In Praise of (Loud, Stinky) Bars

The vaunted “third space” isn’t home, and isn’t work—it’s more like the living room of society at large. It’s a place where you are neither family nor co-worker, and yet where the values, interests, gossip, complaints and inspirations of these two other spheres intersect. It’s a place at least one step removed from the structures of work and home, more random, and yet familiar enough to breed a sense of identity and connection. It’s a place of both possibility and comfort, where the unexpected and the mundane transcend and mingle.

And nine times out of ten, it’s a bar.

So, a little story: Once upon a time there was a scruffy real estate developer who shall go nameless, who made some prudent purchases in a derelict former industrial neighborhood. He had a dream to turn that neighborhood into a vibrant new community that attracted talented young professionals willing to pay at least $1,000 per square foot to live there. But times were hard and everyone thought he was nuts. Now, the developer had three things going for him: time, empty space, and a son who was actively dating. The son would come home from a date and say, “Pops, you know that empty storefront down the side street by the pier? Can my girlfriend turn that into a welding shop?” And poof! A rent-free welding shop would appear. Soon the area was populated with ex-girlfriends running quirky artisanal industries, but still times were tough and the talented young professionals would not come.

Then one day the son came home and said, “Hey Pops, my girlfriend wants to open a bar.” The father considered this gravely, but finally agreed. Bars were stinky and noisy and they sold liquor. But they also attracted people and besides the place was just sitting empty now anyway. The bar was opened, and lo and behold it became a Third Space: a place where poor young hipsters could go and hang their weary heads over cheap beer after a long day of yarn bombing, and also where the local shipping company guys enjoyed the jukebox. Before you knew it, alcohol was flowing freely, and the new locals and old locals were conspiring to illegally convert lofts into residential units and open food co-ops. It wasn’t long before the bar started serving food, and then one day the unthinkable happened – it opened a café next door with really good coffee and quirky flavors of scones….

Look, I’m not telling this story to glorify bars as the ultimate third space intervention – I’m just trying to point out that bars occupy are particular niche in the place-making ecosystem. They are like the prairie grass after the fire: preparing the way for the scrub, and ending with the deciduous trees and their variegated canopy. They are hardy pioneers, taking root where not much else can sustain life.

Wait, was that metaphor too much? Yes, definitely.

But it’s also the point: we shouldn’t romanticize third spaces as only being about brightly lit cafes, pedestrianized streets, and the local public library. Bars work in their scruffy way by offering a place to get away from an overcrowded apartment or a squalid loft or a grimy job. They are a place where someone with little to spare can go for a change of pace, and in many edgy neighborhoods those folks are overwhelmingly low-income, and many are also young. These are the bright young things who do the hard work of place-making, but they aren’t necessarily looking for “vibrancy.” It’s more likely they want cheap beer, a decent burger, and a friendly face.

The goal of a bar patron is to enjoy the primary benefit of any decent third space: a place to linger. I’m still looking for someone to generate a “lingering index” so that we can measure the impact of just plain old hanging out – but that’s really at the heart of place-making, and we shouldn’t forget it.

Place-making is thirsty work, so bottom’s up in praise of bars and the Third Space promise they hold.

by Michael Hickey, Rooflines
Photo: Bree Bailey via Creative Commons, CC BY-SA

Moonrise Kingdom

The movie, which takes place in 1965, opens with a cross-stitch portrait of a red New England vacation home with its own small, built-in lighthouse. The portrait, we soon see, hangs in that selfsame red vacation home. (Yes, this is a Wes Anderson movie.) This is the warm-weather abode of Walt and Laura Bishop (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), two attorneys who have been drifting apart, their marital estrangement signified by the name of the property: Summer's End.

But this is only peripherally the story of Walt and Laura, or of their three young sons. Rather, it is the tale of their "difficult" eldest child, 12-year-old Suzy (Kara Hayward) and another young misfit with whom she—there really is no better word for it—elopes. This would be Sam (Jared Gilman), a serious, bespectacled, and unpopular boy who fell in love with Suzy the prior year, when he saw her playing the raven in a summer production of Benjamin Britten's Noye's Fludde. (It is one of several references to the composer in the film.)

