Accidental Blogger

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  • 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)

  • Iraq War And The Politics Of Pluto

    It's the month of August and once again, as the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is about to convene for its general assembly meeting in Rio de Janeiro to discuss matters astronomical, my thoughts turn to Pluto, the planet / unplanet.  Apparently, since its high handed and mostly unpopular ouster from the line up of planets three years ago, Pluto has lost its lobbying power. It is not likely to be reinstated to the planetary fold any time soon although some astronomers believe that a decade or so in the future, data collected by space probes will establish its bona fides as an authentic planet once again. (See Eric Berger's article in the Houston Chronicle) 

    So with no revision to Pluto's status is the former planet's demotion officially a fait accompli?

    Not likely, said Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tuscon, Ariz.

    “The IAU executive committee does not want to address it,” Sykes said. “They put out their encyclical, and they're basically done with it. But does the IAU dictate thought? No, they're not the holy mother church. There are a lot of scientists who will simply ignore what they have done and continue to refer to and write about Pluto as a planet.”

    Celestial evidence

    Sykes said he believes evidence will come out within the next decade that will force the IAU to reverse its decision on Pluto.

    Two separate probes, the Dawn mission to the large asteroid Ceres and the New Horizons probe to Pluto, should reach their respective targets in the year 2015.

    The IAU definition essentially treats dwarf planets such as Ceres and Pluto as innate hunks of rock, Sykes said. But both of these bodies have atmospheres, and Sykes believes the probes will also find evidence of geological activity. Ceres might even have a sub-surface ocean.

    “I think we're going to find that these planets are much more like the Earth than Earth is like Jupiter,” he said.

    Not all American astronomers agree. Foremost among Pluto's detractors is Neil deGrasse Tyson , who as director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in 2000 omitted Pluto from an exhibit of the planets.

    At the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Pluto remains entrenched in an outdoor diagram of the planets, with a plaque that still lists it as a planet.

    “We have no plans to remove the object since it's still there in the real solar system,” said Carolyn Sumners , the museum's director of astronomy. “Since changing plaques is expensive and Pluto's status is still in flux, we decided to leave the plaque as it is and see if the astronomical community can reach a more permanent consensus.”

    Planets Bush-cheney-rumsfeld

    A couple of more observations. While searching the archives for Pluto related posts, I discovered that  this is the sixth time in less than four years that I am writing about the ninth planet on A.B.  And although I had suspected that Pluto's (the only planet discovered by an American) demotion had something to do with the unpopularity of American politics in 2006, I had not seen anything until now, to confirm my suspicion.  Berger mentions that the plight of Pluto had much to do with the rest of the world's anger with the Iraq war. Oh well, so Pluto didn't just get plutoed – it also got Bushed.

  • The optional and the forbidden (D)

    If you wish to believe that certain certain kinds of conservatism are caused by bugs in the brain, I offer up some tentative evidence:

    Recently, Mark Krikorian at the National Review has decided to bless us with the insight that vegetarianism is immoral:

    The problem is that none of this is vegetarianISM, which, if words have meaning, is the normative principle that the consumption of animal flesh (and dairy and eggs, for vegans), under any circumstances, is wrong. None of the practical reasons offered for such a moral principle hold any water, which is why the only meaningful basis for such a normative stance is that animals are on the same moral plane as human beings.

    The claim was picked up by Julian Sanchez, in whose comments thread a PETA vice president shows up and says even he doesn't believe non-human animals and people have the same moral worth. He points out, quite reasonably, how strange such a view might be for him to hold as a practicing Catholic.

    As I read that thread, I suddenly remembered I myself had only recently seen someone at NRO make the truly bizarre claim that it's wrong to not anglicize foreign names. Yep, it's Krikorian again, insisting that it's wrong to pronounce 'Sotomayor' with the stress on the final -or:

    This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

    Here I offer an entire comments thread jumping all over this pap, if you care to see it done.

