Annals of Really Obvious Research

High-heels Linked To Heel And Ankle Pain.

The mind boggles at the audacity of this claim.

Andy Warhol

A dispute has broken out over which works by Andy Warhol are "authentic." This has a marvelous irony about it, because Warhol's whole career was aimed at undermining the concept of "authentic" art. He was fascinated by the notion of creating works of art that he never touched with his hands, and he even created a stamp of his signature. He was interested in the image, not doing anything with his own hands, which is why he called his studio the Factory. Nonetheless, the art world has decided that there must be authentic Warhols and inauthentic Warhols, and so now we have lawsuits over the matter. What a joke.

But I am writing about Warhol not because of this absurd fooferaw about authenticity, but because of the widely entrenched notion that he was some kind of sage:

Warhol asked different questions about art. How does it differ from any other commodity? What value do we place on originality, invention, rarity, and the uniqueness of the art object? To do this he revisited long-neglected artistic genres such as history painting in his disaster series, still life in his soup cans and Brillo boxes, and the society portrait in Ethel Scull Thirty-Six Times. Though Warhol isn't always seen as a conceptual artist, his most perceptive critic, Arthur C. Danto, calls him "the nearest thing to a philosophical genius the history of art has produced."

Everything that passed before Warhol's basilisk gaze—celebrities, socialites, speed freaks, rock bands, film, and fashion—he imprinted with his deadpan mixture of glamour and humor, then cast them back into the world as narcissistic reflections of his own personality. This is what makes him one of the most complex and elusive figures in the history of art. As Danto explains in his brilliant short study of Warhol, the question Warhol asked is not "What is art?" but "What is the difference between two things, exactly alike, one of which is art and one of which is not?"

Now I grant you that Warhol was clever, and he certainly understood some things about the twentieth-century art world better than anyone else. Hence his mockery of the fetish for "authenticity," and his insights into the nature of celebrity and the power of a simple image reproduced a thousand times.

To me, though, philosophy should go beyond this. To me, sages are supposed to do something besides observe the foibles of their own times. They should point toward something of value; they should say, not just how things are, but how they might be better. Warhol explicitly rejected this notion of wisdom. To him artists were people who made striking images, and who somehow embodied the excitement, the glamor, and the eroticism of art as a way of life. Which is certainly his right, and I have no real complaint about Warhol's life. He made striking images, got rich, and lived just the way he wanted to. Great for him.

What bothers me is holding Warhol up as some kind of model of what art is. To me, Warhol was essentially a clown. Or perhaps a fool would be better. Just as fools mocked kings in some way that was supposed to enhance the kings' glory, Warhol mocked art, and the art world has decided that his mockery somehow enhances the glory of contemporary art. But it doesn't. Warhol showed that art is just a species of entertainment and artists are no different from other celebrities, and therefore that is it completely absurd to pay thousands of dollars for works that are no different in kind from Campbell's Soup cans. Somehow the art world embraces this notion while still insisting that works of art are objects of great value. If Warhol was right, original works of art have no value at all. If he was wrong -- well, what? What would show that he was wrong? Have any of the people who buy and sell contemporary art given any thought to what would show that Warhol was wrong? To what would really give art value?

Warhol's questions are neither original nor interesting. The problem of what constitutes art has been debated since the 1700s, and Marcel Duchamp already asked Warhol's questions in the most extreme possible way. And, frankly, who cares? Nobody but people who have millions of dollars invested in things that they consider works of art. I couldn't care less what art is. When I look at something, I ask myself, is it interesting? Is it beautiful? Does it have some effect on my mind and my emotions that goes beyond the effect that reading the catalog description would have? And is that effect a good thing or a bad one?

But this is somehow too deep for the contemporary art world, just as it was too deep for Andy Warhol. His glitzy silk screens leave me completely cold. I have read in several places that Warhol was proud of having no hidden depths. Everything, he liked to say, was right there on the surface, and likewise there was nothing to his art except what you saw. Still, critics have loaded his works with meaning, just as they have loaded some of his silk screens with authenticity.