Sam goes AWOL from his troop of Khaki Scouts at nearby Camp Ivanhoe to rendezvous with Suzy. United, the two disappear into the wooded thickets of New Penzance Island—the name itself is worth the price of admission—Suzy with her binoculars and pastel suitcases and battery-powered record player; Sam with his coonskin cap and corncob pipe and abundance of camping gear. There, in the dappled forests and sunswept coves, the two young runaways discover freedom, and companionship, and the early, innocent rumblings of sex. As they follow their trail of pseudo-maturity, they are of course sought after by an escalatingly (and understandably) frantic brigade of adults: Suzy's parents, the local police captain (Bruce Willis), and Sam's scoutmaster (Edward Norton). As this last informs the young scouts he's dragooned into the hunt: "This is not just a rescue party. This is a great scouting opportunity."

The book is awash with echoes of children's adventure fiction, from Tom Sawyer to Treasure Island to A High Wind in Jamaica. Underage though they may be, the kids are resourceful, optimistic, capable of loyalty and love—all the qualities with which their elders struggle. It's worth noting that this is the rare tale set in 1965 in which most of the adults are single, and the one marriage to which we are introduced is an unhappy one. (Well, the one legally binding marriage: I should cite here a hilarious cameo by Jason Schwartzman as a renegade scoutmaster with a weakness for performing age-inappropriate matrimonies.)

Moonrise Kingdom is touching, bittersweet, and very, very funny. Cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Anderson's usual collaborator, evokes the the feel of New England (the film was shot in Rhode Island) so precisely that the story's locale need never be mentioned. And the script, by Anderson with Roman Coppola, captures the indolent yet enterprising texture of childhood summers, the sense of having a limited amount of time in which to do unlimited things. The performances are excellent across the board, from the adults who recognize that their best is never quite good enough, to the kids who realize they will be forced to make up the deficit. On the former side, Norton and (particularly) Willis are standouts; on the latter, newcomer Gilman, as Sam, offers a portrait of a boy trying to will himself into premature manhood so indelible that it can almost almost compete with (then-newcomer) Schwartzman's Max Fischer in Rushmore.

by Christopher Orr, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Illustration: “Moonrise Kingdom” by Adrian Tomine for The New Yorker. via

You Are Not a Curator

"Curation is replacing creation as a mode of self-expression." - Jonathan Harris

As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I'm fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it's not actually curation, or anything like it. Your faux TED talk is not going well for you if you are making some point about "curation" replacing "creation" because, well, for starters, "curation" is choosing among things that are created? So like there's nothing for you to curate without creation? This precious bit of dressing-up what people choose to share on the Internet is, sure, silly, but it's also a way for bloggers to distance themselves from the dirty blogging masses. You are no different from some teen in Indiana with a LiveJournal about cutting. Sorry folks! You're in this nasty fray with the rest of us. And your metaphor is all wrong. More likely you're a low-grade collector, not a curator. You're buying (in the attention economy at least! If not in the actual advertising economy of websites!) what someone else is selling—and you're then reselling it on your blog. You're nothing but a secondary market for someone else's work. Oh and also? You "curators" might want to be careful with your language....

"When you create digital tools that changes people's behavior, you are not a software engineer but a social engineer!" -Jonathan Harris

Oh, hey, you know who else was a social engineer?

Anyway:

In the 16th century, the poet was artist-king. The 19th: the novelist. 20th: the film-maker. I wonder if in the 21st, it'll be the curator. -Joe Hill

Hey, how did we blow past "editor"? Why don't the curators want to be editors?

