Win Some, Lose Some

A new Australian study suggests that when pregnant mothers take folic acid supplements, which are recommended to prevent neural tube defects, they increase the risk that their children will get asthma.

Windfarms vs. the Sunrise

From the Associated Press:

MASHPEE, Mass. (AP) -- From a blustery perch over a Cape Cod beach, Chuckie Green gestures toward a stretch of horizon where he says construction of the nation's first offshore wind farm would destroy his Indian tribe's religion.

The Wampanoag - the tribe that welcomed the Pilgrims in the 17th century and known as "The People of the First Light" - practice sacred rituals requiring an unblocked view of the sunrise. That view won't exist once 130 turbines, each over 400 feet tall, are built several miles from shore in Nantucket Sound, visible to Wampanoag in Mashpee and on Martha's Vineyard.

Tribal rituals, including dancing and chanting, take place at secret sacred sites around the sound at various times, such as the summer and winter solstices and when an elder passes.

The Wampanoag fight to preserve their ceremonies has become the latest obstacle - some say delay tactic - for a pioneering wind energy project that seemed at the cusp of final approval.

"We, the Wampanoag people, who opened our arms and allowed people to come here for religious freedoms, are now being threatened with our religion being taken away for the profits of one single group of investors," Green said.

The Mashpee and Aquinnah Wampanoag claim Nantucket Sound is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property. The tribes say the designation, which would come with new regulations for activity on the sound, is needed to preserve not only their pristine views but ancestors' remains buried on Horseshoe Shoal, where the turbines would be built.

Cape Wind supporters say the tribes' claim for a National Register listing for the sound is baseless and was sprung late, in league with the project's most vociferous opponents, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound.

"I think this is clearly a tactic for delay, for delay's sake," said Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Cape Wind. "I think it's fair to say, looking at the past eight years, that opponents to Cape Wind have tried every conceivable strategy to slow down or stop the project."

Green bristles at the notion that the tribes, prodded by the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, are jumping in late just to gum up the works. Green and Audra Parker, the alliance's executive director, said the alliance supports the Wampanoags' claim, but didn't engineer it.

Cape Wind, proposed in 2001 and expected to cost $1 billion, aims to provide up to 75 percent of Cape Cod's power. Other offshore wind farm proposals are in earlier stages of development in several states, including Rhode Island, Delaware and Texas.

The picture above shows what the wind farm would look like from the closest point on land, according to Cape Wind.

The Restless Voter

It is one of the oddities of Democracy that elections are decided by the people who think and care the least about politics. These restless "independent" voters seem to have no idea what they want, just a perpetual dissatisfaction with the status quo. This has the advantage of making it difficult for any party to stay in power for too long, but I think it is mistake to read too much into their fickle choices.

Of the three major political contests yesterday, the Republicans won two, the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, and Democrats won one, the House election in upstate New York. The only messages I see in this result are, first, that people in New Jersey and Virginia cling to the mysterious belief that the governor has some power over the state economy and, second, that people in upstate New York, like most Americans, seem to resent having their local politics made into contests between national interest groups who couldn't find their home towns on a map -- the losing candidate in that race was endorsed by many national figures and raised a lot of out-of-state money, but was not well known to voters in a district where he doesn't even live.

For me the only important election yesterday was the vote in Maine on gay marriage, which sadly went to the anti-marriage side. But anti-marriage voters are dying by the day, and young people are solidly on the virtuous side, so we will outlive the anti-marriage forces soon enough.

Archaeological Nationalism

Another fossil discovery in China, of a jaw that looks sort of like a Neanderthal's and sort of like a modern humans, triggers more claims by Chinese archaeologists that modern humans originated in East Asia. That nobody outside China takes these claims at all seriously only seems to encourage the Chinese. There are also Russian archaeologists who insist that modern humans arose in Siberia. The whole business is a reminder of how much what even experts see is determined by what they want to believe.

