Over at 3 Quarks Daily, a spirited discussion is under way regarding the morality of informed parents giving birth to biological children when the world is becoming over-populated, strapped for resources and there is an abundance of poor, malnourished and orphaned children in the world.
Tauriq Moosa's orginal provocative post here.
Nicholas Smyth's rebuttal here.
Moosa's response to Smyth and other commenters here.
About a week ago, I read a blogblurb raving about some new phone app, which would use the power of GPS to tell you where you were and highlight the most interesting thing in the vicinity.For instance, if you were in France, walking near the Eiffel tower, your phone could superimpose cool factoids and trivia about the Eiffel tower on the screen, allowing you to become a walking encyclopedia, in more ways than one.
Heaven forbid that you should just put your phone away and just look up at the Huge Tower. There, just in front of you.
Today's review of museum apps (from the NY Times) suggests that we have indeed reached the era of phone-toting zombies wandering around the halls of sarcophagi and Picass(i?), colliding as they swipe, swirl and shove their way across their touch screens. The guard rails around the exhibits had better be strengthened to prevent untoward accidents as the wired museum goer pays more attention to the screen than the exhibit.
From the article:
"You have to type in strings of as many as eight or nine digits to get information about an object, though many cannot be found in the system; some offer less information than the museum’s label. The app’s real point, though, is its embrace of populist Web culture, in which votes and tags are supposed to yield a kind of collective wisdom. If you are looking at an object in the program, you can “vote” for it by clicking on a button with a heart, declaring your taste: “Like this.” You are then directed to other objects people have “liked” in the same gallery and can see how many votes they get. (Few people seem to use this system: the number of “likes” rarely seems to rise above five.)"
Talk about walking hazards, as you attempt to key in all of the above and 'Like' a particular exhibit, and follow the map presented to you to the next object you might 'Like'.
In fairness, though, the author of the article, after weary recaps of every museum app he tried, concludes:
"It is best to consider all these apps flawed works in progress. So much more should be possible. Imagine standing in front of an object with an app that, sensing your location, is already displaying precisely the right information. It might offer historical background or direct you through links to other works that have some connection to the object. It might provide links to critical commentary. It might become, for each object, an exhibition in itself, ripe with alternate narratives and elaborate associations.
And, best of all, you could save it for later, glance up from the screen and look carefully at what faces you, all scrims removed, all distractions discarded. Like this! There must be an app for that!"
Try looking at the objects in the museum, instead of the phone screen. What a revolutionary concept!
Abercombie & Fitch, the upscale clothing retailer has long been suspected of discriminatory hiring practices as also, criticized for marketing what many consider tasteless t-shirts. (The Chinese laundry logo, "Two Wongs Can Make It White," is priceless; I wonder how many high fives were exchanged after this particular witticism was coined.) Given the image of the store, it is not surprising that an African American employee lost his job for wearing his hair in corn-rows. It is also unsurprising that the dismissed employee sued on the basis of racial discrimination. Here is the press release of the case.
Race Discrimination Case Against Abercrombie and Fitch Heads
Toward Trial: African-American Man Was Fired in 2007 for His
So-Called “Extreme” Hairstyle
A federal race discrimination lawsuit filed against Abercrombie and Fitch by an African-American man who was fired for his hairstyle is gearing up for trial. Abdul Jabbar Gbajiamilla filed his case after he was fired in 2007 from a San Diego store for wearing his hair
in corn-rows. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in May 2010, by civil rights attorneys Lisa Holder and Sanjukta Paul of Los Angeles, has cleared initial procedural hurdles and is now on the path toward trial.
The company did not contend that Gbajiamilla suffered from performance problems or that there was any other reason for his termination. Instead, Abercrombie has expressly stated that corn-rows violate the company’s grooming policy, which requires employees to sport a “clean, natural, and classic” hairstyle. Abercrombie’s Director of Human Resources testified in a related proceeding that corn-rows do not fit this definition because they are “extreme” and “uncommon.”
