Food for thought
La cocaina e' ottima per uno come me che non ritiene di essere cosi' attraente e che in gioventu' non e' mai stato giovane e ora che ha ormai trent'anni non riesce a diventare maturo.
Ora era giunto il momento di accorgersi che l'Altro non esisteva e anche il diario e' un intrattenimento solitario. Pero' a quella monodia si era assuefatto, e decideva di continuare cosi'.
non e' che si amasse particolarmente, ma il fastidio che sentiva per gli altri lo induceva persino a sopportarsi.
Da "Il cimitero di Praga" di Umberto Eco
Piccola fata stellina
fuori la pioggia imperversa
sei sola? sei persa?
qui nella mia cameretta
un bel calduccio ti invita,
vieni a scaldarti le alucce,
piccola fata smarrita.
- Mamma
Stages b
y Herman Hesse
As every flower fades and as all youth
Departs, so life at every stage,
So every virtue, so our grasp of truth,
Blooms in its day and may not last forever.
Since life may summon us at every age
Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor,
Be ready bravely and without remorse
To find new light that old ties cannot give.
In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.
"Monkeys are people too"
The branch of economics concerned with issues like inflation, recessions, and financial shocks is known as macroeconomics. When the economy is going well, macroeconomists are lauded as heroes; when it turns sour, as it did recently, they catch a lot of the blame. In either case, the headlines go to the macroeconomists. We hope that after reading this book, you'll realize there is a whole different breed of economist out there—microeconomists—lurking in the shadows. They seek to understand the choices that individuals make, not just in terms of what they buy but also how often they wash their hands and whether they become terrorists. Some of these microeconomists do not even limit their research to the human race. Keith Chen, the son of Chinese immigrants, is a hyper-verbal, sharp-dressing thirty-three-year-old with spiky hair. After an itinerant upbringing in the rural Midwest, Chen attended Stanford, where, after a brief infatuation with Marxism, he made an about-face and took up economics. Now he is an associate professor of economics at Yale.
His research agenda was inspired by something written long ago by Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics: "Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that."
In other words, Smith was certain that humankind alone had a knack for monetary exchange. But was he right? In economics, as in life, you'll never find the answer to a question unless you're willing to ask it, as silly as it may seem. Chen's question was simply this: What would happen if I could teach a bunch of monkeys to use money? Chen's monkey of choice was the capuchin, a cute, brown New World monkey about the size of a one-year-old child, or at least a scrawny one-year-old who has a very long tail. "The capuchin has a small brain," Chen says, "and it's pretty much focused on food and sex." (This, we would argue, doesn't make the capuchin so different from many people we know, but that's another story.) "You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want. You can feed them marshmal-lows all day, they'll throw up, and then come back for more." To an economist, this makes the capuchin an excellent research subject. Chen, along with Venkat Lakshminarayanan, went to work with seven capuchins at a lab set up by the psychologist Laurie Santos at Yale-New Haven Hospital. In the tradition of monkey labs everywhere, the capuchins were given names—in this case, derived from characters in James Bond films. There were four females and three males. The alpha male was named Felix, after the CIA agent Felix Leiter. He was Chen's favorite.
The monkeys lived together in a large, open cage. Down at one end was a much smaller cage, the testing chamber, where one monkey at a time could enter to take part in experiments. For currency, Chen settled on a one-inch silver disc with a hole in the middle—"kind of like Chinese money," he says.
The first step was to teach the monkeys that the coins had value. This took some effort. If you give a capuchin a coin, he will sniff it and, after determining he can't eat it (or have sex with it), he'll toss it aside. If you repeat this several times, he may start tossing the coins at you, and hard.
So Chen and his colleagues gave the monkey a coin and then showed a treat. Whenever the monkey gave the coin back to the researcher, it got the treat. It took many months, but the monkeys even¬tually learned that the coins could buy the treats.
It turned out that individual monkeys had strong preferences for different treats. A capuchin would be presented with twelve coins on a tray—his budget constraint—and then be offered, say, Jell-O cubes by one researcher and apple slices by another. The monkey would hand his coins to whichever researcher held the food he preferred, and the researcher would fork over the goodies.
Chen now introduced price shocks and income shocks to the monkeys' economy. Let's say Felix's favorite food was Jell-O, and he was accustomed to getting three cubes of it for one coin. How would he respond if one coin suddenly bought just two cubes?
To Chen's surprise, Felix and the others responded rationally. When the price of a given food rose, the monkeys bought less of it, and when the price fell, they bought more. The most basic law of economics—that the demand curve slopes downward—held for monkeys as well as humans.
Now that he had witnessed their rational behavior, Chen wanted to test the capuchins for irrational behavior. He set up two gambling games. In the first, a capuchin was shown one grape and, dependent on a coin flip, either got only that grape or won a bonus grape as well. In the second game, the capuchin started out seeing two grapes, but if the coin flip went against him, the researchers took away one grape and the monkey got only one.
In both cases, the monkey got the same number of grapes on average. But the first gamble was framed as a potential gain while the second was framed as a potential loss.
How did the capuchins react?
Given that the monkeys aren't very smart in the first place, you might assume that any gambling strategy was well beyond their capabilities. In that case, you'd expect them to prefer it when a researcher initially offered them two grapes instead of one. But precisely the opposite happened! Once the monkeys figured out that the two-grape researcher sometimes withheld the second grape and that the one-grape researcher sometimes added a bonus grape, the monkeys strongly preferred the one-grape researcher. A rational monkey wouldn't have cared, but these irrational monkeys suffered from what psychologists call "loss aversion." They behaved as if the pain from losing a grape was greater than the pleasure from gaining one.
Up to now, the monkeys appeared to be as rational as humans in their use of money. But surely this last experiment showed the vast gulf that lay between monkey and man.
Or did it?
The fact is that similar experiments with human beings—day traders, for instance—had found that people make the same kind of irrational decisions at a nearly identical rate. The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, "make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors."
So the parallels between human beings and these tiny-brained, food-and-sex monkeys remained intact. And then, as if Chen needed any further evidence of these parallels, the strangest thing happened in the lab.
Felix scurried into the testing chamber, just as he'd done countless times before, but on this day, for reasons Chen could never understand, Felix did not gather up the twelve coins on the tray and use them to buy food. Instead, he flung the entire tray's worth of coins back into the communal cage and, fleeing the testing chamber, dashed in after them—a bank heist followed by a jailbreak.
There was chaos in the big cage, with twelve coins on the floor and seven monkeys going after them. When Chen and the other researchers went inside to get the coins, the monkeys wouldn't give them up. After all, they had learned that the coins had value. So the humans resorted to bribing the capuchins with treats. This taught the monkeys another valuable lesson: crime pays.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Chen saw something remarkable. One monkey, rather than handing his coin over to the humans for a grape or a slice of apple, instead approached a second monkey and gave it to her. Chen had done earlier research in which monkeys were found to be altruistic. Had he just witnessed an unprompted act of monkey altruism?
After a few seconds of grooming—bam!—the two capuchins were having sex.
What Chen had seen wasn't altruism at all, but rather the first in-stance of monkey prostitution in the recorded history of science.
And then, just to prove how thoroughly the monkeys had assimilated the concept of money, as soon as the sex was over—it lasted about eight seconds; they're monkeys, after all—the capuchin who'd received the coin promptly brought it over to Chen to purchase some grapes.
This episode sent Chen's mind spinning. Until now, the researchers had run narrowly denned money experiments with one monkey at a time. What if Chen could introduce money directly into the monkeys' lives? The research possibilities were endless.
Alas, Chen's dream of capuchin capitalism never came to pass. The authorities who oversaw the monkey lab feared that introducing money to the capuchins would irreparably damage their social structure.
They were probably right.
If the capuchins were so quick to turn to prostitution as soon as they got hold of some money, just imagine how quickly the world would be overrun with monkey murderers and monkey terrorists, with monkey polluters who contribute to global warming and monkey doctors who fail to wash their hands. Future generations of monkeys, of course, would come along and solve these problems. But there would always be something to fix—like the monkeys' pigheaded insistence that all their children ride in car seats ...
The Paradox of choice: why more is less - Prof. Barry Schwartz
Chapter I: Let's go shopping
These days a typical college catalog has more in common with the one from J. Crew than you might think. Most liberal arts colleges and universities now embody a view that celebrates freedom of choice above all else, and the modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall.
A century ago, a college curriculum entailed a largely fixed course of study, with a principal goal of educating people in their ethical and civic traditions. Education was not just about learning a discipline—it was a way of raising citizens with common values find aspirations. Often the capstone of a college education was a course taught by the college president, a course that integrated the various fields of knowledge to which the students had been exposed. Hut more important, this course was intended to teach students how to use their college education to live a good and an ethical life, both as individuals and as members of society.
