This week's Economist cover focuses on the growing importance of latin america.

The clever illustration shows latin america on the northern hemisphere and the USA on the southern hemisphere.

It reminds me of this vintage scene in "The West Wing", where a group of cartographers explain how a map details much more than geographical location. It also illustrates geopolitical importance.

http://lisnews.org/how_open_new_book

Here's a lovely illustration of how to open a new book.

In the days of nook and kindle and ipad, such illustrations may soon become archaic. Already, I look at them the way I regard cave paintings (how to light a flintstone; how to capture a wooly mammoth).

Companies all over are battling with huge book inventories that don't have a hope of selling.

Meanwhile, new  companies  such as Espresso are ushering in print-on-demand technologies.


Soon, any book we read is probably going to be mint-fresh literally.

And such illustrations may yet have a hope of being useful.

There are those that think automating humor is nothing more than a big joke.
And then there are those that think its an incredulous waste of money.

NU prof: Computer research no joke :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Technology

And then there those that believe its a way of modelling the way the brain works.

And then there are those that like me, who feel a little disconcerted thinking of a day when we're going to be so dependent on computers for even a quick joke.

Humour is possibly a recently evolved trait and therefore more susceptible to erosion.

What if all that's left of humans is the ability to understand jokes but not be able to actually make a joke. It can happen!

What if computers ( cloud, cluster) take over the world by telling us really good jokes ? (Gasp!)

This Comment if Free article at the Guardian talks about how buzz-words can trick us into believing the wrong sort of thing.

"But then, that's the beauty of language. It can change the way you see things without actually altering anything in the physical realm. It turns good into bad and bad into good and back again without anyone lifting a finger."

And the NyTimes takes a more pedantic approach.

NY Times explains how the words we use to describe the world may affect the way we perceive our world.

"The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same."

Grub, is a diner in Brooklyn where meals are made from food that would have otherwise been wasted.

A place where the menu can never can get too boring, or the history of the ingredients too intriguing.

My current addiction : Reading op-eds.

And I love theatlanticwire.com for rounding up opinion articles across the web. The Atlantic, is understandably biased towards covering issues of concern in the United Issues.

In the largest democracy of the world, I've found it hard to come across a one-stop shop for opinions.

Blogs at Outlook India does a decent job of it and so far, I am loving it.

Dr Marc Hauser, a primate psychologist, has recently been charged with 8 counts of scientific misconduct by Harvard University.

I wrote to Dr Marc Hauser while applying to grad school and for what its worth, he was a thorough gentleman. There was no need for him to reply to a student that was clueless about neuroscience. He was clearly interested in teaching. He, and his papers, were instrumental in initiating my journey into neuroscience. They never failed to convey a sense of possibility. But, I have long since diverged from his particular area of expertise.

Dr Marc Hauser has recently been charged with scientific misconduct. A lot of his science consists of observing monkeys by only ever so slightly changing the wild environment that monkeys are used to. Data from these kinds of set ups are inherently hard to figure out and not amenable to extremely thorough statistical analysis. Even then, some things can be gleaned.

Dr Marc Hauser believes that much about the way humans think (and therefore behave) can be learnt from the way monkeys behave. And that much is true. How much we can really learn is a different matter, one that is and should be fully debated. But that we can learn nothing at all, as many will want to believe after this incident, is really stupid (for lack of a more direct word). I happen to work with monkeys as well. My experiments are rooted in solid science. But when I'm only plainly interacting with them, it's not hard to see that they're very much like humans. When you come out into the city and watch a bunch of humans, it never passes your mind that they act very similarly to the monkeys in your lab; much more than other pets such as dogs and cats are. It is hard not to find yourself anthropomorphizing, but it is an ability that must be mastered if any good science is to be done at all.

It took me a while to learn to take very seriously what is said in the Results and Analysis section in a Journal Paper while to no more than consider what is said in the Discussion section of the paper. One is cold truth. The other is an addictive trail to a magical fairlyland where all sorts of wondrous things are possible. The way of science is to repeat and replicate what is said in the Results and Analysis section and to test what is conjectured in the discussion section. Progress is made either when many wondrous things, turn out in fact, to be possible or when we can confidently say that some things belong to fairlyland.

Perhaps Marc Hauser's error was that he confused Discussions and Results. And it is a practiced art to know your limits, to stop yourself from going too far, to stop yourself from insisting rather than conjecturing.

Marc Hauser is credited with bringing the entire field of evolutionary cognition to the fore. But his irresponsible behavior (if that is what it is) must not be condoned. But often, because of the way humans are, we can do a double flip and throw a whole field of science out of the window. And it can take years before we come to reconcile with it again. There are those of us who will now insist that all of his science (and those of his trainees) is absolute trash. But maybe, if we thought of all his studies as Discussions rather than Results and Analysis, academia can find a way to not only make peace with it, but to improve the science itself, instead of abandoning it.

Scott Adams on how to build a green house (and how not to).

Let's say you love the Earth. You see an article in a magazine about a guy who built a "green" house using mostly twigs, pinecones and abandoned bird nests. You want to build a green home, too. So you find an architect, show him the magazine and say, "Give me one just like this."

Good luck with that.

******************

Thanks to the shortage of water supply and the frequent powercuts, many houses in India have solar water heaters. The newer ones must be built with a mandatory water harvesting system. Amongst the most crucial of problems faced by the climate-change supporters, is to convince people how grave the situation really is. Humans, as it turns out, are not adept at grasping catastrophic problems of chronic and gradual change. But give people real, tangible, sometimes embarrassing problems- such as finding there's no water in the pipes when you're all soaped up or to have no hot water and to bear the guilty secret of having gone to work without having had a decent shower; then things will automatically fall in place.