Enough already. There is nothing to Warhol's works but the image, and there is nothing to his thinking but one long-running joke. There is no there there.

The American Speech Community (?)

E.D. Hirsch, Jr., writing in the Chronicle ("How Schools Fail Democracy"), bemoans the many Americans who don't seem to have a common language for talking about political problems:

Full membership in any speech community and in any democracy involves mastery not just of grammar and pronunciation, but also of commonly shared knowledge—often unspoken and unwritten—that is equally essential to communication. All effective writers and speakers have learned the convention of tacit knowledge. They know that a baseball metaphor like "he struck out" can be confidently used, but a cricket metaphor like "he was leg before" cannot. Their audience will know the name Franklin D. Roosevelt, but not necessarily Harold L. Ickes.

Obviously there is something to this. You can't have much of a conversation without some shared knowledge and experience. We do count on our schools to teach students enough American history and civics to understand the basic political discourse.

But the whole piece still reeks of white privilege and smug conservatism. Hirsch assumes that everybody but a few kooks agrees on what our students ought to be learning, and that what they agree on is the standard patriotic historical narrative, plus the Bible, Shakespeare, and a few other classics. In fact there is no such agreement, and every time somebody tries to create such a standard curriculum a horrible row breaks out. Who are the historical figures American students should be learning about? Should we have Ronald Reagan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Thomas Edison? Or perhaps Nat Turner, Samuel Gompers, and Medgar Evers?

And what should the students learn about whatever heroes we choose? I think we could probably agree that George Washington belongs in the curriculum, but what will we say about him? Should we point out that he believed very strongly that society should be dominated by the wealthy, educated elite, and that he was very suspicious of democracy? Should we note that he was a deist who said a great deal about Providence and next to nothing about Jesus, and who explicitly said that the United States was not a Christian nation? (I dare you to try that one in rural Virginia.) Should we point out that Thomas Jefferson was one of history's leading hypocrites? That Martin Luther King cheated on his wife and was at least interested in socialism?

There is no politically neutral way to teach history. By what we choose to include or exclude, and what we chose to say, we offer an interpretation of the past that somebody else will challenge. When I teach recent history I try to convey what political activists of all stripes believe in and what vision they pursued, and I strive to be even-handed. But this is itself a political act, because it asserts that the past is not of immediate political relevance. It denies the stories that, for example, labor activists and religious conservatives believe ought to be told. By teaching without villains and heroes, without white hats and blacks, I reject certain approaches to both the past and to contemporary politics.

Literature is no easier. There is no list of books that everyone agrees are important, nor is there any agreed way to teach the ones that show up on numerous lists. And why do kids need to know baseball metaphors, when a lot more of them play soccer?

Hirsch wants to use the school curriculum to promote American unity:

Mastery of the knowledge assumed within the American speech community is not just a technical prerequisite for proficiency in the standard language. It is also a prerequisite to something equally profound in a democracy—a sense of community and solidarity within the nation.

But does a real knowledge of history promote a "sense of community," or does it show that we have always been in conflict with each other? Should we exclude, say, slavery, the Civil War, the coal mine wars, and the Civil Rights struggle in the name of "solidarity"?

I have a better idea: instead of trying to create a sense of community through shared metaphors, how about we actually work together and help each other? When rich bankers oppose giving basic health care to poor people, and CEOs take no interest in whether their lower-ranking employees can make ends meet, maybe people should fight them, instead of looking for some kind of common ground based on baseball metaphors and the Federalist Papers.

Hyenas are Smarter than You Think

At least when they are working together:

Spotted hyenas may not be smarter than chimpanzees, but a new study shows that they outperform the primates on cooperative problem-solving tests.

Captive pairs of spotted hyenas (Crocuta crocuta) that needed to tug two ropes in unison to earn a food reward cooperated successfully and learned the maneuvers quickly with no training. Experienced hyenas even helped inexperienced partners do the trick.

When confronted with a similar task, chimpanzees and other primates often require extensive training and cooperation between individuals may not be easy, said Christine Drea, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University.