Anyway, replace "curator" with "people who are really picky with what they share on Facebook" and maybe Joe Hill will be right on the money! Although I suspect that in the 16th century, if not "painter," then actually the "patron" was the "artist-king." (Commissioning is an art! Ask Pope Julius II!) And then that "editors" were the dominant influence in the 19th. And "studios" in the 20th. So I guess now either "ad sales people" or "web engineers" are at the top of the artistic food chain? Oh dear.

by Choire Sicha, The Awl |  Read more:

watch her disappear (by carlein)
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The Battery Thermokruzhkus Mug, available at ThinkGeek, helps you power up when your energy levels are low.

Caffeine is our power source, whether it’s from coffee or tea or BAWLS. What better way for us to visualize our batteries being charged than a mug with a battery that powers up when we fill it with our piping hot caffeinated libation of choice?

This ceramic mug is classic black with a white outline of a battery on it. Pour in your hot liquid – anything over 96.8F (36C) – and watch the green cells within the battery light up. As your beverage cools (or is ingested) the battery will fade into emptiness, reminding you that you need a refill.

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And after all I’ve done for you
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Gratuities Etiquette; Tipping For Success

To tip or not to tip

Arriving at a hotel room with the member of staff whom has just assisted you in finding the way and also brought your bags, there is a momentary awkward pause as he/she waits for ‘something’. You are still absorbing the luxurious fittings, the view from the window and the contents of the mini-bar. Suddenly you become aware they have not yet left. Slightly embarrassed, you apologetically fumble with your cash, a note is offered, it is accepted, but you are left with the distinct impression that they are unimpressed or equally embarrassed. Was that enough, did you get the exchange rate wrong; maybe you actually gave too much?

It is a scenario all but the most savvy of travellers or thick-skinned of us are painfully familiar with, and questions we have often asked ourselves. What is correct gratuities etiquette and how much to tip and when is the right moment to do so? Of course all situations are different; your baggage may have been transported to the room by way of a golf buggy and therefore you may not feel so inclined to provide as much as to the poor young man who carried all your baggage single-handedly up three flights of stairs because the lift was not working!

There is also often a gulf in culture and wealth, both of which can provide a variety of expectations of the gratuity that a hospitality industry worker may expect. Tipping in the United States is almost customary and it is common practice to see American tourists paying small gratuities for almost every service that they receive wherever they travel.

The various cultures throughout Europe have their own customs for providing tips, often dependant on whether it is also common practice for establishments to include a ‘service charge’ within the bill. There was even a television campaign for a well known high street bank in the United Kingdom which inferred that tipping within Iceland was actually considered insulting. However the truth is whilst a tip is never expected as it is usually included in the bill I doubt it is ever refused! Japan however, where gratuities are seldom given, the offer of a tip may cause a degree of embarrassment, confusion and even offence.

Gratuitous gratitude

In some countries, including Egypt (baksheesh), Morocco and even parts of Turkey (bahşiş) tipping is almost de rigueur, and even the tiniest ‘service’ will result in a proffered hand. Examples of this may include showing you the ‘very best’ spot to get your photograph, or just opening a door to see inside a room. It is always a good idea to carry some small denomination coinage around with you for when you feel such a service genuinely warrants a small payment. A word of advice though, if in Egypt do not ever hand your camera to anybody to take a photograph of you, you may have to pay to get it back! (...)

The level of service received and the circumstances of the visit will obviously affect the size of the gratuity. A one off visit to a restaurant where a good meal and excellent service resulted in an extremely pleasant evening will hopefully be rewarded accordingly. Poor service will usually result in little or no tip at all! However a favourite restaurant that you visit regularly and where you have a rapport with the staff will often mean they receive better tips, this encourages better service, you keep returning and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle.

More difficult to judge is the method and size of gratuity that is effective when staying for a week or more at a hotel or resort hotel. It is likely that you will be served by many different staff, chamber maids, bar, waiting and reception staff, pool attendants and concierges, all of which will expect a little remuneration for their services. This is often where some travellers falter, providing a tip for every little act of hospitality they receive. This can work out extremely expensive and may even prove slightly offensive to the receiver as it can be misconceived that their benefactor is actually ‘showing off’ their affluence. (...)

