Daily Office:
Thursday
17 December 2009
¶ Matins: Are plastic highways — roads paved of recycled rubbish — a good idea? Saritha Rai seems to think so. (GlobalPost; via The Morning News)
A local entrepreneur duo is helping traffic, and cleaning up the environment, by adding plastic waste to road-laying materials.
The benefits? Plastic roads can better handle the pressure of incessant traffic and, most importantly, the harsh sun, pounding rain and other quirks of Indian weather.
But the plastics approach offers another environmentally friendly benefit.
“It is handy in disposing the tons of waste plastic that Bangalore’s residents produce daily,” said Ahmed Khan, 61, who with his brother Rasool, 59, is behind the recycling idea.
But we agree with the commenter who worries about the pollution of groundwater.
¶ Lauds: Colm Tóibín buys a minimalist painting — a pair, actually — only to discover their baggage of invisible meaning when he unpacks them in his Dublin flat. (LRB)
They are proof if I need proof that I really do miss the point of things. Instead of wallowing in their clean beauty, unsullied by modern fashions in painting and the general tendency to ironise everything that moves and everything that stays still, they are a sort of joke. I did find some of this out when I looked at them the third time and before I bought them, but at times it takes a while for the enormity of something to make its way into my skull.
¶ Prime: While Felix Salmon scratches his head over the to-him mystifying refusal of incoming Cravath, Swain associates to take the firm's offer to stay home for a year at a salary of $80,000, a handful of sharp law students attempt to illuminate the high-end legal profession for our British visitor. This one is for the comments.
alternative forms of employment (assuming one desires employment) are hard to come by at the moment. There aren’t all that many jobs available to young graduates with limited work experience paying 80K. If you’re going to be working, might as well be making the full 160K…
¶ Tierce: Peter Reynolds leads off an intriguing discussion (entry and comments) on autism and the neurological basis of the sense of self, which seems to be lacking or underdeveloped in ASD patients. (Short Sharp Science)
In a study published yesterday in the journal Brain, Michael Lombardo at the University of Cambridge reports scanning the brains of 66 males - half with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), half developmentally normal - while they thought and made judgements about themselves and, separately, Queen Elizabeth.
For the non-autistic subjects, two brain areas linked to self-reflection proved more active when they thought about themselves, compared with thinking about the queen.
Not so for those with ASD. One region, the ventralmedial prefrontal cortex, tended to respond similarly to regal and personal judgements, while the second region, the middle cingulate cortex, proved more active when ASD patients thought about the queen.
¶ Sext: Here's the piece that got the Editor wound up about MP3s last night. Jeremy Eichler feeds his CDs into his computer, packs them away, and muses on the death of the personal music library. (Boston Globe; via Arts Journal)
But as I haul boxes of discs down to a basement room - at a time when CD stores have all but vanished from the local landscape and musical downloading has reached a tipping point in our society at large - I’ve been thinking not only about the virtues of high-tech listening but also about what’s been lost in our headlong sprint into the digital future. This is not a Luddite’s lament, or a cri de coeur about the significantly reduced audio quality of those compressed MP3 files. I love having more music at arm’s reach than ever before, I love taking it with me wherever I go. But I do find myself wondering why, exactly, collecting music now means so much less.
¶ Nones: You have to love the new Russia — which is really just the old, old Russia, Mother Russia. And you have to love the fact that the Cold War is over. Try to imagine, if you will, the response of any American administration from Eisenhower to Reagan to the purchase of the world's smallest republic's recognition of the breakaway, pro-Moscow territory of an American ally. Try to imagine how different the Russian response would be. (NYT)
The news provoked waves of mirth from Russian commentators, some of whom broke down the per-capita cost of lobbying various nations to recognize the enclaves: roughly $3,500 a head for every resident of Nauru, $100 per Venezuelan, $200 per Belarussian, etc. One blogger called it “nano-recognition for nano-Russia.”
But Sergei Markedonov, a Caucasus specialist at the Institute for Political and Military Analysis in Moscow, said the agreement was a real achievement for Abkhazia, which has actively sought alliances with countries other than Russia. Asked about the reported payment to Nauru, he answered, “If no one paid, why would they come?”
“There is no question of morality here,” Mr. Markedonov said. “It’s the smallest country in the world. It has no potential, just to trade in independence. Independence is a commodity — people will trade it.”
Nauru ought to appoint a grand duke, just to complete the picture.
¶ Vespers: Joan Acocella isn't crazy about Peter Ackroyd's "retelling" of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but at least the book occasions a jolly essay on our tongue's first major poet (and major writer, for the matter of that). (The New Yorker)
Whatever its source, Chaucer's lewdness is balanced by a tenderness that is almost always there in the poem, asserting itself gently. If, in story after story, old men are cuckholded by their young wives, this should mean that they are being made fools of, and that is the case, sort of. But Chaucer has a breadth of feeling that prevents anyone's being ridiculed for long. In the Miller's Tale, Alison's husband, a carpenter named John, is deceived by her lover, Nicholas, into thinking that the flood is coming a second time and that, to escape it, he must spend the night in a bathtub lashed to the rafters of his barn. (This is to allow Nicholas and Alison to spend the night together in bed.) The sight of John swinging in the air in a bathtub is funny, but somewhat less funny in view of the fact that this man's first thought, when told of the coming deluge, was for his wife. "Alas, my wife! And she shall drown! My Alison!"
¶ Compline: Jonah Lehrer responds to James Surowiecki's New Yorker column about Tiger Woods and the branders with an interesting discussion of Fundamental Attribution Error, something that we're far more prone to than we like to think. From the TV fans to the brass at Accenture, everyone was mistaken in attributing the golfer's formidable self-control to his character overall — they were mistaken to make the attribution, and now we know that they were mistaken.
The same thing happens when you meet someone in a bar and assume they are always talkative and outgoing. What you've failed to consider is the four beers and two shots that preceded your conversation. The drunk extrovert might be shy in a different and more sober situation.
What does the FAE have to do with Tiger Woods? We watched him golf on television and couldn't help but stare in wonder. He seemed supernatural, an exemplar of steely focus and self-control. We assumed, because of the FAE, that these traits were fundamental attributes of Tiger Woods, and not just a by-product of the golf course. In other words, he must always be controlled and focused, because he's so controlled and focused while swinging a golf club.
The same thing happens when you meet someone in a bar and assume they are always talkative and outgoing. What you've failed to consider is the four beers and two shots that preceded your conversation. The drunk extrovert might be shy in a different and more sober situation.
What does the FAE have to do with Tiger Woods? We watched him golf on television and couldn't help but stare in wonder. He seemed supernatural, an exemplar of steely focus and self-control. We assumed, because of the FAE, that these traits were fundamental attributes of Tiger Woods, and not just a by-product of the golf course. In other words, he must always be controlled and focused, because he's so controlled and focused while swinging a golf club.
See also Mr Surowiecki's blogged follow-up to his column.
Copyright (c) 2009 Pourover Press