This is no longer the case. Now there is no fixed curriculum, and no single course is required of all students. There is no attempt to teach people how they should live, for who is to say what a good life is? When I went to college, thirty-five years ago, there were almost two years' worth of general education requirements that all students had to complete. We had some choices among courses that met those requirements, but they were rather narrow. Almost every department had a single, freshman-level introductory course that prepared the student for more advanced work in the department. You could be fairly certain, if you ran into a fellow student you didn't know, that the two of you would have at least a year's worth of courses in common to discuss.
Today, the modern institution of higher learning offers a wide array of different "goods" and allows, even encourages, students— the "customers"—to shop around until they find what they like. Individual customers are free to "purchase" whatever bundles of knowledge they want, and the university provides whatever its customers demand. In some rather prestigious institutions, this shopping-mall view has been carried to an extreme. In the first few weeks of classes, students sample the merchandise. They go to a class, stay ten minutes to see what the professor is like, then walk out, often in the middle of the professor's sentence, to try another class.
Chapter II: deciding and choosing
Aversion to losses also leads people to be sensitive to what arc-called "sunk costs." Imagine having a $50 ticket to a basketball game being played an hour's drive away. Just before the game there's a big snowstorm—do you still want to go? Economists would tell us that the way to assess a situation like this is to think about the future,
not the past. The $ 50 is already spent; it's "sunk" and can't be recovered. What matters is whether you'll feel better safe and warm at home, watching the game on TV, or slogging through the snow on treacherous roads to see the game in person. That's all that should matter. But it isn't all that matters. To stay home is to incur a loss of $ 50, and people hate losses, so they drag themselves out to the game. Economist Richard Thaler provides another example of sunk costs that I suspect many people can identify with. You buy a pair of shoes that turn out to be really uncomfortable. What will you do about them? Thaler suggests:
The more expensive they were, the more often you'll try to wear them. Eventually, you'll stop wearing them, but you won't get rid of them. And the more you paid for them, the longer they'll sit in the back of your closet. At some point, after the shoes have been fully "depreciated" psychologically, you will finally throw them away.
Maximizers:
maximizing is not a measure of efficiency. It is a state of mind. If your goal is to get the best, then you will not be comfortable with compromises dictated by the constraints imposed by reality. You will not experience the kind of satisfaction with your choices that satisficers will. In every area of life, you will always be open to the possibility that you might find something better if you just keep looking.
Chapter III: Choice and happiness
Learned helplessness:
But beyond our political, moral, and social reliance on the idea of autonomy, we now know that it also has a profound influence on our psychological well-being, fn the 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman and his collaborators performed an experiment that involved teaching three different groups of animals to jump over a little hurdle from one side of a box to the other to escape or avoid an electric shock. One of the groups was given the task with no prior exposure to such experiments. A second group had already learned to make a different response, in a different setting, to escape from shock. Seligman and his coworkers expected, and found, that this second group would learn a bit more quickly than the first, reasoning that some of what they had learned in the first experiment might transfer to the second. The third group of animals, also in a different setting, had been given a series of shocks that could not be escaped by any response.
Remarkably, this third group failed to learn at all. Indeed, many of them essentially had no chance to learn because they didn't even try to escape from the shocks. These animals became quite passive, lying down and taking the shocks until the researchers mercifully ended the experiment.
Seligman and his colleagues suggested that the animals in this third group had learned from being exposed to inescapable shocks that nothing they did made a difference; that they were essentially helpless when it came to controlling their fate. Like the second group, they had also transferred to the hurdle-jumping situation lessons they had learned before—in this case, learned helplessness.
Seligman's discovery of learned helplessness has had a monumental impact in many different areas of psychology. Hundreds of studies leave no doubt that we can learn that we don't have control.
And when we do learn this, the consequences can be dire. Learned helplessness can affect future motivation to try. It can affect future ability to detect that you do have control in new situations. It can suppress the activity of the body's immune system, thereby making helpless organisms vulnerable to a wide variety of diseases. And it can, under the right circumstances, lead to profound, clinical depression.
...
more choice may not always mean more control. Perhaps there comes a point at which opportunities become so numerous that we feel overwhelmed. Instead of feeling in control, we feel unable to cope. Having the opportunity to choose is no blessing if we feel we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely.
... To avoid the escalation of such burdens, we must learn to be selective in exercising our choices. We must decide, individually, when choice really matters and focus our energies there, even if it means letting many other opportunities pass us by. The choice of when to be a chooser may be the most important choice we have to make.
....
And as (Robert) Lane points out, the rate of serious clinical depression has more than tripled over the last two 'generations, and increased by perhaps a factor of ten from 1900 to 2000. All of which contributes to, and is exacerbated by, a massive increase in levels of stress, stress that in turn contributes to hyper-tension and heart disease, lowers immune responsiveness, and causes anxiety and dissatisfaction. But, as Lane put it very simply, in addition to the other factors contributing to our modern malaise:
"There are too many little choices . . . without concern for the resulting overload . . . and the lack of constraint by custom . . . that is, demands to discover or create an identity rather than to accept a given identity."
The rise in the frequency of depression is especially telling.
...
(Robert) Lane writes that we are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations. We earn more and spend more, but we spend less time with others. More than a quarter of Americans report being lonely, and loneliness seems to come not from being alone, but from lack of intimacy. We spend less time visiting with neighbors. We spend less time visiting with our parents, and much less time visiting with other relatives. And once again, this phenomenon adds to our burden of choice. As Lane writes: "What was once given by neighborhood and work now must be achieved; people have had to make their own friends . . . and actively cultivate their , own family connections." In other words, our social fabric is no I longer a birthright but has become a series of deliberate and demanding choices.
...
So by using rules, presumptions, standards, and routines to constrain ourselves and limit the decisions we face, we can make lilt-more manageable, which gives us more time to devote ourselves to other people and to the decisions that we can't or don't want to avoid.
Chapter IV: Missed opportunities
Opportunity costs:
E conomists point out that the quality of any given option cannot be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the "costs" of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. This is referred to as an opportunity cost. An opportunity cost of vacationing on the beach in Cape Cod is great restaurants in California. An opportunity cost of taking a job near your romantic partner is that you won't be near your family. Every choice we make has opportunity costs associated with it.
....
According to standard economic assumptions, the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative. So let's say your options for next, Saturday night, listed in order of preference, include:
1. Dinner in a nice restaurant
2. A quick dinner and a movie
3. Music at a jazz club
4. Dancing
5. Cooking dinner for a few friends
6. Going to a baseball game
If you go for the dinner, the "cost" will be whatever you pay for the meal, plus the passed up opportunity to see a movie. According to economists, that's where your "cost accounting" should stop. Which is also excellent advice for managing our own psychological response to choice. Pay attention to what you're giving up in the next-best alternative, but don't waste energy feeling bad about having passed up an option further down the list that you wouldn't ' have gotten to anyway.
The psychology of trade-offs and avoiding decisions:
...
So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.
Night and day - Virginia Woolf
Denham had accused Katharine Hilbery of belonging to one of the most distinguished families in England, and if any one will take the trouble to consult Mr Gallon's 'Hereditary Genius',1 he will find that this assertion is not far from the truth. The Alardyces, the Hilberys, the Millingtons, and the Otways seem to prove that intellect is a possession which can be tossed from one member of a certain group to another almost indefinitely, and with apparent certainty that the brilliant gift will be safely caught and held by nine out of ten of the privileged race. They had been conspicuous judges and admirals, lawyers and servants of the State for some years before the richness of the soil culminated in the rarest flower that any family can boast, a great writer, a poet eminent among the poets of England, a Richard Alardyce; and having produced him, they proved once more the amazing virtues of their race by proceeding unconcernedly again with their usual task of breeding dis tinguished men. They had sailed with Sir John Franklin to the North Pole, and ridden with Havelock to the Relief of Lucknow, and when they were not lighthouses firmly based on rock for the guidance of their generation, they were steady, serviceable candles, illuminating the ordinary chambers of daily life. Whatever profession you looked at, there was a Warburton or an Alardyce, a Millington or a Hilbery somewhere in authority and prominence.
It may be said, indeed, that English society being what it is, no very great merit is required, once you bear a well-known name, to put you into a position where it is easier on the whole to be eminent than obscure. And if this is true of the sons, even the daughters, even in the nineteenth century, are apt to become people of import ance - philanthropists and educationalists if they are spinsters, and the wives of distinguished men if they marry. It is true that there were several lamentable exceptions to this rule in the Alardyce group, which seems to indicate that the cadets of such houses go more rapidly to the bad than the children of ordinary fathers and mothers, as if it were somehow a relief to them. [page 26]
Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition, although the labour of mill and factory is, perhaps, no more severe and the results of less benefit to the world. She lived at home. She did it very well, too. Any one coming to the house in Cheyne Walk4 felt that here was an orderly place, shapely, controlled - a place where life had been trained to show to the best advantage, and, though composed of different elements, made to appear harmonious and with a character of its own. Perhaps it was the chief: triumph of Katharine's art that Mrs Hilbery's character predominated. She and Mr Hilbery appeared to be a rich background for her mother's more striking qualities.
