Nothing

This past Saturday I saw a video of Mark Gungor’s “Laugh Your Way to a Better Marriage.” One thing that stood out was his discussion of the difference between the minds of men and women. According to Gungor, a man’s mind can be understood in terms of boxes: we have a box for each thing and each thing has its own box. In contrast, a woman’s mind is like a ball of wires-everything is interconnected and everything is linked to emotions. The highlight of this discussion was the nothing box. As Gungor sees it, each man has a special box in his mind that contains nothing. This box is supposed to be our favorite box and it explains how we men can do nothing and think nothing.

Naturally, Gungor is not the first comedian to note the special connection between men and nothing. Jerry Seinfeld famously had a show about nothing and numerous other comics have bits on the subject. Of course, this is not a blog about comedy, but a philosophy blog. Philosophy, as you know, is a lot like comedy, only less funny.

When it comes to nothing in philosophy, it is natural to think of Martin Heidegger and his work Being & Time as well as Sartre’s Being & Nothingness. Since I have no idea what Heidegger meant and I only understand Sartre while eating croissants, I will simply mention them and move along to the question of whether or not men can think or do nothing.

Like all men, I purport to be able to think nothing. To be specific, if a man is asked by his significant other “what are you thinking”, then the best bet is that he will respond by saying “nothing.” It is, of course, tempting to infer that a man says this because he is aware that saying what he was really thinking will result in a look of disgust, a slap, or both. However, men do claim to actually be thinking of nothing (at least at times). This raises the obvious question of whether or not this is even possible.

Daisy Lowe for UK esquire HD from Greg Williams on Vimeo.

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Staying the Course

by Wright Thompson

AUFUSKIE ISLAND, S.C. -- Patrick Ford stops by the marina bar. Sometimes the only answer is a vodka tonic or a cold beer. He's lanky, with an easy smile and slightly crooked teeth, dressed in shorts and a polo shirt. A golf pro's uniform. Some people are born to join fancy clubs. His destiny is to work at them. That's how he ended up here, in his summer of uncertainty. One moment, he was tinkering with swings and charging credit cards at a pricy resort; an instant later, he found himself engaged in a struggle that would be comical were it not happening to him: living on a bridgeless island, taking on nature itself, trying to save a bankrupt golf course.

The bar jumps around him. Friends come and go, with a nod, with a few words of thanks. The tourists sip Coronas and eat fried bologna sandwiches. It's the last week of August 2010. Jam band music plays for the college kids stealing one more day of sunshine. Patrick lingers before three shades of dusty pink. It's easy to understand why so many people are drawn here. Daufuskie Island is hypnotic at the pastel end of day. The first time Patrick sailed from the coast of Hilton Head toward its shores, the beauty and potential overwhelmed him. That seems a lifetime ago.

A big week lies ahead. Finally, one not like all the others, which is both good and terrifying. There's a group trying to raise money to buy the resort, which would put an end to his fight. A sale brings a whole new set of problems -- Will he be rewarded for his sacrifice? -- but those are worries for another day. He's trying to get through this one.

"That's the mode we're in right now," he says. "Survival mode. I don't know how much longer we can make it."

People like Patrick don't cause corporate bankruptcy or greedy land speculation any more than they control the tides pushing and pulling on this tiny hand-shaped island. But what if he could? That's the point of this ridiculous fight. Nature is more than weeds. It's the whole order of things, the invisible forces that move oceans and direct lives. Can a man stop the inevitable power of the tides? Can he choose his future, or is it chosen for him?

Can Patrick Ford choose?

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Aftershocks

by Evan Osnos

The afternoon of Friday, March 11th, was cool and partly cloudy on the northeast coast of Japan’s main island, a serene stretch once known as the nation’s “back roads.” At 2:46 P.M., as schools were beginning to let out, the ground began to shake. It was violent even by Japan’s standards—the thundering went on for five minutes—and before long Japanese television was warning of a wave charging west across the Pacific Ocean at the speed of a jet. Kicked up from the seabed, the tsunami amplified in size and slowed in speed as it moved into the shallows beside the Japanese coastline, and by the time it touched land it was a wall of water, black and smooth. It was as tall in places as a three-story building, moving at fifty miles per hour. It flicked fishing trawlers over seawalls, crunched them against bridges. It sent fleets of cars and trucks hurtling from parking lots, and turned homes into chips of wood and tile, before heading deeper into Miyagi and Iwate Prefectures across a span of six miles. Rampaging through former farming and fishing villages, and the cosmopolitan city of Sendai, the wave slowed, but remained too fast for most people to outrun on foot.

