Thursday, November 28, 2002 05:31 p.m. Business 2.0 has a cover feature on thinking "with your gut"
We get more satisfaction from avoiding a $100 loss than from making a $100 gain, for example, and we compulsively find patterns where none exist. (This stock has gone up for three days; therefore it will continue to go up.) Go ahead, point it out to us. It doesn't matter; we'll make the same mistakes over and over again.
George Soros is cited as getting a pain in his back when he's got a feeling for something, but those of us without clear physical responses need to listen more carefully and look for signs of a "hunch." One of the "tips" offered is very interesting:
Tell stories. Fictionalize a problem as a business school case or as happening to someone else. That can free up your imagination. Dave Snowden, director of IBM's Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity in Wales, has been working with antiterrorism experts and finds that they think more creatively if he poses problems set in a different time -- the Civil War, for example. Another kind of storytelling is what cognitive psychologist Gary Klein calls a "pre-mortem": Imagine that your project has failed and gather the team to assess what went wrong.
It comes more easily when you identify problem-solving and decision-making as pattern-seeking. While computer processors seek patters with the "deductive" method, reasoned associations between what is known; humans are "abductive" and will jump to conculsions with information even if it only hovers in the subconcious.
Monday, November 25, 2002 06:54 p.m. Found Magazine is my new favorite "when I'm bored" stop. When I lived in the city, I got a note on my car one morning telling me not to block the writer's driveway (when I wasn't) "or I'll have your fucking vehicle towed. Don't be a MASShole!" See, that's funny because I have Mass plates. I wish I held on to it.
Monday, November 25, 2002 05:47 p.m.
If you live within a 50 miles radius of the city, there is no excuse for missing DIY Art-o-Matic before it culminates on Saturday with another fun party. The 1,000 artists involved each paid a display fee and volunteered to work shifts. They lined up at 7 in the morning to secure a spot, and -- although the space is huge -- there was a long waiting list for those who didn't make it in time. Of course some of it comes from Corcoran School hacks, but a lot of the stuff is really good. But what makes it fun is the labyrinth-like space that you can't possible cover in only one evening. There you have it, no need for NEA funding.
Monday, November 25, 2002 04:16 p.m. The Boston Globe has a spotlight on Tyler Cowen.
His wide-ranging tastes don't stop at high culture and exotic cuisine. The index of ''In Praise of Commercial Culture,'' for example, shows more page citations for the rock band My Bloody Valentine than for Vladimir Nabokov, and a reference to Smashing Pumpkins is nestled between ones to John Sloan and Adam Smith. Cowen also collects Haitian art and has traveled to some 60 countries; at the outset of ''Creative Destruction,'' rather than citing a series of academic papers as the book's foundation, he points to his ''diverse experiences as a cultural consumer
A little while ago, I read Tyler Cowen's essay "Policing Nature" that asks rhetorically, why not police carnivores if the marginal cost is small?
It is a cunningly thought-out argument though the paper left me less sure of my stance on animal rights that before I read it. People commonly argue against policing nature because of "distance." Cowen posed the question as this: if there were a tribe in a remote South Pacific island known for acts of cannibalism and human sacrifices do we intervene? And if not, is the "distance" between us and the islanders not obviously smaller than the "distance" between us and animals? No, we don't police cannibals. That atrocious faction in Uganda I posted about earlier -- an "army" that eats their victims and recruits children as soldiers and sex-slaves -- is only now getting attention as a rival army has alone placed a bounty on the Lord's Resistance Army leader's head.
Monday, November 25, 2002 12:07 p.m. The Register has something on the "Cyber Murder Law" that passed in the Senete on Tuesday. This enables life sentances to hackers "if the offender knowingly or recklessly causes or attempts to cause death." Language clear as the driven snow.
"While it's completely understandable that society would want to impose a life sentence for any kind of murder... what we've done is attached that idea to the underlying vagueness of the anti-hacking law, and there are a lot of things that are not clear in the law and not clear in the statute," says Jennifer Granick, director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society, and defense attorney in several federal hacker cases. "Technology is progressing so rapidly... to attach a life sentence to an area of the law that is still in the earliest stages of the development is dangerous."
Monday, November 25, 2002 11:42 a.m.
One of the top headlines of today's Washington Times is Gay sex in park 'worse' despite arrests. Take a look at some of the sentences doled out: including five years for sodomy charged as a felony. Huh? "They're just slapping them on the wrists," says a local.
