When we think today of Don Juan, we think, voluntarily or involuntarily, of ‘Mozart’s Don Juan.’ Mozart did for Don Juan what Goethe did for Faust—made his representation the prototype of all others.
{ Pierre Jean Jouve, Le Don Juan de Mozart, 1957 | Søren Kierkegaard’s Interpretation of Mozart’s Opera Don Giovanni : An Appraisal and Theological Response | PDF }
During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.
The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the remainder — believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts — stayed in Brod’s possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe’s death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters’ favor, they will be free to follow Eva’s stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don’t sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats.
The world is more complex and less controllable than ‘rational’ planners believe. There are two main reasons for this. First, as behavioural economics tells us, agents - be they individuals, institutions or governments - do not necessarily behave rationally; their responses when confronted by new information or a different set of incentives may be hard to anticipate. Second, as the study of networks shows, our tastes and preferences can be altered directly by the behaviour of others and can change over time. Natural selection is now believed to favour social learning strategies that specify when and whom to copy. It seems that humans are particularly adept at this. (…)
In the late 1990s, a group of epidemiologists, sociologists and physicists analysed a database of individuals and their sexual contacts. The results were published in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals. They found that most people have only a few sexual partners, but that a small number have hundreds or even thousands. The real originality of the paper was its finding that the structure of the pattern of the contacts closely reflected a recently discovered type of network that is described as ‘scale-free’. Such networks are important in the natural sciences, and more of them - at least, good approximations of the scale-free pattern - have been discovered in the human world. The internet, for example, has these properties. A few sites receive a massive number of hits, while most get very few. A whole industry has grown up in American marketing circles trying to find these influential ‘hubs’. (…)
Another important type of network that makes life even more complicated is the ‘small-world’ network. When we delve into the maths, there are considerable similarities between a scale-free and a small-world network. But their basic social structure is different. In the scale-free network, there are a few agents who have huge potential influence. The small world is much more like overlapping sets of ‘friends of friends’. The additional feature is that, while no one has a large number of connections, a few agents may have ‘long-range’ connections to others who are remote from their immediate cliques. However, these individuals may be even harder to identify in practice than the hubs of a scale-free network, precisely because they themselves are not distinguished by having an unusual number of connections.
{ RSA Journal | Continue reading }
The World Wide Web, with its potential to connect people globally, was paradoxically a technology that connected people locally.
{ RSA Journal | Continue reading }
Rumors of the web’s memory are greatly exaggerated.
Jeffrey Rosen has an engaging piece in the Times about privacy and the web that touches on issues of forgiveness and reputation and how the Internet has basically screwed that up for all of us; the upshot being that because your Facebook profile never really goes away, your sins are plastered on the world’s largest wall for all to see forever. Here’s the thing. They’re probably not. Forever, that is.
{ Big Questions Online | Continue reading }
As data volumes continue to grow, it’s clear that the Internet’s infrastructure needs upgrading. What’s not clear is who is going to pay for it.
photo { Manuel Vazquez }
I’m sure most of you have heard of the twin paradox “in which a twin makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket and returns home to find he has aged less than his identical twin who stayed on Earth.” This paradox has been worked out for special relativity in Minkowski spacetime. Recently, Boblest et al. worked out the details using general relativity for an expanding universe. (…)
The twins in the paper have names: Eric and Tina. Eric stays on Earth while Tina accelerates away from Earth with constant acceleration α = 9.8 m/s2 until her clock shows 5 years have past. Then she decelerates by the same magnitude coming to a complete stop after ten years then begins her journey back to earth accelerating then decelerating in the same 5 year intervals. Finally, after 20 years has transpired on her clock she has returned to earth being now 20 years old. (…) Eric is nearly 350 years old when Tina returns.
By what age do children recognise that plagiarism is wrong?
To view plagiarism as an adult does, a child must combine several pieces of a puzzle: they need to understand that not everyone has access to all ideas; that people can create their own ideas; and that stealing an idea, like stealing physical property, is wrong.
images { Left: Maurizio Cattelan, Bidibidobidiboo, 1996 | Right: Print ad for Seidl Confiserie, 2008. Advertising Agency: Serviceplan München/Hamburg, Germany. Maurizio Cattelan was not credited. }
So what does fascinate me in the animal? The first thing that fascinated me is that every animal has a world. It is curious because many people do not have a world. They live the life of everyone’s life, no matter who, no matter what. Animals have worlds. An animal world, what is it? It is sometimes extraordinary limited. And this is it that moves me. Finally the animals react to very few things. Several sorts of things.
