memorandada

MoMA's `Dada' Shows Startling Art Made to Change the World

2006-06-19T21:58:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg.com: Culture

The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Bloomberg.)By Carly Berwick
June 15 (Bloomberg) -- The mannequin has a prosthetic leg, a gun on its shoulder and dentures in its crotch. It's a piece of ornery protest art that could be in any Chelsea gallery today, but it was in fact conceived 86 years ago, by Dada artists George Grosz and John Heartfield in post-World War I Berlin.
The abrasive figure stands sentry in ``Dada,'' a must-see exhibition that opens June 18 at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Previously at the National Gallery of Art, ``Dada'' is the first major U.S. show devoted to one of the most influential art movements of the last century.
We are all a bit ``Dada'' now: crazed and awed by war, media and rampant technology. But the hostility toward received wisdom, skepticism toward pretty paintings and revulsion toward militarism that defines today's art world first surfaced some 90 years ago in Zurich and New York.
The founders of this movement wanted their art to be about ideas, not technique. Still, as this sweeping survey shows, they pioneered several visual and literary techniques -- from nonsense sound-poetry to camera-less photos called Rayographs -- and even managed to come up with some perversely attractive art in the process.
War Haters
Business as usual was out, the weird and freaky were in. Revolted by the carnage of World War I, draft-dodging German artists Hugo Ball, Hans Arp, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Richter and Christian Schad, as well as the Romania-born Tristan Tzara, moved to neutral Zurich.
In 1916, the Zurich group danced around in masks, made mooing noises and banged on drums for tiny audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire. They printed journals, sent letters and came up with a name for their ideas: Dada, a word randomly picked from a German-French dictionary and seized on for its infantile, primitive sound.
Still, the artists did not reject beauty entirely. The Dadaists wanted to change art, not eliminate it. Arp and Sophie Taeuber made masks and marionettes to confuse the distinction between high and low art. But Taeuber's untitled gouache on paper from 1920, a patchwork field of color, and Arp's 1917 ovoid, wooden wall-relief are elegant abstractions whose formal power pulses on the wall.
Independently and simultaneously, a group of like-minded refugees in New York antagonized the chattering classes with art made from common objects and based on machines. Marcel Duchamp concocted what he called a Ready-made in 1915, buying a snow shovel from a hardware store and suspending it from the ceiling.
Porcelain Slap
His ``Fountain'' (1917), a urinal turned upside-down, was a deliberate provocation. It compelled painter George Bellows to wonder if horse manure as art would be next. (In the Paris venue of this show, a man took a hammer to a ``Fountain,'' remade by Duchamp in 1964, and damaged it; the one in New York is a different 1964 version, owned by the Mugrabi Collection.)
MoMA's installation emphasizes New York's contribution to Dada by opening the exhibition through either of two doorways: one leads to Zurich, the other to New York, suggesting that Dada sprouted in both places at once.
It's a slightly disingenuous equivalence: the New Yorkers - - Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Man Ray -- joined the movement after hearing about it in missives from Zurich. The Zurich group's bold statements against tradition and for unruliness suited their existing methods just fine.
The New Yorkers were obsessed with machinery. Picabia's print ``Portrait of a Young Girl in a State of Nudity'' (1915) is, in fact, an image of a spark plug with ``For-ever'' inscribed on its face. Like many Dada works, the idea behind it -- revealed in the title -- makes it naughty and clever.
Collage Attacks
Political anger and bitter satire were most savage and unapologetic in Berlin. Hannah Hoch's brutally incisive collages laced into profiteering industrialists and lionized the new feminists. In ``High Finance'' (1923), the heads of two older gentlemen are sliced through with cocked rifle barrels as they stride across rows of factories.
Grosz produced deliberately grotesque paintings and collages of smug fat cats who extolled the virtues of their great nation. In his ink-and-collage ``Voice of the People, Voice of God'' (1920), clippings from conservative newspapers stream from the mouths of donkeys and apes sipping from coffee cups with swastikas on them. (Thirteen years before Hitler came to power, Grosz already recognized the danger of the symbol.) Hoch and Grosz used the mass media -- photos, advertisements, newspapers -- as material for layered invective.
A Fractious Group
Dada, which petered out as a movement about 1924, encompassed a history of shifting allegiances and manifestos made and broken. Those require a thorough read of the show's worthy catalog to comprehend. The Hanover branch of Dada, for example, consisted mainly of Kurt Schwitters, whose dreamy, compulsive collages were deemed insufficiently political by the Berliners.
Two of Dada's most prominent founders -- Duchamp and Ball - - ultimately distanced themselves from it. Such contrariness, however, is supremely Dada. Dadaists were the first avowed conceptual artists. Art-makers today work either in or against the waves they made.
``Dada'' is on view from June 18 to Sept. 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd St. Information: (1)(212) 708-9400 or http://www.moma.org . The exhibition is sponsored by the Dana Foundation. It is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art.
(Carly Berwick is an art critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the reporter on this story:
Carly Berwick at cberwick@gmail.com.
Last Updated: June 15, 2006 00:14 EDT

The Great Picabia - artnet Magazine

2006-06-19T21:54:00.001-07:00

The Great Picabia - artnet Magazine

It is no exaggeration to say that without the Museum of Modern Art, Dada as an art historical phenomenon, much less its overarching influence on contemporary art praxis for the last 35 years, would be forgotten.
Particular jewels of the Alfred Barr era dazzle throughout "Dada," the rakishly formal and charmingly comprehensive installation which opened at the Museum of Modern Art this week. Here are, for example, Max Ernst’s chilling and bucolic Two Children Threatened by a Nightingale and George Grosz’s portrait of John Heartfield in uniform, The Convict. (Dadaista Francis Naumann remarked at the opening, "I’ve never heard this called The Convict before. It’s always been known as The Admiral. Heartfield, of course, continued to wear his uniform, after the War.")
It would be a disservice to judge Marcel Duchamp, however, by the memorable ephemera included in "Dada." A toylike display of the refashioned readymades Duche created at the behest of Arturo Schwartz in the ‘60s comes across as a throwaway gesture in a most serious show. Marcel’s puerile puns and light plays upon the female anatomy have become so hackneyed in the discourse that their internment in storage for a couple of decades might be advisable. For "Dada" makes an intriguing case for a movement which can subsume Duchamp’s Borscht Belt tendencies with a flick of the dick.
Doing the flicking, exalted to protean heights by "Dada," is Francis Picabia. As the painter Holly Hughes commented on opening night, "The number of careers which owe a direct debt to Picabia is immeasurable." Her husband, curator Bruce Altschuler, trilled, "There are so many pieces in this show I’ve never seen in person before," and this is especially true of the deep and varied Picabia selections.
Take a small example, Francis Picabia’s Signature, a flowing blue announcement of self which anticipates and encapsulates the entire career of Ed Ruscha. Intervention of a Woman by Means of a Machine is what my wife, a Southern lady, acerbically described as "what they did, sexing up the machines, but this one works!!"
The Animal Trainer, a black colossus whipping a pack of Dada dogs, is the most esthetically pleasing and visually dominant piece in the show. What appears to be an amusing illustration of bowling balls, Volocelles, anticipates Al Held. The range of Picabia’s concerns, his mordant industrial humor and sheer manliness send Duchamp scurrying to the sidelines like an urchin picking snot from his nostrils.
Indeed, Picabia’s Tabac-Rat, a frame sarcastically showing string, is a hilarious send-up of The Large Glass and its author’s pretensions (the piece exhibited here was reconstructed in 1948). The triumph of "Dada" lies in a portly bachelor stripping a bride, the rape of Marcel by Francis in retro. Just glorious.
"Dada," June 18-Sept. 11, 2006, at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10019
CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).

The Great Picabia - artnet Magazine

2006-06-19T21:54:00.000-07:00

'Dada' at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum - New York Times

2006-06-19T21:53:00.000-07:00

'Dada' at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum - New York Times

NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were lying, and soldiers were dying, and society looked like it was going bananas. Not unreasonably the Dadaists figured that art's only sane option, in its impotence, was to go nuts too.

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Librado Romero/The New York Times
Marionettes made by the artist Sophie Taeuber in 1918 are among the works in "Dada," an exhibition opening on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art examining the movement that reacted to difficult times by throwing away the rules. A review by Michael Kimmelman. More Photos »

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"Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Age)" by Raoul Hausmann. The sculpture is made from a hairdresser's dummy, parts of a pocket watch, pieces of a camera, tape measure and other objects. More Photos >
"Total pandemonium" was how the sculptor Hans Arp reported the situation in 1916 at the great Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, where Dada was born. "Tzara is wiggling his behind like the belly of an Oriental dancer. Janco is playing an invisible violin and bowing and scraping. Madame Hennings, with a Madonna face, is doing the splits. Huelsenbeck is banging away nonstop on the great drum, with Ball accompanying him on the piano, pale as a chalky ghost."

I'm sure you had to be there.

The Dada show, opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is pretty much an official survey (an oxymoron), and, this being MoMA, nearly all 450 or so objects in it look elegant, which they were certainly never intended to look. Interpret that as you will. The buttoned-down museum, which in many ways seems to have lost its bearings, returns to its roots.

The exhibition arrives after stops in Paris (where, papered with hundreds of documents and arranged like a chessboard of small rooms, it was by all accounts superbly eccentric) and in Washington, where it was pared down and didactic.

Splitting the difference, MoMA's curator, Anne Umland, has added Dada touches like two separate entrances. (You choose.) She knows the Dadaists were actually closet aesthetes. After Marcel Duchamp waltzed into a plumbing equipment manufacturer on lower Fifth Avenue, acquired a porcelain urinal, signed it "R. Mutt" and submitted the now notorious "Fountain" to an art show, he claimed to be horrified when people found his readymade beautiful.

Art by declaration had replaced art by discrimination. A urinal, a snow shovel, a hat rack and a bicycle wheel fastened to a stool were art because he said so, and who was to say they weren't? Except that, by the same token, if someone decided the urinal or snow shovel looked aesthetically pleasing, who was he to deny it?

Such became the world of modern art, and either you are the sort of skeptic who thinks that art went to hell in a handbasket, or you see that Dada opened art up to the everyday and we are its beneficiaries. That hat rack looks awfully stylish now, and so does the mobile fashioned out of clothes hangers by Man Ray, never mind if it's still a little hard to love the silvered plumbing trap that Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Morton Livingston Schamberg titled "God." (I wonder if they noticed that the curlicue of the trap spells each of those letters in lowercase?)

In any event, it's good to be reacquainted with a generation that had no market to speak of and for whom society's corruption and exhaustion seemed a golden opportunity to make themselves useful. Politicians were responsible for mass murder, advertisers were conmen, the press self-censoring.

So Dadaists figured it was time to throw away the rules, and you can tell they had a ball doing so. Out with jingoism and the clichés of romanticism and Expressionism, whose self-centeredness they particularly despised, and in with a new spirit of internationalism, collaboration, serendipity and transparency. (Duchamp's cracked glass was the operative symbol.) Dada stood for freedom. Art may be useless but it is also indispensable.

The show is organized by cities, different artists having come to the same notion of Dada around the same time in different places. Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Arp and his wife, Sophie Taeuber, settled in neutral Zurich. Ball, seeing corpses on the battlefield, had contemplated suicide. Marcel Janco said that he could still hear the bombardments in faraway Verdun while he slept.

Out of this came antiwar happenings and lyrical abstractions. Arp and Taeuber, separately and together, made collages, jig-sawed reliefs, chalices and bowls in earthen colors, and marionettes with faces like Oceanic masks for retelling an 18th-century play, "The King Stag," as an allegory of psychoanalysis. "Kill me, kill me. I have not analyzed myself and can't stand it anymore!" was the king's minister's big line.

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"Dada" opens Sunday and continues through Sept. 11 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; (212) 708-9400.

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VOA News - Dada in DC: 90-Year-Old Art Movement is Still Provocative, Whimsical, Engaged

2006-05-15T22:04:00.000-07:00

VOA News - Dada in DC: 90-Year-Old Art Movement is Still Provocative, Whimsical, Engaged

Max Ernst, The Hat Makes the Man, 1920
The National Gallery of Art in Washington is about to say goodbye to a major show on Dada, the early 20th century art movement. Painting, sculpture, film, photography, collage and "readymades" from Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, Paris and New York are all part of Dada, which the Gallery calls the most comprehensive exhibition of Dadaist art ever shown in the United States.

Dada curator Leah Dickerman
German artists fleeing World War One founded the Dada art movement in Switzerland in 1916, naming it after a nonsense word. The movement was born out of the artists' horror at the war, particularly its mechanized killing, says the National Gallery's Dada curator, Leah Dickerman, and so she opens the show with a reel of World War One-era footage. “Many of the technologies that we associate with modern warfare, including tanks and aerial dogfights and poison gas, were invented in this moment,” she said in an interview. “These new strategies provided a new efficiency in killing. And for the Dadaists as well as their contemporaries, it really threw into question whether you could talk about a rational European civilization.”

Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Age), c. 1920
The Dadaists included artists with very different styles and interests, from George Grosz to Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber, to Man Ray. Wherever it migrated, from Zurich to Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, and on to Paris and New York, Dadaism rejected artistic convention, making art that was by turns angry and political, or witty, modest and abstract -- or a challenge to the very definition of art. “The idea that art is a picture where you can look through the surface onto an imaginary world, was something they exploded as a group,” Ms. Dickerman said. “They replaced it with many of the key strategies we see in the rest of the 20th century: things like collage, montage, installation art, media pranks, sound art.”

Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)
The sound art at Dada includes a 1926 film score, Le Ballet mécanique -- played at the National Gallery for the first time with the fully robotic orchestra that composer George Antheil envisioned: sixteen player pianos, together with xylophones, drums, bells, and sirens. In every medium, from sound to sculpture, Dada art was provocative, oppositional, outrageous. Marcel Duchamp doodled on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, and exhibited a urinal as a piece of sculpture. But Leah Dickerman says Dadaism was never disengaged. “I think it's about people who want to understand their own moment,” she said, “and they want to analyze it, and they want to make it visible to their audiences, as well. They're trying to sometimes shock people into another understanding of their own times, to shock them out of a kind of amnesia, or shock them out of a kind of sleepwalking state.”

A visitor to the Dada show says it speaks to our times too
Visitors to the show said they were surprised at how topical it seemed. “It's really timely,” said one man. “A lot of those pieces could be today, you know, because of the reaction of the artists to the war, and to the mindless violence, and sort of incomprehensible stuff that's going on in society, I think is just exactly what we see in a lot of ways right now.” Another agreed, saying, “You can't divorce their art from the moment that they're in, and of course it makes you think about our moment." The National Gallery of Art show was selected from art works shown in Paris as part of a larger exhibit. A third version of Dada opens in June at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

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New Statesman - Arts - Keeping it surreal

2006-05-15T21:57:00.000-07:00

New Statesman - Arts - Keeping it surreal

In the 1920s Georges Bataille's art magazine Documents embraced all that was "soiled, senile, rank, sordid" in western civilisation. Its radical message is as fresh as ever, writes Ned Denny

What place does surrealism, once the most insurrectionary of modernist art movements, have in our brave new world of laptops, "passionate" sandwiches and CCTV? In the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, the group's self-appointed leader, André Breton, called for the liberation of desire and asserted the magical power of dreams. He argued that if we all unshackled the vital energies of the subconscious, not just in art but in our lives, the grim spectre of 19th-century humanism would be banished for good.

According to some, you have only to look around at our virtual, prodigious and ever-transforming landscape to see the ubiquity and triumph of the surrealists. Conversely, a recent article in the Observer contained the peculiar, dry-as-dust statement that "the relevance of surrealism . . . is generally agreed to be at an all-time low" (but relevant to what, and agreed by whom?).