Sunday, November 24, 2002 07:42 p.m.
At a lame benefit for ARISE-- concluding that "What's Next for the Left" is bad poetry, bad art, and Jedediah Purdy-- I picked up a flier for Flexcar. It's a "car-sharing" (renting) business with environmental-friendly pretentions but a pretty good idea going. Sample rate for the DC area: 5 hours/50 miles for $35. Not much more $$$ than an evening on the town.
Another start-up I hope to see florish is Netflix. Wired is optimistic and so am I. I've been working my way through Peter Greenaway and David Cronenberg collections (most recently, the bloody brilliant Dead Ringers) on my own time.
Sunday, November 24, 2002 02:11 a.m.
I've come to a semi-conclusion on what some of my more meanding posts lately have been hitting at. That the constant duality of the self is quadrupled (or quintupled or sextupled) if one is a writer (I hate to refer to myself as one but if I write words that people read, there is no other term.) It is bothersome to be only a not-so-bad-looking jpeg and a series of paragraphs. It means I'm a mirror of you, if you've put your thoughts onto my words. Likewise, I fear even my real self has become but blank slate -- one with a cowboy gait, that says "like" too much -- impossible to convey any depth or history without a lengthy proper conversation. Alina thought I was stupid when we first met. But what is my option? Must a person chose to let all his quirks loose at first introduction, and be ergo, loud and obnoxious? I guess it might be better if we were hard-wired to assume the initial self is always a facade, and if you scratch the surface, anyone is much more complex than that.
Saturday, November 23, 2002 03:13 a.m.
The Average
by W.H. Auden
His peasant parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil
For any of those smart professions which
Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.
The pressure of their fond ambition made
Their shy and country-loving child afraid
No sensible career was good enough,
Only a hero could deserve such love.
So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town;
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;
The silence roared displeasure: looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the exceptional, and ran.
Friday, November 22, 2002 11:22 a.m.
An op-ed in Le Monde argues political violence is at an all time low, but the deepening of "inequality" has created "social violence." Yeah, sure it does.
There are obviously other forms of violence at work. We could begin with the economic violence perpetrated against the world with free-market globalisation: the violence of the rulers against the ruled. Inequality is reaching extraordinary proportions. Half of humanity lives in poverty, and a third in misery; 800m people suffer from malnutrition; almost a billion are illiterate; a billion and a half have no access to safe water; two billion do not have electricity.
And incredible as it may seem, these billions of wretched of the earth are keeping politically quiet. This is a great paradox of our time: we have more people in poverty but less people in revolt than ever before. Can this continue? Probably not. Because Marxism is exhausted as an international motor of social struggle, the world is in transition. We are in a phase between two cycles of political revolution. Social injustice is more outrageous than ever, and partly as a result of this other kinds of violence are extreme.
Friday, November 22, 2002 11:05 a.m. BBC News has an interesting article on China's "yuppie class" of urban twentysomethings. The Washington Times has an op-ed on Saudi-specific policy the Homeland Security bill. It of course, comes to the wrong conclusion:
The State Department protested to House and Senate leaders that the language, written by Rep. Dave Weldon, singled out the Saudis. But shouldn't we "single out" the country that sent us 15 of 19 September 11 terrorists? Apparently, not everyone in Congress agreed, as the State Department was assured that the Weldon provision would be removed, according to a House GOP leadership aide. But with the last-minute confusion and the rush to get the mammoth bill passed during the lameduck session, the section targeting Saudi Arabia stayed put. That may be a loss for the State Department, but it is a clear victory for border security — and Americans.
"I was having fun," responded Gore. "You know, there was an old song that Janis Joplin sang: 'Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.'"
The next morning, subscribers of the Washington Post opened the plastic inserts of their papers to find a Gore profile by staff writer Liza Mundy. Here again, Gore was holding forth on his laid-back lifestyle: "The old Kris Kristofferson lyric kind of sums it up for me: 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.'"
Tuesday afternoon, Fresh Air host Terry Gross was quizzing Gore on similar topics, with similar results: "My philosophy is summed up by the Kris Kristofferson lyric, 'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,'" noted the interviewee.
Will someone please edit Al Gore?
Thursday, November 21, 2002 11:40 p.m.
People are never as interesting or mannered as they seem in fiction. Alina and I have compared notes on the soirees of late, and came to the same conclusion of frustration. I can't be the puppeteer who pulls a string when someone's acting not right. Socialization is but an irksome neccessity that interrupts my freer (if often lonlier) goings on internally.
