First Day of School

Ben starts first grade.

The Voter as Constitutional Monarch

In this sense, in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king, but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive. The problem of democratic legitimacy is homologous to the problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to make it seem that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call the ‘crisis of democracy’ isn’t something that happens when people stop believing in their own power but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, when they perceive that the throne is empty, that the decision is now theirs. ‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to grant it to them.

--Slavoj Žižek, Berlusconi in Tehran

Kristof on Health Reform

Great column:

The existing system doesn’t just break up families, it also costs lives. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour.

In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of “death panels” could — even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters.

So, for those of you inclined to believe the worst about President Obama, think it through. Suppose he is indeed a secret, foreign-born Muslim agent who is scheming to undermine American family values while killing off as many grandmothers as possible.

If all that were true, why on earth would he be trying so hard to reform our health care system? We already know how to prod families into divorce and take a life unnecessarily every 30 minutes — all we need to do is reject reform and stick with exactly what we have.

Farnsworth House

This is the famous Farnsworth House, designed by Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1951. At the time it was very controversial, and House Beautiful called it a communist attempt to supplant traditional American values. Now it's a National Historic Landmark (which is actually difficult to achieve, unlike getting listed on the National Register of Historic Places), and I suppose this represents progress of a sort.

My objections to it are 1) it's ugly, and 2) it's completely unlivable. The original owner was a sort of half-mad ascetic who enjoyed the rigor of living in a glass cube. When British magnate Peter Palumbo bought it, mostly as a place to show off his sculpture collection, he made major changes (including curtains) but still found it impossibly uncomfortable to stay in this masterpiece for more than a day or two. And this is the thing that drives me crazy about architects. A house is a place to live, not a sculpture or a statement about artistic values. So as far as I am concerned, a house that nobody wants to live in is a failure, no matter how cool it looks.

And, as we have recently discovered, the house isn't sited very well.

The National Trust is trying to raise money for some kind of flood control, but I have a better idea: let it float away.

The Golden Mean of Drinking

A new, large study of people in Britain and Sweden shows that heavy drinkers and teetotalers both have higher rates of depression and anxiety than people who drink moderately.

The happiest people, in contrast, were those who averaged about two glasses of alcohol per week.

Looking for reasons why non-drinkers are more depressed, they offer two: some people don't drink because they are in poor health, and people who don't drink report having fewer friends and going out less.

"We see that this group is less socially well-adjusted than other groups”, Stordal says. “Generally when people are with friends, it is more acceptable in Western societies to drink than not to drink. While the questionnaire recorded non-drinkers’ subjective perception of the situation, a number of other studies also confirm that teetotalers experience some level of social exclusion. ”

District 9

I saw District 9 last night, and I liked it. I think much of the praise heaped on it comes from the kind of film buffs who hunger for something different, because while it isn't wonderful it certainly is unusual. The very original plot concerns aliens who come to earth and get shoved into a refugee camp, treated like we generally treat unwanted refugees. It has the most unlikely hero I've seen in years, and some quite acceptable bad guys. I would give it a B+.

Spain, 1937

The stars are dead; the animals will not look:
We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and
History to the defeated
May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

--W.H. Auden

Edward M. Kennedy RIP

What always impressed me most about Ted Kennedy was his endurance. He just kept on going, working through scandal and tragedy, in the majority and in the minority, through triumph and failure. He worked on health care reform from his first year in office until his death, always pushing the same principles. He wasn't brilliant or virtuous, but he spent a lifetime working hard for what he believed in, and that counts for a lot.

Matt Yglesias puts it this way, analyzing Kennedy's most famous speech:

Its closing line is, I think, crucially important: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

I’m never able to express myself nearly that well, but what I take Kennedy to be doing here is trying to offer an alternative to the boom-bust mentality that often overtakes American progressives. There’s a tendency to get extremely wound up with optimism about the imminent dawn of sudden and radical change for the better, and then intensely bitter, cynical, and depressed when that fails to materialize. The reality, however, is that change is hard. That’s not an excuse for the people who stand in its way, it’s the reality. But if you respond to the difficulty of making things better by giving up or getting frustrated, then it only gets harder.

Building a better country and a world is work—hard work—and it’s work that goes on. And on. And on.

Wandering in Circles

It seems that if people can see the sun or the moon, or any reference point, they can walk in straight lines. But in the dark or in the woods on a sunless day, they really do walk in circles.

Summer is Over

The season's first soccer practice; that's Ben in the orange. Actually it should have been the second, but Robert blew his off.

Abolished Loneliness?

From Christopher Hitchens' Atlantic review of Elizabeth Edwards' new book:

She has herself, meanwhile, become a best-selling model for many readers, and not, I am sure, only for female ones. She is a person with many friends and many internal and moral and intellectual resources, yet she confesses in the most disarming—and helpful—manner how much the Internet came to her aid, first when her son was killed and second when she discovered that a term had been set on her own life. The importance of this medium in bringing about a great unspoken social reform—the abolition of loneliness—has not to my knowledge been better evoked.

Has the internet abolished loneliness?

Getting Richer

This table, drawn from Census Data, shows some of the concrete benefits that our ever increasing wealth has brought us over the past century.