A tipping strategy

It is important to assess the particular person that you are dealing with, how often are they likely to be ‘servicing’ your needs. A chamber maid, waiter at breakfast or pool attendant is likely to deal with you regularly, but the waitress in the expensive a la carte restaurant may only see you once or twice. Upset the wrong member of the team and it could prove costly in terms of your comfort especially as it is likely they will communicate their displeasure with other hotel staff! A horses head in your bed is probably unlikely, but the hospitality industry is awash with stories how of staff have avenged their grievance with guests.

It is appropriate to provide a small, but reasonable tip to staff which are unlikely to be in contact with you often throughout your stay. However those that will be attending to your needs on a daily basis require a more well thought out tipping strategy. I suggest a sensible initial sum is offered to them at the earliest opportunity, hopefully your first encounter with them. Make it perfectly clear that they will get a further tip before you leave if you feel you have been well looked after. This will usually ensure that they work especially hard to keep you happy and will often ask if you have any special requirements. Your room will be well serviced each day and you will often be given the best table available when you arrive for a meal.

by Iain Mallory, Mallory on Travel |  Read more:

The Right Chemistry

O.K., let's cut out all this nonsense about romantic love. Let's bring some scientific precision to the party. Let's put love under a microscope.

When rigorous people with Ph.D.s after their names do that, what they see is not some silly, senseless thing. No, their probe reveals that love rests firmly on the foundations of evolution, biology and chemistry. What seems on the surface to be irrational, intoxicated behavior is in fact part of nature's master strategy -- a vital force that has helped humans survive, thrive and multiply through thousands of years. Says Michael Mills, a psychology professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles: "Love is our ancestors whispering in our ears." (...)

Lovers often claim that they feel as if they are being swept away. They're not mistaken; they are literally flooded by chemicals, research suggests. A meeting of eyes, a touch of hands or a whiff of scent sets off a flood that starts in the brain and races along the nerves and through the blood. The results are familiar: flushed skin, sweaty palms, heavy breathing. If love looks suspiciously like stress, the reason is simple: the chemical pathways are identical.

Above all, there is the sheer euphoria of falling in love -- a not-so- surprising reaction, considering that many of the substances swamping the newly smitten are chemical cousins of amphetamines. They include dopamine, norepinephrine and especially phenylethylamine (PEA). Cole Porter knew what he was talking about when he wrote "I get a kick out of you." "Love is a natural high," observes Anthony Walsh, author of The Science of Love: Understanding Love and Its Effects on Mind and Body. "PEA gives you that silly smile that you flash at strangers. When we meet someone who is attractive to us, the whistle blows at the PEA factory."

But phenylethylamine highs don't last forever, a fact that lends support to arguments that passionate romantic love is short-lived. As with any amphetamine, the body builds up a tolerance to PEA; thus it takes more and more of the substance to produce love's special kick. After two to three years, the body simply can't crank up the needed amount of PEA. And chewing on chocolate doesn't help, despite popular belief. The candy is high in PEA, but it fails to boost the body's supply.

Fizzling chemicals spell the end of delirious passion; for many people that marks the end of the liaison as well. It is particularly true for those whom Dr. Michael Liebowitz of the New York State Psychiatric Institute terms "attraction junkies." They crave the intoxication of falling in love so much that they move frantically from affair to affair just as soon as the first rush of infatuation fades.

Still, many romances clearly endure beyond the first years. What accounts for that? Another set of chemicals, of course. The continued presence of a partner gradually steps up production in the brain of endorphins. Unlike the fizzy amphetamines, these are soothing substances. Natural pain-killers, they give lovers a sense of security, peace and calm. "That is one reason why it feels so horrible when we're abandoned or a lover dies," notes Fisher. "We don't have our daily hit of narcotics."