Silence being, thus, both natural to her and imposed upon her, the only other remark that her mother's friends were in the habit of making about it was that it was neither a stupid silence nor an indifferent silence, But to what quality it owed its character, since character of some sort it had, no one troubled themselves to inquire. [page 33]
What a distance he was from I all! How superficially he smoothed these events into a semblance of decency which harmonized with his own view of life! He never wondered what Cyril had felt, nor did the hidden aspects of the case tempt him to examine into them. He merely seemed to realize, rather languidly, that Cyril had behaved in a wave which was foolish, because other people did not behave in that way. He seemed to be looking through a telescope at little figures hundreds of miles in the distance. [page 89]
Rooms, of course, accumulate their suggestions, and any room in which one has been used to carry on any particular occupation gives off memories of moods, of ideas, of postures that have been seen in it; [page 92]
the old conclusion to which Ralph had come when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance. [page 104]
The village of Disham1 lies somewhere on the rolling piece of cultivated ground in the neighbourhood of Lincoln, not so far inland but that a sound, bringing rumours of the sea, can be heard on summer nights or when the winter storms fling the waves upon the long beach. So large is the church, and in particular the church tower, in comparison with the little street of cottages which compose the village, that the traveller is apt to cast his mind back to the Middle Ages, as the only time when so much piety could have been kept alive. [page 148]
Like most people who do things meth odically, the Rector himself had more strength of purpose and power of self-sacrifice than of intellect or of originality. [page 149]
Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day. [154]
This stage was soon succeeded by another, in which there was nothing in the universe save stars and the light of stars; as she looked up the pupils of her eyes so dilated with starlight that the whole of her seemed dissolved in silver and spilt over the ledges of the stars for ever and ever indefinitely through space. [page 164]
Lady Otway was one of the people for whom the great make-believe game of English social life has been invented; she spent most of her time in pretending to herself and her neighbours that she was a dignified, important, much-occupied person, of consider able social standing and sufficient wealth. In view of the actual state of things this game needed a great deal of skill; and, perhaps, at the age she had reached - she was over sixty -she played far more to deceive herself than to deceive any one else. [page 174]
but he could gain little information from her eyes, which looked steadily at the brown heather, or from the lines drawn seriously upon her forehead. Thus to lose touch with her, for he had no idea what she was thinking, was so unpleasant to him that he began to talk about his grievances again, without, however, much conviction in his voice.
'If you have no feeling for me, wouldn't it be kinder to say so to me in private?'
'Oh, William,' she burst out, as if he had interrupted some absorb ing train of thought, 'how you go on about feelings! Isn't it better not to talk so much, not to be worrying always about small things that don't really matter?'
'That's the question precisely,' he exclaimed. 'I only want you to tell me that they don't matter. There are times when you seem indifferent to everything. I'm vain, I've a thousand faults; but you know they're not everything; you know I care for you.'
'And if I say that I care for you, don't you believe me?'
'Say it, Katharine! Say it as if you meant it! Make me feel that you care for me!'
She could not force herself to speak a word. The heather was growing dim around them, and the horizon was blotted out by white mist. To ask her for passion or for certainty seemed like asking that damp prospect for fierce blades of fire, or the faded sky for the intense blue vault of June.
He went on now to tell her of his love for her, in words which bore, even to her critical senses, the stamp of truth; but none of this touched her, until, coming to a gate whose hinge was rusty, he heaved it open with his shoulder, still talking and taking no account of his effort. The virility of this deed impressed her; and yet, normally, she attached no value to the power of opening gates. The strength of muscles has nothing to do on the face of it with the strength of affections; nevertheless, she felt a sudden concern for this power running to waste on her account, which, combined with a desire to keep possession of that strangely attractive masculine power, made her rouse herself from her torpor.
Why should she not simply tell him the truth - which was that she had accepted him in a misty state of mind when nothing had its right shape or size? that it was deplorable, but that with clearer eyesight marriage was out of the question? She did not want to marry any one. She wanted to go away by herself, preferably to some bleak northern moor, and there study mathematics and the science of astronomy.
…
A sense of her own misbehaviour, which she had succeeded in keeping from her by sharpening her consciousness of Rodney's faults, now swept over her and almost overwhelmed her. What were his faults in comparison with the fact that he cared for her? What were her virtues in comparison with the fact that she did not care for him? In a flash the convition that not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped itself upon her inmost thought; and she felt herself branded forever.
…
As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing the effect that they might have upon a man who cared for her. [page 202]
Her soliloquy crystallized itself into little fragmentary phrases emerging suddenly from the turbulence of her thought, [page 219]
Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not possible to step from one to the other, erect, and without essential change? Was this not the chance he offered her - the rare and wonderful chance of friendship? [page 288]
'You come and see me among flowers and pictures, and think me mysterious, romantic, and all the rest of it. Being yourself very inexperienced and very emotional, you go home and invent a story about me, and now you can't separate me from the person you've imagined me to be. You call that, I suppose, being in love; as a matter of fact it's being in delusion. All romantic people are the same,' she added. 'My mother spends her life in making stories about the people she's fond of. But I won't have you do it about me, if I can help it.' [page 323]
At this she smiled, but in another moment her smile faded, either because of his words or of the way in which he spoke them. She was capable of forgetting things. He saw that. But what more did he see? Was he not looking at something she had never shown to anybody? Was it not something so profound that the notion of his seeing it almost shocked her? Her smile faded, and for a moment she seemed upon the point of speaking, but looking at him in silence, with a look that seemed to ask what she could not put into words, she turned and bade him good night. [page 325]
He rose and began, as usual, to pace up and down the room. He knew that what he had just said bore very little resemblance to what he felt, for Mary's presence acted upon him like a very strong magnet, drawing from him certain expressions which were not those he made use of when he spoke to himself, nor did they represent his deepest feelings. He felt a little contempt for himself at having spoken thus; but somehow he had been forced into speech. 'Do sit down,' said Mary suddenly. 'You make me so—' She spoke with unusual irritability, and Ralph, noticing it with surprise, sat down at once. [page 331]
Ralph, at length, rose and walked gloomily to the window. He pressed close to the pane. Outside were truth and freedom and the immensity only to be apprehended by the mind in loneliness, and never communicated to another. What worse sacrilege was there than to attempt to violate what he perceived by seeking to impart it? Some movement behind him made him reflect that Katharine had the power, if she chose, to be in person what he dreamed of her spirit. [page 403]
In truth, she found an extraordinary pleasure in being thus free to talk to some one who was equally wise and equally benignant, the mother of her earliest childhood, whose silence seemed to answer questions that were never asked. [page 410]
'So much earth and so much water and that sublime spirit brooding over it all,' she mused, and went on to sing her strange, half-earthly song of dawns and sunsets, of great poets, and the unchanged spirit of noble loving which they had taught, so that nothing changes, and one age is linked with another, and no one dies, and we all meet in spirit, until she appeared oblivious of any one in the room. But suddenly her remarks seemed to contract the enormously wide circle in which they were soaring and to alight, airily and temporarily, upon matters of more immediate moment. [page 423]
The Pleasures and sorrows of work - Alain De Botton
Added on August 20th 2009
When does a job feel meaningful? Whenver it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status and money.It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in sumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defribillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit.
But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good and it seems that making a perfectly formed stripey chocolate circle that helps to fill an impatient stomach in the long morning hours between nine o'clock and noon may deserve its own secure, if microscopic, place in the pantheon of innovations designed to alleviate the burden of existence. The real issue is not whether baking a biscuit is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. An endevour endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.
III-5
The care and skill that Pottier brought to his occupation reinforced the point made in the book I had been reading the previous evening, with its analysis of two contrasting approaches to work found in the histories of Protestant and Catholic thought. In Catholic dogma, the definition of noble work had mostly been limited to that done by priests in the service of God, with practical and commercial labour relegated to an entirely base category unconnected to the display of any specifically Christian virtues. By contrast, the Protestant worldview, as it had developed over the sixteenth century, attempted to redeem the value of everyday tasks, proposing that many apparently unimportant activities could in fact enable those who undertook them to convey the qualities of their souls. In this schema, humility, wisdom, respect and kindness could be practiced in a shop no less sincerely than in a monastery. Salvation could be worked out at the level of ordinary existence, not only in the grand, sacramental moments which Catholicism had privileged. Sweeping the yard and arranging the laundry cupboard were intimately connected to the most significant themes of existence.
III-8
Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic, intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party. How different everything is for the craftsman who trasnforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object - whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug - and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, ad hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.
VI-6
There is something improbable about the silence in the carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greeting-card companies. Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean the new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper. To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
VIII-2
The flat is quiet and guilty. Nothing moved while, on the banks of the Thames, the accountant was meeting with IT and striving to keep his temper with an intern. He notices the bath towel thrown hastily over the sofa after the morning shower. The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions in the office. Now there are only silence and flashing of the unset clock of the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. he will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life. For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilization could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by cofee and alcohol. The final approach will be made under the benign guidance of a Chilean Cabernet and the hypnotic, entirely untroubling retelling of the day's misdemeanors and cataclysms on the evening news.
