Super Hamburger America

A little less returned for him each spring.Music began to fail him. Brahms, althoughHis dark...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 21:23:28 +0200

A little less returned for him each spring.
Music began to fail him. Brahms, although
His dark familiar, often walked apart.

His spirit grew uncertain of delight,
Certain of its uncertainty, in which
That dark companion left him unconsoled

For a self returning mostly memory.
Only last year he said that the naked moon
Was not the moon he used to see, to feel

(In the pale coherences of moon and mood
When he was young), naked and alien,
More leanly shining from a lankier sky.

Its ruddy pallor had grown cadaverous.
He used his reason, exercised his will,
Turning in time to Brahms as alternate

In speech. He was that music and himself.
They were particles of order, a single majesty:
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.

He stood at last by God’s help and the police;
But he remembered the time when he stood alone.
He yielded himself to that single majesty;

But he remembered the time when he stood alone,
When to be and delight to be seemed to be one,
Before the colors deepened and grew small.

—”Anglais Mort a Florence”, Wallace Stevens

via Information is Beautiful

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 20:04:38 +0300

via Information is Beautiful

"We welcome essays and research on all subjects in any discipline, including (but not limited to):..."

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:43:39 +0300

“We welcome essays and research on all subjects in any discipline, including (but not limited to): ethics, history, rhetoric, astronomy, theology, biology, chemistry, botany, cosmology, logic, speleology, phrenology, physics, photography, geometry, psychology, mathematics, geology, apiculture, philology, pedagogy, numismatics, literary criticism, woodworking, ethnochoreology, futurism, eschatology, applied harmonics, forensic astrobiology, robonumerical cyberinformatics, hermetic Qabalah, orienteering, and zigguratics.”

- The Athanasius Kircher Omniscientific Society for Improvement of All Knowledge seeks papers for the fall 2009 volume of their journal, “Annals of All Knowledge”. Do consider a submission.

The Obama effect quantified: data from the Pew Global Attitudes...

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:37:21 +0300

The Obama effect quantified: data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

In 1969, William Safire prepared this address for Richard Nixon...

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 09:52:00 +0300

In 1969, William Safire prepared this address for Richard Nixon in the event of an Apollo 11 disaster.

Enemies of the good

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:14:20 +0300

Enemies of the good:

“In a 2003 study a team led by psychologist Peter J. Bieling of McMaster University in Ontario evaluated 198 students for perfectionism and then asked them what grade they wanted to get on an upcoming midterm. The perfectionists aimed for higher grades than nonperfectionists did, but on average, the two types of students performed the same on the test; the perfectionists were thus more likely to fall short of their ambitions. And rather than adjusting their expectations to reality, perfectionists who did not get the grades they wanted insisted on keeping or even raising the bar for the next exam.”

"Our results show that Old World regions that were suitable for potato cultivation experienced..."

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:17:00 +0300

“

Our results show that Old World regions that were suitable for potato cultivation experienced disproportionately faster population and urbanization growth after the introduction of potatoes.The estimates are extremely robust to a variety of sensitivity checks, including the omission of outliers and influential observations, the omission of Western Europe, the inclusion of the countries north of Mezzo America, and the inclusion of a host of additional control variables.

The magnitudes of our estimates are also interesting. One way to measure the estimated effectsis to ask how much of the average difference in population or urbanization levels (or their growth rates) between the pre-potato adoption period (1000–1700) and the post-adoption period (1700–1900) is explained by the introduction of the potato. Doing this calculation, our baseline estimates suggest that the potato accounts for 12% of the increase in population, 22% of the increase in population growth, 47% of the increase in urbanization, and 50% of the increase in urbanization growth.

”

- Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Potato’s Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence from an Historical Experiment”

Invention of the katzenklavier, or cat-organ, is attributed to...

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:50:00 +0300

J.T. de Bry, Emblemata Saecularia, 1596

Caspar Shott, Magia Naturalis, 1657

French journal "La Nature," 1883

Weckerlin, Musicana, 1887

Invention of the katzenklavier, or cat-organ, is attributed to German Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher. Though many incorrectly believe that he first proposed the device in his 1650 musicology treatise Musurgia universalis, the peculiar piano was described by Kircher’s student Caspar Shott in the 1657 text Magia universalis naturae et artis, sive recondita naturalium et artificialum rerum scientia. The origin and authenticity of the cat-organ were the subject of some debate in volumes 5 and 6 of the hard-to-find journal Experimental Musical Instruments, but according to one modern scholar, Thomas Hankins, Kircher introduced the instrument with the following story:

“In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music?—and so was the prince raised from his melancholy.”