(…)
So the very first characteristic of the animal is the existence of specific, peculiar animal worlds; and it is perhaps, sometimes, the poverty of those worlds, the reduced character of those worlds that interest me a lot.
For example, we have been previously talking about animals such as the tick. The tick responds or reacts to three things. Three stimuli. Nothing more in a nature that is a huge nature, three stimuli, that’s all. It tends towards the edge of a branch, attracted by light. It can wait on top of that branch for years without eating, without anything, totally amorphous. Well, it waits for a ruminant, an herbivore, an animal that passes under its branch, ready to drop; it is a kind of an olfactory stimulus. The tick smells the animal passing under its branch. The second stimulus; the light then the smell. Then, once fallen on the back of the poor animal, it will look for the least hairy area. Here a tactile stimulus. And it sinks into the skin. It does not care about anything else. In a swarming nature, the tick extracts three things. This is what makes a world.
(…)
It is not enough to have a world to be an animal. What absolutely fascinated me are the issues of territory. Because constituting a territory is nearly the birth of art.
(…)
If someone would ask me what an animal is, I would answer “a being on the lookout”. It is a being fundamentally on the lookout. (…) The writer is on the lookout. So is the philosopher. You see, the ears of an animal. Well it does nothing without being on the watch. An animal never keeps still. While eating, it has to watch out if anything is happening in its back, on its sides, etc. Such an existence on the lookout is terrible.
{ Gilles Deleuze’s ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet | PDF | Read more | Video 1, Video 2 }
photo { unsourced }
A Michigan company announced that for the low, low price of $1.99, you could have a lifetime license to use something you might not have thought you needed - a new punctuation mark.
It’s called the SarcMark, and it looks like a reversed “at” sign.
Beyond the practical experiences and impressions being held for ages from ancient times, the scientific observations and surveys indicate that psychopathological symptoms, especially those belonging to the bipolar mood disorder (bipolar I and II), major depression and cyclothymia categories occur more frequently among writers, poets, visual artists and composers, compared to the rates in the general population. Self-reports of writers and artists describe symptoms in their intensively creative periods which are reminiscent and characteristic of hypomanic states. Further, cognitive styles of hypomania (e.g. overinclusive thinking, richness of associations) and originality-prone creativity share many common as indicated by several authors.
Among the eminent artists showing most probably manic-depressive or cyclothymic symptoms were: E. Dickinson, E. Hemingway, N. Gogol, A. Strindberg, V. Woolf, Lord Byron (G. Gordon), J. W. Goethe, V. van Gogh, F. Goya, G. Donizetti, G. F. Händel, O. Klemperer, G. Mahler, R. Schumann, and H. Wolf. Based on biographies and other studies, brief descriptions are given in the present article on the personality character of Gogol; Strindberg, Van Gogh, Händel, Klemperer, Mahler, and Schumann.
Further example is the enigmatic silence and withdrawal from opera composing of Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868), which is still a matter of various theories and explanations. Until his life of 37 years he composed 39 operas and lived almost another 40 years without composing any new one. Biographies show that severe depressive sufferings played a role in that withdrawal and silence, while in his juvenile years most probably hypomanic personality traits contributed to the extreme achievements and very fast composing techniques. Analysing the available biographies of Rossini and the character of music he composed (e.g. opera buffa, Rossini crescendo) strongly suggests the medical diagnosis of a bipolar affective illness.
Comparing to the general population, bipolar mood disorder is highly overrepresented among writers and artists. The cognitive and other psychological features of artistic creativity resemble many aspects of the hypomanic symptomatology. It may be concluded that bipolar mood traits might contribute to highly creative achievements in the field of art. At the same time, considering the risks, the need of an increased medical care is required.
The Chaos Theory of Careers (CTC) characterises individuals as complex systems subject to the influence of complex influences and chance events. However, over time patterns emerge in our behaviour that are self-similar but also subject to change.