VIII-9
The start-up ocmpany may be as central to our contemporary ideals as the ritual of praying for the souls of the dead or the maintenance of female virginity was to the values of our medieval ancestors.
Yet, in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all of those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.
Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule. The statistical probabilities of successfully rerouting commercial reality were laid bare for me by a wry venture capitalist who had come to the fair with few expectations., save for having the opportunity of spending a day away from his office. Of the two thousands business plans he received a year, he said, he immediately threw out 1,950, scrutinized fifty more closely and ended up investing in ten. Within five years, out of those ten enterprises, four would be bankrupt, another four would be stuck in what was termed a "graveyard cycle" of low profits and a mere two would be generating the significant returns to keep his industry afloat. Here was a vision of success guaranteed to disappoint 99.9 percent of its subscribers.
The again, there was a certain heroic beauty in the exuberant destruction of both capital and hope entailed by the entrepreneurs' activities. Money patiently accumulated through decades of unremarkable work would, in a rush of optimism inspired by a flattering business plan, be handed over to a momentarily convincing chief executive, who would hasten to set the pyre alight in a brief, brilliant and largely inconsequential blaze.
IX-3
If we could winess the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to imediate paralysis. Would anyone who watched the departure of Xerses' ary on its way to conquer the Greeks, or Taj Chan Ahk giving orders for the construction of the golden temples of Cancuen, or the British colonial administrators inaugurating the Indian postal system, have had it in their hearts to fill their passionate actors in on the eventual fate of their efforts? Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectable tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.
X-2
Malaria
Resistance is useless
Apr 8th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Evolutionary theory may help to fight a fatal disease
LIKE many other activities, global health has fashions. For the past couple of decades AIDS has captured both the imagination and the research dollars. Recently, though, the focus has shifted towards malaria, which kills a million people a year, most of them children, and debilitates hundreds of millions more. Insecticide-impregnated bednets designed to stop people being bitten by infected mosquitoes are being scattered throughout Africa. New drugs based on a Chinese herb called Artemisia have been introduced. And researchers are vying with one another to be the first to devise an effective vaccine. But the traditional first line of attack on malaria, killing the mosquitoes themselves, has yet to have a serious makeover.
One reason is that time and again chemical insecticides have produced the same dreary pattern. They prove wonderfully effective at first, only to dwindle into uselessness. This is because evolution quickly throws up resistant strains. Indeed, spraying campaigns, which generally aim to kill mosquitoes before they can breed, might have been devised as textbook examples of how to provoke an evolutionary response. With their competitors all dead, the progeny of a mosquito carrying a mutation that can neutralise the insecticide in question have the world to themselves.
The upshot is that discovering a way to retain the anti-malarial benefits of insecticides without provoking an evolutionary response would be a significant breakthrough. And that is what Andrew Read of Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues think they have done. They have rethought the logic of insecticides, putting evolutionary theory at the centre, instead of a simple desire to destroy the enemy. The result is a modest proposal to deal with the problem of resistance.
Dr Read started from the observation that it is old, rather than young, mosquitoes that are infectious. Only females can transmit malaria (males suck plant juices, not blood) but they are not born with the parasites inside their bodies. They have instead to acquire them from humans already carrying the disease, and that takes time. Once a female does feed on infected blood, the parasites she ingests require a further 10 to 14 days to mature and migrate to her salivary glands, whence they can be transmitted to another host when she next feeds. In theory, then, killing only the oldest female mosquitoes—those at significant risk of being infectious—could stop the transmission of the disease. Since these females would have had plenty of time to reproduce before they died, the evolutionary pressure imposed by killing them would be much lower.
To test this insight, the researchers constructed a mathematical model of the mosquito’s life-cycle. They then plugged in data, collected from malaria hotspots in Africa and Papua New Guinea, that describe the insect’s lifespan and egg-laying cycles in those parts of the world and the way that malaria parasites grow inside mosquitoes. The model, which they have just published in the Public Library of Science, reveals that selectively killing elderly mosquitoes would reduce the number of infectious bites by 95% and that resistance to such a tactic would spread very slowly, if it spread at all, because mosquitoes vulnerable to a post-breeding insecticide would have had a chance to pass on their vulnerable genes to future generations.
The problem, of course, is to find an insecticide that kills only the elderly. One option is to use existing chemicals, but at greater dilutions. That could work because older mosquitoes are more vulnerable to insecticides than younger ones.
A more radical answer, though, may be to use a completely different sort of insecticide: a fungus. The team are working with fungi that take 10 to 12 days to become lethal. That is short enough to kill parasite-infected insects before they become infectious, but long enough to allow them to breed. A trial of this idea, spraying fungal spores on to bednets and house walls in Tanzania, is being set up at the moment. If it works, it will be a good example of the value of thinking about biological problems from an evolutionary perspective. People will still get bitten, but the bites will merely be irritating, not life-threatening.
Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death
By Robert D. McFadden and Angela Macropoulos (NY Times)
Published: November 28, 2008
The throng of Wal-Mart shoppers had been building all night, filling sidewalks and stretching across a vast parking lot at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y. At 3:30 a.m., the Nassau County police had to be called in for crowd control, and an officer with a bullhorn pleaded for order.
Tension grew as the 5 a.m. opening neared. Someone taped up a crude poster: “Blitz Line Starts Here.”
By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.
Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said.
Some workers who saw what was happening fought their way through the surge to get to Mr. Damour, but he had been fatally injured, the police said. Emergency workers tried to revive Mr. Damour, a temporary worker hired for the holiday season, at the scene, but he was pronounced dead an hour later at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream.
Four other people, including a 28-year-old woman who was described as eight months pregnant, were treated at the hospital for minor injuries.
Detective Lt. Michael Fleming, who is in charge of the investigation for the Nassau police, said the store lacked adequate security. He called the scene “utter chaos” and said the “crowd was out of control.” As for those who had run over the victim, criminal charges were possible, the lieutenant said. “I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it is not,” he said. “Certainly it was a foreseeable act.”
But even with videos from the store’s surveillance cameras and the accounts of witnesses, Lieutenant Fleming and other officials acknowledged that it would be difficult to identify those responsible, let alone to prove culpability.
Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.
“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”
Wal-Mart security officials and the police cleared the store, swept up the shattered glass and locked the doors until 1 p.m., when it reopened to a steady stream of calmer shoppers who passed through the missing doors and battered door jambs, apparently unaware that anything had happened.
Ugly shopping scenes, a few involving injuries, have become commonplace during the bargain-hunting ritual known as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. The nation’s largest retail group, the National Retail Federation, said it had never heard of a worker being killed on Black Friday.
Wal-Mart declined to provide details of the stampede, but said in a statement that it had tried to prepare by adding staff members. Still, it was unclear how many security workers it had at the Valley Stream store for the opening on Friday. The Green Acres Mall provides its own security to supplement the staffs of some large stores, but it did not appear that Wal-Mart was one of them.
A Wal-Mart spokesman, Dan Folgleman, called it a “tragic situation,” and said the victim had been hired from a temporary staffing agency and assigned to maintenance work. Wal-Mart, in a statement issued at its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., said: “The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families at this tragic time.”
Wal-Mart has successfully resisted unionization of its employees. New York State’s largest grocery union, Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, called the death of Mr. Damour “avoidable” and demanded investigations.
“Where were the safety barriers?” said Bruce Both, the union president. “Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner? This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart.”
While other Wal-Mart stores dot the suburbs around the city, the outlet at Valley Stream, less than two miles from New York City’s southeastern border, draws customers from Queens, Brooklyn and the densely populated suburbs of Nassau County. And it was not the only store in the Green Acres Mall that attracted large crowds.
Witnesses said the crowd outside Wal-Mart began gathering at 9 p.m. on Thursday. The night was not bitterly cold, and the early mood was relaxed. By the early morning hours, the throngs had grown, and officers of the Fifth Precinct of the Nassau County Police Department, who patrol Valley Stream, were out in force, checking on crowds at the mall.
Mr. Damour, who lived in Queens, went into the store sometime during the night to stock shelves and perform maintenance work.
On Friday night, Mr. Damour’s father, Ogera Charles, 67, said his son had spent Thursday evening having Thanksgiving dinner at a half sister’s house in Queens before going directly to work. Mr. Charles said his son, known as Jimmy, was raised in Queens by his mother and worked at various stores in the area after graduating from high school.
Mr. Charles said he had not seen his son in three months, and heard about his death about 7 a.m. Friday, when a friend of Mr. Damour’s called him at home. He arrived at Franklin Hospital Medical Center an hour later to identify the body. Mr. Charles said he was angry that no one from Wal-Mart had contacted him or had explained how his son had died. Maria Damour, Mr. Damour’s mother, was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but was on her way back to the United States, Mr. Charles said.
About the time that Mr. Damour was killed, a shopper at a Wal-Mart in Farmingdale, 15 miles east of Valley Stream, said she was trampled by a crowd of overeager customers, the Suffolk County police reported. The woman sustained a cut on her leg, but finished her shopping before filing the police report, an officer said.