    We may, in trying to understand why anyone would arrive at these bizarre nooks of idea-space, try to consider differing models and assumptions underlying political reasoning. Maybe we should incorporate in our toolkit different theories of multicultural coexistence, for instance. Here at least I think it's all a lot simpler though: Mr Krikorian has achieved a wiring mistake in his head, and has confused the 'not obligatory' with the 'absolutely forbidden'. He has lost the bucket in his head that corresponds to the 'optional', so whenever he decides he doesn't need to do something, he jumps from there to the conclusion that everyone ought to do the opposite. Assuming the twice-in-two-months repeat time is typical, I expect two or three more performances this year.

  • Walls and Fences

    For thousands of years men have built security barriers to keep out menace, real and imaginary. History tells us that while the track record of walls and fences to keep out a wily enemy is mixed, political barricades almost always generate paranoia and a misguided sense of power among those who guard them.

    A week ago I wrote about the wall that Israel has erected to keep out Palestinians and the ridiculous commercial that celebrates the peaceful atmosphere supposedly created between warring populations as a result of separation. Following in the footsteps of Israel, India has built a fence on its border with Bangladesh to keep out smugglers, illegal aliens and terrorists. The area around the fence has become a killing zone. The Indian Border Security Force (BSF) is accused of firing indiscriminately and killing citizens on both sides of the fence.  Around 6:41 on the video, listen to the Indian minister supporting the right of the security guards to "exercise his right of private defence by using minimum force." Shooting to kill unarmed villagers qualifies as minimum force according to this idiot's standards! (video link via Sepia Mutiny)

    http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1184614595

  • The Ice House That Was’nt

    I present here a longish excerpt from an essay by guest author Narayan Acharya (who goes by the name "narayan" in his writings). On a visit to India Narayan learnt about Elihu Yale's connections to the south Indian city of Madras (currently Chennai). He later traced Yale's footsteps from England to India and back in a book by Yale professor, Hiram Bingham. (Narayan's complete article can be found at Amardeep Singh's blog)

    I, Eli & Hi

          – narayan

    Madraspatnam / Medras / Chennai


    Phonetics and orthography were at odds when the British named the city lately called Chennai. In 1639, factors of the Honourable East India Company (HEIC) trying to get a foothold on the South-Eastern coast of India, the Coromandel, leased land from the local Nayaks at Madraspatnam, a name of dubious origins. S. Muthiah, the popular-historian of Chennai, in his admirable and informative book "Madras Rediscovered”, says that it was by all accounts "a God forsaken place … a narrow protected peninsula [sic], but a site without a safe landing place". Francis Day, the junior factor, who was "a hard-drinking, enthusiastic gambler and lusty womaniser", finalized the deal, justifying his choice with the report that the hinterland offered "excellent long Cloath and better cheape by 20 percent than anywhere else”. Plus ça change! Muthiah credits the senior factor, Andrew Cogan, with "encouraging the boisterous Day, making the first official landing, building the first fortified factory which was to grow into Fort St. George, and colonizing the place – the result of which industry is Madras today". Neither Cogan and Day, nor their Indian aides, Thimmappa and Nagabattan, are memorialized anywhere in the city.

    My 1980 trip to Medras (which native ever pronounced it otherwise?) was doomed from the start, a favor to a well-meaning uncle. I spent the morning on the verandah of a mansion, stretching out polite conversation with a taciturn woman, a scientist with a PhD from Europe, past marriageable age like myself. She too had a well-meaning uncle as I soon surmised. I had to catch a bus to Pondy in four hours and was determined to wait it out. Watching the sly antics of a chhipkali in the bushes outside helped. There was a brief interview with the ageing father, then the special lunch for the prospective son-in-law. She insisted on accompanying me to the bus station in their chauffeured Ambassador with cloth covered seats. In her relief at my departure she became voluble, pointing out landmarks to me as we skirted Marina Beach, the one place I remembered from occasional family trips in childhood. At one point she pointed to a large brick structure and said, "And that’s Yale’s Ice House". Seconds later I reacted, "What do you mean – Yale?" "You know, Yale – from the university. He was Governor here."

