March 2007

I’m in very irritable humour and an occasional annoyance has just breached my tolerance threshold. Reading a friend’s copy of last weekend’s Sunday Independent (Of course I’d never buy the worthless gossip rag myself. I just like reading it.) I counted THREE instances of the term ‘passing on’ to describe death. It’s clear from the articles that the journalists are paraphrasing the words of interviewees who would probably be mortified to hear their alcoholic, wife-beating father had simply ‘passed on’ after several years of poisonous decline.

The Sindo is an Irish newspaper, and Irish people do not use the euphemism ‘passing on’ for ‘dying’. The preference in speech has generally been for the more brutal ‘he/she died’. The passing off of ‘passing on’ as the polite way to describe death is starting to creep in to written language. Not that the Sindo is any model of the written language; it’s a flag of convenience for some decent and mostly average clique of writers to pen gossip pieces about their buddies.

Now, I understand that Americans prefer to say someone passed on than to say ‘they died’. Just as they prefer to say someone went to ‘the rest room’ than to the toilet. I expect that in a multicultural society that has nonetheless a quite puritanical aversion to the acknowledgement of bodily functions, a certain amount of stylised nicety is needed for everyone to get along and not constantly embarrass or offend each other. But the use of this term in Ireland is a purely aspirational adoption of others’ sensitivities. In a country where funeral-going is a national pastime, there’s nothing refined about dancing around death.

Not to mention that ‘passing on’ implies a belief in some sort of after-life, which seems a bit presumptious seeing as for many being dead means simply ceasing to exist.

Last night’s edition of BBC’s flagship programme Newsnight contained fictionalized scenarios from the future of Iraq prepared by a pessimist (Toby Dodge of QMC) and an “optimist” — Brendan O’Leary of the University of Pennsylvania. Brendan is an old friend of mine, but, as an adviser to the Kurdistan regional government, he’s been a keen promoter of something like the “decent left” agenda. His “optimistic” scenario has Iraq descending even further into the mire of sectarian killing, US withdrawal and Iranian and Saudi invasion … but then the character who utters his script tell us: “we were at the brink, and then, for some reason — a miracle — we stepped back”. (Oh, and Kurdistan ends up with the Winter Olympics.) I’m all for looking on the bright side. But miracles? Watch the whole thing “here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6332717.stm (today only). The “miracle” remark is at about 12.01.

When a rumor began to circulate during the first week in January that Michael Bérubé would soon be shutting down his blog — confirmed in due course by an official statement/explanation — it was big news in this little world of “web” “logs.” Sure, there are plenty of places online where you can find discussions of Stuart Hall, economic populism, Ralph Nader, the NHL, and disability studies. Just not all in the same place at the same time. Bérubé had been at it for three years, during which he built up a large readership and even managed to include a number of blog entries in a collection of essays published by a university press.

So when the news got out, there was a general groan of dismay from many quarters of the academic and lefty/progressive commentariat in the United States. And in particular from that subset of each consisting of hockey fans. The shutting down of Bérubé’s blog also met, it must be said, with cheering from members of the Peoples’ Revolutionary Committee for a Committee of Revolutionary Peoples who were still upset that he had occasionally written disobliging things about Slobodan Milosevic.

No doubt there were also sighs of relief — gentle tears of gratitude, even — elsewhere.

It was in short an epochal event: the end of an institution, the twilight of an era, etc. Then came February and it all really was history.

Well, after some downtime–during which he’s probably written a couple of books–Michael Bérubé is now joining Crooked Timber. He is being taught the secret password (“Is there no help for the widow’s son?”) and handshake even now. In the meanwhile, please join me in welcoming Michael back into the fray.

Last June I wrote about my friend Havi Carel and her battle with the lung disease Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM). Havi has an “article in today’s Independent about LAM”:http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article2369574.ece and about what it is like to live with a terminal illness and how that changes your relationship to others, indeed, to everything.

Last time I wrote I invited you to sponsor Havi on a bike-ride to raise money for LAM Action which supports patients and raises money for research. This time “Kate Gamez”:http://www.justgiving.com/kategamez and “Becky Tunstall”:http://www.justgiving.com/beckytunstall are running the London Marathon for LAM Action – so please click on one of their names if you want to sponsor them.

Following up on the “Twitter Curve”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/13/twitter-curve/ from last week, here is Twittervision, a mashup of Twitter and Google Maps.

When Rip awoke from his 20-year sleep, he had a beard a foot long, and had missed out on some big political events. I’ve been paying attention to politics for the past 30 years or more, but events in the world of shaving have mostly passed me by. I was aware that it was no longer possible, as it once was, to get a shave and a haircut for two bits, but I was surprised to discover that you can no longer get a shave at all, at least, not at a barbershop – perhaps a long-delayed reaction to The Man from Ironbark.