2008/11/07
Deprogramming Jihadists (By Katherine Zoepf, NYT)
"The sunset prayer had just ended, and Sheik Ahmad al-Jilani was already calling his class to order. When the latecomers slipped into the front row, Jilani nodded at them briskly. “Young men,” he began, “who can tell me why we do jihad?”
The members of the class were still new and a bit shy. Jilani clasped his hands and smiled encouragingly. Before him, sitting in school desks, were a dozen young Saudi men who had served time in prison for belonging to militant Islamic groups. Now they were inmates in a new rehabilitation center, part of a Saudi government initiative that seeks to deprogram Islamic extremists.
Jilani has been teaching his class, which is called Understandings of Jihad, since the center was established early last year. A stout man who makes constant, self-deprecating references to his weight, the sheik is an avuncular figure, popular with his students. On this chilly evening he had on a woolly, brocade-trimmed bisht, the cloak that Saudi men wear on formal occasions or in cool weather, which gave him a slightly imposing air. But behind his thick glasses, his eyes shone warmly as he surveyed the classroom.
Finally, someone answered: “We do jihad to fight our enemies.”
“To defeat God’s enemies?” another suggested.
“To help weak Muslims,” a third offered.
“Good, good,” Jilani said. “All good answers. Is there someone else? What about you, Ali?” Ali, in the second row, looked away, then faltered: “To . . . answer . . . calls for jihad?”
Jilani frowned slightly and wrote Ali’s answer up on the white board behind him. He read it out to the class before turning back to Ali. “All right, Ali,” the sheik said. “Why do we answer calls for jihad? Is it because all Muslim leaders want to make God’s word highest? Do we kill if these leaders tell us to kill?”
Ali looked confused, but whispered, “Yes.”
“No — wrong!” Jilani cried as Ali blushed. “Of course we want to make God’s word highest, but not every Muslim leader has this as his goal. There are right jihads and wrong jihads, and we must examine the situation for ourselves. For example, if a person wants to go to hajj now, is it right?”
The class chuckled obligingly at Jilani’s little joke. The month for performing hajj, the holy pilgrimage to Mecca that observant Muslims hope to complete at least once in their lives, had ended five weeks earlier, and the suggestion was as preposterous as throwing a Fourth of July barbecue in November.
“Well, just as there is a proper time for hajj, there is also a proper time for jihad,” Jilani explained.
Jilani’s students, who range in age from 18 to 36, are part of a generation brought up on heroic tales of Saudi fighters who left home to fight alongside the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during the 1980s and who helped to force the Soviets to withdraw from the country. The Saudi state was essentially built on the concept of jihad, which King Abdul Aziz al-Saud used to knit disparate tribal groups into a single nation. The word means “struggle” and in Islamic law usually refers to armed conflict with non-Muslims in defense of the global Islamic community. Saudi schools teach a version of world history that emphasizes repeated battles between Muslims and nonbelieving enemies. Whether to Afghanistan in the 1980s or present-day Iraq, Saudi Arabia has exported more jihadist volunteers than any other country; 15 of the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were Saudis.
But jihad can go too far. The Saudi government has condemned the Sept. 11 attacks and arrests jihadists who attempt to enter Iraq. Some Saudi veterans of overseas jihads have adopted one form of the doctrine of takfir, in which a Muslim is judged by another Muslim to be an unbeliever. Because traditional Islamic law calls for the execution of apostates, some have used takfir to justify attacks on the Saudi state. In recent years, these attacks have raised fears that the chaos in some of the world’s conflict zones is being brought home to Saudi Arabia by radicalized jihadists. The Saudi government thus finds itself in the awkward position of needing to defend the principle of jihad to its citizens while discouraging them from actually taking up arms. One step it has taken is simply to talk to those who have proved to be most vulnerable to the temptations of jihad, the captured militants themselves. As Jilani put it to me, “The kingdom of Saudi Arabia has the confidence to fight thoughts with thoughts.”
Jilani and his colleagues are not just fighting a war of ideas. Though the Saudi government tends to explain its rehabilitation program in purely Islamic terms, as an effort to correct theological misunderstandings, the new program also addresses the psychological needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad in the first place. It tries to give frustrated and disaffected young men the trappings of stability — a job, a car, possibly a wife.
...
“We’re finding that they don’t generally join for religious reasons,” John Horgan told me. A political psychologist who directs the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State, Horgan has interviewed dozens of former terrorists. “Terrorist movements seem to provide a sense of adventure, excitement, vision, purpose, camaraderie,” he went on, “and involvement with them has an allure that can be difficult to resist. But the ideology is usually something you acquire once you’re involved.”
...
In January 2007, the Interior Ministry began renting small vacation compounds in the Riyadh suburb of al-Thumama. Half-a-dozen adjoining compounds now house the Care Center, a post-prison continuation of the Munasaha program offering more intensive rehabilitation activities. Each compound holds up to about 20 men, who study, eat and sleep together for the duration of the program.
On arrival, each prisoner is given a suitcase filled with gifts: clothes, a digital watch, school supplies and toiletries. Inmates are encouraged to ask for their favorite foods (Twix and Snickers candy bars are frequent requests). Volleyball nets, PlayStation games and Ping-Pong and foosball tables are all provided. The atmosphere at the center — which I visited several times earlier this year — is almost eerily cozy and congenial, with mattresses and rugs spread on stubbly patches of lawn for inmates to lounge upon. With few exceptions, the men wear their beards untrimmed and their thobes, the long garments that most Saudi men wear, cut above their ankles in the style favored by those who wish to demonstrate strict devotion to Islam. The men are pleasant but many seem a bit puffy and lethargic; one 19-year-old inmate, Faisal al-Subaii, explained that they are encouraged to spend most of their daytime hours in either rest or prayer.
...
In Saudi Arabia, psychological disorders are often understood as the results of a person finding himself somehow outside the traditional circle of family and community. Most of the counseling that the inmates receive is focused on helping them to develop more healthful family relationships. “We use Western psychiatric techniques together with Islamic techniques,” T. M. Otayan, the center’s staff psychologist, says, referring to the intensive religion classes.
...
Most prisoners complete the program within two months. Upon release, each former jihadist is required to sign a pledge that he has forsaken extremist sympathies; the head of his family must sign as well. Some also receive a car (often a Toyota) and aid from the Interior Ministry in renting a home. Social workers assist former jihadists and their families in making post-release plans for education, employment and, usually, marriage. “Getting married stabilizes a man’s personality,” Hadlaq says. “He thinks more about a long term future and less about himself and his anger.”
Other countries have experimented with efforts to rehabilitate Islamic extremists. In Egypt and Yemen, moderate clerics counsel prisoners accused of militant activity. The Religious Rehabilitation Group in Singapore has been widely praised for reducing the influence of the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organization. But the Saudi approach is unusual and, according to Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, “is consistent with Saudi history in that you try through nonviolent means to cajole, to bribe, to buy off the opposition.”
Sheik Jilani likes to encourage class discussions by asking the men to share their experiences, and on one of the occasions I visited, he asked a student named Azzam to explain why he spent five months in Iraq. Referring to the infamous Mahmudiyah killings of 2006, Azzam replied that he had seen an article on the Internet about “the little girl named Abeer who was raped and killed by the Americans.”
“I felt so much sympathy for the Muslims,” Azzam continued. “The infidel rape women and kill children. I decided then that I should join the Muslims in Iraq in order to drive the Americans out.”
“Tell us, Azzam. What did you find in Iraq? Did you feel good when you went there?”
Azzam frowned. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t find what I was expecting,” he said. “In Iraq, even the Muslims fight each other. I was expecting them to be well organized, but they weren’t.”
Jilani nodded. “So did you fight?”
“I didn’t have the chance,” Azzam said, sounding defensive. “For months, we went from safe house to safe house. There wasn’t anything to do — no action, no training. Finally, they asked me to be a suicide bomber. But I know that suicide is forbidden in Islam, so I came back home.”
Of all the concepts addressed in classes at the rehabilitation center, takfir is the one that tends to evoke the most anger among mainstream Saudi Muslims. The idea that there’s a slippery slope from jihad to takfir comes up regularly in discussions with Saudi clerics.
“Some of our young people don’t listen to the right scholars,” Jilani told me. “First they start to think that they have the right to go to jihad at any time. After that, they start to think that we have the right to kill any non-Muslim.
“Then they start to say that our leaders are kuffar, infidels,” the sheik continued. “After that they start to say that our scholars, too, are kuffar. Before long, they’ve declared war against the whole world.”
...
A consulting psychiatrist at the King Faisal hospital in Riyadh says that to truly fight jihadism would mean fundamentally changing how Islam is taught in Saudi schools and mosques in a way that the Saudi government has until now been unwilling to attempt. “The government is never going to say, full stop, that jihad is wrong,” he explains. The doctrine is an integral part of Islamic law, and arguing against it would raise the ire of religious scholars and possibly call the Islamic credentials of the Saudi government into question.