Trotting out the Cliches

I was reading some obituaries for Claude Lévi-Strauss, preparatory to writing my own farewell. But I was so disgusted by the claptrap in the Times obit that I have to vent. I understand that this was written quickly, but is that any excuse for this garbage? First, to exaggerate Lévi-Strauss's contribution, we have to make everyone who came before him seem stupid:

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Accepted by whom? I mean, really. Western intellectuals had been collecting myths and folktales around the world for 200 years when Lévi-Strauss was born, which suggests at least an interest in the imaginations of primitive peoples. Lévi-Strauss lived 150 years after Captain Cook went to Tahiti, bringing home the famous account of how happy and devoted to pleasure the Tahitians were. He came a generation after Malinowski, who documented the complicated web of mutual obligations that underlay ritual gift exchange in Melanesia. I could go on, but this is such an obvious falsehood that it isn't worth our time.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

A fair summary of Lévi-Strauss's approach, but so far nothing not accepted by most anthropologists of his time. Here we get to the interesting part:

For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

True, and an perfect example of how one gets to be a famous intellectual. You take an old idea, that people have a tendency to think in binary terms, well known to both philosophers and ethnographers, and you inflate it into a grand principle that, you assert, explains everything. People are impressed by the many examples you can adduce in support of your view (after all, people do like to think in binary terms), and by the universal sweep of your law. The obvious fact that people also think in lots of other ways is brushed aside, and Presto! a genius is born.

And then more appalling claptrap:

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Gag. The most common criticism of nineteenth-century anthropology was actually that it was too abstract and too interested in universals. Every missionary who went up the Congo or the Amazon was eager to show how the customs of his neighbors illustrated the universals of human nature and God's Plan of Creation.

Which brings me to what I was going to say about Lévi-Strauss: he was the last great intellectual of the nineteenth-century world. I suppose what I really mean is that he was a modernist, a man of the "modern" era that stretches from about 1750 to 1960. This was the age of reason, the age of big ideas and big systems, of revolutionary ambitions in every field. It was the age of synthesis, of discovering the universal laws that underlie the apparent randomness of daily events. It was the age of classification. It was an age when an obscure professor could author a political manifesto calling for abolition of the old world, which might be taken up by a gang of bomb-making students, or even an army of jungle revolutionaries.

Our world, the post-modern world, is not so in love with grand theories and revolutionary agendas. We are suspicious of both big ideas and big changes. The most famous French intellectual of the generation after Lévi-Strauss was Foucault, to whom grand theories led inevatibly to terrible oppressions, and who ended up celebrating the anti-modern, anti-Western revolution of Iran. Most contemporary anthropologists are more interested in celebrating primitive culture and defending the rights of native peoples than in pronouncing theories; the only theory that gets any real attention in anthropology these days is biological evolution.

Lévi-Strauss was one of those thinkers who is most known for his theories, but whose work is best when it is least theoretical. His books on myth are sometimes wonderfully phantasmagorical, leaping from one strange story to another based on strained metaphorical links. He had a profound respect for all human thought, and believed that the shamans of the Amazon were intellectuals equal to the philosophers of Europe. He took people seriously and found them fascinating. What I remember best about his books is the wondrous rainbow of examples he could trot out, and his conviction that the weirdest vision of the most drug-addled shaman means something important. Somewhere in his books there is a long discourse on the myths of the half man, who has only one leg and one arm, and I remember how Lévi-Strauss's insistence on taking this notion seriously brought home to me how weird the idea is, and thus how interesting it is that it appears in myths all over the world. I never liked his more didactic passages, when he starts to insist how everything reflects the Big Idea. But he was a remarkable thinker and a humane man, and for that I celebrate him.

Oh, the Horror

From New York Magazine:

Cobble Hill Mom No. 1: So, what were your kids for Halloween?
Cobble Hill Mom No. 2: It was adorable. They love art and architecture, so all three of them dressed up as different museums — the Whitney, the Guggenheim, and the New Museum. What about your little boy?
Cobble Hill Mom No. 1: Oh, he was a, uh ... a pumpkin. He likes pumpkins.
Cobble Hill Mom No. 2: Oh, that sounds ... cute.
Cobble Hill Mom No. 1: Yeah ...
Cobble Hill Mom No. 2: I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.

