Accidental Blogger

My religious manifesto

In my recent post on Kathryn Lofton's take on the New Atheists (NAs) and their "misogyny," I dismissed Lofton's arguments on that point as more projection than proof. The post has now been linked at a couple of other blogs where some lengthy discussions have ensued. In one of my comments in response to another reader on the 3 Quarks Daily thread, I described at some length my overall attitude toward the religion vs atheism debate and my view of the NAs. Prasad suggested that the comment could serve as an independent post here to clarify where I stand on both issues. I thought that is a good idea. I will do so and let the post serve as reference point in the future if and when I again feel the need to discuss any other provocative subject in this particular field.

Before I go to the summation, I want to also clarify a couple of other points in the form of questions that may be asked of me:

• Have I for most of my adult life found a reason to live according to the precepts of any organized religion?
• Having rejected religion, am I ignorant of the role religion has played in human history and do I also reject any or all art, music, literature etc. which may have its origin in a religious experience, inspiration or reference?
• Do I as a non-believer find the celebration of joyous religious / cultural events like Christmas, Diwali, Passover or Eid offensive?
• Does the religious belief of others bother me unless it interferes in a negative way with my life?
• When I support a political candidate or a social commentator, does it mean that I agree with him or her about everything including the rules of etiquette they choose to adopt?

The answers to all of the above is "no."  Now the manifesto:

The "Ditchens"* don't necessarily speak for me but Cyrus Hall** does. Thanks, Cyrus!

Has Dawkins stopped secretly beating his wife? Has Hitchens? I don't know and frankly I don't care until the police starts to investigate or one of them declares that wife beating is a salutory way of maintaining domestic harmony. Neither Lofton's projections and innuendo about uber-rationality and misogyny nor the paucity of contributions of female writers in Dawkins' tract are enough evidence for me to conclude that he or the other atheists are woman haters. And if it turns out that they are, it will probably have little to do with their rejection of god and belief in scientific enquiry.

Some of the rationalist hand wringing over the strident style of the Ditchens reminds of a somewhat crude joke about liberals I had heard many years ago. The humorist said that liberals are people who when someone else farts in a crowded room, feel compelled to declare loudly that they didn't do it.

Do the Ditchens speak for me? Not all the time. I should speak for myself and I do, whenever I have the opportunity with the little voice I have. I have neither the gusto nor the forum to be heard as widely as the New Atheists do (how about neo-atheists instead of new? that sounds more official and is a nice foil for neo-cons). The core message of what many of the New Atheists wish to convey about the role of religion in society is more or less what I might say myself, but perhaps at a lower decibel. Do I want them to keep speaking and shaking things up? Definitely. My agreement with the New Atheists is limited to the idea of religion and its place in public policy. Their politics or any personal traits they may possess are different matters altogether. I have made myself clear several times on what I think of Hitchens' support of the Iraq war. But now we are getting into the territory of babies and bathwater.

For years and decades, the only voices in the public sphere regarding religion / god etc. have belonged to those with whom I disagree vehemently. The likes of Reverends Billy Graham, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have had the attention of sizable segments of the American public and the ears of several presidents in my time. They have influenced the national conversation and probably public policies as well. Politicians of all stripes have kow towed to them until I have felt like throwing up. No, please don't tell me that they are ignorant louts. All of them were educated with advanced degrees and commanded huge followings. I don't consider myself an intellectual who resides in the rarified towers of ivory where I can only have conversations with like minded people. I have brought up two children in red states, volunteered in schools, the Little League and the Boy Scouts and served in the community as a tutor and political campaigner amidst those who listen to Fox News and believe in the messages of the likes of Falwell and Robertson. Occasionally it has been lonely and frustrating. I also have many religious (some very) friends whose faith defines every aspect of their lives including the outcome of a football game. We get along rather nicely. I grew up with an atheist father and an observant mother in a family whose members were divided roughly equally on both sides of the religious debate and I loved them all. Things were harmonious and never did we as children, feel the pressure to believe in either ideology. So, as Cyrus points out, I am fully cognizant of the simple fact that some people indeed need god and religion in their lives to carry on and others muddle through fine without them. I am not interested in conversion. But I want to be recognized as a part of an often vilified constituency which does not wish to see the law, war, peace, health care and science education defined in religious terms. I want my opinions in these matters to count.

Now at last, my side of the story is being told, albeit by some who come across as agent provocateurs. I wish to have a pony in this race and I would love for a gorgeous, elegant horse to enter the track on my behalf. But that horse is not here yet and hasn't been throughout my lifetime. There however, has appeared a stubborn and bad tempered mule in the form of the Ditchens who crashed the theological party. My two bits worth of betting money is on them for now if only to mix things up at the race course.

*Ditchens = Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett & Christopher Hitchens.

**Cyrus Hall = Another commenter with whom I was in agreement.

Professor (Mrs.) Dasgupta (*) (prasad)

The Daily Princetonian has a story about percentages of female faculty, which are neither particularly high nor rising rapidly. The article doesn't do either sexism or the Larry Summers stuff, and instead focuses on the lifestyle difficulties inherent in obtaining tenure, at least as currently structured:

Director of the Women’s Center Amada Sandoval said she was “surprised that we are not on par with our peers,” adding that she thinks the gender gap is a significant problem at the University. One of the biggest obstacles for women is the way the timeline for the tenure system is structured, she explained.

“The way the tenure system works, if you were hired in the tenure track, you would first be an assistant professor,” she said. “After six years, your position would be associate professor if you received tenure, and after a certain amount of time after that, you might be promoted to a full professor. This tenure structure is really hostile to people who anticipate having a family or people who are trying to have a family.”

The tenure system is not keeping up with social changes that have occurred in the past several years, Sandoval noted.

“I think the tenure system really hasn’t changed since most of the tenured faculty were men and most of the women stayed at home with the children,” she said. “That’s not the kind of world that we live in any more … I would say the system needs to get more flexible. It’s not just women that want to spend time with their children. It’s men, too, and they’re getting more and more able to admit that as our gender norms are softening up a bit.” (emphases added)

To zeroth order, one wins tenure at a top university (in addition to being smart and working on the right topics and making the right networking moves and all that jazz) by working all the time and not having a life. This isn't too conducive to success in family related pursuits, especially if the pursuits in question involve babies.

To the extent that, as Ms. Sandoval seems to think, female Assistant Professors are less willing to forego rich family lives, it's not clear to me that this is a problem a university either could or should fix, at least if the commodity it is most interested in maximizing is research output. A six-month or year long stop in the tenure clock for infant-tending seems decent, but it's not my understanding that baby-work falls off rapidly after the first year. Delayed / flexible tenure tracks are especially problematic in the sciences or in engineering, where the expectation is that a researcher's best work will have been done by age 45.

If the problem instead is that male junior faculty find it rather easier to find stay-at-home wives, no university has the ability to provide ambitious female professors desirous of home comforts with men who enjoy pushing baby-strollers and are willing to maintain the household. That change presumably comes about via societal changes in mores about about work in and out of home, supported by Scandinavian-style governmental legislation about paternity leave etc. I'm not claiming a university do nothing - CERN has a nice daycare center, for example; but to the extent that parity is the goal and the problem isn't of the sexist-hiring-committee variety, I doubt an individual university can make dramatic improvements or even lead industry.

(*) A form of address I came across once

World AIDS Day 2009 and the promise of an HIV vaccine

More than a year ago I had highlighted my husband, Sudhir Paul's research in developing a vaccine against HIV. The HIV / AIDS epidemic which in the west was confined almost exclusively within the male gay community and IV drug users in the early days, has now extended its lethal reach well into the heterosexual population. In fact in less developed nations, AIDS is now  mostly a disease of straight men and women.  Currently there is no viable vaccine against the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. 