Researchers see a contrast between the heated infatuation induced by PEA, along with other amphetamine-like chemicals, and the more intimate attachment fostered and prolonged by endorphins. "Early love is when you love the way the other person makes you feel," explains psychiatrist Mark Goulston of the University of California, Los Angeles. "Mature love is when you love the person as he or she is." It is the difference between passionate and compassionate love, observes Walsh, a psychobiologist at Boise State University in Idaho. "It's Bon Jovi vs. Beethoven." (...)

A certain smile, a certain face

-- Johnny Mathis

Chemicals may help explain (at least to scientists) the feelings of passion and compassion, but why do people tend to fall in love with one partner rather than a myriad of others? Once again, it's partly a function of evolution and biology. "Men are looking for maximal fertility in a mate," says Loyola Marymount's Mills. "That is in large part why females in the prime childbearing ages of 17 to 28 are so desirable." Men can size up youth and vitality in a glance, and studies indeed show that men fall in love quite rapidly. Women tumble more slowly, to a large degree because their requirements are more complex; they need more time to check the guy out. "Age is not vital," notes Mills, "but the ability to provide security, father children, share resources and hold a high status in society are all key factors."

Still, that does not explain why the way Mary walks and laughs makes Bill dizzy with desire while Marcia's gait and giggle leave him cold. "Nature has wired us for one special person," suggests Walsh, romantically. He rejects the idea that a woman or a man can be in love with two people at the same time. Each person carries in his or her mind a unique subliminal guide to the ideal partner, a "love map," to borrow a term coined by sexologist John Money of Johns Hopkins University.

Drawn from the people and experiences of childhood, the map is a record of whatever we found enticing and exciting -- or disturbing and disgusting. Small feet, curly hair. The way our mothers patted our head or how our fathers told a joke. A fireman's uniform, a doctor's stethoscope. All the information gathered while growing up is imprinted in the brain's circuitry by adolescence. Partners never meet each and every requirement, but a sufficient number of matches can light up the wires and signal, "It's love." Not every partner will be like the last one, since lovers may have different combinations of the characteristics favored by the map.

by Anastasia Toufexis, Time |  Read more:
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The Economic Costs of Fear

The S&P stock index now yields a 7% real (inflation-adjusted) return. By contrast, the annual real interest rate on the five-year United States Treasury Inflation-Protected Security (TIPS) is -1.02%. Yes, there is a “minus” sign in front of that: if you buy the five-year TIPS, each year over the next five years the US Treasury will pay you in interest the past year’s consumer inflation rate minus 1.02%. Even the annual real interest rate on the 30-year TIPS is only 0.63% – and you run a large risk that its value will decline at some point over the next generation, implying a big loss if you need to sell it before maturity.

So, imagine that you invest $10,000 in the S&P index. This year, your share of the profits made by those companies will be $700. Now, imagine that, of that total, the companies pay out $250 in dividends (which you reinvest to buy more stock) and retain $450 in earnings to reinvest in their businesses. If the companies’ managers do their job, that reinvestment will boost the value of your shares to $10,450. Add to that the $250 of newly-bought shares, and next year the portfolio will be worth $10,700 – more if stock-market valuations rise, and less if they fall.

In fact, over any past period long enough for waves of optimism and pessimism to cancel each other out, the average earnings yield on the S&P index has been a good guide to the return on the portfolio. So, if you invest $10,000 in the S&P for the next five years, you can reasonably expect (with enormous upside and downside risks) to make about 7% per year, leaving you with a compounded profit in inflation-adjusted dollars of $4,191. If you invest $10,000 in the five-year TIPS, you can confidently expect a five-year loss of $510.

That is an extraordinary gap in the returns that you can reasonably expect. It naturally raises the question: why aren’t people moving their money from TIPS (and US Treasury bonds and other safe assets) to stocks (and other relatively risky assets)?

People have different reasons. And many people’s thinking is not terribly coherent. But there appear to be two main explanations.

by Brad DeLong, Project Syndicate |  Read more:
Illustration by Paul Lachine

The xx

Richard Hamilton - Stage Proof 19, 1972. Screenprint on paper
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Peter Doig “Red Boat (Imaginary Boys)” 2004
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Is the Web Closing?