Plaintiff Gbajiamilla commented, “I brought this lawsuit because I believe the United States has come too far in regards to racial tolerance to now retreat. I should not be forced to conceal or tone down my God-given identity as a black person. There is nothing ‘extreme’ about being black.”
The lawsuit is the latest allegation of racial discrimination against the national retailer, which is already subject to a federal consent decree that requires it to take steps to prevent discrimination against nonwhite employees and to promote racial and cultural diversity. That suit, filed by a panoply of civil rights groups, settled in 2005.
Gbajiamilla is the son of Nigerian immigrants and grew up in Southern California. He had styled his hair in corn-rows for his college graduation ceremony from San Diego State University.
The lawsuit is brought under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act. It alleges that under Abercrombie's grooming policy, which mandates that employees sport a "clean, natural, and classic" hairstyle, African-American employees are required to wear hairstyles which are intended to conceal the distinctive texture of their hair. For example, African-American men are required to wear a closely cropped haircut, such that the texture of their hair is not visible at all. Other men, with "straight or loosely curled" hair, are permitted to wear their hair in a vast array of hairstyles and in varying lengths.
Perhaps the dismissal of Gbajiamilla for allegedly sporting an "extreme" hairdo and the image of Abercombie & Fitch can be better understood when you examine the man behind the store's "classic" look.
(One of the two civil rights attorneys working on the case is my daughter Sanjukta Paul. You can listen to an interview with the lawyers, Lisa Holder and Sanjukta on KPFK radio, San Diego. (you have to wait a bit for the interview to begin). Here is a report in the L.A. Weekly which leaves nothing to the imagination by beginning the article by invoking Hitlerian aesthetics right off the bat.)
When a Detroit minister named Mayowa Lisa Reynolds went to her City Council last summer to complain about malt liquor advertising, she came prepared.The minister had conducted a survey in which she found a Colt .45 billboard in every square mile of the city. She looked in the nearby, majority white suburbs of Plymouth and Royal Oak.There were none.
Still, the Colt .45 billboards were relatively inoffensive by the traditional standards of malt liquor advertising.In one notorious 1986 print spot for Midnight Dragon, a voluptuous woman grasped a squat 40 ounce bottle above the tagline “I could suck on this all night.”In the 90s, charismatic gangster rappers incorporated 40s into their tales of murder and drug-dealing, driving malt liquor sales to all-time highs. In contrast, the 2009 Colt .45 ads merely featured a cartoon drawing of longtime spokesman Billy Dee Williams dressed in mauve and beige evening wear, accompanied by the slogan, “Works Every Time.”
Reynolds needn’t have worried. Several council members went ballistic at her findings. Alberta Tinsley-Talabi, who created a “Denounce the 40 Ounce Campaign” in the 90s to reduce alcohol consumption in Detroit, fumed that “every 20 years we have to start this fight again.” Reynolds pondered the meaning of “works every time.” “If women drink it, ladies will lose their virginity?” she asked. Councilwoman JoAnn Watson brought out the heaviest rhetorical guns: “This is killing our community. It’s an issue of racism and perversity.” (David Josar, "Detroit council takes aim at Billy Dee Williams malt liquor ads," The Detroit News, July 7, 2009).
For someone who knew nothing about the history of malt liquor, such strong denunciations might seem excessive. Racism and perversity? The Colt .45 billboards in Detroit are hardly more outlandish than other kinds of beer advertising.
But the anger from Tinsley-Talabi and Watson are not atypical.In the summer of 2008, at a Philadelphia bike shop called Jay’s Pedal Power, community protests forced the painting-over of a different graffitti-style billboard of young partiers drinking Colt .45. In June 2009, Colt .45 bus-shelter ads in St. Louis brought protests that the company was seducing young African-Americans into a life of alcoholism. "If you look at the black community, the only thing that's advertised is cigarettes and alcohol. Period," alderman Charles Quincy Troupe told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "There's nothing that's advertised that puts forth any wellness."
Malt liquor clearly bears a stigma with African-Americans. But with the current “reboot” of an aging and stigmatized brand, Colt .45 is also trying to sell to a different demographic group, a group of people that sometimes appears to lack historical memory of anything that happened before last Tuesday: hipsters.
Like an earnest Mom trying to connect with her teenagers by using the latest slang, Colt .45 is communicating with the kids in a language that they will understand. And some of the efforts are impressive. The company has dialed-in promoters putting on parties and concerts in New York and L.A. with hot bands of the moment, like Das Racist, War Tapes, and the Rapture – with Colt .45 served on the house. Whatever your principles, it’s hard to turn down free booze and music, especially in the middle of a brutal recession.
Some of the other tactics are less auspicious. There’s the bizarre schwag, like special edition brown bags or a Colt .45 unisex robe (available now for just 30 dollars). And some painfully unclever cartoons, as when a young man seduces a total stranger, who has just had a terrible fight with her boyfriend, merely by knocking on her door and giving her a can of malt liquor. (Unless your taste runs to poverty-stricken alcoholics, courtship tends to be a bit more complicated than that, even in these informal times). In a different cartoon scenario with vague echoes of Buckwheat from The Little Rascals, a group of partygoers discover that they have run out of Colt .45 – until noticing that one resourceful drunk has squirreled away a dozen cans in his Afro. They’re forced to attack him to get their fair share.
The humorous portrayals of problem drinking are the work of a young white graphic artist named Jim Mahfood, who hails from the macrobrewery company town of St. Louis. On a promotional video produced by Colt .45’s ad agency Cole & Weber United, Mahfood explains the concept behind the campaign:
"The general vibe, of like, Colt .45, or even drinking 40s?…It just reminds me of being at art school, and people having like, a spontaneous party on the campus lawn, and just people drinking 40s and listening to a ghetto-blaster…When I was able to tell all my friends, especially my friends I went to art school with, that I was doing this campaign? And my comic book label was called "40 Ounce Comics?" I feel like I've been rewarded for all those years of drinking malt liquor."
(Cole & Weber United website, accessed October 1, 2009)
The artist's life turns out to be not so tough — so long as you jettison any pretensions to originality or having something to say.
Companies are not always so ham-handed when it comes to marketing products to hipsters. The journalist Christian Lorentzen may have concluded that “hipsters” don’t actually exist, but Madison Avenue certainly thinks that they do. That's not praise, so much as an observation – advertisers are clearly targeting hipsters, a group loosely defined as young people with relative pop cultural sophistication, a surface detachment from middle-class values, and a love of kitsch and retro styles.
The resuscitation of Pabst Blue Ribbon offers the best example of how subtle the Don Drapers of today can be. P.B.R. went from a beer known for being cheap and bland and in seeming terminal decline in 2001, to a brand known for being cheap and bland that has increased sales by over 25% since 2008, in spite of raising prices in the middle of a recession. That’s on top of a roughly 60% increase in sales between 2001 and 2006, due to a stealth marketing campaign astutely analyzed by Rob Walker in his book Buying In.
As Walker shows, P.B.R. grew precisely because of the lack of overt marketing. A group of bike messengers, skaters, punks, and others who identified with P.B.R.’s low price and vaguely blue-collar image were also attracted by the fact that the beer’s corporate parent didn’t seem to care enough about it to run endless T.V. ads or miles of billboards. (Never mind that the actual owners were uniformly white-collar, having summarily fired 250 Milwaukee brewery workers and outsourced production to Miller in 2001 – PBR is a “virtual” brand that exists only as a marketing and distribution entity).When Kid Rock’s lawyer noticed the young, hard edged drinkers drawn to P.B.R., and thought that that his client might make an excellent spokesman, the company rebuffed his overtures. Instead, P.B.R. continued its unobtrusive promotions, like skateboard movie screenings, art gallery openings, indie publishing events, and the "West Side Invite,” where Portland messengers drank beer and played “bike polo” together – but without pushing the brand using ostentatious posters or signs.
