffered damage by implanting the chips in their brains.

The hippocampus makes short-term memories into long-term memories. Berger has developed equations that describe how electrical signals move through the neurons of the hippocampus to form a long-term memory, and he has shown that his equations match reality.

Berger defines memory as a series of electrical pulses over time that are generated by a number of neurons. You can put an electrode in and record something that matches this definition of a memory. You can find the set of neurons that make up this memory.

In graduate school at Harvard, Berger's mentor was Richard Thompson, who studied learning-induced changes in the brain. Thompson used a tone and a puff of air to condition rabbits to blink their eyes and aimed to deduce where the new memory was stored.

Thompson and Berger published the results in 1976. They inserted electrodes into rabbit hippocampus to monitor single neurons. They recorded the electrical spikes in the as rabbits developed a memory. The spikes formed patterns that revealed the code used to form a memory.

In the early 1990s, Berger and colleagues made computer chips that mimic the signal processing in the hippocampus. They input random pulses into the hippocampus, recorded the signals at various points to see how they were transformed, derived equations for the transformations, and implemented those equations in computer chips. Then they put electrodes into a brain slice, let their chip perform the transforms, and sent the output via other electrodes back to the brain slice.

Then they trained rats to push one of two levers to get a treat and recorded hippocampus traces. They modeled the signal transforms as the rats laid down memories as well as the code for the memory, and checked that their device could generate the memory code from the recorded input. When the rats were given a drug that blocked the ability to lay down memories, they forgot which lever gave the treat. The researchers pulsed the rat brains with the code and they again chose the right lever.

Last year, the scientists published primate experiments involving prefrontal cortex, which retrieves long-term memories created by the hippocampus. They put electrodes in monkey brains to capture the code in prefrontal cortex that the monkeys used to remember an image. Then they drugged the monkeys to impair that part of the brain. With implanted electrodes sending the correct code to prefrontal cortex, the monkeys succeeded at the image task.

Berger and his colleagues now plan human studies.

Russia vs. Japan
Financial Times

Four islands north of Japan, known in Russia as the Kuril Islands and in Japan as the Northern Territories, were occupied by the USSR at the end of WW2. Japan has made their return a condition for signing a WW2 peace treaty with Russia.

Russian president Vladimir Putin and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe met in Moscow and agreed to restart negotiations intended to resolve the dispute.

AR My 1996 novel LIFEBALL, set in 2013, used this issue as a plot driver.

2013 April 29

Creativity
Katy Cowan

During my spare time, I run a popular blog. It started out small and grew organically. By 2012, my blog wasn't just a hobby anymore, but a monster of my own making. I'd lost the passion.

You might not realize it until that moment of clarity when the light bulb flashes in your head. I didn't want to waste all those years of hard work. I had to change it into something I was happy with.

I went back to basics. I looked to my audience and considered what they want. I got rid of anything they might find irrelevant and boring, and instead brought in new stuff I enjoy.

It's probably the best thing I ever did. I've got my passion back and I'm enjoying it again. Change is essential for any creative project. Listen to your gut feelings.

EZ Tax Shenanigans
Financial Times

The Netherlands and Luxembourg had booked foreign direct investment of $5.8 trillion by the end of 2012 — more than the US, UK, and Germany combined. The Netherlands attracted FDI of $3.5 trillion, of which $573 billion ended up in the real Dutch economy. Luxembourg booked $2.28 trillion in FDI but $122 billion entered the real economy. The "unreal" economy covers the finance and holding companies that help big businesses avoid tax.

OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría said business cannot be blamed for using the rules that policy makers have set up: "Tax planning strategies that exploit loopholes are mostly legal" yet "constitute a major risk to tax revenues, tax sovereignty, and tax fairness".

AR This is shameless abuse of weaknesses in EZ policy coordination. No wonder Chancellor Merkel wants standardization of EZ fiscal and monetary policy. The present shambles amounts to massive and cynical fraud against every honest EZ taxpayer.

Syrian Islamists
New York Times

In the Syrian city of Aleppo, rebels aligned with Al Qaeda control the power plant, run the bakeries, and head a court that applies Islamic law. Elsewhere, they have seized government oil fields, put employees back to work, and now profit from the oil. Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with new courts.

This is the landscape President Obama confronts as he considers how to respond to growing evidence that Syrian officials have crossed his red line.

The Islamist character of the opposition reflects the failure of mainstream rebel groups to secure regular arms supplies. The rebel movement includes Qaeda-aligned jihadis seeking to establish an Islamic emirate, political Islamists inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, and others who want Sharia law.

Among the extreme groups is the Al Nusra Front, which cooperated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and claims responsibility for a number of suicide bombings. The group has set up camp in a former children's hospital in Aleppo and helped establish a Sharia commission in the eye hospital next door to govern the city's rebel-held neighborhoods. The commission runs a police force and a Sharia court.

The United States has designated Nusra a terrorist organization. As for the red line, the Obama administration says it needs more conclusive information before it acts.

AR President Assad is ineffectual. The rebellion is a tragedy.

2013 April 28

Bionic Superhumans
Ramez Naam

We're in the midst of a bionic revolution. The age when prostheses were largely inert pieces of wood, metal, and plastic is passing. Advances in microprocessors, interfaces with the human nervous system, and in battery technology are turning replacement limbs into active parts of the body.

These new prostheses will enhance human abilities. They will give us new powers and augment those we have. While present prostheses are still primitive, we can already see the trend when a monkey moves a robotic arm on the other side of the planet just by thinking about it.

We can now enhance brain function. The hippocampus helps make memories. If it's damaged, people have difficulty forming long-term memories. Researchers in 2011 created a chip that when implanted in brain-damaged rats could not only repair memory but also improve their ability to learn new things.

A 2012 study demonstrated that brain chips can boost intelligence in monkeys. Scientists implanted the chips in a set of monkeys and trained the monkeys to play a picture game. When the implant was activated, it raised their scores by an average of 10%. The implant made them smarter.

Technologies for boosting memory and intelligence are in very early stages, in animal studies only, and decades away from wide use. But the technology will sneak up on us, starting with people with disabilities, the injured, and the ill. Soon we'll be doing more and making us superhuman.

Aquatic Apes
The Observer

Perhaps humans lost their fur, started to walk upright, and developed big brains because they took to living by the water's edge. We have subcutaneous fat and a descended larynx, features common among aquatic animals but not other apes. The aquatic ape theory is backed by a growing group of scientists.

The theory was first proposed in 1960 by Alister Hardy, who believed apes learned to live on river banks and beaches. To keep their heads above water, they evolved an upright stance, freeing their hands to make tools for fishing. Then they lost their body hair and grew fat to keep warm in the water.

Peter Rhys Evans: "Humans have particularly large sinuses, spaces in the skull between our cheeks, noses and foreheads. But why do we have empty spaces in our heads? It makes no sense until we consider the evolutionary perspective. Then it becomes clear: our sinuses acted as buoyancy aids that helped keep our heads above water."

Michael Crawford: "DHA is an omega-3 fatty acid that is found in large amounts in seafood. It boosts brain growth in mammals. That is why a dolphin has a much bigger brain than a zebra, though they have roughly the same body sizes. The dolphin has a diet rich in DHA. Without a high DHA diet from seafood we could not have developed our big brains."

Forty years ago, Elaine Morgan wrote a popular account of the theory, The Descent of Women, which became a bestseller.

2013 April 27

Lithuanian Austerity
Dalia Grybauskaite

Lithuania is a small country. Our business community trades mostly with the eurozone, so we want to be part of the currency union. Our currency has been pegged to the euro since 2002, and a quarter of our national budget comes from the European Union. We understand the value of solidarity.

After 2009, the Baltic states had to implement very radical austerity measures. In Lithuania, we consolidated 12% of GDP in 2 years. We cut public salaries by 20% and pensions by 10%. Our adjustment was a lot deeper than what we see now in southern Europe. And we saw growth return after 2 years.

As for the crisis in Europe, the bottom line is that debt levels have to come down. The German people are largely responsible for paying for the bailouts. I cannot imagine a head of government whose country is paying for something not asking for certain conditions. It is legitimate that Berlin leads the way.

Chancellor Angela Merkel knows exactly how much every policy move costs for Germany. She is interested in the facts and tries to find a consensus. Because Germany pays for the bailouts and sets the conditions, she becomes a target. But if it weren't for Germany, the indebted countries would be bankrupt.

Why Priests?
Irish Times

Garry Wills asks how the priesthood become so central to the Roman Catholic Church. The early Christian community was an egalitarian movement without priests. Then Catholic priests used concepts provided by Thomas Aquinas to claim they transformed bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation sought to impose a literal interpretation on a symbolic idea. Wills wants to restore the Eucharist to its original meaning as a thanksgiving meal. This opens the way to abolishing the priesthood entirely.

Schwarzman Scholars
AR

American billionaire philanthropist Stephen A. Schwarzman, founder and chairman of the private equity firm Blackstone, has launched a scholarship program to send 200 graduates a year to study in China.

Schwarzman Scholars will fund scholarships for students from overseas to attend classes at Tsinghua University, Beijing. The endowment will fund the studies of 10 000 students over 50 years, 45% from the United States, 20% from China, and the rest from other parts of Asia, Europe, and Latin America. Each year, 200 students will take a one-year master's program at Tsinghua in public policy, economics and business, and international relations or engineering, starting in 2016.

The $300 million program will be jointly governed by the Schwarzman Education Foundation and Tsinghua University on matters including curriculum and faculty, and will enjoy full academic freedom, with no topic off limits in the classrooms. The students will take classes in English at Schwarzman College, which will be a new building on the Tsinghua campus.

The Schwarzman Scholars program aims to rival the Rhodes Scholarship program, which for over a hundred years has enabled foreign students to study at the University of Oxford, UK. A generation from now, the president of the United States will have been on a Schwarzman to Tsinghua, instead of a Rhodes to Oxford, as Bill Clinton did a generation ago.

Schwarzman is donating $100 million of his own $6.5 billion fortune to the fund. A further $100 million comes from private donors, including BP, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Boeing, GE, JPMorgan Chase, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Caterpillar, Credit Suisse, and Deloitte. Schwarzman is hoping to raise the remaining $100 million by the end of this year.

The program's advisory board includes Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, Brian Mulroney, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Kevin Rudd, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Yo-Yo Ma.

Tsinghua was founded in 1911, when the United States used Chinese government money to establish a school to prepare students sent to study in America. The university has graduated many Chinese leaders, including current President Xi Jinping and former President Hu Jintao.

Schwarzman: "For future geopolitical stability and global prosperity, we need to build a culture of greater trust and understanding between China, America and the rest of the world ... A win-win relationship of mutual respect between the West and China is vital, benefiting Asia and the rest of the world, and enhancing economic ties that could lead to a new era of mutual prosperity ... The board shares my belief that fostering connections between Chinese students, American students, and students from around the world is a critical aspect of ensuring geopolitical stability now, and into the future."

With input from BBC News, The Economist, Huff Post Business

The Rise of Big Data
AR + Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger

Fact 1 Big data: Today our world is flooded with well over a zettabyte of digital information.

Fact 2 Datafication: We can "datafy" many aspects of the world that we never could before.

Fact 3 Cheap hardware and powerful software enable us to use data in new ways:
   — We can collect and use all the data rather than trying to extract random samples.
   — We can shed our preference for cleaned and curated facts and accept dirty data.
   — We can give up our quest for the real causes and make do with correlations.

Datafication is not the same as digitization, which takes analog content and reduces it to lots of bits. Google Glass datafies the gaze and Twitter datafies stray thoughts. Once we datafy things, we can transform their purpose and enhance their value.

Big data will change how governments work. It will help them generate economic growth, provide public services, and fight wars. Open data initiatives will give public access to vast amounts of previously hidden government data. Antitrust laws are hard to apply to big data, but governments will need to protect personal privacy against companies like Amazon or Facebook.

Government with big data could become Big Brother. Big data exacerbates the asymmetry of power between the state and the people. It even allows authorities to track potential wrongdoers before they do wrong. Predictive systems may soon be able to drill down to individuals. Prevention is better than punishment, but it overrides free will. Big data will rock our world.

2013 April 26

The European Dream
AR + Simon Jenkins

The European Union has lost the support of two thirds of its citizens. Perhaps this is blowback from the politics of austerity, but anti-federalism was growing across Europe even before the credit crunch. The European dream is badly in need of a reality check.

A united Europe was the dream of bad men for many centuries. Today it cloaks the meddling and fraud of the EU. The idea that such an empire can wield power with the euro and still win the consent of European people is absurd. Democratic deficits are unsustainable.

The great achievement of modern Europe is national democracy. There is no way the EU can supplant it through the present EU parliament, which has no ministerial responsibility, no governing party discipline, and no identifiable political culture. It is a Potemkin parliament.

The introduction of the euro has forced a stark choice between more Europe and less Europe. But even after the EU, the nation states of Europe must discipline their dealings with each other, or they will lapse back into trade controls and mutual hostility.

Euroskeptics need a new vision of Europe. Closer European union started as an answer first to war and then to communism. So far so good. But then federalists pretended that a single currency could paper over economic differences. We need more respect for diversity.

The New Digital Age
Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

Connectivity encourages and enables altruistic behavior. The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity. Most of the world’s population will soon enjoy open online communications and access to information.

We will soon live in a world where repressive states will have a dangerous advantage in targeting their citizens. People living in such places will have to fight harder for their rights. But they will have at their disposal tools and software designed to help safeguard citizens living under digital repression.

For every negative, there will be a counter-response that has the potential to be a substantial positive. People who try to perpetuate myths about religion, culture, ethnicity, or anything else will struggle to keep their narratives afloat amid a sea of newly informed listeners.

2013 April 25

Less Trust In European Union
The Guardian

Public confidence in the European Union has fallen to historic lows in the six biggest EU countries.
Percentage of nationals who said they tended not to trust the EU:
 

 
The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) analyzed Eurobarometer polling data for Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain, and Poland: In 2007, trust prevailed over mistrust in all the countries except the UK, but by 2012 mistrust prevailed over trust by big margins in all but Poland.

ECFR Madrid office head José Ignacio Torreblanca: "The damage is so deep that it does not matter whether you come from a creditor, debtor country, euro would-be member or the UK: everybody is worse off. Citizens now think that their national democracy is being subverted by the way the euro crisis is conducted."

European Commission president José Manuel Barroso: "At a time when so many Europeans are faced with unemployment, uncertainty and growing inequality, a sort of European fatigue has set in, coupled with a lack of understanding. Who does what, who decides what, who controls whom and what? And where are we heading to?"

German chancellor Angela Merkel: "We still haven't found the answer to the question of whether we're actually now prepared to unite on common economic parameters inside the single currency area. If we want to have a common currency, a common Europe, we have to be ready to give up our hard-won habits ... That means we have to be prepared to accept that in the end Europe has the final word in certain things."

Polish PM Donald Tusk: "We can't escape this dilemma: how do you get a new model of sovereignty so that limited national sovereignty in the EU is not dominated by the biggest countries like Germany, for example."

AR Europe needs a new democratic revolution to sweep away the fat cats in Brussels and Strasbourg. I volunteer to draft the manifesto — can I get an EU grant to sponsor me?

2013 April 24

Iran Nears Red Line
Jerusalem Post

Former Israeli military intelligence head Amos Yadlin: "By the summer, Iran will be a month or two away from a decision about the bomb ... we are on a course of collision towards the end of the year."

Yadlin stressed that without a drastic change in the sanctions placed on the Islamic Republic, Iran would continue buying time and expanding its nuclear program. He added that of American military credibility is needed for negotiations. "This credibility will be achieved if the US aims a precise strike to stop the Iranian nuclear program and show that it can deal with the escalation that would follow this strike."

Iran has kept its stockpile of uranium enriched to 20% below 250 kg, the amount needed, if further processed, to make one nuclear bomb. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu set the 250 kg mark as the "red line" for a military strike in a UN speech last year. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayayollah Ali Khamenei has reportedly decided to rein in the country's nuclear progress in order to avoid crossing the red line.

AR Grasp the nettle: Humiliate the Islamic Republic, give the Iranian people a chance to break free of the mullahs, contain the blowback from Islamists worldwide, and declare victory in time for President Obama to cut a new deal with Gulf Arabs to cooperate with Israel in rebuilding the Mideast. But I don't see Obama doing it without a big jolt from Tehran.

2013 April 23

Barroso, Europe, Austerity
Financial Times

European Commission president José Manuel Barroso said that while he still believed in the need for sweeping economic reforms and drastic cuts in budget deficits, political and social acceptance of such policies was now at risk: "While this policy is fundamentally right, I think it has reached its limits in many aspects. A policy to be successful not only has to be properly designed, it has to have the minimum of political and social support."