I think this study supports the notion that "Intelligence" is not a simple, single thing, but a bundle of skills, some of them only loosely connected. Hyenas survive by hunting as a pack, so they are good at seeing how their actions will work together with those of a companion to achieve a desired goal: if I make this zebra turn while you go for the hind leg. . . . Chimps by contrast rarely do that sort of thing, so they aren't naturally good at it. On the other hand they were able to learn with enough work, which shows an advantage they have over hyenas: they can learn to do unnatural, unfamiliar things if they have to.

New Species

As a result of all the biodiversity surveys going on around the world, hundreds of new animal species are being discovered every year. Of course a lot of them are nematodes and ants, but many of them are mammals, like the Laotian Rock Rat, reptiles like this gekko, and amphibians. The world truly is a big and fascinating place.

Reasoning

"Reasoning is a robust source of hope and confidence in a world darkened by murky deeds. . . . The remedy for bad reasoning is better reasoning."

-- Amartya Sen

My Favorite Definition of Justice

". . . the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society."

--Learned Hand

Mandatory Flu Shots?

The New York state government is requiring that all health care workers who have direct contact with patients get both the annual flu and H1N1 vaccines. And lots of people are upset about it. Some, of course, are crying "big government" and moaning about the erosion of individual rights. But in another sign that anarchists understand the world better than libertarians, some private companies, including HCA, the largest private hospital chain, are requiring the vaccinations for their employees. All big bureaucracies, private or public, limit freedom, and since public bureaucracies are subject to more kinds of pressure, they are generally less arbitrary than private companies. Case in point: NY is allowing a religious exemption from the vaccination requirement, but HCA is not.

The rationale is that doctors and nurses who get the flu can spread it to their patients, especially hospital employees who work with sick and vulnerable people.

"The rationale begins with the health-care ethic, which is: The patient's well-being comes ahead of the personal preferences of health-care workers," New York State Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines said.

I find it interesting that only about half of health care workers get the annual flu vaccine, a number that is frustrating to disease fighters. Some of this is just the inevitable carelessness that people develop about routine activities, like doctors who don't wash their hands, or organic chemists who have to be forced by OSHA to work under fume hoods. But I think lots of people, including doctors and nurses, are freaked out about shots. A nurse in NYC:

I have a problem with being mandated to put something in my body.

Is this fed by the movies, in which injections are almost always given by bad guys and contain something horrible?

But NY State and the hospital companies are holding firm, saying that the vaccines are safe. An HCA administrator:

If somebody didn't want to wash their hands or scrub before going into surgery, you can imagine there wouldn't be a lot of tolerance for that.

There certainly wouldn't. The protection of public health is one area in which governments have long wielded great powers, going back to medieval efforts to combat the plague, so there is nothing new about any of this. And I think in this case the bureaucrats are right. Health care providers do have an obligation not to make their patients sick, one they very often fail at. Here is a simple way they can perform their duties better. If you're that freaked out about shots, and about regulations designed to protect patient health, maybe you shouldn't be working in health care.

Genetic Evidence for an Aryan Invasion of India

The languages of northern India are Indo-European, related to the languages of Iran and Europe. This, plus the caste system and certain other details of ancient Indian society, have long led European scholars to imagine an invasion of India by Indo-European or Aryans around 3000 years ago. However, Indian nationalists hate this notion. They want Indian civilization to be wholly native-grown, and they want all Indians to more closely related to each other than they are to any outside growth. They especially hate the notion that the caste system is the remnant of an ancient conquest, since in their view it was an organic product of Indian religion.

Now a genetic study of the Indian population by an international Indian and American team supports the invasion hypothesis:

The new research reveals that nearly all Indians carry genomic contributions from two distinct ancestral populations. Following this ancient mixture, many groups experienced periods of genetic isolation from each other for thousands of years. . . .

These genomic analyses revealed two ancestral populations. "Different Indian groups have inherited forty to eighty percent of their ancestry from a population that we call the Ancestral North Indians who are related to western Eurasians, and the rest from the Ancestral South Indians, who are not related to any group outside India," said co-author David Reich.