Today marks the 21st anniversary of World AIDS Day, a reminder that the scourge of AIDS is still with us. On this occasion, Mary Carmichael, the editor of the Health / Life section of Newsweek has an interesting and provocative report about the promise and the challenges of Professor Paul's efforts in developing an effective vaccine against HIV. In the article, Carmichael also describes the role of CIF, a foundation launched by a group of young enthusiasts who wish to see the putative vaccine traverse the successful path from the test tube to a medicine vial.  

Please read the full article, enjoy the video and let me know what you think. (Another more technical article about the research in last summer's Washington  Post)

Last summer, while watching a news program about a possible AIDS vaccine, Zach Barnett had a "Eureka!" moment. The show was describing a Texas scientist's unorthodox approach to vaccine-making, a strategy that involved superantigens and covalent bonds and a lot of other words that weren't in Barnett's vocabulary. That didn't matter; the science turned him on anyway. "It was just so cool," he says. "I was like, 'lightbulb!' "

For years, Barnett, a fashion publicist, had been trying to get involved in AIDS activism, but mainstream organizations had told him there wasn't much for him to do, save passing out brochures. "That was a waste of my talent," he says. Here he saw a use for his skills. He wrote to the scientist, Dr. Sudhir Paul of the University of Texas, to tell him that "if what he was saying was true, he was doing a bad job of publicizing it." To show he was serious, he offered Paul $50 out of his own pocket to support the research.

In the past decade, private groups have started funding not just causes but specific researchers. The phenomenon may have started with autism—private organizations raise $78 million each year, or 35 percent of the country's funding, some of it for research that isn't completely in line with mainstream thinking—but it's seeping into other fields too, including AIDS research. It's tempting to write off Paul's supporters: what makes them think they know something the NIH doesn't? On the other hand, if they're right and Paul really does have a way to vaccinate against HIV, they're funding one of the most important projects in contemporary medicine. The question they have to ask themselves is whether they're wasting their money or shifting a paradigm.

The AIDS vaccine field could use a shift. For more than two decades, scientists have mounted campaigns to vaccinate against the virus, only to lose each one, watching as their vaccine candidates have failed (and, in one case, may have made people more susceptible to the disease). In September, researchers announced some of the most encouraging results in years, but even that success was quickly undercut by an argument over how the data were analyzed. "It's been so tough to solve this problem," says David Montefiori, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development at Duke University. "That may be because a lot of the approaches have just been the same old, same old. People keep repeating the same tactics over and over again with minor variations."

At first glance, Paul's HIV vaccine looks familiar; it uses the "neutralizing antibody" strategy, which calls on the body's B cells to make proteins that fight the virus. This approach is how all existing vaccines for other diseases work, but it hasn't succeeded against HIV. The virus is too smart to fall victim to the human immune system. It hides many of the identifying proteins on its outer coat, cloaking them from the prying eyes of B cells, and thus no antibodies are made.

A few proteins on the outside of the HIV virus remain naked and exposed. They have to, in order to bind to human cells and kill them. Paul has his eye on one of these proteins, called gp120. According to his theory, it is a superantigen, a protein related to a fragment of a retrovirus that wormed its way into the human genome hundreds of thousands of years ago and stayed there.
 

 

Pretty fly (prasad)

Visual computations tend to be generically hard and resource intensive. For example, our state-of-the-art algorithm for yaw detection in flight apparently needs Moore's Law engorged Intel Cores to do anything useful. And yet mere flies seem to manage the number-crunching just fine...The trick at least in this instance seems to be that flies aren't using our stupid state-of-the-art algorithm. Theirs is vastly nicer:

By turning the brain cell activity underlying fly eyesight into mathematical equations, researchers have found an ultra-efficient method for pulling motion patterns from raw visual data.[...]

“We can build a system that works perfectly well, inspired by biology, without having a complete understanding of how the components interact. It’s a non-linear system,” said David O’Carroll, a computational neuroscientist who studies insect vision at Australia’s University of Adelaide. “The number of computations involved is quite small. We can get an answer using tens of thousands of times less floating-point computations than in traditional ways.”[...]

The researchers’ algorithm is composed of a series of five equations through which data from cameras can be run. Each equation represents tricks used by fly circuits to handle changing levels of brightness, contrast and motion, and their parameters constantly shift in response to input. Unlike Lucas-Kanade, the algorithm doesn’t return a frame-by-frame comparison of every last pixel, but emphasizes large-scale patterns of change. In this sense, it works a bit like video-compression systems that ignore like-colored, unshifting areas.

There's probably some generic lesson here - the set of efficient solutions to any problem could well be vastly larger than the subset which makes use of well-separated, clear, extensible cases, modular reasoning, simple and readily debugged steps and the like, which subset in turn is probably larger than that of solutions people tend to come up with. Nature, with no particular need for comprehensibility or ease of maintenance, can happily brute-force out methods that work rather well while making no sense.

I'm sure that's overstated - eyes work in quite sensible ways - while R&D and further inquiry will doubtless clarify what now seems inexplicable because of novelty. Still, I shouldn't be surprised if many mind-tricks turned out to be like this - no human smart enough to do the amazing thing would have the cheek to do it this maddening, meaningless, hideous way.

Four Years of Fun, Frolic and Occasional Fury

Today Accidental Blogger enters its fifth year. For the past four years my co-bloggers and I have shared our thoughts with each other and our readers, doing our bit to add to the cacophony of the blogosphere, whether or not anyone was listening. On the past three anniversaries, I reported on the health of the blog and some of the more interesting moments that we encountered on our way. This year I will let my co-bloggers weigh in on what they think of being Accidental Bloggers. Also, instead of posting one of my own paintings, I am attaching a festive image associated with the Indian festival of Diwali which was celebrated last Saturday. It is interesting and heartening to note that despite the multiple voices that have been added since its inception, the character of this blog remains true to what I had envisioned when I first launched it as a solo effort in October, 2005. Thanks to my co-bloggers and our readers for staying with A.B. over the years.

The authors' comments appear in the order that they were sent to me.

Joe:

It's hard to believe that A.B. has been around for four years.  In that time, lots of things have changed: I went from being an aspiring law student to a lawyer.  Anna and Andrew got married.  Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush.  And yet, how does the saying go?  The more things change, the more they stay the same?  So it will no doubt be comforting to my co-bloggers and our readers that, for example, Dean remains, self-describedly, an unrelenting curmudgeon.  Or, take the recent balloon-boy incident.  Among other things, I have been complaining about the media and their news creation/reporting since I started blogging.  As Ezra nicely sums it up: "it certainly served as a perfect metaphor for cable news: America spent hours riveted by a powerful and gripping story that turned out to be totally meaningless, and will have no significant impact on anybody's lives going forward."

Sujatha:

We all love to tell our stories and anecdotes, wax profoundly and eloquently, or indulge in occasional silliness. We are thoughtful, mordant, indignant, pedantic, satirical, political, conspiratorial, as the mood takes us. We are the bloggers at Accidental Blogger, and are having a blast blogging and discussing here. Happy Blogversary!