In fact, these seemingly opposed positions both contain an element of truth. One cannot deny the dazzling bizarreness of contemporary life, yet this represents not freedom, but the manner in which industrial society turns the imagination to its own conformist ends. Far from having been liberated, the "rational" but pathologically destructive culture that the surrealists opposed with their calls to poetry and love has become more neurotic and impervious to change.

In this regard, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse's analysis of advanced societies, was prescient. Like all subversive currents, the surreal has become window dressing, in a world characterised more than ever by "the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for administering such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets". If surrealism can safely be dismissed as irrelevant today, that is because its defeat has been almost total. Absorbed into a way of living whose end is a bland narcosis, André Breton's "convulsive beauty" has become an advertiser's gimmick.

In this somewhat dispiriting light, the Hayward Gallery's latest show on the surrealists is nothing if not timely. First conceived after the gallery's "Dada and Surrealism Reviewed" exhibition of almost 30 years ago, "Undercover Surrealism" pays homage to the movement's most uncompromising provocateur: Georges Bataille (prudently, Microsoft Word advises that I change his name to "Bastille"). Bataille was temperamentally opposed to the dreamier aspects of orthodox surrealism, despising what he saw as the latent idealism of Breton's project. He despised everything, in fact, that gave it an obscure kinship with the progressive civilisation it claimed to reject.

Bataille thus stayed closer to the surrealists' roots in Dada, that primal howl which rose out of Zurich in the depths of the First World War. The black soil to surrealism's wildly exotic flower, Dada prescribed strange chants and the ancestral throb of drums as remedies for a culture engaged in ritual self-slaughter. Enlightenment and the march of reason having led to a mass grave (both literally and psychologically), Dadaism sought a solution in the healing powers of so-called darkness.

In many respects, Bataille's Documents magazine - the central focus of "Undercover Surrealism" - was a continuation of the Dadaist onslaught against cultural somnambulism. In it, he wrote that "horror alone is brutal enough to break what is stifling", a statement that communicates the essence of his aesthetic. If the European mind had indeed become a "whited sepulchre" (as Marlow describes the unnamed city in Conrad's Heart of Darkness), cracking it open would require formidable tools.

This is why, for example, Documents carried a gruesome series of photographs taken in the abattoirs at La Villette. Bataille saw the modern abattoir as a direct descendant of the sacrificial temple, albeit one bereft of any sacred dimension. With the killing of animals not only secularised but carried out behind closed doors, people now occupied "an amorphous world where there is nothing horrible any longer". The result? A numbed and abstracted consciousness which, paradoxically, ushers in the industrial-scale sacrifice of technological warfare.

The "nature" photography that Documents reproduced had the same function: to shock the mind into a clear-headed (or perhaps simply fearful) perception of reality. An oddly angled close-up of a lobster's claw seems at first glance to be a portrait of a monstrous, evil-eyed parrot. Similarly, Karl Blossfeldt's images of alien-like plants militated against a sentimental view of the natural world. As Bataille wryly notes, "Even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centre by hairy sexual organs."

Such intuitions of a fundamentally vile and rapacious nature linked closely with the art of the Gauls, another of Bataille's fascinations. In his essay "The Academic Horse", published in the first issue of Documents, he examined how the noble steeds of classical currency were transformed on Gaulish coins into frenzied, ravening, insect-like beasts. The Gauls had "calculated nothing, conceiving of no progress and giving free rein to immediate expressions and violent sentiment". They were thus part of that same anarchic lineage that had more recently found expression in the formal shatterings of cubism, a style of painting he described elsewhere as being "maximally incompatible with social stability".

Botanical photographs, ancient coins, modern art - all mingled in Documents with reviews of the latest jazz, the un-expected juxtapositions blowing away the stale air of conventional scholarship. Bataille's love for the rhythms of black music is another link with the Dada poets, who "would have liked to drum literature into the ground". Even more than the comparatively jaunty Duke Ellington, the sparse pulse of the Ethiopian earth-drum was a key to the mysteries of African art.

Here Bataille shows his kinship with the savage pessimism of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, a holy text for the surrealists. Identifying not only with his pagan Gaulish ancestors but with the downtrodden "nigger" of the colonies, Rimbaud had commanded: "No more words . . . Shouts, drums, dance, dance, dance!" And then, abruptly: "The white men are landing. Cannons! Now we must be baptised, get dressed, go to work."

Just like the frantic horses on Gaulish coins, tribal masks had long been regarded by European art historians as "degenerate" attempts at classical serenity. Bataille, however, perceived that they bore witness to an overwhelming Dionysian force, one that might reconnect modern man with the long-neglected gods.

There has been a tendency to paint Bataille as a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde character, an unassuming librarian who, by night, turned into the "excremental philosopher" of popular notoriety. This is true up to a point, but misleading when it does not recognise that the antithesis is not personal, but cultural. If we spend our days in the hushed, book-lined chamber of conceptual thought, the energies we suppress are bound to resurface in frightening or destructive forms. What distinguishes Bataille is not his perversity, but his recognition of the tough measures needed to cure a perverse situation.

Shunned by mainstream surrealism for his attraction to all that is "soiled, senile, rank, sordid", Bataille saw that we can no more be healthy without embracing darkness than a tree be loath to dirty its roots by placing them in the ground. In a world moving further away from the shadowy yet nourishing earth, this insight is more urgent than ever.

"Undercover Surrealism" is at the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London SE1 (0870 380 4300) until 30 July. [http://www.hayward.org.uk]

The Brooklyn Rail - Allan Kaprow (1927�2006)

2006-05-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

The Brooklyn Rail - Allan Kaprow (1927�2006)

Allan Kaprow, the Happener
In the late Fifties, the spirit of Dada was revived in Post-World War II American Art. For Allan Kaprow, the artist who led this revival was Jackson Pollock. In a famous article, written in 1956 (the year of Pollock’s death) and published two years later in Art News by the distinguished editor Thomas Hess, Kaprow claimed that Pollock was less important for his paintings as material objects than for the kind of choreographic approach to painting that the artist instigated. This led Kaprow to explore a concept, close to Dada, in which intermedia performances involving groups of participants—which came to be known as “Happenings”—became a new art form. By 1959 Kaprow was exploring a direction in art where idea and process were considered more important than the object. Others, like Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, and Red Grooms, eventually joined in with their own versions of this phenomenon. In many ways, Kaprow was as much a link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art as Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, or even the sculptor George Segal.

As the Happenings moved from its association with Neo-Dada in the late Fifties to Fluxus in the early Sixties, it became clear that Kaprow’s idea was also shifting between avant-garde aesthetics on one hand and popular culture on the other. By the late Sixties, his work had indirectly spurred various countercultural phenomena—such as the “be-ins” and “love-ins”—as well as the massive outdoor rock festivals of that era. This kind of popularization was not particularly welcomed by Kaprow, who believed his ideas were being distorted by the commercial media and, at a certain point, refused to allow journalists and press photographers admittance to his events. In retrospect, Kaprow’s Happenings were less “anti-art” than many claimed and were never entirely devoid of aesthetic interest. As much as he tried to integrate the art-and-life paradigm by giving his “activities” in the Seventies a purposefully bland and reductive appearance, Kaprow’s rarefied, somewhat overdetermined aesthetic became even more pronounced. As much as he tried to reduce the formal ingredients by which a Happening could be identified as “art,” its cultural framework somehow managed to remain indelible. Its spontaneous element was always guided by the structure of the piece, regardless of its openness.

Having curated a Kaprow retrospective at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Kansas in 1979, and then later, in 1987, giving a keynote talk at another in Texas (curated by Jeff Kelley), I grew increasingly to admire the importance of this deeply singular artist’s work. Allan never wanted to be part of a movement nor did he believe that the market had any real relevance to the future of art. He was forever committed to art as a medium that could feed and nourish our understanding of human psychology, sociology, aesthetics, and politics. Initially influenced by the philosophy of John Dewey and later by the teachings of Meyer Shapiro, John Cage, and Hans Hofmann, Kaprow believed in an expanded idea of art—prior to the conceptualists and long before the advent of postmodernism—that was inextricably bound to aesthetics and could encompass actions and ideas as much as objects. Allan Kaprow was always in advance of his time and, in many ways, he still is.

—Robert C. Morgan

First Nam June Paik. Now Allan Kaprow. Two great innovators, gone.
In 1957, I wrote a review for Art News in which I praised Allan’s wall-size collage-action-paintings. Raw, raucous, and frenetic, they introduced a fresh note of urban realism into Abstract Expressionist painting. I met Allan shortly after, and we became friends.

Allan’s soft-spoken reasonableness belied his iconoclasm. I recall him taking the floor at the end of a panel at The Club, the Abstract Expressionist hangout, in 1958 and quietly challenging in the audience, which consisted primarily of painters. He said: “I am convinced that painting is a bore. So is music and literature. What doesn’t bore me is the total destruction of ideas that have any discipline. Instead of painting, move your arms; instead of music, make noise. I’m giving up painting and all the arts by doing everything and anything.” Like his mentor, John Cage, Allan was calling for artists to break down all barriers between art and non-art. There was a shocked silence in the room before the painters turned in fury on Allan. He had anticipated what to expect and remained calm. The avant-garde art world would never be the same.

In a seminal article, titled “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” published in the October 1958 issue of Art News, Allan predicted that in the future he and like-minded artists would “become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life…Not satisfied with the suggestion through paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight, sound, movements, people, odors, touch. [We shall show] as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us, but ignored.” The upshot would be a new kind of visual art theater.

If Allan’s thinking was influenced by Cage, it was also rooted in Harold Rosenberg’s conception of Action Painting. However, as Allan said, he had kept the action and jettisoned the painting. He put down all post-Pollock painting as passé. As a partisan of Abstract Expressionism, I disagreed strongly with Allan and rebutted his statements in a letter to Art News. Nonetheless, I recognized the importance and timeliness of his ideas and invited him to participate on Club panels. And in 1963, recognizing that he had become the primary spokesperson for Environments and Happenings, I introduced his ideas to the general public readership of The New York Post by publishing a lengthy interview with him in the newspaper.

Statements like the one Allan made at the The Club got him labeled as a Neo-Dada, but he was not anti-art. In the Post interview, he acknowledged the importance of Dada for its “healthy hatred for clichés and smug esthetics,” but he did not “count it as a major influence on [his] art, either in attitude, subject or method.” He only rejected what he believed was dead in contemporary art. And his nay-saying led him to innovate what he would label Environments and Happenings. As he said, the purpose of these works, like “that of any art [is] to come to grips with the world, to do something revelatory which in turn could make things about us more meaningful…This, I think, is central to the best art, no matter what else it may superficially be about.”

As I write this appreciation, memories of Allan’s Happenings come back to mind: happily clambering over a mountain of used tires in the yard of the Martha Jackson Gallery, or lost in an Environment of words painted and collaged on the walls of a gallery and three-dimensional constructions that Allan built within it. The mise-en-scene enveloped the viewer, calling to the mind the mesh of words—newspaper, magazine, radio, T.V., etc.—that clutters up our minds. It was a hyper slice of reality. In 1962, I helped arrange Allan’s most ambitious Happening. It took place in the nine-story high courtyard of the disused Mills Hotel on Bleecker Street. As its climax, a huge inverted mountain descended from the roof onto an upright mountain, the two peaks figuratively kissing.

I asked Allan if the transience of his works concerned him. He answered: “No. If the work is of value it will stimulate the creation of related works later on and thus the tradition will stay alive that way.” The trail-blazer of Environments and Happenings, Allan influenced Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, among others in the late 1950s. He was also a formative influence on subsequent Installation Art and Performance Art, which is to be seen everywhere in today’s art world. Allan’s incisive polemics and the documentation of his work have been very much alive for almost half a century, and if current art is any indication,  will surely live on.

—Irving Sandler

I met Allan Kaprow at the High School of Music and Art in 1942. (Because of his asthma, his family had moved him from Arizona to New York.) I remember the first few weeks Allan used to come to school wearing cowboy hat and boots, talking about horses and all us New York kids thought he was strange, but we became friends anyway. After graduation in 1945, while I was away in the navy for a year, Allan had developed a hemorrhaged ulcer (a result of having argued with his father over his fate. Mr. Kaprow, the senior, was a self-made lawyer who wanted his son to follow his footstep instead of being an artist) which was so severe that they had to take him to the hospital in order to clean different part of his organs separately. At which point, the doctor told his father “you’ve got to let that boy do what he wants.” That was how Allan came to the Hofmann School with me.

Art school was where he wanted to be, but the environment didn’t quite fit his temperament. Allan wasn’t exactly the most natural painter. He used to say to me,” Every time I made a brush stroke it was taken from Kandinsky, Miro or Picasso”, which I responded,” That’s silly. You’re a student you can afford to be influenced”. But by nature Allan was too much of a rebel to do anything that has a look of tradition.

One weekend in the summer 1950, I had a job working on a farm in Hopewell Junction, New Jersey, Allan came by to visit me—he was staying with Stefan Wolpe, who besides John Cage, I think had an equally great impact on Allan’s thinking about the avant-garde—and he said to me, “ Painting is dead ”. That was the summer that marked the beginning of Allan’s new thinking about art, which he wrote eight years later in an article, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock.” In the interval Allan went to study art history with Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University and later with John Cage at the New School for Social Research. One of Allan’s first memorable show, Penny Arcade, was at Hansa gallery in 1956, with objects and things hanging from the ceiling and all kind of noises including a telephone ringing at unpredictable time, which would get Dick Bellamy, who was at the time the gallery director, running to the telephone for nothing. A few years later Allan became a member of the Reuben gallery where he installed his landmark, 18 Happening in 6 Parts. After that, through George Segal, Allan got a teaching job at Rutgers University and a few other institutions before heading to California. In spite of the long distance, we still managed to talk on the telephone quite regularly when he was at the University of California in San Diego, where he taught the rest of his professional life.

To my greatest surprise, Allan agreed to give a lecture on my work when I had a show at the San Diego Museum in 1981. Everyone said it was highly intelligent and praising of my work, and so I call Allan up and said: “Gee whiz, I thought you said painting was dead.” He said “Well you know that was a public statement. Privately, I might think something else.” Allan kept amazing me. We grew up with the idea that artists were marginal types who didn’t shake hands with the world at large. If anybody got popular or started to sell, it was the kiss of death. But Allan thought that was sophomorically romantic, and he wrote an article in repudiation,” Should the Artist Be a Man of the World.” Perhaps Allan’s vision was prophetic because I’m still struggling to be a man in the world. In the meanwhile I hope that Allan is doing good Household on Cloud Nine, spreading strawberry jam over an old Volkswagen and having the angels lick it off.

—Wolf Kahn

| Paradise Now

2006-03-19T16:55:00.000-08:00

Guardian Unlimited Arts | Arts features | Paradise Now

The world was in disarray, shattered by the first world war and heading into a second. Out of this chaos came the modernists - a group of utopian designers with thrilling new visions of what the future could hold. But was anyone ready for this brave new world? As a new blockbuster exhibition of modernist art, architecture and design opens at the V&A, we present a G2 special celebrating the Modern movement. To begin, Robert Hughes introduces its key players - and discovers how many of their dreams still survive

Monday March 20, 2006
The Guardian

Modernism is a weasel of a word, whose meanings slip and slide. They always have. Not that one should use "modernism" and "always" in the same sentence. Nobody talked or thought about modernism in the middle ages - the idea of a battle between "new" and "established" cultural forms was not an issue then. Now it has gone completely the other way. Nobody, or nobody with brains, assigns a missionary role to culture. The work of art is just one more consumer product among others.