Basho, the most famous poet of Edo-era Japan, once cited a Chinese poet in describing the northern reaches: “Countries may fall, but their rivers and mountains remain. When spring comes to the ruined castle, the grass is green again.” Yet when the wave receded, some of the small towns in a region that traced its history to the seventh century had ceased to exist in visible form. Minamisanriku (pop. 17,000) reported that it could not account for half its people. A kindergarten in the city of Ishinomaki was spared, because of its location on a hilltop, but its school bus was not. It had already left for the day and was engulfed in a fire ignited by the wave. Parents found the bodies of their children huddled together.

One of the first outsiders to arrive from Tokyo was Tetsuo Jimbo. A reporter and the head of Japan’s largest Internet television news network, Jimbo had raced north just half an hour after his office stopped shaking. He drove twelve hours in his Toyota minivan on small country roads until the debris and sludge made the roads impassable. Then he continued on foot until he reached a broad, placid rice paddy, with telephone poles protruding from it at odd angles. The paddy, locals said, was the village of Karasu.

A hundred and twenty people were dead, as far as anyone could estimate at that point, and eventually the survivors made their way into the dark, unheated elementary school and other shelters, where classrooms were preferred to gymnasiums. (The large spaces were bone-cold.) At a junior high school near Kesennuma, five hundred people were sleeping on the gymnasium floor, sharing ten toilets with no running water. The mess besieged them, and eventually they resorted to the fields of snow outside. They were overwhelmingly elderly; the tsunami had hit the rural coastline, which, like so much of the countryside in one of the world’s fastest-graying societies—more than one in five Japanese citizens are now older than sixty-five—was a land of retirees, the aging children of the postwar baby boom and their parents.

On a hilltop overlooking the ruined city of Rikuzentakata, Jimbo met a semi-retired man in his sixties, who had heard the tsunami siren and packed his mother and dog into his truck and driven two miles inland, the waves churning in his rearview mirror. “He lost his house, and it’s not covered by insurance,” Jimbo said. “His family, fortunately, survived. I said, ‘What will you do next?’ He said he would like to think there will be some assistance from the local government. But all he could think was: The city-assembly office is gone. The mayor could be dead. The only thing he can turn to is the government. But his local government is gone.”

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Holualoa

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Solar Struggle in the Desert

 

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The Secret Ingredients of Everything

by Tim Folger

From smart phones to hybrid vehicles to cordless power drills, devices we all desire are made with a pinch of rare earths—exotic elements that right now come mostly from China. 

Most of us would be hard-pressed to locate Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi, or Guangdong on a map. Yet many of the high-tech devices we depend on—cell phones, laptops, and hundreds of others—would not exist without an obscure group of elements mined, sometimes illegally, in those three and other regions of China.

Rare earths, as the elements are called, were discovered beginning in the late 18th century as oxidized minerals—hence "earths." They're actually metals, and they aren't really rare; they're just scattered. A handful of dirt from your backyard would probably contain a smidgen, maybe a few parts per million. The rarest rare earth is nearly 200 times more abundant than gold. But deposits large and concentrated enough to be worth mining are indeed rare.

The list of things that contain rare earths is almost endless. Magnets made with them are much more powerful than conventional magnets and weigh less; that's one reason so many electronic devices have gotten so small. Rare earths are also essential to a host of green machines, including hybrid cars and wind turbines. The battery in a single Toyota Prius contains more than 20 pounds of the rare earth element lanthanum; the magnet in a large wind turbine may contain 500 pounds or more of neodymium. The U.S. military needs rare earths for night-vision goggles, cruise missiles, and other weapons.

"They're all around you," says Karl Gschneidner, a senior metallurgist with the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, who has studied rare earth elements for more than 50 years. "The phosphors in your TV—the red color comes from an element called europium. The catalytic converter on your exhaust system contains cerium and lanthanum. They're hidden unless you know about them, so most people never worried about them as long as they could keep buying them."

Now a lot of people are worried.

