From a Washington Post piece by Sarah Kliff that charts the things that kill us now as opposed to 200 years ago, a passage about the 1812 New England Journal of Medicine worrying over death by cannonball and sponteous combustion:
“Doctors agreed that even a near miss by a cannonball — without contact — could shatter bones, blind people, or even kill them. Reports of spontaneous combustion, especially of ‘brandy-drinking men and women,’ received serious, if skeptical, consideration. And physicians were obsessed with fevers — puerperal, petechial, catarrhal, and even an outbreak of ‘spotted fever’ in which some patients were neither spotted nor febrile.”
In a smart NPR post, Amanda Katz wonders what the advent of e-books will mean to the generational passing down of volumes, using as an example a boyhood copy of War of the Worlds owned by pioneering rocketeer Robert Goddard. The opening:
“In 1898, a man bought a book for his 16-year-old nephew. ‘Many happy retoins [sic]. Uncle Spud,’ he wrote on a blank page at the front.
The book: H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, then just out in America from Harper & Brothers.The ripping tale of a Martian attack that set the mold for them all, it’s almost more striking to a reader today for its turn-of-the-century detail: carriage-horse accidents, urgent telegrams, news only via newspapers. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator gets ahold of a first post-attack copy of the Daily Mail: ‘I learned nothing fresh except that already in one week the examination of the Martian mechanisms had yielded astonishing results. Among other things, the article assured me what I did not believe at the time, that the ‘Secret of Flying’ was discovered.’
This was, of course, science fiction. But it was also prophetic. Uncle Spud’s teenage nephew — who stamped his name on the first page of the novel and read it religiously once a year — would himself go on to discover many secrets of flying. That nephew was Robert Hutchings Goddard, inventor of the liquid-fuel rocket.” (Thanks Browser.)
At the BBC site, Adam Curtis has an epic post about the history of counterinsurgency, which includes a sketch of Jack Idema, a North Carolina pet-hotel operator who became a self-styled terrorist hunter in Afghanistan. An excerpt:
“But then Jack Idema started to believe his own stories. He set up his own militia group that he called Task Force Sabre Seven – and he and his men went and arrested Afghans they were convinced were terrorists. And then he locked them up in his own private prison.
Things got out of hand in June 2004 when Idema arrested the Afghan Supreme Court judge, Maulawi Siddiqullah, because he believed he might be involved with terrorists. The judge later described what it was like in Idema’s prison:
‘The first night, around midnight, I heard the screams of four people. They then poured very cold water on me. I tried to keep myself from screaming, but coudn’t. Then they played loud, strange music. Then they prevented me from going to the bathroom; a terrible situation. I was hooded for twelve days.’
In July Afghan police raided Idema’s house in Kabul and found what was described as a private torture chamber. Eight hooded men, including the judge, were incarcerated there, and three of them were hanging by their feet from the ceiling, with their heads hooded.
Idema and two others were put on trial – and sentenced to ten years in an Afghan jail. And all the journalists puffed a lot about how persuasive he had been.
Here is Idema during the trial – still trying to persuade the journalists that he is what he said he was. And how he is being set up by dark sinister forces.
But what is also interesting about Jack Idema is that in a strange way he may have been ahead of his time.
Because at the moment that Idema was entering his Afghan prison, a group of very senior US military men, led by a General called David Petraeus, were sitting down in a military staff college in Kansas and beginning to write a study that would completely transform the tactics of the US army in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
What General Petraeus and his team did was to go back into the past and exhume a theory of warfare that had been discredited by the US military who thought it was long buried and forgotten. It was called Counterinsurgency.
And out of that would allegedly come the same kind of arms-length, privatised interrogation and torture methods that Idema was indulging in.”
Iris scans are only the start of the souped-up technology at Dallas’ Love Field airport, which aims to make check-in a paperless, stopless process. From USA Today:
“At a terminal being renovated here at Love Field, contractors are installing 500 high-definition security cameras sharp enough to read an auto license plate or a logo on a shirt.