Dean:

A lot of discussion concerning A.B. over the years has taken place "under the radar," via email between the authors, usually with Ruchira at the hub of the network. We get caught up in a topic, have at it among ourselves, and then--oops, sorta accidentally--we end up publishing the proceedings as a post and comments. I seem to remember that this is how I met Ruchira, by introducing myself individually via email, but in fact it could have been the reverse. I might have posted a comment or two in response to one of her posts, and then heard from her later via email. This situation continues. I'll often vent to her directly, and then she'll remind me to "Comment, please." Of course, I've never actually met her, nor any of the other authors, except Anna and Andrew, who coincidentally moved to the area not two years ago. I never thought much of Howard Rheingold's touchy-feely notion of a virtual community, but there is something both comforting and perplexing about the familiarity that grows among remotely dispersed people who talk to each other occasionally using digital telecommunications. It goes without saying that A.B., the blog, couldn't exist without all the wires, silicon chips, tubes (pneumatic and vacuum), and protocols that are the 'net. Friendships or acquaintances with Ruchira, Sujatha, Joe, somebody who goes by D, another who goes by M, Narayan, or the folks who regularly comment could have arisen without any of that, but likely would not have done so.

D:

Hullo all, and it's lovely to be accidentally blogging, interacting with such excellent co-bloggers and commenters. A big huzzah then for our gracious host. And it's a privilege to have an audience for my rants, of which I promise more in the future.

Andrew:

I really value A.B. as a place where people from around the country can gather to talk about current events without the excessive snark or knowingness of a lot of the political blogs.  And as a jazzhead, I appreciate its free-form nature, i.e., the opportunity to bounce ideas about musicians off of the various co-authors.  Lastly, I first fell in love with Ruchira's writing from her eviscerations of Thomas Friedman -- though she generally keeps her tone level, it's still a pleasure to see her let it rip every once in a while.

( Editor's note: "D" is our newest author who came on board in the past year . So far five authors have sent me their thoughts. If and when I hear from Anna and Narayan, I will publish their comments as updates. Or perhaps we will hear from them in the comments section.)

Right Ho and Toodle-oo! (Why India still loves P.G. Wodehouse)

Although he may no longer be eagerly sought out by the reading public in the country of his birth, P.G. Wodehouse enjoys an enviable degree of popularity in India. Every so often I come across reports and articles puzzling over why a long dead British humorist from a long lost era continues to charm a couple of generations of modern Indians who have very little fascination (outside the academic world of literature and history) with the likes of Kipling or the culture of colonial England. Here is an excerpt from the transcript of a report on NPR that I found while searching for Wodehouse: (Do listen to the audio recording of Mandy Cunningham eavesdropping on a group of Wodehouse fans in Bangalore, India)

CUNNINGHAM: These people have gathered to share their love of the works of the comic novelist and satirist P.G. Wodehouse. Each person have adopted the name of their favorite Wodehouse character.

RAHM(ph): My name is Rahm, and I go by the name of Smith, Rupert Smith. Smith preferred to use big, long words. You know, he would use 20 words in a sentence when five would suffice. It's an eccentricity of sorts, but I felt that it's something that I would like to talk myself.

CUNNINGHAM: The group, like many others around India, knows everything there is to know about Wodehouse. They know that he was born in England, that he spent most of his years in the United States, becoming an American citizen, and that he wrote short stories, lyrics for musicals and almost a hundred novels. The reason they're so well informed is that most of them, like Narupa(ph), was introduced to Wodehouse at a very tender age.

NARUPA: When I was about nine or 10, there was this Indi series on TV, and I remember my father was so disgusted with the adaptation that from his office library, he handed out a copy of "Leave it to Smith" and made my sister and me read it.

CUNNINGHAM: Most of the group cut their teeth on stories about Wodehouse's most-famous characters, the erudite gentlemen's gentleman Jeeves and his affable but buffoonish aristocratic boss Bertie Wooster, depicted here in a BBC adaptation.

(Soundbite of BBC program)

Then there was this article I read more than three years ago, attempting to analyze Wodehouse's peculiar hold on middle class India's imagination.  

Up on the eighth floor of a concrete high-rise, I find the retired history lecturer at St Stephen’s College, part of Delhi University, and staff advisor to its Wodehouse Society, smoking a beedi, a pungent roll-up cigarette.

The apartment has a lingering odour of lunchtime curry. It’s a dashed rummy place to be talking about Bertie Wooster. I have come to explore the curious Indian obsession with P. G. Wodehouse.

Nearly 60 years after the nation’s British rulers packed their bags and legged it home, his books are on sale in most bookshops, sometimes nestling nervously between Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf.

Wodehouse never wrote about India, but sells better on the subcontinent than in Britain, with pirated copies in common circulation. He is one of the most heavily requested authors at the British Library in Delhi and there are clubs and internet chatrooms devoted to him. ....

....The club’s [St Stephen’s Wodehouse Society] president in the mid-1980s, Thomas Abraham, is now president of Penguin Books India, the country’s largest Wodehouse publisher. “We’ve all grown up with Wodehouse,” he says. “It’s a phenomenon here. When one of his books goes out of print, everyone goes ballistic. My publishing counterparts in the UK are very amused.”

In a country where most books in English sell fewer than 1,000 copies and 5,000 constitutes a bestseller, the corduroy-suited Abraham estimates that his company sells up to 70,000 Wodehouses a year: part of a thriving “retro-market” that ranges from Agatha Christie to Modesty Blaise. Most Wodehouses are bought by middle-class Indians whose public school-like “English-Medium” education arguably equips them to appreciate the author’s verbal virtuosity and literary allusions better than many Brits.

“Wodehouse’s appeal is a pure sense of linguistic delight,” says Abraham, who has read “about 82” of his 85 books. “In the 1980s there was a debate about whether he was ‘literary’ or not, but the fact is that the books are a great read, laugh-aloud funny.

“It’s a whole world of clean, wholesome, escapist fun and parents here like to hand it down to their children. Today’s humour is fairly dark, but the appeal of these books for parents is: ‘No sex please, we’re Indian’.”

Back in 1945, George Orwell noted the books’ moral uprightness in his celebrated essay In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse: “Most of the people whom Wodehouse intends as sympathetic characters are parasites, and some of them are plain imbeciles, but very few of them could be described as immoral . . . Not only are there no dirty jokes, but there are hardly any compromising situations.”

Orwell recalled meeting a young Indian nationalist who saw Wodehouse as a satirist of English society, “an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours . . . On the contrary, a harmless, old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work.”

I don't know that one can accurately point to a national trait, history or culture to explain why Wodehouse is loved by Indians. I happen to be a long time Wodehouse fan but not for some of the reasons described in the Times article. The nostalgia for the Raj, the butler, the pucca sahib culture of the gymkhana etc., none of them works for me.  I think I know what I find so charming about P.G.W. - mainly his extraordinarily adept linguistic calisthenics, for sure. And perhaps also what Orwell said.  Although I am perfectly at home with dark brooding humor, searing satire, biting badinage and cutting edge cleverness, there may indeed be something oddly comforting about a prodigious body of literary work which has no sex, no serious love, little existential angst and very few moral dilemmas. One of my favorite posts here is on Wodehouse, one that I wrote soon after I launched this blog. I am bringing it to the front  for new readers.

Mid-Week Links Roundup (Joe)

Food - Deliciousness in Portland, Maine.  I'm intrigued by "ravioli are stuffed with sweet local shrimp and haddock" - shrimp in ravioli isn't uncommon or remarkable, but haddock? 

Happiness - Is happiness catching?  Maybe, but not like the global pig flu pandemic.

Work Out, Become Smart - Mice on treadmills smarter than mice not on treadmills.  Weightlifting and stretching are good for your physical health, but they won't make you smarter.  Aerobic exercise will, although it must be fairly intense, at least if you're a mouse.