AR My next austerity step is to stop eating to cut costs.

UK vs. EU
Thomas de Maizière

If the UK were to leave the EU, it would be a great disappointment to us in Germany. It would weaken NATO and weaken the British influence within NATO. From a military point of view, the disadvantages for Britain would be bigger than the advantages.

We in Germany would lose a strong partner for transatlantic cooperation with America and a pragmatic British approach to security issues. For the last five years, the German defense budget has been quite stable. In the future too, it will remain stable. This is nearly unique in Europe. Of the bigger countries, only Poland is in a similar position. I see reductions in Britain and France.

In the euro crisis, some countries call for German leadership. They criticize us when we say leadership means we Europeans shouldn't spend so much raising debts, and they say this is not good leadership. But when the leader only fulfills the wishes of the others, that is not leadership.

Trident

Liberal Democrat former armed forces minister Nick Harvey says Britain cannot afford a new Trident fleet. Lib Dems were infuriated by the PM's recent claim that the UK needed to retain a "continuous at-sea" deterrence to protect the country from rogue states such as North Korea. Harvey calls Trident as a "fantastically expensive insurance policy" that no longer makes sense: "Trident is, quite simply, a burden that distorts the defense budget."

AR Merge the British and French nuclear deterrents and let Europe pay — more.

America The Skittish
Stephen M. Walt

I am troubled about our collective inability to keep dangers in perspective and to respond to them sensibly. The speed with which the Tsarnaev brothers were identified was remarkable, but public officials shut down the entire city of Boston and several surrounding suburbs for most of the day, at an estimated cost of roughly $300 million. A teenage amateur paralyzed an entire American metropolis. Terrorists want a lot of people watching, and that's what the American media gave them.

Ever since 9/11, our political leaders have kept us disrobing in security lines, obsessing over every bizarre jihadi utterance, and constantly fretting about the Next Big One. Terrorism "experts" keep us on the edge of our seats, even though many other dangers pose a far greater risk. Bad things happen to good people, and it is the task of our political leaders to help us keep our heads even when awful things occur. The reaction to the Marathon attacks was grossly disproportionate.

Islamophobic Tweets?

Richard Dawkins: "Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist."

Tom Watson: "You really are a gratuitously unpleasant man."

Dawkins: "Actually no. Just frank. You'd ridicule palpably absurd beliefs of any other kind. Why make an exception for religion?"

Watson: "You are gratuitously unpleasant; I am just frank."

Dawkins: "A believes in fairies. B believes in winged horses. Criticise A and you're rational. Criticise B and you're a bigoted racist Islamophobe."

2013 April 22

US GDP To Grow 3%
Financial Times

The US GDP will become 3% bigger in July as billions of dollars of intangible assets enter the accounts. The revision adopts a new international standard in the biggest update since 1999 and rewrites history back to 1929. Bureau of Economic Analysis national accounts manager Brent Moulton: "We're capitalizing research and development and also this category referred to as entertainment, literary and artistic originals, which would be things like motion picture originals, long-lasting television programs, books, and sound recordings."

To Boldly Go
Martin Rees

Subjects that were once in the realm of science fiction are now serious. Predictions:

1 With big new telescopes, we can look for planets like Earth orbiting stars like our Sun.

2 Space trips for tourists around the Moon are likely soon, with round trips to Mars later.

3 In this century, flotillas of tiny robotic spacecraft will map the Solar System, initially for minerals.

4 In a century or more, human colonies are likely to be living independently on asteroids or on Mars.

5 Humans will be redesigned to cope with hibernation or suspended animation for interstellar travel.

6 New computers will create virtual universes containing artificial life, allowing virtual time travel.

2013 April 21

Islamophobia
Andrew Zak Williams

New Atheists have recently been accused of Islamophobia. Sam Harris imagines a radical Islamist state acquiring long range nuclear weaponry. An avowedly suicidal regime makes nuclear deterrence a worthless currency. Harris anticipates the possibility that the United States may find itself having to press the button first. But so do we all.

One can dream up allegations about any religion that are so obscene that no believer should be expected to respond. But Islam's holy book, taken literally, demands an embrace of violence and reprisals that wouldn't be tolerated by any humanist ethos. These tenets and precepts have real consequences and repercussions for all of us.

We are used to seeing Muslim spokespersons choosing the aftermath of a terrorist attack carried out in the Prophet's name to practise mealy-mouthed equivocation at the price of heartfelt sympathy. Then again, many moderate Muslims are at the front of the queue deploring much that is done in the name of their faith.

The atheist community will not be bullied by lazy allegations of bigotry leveled against those who point out that a religion that harbors such extremes has some explaining to do. Resort to the tag "Islamophobia" is justified only if you adapt a bizarre definition of the word that is satisfied merely if the religion is held up to scrutiny.

2013 April 20

The Tsarnaev Brothers
Caitlin Dickson

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was originally from Chechnya and came to the United States with his family in either 2002 or 2003. He studied engineering at a community college in Boston. He was also a boxer, participating in a national Golden Gloves competition, and dreamed of fighting in the Olympics.

Tamerlan was a Muslim. He did not drink or smoke and said "there are no values anymore" and "people can't control themselves". After five years in the United States, he said: "I don't have a single American friend. I don't understand them." On YouTube he subscribed to a channel called "Allah is the One."

His brother Dzhokhar, 19, entered the U.S. at the same time and attended a public high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he became a Greater Boston League winter all-star for wrestling. He also won a scholarship of $2,500 from the city of Cambridge in 2011.

The area near Chechnya where the brothers originate has been a hotbed of Islamic insurgency. Their father Anzor Tsarnaev described Dzhokhar as "a true angel" and "a second-year medical student" in the United States: "He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here."

Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Douglas Yoffe: "I met him almost 10 years ago, I was down at one of the boxing gyms and he was boxing ... I said he must have had some fights in Russia, he was too polished for such a young kid. He was very relaxed, very smooth in the ring ... But he did have an arrogant, disdainful attitude."

FBI hatte Tamerlan Zarnajew schon 2011 im Visier

Tamerlan Zarnajew ist Anfang 2011 vom FBI befragt worden. Er soll "Anhänger eines radikalen Islam" gewesen sein und sich darauf vorbereitet haben, die USA zu verlassen, um sich Untergrundorganisationen anzuschließen.

AR Face facts: Islam again. We have a clash of civilizations. Nominative determinism: The original Tamerlane was the "Sword of Islam" in the 1300s who led Mongol hordes on rampages that killed an estimated 17 million people. See Coral.
 

UK and IMF to Fight
A Battle in May
Financial Times

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is preparing an aggressive battle with the IMF in May over the credibility of his Plan A for austerity in the UK. Osborne fears IMF officials will criticize his plan as part of a proxy attack on US Republicans.

AR He should be proud to do battle on behalf of US capital.






ET Homes?
CNN

The NASA Kepler orbiting
telescope has found three good candidates for habitable worlds outside our solar system:

Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f are the outermost of 5 planets around Kepler-62, which is 11 Em away.
Kepler-69c is on the edge of the habitable zone of Kepler-69, which is 25 Em away.

1 exameter = ca 105 light years

TMT Observatory Corporation

The Thirty Meter Telescope has go for construction on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. TMT will join 13 others on the peak but will dwarf them all: the biggest now are the twin 10 m Keck telescopes. If all goes well, its astronomy will start in 2021.

AN
original trailer
(3:43)

KCNA
NK supreme leader Kim Jong-un
and his new wife Ri Sol-ju

NYT
SK president Park Geun-hye

Bras
Emer O'Toole

Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon has been studying women's breasts. He has found that, after a year, the bosoms of young bra wearers sag an average of 7 mm more than free-range boobs. A Japanese experiment from 1990 had similar results. Science has blown the claim that all women need lifelong surgical supports across their upper torsos. Is it time to sack the straps?

AR Lose the bras, girls.
Be free.

NK Musudan


US To NK
CNN

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says NK is "skating very close to a dangerous line" as it heats up the rhetoric: "Their actions and their words have not helped defuse a combustible situation." He said the USSK is "fully prepared to deal with any contingency".

AR Skate and burn —
mixed metaphor















NYT
Seen in Belfast, Northern Ireland

Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead
(YouTube, 0:31) now has over a million views.

CORAL

2 preview files, with
20 book pages each,
are now available

DM

2013 April 19

Despair
David Simon

A sane man's contempt for the United States Senate must now be certain and complete. Given its null response to the mass murder of schoolchildren, those who still believe that our governance represents popular will are suckers or worse.

The higher house of our bicameral farce is one in which 40% of the American population choses 60% of the representation. And the lower house is gerrymandered to a point where a majority of American votes are guaranteed to achieve a minority of the representation. But focus on the money.

We have given our democratic birthright over to capital. The risk to political careerists from individual Americans who want stricter gun laws pales beside that from a lobbying group backed by those who profit from the fear and violence in our culture. Only cash has meaning to those who claim to represent us.

It isn't the American presidency that's broken, it's the legislative branch. The sin was the equivocation that declares money to be speech. The government has elevated money and guns over human life.

Germany
Philip Stephens

German power was central to Europe even before the principalities of the Holy Roman Empire were soldered together by Otto von Bismarck. Unification, and then reunification, turned the German question into the abiding dilemma of European geopolitics.

The euro was the price Helmut Kohl paid to Francois Mitterrand to win his blessing for reunification. It is not responsible for the financial mess in the British economy. But it is easy for those suffering from austerity to see the euro as a sinister German plot.

The progressive integration of the German economy with those in the east plays to the same conspiracy theory. In the early stages of the euro crisis, the gripe was about an absence of leadership. Yet many of those who fear Germany complain that Berlin prefers the role of a greater Switzerland to that of a big player in European defense.

The criticism of Germany that sticks is about the idea that all would be well if others behaved like Germans. Adjustment has to be symmetrical. For others to cut their deficits, Germany must shed some of its surplus and learn to carry European responsibilities.

Scientology
Diane Johnson

Lawrence Wright tells a scary story in Going Clear. The Church of Scientology started as a method of psychological self-help, but now has at least $1 billion in liquid assets and property estimated at about the same amount, making it among the richer world religions.

Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, born in 1911 in Nebraska, had some talent as a writer and a good deal of personal charm. Though his life may have been spoiled by his own frailties, he apparently needed to see himself as a serious thinker, and maybe even was one.

In his book Dianetics, Hubbard describes the procedures to master in order to progress. Many members and former members claim to have gotten some benefit from the Scientology training. The people who grew up in the church were taught to despise "wog" (without goals) society.

Scientology uses lawsuits as a weapon. When in 1993 the IRS sent a bill to Scientology for $1 billion in back taxes, Scientologists infiltrated it, IRS agents were threatened, and their lives became a sea of legal and domestic torments. The agency capitulated and granted Scientology the status of a religion.

Emerging Consciousness
New Scientist

Sid Kouider at the ENS Paris and colleagues used EEG to record electrical activity in the brains of 80 infants while they were briefly shown pictures of faces.

In adults, awareness of a stimulus is linked to a two-stage pattern of brain activity. Areas of the visual cortex fire immediately after a visual stimulus. About 300 ms later other areas light up, including the prefrontal cortex. Conscious awareness emerges when the second stage reaches a threshold.

Kouider and colleagues put EEG caps on groups of babies aged 5, 12, and 15 months, to record brain activity as the babies were shown a series of rapidly changing images. Most of the images were randomly patterned ovals, but among them was a face, flashed for between 17 and 300 ms.

Each group responded to the face with the two-stage pattern. In the babies aged 12 and 15 months it arrived 800 to 900 ms after the image display. In the 5-month babies, there was a delay of more than 1 s before the second pattern appeared. In adults, it appears after 300 ms, on average.

The results are not direct evidence of subjective experience. We don't know how short the delay must be for awareness.

2013 April 18

DPLA
Robert Darnton

The Digital Public Library of America is launched today. The holdings of U.S. research libraries, archives, and museums become available to everyone online and free of charge.

The DPLA expresses an Enlightenment faith in the power of communication. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin both believed that the health of the Republic depended on the free flow of ideas. Thanks to the Internet, we now can realize their dream. We can make all the collections of all our libraries accessible to all. That is the mission of the DPLA.

The DPLA will be a distributed system that will make the holdings of public and research libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies available via the web. The user-friendly interface will enable readers to consult works that used to be stored on inaccessible shelves or locked up in treasure rooms. Readers will simply navigate to the DPLA.

2013 April 17

The Magaret Thatcher state funeral today was a classic British exercise in imperial pomp, the greatest
since the funerals of Winston Churchill in 1965 and the Queen Mother in 2002.

Netymology
Tom Chatfield

Top Ten Internet neologisms:

1 Avatars — This word for our digital incarnations has a mystic origin in the Sanskrit term avatara for a god descended from the heavens into earthly form.

2 Hashtags — Once an American shorthand for weight in pounds, the # sign was adopted by Bell engineers as the function symbol on their phones. Hashtags have come into their own on Twitter.

3 Scunthorpe problems — Entirely innocent words can fall victim to machine filth-filters thanks to unfortunate sequences of letters within them. The effect was labeled in honor of Scunthorpe in 1996, when AOL temporarily prevented any Scunthorpe residents from creating user accounts.

4 Trolling — The Old French verb troller means to wander around while hunting, and "trolling" entered English to describe fishing by trailing bait around. This idea of baiting the unwitting led to online trolling, where net users simulate naivety to ensnare the naive. Trolls are also monstrous Nordic creatures.

5 Memes — Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to signify a unit of cultural transmission.

6 Spam — The most enduring gift of British comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus may be the reuse of the brand name used since 1937 by the Hormel Foods Corporation for spiced ham. Spamming came to describe any process of drowning out "real" content.

7 LOLs — If you type "LOL" or "lol", you're not literally laughing out loud. You're offering a kind of stage direction: dramatizing a move in a conversation through written words.

8 Meh — The supremely useful "meh" expresses a contemporary species of indifference. It suggests something like "OK, whatever" and was apparently first recorded in a 1995 episode of The Simpsons.

9 Cupertino errors — Also known as "auto-correct errors", a Cupertino error occurs when your computer thinks it knows what you're trying to say better than you do. The name comes from the California city where Apple has its headquarters.

10 Geeks — In Low German, a geck is a crazy person. In 1952, Robert Heinlein used "geek" in the sense of a freakishly adept technology enthusiast.

2013 April 16

Globorg 2020
Doug Gross

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt: "For every person online, there are two who are not. By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected."

About 38% of the world's population uses the internet in 2013, up from about 35% last year, according to the ITU. Poor and developing nations around the world are isolated by crumbling or nonexistent Web infrastructures, and others are hindered by factors ranging from geography to censorship.

Google supports a project called Geeks Without Frontiers, a nonprofit group that donates computers and related technology to poor areas around the world. The group now aims to bring wireless access to regions with no traditional Web access. In Africa, more people have access to a mobile phone than have access to electricity. Samsung is backing a project to turn old shipping containers into solar-powered, web-enabled classrooms in places like South Africa and Sudan.

Privacy is so last century!

The Facebook Home app integrates all of the social network's services into Android. Instead of having to download apps, access is consolidated on the user's home screen. Facebook says the data Home would collect is no different from what the site already tracks. Privacy is fast becoming an outdated concept.

David Rowan: "Our concept of privacy is very much a 20th century idea. All that personal data you are giving to these private companies they are making money on and they decide how it's going to be used. You lose control of that data."

Jaron Lanier says we pay for the big online services such as Google and Facebook by giving away information about ourselves that can be turned into big money.

Andrew Keen: "Facebook wants to know everything we do, so they can sell more advertising. It shows that Facebook has absolutely no respect for our privacy." He foresees a "scary, nightmarish, dystopian future" of "radical transparency" where every aspect of our existence is recorded: "Data distribution and the invasion of our privacy is the pollution of the big data age."

NK Nukes
Eli Lake

NK engineers launched a satellite into space December 2012. After the launch, US Navy ships recovered the front section of the rocket and found clues about NK warhead design. US officials say the NK missile cone had dimensions to fit a nuclear warhead for atmospheric reentry.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, in a classified assessment, expressed "moderate confidence" that NK "has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles". Intelligence has been building for years and now suggests NK has mastered miniaturization and warhead design.

2013 April 15

NK Has Won
Frida Ghitis

NK nuclear and missile technology has already found its way to the Mideast. The regime helped Syria develop a nuclear reactor. It has sold its wares to anyone willing to pay and works closely with Iran.