All current genetic research should carry the label, "interesting if true," but this seems like a good study, and it confirms what I think is the obvious interpretation of Indian history.

Anglo-Saxon Gold

What can you say about this discovery except, wow. The hoard contains 1500 objects and 12 pounds of gold. From the curator:

The two most striking features of the hoard are that it is unbalanced and it is of exceptionally high quality. It is unbalanced because of what we don’t find. There is absolutely nothing feminine. There are no dress fittings, brooches or pendants. These are the gold objects most commonly found from the Anglo-Saxon era. The vast majority of items in the hoard are martial - war gear, especially sword fittings.

The quantity of gold amazing but, more importantly, the craftsmanship is consummate, this was the very best that the Anglo-Saxon metalworkers could do, and they were very good. Tiny garnets were cut to shape and set in a mass of cells to give a rich, glowing effect, it is stunning. Its origins are clearly the very highest-levels of Saxon aristocracy or royalty. It belonged to the elite.

Most of the gold and silver items appear to have been deliberately torn from the objects to which they were originally attached. We have over 80 gold and garnet pommel caps, and there also appear to be fittings from helmets.

This is not simply loot; swords were being singled out for special treatment. If it was just gold they were after we would have found the rich fittings from sword belts. Perhaps gold fittings were stripped from the swords to depersonalise them – to remove the identity of the previous owner. The blades then being remounted and reused.

It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career. We also cannot say who the original, or the final, owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when. it will be debated for decades.

We don’t know how it came to be buried in that field, it may have been a tribute to the pagan gods or concealed in the face of a perceived, but all too real, threat, which led to it not being recovered.

The Lure of Tabloid Love

Sometimes I just can't resist the articles of dating advice that Yahoo dangles before my eyes when I sign out of my email account. There is something so intriguingly tawdry about them. Something sexy and ridiculous at the same time. And the worldview they represent is so incoherent. Take this latest, "Nine Signs a Guy is a Keeper," from Glamour magazine.

1) He has his act together.

Girls, fight that impulse to heal a crazy guy with your love and settle for the stable lunkhead!

2) He puts you first. Picture a delicious platter of grilled steak. Does your man offer it to you first to pick the best piece? He does if he's a keeper!

Because you're so narcissistic you couldn't possibly live with a guy who didn't accept how much more important you are than he is.

3) He's not afraid of your germs. You know a guy is really into you when he can't stay away, even when you're bedridden and snotty. When you're sick with the flu, he says, 'Let me come over and take care of you,' rather than, 'Oooh, you sound really contagious... call me when you're feeling better."

The first clue that there is something weirdly maternal going on here.

4) He asks about your family, and he seems to genuinely want to hear about them.

Now I see; this wasn't written by a woman of dating age, but a mother with daughters of dating age. Date nice boys who will want to take me to lunch!

5) He makes time for your friends. In the beginning of your relationship, does your man show an interest in meeting your besties? And does he follow it up with a plan, like hosting a low-key dinner party?

Honestly, ladies, how many of you have ever dated a man who would hold a dinner party and invite your friends? And why doesn't he have any friends of his own?

6) He's your biggest cheerleader.

Is this your boyfriend or your mom?

7) He remembers the little things. Does your man really listen to you? You'll know he's a keeper if you tell him you have a big scary work meeting and the next time you talk, he asks how it went. Or if you tell him you left your sunglasses at his house and he remembers them on your next date.

Looking past weird assumption that "you" have "scary" work meetings -- why are "you" scared of your job, anyway? -- we have to ask what this implies. If you ask me, it means, "only guys who act like girlfriends can be considered keepers."

8) He's happy when you're happy. This is the guy who goes to a chick flick with you on Friday night rather than an action film -- not because he actually wants to, but because it makes you happy.

Or because he's a weak-kneed mama's boy with no mind of his own and a deep-seated need to please women.

9) He makes you the best you can be. A guy who makes you feel like the luckiest woman alive -- like you can (and should!) be your confident, fabulous self -- is worth hanging on to.

Well, it's hard to argue with that.