The cameras, capable of tracking passengers from the parking garage to gates to the tarmac, are a key first step in creating what the airline industry would like to see at airports worldwide: a security apparatus that would scrutinize passengers more thoroughly, but less intrusively, and in faster fashion than now.
It’s part of what the International Air Transport Association, or IATA, which represents airlines globally, calls ‘the checkpoint of the future.’
‘The goal is for fliers to move almost non-stop through security from the curb to the gate, in contrast to repeated security stops and logjams at checkpoints.'”
••••••••••
President Kennedy and the First Lady arrive at Love Field, November 22, 1963, less than an hour before he was assassinated.
“Between 1903 and 1933 the world was revolutionized: Cities were electrified; telephones and broadcast radio became common; talking motion pictures appeared; automobiles became practical; and aviation progressed from the Wright Flyer to the DC-3 and Hawker Hurricane. Between 1933 and 1963 the world changed again, with the introduction of color television, communication satellites and interplanetary spacecraft, computers, antibiotics, scuba gear, nuclear power, Atlas, Titan, and Saturn rockets, Boeing 727’s and SR-71’s. Compared to these changes, the technological innovations from 1963 to the present are insignificant. Immense changes should have occurred during this period, but did not. Had we been following the previous 60 years’ technological trajectory, we today would have videotelephones, solar powered cars, maglev trains, fusion reactors, hypersonic intercontinental travel, regular passenger transportation to orbit, undersea cities, open-sea mariculture and human settlements on the Moon and Mars. Instead, today we see important technological developments, such as nuclear power and biotechnology, being blocked or enmeshed in political controversy — we are slowing down.”
From “If They Could Only Talk,” Hannah Bloch’s new National Geographic article about the elemental questions we need to ask about Easter Island:
“Easter Island covers just 63 square miles. It lies 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east of Pitcairn, its nearest inhabited neighbor. After it was settled, it remained isolated for centuries. All the energy and resources that went into the moai—which range in height from four to 33 feet and in weight to more than 80 tons—came from the island itself. Yet when Dutch explorers landed on Easter Sunday in 1722, they met a Stone Age culture. The moai were carved with stone tools, mostly in a single quarry, then transported without draft animals or wheels to massive stone platforms, or ahu, up to 11 miles away. Tuki’s question—how did they do it?—has vexed legions of visitors in the past half century.
But lately the moai have been drawn into a larger debate, one that opposes two distinct visions of Easter Island’s past—and of humanity in general. The first, eloquently expounded by Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond, presents the island as a cautionary parable: the most extreme case of a society wantonly destroying itself by wrecking its environment. Can the whole planet, Diamond asks, avoid the same fate? In the other view, the ancient Rapanui are uplifting emblems of human resilience and ingenuity—one example being their ability to walk giant statues upright across miles of uneven terrain.”
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Leonard Nimoy applies his spooky gravitas to Easter Island, 1977:
“Neiman began his art career in sewing rooms, as a fashion illustrator for designers like Yves St. Laurent. His work appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Bride’s Magazine. Over the years, through persistence and the cultivation of a highly distinctive style—he is known as ‘a flamboyant colorist’—he became a personality as gaudy as those he portrays. In fact, at a poor showing of the New York Jets one Sunday in Shea Stadium, fans began to yell, ‘Put LeRoy in!’ Often, Neiman’s mere presence at an event overshadows it and the work he produces there. Such status now brings him as much as $25,000 for a painting. He is best known for his sporting canvases and lithographs.
‘LeRoy has style,’ said a publisher of coffee-table books-while sipping a drink at 21. ‘He discovered it 10 years ago and it’s made him a lot of money. He’s a very wealthy man you know, extremely. He has some beautiful suits. Still, I don’t think he’s put his soul into a painting in 10 years.’
At 44, Neiman has a lion’s mane of lustrous black hair, a surprisingly wispy, up-curled mustache and pale, puffy good looks. Perpetually clamped between his teeth or propped between his fingers is a long, thin cigar the length of an artist’s paintbrush. Maddeningly, the cigar never seems to diminish. Like plastic firewood, it appears to be an electronic prop that never sheds an ash.
