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  • “A Border Passage” by Leila Ahmed

    I have been meaning to write a proper review of Leila Ahmed's autobiography A Border Passage ever since I finished reading it a couple of months ago. But the inertia that has befallen any attempt at writing a substantive blog post once again prevents me from writing a well thought out review. I will leave you with the link to the Amazon page where the first three reviewers' opinions pretty much encapsulate what I may have said here. Somewhere down the thread, a couple of readers have commented that the book is not a typical autobiography (true) and that Ahmed has nothing interesting to say (not true). 

    A Border Passage is not about Ahmed's personal history but more a history of her family, that of the Egyptian society she grew up in and the changes she observed with the passage of time. In recounting them she gives her readers a brief tour of modern Egypt's evolution from the last part of the 19th century to the present, from being a part of the Ottoman Empire, a British colony and finally becoming an independent nation in the middle of the 20th century. The events chronicle the rise of Egyptian nationalism, the country's many attempts at shaking off the stranglehold of European colonialism and the dream of forging a liberal democratic system of government. Despite a vibrant political climate and a sizable secular western educated intelligentsia, democracy never did acquire a  foothold in Egypt's political system. After the colonial rule was dismantled, it was replaced by successive homegrown military regimes. We are currently witnessing the struggles and aftermath of the so called Arab Spring in several middle eastern and north African Muslim countries. Egypt was one of the first nations to recently topple a totalitarian government by popular uprising. Whether democracy will finally arrive in Egypt is anybody's guess but the final outcome of the recent elections there may well have its roots in the Islamic nationalist movement set in motion in the 1930s and which the secular faction of Ahmed's parents' generation opposed vehemently.  

    I very much enjoyed A Border Passing. Ahmed's quiet and scholarly interpretation of Egyptian societal ethos, gender and class hierarchies, the stark divide between intellectual and cultural Islam and the many political upheavals that unfolded around her in Egypt, England and some parts of the middle east seem straightforward, thoughtful and sometimes surprising. The reader is not afforded much of an insight into the minutiae of the author's own personal conflicts, joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures, her moods or her love life. I think she intended it that way.

    A Border Passage

  • The Hermit and the Concubine (Norman Costa)

    OnuphriusByzantineIcon4thCentury

    The Hermit and the Concubine (Norman Costa)

    My cousin, Louis Defilippi, is a biochemist and lives in Chicago. When he is not tinkering with peptide chains he is the resident geneologist for the Costa family. On his Facebook page, Louis dedicated this Fathers Day to our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather Honofrio La Mantia, born in Sicily around 1566, and named after the Greek Egyptian saint, "Onuphrius or Onoufrios (Greek: Ὀνούφριος, from Egyptian: Wnn-nfr meaning "he-who-is-continuingly-good")." 

    Louis included a link to an icon art piece of Saint Onoufrios (I prefer the Greek.) The Saint was revered in the Roman Catholic Church, and Eastern Othodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Eastern Catholic Churches. The icon depicts Onoufrios as he was known to live his life, as a revered desert hermit. His life is interesting and curious in the way most stories about 4th century desert hermits are interesting and curious to us who are removed by many centuries. 

    I found the icon, itself, fascinating. The resolution of the art work is sufficient to examine and enjoy the detailed work of the artist. The provenance and date of the icon are unknown. You can see it in full resolution HERE. It shows an old hermit dressed only in his long hair and a loincloth made of leaves. I did say he was a desert hermit. You can see an angel bringing him the Eucharist, the sacramental bread that becomes the Body of Christ.

    Jean_Auguste_Dominique_Ingres,_La_Grande_Odalisque,_1814

    A couple of things fascinate me about the painting, starting with color. I love the gold that is both deep and bright. Light shines with a white-out on his beard. The reds have a deep blood feel to them. The green of trees and loincloth leaves are like the German Schwarzwald. Most interesting, though, is the strange depiction of the body form. That is what brings me to the Grand Odalisque of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1814.) The oil on canvas is in the Louvre, in Paris.

