EXCERPT: A group of songbirds may have avoided a devastating storm by fleeing their US breeding grounds after detecting telltale infrasound waves.
[...] “We looked at barometric pressure, wind speeds on the ground and at low elevations, and the precipitation, but none of these things that typically trigger birds to move had changed,” said David Andersen at the University of Minnesota.
“What we’re left with is something that allows them to detect a storm from a long distance, and the one thing that seems to be the most obvious is infrasound from tornadoes, which travels through the ground.”...
EXCERPT: Modern art was born from a desire to destroy kitsch, but time and again it is drawn back to its lure... In the early years of the 20th Century, the arts entered a period of revolution. Enough of the escapism, the modernists said. Art must show modern life as it is. Only in that way can it offer real consolation.
Ornament is crime, declared the architect Adolf Loos, and all those baroque facades that line the streets of Vienna, encrusted with meaningless knobs and curlicues, are so many denials of the world in which we live. They tell us that beauty belongs in a vanished past. In the face of this message, Loos set out to discover a purer beauty - beauty that belongs to modern life and also endorses it.
[...] In the attacks on the old ways of doing things one word in particular came into currency. That word was "kitsch". Once introduced, the word stuck. Whatever you do, it mustn't be kitsch. This became the first precept of the modernist artist in every medium.
In a famous essay published in 1939, the American critic Clement Greenberg told his readers that there are only two possibilities available to the artist now. Either you belong to the avant-garde, challenging the old ways of figurative painting, or you produce kitsch. And the fear of kitsch is one reason for the compulsory offensiveness of so much art produced today. It doesn't matter that your work is obscene, shocking, disturbing - as long as it isn't kitsch.
[...] However, to avoid kitsch is not so easy as it looks. You could try being outrageously avant-garde, doing something that no one would have thought of doing and calling it art - perhaps trampling on some cherished ideal or religious feeling. But as I argued last week, this way also leads to fakes - fake originality, fake significance, and a new kind of cliche, as in so much Young British Art. You can pose as a modernist, but that won't necessarily lead you to achieve what Eliot, Schoenberg or Matisse achieved, which is to touch the modern heart in its deepest regions. Modernism is difficult. It requires competence in an artistic tradition, and the art of departing from tradition in order to say something new.
This is one reason for the emergence of a wholly new artistic enterprise, which I call "pre-emptive kitsch". Modernist severity is both difficult and unpopular, so artists began not to shun kitsch but to embrace it, in the manner of Andy Warhol, Allen Jones and Jeff Koons. The worst thing is to be unwittingly guilty of producing kitsch. Far better to produce kitsch deliberately, for then it is not kitsch at all but a kind of sophisticated parody. Pre-emptive kitsch sets quotation marks around actual kitsch, and hopes thereby to save its artistic credentials.
Take a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson cuddling his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, add cheesy colours and a layer of varnish. Set the figures up in the posture of a Madonna and child, endow them with soppy expressions as though challenging the spectator to vomit, and the result is such kitsch that it cannot possibly be kitsch. Jeff Koons must mean something else, we think, something deep and serious that we have missed. Perhaps this work of art is really a comment on kitsch, so that by being explicitly kitsch it becomes meta-kitsch, so to speak....
EXCERPT: One Monday in June 2009, at the start of the evening rush hour in Washington, D.C., a computer killed nine people. At least that’s one possible interpretation of the crash that occurred at a suburban Metrorail station. The train was in ATO, or “automatic train operation” mode, which means a computer was in control. Investigators later determined that the complicated automatic sensor mechanisms embedded in the trains and tracks had failed, causing one train traveling at almost 50 miles per hour to crash into the back of another stopped at the station. The human operator of the train, realizing too late what was happening, tried in the last few seconds to pull the emergency brake. She died along with eight others that day. It was the worst transportation disaster in the history of the D.C. Metro system.
No one would claim a computer intentionally killed, of course, but the day’s events were the unforeseen, tragic consequence of something that increasingly governs many aspects of our daily lives: computer automation.
In The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, Nicholas Carr, the author of several books about technology, explores our increasing reliance on automation. “The computer is becoming our all-purpose tool for navigating, manipulating, and understanding the world, in both its physical and its social manifestations,” Carr writes. Now, often unwittingly, we allow computers to automate aspects of our lives that never used to be subject to the control of software or hardware. Carr’s astute survey of automation shows just how quickly and uncritically we have outsourced the daily experience of being human to algorithms and machines, and how crucial it is to stop and reflect on what we are doing to ourselves....
EXCERPT: [...] When a prominent libertarian writer extols a half-century-old work that is contemptuous of the reform of modern American capitalism, written by a leftist scholar who spent most of his career teaching in Canada, attention must be paid. [...] The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney—a relentless libertarian who has never seen a government program he did not view as a squalid arrangement between statist liberals and corporate welfare seekers—paid tribute to Gabriel Kolko, a historian identified with the New Left of the 1960s [...]
Carney wrote that Americans typically believe a classic “fable” that courageous “trust busters” like Teddy Roosevelt used “the big stick of federal power to battle the greedy corporations.” Kolko’s work, especially his most significant book, The Triumph of Conservatism (1963), though little known today to anybody but specialists in early twentieth-century history, “dismantled this myth.” Carney quoted Kolko’s core argument: “The dominant fact of American political life” in the Progressive Era “was that big business led the struggle for the federal regulation of the economy.” And to both Carney and Kolko, this is pretty much everything you need to know.