The crisis has already broadcast a message of encouragement to tyrants and regimes considering nuclear weapons. If you have nuclear capabilities, it doesn't matter how outrageously you behave, how horribly you mistreat your people, how flimsy your economy is. Superpowers are afraid of making you angry.

As NK threatened a "preemptive nuclear attack" on the US, the "final destruction" of SK, and a "nuclear attack" on Tokyo, world powers held talks with Iran over its nuclear program. The talks went nowhere.

Last September, Tehran and Pyongyang signed a cooperation agreement like the one NK signed with Syria a decade ago, which brought NK technicians to help Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad build a nuclear reactor that Israel destroyed in 2007. Iranian scientists observed the third NK nuclear test earlier this year.

AR If Obama were to nuke the NK nuke site, that would send a message too.

2013 April 14

News Is Bad 4U
Rolf Dobelli

News is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News flashes are bright-colored candies for the mind.
Today, we are beginning to recognize how toxic news can be:

● News misleads
● News is irrelevant
● News has no explanatory power
● News is toxic to your body
● News increases cognitive errors
● News inhibits thinking
● News works like a drug
● News wastes time
● News makes us passive
● News kills creativity

Books are good.

Unholy Trinity

This just in: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens are accused of Islamophobia.
All are accused by Nathan Lean, Murtaza Hussain, and Glenn Greenwald of New Atheist bigotry.

>> more

2013 April 13

SK Leader Battle Ready
New York Times

Her mother was shot by an assassin. Her father, a staunchly anti-Communist dictator, was similarly killed. And she survived a vicious razor attack to the face.

New SK president Park Geun-hye, 61, is as hard as they come. On learning that her father had died, her first concern was over an NK invasion. Her first question after an operation for the razor attack in 2006 was how her party was campaigning.

Park is so tough that her gender is a nonissue. Choi Jin, head of the Institute for Presidential Leadership in Seoul: "She dispelled whatever doubt there had been about a female president by showing that she was a strong-minded leader."

But she may go too far in hanging tough. She filled the top security posts in her cabinet and staff with former generals and plays hardball with the NK regime.

Was Richard Wagner the prophet and Adolf Hitler the disciple?
My illustrated cut of the troubled history of the Wagner family

2013 April 12

Cameron and Merkel
Press Association

David Cameron will discuss European reform with Angela Merkel on a visit to Germany this weekend.

Cameron: "We need a Europe that is more open, that is more competitive, that is more flexible, that thinks more about the cost that it's putting on businesses, particularly small businesses; we want a world that wakes up to this modern world of competition and flexibility. That is the aim."

CDU deputy parliamentary chairman Michael Meister: "We want to unify Europe and we have to do it together, and I think there are a lot of common ideas with the British side and the German side on it."

Maggie Dead
Mark Steel

If someone robs your house, you don't say: "I disagreed with the burglar's policy of tying me to a chair. But I did admire her convictions."

Maggie's supporters are insulting her memory with a funeral paid for by the taxpayer. They should say: "If you can't stand on your own two feet, you can't expect help from the state."

Iranian Standoff
The Atlantic

The impasse over the Iranian nuclear program may have reached a balance. Each party is more comfortable with the status quo than with any available alternative. Tehran is more inclined to stand its ground than make a deal, and Washington prefers the present impasse to war. Israel may feel less comfortable, but the risks of a unilateral Israeli strike might convince Israel to hold its fire. Iran has stopped short of their red line.

Pentagon Security Breach
CNN

Sensitive information about the NK nuclear program from a classified March 2013 report was discussed during an open hearing on Capitol Hill.

In a hearing to discuss the Pentagon budget, Representative David Lamborn read a sentence in a report by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): "DIA assess with moderate confidence the North currently has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles, however, the reliability will be low."

Officials said after the hearing that the sentence he read was "mistakenly" marked as unclassified.

AR All this reminds me of the foreplay to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Graft In China
Roderick MacFarquhar

The Little Red Book is gone. With the loss of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, China no longer has an ideology. New President Xi Jinping appeals to patriotism, but before the Chinese dream can move the masses, the country needs to fight corruption. New Premier Li Keqiang: "Since we have chosen public office we should give up all thought of making money."

So far, Xi and Li have pursued easier objectives, ordering officials to abandon high-style living. It seems some official departments are turning their canteens into luxury restaurants so that they can continue to enjoy their banquets. The regime goes after the small fry but is leery of targeting corruption in the higher ranks. Investigations reveal vast wealth accumulated by relatives of the party's inner circle and by the descendants of the old revolutionaries. The upper ranks of Chinese society form a robber baronage.

Officials bundle peasants off the land to sell it and get business kickbacks for factories that pollute the air and rivers. Transforming so corrupt a system from top to bottom has dire political implications. If the Chinese people don't tackle corruption, China will be doomed, but if they do tackle corruption the party will be doomed. China needs leaders who put people above party.

Rotten "Loathsome" Attack
Daily Mail

The artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten, John Lydon, says those now celebrating Margaret Thatcher's death are "loathsome". The former Sex Pistol added: "I'm not going to dance on her grave." He also denied being a misogynist and a Nazi.

Silence
Karen Armstrong

Good theology helps one to live for a while in silence. Apophatic theology is often called negative. It is a habit of mind that we have lost sight of in our talkative age of information.

Negative theology takes us through speech to another dimension of reality. The apophatic moment can only occur after a feast of noise. God is not goodness, not soul, not intellect. But a vigorous affirmation of God is an essential part of the process.

When we speak of God we have no idea what we are talking about. It is all too easy to turn what we call "God" into a being like ourselves, writ large, to give our prejudices a seal of transcendent approval. Apophatic silence is good.

AR Armstrong is nearly there. Zen is apophatic: Let silence peak in a moment of satori. Bang — all over. No God. No more blabber, just clarity and calm.

2013 April 11

NK: "War can break out any moment"
CNN

North Korea has erected at least one Musudan missile into its firing position. A US official said the erection may be a trial run to check everything works. The missile is an untested No-Dong-B BM-25 Musudan MRTBM (based on the Soviet R-27 SLBM) with a range up to 3,500 km (3.5 Mm) and 1.6 km CEP for its 1,200 kg (1.2 Mg) separating warhead.

China Forex $3.4T
Financial Times

China is again facing heavy capital inflows after its foreign exchange reserves jumped to $3.44 trillion — about as big as the German GDP — in Q1.

Money fled China in 2012. Its return stoked fast credit growth in Q1. The People's Bank of China has stepped up liquidity withdrawals to blunt the inflationary effect of the inflows. Beijing has capital controls to prevent speculative inflows, but investors are sneaking money in.

China's GDP grew at 7.9% in Q4 2012 and is expected to be higher for Q1 2013.

AR Would that we could share such pain.

OMG: English Evolves
New Scientist

OMG has a long history. In a 1917 letter from First Sea Lord Admiral Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher to First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Spencer Churchill, the old admiral wrote: "I hear that a new order of Knighthood is on the tapis — O.M.G. (Oh! My God!) — Shower it on the Admiralty!"

As for LOL, the textual speech act of laughing out loud is a stage direction for transient feelings. ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing) exceeds lolling in intensity, while ROFLMAO (rolling on the floor laughing my ass off) is more ironic. Or I can LMFAO (laugh my fucking ass off).

This is memetic evolution in action. Within a few letters and characters, deep layers of meaning are gathering. Texting was originally a test tool for network operators. But it caught on with young users who found its cryptic characters an ideally minimal medium in an era of information overload.

Some texters act "for the lulz". The lazy lower case letters and use of the "internet z" as a typo for "s" convey a shift of meaning. They connote subversion, as the name of the hacker collective LulzSec (Lulz Security — "the world's leaders in high-quality entertainment at your expense") suggests.

Online text acts are performative. Typing for lulz signals membership of a tribe. It adds wit to communicative intent. And it puts an exchange in a shell of self-reference. Even if the texted me resembles my true self, "I" remain an elaborate self-invention, performed letter by letter.

Tweeters sometimes outsource the composition of crucial text messages and status updates to their more eloquent friends. Their 140 characters are crafted and pitched to sound spontaneous — poetry.

Johnny Rotten Sexist Pig
The Independent

Former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten, now known as John Lydon, 57, told Australian TV anchor Carrie Bickmore to "shut up when a man is talking". Lydon insulted Bickmore when she cut in with a question. He went on: "Stop it. You sound like one of them dreadful loud birds I don't like."

When she said he was offensive, he replied: "So are you when you do that. You have to learn what manners and respect is." A fellow TV anchor: "He was a flat-out sexist, misogynist pig."

2013 April 10

Eurobonds
George Soros

The euro crisis threatens to destroy the European Union. Eurozone countries are indebted in a currency they don't control. They are held guilty and the structural defects of the euro go uncorrected.

The blueprint for the euro created two problems. The political problem is that Germany did not seek the dominant position into which it has been thrust and it is unwilling to accept the obligations and liabilities that go with it. The financial problem is that Germany is imposing the wrong policies on the eurozone. Austerity doesn't work. You cannot shrink the debt burden by shrinking the budget deficit.

In the bailout of Cyprus, Germany went too far. Attention focused on the impact of the rescue on Cyprus, but the impact on the European banking system is far more important. Banks will now have to pay risk premiums that fall more heavily on the weak.

The solution for problems of the eurozone is eurobonds. Countries that abide by the fiscal compact could be allowed to convert their entire stock of government debt into eurobonds. Germany has no right to prevent this. If Germany is opposed to eurobonds, it should consider leaving the euro.

If Germany left, the euro would depreciate. The debtor countries would be more competitive and their debt would become sustainable. By contrast, if Italy left, its debt burden would become unsustainable and would have to be restructured. This would plunge the global financial system into a meltdown.

Germans should choose between accepting eurobonds or leaving the euro. Authorizing eurobonds would benefit Germany. The cost of leaving the euro may be the end of the European Union.

Thatcherism
Der Spiegel

When Margaret Thatcher came to power, she faced a Britain still dreaming of being a world power but blocked by the power of the trade unions. With aplomb, she neutered the unions and woke up the UK. But she also set up Britain for the growth of financial market capitalism and drove it to the brink of deindustrialization. She discredited the EU in the UK. She helped Ronald Reagan win the cold war, but on German reunification she was cold.
— Die Welt

The social coldness that is making Britain shiver once again today is her legacy. After her forced resignation in 1990, she was asked what she had changed as leader of the country, and she answered: "Everything." That crowing answer is the key to understanding her. She was always a rebel.
— Süddeutsche Zeitung

Thatcherism stands for deregulation, privatization, and the destruction of the welfare state. No one divided British society as much as Margaret Thatcher. She destroyed the trade unions and ruined the public sector. As soon as she gained office, she lowered the top tax rate from 83% to 60% and raised VAT from 8% to 15%. During her time in office she used up more than 100 ministers and surrounded herself with yes-men. Only one women made it into her cabinet.
— Die Tageszeitung

Thatcher liberalized the British financial sector. The move triggered the massive boom of the City of London. Between 1993 and 2006, the British economy grew by 2.8% on average per year while unemployment fell from 9% to 4%. But since then, the world has learned that faith in free markets was a mistake. The Big Bang was followed by the Big Bust. Today prime minister David Cameron and his finance minister George Osborne look with envy at the industrial heart of the German economy.
— Handelsblatt

Maggie
Christopher Hitchens, December 1990

Margaret Thatcher, November 1990: "I make up my mind about people in the first 10 seconds, and I very rarely change it." Within minutes of first being introduced to me, Thatcher lashed me across the buttocks with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper.

It happened in 1977, when she was still leader of the opposition and was pandering to South African racists. I made the mistake of bowing as if to acknowledge some point of hers, and she took swift advantage of my posture by shrieking, "Bow lower!" and spanking me. Later, in 1979, she reversed her position and oversaw the transition of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe.

It is easy to summarize the foulness of the Thatcher years: the combination of Malthus and Ayn Rand that went to make up her social philosophy; the police mentality that she evinced when faced with dissent; the awful toadying to Reagan and Bush; the indulgence shown to apartheid; the coarse, racist betrayal of Hong Kong; the destruction of local democracy and autonomous popular institutions.

Thatcher was a radical and not a reactionary. She has shown that there is power and dignity to be won by defying the status quo.

2013 April 9

"Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!"
Ian McEwan

Maggie Thatcher forced us to dislike her. She seemed intent on monetizing human value and famously cared little for the impulses that bind individuals into a society.

But before her reign TV schedules were a state secret not shared with daily newspapers. A special license was granted exclusively to the Radio Times. It was illegal to put an extension lead on your phone — you had to wait six weeks for an engineer. There was only one state-approved answering machine available. Electricity was a state monopoly. Thatcher swept all this away.

We live in a world that is harder and more competitive, and certainly more intently aware of the lure of cash. It is doubtful that we will ever undo her legacy.

Cyprus
FT

Cyprus was partitioned in 1974. Its northern third remains under Turkish control.

Greek Cypriots in the south built a freewheeling banking center. They grew rich on chaos in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.

Real per capita Cypriot income quadrupled between 1975 and 2011. In US dollars, earnings per head rose by a factor of over 20 over the same period.

Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004 and the euro in 2008. But tax havens and brass plaque economies fell out of favor.

CNN
Wesley Clark on NK

Big Nuts Rise Faster
On Earth Than On Mars
MIT Technology Review

TU Braunschweig physicist
Carsten Guttler and colleagues have shown that Brazil nuts in a shaken container of mixed nuts would rise to the top more slowly on Mars than on Earth, and even more slowly on the Moon.

Dark Matter
Wired

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was installed on the International Space Station in 2011 and has recorded more than 25 billion particle events, including 400,000 positrons. The results show "unexpected new phenomena" and will be published Friday.

Dark matter is unknown stuff that in total has six times more gravity than ordinary matter. Scientists think dark matter particles should occasionally hit one another, annihilating into positrons and electrons, which AMS can detect at higher energies (up to 350 GeV) and better precision than previous experiments. AMS has observed a uniform positron excess across the sky, suggesting a single explanation.

KOREA

USSOS John Kerry, Tuesday:
"The bottom line is simply that what Kim Jong Un is choosing to do is provocative. It is dangerous, reckless. The United States will not accept the DPRK as a nuclear state."

AR Right on, John.

KOREA

North Korea rattled off fresh volleys of bombast over the weekend, declaring that it had entered a "state of war" with SK and calling the US mainland a "boiled pumpkin".

AR Kim's the pumpkin!

2013 April 8

Nuclear Disparity
Leslie H. Gelb

President Obama has told Iran's leaders that if they come close to marrying a nuclear warhead with a missile that can hit the United States or our allies, they should expect a U.S. military attack, yet he's not nearly as tough with North Korea.

Is North Korea more or less dangerous than Iran?
Is President Ahmadinejad more or less crazy than President Kim Jong-un?
Is Pyongyang too far gone toward nukes to stop, while Tehran is not?
Is Israel more important to American security than South Korea and Japan?

Obama made his strongest statements against Iranian nukes to AIPAC, suggesting that Israel and oil count for more than Seoul and Tokyo. American tolerance of Kim's nukes may push South Koreans and Japanese toward their own nukes.

AR The US umbrella is effective against NK, which is constrained by China, but not against Iran, which wants a Holocaust.

Zen and the NHS
The Guardian

MIT grad Jon Kabat-Zinn discovered Zen in 1965: "That first class took the top off my head. I found a sense of largeness beyond my little preoccupations of what would happen to my future, or my relationships. It opened up a new dimension of being which could offer more meaning and enable me to interface more effectively with society in a way which could be healing and transformative."

Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program: an eight-week course of meditation and yoga that train practitioners to pay close attention to the current moment. Since then, a steady stream of academic papers, books, and randomized control trials led to hundreds of MBSR programs across the US.

In recent years, Kabat-Zinn has collaborated with psychologists in the UK who have adapted his work for Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), now recognized by NICE as a treatment for depression. Kabat-Zinn and others say mindfulness has unlimited applicability to healthcare issues. UK policymakers are keen to hear more.

AR Excellent move: I like Zen.

EZ Growth
Financial Times

The EZ risks drifting into prolonged stagnation. A recovery now looks fanciful. Even Germany has run out of steam. Growth will not come fast enough from structural reforms. Rich EZ countries need to help their poor partners.

SMEs are the engine of job creation. Yet they find loans hard to get and expensive. The ECB should lower its policy rate. It could offer cheap loans to banks or lend directly to SMEs.

AR Yes, lend me what I need to create an SME.

2013 April 7

Ban Killer Robots
Noel Sharkey

Some say robots could be more accurate in battle than human soldiers. But current machines have no way to conform to international law. Their sensing systems are not up to that. They lack the vital components of battlefield awareness and common sense reasoning to make decisions about whom to kill.