Neiman’s friend and mentor, Salvador Dali, is also a believer in image-making props and elaborate mustaches, and, like Dali, Neiman has been accused by critics of expending more energy on the creation of his public character than on his art.”
Eugene Selznick, who just passed away, was one of the fathers of American volleyball and no slouch at ballyhoo, either. He recruited basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain to play on a tour in the early 1970s, which helped further popularize the game and make it an Olympic sport. An excerpt fromSelznick’s New York Times obituary, which was written by Paul Vitello:
“Chamberlain, the 7-foot-1 N.B.A. star, was near the end of his basketball career in the early 1970s when he took up beach volleyball to help rehabilitate his battered body. Selznick proceeded to cajole Chamberlain into joining him and other top players for a nationwide exhibition tour in the summer of 1973, the year he retired from basketball.
The publicity generated by the Chamberlain tour, as it was known, brought a new generation to volleyball and laid the groundwork for a boom in popularity that began in the ’80s. Beach volleyball became an official Olympic sport in 1996. Selznick coached the men’s Olympic beach volleyball team of Sinjin Smith and Carl Henkel to a fifth-place finish in Atlanta in 1996, and the women’s Olympic team of May-Treanor and McPeak to fifth place in Sydney in 2000.”
••••••••••
Home-movie footage from the Chamberlain-Selznick tour.
Chamberlain visits Ed Sullivan after scoring 100 points in a game, 1962.
From Alexis Madrigal’s new Atlantic article about Facebook’s attempt to govern its “nation” of users, a succinct description of the origins of technocracy:
“The original technocrats were a group of thinkers and engineers in the 1930s who revived Plato’s dream of the philosopher-king, but with a machine-age spin. Led by Thorstein Veblen, Howard Scott and M. King Hubbert, they advocated not rule by the people or the monarchy or the dictator, but by the engineers. The engineers and scientists would rule rationally and impartially. They would create a Technocracy that functioned like clockwork and ensured the productivity of all was efficiently distributed. They worked out a whole system by which the North American continent would be ruled with functional sequences that would allow the Continental Director to get things done.
Technocracy, as originally conceived, was explicitly not democratic. Its proponents did not want popular rule; they wanted rule by a knowledgeable elite who would make good decisions. And maybe they would have, but there was one big problem. Few people found the general vision of surrendering their political power to engineers all that appealing.”
Steven Pinker has an essay Edge in which he counters evolutionary scientists who support group selection theory. The opening:
“Human beings live in groups, are affected by the fortunes of their groups, and sometimes make sacrifices that benefit their groups. Does this mean that the human brain has been shaped by natural selection to promote the welfare of the group in competition with other groups, even when it damages the welfare of the person and his or her kin? If so, does the theory of natural selection have to be revamped to designate ‘groups’ as units of selection, analogous to the role played in the theory by genes?
Several scientists whom I greatly respect have said so in prominent places. And they have gone on to use the theory of group selection to make eye-opening claims about the human condition. They have claimed that human morailty, particularly our willingness to engage in acts of altruism, can be explained as an adaptation to group-against-group competition. As E. O. Wilson explains, “In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals.” They have proposed that group selection can explain the mystery of religion, because a shared belief in supernatural beings can foster group cohesion. They suggest that evolution has equipped humans to solve tragedies of the commons (also known as collective action dilemmas and public goods games), in which actions that benefit the individual may harm the community; familiar examples include overfishing, highway congestion, tax evasion, and carbon emissions. And they have drawn normative moral and political conclusions from these scientific beliefs, such as that we should recognize the wisdom behind conservative values, like religiosity, patriotism, and puritanism, and that we should valorize a communitarian loyalty and sacrifice for the good of the group over an every-man-for-himself individualism.
I am often asked whether I agree with the new group selectionists, and the questioners are always surprised when I say I do not.”
“Burtynsky: I love the tones of browns and grays—I love more neutral tones. That’s why I like going to the desert and working in the desert. I find that green trees and things like that have a tendency to lock us into a certain way of seeing. When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don’t know how to make an interesting picture of that. We’re familiar with that already.