Roger Eberts empathizes with the state of Christopher Hitchens. One has survived the worst of cancer and the other will hopefully see the other side as well.

Eberts also discusses his views on God which match those of Hitchens, and as a matter-of-fact mine. Henceforth, I shall refer to anyone who cares to know my views on God to this article. Because try as I might (and I have attempted to several times), I have never been understood. Perhaps Eberts has a better chance of being understood.

Regardless, Roger Ebert's choice of words as always is delicious.

“I was asked at lunch today who or what I worshipped. The question was asked sincerely, and in the same spirit I responded that I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.”

Dalton Ghetti, a professional carpenter who has taken 25 years to perfect the art of making miniature pencil-tip scultptures.

Man! I envy people who have the focus (let alone the creative genius) to commit themselves to creating works of art.

More pencil sculptures here...


Years from now,  when touchpads become the preferred tool for creating the written-word, can anything as beautiful be created from keyboards.  To me the keyboard looks like a pretty hideous device :/

Meanwhile, save all your pencils.

Someone's got to start taking quality control of the news and articles in their hands.

Tom Scott decided to do it himself.
He created journalism warning labels and goes about posting it on articles on all the free papers he can get his hands on.

Now if only the fed will take the lead and create a whole agency for it, we'll have reduced unemployment and improved quality of life.

But while, they choose to ignore these possibilities, Tom Scott's labels are free for anyone to use.

One would think Steven Slater would be embarrassed at his behavior and that a judge would be inclined to send him to anger management therapy. Instead, Steven Slater seems to have won everyone's hearts by doing what all of us have wished we can do but have never had the gumption to try - jump out of the emergency chute of an aeroplane!  He now has fans on twitter, facebook, and donations are pouring in to foot his legal bill.


"We live in times of grave danger your honor. The world needs leaders.  It needs people who're not ashamed to cower in times of deep distress. It needs people willing to show them the emergency chute"


So it seems that Slater may now end up with a book contract

And may very well be one of the new-age folk heroes.

 What people can do in 160 characters continues to amaze me.

Not too long ago, Josh Cagan came up with the clever idea of matching Kanye West's tweets with cartoons from the New Yorker.

This time,  @veryshortstory is coming up with O Henry-esque twists in no more than 160 characters. All he needs is inspiration in the form of simple nouns. He'll come up with a whole story around them.

Take this one :
"I smashed the pocket watch on the ground, freezing the moment, so I'd have time to change my ways and stop you from breaking up with me." 


or this  one :

"4am. You are asleep again. I am awake. I am making a tape of you snoring. I will use this in court when I plead insanity"


For those of us who don't have time for big novels anymore, there's always twitter. 

English is such a remarkably plastic language. Yet it doesn't have a gender-neutral pronoun. With women's suffrage and what not, we can no longer pass of as sensitive and liberal if we deign to use a singular pronoun with a masculine tinge.  It's about time we got ourselves a general-neutral pronoun.


Johnson. the language blog at The Economist looks at whether English is ever capable of evolving a Gender Neutral Pronoun   .

The fight for gender neutral pronouns has been on for nearly 2 centuries now. Among the several interesting links  is the post by Dennis Baron., chronicling the attempts of the many increasingly exasperated people demanding and suggesting words to fill this glaring vacuum in the English Language.

Johnson at Economist's language blog argues that all these words are in an evolutionary race to beat each other into popular parlance. We need to let evolution have his/her way. People coming up with new words ad-hoc is not going to work he says. The English Language will refudiate it.

His bet for the gender-neutral pronoun is "they".

Mine is on s/he. Because it is also about time a few characters got added to the English alphabet.
@ABCDEFGHI/JKLMNOPQR$TUVWXYZ.

Today's version of the Atlantic Wire's strange bedfellows points you to Guardian's opinion page if you want your funny bone tickled by giggle-worthy analogies.

'Words Are Like Cockroaches' | The Atlantic Wire

says Charlie Brooker.

quote "
To function efficiently as a writer, 95% of your brain has to teleport off into nowhere, taking its neuroses with it, leaving the confident, playful 5% alone to operate the controls. To put it another way: words are like cockroaches; only once the lights are off do they feel free to scuttle around on the kitchen floor. " unquote

But his analogy does make sense - in a funny, creepy sort of way.

The only way you're ever going to be a good writer is if you get yourself a deadline. Meanwhile, don't ask him for advice, he warns. He really doesn't want anyone to succeed and have all the glory:)

Hendrik Hertzberg explains, perhaps a touch too surgically, why one is not justified in comparing the current Park 51 controversy with a previous controversy regarding a Catholic church in the perimeter of Auschwitz.

Cordoba and the Carmelites

Even if the comparisons are justified, Hertzberg points out that both controversies can falsely lead us to label several unique individuals as abstractions of the same identity. He says quote "That slope of that kind of thinking is, to put it mildly, slippery." unquote.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/08/cordoba-and-the-carmelites.html#ixzz0wnqqY5s7

Yesterday, at the Guardian, Michael Hoffman reproached the attitude of the British towards learning new languages.

Hoffman gives several appealing reasons:- It's by learning more languages, more phrases that you allow yourself to outwit yourself in thought and expression. A goal well worth pursuing I think.

In the end he adds, interestingly, that its only fair. Since the British have thrust their language on several areas of the world, they're obliged to learn some of the other languages themselves.

Meanwhile, another British Anthropoligist is going to great lengths to save a language. He's embarking on a year-long stay to stay with a small community in Greenland to learn their language which he believes will vanish given that this community will soon migrate due to climate conditions and absorb other languages.