The Blessings of Sadness

Reuters:

Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.

The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.

"Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world," Forgas wrote.

"Our research suggests that sadness ... promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations."

This sort of study has inspired a little movement of people devoted to "depressive realism," that is, the belief that a realistic view of the world makes one depressed, and optimism is based on delusion.

Revisiting Core Knowledge

A few weeks ago I complained about an essay by E.D. Hirsch on the "American speech community," extolling the virtues of his "core knowledge" approach to education. Since then I have corresponded with a friend whose children attend a "core knowledge" elementary school with a very good reputation, and I have read some other things that tout the successes of Hirsch's approach, especially in Massachusetts. And I accept that an approach like Hirsch's focused on having children learn a certain set of facts, can get results. After all, I used to teach Western Civ.

But this article by Sol Stern perfectly illustrates what I was complaining about, the danger that any "core knowledge" curriculum will degenerate into an ideological operation that indoctrinates children rather than expanding their minds:

After Hirsch has memorialized early American education, you can almost hear his remorse as he surveys what passes for higher thinking today in the education schools and teachers’ organizations. In The Making of Americans, Hirsch again shows how consensus science proves that “a higher-order academic skill such as reading comprehension requires prior knowledge of domain-specific content.” But the ed schools’ closed “thoughtworld” (Hirsch’s term) has insulated itself from science. For that matter, future classroom teachers must search far in ed-school syllabi to find a single reference to any of Hirsch’s work—yet required readings by radical education thinkers such as Paulo Freire, Jonathan Kozol, and ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers are common. From these texts, prospective teachers will learn that the purpose of schooling in America isn’t to create knowledgeable, civic-minded citizens, loyal to the nation’s democratic institutions, as Jefferson dreamed, but rather to undermine those institutions and turn children into champions of “social justice” as defined by today’s America-hating far Left.

The interweaving of sense and outrageous nonsense in this paragraph takes some unraveling, but I think it is worth doing. The central assertion of the "core knowledge" approach is that children can't just learn, they have to learn something. I believe that this is true, and I regularly use this argument with my children when they ask, "why do I have to learn this?" "You don't," I say, "but to train your mind you have to learn something, and this works as well as anything else." The second part of Hirsch's argument is that it is very hard to understand things about which one knows nothing, no matter how well trained one's brain is. We should, therefore, strive to teach children important facts and expose them to important arguments, so that when they encounter them in civic life they will have some basis for understanding them. I believe this is also true. But the example Sol Stern gives is a test involving a paragraph from a book about the Civil War; not surprisingly, students who had some knowledge of the Civil War scored higher on a "reading comprehension" test based on this paragraph than those who did not. Ok, fine, but why is it important for Americans to understand books about the Civil War? Who decides that Civil War history is important knowledge, but not history of the labor movement or of paranormal belief?

Many of the most hotly debated topics in our civic life concern changing patterns of marriage, child-bearing, and sexuality, but I very much doubt that Sol Stern would endorse of curriculum giving high school students a decent knowledge of how much these things have varied across human history. We debate war and peace all the time, but it seems to me that to judge correctly when war might be necessary we should expose students not just to the glories of D-Day and Bunker Hill, but to My Lai and Wounded Knee.

And what about this business of creating citizens loyal to our institutions? I am myself a great fan of our constitution, but I have a suspicion that what Sol Stern has in mind is history as a grand whitewash. Does it make me an America-hating leftist to think that think that it makes no sense to teach about the Civil Rights movement without pointing out how many people opposed it? To teach the Civil War without mentioning that the secessionists were motivated by their desire to preserve slavery? To discuss the Cold War without sparing a few words for the growth of secret government?

I consider myself a patriotic American, but to me that means recognizing my nation's crimes and working to redress them; it means not just believing that my nation is good, but trying to make it better; it means not believing that our way is the best way, but wanting to make our way the best.