    Kafka would have wept at the struggle at the bus station just to buy a ticket; he would have soiled his pants on the bus ride back from Pondy. Understandably, I forgot all about the Medras fiasco until I was safely back in Boston. Months later, while browsing through the stacks at the public library, I came upon Hiram Bingham’s 1939 book "Elihu Yale – The American Nabob of Queen Square". Excuse me? Shouldn’t that be "Welsh Nabob of Medras"? After a prefatory nod to Kipling, a man who had never ventured south of the Vindhyas, Bingham begins : "Before the War it was exciting to go and find behind the ranges of the Andes the white temples of Machu Picchu and the palace of the last of the Incas." More about this later.

    Yale

    Elihu Yale’s father David, unmarried at twenty-three, emigrated from Wales to Boston, with his mother Anne, two siblings, his stepfather Theophilus Eaton, and two Eaton children. Shortly after, they moved to the new settlement of New Haven, then back to Boston after six years of domestic and social instability. David married at thirty and engaged in trade, but chafing at the theocratic rule of the Massachusetts Bay Colony decided to try his luck in Cromwell’s England. Elihu, David’s second child, was three in 1652 when he left Boston; he never set foot in America again. David succeeded in trade and became a man of property. He used his influence to get Elihu a berth in the HEIC as a Writer, paying a bond of £500 for the privilege.

    When he set foot in Fort St. George in June 1672 after a six month voyage from England, Elihu was twenty three and at the bottom rung of the company. By the time he left India in February 1699 he had become Governor of the colony, only to be recalled under a cloud of suspicion. The story of the intervening years is Bingham’s to tell; it would be foolish of me to attempt a précis here. Rushdie and Swift together could not have conjured up the Munchausenesque events, intrigue, and personalities that inhabit the two hundred pages of Bingham’s book that detail Elihu’s twenty-seven year tenure in India.

    Yale

    (more…)

  • Verlyn Klinkenborg needs a geography lesson (D)

    (Alt. title: your eco-rant for the week)

    I wonder, only half-facetiously, whether Verlyn Klinkenborg is one of those “US Americans” who don’t have maps, and don’t know there’s almost a whole planet outside it.
    Here he is from a few years ago, on mining in Wyoming:

    The mining laws, which assume that mining is the highest, best use of the land, already make ordinary people feel disenfranchised…It’s hard enough to protect the Bridger-Teton National Forest, vastly harder still to protect a place like the Green River Basin. To a driller it’s a wasteland ready for the drilling rig. To an environmentalist, it’s delicate habitat.

    The real question isn’t whether Wyoming can stabilize its prosperity. It’s whether it can protect values and resources that are not as easily monetized as coal, oil and natural gas, or translated into the terms of national security. But then this is the question the whole nation faces.

    Here he is now, hand-wringing about a plan to get natural gas in New York:

    There is plenty of change in the Catskills, much of it driven by energy development. The great scar of the Millennium Pipeline, which will someday bring natural gas from Ontario to New York City, comes straight over the mountains and down to the river. Yet that is nothing when measured against the huge changes that will come if New York State gives the go-ahead to gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

    It is of course true that acquiring fossil fuels imposes severe costs upon the planet. We should be doing what we can to reduce heating/cooling costs, make cars more efficient, improve public transport, raise gas taxes, research alternative energies, and so on. Meanwhile, we should be trying to optimize the use of what fossil fuel we must.

    But none of this accounts for Klinkenborg’s opposition to energy development in the US. Any given unit of oil consumed – however much is consumed in toto – must come from somewhere, and where it comes from, it shall degrade the environment and decimate biodiversity. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the North Sea and Canada all have ecosystems too, and drilling there causes bio-destruction too, just somewhere else. A respectable response to “drill, baby drill” is to try and reduce total drilling consistent with global development, not to insist that that drilling just happen out of American sight.

    Now of course in practice such dumping happens in the Larry Summers spirit – ships get broken in Alang, not in Boston. The trash from Beverly (or Malabar) Hills probably gets dumped in some poor locality. I’m even on the whole a realist about this sort of thing – I don’t think it’s unusually wise economically to insist that eco-standards in China be what they are in the US, for instance. But why on earth should such positions acquire a varnish of green virtue? Why should it be a precept of the environmental movement that a nation using a quarter of the world’s oil resources shouldn’t suffer any of the costs? It’s especially galling in that in a related context, that of labor treatment by multinational corporations, you’d expect someone like Klinkenborg to hand-wring the other way, fair-trade coffee-cup firmly in hand.