Career trajectories / histories / stories are examples of such complex fractal patterns.
Our careers are subject to chance events far more frequently than just about any theory other than CTC and Happenstance Learning Theory would suggest.
Our careers are subject to non linear change — sometimes small steps have profound outcomes, and sometimes changing everything changes nothing.
Our careers are unpredictable, with most people expressing a degree of surprise/delight or disappointment at where they ended up.
Our careers are subject to continual change. Sometimes we experience slow shift (Bright, 2008) that results in us drifting off course without realising it, and sometimes our careers have dramatic (fast shift) changes which completely turn our world upside down.
photo { Arno Rafael Minkkinen }
Pursuit of novelty may be one of fashion’s most durable illusions. The fact is that very little in fashion is new, in any real sense, nor is it truly supposed to be. (“There’s so much striving for newness now that newness feels less new,” as Marc Jacobs told Style.com.) Many of the 175,000 people who work in fashion in New York, in the more than 800 businesses that generate $10 billion in total annual wages and tax revenues of $1.7 billion, could probably confirm Mr. Asfour’s proposition that fashion is at heart a conservative business.
Why We’re Teaching ‘The Wire’ at Harvard
“The Wire,” which depicted inner-city Baltimore over five seasons on HBO, shows ordinary people making sense of their world. Its complex characters on both sides of the law defy simplistic moral distinctions. (…) We think it is more than just excellent television. Impressed by its treatment of complex issues, we developed a course at Harvard drawing on the show’s portrayal of fundamental sociological principles connected to urban inequality. Our seminar was designed for 30 students; four times that many showed up for the first class last week.
Of course, our undergraduate students will read rigorous academic studies of the urban job market, education and the drug war. But the HBO series does what these texts can’t. More than simply telling a gripping story, “The Wire” shows how the deep inequality in inner-city America results from the web of lost jobs, bad schools, drugs, imprisonment, and how the situation feeds on itself.
Those kinds of connections are very difficult to illustrate in academic works. Though scholars know that deindustrialization, crime and prison, and the education system are deeply intertwined, they must often give focused attention to just one subject in relative isolation, at the expense of others. With the freedom of artistic expression, “The Wire” can be more creative. It can weave together the range of forces that shape the lives of the urban poor.
{ Julius Wilson and Anmol Chaddha/Harvard College | Continue reading }
photo { Anthony Suau }
String theory suggests that matter can be broken down beyond electrons and quarks into tiny loops of vibrating strings. Those strings move and vibrate at different frequencies, giving particles distinctive properties like mass and charge. This strange idea could unite all the fundamental forces, explain the origins of fundamental particles and connect Einstein’s general relativity to quantum mechanics. But to do so, the theory requires six extra dimensions of space and time curled up inside the four that we’re used to.
To understand how these extra dimensions could hide from view, imagine a tightrope walker on a wire between two high buildings. To the tightrope walker, the wire is a one-dimensional line. But to a colony of ants crawling around the wire, the rope has a second dimension: its thickness. In the same way that the tightrope walker sees one dimension where the ants see two, we could see just three dimensions of space while strings see nine or ten.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know if this picture is real. But although string theorists can’t test the big idea, they can use this vision of the world to describe natural phenomena like black holes. (…)
Now, physicists at Imperial College London and Stanford University have found a way to make string theory useful, not for a theory of everything, but for quantum entanglement.
At first glance, it may seem strange to juxtapose Spinoza and Heidegger, the first an ‘excommunicated’ Jew living in Amsterdam in the mid-1600’s (and then, The Hague), the other a German (and a dissident ‘Nazi’), living at the time of his lectures on Schelling, that is 1936, near Freiburg. Although, as we will see, Heidegger’s documented interest in Spinoza and ‘Spinozism’ had already arisen at least as early as the 1920’s, it is interesting that in his lectures, after his first mentions of Spinoza, Heidegger seems necessitated or compelled to explain to his audience (among whom were the panoptic Nazi auditors) that the latter is not properly a ‘Jewish thinker’, citing of course, his expulsion from the Jewish community at the age of 23. It should be remembered that well before this time, Heidegger already had a quite severe falling out with leading Nazi officials and academic operators, such as Alfred Baumler, who had not only prevented him from being elected President of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, but had also placed Heidegger under surveillance. Strangely enough, in a long report that would remove from Heidegger any hope of being elected President of the Academy of Sciences, it was stated that Heidegger was a schizophrenic, and that his philosophy was influenced by Jewish ideas (notably Husserl).