Quote for the Day

Twitter reinforces the tendency of adults to behave like high school students, passing rude notes, spreading exaggerated rumors and obsessing endlessly — and pointlessly — about who said what mean thing about whom.

-- Saray Lyall

Ah, the Art Market

In the NY Times, Carol Vogel writes that the fall art auctions are being dominated by "traditional" works, like, apparently, these paintings by Willem de Kooning (above) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (below), and several works by Andy Warhol. Imagine what any of these men would have thought of being labeled "traditional."

When the two weeks of big fall auctions start Tuesday evening, buyers will find traditional paintings, sculptures and drawings intended to appeal to today’s more conservative tastes.

Conservative! Carol Vogel doesn't know what conservative tastes are. I could give her an education in that. People with really conservative tastes don't like Basquiat. We like lovingly rendered portraits and landscapes, or, better yet, artifacts excavated from 2,000-year-old tombs.

Halloween 2009

I could go on again about all the reasons I love Halloween, but I would just be repeating what I said last year. But I wish to point out to all my friends who think I am incapable of change that the pumpkin I designed, the one in the middle, looks different from the super-traditional pumpkin I have carved every year before. So there. (The other pumpkins were designed by Thomas, Ben, and Clara and carved by me.)

Once again this year I took Ben and Clara trick-or-treating. Mary went to a party with a bunch of other girls all dressed up goth, Thomas went trick-or-treating with a horde of boys, five of whom are at this moment sleeping in my basement, and Robert went off with his friends doing things I probably don't want to know about.

Intelligence and Ideology

As everybody knows, liberals are smarter than conservatives. Alas, this is not necessarily a point in favor of liberal politics, because libertarians are smarter than either. Back in the 1920s, the intellectual class was agog over Lenin. Many smart people are drawn to theoretically consistent philosophies that simplify the world, and many people who fancy themselves smart delight in thinking the opposite of what the foolish masses believe.

Bruce Charlton, a professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Buckingham, recently coined the term “clever sillies” to describe people who hold wacky political views seemingly because of—rather than despite—their high intelligence.

Intelligence and wisdom are far from being the same thing.

HIV Travel Ban to End

President Obama, today:

Twenty-two years ago, in a decision rooted in fear rather than fact, the United States instituted a travel ban on entry into the country for people living with HIV/AIDS. Now, we talk about reducing the stigma of this disease -- yet we've treated a visitor living with it as a threat. We lead the world when it comes to helping stem the AIDS pandemic -- yet we are one of only a dozen countries that still bar people from HIV from entering our own country.If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it.

And that's why, on Monday my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban effective just after the New Year. Congress and President Bush began this process last year, and they ought to be commended for it. We are finishing the job. It's a step that will encourage people to get tested and get treatment, it's a step that will keep families together, and it's a step that will save lives.

Vanity Fair

To give you an idea of how much time I spend in my car when I have crews in the field, over the past month I have managed to listen to all 30 hours of Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) on cd. I enjoyed it quite a bit and I am glad that I was never forced to read it as an undergraduate, when I wouldn't have had the time or the background to appreciate it properly.

You know, we like to complain that we live in a very ironic time, and we wonder if our ironic sensibilities keep us from forming powerful attachments or working to make the world better. Let me tell you, no contemporary writer has anything on Thackeray when it comes to irony. The book is full of little asides like, "it was heartwarming to see how often her friends visited her and how well they treated her once she had inherited a fortune." The whole attitude toward society is deeply ironic, whether the subject is social status, the law, the church, the universities, boxing, courting, or even mothers' love for their children. The only things not roundly mocked are private prayer and the bravery of the British army at Waterloo.

"Tenacity" and World War I

I have been looking for an excuse to say this for some time, but now David Brooks has given me one. Brooks says he has been talking to military experts who say that what matters about Afghanistan is not our particular troop level but rather our determination to see the thing through. In particular, they doubt the determination of the Commander-in-Chief:

They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad. . . . They do not know if he possesses tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion. They do not know if he possesses the obstinacy that guided Lincoln and Churchill, and which must guide all war presidents to some degree.

