| Kritikon | ||||||
|
News Would you like to receive updates regarding changes to this page and to other parts of the website? Subscribe to our newsletter.
|
Previous issues of the newsletter contained links to articles of interest. This feature was replaced by a web log and an RSS feed. The last newsletter containing links to articles is given below. Scroll to the bottom of this page to check an archive of previous newsletters. Newsletter for 03-29-2005 For previous newsletters, please visit this page. Note: You may need to register (for free) to access some of these articles. If the link is not accessible, try entering the address using the Internet Archive Wayback Engine. Resources Articles According to the last ‘National Assessment of Educational Progress in U.S. History,’ which was undertaken in 1994, we can no longer call upon the traditional schoolmarm concept of history as a pageant, or even as one damn thing after another. In order to argue against this caricature, you would need to know at least the official reason why Pilgrims and Puritans first voyaged to America, which 59 percent of fourth graders were unable to do. You would certainly need to be able to name one of the original thirteen colonies, which was beyond the capacity of 68 percent of that grade. By the eighth grade, matters have got worse, as they are bound to do. Ninety percent of eighth graders could recount nothing of the debates at the Constitutional Convention. Even when prompted by mentions of Yalta, Lend-Lease, and Hiroshima, 59 percent of the eighth grade were unprepared to say which conflict these references brought to mind. In the twelfth grade, 53 percent looked blank when invited to specify "the goal that was most important in shaping United States foreign policy between 1945 and 1990. *** A number puzzle originating in the work of self-taught maths genius Srinivasa Ramanujan nearly a century ago has been solved. The solution may one day lead to advances in particle physics and computer security. *** ...Dan Brown has penned a poorly written, atrociously researched mess. So, why bother with such a close reading of a worthless novel? The answer is simple: The Da Vinci Code takes esoterica mainstream. It may well do for Gnosticism what The Mists of Avalon did for paganism—gain it popular acceptance. After all, how many lay readers will see the blazing inaccuracies put forward as buried truths? What’s more, in making phony claims of scholarship, Brown’s book infects readers with a virulent hostility toward Catholicism. Dozens of occult history books, conveniently cross-linked by Amazon.com, are following in its wake. And booksellers’ shelves now bulge with falsehoods few would be buying without The Da Vinci Code connection. While Brown’s assault on the Catholic Church may be a backhanded compliment, it’s one we would have happily done without. *** Challenging a scientific law of inheritance that has stood for 150 years, scientists say plants sometimes select better bits of DNA in order to develop normally even when their predecessors carried genetic flaws. *** Will the real Adam Smith stand up, please? There certainly are plenty of phoney versions on parade whenever his name is mentioned. *** Mathematicians, like other scientists, strive for simplicity; we want to boil messy phenomena down to some short list of first principles called axioms, akin to basic physical laws, from which everything we see can be derived. This tendency goes back as far as Euclid, who used just five postulates to deduce his geometrical theorems. But plane geometry isn't all of mathematics, and other fields proved surprisingly resistant to axiomatization; irritating paradoxes kept springing up, to be knocked down again by more refined axiomatic systems. The so-called "formalist program" aimed to find a master list of axioms, from which all of mathematics could be derived by rigid logical deduction. Goldstein cleverly compares this objective to a "Communist takeover of mathematics" in which individuality and intuition would be subjugated, for the common good, to logical rules. By the early 20th century, this outcome was understood to be the condition toward which mathematics must strive. Then Gödel kicked the whole thing over. *** What is true of the television set is also true of its most important accessory, the device that forever altered our viewing habits, transformed television programming itself, and, more broadly, redefined our expectations of mastery over our everyday technologies: the remote control. The creation and near-universal adoption of the remote control arguably marks the beginning of the era of the personalization of technology. The remote control shifted power to the individual, and the technologies that have embraced this principle in its wake—the Walkman, the Video Cassette Recorder, Digital Video Recorders such as TiVo, and portable music devices like the iPod—have created a world where the individual’s control over the content, style, and timing of what he consumes is nearly absolute. Retailers and purveyors of entertainment increasingly know our buying history and the vagaries of