Part of the reason characters on a page are attractive is we flesh them out with our preconcieved notions. Whatever the writer might be really getting at is lost once a work is open to readers. Certain words trigger associations and memories local only to the individual. Reading is just an extention of the thought process.
My own internal dialogue at times concerns the larger things, like whether there's a god or etc. The Skeptic column on intuition has created a mental tidlewave. I've got a sixth-sense. I can tell when people lie and can usually estimate their motivations for doing so. It's hard to explain the process better than The Skeptic did. That's why I've been thinking about it all day. And of course there are the thoughts that are regretably fleeting and irrelevant. Spot an attractive person on the metro then flash to an imagined intimate scenerio and that kind of thing. I usually have several running questions that for varying reasons, lately its "why am I concerned with privacy if I've got nothing to hide?" and something semi-intellectual that I test and abandon various hypotheses until one makes sense like, "why do accents arise in language?" It's all easier to think about thn what exactly will I being doing once school runs out in three weeks. Whatever. I lost my copy of Ravelstein today and yet again, forgot to take my dinner out of the oven before breakfast. I must be losing my mind too.
Thursday, November 21, 2002 06:25 p.m. Emma's War looks like one hell of a great book. It's the story of a former model from Britain, Emma McCune, who moved to Sudan as an aid worker. She fell in love with, and married a head officer of the Sudan People's Liberation Army. Not a nice man. She became an apologist for the SPLAs atrocities
I do, however, resent the assumtion made in several reviews of this book that tall + kinda quiet = flakey femme. Albeit, it can be advantagous as a ruse.
Thursday, November 21, 2002 11:58 a.m.
I like this headline, "Chancellor Schröder faces political and satirical backlash amid claims of broken election promises." Oh no! The Free Democrats take comparisons to the Weimar Republic very seriously. Schröder's former finance minister Oskar Lafontaine, took him to task in a newspaper article comparing him to Heinrich Brüning, "the chancellor who caused mass unemployment - and paved the way for Hitler. As they were then, people are uncertain and are spending less and less money."
"Der Steuersong" (The Tax Song,) a Schröder satire, is number one on charts. "Its lyrics, including the words "promises that were made yesterday can be broken today", were printed in place of the conservative tabloid Bild's usual editorial column on Tuesday."
Also from The Guardian, Kazakhstan has found its comparative advantage as Europe's nuclear waste dump.
Thursday, November 21, 2002 11:38 a.m.
There are riots in Nigeria over the Miss World pageant that is in production for the next several weeks. In Kaduna, a city divided into Christian and Muslim factions, barricades of burning tired were erreced, churches were attached and on Wednesday, hundreds gathered outside a local newspaper office to protest an article that said if Prophet Mohammed could see one of the pageant contestants, he would marry one. The Muslims also despise the pageant as the festivities began the same month as Ramadan.
And bless the leggy contestants for boycotting the location until The Nigerian Government promised to ban stoning, in light of the Amina Lawal case
Wednesday, November 20, 2002 11:18 a.m. Scientific American's The Skeptic has a new one up on "The Captain Kirk Principle" of intuition
Intuition is not subliminal perception; it is subtle perception and learning-- knowing without knowing that you know. Chess masters often "know" the right move to make even if they cannot articulate how they know it. People who are highly skilled in identifying "micromomentary" facial expressions are also more accurate in judging lying. In testing college students, psychiatrists, polygraphists, court judges, police officers and Secret Service agents on their ability to detect lies, only the agents, trained to look for subtle cues, scored above chance
Most of us are not good at lie detection, because we rely too heavily on what people say rather than on what they do. Subjects with damage to the brain that renders them less attentive to speech are more accurate at detecting lies, such as aphasic stroke victims, who were able to identify liars 73 percent of the time when focusing on facial expressions. (Nonaphasic subjects did no better than chance.) We may even be hardwired for intuitive thinking: damage to parts of the frontal lobe and amygdala (the fear center) will prevent someone from understanding relationships or detecting cheating, particularly in social contracts, even if he or she is otherwise cognitively normal.
Wednesday, November 20, 2002 10:55 a.m.
Thomas Haidon for Counterpunch offers The CIA's Yemen Operation:
a Legal Critique. And Politech's cited a WSJ article on the Post-Sept. 11 Watch List. For Index, Aryeh Neier of the Soros Foundation argues "linking Iran to the 'Axis of Evil', undermines the country's brave struggle for change. "