Knowledge and Thinking - If they don't drop out, what should we teach them?  You need a knowledge base.  Well, yes.  But critical thinking ability is way more important than collection of random trivia, in my opinion.  Of course, this is like the nature-nurture debate: meaningless as an abstract discussion.  The op-ed is light on facts, so it's not clear to me exactly what they're doing in the Massachusetts schools, and I'm skeptical of anything called "cooperative learning" or "skills training," but that's not remotely the same thing as "critical thinking."  Even the author's suggestion that "critical thinking" pushes aside subjects like literature strikes me as absurd.  For example, I took a Milton class in college, and the valuable part of that is that it made me a better thinker-reader-writer, not that I can talk about metapoetry or talk about how Satan fits within the epic tradition.

The varying shades of racism

A recent chance conversation with an Indian friend and Dean's comment on class and meritocracy, reminded me that although I have discussed racism in America and Europe on several occasions, I have probably never addressed the same issue vis-a-vis India in particular and Asia in general. Rampant racism, casteism, privilege by virtue of *high birth* and family connection is an unsavory fact of life in many parts of the world. In south Asia skin color plays a major role in determining social status, at least superficially.

It is not very well known that amidst the widely heterogeneous racial admixture that makes up the population of the Indian subcontinent, a tiny minority is of African descent. A couple of years ago, on his blog Amardeep Singh had written briefly about the Afro-Pakistani poet Noon Meem Danish. Amardeep's post contains a  link to an interesting account of the contrast between the modern Pakistani intelligentsia's political solidarity  with the distant continent of Africa and the sad plight of Pakistani citizens whose ancestors had been brought to the region as slaves from Africa centuries ago (scroll down to the last three paragraphs). The derogatory word for blacks in northern India and Pakistan is "Habshi." It packs a punch not quite as vicious as the N-word in the US, but the disdain built into the pejorative is unmistakable.

Faiz Muhammed Sheeddi and his organization have been in the forefront of advocating this community's causes. Indeed, the treatment of the sheeddis in Pakistan -- an example of which is the murder in police custody of the Afro-Sindhi youth, Mashooq Sheeddi, in 1994 at the hands of the Hyderabad police -- is reminiscent of racist police brutality against black youth in the US.

These communities closely follow events in Africa, and an example of both the interest and the identification is the fact that Faiz Muhammed Sheeddi and his fellow sheeddi tribesmen proudly say that Nelson Mandela has the same origins as themselves.

These currents of influence -- sometimes paradoxical, even contradictory -- between the continent of Africa and the region that is now Pakistan give the lie to the self-contained vision of the nation projected by the state. Instead, they bear witness to the histories of the wretched of the earth, and their struggles for solidarity. It is high time that the third world state began to reflect these histories and these realities of power, and took on again, with more seriousness than the last time, the project of solidarity.

I had left the following comment on Amardeep's post - a litany of casual observations describing what I had encountered as a young person growing up in a multi-ethnic society where color consciousness and judging people by physical attributes are ingrained.  Africans were not the only targets of derison.  

Two Indians of African descent that I was familiar with in childhood (although I only realized that fact when I was a bit older) was Siddhi, as he was commonly known, and Prakash. Siddhi was my father's favorite fishmonger who came to our home early every morning during the first ten years of my life bearing the *best catch of the day* for my father. He belonged to the Siddhi community of coastal Gujarat whose members trace their ancestry to Africa. Siddhi was dark skinned but looked not much different from many other Indians. Prakash, my uncle's motorcycle mechanic who too came to our home to do the repairs on the Royal Enfield, was a true blue African. A Kenyan by birth, he had been adopted in his infancy by a Punjabi couple in Nairobi who later moved to India when Prakash was a toddler. Well over 6' 3", he was an extremely handsome, gentle giant who spoke fluent Hindi and Punjabi. Given Prakash's size and build, I doubt that anyone called him a Habshi .... at least surely not to his face.

Habshi doesn't mean "slave" technically. It is derived from the word Abyssinian but does have a derogatory connotation in India and Pakistan. In my native language Bengali, I don't recall an equivalent word. But among my Hindi and Punjabi speaking friends, the word was common parlance. Some of my Punjabi friends' mothers would gently chide their fair complected daughters to stay out of the sun lest they start looking like "Habshis." And that extremely kinky hair that Narayan refers to, I have seen that trait mostly among dark complexioned Keralites and fair skinned Punjabis. 

By the time I was in college, (late sixties - early seventies) there were quite a few students from Africa in Delhi university. The way some students behaved with them was deplorable. They also found more difficulty in renting rooms around the university campus than other foreign students did. But then most foreign students (Thai, Arab, Indonesian, European) faced insulting conduct frequently. Even diasporic Indians from Fiji, east Africa, Mauritius etc. and genuine Indians from the northeast (Assam, Nagaland, Manipur), as also Tibetan and Sikkimese students faced rude behavior at the hands of local toughs. Most groups swallowed the insults and went about their business, sharing their discomfort with their more sympathetic Indian friends. Except the well built and fleet of foot, soccer & hockey playing Tibetan boys. I witnessed some truly blood curdling retributive justice meted out to those who made the mistake of calling them "Chinks."

The question of race is muddled and external appearances misleading but we just can't let go of it. South Asians are as obsessed with it as anyone else. Race being such an inexact category it is best not to make too much of it as James Watson has probably realized now.

Amardeep, please forgive me for two rapid links to self promotion. We have discussed the race / IQ / genetic trait controversy extensively at our blog. Please see what my co-blogger Anna wrote regarding something else Malcom Gladwell has said about IQ, this time Jewish IQ specifically.

Swine Flu and Common Sense

The news outlets are full of reports about the impending global epidemic of swine flu. With cold weather on its way in the northern hemisphere and regular flu season beginning around September, we are being warned about a sharp uptick in the spread of the H1N1 (aka swine flu) virus. Drug companies are scrambling to produce a vaccine against the virus.  Mass vaccination was earlier expected to be in full swing by the middle of October. Now US health officials are saying that the vaccine supply will fall short of their earlier estimate thereby delaying the vaccination campaign.

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials Monday said they had slashed their estimate of how many swine flu vaccine doses will be available for the start of a mass vaccination campaign in the fall. Citing delays in manufacturing and packaging the vaccines, the Department of Health and Human Services said only 45 million doses of the new H1N1 vaccine would be on hand in mid-October, instead of the 120 million previously forecast.

The revised delivery guidelines would push back a government estimate that all those requiring vaccinations be immunized by the first week of December.

"Our latest information from the manufacturers tells us that we now expect to have about 45 million doses by October 15 with approximately 20 million doses being delivered each week Thereafter, up to the 195 million doses that we have purchased," Bill Hall, an HHS spokesman, said in an e-mail.

The Geneva-based World Health Organisation declared H1N1 a full pandemic in June, and the virus has spread to about 180 countries. World health officials have said people should receive the two-dose swine flu vaccination as well as the single-dose seasonal flu vaccination this year.

Now, I don't mean to come across as dismissive of the dangers of a swine flu outbreak. If I had young children of school age or family members with respiratory conditions like asthma, I would be concerned. However, having grown up in a country with rampant infectious agents in the environment, in an era when few vaccines were available, I am a bit more realistic about what can or cannot be done during the spread of a contagious disease. When I was a child in the 1950s, we lived amidst routine outbreaks of small pox (this scary disease would be controlled and eradicated only a couple of decades later), cholera, typhoid, whooping cough, malaria, measles, mumps, jaundice, dysentery and flu. Tuberculosis was widespread in the population. Leprosy victims sat at street corners and came to one's front door to beg for food and money (leprosy is not contagious in the short term). One never knew what one would be exposed to on stepping out of the home and being in crowded places. Almost every place in India is a crowded place.

