Matins

¶ At The Morning News, Michael Dacroz compiles an Internet reading list as an admirably suitable memorial to Tony Judt, who died the other day, at 62, of ALS.

I think there’s great value in understanding the perspective of someone who’s seen combat (in the Seven Day war), experienced a debilitating disease, and spent his career trying to understand the failure of the left. If he can sustain optimism, not become cynical in spite of all that, and go on to propose a huge reimagining of what a fair society should look like, then I think he deserves our attention for longer than we’ll spend reading his obituary. Which I why I just brought his book “Ill Fares The Land.”

— A New York profile is full of juicy quotes and Judt offers an apt one to close:

The meaning of our life…is only incorporated in the way other people feel about us. Once I die, my life will acquire meaning in the way they see whatever it is I did, for them, for the world, the people I’ve known.

There you have Tony Judt, fairly confident of being remembered, but aware that it will be in that rememberance that his life acquires its meaning. Might we propose, as Judt’s Law, that “the meaning of (your) life is none of your business.”

Lauds

¶ At City of Sound, Dan Hill shares his notes of the World Design Conference  that he attended in Beijing almost a year ago. At the beginning of his multi-part account, he tells us why it took so long to publish it.

I was in Beijing for the first time, for the World Design Congress conference – where I was a speaker on Tuesday and a panellist on Wednesday – and to launch the aforementioned ‘Designing Creative Clusters’ project. It’s my first visit of any significance to China and as usual I’m fascinated by a new city, a new map, but this is something else, as if I’d been waiting for years to experience this first hand (in truth, I had.) The flurry of thoughts and observations is proving almost impossible to pin down – and new reflections keep emerging, weeks later – so as usual please excuse the impressionistic jottings. This one is organised in broadly chronological order.

I’m also conscious of a note at the beginning of Thomas J. Campanella’s book The Concrete Dragon, regarding visiting academics “discovering” China.

Upon his first visit, the scholar is ready to write a book; after visiting a second time, he decides to settle for an article. By the third visit, our erstwhile academic realizes he knows next to nothing about China, and had better keep his mouth shut.

This is probably the first visit of three for this research project alone, and unfortunately I have new publishing platforms such as this at my disposal, so here goes. (NB. Re-reading this, months later, and a visit to Hong Kong and Shanghai later, I think Campanella’s anecdote is right, in that I already wouldn’t write in the same way about China. But this is the nature of first impressions, after all.)

Prime

¶ At the Opinionator, Allison Areff notes that the strange American practice of choosing a home for its resale value is waning, along with the idea of moving up to something bigger and better with every promotion/pay raise. What stands in the way can only be called regulatory prejudice. (NYT)

The 2009 Builder/American Lives New Home Shopper Survey showed a trend toward smaller house size in 2010. The “unprecedented housing bust, which brought about the largest loss of home equity in history,” the magazine reported, “has fostered fundamental attitudinal changes in new-home prospects…. The desire for a McMansion seems to have been supplanted by the desire for a more responsible home.”

People still want amenities, that same survey suggests, but they also want energy-efficient heating and cooling. Yet the status quo makes such greener options hard to come by: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently announced a decision to block green financing projects in California, for example, making solar and other energy efficiency projects nearly impossible to achieve. The state is suing to overturn the decision.

Perhaps recognizing that they’ll be staying in their homes longer, buyers are starting to look for universal design, ranging from wheelchair-accessible bathrooms to single-story homes — options that will allow them to “age in place” — in other words, move into a home they can grow old in. They want accessory dwellings (a k a granny flats) to accommodate rising numbers children moving home after college and aging parents needing care. So far, the market isn’t offering many of these, a lack one can chalk up somewhat to inertia but also to legitimate obstacles ranging from zoning and code restrictions to difficulties with financing.

Housing, like many econimic activities, needs to be seen less as a business and more as an amenity.

Tierce

¶ First, the dish: Razib Khan doesn’t appear to like Jonah Lehrer, whom he entitles “the boy-king of the cognitive neuroscience blogosphere.” We hope that this resentful animus is strictly personal, and not a byproduct of different enlistements (Wired Science in MrLehrer’s case; Discover for Mr Khan).

Not that there appears to be a substantive disagreement in their responses to the entry at Neurocritic that’s the reason why, er, we’re here.

The latest search for genetic variants that underlie differences in personality traits has drawn a blank (Verweij et al., 2010). The researchers conducted a genome-wide association study using personality ratings from Cloninger’s temperament scales in a population of 5,117 Australian individuals:

Participants’ scores on Harm Avoidance, Novelty Seeking, Reward Dependence, and Persistence were tested for association with 1,252,387 genetic markers. We also performed gene-based association tests and biological pathway analyses. No genetic variants that significantly contribute to personality variation were identified, while our sample provides over 90% power to detect variants that explain only 1% of the trait variance. This indicates that individual common genetic variants of this size or greater do not contribute to personality trait variation, which has important implications regarding the genetic architecture of personality and the evolutionary mechanisms by which heritable variation is maintained.

We like the way Jonah Lehrer puts it at the end of his piece.

We’re trying to find the genes for personality constructs that don’t exist. It’s not that people don’t have personalities, or that these personalities can’t be measured – it’s that we aren’t the same person in every situation, which is what all these “tests” implicitly assume. It turns out that Shakespeare had it right all along. Just look at Hamlet – the Danish prince wouldn’t fit neatly into the categories of Myers-Briggs. He’s brooding and melancholy in one scene, and then violent and impulsive in the next. But this doesn’t seem strange to the audience. Instead, the inconsistency of Hamlet seems all too human.