Within the tech community, there is much angst about whether the Web is about to be “closed.” Will it be controlled by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, or will it remain “open” to all? Will individuals be able to reach any content they choose? Will developers be able to serve users on any platform?

These questions are not new. Fifteen years ago, in the United States at least, it was America Online (now AOL) that was closing the Internet. Millions of people were relying on it for Internet service and content. Today, AOL’s purported control of the Internet looks like a joke, but it was considered a real threat at the time.

The threats nowadays come from both new companies and new models. (More about governments some other time!) Facebook is getting a lot of press, owing to its omnipresence and its pending stock offering. Increasingly, many people go online to use Facebook and little else, while Facebook encourages people to stay on Facebook to play games on Zynga, shop through Facebook commerce pages, and so on. Will Facebook control who gets to talk to us?

Likewise, Apple not only sells hardware; it controls, through its AppStore, what applications we can use on our iPads and iPhones. Amazon determines which books we read. Google, for its part, is filtering our search results – both by focusing our attention on what also interests our friends, and by excluding Twitter and Facebook results from what we see (mostly because Google and Facebook/Twitter cannot agree on whether Google should pay them or they should pay Google).

Beyond these big players, smaller startups are increasingly focusing on apps – applications that capture a user and keep him or her safe from the open Web. These apps are typically cleared and registered by big players. For many people, Apple’s App Store is a benefit, because it ensures (for the most part) the quality and security of the apps. Various app stores perform the same function for Android phones, but with fewer restrictions and less security.

In short, you can choose from along a spectrum, with more security at one end and more freedom at the other. The Web’s openness or closure is not a matter to be settled once and for all, but rather a fluctuating situation (even if the Web takes on some other name). CompuServe and FTP (file transfer protocol, remember that?) were not the end of Internet history. The same is true of the World Wide Web. Nor will Google or Facebook and apps be the last word of the digital age.

The great thing about Internet companies is that they, unlike governments, can be relatively easily deposed. They cannot outlaw competition, and, though they can engage in anti-competitive practices and filter content for their users, eventually consumers and startups fight back.

by Esther Dyson, Project Syndicate |  Read more:
Illustration by Pedro Molina

Is It Art? Increasingly, That's a Judicial Decision

When did judges become the ultimate arbiters of art?

Hardly a month goes by without a court being asked to settle a dispute over the nature of artistic meaning, expression or authenticity. These are the big-think questions that confound philosophers, art critics and artists themselves. But judges are regularly obliged to take on these questions—and their answers have huge consequences for what can and cannot be attempted by artists.

Among the most recent legal tussles is a claim for damages involving one of Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawings. The conceptual artist made more than a thousand of them before his death in 2007. Which isn't to say he drew or painted all of them. The genius of Mr. LeWitt's Wall Drawings was that they were generally executed by others. He drew up the plan or strategy for each work, with directions—written out on certificates signed by the artist—that were as specific in intent as they were abstract in result.

But the question then arises, what is the work of art? Is it the instructions written out on the signed certificate, or the image rendered according to the instructions? The owner of one LeWitt Wall Drawing is suing a gallery that lost the drawing's certificate. If it comes to determining damages, a judge may have to decide whether the certificate was itself the artwork.

And then there is the continuing litigation over whether Richard Prince's "appropriation" artworks have original meaning or are just copyright-infringing copies of other artists' works.

Or take the litigation over Cady Noland's 1990 work "Cowboys Milking." In February, art dealer Marc Jancou sued Sotheby's and Ms. Noland for $26 million (later adding $20 million more to the claim for damages). The auction house had agreed to sell "Cowboys Milking" for Mr. Jancou, but according to the dealer's court filing, Sotheby's pulled it from the auction at the last moment, at the artist's request. According to the art-industry newsletter Baer Faxt, Ms. Noland had "disavowed" the work.