My sister and I grew up in the care of an intelligent and hygienically cautious mother. From early childhood we were trained to acquire some common-sensical habits without becoming unduly paranoid. Our mother taught us to:

• Avoid touching surfaces (hand rails, eg.) in public places that many others are likely to have touched.
• To always carry a handkerchief to cover the mouth and nose when others coughed or sneezed around us and also when we did.
• Not share food or drinks with others when saliva too is likely to be shared.
• Above all, to wash hands with soap many times during the day, especially before eating.
• We were regularly vaccinated whenever a vaccine became available.

My sister and I were very healthy children and have remained mostly disease free well into our middle age. Perhaps we are blessed with good immune systems or it is pure dumb luck. Or it could be that our mother's training bore fruit.

To protect yourself and your kids against swine flu (or any other flu) during the high flu season, you should do all the things that my mother taught me and some more.

• Stay in touch with your doctor regarding the availability of the vaccine and sign your children up as candidates.
• Avoid unnecessary contact with other people. For example, tell your children that instead of high fiving with open palms, they should celebrate an exuberant moment with a fist bump.
• Refrain from practices such as drinking from a shared bottle.
• Minimize time spent in closed places (movie theaters, planes) as far as possible.
• Always pack a bottle of Purell or some other hand sanitizer for frequent use when soap and water are not accessible.
• Carry a clean napkin or handkerchief (sterile masks if you are really concerned) to cover the nose and mouth around people with persistent coughs.
• At the first sign of flu like symptoms, please visit the doctor. Early intervention is the best line of defense.

I am sure most of you are aware of these precautions and probably the steps are already in place for your family. I am reinforcing them as a mature person who knows from experience that simple cautionary steps help even in panicky times.

There is another preventive measure that my mother taught us which you may not know and I have never seen it mentioned anywhere in public health guidelines. Gargling and irrigating the nasal passages with warm saline water is a stunningly effective way to destroy pathogens in our respiratory tract. During cold season when respiratory diseases are common, this practice (once or twice a day) can ward off many infections as well as any medication available at the pharmacy. I am not sure if this method will work against the H1N1 virus. But there’s no harm trying. See if you can inculcate this habit in your kids and yourself. Good luck and stay well.

(For more swine flu related cartoons from all over the world, see here)

"Serenity": The picture

My recent post on peace and happiness reminded me of one of my paintings whose title was Serenity. I have never put up my paintings for sale. But I did end up selling just one and it was Serenity.  A good friend of mine really, really wished to have it. She is a psychologist / counselor and wanted the painting for her office where she thought it would exude a peaceful aura. After much friendly persuasion, I agreed to sell it to her knowing that it would be in good hands and that I would always know where to find it. The title was not my choice. My art instructor Joanie Furrow suggested it when I needed names for my paintings during an exhibition.  (More of my paintings here)

A Birthday Message For President Obama

"If you wish to win public support for your healthcare plan, please stop calling it Healthcare Reform and instead try selling it as Health Insurance Reform. Americans like the health care they are getting for the most part but are tired of being jerked around by insurance companies.  Best of luck!"  

A minimalistic approach to happiness

In a blog post in the NYT travel writer Pico Iyer describes life in a small apartment in Japan as his route to finding peace and happiness. Says Iyer:

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

I’m no Buddhist monk, and I can’t say I’m in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I’ve written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn’t want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I’ve come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

I like Pico Iyer's writings. I do not share his views on happiness entirely but some observations struck a chord.

My life is very different from Iyer's. Unlike him, having left the work force long ago I have not felt the urgent need to run away from the stresses of a busy professional life.  But one's personal fantasies about attaining that contented state of peace and happiness are not bound by what we do and where we are. Like Iyer, my day dreams too occasionally take me to Japan.

In my moderate travel experience through world cities, three left magical impressions, each for different reasons - San Francisco, Barcelona and Kyoto. Of these, the only one where I have imagined myself living is Kyoto. The existence I conjure up is very similar to what Iyer is currently living. But add to mine a view of the wavy, crenellated tiled roof of a Buddhist temple from an upstairs window and high speed internet.

I doubt that the Japanese are happier than the rest of the world. But for some reason, I can see myself feeling at peace in Japan, my lack of mastery over the local language notwithstanding. It is one place where I imagine that isolation from the outside chatter will not make me feel left out or lonely. It is of course all a fantasy with no real life experience of an extended stay to back up its veracity, arising solely out of some moments of exceptional calm that I have felt during my travels there even though my Japanese itineraries were always packed and hectic.

I am old enough to know that contentment and peace of mind are hardly ever wholly contingent upon our relationship with a person, possession or place. Like refreshing coastal showers they can come upon us suddenly at the least expected moment and in an unlikely setting. But it is still fun to dwell upon an imaginary escape hatch to serenity.  

I have occasionally written about Japan on A.B. touching upon one experience or the other. My last post on Japan was a pot-pourri of a few such observations. See here. That trip in the autumn of 2006 is nearly three years in the past. It may be time to plan another trip.

(The link to Iyer's article is via Namit Arora. The content of my post here is a modified version of the comment I left on Namit's blog)

Abolish It! (Joe)

The short version is, the bar exam is a stupid, pointless, useless, meaningless barrier to entry.  Way back in the archives of 2005, Dan Solove made this argument in much more detail than I am willing to -- suffice it to say, I agree.

"Legalize pot."  "Abolish the bar exam."  "Stop incarcerating the black ghetto on a population-wide scale."¹  "Stop killing people in the Muslim-populated countries of the Middle East."  Regular readers are probably thinking, Why is Joe always rabble-rousing?  Why all the agitation for significant social change?  To which I respond, Because I can, people.  That's what bloggers do.

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1 - Speaking of which -- by which I mean, speaking of something else entirely, the connection being race and criminal justice -- I'm surprised no one on this blog has commented on the Skip Gates arrest.

Musings on the conjunction fallacy (D)

The classic demonstrator of the conjunction fallacy is the following:

1. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
1A. Linda is a bank teller.
1B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

The general form is this: of an entity X, qualities x_i are asserted. We are to decide whether X is more likely to possess quality y or quality y in addition to to some quality z. The fallacy consists in the fact that people, when queried, pick 1B. as more probable, when, as a proper subset of 1A., it couldn't possibly be. (All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers but some bank tellers aren't feminist) Now, we commonly understand this as emerging from use of the heuristic of representativeness. To use the jargon of the election cycle, latte-sippers like Linda sound more like feminists than like bank-tellers. So much more so, in fact, that people are willing to contemplate and assert mathematical impossibilities like p(y & z | x_i) > p(y | x_i) simply because p(z | x_i) > p(y | x_i).(*) Here, the x_i's are the facts stated about Linda, y is the state of her being a bank teller and z is the state of her being a feminist.

Okay. But now consider a related but different situation:

2. Someone murders a nice Jewish couple in a high-rise apartment complex. Linda is a suspect. In which of the following situations is it more appropriate to convict her? She's seen to leave the building:
2A. five minutes later
2B. five minutes later, covered in blood, with a gun in her hand, and with a swastika inked on her exposed right forearm.

Now here too 2B is a proper subset of 2A, yet now the the correct response is obviously 2B, not 2A. There's no logical puzzle here; it's just that now we're reasoning backwards from the observations 2A, 2B to settle the truth of 2. That is, now we're comparing p(x|y & z) to p(x|y) and it's quite kosher for the first of those two to be larger (or smaller) than the second.