Instead, I like the transparency that comes when leaves are off and you can look deeper into the landscape—you can look through the landscape. When I did try to make those kind of green-tree/sunny-day pictures, I’d find myself not ever putting them up and not ever using them. Eventually, I just said, well, I’m not going to take them anymore, because they never make it past the edit.
There’s a certain point where you learn from your own editing. You just stop taking certain pictures because they never make it through. Your editing starts to inform your thinking, as far as where you want to go and what you want to look for when you’re making a photograph.
That what’s different about me after thirty years of doing this kind of work—there are a lot of pictures I don’t have to take anymore. I think that’s called wisdom—learning what not to waste your time on!”
John Cook and Hamilton Nolan are consistently good reads at Gawker. The former can sometimes be extreme–his takedown of Mike Wallace went too far, I think–but even in his excess a lot can be learned. Here’s the opening of Cook’s reconsideration of those Watergate wonders Woodward and Bernstein:
“Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigation into the origins of the Watergate break-in—which took place 40 years ago yesterday—is one of the most highly mythologized episodes in the history of journalism. It represents the Platonic ideal of what journalism-with-a-capital-J ought to be, at least according to its high priesthood—sober, careful young men doggedly following the story wherever it leads and holding power to account, without fear or favor. It was also a sloppy, ethically dubious project the details of which would mortify any of the smug high priests of journalism that flourished in its wake. The actual Watergate investigation could never have survived the legacy it helped create.”
Product development is endlessly fascinating and nothing amuses more than truly terrible products that were brought to the market. A lot of very intelligent people thought they sounded like good ideas at the time. Or maybe they were initially good ideas that just got away from them. From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian article about his recent visit to a storehouse of failed consumer products in Ann Arbor:
“This is consumer capitalism’s graveyard – the shadow side to the relentlessly upbeat, success-focused culture of modern marketing. Or to put it less grandly: it’s almost certainly the only place on the planet where you’ll find Clairol’s A Touch of Yogurt shampoo alongside Gillette’s equally unpopular For Oily Hair Only, a few feet from a now-empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum is home to discontinued brands of caffeinated beer; to TV dinners branded with the logo of the toothpaste manufacturer Colgate; to self-heating soup cans that had a regrettable tendency to explode in customers’ faces; and to packets of breath mints that had to be withdrawn from sale because they looked like the tiny packages of crack cocaine dispensed by America’s street drug dealers. It is where microwaveable scrambled eggs – pre-scrambled and sold in a cardboard tube with a pop-up mechanism for easier consumption in the car – go to die.
There is a Japanese term, mono no aware, that translates roughly as ‘the pathos of things’: it captures a kind of bittersweet melancholy at life’s impermanence – that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, say, or human features, as a result of their inevitably fleeting time on Earth. It’s only stretching the concept slightly to suggest that this is how the museum’s proprietor, an understatedly stylish GfK employee named Carol Sherry, feels about the cartons of Morning Banana Juice in her care, or about Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs. Every failure, the way she sees it, embodies its own sad story on the part of designers, marketers and salespeople. It is never far from her mind that real people had their mortgages, their car payments and their family holidays riding on the success of products such as A Touch of Yogurt.” (Thanks Browser.)