2008/07/26
"I'd always know that climbing mountains was a high risk pursuit. I had accepted that danger was an essential component of the game - without it, climbing would be little different from a hundred other trifling diverions. It was titillating to brush up against the enigma of mortality, to steal a glimpse across its forbidden frontier. Climbing was a magnificent activity, I firmly believed, not in spite of the inherent perils, but precisely because of them."
Into thin air, a personal account of the Everest disaster - Jon Krakauer
2008/03/11
"The starving peple did not chant any slogans. They did not demand anything from us well-fed city folks. They simpy lay down very quietly on our doorsteps and waited to die.
There are many ways for people to die, but somehow dying of starvation is the most unacceptable of all. It happens in slow motion. Second by second, the distance between life and death becomes smaller and smaller, until the two are in such close proximity that one can hardly tell the difference. Like sleep, death by starvation happens so quietly, so inexorably, ne does not even sense it happening. And all for lack of a handul of rice at each meal."
Banker to the poor - Muhammad Yunus (nobel peace prize recipient for microfinancing)
2008/01/08
"Il giudizio che accompagna le nostre azioni qualifica solo cio' che siamo, non cio' che eravamo prima."
"- Senti - dice - con questa decisione che ho preso mi sento improvvisamente saggio, percio' vorrei darti un buon consiglio, se me lo permetti.
Non so come sia successo, ma d'un tratto siamo troppo vicini - sento il suo odore, quello del suo alito, nn va bene - e devo fare un passo indietro.
- Certo.
- Cosi', anche se probabilmente tu non ne hai bisogno.
- C'e' sempre bisogno di un buon consiglio.
- Beh, allora il consiglio e' questo - avanza di nuovo e riecco che siamo troppo vicini - Appena senti che non ce la fai, molla. Non resistere a nulla, mai.
Enoch, l'uomo che fu scagliato in Africa da una bestemmia. Resta qualche secondo a fissarmi, sempre troppo vicino, e a puzzare, diciamolo, come per scolpire le proprie parole in questo assedio prossemico - e godersi, magari, il mio imbarazzo; poi si ritrae, scrolla le spalle e se ne va."
"Ora, pero', devo dirla io a voi, una cosa importante: ci siete ancora tutti? Dopo vi prometto che staro' zitto, perche' il silenzio non mi fa piu' paura, ma adesso vi chiedo di fare attenzione a quello che ho da dirvi. E' una cosa decisiva che ho capito in questo momento e che riguarda anche voi. Jolanda, ascoltami, perche' a te ti riguarda di sicuro. Ma riguarda anche te, Marta, che non riesci a trovar pace, e anche te, Carlo, con la tua fissa per Peter Pan. E forse anche te Jean-Claude. Forse ci riguarda davvero tutti.
Ascoltatemi bene allora: la palla che lanciammo giocando nel parco e' tornata giu' da un pezzo. Dobbiamo smettere di aspettarla."
Caos Calmo - Sandro Veronesi
2007/10/07
"
What extroverts should know about introverts:
1) If an individual is an introvert, it does not mean that this person is shy or asocial. This is usually the most common accusation, although it's a wrong one. People who are prone to interior thoughtfulness are using more the front part of the brain, that is deputated to complex thought and problem solving. the extrovert, on the other hand has more activity in the rear side of the brain that deals with the managing of external sensorial input.
2)The introvert is not fond of superficial conversations. They regard them as a waste of time. They love having deeper conversations.
3) Intorverts love socializing. They do it in a different way and less often. they choose the people they ahve conversations with more carefully. They don't just do with the first who comes by. When they decide to open up, they are able to maintain a conversation and even become the center of it.
4) Introverts need to be alone to recharge their batteries. Refusing invitations and social obbligations make people regard them as asocial, wihle in reality the introverts are fond of taking part in such social events, but it requires to them more energy then to other people, so they need to dose their participation.
"
From "Il corriere della sera"
2007/09/07
"
This day in 1986, however, Gutfreund did something strange. Instead of terrifying us all, he walked a straight line to the trading desk of John Meriwether, a member of the board of Salomon Inc. and also one of Salomon's finest bond traders. He whispered a few words. The traders in the vicinity eavesdropped. What Gutfreund said has become a legend at Salomon Brothers, and a visceral part of its corporate identity. He said: "One hand, one million dollars, no tears."
One hand, one million dollars, no tears. Meriwether grabbed the meaning instantly. The king of Wall street, as Business week had dubbed Gutfreund, wanted to play a single hand of a game called Liar's Poker for a million dollars. He played the game most afternoons with Meriwether and the six young bond arbitrage traders who worked for Meriwether, and was usually skinned alive. Some traders say Gutfreund was heavily outmatched. Others, who couldn't imagine Gutfreund as anything but omnipotent - and there were many - said that losing suited his purpose, though exactly what that might be was a mystery.
The peculiar feature of Gutfreund's challenge this time was the size of the stake. Normally his bets didn't exceed a few hundred dollars. A million was unheard of. The last two words of his challenge, "no tears", meant that the loser was expected to suffer a great deal of pain, but wasn't entitled to whine, bitch or moan about it. He'd just have to hunker down and keep is poverty to himself. But why? you might ask if you were anyone but the king of Wall Street. Why do it in first place?Why, in particular, challenge Meriwether instead of some less managing director? It seemed an act of sheer lunacy. Meriwether was the king of the game, the Liar's Poker champion of the Salomon Brothers' trading floor. On the other hand, one thing you learn on a trading floor is that winners like Gutfreund always have some reasons to do what they do; it might not be the best of reasons, but at least they have a concept in mind. I was not privy to Gutfreund's innermost thoughts, but I do know that all the boys on the floor gambled, and that he wanted badly to be one of the boys. What I think Gutfreund had in mind in this instance was a desire to show his courage, like the boy who leaps from the high dive. Who better than Meriwether for the purpose? Besides, Meriwether was probably the only trader with both the cash and nerve to play.
The whole absurd situation needs putting into context. john Meriwether had, in the course of his career, made hundreds of millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers. He had an ability, rare among people and treasured by traders, to hide his state of mind. Most traders divulge whether they are making or losing money by the way they speak and move. They are either overly easy or overly tense. With Meriwether you could never, ever, tell. He wore the same blank half-tense when he won as he did when he lost. He had, I think, a profound ability to control the two emotions that commonly destroy traders (fear and greed) and it made him as noble as a man who pursues his self-interest so fiercely can be. He was thought by many within Salomon to be the best bond trader on Wall Street. Around Salomon no tone but awe was used when he was discussed. People would say "he's the best business man in the place", or "the best risk-taker I have ever seen", or "a very dangerous Liar's poker player".
Meriwether cast a spell over the young traders who worked for him. his boys ranged in age from twenty-five to thirty-two (he was about forty). Most of them had PhDs in maths, economics and/or physics. Once they got on to Meriwether's trading desk, however, they forgot they were supposed to be detached intellectuals. They became disciples. they became obsessed by the game of Liar's Poker. They regarded it as their game. And they took it to a new level of seriousness.
John Gutfreund was always the outsider in their game. That Business Week put his picture on the cover and called him the king of Wall Street held little significance for them. I mean, that was, in a way, the whole point. Gutfreund was the king of Wall street, but Meriwether was the king of the game. When Gutfreund had been crowned by the gentlemen of the press you could almost hear traders thinking: foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places. Fair enough, Gutfreudn had once been a trader, but that was as relevant as an old woman's claim that she was once very beautiful.
At times Gutfreund himself seemed to agree. He loved to trade. Compared with managing, trading was admirably direct. you made your bets and either you won or you lost. When you won, people - all the way up to the top of the firm - admired you, envied you and feared you, and with reason: you controlled the loot. When you managed a firm, well, sure you received your quota of envy, fear and admiration. But for all the wrong reasons. You did not make the money for Salomon, you did not take risk. You were hostage to your producers. They took risk. They proved their superiority every day by handling the risk better than the rest of the risk-taking world. The money came from risk-takers such as Meriwether, and whether it came or not was really beyond Gutfreunds control. That's why many people thought that the single rash act of challenging the arbitrage boss to one hand for a million dollars was Gutfreund's way of showing he was a player too. And if you wanted to show off, Liar's Poker was the only way to go. The game had a powerful meaning for traders. People like John Meriwether believed that Liar's Poker had a lot in common with bond trading. it tested a trader character. It honed a trader's instincts. A good player made a good trader and vice versa. We all understood it.
The game: In Liar's Poker a group of people - as few as two, as many as ten - form a circle. Each player holds a dollar bill close to his chest. The game is similar in spirit to the card game known as "I doubt it". Each of the players attempts to fool the others about the serial numbers printed on the face of his dollar bill. One trader begins by making "a bid", he says for example, "three sixes". . He means that the serial numbers of the dollar bills held by all player, including himself, contain at least three sixes. Once the first bid has been made, the game moves clockwise in the circle. Let's say the bid is three sixes. The player to the left of the bidder can do one of two things. He can bid higher. There are two sorts of higher bids: the same quantity of a higher number (three sevens, eights, or nines).