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Modernism is something old that we look back on, not without nostalgia. Its ashtrays and dinner sets, the chrome-tube-and-leather-strap Marcel Breuer chairs, get revived and recirculated without comment. The idea of modernism connotes some kind of ideal and even quasi-official mindset. Seen in one light, it even suggests too much solidity: think of how the innumerable descendants and clones of Mies van der Rohe created, in their high, bland cliffs of steel and glass, the face of American corporate capitalism.
That certainly wasn't the modernité Charles Baudelaire was thinking of in 1863 when, in The Painter of Modern Life, he described "modernity" as an exaltation of "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable". Nor was it what Jonathan Swift complained of in a letter to Alexander Pope - the work of English scribblers "who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms". That was in 1737, and was the first and probably the last time that "modernism" and "quaintness" were linked in the same sentence. The essence of modernism, to the early 20th century, when its lessons really began to catch on, would be that it was anti-quaint: clear, clean, stripped as a piston, dealing only in essentials. But by "quaint" Swift meant something more like "bizarre" - he wasn't thinking of picturesqueness.

Once, movements and works that no longer seem to match up with modernism as we understand it used to call themselves modernist. In Barcelona, the modernists were architects like Josep Puig I Cadafalch, Lluís Domènech I Montaner and even Antoni Gaudi, all of whose work fairly groaned beneath the weight of its historical references, exuberant natural detail and symbolic narratives - the very opposite of what people at the Bauhaus were thinking about. Would you call a concert-house ceiling encrusted with giant polychrome pottery roses, each the size of a cabbage, "modernist"? But that was what Domenech, the star of Catalan modernism, did in his masterpiece, the Palace of Catalan Music, a building almost unimaginably remote from the products and ideas of northern modernist architects and theorists like Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, who wanted to strip all ornament from buildings and, like Euclid, "look on Beauty bare".

Adolf Loos, in Vienna, actually wrote a polemical text entitled Ornament and Crime, in which he set forth the truly demented thesis that the impulse to decorate any shape or surface was in itself degenerate, characteristic of the bestial primitive: ornament was excrement. In the imagination of such people - mercilessly satirised by Evelyn Waugh in the character of the mad modernist architect Professor Silenus (read, "Gropius") in Decline and Fall - the only worthwhile culture in the 1920s was machine culture, made of the shapes that machines could make, with no caressing handwork, every form repeatable at will. "No noodles," van de Rohe, one of the heroes of the style, used to say. In 1900 Paris, l'art moderne was not machine culture at all. It was organic, luscious and hysterically decorative - what we now call art nouveau, whose twining whiplash curves (or noodles) were the polar opposite of machine metaphors.

But gradually the meaning of "modernism" settled down to its present form, based on utopian fancies, standardisation, industrial materials like chrome and plate glass, abstraction and a vehement ambition to make a new world, not just a new art. Design - the rethinking from zero on up of everything from teapots to whole cities - was imagined as potentially all-powerful. And this is the impulse to which the forthcoming show at the V&A in London, Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-39, is dedicated.

It's no accident that the exhibition's delimiting years should be the starting dates of two catastrophic world wars, 1914 and 1939. These dates mark the span of a hectic utopian hope among Europeans, who felt - as Apollinaire wrote in his great paean to cultural renewal: "In the end, you are tired of this old world." The hope of renewal took form in the rubble of post-first world war Germany and attained something like hysteria in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. In broad terms, it said: things can't get worse than this. You can't take the elements of pre-1914 visual culture and put them, like Humpty Dumpty, together again, just as they were before. The corpse will not rise and speak. We therefore, as intellectuals and artists, can make one of three choices.

Either we throw out the vestiges of culture, all of them, dream romantic dreams of blank slates, reject everything that makes claim to humane and rational discourse, all that our parents called "adult", and call ourselves dadaists. The name "dada" parodied a child's first utterance; it was meant to symbolise the act of beginning again from nothing, having rejected the past in all its weighty totality - a cultural impossibility, but at least a challenge for disoriented self-made radicals in 1917.

Or we put our bets on transferring fantasies about the future back into the present, make enormously inflated claims about a technological millennium that hasn't arrived and isn't likely to appear just yet, and call ourselves futurists, a rhetorical stratagem that works best among the whimsical and operatic Italians.

Or else, we say that Europe, dire as its condition is, can actually be improved. So we must invent a new environment of buildings, cities, images and tools, whose end will be to create new societies of men and women. This engineering will get a name: modernism. It will be buoyed up by an immense and irrational hope shared, as cultural movements tend to be, by a small number of like-minded people who only have the haziest notion of, and generally rather despise, what the majorities around them want.

In Russia particularly, this hope attained an absurdity worthy of the inventors' isle of Laputa, as imagined by Swift. One inventor, Georgii Krutikov, put out an idea for a "flying city", kept in the air by electrical currents - this at a time when there was hardly enough surplus wattage in all of Moscow to run an egg timer. Another, Anton Lavinskii, came up in 1923 with the notion of a "city on springs" - a not-so-remote ancestor of some of the walking-city fantasies thrown off by the Archigram designers in England in the 1960s. And Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian constructivist, dreamed up what he hoped would be an everyman's bicycle of the air, the wooden Letatlin, on which (he hoped) members of the proletariat, having slipped the surly bonds of earth, would go gliding about from People's Dormitory to People's Cultural Centre. Of course, it did not and could not fly.

Tatlin's most grandly useless conception, however, which has always been the darling of "radical" art historians, was his design for a Monument to the Third International, 1920. It was to be a gigantic open-frame ziggurat of steel, spiralling up from the middle of Petrograd and dwarfing everything on the city's skyline. It would be built on a diagonal, representing that of the earth's axis. It would contain four enormous glass halls, each containing a different ceremonial structure for the Party, all turning at different speeds. The lowest one, a cylinder, would rotate once a year. The next, a pyramid, would turn once a month; and so on to the topmost hall, another cylinder, going round once a day. But although it would have some generally designated uses, these were never thought through - they were just part of the cloudy rhetoric that served to hide the disastrous shortages the revolution produced. The whole affair would be 400 metres high but it never materialised, because it would have used up far more structural steel than the whole of Russia had. It was the unbuilt and unbuildable tower of a Babylonian socialism. Perhaps some faint ghost of it lingers in those enormous and pointless space needles later constructed in the capitalist west, in places such as Seattle and Sydney, capped with revolving restaurants serving pretentious food.

This hope of world improvement expressed itself, everywhere, in the most idealist and highfalutin language. The people who used it have become fixtures in the firmament of 20th-century art, although they did not achieve what they thought their work could do. "Art is a universal and real expression of creative energy," wrote the constructivist artists El Lissitzky (Russian), Hans Richter (German) and Theo van Doesburg (Dutch), in the early 1920s. It would "be used to organise the progress of mankind, it is the tool of universal progress". If you didn't believe in progress, you couldn't call yourself a modernist. However, being a "modernist" was not necessarily the same as being a "functionalist". The most extreme illustration of their difference was afforded by the work of the Russian Kazimir Malevich, who called himself a "suprematist" - the postwar years were a bumper season for increasingly silly-isms - and made designs for various notionally habitable structures: big ones that he called "architectons" and little ones he named "planits", with an i. Malevich, who had no scientific background, was much given to waffling and burbling about how, in the marvellous Future, people of all nations would foregather on these extraterrestrial objects, creating termitaries of peace, love and cooperation as they were carried through space.

The prime building material of progress, of the longingly desired postwar utopia, was glass. Glass had several symbolic qualities to recommend it. First, its fragility. People remembered the gaping window frames, the shattered and empty openings, left in the wake of the great war. A society with intact glass buildings, manifestly, was a society at peace. Then, not only was glass fragile: with the correct framing, it could be very strong (though not in bending) and amazing feats of structural daring could be executed in it. Nobody who had seen Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, that prodigious triumph of British engineering, could possibly doubt that. Glass was the very opposite to heavy stone and opaque brick. Light streamed through it, the light of heaven itself. This offered social redemption. Glass forms, crystalline and suggestive of weightlessness, seemed to be the stuff of transcendence. Glass carried implications of myth, of other, soon-to-be-built Crystal Palaces. "Glück ohne Glas, wie dumm ist das," began one architect's paean to the wonderful substance : "Joy without glass, what stupidity!"

The sharpest expression of this utopian rapture was demolished long ago: an all-glass pavilion, resembling a faceted Islamic dome, that had been commissioned from the architect Bruno Taut by the German glass industry, for the 1914 Werkbund industrial exhibition in Cologne. Its likeness survives today only in drawings, photos and a model or two. The building was pervaded by colour shining from a reflecting pool of violet water and, although it is not clear just what the colour sequences were, by a kaleidoscope in the dome. This pavilion was tiny, almost toy-like, but it bears a distant similarity to one of the great buildings of the early 21st century - Norman Foster's "gherkin" in London, the Swiss Re building.

Modernism left its handprints everywhere: especially in communications, in typography, and in the design of household objects from Gropius' and Mies' chairs to the lamps of Marianne Brandt, which have never dated (though they were designed 80 years ago) and remain wholly covetable. And yet, one of the strange facts about modernism is that, given its recentness and the enormous spread of its ideas, so little of it remains. This makes it extremely difficult, maybe impossible, to think one's way back into the cultural fanaticism that gripped some European modernists in the 1920s and 30s, breeding contradictory reductionist movements like viruses in a lab and leading the designer/ architect/painter Theo van Doesburg to declare: "Art should not deal with the 'useful' or the 'nice', but with the 'spiritual' and the 'sublime'. The purest art forms do not cause the decorative change of some detail from life, but the inner metamorphosis of life, the revaluation of all values." This was way too much to expect of a few blocks of workers' flats.

The hopeful rhetoric of modernism was always way, way out in front of its actual products. Modernists were always hoping that big business, big planning, big government would latch on to their designs and make them generally available to people (preferably workers) who would recognise their benefits and gratefully use them. Alas, it didn't happen that way. There was not enough demand for "radical" designs of common household things, let alone buildings or whole suburbs, to attract anything like a mass market, which is why the occasional isolated Bauhaus workshop object, a jug attributable to Johannes Itten or a prototype Gropius chair, creates excitement among collectors today. Such things never entered the vernacular. Still less did the ugly, standardised clothes some modernist designers, Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko among them, proposed for the new millennium. (Universal worker clothing, unisex, democratic and cheap, would come from the American mills of Levi Strauss, not from European or Russian avant-gardists.)

What ordinary people wanted was culture they could relax into - the middle-class comfort of the upholstered armchair, not the bracing, challenging austerities of chrome tubes and leather thongs. What modernism, whose singing school was the Bauhaus presided over by Gropius and others, proposed to them was something rather different: the virtuous but not very alluring prospect of what German ideologues called Wohnung für das Existenzminimum, "minimum-existence housing", with its bedrooms the size of closets, and closets hardly bigger than shoeboxes. This had its reformative, even its holy aspect. When Gropius in 1919 wrote a program for the first state Bauhaus, which was set up in Weimar, he invoked the images of a cathedral, a crystal edifice, a new community of faith expressing itself in craft. At the root, there was always something penitential about modernism, with its stern abjuration of the world's sensuous pleasures in the interest of higher ones. You were never left in any doubt that the monk's cell was a better place to be than the capitalist's study, let alone his wife's boudoir.

If few modernist objects remain, even less of its architecture survives. The V&A's show does what it can with drawings and photographs, but these can never suffice. The fact is, not much of it was actually built and, of what there was, so much was torn down. I didn't altogether realise this until, 25 years ago, I and a team from the BBC were engaged in making a television series, The Shock of the New. We needed to film some great, canonical building in Europe that would exemplify all that passion over form and function, the abolition of ornament, the stripping away of "superfluous" detail, the overriding myths and utopian metaphors of the machine age. And one of the first things we found was that such buildings mainly existed on paper, hardly at all in the real world. Once the designers' ideas of what society "needed" came up against the things real people seemed to want, there was a collision that often amounted to a fiasco.

The memorable example, for me, was the one building in which Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887-1965), the Swiss watchmaker's son who went by the name of Le Corbusier, was able to pour out his notions of social amelioration through housing: the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles, which began receiving its first tenants in 1952. Raised on its thick, raw concrete stilts, massive and domineering, the Unité became an instant classic of Modern architecture. Just about everyone in the profession adored it, or said they did; the only people who couldn't stand the great grimy beast were the luckless ones who lived in it. We found when we arrived there in 1979 that it was in pitiable condition. Corbu's béton brut couldn't be cleaned, the metal-framed windows were hopelessly corroded, the electricity kept shorting out, the brise-soleils or concrete sunscreens were permanently foul with pigeon shit, the "shopping street" halfway up inside was locked and shuttered because ordinary French people prefer to do their marketing on real streets (an obvious aspect of social behaviour that eluded the intellectual grasp of the formgiver, who believed that folk ought to behave in accordance with the dotty authoritarian notions of idealist philosophes like Saint-Simon and Fourier). Saddest of all was the roof, which Corbu had imagined as a sort of concrete Acropolis dedicated to the cult of the sun and of physical culture, like a Greek palaestra, complete with pools and jogging track. It was a chaos of dried slime and broken cinder-blocks. And when the concierge, who hated the place, granted us admission to his flat in the Unité, we found that he and his wife had valiantly fought back against the functionalist plainness Corbu had prescribed for the residents: it was chock-a-block with fringes, bobbles and tassels, Louis this and that, and even a department-store rococo chandelier which, due to the lowness of the ceiling, almost touched the dining-table. Here, the working class had ceased to be the abstraction Corbu fancied. It had taken its revenge on the modernist emperor. I sometimes wonder if the decor of that concierge's flat is still the same today.

· Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-39 is at the V&A, London SW7, from April 6. Details: 0870 906 3883.

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Ne'Hunch engine' sharpens up your half-baked ideas - Technology

2006-03-11T21:33:00.000-08:00

New Scientist Premium- 'Hunch engine' sharpens up your half-baked ideas - Technology: "New software blends a computer's ability to rapidly sift large numbers of possible solutions with human-like hunches for what seems right

IMAGINE you could plug a computer into your brain and get the machine to do the donkey work while you concentrate on the creative bits. A novel piece of software that generates names and hunts down pictures gets close to doing just that.

The 'hunch engine' blends a computer's ability to rapidly sift through a large number of possible solutions to a problem with human hunches for what looks or sounds right. Whether you are trying to think up a company name or find the perfect image on the web, the system does the hard work and lets you have all the fun.

Developed by Icosystem of Cambridge, Massachusetts, the hunch engine uses a genetic algorithm (GA) whose evolutionary direction can be nudged by the person running it. The GA breeds initial solutions to a problem, two of which are used to spawn offspring with the best characteristics of both. ...
The complete article is 472 words long.
If you are not an existing subsc"

Study Grammar ability hardwired in humans

2006-03-06T17:37:00.000-08:00

Study Grammar ability hardwired in humans

University of Rochester scientists studying why characteristics of grammar are found in all languages say the use of grammar is hardwired in our brains.

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The study examined deaf individuals who were isolated from conventional sign, spoken and written language their entire lives, and yet still developed a unique form of gesture communication.

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(Ads by Google)"Our findings suggest that certain fundamental characteristics of human language systems appear in gestural communication, even when the user has never been exposed to linguistic input and has not descended from previous generations of skilled communicative partners," said Elissa Newport, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and linguistics

"We examined a particular hallmark of known grammatical systems and found these signers also used this same hallmark in their gestured sentences," said said. "They designed their own language and wound up with some of the same rules of grammar every other language uses."