This horrifying classic photograph was taken sometime during May 1871, when members of the failed Paris Commune uprising were executed en masse. An estimated 20,000 Communards faced the firing squad and thousands more were jailed or deported. The heady two months of Socialist rebellion ended with scores of lifeless citizens who resembled broken dolls returned to their boxes. From an eyewitness account of a triple execution of revolutionaries who had been convicted of murder, which first appeared in the London Daily Telegraph and wasreprinted in the New York Timeson June 10, 1872:
“The priest, going up to each in turn, kissed him on both cheeks, in what seemed to me a hurried and perfunctory manner. Then, while the sentence was being read to the prisoners in a quick, low, quite inaudible tone, BOIN made a long harangue, much of which was lost in the perpetual rolling of those ghastly drums. But one could distinguish snatches of sentences such as ‘Soldiers, you are children of the people as we are, and we will show you how children of the people can die. Nous mourons innocents,’ and then opening wide his light coat–he wore no waistcoat–he offered white shirt-front for a mark, and striking his heart with his open palm, he exclaimed: ‘Portez armes en joue! feu! tirez au coeur!’ This he repeated several times, and while he was yet speaking, standing out clear away from the poteaux, and looking death at ten paces literally in the face, a sword flashed in the sun, and the three men leaped from the ground only to fall to it in horrible contortions. The smoke and the report were unheeded, for all the senses of the horrified spectator were arrested by the awful spectacle of writhing limbs and twisting hands. BOIN seemed to be rewarded for his bravery by suffering less than the others, but SERIZIER literally rolled over, and BOUDIN also moved. The surgeon then went up, examined BOUDIN first, and then directed one of the sergeants in reserve to give the coup de grace in the ear. Then SERIZIER was examined and treated in the same way; and lastly, after a considerable interval, BOIN was dragged into position and dispatched. I cannot give you any idea of the sickening impression produced by this seemingly deliberate butchery. I can say seemingly, for the men may have been dead, but, in any case, surely if the coup de grace must be given, it should be done at once. I did not time the proceedings, but, long as my description is, I believe not more than two minutes elapsed from the time that the ambulance wagons came on to the ground to the time that the volley was fired. Several more minutes, however, elapsed before the dull thud of the last coup de grace delivered a bout pontant right into the poor wretch’s ear stuck upon the ground. I have seen something of the horrors of war at Sedan and Strasbourg; I have witnessed the degradation of a public hanging in England, but have never seen anything so horrible as this supplemental butchery of the coup de grace.“
“This is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.” (Image by Gerhard Boeggemann.)
From “In the Air,”‘ Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 New Yorker assault on the Great Man Theory, a thumbnail portrait of Nathan Myhrvold, a legend at Microsoft, a company that didn’t exactly have original ideas:
“Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions. He is obsessed with aperiodic tile patterns. (Imagine a floor tiled in a pattern that never repeats.) When Myhrvold built his own house, on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—a vast, silvery hypermodernist structure described by his wife as the place in the sci-fi movie where the aliens live—he embedded some sixty aperiodic patterns in the walls, floors, and ceilings. His front garden is planted entirely with vegetation from the Mesozoic era. (‘If the Jurassic Park thing happens,’ he says, ‘this is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.’) One of the scholarly achievements he is proudest of is a paper he co-wrote proving that it was theoretically possible for sauropods—his favorite kind of dinosaur—to have snapped their tails back and forth faster than the speed of sound.”
I exercise all over the city and the demographic most actively involved in athletics seems to be women in their 20s. That wasn’t always the case. Title IX, the Nike “If You Let Me Play” campaign and the women’s World Cup soccer victory in 2009 really changed hearts and minds, and sports bras became omnipresent. But Title IX was easily the most important factor of all. From Allen Barra’s “Female Athletes, Thank Nixon,” a smart New York Times opinion piece about arguably the most Liberal American President of the last 40 years, who did some very progressive things when not busy being a paranoid nutjob:
“Nixon did leave some legacies that may outlast the memory of Watergate. Historians have argued that he did a great deal to desegregate Southern schools; that he defied the conservatives in his party to open relations with China; and that he had a good record on the environment. Significantly, he brought women into the world of sports, through the portion of the 1972 Education Amendments better known as Title IX, whose 40th anniversary is celebrated on June 23.
But maybe because Nixon is, well, Nixon, there seems to be a concerted effort to separate the memory of the man from Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally financed education programs.
For instance, the ESPN Web site is running a tribute to the amendment called The Power of IX, which it praises as ‘a law whose ripple effects extend far beyond the U.S., creating a women’s sports culture awash in opportunity.’ But there is no word of praise to be found for the man who created the opportunity for the opportunities.
It’s hard to exaggerate the far-reaching effect of Title IX on American society.”
••••••••••
Criticized initially for its pleading tone, the 1995 Wieden & Kennedy “If You Let Me Play” campaign was ultimately an empowering statement that allowed Nike to turn a secondary market into a primary one.