Can an artist disown a piece long ago sold? And, if so, does the artist have to give a reason? Would it be reason enough if a work were slightly damaged, or if an artist simply no longer liked the work of her salad days? And what then? Does a work cease to be art if the artist renounces it?

This last question, in particular, is the sort of ontological question philosophers make a specialty of noodling. But increasingly these tricky theoreticals about the nature of art are being answered, not by the heirs of Aristotle but by the judiciary. We are in the age of courthouse aesthetics.

by Eric Felten, WSJ |  Read more:
Illustration: Alex Nabaum

How Octopuses Make Themselves Invisible

[ed. Amazing. I knew they had camouflage capabilities, but this is beyond the beyonds.]

Lucian Freud Still Life with Aloe
1949-50
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Do You Really Want to Live Forever?

Imagine you are offered a trustworthy opportunity for immortality in which your mind (perhaps also your body) will persist eternally. Let’s further stipulate that the offer includes perpetual youthful health and the ability to upgrade to any cognitive and physical technologies that become available in the future. There is one more stipulation: You could never decide later to die. Would you take it? Metaphysician and former British diplomat Stephen Cave thinks accepting such an offer would be a bad idea.

Cave’s fascinating new book, Immortality, posits that civilization is a major side effect of humanity's attempts to live forever. He argues that our sophisticated minds inexorably recognize that, like all other living things, we will one day die. Simultaneously, Cave asserts, “The one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This is what I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization.”

Cave identifies four immortality narratives that drive civilizations over time which he calls; (1) Staying Alive, (2) Resurrection, (3) Soul, and (4) Legacy. Cave gracefully marches through his four immortality narratives citing examples from history, psychology, and religion up to the modern day. “At its core, a civilization is a collection of life extension technologies: agriculture to ensure food in steady supply, clothing to stave off cold, architecture to provide shelter and safety, better weapons for hunting and defense, and medicine to combat injury and disease,” he writes.

In the Staying Alive narrative Cave opens with the quest of the First Emperor of China to find the elixir of life but lands us soon the 21st century where transhumanists aim to use modern science to finally achieve the goal of perpetual youthful life. He notes that in the last century, humans have in fact doubled average human life expectancy.

Why not simply repair the damage caused by aging, thus defeating physical death? This is the goal of transhumanists like theoretical biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey who has devised the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) program. SENS technologies would include genetic interventions to rejuvenate cells, stem cell transplants to replace aged organs and tissues, and nano-machines to patrol our bodies to prevent infections and kill nascent cancers. Ultimately, Cave cannot argue that these life-extension technologies will not work for individuals but suggests that they would produce problems like overpopulation and environmental collapse that would eventually subvert them. He also cites calculations done by a demographer that assuming aging and disease is defeated by biomedical technology accidents would still do in would-be immortals. The average life expectancy of medical immortals would be 5,775 years. Frankly, I will be happy to take that.

Resurrection is his next immortality narrative. Of course, the most prevalent resurrection story is that of Jesus of Nazareth 2,000 years ago. The New Testament explicitly states that one day every individual will once again live in his or her real but improved physical bodies. Physical resurrection is also the orthodox belief of the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam. Thus, Cave notes, half of the world’s population officially believes in the future resurrection of their physical bodies. He adds, however, that many Christians, Jews, and Muslims actually subscribe to another immortality narrative, Soul.

Cave identifies three major problems with the Resurrection Narrative: the Cannibal problem, the Transformation problem, and the Duplication problem. Briefly, if resurrection is to mean anything, it must mean that a specific individual is brought back to life. The question is what happens when atoms have been shared by more than one person: Who gets to use the specific nitrogen and carbon atoms when everyone is brought back to life? I don’t think that that is much of problem since atoms are interchangeable and presumably God could simply put any random carbon and nitrogen atoms back in the same places they were in your physical body. They needn’t be the exact same atoms that you had when you died.