Instead, having had my hair trimmed and my beard clipped down to Number 0 (as shown here), I was left to rely on my own devices to remove the stubble. Of course, I had no such devices, but I thought that the relevant technology would be fairly much as I remembered it. On the contrary, shaving now appears to require five blades and a power supply. Actually, I did read about this in one of Maria’s posts a while back, but of course skipped over it as being of no relevance to me.

I’m slightly bemused by it, but I’m the ideal target market for this kind of thing, since the only memories of shaving that have survived three decades are the painful ones. So, I’m now on the bleeding edge of technology, literally, but hopefully not bleeding as much as I would be if I stuck with the old gear.

On a more serious note, my appeal for the Leukemia Foundation raised over $A6000, more than any of the charitable appeals I’ve run in the past. Sincere thanks to CTers who contributed (I’ve tried to email people where I had an address, but inevitably missed some).

Tyler Cowen asks,

bq. So why *are* women more religious than men? Is it just greater risk-aversion?

According to my colleague Louise Roth, in an article from the current ASR co-authored with Jeff Kroll, the answer to the second question is, “No.” Here’s the abstract:

bq. Scholars of religion have long known that women are more religious than men, but they disagree about the reasons underlying this difference. Risk preference theory suggests that gender gaps in religiosity are a consequence of men’s greater propensity to take risks, and that irreligiosity is analogous to other high-risk behaviors typically associated with young men. Yet, research using risk preference theory has not effectively distinguished those who perceive a risk to irreligiousness from those who do not. In this article, we evaluate risk preference theory. We differentiate those who believe in an afterlife, who perceive a risk to irreligiousness, from nonbelievers who perceive no risk associated with the judgment after death. Using General Social Survey and World Values Survey data, multivariate models test the effects of gender and belief on religiousness. In most religions and nations the gender gap is larger for those who do not believe in an afterlife than for those who do, contradicting the predictions of risk preference theory. The results clearly demonstrate that the risk preference thesis is not a compelling explanation of women’s greater average religiosity.

I used to give blood, less often than I probably should have done, but willingly, and without much personal cost. Needles don’t bother me (as long as I am the victim) and whereas I’d feel tired at the end of the day, that was about it. There’s nothing special about my blood, and I’m sure it’s a drop in the ocean, but a recent conversation about why I no longer give blood has prompted me to wonder whether I should start again.

Why don’t I give any longer?

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What do you get when you sort approximately 800,000 published papers into 776 scientific paradigms? If you have an interesting visualization expert working with you on the project then you get this map (or click here for an even larger version). Seed Magazine has more on the details and Brad Paley’s Information Esthetics Web site tells you how you can get your own copy just for paying shipping and handling charges.

This map is just one project of Katy Börner’s cool Places and Spaces: Mapping Science initiative at Indiana University. Check out that site for more goodies.

Brad also has some other intriguing projects, like this calendar (an alternative to what we usually use). One of my favorites, however, remains his TextArc work for alternative ways of visualizing text. For example, check out his representation of Alice in Wonderland.

UPDATE: I’ve been meaning to blog about Jim Moody’s related work as well so I should’ve remembered to include a link to his visualizations, too: co-citation of physical and bio sciences, dynamic visualization of sociology co-authorship network.

The recent “profusion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/12/skin/ “of”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/14/gift-exchange/ “posts”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/15/how-about-my-gift/ on beard shaving has attracted a slightly more sophisticated class of comment-spammer to CT than the usual midget-porn purveyors we hose out of the moderation queue every morning.

I’ve been hiding under my facial hair for so long because of life circumstances it was no point in getting involved. Now life is starting to look better and I’m not under such stress and crap. I might just have to get back in the game… How do I attract women? I suppose I need to do more than just shave or use the ever-popular [name of pheromone product deleted]. I’m gonna have to ditch my caveman culture and transform myself a little I guess. The secret is that i use pheromones [url deleted] for attracting women. They are like magic.

It’s unclear whether this is a good or a bad thing.

Following up on my “ethicist” posts, a correspendent points me to this, rather unnerving, article from the Washington Post. A couple of quotes:

The woman and two others interviewed by The Washington Post learned from friends that they were the subject of derogatory chats on a widely read message board on AutoAdmit, run by a third-year law student at the University of Pennsylvania and a 23-year-old insurance agent….It contains many useful insights on schools and firms. But there are also hundreds of chats posted by anonymous users that feature derisive statements about women, gays, blacks, Asians and Jews. In scores of messages, the users disparage individuals by name or other personally identifying information. Some of the messages included false claims about sexual activity and diseases. To the targets’ dismay, the comments bubble up through the Internet into the public domain via Google’s powerful search engine.