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The Duke In His Domain

By Truman Capote

November 9, 1957

Most Japanese girls giggle. The little maid on the fourth floor of the Miyako Hotel, in Kyoto, was no exception. Hilarity, and attempts to suppress it, pinked her cheeks (unlike the Chinese, the Japanese complexion more often than not has considerable color), shook her plump peony-and-pansy-kimonoed figure. There seemed to be no particular reason for this merriment; the Japanese giggle operates without apparent motivation. I'd merely asked to be directed toward a certain room. "You come see Marron?" she gasped, showing, like so many of her fellow-countrymen, an array of gold teeth. Then, with the tiny, pigeon-toed skating steps that the wearing of a kimono necessitates, she led me through a labyrinth of corridors, promising, "I knock you Marron." The "l" sound does not exist in Japanese, and by "Marron" the maid meant Marlon—Marlon Brando, the American actor, who was at that time in Kyoto doing location work for the Warner Brothers-William Goetz motion-picture version of James Michener's novel "Sayonara.”

My guide tapped at Brando's door, shrieked "Marron!," and fled away along the corridor, her kimono sleeves fluttering like the wings of a parakeet. The door was opened by another doll-delicate Miyako maid, who at once succumbed to her own fit of quaint hysteria. From an inner room, Brando called, "What is it, honey?" But the girl, her eyes squeezed shut with mirth and her fat little hands jammed into her mouth, like a bawling baby's, was incapable of reply. "Hey, honey, what is it?" Brando again inquired, and appeared in the doorway. "Oh, hi," he said when he saw me. "It's seven, huh?" We'd made a seven-o'clock date for dinner; I was nearly twenty minutes late. "Well, take off your shoes and come on in. I'm just finishing up here. And, hey, honey," he told the maid, "bring us some ice." Then, looking after the girl as she scurried off, he cocked his hands on his hips and, grinning, declared, "They kill me. They really kill me. The kids, too. Don't you think they're wonderful, don't you love them—Japanese kids?"

The Miyako, where about half of the "Sayonara" company was staying, is the most prominent of the so-called Western-style hotels in Kyoto; the majority of its rooms are furnished with sturdy, if commonplace and cumbersome, European chairs and tables, beds and couches. But, for the convenience of Japanese guests who prefer their own mode of décor while desiring the prestige of staying at the Miyako, or of those foreign travellers who yearn after authentic atmosphere yet are disinclined to endure the unheated rigors of a real Japanese inn, the Miyako maintains some suites decorated in the traditional manner, and it was in one of these that Brando had chosen to settle himself. His quarters consisted of two rooms, a bath, and a glassed-in sun porch. Without the overlying and underlying clutter of Brando's personal belongings, the rooms would have been textbook illustrations of the Japanese penchant for an ostentatious barrenness. The floors were covered with tawny tatami matting, with a discreet scattering of raw-silk pillows; a scroll depicting swimming golden carp hung in an alcove, and beneath it, on a stand, sat a vase filled with tall lilies and red leaves, arranged just so. The larger of the two rooms—the inner one—which the occupant was using as a sort of business office where he also dined and slept, contained a long, low lacquer table and a sleeping pallet. In these rooms, the divergent concepts of Japanese and Western decoration—the one seeking to impress by a lack of display, an absence of possession-exhibiting, the other intent on precisely the reverse—could both be observed, for Brando seemed unwilling to make use of the apartment's storage space, concealed behind sliding paper doors. All that he owned seemed to be out in the open. Shirts, ready for the laundry; socks, too; shoes and sweaters and jackets and hats and ties, flung around like the costume of a dismantled scarecrow. And cameras, a typewriter, a tape recorder, an electric heater that performed with stifling competence. Here, there, pieces of partly nibbled fruit; a box of the famous Japanese strawberries, each berry the size of an egg. And books, a deep-thought cascade, among which one saw Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" and various works on Buddhist prayer, Zen meditation, Yogi breathing, and Hindu mysticism, but no fiction, for Brando reads none. He has never, he professes, opened a novel since April 3, 1924, the day he was born, in Omaha, Nebraska. But while he may not care to read fiction, he does desire to write it, and the long lacquer table was loaded with overfilled ashtrays and piled pages of his most recent creative effort, which happens to be a film script entitled "A Burst of Vermilion.”

In fact, Brando had evidently been working on his story at the moment of my arrival. As I entered the room, a subdued-looking, youngish man, whom I shall call Murray, and who had previously been pointed out to me as "the fellow that's helping Marlon with his writing," was squatted on the matting fumbling through the manuscript of "A Burst of Vermilion." Weighing some pages on his hand, he said, "Tell ya, Mar, s'pose I go over this down in my room, and maybe we'll get together again—say, around ten-thirty?"