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  • How to recognize different vintages of wine from quite a long time ago (prasad)

    As the high-end wine market confronts the problem of counterfeiting, a professional wine “detective” and sommelier explains how she identifies counterfeit wines:

    fraud detection has nothing to do with the taste of a wine, Downey says. “If you’ve got something that’s been in a bottle for 40 or 50 or 100 years, there’s going to be bottle variation.” […] nobody on the planet has so much experience with these incredibly rare wines that they can say with any degree of accuracy, ‘Oh yeah, this is correct Petrus from 1920.’ Bulls–t.” If taste told the tale, she points out, Kurniawan never would have pulled off the giant con he’s now charged with.

    Downey’s approach when studying bottles and preparing authentication reports for clients is more about forensics than flavor. She takes into account paper stock, printing quality, and the oxidation rate of label paper…brings to bear historical knowledge about tin capsules and what colors of glass were used to bottle what brands when. “If you see a bottle where the label looks like hell but the capsule looks pristine, that’s like a 20-year-old’s body with a 90-year-old’s face,” she says. “They should have aged together. These are all errors that counterfeiters make.”

    This sounds more like identifying cultured pearls than like identifying fake bike helmets or adulterated food. But if copying the taste of the great brands is possible for good forgers, one is left with a puzzle. iPads and Louis Vuitton bags can certainly be faked, and there are people who participate in that illegal activity, but they can also be knocked off legally via products that are designed to look and behave basically the same, but don’t try to mimic exactly or dupe the customer into paying the premium for a fake product. There should be if anything more of this in markets where taste is the only objective (as in non-prestige) quality of value. So where are the knock-off Chateau Lafite’s and Famous Teas and civet coffees where they save money by using cats or goats or something? Brands that say “we are very similar to the famous brands, but cost about a tenth, and are good enough that only experts and ‘detectives’ can tell us apart from the real deal. For $large/10 you can experience what the aristocrats and billionaires and movie stars drink” Or do they exist?

  • Psychology’s Quest for Scientific Respectability (Norman Costa)

    

    Psychology's Quest for Scientific Respectability 
    By

    Norman Costa Ph.D.

    (Note: This article was originally published in two-parts in January and February of 2012 
    under the titles "Psychological Science: Mathematical Argument and the Quest for 
    Scientific Respectability - Part 1 and 2." The reason for combining the two was so that
    it could be submitted for the 3QuarksDaily prize in Science Writing.)
    

    Part 1 - Mathematical Argument
    

    We are reminded by Carl Sagan in his book, Cosmos, that the underpinning of modern 
    science with mathematics goes back to Pythagoras. In the search for truths in nature, 
    however, we no longer look for them in Pythagoras' mystical, even magical, power of 
    numbers. Today, mathematics is indispensable for science as method, and science as 
    content. We count, measure, perform basic operations (add, subtract, multiply, and 
    divide,) compute values, solve equations, use visual display to communicate quantitative 
    information, conduct statistical tests, and represent things and ideas with symbols and 
    relationships.
    

    The history of psychological science, even to the present day, has been a quest for scientific 
    respectability. Few things have been as important to this quest as the development of 
    mathematical argument for the science of psychology. Nothing has been more important, 
    or as far reaching, for mathematical argument in psychology, than the development of the 
    correlation coefficient. Because much of psychology (and the social sciences in general) 
    has been the examination of individual differences, it was inevitable that tools be developed 
    to express relationships and dependencies among different traits, capabilities, and just 
    about anything that could be measured and recorded about people.
    

    The rapid fire discoveries, in the 19th century, of fundamental laws of nature in physics, 
    chemistry, and life sciences created an air of expectation, pride, and optimism. Some 
    held the view that the final discovery of all laws of physical nature would be concluded 
    in the early part of the new century. Psychology envisioned its own role in this great leap 
    forward in knowledge and science. The development of mathematical argument was 
    about to elevate psychology to a level that was on par with the more successful physical 
    and life sciences – or so it was hoped.
    