The research was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International

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Fredericksburg.com - Dada changed art world

2006-03-02T15:31:00.000-08:00

Dada changed art world

'Dada' at the National Gallery of Art explores the avant garde art movement born in the midst of World War I

Date published: 3/2/2006

By SHEILA WICKOUSKI

For THE FREE LANCE-STAR

Through the years, war has inspired art, or more specifically, anti-art move- ments. One of the edgiest ever was Dada, which emerged in the midst of World War I, first in the capital cities of Europe and then in New York.

Smart, trendy, crude, angry and outrageous, Dada was a movement of the young and the restless and like its contemporary counterparts, it is often dismissed as impulsive art with no lasting value. Indeed many critical art historians regard it as little more than a footnote or lump it together with the fantastical imagery of surrealism.

Now for the first time ever, the National Gallery of Art in Washington is presenting a blockbuster show with more than 450 works and assorted materials of 50 artists.

The premise is that Dada is an idea in itself, not just the seed of surrealism. Using a variety of media, and with strong principles but not set rules, Dada's revolutionary ideas made an irrevocable break with traditional approaches to artistic creation. The separation opened wide the possibilities of media and expression.

The entrance exhibit of "Dada" starts with grainy gray footage of World War I, to set the tone of the horror of the war that gave birth to the age of political, economic and social crisis.

Zurich, which is represented as part of the exhibit, was a neutral wartime refuge, home to political dissidents and a center for an expatriate community that included Dada artists such as Hans Arp and Tristan Tzara. In an alcove off the Zurich room, one can listen to a recording by Hugo Ball that re-creates what might have been heard in their hangout, Cabaret Voltaire.

Particularly delightful is a complete set of Sophie Taeuber's turned-wood marionettes, created for a performance meant to satirize the new field of psychology and including characters like Freud Analytikus, Dr. Komplex and the fairy Urlibido.

In Germany, Berlin and Hannover differed in their political tones and their art forms. The Berlin Club Dada group pioneered the new medium of photomontage. Hannover hosted an alternative form of Dada called "Merz," which embraced the principle of using any material at all, and spawned collages and assemblages from what we might today call "recycled materials."

British-occupied Co-logne hosted an exhibition that encouraged visitors to destroy artwork with an ax, something which might strike us as a more recent idea.

In New York, the Dadaists focused on machines and "readymade" objects. Most famous is Marcel Du-champ's "Fountain," an inverted urinal. The artist's "In Advance of the Broken Arm" is a snow shovel.

For perspective on how contemporary these ideas are, one might recall that Man Ray's "Obstruction," a series of wooden hangers, looks surprisingly familiar to the white paper hangers that recently showed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

The Paris portion of the show is filled with articles first exhibited there, creating a feeling of what it must have been like to have actually been there for an exhibition during the Dada movement. A favorite piece is Duchamp's mockery of the icon of Renaissance art--the "Mona Lisa" with a goatee and mustache.

The Dada movement literally used anything--paint, prints, photomontage, poems--to express itself. The more ephemeral Dada experience was captured in film, of which 10 are being shown in a continuous loop in a small side theater and in a series of musical concerts the NGA has scheduled to re-enact Dada performances.

This exhibit is teasingly fun, reminding the viewer of how robust and youthful these ideas from nearly a century ago still are.

So what is the meaning of Dada? Or rather, what are the meanings, (the Dadaists delighted in employing word play to describe the linguistic divisions of the European countries at war)? For instance, Dada means "yes, yes" in Romanian and "rocking horse" or "hobby horse" in French. In German, it means "there, there" and was a sign of the foolish naivete and joy of procreation.

It may sound like a child's word, but Dada was also the brand name of a popular soap and hair tonic. The competing definitions allowed these artists to proclaim that "Dada means nothing."

For all its chaos and cacophony, the Dada movement, born out of despair and disillusionment, took one strong ethical stance--against absolute rules. To artists who have come after, Dada represents a freedom of thought and expression.

WHAT: Dada

WHERE: the National Gallery of Art East Building, on the National Mall between Third and Fourth streets at Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington

WHEN: The exhibit runs through May 14. Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

COST: Free

INFO: 202/ 737-4215, nga.gov/exhibitions/ dadainfo.htm

Entanglement heats up (February 2006) - News - PhysicsWeb

2006-02-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

Entanglement heats up (February 2006) - News - PhysicsWeb

Entanglement" could occur at any temperature and not just in systems cooled to near zero according to new calculations by a team of physicists in the UK, Austria and Portugal. Vlatko Vedral of the University of Leeds and colleagues at the universities of Porto and Vienna have found that the photons in ordinary laser light can be quantum mechanically entangled with the vibrations of a macroscopic mirror, no matter how hot the mirror is. The result is unexpected because hot objects are usually thought of being classical. The finding suggests that macroscopic entanglement is not as difficult to create as previously believed and could have implications for making room-temperature quantum computers in the future (Phys. Rev. Lett. 96 060407).

Light and mirror entanglement
Entanglement is one of the most mysterious and fundamental properties of quantum mechanics and allows particles to have a much closer relationship than is possible in classical physics. If two particles are entangled, we can know the state of one particle by measuring the state of the other. However, entangled states are thought to vanish above a certain temperature because of thermal effects that make the system classical in a phenomenon known as "decoherence".

Now, Vedral and colleagues have shown otherwise. The UK-Portugal-Austria team have calculated that an entangled state formed between the photons in a laser pulse and the phonons -- quantum mechanical vibrations of the crystal lattice -- in a mirror can persist at arbitrarily high temperatures. The physicists obtained their results by treating both the laser light and the mirror as simple quantum-mechanical harmonic oscillators. The photons and phonons interact via the so-called light pressure mechanism, in which photons bombarding the mirror exert a pressure on it because of mutual interactions.

The pressure exerted on the mirror depends on the number of photons hitting it: the more photons in the laser, the more pressure they exert on the mirror and the more the mirror vibrates. Vedral and co-workers calculated that if they were to measure five photons in the light field, then there would be five phonons in the motion of the mirror; and if they measured ten photons, then that meant ten phonons, and so forth. This is typical of an entangled state but the difference in the new calculation is that it works for large systems too -- there are millions of photons in the laser beam and more than a billion atoms in the mirror.

The results show that macroscopic entanglement is not that difficult to create. "If our analysis is confirmed in an experiment -- and I see no reason to believe otherwise -- then this would push the limits of the validity of quantum mechanics further," says Vedral. This may also have important implications for quantum computers: "Perhaps we would not need to cool quantum bits (or 'qubits') down to low temperatures in order to use them for quantum computation. Maybe we could have room temperature quantum computers, just like the classical ones of today."

About the author
Belle Dumé is science writer at PhysicsWeb

New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Is our universe about to be mangled?

2006-02-23T17:50:00.000-08:00

Is our universe about to be mangled?

Our universe may one day be obliterated or assimilated by a larger universe, according to a controversial new analysis. The work suggests the parallel universes proposed by some quantum theorists may not actually be parallel but could interact – and with disastrous consequences.
Random quantum fluctuations mean the behaviour of particles and photons of light cannot be predicted exactly. The quantum equations that describe them contain a variety of different - and opposing - outcomes in their solution, such as a particular particle causing a bell to both ring and not ring in an experimental setup. Physicists then have to use an equation called the Born rule to calculate the probability of the bell ringing, and countless experiments have shown the rule works.
But researchers have long struggled to understand why a bell will ring – or not ring – in any given run of an experiment, since in theory it has the option of doing both. This conundrum, known as the quantum measurement problem, has led a small subset of physicists to argue that in fact the bell does do both - but that each possible outcome takes place in a different, parallel universe that pops into existence during the experiment.
"This is what the math suggests if you take it literally," says Robin Hanson of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, US. But the idea that "every microsecond, the universe splits into a bunch more universes boggles the mind."
Destructive interaction
And this idea, called the "many worlds" interpretation, raises other problems. Some theorists say it suggests that physicists doing a quantum experiment would find themselves in a random world, such that they would have an equal chance of seeing the bell ring or not ring. But this does not match the well-tested Born rule, which may predict that the bell should ring 70% of the time, for example.
Physicists have attacked this problem in a number of ways. Now Hanson, an economist who also studies physics, is taking a new approach. He argues that these multiple universes are not actually independent, as was thought, but interacting and sometimes destructive.
Quantum theory states that all universes are not created equal - each "parent" universe is much larger according to a particular quantum measure than its later descendants.
Quantum interactions between the universes were thought to be too small to really affect them, but Hanson says the interactions can be significant between universes of vastly different size.
Boiled worlds
The interactions can "smash or mangle the small worlds", says Hanson. He has not worked out exactly what happens, but he believes the small universes would be either destroyed or assimilated by the large universes, like specks of dust colliding with a planet.
"It could act like a big random fluctuation, like suddenly making the temperature of the universe become really high and boiling everything," he told New Scientist. "Or it could be more peaceful, where you're simply converted into somebody who remembers stuff from the large world, so the statistics would be those of the large world."
In this scenario, Born rule predictions that a bell should ring 70% of the time in an experiment work out because small worlds – in which bells ring less or more often – are too mangled to be observed. Hanson says there is a cut-off between small worlds that become mangled and large worlds that do not, and that most universes are near or below this line.
That suggests that the universe we live in now could be mangled at any moment by a larger universe, he says. "It could be there's a moment of pain before the end," Hanson says. "But you could be comforted by the fact that versions of you will go on, even if you don't."
Finely tuned
Physicists who have studied Hanson's idea say it is interesting, though preliminary and probably flawed. Michael Weissman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, US, says his biggest concern with the work is the notion of a cut-off.
He points out that the range of universe sizes is constantly growing. So the cut-off for what makes a universe observable must be perfectly balanced with that growth to produce the probabilities seen with the Born rule. "We don't have any real reason to think this fine-tuning will actually work out in practice," Weissman told New Scientist.
"It's interesting work and might feed into part of the Born rule problem," says David Wallace, a philosopher of quantum mechanics at Oxford University, UK. But he criticises Hanson's approach because "it doesn’t seem to handle one-off probabilities, only long-term sequences of probabilities," he told New Scientist. "It doesn’t tell us why right now we’d be better off betting on the bell ringing than not ringing."
Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society A (DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2005.1640)
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National Gallery opens dada exhibit

2006-02-23T14:08:00.000-08:00

National Gallery opens dada exhibit

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- Washington`s National Gallery of Art has launched a 447-work exhibit devoted to the irreverent dada art movement.
The brief movement launched in Switzerland during World War I was a nonsensical protest against the war, The Washington Post said.
The six capital cities of dada -- Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, New York and Paris -- are all represented in the National Gallery`s exhibit.
Although much of dada is sheer silliness, several of the compositions paved the way to more legitimate forms of art down the road, such as the minimalist movement that began 50 years later in the United States, the Post noted.
The exhibit includes abstract sculptures and collages as well as pioneering sounds and documentation of performance art of the time.
Admission to the National Gallery is free.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International
WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- Washington`s National Gallery of Art has launched a 447-work exhibit devoted to the irreverent dada art movement.
The brief movement launched in Switzerland during World War I was a nonsensical protest against the war, The Washington Post said.
The six capital cities of dada -- Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, New York and Paris -- are all represented in the National Gallery`s exhibit.
Although much of dada is sheer silliness, several of the compositions paved the way to more legitimate forms of art down the road, such as the minimalist movement that began 50 years later in the United States, the Post noted.
The exhibit includes abstract sculptures and collages as well as pioneering sounds and documentation of performance art of the time.
Admission to the National Gallery is free.
Copyright 2006 by United Press International

Quantum computer works best switched off

2006-02-22T18:52:00.000-08:00

New Scientist News - Quantum computer works best switched off

Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running.

The idea behind the feat, first proposed in 1998, is to put a quantum computer into a “superposition”, a state in which it is both running and not running. It is as if you asked Schrödinger's cat to hit "Run".

With the right set-up, the theory suggested, the computer would sometimes get an answer out of the computer even though the program did not run. And now researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works.

They send a photon into a system of mirrors and other optical devices, which included a set of components that run a simple database search by changing the properties of the photon.

The new design includes a quantum trick called the Zeno effect. Repeated measurements stop the photon from entering the actual program, but allow its quantum nature to flirt with the program's components - so it can become gradually altered even though it never actually passes through.

"It is very bizarre that you know your computer has not run but you also know what the answer is," says team member Onur Hosten.

This scheme could have an advantage over straightforward quantum computing. "A non-running computer produces fewer errors," says Hosten. That sentiment should have technophobes nodding enthusiastically.

Journal reference: Nature (vol 439, p 949)
From issue 2540 of New Scientist magazine, 22 February 2006, page 21

Modeling Swarm Behavior

2006-02-22T16:41:00.000-08:00

Modeling Swarm Behavior

The swarming behavior of ants, bees, termites, and other social insects has implications far beyond the hive. Swarm intelligence — the collective behavior of independent agents, each responding to local stimuli without supervision — can be used to understand and model phenomena as diverse as blood clotting, highway traffic patterns, gene expression, and immune responses, to name just a few. Swarm technology is proving useful in a wide range of applications including robotics and nanotechnology, molecular biology and medicine, traffic and crowd control, military tactics, and even interactive art.

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Students and faculty in the Evolutionary and Swarm Design (ESD) Research Group at the University of Calgary, Canada, use Mac computers and Mac OS X to model swarm behavior and to apply it to an ever-increasing number of real-world problems. Swarm modeling theories provide new conceptual frameworks for extending the field of artificial intelligence and suggest new possibilities for computer hardware and software design.

Christian Jacob has led the ESD Research Group since its inception. Like many swarm researchers, he believes that biologically-inspired computational tools like the ones being developed in the ESD Research Group will prove invaluable for developing many of the important technologies of the twenty-first century.

“What I find intriguing is the fact that very similar principles seem to apply to swarm-like systems regardless of scale,” Jacob says. “We can use the models that describe army ant raiding behavior to predict the behavior of automobile traffic or pedestrians on the road. The models that describe how birds and fish flock and school have practical applications in, for example, genetic algorithm test functions and the training of artificial neural network weights.”

A Mind of Its Own

In contrast to the top-down organization that characterizes many human endeavors, many social species achieve their communal goals using a purely bottom-up approach with no central command-and-control structure. A swarm of termites, for example, exhibits a collective intelligence that far exceeds the intelligence of any individual insect, which by itself has limited capabilities for processing and communicating information.

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(Ads by Google)The collective intelligence of the swarm emerges in a decentralized way from the actions of individual insects responding to local stimuli from the environment and, most importantly, from other members of the swarm. There is no “boss” in charge. No individual insect grasps the big picture. Yet in the aggregate, the local actions of each insect based on the local stimuli available to it can accomplish a collective goal that serves the interests of the whole community.

“It turns out that what makes sense in the biological world often make sense in the computational world as well,” explains Jacob. “For some types of applications, a collection of small, simple agents with limited intelligence, local decision-making capability, and a communication path to nearby peers can outperform a large centralized processor. Moreover, a decentralized system has several important advantages over a centralized one, most notably robustness and flexibility.”

Source: University of Calgary (By Frank Lacombe)

Big fine for damaging artistic urinal - World News - MSNBC.com

2006-02-20T18:10:00.000-08:00

Big fine for damaging artistic urinal - World News - MSNBC.com

PARIS - A Frenchman who attacked and damaged “Fountain,” a urinal declared a work of art by Dada pioneer Marcel Duchamp, was ordered on Tuesday to pay a fine of $262,700.

A Paris court also gave Pierre Pinoncelli, 77, a three-month suspended sentence for taking a hammer to the absurdist artwork, the second time he has attacked it since 1993. The attack last month left the ceramic urinal slightly cracked.