Alex Wipperfürth, who consulted for P.B.R. during those years and has written a book that draws on his findings, describes P.B.R. customers as engaging in “lifestyle as dissent” and “consumption as protest” – embracing this seemingly forlorn beer as a kind of expression of “no future” solidarity. P.B.R. succeeded by willfully keeping its marketing efforts as neutral as possible, to perpetuate the beer’s underdog image.
Buying P. B. R. is not much of a form of dissent, in comparison with, say, marching across the bridge at Selma or smuggling in food to Anne Frank, but it is dissent nevertheless. As Walker observes, buying the P.B.R. beer brand, owned by a large holding company, is hardly a way to strike back against corporations – but it is a way to protest against the phony hilarity and brand saturation of conventional marketing. Incredibly, Pabst marketing whiz Neal Stewart shaped his unconventional campaign by reading Naomi Klein’s 2000 book No Logo. After finishing Klein’s impassioned protest against the pervasiveness of corporate brands, Stewart concluded, "Hey, there are all these people out there who hate marketing – and we should sell to them."
Though Pabst is in the same family of brands as Colt .45, the patronizing cartoons and that silly bathrobe suggest that Cole & Weber United hasn’t learned the lessons of subtlety in selling to young people who loathe pandering advertising campaigns. The central conceit of the hipster is that his bullshit-detector and cultural awareness render him too much of a special snowflake to be targeted by some agency’s dorky creative team. But even were Cole and Weber to replicate some of P.B.R.’s clever moves, it would be hard for it to replicate their results. Colt. 45 is not just another beer, as Watson’s accusation of “racism and perversity” suggests.
Instead of the vaguely blue-collar but essentially blank canvas on which hipsters can project a “no future” image, Colt .45 and malt liquor offer a very particular history. Originally invented during the Depression as a way to make a potent brew cheaply, by replacing some of the expensive malt used in conventional beer with less expensive dextrose, and using heartier yeast strains that result in more alcohol and less flavor, malt liquor has been eclipsed by its marketing. In the 1980s and 90s, malt liquor became a way for brewers to bottle black stereotypes and sell them, in a pomo echo of the minstrel tradition.
How many different ways can Vatican officials put their pious feet in their mouths before they bother to look in the mirror? Pope Benedict's own past as a member of the Hitler Youth Brigade makes this latest grandiose statement all the more ironic and offensive.
The Pope has compared "atheist extremism" to the Nazi tyranny of WWII in a speech given in Edinburgh as he begins a four-day visit to the UK.
The pontiff praised Britain's fight against the Nazis – who "wished to eradicate God" – before relating it to modern day "atheist extremism".
Afterwards his spokesman Federico Lombardi said: "I think the Pope knows rather well what the Nazi ideology is".
Humanists have said the comments were a "terrible libel" against non-believers…
…
A statement from the British Humanist Association said the Pope's remarks were "surreal".
"The notion that it was the atheism of Nazis that led to their extremist and hateful views or that it somehow fuels intolerance in Britain today is a terrible libel against those who do not believe in God.
"The notion that it is non-religious people in the UK today who want to force their views on others, coming from a man whose organisation exerts itself internationally to impose its narrow and exclusive form of morality and undermine the human rights of women, children, gay people and many others, is surreal."
The German-born Pope has previously spoken of his time growing up under the "monster" of Nazism.
He joined Hitler Youth at 14, as was required of young Germans at the time.
That's the conclusion that Stephen Hawking has come to, in his latest book The Grand Design, written in conjunction with Leonard Mlodinow.
In his introduction to the book on the amazon.com website:
"How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? Over twenty years ago I wrote A Brief History of Time,
to try to explain where the universe came from, and where it is going.
But that book left some important questions unanswered. Why is there a
universe–why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist?