You see this argument a lot these days. We have to persevere. We have to follow through on our commitments. We have to show our allies that they can trust us. We can't cut and run.

Well, maybe, but whenever you hear this kind of argument, you have to remember that arguments like this are the reason World War I was fought. There wasn't any particular issue at stake in the Great War, but all sides felt that they had to stick to their agreements and back up their words with deeds and generally show that they were tough and serious and meant what they said. Millions of dead men later, with Europe in ruins, they had proved their point. They were serious, and they followed through.

But for what? Before we get our backs up about toughness and determination and following through, shouldn't we have something worth fighting for? Some goal worth achieving that we can actually achieve? Because if not, determination is just the route to the Somme and Verdun.

* * *

Update: Amy Davidson's comment on Brooks' essay was, "babbling about imposing one’s will, as if war were a matter of Ray Lewis making a goal line stand, does not tell us anything about what, exactly, we’re doing in Afghanistan."

Gettysburg

When the South seceded, many Southerners thought the North was not in earnest and would not fight. Almost as soon as the North showed it would fight, some Southerners began to slip into the elegaic melancholy of the Lost Cause. Others believed that though the odds were long against them, the Confederates could still win the war if they fought with enough brilliance and daring. The leading spirits of these aggressive optimists were Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Both generals believed that the side with the fewest men must take the longest chances, and that only boldness could keep the Union armies at bay. For two years their methods worked, and they drove back every assault on the Confederate capital of Richmond.

But though the Union could not advance in Virginia, none of Lee's and Jackson's victories seemed to bring the war any closer to the end. Their most brilliant victory, at Chancellorsville in May, 1863, is still taught in military academies but drove the Northerners back only five miles, and the loss of Stonewall Jackson might have mattered more than any battle. Meanwhile the Union was slowly conquering the Confederate west. Searching for some way to win the war, rather than just prolong it, Lee decided on an invasion of the north. A great victory on Union soil, along with the seizure of Philadelphia or Washington, might, he reasoned, have an effect on northern morale that none of his Virginia victories had. So he led his men into Pennsylvania, the Union troops followed, and the two armies blundered into each other at Gettysburg.

For two days, the fighting went well for the Confederates. They drove the Union forces back, breaking their lines several times. But by 1863 there were so many experienced officers and veteran regiments on both sides that there were no easy victories. Every time their position was threatened, Union officers did what was necessary to repair the damage, acting without waiting for orders. Every Confederate thrust was countered, every breakthrough contained. Every act of Confederate gallantry was matched by one from Union men. Both sides suffered frightful casualties, but at the end of two days the Union army remained unbeaten, still in a strong position. And while the Confederate army shrank with every passing hour, steadily arriving reinforcements swelled the Union force. On the night of that second day, Union commander George Meade called a council of war. His top commanders agreed unanimously that they should remain where they were and receive the attack that Lee was certain to launch the next day. Much is made of the way Lee anticipated the moves of his opponents, but after two years of fighting many Union officers knew Lee as well as he knew them. Meade even guessed where the assault would fall, warning John Gibbon that he would be attacked in the morning. Lee, Meade guessed, would use the same design as Marlborough at Blenheim and Napoleon at Marengo; after wearing down his enemy with repeated assaults on their flanks, he would try to break their center with a great charge.