Beyond these perplexing historical considerations, however, the sigificance of Spinoza (and ‘Spinozism’) for Heidegger was long-standing and quite profound in relation to the development of his own philosophical perspective. Of course, it is Heidegger’s opposition to the rationalist and mathematical aspects of his philosophy that is most pronounced in all of his extant statements about Spinoza. (…)
Heidegger places a great emphasis upon the epistemic role of mood, and specifically, upon anxiety, in this context; and with the usual stipulations, we could argue that he has a different, and seemingly more positive, relationship with the (negative) emotional aspect of existence than does Spinoza. Of course, Spinoza, as Deleuze advertises, is a great seeker of Joy and pleasant emotions (in moderation); yet, it is his aversion to the ‘sad passions’ and ‘pain’ which clearly distinguishes him from Heidegger (and from Schopenhauer, for that matter). (…)
Heidegger, in the 1920’s phenomenology, is not speaking primarily of fear, as in the fear of death. He speaks instead of anxiety. Fear is a mood in which that which is feared is a threat that may happen or not. In this way, fear in Heidegger is the same as fear in Spinoza’s Ethics, as this emotion is always accompanied by hope (that some event, etc. will not occur). (…)
However, as stated, fear is not Heidegger’s primary concern, nor is it his epistemic source for the differentiation of our own being from that of entities. This is indicated, as I have mentioned, in anxiety, and again, we can find an analogue of this indication in Spinoza. For Heidegger, anxiety is a sense of a threat to our being that is insurmountable, of our own possibility of impossibility. In the absence of any hope, anxiety shares a family resemblance to Spinoza’s emotion of despair. That which is crucial here is that Heidegger contends that anxiety reveals to us the Nothing, which has the sense of the negativity of ourselves (finite transcendence), in our difference from generic beings and from any transcendent being. Moreover, as it is insurmountable, anxiety, in distinction from fear and the unreality of its sense of time, discloses the truth of what is there in its ultimate necessity.
In his radical, that is phenomenological and existential, ontology, Heidegger is seeking to disclose the specificity of our own human being, which, truth be told, is in each case, my own. Heidegger has, in this way, exposed a radical leap by Spinoza away from the truth, and into the consoling fiction of his notion of divine substance, which is meant to be imminent, to be our true being, but becomes, in its lack of being, perhaps the symbol of our greatest weakness and un-freedom. (…)
In our courage to face the futurity of our being-toward-death, we thus come to ourselves from out of the shadows – as the truth of Being. In this way, it could be contended that Spinoza does not give us an adequate conception of freedom, as he has failed, as Heidegger suggests in his lectures on Schelling, to disclose the true radicality and depths of human existence. (…) It is in this way that we affirm the desire which is our being, and do not take the path of renunciation for an eternal that is only a prison-house of graves.
{ James Luchte | Continue reading }
Thinking that the second kind of knowledge is a kind of mathematical knowledge, that’s an abominable silly thing, because then all Spinoza becomes abstract. / Mais penser que le second genre soit un type de connaissance mathématique, c’est une bêtise abominable parce que, à ce moment-là, tout Spinoza devient abstrait.
{ Deleuze on Spinoza, Cours de Vincennes, 1981 | Continue reading }
In the long run, physicists are, no doubt, getting closer and closer to the truth. But you can never be sure when the long run has arrived. And in the short run—to adapt Keynes’s proverb—we are often all wrong.
It is perhaps the biases of science reporting in the popular press that produce the most misinformation, especially in medicine. (…) When a drug is tested on animals and seems promising, it makes headlines, even though the majority of drugs that pass animal trials never become usable for people. And barely a day goes by without the media exploiting an almost universal misunderstanding of statistics and reporting something that has no relevance to anything. When researchers are said to have found that an effect occurs to a statistically significant degree, this means that it probably isn’t caused by a fluke, not that it is large or definite enough to be useful.