Brando scowled, as though unsympathetic to the idea of resuming their endeavors later in the evening. Having been slightly ill, as I learned later, he had spent the day in his room, and now seemed restive. "What's this?" he asked, pointing to a couple of oblong packages among the literary remains on the lacquer table.

Murray shrugged. The maid had delivered them; that was all he knew. "People are always sending Mar presents," he told me. "Lots of times we don't know who sent them. True, Mar?"

"Yeah," said Brando, beginning to rip open the gifts, which, like most Japanese packages—even mundane purchases from very ordinary shops—were beautifully wrapped. One contained candy, the other white rice cakes, which proved cement-hard, though they looked like puffs of cloud. There was no card in either package to identify the donor. "Every time you turn around, some Japanese is giving you a present. They're crazy about giving presents," Brando observed. Athletically crunching a rice cake, he passed the boxes to Murray and me.

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Code School

by James Somers

When Colin Hughes was about eleven years old his parents brought home a rather strange toy. It wasn't colorful or cartoonish; it didn't seem to have any lasers or wheels or flashing lights; the box it came in was decorated, not with the bust of a supervillain or gleaming protagonist, but bulleted text and a picture of a QWERTY keyboard. It called itself the "ORIC-1 Micro Computer." The package included two cassette tapes, a few cords and a 130-page programming manual.

On the whole it looked like a pretty crappy gift for a young boy. But his parents insisted he take it for a spin, not least because they had just bought the thing for more than £129. And so he did. And so, he says, "I was sucked into a hole from which I would never escape."

It's not hard to see why. Although this was 1983, and the ORIC-1 had about the same raw computing power as a modern alarm clock, there was something oddly compelling about it. When you turned it on all you saw was the word "Ready," and beneath that, a blinking cursor. It was an open invitation: type something, see what happens.

In less than an hour, the ORIC-1 manual took you from printing the word "hello" to writing short programs in BASIC -- the Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code -- that played digital music and drew wildly interesting pictures on the screen. Just when you got the urge to try something more complicated, the manual showed you how.

In a way, the ORIC-1 was so mesmerizing because it stripped computing down to its most basic form: you typed some instructions; it did something cool. This was the computer's essential magic laid bare. Somehow ten or twenty lines of code became shapes and sounds; somehow the machine breathed life into a block of text.

No wonder Colin got hooked. The ORIC-1 wasn't really a toy, but a toy maker. All it asked for was a special kind of blueprint.

Once he learned the language, it wasn't long before he was writing his own simple computer games, and, soon after, teaching himself trigonometry, calculus and Newtonian mechanics to make them better. He learned how to model gravity, friction and viscosity. He learned how to make intelligent enemies.

More than all that, though, he learned how to teach. Without quite knowing it, Colin had absorbed from his early days with the ORIC-1 and other such microcomputers a sense for how the right mix of accessibility and complexity, of constraints and open-endedness, could take a student from total ignorance to near mastery quicker than anyone -- including his own teachers -- thought possible.

It was a sense that would come in handy, years later, when he gave birth to Project Euler, a peculiar website that has trained tens of thousands of new programmers, and that is in its own modest way the emblem of a nascent revolution in education.

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Flacking for Big Pharma

by Harriet Washington

Drug Makers Cut Out Goodies for Doctors” and “Drugmakers Pulling Plug on Free Pens, Mugs & Pads” read headlines in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Health Blog at the end of 2008 after, in a very public act of contrition, 38 members of the pharmaceutical industry vowed to cease bestowing on prescribing physicians goodies such as pens, mugs, and other tchotchkes branded with their names. Some physicians and ethicists had long expressed concern about the “relationship of reciprocity” that even a pizza or cheap mug can establish between doctors and drugmakers, and branded trinkets also send a message to the patient, who might reason that Gardasil must be a good drug if her doctor wields a reflex hammer inscribed with its name. But while the popular press celebrated this sudden attack of nanoconscience and while we still gravely debate whether physicians’ loyalties can really be bought for a disposable pen or a free lunch, the $310 billion pharmaceutical industry quietly buys something far more influential: the contents of medical journals and, all too often, the trajectory of medical research itself.

How can this be? Flimsy plastic pens that scream the virtues of Vioxx and articles published in the pages of The New England Journal of Medicine would seem to mark the two poles of medical influence. Scarcely any doctor admits to being influenced by the former; every doctor boasts of being guided by the latter. In fact, medical-journal articles are widely embraced as irreproachable bastions of disinterested scientific evaluation and as antidotes to the long fiscal arm of pharmaceutical-industry influence.