Robots do not have the agency to decide if striking a target is proportional to the expected military advantage. There is no metric for this. Much of war is art and not science. A military commander must make a qualitative decision about the civilian lives that can be risked for a military objective.

A robot has no moral agency. Some would hold the commander who sends a robot on a mission responsible. But the problem could lie with the mission programmer, the manufacturer, or an unknown subcontractor. Maybe the device was tampered with in the industrial supply chain or damaged in action. Forensics are difficult with complex devices.

The United States has the opportunity to take a lead. We need to think about how:

1 An adaptive enemy will exploit the weaknesses of robot weapons with spoofing or hacking.
2 Unknown computer programs will interact when swarms of robots meet.
3 Autonomous weapons could destabilize world security and trigger unintentional wars.

This month in London, a group will launch a civil society campaign to stop killer robots.

AR A ban would be hard to enforce, worse than a nuclear proliferation ban.

2013 April 6

Google
Evgeny Morozov

In 2004, Google co-founder Larry Page predicted that online search "will be included in people's brains" so that "when you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information".

Google didn't set out with a strategy for world domination. When last year Google announced it would bring the data collected through its online services together, the move made business sense. By tracking our every email, appointment, and social networking activity, Google Now can predict where we need to be, when, and with whom, to relieve us of making decisions. But six European countries are asking if Google's data policy violates their national privacy laws.

Europe is defending personal privacy as a human right. Google Glass is a line of smart glasses that privacy advocates compare to stylish CCTV cameras that people choose to wear on their heads. Were Google's privacy policy to stay in place and cover self-driving cars and Google Glass, our internet searches might be linked to our driving routes, and all the ads we saw linked to the scenery might be based on everything that Google already knows about us.

For many, this may be an enticing future. Only by understanding it can we get Google to act more responsibly. For an engineer, the past and the present are just raw materials for making a better future. Let's make it right.

Egypt
Judith Miller

The Cairo subway was one of Hosni Mubarak's proudest achievements. It cost several billion dollars and was beautifully appointed. A special police unit kept the stations clean and safe. Then came the Egyptian revolution. Today, the subway is a wreck. The tile walls of its central hub, Tahrir Square, are chipped and filthy. Platforms are strewn with litter and passageways stink.

Egyptian women now fear shopping or taking cabs at night. Cairo police sit in their precinct houses and refuse to provide security. Tourists have vanished. Youth unemployment and inflation are high and rising, and much of the economy is unregulated and unofficial. Egypt imports roughly $60 billion worth of goods and services per year but exports under $25 billion.

Egypt spends about 20% of its budget on fuel subsidies, and Egyptians spend 70% of their income on subsidized food. But to secure the IMF loan Egypt needs to unlock more aid and investment, it must cut its subsidies and plan for growth. Many Egyptians blame the mess on the incompetence of President Mohammed Morsi and his ruling Muslim Brotherhood.

Doctor
Rebecca Schuman

I deeply regret going to graduate school. It was a terrible idea. After years of trying, I will not get a job. Tenure-track positions in my field have about 150 applicants each. Multiply that chance by the 10 or so appropriate positions in the entire world, and you have about 6% chance of success. You wouldn't bet your life on such ludicrous odds.

Just go do something else. By the time you finish graduate school, you academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why.

Don't resent the generation of full professors teetering toward retirement, cleaving resolutely to their positions. Their tenure lines will die with them. You don't need to put yourself through 5 to 10 years of the hardest work you will ever do, followed by years of rejection and dejection, simply to regret it. When it comes to graduate school, just say no.

AR Cheer up, Rebecca, write a rom-com screenplay about it!

2013 April 5

Narratives Of War
Michael Howard

Emile Simpson sees two kinds of war. Traditional bipolar conflicts are fought to establish military conditions for a political solution. A new kind of war seek political outcomes directly, usually via counterinsurgency. In the former, strategy is largely driven by the operational needs of warfare. But in the latter, operations are themselves political tools, used to undermine the adversary, deprive him of political support, and if possible to convert him. In both, the war aim is to convey a message.

In old wars, the primary audience was the enemy population. In new conflicts, the adversary is disparate, the people at home may be puzzled and divided, and a much of the audience is global. An operation that conveys one message to one audience may mean something else to another. The operations of the United States and its allies in the Mideast were intended to convey a message of liberation to local populations. But for many on the receiving end, and for many global observers, they were imperialist.

No responsible government now uses armed force without calculating the global impact of doing so. A strategic narrative is needed that explains why one is at war at all, and how the military operations can help. The narrative must not only be reasonable but also appeal to the emotions. Above all, it needs an ethical foundation. The wider audience must believe that one is fighting a just war. The genius of Winston Churchill in 1940 was to devise a strategic narrative that not only inspired Britons but also won the support of the United States. By contrast, Hitler had no good strategic narrative.

AR The Kim Jong Un strategic narrative fails too.

NK-UK Surprise
The Independent

UK PM David Cameron defended his decision to retain the Trident nuclear deterrent by citing the threat of an NK nuclear strike against the UK: "North Korea does now have missile technology that is able to reach, as they put it, the whole of the United States and if they are able to reach the whole of the United States they can reach Europe too. They can reach us too, so that is a real concern."

AR If NK can nuke the UK, then I'm a billionaire. If this is the best defense Cameron can find for Trident, then scrap it. If this is an acceptable threat claim, then what Tony Blair said about the Iraqi WMD threat was acceptable too.

2013 April 4

Lost In The Cloud
Douglas Heaven

Clusters of servers scattered worldwide now hold our music, photos, and mail. We are moving toward living our entire digital lives in the cloud. Your digital stuff now sits in vast data centers owned by the likes of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. The cloud lets us access online services and digital possessions from any of our devices. It seems that by 2020 the cloud will run all digital life.

Storing your stuff with a service offered by a third party is like dumping your things in someone else's warehouse. But service agreements that would be unacceptable for a physical warehouse are standard for cloud storage. Though you technically retain copyright for stuff you create and upload, in fact the service terms generally reserve many rights. The services can delete files, or lose your stuff with impunity.

Our understanding of property is based on material objects, but digital information has no fixed physical existence. A digital file exists as a state of matter rather than matter itself. And your cloud possessions rarely exist in just one location. There is no way you can track them. If your file has already been uploaded by someone else, Dropbox will just link you to the existing files instead of uploading a duplicate. Your relation to your cloud property is confusing.

Some say we should restructure the basic architecture of the cloud to help bring it closer to traditional notions of property. One idea is modeled on a deposit box. For example, you would keep a photo on a small local server. There would be no doubt that you legally own a photo stored in your box. A Facebook image would be uploaded from your box whenever it was needed.

A cloud "doomsday event" such as a massive and widespread loss of data would jog our ideas.

Offshore Tax Haven
The Guardian

Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain's offshore financial industry. Thousands of holders of anonymous wealth are exposed by the British Virgin Islands (BVI) data leak, involving some $30 trillion stashed in overseas havens. Naming names may be damaging for many of the world's wealthiest people.

The BVI has incorporated more than a million offshore entities since it began marketing itself worldwide 30 years ago. The UK Foreign Office depends on the licensing revenue to subsidize the BVI, while lawyers and accountants in the City of London benefit from a lucrative trade as intermediaries. The 200 GB of BVI data covers more than a decade, as well as offshoots in Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Cook Islands.

AR All this is rank corruption. The BVI should be closed down immediately, by force if necessary.

2013 April 3

Big Data
Leon Wieseltier

Young man: "She told him that she loves me, which is an important data point." Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier would call this datafication: "To datafy a phenomenon is to put it in a quantified format so it can be tabulated and analyzed."

Sentiment analysis is a branch of digital analytics that seeks to identify the viewpoint(s) underlying a text span. This is accomplished by identifying the words in a proposition that originate in subjectivity, and thereby obtaining an accurate understanding of the feelings and the preferences that animate the utterance. This finding can then be tabulated and integrated with millions of similar findings, to create a vast repository of information about inwardness, which can be mined to detect patterns that will enable prediction, for example using the Good Grief Algorithm to detect dissatisfaction.

We are ambiguous beings. We frequently have mixed feelings, and are divided against ourselves. We use different words to communicate similar thoughts, but those words are not synonyms. Our meanings are often obscure. A choice is often a coarse and inadequate translation of a feeling. In an election, what matters is that I vote. The same is true of what I buy. A business wants my money. Its interest in my heart is owed to its interest in my money. In the scholarly papers on sentiment analysis, the examples given are restaurant reviews and movie reviews — a Rotten Tomatoes view of life.

Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier: "With the help of big data, we will no longer regard our world as a string of happenings that we explain as natural and social phenomena, but as a universe comprised essentially of information." The religion of information is here.

Union of Concerned Scientists

We put rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet's most pressing problems. We combine technical analysis and effective advocacy to create innovative, practical solutions for a healthy, safe, and sustainable future.

What began as a collaboration between students and faculty members at MIT in 1969 is now an alliance of more than 400,000 citizens and scientists. UCS members are people from all walks of life. Our members understand that scientific analysis should guide our efforts to secure responsible changes in government policy, corporate practices, and consumer choices.

AR Digital analytics is what the engine I worked on at SAP did. But data — even big data — needs a lot more than a few "good grief" algorithms to become real science.

2013 April 2

The Meme Hustler
Evgeny Morozov

Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, gave us such memes as open source, Web 2.0, government as a platform, and architecture of participation. He is a smooth and stylish self-promoter as well as a prolific blogger and tweeter. He says his company's vision is to "change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators" and his personal credo is to "create more value than you capture".

As a young man, OR had hopes of writing deep books that would change the world. In 1978, he launched a consulting firm that specialized in technical writing. The growth of open source software was his first big break. He hosted a summit to define the concept, wrote provocative essays on it, produced a host of books and events to popularize it, and cultivated a network of thinkers for it.

To support his narrative about open source software, OR produced an account of the Internet that became the standard way to talk about its history. He saw that as software migrated from desktops to servers — now the cloud — it was counterproductive to fixate on licenses. As he saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were driven by open source behavior.

In 2004, OR hit on the idea of Web 2.0. He said Silicon Valley companies should heed the lesson of the 2001 market crash and find a way to make collective intelligence part of their business model. The label caught on, and OR ran events with titles like "Gov 2.0".

In public, OR presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group he dubs the "alpha geeks" and promoting their ideas: "Just as gene engineering allows us to artificially shape genes, meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted."

With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, OR turned his attention to government reform. His writings on Gov 2.0 reveal the same talented meme-engineer who gave us open source and Web 2.0.

OR wants to redefine participation to something that arises from individual frustration with bureaucracies and usually ends with citizens using or building apps to solve their own problems. Debates about the content and meaning of specific reforms and institutions are replaced by governments calling on their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or use their phones to report potholes. That politics can aspire to something more ambitious than bug-management is not an insight that occurs after politics has been refracted through the prism of open source software.

As The New Yorker reported in 2010, British PM David Cameron is using the OR memes in his BS:

David Cameron's Big Society
Lauren Collins

The Big Society is Cameron's plan to devolve power "from the elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street". The program comprises public-service reform (cutting red tape), community empowerment (transferring authority to the local level), and social action (encouraging voluntarism and philanthropy — getting people to do things for nothing that they used to get paid for).

This is Wikipedia government, intended to mend Broken Britain by way of piecework. Qualitatively, the goal is to compel a more robust citizenship, in which people must not only pay taxes and refrain from doing ill but actively seek to do good.

2013 April 1

FU NK
FT

SK President Park Geun-hye: “If there is any provocation against South Korea and its people,
there should be a strong response in initial combat without any political considerations."

Guardian Goggles: because life's too short to think for yourself
(video, 3:23)

dd
Stonework by my nephew #3

Getty
Oxford beat Cambridge
in boat race

POTUS To NK

As Air Force One flies
Barack Obama to Miami,
deputy press spokesperson
Josh Earnest tells onboard
reporters: "The bellicose
rhetoric emanating from
North Korea only deepens
that nation's isolation. The
United States remains
committed to safeguarding
our allies in the region and
our interests that are located there."

>> more

Korean War

Kim Jong Un says "the time has come to settle accounts with the U.S. imperialists in view of the prevailing situation".

The USAF flew B-2 bombers over Korea in military exercises. US Forces Korea: "The United States is steadfast in its alliance commitment to the defense of the Republic of Korea, to deterring aggression, and to ensuring peace and stability in the region."

>> more

Google
Made in USA

Google is working with Foxconn to assemble its new headset at a facility in Santa Clara, California. The small scale, high cost, and complexity of the project's initial run makes it practical to base manufacturing operations near Google HQ. Only a few thousand Google Glass devices will roll off the line in the coming weeks. Manufacturing locally will allow Google engineers to be closely involved with the production process and facilitate quick fixes and personal customization. Many parts are sourced in Asia.








SPAM

Spamhaus blacklists servers used to spew forth spam around the net. Last week, a spammer launched a massive distributed denial of service attack on Spamhaus that knocked it offline. The attack was so big it blocked DNS servers and slowed down the internet for users worldwide. Spamhaus reacted by turning to CloudFlare, which can spread the traffic over a larger bandwidth. CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince likened the attacks to digital nuclear bombs. Cyberbunker, a web hosting service housed in a disused nuclear bunker in the Netherlands, may be the culprit. It was recently added to a Spamhaus blacklist.

AR I felt the blast.

Cyprus EZ Model
Financial Times

After Cyprus, EZ leaders will push the risks of paying for bank bailouts from taxpayers to private investors. Eurogroup president and Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem: "Taking away the risk from the financial sector and taking it on to the public shoulders is not the right approach. If we want to have a healthy, sound financial sector, the only way is to say: Look, there where you take the risks, you must deal with them, and if you can't deal with them you shouldn't have taken them on and the consequence might be that it is end of story."

AR Quite right. Sanity at last.




Russian Response
Der Spiegel

Russian state TV news anchor Dmitry Kiselev called the EZ action in Cyprus "destructive" and said the last time a European government acted so recklessly was when Adolf Hitler robbed the Jews. Nazi propaganda described their money as "dirty" — how EZ officials now describe Russian money in Cyprus.

AR EZ goes it loose,
to quote a phrase.

The Guardian

If you say it over and over again, "Jesus" morphs into Cheesus.
Lovers of Cheesus celebrate the cross of Good Friday as a moment of triumph. This is theologically illiterate. Cheesus is Jesus-lite, a romantic infatuation. No PR agency in the world could sell the message of a man who told his followers they too would go the way of the cross.

Pink Floyd
The Dark Side of the Moon

Album released 40 years ago,
when the UK was being held
to ransom by the National
Union of Mineworkers.


Bibi Says Sorry
Jerusalem Post

As Barack Obama was leaving Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu called Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan and apologized for mistakes in the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident. The two agreed to make up.

AR Bibi saw sense.

ESA
Axis of evil

Data from the 4-year ESA Planck spacecraft mission shows the universe is slightly older than we thought and fits the inflationary scenario. Lingering mysteries include a cosmic "axis of evil" and an odd cold spot.







ESA
ESA Planck CMB Map

The European Space Agency has released the most detailed map yet of the cosmic microwave background. The map, made by the Planck telescope, reveals tiny variations in the average temperature of about 3 K. Cooler regions (blue) are more dense and later seed stars and galaxies. The data suggests the universe is about 13.82 billion years old. Normal matter seems to comprise 4.9%, dark matter 26.8%, and dark energy 68.3% of the universe. This is a snapshot of the universe about 12 Ts after the big bang.

Sugar
Robert Lustig

Sugar is the real villain in the obesity epidemic. Cocaine and heroin are deadly because they are addictive and toxic, and so is sugar: "We need to wean ourselves off. We need to
de-sweeten our lives."

"The food industry has made it into a diet staple because they know when they do you buy more. This is their hook."

Fat Chance: The Bitter
Truth About Sugar

Can Russia Save Cyprus?
Der Spiegel

Europe is clueless following the rejection by Cyprus of the EU bank rescue package. Rich Russians launder money in Cyprus, so Cyprus is appealing to Russia for help.

AR Monday the UK helicoptered cash into Cyprus for stranded British servicemen. Maybe it should helicopter the men out: Cyprus could implode.

Top 5 Arms Exporters
SIPRI

Ranking for 2008-2012:

USA 30%
Russia 26%
Germany 7%
France 6%
China 5%

China pushed the UK out of the top 5: 55% of its arms exports went to Pakistan.

German history

St. Patrick's Day Party
Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut
Haus der Kultur, Heidelberg

AR Didn't go.