Duchamp was a leader of the Dada movement, an avant garde “anti-art” school of the early 20th century that mocked conventional standards, and “Fountain,” made in 1917 — is considered one of the most influential artworks of its kind.

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“This was a wink at Dadaism,” Pinoncelli told the court in his defense. “I wanted to pay homage to the Dada spirit.”

Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

Knowledge is proud

2005-12-03T22:40:00.000-08:00

"Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more."
William Cowper (1731 - 1800); English poet.

The age of your heart

2005-12-03T22:39:00.000-08:00

"The age of your heart is the age of what you love."
Marcel Prévost (1862-1941); French writer.

It is not enough to have a good mind

2005-12-03T22:38:00.000-08:00

"It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well."
René Descartes (1596-1650); French philosopher and mathematician.

Education is

2005-12-03T22:37:00.000-08:00

"Education is the best provision for old age."
Aristotles (384 BC-322 BC); Greek philosopher.

What is past

2005-12-03T22:36:00.000-08:00

"What is past is prologue."
William Shakespeare (1564-1616); English playwright, poet

A wise person does at once

2005-11-26T01:09:00.000-08:00

"A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last.
Both do the same thing; only at different times."
Lord Acton (1834-1902); British historian.

Hope herself ceases

2005-11-19T21:48:00.000-08:00

"Hope herself ceases to be happiness when Impatience companions her."
John Ruskin (1819-1900); British writer and critic.

try to stop knowledge from going forward

2005-11-19T21:46:00.000-08:00

"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward.
Ignorance is never better than knowledge"
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) US Italian-born physicist

America had often been discovered

2005-11-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

"America had often been discovered before Columbus,
but it had always been hushed up"
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet

Knowing

2005-11-19T21:43:00.000-08:00

"Knowing is remembering."
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC); Greek philosopher.

It's a sign of mediocrity

2005-11-19T21:41:00.000-08:00

"It's a sign of mediocrity when you demonstrate gratitude with
moderation."
Roberto Benigni (1952), Italian actor, comedian, and director

Don't fear failure

2005-11-19T21:40:00.000-08:00

"Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new thing"
Louis E. Boone (1941), United States academic author

Machines take me by surprise

2005-11-19T21:39:00.001-08:00

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."
Alan Turing (1912 - 1954), English mathematician
and one of the founding fathers of modern computing

Fashion is a form of ugliness

2005-11-19T21:39:00.000-08:00

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable
that we have to alter it every six months."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet

The two most powerful warriors

2005-11-19T21:37:00.001-08:00

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910); Russian novelist.

Practice and thought

2005-11-19T21:37:00.000-08:00

"Practice and thought might gradually forge many an art."
Virgil (70 BC - 19 BC); Roman poet.

Nature has planted in our minds

2005-11-19T21:35:00.000-08:00

"Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the
truth."
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC-43 BC.); Roman orator, philosopher,
statesman.

Many a truth

2005-11-19T21:34:00.001-08:00

"Many a truth sprang from an error."
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830 - 1916); Austrian novelist.

The World was creat

2005-11-19T21:34:00.000-08:00

"The World was created to be recreated."
Georges Duhamel (1884-1966); French writer.

The person who has lived the most

2005-11-19T21:33:00.000-08:00

"The person who has lived the most is not the one with the most years
but the one with the richest experiences."
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); French philosopher.

Inspiration is

2005-11-19T21:31:00.000-08:00

"Inspiration is the opportunity of genius."
Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850); French writer.

Be glad of life

2005-11-19T21:30:00.000-08:00

"Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love
and to work and to play and to look up at the stars."
Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933); US writer.

When ideas fail

2005-11-19T21:27:00.000-08:00

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832); German dramatist,
novelist, poet, and scientist.

Natural abilities are like natural plants

2005-11-19T21:26:00.000-08:00

"Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study".
Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626); English author and philosopher.

What makes the desert beautiful

2005-11-19T21:24:00.001-08:00

"What makes the desert beautiful is that
somewhere it hides a well."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944); French writer.

A people that values its privileges

2005-11-19T21:24:00.000-08:00

"A people that values its privileges above
its principles soon loses both."
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), US general & politician

There's only one corner of the universe

2005-11-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

"There's only one corner of the universe you can be
certain of improving, and that's your own self."
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963); English author.

Life is a long lesson

2005-11-19T21:21:00.000-08:00

"Life is a long lesson in humility."
James M. Barrie (1860-1937); Scottish dramatist & novelist.

I accept chaos

2005-11-19T21:20:00.000-08:00

"I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me".
Bob Dylan (1941); US singer/songwriter.

indistinguishable from magic

2005-11-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - ); English physicist & science fiction author.

There are no such things

2005-11-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

"There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of
science."
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895); French biologist & bacteriologist.

The future belongs

2005-11-19T21:03:00.000-08:00

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their
dreams."
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884- 1962); US writer and politician.

To exist is to change

2005-11-18T16:15:00.000-08:00

"To exist is to change, to change is to mature,
to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly."
Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941); French philosopher.

Voyage of discovery

2005-11-18T04:33:00.000-08:00

The Spectator.co.uk

Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism: it’s funny how many names of modern art movements originated as insults on the lips of critics. Not Dada, though. The founders of art’s first anartism were ahead of the game, pre-emptively christening their movement with a silly name designed to put any critic off his stroke.

The many derivations since attributed to the word ‘dada’ are missing the point, which is that, as founder Dadaist Tristan Tzara plainly stated, ‘Dada does not mean anything.’ Dada was a nickname given to a war baby born in 1916 at the Café Voltaire in Zurich and brought up by a Bohemian riff-raff of bachelor uncles — and the odd aunt — who encouraged it to misbehave. But the movement’s fundamental aims were serious. For the group of young pacifist writers and artists who adopted the name as an artistic protest against the horrors of the first world war, Dada was also a manifesto — the first and most succinct of many — declaring the founders’ radical intention to throw all capitalism’s precious art toys out of the cot.

My, how baby has grown! Who would have guessed that less than a century later it would be given the run ...

The important thing

2005-11-18T04:01:00.000-08:00

"The important thing is never to stop asking questions."
Albert Einstein (1879-1955); physicist and mathematician.

Dada

2005-11-17T14:40:00.001-08:00

http://www.centrepompidou.fr/images/illustrations/XL/EXP-DADA2.jpg

Centre Pompidou - Art culture mus�e expositions cin�mas conf�rences d�bats spectacles concerts

2005-11-17T14:40:00.000-08:00

Centre Pompidou - Art culture mus�e expositions cin�mas conf�rences d�bats spectacles concerts

This exhibition spans Dada's various expressions

2005-11-17T14:38:00.000-08:00

Centre Pompidou - Art culture mus�e expositions cin�mas conf�rences d�bats spectacles concerts

This exhibition spans Dada's various expressions as they materialised in Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, Paris and New York between 1916 (when Zurich saw Cabaret Voltaire open) and 1924 (when most Dadaist groups disbanded or changed direction). This is the first nothing-but-Dada-by-Dada exhibition – dedicated to one of the historical avant-garde's most influential movements.

Commissaires / organisateurs:
Mnam/Cci - Laurent Le Bon

-----------------------

Dada: art as weapon against establishment|

2005-11-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

Dada: art as weapon against establishment|19Nov05|Socialist Worker

The French Marxist Michael Löwy looks at a new exhibition of Dadaist artworks

The French Centre for Modern Art in Paris is featuring a rich exhibition about Dada until 9 January 2006.

In some 40 interconnected rooms one can hear sounds and see objects, paintings, drawings, documents and films from Zurich, Berlin, Cologne, Paris and other cities where the Dada movement developed from 1916-23.

Key exhibits, which have become symbols of the irreverent and provocative spirit of Dadaism, include Marcel Duchamp’s famous mustachioed Mona Lisa (1919), graced with the title LHOOQ (read in French, the initials mean “she has a hot arse”). Also by Duchamp is the readymade object Fountain (1917), a simple and elegant ceramic urinal turned upside down.

A pig-headed dummy with a German army officer’s uniform by George Grosz and John Heartfield (1920) hangs from the ceiling. Other artworks include Francis Picabia’s Holy Virgin (1920), a huge inkblot on paper, and René Clair’s fascinating picture Entr’acte (1924).

So what was Dada? Born in Zurich, Switzerland, at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 under the initiative of Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara (an immigrant Romanian Jew), Sophie Taeuber and Richard Huelsenbeck, it came out of the despair and disgust which reigned among young people opposed to the First World War.

It was first of all a cultural protest against war, militarism, chauvinism and the bourgeois civilisation that gave rise to such monsters. The name Dada was chosen by sticking a knife into a dictionary, and it became the rallying cry for a movement which soon spread to Berlin, Cologne, Paris and New York.

Irreverence, derision, black humour and absurdity were the weapons used by these young artists in order to express their rage and supreme contempt for the values of the established order. The slate had to be cleaned of all bourgeois conventions, traditions and expectations.

The movement had a powerfully destructive attitude towards official art and culture, but it was also an immensely creative force, inventing new and unexpected forms of expression.

In a formal sense it is hard to identify a specific Dada style or a favourite Dada medium, so little unity was there among their works. What is there in common between the proto-surrealist paintings of Max Ernst, the disturbing photos of Man Ray or the collages by Hanna Hoch?

Not much, except a certain Dadaist spirit… All dogma was rejected and no activity eluded the Dadaist fury.

The political dimension — insufficiently represented, as one might expect, in the Paris exhibition — was very much present in Dadaism from its origins in Zurich and then, in a much more direct way, in Germany.

Berlin Dadaists supported the revolution of 1918-9. At the Congress of the Weimar Constitution, Dadaist Johannes Baader launched a tract signed by “The Central Council of Dada for the World Revolution”. Their Communist sympathies were very much visible in the International Dada Exhibition of 1920, which proclaimed “Dada is political”.

After 1920 Paris became the centre of Dada. André Breton, Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard organised a mock trial of Maurice Barrès, a gifted but ultra-reactionary writer.

However soon afterwards in 1923 disagreements between Breton and Tzara led to the dissolution of the original Dada movement.

With the publication of Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 1924 a new movement appeared which inherited the Dadaist subversive spirit, but aimed at an alternative culture, against bourgeois society and art, an alternative tapping into the infinite resources of desire and the marvellous.

Go to the exhibition site

Michael Löwy’s recent book Theory Of Revolution In The Young Marx is available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop. Phone 020 7637 1848.

© Copyright Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original and leave this notice in place.

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Dalai Lama Links Science, Buddhism

2005-11-12T23:00:00.000-08:00

Dalai Lama Links Science, Buddhism - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON - Science and Buddhism share a quest of open investigation into the nature of reality, and science can be a pathway to discovering well-being and happiness, the Dalai Lama told the Society for Neuroscience on Saturday.

Tibet's spiritual leader, speaking alternately in English and through a translator, praised neuroscience — the study of the brain and nervous system — as important work he's been interested in for 15 years.

"I believe we want happiness," he said, adding that the way to transform society is through education and by boosting among individuals, families and communities "some of the useful emotions such as compassion or forgiveness."

Science is particularly important, he said, because it reaches both the religious and nonreligious and can help identify the factors and forces that promote well-being.

And on the growing controversy surrounding the teaching of intelligent design in addition to evolution in U.S. classrooms, the Dalai Lama said the greater the dialogue, the better.

But the Dalai Lama's visit to Washington was not without controversy. More than 500 people, many of them Society for Neuroscience members, signed a petition decrying the selection of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner as a speaker.

Society President Carol Barnes said Saturday that six abstracts were withdrawn from the conference in protest and that the objections were both over the Dalai Lama's qualifications to address a scientific meeting and his subject matter as well as his politically charged leadership.

The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in 1959 following an aborted uprising against Chinese rule in the territory and now keeps an office in exile in the Himalayan town of Dharmsala, India.

"He is qualified to speak about his own experience," Barnes said, adding that the goal of the society's new "Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society" series is to expand the horizons of the group's membership.

She said a counter petition supporting the Dalai Lama's visit also was circulated.

___

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Society for Neuroscience: http://www.sfn.org

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Not the Wind, Not the Flag

2005-11-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

Not the Wind, Not the Flag

Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said: `The flag is moving.'
The other said: `The wind is moving.'

The sixth patriach happened to be passing by. He told them: `Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving.'

Mumon's Comment: The sixth patriach said: `The wind is not moving, the flag is not moving. Mind is moving.' What did he mean? If you understand this intimately, you will see the two monks there trying to buy iron and gaining gold. The sixth patriach could not bear to see those two dull heads, so he made such a bargain.

Wind, flag, mind moves.
The same understanding.
When the mouth opens
All are wrong.

The Meaning of Meaning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2005-11-07T20:02:00.000-08:00

The Meaning of Meaning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Meaning of Meaning subtitled A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923) was co-authored by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. It is accompanied by the two supplementary essays by Bronislaw Malinowski and F. G. Crookshank.

Contents [hide]
1 Opening quotations
2 Thoughts, words and things
3 Mental, verbal and external contexts
4 Attention to C. S. Peirce
5 Supplementary essays
6 Criticism
7 Aftermath
8 Coincidental titles
9 See also
10 External links

[edit]
Opening quotations
"All life comes back to the question of our speech -- the medium through which we communicate." -- HENRY JAMES.

"Error is never so difficult to be destroyed as when it has its root in Language." -- BENTHAM.

"We have to make use of language, which is made up necessarily of preconceived ideas. Such ideas unconsciously held are the most dangerous of all." -- POINCARÉ.

"By the grammatical structure of a group of languages everything runs smoothly for one kind of philosophical system, whereas the way is as it were barred for certain other possibilities." -- NIETZSCHE.

"An Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, and an Italian cannot by any means bring themselves to think quite alike, at least on subjects that involve any depth of sentiment : they have not the verbal means." -- Prof. J. S. MACKENZIE.

"In Primitive Thought the name and the object named are associated in such wise that the one is regarded as a part of the other. The imperfect separation of words from things characterizes Greek speculation in general." -- HERBERT SPENCER.

"The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever receives a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own : and if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious, too high to be an object of science." -- J. S. MILL.

"Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach on the province of grammarians, and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern." -- HUME.

"Men contend themselves with the same words as other people use, as if the very sound necessarily carried the same meaning." -- LOCKE.

"A verbal discussion may be important or unimportant, but it is at least desirable to know that it is verbal." -- Sir G. CORNEWALL LEWIS.

"Scientific controversies constantly resolve themselves into differences about the meaning of words." -- Prof. A. SCHUSTER.