And yet, “All journals are bought—or at least cleverly used—by the pharmaceutical industry,” says Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal, who now sits on the board of Public Library of Science (PLoS), a nonprofit open-access group publishing scientific journals that eschew corporate financing and are freely available online to the public.

Big Pharma, as the top tier of the industry is known, starts modestly, inserting the thin edge of its wedge by advertising copiously—and often inaccurately—in medical journals. In 1981, concerned officials at the Food and Drug Administration recognized the educational nature of pharmaceutical advertising by establishing explicit standards for medical-journal ads that mandate “true statements relating to side effects, contraindications, and effectiveness,” and a “fair balance” of statements about medication risks and benefits.

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Where Prisoners Can Do Anything, Except Leave

by Simon Romero

PORLAMAR, Venezuela — On the outside, the San Antonio prison on Margarita Island looks like any other Venezuelan penitentiary. Soldiers in green fatigues stand at its gates. Sharpshooters squint from watchtowers. Guards cast menacing glances at visitors before searching them at the entrance.

The children of some inmates swim in one of the prison's four pools. Prisoners say they financed the amenities on their own.

A bodyguard for the prisoners' leader, in a photo provided by an inmate. “I've seen some guns in here that I've never seen before,” said one of the inmates.

But once inside, the prison for more than 2,000 Venezuelans and foreigners held largely for drug trafficking looks more like a Hugh Hefner-inspired fleshpot than a stockade for toughened smugglers.

Bikini-clad female visitors frolic under the Caribbean sun in an outdoor pool. Marijuana smoke flavors the air. Reggaetón booms from a club filled with grinding couples. Paintings of the Playboy logo adorn the pool hall. Inmates and their guests jostle to place bets at the prison’s raucous cockfighting arena.

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Chet Baker - Almost Blue

 

Thanks, GS.

The Glasswinged Butterfly

The Glasswinged butterfly (Greta oto) is a brush-footed butterfly, and is a member of the subfamily Danainae, tribe Ithomiini, subtribe Godyridina.  Its wings are translucent, with a wingspan of 2.2 to 2.4 in (5.6 to 6.1 cm).  Its most common English name is glasswinged butterfly, and its Spanish name is "espejitos", which means "little mirrors." Indeed, the tissue between the veins of its wings looks like glass, as it lacks the colored scales found in other butterflies.  The opaque borders of its wings are dark brown sometimes tinted with red or orange, and its body is dark in color.

Adults range from Mexico through Panama. G. morgane oto visits common flowers like lantana, but prefers to lay its eggs on plants of the tropical Solanaceae genus Cestrum.   The green caterpillars feed on these toxic plants and are perhaps toxic to predators through secondary chemicals stored in their tissues; caterpillar chemical extracts are unpalatable to Paraponera clavata ants. Adults are also assumed to be toxic, but their toxicity mainly results from males feeding on flowers (e.g., Asteraceae) whose nectar contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids. These same alkaloids also are converted into pheromones by the males and used to attract females.

The Greta oto may also be found in Venezuela, as there are photographs taken in the mountain area around the City of Caracas.

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The Need To Be Valued

by Tony Schwartz

Think for a moment of the last time you felt triggered — pushed into negative emotions by someone or something. Here, for example, are several of my triggers: feeling taken advantage of, not getting a response to an email I've sent to someone, and not being acknowledged for good work I've done.

We move into negative emotions — what we call the "Survival Zone" in our work at The Energy Project — when we feel a sense of threat or danger.

But what is the threat exactly? Over the past decade, my colleagues and I have asked thousands of our clients to describe something that consistently triggers them and then explain why.

Remarkably, we've found that a trigger can almost always be traced to the same root cause: the feeling of being devalued or diminished by someone else's words or behavior. Consider my triggers above.

The struggle to feel valued is one of the most insidious and least acknowledged issues in organizations. Most employees are expected to check their feelings at the door when they get to work. But try as we might, we can't.

How we're feeling — and most especially whether or not we feel acknowledged and appreciated — influences our behavior, consumes our energy and affects our decisions all day long, whether we're aware of it or not.

Our core emotional need is to feel valued. Without a stable sense of value, we don't know who we are and we don't feel safe in the world.

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