Although another modern paper on the bizarre instrument includes an illustration of a katzenklavier-like device from 1596, several years before Kircher’s birth, a number of animal-based instruments were apparently developed independently by other thinkers in the 16th and 17th centuries, including a donkey chorus and a pig-piano.

Speaking of obsolete scientific theories, Johann Christian Reil, an early scientist of mental illness and creator of the term “psychiatry” suggested a katzenklavier-based treatment for patients distracted by “constant reverie” and unable to focus. In his book, Rhapsodieen uber die Anwendung der psychischen Curmeth- ode auf Geisteszerriittungen (Rhapsodies on the Application of Psychological Methods of Cure to the Mentally Disturbed), Reil proposed that:

“[The cats should] be arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument—when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expressions on their faces and the play of these animals—must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.”

Fortunately for the rest of us, this theory would soon be discredited by modern psychiatric research.

"By his own account, Hörbiger was observing the Moon when he was struck by the notion that the..."

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 08:55:00 +0300

“By his own account, Hörbiger was observing the Moon when he was struck by the notion that the brightness and roughness of its surface was due to ice. Shortly after, he experienced a dream in which he was floating in space watching the swinging of a pendulum which grew longer and longer until it broke. ‘I knew that Newton had been wrong and that the sun’s gravitational pull ceases to exist at three times the distance of Neptune,’ he concluded.”

- Wikipedia’s entry on Welteislehre, the “world-ice theory” of Hans Hörbiger, who proposed that the universe was created by the interaction of ice and aether.

Last evening, researching an imbalance of black bile, I came across Wikipedia’s index of “obsolete scientific theories,” a delightful trove of bizarre and discredited ideas. Glacial cosmology may be the strangest, but there’s something for everyone: rocks from seawater and fire from phlogiston! The tetrahedral and expanding Earth! Luminiferous aether, animal magnetism, and Japhetic theory!

But take care not to get too excited. Abnormal enthusiasm spreads disease.

Organ options

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 06:26:05 +0300

Squashed is concerned about the ethics and equity of a market in human organs:

The human body is not for sale.
Let’s back up. I think capitalism, on a whole, is a good thing. But I have no faith in the mystical power of the market to solve problems that it has, demonstrably, failed to solve. Their are some things I am not willing to sacrifice on the bloody altar of extractive capitalism in order to appease the hungry gods of the market.

Even at its best, capitalism is about creation and distribution of wealth. One of the great things about kidneys is that they’re pretty optimally distributed. Almost everybody has two of them. Nobody wants three of them. There are no speculators on kidney futures. Supply is almost perfectly matched to demand. Once in a while somebody needs a new kidney. Similarly, people die and stop using their kidneys. Thankfully, we can do transplant. We have a system that works pretty smoothly. If we needed to increase our kidney supply, we could tweak a policy, say by making organ donation opt-out rather than opt-in. Or we could pray to capitalism and ask it to do its thing, recreating existing structures in its own image. And suddenly we’ve got a kidney surplus—so we can sleep comfortably at night knowing that we’ve added “kidney failure” to the list of things our money and privilege can prevent us from dying from. (As usual, we ought not inquire too closely into where that warehouse full of frozen kidneys came from.)

Of course, voluntary exchange for human kidneys would not “appease the hungry gods of the market,” who do not exist, but save some or all of the 4,500 Americans who died waiting for a kidney last year—who are unequivocally real.

Kidneys are not optimally distributed. Nor does our system of donation work smoothly. In fact, last year alone millions upon millions of surplus kidneys were wasted while thousands of needy donors died.

Last year, 85,000 people were on the waiting list for a kidney transplant in the United States. For those on the list, a donor kidney is of enormous value: every one of them needs a new organ to survive. Meanwhile, of about 2.4 million Americans who died last year, only 6,662 donated their organs after death. Unless the dead have a personal or religious reason to keep their cadaverous organs intact, their kidneys have no value at all. We ought to ask capitalism to “do its thing”—that is, to reallocate cadaverous kidneys from low-value uses like throwing them in holes in the ground and covering them up with dirt to high-value uses like transplanting them into needy donors.

I understand the ethical objections to a market in organs from live humans, though I don’t agree with them. But for the sake of argument, I’ll accept that live organs are too special to “sacrifice on the bloody altar of extractive capitalism.” Fortunately, a cadaverous organ is no longer a unique and beautiful component of a human life—it is a bit of flesh soon to decay in the body of the deceased.

Squashed suggests “making organ donation opt-out instead of opt-in” as a possible policy option. Under such a system, we might increase the supply of organs, but it’s easy to imagine organs harvested from the uninformed against their will. Under the current system, we have a shortage of organs, but at least every donor has clearly consented to give up their kidneys at death. Voluntary exchange would solve both problems: supply would increase while maintaining express consent from each donor.