The Inspector General's Report on CIA Torture

From Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent:

For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:

“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country,” Cheney said. “I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

Those documents were obtained today by The Washington Independent and are available here. Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.

The more we know, the more the claims made by Cheney and others about the importance and usefulness of "enhanced interrogation" dissolve into the fog of political war.

Turning Science into Therapies

How long does it take for a "scientific breakthrough" to lead to an accepted medical therapy? According to a study published last year in Science, about 24 years on average, with a span of 14 to 44 years. And very few "breakthroughs" announced with fanfare ever do lead to any real medicine:

Despite a major interest in translational research (1-3), development of new, effective medical interventions is difficult. Of 101 very promising claims of new discoveries with clear clinical potential that were made in major basic science journals between 1979 and 1983, only five resulted in interventions with licensed clinical use by 2003 and only one had extensive clinical use (4). Drug discovery faces major challenges (5-8). Moreover, for several interventions supported by high-profile clinical studies, subsequent evidence from larger and/or better studies contradicts their effectiveness or shows smaller benefits (9).

This is from one of my skeptical heroes, John Ioannidis, author of the brilliant "Why Most Published Research Findings are False."

Measles Returns to New Zealand

In a bit of disturbing news, the number of measles cases in New Zealand this year is more than 7 times last year's total. The likely reason: the vaccination rate for children is only 83%. Measles has also reappeared in the UK, where the vaccination rate has fallen below 90%.

What Happens to Plastic in the Ocean

There have long been rumors about enormous dumps of plastic in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, where all the world's plastic bags and styrofoam cups get whirled together by currents into islands of debris. Alas, expeditions launched to find these floating trash dumps were generally disappointing, leading to all sorts of strange theories about plastic sinking to the bottom or getting pulverized into tiny pieces.

Turns out that most of the plastic that goes into the Ocean dissolves. Warm salt water can turn most plastics back into hydrocarbon molecules in a matter of months. While this discovery frees us from the nightmare of the seas getting covered by continent-sized mats of plastic trash, it also means that plastic washing into the sea is just like piplines disgorging chemical waste.

And while I'm on the subject, it's worth pointing out that most of the plastic in the ocean doesn't come from cruise ships or nefarious waste dumpers, it washes in from the land. Litter = chemical pollution of the oceans.

Money and Happiness

Statistically speaking, money buys a little happiness, but not very much. Every study that compares income and happiness finds that while poverty can make you miserable, once you rise above poverty more money makes you only a very little bit more satisfied with your life. Now why should that be? It seems that the real problem with money is how we spend it:

A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it’s just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on a car may not.

“Just because money doesn’t buy happiness doesn’t mean money cannot buy happiness,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. “People just might be using it wrong.”

Dunn and others are beginning to offer an intriguing explanation for the poor wealth-to-happiness exchange rate: The problem isn’t money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences, ourselves over others, things over people. When it comes to happiness, none of these decisions are right: The spending that make us happy, it turns out, is often spending where the money vanishes and leaves something ineffable in its place.

What makes people happy isn't stuff, it's connections to other people. I suspect that one reason money doesn't do more for us is that we typically use it to insulate ourselves from other people, for example, by buying houses with such big yards that we never see our neighbors. When poor people move they rent a truck and call in their friends, but rich people hire movers. Helping your friends move is a drag, but this is the kind of thing that builds strong social networks, and friends -- not money, not freedom from carrying mattresses -- are what makes us happy. I am quite certain that broadband internet is one of the most important things my family buys, since we use it mainly to keep in touch with friends.

Another part of the equation shows up in the value of vacations and other adventures. When daily life gets dreary, it is great to have something different to look forward to, or something special to remember. One study I read showed that going to a new restaurant made married couples much happier than going to one they'd been to before. We need variety in our lives, and when we spend money to get it, we may be doing ourselves a lot of good.

The Appendix has a Function?

Another of my cherished ideas about the world is shaken -- now they tell me that the appendix serves a purpose:

The lowly appendix, long-regarded as a useless evolutionary artifact, won newfound respect two years ago when researchers at Duke University Medical Center proposed that it actually serves a critical function. The appendix, they said, is a safe haven where good bacteria could hang out until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea, for example.

I wonder how I missed this news when it first came out.

The Wilderness

We're bidding on a job at the Wilderness Battlefield, and it will be a big help for us to know what the sites look like, and since I had never been to this battlefield I thought it would be a good idea to drive down and have a look. It's about 11o miles from my house, Interstate almost the whole way, so I thought I could get there and back in about four hours. Silly me. For reasons I don't understand traffic on I-95 crawled all the way from Washington to Fredericksburg -- this is Saturday! -- and as soon as I got off the Interstate I got stuck in a local traffic jam surrounding the string of strip malls that lines Route 3. At this point I was in the middle of a terrific thunderstorm that kept up furiously all the way to the battlefield. Not wanting to get soaked, I went first to stop in at the Visitors' Center for a chat with the rangers. After the rain abated a bit I went driving around the battlefield. The Battle of the Wilderness was fought in dense thickets of saplings spread across a generally flat landscape, and the soldiers all complained that it was impossible to really see what they were doing or get any sense of what was happening around them.