  • Getting old? On the other hand…

    Here are some perks of reaching 50, being 60 …. and heading towards 70 and beyond!

    01. Kidnappers are not very interested in you.
    02. In a hostage situation you are likely to be released first.
    03. No one expects you to run–anywhere.
    04. People call at 9 pm and ask, did I wake you?
    05. People no longer view you as a hypochondriac.
    06. There is nothing left to learn the hard way.
    07. Things you buy now won't wear out.
    08. You can eat supper at 4pm. 
    09. You can live without sex but not your glasses.
    10. You get into heated arguments about pension plans.
    11. You no longer think of speed limits as limiting.
    12. You quit trying to hold your stomach in no matter who walks into the room.
    13. You sing along with elevator music.
    14. Your eyes won't get much worse.
    15. Your investment in health insurance is finally beginning to pay off. 
    16. Your joints are more accurate meteorologists than the national weather service.
    17. Your secrets are safe with your friends because they can't remember them either.
    18. Your supply of brain cells is finally down to manageable size. 
    19. And you notice the list is all in Big Print for your convenience. 
    20.You can't remember who sent you this stupid list.

    As has happened before, this one came to me from a friend. It is all a matter of perspective of course. Feeling old is a state of mind. Age on the other hand, is an irreversible reality.

    (Sorry, if some of you find this utterly juvenile although that may not be so bad when speaking of old age. Also, I had nothing weightier to post. A more serious article to follow)

     

  • Atlas Shrugged (film) (Joe)

    Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the biggest piece of garbage I'm proud to say I've never read.  Well, apparently they're making it into a movie.  Or a miniseries, I'm not sure.  But definitely starring Charlize Theron, or else some other beautiful blonde actress who can't act.  Anyway, in advance, the Onion's A.V. Club has a funny and appropriately scathing review.  (h/t that guy with all the blogs)

  • Who Acted Stupidly, Indeed (Joe)

    Over at Faculty Lounge, Calvin Massey somehow manages to conclude (1) that Gates acted stupidly and (2) that the police officer did not act stupidly.  How?  By twisting the facts — beyond even those stated in the official police report.

    A pedestrian out for a walk notices two men wearing backpacks jimmying
    open the front door of a house.  She calls 911 to report what appears
    to be a burglary in progress.  A cop responds to the broadcast of an
    apparent burglary.  He finds two men inside the front door of the
    house.  The cop asks for their identification.  One of the men refuses
    and hurls abuse at the cop.  The cop persists in his request.  Finally
    the man produces ID from his university employer.  The man continues
    the abuse and, after delivering various threats to the officer, demands
    the officer's name and badge number.  The cop gives it to him.  The
    cop, apparently satisfied that the man does in fact live in the house,
    exits the house to the front porch.  The man pursues him to the front
    porch, heaping more abuse upon the cop and repeatedly demanding the
    cop's name and badge.  The cop tells him he has already provided that
    information.  A small crowd gathers.  The man remains in high dudgeon. 
    The cop then tells him to cool down and warns him that he is engaging
    in public disorderly conduct.  The man continues his tirade.  The cop
    arrests him.  The man has a friend, who happens to be President of the
    United States, who then says that while he "doesn't know all the
    facts," the cops "acted stupidly."  Oh, the man is black; the cop is
    white.  The man says this is a case of racial profiling.  Racial
    profiling?  The man was arrested for his abusive behavior towards a cop
    performing a service for the man in question.  After all, the man was
    jimmying his front door because, by his own admission, his house had
    been the subject of a recent burglary attempt.

    Nice.  We don't know why, or at what point, Gates got pissed off at the cop.  But we do know that the officer asked Gates to step outside and join him on the porch; Gates did not "pursue[] him to the front porch."  Again, this is by the version of facts as presented in the police report.  Massey makes it sound like the officer just decided to leave ("thank you, have a nice day") when he saw identification proving that Gates was who he said he was and that it was in fact his own house — but that's just not the case or he would have, you know, left.  It's pretty clear that the only possible basis for asking Gates to join him outside was to create the basis for an arrest for disorderly conduct. 