    It is difficult to appreciate, today, how exciting it was for scientific psychology in the late 
    19th and early 20th centuries. The development of the correlation coefficient became the 
    Royal Road to scientific respectability, at least in the minds of the pioneers of 
    psychological science. Statistical correlation formulas provided powerful tools that could 
    be applied to a myriad of problems in the budding social and economic sciences. The 
    correlation coefficient led to the development of other powerful tools like multiple 
    correlation, canonical correlation, regression, and factor analysis. It gave impetus and 
    support to the development of other tools for mathematical argument, particularly the 
    concept of true score, and statistical tests.
    

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    Increasing Abortion Rates for Make Benefit Glorious Society, with a sop to “men’s rights” (prasad)
    



    

    

    

    



    The following is more of a set of musings than an argument, which musings I come by via this Slate article about giving men a choice in supporting children they didn’t want in the first place. My interest in that question itself as an ethical issue is not great, though I do think there’s something a bit off  about giving a man no voice in whether a pregnancy is brought to term, but holding him equally responsible after birth, in the sense that this is a moral cost, not a moral benefit. My interest is in the existence of children who aren’t wanted by their parents, not abortion or child support per se. But here’s the baroque, not thought-out scheme I’m brought in mind of, more to stimulate talk than anything else.
    

    The collection of ideas/presuppositions I’m working with is:
    

      

    1.  Single parent families are on balance bad for children, and impose fairly large costs upon society.
      2. 

    2.  Abortion reduces the number of such unwanted babies and benefits society, via the Freakonomics type mechanism.
      3. 

    3.  The woman’s right to choose is morally valuable, and should not be legally restricted by other people’s views.
      4. 

    4.  Early abortion (till the development of a nervous system, for example) is morally neutral, and we shouldn’t particularly care how many or few there are. 
      5. 

    5. The chief existing constraints upon abortion come from people who want fewer abortions, not from those who want to encourage them.

    

    What I’m thinking of, is the idea of giving men a legally recognized way of disclaiming all rights/responsibility toward their would-be baby in the early stages (say first couple of months?) of pregnancy. The legal right to abort or not would continue to reside solely with the woman, but if a man indicated through this mechanism his unwillingness to support the child, the woman (together with some state monetary support, see below) would bear sole legal responsibility for the child, with no expectation of any legal or financial support from the father from then on. 
    

    What would follow? The chief outcome of such a scheme, it seems to me, would be to reduce dramatically the number of births where both parents are not invested in the child being born. Currently a pregnant woman who doesn’t on balance want a child can abort, so that children born are likely to be wanted at least by one parent (the mother). Under such a scheme the legally valid statement of a father to disown the child gives the mother extra incentive to abort in such situations, reducing the number of children born who aren’t wanted by both parents.
    

     Now I don’t really want to actually deprive any father-unwanted child of financial support (though conceivably if the drop in the count of such children is sufficiently large that might be a cost worth incurring?). I want to say thus that the state should pay the tab in such situations. This leads to many further issues. The potentially tractable question is where-does-the-money-come-from. I really do think reducing the number of unwanted single-parent kids has such large social and economic benefits that it could be made to pay for itself and then some. A more tricky problem is that this gives men an incentive to disclaim interest in a child, as a way of attracting state support. To me the cleanest handle on this issue is that with the divorce rate at near 50%, there are difficulties with disclaiming interest in a child unless you mean it, e.g. for custody situations. The hardest objection might be: since the scheme is based on dissuading mothers from having children fathers don’t want, providing state support merely exchanges a dissuasion with its removal. I have a vague sense that the “net pre-natal dissuasion” would continue to be strongly positive, that people don’t emotionally regard the state as a complete substitute for their romantic partners. In other words, the strongest impact of the scheme is to have it be legally “out there” early in pregnancy that one person wants nothing do do with the child being born, and won’t take interest in it thereafter.
    