And so it still is. This is what the Wilderness Battlefield looks like:

I took more pictures, but except for the ones of monuments they all look exactly like this. There is no point from which you can see anything or get any sense of how the battle unfolded. It's just mile after mile of woods. This makes for an unsatisfying experience as a visitor, but on the other hand I suppose it gives one a faint sense of what the place was like for the men who fought there. Just like them, I was wandering in a confusing woodland where all directions looked the same, not knowing who would have been going in which direction or why.

And then home through even worse traffic, not getting back until eight hours after I left. At least I had a good book to listen to along the way.

Science Fiction and Bad Technology

From John Scalzi's list of badly designed stuff in Star Wars:

Lightsabers
Yes, I know, I want one too. But I tell you what: I want one with a hand guard. Otherwise every lightsaber battle would consist of sabers clashing and then their owners sliding as quickly as possible down the shaft to lop off their opponent's fingers. You say: Lightsabers can slice through anything but another lightsaber, so what are you going to make a hand guard out of? I say: Dude, if you have the technology to make a lightsaber, you have the technology to make a light hand guard.

Blasters
A tactical nightmare: They're incredibly loud, especially for firing what are essentially light beams. The fire ordnance is so slow it can be dodged, and it comes out as a streak of light that reveals your position to your enemies. Let's not even go near the idea of light beams being slow enough to dodge; that's just something you have let go of, or risk insanity.

Which brings me to the topic of how many science fiction plots turn on finding ways to make the technology not work. Surely by 2300 we will have self-aiming guns that never miss, but Star Wars, Star Trek, and tons of other sci-fi stories still feature guys blazing away with cool looking weapons that turn out to be a lot less effective than an AK-47. Lisa and I are always laughing at the number of different ways the Star Trek: Next Generation writers have found to keep their sensor array from working when they really need it. It's the niobium in the rocks! It's the magnetic storms! But at least the Enterprise has a sensor array, putting its crew at a distinct advantage to the poor slobs of Alien and Aliens, who are reduced to sort of peering around ineffectually whenever they encounter clouds or darkness.

Afghanistan

Outstanding long article by Rory Stewart on the situation in Afghanistan. A sample:

It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

Farming the Sea

Interesting piece at National Geographic about future fish farms. The latest notion is to build big, robot-controlled fish cages that could roam the oceans under their own very minimal power, letting the fish be kept clean by currents and largely fed by whatever comes in through the mesh of the cage. This makes some sense.

I have a question about aquaculture. There are big areas of the ocean where there isn't much life of any kind, especially in the central Pacific. And the reason there isn't much life is that there aren't sufficient minerals in the water, especially iron, for the algae that start the food chain. What I wonder is, why can't find some way to disperse iron and other minerals into the water in these locations, starting our own food chains?

Everybody knows that some parts of the ocean are much more productive than others, again, largely because of the mineral content of the water. Why can't we change that?

I really don't know if this is feasible or not.

Sandy Point

I took today off and Lisa and I took four of our children to Sandy Point State Park, a mostly artificial beach by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It was delightful. It was 92 degrees today, but with enough cloudiness to cloak the burning sun and make the temperature bearable. The beach wasn't nearly as crowded as it is on weekends. My children were in good spirits. The water was a little like dirty bath water, but it was still cool enough to feel soothing, and I felt chilled when I got out.

The waves were just big enough to bob on. This was perfect for Clara, who is still too scared of big waves to go in the ocean, and my sons managed to have plenty of fun without breakers to ride. Boys will be boys:

Women Soldiers

One of the most radical things we have done in the radical modern world is to erase much of the distinction between men's and women's work. Every agricultural society we know about has fairly rigid divisions between the work that men and women do, and these distinctions are fundamental to the identities of both men and women. Our move toward a society in which men and women do pretty much the same kinds of work strikes me as a very big change. Sometimes I read articles about topics like sexual harassment, or how much corporations should do to accomodate working mothers, that seem to imply that this would be very easy if a few nasty people weren't being wicked. But these are big changes, and they have raised and will continue to raise many problems for all of us.

Since this is my general attitude to the problem, I find it very interesting that women in the American military are increasingly doing the same things as men, and facing the same risks, without anyone making much of a fuss over it. The kind of conservatives who go crazy about the minor changes embodied in Obama's health care proposals are mostly silent about women carrying guns and getting killed in combat. Where, I wonder, are the fundamentalists on this one? Aren't female soldiers a bigger violation of Old Testament norms than limits on medical tests?

But the changes go on, and I can't remember the last time I heard an important politician say anything about them. Right now about 1 in 20 of the soldiers in our front-line Iraqi bases is a woman. The attitude of American officers seems to be pretty much my attitude toward the whole problem of breaking down gender barriers, that is, the problems involved are only what would expect from any major organizational change. It probably helps that the female soldiers aren't exactly shrinking violets. From a piece in today's NY Times:

Staff Sgt. Patricia F. Bradford, 27, a psychological operations soldier, said that slights, subtle and not, were common, and some were easier to brush off than others. Women are still viewed derisively at times in the confined, occasionally tense space of an outpost like Warhorse.

