Daily Office:
Thursday, 2 September 2010
¶ Just in case you were taking consciousness for granted: Daniel Dennett has called it “the last surviving mystery,” and a glance at the Quantum Consciousness theory of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hamerhoff may leave you un-demystified. (Big Think; via 3 Quarks Daily)
Twelve years ago, Cal Tech professors Christof Koch and Francis Crick put forward the idea that consciousness resides in the brain’s prefrontal cortex; they described where in the brain we experience things when we experience them—but not why we do. In 2009, physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hamerhoff advanced a “quantum mind theory” that took Koch and Crick’s ideas to a deeper, cellular level, suggesting that consciousness is a result of quantum mechanics, with microtubules inside the brain working as computing elements in a system they call “orchestrated objective reduction.” The theory suggests that human consciousness is a result of the wave functions of quantum particles collapsing once they reach specific energy levels. Hamerhoff’s blog, Quantum Consciousness, describes this theory in depth, and details how he and Penrose believe the brain’s neural networks and cells process information that results in consciousness. Critics of the quantum mind theory contend that consciousness is hardly demystified by relating the brain to the rarefied realm of subatomic physics.
¶ At the Guardian, Alistair Smith casts a spotlight on the boom in cruise ship theatre productions. (via Marginal Revolution)
And while you’re unlikely to see Chekhov on the high seas, some of the smaller lines do stage a little drama – Crystal Cruises has previously put on one-woman shows by Lynn Redgrave and Susannah York. There is huge scope for employment for people in the theatre industry on cruise lines and because it’s a profit-making industry – the amount these ships take on their bars alone is quite staggering – the number of openings is steadily growing.
Celebrity, for example, is planning to launch two more of its gigantic luxury ships, each with 1,150-seat theatres and jobs for more than 50 entertainers over the next couple of years. People can be a bit sniffy about working on cruise ships and, to be fair, the performers I spoke to on Celebrity admitted the first time they accepted work on a cruise, they thought it would just be filling in between other jobs. But, they came to love it and now see it as a long-term career choice.
One dancer told me: “I always tell my friends, yes, I could be in the West End, but in the West End I’d be doing the same show for six months, just getting enough money together to live, go to auditions and take classes, and I’m not going to save any money from it. Right now, I’m doing amazing shows, getting free training, saving a lot of money [accommodation is free] and seeing the world.”
¶ Although he writes as though that detox tea that he has been drinking has fermented, possibly, what we like about Philip’s gaze into the future of economics is the idea that we’re still missing some very important pieces of the puzzle — that is, we don’t know what we’re doing. (Weakonomics)
For centuries we tried to defy the law of gravity without really understanding it. I’m sure there were hundreds of thousands of different experiments that failed miserably. But each experiment lasted as long as it took gravity to bring you back to earth. You can’t experiment with economics, and each attempt takes decades to analyze before any consensus can be reached. Even then, consensus is a relative term. There still isn’t agreement on the Great Depression.
In this respect economics is harder than physics. We’ve learned how to work around gravity by using other laws such as lift (planes), molecules lighter than air (balloons), and simply blasting through it (rockets). We’re to the point with gravity that the only thing holding us back (yeah, pun intended) are the resources to develop and expand on the existing knowledge. In other words we could probably get flying cars real quick if we put all our research money into it. There’s a threshold you cross that goes from “figuring it out†to “ah ha, now let’s run with itâ€. That probably happened with gravity around 1900 in Kitty Hawk NC, and you can see how far we’ve come since then.
In economics, we’re still strapping wings to our arms and jumping off cliffs. That’s because we’re simply trying to repeat what we see in nature. We seem to be better off with low unemployment, so let’s try to keep unemployment low. Bird fly by flapping wings, so let’s make some wings and flap. To our 16th century brains, there’s no other way to do it. I don’t even think we’re to the Isaac Newton level of understanding with economics, much less the Wright Brothers.
As my Indian tea buzz wore off, I imagined two futures for economics. Not two different futures, just that one comes first and then the other builds upon the first. They’re both best explained again within the concepts of gravity.
¶ Intensive analysis of Sudanese bones dating from (roughly) the late Roman Empire reveals tetracycline saturation, leading scientiest to infer that not only that the local beer was antibiotic but that the brewers knew what they were doing. Jess McNally reports, in Wired Science.
They must have known how to propagate the beer because they were doing it to make wine, Nelson says. There was also so much of it in their bones that it is near impossible that the tetracycline-laced beer was a fluke event.
To make sure that making the antibiotic beer was possible, Armelagos had his graduate students give it a try.
“What they were making wasn’t like a Bud Light but a cereal gruel,†Armelagos said. “My students said that it was ‘not bad,’ but it is like a sour porridge substance. The ancient people would have drained the liquid off and also eaten the gruel.â€
¶ It’s that kind of day: we’re in deep sympathy with The Awl‘s Alex Balk, who fell into the WikiHole of his quest for the truth about Ellen Pompeo’s polydactylism. (And Ellen Pompeo would be — ? Oh.)