    I’d assume people of “tender hearted” dispositions want to have nothing to do with such schemes, but I’ve never been one of ’em. More concretely, what are the good/bad reasons in both directions here?
    

    


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    My Father: A Veteran’s Story – The Battle of Graignes, Normandy, France, June 6-13, 1944
    



    

    

    

    



      82nd insignia
    

    My Father: A Veteran's Story - The Battle of Graignes, Normandie June 6-13, 1944
    

    My father, Frank P. Costa, Sr., died on August 26, 2010 at his nursing home in Catskill, NY. He was 93 years old. He was a combat veteran of the D-Day Invasion of Normandy, France, June 6, 1944. 
    

    Dad was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. He was in the 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment. His first combat jump was on the night of June 5-6, 1944 into Normandy France – the allied invasion of Europe. He was positioned as the first soldier to exit the plane when the green light jump signal was given. On his training jumps he would always get faint and queasy. He couldn't wait to get out of the plane and into the fresh air. So the jump sergeant sat this eager jumper next to the door of the C-47. Thedesignated landing zone was the area around Ste. Maire Egliese. The triple A flak was so heavy, the pilot made a right turn to avoid the danger and gave the jump signal at a purely arbitrary moment. Many of the pilots in the following planes, with other 507th paratroopers, followed the lead pilot's right turn. As a result, they landed more than 30 km from the drop zone.
    

    Dad landed in a flooded field, up to his shoulders in water around 1 AM. He cut himself out of the risers of his parachute with his trench knife, but he lost his M1-A carbine. At about 5 AM, with the arrival of dawn, he was able to spot high dry ground and made his way out of the water. He regrouped with his regiment, part of it anyway, in the tiny hamlet of Graignes, maybe 15 km from Carentan. The village church with a tall bell tower was the most recognizable feature and occupied the highest elevation in a generally flat terrain. One-hundred seventy-six (176) assembled, including a few from the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. There was one Army Air Force fighter pilot. None of the surviving vets remembers where the fighter pilot came from nor what happened to him afterwards.
    

    The 507th was a headquarters outfit. That meant they had mortars, 50 caliber 'light' machine guns, and lots of explosives. They also had a lot of communications equipment, but they were too far away to contact the main units of the Division. They had some great officers with them – a Colonel 'Pipp' Reed, a Captain, and number of Lieutenants. One was my father's Lieutenant, Frank Naughton. The first thing they did was ascertain where they were with the help of the locals. They were so far off the drop zone that it was off their combat map. After much deliberation and argument, the Colonel Reed decided to stay and set up a defense perimeter, rather than try to get back to the friendly lines through unfamiliar terrain and mostly flooded fields.
    

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    Reflections – more than what you see
    



    

    

    

    



    Downtown fort worth-comp
    

    I am in Fort Worth for a couple of days. I took this picture of downtown Fort Worth reflected on the glass facade of a building. I was wondering why I took the photo this morning from the balcony of my hotel room directly across the street while enjoying a cup of coffee. I normally don't take photos unless I am officially in a "tourist" mode. It could well be that reflections and city structures were on my mind subconsciously because I am currently in  the middle of a crime thriller set in Los Angeles and Hong Kong in which the location of a crime scene is deciphered through an accidental flash on a video that catches the images of surrounding buildings as reflected on a window pane. The police work backwords, or rather flip it from left to right to figure out where the place is.
    

    After seeing the photo on my Facebook page a blogger friend sent me the link to one of his essays on 3 Quarks Daily. 
    

    


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    4th Annual 3 QD Prize in Science
    



    

    

    

    



    I forgot to post this earlier. The nomination process for the 4th annual 3 Quarks Daily competition for best science writing on blogs is under way. If you have read a blog post in this category that caught your attention, please consider nominating it. Details here. 
    