Taj Mahal
TSC 2013
Agra, India
Setting the Agenda for a Science of Information
By A. K. Mukhopadhyay
PDF: 85 slides, 10 MB

Getty
Pope Francis

FAA 787 OK
FT

Federal Aviation Administration approves Boeing 787 Dreamliner battery fix and gives go-ahead for test flights. The fix improves insulation between battery cells, puts the battery in a fireproof box, and allows any smoke to vent outside the aircraft. Boeing wants resumed flights within weeks.

Falkland Islands

Falkland islanders referendum:
"Do you want to stay British?"
Electorate 1,650; turnout 92%;
result 99.8% yes; 3 voted no.






One Ring To Rule Them All

Google has built rings that not only adorn a finger but also let wearers log in to a computer or online account. It says using a ring to log in is less risky than reusing passwords.

2013 Easter Sunday

After God
New Statesman

1 Alain de Botton

The challenge of our times is not to measure the god-shaped hole, but to fill it. Three ways:

For centuries in the west, priests were there to take care of your soul. The deep self has not lost its aches and pains simply because some scientific inaccuracies have been found in the bible. Psychotherapy remains a minority activity, out of reach of most people. Christian societies would imagine there was something wrong with you if you had no priest, but we usually assume that therapists are there solely for moments of extreme crisis. There is also an issue of branding. Therapy is depressing. It has a long way to go to plug the gap left by the priesthood.

Claims that culture could stand in for scripture still sound eccentric or insane. But the qualities that the religious locate in their holy texts can often be found in works of culture. Novels and philosophy can impart moral instruction and offer consolation. Equivalents to the ethical lessons of religion lie scattered across the cultural canon. The notion of replacing religion with culture only sounds odd because universities fail to train students to use culture as a repertoire of wisdom.

Some say art museums are our new churches. But art museums abdicate their potential to function as new churches by failing to frame their collections in a way that links them to our inner needs. A walk through a museum of art should amount to a structured encounter with ideas that are easy to forget but are vital to remember. The challenge is to change our art museums to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as they formerly served those of theology. In the course of casting off bad ideas, secularists have lost useful and attractive aspects of the faiths.

2 Francis Spufford

Richard Dawkins shows indifference to all religions except Christianity. He feels he is locked in righteous combat with the powers of darkness. For him the world is obscured by a layer of corrupting gunk that purports to mediate between us and meaning but actually hides the truth. We need to take up the wire wool of reason and scrub the lies away. We need no priests. We can and must see the world as it is.

But the project is impossible. Direct apprehension of truth is not available, except via the hard work of science. That gunk the New Atheists scrub away is the accumulating deposit of human culture. It grows faster than they can remove it. We'll never arrive at the Year Zero where everything means only what science says it should, for our imaginations will never stop. We cannot disenchant the world. Even advocacy for disenchantment becomes a new enchantment, with prophets, heresies, and myths.

Alain de Botton finds virtues and beauties in religion. He seeks to reconcile unbelief with a fertile culture. Maybe we are entering a more tolerant phase, where atheists abandon the impossible task of trying to abolish religion and tackle instead the more useful task of sorting the good kinds from the bad.

3 Jim Al-Khalili

As a scientist, I have an unshakeable conviction that our universe is comprehensible. There is no need for a supernatural being to fill the gaps in our understanding. We shall fill them with answers arrived at by examining hypotheses, testing our theories, and dropping them if they conflict with empirical data. Scientists are constantly subjecting our worldview to scrutiny. This is the opposite of blind faith.

Not all scientists abandon a view when proved wrong, and not everyone with religious faith follows it blindly. If you are convinced that there is a deeper significance to the universe or a spiritual meaning to your life, I shall not try to convince you otherwise. But I take issue with the arrogant attitude that religious faith is the only means of providing us with a moral compass. That idea is nonsense.

We still have a long way to go to rid the world of the bigotry and injustice that come with religion. But we can afford to moderate our criticism and tolerate those with a faith. I believe we are winning the argument. This is no time for complacency, but we are now in a strong position to change attitudes, to correct laws, and to build a fairer society in which religion does not confer special privileges.

Our society is no longer predominantly religious. Atheists are the mainstream. We cannot afford to be complacent or conciliatory on the evil intent of religious fanatics, the stubborn ignorance of creationists, or the injustices against women or minority groups in the name of barbaric medieval laws, but we can take a softer approach. Some atheists will call me an accommodationist. I call myself a humanist.

4 Karen Armstrong

Most of us are introduced to God and Santa Claus at about the same, but over the years our views of Santa mature and change, while our notion of God often gets stuck at an infantile level.

Religious thinking in the west is often remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. Maimonides and Aquinas both insisted that God was not another being. God, said Aquinas, is being itself.

The biblical God is a starter kit. Throughout history, many people have been content with a personalized deity, not because they believed in it but because they learned to behave in a way that made it real. Religion is a form of practical knowledge, like driving or dancing, not the quest for an abstract truth. Usually religion is about doing things and it is hard work. The Christian Trinity was a new way of thinking, an activity rather than a metaphysical truth. It is probably because most western Christians have not been instructed in this exercise that it remains incomprehensible or absurd.

If you don't do religion, you don't get it. Originally, belief meant commitment. When Jesus asked his followers to have faith, he was asking his disciples to give all they had to the poor, live rough, and work selflessly for the coming of a kingdom in which rich and poor would sit together at the same table. Real faith demands overcoming selfishness to bring new meaning into our world.

5 Richard Holloway

No matter how they answer the God question, generous-minded people could profit from adopting an attitude of critical sympathy toward religion and maybe even try it.

Most religions have two main departments. Natural theology addresses ultimate questions about our universe, so natural theologians are like philosophers, and they usually end up in a kind of agnosticism. Revealed theology tries to work out the meaning of the messages that God has sent us from beyond to answer our questions. Revelation is what you get when you go to the synagogue or church or the mosque. You get instructions from God to do this or abjure that.

The problem is the circularity of the claims made by exponents of revealed theology. If you ask them how they know that the words they quote came from God, they say the Bible or the Quran or the Whatever tells them so. To the question of where all this stuff came from, the obvious answer is that it came from us. All these sacred texts are creations of the human imagination, crafted to tell a story. They are myths. A myth is a story that encodes but does not necessarily explain a universal human experience. Ask of a myth not whether it is true or false but whether it is dead or alive.

2013 March 30

Austerity
A.C. Grayling

Austerity in hard economic times mean giving up the car, going out less often, cutting not just amenities but necessities, or what we think are necessities. The people who take the hardest hit are the poor and vulnerable.

Most of the things that are most valuable in human life do not cost money. It might be pleasurable to dine with friends in a fine restaurant, but to meet them on a park bench in the sunshine can be good too. Material possessions can become an impediment.

Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher of antiquity, said that the truly rich person is he who is satisfied with what he has. Enforced austerity might teach one to be grateful not to be burdened with more than is sufficient.

So long as people measure their worth by how much they earn or own, they will think that having less is austerity, that living more simply is austerity, that getting to know their own locale rather than rushing to distant beaches is austerity.

2013 March 29

Chinese Supremacy
Ian Johnson

China's territorial claims to islands and waters in East Asia have turned bellicose and even provocative. The Philippines and Japan say they will become "strategic partners" in settling their maritime disputes with China. Japan is one of the world's most capable maritime powers, and actively defends claims to the disputed islands known as the Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

These problems predate the People's Republic of China. Many Chinese are convinced that old maps and imperial records imply historical Chinese control. In 1895, China and Japan fought a war and Japan annexed the islands. Now that China's economy has surpassed that of Japan, the two countries are locked in their most sustained and bitter dispute since World War II.

Arvind Subramanian argues that China will eclipse the United States even if Washington pulls off a turnaround by balancing the budget and getting growth back on track. Within the foreseeable future, China will surpass the United States as the world's biggest economy. China will be in a position to dominate it politically as well. The best Washington can do is prepare for relative decline.

Edward Luttwak predicts that China cannot rise as a superpower in its current incarnation. Its growth will cause countries to band together and stymie its rise. Germany's economic and military growth caused France and England to ally with each other, and China's rise to the top is causing a reaction, not only in Japan and the Philippines but also in the United States.

In 2010, China responded to the arrest of a Chinese fishing captain who had violated Japanese territorial waters by issuing inflammatory statements, arresting Japanese businessmen, and effectively suspending rare earth shipments to Japan. Then it sought to make a deal with Japan. But the Japanese were alarmed, and this prompted the national government to take action.

All rising powers cause a reaction, and rarely gain hegemony unless they create or take advantage of a historic turning point, such as a war. The United States used Japan's defeat and the decline of Britain and France after World War II to move decisively into the Pacific as a donor of economic aid. By contrast, China is seen as a predator and a challenge to its neighbors.

Minimalism
Katy Waldman

Graham Hill sold his Internet company for millions in the late 1990s and went on a shopping binge. But it failed to buy him happiness, so he downsized to a 39 sqm studio: "My space is small. My life is big."

Hill has a point. Many people amass belongings not because they have to, but because they want to. Such conspicuous consumption and waste seems obnoxious and can imply unhealthy psychic needs.

Minimalism has roots in the spiritual asceticism of Zen, Jain, early Christians, and Gandhi. In 1936, Richard Gregg coined the term "voluntary simplicity" to describe the lifestyle. It still wins converts.

Everett Bogue had an epiphany in 2009 that led him to quit his New York job, sell his possessions, and wander around the world. After three years of living out of one bag, he blogged: "Fuck Minimalism."

Dave Bruno lives in California with his wife and children. He takes walks, gardens, and spends time with his family. He calls it simple living, not minimalism, and thinks you can own stuff and still live simply.

AR This is how I plan to live.

2013 March 28

Cyprus Lessons
Martin Wolf

1 The eurozone can do the right thing in the end. Superior alternatives assume a nonexistent degree of solidarity among member states. Short of funding a tax haven, the present plan is the least bad one.

2 Euros are not all equal. Nearly all euros are bank liabilities. The value of a euro of bank liabilities depends on the solvency of the bank and the government behind the bank. If both are insolvent, lenders may lose much of their money and find the rest frozen behind controls.

3 The relationship between banks, sovereigns, and the eurozone is complicated. There is no EZ consensus on the principle that creditors, not taxpayers, should pay if a bank becomes insolvent. The German government would rescue Deutsche Bank if it were in trouble.

4 The "bad marriage" that binds EZ members together has got worse.

College Grads In Coffee Shops
Megan McArdle

Too many college kids are living in Mom's basement, or working at Starbucks. Grad school often makes it worse. Skilled workers with higher degrees are ending up in jobs that don't need degrees.

The average cognitive load of the jobs done by college students spiked in 1990-2000, as the IT revolution created new roles for thinkers. Then it started to fall. Now college students do more routine work.

It seems we no longer need so many skilled workers doing hard jobs with a big analytical component. Grads who can't get those jobs are taking less skilled ones. Unskilled workers are dropping out.

We may be over-investing in college:
1 A lot of college attendance is seat warming rather than useful learning.
2 More students with degrees end up in jobs that don't make use of them.
3 A substantial number of kids drop out, with debts but no job prospects.

Yet the wage premium for a college graduate is higher than ever. Lower skilled workers are falling out of the higher paying jobs as college graduates move down the skill ladder. College graduates are having trouble getting good jobs, but the unskilled workers are doing even worse. This doesn't prove that college degrees are raising wages.

This is bad news. Kids are still taking expensive college courses, but the credentials are often inflated tickets to routine service jobs. If you plan to major in English, get ready for a career at Starbucks.

Ogooglebar
The Guardian

The word for "ungoogleable" — "impossible to find via web search" — is gone from the Swedish lexicon published by The Language Council of Sweden.

The term had become a notable neologism during 2012, but Google's lawyers got wind of the council's intentions and told it the company did not want its trademark diluted. Google proposed the definition "something that cannot be found on the web using Google" together with a trademark notification.

Instead, the council dropped the word from its list. Council director Ann Cederberg: "Google asked the Language Council to amend the definition of the word. Today, we instead are deleting the word, marking our displeasure with Google's attempts to control the language."

Cederberg: "One purpose of the neologisms list is to show how society and language development interact with each other. Google wanted to amend the definition and add a disclaimer about its trademark ... We have neither the time nor the inclination to pursue the lengthy process that Google is trying to start."

AR Google has forgotten its motto: "Don't be evil." Free speech implies we must stop lawyers trying to tell us what we may and may not say.

2013 March 27

Dark Matter
Andrew Pontzen

Carlos Frenk proposed dark matter long ago. Today it is orthodoxy. Wherever dark stuff accumulates normal matter follows, drawn by its gravity, to form stars and galaxies. Dark matter explains the fact that clusters of galaxies whirl around too fast for the amount of ordinary matter in them. And patterns in the CMB reveal matter in the early universe poised between gravitational contraction and expansive pressures in a way that agrees with dark matter theory.

My research suggests that to reproduce the facts we need dark matter as a cold soup that barely moves at all. The energy from exploding supernovas and stuff falling into black holes sends vast quantities of gas swirling violently around. My simulations suggest that, if normal gas is shaken enough, it swirls dark matter around too. Dark matter particles could then be jostled by normal matter just enough to stop it clumping too densely.

The NASA gamma-ray telescope Fermi offers evidence for the idea of normal matter kicking dark matter around. Cold dark matter theory suggests you can see its particles collide and annihilate in a flash of gamma rays. But annihilating superparticles would produce gamma rays with a spread of energies, unpredictably. Frenk: "The case is absolutely fascinating, but I don't think we've found anything yet."

Dark Mind
Max Liu

David Shields wants to forge a literary form that can articulate experience and assuage loneliness: "The only way out is deeper in." He reveres Proust but no longer has the patience to read him. He reads because he wants to watch others thinking and he writes from the compulsion to share his mind's movements. But he believes writers must confront "the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms".

2013 March 26

Cyprus EZ Deal
Der Spiegel

How far can one bend to a country like Cyprus without losing credibility? The most important glue holding the EZ together is the mutual confidence of its members, but Club Med countries are increasingly furious over the austerity diktats from Berlin, Brussels, and Frankfurt.

Cypriots see themselves as the innocent victims of a ruthless bailout policy. They say their business model differs only slightly from those of Ireland, Luxembourg, and the UK. But now, says a Cypriot diplomat, "the German public only associates us with money laundering, the Russian mafia, and oligarchs".

The Germany intelligence agency BND portrayed Cyprus as a hub for money laundering. Wealthy Russians liked the setup and invested billions in Cyprus, avoiding the Russian tax collector. According to the BND, 80 Russia oligarchs have sheltered their money on the island.

President Anastasiades initially opposed the EZ plan to introduce a mandatory levy on savings deposits to bridge the funding gap. When he acquiesced, he insisted that small deposits also be levied, only to claim afterwards that the hardliners from Germany had supported the inclusion of ordinary savers. He had wanted to protect large investors.

Berlin rejects all blame for the crisis.

AR I back Berlin: Close down the tax havens. Give law-abiding taxpayers a break.

German Europe
Gideon Rachman

Cyprus has been forced to succumb to the will of Germany. Germanophobia is unfair. German taxpayers will once again be funding the biggest single share of yet another eurozone bailout. Yet growing German power is now the main theme in European politics.

The European Commission, the IMF, and the ECB took the lead in the Cyprus negotiations. But no deal could go through without the German government. The Germans have a clear and consistent analysis of the problem. They believe that fiscal profligacy or faulty business models lie at the heart of the crisis, and the solution is austerity, allied to structural reform.

The notion that Europe should be driven forward by a Franco-German partnership was crucial to French thinking. But any notion that France is playing an equal role to Germany has disappeared. Germany is writing the cheques, enforcing the rules, and increasingly making them up as well. That is a dangerous situation for Europe.

AR Not really. Recall the Holy Roman Empire. Ample precedent, I'd say.

Nations
Pierre Manent

The ancient world turned on city states and empires. The city is the smallest human association capable of self-government. The empire is the most extensive possible grouping under a single sovereign. Athens was a city. Rome was an empire.

Cicero was a major reference for Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Medieval thinking is divided between those who carry on the ancient tradition and those who announce or prepare the work of the moderns. Europe was in search of an order.

Modernity was defined by a movement toward a reordering. Medieval authors were caught up for ten centuries in confusion. The rupture associated with Machiavelli and with Luther allowed a fresh start.

Machiavelli stated that fortune favors the bold. He dismissed moral precepts and traditional inhibitions. He reduced all the virtues to hope and courage. It was a call to revolution.

Luther attacked ecclesiastical mediation between man and God. The rupture empowered temporal authorities. The repository of religious authority became the community of believers. The Reformation was a national revolution.

With the Church set aside, the social world accelerated. The nation became the natural framework of civilized human life. Europeans felt that they inhabited the most perfectly developed political form.