In fact, I think Squashed touched on the correct solution to the kidney conundrum. “There are no speculators on kidney futures,” he writes. But there ought to be! Why not allow me to sell an options contract on my kidney, redeemable after my natural death in exchange for some sum of money paid to my heirs? Such a contract would be totally voluntary. Redeemability and payment after natural death would both prevent the poor from grinding themselves “in the gears of capitalism” in pursuit of a quick buck, and prevent foul play in pursuit of fair organs. Most important, kidney options contracts would save tens of thousands of lives each year.

Some will surely object that I am blinded by ideology, dedicated to extending cold capitalist logic to a market in human life. But which belief is really more rigid: an unswerving declaration that “the human body is not for sale,” or the idea that we should adopt any voluntary mechanism that will help more suffering humans in need?

'We, amnesiacs all…'

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:24:39 +0300

Greg Brown’s writing on forgetting reminds me of the amusing, unsettling, and profound Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, which I had a chance to visit earlier this week. To describe it as a wunderkammer isn’t quite accurate: to really understand, listen to this NPR segment on the museum, or read this interview with founder David Wilson.

Among the museum’s many enigmatic exhibits is one dedicated to the work of memory researcher Geoffrey Sonnabend and his three-volume opus, “Obliscence, Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter.” It’s the largest and most elaborate section of the museum, and for good reason: Sonnabend’s theories are a complex and elegant consideration of forgetting.

According to the exhibit, during a period of fruitless research into neural pathways in carp, Sonnabend suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew to Brazil in 1936, where a view of Iguazú Falls and the voice of an amnesiac opera singer inspired him to write an elaborate new model of memory and forgetfulness over one sleepless epiphanic night. Though Sonnabend’s theory was a breakthrough, his eccentric life left his work ignored by most modern scholars.

In his view, memory is an illusion, created to hide the reality that all experience is forgotten. “We, amnesiacs all, condemned to live in an eternally fleeting present,” he writes in “Obliscence,” “have created the most elaborate of human constructions, memory, to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrieveability of its moments and events.”

Instead, Sonnabend holds that “there is only experience and its decay” — that the thing we know as memory is simply a set of decomposing moments of sensory perception, or “our experiencing the decay of an experience.” To illustrate this idea, he models experience and memory as a cone, static along a fixed axis, moving over time through a series of dynamic planes:

As the exhibit’s summary of Sonnabend explains:

In its most basic form Sonnabend’s model of obliscence consists of two elements: the Cone of Obliscence and the Plane of Experience (sometimes also known as plane experience).

All living things have a Cone of Obliscence by which the being experiences experience. This cone is sometimes also known as the Cone of True Memory (and occasionally the Characteristic Cone.) Sonnabend speaks of this cone as if it were an organ like the pancreas or spleen and like those organs its shape and characteristics are unique to the individual and remain relatively consistent over time. This cone (occasionally referred to as a horn) is composed of two elements - the Atmonic Disc (or base of the cone) which Sonnabend described as “the field of immediate consciousness of an individual” and the “hollows” (or interior of the cone). A third implied element of the Characteristic Cone is the Spelean Axis, an imaginary line which passes through the tip of the cone and the center of the Atmonic Disc. The Spelean Axis can be thought of as the individual’s line of sight or perspective, with the eye of the individual firmly held at the intersection of the Spelean Axis and the Atmonic disc.

The second element of the basic Sonnabend dyad — the Plane of Experience— is far more dynamic. Planes of Experience are always in motion, always (in Class I planes) moving from the Obverse Experience Boundary (or leading edge) to the Perverse Experience Boundary (or trailing edge).

As the cone, (human observation) passes through a plane (sensory perception), we percieve the intersection first as involvement in an experience, when the plane is first tangent to the cone, later as memory of that experience, as it passes further and the conic section narrows, and finally as a forgotten experience, once the cone has passed far enough that the plane no longer intersects, to somewhere beyond the single point to which the cone tapers. The thing we call memory is modeled “as a progressively constricting or diminishing disc,” a geometric metaphor for the way that “experiences pass and memories fade.”

It’s an interesting idea — that perhaps forgetting is not just an important counterpart to remembering, as Greg reminds us, but the only component of memory. And it makes some sense — how often do you discover that a childhood memory has decayed over the years as you share stories at the Thanksgiving table or peruse an old photo album? More important, it is a powerful way to think about memory. Though our Cones of Obliscense have varying slopes and heights, Jill Price’s is a cone of infinite height, and Ireneo Funes’s is not a cone at all, but a solid cylinder that extends forever, a visual analog to his endless memory.