It’s hard to call a historian “forgotten” in a country in which the phrase “that’s ancient history!” is about the most withering description of irrelevance imaginable. But Kolko is, at least, semi-forgotten [...] writing several highly critical works about U.S. foreign policy before living his final years in Amsterdam.
When it was published, The Triumph of Conservatism completely undermined the dominant narratives about the Progressive Era: that a countervailing federal government, determined to limit the power of big business, had done just that; or that middle-class professionals and technocrats had engineered a rational mixture of markets and regulatory monitoring to moderate both business concentration on the right and labor and agrarian agitation on the left....
EXCERPT: In 1897 the American Civil War correspondent and editor Francis Pharcellus Church wrote an editorial for the New York newspaper The Sun in defense of religious belief. The piece responded to a question by 8-year-old Virginia O. Hanlon and included what has become the famous catch phrase, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
Church’s argument is double-barreled. First he argues we have no way of knowing if Santa is really there. Even if we observed every chimney in the world, we wouldn’t know that Santa couldn’t slip through in some as yet undetected and untheorized manner. After all, we know today that both Church and Virginia had neutrinos passing through their bodies although neutrinos were far beyond the most advanced physics of their day. Maybe Santa’s like that. Further, just as the human stomach — unlike the termite’s — can’t digest wood, so there are some things our brains just aren’t capable of knowing. Maybe Santa is one of them.
But why does Church argue for making the leap to Santa belief, rather than standing pat with Santa agnosticism? Here Church brings in his second, pragmatic point. We should believe in Santa Claus because it will make our lives better if we do. Echoing Nietzsche’s defense of art, Church argues that we need poetry, romance and childlike faith to make life tolerable. Life without Santa is dreary and unromantic, and life with Santa is fun and magical. So we might as well believe in him. We also, according to Church, should believe in fairies dancing on the lawn, and an unseen world full of “supernal beauty and glory.”
As a war reporter, Church saw mass slaughter carried out in the name of unseen ideals. He needed to believe in fairies, but we may balk at his Victorian tone with its creepy veneration of childhood and high-toned glurge. So it’s worth restating his point about the benefits of a belief in Santa in more modern, prosaic terms....
EXCERPT: What if the outcome of a coin toss depended on what you had for breakfast? As bizarre as it sounds a similar effect could hold sway in the quantum world. Dagomir Kaszlikowski and Pawel Kurzynski, both physicists at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) in Singapore, believe that this esoteric phenomenon, known as quantum contextuality, hasn’t had its fair share of time in the sun. If they have their way, and their theoretical explorations into this particular slice of quantum weirdness prove fruitful, they dream of opening doors to applications as bizarre as teleportation and time travel...
Look. I'm all for the proper diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. But according to recent stats, about half of all Americans has had or will have a mental disorder at some time in their life. At present according to the DMV-5 there are 297 mental disorders. I wonder about that. I wonder about the influence of Big Pharma on the definition of new disorders. I wonder about the extent to which what is "medicatable" comes to decide what shall be considered a disorder. And I wonder about the mentality of passive victimization that underlies a basically materialistic etiology of human behavior. In a world increasingly driving us towards bodily alienation and mental abstraction, in which the maddening obsession to be hyper informed seems to underlie all we do, is it any wonder that the 4 million year old human psyche is rapidly mutating into so many types and subtypes. Is the problem in US, or in the society we live in?
"Before Charlotte the spider spelled the word "humble" in her web to describe Wilbur the pig, she told Templeton the rat that the word meant "not proud."
That's probably what most people say if you put them on the spot. But if you give them time to think about it deeply, like a new study just did, other themes emerge that have a lot to do with learning.
And these intellectual dimensions of humility describe the spider as well or better than the pig.
"Wilbur has many of the dimensions of humility in general: regard for others, not thinking too highly of himself -- but highly enough," said Peter Samuelson, the lead study author. "Charlotte shows some of the unique aspects of intellectual humility: curiosity, love of learning, willingness to learn from others."
Samuelson is a psychologist at Fuller Theological Seminary who embarked on a new voyage for academia: a bottom-up exploration of what it really means to be humble. Samuelson teamed up with Brigham Young University psychologist Sam Hardy.
For his part, Hardy utilized a statistical technique called multi-dimensional scaling that made sense of open-ended responses from the 350 study participants recruited from Amazon's "Mechanical Turk."
"This is more of a bottom-up approach, what do real people think about humility, what are the lay conceptions out there in the real world and not just what comes from the ivory tower," Hardy said. "We're just using statistics to present it and give people a picture of that."
Hardy's analysis found two clusters of traits that people use to explain humility. Traits in the first cluster come from the social realm: Sincere, honest, unselfish, thoughtful, mature, etc. The second and more unique cluster surrounds the concept of learning: curious, bright, logical and aware.
Samuelson says the two clusters of humble traits -- the social and intellectual -- often come as a package deal for people who are "intellectually humble." Because they love learning, they spend time learning from other people.
"In many ways, this is the defining feature of intellectual humility and what makes it distinct from general humility," said Samuelson, who formerly served as a Lutheran pastor prior to his academic career.
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