I dejectedly clicked through the citation to find the ultimate proof that would shatter my belief that we live in a world where Ellen Pompeo has the normal allotment of podial appendages. As it happens, the source for the six-toed assertion turned out to be… wait for it… the very Daily Mail piece that suggested her extravagance of foot fingers in the first place.
Someone out there wanted me to think that Ellen Pompeo had six toes, but they didn’t understand that I wasn’t going to give up that easy. Not with Google on my side.
I’ve been to some dark places in my time, and I’ve learned some things that no man should ever know, but what I found when I started searching for “ellen pompeo barefoot toes” rocked me to my core. I’ve seen images that even the filthiest fetishists would vomit at. If the government ever searches my computer I’m sure there are now pictures in it that will get me sent to prison. For life.
But I also found wikiFeet, “a free collaborative site featuring Celebrity-Feet pictures. It is Probably the largest celebrity feet database EVER!!”
(I’ll give you a moment.)
¶ Dexter Filkins reports on the run on Kabul Bank, brought by cronyism to the brink of collapse. (NYT)
Most Afghans do not keep their money in the banking system, and Kabul Bank is tiny by international standards. But creating a credible and stable banking system is an important goal of the American-led effort in the country, which is seeking to help Afghanistan develop a modern economy.
Kabul Bank, one of the biggest private financial institutions that sprang up after the fall of the Taliban, stands at the very center of Afghanistan’s political and economic elite. A brother of Mr. Karzai, Mahmoud, is a major shareholder, as is Haseen Fahim, the brother of the country’s vice president. The bank lent Mr. Fahim, a prominent businessman, as much as $100 million, officials say.
The bank helped finance President Karzai’s re-election campaign last year, giving him as much as $14 million, according to former senior Afghan officials. Mr. Karzai, in turn, chose the bank to administer much of its payroll, which Mr. Frozi desribed as one of the bank’s most lucrative fields of business.
Afghan and American regulators say that it is these very connections that shielded the bank from official scrutiny for so long.
Felix Salmon all but chortles at the “no worries” announcement by the Afghan president’s brother, an owner of the bank who’s speaking from a bank-owned villa in Dubai.
¶ Scott Esposito applies Clay Shirky’s distinction between writers and authors to The Shallows, and concludes that Nicholas Carr is the first but not the second. It’s ironic, in a sour sort of way, that a book bemoaning the deleterious effects of the Internet should betray infection by them. (Conversational Reading)
If you try searching The Shallows for proof of the claim that scanning is now “our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts,†you will do so in vain, other than to find that some Rhodes Scholar is anti-book.
The Shallows is full of unconvincing claims such as that. I am simply not convinced that we’ve exchanged book-style reading for Internet-style reading, and nor am I convinced that such an exchange is as pivotal as Carr wants to argue. Maybe in Carr’s mind that is the case (he includes an epilogue where he writes, without irony, about how he had to move into the woods away from the Internet just to be able to complete writing The Shallows). But, 1) I don’t think the change is near as pivotal as Carr asserts, and 2) certainly there are other major historic trends that must be taken into account in addition to the shift from books to Internet.
After reading The Shallows, I have to say that I think I’d like Nicholas Carr as a person. He certainly means well in writing this book, and he comes across as sincere. I share his fears of a world that may one day skim more than read, and I’d say we’re both fighting for the same side. To the extent that The Shallows will help convince Internet junkies and iPhone tweakers to put down their devices for a while, it is probably a good thing. But it remains a deeply dissatisfying book on a topic that is still awaiting someone who can truly interpret it for us.
¶ Chinese rock — how’s that for an oxymoron? “This is not a society of rebels.” The Telegraph‘s Malcolm More chats with impresario Archie Hamilton.
Meanwhile, the emergence of Chinese bands has been limited by the absence of any real market for music. Chinese fans download music for free, and rarely have the money to pay for gigs, for drinks, or even a taxi home. Splitworks lost “a ton of money” on the Yue Festival, Mr Hamilton admits.
Kevin Fritz, the director of Wasted Orient, a documentary about Chinese rock, says: “It’s not glamorous. It’s filthy. It’s filled with despair. It’s very unwanted in that society and is shown in its citizens’ apathetic response to it.”
Take-away for would be promoters:
The key piece of advice for entrepreneurs, says Mr Hamilton, is to remember that the Chinese begin negotiations only after they have signed a contract. “We booked the Shanghai Theatre for Sonic Youth in 2007, and they seemed happy with a fee of 40,000 renminbi (£4,000) for the rent of the venue. So we started the marketing, and the wheels were turning, and we had a contract with the band, so we couldn’t back out. Then they came to us with a demand for 350 seats ‘for government’ out of our 1,600. We gave it to them. A week later they asked us for 20pc of the total, sold-out, gross, in advance as an extra fee. That was before we had sold any tickets,” he says.
Eventually the gig sold out, bar 120 tickets. Could Splitworks use the box office to sell those on the night? “Certainly, they said, for another 20pc.” He laughs: “So you know we lost a bit of money, but we had a great time and the show was awesome.”
¶ “Fightin’ iRish: Notre Dame Class Switches to iPads.” (Good)
¶ secondome. (Design Sponge)