Of course, the dedicated researcher may find Sonnabend’s work elusive. “Obliscense” remains out of print, his papers are inaccessible, and the finer details of his extraordinary life and research are sometimes ambiguous and contradictory. A devoted skeptic might write off his work altogether for lack of access to primary sources. But like the rest of us amnesiacs, he would be forgetting something.

mills: “If we remembered everything perfectly, we should never be able to generalize at all; for...

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:43:00 +0300

mills:

“If we remembered everything perfectly, we should never be able to generalize at all; for there would appear before our minds nothing but individual images, precise and different.”

Aldous Huxley in Along the Road, quoted by the always-brilliant Greg Brown, who adds the following (which I’ve quoted in its entirety, bolding a particularly good sentence):

“Jorge Luis Borges expanded this idea in “Funes, His Memory” (also sometimes translated as “Funes, the Memorious”). It’s a quick read; here’s a quote*:

Funes, we must not forget, was virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol “dog” took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the “dog” of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally. His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift wrote that the emperor of Lilliput could perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock; Funes could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw - he noticed - the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world.

It’s a useful reminder that just as memory has its power, so does forgetting.

* The wording’s actually a bit different than in the link since I’m using a different translation from Andrew Hurley, as found in my copy of Borges’ Collected Fictions.”

Jill Price, whose nearly perfect episodic recall is the first case similar to Funes in the annals of modern memory research, described living without forgetting in a fascinating Der Spiegel article last year:

“People say to me: Oh, how fascinating, it must be a treat to have a perfect memory,” she says. Her lips twist into a thin smile. “But it’s also agonizing.”

In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance. It’s more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It’s like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button.”

She’s constantly bombarded with fragments of memories, exposed to an automatic and uncontrollable process that behaves like an infinite loop in a computer. Sometimes there are external triggers, like a certain smell, song or word. But often her memories return by themselves. Beautiful, horrific, important or banal scenes rush across her wildly chaotic “internal monitor,” sometimes displacing the present. “All of this is incredibly exhausting,” says Price.

The striking thing about Price is the difference between her case and the imagined experiences of Borges and Huxley. Even new, precise, and unique moments call up a parade of past images in Price’s mind, somehow associating a thing from the past with a sensory input from the present. It seems more of a burden than Funes’s gift: where he might have accepted the newness of everything (making memories of many things memory of no thing), newness for Price brings memories of many things associated with memories of many more.

Either way, Greg’s reminder is a wise one.

Boreas - “Muddy Lullaby” Resolved: Crash cymbals and...

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:08:00 +0300

Boreas - “Muddy Lullaby”

Resolved: Crash cymbals and slide trombones make everything better. The spectral wails and boozy brass make this my favorite track, but do check out the rest of their album.

"Nearly 60% of Americans now say that they approve of the way the Supreme Court is doing its job...."

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:00:29 +0300

“Nearly 60% of Americans now say that they approve of the way the Supreme Court is doing its job. Before Mr Obama’s election, Republicans approved and Democrats did not. In June, even though the make-up of the court had not altered, it was the other way round. That’s the Obama effect for you.”

- The Economist, “A Year at the Supreme Court”

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National...

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:22:22 +0300

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

—Frederick Douglass, 5 July 1852

"The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme,..."

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:17:34 +0300

“The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.”

- Malcolm Gladwell, “Priced to Sell”

Q: How worrisome is 'Cyber-warfare?'

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:07:50 +0300

Q: How worrisome is 'Cyber-warfare?':

A: “Almost as scary as raptors in Central Park or a giant asteroid heading toward the White House. The latter two are not, however, being presented as ‘national security risks’ yet.”

"By neglecting — and in some cases even opposing — essential modernization programs,..."

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:41:05 +0300

“By neglecting — and in some cases even opposing — essential modernization programs, arms-control proponents are actually undermining the prospect for further reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As our nuclear weapons stockpile ages and concern about its reliability increases, we will have to compensate by retaining more nuclear weapons than would otherwise be the case. This reality will necessarily influence future arms-control negotiations, beginning with the upcoming Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty follow-on.”

- Jon Kyl and Richard Perle, “Our Decaying Nuclear Deterrent”

"We estimate that, when the president cannot seek reelection or the economy is not in a recession,..."

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:45:37 +0300

“We estimate that, when the president cannot seek reelection or the economy is not in a recession, the probability of war initiation in a year is about 30 percent. By contrast, the probability significantly increases to over 60 percent when both the economy is doing poorly and the president is up for reelection. These results appear to be robust to the choice of other indicators of economic performance, such as GDP growth and changes in the unemployment rate. We also find that historical evidence back to 1897 is also consistent with the theory.”

- Gregory Hess and Athanasios Orphanides, “War Politics: An Economic, Rational-Voter Framework”.

"As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a..."

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:34:39 +0300

“As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. […] To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”

- David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”