“You’re a bitch, a slut or a dyke — or you’re married, but even if you’re married, you’re still probably one of the three,” Sergeant Bradford said.

At the same time, she and other female soldiers cope with the slights, showing a disarming brashness.

“I think being a staff sergeant — and a bitch — helps deflect those things,” she added.

The issues that arise in having women in combat — harassment, bias, hardship, even sexual relations — are, she and others said, a matter of discipline, maturity and professionalism rather than an argument for separating the sexes.

I think the lack of any political opposition to women serving in combat reflects two major changes that have taken place in America. First, the military has become a career path full of specialists, not a trial of manhood for all the males in the population. Second, most Americans have accepted that some women can do almost anything a man can do, and that if women can so something, it is just wrong to keep them from doing it.

coffee alone

Right now I am enjoying a little pleasure I get all too seldom, sitting alone in the dining room in the early morning, drinking coffee, reading the news, and feeling relaxed. Five days a week I am hurrying out the door, and Saturdays and Sundays I usually sleep in to make up for the sleep deficit I accumulate during the week. But today I am off, my body woke me up at 6, and the kids are all abed, so the moment is all mine.

The Ness of Brodgar

Amazing finds at a neolithic village in the Orkneys called the Ness of Brodgar, including a structure with stone foundation walls more than twenty meters long that they are calling a "neolithic cathedral." Quick summary in the London Times here.

All of which raises the question, why were the Orkneys such a good place to live in the Neolithic, when they are such a lousy place to live now?

Below, the Standing Stones of Stenness, which are very close to the new dig site.

Butterflies

The butterflies are finally swarming around my garden, a month later than usual. Besides lots of Tiger Swallowtails like this one, we have Zebra Swallowtails, black and purple swallowtails, Monarchs, and little yellow and white ones.

Invisible Galaxy Distorting Milky Way

This is eerie:

A LARGE satellite galaxy may be lurking, hidden from view, next door to our own.

Sukanya Chakrabarti and Leo Blitz of the University of California, Berkeley, suspected that the gravity of a nearby galaxy was causing perturbations that have been observed in gas on the fringes of the Milky Way. "We did a large range of simulations where we varied the mass of the perturber and the distance of closest approach," says Chakrabarti. In the best-fitting simulation, the unseen galaxy has about 1 per cent of the Milky Way's mass, or 10 billion times the mass of the sun.

That's a lot. It means the object has roughly the same mass as the Milky Way's brightest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

Right now, says Chakrabarti, the galaxy is roughly 300,000 light years away from us - about twice as far away as the LMC. But the simulations suggest it follows a highly elongated elliptical path, and about 300 million years ago it swept through our own galaxy just 16,000 light years from the galactic centre - closer in than Earth - disturbing the Milky Way's outskirts as it went.

Populist Conservatism in America

Great piece from Rick Perlstein on the history of right wing craziness in America:

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as "20 years of treason" and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House "found in the files a blueprint for socializing America."

When John F. Kennedy entered the White House, his proposals to anchor America's nuclear defense in intercontinental ballistic missiles -- instead of long-range bombers -- and form closer ties with Eastern Bloc outliers such as Yugoslavia were taken as evidence that the young president was secretly disarming the United States. Thousands of delegates from 90 cities packed a National Indignation Convention in Dallas, a 1961 version of today's tea parties; a keynote speaker turned to the master of ceremonies after his introduction and remarked as the audience roared: "Tom Anderson here has turned moderate! All he wants to do is impeach [Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren. I'm for hanging him!"

Before the "black helicopters" of the 1990s, there were right-wingers claiming access to secret documents from the 1920s proving that the entire concept of a "civil rights movement" had been hatched in the Soviet Union; when the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act was introduced, one frequently read in the South that it would "enslave" whites. And back before there were Bolsheviks to blame, paranoids didn't lack for subversives -- anti-Catholic conspiracy theorists even had their own powerful political party in the 1840s and '50s.

The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can't stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

The Prosperity Gospel

Real proof that the post-modern literary critics are right when they say that texts have no inherent meaning is provided by the "prosperity gospel" movement. If Jesus was clear about anything, it was that earthly riches are useless (at best). And yet we have, in America, whole churches devoted to the notion that Jesus wants you to be rich, led by pastors who claim the authority to preach on the basis of their own wealth. Laurie Goodstein in the NY Times:

FORT WORTH — Onstage before thousands of believers weighed down by debt and economic insecurity, Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and their all-star lineup of “prosperity gospel” preachers delighted the crowd with anecdotes about the luxurious lives they had attained by following the Word of God.

Private airplanes and boats. A motorcycle sent by an anonymous supporter. Vacations in Hawaii and cruises in Alaska. Designer handbags. A ring of emeralds and diamonds.

“God knows where the money is, and he knows how to get the money to you,” preached Mrs. Copeland, dressed in a crisp pants ensemble like those worn by C.E.O.’s.

Even in an economic downturn, preachers in the “prosperity gospel” movement are drawing sizable, adoring audiences. Their message — that if you have sufficient faith in God and the Bible and donate generously, God will multiply your offerings a hundredfold — is reassuring to many in hard times.