[edit]
Thoughts, words and things

the meaning of meaning

2005-11-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

meaning - definition of meaning by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

mean·ing (mnng)
n.
1. Something that is conveyed or signified; sense or significance.
2. Something that one wishes to convey, especially by language: The writer's meaning was obscured by his convoluted prose.
3. An interpreted goal, intent, or end: "The central meaning of his pontificate is to restore papal authority" Conor Cruise O'Brien.
4. Inner significance: "But who can comprehend the meaning of the voice of the city?" O. Henry.
adj.
1. Full of meaning; expressive.
2. Disposed or intended in a specified manner. Often used in combination: a well-meaning fellow; ill-meaning intentions.
Synonyms: meaning, acceptation, import, sense, significance, signification
These nouns refer to the idea conveyed by something, such as a word, action, gesture, or situation: Synonyms are words with the same or nearly the same meaning. In one of its acceptations value is a technical term in music. The import of his statement is ambiguous. The term anthropometry has only one sense. The significance of a green traffic light is widely understood. Linguists have determined the hieroglyphics' signification.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

ThesaurusLegend: Synonyms Related Words AntonymsNoun 1. meaning - the message that is intended or expressed or signified; "what is the meaning of this sentence"; "the significance of a red traffic light"; "the signification of Chinese characters"; "the import of his announcement was ambigtuous"
signification, import, significance
subject matter, content, message, substance - what a communication that is about something is about
lexical meaning - the meaning of a word that depends on the nonlinguistic concepts it is used to express
grammatical meaning - the meaning of a word that depends on its role in a sentence; varies with inflectional form
symbolisation, symbolization - the use of symbols to convey meaning
signified, sense - the meaning of a word or expression; the way in which a word or expression or situation can be interpreted; "the dictionary gave several senses for the word"; "in the best sense charity is really a duty"; "the signifier is linked to the signified"
connotation, intension - what you must know in order to determine the reference of an expression
referent - something referred to; the object of a reference
gist, burden, essence, effect, core - the central meaning or theme of a speech or literary work
purport, intent, spirit - the intended meaning of a communication
moral, lesson - the significance of a story or event; "the moral of the story is to love thy neighbor"
nuance, subtlety, nicety, refinement, shade - a subtle difference in meaning or opinion or attitude; "without understanding the finer nuances you can't enjoy the humor"; "don't argue about shades of meaning"
overtone - (usually plural) an ulterior implicit meaning or quality; "overtones of despair"
point - a brief version of the essential meaning of something; "get to the point"; "he missed the point of the joke"; "life has lost its point"
2. meaning - the idea that is intended; "What is the meaning of this proverb?"
substance
idea, thought - the content of cognition; the main thing you are thinking about; "it was not a good idea"; "the thought never entered my mind"
implication, significance, import - a meaning that is not expressly stated but can be inferred; "the significance of his remark became clear only later"; "the expectation was spread both by word and by implication"
tenor, strain - pervading note of an utterance; "I could follow the general tenor of his argument"
undercurrent, undertone - subdued emotional quality underlying an utterance; implicit meaning
denotation, reference, extension - the most direct or specific meaning of a word or expression; the class of objects that an expression refers to; "the extension of `satellite of Mars' is the set containing only Demos and Phobos"
reference - the relation between a word or phrase and the object or idea it refers to; "he argued that reference is a consequence of conditioned reflexes"
connotation - an idea that is implied or suggested
Adj. 1. meaning - rich in significance or implication; "a meaning look"; "pregnant with meaning"
pregnant, significant
meaningful - having a meaning or purpose; "a meaningful explanation"; "a meaningful discussion"; "a meaningful pause"

Koan

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Koan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A koan is a story, dialog, question, or statement in the history and lore of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, generally containing aspects that are inaccessible to rational understanding, yet that may be accessible to Intuition. Koans are often used by Zen practitioners as objects of meditation to induce an experience of enlightenment or realization, and by Zen teachers as testing questions when a student wishes to validate their experience of enlightenment.

A famous koan is, "Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?" (oral tradition, attributed to Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769), considered a reviver of the koan tradition in Japan)..

Koans are said to reflect the enlightened or awakened state of historical sages and legendary figures who uttered them, and sometimes said to confound the habit of discursive thought or shock the mind into awareness or an experience of metanoia or radical change of consciousness and perspective, from the point of view of which the koan 'question' is resolved, and the practitioner's religious faith is enhanced.

Koans typically include the words of, or dialog with, an awakened or enlightened person, generally one authorized to teach in a lineage that regards Bodhidharma (c. 5th-6th century) as its ancestor. Informally, the term koan sometimes refers to any experience that accompanies awakening, spiritual insight, or kensho.

As used by teachers, monks, and students in training, koan can refer to a story selected from traditional sayings and doings of such sages, a perplexing element of the story, a concise but critical word or phrase (話頭 hua-tou) extracted from the story, or to the story appended by poetry and commentary authored by later Zen teachers, sometimes layering commentary upon commentary.

English-speaking non-Zen practitioners sometimes use koan to refer to an unanswerable question or a meaningless statement. However, in Zen practice, a koan is not meaningless, and teachers often do expect students to present an appropriate and timely response when asked about a koan. Even so, a koan is not a riddle or a puzzle1. Appropriate responses to a koan vary according to circumstances; there is no fixed answer that is correct in every circumstance.

The word koan corresponds to the Chinese characters 公案 which can be rendered in various ways: gōng'àn (Chinese pinyin); kung-an (Chinese Wade-Giles); gong'an (Korean); cong-an (Vietnamese); kōan (Japanese Hepburn; often transliterated koan). Of these, "koan" is the most common in English. Just as Japanese Zen, Chinese Ch'an, Korean Son, and Vietnamese Thien, and Western Zen all share many features in common, likewise koans play similar roles in each, although significant cultural differences exist.

Contents [hide]
1 Examples
2 Roles of the koan in Zen practice
3 Etymology and the evolving meaning of koan
4 The role of koans in the Soto, Rinzai, and other sects
5 Interpretation of koans
5.1 The sound of one hand
5.2 The Gateless Gate
5.2.1 Case 1: Zhaozhou's Dog
5.2.2 Case 6: Buddha Holds out a Flower
5.2.3 Case 7: Zhaozhou Washes the Bowl
5.2.4 Case 8: Keichu's Wheel
5.2.5 Case 29: Huineng's Flag
5.2.6 Case 37: Zhaozhou's Cypress
5.3 Other Traditional Koans
5.3.1 What is the Buddha?
5.3.2 Kill the Buddha
5.3.3 The Abbot's Gift
5.4 Contemporary Koans
6 See also
7 External links
8 References

[edit]
Examples
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" Zhaozhou said, "Wú".
("Zhaozhou" is rendered as "Chao-chou" in Wade-Giles, and pronounced "Joshu" in Japanese. "Wu" appears as "mu" in archaic Japanese, meaning "no", "not", or "nonbeing" in English. This is a fragment of Case #1 of the Wu-Men Kuan. However, note that, a similar koan records that on another occasion, Zhaozhou said "yes" in response [Case #18 of the Book of Serenity].)
Hui Neng asked Hui Ming, "Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born".
(This is a fragment of case #23 of the Wu-Men Kuan.)
A monk asked Tung Shan, "What is Buddha?" Tung Shan said, "Three pounds of flax".
(This is a fragment of case #18 of the Wu-Men Kuan as well as case #12 of the Blue Cliff Record.)
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "What is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the west?" Zhaozhou said, "The cypress tree in the courtyard".
(This is a fragment of case #37 of the Wu-Men Kuan as well as case #47 of the Book of Serenity.)
[edit]
Roles of the koan in Zen practice
Koans collectively form a substantial body of literature studied by Zen practitioners and scholars worldwide. Koan collections commonly referenced in English include the Blue Cliff Record (Chinese: Pi-yen lu; Japanese: Hekiganroku), the Book of Equanimity (also known as the Book of Serenity; Chinese: Ts'ung-jung lu; Japanese Shoyoroku), both collected in their present forms during the 12th century); and Gateless Barrier (also known as Gateless Gate; Chinese: Wu-Men Kuan; Japanese Mumonkan) collected during the 13th century). In these and subsequent collections, a terse "main case" of a koan often accompanies prefatory remarks, commentary, poems, proverbs and other phrases, and further commentary, etc. about prior emendations. Koan literature typically derives from older texts and traditions, including texts that record the sayings and doings of sages; from Transmission of the Lamp records, which document the monastic tradition of certifying teachers; and from folklore and cultural reference points common among medieval Chinese. According to Victor Hori—a native English speaker who has experienced extensive koan training in Japanese monasteries—koan literature was also influenced by the pre-Zen Chinese tradition of the "literary game"—a competition involving improvised poetry2. Over centuries, contemporary collections continued to inspire commentary, and current koan collections contain modern commentaries. New koans on occasion are proposed and collected—sometimes seriously, sometimes in jest.
A koan or part of a koan may serve as a point of concentration during meditation and other activities, often called "koan practice" (as distinct from "koan study", the study of koan literature). Generally, a qualified teacher provides instruction in koan practice to qualified students in private. In the Wu-Men Kuan, case #1, Wu-Men wrote "...concentrate yourself into this 'Wu'...making your whole body one great inquiry. Day and night work intently at it. Do not attempt nihilistic or dualistic interpretations."3 Beyond this, written instructions are rare.
A koan may be used as a test of a Zen student's ability. For monks in formal training, and for some laypersons, a teacher invokes a koan and demands some definite response from a student during private interviews.
Koans are presented by teachers to students and other members of the community, often including the teacher's unique commentary. A koan may seem to be the subject of a talk or private interview with a student. However, a koan is said to supersede subject-object duality and thus cannot necessarily be said to be the "subject" of such encounters. The dialog, lecture, or sermon may more resemble performance, ritual duty, or poetry reading.
[edit]
Etymology and the evolving meaning of koan
Koan is a Japanese rendering of the Chinese term (公案), transliterated kung-an (Wade-Giles) or gōng'àn (Pinyin). Chung Feng Ming Pen (中峰明本 1263-1323) wrote that kung-an is an abbreviation for kung-fu an-tu (公府之案牘, Pinyin gōngfǔ àndú, pronounced in Japanese as ko-fu no an-toku), which referred to a "public record" or the "case records of a public law court"4 in Tang-dynasty China. Koan/kung-an thus serves as a metaphor for principles of reality that go beyond the private opinion of one person. A teacher's test also resembles the judgement of a student's ability to recognize and actualize that principle. Moreover, commentaries in koan collections bear some similarity to judicial decisions that cite and sometimes modify precedents. An article by T. Griffith Foulk claims ``...Its literal meaning is the "table" or "bench" [an] of a "magistrate" or "judge" [kung]..."4. Apparently, kung-an was itself originally a metaphor—an article of furniture that came to denote legal precedents.

Before the tradition of meditating on koans was recorded, Huangbo Xiyun (720-814) and Yun Men (864-949) are both recorded to have uttered the line "Yours is a clear-cut case (chien-cheng kung-an) but I spare you thirty blows", seeming to pass judgement over students' feeble expressions of enlightenment. Xuedou Zhongxian (雪竇重顯 980-1052)—the original compiler of the 100 cases that later served as the basis for the Blue Cliff Record—used the term kung-an just once in that collection (according to Foulk4) in Case #64.

Yuanwu (圜悟克勤 1063-1135), compiler of the Blue Cliff Record (碧巌録) in its present form, "gained some insight" by contemplating (kan) koans5. Yuanwu may have been instructed to contemplate phrases by his teachers Chen-ju Mu-che (dates unknown) and Wu-tzu Fa-yen (五祖法演 ?-1104). Thus, by the Sung Dynasty, the term kung-an had apparently taken on roughly its present meaning from the legal jargon.

Subsequent interpreters have influenced the way the term koan is used. Dogen Zenji wrote of Genjokoan, which relates everyday life experiences to koans. Hakuin Ekaku recommended preparing for koan practice by concentrating on qi breathing and its effect on the body's center of gravity, called the tanden or hara in Japanese—thereby associating koan practice with pre-existing Taoist and Yogic chakra meditative practices.

[edit]
The role of koans in the Soto, Rinzai, and other sects
Koan practice—concentrating on koans during meditation and other activities—is particularly important among Japanese practictioners of the Rinzai sect of Zen. However, study of koan literature is common to both Soto and Rinzai Zen. There is a common misconception that Soto and related schools do not use koans at all, but while few Soto practictioners concentrate on koans while meditating, many Soto practitioners are indeed highly familiar with koans.

In fact, the Soto sect has a strong historical connection with koans. Many koan collections were compiled by Soto priests. During the 13th century, Dogen, founder of the Soto sect in Japan, compiled some 300 koans in the volumes known as the Greater Shobogenzo. Other koans collections compiled and annotated by Soto priests include The Iron Flute (Japanese: Tetteki Tosui, compiled by Genro in 1783) and Verses and Commentaries on One Hundred Old Cases of Tenchian (Japanese: Tenchian hyakusoku hyoju, compiled by Tetsumon in 1771.) However, according to Michael Mohr, "...koan practice was largely expunged from the Soto school through the efforts of Gento Sokuchu (1729-1807), the eleventh abbot of Entsuji, who in 1795 was nominated abbot of Eiheiji."6, p245.

A significant number of people who meditate with koans are affiliated with Japan's Sanbo Kyodan sect, and with various schools derived from that sect in North America, Europe, and Australia. Sanbo Kyodan was established in the 20th century, and has roots in both the Soto and Rinzai traditions.

[edit]
Interpretation of koans
Zen teachers and practitioners insist that the meaning of a koan can only be demonstrated in a live experience. Texts (including koan collections and encyclopedia articles) cannot convey that meaning. Yet the Zen tradition has produced a great deal of literature, including thousands of koans and at least dozens of volumes of commentary. Nevertheless, teachers have long alerted students to the danger of confusing the interpretation of a koan with the realization of a koan. When teachers say "do not confuse the pointing finger with the moon", they indicate that awakening is the standard — not ability to interpret.

Even so, koans emerge from a literary context, and understanding that context can often remove some — but presumably not all — of the mystery surrounding a koan. For example, evidence7 suggests that when a monk asked Zhaozhou "does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?", the monk was asking a question that students had asked teachers for generations. The controversy over whether all beings have the potential for enlightment is even older8 — and in fact, vigorous controversy9 still surrounds the matter of Buddha nature.

No amount of interpretation seems to be able to exhaust a koan. So it's unlikely that there can be a "definitive" interpretation. Teachers typically warn against over-intellectualizing koans, but the mysteries of koans compel some students to reduce (but not necessarily eliminate) the uncertainties — for example, by clarifying metaphors that were likely well-known to monks at the time the koans originally circulated. In that spirit, we present some interpretations that are certainly not the last word.

[edit]
The sound of one hand
Two hands clap and there is a sound. What is the sound of one hand?
— Hakuin Ekaku
The traditional response to this is to thrust out one's hand. The reference to two hands is understood as a metaphor for dualism (yin/yang, subject/object, etc) and intellectual discrimination, while the reference to one hand is a metaphor for nondualism.
...in the beginning a monk first thinks a koan is an inert object upon which to focus attention; after a long period of consecutive repetition, one realizes that the koan is also a dynamic activity, the very activity of seeking an answer to the koan. The koan is both the object being sought and the relentless seeking itself. In a koan, the self sees the self not directly but under the guise of the koan...When one realizes ("makes real") this identity, then two hands have become one. The practitioner becomes the koan that he or she is trying to understand. That is the sound of one hand.
— G. Victor Sogen Hori, Translating the Zen Phrase Book 11
[edit]
The Gateless Gate
The Gateless Gate or Mumonkan is a collection of 48 koans and commentaries compiled in the early 13th century by Chinese monk Wumen. Several of these involve Zen master Zhaozhou, otherwise known as Chao-chou or, in Japanese, Jōshū.