Now for the musings: in addition to failures of the representativeness heuristic, does some part of the conjunction fallacy arise from matters of this kind? After all,
- we pretty generically confuse the p(A|B) with p(B|A) - assuming we intuit that these things are different at all.
- we often confuse the thing assumed with the thing to be proved, as anyone who's ever tried an A-only-if-B style math proof knows too well.

Maybe instead of following imperfect heuristics through to the implicit conclusion that intersections can be more probable than what they're intersections of, some people are just trying to "convict" Linda of her stated biography (1) in two alternate worlds 1A and 1B, and deciding that 1B gives a more workable case for the prosecution. If so, their reasoning wouldn't instantiate idiotic math, just math that - reliably and well - answers a different question. Maybe the very fact that respondents are being asked about these things using the language of probability pushes some of them to start thinking like good prosecutors, getting them to condition priors on posteriors

How might we test for such? It's hard, and I wouldn't know, but here's the first thing I would try: ask people question 1. as before, except ask them to assign numerical subjective probabilities to options 1A and 1B. Then, ask them to assign probabilities to:
1C. Linda is a feminist.
1D. Linda is anti-nuclear.

I'd expect that at least some of the people who committed the conjunction fallacy would be tricked into assigning lower probability to 1D. than to 1C, something which no-one who saw 1D as given fact should do.

Finally, what if some people, instead of reversing premises and conclusions, aren't separating them clearly at all? What if what's being done instead is to evaluate an overall web of interrelated fact-claims for how well it hangs together? This would be representativeness heuristic taken to a certain logical endpoint, where all the different qualities mentioned simply may or may not apply to someone labeled 'Linda', and one essentially evaluates each belief for plausibility in the background of the rest. To test for that, one might ask something like this:

3. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy at Vassar College. She intends to home-school her children some day. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
3A. Linda is a bank teller.
3B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

If some people really are doing this last horrible(**) thing, I'd expect such to assign measurably lower probabilities to:
3C. Linda approves of home-schooling
than to
3D. Linda is anti-nuclear.
(She's been plonked into Vassar to "compensate" for the intuition that feminists are less likely to homeschool)

Conclude ramble.

(*)I'm setting entirely to the side the question of whether knowing a person is like Linda in fact raises the odds of her being a feminist more than it does those of her being a bank-teller.

(*) Well, horrible in this kind of setting at any rate, where the known is utterly known, beyond all possible doubt and whatnot. In more realistic situations, we frequently must revise assumptions in light of conclusions, and reason our way out of particular first principles and into others. Maybe Linda wasn't that big on social justice after all. Many people simply mayn't have acquired the peculiar academic discipline of really, truly, completely, suspending disbelief when presented with a set of consistent assumptions and therefore end up thinking about them instead of just with them. It's not like we particularly excel at abstract thought anyway...

Music. Smoking. Whales. Dodgy conceptions (D)

1. I imagine the average music listener has as much trouble teasing apart the different musical lines, instruments and voices in a symphony (say) as I do. Why isn't there a product category on the market where the different voices in a piece are all recorded individually? With a suitable software interface, you'd be able to hear just the first violin, or only the brass or only what the pianist is playing with his right hand, and so on. Or various toggle-able combinations of the elements. Plus of course, you could turn everything on and hear a serviceable, though hardly great, recording of the piece. The time I can imagine spending with such a CD is almost limitless; it'd be like having this for every piece I cared about. Surely the market can't be that small, and the production certainly isn't difficult. Why's no-one doing this?

2. I've often harbored a certain dim, masochistic sense that bans related to passive smoking have been less about health than about the general ickiness of the habit, the smell of the noxious weed and a certain puritanical desire to control and command. Indeed, I'd assumed the actual health risk from second hand smoke was minimal. I still assume those other factors are salient, but apparently this last isn't so. Orac at Scienceblogs has a very nice post up about secondhand smoking, that gets into the various studies performed, the mechanisms of consensus-generation and the politics in forming, disputing and proceeding from that consensus. Two takeaway numbers, in case you don't read the whole thing:
- "A person who smokes two packs a day smoker for 40-50 years will have approximately a 20% chance of dying of lung cancer."
- "In adults, numerous studies support the existence of approximately a 25% elevated risk of lung cancer from those exposed to secondhand smoke chronically."

3. This New York Times story is almost perfect for transporting a certain sort of mind into mystical ecstasies. It has all of:
- natural creatures who've suffered greatly under Man, yet absolve him of his sins
- cuddly, natural Disney creatures to boot, none of this scary, bloody competitive evolution stuff around.
- wise Natives who, with other ways of knowing, have penetrated to the core of Deep Truths White Man is only dimly coming to appreciate.
- concomitant dismissals of hard scientists, who've not truly achieved Wisdom for all their appropriation of cold, technical facts.
Actually, it's a pretty good piece for all the scorn I've heaped upon it. The stolid insistence that one not anthropomorphize the animal world is only going to be so useful, and unless one is a creationist other animals will necessarily be seen to exhibit many qualities we do in some form, including emotional ones.

4. This last I mention without further comment. Ms. Kathryn Jean Lopez finds this story amusing.

Personal and Political, Though Only As A Tourist (Anna)

A photo I took of some Uighur men, at their request, on the Southern Silk Road in Summer 2006. More photos here. Some ruminations after the break.

A more powerful way of naming names (phi-to-the-large-power D)

It is a just and proper convention we use in naming authors and thinkers that the immortals have only last names. After all, to name an author is to enter into a game where we are to rank them in an implicit list by excellence, profundity and significance. Hence, to Gustave a Flaubert is to commit a faux pas, while depriving a Roth of his Philip sounds odd. I have been using this elegant and delightsome signaling scheme for years now, though in my college years when I hadn't yet mastered its intricacies I did commit some few gaffes. Still, the skill has now been acquired, so I rejoice in seeing its proper use in others, and police violations diligently.

And yet, and yet. This venerated scheme is obviously too simple to be perfect. We perforce Emilify and Charlottize our venerated Brontë's, and this when we yearn so earnestly to deprive them of those cumbersome affixes. Then too, rare names seem to unfairly boost reputations. Hence DeLillo or Dawkins, and this while poor Adam shall never be a Smith. And then there are those annoying writers of whom we know no other name other than the one in common use. Both Aristotle and Adonis are known by a mere single name. What a pity to be unable to mark just and proper distinctions in these cases! And, to get to the very core of the issue, does not the mind of delicacy rebel at the coarseness of a mere binary distinction where so many finer gradations may be fruitfully deployed?

Allow me these simple suggestions:

1. Since the great thinker is firstname-to-the-zeroth-power lastname, and the rest are firstname-to-the-first-power lastname, mayn't we make this explicit? Then we may speak properly of Adam to the zeroth Smith and Nico to the first Malebranche.
2. Immediately as we recognize this, we are able to shake ourselves free of the binary hypnosis, and perceive the number line in all its elemental glory. For if firstnames are an embarrassment, how much worse it should be to have them repeated, and what an honor it should be to have the first name divided away from the last! Properly, we may speak of inverse-leo-to-the-sixth Tolstoy, Kant by Immanuel-to-the-fifth or Jacques-cubed Lacan. He who is as yet unconvinced needs merely repeat 'Yann-to-the-fourth Martel' a few times to recognize the wisdom of our proposal.
3. The problem of missing firstnames is adequately dealt with by means of introducing the null first name (denote phi). Then, Voltaire by phi, but also phi Cher, inverse-phi-squared Pele and so on.

Bugs doubtless remain to be fixed, chief of which seems to me the inability of many rendering schemes to properly do mathematical exponents as in 2. Still, at least the explicit accounting of 1. may be achieved by writing firstnames, then striking them through when appropriate. This scheme, if followed, should make discussions of the more intellectual sort rather more exact, and by virtue of its more fine-grained telegraphical nature, superior at concise assessment. Alternately, we might name people pragmatically as we please, but this is less excellent.