The stories prompted the deans of Yale and Penn Law School to issue statements condemning these sorts of attacks.

In case that doesn’t worry you:

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Pierre Assouline’s excellent blog at Le Monde “has some figures”:http://passouline.blog.lemonde.fr/2007/03/17/langlais-regne-en-librairie/ for the provenance of novels published in French translation:

bq. in 2006, 41.4% of novels published in France were translated from a foreign language…. English is, naturally, in first place with 2503 titles but the extent of English domination is surprising: 75.5 per cent of the total! In the runners-up spot are German and Spanish with 134 titles (4%), followed by Italian (108 titles or 3.3%). Juste après, on trouve l’allemand et l’espagnol avec 134 titres (soit 4%) suivis par l’italien (108 titres soit 3,3%). …. Russian (which is in decline) and the languages of the East [meaning? CB] are neck and neck (with 44 titles translated in the year), then come the Scandinavian languages and Japanese. The only notable breakthrough is the Chinese novel, with 37 titles translated.

I haven’t seen much coverage in either US newspapers or the blogosphere of the developing crisis in Pakistan. Not knowing very much more than what I read in the newspapers, I’m not able to contribute much myself. But I do want to point to this “FT article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d11108b0-d29b-11db-a7c0-000b5df10621.html which provides what seems to me to be an excellent overview of the politics.

Not since September 12 2001 has Pervez Musharraf found himself under such pressure. … Five and a half years later, as blowback from the war in Afghanistan pushes anti-American sentiment in Pakistan to new levels, the political cost to Gen Musharraf of being seen as a puppet of the administration of President George W. Bush is becoming unsustainable. This week, Gen Musharraf revealed his own mounting unpopularity when he provoked nationwide protests by unceremoniously suspending the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The top judge, Iftikhar Chaudhary, is understood to have alarmed Gen Musharraf by taking an independent stand on a number of controversial cases and potentially jeopardising the general’s re-election plans. By accepting, in particular, that there should be an investigation into suspected “disappearances” of terror suspects, Mr Chaudhary seems to have overstepped the mark. … judge – who claims to have been roughed up and stripped of his mobile phone, car and passport – has become the rallying point for all the disaffected of Gen Musharraf’s Pakistan. … “It’s a whirlpool right now,” says Taffazul Rizvi, a US-trained Pakistani lawyer. “It’s an emerging situation, which can take down anyone, including Musharraf.” … Gen Musharraf’s political weakness will, in time, inevitably undermine his relations with the US, his chief patron, and prompt Washington to look for ways to bolster the credibility of its ally, possibly by encouraging the general to co-opt one or other of the two exiled political leaders in a broad coalition. … Diplomats in Islamabad worry it may be too late for such political fixes. Religious radicalism is spreading so rapidly that there is little time left to save Pakistan’s moderate political parties and institutions such as the Supreme Court that are central to the functioning of any future democracy.

Those more knowledgeable than myself should feel free to add to/contradict/etc in comments.

I came across James Fallows’ 1991 piece on _The Economist_ (to which my subscription has just lapsed), “The Economics of the Colonial Cringe”:http://jamesfallows.com/test/1991/10/16/the-economics-of-the-colonial-cringe-about-the-economist-magazine-washington-post-1991/, and thought it pretty interesting. On the one hand, this seems a little dated:

In functional terms, The Economist is more like the Wall Street Journal than like any other American publication. In each there’s a kind of war going on between the news articles and the editorial pages. The news articles are not overly biased and try to convey the complex reality of, well, the news. Meanwhile, the editorials and “leaders” push a consistent line, often at odds with the facts reported on the news pages of the same issue.

If there’s any marked difference these days between the line touted in the editorial pages line and the perspective of the news articles, I can’t detect it. The _WSJ_ seems to still have a firewall between the two (although in fairness its editorial pages are also far loopier than those of the _Economist_).

On the other, this still seems bang on the mark.

The other ugly English trait promoting The Economist’s success in America is the Oxford Union argumentative style. At its epitome, it involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact. American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control. The forte of Oxford-style debate is to be able to sound certain and convincing about a topic pulled out of the air a few minutes before, such as “Resolved: That women are not the fairer sex.” (The BBC radio shows “My Word” and “My Music,” carried on National Public Radio, give a sample of the desired impromptu glibness.) Economist leaders and the covers that trumpet their message offer Americans a blast of this style. Michael Kinsley, who once worked at The Economist, wrote that the standard Economist leader gives you the feeling that the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately — and then tried to think what the steps should be.