our unique tastes. As consumers, we expect our television, our music, our movies, and our books “on demand.” We have created and embraced technologies that enable us to make a fetish of our preferences. The long-term effect of this thoroughly individualized, highly technologized culture on literacy, engaged political debate, the appreciation of art, thoughtful criticism, and taste-formation is difficult to discern. But it is worth exploring how the most powerful of these technologies have already succeeded in changing our habits and our pursuits. By giving us the illusion of perfect control, these technologies risk making us incapable of ever being surprised. They encourage not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And they contribute to what might be called “egocasting,” the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste. In thrall to our own little technologically constructed worlds, we are, ironically, finding it increasingly difficult to appreciate genuine individuality. *** SCIENTISTS have discovered what makes a tune catchy by pinpointing the precise part of the brain where a song’s "hook" gets caught. It is the auditory cortex - the area that handles information from the ears - that holds on to musical memories. *** A detailed and extensive new analysis of the fossil records of marine animals over the past 542 million years has yielded a stunning surprise. Biodiversity appears to rise and fall in mysterious cycles of 62 million years for which science has no satisfactory explanation. *** The rules of physics that apply in a real scene are optional in a painting; they can be obeyed or ignored at the discretion of the artist to further the painting's intended effect. Some deviations, such as Picasso's skewed faces or the wildly coloured shadows in the works of Matisse and other Impressionists of the Fauvist school, are meant to be noticed as part of the style and message of the painting. There is, however, an 'alternative physics' operating in many paintings that few of us ever notice but which is just as improbable. These transgressions of standard physics — impossible shadows, colours, reflections or contours — often pass unnoticed by the viewer and do not interfere with the viewer's understanding of the scene. This is what makes them discoveries of neuroscience. Because we do not notice them, they reveal that our visual brain uses a simpler, reduced physics to understand the world. Artists use this alternative physics because these particular deviations from true physics do not matter to the viewer: the artist can take shortcuts, presenting cues more economically, and arranging surfaces and lights to suit the message of the piece rather than the requirements of the physical world. In discovering these shortcuts artists act as research neuroscientists, and there is a great deal to be learned from tracking down their discoveries. The goal is not to expose the 'slip-ups' of the masters, entertaining as that might be, but to understand the human brain. Art in this sense is a type of found science — science we can do simply by looking. *** American Francophobia is not all it's cracked up to be. Actually it's not even a phobia. It is more like an expression of extreme distaste or disgust. Its character is evident in the invention of "Freedom Fries" or in the pouring of Bordeaux wine into sewers. It is theatrical and demonstrative. It tends toward ridicule. And usually it reacts to something very specific: it has a news peg. *** But do computers really help children learn? Should technological “literacy” really be a central component of childhood education? *** Devastating epidemics that swept Europe during the Middle Ages seem to have had an unexpected benefit - leaving 10% of today's Europeans resistant to HIV infection. *** The discovery in the 1990s that there could be some kind of mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of the universe came from studies of supernovae billions of light years away. Now, it turns out that the evidence for dark energy was there in our cosmic backyard all along, and that astronomers could have discovered it nearly 30 years ago. *** Aldous Huxley long ago warned of a future in which love was beside the point and happiness a simple matter of consuming mass-produced goods and plenty of soma, a drug engineered for pleasure. More than 70 years later, Dr. Peter C. Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, has seen the future, and the society he describes isn't all that distant from Huxley's brave new world, although the soma, it seems, is in ourselves. *** The argument that psychoanalysis is a science is not often heard today. Freud was the first, and only, psychoanalyst to be made a member of the Royal Society (in 1936 he was elected as a corresponding member, aged 80). The society awarded him its honour not as an endorsement of the therapeutic use of psychoanalysis, as was clarified in the society's obituary notice in 1941, but as a recognition of his discovery and exploration of the unconscious mind. For many scientists, Freudianism is bunk. *** A veteran of the vibrant 1960s poetry scene, Camille Paglia argues that critics can no longer read, poets can no longer write, and the unacknowledged legislators of our age are writing advertising jingles for peanuts. *** Anthropologists have built a "Frankenstein" Neanderthal skeleton, the first and only full-body reconstruction of the species. The result, announced today, is a shape no one expected. *** The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. *** The USA's children live in an increasingly heavy stew of media, spending about 6½ hours a day mostly watching TV, using computers and enjoying other electronic activities. And they are spending relatively little time reading or doing homework, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey reported Wednesday. *** Today's personal technologies, particularly the cellphone and the digital video recorder, have not provoked similar worries. They are marvels of individual choice, convenience and innovation; they represent the democratization of the power of the machine. Our technologies are more intuitive, more facile and more responsive than ever before. In a rebuke to Marx, we have not become the alienated slaves of the machine; we have made the machines more like us and in the process toppled decades of criticism about the dangerous and potentially enervating effects of our technologies. Or have we? The cellphone, a device we have lived with for more than a decade, offers a good example of a popular technology's unforeseen side effects. More than one billion are in use around the world, and when asked, their owners say they love their phones for the safety and convenience they provide. People also report that they are courteous in their use of their phones. One opinion survey found that ''98 percent of Americans say they move away from others when talking on a wireless phone in public'' and that ''86 percent say they 'never' or 'rarely' speak on wireless phones'' when conducting transactions with clerks or bank tellers. Clearly, there exists a gulf between our reported cellphone behavior and our actual behavior. *** The secret behind Italian Renaissance painters' brilliant palettes... *** The rich are getting richer while the poor remain poor. If you doubt it, ponder these numbers from the US, a country widely considered meritocratic, where talent and hard work are thought to be enough to propel anyone through the ranks of the rich. In 1979, the top 1% of the US population earned, on average, 33.1 times as much as the lowest 20%. In 2000, this multiplier had grown to 88.5. If inequality is growing in the US, what does this mean for other countries? Almost certainly more of the same, if you believe physicists who are using new models based on simple physical laws to understand the distribution of wealth. Their studies indicate that inequality in market economies may be very hard to get rid of. *** Why the iconic images of Albert Einstein as an aging, eccentric genius distort our understanding not only of the scientist, but of science itself. *** France is the latest country to air a TV competition to determine its greatest citizen and this week's announcement of the top 100 has riled many. *** Everything you ever wanted to know about the arts* *but were afraid to ask *** No single domesticated species has changed human evolution as much as the horse. Long-standing hypotheses about equine size, range and age are thus intimately tied to understanding our own cultural origins. But new fossil evidence points to an older and perhaps smaller ancient horse that adapted from leaf eating to grazing. The result may rewrite the anthropological textbooks as well as the equine ones. *** The capture of first light from planets outside our solar system may usher in a golden age of discovery. *** Art today likes to think of itself as very, very clever. You can understand this insecurity, in a world where people are discovering superstrings and mapping the human genome. But what the ever more arcane books and talks and curatorial styles whose high temple is Tate Modern do is not to think, but rather provide a facsimile of thinking. You can learn all these big words - "narrativisation" is a good one - and actually feel you know something. *** T.P. Wiseman looks at the development of the myth of ancient Rome, derived from the way its history has been seen. *** 13 things that do not make sense *** However long and hard the classical music world has labored to join the modern visual age, disasters so far outweigh successes. OK, there's Walt Disney's Fantasia (which I don't much like but everybody else does). But there are also the rock-concert-style video screens at orchestral concerts giving close-ups of musicians that we just don't care to see. More promising are computer-generated graphics projected in sync with the music. But without great originality, they're likely to reprise your screen-saver. My newest theory on the subject is this: Sight and sound are a perpetually uneasy marriage and always will be. So how about an annulment, or at least separate bedrooms - allowing cohabitation rights without the responsibility of mutual support? ***
|
|||||