The Transformation problem is harder. Many believers would have died old, decrepit, and demented. That’s not how they believe they will be resurrected; they expect to get better, incorruptible bodies. By being thus transformed would the resurrected believer really be the same person who had died or a different person? And then there is the problem of duplication. God could not just reassemble a believer as she was when she died, he could also reassemble her as a 5-year-old girl. Cave argues that these three problems calls into question the notion that it would truly be a specific individual believer rising from the grave. (...)

Cave notes that this focus on preserving a person’s mind leads other modern would-be computational resurrectionists to argue for uploading minds (information encoded in an individual’s brain) onto another piece of hardware, an electronic avatar, a robot, or another brain which would be psychologically identical to the original mind. Cave argues that computational resurrection does not actually achieve immortality for a specific individual, but merely makes an exact psychological copy of him. There is the additional problem that if minds can be digitized they can be duplicated many times. If this occurs who then is the original resurrectee? “When you closed your eyes on your deathbed, you could not expect to open them again in silicon form,” he explains. The result of mind uploading “would all just be high-tech ways of producing a counterfeit you.”  (...)

The most popular immortality narrative is Soul. Most Christians now believe that their souls, which persist after death, will be reunited with their resurrected bodies. Souls thus solve a lot of the identity problems associated with the earlier Resurrection narrative. Cave argues that Soul narrative resolves the Mortality Paradox by denying “that the failing body is the true self, identifying the person instead with exactly that mental life that seems so inextinguishable.” In Christianity all souls are equal before God, so if the omnipotent and omniscient Creator of the universe is interested in your life then who are your politicians to ignore your desires?

What about the afterlife? Cave cites American evangelist James L. Garlow who says that in Heaven “your every desire is satisfied more abundantly than you’ve ever dreamed.” But what if your desire is to be reunited with your wife who instead desires to spend her eternity with her childhood sweetheart? A more sophisticated theocentric view of the soul’s afterlife is that Heaven is the eternal exaltation of God. But what can this mean? Cave points out that an afterlife without time is not really a life at all. “Everything that makes up a human life—experience, learning, growth, communication, even singing hosannas—requires the passage of time. Without time, nothing can happen; it is a state of stasis, a cessation of thought and action,” he argues. “The attraction of the soul view was the unique aura it gave to every individual life, but its logical conclusion is an eternity of nothing, with life negated altogether.”

by Ronald Bailey, Reason |  Read more:

Ela Madreiter, “Zoomum”, mixed media
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Silence and Word

As we draw near to World Communications Day 2012, I would like to share with you some reflections concerning an aspect of the human process of communication which, despite its importance, is often overlooked and which, at the present time, it would seem especially necessary to recall. It concerns the relationship between silence and word: two aspects of communication which need to be kept in balance, to alternate and to be integrated with one another if authentic dialogue and deep closeness between people are to be achieved. When word and silence become mutually exclusive, communication breaks down, either because it gives rise to confusion or because, on the contrary, it creates an atmosphere of coldness; when they complement one another, however, communication acquires value and meaning.

Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible. It is often in silence, for example, that we observe the most authentic communication taking place between people who are in love: gestures, facial expressions and body language are signs by which they reveal themselves to each other. Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence – indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression. Silence, then, gives rise to even more active communication, requiring sensitivity and a capacity to listen that often makes manifest the true measure and nature of the relationships involved. When messages and information are plentiful, silence becomes essential if we are to distinguish what is important from what is insignificant or secondary. Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.

The process of communication nowadays is largely fuelled by questions in search of answers. Search engines and social networks have become the starting point of communication for many people who are seeking advice, ideas, information and answers. In our time, the internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers – indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive. Amid the complexity and diversity of the world of communications, however, many people find themselves confronted with the ultimate questions of human existence: Who am I? What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? It is important to affirm those who ask these questions, and to open up the possibility of a profound dialogue, by means of words and interchange, but also through the call to silent reflection, something that is often more eloquent than a hasty answer and permits seekers to reach into the depths of their being and open themselves to the path towards knowledge that God has inscribed in human hearts.

by Pope Benedictus XVI |  Read more: