Новости за 06.07.2016

Pervasive light pollution from cities and highways ensures that most people in Europe and America never know real darkness, never see the night sky as their ancestors did, rarely see any stars. “Most North Americans and Europeans live under Class 6 or 7 skies, in which the Milky Way is undetectable and the sky has been smudged by a ‘vague, grayish white hue’. In that kind of night, a person can wander outside, unfold a lawn chair, open a newspaper, and recite the headlines, if not the stories”

Cut-out-and-keep list of concepts, models and heuristics drawn mostly from economics, statistics, and philosophy. Among them: Simpson’s Paradox,  “A paradox in probability and statistics, in which a trend appears in different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined”; Opportunity Cost,  “The value of the best alternative forgone where, given limited resources, a choice needs to be made between several mutually exclusive alternatives”

Adultery is still a crime in much of America. Penalties range from a $10 fine in Maryland to life imprisonment in Michigan. Six states allow civil proceedings for “alienation of affection”, six for “criminal conversation”, an offence which “involves neither a crime nor a conversation, but is an action brought by one spouse against the other’s paramour”. The criminal laws go “unenforced because we want to continue our conduct, and unrepealed because we want to preserve our morals”

Americans talk about the human body as a machine — often a military machine. Illness “invades”. The body “fights back”. The “war on cancer” is won or lost. These metaphors have a powerful effect on real-life behaviour. They encourage an aggressive approach to medical treatment on the part of doctors and patients, an ethic that something must be seen to be done even when nothing useful can be done. “Our military mindset causes us to treat death as defeat and life as victory”

The “cultural obsession with child development” took root after 1945. Demobbed men wanted their jobs back, which meant sending women home — for which psychoanalysis, newly popular, provided an argument: “Get back to the house, because if you don’t your children will turn out badly and it will be all your fault.” The “stay-at-home mum” is born. Her children “grow up to announce that she has always been there and that her continuing existence is essential to the nation’s wellbeing”

If Dante wrote a Divine Comedy today, no publisher would accept it for fear of lawsuits and riots. Eminent figures are libelled. The prophet Muhammad languishes in hell. Political, religious and regional groups are insulted on almost every page. Dante was a public figure deeply embroiled in the violent power struggles of medieval Florence. His poetry was “the product of vicious factionalism and packed with local scandal, much of it deployed in the hope of accruing benefits to the author”

What is the part of the political Left in anti-Semitism? We associate anti-Semitism primarily with the political Right; but anti-Semitism in pre-war Europe, especially in France, drew much of its support from socialists and revolutionary anti-capitalists who demonised Jews as wealthy corruptors. The post-war Left tries to allow anti-Zionism and disallow anti-Semitism; the distinction exists, but it is not easily maintained, as the turmoil in the British Labour Party demonstrates

Cy Twombly worked as a cryptologist for the US Army in the 1950s, and he worked as a cryptologist in art for the rest of his life. “Twombly painted canvases of such simple words and root images that the entire story of all human things is probably encoded in there. Maybe there are secrets about the future to be discovered in his canvases as well. I wouldn’t put anything past the old cryptologist. We’ll be looking at his scratches, scrawls and beautiful marks for a long time to come”

We grumble about email overload; but the inbox is a model of economy when set against the cacophony of messages, notifications and alerts which come popping out of our screens from new messaging platforms and intrusive apps; this near-chaos is about to get much worse as more internet companies make messaging their main customer interface. We need a solution at the operating system level — and we won’t get it, because the OS giants, Apple and Google, are heavily invested in messaging