A school of ancient philosophers, the followers of Pyrrho of Elis (who died C270BC), came up with a consistent but impractical response to the problem of whom to believe when expert sources disagree or are found to be unreliable. Believe nobody, they said: suspend judgment on everything. Scholars have debated whether anyone could have lived a life according to this principle, and the consensus is no, they could not. Suspending judgment may keep you free from erroneous beliefs, but it also makes it impossible to decide rationally on what to do about anything.
Some of the italicised words are pure slang and have no place in respectable writing – celebs and nookie, for example. Others come under the heading of coy or vulgar euphemism – toyboy, love child, love nest, cheating and stunner are what might more directly be called gigolo, illegitimate child, flat, committing adultery and mistress .
Some are simply failures of terminology: those who ride horses go riding, not horse riding; and those who shoot or hunt practise field sports. (…)
The main objection to most of the tabloid language highlighted above is that it devalues the currency. If somebody is devastated because his football team has lost a match, how does he feel when he gets home and finds his wife and children have been killed in a fire?
{ Simon Heffer on The language of tabloid exaggeration | The Guardian | Continue reading }
{ Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and philosophy, 1962 | Continue reading }
related:
The body can by the sole laws of its nature do many things which the mind wonders at.
Again, no one knows how or by what means the mind moves the body, nor how many various degrees of motion it can impart to the body, nor how quickly it can move it. Thus, when men say that this or that physical action has its origin in the mind, which latter has dominion over the body, they are using words without meaning, or are confessing in specious phraseology that they are ignorant of the cause of the said action, and do not wonder at it.
I used to have cello lessons on Saturday morning. I would play a certain piece in front of my teacher and then she would give me a new piece to practice for next week.
Some weeks, I practiced for half an hour the following Sunday, then half an hour on Monday, the same on Tuesday, etc., so that when my next lesson would be up, I would have practiced for a total of three hours (6 days; half an hour each). And I usually would be able to play the piece in front of my teacher reasonably well.
Some weeks, however, I forgot about it altogether. By the time it was Friday, I would realize, “It’s my cello lesson tomorrow and I haven’t practiced at all yet!”
What I would usually do then is think, “I will just practice for three hours in a row now. That’s the same amount of time as half an hour each day for six days, and I am sure I will be fine.” But I never was. It never worked. I would be terrible, and my teacher’s ears would hurt for hours after she sent me away.
I couldn’t understand at the time how that was possible. Three hours is three hours, right?
Of course, as adults, we realize that our brain needs rest in between practice sessions. It needs to recuperate before you can put new information and skills into it, and the periods of “inactivity” are just as important as the practice itself. Practice sessions are much less effective if you don’t have the slow periods in between them.
Now, as an adult examining corporate strategies, I see that firms often fall into the same trap.In order to catch up with competitors, for instance, they enter new markets at double the speed, undertake twice as many acquisitions, or hire double the number of employees. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. Just like me practicing the cello, organizations need rest and time in between growth spurts to recuperate and digest the effort. Trying twice as hard does not mean you’ll get twice the benefits. There are limits to how fast you can grow, without starting to suffer from it.
We call this “time compression diseconomies” - a term coined by professors Dierickx and Cool from INSEAD.
{ Freek Vermeulen/Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }
The grammar of Interlingua is an international auxiliary language first publicized by IALA. It follows the usage of the original grammar text (Gode & Blair, 1951), which is accepted today but regarded as conservative.
The grammar of Interlingua is based largely on that of the Romance languages, but simplified, primarily under the influence of English. However, all of the control languages, including German and Russian, were consulted in developing the grammar. Grammatical features absent from any of the control languages were dropped. For example, there is neither adjectival agreement (Spanish/Portuguese gatos negros ‘black cats’), since this feature is absent in English, nor continuous verb tenses (English I am reading), since they are absent in French.
There is no systemic marking for parts of speech. For example, nouns do not have to end in any particular letter. Typically, however, adjectives end in -e or a consonant, adverbs end in -mente or -o, while nouns end in -a, -e, -o or a consonant. Finite verbs virtually always end in -a, -e, or -i, while infinitives add -r: scribe, ‘write’, ‘writes’; scriber, ‘to write’.
{ unsourced image }