Read this list over, close your eyes, and imagine the man who would meet all of these criteria. I see a sweet gay guy in a light blue sweater. Just what your mom wants for you.

Biden Turns Against the Afghan War

Joe Biden, who was one of the biggest early supporters of the Afghan War (and who voted for the Iraq war), has now turned against sending more troops. He has not said much in public, but all the usual sources are saying that in the administration's internal debates he is the loudest voice against continuing the war. The New Republic:

When Obama's national security team first considered a troop increase for Afghanistan in March, Biden circulated a document that outlined alternatives to a major escalation. Although the White House won't provide precise details, aides acknowledge that Biden urged the president to consider a narrow counterterrorism mission, heavy on Special Forces and Predator drone strikes, which would require far less manpower than the military was seeking. Obama ultimately sided with other administration officials arguing for a larger counterinsurgency operation, and approved 4,000 more troops on the heels of the 17,000 he'd dispatched in February. But Biden continues to argue that it may not be possible to defeat the Taliban and stabilize Afghanistan at a reasonable cost.

Good for Biden. I hope Obama listens.

Everything I Hate is the Same Thing

There is a common human error, for which there ought to be a name, which is assuming that all the things you hate are somehow connected, or even are somehow expressions of the same deeper reality. Case in point: Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa has decided that gay marriage is socialism:

If there's a push for a socialist society where the foundations of individual rights and liberties are undermined and everybody is thrown together living collectively off one pot of resources earned by everyone, this is one of the goals they have to go to, same sex marriage, because it has to plow through marriage in order to get to their goal. They want public affirmation, they want access to public funds and resources. . . . Not only is it a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept in the final analysis.

But as this case shows to anyone with a mind, the things we hate may be completely unrelated. It is not true that warmongering is racist, that capitalism is sexist, that high taxes destroy traditional communities, or that gay marriage promotes socialism.

Now that I think about it, this might be a subspecies of "tabloid thinking," which is defined in rhetoric as assuming that things are much simpler than they are. But it still deserves a special name.

The Very Small

Those aren't bacteria in this picture, they're molecules. Pentacene, to be precise, which consists, as you can see, of five fused benzene rings. Astonishing.

Note the scale: 20 angstroms is 0.000000002 meters.

The News Business

From Michael Massing, former editor of the Columbia Journalism Review:

While doing some recent research on the news business, I came upon this remarkable fact: Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.

Of course this isn't really CBS's fault. Most people don't choose which news show to watch based on the quality of the reporting, but on whether they like the anchor. But this does point out the absurd salary structure at the heights of American corporate power. Does anybody think they couldn't get lots of charismatic people to apply for the job even if it only paid $2 million a year?

One Seriously Weird Fish

According to National Geographic, this thing, recently caught off the coast of Brazil, is a member of a group called the "jellynose fish", which live in deep waters around the world. Weird.

Those to Whom Evil is Done

In 1994, Rwandan Hutus killed about 800,000 of their Tutsi compatriots. Before they finished their genocide their government was overthrown by an invading Tutsi army, widely assumed to have been backed by the CIA and British intelligence. The Tutsi invaders set up a new government and told the world that they supported peace and "ethnic reconciliation."

Alas, they have turned out to be monsters. They have fomented a war in eastern Congo that has claimed more than 5 million lives; their stated reason for intervening is to fight the remnants of the genocidal Hutu state, gone into Congolese exile. But it has become clear that they continue to intervene mainly to loot Congo's minerals, which they trade for the weapons they use to strengthen their dictatorship at home and increase their control of eastern Congo.

We would like to think that the victims of horrible crimes will be strengthened in virtue, but it is not so. Instead, what we see again and again is that "those to whom evil is done do evil in return."

Carl Woese's History of Life

From Freeman Dyson's fascinating article on the future of genetic engineering:

When did Darwinian evolution begin? By Darwinian evolution Woese means evolution as Darwin understood it, based on the competition for survival of noninterbreeding species. He presents evidence that Darwinian evolution does not go back to the beginning of life. When we compare genomes of ancient lineages of living creatures, we find evidence of numerous transfers of genetic information from one lineage to another. In early times, horizontal gene transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent the further back you go in time.