Estivate, Baby. Estivate.

Summer has arrived early in Houston this year. June, usually a much cooler month than July and August, is sizzling. Most years around this time, it feels more like late spring or early summer with temperatures in the mid to upper 80s. Instead, the thermometer has hovered around readings more reminiscent of broiling mid-summer for the past several weeks. After a long spell of near 100 degree temps, there is still no respite in sight in the coming days. We've also not seen any rain for the last one month, a rare occurance in the coastal city. 

I am no new comer to blazing summer heat, having grown up in North India during pre-air conditioning days. In those days ceiling fans and desert coolers provided some respite inside the home. Outside, we carried umbrellas and tried to stay in the shade. From April onwards until the refreshing monsoon showers broke the enervating spell in early July, folks adjusted their lifestyles to accommodate the unrelenting assaults of heat and dust. We learnt ways to survive the inferno with simple, common-sense coping methods  - frequent cold showers and change of sweat soaked clothes, avoiding the mid-day sun, wearing cotton, sleeping in the open air at night (on roof-tops and courtyards), drinking cold drinks made with yoghurt and roasted green mango and eating light, bland, torpor inducing foods. (see my last comment on this post) Air conditioning has improved things in India, at least for those who can afford it. But people still treat north Indian summers with prudence and resigned caution.

Houstonians too have their own ways to deal with the persistent summer heat. In principle, they are not very different from what we did in Delhi. The bottom line is that those who must put up with extreme heat, sometimes wish for a prolonged sleep of oblivion. Some surely wish they could escape the weather through estivation.  From Saturday's Houston Chronicle:   

Summer officially starts tomorrow, but in fact, the season oozed up weeks ahead of schedule, the way it always does in Houston. And just as predictably, it’ll refuse to leave in September, when the calendar says it’s fall’s turn. Summer here isn’t the fleeting visitor so beloved in more temperate climates. It’s the overbearing roommate you can’t evict, the unwanted house guest who decides to move in. It is the season that tries the Houstonian’s soul.

You know the drill. You leave a super-chilled building — an airport, the grocery store, your office — and walk into air warmer and more humid than your exhaled breath. You open your car door, stepping back to avoid the oven-like blast of heat. You swat a mosquito, then wipe your own blood from your hand.

Summer is the season of warnings: air-quality warnings, hurricane warnings, warnings to your kids that if they don’t do something besides play on-line games, their brains will melt and leak out through their ears. You’re warned to avoid the heat of midday, to exercise in the morning, to water your plants in the evening.

Use sunscreen! Stay hydrated! Never leave your dog in the car! In other places, it’s winter that kills. Here it’s summer.

To survive, we go to ground. “Estivate” is the word. A zoology term, it means “to pass the summer in a dormant or torpid state.” It’s the hot-weather version of hibernating.

In humans, estivation involves long naps, tall iced teas and shade. Icehouses, movie theaters, swimming pools, hammocks: They’re our versions of the cool, safe hole in the ground. No-brain TV shows, shallow summer movies, paperback thrillers, Popsicles, margaritas: Count them as aids to mental hibernation, necessary to lull your brain into a survival-enhancing state of rest.

Sooner or later, summer will end. We forget that it will, but it always does. The kids quit running through sprinklers and go back to school. The mosquitoes die. Hurricanes give way to northers.

On some crisp morning, months from now, we’ll no doubt return to our old productive selves: Full of projects, full of plans. But that bright day is a long way away. Right now, we’re in the teeth of summer, and we’re struggling to hang on. Wake us up when it’s over.

Plantinga. Also bloody babies. (D)

It seems Alvin Plantinga has written a popular account of his evolutionary argument against naturalism, viz. that evolution selects beliefs for survival value, not truth, so that while our beliefs may be useful we've no reason to think them true. I've nothing much to say about the argument itself...lots of people have written about it, and there's a plentiful academic literature in any case. [I do note that in this popularization at least, he follows up with some pretty trippy math that suggests that if our prior probability that one useful belief is true is a half, that the probability that a set of one hundred beliefs is true is one over two to the googol'th power. Such assumptions of total independence between utility and truth, between the truths of related beliefs, such maximally in-coherentist ideas seem more than a bit dubious to me. Incidentally, a surprising number of iffy probabilistic arguments seem to involve assumptions of independence followed by simple multiplication. Break thee free man, of the tyranny of the product sign! Rejoice, for not all probabilistic reasoning needs sixth grade maths!]

What puzzles me about Plantinga is not the extent to which he doubts naturalistic reason, though I don't think he sufficiently respects the resources a naturalist has. What surprises me is his sense that his own beliefs do - or should - give him a strong degree of extra confidence in his accounts of nature:

Clearly this doubt arises for naturalists or atheists, but not for those who believe in God. That is because if God has created us in his image, then even if he fashioned us by some evolutionary means, he would presumably want us to resemble him in being able to know; but then most of what we believe might be true even if our minds have developed from those of the lower animals. On the other hand, there is a real problem here for the evolutionary naturalist.

Let us not here get into tediously evaluating these religious beliefs for plausibility. Indeed, let us grant Plantinga all he'd hope for, a God in heaven and several larks and snails squishing about. Going from even there to a strong confidence in beliefs about the world seems to me like an odd path for a Christian to follow. From this outsider's perspective, one of the most striking aspects of that belief system is its keen appreciation of our finitude and fallibility - sin disorders minds, and distance from God causes error. Nor does accepting Christ make you intellectually or ethically more than human. Christians are not perfect, just forgiven, as they say. The dark glass remains, all that good stuff.

Indeed, that we get things wrong, that we make mistakes, that our cognition is error prone, that we fuck things up, that in our Rumsfeldian world we face each of known and unknown knowns and unknowns, this is as close to being a brute fact as anything I can think of. If your metaphysics can't admit to the possibility of error, so much the worse for it. No well-represented philosophy I've come across tries to sell that snake oil. Even traditions marking a less stark separation between man and God, between the circumscribed and the limitless, all have the sense to stay away from such ideas. After you gain enlightenment you must still chop wood and carry water. Whether or not you know that you are that, you must listen to the mahout when he yells at you to get away from the mad elephant. It is just especially strange coming from a Christian. I'm reminded of that cute thing Chesterton said:

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

Anyhow. On the off-chance that you've not seen it already, I think this is in the coolest video (and child) on youtube. Maybe it's me, but when I see it I keep thinking of Basil Fawlty yelling 'fire' in his hotel...the same helpless inability to convince others to take one seriously.

Computering Bleg (Joe)

I want a to-do list on my Windows desktop.  Creating a Word/Notepad/etc. document that I have to open is no good; for much the same reason, anything web-based (e.g. something like Google Calendar) won't really work.

I really just want to be able to write, "Look for plane tickets," "Send thank-you card," "Buy groceries," "Find a copy of Abbey Road,"¹ and "Consider studying for the bar," and have it stay on my desktop.  I need a reminder that's there, not one that I have to look for.

Suggestions?

---
1 - Why aren't the Beatles on iTunes?  This is odd.  And not a good business strategy -- I would've paid my $9.99 to download it yesterday, but it's not there, and while I don't plan on violating any copyrights (and, um, if I did I wouldn't admit it publicly), this has to mean lost revenue.

George Tiller, "Abortion Doctor" (Joe)

So, you know, he was killed today by some anti-choice nut.  (Sad, etc.)  Actually, in this case, let's call the person who killed Tiller a "pro-life" nut -- it's more ironic than usual.