We would go a bit further: we don’t believe that the language of humanist psychology — and the metrics, such as the Meyers-Briggs test, that have been built with it — corresponds with useful precision to neuronal events in the brain. It is, instead, a language of speculative ignorance.

Sext

¶ Thanks to Nige, we’ve come across a new blog, The Dabbler, and learned-something-new-every-day, in this case, about the “British Israelite movement” — don’t try to guess what that was! Frank Key reprints a supplicating letter (a true de profundis) written in Buffalo in the late Eighteen Eighties.

I am in great distress and know not my future. My failure is in Buffalo. I have been here so long because I have no money to move away. I have been evicted and have lost all my clothes and goods, am destitute, a stranger in a strange land, friendless, helpless and hopeless; have not had a full meal for a month, am dirty, ragged and in tatters; precisely in the condition that Joshua might be expected to be in, and do not know at all what is to become of me – all seems dark. I am aged, have grown infirm, and badly ruptured with always a swimming in my head. Walk about the streets ready to fall, inclined to think my mission in life has ended, and that this is my last letter… People at home have been secretly working against me. I am too honest to steal, too proud to beg, too old to work, and have no trade at my hands.

We are grateful that “swimming in the head” has not figured among our limited tribulations.

Nones

¶ Jon Lee Anderson’s report from Iran (in The New Yorker) prompts thoughts about the futility of middle-class revolutions. No one ever quite comes out and says so, but it seems to us fairly clear that the regime’s popular, almost semi-official Basiji militias are engaged in a class war against their “betters.”

Some analysts interpret this as part of Mousavi’s continuing attempt to present himself as an unflinching nationalist, in the hope of retaining influence in the reformist movement. But the Iran expert told me that, in the absence of strong leadership, the movement was splintering. He explained, “The Green Movement was made up of different kinds of people: those who hated the regime, those who were offended by the election fraud, and those who joined because they were offended by the treatment of the prisoners. Eventually, they began to separate out.”

One Iranian, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his safety, described the movement’s status. “Despotism works,” he said. “That’s what this situation shows. The reformist movement is over. The middle classes aren’t willing to die en masse, and the regime knows this. It has killed and punished just enough people to send the message of what it is capable of doing. The reformist leaders and the regime have a kind of unspoken pact: ‘Don’t organize any more demonstrations or say anything and we’ll leave you alone. Do anything and we’ll arrest you.’ It’s over.”

But the members of the movement I spoke to have not changed their sympathies. In Tehran, I was invited to watch a televised soccer match in the home of an Iranian family. During a break in the action, someone mentioned that I had interviewed President Ahmadinejad that week. One of my hosts, a professional woman in her thirties, immediately put two fingers into her mouth and bent over in a pantomime of gagging. “Oh, how I hate him,” she said. “He makes my skin crawl. He is the worst kind of Iranian; he offends our dignity and our sense of ethics, and the worst thing is he thinks he is so clever.” The mere mention of his name, she said, made her feel depressed. In the crackdown that has followed last year’s unrest, she added, many of her friends and acquaintances—mostly other educated young professionals, of the sort that overwhelmingly supported the Green Movement—had fled the country, or were planning to. She did not plan to emigrate, but she understood the urge to do so. “The frustration is almost too great to bear. People feel so robbed, and their dignity and hopes are so offended. Every day, it is so painful. It hurts. This feeling will not just go away. The Green Movement represents this feeling, and it can’t just disappear. Somehow, maybe in another shape, it has to reëmerge.”

¶ A brief and jaunty encounter with Carl Hiaasen, whose latest entertainment, Star Island, has just come out. James Adams at the Globe and Mail (via  Arts Journal)

With the exception of his three novels for children and a smattering of non-fiction, most of Hiaasen’s oeuvre can be found in the crime or mystery fiction section of your favourite bookstore, racked like so many boxes of brand detergent in bright, candy-coloured covers. Yet it’s a berth Hiaasen finds rather, well . . . mysterious.

“My books are character-driven. They’re not driven by the story,” he explained. “There’s not this precise, linear plotting . . . And there’s no mystery really. If anything, the mystery is how are these people going to get out of this fix or end up.”

In the late 1980s, Hiaasen’s editor at Random House pressured the writer to take a character from his third novel, Skin Tight — a state’s attorney investigator — and hook all his future novels around the investigator’s exploits. Hiaasen begged off becoming a serialist, even though, sipping a big glass of Coca-Cola, he acknowledged it likely would have “made an easier road.”

But, as Mr Hiaasen doesn’t need to tell usw, he gets “bored so easily.”

Compline

¶ We don’t hear much about “cybernetics” anymore, possibly — it occurs to us this afternoon, reading Jaron Lanier’s Op-Ed piece, “The First Church of Robotics” — because the relationship between humanity and machinery implicit in that term has been reversed, so that “technology” is now the grander term, the source of metaphor for human cognition. Some old farts might find in this a worrying development, but we think, along with Mr Lanier, that it’s mostly froth. (NYT)

What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.

In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial — real thought and creativity — takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.

A devaluation — but of course not a termination.

Have a Look

¶  Mig goes to Paris. (Metamorphosism)

¶ “Doing the Reactionary“: Barbra Streisand sings Harold Rome’s 1937 tongue-in-cheek novelty dance item. Thing is, she sounds as though she were singing in 1937. (via MetaFilter)

¶ “Ceremonial Esophagus — $40” (You Suck at Craigslist)

Kevin Nguyen’s “Domestic Conflict, Explained By Stock Photos” (The Bygone Bureau)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 10:30 am.