Why are the laws of nature what they are? Did the universe need a
designer and creator?It was Einstein’s dream to discover
the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains
everything. However, physicists in Einstein’s day hadn’t made enough
progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a
realistic goal. And by the time I had begun writing A Brief History of Time,
there were still several key advances that had not yet been made that
would prevent us from fulfilling Einstein’s dream. But in recent years
the development of M-theory, the top-down approach to cosmology, and new
observations such as those made by satellites like NASA’s COBE and
WMAP, have brought us closer than ever to that single theory, and to
being able to answer those deepest of questions. And so Leonard
Mlodinow and I set out to write a sequel to A Brief History of Time to attempt to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The result is The Grand Design, the product of our four-year effort.In The Grand Design
we explain why, according to quantum theory, the cosmos does not have
just a single existence, or history, but rather that every possible
history of the universe exists simultaneously. We question the
conventional concept of reality, posing instead a "model-dependent"
theory of reality. We discuss how the laws of our particular universe
are extraordinarily finely tuned so as to allow for our existence, and
show why quantum theory predicts the multiverse–the idea that ours is
just one of many universes that appeared spontaneously out of nothing,
each with different laws of nature. And we assess M-Theory, an
explanation of the laws governing the multiverse, and the only
viable candidate for a complete "theory of everything." As we promise
in our opening chapter, unlike the answer to the Ultimate Question of
Life given in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer we provide in The Grand Design is not, simply, "42."
At issue is a single line, much quoted before the book itself is released to the general public, where Hawking states: "“Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist…It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."
The pundits of the media, having nothing else to blather about,have decided to pounce on this book and generate some 'discussion'. Also, some sales for the book, I presume.
Here's a sampling of the headlines.
God did not create the universe, says Hawking
Stephen Hawking says universe not created by God
A review by Roger Penrose (he's not interested in the God argument, but has other bones to pick.)
Note: Ruchira is currently dealing with a medical emergency and won't be posting until she gets back to Houston.
August 2010 has been a torrid month in Houston- it is winding down to become the hottest August on record. The high temperatures and humidity have made the days unusually uncomfortable with heat advisories being issued nearly daily. Two days ago the Houston Chronicle ran a mildly amusing editorial named The ugliest August. It described synapses melting in fearsome heat filled days.
Here in the depths of a Houston August, we sometimes suspect that the heat has melted our brain. So we run little tests. Sometimes we ask ourself poll questions like, "Is Barack Obama a Muslim?" If the answer is yes, and if we think that we learned that from the media, we walk very carefully, holding our head up straight, so those liquid neurons don't slosh out our ears.
Another little test we run is to read SciGuy's blog on the Chronicle's website. Eric Berger uses graphs and words like "correlation," and we feel smarter just looking at that stuff on our screen. If the heat had truly liquefied our lobes, wouldn't we be on TMZ reading about Mel Gibson's latest phone rant?
(Okay, so we were reading that. And we'd like to reach out to Mel, who's clearly a fellow sufferer of Melted Brain Syndrome. It's just that we're afraid he'd call back.)
Where were we? Oh, yeah. SciGuy. On Friday, he started his blog with the line, "It's been so hot this month that…" Our overheated synapses got all excited: Was SciGuy going to crack jokes? We braced for stuff that would knock 'em dead at the nanotech centers — "so hot that 'heat death of the universe' takes on a whole new meaning!" … or "so hot that climate-change skeptics could cook their numbers on the sidewalk!"
But no. Instead, SciGuy dazzled us with data. It's so hot, he wrote, that "this month is on pace to become the warmest month on record in Houston. Any month. Ever." It's so hot that the average monthly temperature of 88.3 degrees is a whopping eight-tenths of a degree warmer than any previous August on record. So hot that this August has already had two — two! — daily minimum temperatures of 83 degrees, a level of overnight misery achieved only once before in 110-plus years of records.
There's no respite, we realized. This vicious month is giving no quarter. There's no chance for a melted brain to cool down. Demoralized, we slumped in our chair, leaned back, and felt our neocortex dribble down our neck. At least it made our neck feel cooler.