Whatever Carl Woese writes, even in a speculative vein, needs to be taken seriously. In his "New Biology" article, he is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.

But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria—and the first species of any kind—reserving their intellectual property for their own private use. With their superior efficiency, the bacteria continued to prosper and to evolve separately, while the rest of the community continued its communal life. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archea. Some time after that, a third cell separated itself and became the ancestor of the eukaryotes. And so it went on, until nothing was left of the community and all life was divided into species. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established, evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.

First Day of Fall

Happy Equinox!

More on Women's Happiness

The most read thing on the NY Times web site for the past week has been Maureen Dowd's "Blue is the New Black," on women getting less happy. Dowd's piece is a sort of response to one by Arianna Huffington, “The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling,” which she posted to introduce a series on women's happiness by pollster Marcus Buckingham.

I've already written a little about what I think is going on. (To the extent that there is anything going on; the changes are not very big, and I am not really all that convinced by these surveys. But in the spirit of the thing I will ask what might be behind these numbers.) Women have more choices now, which is ambivalent, because it ads to stress and leaves us wondering if we have done the right thing. Many women also have trouble finding an identity that fits them. They are also embarking on a new experiment in social roles, which means that they lack the supports that tradition gives to people who doing pretty much the same things their parents did.

I was especially interested in the data that show women get less happier as they age, while men get happier:

This creeping unhappiness can seep into all aspects of a woman's life. When the researchers asked more specific questions, such as, "How satisfied are you with your marriage?" and "How satisfied are you with the things you own?" and "How satisfied are you with your finances?" the pattern was always the same: women begin their life more satisfied than men, and wind up less satisfied. Sure, the crossover points vary a little--women's happiness with their marriage sinks below men's at age thirty-nine; their satisfaction with their finances dips at age forty-one; and by forty-four, they're more dissatisfied than men with stuff they own.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/whats-happening-to-womens_b_289511.html

I have a theory about this. In my experience, based on the non-random sample of women I have known, young women are prone to thinking that their future happiness will be assured if they achieve certain things. Many young women think that if they get married, have children, and find a career, they will be happy. The pursuit of these goals is exciting and makes them happy. But once they achieve them, they slowly realize that having those things is not nearly as nice as anticipating them was. So they get sad.

Happiness is not a race to a goal, or a matter of achieving certain things. Having children, in particular, does not seem to make people happier. According to what I have read, what leads to happiness is:

1) doing the things you love
2) being with friends
3) cultivating a positive attitude

Achieving goals doesn't seem to make much impact. Happiness is an ongoing, day-to-day thing. So my theory is that contemporary women are too focused on goals and not enough on having fun and making friends, so once they have achieved those goals they end up wondering why they did it or what went wrong.

Or maybe it's just that the reality of being married to a man is a lot less fulfilling than the fantasy.

Those Voids in the Biosphere

This map shows something that I alluded to when I was writing about fish farming. The big blue areas are parts of the ocean where little photosynthesis takes place, and therefore places with very little life. What is missing is minerals, especially iron. Is there a reason we can't pump minerals into those areas and start some food chains?

A Troubled Future for Higher Education

This interesting article by Kevin Carey describes a new venture that offers online college courses for $99 a month.

As I have noted before, colleges depend financially on offering big lecture courses to freshmen and sophomores. Carey speculates that they are financially vulnerable to cheap online schools in the same way that newspapers were vulnerable to online classified ads. Newspapers depended on the big profits from classified ads to fund their money-losing news bureaus, and colleges depend on the profits from offering big lecture classes to freshmen to subsidize upper division courses; when online schools pick off many of those students, a lot of colleges are going to be in big financial trouble.

I am not sure that this is true, in the short term, except for certain marginal public universities and for profit schools like Strayer. What universities offer students is not just the content of their courses but a much broader experience.

In the long term, though, the existence of programs like this one will put pressure on universities to explain what it is they offer, beyond course credits and certifications.