    


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    African Butterfly Bush
    



    

    

    

    



    I just posted this on Facebook and thought I should share the photo here. An African butterfly bush which I planted in early spring is flourishing in my front garden. I had never seen this plant until I found it in a nursery and decided to bring it home. This bush is not to be confused with other common butterfly bushes which attract butterflies (I have some of those also). This one is so named because its flowers look like butterflies. I love  it. Hope you enjoy the lovely and unusual botanical specimen.
    

     Butterfly Bush-1(click to enlarge)
    

    


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    What happens after the crowds go home?
    



    

    

    

    



    On July 7, 2005, one day after Londoners received word that the city would host the 2012 Olympics, terrorist bombs tore through the public transit system, killing 56 people. To prevent a repeat attack and protect the roughly 25,000 athletes, family members, coaches, and officials attending (along with roughly 700,000 spectators), spending on security has topped $1.6 billion. Sydney's pre-9/11 Olympic security in 2000 cost only $179.6 million.
    

    Some privacy advocates have questioned the efficacy of such huge outlays of taxpayer cash. James Baker, the campaign manager for the privacy organization No2ID, points out that in May, a concerned workman at The Sun tabloid was able to smuggle a fake bomb into the Olympic Park in spite of spite of iris and hand scanners at the site. Baker also wonders if authorities will be able to use the web of surveillance technologies quickly enough to be effective — he points out that in 2009, several of the more than 10,000 license plate scanners around the country detected the car of Peter Chapman 16 different times — he was wanted for arson, theft, and violation of his status as a sex offender. But police were inundated with hits from the system and did not follow up. Two days later, he raped and murdered a teen he met via Facebook.
    

    Olympics_security
    

    More from our own Andrew Rosenblum in CNN Money magazine.
    

     
    

    


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    Another minor collateral damage in the great war on terror
    



    

    

    

    



    I mean, couldn't this guy have been whisked out beforehand or even during the raid in one of the Blackhawk helicopters? Didn't the US intelligence know that Al Qaida sympathizers in the  Pakistani army and government, who were probably harboring bin Laden, were going to punish this guy for embarrassing them?
    

    


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    Saadia Toor and “The state of Islam” (Omar Ali)
    



    

    

    

    



    by Omar Ali
    

    First published at http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2012/05/saadia-toor-and-the-state-of-islam.html#more
    

    The-State-of-Islam-Toor-Sadia-9780745329918Saadia Toor is an assistant professor of sociology and social work at the City University of New York and recently published a book about Pakistan titled The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War politics in Pakistan. She states that the book grew out of her PhD thesis (a doctoral thesis in developmental sociology titled “"The Politics of Culture and the Poetics of Protest: Pakistani Women and Islamisation, 1977-1988."). The book’s official blurb states:
    

    The State of Islam tells the story of the Pakistani nation-state through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, in order to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the rise of militant Islam across the world. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam, and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined political realm, The State of Islam is a Gramscian analysis of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period.  The author uses the tools of cultural studies and postcolonial theory to understand what is at stake in discourses of Islam, socialism, and the nation in Pakistan…
    

    She also states that:
    

    I wanted to subvert this discourse by highlighting the complexity of Pakistan’s history and the primacy of people’s struggles within it, as well as the role of the US-aligned establishment (and, at key junctures, liberals) in quashing these struggles and the alternate political and cultural visions they embodied.
    

    It is indeed possible to write a good work of history that is also a subtle work of socialist (or other) propaganda and that appeals to the author’s in-group while reaching a larger audience. But this takes a lot of skill and experience and Ms Toor, unfortunately, is unable to manage this feat. In her youthful enthusiasm for her version of the socialist cause (a cause she formally joined by becoming a member of the Pakistan workers and peasants party or Mazdoor Kissan Party, while back in Pakistan researching her PhD thesis) leads her to shoehorn every event into an academic-Marxist narrative that owes more to to Tariq Ali and fashionable Wesern academic prejudices than to the actual history of Pakistan. Of course, it is possible for youthful enthusiasm  to produce a great book (John Reed’s “Ten days that shook the world” comes to mind) but unfortunately, this is not that book.
    

    

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