So okay, it wasn't really even mildly funny after the first paragraph. But I was thankful that amidst all those numbers that SciGuy is throwing around, there is no mention of the heat index which is regularly reported on TV weather reports alhough not on the Chronicle's own weather page.
I have always been mystified by the concept of heat index and wind chill factor. While there is no dispute that higher humidity on a hot day makes us feel hotter and howling winds during chilling temperatures can cut like a knife on the skin, how can the meteorologists say "exactly" how hot or cold one is supposed to feel due to these indices? I need a light cardigan or a shawl on a clear and breezy 70 degree night. My husband feels comfortable in shorts and a t-shirt on 55 degree days. During his high school years my son played hours of tennis in July when the thermometer would regularly hover in the high 90s, often climbing to triple digits while I sat under a tree or an umbrella fanning myself, drinking copious amounts of iced water and wishing for the matches to end.
Who knows exactly how hot or cold a person feels? Perhaps 97 degrees Fahrenheit and high humidity feel like 100 to me, 105 to my husband and merely 97 to my son, while the meteorologist confidently tells us that it should feel like 103. Measurements of weather phenomena have made tremendous advances but it would serve the public well if weather reports stay within the bounds of measurable parameters. Despite sophisticated instruments, predicting weather remains an inexact science. Having lived for a long time in tornado and hurricane prone regions of the country, I know this first hand. But rather than accept the fact that weather conditions are routine and for the most part, uneventful parts of our lives, the men and women reporting them on TV have become performers who are called upon to joke, scare and embellish. Instead of stating mere facts like the barometric pressure, the exact temperatures, relative humidity, wind velocities and the inches of snow and rainfall and occasionally issuing necessary warnings during severe weather, they must spice up the daily weather report by providing the measure of "feelings." I don't see the utility of the heat index and the wind chill factor and also why the weather segment of TV news has to adopt the sensationalist mode that has crept into all other forms of news reporting.
Hands-On Research is a commendable outreach program for higher education in science. My cousin Rajarshi Roy of the University of MD is one of the directors of this program. He described to me the scope and objectives of this remarkable project. I am very impressed both by the design of the program and the dedication of the participants. A labor of love for academics (mostly physicists) from several countries, Hands-On Research has so far conducted workshops in India, Brazil and Cameroon.
Coffee at Starbucks. It's advertised in three sizes. What wasn't obvious to me is that the sizes actually contain different concentrations of coffee. A tall (12 oz.) coffee has a shot of coffee, as does a grande (16 oz.), but the venti (20 oz.) coffee has two coffee-shots. So, depending on which size you get, you get volume-to-coffee ratios of 12 oz./shot, 16 oz./shot and 10 oz/shot.
Now of course there's nothing inherent in the taste of lattemedium that should make it best served in medium-sized portions. The form of the lattesmall does not come equipped with an intrinsic volume-scale. In fact, you should be able to buy each of coffeesmall, coffeemedium and coffeelarge in sizes small, medium and large as desired. Think of it: you really like the especially mild and milky flavor of lattemedium, sufficiently in fact to to
want it in the large size. A largelattemedium, so to speak. For when mediumlattemedium just isn't enough. Or maybe the robust heartiness of largemochalarge is appealing, but who wants that much coffee? Is not the mediummochalarge a worthy alternative? Coffee is not a univariate entity – no, it is inherently a matrix-type proposition. It seems to me Starbucks underserves us by offering us only the diagonal coffee-elements, and compounds the error by identifying the elements, as if a lattemedium were merely a jumbo version of the lattesmall.
I have great trouble convincing people of the essential awesomeness of the proposed scheme; somehow people – even those fluent in the half-syrup-half-caramel-one-percent-macchiato-with-cinnamon lingo – seem to find this a bit complicated. Me, I think a world with grid-valued coffee types, in which people had to think with 3×3 matrices every time they ordered a cuppa, would be a happier place in all of the best ways.
Accidental Blogger 