One of the things I find fascinating about our species is the way we like to turn our innate impulses upside down and assign spiritual value to not doing what comes naturally. Nothing is more natural to us than eating, so no spiritual practice is more widespread than fasting. The desire to acquire status and wealth is widespread and strong, so societies around the world assign spiritual value to voluntary poverty. Admiration of those who can renounce the world is common. And yet renunciation is, after all, very difficult, especially since it leads to being lorded over by those who haven't renounced anything. So even where renunciation is a common and much praised choice -- India, medieval Europe -- it exists in a twisted relationship with societies devoted to material gain.

Which leads me back to the prosperity gospel. This is based on flat-out abandoning the contrary parts of Christian teaching and equating religious values with those of the marketplace. Last will be first, my ass -- make me rich now! Its followers are people who don't want complexity in their moral worlds. They want everything to line up nicely. For them there is no dark side to money, which, after all, buys nice things like cars and boats and designer handbags. They see nothing wrong in wanting to be rich, and they don't understand why God would see anything wrong about it, either. It is, in its way, a very cheerful and optimistic faith. It does not wrestle with either religious questions like why God would give cancer to his most devoted followers or economic questions like whether the prosperity of some is based on the misery of others toiling in sweat shops. It simply lines up everything good on one side and everything bad on the other and urges us to seek God's help in getting the good.

Obviously, not everyone feels the spiritual pull of renunciation. And if you simply don't understand why not having is better than having, why not invent a religion that expresses your view of the world?

Mary is 15 today

Over the past year my elder daughter has taken lots of self portraits with her little digital camera, and these are two of my favorites. So grown up, my little girl.

men's bodies

Suddenly, without meaning to, I'm in fashion. Or so says the NY Times.

Saturday Morning

Twelve-year-old boys are such slobs.

Ben shows off his latest castle.

And the morning glories put on their daily show.

I vote for tearing it down

The NY Times asks,

IS the 1955 Donnell Library on West 53rd Street a rare piece of midcentury Modernism? Or an empty suit of expressionless masonry?

You have to ask?

Writing in his column in The New Yorker in 1956, Lewis Mumford likened it to the careful, ordered facade of a high Renaissance palazzo, but one “cleansed of ornament.” For Mumford that was not necessarily a negative, but he found the “cheerless” Donnell a design of “assiduous anonymity.” The library, he wrote, “has very little to say, and is content with not saying it.”

I hear it saying, "go away, you insignificant mortal, and live out your brief existence in misery."

Friday evening at the pool

I like the pool best at these times, late in the summer, in the evening, my whole family together.

Goldfinches!

Birthday

Somebody knows how old she is.

Allies, Opponents, and Lunatics

It is important to divide the world, not just into those who agree with you and those who don't, but into those on either side whose support is worth having. Thus the "grid of disputation":

Burma is Creepy

A reader emails James Fallows:

For me, the strangest thing about the news of nukes in Burma is that I first heard it in January -- from a seemingly average guy on the street in Burma.

"During my two weeks of travel around Burma, many people would come up to me when no one was looking, start with a few friendly words, then progress into a series of terrible stories about their government: beatings, arbitrary taxation, health care withheld from pregnant women, children forced into the military, monks who were taken by police and never seen again. . . .

"A few stories seemed at first to be possible paranoia, but I eventually started believing them:

"Your rickshaw driver is a spy"

"That seemed unlikely since he was a very poor looking guy, and why would they care about me? But a shop keeper pointed out-- That guy speaks some English, so why can't he get a better job? I've lived in this town all my life, I know every rickshaw driver, and I've never seen this one until recently. . . . I sometimes see drivers like this with radios, talking to the police. . . . They are spies who report what foreigners are saying and where they are going. They rotate between different cities so that people won't recognize them. I would never speak to you while he is nearby. . . .

"The government is buying nuclear weapons from North Korea"
"A guy in his 50's came up to me on the street and started telling some of the same stories of oppression that I had heard from so many other people. He went on to say that the government is very rich from its monopoly on of the country's natural resources, and the money is used to buy weapons. "The government is buying so many weapons, but which country is their enemy? The people are their enemy." He went on to say that the government is now trying to buy nuclear weapons from North Korea. How could a seemingly average guy on the street know something like that? Wouldn't it be a closely guarded secret? I dismissed it a paranoid rumor, until Hillary Clinton said the same thing six months later.

"Another unexpected thing I heard was "I like George Bush". In January 2009 that was an unlikely statement anywhere in the world. I didn't hear it often in Burma, but more than once. The reason was simply that he had invaded Iraq and taken out an oppressive government. Another person asked "Why can't America do that to our government? You can just use those planes with no pilots that you fly over Pakistan." (Of course, this could have the same result as in Iraq, since Burma is similarly composed of people with a history of fighting each other.) I've traveled a fair amount and Burma is certainly the only place I've been where people would suggest, with a glimmer of hope, maybe America will attack our country."