[edit]
Case 1: Zhaozhou's Dog
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"
Zhaozhou replied, "Wú."
This koan is particularly well-known. Translators often render Zhaozhou's answer as mu from Japanese retellings. Wu and mu are variously interpreted as meaning no, not, or nonexistence. Centuries earlier, the same Chinese character appeared at the end of verse 40 of Lao Zi's famed Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) in a line sometimes translated as "existence emerges from nonexistence". Mahayana Buddhist doctrine codified in the Nirvana Sutra held that all sentient beings possess the capacity for enlightenment. The commentary of teachers in the Linji (Rinzai in Japanese) tradition tends to emphasize that the interpretation pertains to a challenge the monk poses to Zhaozhou to demonstrate Buddha-nature without becoming entangled in doctrine; and that this interpretation only has meaning in the context of a meditator who contemplates the koan. Some students speculate otherwise, for example that wu is a pun that means "It is unknowable whether the dog has Buddha-nature" or "The question has no meaning." Others have suggested the word "wu" was originally intended to also convey the sound of a barking dog, the way we would say "woof!". In effect, indicating Zhaozhou answering by being the dog. This is consistent with the general principle that koan "answers" involve a change of perspective, rather than a linguistic answer.
In another koan, Zhaozhou answers differently:

One time a monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"
Zhaozhou answered, "No."
Another time, a monk asked Zhaozhou, "Does a dog have Buddha-nature or not?"
Zhaozhou answered, "Yes."
This is related to but in contrast to the previous koan; here, the emphasis is on the applicability of the answer rather than the meaning of Buddha-nature.
[edit]
Case 6: Buddha Holds out a Flower
When Shakyamuni Buddha was at Mount Grdhrakuta, he held out a flower to his listeners.
Everyone was silent.
Only Mahakashyapa broke into a broad smile.
The Buddha said, "I have the True Dharma Eye, the Marvelous Mind of Nirvana, the True Form of the Formless, and the Subtle Dharma Gate, independent of words and transmitted beyond doctrine. This I have entrusted to Mahakashyapa."
From Wu-Men's comment about this koan: "Gautama insolently insults noble people. He sells dog meat labeled as mutton and thinks it commendable." Wu-Men actually intends his scathing insult as a form of high praise, thwarting any student's attempt to rationally explain the koan as feeble.
[edit]
Case 7: Zhaozhou Washes the Bowl
A monk asked Zhaozhou to teach him.
Zhaozhou asked, "Have you eaten your meal?"
The monk replied, "Yes, I have."
"Then go wash your bowl," said Zhaozhou.
At that moment, the monk was enlightened.
This koan is beloved of students, perhaps because it seems to negate the need to understand obscure doctrines. Wu-Men comments in verse "Because it's so clear / it takes long to realize", and straightforward it may seem, but this koan is an idiom and the student is assumed to be aware of its cultural context. If one does not know this context, the koan cannot be understood.
The meal of consideration is a traditional meal of rice. It was customary for monks to maintain samadhi while eating this meal, and so Zhaozhou is not asking whether the monk has eaten: he asks instead whether the monk was able to remain in samadhi throughout the meal. The monk affirms, and then realizes he has already received the teaching.
[edit]
Case 8: Keichu's Wheel
Getsuan said to his students, "Keichu, the first wheel-maker in China, made two wheels having fifty spokes each. Suppose you took a wheel and removed the nave uniting the spokes. What would become of the wheel? If Keichu had done so, could he be called the master wheel-maker?"
This koan alludes to the Tao Te Ching, one of the main texts of Taoism:
We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
[edit]
Case 29: Huineng's Flag
Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind. One said to the other, "The flag is moving."
The other replied, "The wind is moving."
Huineng overheard this. He said, "Not the flag, not the wind; mind is moving."
Of the two monks, Wumen says they were trying to buy iron; Huineng, out of compassion, gave them gold instead. This koan demonstrates the idea that in naming an object, one clouds one's understanding of its true nature.
[edit]
Case 37: Zhaozhou's Cypress
A monk asked Zhaozhou, "Why did Bodhidharma come to China?"
Zhaozhou replied, "The cypress in the courtyard."
After Zhaozhou's death, a monk asked Huijiao (a disciple of Zhaozhou's) about the cypress koan. Huijiao denied that Zhaozhou ever said it. The disciple did indeed know Zhaozhou's koan (it was very famous already), but felt it would be better to retire the koan for this particular monk. This denial has become a koan itself.
Reportedly, Chinese translators have tended to render the type of tree in the koan as "cypress" while Japanese translators have rendered it as "the oak tree in the courtyard".10
[edit]
Other Traditional Koans
[edit]
What is the Buddha?
Zen masters asked this question have given various answers. Here are some of them:

The Buddha? He is on the meditation hall altar.
He is made of clay and covered with gold.
Don't talk nonsense.
The danger comes from your mouth.
What is rounder than the Sun.
We are surrounded by mountains.
The distance between thought and a pin wheel.
Look at this man who exposes his breast and walks with bare feet.
This flax weighs three pounds. (Tozan's answer in case 18 of The Gateless Gate)
Dried dung. (Yunmen WenyanUmmon's answer in case 21)
[edit]
Kill the Buddha
If you meet the Buddha, kill him.
— Linji
If you are thinking about Buddha, this is thinking and delusion, not awakening. One must destroy preconceptions of the Buddha. Zen master Shunryu Suzuki wrote in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind during an introduction to Zazen, "Kill the Buddha if the Buddha exists somewhere else. Kill the Buddha, because you should resume your own Buddha nature."
[edit]
The Abbot's Gift
A Zen monk, early in his training, is preparing to leave the monastery and switch locations, for that is common in the Zen practice. Before he leaves he goes to the abbot of the monastery, to say goodbye. He does so, but the abbot says he has a gift for him. Now, it is part of the Japanese way to accept gifts and be appreciative; to do otherwise is rude and, therefore, wrong. The abbot takes a pair of tongs and picks up a red hot coal from the adjacent fire pit that he has a tea kettle on.
The young monk starts to contemplate what he should do, and after a few moments runs out of the hall distressed, for he cannot figure out what he is supposed to do; he can take the coal and be burned or he can refuse the gift of the abbot. Both, in his mind, are things he cannot do.
He meditates on the problem for the next week, and comes back to say goodbye. However, the same scene is played again, and the same frustration is found when he tries to figure out what the abbot wants him to do.
He meditates further on the subject and feels he has discovered how to respond to the abbot's gift. He returns, for the third time, to say goodbye to the abbot, and as before the abbot picks up a red hot coal and presents it as a gift to the young monk. The young monk simply replies, "Thank you."
The abbot breaks a grin, nods his head, and returns the coal to the fire pit. "You may go now," he says.
[edit]
Contemporary Koans
Anecdotes of recent zen teachers have started to make their way into zen lore as koans, for example:

One day, a student of Shunryu Suzuki roshi confronted him at Sokoji, in his office, and said, "if you believe in freedom why do you keep your bird locked up in a cage?" Suzuki Roshi went over and opened the door of the cage and the bird flew out and flew out the window. [1]
Hacker culture has invented a number of humorous koans which do not fit the normal definition of koan. See hacker koan.

[edit]
See also
dharma
[edit]
External links
The Gateless Gate
Life at the Monastery - a humorous look at koans
Zen Buddhism Koan Study Pages
Zen Koans: Transcending Duality - a list of koans
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
One Drop Reveals the Ocean - a talk given by Geoffrey Shugen Arnold regarding Zhaozhou's Cypress
The Unconditioned in Buddhism, Zen, and Our Own Lives
Zen Koans
[edit]
References
[1] See Ruth Fuller Sasaki's introduction on page xi of The Zen Koan, Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Harvest/HBJ, 1965; see also Steve Hagen's introduction on page vii of the 2000 edition of The Iron Flute (subtitle) 100 Zen Koans, translated into English by Nyogen Senzaki and Ruth Stout McCandless, originally Tetteki Tosui, Genro, 1783; see also pp xiii, 26, and 212 of The Gateless Barrier (subtitle) The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan), Robert Aitken, North Point Press/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1991, incorporates Wu-Men Kuan (J. Mumonkan), Wu-Men, 1228); see also p64 of Two Arrows Meeting in Mid Air (subtitle) The Zen Koan, John Daido Loori, Charles E. Tuttle, Vermont/Tokyo, 1994.

[2] See chapter 4 of Zen Sand (subtitle) The Book of Capping Phrases for Koan Practice, Victor Sogen Hori, 2003, University of Hawai'i Press.

[3] The Gateless Barrier (subtitle) Zen comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkei Shibayama (1894-1974), Translated from Chinese and Japanese into English by Sumiko Kudo, Shambhala Publications, 1974; incorporates Wu-Men Kuan (J. Mumonkan), Wu-Men, 1228).

[4] See The Zen Koan (see note [1]) p4-6, and also "The form and function of koan literature" (subtitle) "A historical overview", T. Griffith Foulk, in The Koan (subtitle) Texts and contexts in Zen Buddhism, Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright, eds., 2000, Oxford University Press, p21-22. Assertions that the literal meaning of kung-an is the table, desk, or bench of a magistrate appear on page 18 of the article by Foulk, and also in Seeing Through Zen, (subtitle) Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, John R. MacRae, 2003, University of California Press, p172-173 note 16.

[5] See Zen Letters (subtitle) Teachings of Yuanwu, Yuanwu Kequin (1063-1135), translated into English by J. C. Cleary and Thomas Cleary, 1994, Shambhala Publications, p16, and "Before the empty eon versus A dog has no Buddha-nature" (subtitle) "Kung-an use in the Ts'ao-tung tradition and Ta-hui's Kung-an introspction Ch'an", Morten Schlutter, in The Koan (subtitle) Texts and contexts in Zen Buddhism, Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright, eds., 2000, Oxford University Press, p185-186.

[6] "Emerging from Nonduality" (subtitle) "Koan Practice in the Rinzai tradition since Hakuin", Michael Mohr, in The Koan (subtitle) Texts and contexts in Zen Buddhism, Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright, eds., 2000, Oxford University Press, p245.

[7] See the commentary on case #1 in The Gateless Barrier (subtitle) Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, Zenkei Shibayama, translated in English by Sumiko Kudo, 1974, Shambhala Publications.

[8] See "Tao-sheng's Theory of Sudden Enlightenment", Whalen Lai, in Sudden and Gradual (subtitle) Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought, p173 and 191. The latter page documents how in 429 or thereabouts (more than 400 years before Zhaozhou), Tao-sheng was expelled from the Buddhist monastic community for defending the idea that incorrigible persons (icchantika) do indeed have Buddha-nature (fo-hsing).

[9] Pruning the Bodhi Tree (subtitle) The Storm over Critical Buddhism Jamie Hubbard and Paul L. Swanson, eds, 1997, University of Hawaii Press; for example see Chapter 1, "Why They Say Zen Is Not Buddhism" (subtitle) "Recent Japanese Critiques of Buddha-Nature", Paul L. Swanson.

[10] The Gateless Barrier (subtitle) The Wu-Men Kuan (Mumonkan), Robert Aitken, North Point Press/Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1991, incorporates Wu-Men Kuan (J. Mumonkan), Wu-Men, 1228); see p306, footnote 1 for Case #37.

[11] Translating the Zen Phrase Book, G. Victor Sogen Hori, Nanzan Bulletin 23, 1999, p44-58. [2]

Dates are as per Zen's Chinese Heritage, subtitled The masters and their teachings by Andy Ferguson, published in 2000 by Wisdom Publications.

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Virtues : Charity | Compassion | Integrity | Mercy | Seven virtues

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan"
Categories: Cleanup from June 2005 | Zen | Metaphors

This Page Intentionally Left Blank -

2005-11-07T19:57:00.000-08:00

BBC - h2g2 - This Page Intentionally Left Blank - A676280

'This Page Intentionally Left Blank' could be one of the oddest sentences in the English language. Found in instruction manuals around the world, it indicates that the page on which it appears has been purposely left empty of words or pictures. But once this phrase has been printed on the page, the page is no longer blank; in fact, it is intentionally not blank. Therefore, this statement is only correct when it has not yet been made. Once it has been written down, it is instantly wrong. By virtue of self-reference, the phrase is denying its own existence and contradicts itself. The only known phrase that is more confusing is 'This is a lie'.

To fully appreciate the absurdity of this, compare the following:

Not really blank:

HAL/9000 SYSTEM OPERATOR'S MANUAL
Upper widget snarkle adjustment

Page 15.18 Issue 3.1, 1.26.64

Blank or not blank?

HAL/9000 SYSTEM OPERATOR'S MANUAL
Upper widget snarkle adjustment
This Page Intentionally Left Blank
Page 15.18 Issue 3.1, 1.26.64

The ultimate in pedantry has been found in this example:

HAL/9000 SYSTEM OPERATOR'S MANUAL
Upper widget snarkle adjustment
The page on which this statement has been printed has been intentionally left such that this statement is the only statement printed on it.
Page 15.18 Issue 3.1, 1.26.64

The inventor of this version obviously has taken the point and amended the phrase such that it doesn't contradict itself any more. However, it is so clumsy that it is most likely to draw readers away from studying the manual and have them start contemplating about the deeper sense behind it.

The Purpose

Some theorise that it is a koan, a statement devoid of meaning designed to bring the minds of those that read it to a higher state of being. Others believe that its purpose is to generate confusion in the hardy souls who actually attempt to read instruction manuals, thus making it even more difficult to understand what the manual is about.

But the sentence was introduced in the days when printers would randomly fail to print pages, and it served to reassure readers that they weren't missing out critical sections. However, a printer failure would be indicated by a pure white page, whereas the pages in question aren't blank at all. There's the page header and footer, and the page number, and the lines at the top and bottom. And the logo. And the chapter header. Oh, and the previous page finished halfway down.

Even in the days of desktop publishing, intentionally blank pages do have their purpose. The buyer of a technical item such as a telephone switching centre or a combine harvester can choose from a wealth of features and options when placing the order. Printed manuals are still called for, because the customer may not want to carry a laptop computer around when fixing a problem. In order to avoid confusion, the operations manuals need to be composed so that their contents precisely match the choice of features that each customer has made. Hence the manuals consist of pre-printed chapters which are simply put together in a binder, and the only things to be produced individually are the table of contents and the index. The length of a chapter can amount to an odd or an even number of pages and thus intentionally blank pages come into being. However, this doesn't justify printing the ominous phrase on them.

Alternatives

Manual writers with a less warped way of thinking have found a very simple alternative: in some materials, the phrase has been replaced by the simple heading 'Notes' (or suchlike), which clearly indicates that there was no intention to print anything on the page and encourages people to scribble over it. Even simpler, some unique symbol (for example: -<<>>- ) after the last paragraph of a chapter will make it unmistakably clear that there's nothing to be expected until the next chapter begins.

The Future of Intentionally Blank Pages

Pages which are intentionally left blank are not restricted to print media. On the internet there are lots and of them. A famous example can be found at the bottom of this page.

There even is a TPILB-Project which is promoting intentionally blank web pages as places of 'quietness in the overcrowded World Wide Web' which offer the opportunity of 'relaxing the restless mind'. Now that's a point.

Libby will be to Bush as Liddy was to Nixon

2005-10-28T22:04:00.000-07:00

One of those remarkable coincidences with soundalike names.

Will Lewis Libby prove to be George W Bush's nemesis in the same way as G Gordon Liddy led to Nixon's downfall?

Going Gaga Over Dada --

2005-10-27T15:35:00.000-07:00

TIME Europe Magazine: Going Gaga Over Dada -- Oct. 31, 2005

A new exhibition at Paris' Pompidou Center celebrates the surreal and silly world of Dadaism

It was April 18, 1916, and a volatile group of artists who'd found refuge from World War I in Switzerland were gathered around a table at Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, arguing about a label for themselves and their work. They settled this dispute, according to art lore, by thrusting a letter opener randomly into a French-German dictionary. The word it pointed to — dada — has many meanings: "hobbyhorse" in French, "cube" in certain Italian dialects and "yes, yes" in Slavic languages. That night, they agreed on a name but continued to dispute what the word — and the movement — signified. Tristan Tzara, a Romanian poet and the author of the Dada Manifesto of 1918, came up with what may be the only accurate definition: "Dada means nothing."

That presents the curators of a new exhibition of Dadaism with a wonderful opportunity: to define the undefinable through the remarkably varied work the Dadaists produced. And produce the Dadaists did — collages, letters, manifestos, music, paintings, posters, photographs, sculptures, textiles, typography and more. They had no common medium and no particular mission, simply a dedication to spontaneity, chaos, innovation and nonsense. Though Dada burned out in less than a decade, it was hugely influential and continues to resonate in the work of such controversial artists as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Robert Rauschenberg.