Paleo-Future

An amusing blog chronicling how the future was imagined in the past.

2009's Most Amusing Protest Signs

From the Huffington Post. My favorite:

DON'T STEAL FROM MEDICARE TO SUPPORT SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.

Leaving the Factory

Moving article at the Chronicle about Ford assembly-line workers who took buyouts and went to community college.

Meanwhile, the Trash Piles up in Cairo

From the NY Times:

When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.

The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.

I love this summation of Egyptian government:

“The main problem in Egypt is follow-up,” said Sabir Abdel Aziz Galal, chief of the infectious disease department at the Ministry of Agriculture. “A decision is taken, there is follow-up for a period of time, but after that, they get busy with something else and forget about it. This is the case with everything.”

Thought for Today

I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.

--John Locke

Today's Weirdly Frightening News

Some bacteria get more virulent in space:

When the Shuttle returned, the team recovered the space-bound bacteria and analysed the pattern of genetic activity across their entire genomes using microarrays. This modern and powerful technique allows scientists to measure the activity of thousands of genes at the same time. The researchers also measured the levels of every protein in the samples.

The team looked at the entire Salmonella genome and found that the expression of 167 genes and the levels of 73 proteins had changed in the space-travellers. Clearly, the environmental changes of space-flight had triggered changes in the bacteria at the molecular level.

When fed to mice, the altered bacteria were three times more virulent than their Earth-bound counterparts. The infected mice succumbed to much lower concentrations of space-faring bacteria and in much shorter times.

Money Can't Buy Happiness (or Brains)

From Sports Illustrated:

• By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.

• Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.

Of the many other tidbits in the article, this is my favorite: in the past three months, 400 championship rings have been pawned with one company, championship-rings.net, including a 2008 Super Bowl ring.

Pro athletes, it seems, are regarded by sleazy businessmen as the easiest source of capital for dubious ventures, and the roll of big name athletes who have lost everything investing in questionable inventions, bad real estate deals, silly theme businesses, and so on is lengthy and sad.

Reading the first part of the article, I kept thinking, "Where are their wives?" I mean, what some of these guys obviously need is to use the time-honored trick of the newly rich man and marry an educated woman from an old money background, or else a stock broker. Then I got to the section on divorce. There aren't any statistics, but the people SI spoke to estimate the divorce rate for pro athletes at 60 to 80 percent. A lot of them marry girlfriends from their old neighborhoods, partly because they have more faith in the people who liked them before they made it. But that means their girlfriends are as ignorant about money as they are, and every bit as whipsawed by the flood of wealth and its sudden disappearance. After they retire, the athletes go from being rich and very busy to being bored, lost, and unemployed, and of course active athletes are famously unfaithful, so they have a lot to argue with their wives about when they are home together.

The whole thing is a sad sermon on how fleeting money and fame are, and how much better most people are without them.

Wassily Kandinsky

There is a major show of Wassily Kandinsky's paintings at the Guggenheim in New York -- no surprise there, he has always been one of their favorite artists. He belongs to the generation that created "modern" painting, a process that always looks to me like an act of demolition. Starting with paintings that were much like the representational art of the nineteenth century, or the colorful crayon landscapes of the Impressionists, Kandinsky, Picasso and their peers gradually broke their images apart into collages and rendered the elements in simpler and more distorted ways, until they ended up with abstraction. Like, I think, a lot of people who don't get abstract painting, I have always found the early stages of this process fascinating, but wish they had not carried on. I also wonder why they did. Was ever increasing abstraction just a fashion that captured their imaginations? Was it some internal dynamic of their work, which, once started on, almost forced to continue down that path? Was some outside political or intellectual force driving them away from depicting recognizable objects and people? Were they running away from photography?

Anyway, Kandinsky's career provides a great view of this process, and I wish I could get to New York for the show. The NY Times has a slideshow of some works, but for reasons I will not ponder there is a much better collection at a site called "chess theory." Below, four images that show the general arc of Kandinsky's career, dated 1902, 1907, 1909, and 1912.