My Generation Takes Control

Of the world, in the person of Barack Obama, and also of the arts scene. When I was a child various forms of modernism ruled the galleries, especially Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, and there was nothing more roundly mocked than Victorian painting. But now that we D&D-playing, Tolkien-reading anti-modernists have grown up and seized control of museum boards and the like, we get to impose our own tastes on the masses. Case in point: a major exhibition of the work of John W. Waterhouse at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

I just love this stuff. You can have your canvases covered with paint splashes or acres of muddy black the represent subscious pain, your cute concept art that comments on socially relevant themes. Give me a grand spectacle of myth or ancient times, charged with the erotic force of fate, time and longing. Give me Waterhouse, Alma-Tadema, the Pre-Raphaelites.

There is a certain pleasure in being against the times, the smug superiority of feeling that your own tastes are better than other people's. But there are also real advantages to having allies in important places, who bring the things you like to the forefront. I find that this is increasingly happening for me in art galleries, in academic history departments, and even on television. Now if only we could talk some sense into the architects.

Paper Ballots Forever

ScienceDaily (Aug. 11, 2009) — Computer scientists demonstrated that criminals could hack an electronic voting machine and steal votes using a malicious programming approach that had not been invented when the voting machine was designed. The team of scientists from University of California, San Diego, the University of Michigan, and Princeton University employed “return-oriented programming” to force a Sequoia AVC Advantage electronic voting machine to turn against itself and steal votes.

The Problem of Medicine that Doesn't Work

From the Respectful Insolence blog, written by a pseudonymous doctor, an essay on how hard it is to stop a medical procedure that demonstrably doesn't work.

The procedure in question is vertebroplasty, which is the treatment of a cracked vertebra by the surgical injection of acrylic cement into the spine. Cracked vertebrae are common in older people with osteoporosis, and they can be extremely painful and take years to fully heal. So when, in the 1990s, this procedure seemed to offer real help to many patients, it took off. There were always hints that it might not be all it seemed, for example, the amount of cement used and the way it was applied seemed to have no effect on how well it worked. Plus any doctor who works with back pain knows how fundamentally mysterious it is, coming and going without much explanation.

Now the New England Journal of Medicine has published two studies rigorously comparing the procedure to a placebo and finding no difference. From the abstract of one of the studies:

Vertebroplasty did not result in a significant advantage in any measured outcome at any time point. There were significant reductions in overall pain in both study groups at each follow-up assessment.

As the RI blogger points out, the placebo effect from bogus surgery is often the most powerful kind of placebo. An added argument here is that the author of one of these studies was one of the pioneers of the procedure, who began the trials with the conviction that he would be vindicated:

Dr. Kallmes, who helped develop vertebroplasty and has been performing it for 15 years, said his team was "shocked at the results." Shock is understandable. As had been pointed out in both papers, vertebroplasty had become the standard of care for the treatment of vertebral compression fractures. Medicare and insurance companies had, on the basis of unblinded studies, begun to reimburse for the procedure.

All credit to Dr. Kallmes, who has performed that very difficult feat of admitting in public that he was wrong, not to mention cutting himself off from a big source of revenue. (Memo to cynics: yes, people really are capable of taking scientific positions that are against their own personal and professional interests.) Science is supposed to work that way, and, what do you know, it has.

Now comes the hard part, which is getting the medical system to respond to the new information. Dr. Kallmes has shown the way, but will others follow? One of the study authors suggests that maybe the procedure should be continued even if it doesn't work, because the placebo effect is so strong, which causes RI to remark, "A $3000 placebo?" Here is his conclusion:

Here's my prediction. These studies will not be enough to change practice, at least not in the short term. I wish I could say otherwise, but I can't. A procedure as well embedded into the standard of care and as profitable as vertebroplasty is won't disappear overnight or without a fight. Less mercenary, vertebral compression fractures are a serious problem for which other treatment options (bed rest, pain killers, and back braces while the fractures heal) are both slow and not palatable to patients or physicians, who want immediate results. However, unlike CAM [alternative medicine] practitioners, eventually physicians will yield to the weight of the negative evidence. There may be a few more studies, and it's even possible that there may be found a subgroup of patients who actually do benefit from vertebroplasty, but eventually the procedure will either be abandoned or scaled back to patients who might actually benefit from it. The process may be far messier than we would like. It may take far longer than we would like. It may even take a turnover to a new generation of physicians for the process to be complete. But, make no mistake, science will eventually win out.

If it doesn't, then we are no better than the homeopaths.

Words Change Meanings

In one of the reports I am working on I found the phrase "Benedict Calvert and his partner, Thomas Johnson, patented the 7,715-acre Mountain Tract. . . ." I thought, that word has meanings we don't intend. I changed it to "business partner."

Dungeons and Dragons

A nice picture Lisa took of me playing Dungeons and Dragons with my sons.

Thomas (12) has started running a game for his friends. This is his first gaming map, preserved here for posterity:

And Ben (6), although he doesn't run a game, has also drawn a map of his own world:

The problem with flash drives

is that they are little, and I lose them.

Ten Mysterious Things about People

At New Scientist, a partly serious, partly amusing list of ten things about humanity that we don't understand. For example, we have no idea why we dream, blush, or laugh.

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house
in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark
darkening the daytime, torch-like with the smoking blueness of Pluto's gloom,
ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day
torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark blue daze,
black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,
giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off light,
lead me then, lead the way.

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendour of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the lost bride and her groom.