"Abortion doctor" -- don't we have a better label than this?  I've seen this term used in CNN and NYT headlines.  It's better than "abortionist," I suppose, but it's still on the disrespectful/demeaning end of things.

We have oncologists and dermatologists and orthopedic surgeons, not cancer doctors and skin doctors and bone-setters.  We have to be able to do better than abortion doctors.

Do a Google News search -- no one is calling him an obstetrician, or an OB-GYN.  I haven't done my fact-checking (as was pointed out in the comments on one of Ruchira's posts, we're not journalists here), so it's possible there's some reason that term doesn't fit, but in that case wouldn't even "abortion provider" be better?

Congrats, Joe!

Dear readers, there is one more legal eagle on the A.B. roster. Our own Joe graduated from law school last weekend.

Joe was one of the two earliest co-bloggers (the other being Anna) to join me on this blog. In late 2005 he was at home waiting to get into law school for the second time. He had been admitted once before but met with an unexpected roadblock. He was to begin school at Tulane University in the fall of 2005. However, mother nature had a plan of her own that summer in the form of Katrina! Joe's law school plans were washed away like much of New Orleans. He returned home to wait for another academic term to begin his legal education. During that idle period, with time on his hands, Joe read a lot of blogs, among them, Accidental Blogger. I came to know him through his comments and recruited him to write when I needed to go on a vacation. It seems like only yesterday. But more than three years have passed since then and Joe is now a full fledged lawyer. Congratulations, Joe!  

This is the second time we are celebrating a formal landmark event in the life of one of our authors. The first time was a wedding.

Sujatha Struggles With A Philosophical Question

A few years ago on a plane, my husband and I got into polite chit-chat with a fellow passenger. The talk turned to children. The lady asked what our kids were up to with their lives. Our daughter was at the time a graduate student in philosophy. Instead of providing that simple bit of information, my husband said rather grandly, "My daughter is a philosopher." The woman retorted laconically, "Aren't we all?" My husband, I am sure, was properly chastised for his pomposity.

What is philosophy? Who is a philosopher? What do philosophers do?  All tricky questions, in my opinion.  Answering them can be a bit like the "Not this, not this"  approach to describing God / Brahman in Hindu philosophy . Our own Sujatha was interrogated by her young daughter along the same lines recently and came up short.

"What is a Filo- so-fer?" M enunciated carefully.

"What?"

 "Here it says that Muskrat was a..." and she showed me the book page.

"A philosopher. Umm, I think that's a person who ponders hard-to-answer questions, like 'What is the purpose of life?' "

 "Or, how did the Big Bang start the universe", M tried to grapple with this new term.

 "No, that's a scientific question. A scientist can do experiments to try and find the answers to such questions. That can't be done in philosophy."

"Or, how did God create Man?"

"No, that's a theological question, not a philosophical one."

 "Or why are we Hindus instead of some other religion?"

"Not exactly", I was starting to run out of adjectives that could be easily explained (cultural? social? ethnic?). "Though it is possible that people of different religions may develop their own philosophies."

M gave up trying to get a coherent answer from me and went back to her book and the whimsies of Moomintroll and Muskrat.

Original post at Fluff 'n' Stuff.

KWB - Knitting While Blogging

Knitting is among the few things that I do reasonably well. While I don't particularly enjoy stitching or embroidery, I have always been fond of knitting since my mother taught me the skill around the time I was five or six years old. I must have made close to a hundred garments and accessories during my life. I have knitted for myself, my family, my friends and their kids.  For the last several years however, my needles have clicked mainly for charity, focusing on easy to finish items like children's hats, scarves, mittens and cardigans donated to my neighbors' churches for their annual bazaars and overseas care packages.

Two winters ago, having come across a nice design in a pattern book, I took on a more elaborate project - an adult sized sweater for my son.  Having duly obtained an excellent yarn I started enthusiastically. The initial tempo was brisk but things soon fell by the wayside, mostly because of my furious rate of blogging during that period. In fact, I often went for months without returning to the sweater. When I would go back to it, it took me a while to figure out exactly where I was and it was dispiriting to gauge the dismal rate of progress. Normally, a pullover of this size and complexity would have taken me no more than three months to finish at a leisurely but steady pace. This one dragged on for two years - all because of my preoccupation with the blog.  A couple of months ago, after Barack Obama became president, I decided to let up a bit on blogging and concentrate instead on the never-ending sweater. Noting my uncharacteristic silence in the blogosphere, the always interesting Elatia Harris of 3 Quarks Daily wrote in an email:

 "Still in the blog doldrums? You did say you were knitting. I hope that doesn't mean endorphin mutiny."

I knew right away that I must bring the expression, "endorphin mutiny" to the attention of my readers somewhere, somehow.  Although it is true that knitting helps keep one from climbing the wall during stressful times, I assured her that this particular effort was a non-therapeutic project and that I intended to finish the job before Houston heat makes knitting an itchy pastime. Well, the sweater was at last finished and put together about ten days ago. I took a few pictures of my handiwork and am displaying them here as evidence of "mission accomplished."  Sadly though, I discovered that a charcoal colored sweater does not photograph well - the pattern does not show up at all in the photos. But here it is anyway - the sweater I sweated over.

  

Kosher Coke - The Real Thing!

I am not an observant Jew. To put it more succinctly, I am not Jewish at all. Yet I look forward to Passover each year for one gastronomic reason - kosher Coca-Cola. I am not much of a soft drink lover either, tea and water being my beverages of choice. But when I do drink soda, I prefer ice cold Classic Coke or regular Pepsi to anything else.  Both are familiar soft drinks of my childhood in India - delicious tingling beverages that brought much relief on hot sunny days at home, in restaurants or by the shack of a road side vendor.

I was not aware that kosher dietary laws extend to soft drinks until just a few years ago (probably 2001 or 2002). During the Passover week that year, I happened to pass a special table displaying kosher goods for the upcoming holiday at my local grocery store and noticed 2 liter bottles of Coke with distinctive yellow caps among the items. I brought one home purely out of curiosity. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise - it tasted like real Coke, a nostalgic taste no longer found in the modern incarnation of the drink. Having never paid any attention to the ingredients in Coca-Cola, I had no idea why the kosher cola tasted so much better than the ordinary variety. A Jewish friend shed light on the mystery. Kosher Coke is made with sugar - it is indeed the Real Thing. In the mid '80s the Coca-Cola company led the way in switching to high fructose corn syrup as sweetener for soft drinks, ditching real sugar from the ingredients. No wonder the kosher Coke tasted so good - it invoked the happy times of youth. Since then every Passover season, I keep an eye out for this rare commodity - kosher Coke is as rare as it is ephemeral. It makes its fleeting appearance for just a few days around this time of the year and if one is not vigilant, it is gone. Last year I missed it. So, I am determined to obtain a couple of bottles this year. I was at the grocery store this morning looking for kosher Coke. It hadn't arrived. I talked to the manager and he assured me that he has some on order and I should check back tomorrow or the day after. Greedy though I am for this special concoction, I only purchase moderate quantities partly out of consideration for Jewish shoppers and partly because 2 liter bottles are not the best option for our household of just two members, neither of whom consumes carbonated drinks in large quantities. Most years I have only managed to find this large sized  packaging. Just once, the store also carried cans of kosher Coke which I much prefer.

If you are too young to have ever tasted soft drinks sweetened  with sugar and you didn't know about  kosher Coke, do try to find some this week and taste the Real Thing.  Read more about this special edition of Coca-Cola here.

Note: This post originally appeared on March 18, 2008. I am bringing it to the front for the Passover week that begins today.