Lee's top subordinate, Longstreet, pleaded with him not to order an attack Longstreet thought was doomed. Lee would not listen. He had not brought his army to Pennsylvania to take it meekly back home. He needed to win a dramatic victory, and he knew he would not win one without taking great risks. So he arrayed the 12,000 men he had available and, after a great artillery bombardment, sent them forward across a mile of open land to the center of the Union line. Seeing them come, Union artillerymen cheered and brought their guns to bear. The Union infantry waiting behind stone walls on Cemetery Ridge loaded their muskets and waited. Some were awestruck by the grand attack, but the more experienced men knew they were being handed a chance to get their revenge for many past defeats. As the Confederates came near, they took aim and fired. Along most of the wall the fire was so intense that the Confederates never got within 50 yards. In one spot called The Angle the men of Picket's Division reached the wall and broke though, and for a few minutes they held their ground at the crest of the ridge, until Union reinforcements arrived and drove them back. A few of them wrote later that they could see masses of stragglers along the road behind the Union front line and knew that with a few more men they could have broken through and won the day. But they were mistaken. The men on the Taneytown Road were not stragglers, but a reserve of 13,000 men and 40 guns that Meade had assembled to seal any break in the line. Meade had so many men that he could defend all his lines and still keep in reserve a force bigger than Lee could muster to attack him. The Confederates retreated to their lines, leaving more than a thousand dead men on the field and another three thousand as prisoners in Union hands.

Gettysburg was not a decisive battle. Lee took his army back to Virginia, Meade followed, and they spent the rest of 1863 in pretty much the same positions they had occupied when the year began. What Gettysburg did was to show, to anyone who still believed otherwise, that Southern brilliance and daring would not be enough to win the war. The Union had found ways of countering Lee and his officers. The war, Gettysburg confirmed, would be won by the weight of men and money. That meant that it was only a matter of time before the Southern armies were crushed, leaving the Confederates to either surrender or head for the hills and fight on as guerrillas.

Oh, yes, I have a little archaeological project at Gettysburg now, which is why I was there today. The top picture shows the view down the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, the second shows Little Round Top from the view of its Confederate attackers, third is the view from the Union line across the field of Picket's Charge, and the last picture shows a red-tailed hawk sitting on a sculpted eagle in the Wheat Field.

There's One in Every Neighborhood

Most of the decorated houses in Georgetown look like this. Unfortunately, there are always a few scapegraces who don't understand the obligations that go with being rich and genteel. What's wrong with these peasants?

The Dancing Plague

I just finished an interesting book, The Dancing Plague by John Waller. (Sourcebooks 2009) It tells the story of an epidemic of uncontrollable, trance-like dancing in Strasbourg in the summer of 1518. In a year of bad harvests, widespread hunger, disease, and a failed peasant uprising in the next district, an ordinary woman of Strasbourg began to dance. Her name was Frau Troffea. Crowds gathered to watch her pitiable dancing, which went on until she collapsed from exhaustion and resumed again as soon as she had rested and had some water. Soon others joined in. The city council was rather enlightened -- Sebastian Brandt, author of The Ship of Fools, was one of their advisers -- and instead of suspecting witchcraft they called in the town's doctors. The doctors diagnosed the dancers with overheated blood in the brain and recommended that they be encouraged to dance until they cured themselves. The town set aside an area for the dancers and even provided musicians. But this only caused the plague to spread faster, until as many as 400 were afflicted. A few died, probably victims of the same kind of exhaustion that occasionally overtakes ecstatic dancers at raves. The city council changed course and began sending the dancers to a shrine of St. Vitus in a mountain grotto 30 miles from Strasbourg. (We don't know how St. Vitus, a late Roman martyr, came to be associated with dancing, but the connection endured for centuries.) Many of the dancers were cured by the pilgrimage, and the plague gradually subsided.

The thing is, that's about everything we know about the outbreak. The story would have made a great article for the New Yorker. Stretched out to 220 pages it is repetitive and full of background stuff that isn’t particularly relevant. So while it is an interesting book, it isn't a great one.