During the twentieth century, the nation state was discredited and now belongs to a past age. Europeans are in transition from one type of human association to another.

AR Family — tribe — nation — polity: EU or EZ? No, GO! The Cloud!

Zombies
Jerome Burne

Brain parasites can change behavior:

● A parasitic wasp attaches its eggs to the belly of an orb spider. They zombify the spider to spin a cocoon for the baby wasps when they emerge.

● A parasitic fungus infects an ant. The ant seeks out a spot on a tree about 25 cm above its trail, facing northwest. At noon, it bites a leaf, holds on, and dies by nightfall. A few days later, a tube sprouts from its head and emits fungus spores to infect more ants.

● A worm reproduces in sheep. It hijacks the brain of an ant, which it programs to climb to the top of a blade of grass every evening and hold on tight. The ant waits all night for a grazing sheep to eat it. If it's still there in the morning, it climbs down to avoid the sun. In the evening, it climbs up and tries again.

● A parasite called Toxoplasma gondii reproduces in cat guts. To get there, it prompts its host to risk being eaten by a cat. Rats infected with Toxo like the smell of cat urine. Toxo in brain areas controlling fear and pleasure damps down alarm at the smell of cat urine and boosts the pleasure hormone dopamine instead. Toxo is linked in humans to disturbed behaviors such as reckless driving and a greater risk of suicide. Studies show men infected with Toxo become introverted and wear rumpled old clothes, whereas infected woman dress smartly and become more trusting and sociable.

● The influenza vaccine changes human behavior. A study of 36 academics (a) two days before and (b) two days after getting a jab showed that from (a) to (b) they almost doubled the number of people they interacted with and cut the amount of time they spent with each person by a factor of more than ten — ideal to spread the virus.

AR Zombies 'r' us. Genes 'n' memes.

2013 March 25

EU Approves Cyprus Deal
Financial Times

EU ministers have approved a deal on Cyprus. The deal leaves accounts worth less than €100,000 untouched. But those above that level in Laiki Bank will be severely cut. The losses on large deposits in Bank of Cyprus could reach 40%. The deal releases a €10 billion bailout package and saves the island from bankruptcy. It will destroy the offshore financial business that was the engine of the island's economy.

AR No pain, no gain.

EZ Breakup Looms
Wolfgang Münchau

A eurozone that comprises countries as diverse as Germany and Cyprus is not sustainable. An operational banking union with supervision, resolution, and deposit insurance is the minimal condition to make a monetary system work. But the eurozone does not meet it. Germany says it is too expensive.

The crisis over Cyprus illustrates the problem. It began when EZ officials decided to tax insured deposits, failing to see the danger of a bank run. The Cypriot government committed three blunders:

1 Its failed appeal to Russia for help offended Germans.
2 Its days of silence toward European officials lost trust.
3 Its proposal to raid the pension fund was abhorrent.

The eurozone makes repeated policy errors. The policy of adjustment via austerity turned a recession into a depression in Italy. A policy that goes against the interests of the people is immoral.

AR The EZ can only work well when Germans learn how to lead it.

Anti-Judaism
R.I. Moore

David Nirenberg argues that hostility to Judaism was deeply and pervasively woven into the fabric of Western Christianity. The early Christians defined their beliefs in opposition to Judaism. Christians said that in refusing to acknowledge Christ, Jews had failed to follow their own prophets.

England prospered in the years after the Norman Conquest in 1066. Jews flourished with it, and their culture and expertise had much to offer. But after a hundred years, the king regulated the loans made by Jewish lenders. The Jews were thrown out in 1290. The story was similar elsewhere in Europe.

The legacy of the Christian Church was anti-Judaism. Enlightenment figures found in Jews an archetypal avarice and deviousness, and in Judaism a primitive superstition. Marx called for the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. Weber rehabilitated capitalism by associating it with Protestantism.

Muhammad faced a paradox in embracing a revelation from which everything must begin afresh while continuing to respect the authority of the Hebrew scriptures. His followers depicted Jews as resisting the revelation of Muhammad and even plotting against him. The seeds had been planted.

Martin Luther's onslaughts on the Jews arose from his anxiety that the world was converting to Judaism. Nirenberg: "Luther's reconceptualization of the ways in which language mediates between God and creation was achieved by thinking with, about, and against Jews and Judaism."

AR All dead weight in spaceship Earth.

2013 March 24

Are We All Martians?
Lawrence Krauss

NASA says the Curiosity rover found proof of running water not so long ago on Mars. When it drilled into a rock in an ancient stream bed, it discovered sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and carbon, which could feed life.

The clay discovered in the drill sample was gray, not red. Life on Earth was possible because no free oxygen existed on the planet at first. Organic materials exposed to oxygen get oxidized, releasing energy we use for life, in a slow burn.

Oxidized iron is red rust. The fact that not all the surface stuff on Mars is oxidized suggests the early wet environment was not oxidizing and not entirely acidic, so early life could have burned some of the material in the gray clay for energy.

If we find evidence for life on Mars, the big question will be whether it is or was related to us. Material routinely travels between Earth and Mars, and microbes could too. Perhaps life first originated on Mars and then was transported to Earth. If that's true, I'm a Martian.

Iraq War For Oil
Antonia Juhasz

Big Oil won the Iraq war. Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq's domestic oil industry was nationalized and closed to foreigners. Today it is largely privatized, and dominated by Big Oil. ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and service companies such as Halliburton are all doing business in Iraq. The war let them in.

Oil was the aim of the Iraq war. In 2000, Big Oil spent big money to get oilmen Bush and Cheney into office. The National Energy Policy Development Group reviewed Iraq and reported in May 2001 that Mideast countries should be urged "to open up areas of their energy sectors to foreign investment".

Before the invasion, two things stood in the way: Saddam Hussein and Iraqi law. The invasion got rid of Hussein. Some Bush insiders said they should change the law through the coalition government of Iraq. Instead, the Bush administration drafted a law for a newly elected Iraqi government to pass.

The Iraq Hydrocarbons Law would lock the nation into private foreign investment on terms friendly to Big Oil. The Iraqi government was pushed to pass it but refused. So in 2008, the oil companies simply signed contracts that provide all of the access and most of the terms they wanted.

Law or no law, the new contracts open Iraq to Big Oil. Iraqi oil production has increased by more than 40% since 2008 to 3 million barrels a day, 80% of it exported. The Iraqi oil and gas sectors rely largely on imported labor. In the war for oil, the losers were the Iraqi people.

AR A big round of thanks to Bush for cheap oil.

2013 March 23

Who Owns The Future?
Jaron Lanier

Cloud software will weaken nearly every present job. The only one left standing will be the owner of the biggest computer on the network. The biggest computer and the biggest data guarantee success. Politics then becomes about the computer instead of the agenda.

If there were micro payments made to the people who fed the big data, there would still be an economy. We choose not to intervene in the market, which is just is an algorithmic result of things we do. Instead of allowing human politics to decide, we let the market sort out our affairs.

Markets need to be honest. We constant find companies like Google saying they are honest brokers. No, they are commercial concerns. There is a smugness to the tech world. But the only proper attitude is that the profession of engineering is there to serve people.

Currently if you have a big computer then you get to keep your data secret, and you have tremendous rights. I would like to see everybody have their autonomy and social mobility independently of some big company. Government must rule on the basics of digital identity.

AR The IT revolution is decoupling effort from reward in the economy. Pay is a political issue: If we accept a market rigged by IT we accept that people who get lucky get rich, while others starve. This cannot stand: We need a principled basis for paying people to live normal lives. We need a right to pay for poor people and a duty to pay back for rich people, all governed by Go(...) and IT.

Chinua Achebe
The Guardian

Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian writer. His first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) sold more than 10 million copies. A quote: "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one."

Achebe won the Man Booker prize in 2007. Elaine Showalter, said he had "inaugurated the modern African novel". Nadine Gordimer said his fiction was "an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence" and that Achebe was "a joy and an illumination to read".

In a 1975 essay, Achebe said Joseph Conrad turned Africa into "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril", asking: "Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?"

Born in 1930 and taught at the University of Ibadan, Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart in English, saying "the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience". In 1990, a car accident in Nigeria left him paralyzed and he moved to the United States. He was a professor at Brown University until his death, aged 82.

AR Fair comment on Conrad: Recall Colonel Kurtz (Marlo Brando) in Apocalypse Now, based on Heart of Darkness. The Cambodians were mere bodies in the horror show.

2013 March 22

Publishing
Richard Nash

Publishing is the business of literature. The system produces great literature in spite of itself. Until recently, unpublished manuscripts were lost, so the universe of knowledge excludes books that were never published. From what is published we choose what we celebrate, and we say the system produced these celebrated works.

Like tables and chairs, books have receded into the backdrop of human life. The book is a technology so pervasive that it reaches the status of nature. Books virtually began consumer capitalism. The bookstore is the model for the supermarket. Digital publishing increased the number of published titles. The number of independent publishers rose with the growth of superstore bookstores, which needed the indie offerings to fill their shelves.

With digital publishing, the cost of creating the text is fixed but the marginal cost for mass consumption is zero. Books reward iteration for readers too. The more you read, the better you get at it, the more fun you have. Books are recipes for the imagination. The book is already good enough. Its job is to deliver a very large set of words.

As for publishers, there is marketing and discovery. Editors add value beyond their editorial skills: they bring relationship skills. People work hard on books that become bestsellers, but what really matters is luck and network effects. Almost all books are commercial flops, but some achieve spectacular success.

Publishing is about making culture. The margin on books is low because it takes so long to discover whether or not you like a book. Publishers cut prices to persuade us to risk wasting our time. But selling a book is not the only way to generate revenue from all the cultural activity around literature and ideas. Book culture is the swirl and gurgle of idea and style in the expression of stories and concepts. Publishers are where the shit hits the fan.

Algebra Breakthrough Wins Abel Prize
Jacob Aron

Mathematician Pierre Deligne of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton has won the $1 million Abel prize. He proved the last of the four conjectures proposed in 1949 by André Weil to tackle the problem of solving polynomial equations within number systems known as finite fields.

Weil suggested describing the number of possible solutions in each finite field by counting certain points on a related shape, using a zeta function. Proving his four statements about the zeta function would confirm that this is the way to tackle polynomial equations within finite fields.

Three of the statements were soon proved, but the last was harder. Finding a cohomology would crack the problem, but it was tricky. Deligne did so in 1974, and won the Fields medal in 1978. Cambridge mathematician Timothy Gowers calls him "one of the absolute all-time greats".

2013 March 21

Europe Versus Cyprus
Christian Rickens

In the spat between Cyprus and the European Union, Russia might ride to the rescue. Russian investors have parked billion in Cyprus. When the Nicosia parliamentarians voted unanimously against the EU bailout package, their main concern was not small savers but maintaining their tax haven.

The Cyprus package called for €10 billion from the ESM plus €6 billion from the levy. If the Euro Group let go the levy, any country in trouble in future would play hardball with Brussels and play havoc with financial markets. European taxpayers will lose trust if their austerity pays for mismanagement in the Med.

Nicosia hopes Moscow will overlook the tax loss from rich Russians banking in Cyprus and bail out the banks. They can offer a natural gas deal that trades Russian access to their deposits for cash. It must be cash. A loan would drive Cypriot sovereign debt too high. If Russia says no, say hi to a new eurocrisis.

Russian Reaction
Financial Times

Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev lambasted EU handling of the Cyprus debt crisis. Cypriot finance minister Michael Sarris met senior Russian officials to seek aid from the Kremlin to bail out its banks. Officials in Moscow are skeptical: Russian businessmen invest using commercial criteria.

Israel Versus Islam
Jerusalem Post

The relationship between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu started off badly in 2009. Washington thought Israel and the Palestinians were close to an agreement. Obama told Netanyahu that progress on the Palestinian track would make it easier to enlist the Arab world in efforts to stop Iran. He seemed to think the proverbial Arab street would be more accepting of Israel if it did right by the Palestinians.

Netanyahu took the opposite approach. Tackle Iran and its nuclear program first, then deal with the Palestinians. A proud Iran would use Hamas and Hezbollah to foul up any diplomatic process. Land for peace never worked in the past. The Arab street looks at the conflict through religion. The Muslim Brotherhood wants an Islamic state and views Israel as alien and unacceptable in the Mideast.

AR Israel versus Iran and Islam: war on two fronts.

2013 March 20

Berlin Can Lead On Syria
Ulrich Speck

On all recent questions of war and peace, Germany has disagreed with the other leading European powers. Berlin opposed the intervention in Libya in 2011, it was reluctant to help France in Mali in January, and it still resists arming the rebels in Syria. So Europe is failing to exert its full power.

Germans still find comfort in the pacifism they adopted in reaction to the horrors of the second world war. They are proud they opposed the Iraq war ten years ago. Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to a push by Britain and France for Europe to lift its arms embargo on Syria thus: "Just the fact that two have changed their minds doesn't mean that the other 25 have to follow suit."

Germany can slow or prevent action by France and Britain by denying access to EU resources. Berlin does not have the military assets that Paris and London have. But Germany is widely seen as a neutral player that can do business with both sides. Hosting a Syria conference in Berlin would advance European interests in the Mideast and let Germany shine as a peacemaker.

UK Budget
Financial Times

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne ordered ministers to come up with £2.5 billion of extra spending cuts. Faced with stagnant growth and disintegrating debt targets, the chancellor will present a budget for "people who want to work hard and get on".

The chancellor is expected to raise the personal tax allowance to £10,000 in 2014, to defer a planned rise in fuel duty, and to trim current spending to promote growth. Any good news in the 2013 budget will be dwarfed by the scale of the UK borrowing crisis.

AR Ask the Saudis for a handout.

2013 March 19

CORAL is now for sale in the new updated version:
● Cropped and clarified Christians
● Enhanced and extended Revelation
● Extended notes and references

Saudi Arabia
Yasmin Alibhai Brown

Prince Charles' wife Camilla wore an unsecured headscarf on her trip to Saudi Arabia. It slipped off and almost uncovered all her hair. According to Saudi Wahhabi Islam, uncovered hidden female tresses are as licentious as exposed pubic hair. The Duchess' shamelessness must have prompted diplomatic jitters.

Charles is keen on Islamic thought but never gets into Mideast politics. To expect him to stand up for human rights is about as hopeless as expecting him to champion equal rights. The real iniquity is the way the UK sucks up to Saudi Arabia, knowing its tyrannical governance and malevolent global influence.

Saudi Arabia is slowly handing some pitifully small rights to women. Female politicians have been given an advisory role and smart young women are able to work under restrictive conditions. But at this pace the world will end before Saudi women achieve full human status. Black cloaks render them invisible.

Saudi funded Wahhabis are everywhere, successfully eradicating all diversity and ease in Islam, aggressively exporting their own brand. I have seen the results of this infiltration in Tanzania, India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Egypt, and in Western cities. The ideology fosters intolerance and extremism.

The oil.

Cyprus, Europe
Financial Times

Cypriot authorities are renegotiating the terms of a €10 billion bailout to scrap its levy on small account holders and instead seize more from larger depositors and businesses. Banks are closed to avoid a bank run as the government responds to the deal struck with the eurozone and the IMF.

2013 March 18

Cyprus, Europe
Financial Times

Just as the eurozone had begun to set the right course in its struggle with an ever-mutating debt crisis, it relapsed into its old vice. Faced with a drowning member state, instead of throwing Cyprus a lifebelt, leaders put a millstone around its neck.

The Cyprus deal imposes a tax on all depositors down to the smallest ones. The small savers are betrayed. A future European banking system must shield taxpayers from the losses of banks.

AR Big banks are saved, small savers are wiped out: TIME TO REVOLT!

Iraq Ten Years On
Ed Husain

Saddam Hussein did not expect his rule to end so abruptly. His fall must have encouraged Arab opposition activists across the Mideast. But if they were directly inspired by the fall of Saddam, they would have risen a decade ago.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities, Arab governments used the ensuing "war on terror" to quell domestic dissent. When opposition Islamist parties questioned the legitimacy of Arab dictators, they were seen as al Qaeda sympathizers and imprisoned.

From 2001 to 2011, government repression of Islamists signaled to young Arabs that Islamism could not overthrow autocratic regimes. Islamists failed to gain political office, and the corruption and nepotism of regimes in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt sank deeper.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter helped young Arabs bypass communications controlled by their dictators. The Arab youth used modern technology to amplify the mood music of Western belief that Arabs too could be free. The Arab Spring was going to happen with or without Saddam Hussein.

Iraq is not a success. It is now an ally of Iran, home to a prime minister who persecutes his own political opposition, and unashamedly supports the Assad regime in Syria.

AR Bush lost the plot for the West.

2013 March 17

Mental Illness
CNN

To ease the heartache of a stillbirth, Kelli Montgomery chose rigorous exercise, yoga, and meditation over the antidepressants and sleeping pills that her physicians suggested.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the bible for mental health professionals. A new campaign will seek to block the May release of the next edition, DSM-5.

The American Psychiatric Association dismisses DSM-5 critics as alarmist. Dr. Carl Bell: "All the good epidemiological studies unfortunately show that one in five people have a psychological disorder."

The APA says the DSM-5 is sound. Dr. David Kupfer: "The development of DSM-5 began with an unprecedented process of research evaluation that included a series of white papers and 13 scientific conferences supported by the National Institutes of Health. This preparation brought together more than 400 international scientists and produced a series of monographs and peer-reviewed journal articles."

Primary care doctors too often dispense anti-psychotic drugs. Montgomery: "I had no mental illness. I had never been medicated. I had not even suggested that I was depressed."

Retirement
David Randall

The number of people aged over 65 in the UK is set to rise from 10 million in 2010 to 15 million in 2030. Many are alarmed by the rising cost of pensions and healthcare.

A new Lords report says businesses should let older people work for longer and people should agree they have no right to be idle for the final third of their lives.

We tend to see retirement as the end. More than a third of women aged 60-64 and a quarter of men aged 65-69 may still be in full or part-time work, but we pay the rest off.

It is high time we harnessed the powers of the retired and semi-retired in a volunteer force. It would end the wicked waste of millions of our more experienced people.

2013 March 16

Muslim Brotherhood On Women
The New York Times

The Muslim Brotherhood has long preached that Islam required women to obey their husbands in all matters. In a statement on a proposed United Nations declaration to condemn violence against women, the Brotherhood issued a list of objections:

● Wives should not have the right to file legal complaints against their husbands for rape.
● Wives need their husbands' consent in matters like travel, work, or use of contraception.
● Husbands should not be subject to the punishments meted out for the rape of a stranger.
● Husbands must have guardianship over their wives, not equal partnerships with them.
● Daughters should not have the same inheritance rights as sons.

Egyptian UN representative Pakinam El-Sharkawy said the Egyptian government objected to the UN declaration only over issues like whether to call restrictions on abortion acts of violence against women. That offended the cultural norms in many Arab and African countries: "We can't give women the freedom to have abortions whenever they want."

Muslim Brother Abu Salam says husbands should keep their wives under tight control: "It's the nature of the weak to overstep the required framework if she is given the space and the freedom, like children."

The Brotherhood says the UN proposals are "destructive tools meant to undermine the family as an important institution" that "would drag society back to pre-Islamic ignorance".

The Book Trade
Der Spiegel

Publishers used to publish enough bestsellers to subsidize diversified lists of prestige titles. Profits depended on their monopoly position. Without them, readers and writers would have no books at all.

Now they're on the defensive. Bookstores and the recommendation system are at risk with the rise of online booksellers like Amazon that let customers recommend books to each other. Self-publishing threatens to cut out traditional middlemen. And cheap e-books are endangering printed books.

People are buying fewer printed books, and buying more of those they do buy online. Online bookstores now have a market share of almost 20%. The big bookstore chains have failed to find a way to fight back.

Amazon is fighting the literary aristocracy. The company wants the business to itself. It locks in e-book customers and demands big discounts from publishers. Some say it is destroying book culture. Yet Amazon depends on people valuing books enough to buy a Kindle to read them.

People read and write a lot, and they are publishing more books than ever before. And it's never been this easy to publish a text as a book, at least in electronic form. All it takes is a few clicks. It's as easy as buying a book. Reading and writing is a mass phenomenon.

Amazon is dominant in the e-book market, with a market share of over 40%. Its customers rank and evaluate their purchases, as a crowd, and give Amazon the data for free. Almost everything can be logged: how fast people read, which text they highlight, and where they stop reading. The data may soon help authors to rewrite their books in response to reader reactions.

Publishers are realizing they need to catch up. They are hoping to learn from the mistakes of the music industry. When the first e-book readers came on the mass market, customers weren't forced into piracy, as in the music industry. And they let authors hold onto their digital rights.

Bestselling authors are rare. Only a small group of writers can support themselves with writing, and that elite is shrinking. Meanwhile, the number of books sold in the middle of the pack declines from year to year. Publishing literary books is still a gamble.

Hilary Putnam
M.T. Nicholson

Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam is a lucidly self-aware neurotic. Born in 1926 in Chicago, he was raised an atheist and progressive. At age 50, he abandoned communism. At 68, he had his Bar Mitzvah.

Putnam denies a clean distinction between facts and values. Scientists agree that simpler theories are better but have no rulebook to say so. They appeal to the greater pragmatic value of simpler theories or to the lack of explanatory value in added complications. Facts are inextricably tied to values.

Putnam says meaning is external and normative. The meaning of our statements is derived from their causal relation to an external world. Symbols derive their content from a complex network of information, metaphor, and history. A brain map of a speaker is not enough to interpret what they say.

Putnam believes in an external reality compatible with our ordinary human values. He has faith in our ability to represent reality correctly. But he finds it hard not to go relativist.

2013 March 15

Beware the Ides of March
Shakespeare

2013 + 44 — 1 (they skipped 0) = 2056 years ago today, Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome.

Beware the View From Nowhere
The Atlantic

Wonkery can only take a blogger so far.

The View from Nowhere is a bid for trust, a preemptive defense against accusations of bias, and an attempt to secure a kind of legitimacy that is denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. Claiming objectivity is not a source of authority.

In journalism, real authority starts with reporting. Knowing your stuff, mastering your beat, being right on the facts, digging under the surface of things, finding out what happened, verifying what you heard, illuminating a murky situation because you understand it better than most. Doing the work!

The Ross Blog embodies that kind of journalism. But Ross tries to bolster his authority by invoking The View from Nowhere. When Ross writes as if politics is about dispassionately identifying the best means to a universally agreed end, he isn't just disagreeing with values not his own, he is disappearing them.

The audience gets resentful when journalists treat their own values as normative. Ross is more than capable of providing the View from Somewhere.

Don't confuse facts and values.

AR Well, should I adopt a point of view?

2013 March 14

CORAL peace: my revisions are satisfactory to me.

Life On Mars?
Phil Plait

The Mars Curiosity rover has found an environment on Mars that was once warm and wet, with a chemistry that would support Earth-like life. Curiosity drilled into a rock and found evidence of clay minerals. The water that formed these minerals was neutral, not too strongly acidic or basic. Curiosity also found sulfur, phosphorus, and carbon, all ingredients for life as we know it.

Curiosity did not find evidence of life. It has been looking for organic compounds but has not yet found them. But it did find conditions were once conducive for it. The region where Curiosity landed was once very wet, and for a long time. It was probably a lake bed, fed by a river or stream that spread out into an alluvial fan. Fairly fresh water once stood where the rover sits now.

NASA has been looking for life, or at least the conditions for it. Now we have speculation based on solid scientific evidence. Mars may have once been suitable for life. Ice has been found just under the surface at mid-latitudes, insulated by the rock and dust above it. Evidence that standing water existed is everywhere, from dry lake beds like this one to strong hints of ancient oceans.

Curiosity has been sent to the right place
Emily Lakdawalla

Curiosity has found a rock that contains evidence for a past environment that would have been suitable for Earth-like microorganisms. The mineralogical and geomorphological observations suggest that the rover is on an ancient Martian lakebed. The rock contains both oxidized and reduced forms of the same elements, so there are chemical gradients that life could potentially exploit as an energy source.

AR Good news

David Foster Wallace told students in 2005 that they can choose how to make meaning out of their lives. In the tides of boredom that wash over us in our daily lives, anyone who harnesses the power of his own attention is king. We can, as he says, "choose what we worship".

2013 March 13

There Is Only Awe
Rachel Aviv

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) by Julian Jaynes was his only book. He said his inspiration arose from an episode of "darkest distress" when he was despairing over the question of how we can know anything. He heard a voice: "Include the knower in the known!"

As a doctoral student at Yale, Jaynes concluded that consciousness was a function of language. He read ancient texts and saw that consciousness emerged in the time between the Iliad and the Odyssey. The actors in the Iliad have no concept of a personal mind, but 300 years later Odysseus is a modern hero.

Jaynes: "The gods were ... man's volition. They occupied his nervous system, probably his right hemisphere." The Trojan War was fought by men with bicameral minds. In moments of stress, their servile left hemispheres took hallucinated voices in their right "god" hemispheres as commands.

By about 3 MBP, turmoil in the Mideast led to mass migrations. The gods fell silent and retreated to the sky. Humans were left alone, groping for answers. They still heard a voice, but they knew it was their own. Jaynes: "The mighty themes of the religions of the world are here sounded for the first time."

Consciousness can only be described through metaphor and analogy. Jaynes noted that writers tend to describe their work in bicameral terms as a form of listening: they hear a voice and take dictation.

Jaynes regarded science as a new attempt by humans to establish contact with a "lost ocean of authority". Science offers a rational splendor that explains everything. In return the adherent receives a world view, a total explanation of man.

Jaynes lived alone in a single room on the Princeton campus. Jaynes: "Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe."

2013 March 12

Books After Amazon
The Independent

Waterstones hopes that books with extra "bonus" material will be enough to persuade paperback fans to shun Amazon and return to the High Street. The promotion is one of several innovative marketing tactics being adopted by booksellers in an attempt to compete with cut-price online rivals.

Bookseller editor Tom Tivnan: "All bookshops are having to innovate and do special things to survive. It's part of the whole package of how to reform themselves. They have to work out what things they can do that online retailers can't ... One of the buzzwords in publishing and bookselling is discoverability."

More than 400 UK bookshops closed in 2012, leaving fewer than 2,000 bookshops in Britain, less than half as many as 7 years ago. Ebook sales doubled in 2012 to £260 million, while physical book sales fell to £1.5 billion, 5% down from 2011.

AR Am I the only one who often buys hardbacks, if only to enjoy their physical quality compared to a cheap paperback, on the grounds that the time spent reading the thing has an opportunity cost that outweighs the price anyway? A good book, like a Blu-ray movie, has value that amply rewards the price. Time is too valuable to waste reading cheap crap.

Nuclear Power, Safer And Cheaper
MIT Technology Review

Transatomic is developing a nuclear reactor that it says will cut the overall cost of a nuclear power plant in half. Its updated molten-salt reactor is highly resistant to meltdowns and small enough to be built in factories and shipped by rail. It can burn nuclear waste and includes new safety features. Transatomic says it can build a 500 MW power plant for $1.7 billion, roughly half current price levels.

AR I buy it as a low carbon planet saver.

2013 March 11

NK Annuls Armistice
American Forces Press

NK annulled the armistice agreement of 1953 and cut off the hot line to SK. The NK press reported that "the US has reduced the armistice agreement to a dead paper."

General James D. Thurman, commander of Combined Forces Command and US Forces Korea, today opened the annual Key Resolve exercise. About 13 000 US and SK participants are honing the skills necessary to defend SK, including improving the operational capabilities of combined US and SK forces, coordinating and executing the deployment of US reinforcements, and maintaining SK military combat capabilities. Thurman: "For 60 years, the armistice agreement has ensured peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula."

AR NK has no chance against USSK resolve.

Invisible Armies
James Blitz

We may see a return of "conventional" warfare between nations if Japan and China or the United States and Iran go to war. But irregular war is more common. Max Boot: "Much of the world's population lives in states whose present boundaries were determined in insurgencies waged by or against their ancestors."

Early guerrillas rarely achieved their aims, but insurgencies have been much more effective in defeating established powers since 1945. Wars nowadays are played out on TV screens as well as real battlefields. Unless an insurgency is put down quickly and effectively, it saps the will of the military to continue.

The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts underscored the importance of winning over hearts and minds rather than merely killing the enemy. Guerrilla movements prevail when they have access to foreign funding, arms training and havens. Boot: "No other factor correlates so closely with insurgent success."

Pinker Tweets
Leon Wieseltier

Thomas Nagel wrote "the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false" and Steven Pinker tweeted it was "the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker".

Nagel: "In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against religion ... I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable."

Nagel is being denounced for heresy. He is a philosopher. In American intellectual life, scientists often do the work of philosophers, but the history of science is a history of mistakes. The provenance of an idea reveals nothing about its veracity. Accept the truth from whoever utters it, said the rabbis.

AR Darwinist logic is good even if it looks imperialist.

2013 March 10

The Undivided Past
Mark Mazower

David Cannadine looks at what historians have said about religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization. He dismisses the idea of history as identity politics. He suggests that the only solidarity that is acceptable is solidarity with humankind. Nazism took the shine off nationalism, and divisions of class trumped race in the British empire. Cannadine seeks to do away with such categories.

Historians are members of their societies, and human society has not yet taken a global form. There is still virtually no shared consciousness globally of common struggles or common achievements. Even our most urgent global issues tend to be tackled regionally or nationally. There may be many things beyond our differences. But it is not yet clear that there is any history.

AR CORAL

i
The French navy will invade Britain this weekend: 200 troops, 43 vehicles, and 4 helicopters from 2 landing craft and a new landing catamaran will storm a beach at Gosport, Hampshire.

AP
Googlass

Google Glass can shoot video and stream it online — that's cool. Wearable computing with voice control will become pervasive. Google co-founder Sergey Brin (above) suggests you can whirl your child around by their arms and say: "OK, Glass, take video!" He says ordinary smartphones are "emasculating".

Anyone wearing Google Glass can beam their story to the web. Google knows this is an issue: "It may be that new social norms develop with Glass, where people develop an informal way of showing that they're not using it — say, wearing it around their neck to signal they aren't using it or being distracted by it."

The Borg

The Borg is the software system at the heart of Google. It parcels out work across the company's vast fleet of computer servers. It's one of the secrets of Google becoming the dominant force on the web. Google is now building a new version called Omega.

>> more

Brits Die Younger
The Guardian

People in the UK enjoy fewer years of good health before they die than the citizens of most comparable European countries.

The UK ranked 12th out of 19 countries of similar affluence in 2010 in terms of healthy life expectancy at birth, according to an analysis from data collected by the IHME.

UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt called the result shocking. Despite more funding and reforms, the UK has not risen in rank since 1990.

AR What a bloody shambles.


China Defense Up 10%

China will increase its defense budget by 10.7% this year, to Rmb 720 billion ($116 billion). The overall economic growth target is 7.5%.


Watch Boston Dynamics robot BigDog use jaws and head to hurl cinder blocks (47 s)

2013 March 9

North Korea
Andreas Lorenz

Pyongyang propaganda says NK forces will flush the Americans mercilessly into the sea, destroy South Korea, and turn Seoul into a nuclear sea of ​​fire, and even annihilate the US aggressors in a pre-emptive nuclear strike. All this is driven by revolutionary ideology and love for NK dictator Kim Jong Un.

The regime vowed to end a nonaggression pact with SK and cut its hot line to Seoul, and threatens to annul the 1953 Korean ceasefire agreement. In the coming weeks, NK forces will launch a major military exercise and may test another ballistic missile. SK experts cannot exclude a new NK attack:

1 The NK bosses are convinced the rest of the world wants to oust them. They think they have a right to nuclear weapons and big ballistic missiles.

2 The NK bosses must confirm their leadership by protecting the masses from their enemies and blaming their misery on foreign sanctions.

3 The NK bosses are testing their new political limits. In China, Xi Jinping is the new head of state. In SK, Park Geun Hye is the new president.

The NK fate depends on China. Beijing need only cut off oil and food to kill the NK regime. The CPC Central Committee want to keep the NK alliance. CPC chief Xi plans to reconsider the NK issue after the People's Congress. Beijing professor Shi Yinhong: "Relations are currently in the toilet."

The Professor, the Bikini Model, and the Suitcase Full of Trouble
Maxine Swann

In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on an online dating site. Soon they were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton, 68, had been a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was lonely since his divorce.

Milani agreed to meet Frampton in La Paz, Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot. In January 2012, Frampton set out for Bolivia and finally arrived in La Paz four days later. By then, Milani had been called away to another photo shoot in Brussels. She sent him a ticket to Buenos Aires and said another ticket to Brussels was on the way. She asked him to do her a favor: bring her a bag she had left in La Paz.

Nine days after Frampton arrived in Bolivia, a man handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. It was an utterly commonplace black suitcase with wheels, and it was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why it was so important. She told him it had sentimental value. The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.

Frampton flew from La Paz to Buenos Aires. He waited for the e-ticket to Brussels. He checked two bags, his and hers, and went to the gate. He heard his name called over the loudspeaker. At the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Soon he was under arrest.