--D.H. Lawrence

The Lucifer Principle

I have a new essay up at bensozia, a review of a flawed book on the fascinating topic of how biological evolution plays out in human history.

Health Care and Unreason

The anger brought forth from so many Americans by the prospect of Obama's very modest health care reform is the darkness of unreason breaking out in another way. Fear is a poison, and millions of Americans feel beset by forces they cannot understand or control. Their jobs depend on the mysterious operations of merchant bankers and international traders, their neighborhoods are full of strangers, their government is in the hands of people they do not trust. All of this makes them afraid, and their fear turns to hatred of enemies they mostly imagine. That they don't have a clue what Obama is actually proposing is, for them, another good reason to be afraid. The intricacies of thousand-page Congressional bills are another one of the mysterious forces acting against them, another reason to be afraid, another reason to hate.

Since America is going to continue in the directions they fear -- less dominated by whites, less rural, more international, more bureaucratic -- I don't know what can be done to ease the fears and hatreds of these people. In the short term there is nothing to do but outvote them and try to take care of their real needs, like health care, and hope that most of them can become accustomed to the 21st century world.

The Ghoul Gate

One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it -- waterstained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichen as to look like a fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave makes you want to be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.

--Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

Gobekli Tepe Video

I'm not sure where this video came from, but it's a good introduction to the wonders of Göbekli Tepe, the oldest monumental temple yet discovered.

Apollo 11 and Nerd Power

More than 400,000 people worked on the Apollo program. At the time the most famous were the astronauts and the mission commanders, but looking back we focus more and more on the engineers. The men in white shirts, dark ties, and glasses are the ones who made the whole thing happen. I noticed that when the Los Angeles Times ran a celebratory article on the mission, their focus was on the engineers who built the Saturn V's enormous engines. Theirs was a real technological triumph. The massive J-1 engines on the Saturn V's first stage were ten times as big as any rocket engines ever built before. They had to be redesigned 15 times in two years by teams of young engineers working 16-hour days, but the end product worked every time. As we now know, what stopped the Soviet moon program was repeated failures in the engines of their giant N-1 rocket, which blew up every time it was tested.

Apollo depended on hundreds of such teams working separately to create its many completely unprecedented systems. Nobody had ever built a craft that could land on another world and then blast back into orbit, a ship that could keep men alive for weeks in space, or a space suit that could be worn while walking on the moon. The men who did these things loved what they did. They reveled in their importance, and they poured their hearts and minds into their work. I remember a story from the memoirs of one of the Apollo astronauts. The night before launch he was walking around the launch complex when he was challenged by a technician who was working late, checking and rechecking every component of the launch computers. When the astronaut had explained who he was, the technician said, "if anything goes wrong tomorrow, it won't be because of my system." The astronaut realized, he said, that flying to the moon was only possible because hundreds of men had the same dedication to engineering perfection. If the mission failed, it wouldn't be because of them.

Until World War I, scientists were almost universally portrayed in America and Europe as ridiculous eggheads doing pointless things. But the technological progress of the twentieth century brought scientists and engineers to the forefront of competition between nations. When World War II came, all the combatants marshaled their scientists into teams more important than any combat division, and the scientists went to work designing stronger armor, more powerful guns, deeper-diving submarines, faster airplanes, sonar, radar, and eventually the atomic bomb. Those fearful mushroom clouds sealed the ascent of scientists to the pinnacle of military power.

When Kennedy sought a non-military way to challenge the Soviets, he turned again to science, announcing his bold plan to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth. Once again the power and prestige of the nation was placed in the hands of the men with slide rules and pocket protectors. I have always been struck by the assertive nerdiness of those men. They made the clothes that looked ridiculous to hippies and hepcats into proud uniforms of intellectual power. You may think we are losers, their attitude said, but we can blow up the world or send a man to the moon, and you can't. Although what they did was in some ways extraordinarily bold, they went about their work with caution and precision. Every drawing was checked and checked again and reviewed by committee after committee. Every part was tested, tested, and tested again. The missions went step by step, each one a little farther into space, a little closer to the moon.

In this picture, the engineers at Mission Control celebrate the successful splashdown of the Apollo 11 crew, July 24, 1969. I celebrate them and their achievement. Apollo 11 was as much as anything the epitome of brainpower, and they supplied the brains.

Terry Pratchett on the Right to Die

Terry Pratchett publishes a manifesto on the right to die:

I write this as someone who has, regrettably, become famous for having Alzheimer's. Although being famous is all the rage these days, it's fame I could do without.

I know enough to realise there will not be a cure within my lifetime and I know the later stages of the disease can be very unpleasant. Indeed, it's the most feared disease among the over-65s.

Naturally, I turn my attention to the future. . . .

I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod - the latter because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven - and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.

Oh, and since this is England I had better add: 'If wet, in the library.'

Who could say that is bad? Where is the evil here?

Democracy and Kung Fu Panda

Via Matt Yglesias, an interesting observation from Slavoj Žižek about how we regard our ideals:

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them.

Crows are Smart

From Science Daily:

New experiments by Oxford University scientists reveal that New Caledonian crows can spontaneously use up to three tools in the correct sequence to achieve a goal, something never before observed in non-human animals without explicit training. Sequential tool use has often been interpreted as evidence for advanced cognitive abilities, such as planning and analogical reasoning, but this has never been explicitly examined. . . .