From “Dorothy, It’s Really Oz,” the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s 1999 essay about that stubborn foolishness Creationism, which has since morphed into the idiocy known as Intelligent Design:
“In the early 1920s, several states simply forbade the teaching of evolution outright, opening an epoch that inspired the infamous 1925 Scopes trial (leading to the conviction of a Tennessee high school teacher) and that ended only in 1968, when the Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. In a second round in the late 1970s, Arkansas and Louisiana required that if evolution be taught, equal time must be given to Genesis literalism, masquerading as oxymoronic ‘creation science.’ The Supreme Court likewise rejected those laws in 1987.
The Kansas decision represents creationism’s first—and surely temporary—success with a third strategy for subverting a constitutional imperative: that by simply deleting, but not formally banning, evolution, and by not demanding instruction in a biblically literalist ‘alternative,’ their narrowly partisan religious motivations might not derail their goals.
Given this protracted struggle, Americans of goodwill might be excused for supposing that some genuine scientific or philosophical dispute motivates this issue: Is evolution speculative and ill founded? Does evolution threaten our ethical values or our sense of life’s meaning? As a paleontologist by training, and with abiding respect for religious traditions, I would raise three points to alleviate these worries:
First, no other Western nation has endured any similar movement, with any political clout, against evolution—a subject taught as fundamental, and without dispute, in all other countries that share our major sociocultural traditions.
Second, evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth’s revolution around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a ‘fact.’ (Science does not deal in certainty, so ‘fact’ can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse to withhold one’s provisional assent.)
The major argument advanced by the school board—that large-scale evolution must be dubious because the process has not been directly observed—smacks of absurdity and only reveals ignorance about the nature of science. Good science integrates observation with inference. No process that unfolds over such long stretches of time (mostly, in this case, before humans appeared), or at an infinitude beneath our powers of direct visualization (subatomic particles, for example), can be seen directly. If justification required eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time—no geology, no ancient human history either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard bony evidence for human evolution, as described in the preceding pages, surely exceeds our reliable documentation of Caesar’s life.)
Third, no factual discovery of science (statements about how nature ‘is’) can, in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we ‘ought’ to behave) or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the ‘purpose’ of our lives). These last two questions—and what more important inquiries could we make?—lie firmly in the domains of religion, philosophy and humanistic study. Science and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different way.”
••••••••••
Gould disccuses evolution in 2000 with that affable dinosaur Charlie Rose:
After I came to America, I became a friend of Immanuel Velikovsky, who was my neighbor in Princeton. Velikovsky was a Russian Jew, with an intense interest in Jewish legends and ancient history. He was born into a scholarly family in 1895 and obtained a medical degree at Moscow University in 1921. During the chaos of the Bolshevik Revolution he wrote a long Russian poem with the title “Thirty Days and Nights of Diego Pirez on the Sant Angelo Bridge.” It was published in Paris in 1935. Diego Pirez was a sixteenth-century Portuguese Jewish mystic who came to Rome and sat on the bridge near the Vatican, surrounded by beggars and thieves to whom he told his apocalyptic visions. He was condemned to death by the Inquisition, pardoned by the pope, and later burned as a heretic by the emperor Charles V.
Velikovsky escaped from Russia and settled in Palestine with his wife and daughters. He described to me the joys of practicing medicine on the slopes of Mount Carmel above Haifa, where he rode on a donkey to visit his patients in their homes. He founded and edited a journal, Scripta Universitatis atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum, which was the official journal of the Hebrew University before the university was established. His work for the Scripta was important for the founding of the Hebrew University. But he had no wish to join the university himself. To fulfill his dreams he needed complete independence. In 1939, after sixteen years in Palestine, he moved to America, where he had no license to practice medicine. To survive in America, he needed to translate his dreams into books.
Eleven years later, Macmillan published Worlds in Collision, and it became a best seller. Like Diego Pirez, Velikovsky told his dreams to the public in language they could understand. His dreams were mythological stories of catastrophic events, gleaned from many cultures, especially from ancient Egypt and Israel. These catastrophes were interwoven with a weird history of planetary collisions. The planets Venus and Mars were supposed to have moved out of their regular orbits and collided with the Earth a few thousand years ago. Electromagnetic forces were invoked to counteract the normal effects of gravity. The human and cosmic events were tied together in a flowing narrative. Velikovsky wrote like an Old Testament prophet, calling down fire and brimstone from heaven, in a style familiar to Americans raised on the King James Bible. More best sellers followed:Ages in Chaos in 1952, Earth in Upheaval in 1955, Oedipus and Akhnaton in 1960. Velikovsky became famous as a writer and as a public speaker.
In 1977 Velikovsky asked me to write a blurb advertising his new book, Peoples of the Sea. I wrote a statement addressed to him personally:
First, as a scientist, I disagree profoundly with many of the statements in your books. Second, as your friend, I disagree even more profoundly with those scientists who have tried to silence your voice. To me, you are no reincarnation of Copernicus or Galileo. You are a prophet in the tradition of William Blake, a man reviled and ridiculed by his contemporaries but now recognized as one of the greatest of English poets. A hundred and seventy years ago, Blake wrote: “The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents and Genius, but whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass and obedient to Noblemen’s Opinions in Art and Science. If he is, he is a Good Man. If not, he must be starved.” So you stand in good company. Blake, a buffoon to his enemies and an embarrassment to his friends, saw Earth and Heaven more clearly than any of them. Your poetic visions are as large as his and as deeply rooted in human experience. I am proud to be numbered among your friends.
I added the emphatic instruction, “This statement to be printed in its entirety or not at all.” A quick response came from Velikovsky. He said, “How would you like it if I said you were the reincarnation of Jules Verne?” He wanted to be honored as a scientist, not as a poet. My statement was not printed, and Peoples of the Sea became a best seller without my help. We remained friends, and in that same year he gave me a copy of his Diego Pirez poem, which I treasure as the truest expression of his spirit. I hope it will one day be adequately translated into English.•
I love dreams, but the great Michael Chabon hates them. The opening of his new essay in the New York Review of Books about unconscious narratives:
“I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.
Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. ‘I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna,’ you begin, ‘only it wasn’t really Lake Michigan…,’ and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.
Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors.”
China, world leader in construction and cancer, is planning to build the tallest edifice on Earth in just 90 days. Pre-fabrication figures into the equation, of course. From CNNGO:
“In an interview with Xinhua, BSB chief executive officer Zhang Yue (张跃) said the company plans to break ground on Sky City in November 2012, and that the tower will be completed in January 2013.
The company is confident the government will green-light the project.
BSB is renowned for its eye-opening construction efficiency. Its portfolio includes assembling a 15-story building in six days in June 2010, and erecting a 30-story hotel in 360 hours in December 2011.
The key to achieving such stunning speed is an innovative construction technique developed by BSB.
Most of the company’s buildings are pieced together with prefabricated components from its factory. In this case, 95 percent of Sky City will be completed before breaking ground.”
The opening of “The Mind Reader,” David Cyranoski’s new Nature article about Adrian Owen, who has developed a method to communicate with patients in vegetative states:
“Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.
Incredibly, he provided answers. A change in blood flow to certain parts of the man’s injured brain convinced Owen that patient 23 was conscious and able to communicate. It was the first time that anyone had exchanged information with someone in a vegetative state.
Patients in these states have emerged from a coma and seem awake. Some parts of their brains function, and they may be able to grind their teeth, grimace or make random eye movements. They also have sleep–wake cycles. But they show no awareness of their surroundings, and doctors have assumed that the parts of the brain needed for cognition, perception, memory and intention are fundamentally damaged. They are usually written off as lost.
Owen’s discovery, reported in 2010, caused a media furor.”
E.O. Wilson thinks war is our genes, though I’ve never felt like going to war with anyone. Perhaps it’s a genetic defect I possess. From the biologist’s new Discover article, “Is War Inevitable?“:
“Once a group has been split off from other groups and sufficiently dehumanized, any brutality can be justified, at any level, and at any size of the victimized group up to and including race and nation. And so it has ever been. A familiar fable is told to symbolize this pitiless dark angel of human nature. A scorpion asks a frog to ferry it across a stream. The frog at first refuses, saying that it fears the scorpion will sting it. The scorpion assures the frog it will do no such thing. After all, it says, we will both perish if I sting you. The frog consents, and halfway across the stream the scorpion stings it. Why did you do that, the frog asks as they both sink beneath the surface. It is my nature, the scorpion explains.
War, often accompanied by genocide, is not a cultural artifact of just a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture. Archaeological sites are strewn with the evidence of mass conflicts and burials of massacred people. Tools from the earliest Neolithic period, about 10,000 years ago, include instruments clearly designed for fighting. One might think that the influence of pacific Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, has been consistent in opposing violence. Such is not the case. Whenever Buddhism dominated and became the official ideology, war was tolerated and even pressed as part of faith-based state policy. The rationale is simple, and has its mirror image in Christianity: Peace, nonviolence, and brotherly love are core values, but a threat to Buddhist law and civilization is an evil that must be defeated.
Since the end of World War II, violent conflict between states has declined drastically, owing in part to the nuclear standoff of the major powers (two scorpions in a bottle writ large). But civil wars, insurgencies, and state-sponsored terrorism continue unabated. Overall, big wars have been replaced around the world by small wars of the kind and magnitude more typical of hunter-gatherer and primitively agricultural societies. Civilized societies have tried to eliminate torture, execution, and the murder of civilians, but those fighting little wars do not comply.”
The opening of “Twilight of the Trucks,” Steven Levy’s new Wired piece about Apple’s further shift from the desk and the lap into the pocket:
“Almost exactly 2 years ago, Steve Jobs outlined his view of personal computing. We used to be an agrarian nation, he explained, and as a result our vehicles were largely trucks. As the country became more urban and suburban, we moved to an era where the highways were dominated by cars, not their lumbering counterparts.
The same thing was happening in the technology world — and, with the iPhone and the iPad, the movement was accelerating. ‘PCs are going be like trucks,’ Jobs said at the 2010 All Things D Conference. ‘They are still going to be around, but only one out of x people will need them.’ Clearly, he didn’t expect the percentage to be a big number.”
“Material and popular culture provided plenty of support for your thesis that the world expected manned flight to magically transform humanity. Please cite some of that colourful evidence for us.
Joseph Corn: ‘An Airplane in Every Garage’ was the name of an article that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1930, a publication for the intellectual elite. During the wind-down of World War II, as the defeat of the Germans and Japanese became obvious in late 1944 and early 1945, Ladies’ Home Journal asked its readers whether they expected to own an airplane and an amazing percentage said yes – 30-odd percent, as I recall, and this was at a time when a far smaller percentage of people had cars. The percentage of people who actually got airplanes was less than 1% at its peak. Planes per population peaked in 1946 and basically it’s been going down ever since.
Remember, America rapidly moved from the development of the Model T to mass automobility by 1915. England didn’t reach the level of car ownership that California had in 1906 until 1956. So people thought, first we had horses and carriages and then we had bicycles and then we had cars and next, soon, it’ll be airplanes. And there was a brief moment after the war when the evidence suggested that the dream of owning an airplane would be within reach of almost anyone. Macy’s Department Store in New York sold airplanes in 1946. One newspaper article reported that the elevator men would call out, ‘Furniture, bed settings and airplanes 5th floor.’. Another bit of evidence of ‘the winged gospel’ – there was a movement, centred at Columbia University Teachers College to push ‘air-age education’ into all schools. Textbooks were written on subjects like ‘air-age English,’ ‘air-age geography’ and ‘air-age mathematics.’ Geography made some sense because the airplane seemed to be shrinking the globe.
…
Perhaps the best evidence were the ritualistic observances that went along with ‘the winged gospel.’ People would go up in airplanes to get married and at least in one case a couple parachuted out to start their honeymoon. One woman in Florida took off with her husband piloting when she was in labour and her obstetrician delivered her baby at 5,000 feet – she named the girl Aero Jean. These little observances are all testimony to the tremendous excitement people had for flight and their tremendous optimism as to how flight was changing the world.”
The central thought experiment from moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous and much-debated 1971 paper, “A Defense of Abortion“:
“But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’ Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. ‘Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.’ I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.”