And more of any numbers (four fives, for instance). or he can "challenge" - which is like saying "I doubt it". In which case all players counts and confess the number of sixes on their dollar bills.
The bid escalates until all players agree to challenge one single player's bid. In the midst of all this the mind of a good player spins with probabilities. What is the statistical likelihood of there being three sixes within a batch of say forty randomly generated serial numbers? For a great player, however, the math is the easy part of the game. The hard part is reading the faces of the other players. The complexity arises when all the players know how to bluff and double-bluff.
The game has some sort of feel of trading, just like jousting has some of the feel of war. The question's a Liar's poker player asks himself are, up to a point, the sames questions a bond trader asks himself. Is this a smart risk? Do I feel lucky? How cunning is my opponent? Does he have any idea what he's doing, and if not, how do I exploit his ignorance? If he bids high, is he bluffing, or does he actually hold a strong hand? Is he trying to induce me to make a foolish bid, or does he actually hold four of a kind himself? Each player seeks weakness, predictability and pattern in the others and seeks to avoid it in himself. The bond traders of Goldman Sachs, First Boston, Morgan Stanley, Merril Lynch and other Wall Street firms all play some version of Liar's Poker. But the place where the stakes run highest, thanks to John Meriwether is the New York bond trading floor of Salomon Brothers. The code of the Liar's Pokerplayer was something like the code of the gunslinger. It required a trader to accept all challenges. Because of the code - which was his code -John Meriwether felt obliged to play. But he knew it was stupid. For him there was no upside. I he won, he upset Gutfreund. No good came of this. But if he lost, he was out of pocket a million bucks. This was worse than upsetting the boss. Although Meriwether was by far the better player of the game, in a single hand anything could happen. Luck could very well determine the outcome. Meriwether spent all day avoiding dumb bets, and he wasn't about to accept this one.
"No John", he said, "if we're going to play for those kind of numbers, I'd rather play for real money. Ten million dollars. No tears."
Ten million dollars. It was moment for all players to savour.Meriwether was playing Liar's Poker before the game even started. He was bluffing. Gutfreund considered the counter proposal. It would have been just like him to accept. Merely to entertain the thought was a luxury that must have pleased him well. (It was good o be rich.)
On the other hand , 10 million dollars was, and is, a lot of money. If Gutfreund lost, he'd only have 30 millions or so left. His wife, Susan, was busy spending the better part of 15 million dollars redecorating their Manhattan apartment. (Meriwether knew this). And as Gutfreund was the boss he clearly wasn't bound by the Meriwether code. Who knows, maybe he didn't even know the Meriwether code. Maybe the whole point of this challenge was to judge Meriwether's response. (Even Gutfreund had to marvel at the King in action.) So Gutfreund declined. In fact, he smiled his own brand of forced smile and said, "You're crazy."
no, thought Meriwether, just very, very good.
"
Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
2007/06/17
"
I pictured having all these qualities.
Strong, positive qualities...
...that people could pick up on from across a room.
But as time passed...
...few ever became any qualities I actually had.
And all the possibilities I faced, and the sorts of people I could be...
...all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer...
...until finally they got reduced to one...
...to who I am.
And that's who I am...
...the weatherman.
"
From "The weatherman", with Nicolas Cage
2007/01/17
I have a better, simpler, more clear example of the double slit experiment in human behaviour....
A boy in front of a girl asks her to love him.
A moment before he asks the uncertainty in his mind is killing him, the whole day he has waited for this moment while his mood has been going up and down like interference fringes between a state of extreme happiness and one of extreme sadness.
Once he reaches for her lips with his lips he will know, imediately, inexorably...
It'll be happiness or sadness. Light or darkness in his heart.
I don't think I can find a better example.
2007/01/02
Some time ago, during an occasional identity crisis I set off to make a list of the things I like and dislike to try and read from it a definition of my self. I'll spare the boring result, but I want to paste here what I wrote about the definition of a person.
"I want to know what defines me? Shouldn't it depend on the "lenses" in front of the eyes of the person observing me? Yes, in theory, but we don't live on probablities and possibilities, but on averages. We don't want to know that our friend can be a good mother AND an adulterous AND an addict (to whatever) AND a generous person AND a murderer AND a prostitute AND a martyr AND...
In fact, we all are all those things and all at the same time until the moment when we are actually tested for one of them, until, say, someone offers us money to sell our body... then we can actually become a prostitute... or not.
At that moment, as we physicists would say, we finally fall into one of those states with a certain probability.
What does that probability depend on? It depends on both the present external circumstances AND, more importantly, it depends on our previous, seemingly unrelated choices.
Those choices will have defined us by modifing constantly, second after second through our entire life, the probability of our choosing to sell our body if offered a given amount of money under that circumstance. Let's say that we decide to decline the offer. That doesn't make our self a non-prostitute in that space of potentials that we all are at all times. It merely says that we were not prostitutes in that specific instance. On the other hand, this decision will have a probably strong impact on the probabilities of becoming a prostitute at any subsequent time. It could make it easier for us to say yes to a second, maybe more lucrative offer, or it could make it easier to say no having already gone along that path once.
So, in conclusion, this is a way of seeing our reality and our lives. A parallel with the universe of quantum mechanics, but apparently not a very useful one if it doesn't help us do anything constructive, like predicting someone's behaviour.
Going back to my initial point, we tend to naturally simplify our view of the world, in order to make a picture of it that we can deal with, interpret, predict in our mind. For this reason I say that we base our experience on averages.
Take the case of a job interview or a date, for that matter. Intances that most of us have been through several times. The person in front of us is trying to figure out who she/he is dealing with and is more responsive (ask any coach) to clear-cut answers. "Are you a team player?" ... "yes!"="good!" ... "it depends on the team"="uhm...". "Are you energetic?" ... "yes, all the time!"="great!" ... "sometimes, if I feel well, relaxed and my mood is good, I go through periods of very high energy"="uhm... inconstant character...uhm...".
They need to categorize us in a simple way, in order to handle the information with some simple algorithm and quickly decide whether they want to hire us or give us a second date (or more ;-) ).
Having said that about our typical need for averaging, I have the feeling that if I think hard enough there must be a psychological equivalent of the double slit experiment, where we can clearly see the effect of the observation on a system (in this case the system being us)."
TO BE CONTINUED
I thought about it and last night talking with my friend Nelido in front of a succulent steak, we may have come up with something resembling, in the realm of human beings, the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics.
Ok, let me briafly describe the experiment in physics (no equation and no weird terms ahead).
Take one single particle, a wall with two slits or holes and a screen behind the wall that is sensitive to the presence of the particle on it (example: particle = a quantum of light, photon and screen = the photosensitive film of a normal camera).
What is found is that when shooting the photon towards the holes, one observes on the screen behind the wall a pattern that can only be there if the photon has gone through both holes at the same time. This is clearly very much in contrast with the classical concept of a single ball going either through hole A or hole B. There is something more. If I decide to put my eye (or a more sophisticated detector) behind one of the two holes, I will not be seeing the photon every time I shoot one, but only some times with a certain probability. In that case also the pattern on the screen will not be there anymore.
Summarizing.... there are two mutually exclusive (classically speaking) events like going through hole A or B. If we don't check directly (observation) which one of the two paths was followed, we will see an effect due to both paths being taken at the same time (superposition of the paths). If we do check, then the superposition disappears and we will either see it going through the hole we're checking or not (with some probability). It is as if we were taking a particle that is in a superposition of (classically) mutually exclusive states and, by merely observing its behaviour, we plunged it into one of the states.
Ok, now... can I find an equivalence in human behaviour?
Read on...
Ingredients: husband (photon), wife (observer/screen), mistress, extremely dangerous icy road, friend of wife.
The husand goes out saying he's going to work. It's rather late at night, stormy weather, snowing etc.
The wife knows that he occasionally has seen the mistress, but he told her that the story with her is over.
The road between the couple's house and the mistress' place is extremely dangerous under this weather conditions and the wife knows that very well.
The wife could check (observe) if the husband went back to his mistress by phoning her best friend who lives opposite from her.
Ok, now let's analyse what can happen...
1) The wife decides to trust her husband and doesn't call her friend to go ahead with the "observation".
2) The wife decides to call her friend: 2a) her husband's car is there. He's cheating again on her. 2b) his car is not there he might have had a deadly accident on the road.
Now, the point is... can we take the state of mind of the wife when not checking on her husband as the equivalent of the classical signature of the particle going both ways? I'm still undecided....
In the next step I would like to analyse the concept of a minimal base of states (or human features) that one can use to define a person.
Ok, let me explain...
In my little model of human reality I claim that each of us is a superposition of things (states). We are with some finite probability both a saint and a mass murderer.. and everything in between. Now, there are some of these states that don't necessarily exlude one another ("good mother" and "adulterous wife") (not orthogonal states) and others that exclude each other like "saint" and "mass murderer" (orthogonal states). Of course, in order to define the orthogonality of human states one has to define a moral. Some people would still think that "good mother" and "adulterous wife" are mutually exclusive (or I could find a more controversial couple of states). That's a very important point and I think it deserves some thinking, but I'll leave it behind for a moment.