In their new study, the scientists tested seven captive New Caledonian crows on a range of tasks requiring the use of up to three different tools in a sequence to retrieve food. Five crows successfully used tools in a sequence (four from their very first trial), and four repeatedly solved the most demanding three-tool condition. In this, food was placed at a depth so that it was only reachable with one particular tool, but getting that tool required the use of two other others. The crows had to use a short, available tool to drag in a longer, otherwise out-of-reach tool, and then use that longer tool to retrieve the correct, longest one. They could then use the longest tool to reach for the food morsel.

the dense darkness

Though all the brilliant intellects of the ages were to concentrate upon this one theme, never could they adequately express their wonder at the dense darkness of the human mind.

-- Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Vacation 2009, Part II

Last year I taught my three older children to play Dungeons and Dragons. Thomas loves it and badgers me constantly to play, but Mary and Robert will only play when there is nothing else to do. In Maine after dark, in our little house without cable tv or xbox, there was often nothing to do, and we played almost every night. We taught Ben to play, and he took to it like a fish to water, or an otter to sliding, or a chimp to making hooting sounds, or something. I asked him what the best part of our trip to Maine, he said, "Dungeons and Dragons!!!" Thomas came home so into it that he has started running a game for his friends, and the maps he has drawn are the neatest and most careful things he has ever drawn or written.

All of which I think is pretty cool.

But back in Maine -- on Thursday my brother arrived at my sister's place on the busy, stylish part of the island (Northeast Harbor). I took several children over. We went sea kayaking, my sister taking Clara in her boat, me taking Ben, and Robert and Thomas in a boat together. Robert had never steered before, and we later discovered that his boat had a balky rudder, so he had lots of trouble. Of course he blamed Thomas, and they proceeded to squabble and shout there way across the harbor, paddling in circles. I took pictures which I assure you were both poignant and hilarious but lost them when I dropped my camera in the harbor. :-(

Friday I went on a great hike with my brother and my 18-year-old niece, who walks a great deal faster than I do. We went up the Beehive, a famous steep hike with lots of iron ladders. We were there at 8 AM and went up with no trouble. Getting there early is important, because this is such a popular hike that by 10 the trail is clogged with people struggling up very slowly. We descended the other side of the hill on a more gradual slope down to a pond called The Bowl, where we watched huge tadpoles and schools of minnows swim in the crystal clear water. Then we went up another mountain the name of which escapes me. Back at my sister's we divided into kayaks for a paddle of over a mile across the harbor to Little Cranberry Island. I was with Mary in the kayak with the balky rudder, and we took such a twisting course that we added at least half a mile to the route. I arrived quite tired. And then had to paddle back.

Meanwhile, Lisa had Clara and the boys and went to the Sand Beach, where they played in the water.

Saturday we headed home via our friends David and Lori's house in Acton, Massachusetts. We were early and our children were restless, so we went to Concorde and stopped by the North Bridge unit of the battlefield. There, on April 19, 1775, American militia were first ordered to fire on British troops, beginning a battle that lasted for hours as Americans harassed the British retreat. We tried to impress a little of the history on our unruly brood but for them it was mainly a sunny place to run and play. One thing I love about my children is how much fun they can have with just an open place to run in.

We played Pooh Sticks on the North Bridge. (Terminological note: Pooh Sticks is what this game seems to be called, but I invented it myself as a child without ever reading A.A. Milne, as no doubt have thousands of other children, since it is a perfectly obvious thing to do, so I don't much care for the name. Pooh has no claim on this game. But I suppose it has to be called something.)

We ran in the field. We climbed a tree. Our sons roughhoused.

And I, at least, spent a while looking at the spot and thinking about what happened there 234 years ago. It was one of the most fun parts of the trip, an absolutely delightful hour.

Psychopathic Brains

A team of neuroscientists has announced the discovery of a significant difference between the brains of convicted criminals diagnosed as psychopaths and those of the rest of us. The discovery concerns the uncinate fasciculus, a channel that connects the amigdale, a part of the brain mainly concerned with emotions, to the orbital frontal cortex, which plays a key part in rational decision making. It seems that the uncinate fasciculus (honestly, how many of you have heard of the uncinate fasciculus before this?) in psychopaths is degraded. Which is quite interesting.

But what about this comment from the study's lead scientist:

If replicated by larger studies the significance of these findings cannot be underestimated. The suggestion of a clear structural deficit in the brains of psychopaths has profound implications for clinicians, research scientists and the criminal justice system.

I wonder. What does knowing that psychopaths have damaged brains have to do with how we act toward them, or how we treat them in court?

So far as I can tell, we are what our brains do. It stands to reason, therefore, that most differences between people reflect some sort of difference in our brains. At some level, I imagine, the brains of nice people are different from those of mean people, those of smart people from those of stupid people, those of the musically talented from those with tin ears. I'm not saying that these differences are simple or even consistent, but what, other than differences in our brains, could cause differences between how people think and act?

So how is saying that people's brains are not the same different from saying that people are not the same? How is saying that someone has a psychopathic brain different from saying that someone is a psychopath?