Frampton ended up in Devoto, an old-style jail in Buenos Aires. It seems a classic tale. Those who know Frampton well portray him as a kind of idiot savant. He grew up in England, matriculated at Oxford, and was awarded his doctorate in 1968. As Frampton tells it, his life is just a line of impressive grades, advanced degrees, and citations of his work in cosmology and physics.

His defense unraveled. There were damning text messages on his cellphone. He tried to shrug them off as jokes. In November 2012, he was sentenced to 4 years 8 months for drug smuggling.

AR Thank God I'm not that bad.

2013 March 8

CORAL news: Wrote 8 good new pages for inclusion in Revelations.
Now I need to delete 8 pages elsewhere to make room for them.
At least I used the time failing to visit India to some purpose.

NATO
Philip Stephens

NATO was robbed of its founding mission by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Events in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya saved it. NATO became an operational alliance.

A decade is several lifetimes in geopolitics. The appetite for intervention has been sated in Washington, even though the Mideast is in flames, Syria is fighting a civil war, Iran is building a bomb, jihadist extremism has spread into Africa, cyberspace risks mass disruption, and rising states are arming fast.

NATO requires military capabilities to confront new threats. They have to be paid for, but no one wants to pick up the bill. Most of the European members of NATO long ago abandoned their commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defense. Britain and France are hollowing out their militaries. Even former communist states have axed their forces.

The U.S. share of NATO spending has jumped to almost 75%. But sequestration has brought down the curtain on the era of American military plenty. Even if the White House and Congress strike a fiscal deal, the U.S. defense budget faces deep cuts. Politicians in Washington are not willing to pay for Europe.

Anyone who thinks the advanced nations can afford to spend less on safeguarding their security need only glance at the threats. They all require collective defense.

Chinese Parliament Has 83 Billionaires
Financial Times

The People's Republic of China parliamentary delegates this year include 83 dollar billionaires, according to a rich list. The United States has no billionaires in the House of Representatives or the Senate.

AR Corruption, guaranteed.

2013 March 7

Celibacy
Christiane Amanpour

The Catholic Church says a vow of celibacy not only underscores the commitment of seminarians to their vocation but also recalls Christ's own celibacy. But a new pope could change church law to allow all priests to marry.

In 1967, Pope Paul VI published an encyclical defending the tradition of celibacy as a superior way of achieving grace that freed priests from familial obligations in order to devote themselves to God and that mirrored heaven as a place without marriage.

In 1993, Pope John Paul II said celibacy did "not belong to the essence of the priesthood" but there was "no doubt about its suitability and indeed its appropriateness to the demands of sacred orders."

Reverend Joseph Fessio says celibacy is a discipline and not a dogma but still important: "It's something the church in its wisdom for 2000 years has recognized as a closer, more exact, more profound following of the example Jesus set us."

AR Sexual self-discipline is essential to a true spiritual vocation. Its best expression is in celibacy. Married priests lack transcendent vision. As family men, they have practical concerns. But for the daily life of a priest, the practical concerns are paramount. As long as priests uphold the vision without succumbing to the Filth (blog March 3), the church can survive. At root, the church is a patriarchy. If that visionary sexual control is lost, human hopes of transcendence crash down in ruin. We become brutes, bonking our brains out in a world run by machines.

Mathematical Physics
Brian Greene

James Clerk Maxwell realized that light was an electromagnetic wave. His equations showed that light speed should be about 300 Mm/s. This was good, but his equations left a nagging loose end: speed relative to what? Einstein argued that scientists needed to take the equations more seriously. Light speed is 300 Mm/s relative to anything. This led to the special theory of relativity, and eventually to the general theory, Einstein's theory of gravity.

Steven Weinberg: "Our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough." Weinberg was referring to the prediction of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the afterglow of the big bang. Einstein understood how a set of mathematical equations can seem real. But he did not take his own general theory seriously enough to believe its prediction of black holes, or of an expanding universe. Others did.

Quantum mechanics used to be seen as relevant only to small things. But in 1957, Hugh Everett took the mathematics seriously. Everett argued that Schrödinger's equation should apply to everything. This led him to the idea of a quantum multiverse. The multiverse has since become a pervasive feature of much mathematics that purports to offer us a deeper understanding of reality. Taken to this extreme, mathematics is reality.

AR The foundation of mathematics is in set theory. The cumulative hierarchy of pure well-founded sets founds all the rest, and it collapses under scrutiny into the unstable but fertile duality of the null set and the universal set — this is the vision I articulated in the logical trilogy I wrote in the 1970s.

2013 March 6

CORAL news: Inspiration for revision has dawned on me.
— Cut a couple of pages from the Christians chapter (which still has too much guff in it)
— Add a couple of pages to the Revelation chapter (on Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Wilber)
It should take me a week or so to prepare a new edition.

Leszek Kolakowski
Barton Swaim

Leszek Kolakowski was a historian of ideas, first at Warsaw University, then at Oxford. His magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism (1978) demolished a sham philosophy. His daughter Agnieszka Kolakowska compiled some of his essays in Is God Happy?

"What Is Socialism?" (1956) is a satirical enumeration of things that socialism wasn't supposed to be: "a state whose neighbors curse geography"; "a state that produces superb jet planes and lousy shoes"; "a state whose philosophers and writers always say the same things as the generals and ministers, but always after the latter have said them."

"Genocide and Ideology" (1977) asked why Soviet communism attracted so many artists and intellectuals and Nazism so few. Nazis straightforwardly promoted Teutonic rule and the conquest of Europe. Communism, on the other hand, "never preached conquest, only liberation from oppression; it never extolled the state as a value in itself, only stressed the necessity of reinforcing the state as an indispensable lever to destroy the enemies of freedom."

"Totalitarianism and the Virtue of the Lie" (1983) explained why a society based on disinformation cannot survive: "Even in the best of conditions the massive process of forgery cannot be completed: it requires a large number of forgers who must understand the distinction between what is genuine and what is faked."

Seven essays cover theological subjects, including the problem of evil and the impossibility of separating the historical Jesus from Western culture and history.

"Erasmus and his God" (1965) describes how Erasmus tried to combine the "faith alone" approach of Luther and Calvin with a Catholic emphasis on works and moral virtue. Kolakowski saw this as "a particular instance of the difficulty inherent in any doctrine which views genuine human effort as the unique source of moral value while at the same time refusing to acknowledge any human contribution to the results of that effort."

"Crime and Punishment" (1991) rejected the idea that punishment must be utilitarian and defended retribution.

AR When Kolakowski was at All Souls, I once explained to him my interest in Hegelian philosophy. He responded with a smile that hovered between impish and tragic.

2013 March 5

Struggle
Steven Snyder

Struggle is essential for career advancement. Embrace struggle as an art to be mastered. Seek out situations where there is rapid change. Look for projects that expand your skills and capabilities.

Performance is best when goals are difficult but still attainable with effort and imagination. If you find yourself easily meeting your goals, they are too easy. Set a higher bar for yourself. Receiving valid feedback is the most valuable of gifts, allowing you to step outside your delusional cocoon and become connected with external metrics of success.

The more anchored and centered you are, the less likely you will be thrown off balance by challenges. Train yourself in a set of daily and weekly practices that keep you on a steady course: exercise, meditation, journaling, prayer, or even just walking in the woods. Build a support community to give you the advice and assistance you need.

By challenging yourself, readily embracing feedback, and remaining grounded and centered, you can embrace struggle head on and use it as fuel for your career. These practices are the foundation.

Homunculism
Colin McGinn

Ray Kurzweil has a pattern recognition theory of mind (PRTM). A stimulus is presented, say, the letter "A", and little brain machines respond by breaking it down and processing its parts: thus "A" is analyzed into a horizontal bar and two angled lines meeting at a point. The neural machine recognizes that the stimulus is an instance of the letter "A". Other letter recognizers combine to recognize, say, the word "APPLE". This procedure is hierarchical. There are some 300 million such modules across the brain.

But pattern recognition is only part of the activity of the mind. When I see an apple as red, the color is simply a sensory quality. Thinking about an absent object is not perceptual recognition. Nor do such mental phenomena as emotion, imagination, reasoning, willing, intending, or feeling pain and pleasure fit the PRTM. Kurzweil has switched from patterns as stimuli in the external environment to patterns as mental entities, without saying so. The PRTM does not generalize beyond perception.

Kurzweil makes relentless and unapologetic use of homunculus language. But neurons don't say things or predict things or see things. People say and predict and see. Such anthropomorphic descriptions of cortical activity must ultimately be replaced by literal descriptions of electric charge and chemical transmission. Homunculus talk can give rise to the illusion that one is nearer to accounting for the mind. Talk of pattern recognition by neurons is already too mentalistic.

Neuroscientists cannot claim that we have observed information transmission in the brain. This is a theoretical description. The brain is causally connected to the mind and the mind contains and processes information. Telephone lines convey information because conscious subjects are at either end of them, exchanging information in the ordinary sense. Neurons are the causal background to the transactions. The brain does not process information or send signals or receive messages. People do.

AR Mind versus brain is an instance of the subject—object dichotomy that we can only accept as fundamental (as an axiom in my psychophysics). But then performing a "homuncular" reduction to minimal parts that correlate 1:1 is fine. Information has subjective and objective sides. Bits are rock bottom. As qubits, they make a physical base for the rest. Mental entities are patterns of (qu)bits. QED

2013 March 4

Swiss: Curb Corporate Pay
Financial Times

Swiss voters want curbs on corporate wages and on company boards: 68% of voters approved rules giving shareholders a binding say on executive pay, banning golden hellos and goodbyes, requiring annual re-elections for directors, and threatening criminal sanctions for non-compliance.

UK chancellor George Osborne plans to try to revise the EU bonus cap, but his prospects are slim. A big majority of EU member states is willing to sign up to the deal. A diplomat: "It's really too late. We don't want to stigmatize one member state but we've come to the end of the argument."

AR Vox pop is clear: corporate robbers must be stopped.

2013 March 3-9

Toward a Science of Consciousness
East-West Views on Brain, Mind and Reality
Dayalbagh Educational Institute
Agra, India

AR To my great regret, I'm not there.

AFP

Daimler
Sheikh wagon:
Mercedes G63 AMG
6x6 with 544 HP V8

Martin Heidegger
Hitler's Philosopher
Standpoint

Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1933. He spoke out on the need to Nazify German universities and was made rector at the University of Freiburg, where he removed all the Jews and let Brownshirts patrol the campus. He died in 1976, unrepentant.

2013 March 3

Filth
John Cornwell

Pope Benedict XVI loved being Pope. Yet he said he wasn't up to it any more. Up to what? He spent most of his time writing, tinkling on the piano, and stroking his cat. He was waited on hand and foot, with a handsome secretary to do his every bidding.

He quit to save the Catholic Church from ignominy. A report on the state of the Curia landed on his desk in January. It revealed that what he called the Filth had entered the bureaucracy. He resigned in February. Now all the senior bureaucrats lose their jobs.

The Curia is a big operation. Rivalries, vendettas, ambition, calumny, backstabbing, and intrigues are endemic. Some of the bureaucrats are actively gay men, others have a weakness for sex with minors. And the people who procure these sexual services are greedy.

Benedict has resigned to purge the Filth. He has given the Church a chance to start again. He would be happy with a smaller Church exerting pressure on sexually active Catholics to play by the rules. If his gamble works, the Church can reform. If not, doom.

Wool
Tammy Oler

Wool was a short story about a post-apocalyptic future in which society has been driven underground into a vast silo. Hugh Howey published it as a e-book on Amazon in 2011. Within three months, it was a Kindle best-seller. Readers asked Howey for the rest of the story, so he decided to write it.

By January 2012, Howey had self-published five serial stories about the silo and collected them into the Wool Omnibus. It landed on the New York Times best-seller list. By the end of 2012, Howey had deals with publishers to release print editions worldwide and optioned the film rights to Ridley Scott.

The silo is a self-sustaining community with full employment and universal access to education and health care. More than 100 floors deep and connected by only a staircase, the silo limits mobility and communication, separating the machine deck at the bottom from the mayor and sheriff up top.

The stories invert the traditional power dynamic between author and fan. By reaching out to Howey and posting rave reviews, fans helped conjure up the fictional world. And Howey converted interest in the first story into dedicated fandom and more sales. He is now writing a sequel called Dust.

2013 March 2

Telepathy In Rats!
Michael Bywater

Scientists have invented a new channel of communication, direct communication between brains. Rat A learns where the food is, and communicates it directly into the brain of Rat B, initially by fine wires running between their brains, and subsequently over the internet.

What's passing between the two rats is information, and information technologies grow exponentially. Imagine a world where I deliver this straight into your brain, via the Cloud. It seems fanciful. But 20 years ago, so much of today seemed fanciful that if someone had suggested it we'd have laughed. Sergey Brin of Google says smartphones are emasculating. He doesn't know the half of it.

AR The CORAL cloud!

Benefits, Bonuses, Caps
Giles Fraser

In the UK this year, benefit entitlements will be capped. According to the government, the benefit cap is necessary. But when it comes to capping bankers' bonuses, the Tories say no. They say if these pin-striped pricks don't get what they want, they will fly off to Singapore. Well, let them go.

London is not just a playground for the super rich. The bankers got us into the financial mess, yet whenever there is talk of limiting the bonus culture that incentivized their absurd risk culture, the government sides with them. The poor are capped, the rich are protected. This cannot go on.

AR The UK is a land of gross moral desolation.

The Case Against Religion
Bryan Appleyard

A.C. Grayling makes his case against religion and outlines the humanist alternative.

Grayling: "Atheism is to theism as not stamp-collecting is to stamp-collecting." This is a ruse to get the horsemen off the charge that they write about religion while knowing nothing of theology. If religion is like belief in fairies, then there is no need to understand it and it should be exposed and refuted.

Western humanism is a very small sect in the context of global beliefs and world views. The idea that it could and should become a world ideology is both wildly improbable and extremely dubious. Like it or not, religions are here to stay. Most thinkers accept some sort of evolutionary explanation. Religious faith is not remotely like belief in fairies. It is deeply embedded in human nature.

Grayling says religion has nothing to offer the world. But religion will teach you more about the human condition than anything written by the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse.

AR I know the truth here: see CORAL.

2013 March 1

European Multiculturalism
Jens-Martin Eriksen, Frederik Stjernfelt

Last summer, the director of Norway's Trondheim Museum of Art, Pontus Kyander, decided that the museum should no longer fly the Norwegian flag. He said it was divisive, that it rallied only ethnic Norwegians and Christians.

The battle over symbols in Europe has intensified. Ethnically distinct groups increasingly demand that they be able to practice their own customs and receive special dispensations for particular religious practices. Muslim organizations in Norway demand special police uniforms for female officers, special opening hours for public swimming pools dedicated exclusively to Muslim women, special hours in fitness centers, special bathing curtains for Muslim boys to protect them from being exposed to other children, special diets in schools, special prayer rooms in airports, and interpretation facilities in all public institutions for those who don't speak the language. These demands are on the agenda in many European countries. Muslims also want to import spouses from their home countries. Meeting their demands is causing massive social problems.

Muslims seek segregation from the mainstream. Pontus Kyander's flag ban is one absurd reaction. Political correctness makes honest discussion impossible. Neither side dares address the real problem: Islamic dogmatism.

AR The only solution is zero tolerance of exceptions for any religion.

Rats
MIT Technology Review

Pairs of rats can communicate through brain chips and collaborate to perform a task. Brain activity recorded in one rat was translated into pulses transmitted to another rat that had been trained to push a lever in response to a pattern of electrical stimulation in its brain. The rats worked together. If the second rat chose the wrong lever, then the first rat changed its brainwaves, which improved the chances in the next trial.

The research was led by Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University Medical Center. The team trained a rat to choose between a right or left lever to push depending on which of two LEDs lit up. If the rat pushed the correct lever, it got a rewarding sip of water. The researchers recorded the electrical activity of the rat's motor cortex and translated the activity in the two cases into more or fewer pulses. They sent the pulses to the implant in the brain of another rat in a separate chamber. That rat had been trained to respond to pulse patterns in a similar way.

With no cue but the pulses, the second rat chose the correct lever 64% of the time, and both rats got a reward. When the second rat got it wrong, the first rat noticed because it did not get a second reward. So in the next trial, the first rat would try harder and make a stronger signal. This was the collaboration.

The team is working on "swarms" of rats that cooperate via brain chips.

AR Swarms of roborats — woohoo — can't wait!

2014 September 3-6

 Food and the Internet
SIEF 20th International Ethnological Food Research Conference
Department of Ethnology and Folklore, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology,
University of Łódź, Poland

AR Bon appetit!

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