    Incidentally, that's a great implicit potshot at Obama: why is he making a judgment about who acted stupidly, when he doesn't know all the facts?  Of course, Massey's understanding of the facts is apparently even worse, yet he's willing to defend the cop against this unfounded charge while at the same time leveling the same charge at the black professor who didn't enjoy being wrongly treated like a criminal.  Proving, once again, that law professors often comment stupidly on things they apparently don't know enough to comment on.  [UPDATE: I apparently misread the last part of the post — there's nothing implicit about it, he actually says it was stupid of Obama to call the cop stupid while admitting he didn't know all of the facts.]

    Speaking of Obama, shouldn't it also be mentioned that his "stupid" comment was his way of defusing the situation?  Read as: "I don't know what role race played in this situation, so I'm not going to call the cop a racist.  But drumming up a disorderly conduct charge in order to arrest a man who broke into his own house, because he annoys the police officer and isn't subservient during their interaction, is police behavior that should be discouraged."

    (I really also want to comment on police character attributes, too.  It seems to me that people become cops — also, soldiers — because they want to be put in the societally accepted role of dominance as a part of their job, which gives them license to frequently beat the crap out of people.  But I don't have time for that post at the moment.)

  • “We just want to have a little fun”

    What is the problem with Israeli made commercials?  A few months ago we featured this ridiculously tasteless spectacle and now a friend points me to another ad from Israel whose makers seem equally oblivious to the implications of the imagery they present.   

    So, some Israeli soldiers are gleefully playing a game of soccer with invisible Palestinians on the other side of the "wall." What does that signify? That the wall has been effective against suicide bombers and has made Israelis so safe and secure that even uniformed soldiers can indulge in a lighthearted game of ball with the enemy? Or does it mean that the wall can shield Israeli citizens from thinking uncomfortable thoughts about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories? A simple "out of sight, out of mind" solution for a complex and intractable problem. Or did the ad makers mean to invoke something deeper, like the WWI Christmas Day truce between German and British soldiers, who were rumored to have played soccer with each other during a brief period of camaraderie? (never mind that they went back to slaughtering each other after the armistice was over.) Perhaps it doesn't mean anything. The tacky video is probably just another example of a crass attempt at peddling a product. After all, as my friend translated for me, the voice-over at the end of the mindless message coos, “We just want to have a little fun”.

  • 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.

    —–
    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.

  • Transformation Through Language

    Sharon Begley in Newsweek:

    When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and lightness" and "breathtaking" beauty. In France, papers praised the "immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Boroditsky thinks not.

    A psychologist at Stanford University, she has long been intrigued by an age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too. Although philosophers, anthropologists, and others have weighed in, with most concluding that language does not shape thought in any significant way, the field has been notable for a distressing lack of empiricism—as in testable hypotheses and actual data.

    That's where Boroditsky comes in. In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, she is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that "the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically," not only when they are thinking in order to speak, "but in all manner of cognitive tasks," including basic sensory perception. "Even a small fluke of grammar"—the gender of nouns—"can have an effect on how people think about things in the world," she says.

    As in that bridge. In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine? Grammatical gender also shapes how we construe abstractions. In 85 percent of artistic depictions of death and victory, for instance, the idea is represented by a man if the noun is masculine and a woman if it is feminine, says Boroditsky. Germans tend to paint death as male, and Russians tend to paint it as female.

    Being fluent in three languages (speak, read, write, think, quarrel), I can attest to the truth of this. Indeed, objects and ideas do often take on different forms and nuances in our minds depending on the language we assign to them. But can language shape our bodies? Some silly people seem to think so, without quite explaining how!

  • The Longest Eclipse

    The longest total solar eclipse of this century started in India on Wednesday morning and is sweeping eastward. The New York Times has a report by a blogger who is chasing the eclipse.

    My previous post on total solar eclipse is here. As per Anna's suggestion (see comments), I have since then read Annie Dillard's essay, "Total Eclipse."  

    Eclipse