The one really interesting addition to the basic story is the last chapter, which is a survey of contagious, hysterical reactions in the anthropological and medical literature. The Strasbourg dancers were in some kind of trance or fugue state; contemporaries observed that while there were fakers, they were easily detected because they simply could not keep dancing as long or with as much intensity as the victims of the plague. And there have been other cases of such outbreaks, including a well-documented one on Madagascar in the 1860s. I was especially struck by the observation that the symptoms of hysterical or psychosomatic outbreaks have changed over time. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, people used to dance uncontrollably, or at least jerk and foam, or go mute. Now the symptoms almost always imitate medical conditions. A lot of shellshocked soldiers in WW I developed heart murmurs. As the dominant model of severe medical crises shifted from curse or possession to disease, the symptoms of the deranged shifted with it:

Perhaps the most salient development in the modern history of hysteria has been a more general shift away from dramatic motor symptoms during the twentieth century. . . .Mutisms, convulsions, paralyses, altered states, and sensory deficits due to anxiety seem to be less common today than in any time over recorded history. This trend was perceptible even during the First World War, as military hospitals were deluged with men suffering from an almost certainly nervous condition dubbed “Disordered Action of the Heart” that involved chest pains, giddiness, and palpitations. During the Second World War, there were even fewer cases of the flamboyant hysterias of the Victorian era. Today, severe stress is far more likely to be express in a form psychiatrists call “somatoform disorder,” involving psychogenic pain (often headaches and stomach or bowel discomfort), fatigue, dizziness, or a general sense of malaise. Research in rural Indian provides strong evidence for this movement toward the less over somatoform disorder. In two well-studied Indian villages, rates of conversion disorder fell significantly between 1972 and 1987. Far more people now complain of pain and fatigue than motor paralysis or sensory loss. This shift has been attributed to a general increase in the mental health of women due to improved access to schools and, just as importantly, education having reduced “public credulity.”

As normal behavior changes, so does mental illness.

Angry Atheists

Here's an NPR Story titled "A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists." The title strikes me as overblown, but there is tension between your Christopher Hitchens (Religion is "sinister, dangerous and ridiculous. . . . I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right") types, and people who think that kind of rhetoric accomplishes nothing.

I have personally never seen that anything is gained by insulting people. To me the way to advance reason in public life is to live justly and morally while being honest about what I believe. Most people who hate atheism don't do so because they are afraid of secular ideas, they do so because they believe atheism leads inevitably to immorality. Screaming at them won't change their minds. Insults are not arguments, they just make the world a meaner, less friendly place.

Felony Torture

Via Andrew Sullivan, a little news item from California:

The couple, Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee, and three other people are accused of luring their two victims to an office where the men were tied up, held for hours and beaten, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney said. . . .

Each count of felony torture, defined as inflicting "great bodily injury" for the purpose of "revenge, extortion, persuasion and for a sadistic purpose," carries a maximum penalty of life in prison. Defense lawyers were not immediately available for comment.

So a civilian can get life in prison for doing things not one percent as heinous as things our former administration did to people we are now releasing from Guantanamo because there is no evidence for holding them.

Curious Things One Didn't Know

Naked mole rats don't get cancer.

Color Blindness

I am red-green color blind. That is, I fail those tests they give you with the numbers concealed in fields of differently-colored spots. But I have no trouble seeing red and green.

I think a better name for my condition would be "color insensitivity." I can see bold blocks of red and green just fine, and I have no trouble recognizing red lights. I have trouble with murky shades, and I would never employ myself as a color consultant, but generally I get along fine. My one practical issue is that I have trouble telling a green light from a white light at night, so it sometimes happens to me that something I took for a street lamp will suddenly turn yellow.

To me the most interesting thing about my color blindness is that it seems to manifest most often, not as being unable to see colors, but as being unaware of them. Once somebody tells me what the number is on one of those test pages, I can see it, and I mean really see it. If I forget what it is, I can't see it any more. I can scan across a green field and not see any of the bright orange surveying flags hiding there, but if one is pointed out to me it leaps into my consciousness. I remember once walking in a field with a friend who observed, "look how red those willows are." I had been unaware until that moment of anything red, and when I looked up at the line of little willow trees by the edge of the pond, they looked at first green. But then some perceptual shift happened, and I saw how red they were.

All of this makes me think that my condition is a glitch in the perceptual software in my brain, not a problem with my eyes. I wonder if other people see as I do, but isn't that one of the great imponderable questions?