My main question this time was... can we find a finite and minimal sub-set of all the possible states a person can be in that will describe this person?
Let's take the mass-murderer example... we can assume that if one is a "mass-murderer", he will also be a simple "murderer", so using the state "murderer" for him is redundant. Got the hang of it? How much can we reduce? And how heavily is this reduction dependent on the definition we give of orthogonality (which is our moral really in this case). I'm afraid it's very much dependent on it... but I want to think about it a little more... :)
It's in the news today (Aug 26th 2006) that an interesting exeperiment will be opened in the London metro system. They will try and harvest energy from the steps of the thousands of passengers that every day walk to and from the trains. Apparently every step of a person produces on average 5-7 Watts and if even a small portion of that could be used to, say, power the trains or the lights of the metro, wouldn't that be great? I doubt it will make us any leaner, but hey...
Piece of News from "La repubblica"
Professor Gottman of the University of Washington has been studying the power of.. well, reading details out of people behaviour. Among other things he has developed a system to scientifically (i.e., reproduceably) predict the future of a relationship ("The mathematics of divorce").
In brief the system consists of having the couple sit alone in front of each other and in front of two cameras (one per individual). Things like their heart rate, rate of sweating, body temperature are continuously monitored. The coupe is asked to talk about a subject affecting somehow their relationship (like wanting to move to another town, taking care of the children, pros and concs of their having a dog).
Well, the magic is, of course, in the analysis of these data. Dr. Gottman created a base of emotions (1=contempt, 2=anger, 13=stonewalling...) and he and his assistants (those poor grad students!) slice an hr worth of film (times two) in one second chinks and number each of them according to the convention just described.
Taking these data and analyzing them with the proper mathematical tools creates the magic...
You'd think the success of a marriage would be dependent on things like the social environment surrounding the couple, their economic status and such?
Well, think again!
Since the early 80s more than 3000 couples of have been analysed in this way and... from a 1 hour long session the predictability of the outcome of a marriage is about 95%!! Wait... with the same tool, using only 15 minutes the success of the method in predicting the future of the marriage is still an impressive 90%!!! In fact, it seems that just looking at 3 minutes of these conversations the predictability is still very high (don't have the number there though).
So, there is no blaming the circumstances anymore. The success of a relationship really resides all in our characters.
The next question would be.. can we work on us to change the outcome? The next question after that would also be.. how much focus and energy would this changing our mental habits require (if possible at all) and would it be worth it?
Oh well... sometimes ignorance is bliss :))
Losely taken from "Blink" by Malcom Gladwell
PS: see also this link for an interview with Prof. Gottman.
Apparently each morse code operator has a distinctive way of "writing" his code (longer line after a dot or viceversa.. something like that). During IIWW there was a group of thousands of people in Britain devoted to singling out the characteristic signature of the various german communication soldiers. These soldiers were often following a certain battalion wherever this was moved to. Once a character would be singled out through his/her specific signature, they would correlate this information with what was known through other sources, in this way, effectively calibrating their new morse contact. Using this piecee of information along with a triangulation of the signal (they could find out where a certain signal was coming from within continental europe, for example), the british could often tell where this or that battalion was being deployed.
Not just beer and crickets these Brits, uh?
"On each gig, you must be marketing your worth, marketing Me Inc. You can go too far (think Dennis Kozlowski or Martha Stewart), but you constantly have to spin-doctor. If you don't, you have what I call 'engineer's mentality'--and I am an engineer by training. People with an engineer's mentality believe that truth and virtue will automatically be their own reward. That's a crock."
-Tom Peters, co-author, "In Search of Excellence"
"We hope that thinking about a decision results in a good choice, and that the more complex the decision, the more time and effort were invested in thinking about it. Dijksterhuis et al. (p. 1005; see the news story by Miller) show that deliberate thinking about simple decisions (such as buy-ing a shampoo) does yield choices that are judged to be more satisfying than those made with little thought, as expected. However, as the decisions become complex (more expensive items with many characteristics, such as cars), better decisions and happier ones come from not attending to the choices but allowing one's unconscious to sift through the many permutations for the optimal combination."
- "Science" Feb. 17th 2006
"Yet he believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the vlue, if not M. himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children supermarket booze, two, sometimes three, generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust - and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underweare or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman, or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes - it made him sick to look, but he had to look.
....
he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, mulfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futurless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To M it was horrible. Endless convoluted incest."
- The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
" Scott Pitnick and colleagues at Syracuse University in New York state, looked at brain size and testicoles size in 334 different species of bat. What they found was that there really is a trade-off between the two organs.
Put simply, bats with large testicles had small brains.
However, whether a similar correlation exists in humans at this point still remains to be seen."
- the Japanese Times (thanks Astrid)
"Ci si strappa a questi nostri anni beceri e incolti, e, come nella famosa lettera del Machiavelli, si lasciano i panni rattoppati e frusti e, per qualche ora, ritroviamo l'Europa colta e tormentata, frequentiamo a Cambridge l'Accademia dei tempi moderni, forse l'ultima della storia, dove ci si batteva per mandare in cattedra i propri avversari filosofici, nella pura persuasione del loro valore intellettuale. Nella sua villa sulle pendici dei colli fiorentini, dove sono andato a rallegrarmi con Michele Ranchetti per questa perla, regna l'austerita' quasi mnacale dello studioso mitteleuropeo d'altri tempi. Parliamo di Wittgenstein, della sua sin qui sconosciuta passione per la medicina, del suo viaggio in Unione Sovietica nel 1935, della sua abilita' nel gestire le cospicue fortune finanziarie della famiglia. Dal giardino di villa Ranchetti ci osserva perplesso un puledro bianco la cui cavezza e' legata a un olivo. Creatura incongrua e nobile, fuori luogo e fuori tempo, proprio come Wittgenstein e come lo stesso Ranchetti. Di certe cose si sta perdendo perfino lo stampo. Mentre il professore dialoga con gli scritti minori di Lutero e Melantone, a un tiro di sasso da li' giunge l'eco della canea transistorizzata e lo stridere delle gomme. Ne' il professore, ne' il cavallo bianco sembrano curarsene.
- S come cultura, Massimo Piattelli Palmarini
"The student took back the book and blushed proudly. What Goethe had written to a woman unknown to him waws beautiful and sad, yearning and sensual, lively and wise, and the student was certain that such beautiful words had never been addressed to any woman. He thought of Kristyna and desired her infinitely. Poetry had cast a cloak woven of the most sublime words over her clothes. She had been turned into a queen."
- The book of laughter and forgetting, Milan Kundera
"The assasination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh cause Allende to be forgotten. The din of war in the Sinai desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, unitl every one has completely forgotten everything.
At a time when history still made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven in a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale, but an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the overfamiliar banality of private life"
- The book of laughter and forgetting, Milan Kundera
"Some researchers in the US (Houston and Davis) have taken all the (US) supreme court rulings and connected them into a net of something like 30,000 rulings made since the 18th century. Each ruling is linked to others that cite it or that are cited in it.
It turns out that the busiest hubs in this juridical map are rulings dealing with the interpretation of the first amendement (freedom of speech and religion). Apparently such a (seemingly) natural thing as freedom of speech and religion cannot just be stated in a Country's constitution, but has to be defended from the Country's own citizens more often than any other.
What the study also found is that the number of citations per year (citations of sup. court rulings, by sup. court judges) will greatly vary when the political wind changes within the supreme court.
For example... after a slow start in the 18th century, the number of citations started climbing in the 19th century to an average of 15 citations/ruling (ca. 1950). Between 1953 and 1969 the trend reversed when an apparently more liberal Justice Chief served (Earl Warren). Later on, when the supreme court turned to the right, again the number of citations/ruling, which had started to increase, plunged in an attempt of the new conservative court to forget the liberal period and move on."
- The Economist
"I heard that in the US 75% of the total health care costs are spent in the last month of life. it would seem that prolonging life at all costs isn't really a great use of our resources. But then again, if you could gain a month of your mother's life..."
"Do you know the expression... when the sh.. hits the fan?
Well, it turns out that hippos mark their territory with their crap and not the usual drop of urine. To optimize the process and gain a few squared meters of territory, hippos spin around at high speed their short tail while in the process of expelling their things... as I said, when the shit hits the fan :)"
"In Queensland, Australia, there is this frog that, after the eggs have been fertilised, swallows them (the female does) and manages to switch off the production of gastric juices. Once the babies are ready to hatch, the mother opens her mouth and the little frogs jump out. now, that's being protective... and the mother won't gain an ounce during the gestation :)"
"Even better (in a sense) the female stick insects: they can reproduce without any need for the male at all... I wonder if and why there are any male stick insects around at all?"
"The seahorse might be the most feminist creature: the female produces the egg and then hands it to the male that has to fertilise and take care of them until the baby hatches."
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