What is Music?

After 75 years or so in which the most respected academic composers have been writing "music" that nobody likes and denouncing their critics as bourgeois pedants, we are still left with the question of what music is and whether there is some legitimate sense in which Beethoven is "better" than Pierre Boulez.

The latest attacks on modern music have come, not from conservative critics, but from neurologists. It seems that it is pretty much impossible to define music, but we all know it when we hear it. The questions is, why do we know it when we hear it? Is it just because we are culturally conditioned to recognize it? Apparently not, because even six-month-old babies respond more to music with a traditional melody than to atonal, arhythmic noise. Neuro-musicologists are now asserting that we respond to music because it matches up to certain strongly innate patterns in our brains. Obviously there is a great deal of flexibility in this mechanism, but the latest thinking is that it does exclude a vast universe of sounds that are not melodic or rhythmic enough to resonate with our brains. Music that doesn't match up with what our brains expect may be exciting to theoretically-minded musical rebels who are mainly looking to like something that pedants like me don't get, but it will never have wide appeal.

Philip Ball has an interesting essay on the topic here. I also like his approach to reviewing a book he dislikes, which is to completely ignore the book and just say what he thinks about the topic.

A Resignation over Afghanistan

Matthew Hoh, a State Department official and former Marine, has resigned from his post in Afghanistan, saying that our presence there is only fueling the insurgency we say we have come to fight. According to Hoh, whose resignation letter you can read here,

The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions, and religion by internal and external enemies. . . . I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul. The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.

From the Washington Post:

"I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love," Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the "second-best job I've ever had," his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve. . . . But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there -- a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. . . .

Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan's eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn't want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.

Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him "how localized the insurgency was. I didn't realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away." Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.

From what I have read, it seems that pressure on Obama to extend the mission is growing, both from in the US military and from some of our allies. I would be very surprised if Obama doesn't go along with these "experts" and send more troops. But it is still the wrong thing to do.

The comment which sheds most light on what is happening in Afghanistan was made by an ordinary Confederate soldier in 1863. Asked by his Yankee captors why he, a poor man with no slaves, was fighting in the war, he said, "I'm fightin' because you're down here."

Glass Microbiology

e. coli, one of a series of microbe sculptures by Luke Jerram. More here. Article on Jerram's work here.

I think these are very striking, but I wonder who would display one in his living room. Perhaps a pharmaceutical company might buy one and put it in the lobby?

The Blind Can See

From Science Daily:

Born with a retinal disease that made him legally blind, and would eventually leave him totally sightless, the nine-year-old boy used to sit in the back of the classroom, relying on the large print on an electronic screen and assisted by teacher aides. Now, after a single injection of genes that produce light-sensitive pigments in the back of his eye, he sits in front with classmates and participates in class without extra help. In the playground, he joins his classmates in playing his first game of softball.

This treatment represents the next step toward medical science's goal of using gene therapy to cure disease. Extending a preliminary study published last year on three young adults, the full study reports successful, sustained results that showed notable improvement in children with congenital blindness.

The study, conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, used gene therapy to safely improve vision in five children and seven adults with Leber's congenital amaurosis (LCA). The greatest improvements occurred in the children, all of whom are now able to navigate a low-light obstacle course -- one result that the researchers call "spectacular."

A Perfect Day

It doesn't get any nicer than this. The fall colors are gorgeous, the sky is blue, the temperature perfect for planting bulbs, which is what I just finished doing.

Animal Pancakes

An old Bedell family tradition.

Ben wasn't impressed with that dragon. He said, "Wow, you're not very good at this any more."

Me: "What do you mean?"

Ben: "You know, sometimes you were good at something in the past, but when you get older you lose it."

Fall

Awesomely Bad Similes

Via Bundle Brent, a collection of bad similes purportedly written by high school students. I doubt these were all really written by high school students, but wherever they came from, they are great fun.

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances, like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E.Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8 The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10 McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Toronto at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Barrie at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighbourhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was a Canadian tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.