And that legacy is the point of the intelligent "Dada" show, at Paris' Pompidou Center until Jan. 9. The exhibition displays more than 1,000 items from museums and private collections around the world. Next year, the 90th anniversary of the movement, a version of the show will travel to Washington's National Gallery of Art, which jointly organized the exhibition, and then to New York City's Museum of Modern Art.

In keeping with the randomness that characterized Dada, the Pompidou has organized the show like a chessboard, making it easy to move through more than 40 rectangular exhibition spaces in no particular order. Thankfully, there are introductory rooms that explain the importance of Zurich, a neutral haven for European intellectuals from Carl Jung to Vladimir Lenin; discuss the Cabaret Voltaire, the local tavern where the Dadaists met for conversation, poetry and drama; and introduce Dada's large cast of characters through their portraits.

These pictures, many of them photographs, bring a sense of reality to artists who would have none of it. The photographer Man Ray stands amid what appears to be a collapsed building, André Breton puts on huge spectacles, Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Stella pose together on a sofa, while Tzara, Max Ernst and Jean Arp relax on a Tyrolean holiday. In one photo Sophie Täuber-Arp holds the fanciful Dada Head, 1920, which she constructed; the actual painted sphere is just a few rooms away. Her husband and frequent collaborator, Jean Arp, is seen with a monocle-like disk over his left eye — the Dadaists, fascinated with mechanization and also repelled by it, often used geometric shapes in their art. Another photograph shows Francis Picabia at the wheel of an open-topped sports car. Picabia used the same image in an assemblage also on view. He pasted the photograph on canvas, drew a similar sketch of himself at the wheel and titled the work The Merry Widow.

It was not meant to make sense. After all, the world, bloodied by the first modern war, hardly seemed a rational place. The Dada movement rejected history, literature, bourgeois values and, of course, artistic conventions. "I don't even want to know if there were men before me," wrote Tzara, the movement's polemicist in chief, in 1918.

Dada spread around the world, to Barcelona, Tokyo, New York City (where Duchamp and Picabia found refuge during the war), Berlin, Cologne, Hanover and ultimately Paris. The first International Dada Fair took place in 1920 in Berlin, at an art gallery evoked here in a room similarly dominated by a hanging dummy dressed in a policeman's uniform wearing a fake pig's head. Members of Berlin's Club Dada, who specialized in "propagandada," are well represented. George Grosz, who served in the German army in the early days of the war, satirizes the false patriotism and misplaced optimism of postwar Germany in his Republican Automatons. Here two faceless capitalists — one with a flag, the other wearing a war medal — strut arrogantly, although their hands and legs are cylindrical stumps. Raoul Hausmann's The Spirit of Our Time is just as cynical about the German bourgeoisie. He has taken a mannequin's head and added to it a traveler's collapsible cup, measuring devices, a typesetting cartridge and the No. 22. Measured and mechanized, this "spirit" has none of its own. Hausmann, along with John Heartfield — formerly Helmut Herzfelde who anglicized his name to show his opposition to the war — among others, pioneered the field of photomontage. Hausmann's fierce, cut-and-paste man in a militaristic pose is not a soldier but The Art Critic.

Not that Dadaists cared what critics thought. In fact, they bequeathed us the enduring notion that art is what the artist says it is, an approach taken up with gusto by people such as Hirst and Koons. In describing the readymades of Duchamp, fellow Dadaist Breton called them "manufactured objects promoted to the dignity of objets d'art by means of the artist's choice." These avant-garde icons, complete rejections of the traditional hierarchy that put painting as the most important art form, are all on show: the snow shovel (In Advance of the Broken Arm), the urinal (Fountain), the Bicycle Wheel, the Hat Rack and the bearded reproduction of the Mona Lisa (L.H.O.O.Q., which is a racy double entendre in French). How did Duchamp choose his objects? On "visual indifference," he once said, "as well as a total absence of taste, good or bad."

The Dadaists loved words, and the Pompidou show displays rooms full of them. It's a legitimate exercise, since the movement started with poetry and performance art at the Cabaret Voltaire. But the books, brochures, letters, manifestos, posters and reviews are simply too much to read. They bog the exhibition down, adding an academic seriousness that the Dadaists would have found unpalatable. In fact, it was a manifesto — written by Breton in 1924 that tried to bring organization to Dada by linking it to Surrealism — that led to the final split among the movement's individualistic adherents.

But the spirit of Dada — and it was always an attitude rather than a coherent school of thought — survived. The Pompidou tries to reinforce this point in the final display space, which includes René Clair's almost coherent 1924 film Entr'acte, and Duchamp's never-quite-finished The Large Glass (also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), two painted and otherwise embellished panes of glass in a wooden frame. The curators even consider the view of Paris through the room's windows to be part of the show. This denouement is frankly puzzling. The Dadaists would have loved it.

Email and letter writing share fundamental pattern

2005-10-26T19:38:00.000-07:00

New Scientist Breaking News - Email and letter writing share fundamental pattern

Both Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein relied on pen, paper, and the postal service to communicate with correspondents around the world. But researchers have now found the pattern of their replies is the same as that of computer users answering email today, with both following the same mathematical formula.

The pattern could reflect some basic biological encoding that shows up in everything from humans at work to birds foraging for food, according to Albert-László Barabási, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US.

In previous work, Barabási looked at how long it took people to answer their email, and found a "bursty" pattern – most emails are answered fairly quickly, but a few sit around for a long time, and some sit around for a very long time.

To describe the pattern, Barabási created a mathematical model in which people prioritise their emails, then respond to the high priority emails quickly and the low-priority emails more slowly. When he crunched the numbers, his model fit the observed results perfectly (Nature, vol 435, p 207).

Prolific writers
The behaviour might seem obvious – most people will respond quickly to an email from their boss, even while less important emails linger for days or weeks in their inboxes. But for those dealing with big, complicated networks like the internet, understanding these sorts of bursty patterns could be the difference between a system crashing or not.

Having done this work, Barabási wondered if the patterns were only a characteristic of email, or if they held up generally for human correspondence. With his co-author João Gama Oliveira at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, he looked at the detailed catalogues of the letters of Darwin and Einstein.

These two icons worked in a time when scientific communication was largely by written letter – Darwin sent at least 7591 letters in his career, and Einstein sent 14,500, writing an average of half a letter and one letter per day, respectively.

Yet despite the differences between electronic communication and paper, the same pattern held up – both men answered most of their mail quickly, within about 10 days. But some of the answers took months or even years to send (Nature, vol 437, p 1251). "From the scientific point of view, the interesting thing is that there is a fundamental way that we do things," Barabási says.

Biologists have noticed similar patterns when they plot the actions of birds foraging for food. Birds will make many short flights, but occasionally very long ones – the same pattern found in answering letters and emails. Barabási suggests that animals might use a common mechanism, selected by evolution, to decide among competing tasks.

Astrology is scientific theory, courtroom told

2005-10-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

New Scientist Breaking News - Astrology is scientific theory, courtroom told

Astrology would be considered a scientific theory if judged by the same criteria used by a well-known advocate of Intelligent Design to justify his claim that ID is science, a landmark US trial heard on Tuesday.

Under cross examination, ID proponent Michael Behe, a biochemist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, admitted his definition of “theory” was so broad it would also include astrology.

The trial is pitting 11 parents from the small town of Dover, Pennsylvania, against their local school board. The board voted to read a statement during a biology class that casts doubt on Darwinian evolution and suggests ID as an alternative.

The parents claim this was an attempt to introduce creationism into the curriculum and that the school board members were motivated by their evangelical Christian beliefs. It is illegal to teach anything with a primarily religious purpose or effect on pupils in government-funded US schools.

Supporters of ID believe that some things in nature are simply too complex to have evolved by natural selection, and therefore must be the work of an intelligent designer.

Peer review
Behe was called to the stand on Monday by the defence, and testified that ID was a scientific theory, and was not “committed” to religion. His cross examination by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Eric Rothschild of the Philadelphia law firm Pepper Hamilton, began on Tuesday afternoon.

Rothschild told the court that the US National Academy of Sciences supplies a definition for what constitutes a scientific theory: “Theory: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses.”

Because ID has been rejected by virtually every scientist and science organisation, and has never once passed the muster of a peer-reviewed journal paper, Behe admitted that the controversial theory would not be included in the NAS definition. “I can’t point to an external community that would agree that this was well substantiated,” he said.

Behe said he had come up with his own “broader” definition of a theory, claiming that this more accurately describes the way theories are actually used by scientists. “The word is used a lot more loosely than the NAS defined it,” he says.

Hypothesis or theory?
Rothschild suggested that Behe’s definition was so loose that astrology would come under this definition as well. He also pointed out that Behe’s definition of theory was almost identical to the NAS’s definition of a hypothesis. Behe agreed with both assertions.

The exchange prompted laughter from the court, which was packed with local members of the public and the school board.

Behe maintains that ID is science: “Under my definition, scientific theory is a proposed explanation which points to physical data and logical inferences.”

“You've got to admire the guy. It’s Daniel in the lion’s den,” says Robert Slade, a local retiree who has been attending the trial because he is interested in science. "But I can’t believe he teaches a college biology class."

The cross examination will continue Wednesday, with the trial expected to finish on 4 November.

Book thrown at proponents of Intelligent Design

2005-10-06T21:14:00.000-07:00

New Scientist Breaking News - Book thrown at proponents of Intelligent Design

"Devastating" early drafts of a controversial book recommended as reading at a US high school reveal how the word “creationism” had been later swapped for “intelligent design”, a landmark US trial scrutinising the teaching of ID heard on Wednesday.

The early drafts of the book Of Pandas and People, was used as evidence to link the book to creationism, which it is illegal to teach in US schools.

“ID proponents have said for years that they are not creationists,” says Nick Matzke of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, which is advising 11 parents who are suing the school board of Dover High School in Pennsylvania for incorporating ID into the science curriculum. “This proves beyond a doubt that this is simply a new name for creationism.”

ID proposes that life is so complex that it cannot have emerged without the guidance of an intelligent designer. The school’s board voted in November 2004 to encourage students to consider ID as an alternative to evolution and recommended Of Pandas and People.

The parents claim this is a veiled attempt to bring creationism into the school. They are suing on the grounds that it has been ruled unconstitutional to teach anything in US schools that does not have a primarily secular motive and effect on pupils.

Trojan horse
The early versions of the book were displayed to the court by expert witness for the plaintiffs and creationist historian Barbara Forrest of the Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. She suggested that they were strong proof that ID is indeed creationism by another name.

Forrest compared early drafts of Of Pandas and People to a later 1987 copy, and showed how in several instances the word “creationism” had been replaced by “intelligent design”, and “creationist” simply replaced by “intelligent design proponent”.

“Forrest’s testimony showed that ID is not a scientific theory, but a Trojan horse for creationism,” said Eric Rothshild of Pepper Hamilton in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

Evolving drafts
Matzke, who was at the trial, points out that the “switching” of the words is also suspicious because of its timing, which came just after the US Supreme Court’s decision on 19 June 1987 that it was unconstitutional to teach creationism in schools.

The names of the drafts alone are incriminating, he says. The first draft, in 1983, was called Creation Biology, the next is Biology and Creation, dated 1986, and is followed by Biology and Origin in 1987. It is not until later in 1987 that Of Pandas and People emerges.

His comments infuriated John West, of the Discovery Institute, a think tank based in Seattle, Washington, that supports ID, but which has declined to testify on behalf of the defence in the trial.

West says that Forrest, author of a book called Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The wedge of intelligent design has used the drafts selectively and “cherry picked” the pages shown.

Attempts to discredit Forrest as a witness, by the defence lawyers from the Thomas More Law Center, in Ann Arbor, Michigan were not upheld by the judge.

Misconstrued creationism
West says that Of Pandas and People, while supporting ID, does not promote religion but rather leaves open the question of whether an intelligent designer lies within nature, or outside it. But he admits that the book states: "This is not a question that science can answer."

He says that while the timing of the changes in the drafts may not be a coincidence, this does not mean Of Pandas and People is a religious book. “If they did drop out the term creationism, [it is] because people may have misconstrued it,” he says.

Forrest will continue to be cross-examined by the defence's attorneys on Thursday. A full report on the trial at its completion will appear in New Scientist print edition.

Evolution - Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report

Punk meets Dada - Style - International Herald Tribune

2005-10-06T15:51:00.000-07:00

Punk meets Dada - Style - International Herald Tribune

reprise of punk and an ironic nihilism is coursing through the summer 2006 shows, reflecting the young music scene. A new Paris exhibition of Dada, the rejection of bourgeois values a century ago, is also an inspiration.

Until Comme des Garçons sent out an entirely punk collection on Tuesday, a reprise of Vivienne Westwood at her most outrageous, complete with Union Jack jersey underpants and tilted crowns above pretty pink faces, punk seemed like a fashion undercurrent. But here was Rei Kawakubo picking up an angry new youth culture in Tony Blair's Spend! Spend! Britain. To the soaring nationalistic "Land of Hope and Glory" and Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus," the models walked the runway, their mix of plaids, flowers and the red, white and blue Union flag as fabric draped across the body, padding shoulders and torso.

This new clash of the tartans was not aggressive, but beautiful, expressing all the new volumes, puffed shoulders and drapes current in fashion. Although this Comme show entitled "Lost Empire" did not have the emotion of last season's "broken bride," it proved that Kawakubo is always alert to what is going on.

Earlier in the day, Junya Watanabe was also in punk mode, but a more aggressive version. The show's ear-splitting music engulfed the run-down parking space, as the models came out with vicious spikes on their heads, their faces enclosed in cling-film. Yet the collection was beautifully realized with its Edwardian silhouette of cut-away jacket, worn over cropped pants. The obligatory punk uniform of plaid pants and leather jacket appeared. So did recycling, but dresses made from what looked like a bunch of nylon hose have been seen previously at Gaultier and Margiela. Standout pieces were the simplest: cut-away raincoats, jackets edged with houndstooth and khaki green jackets worn over knife-pleated shirts.

Viktor & Rolf turned fashion upside down - literally, as the show started with the duo and their models taking a bow. Then came dresses worn so that sleeves or shoulder straps were dangling at the ankles. Although Viktor Horsting (dressed in white) and Rolf Snoeren (in black) said that the creative rotation produced new shapes and silhouettes, it all looked like their familiar aesthetic: a spirited modern take on classics producing evening clothes fit for the Dutch Princess Mabel, who turned to the duo for her wedding dress. There was much to like among the cream and cappuccino satin dresses or blouses patterned with birds. But layers of upended tank tops with dangling straps were just too clever.

You might think that the veteran Vivienne Westwood would no longer be intent on stirring up protest. But from the moment she hung a giant red "AR" at the back of the runway, to her final exit wearing a T-shirt saying: "I'm not a terrorist - please, please don't shoot me," she was promoting "Active Resistance to Propaganda." But the clothes were more of Westwood's historical romanticism, with swooshing fabrics and asymmetric cutting.

Jean-Paul Gaultier's reprise of his Ukraine-inspired couture show brought peasant blouses mixed with Parisian tailoring, flower-patterned meadow-sweet dresses and ooh-la-la apron skirts. The peasant stuff included cherries on the head and puffed-sleeve blouses. The show was charming, but mostly walked familiar territory as androgynous pants suits were given a stylish airing. The Ukrainian maidens morphed into black-clad Sicilian widows. But only occasionally, when red-and-white checked gingham touched coal-black tailoring or the folkloric embroidery was on a smart wrap jacket, did this Ukrainian rhapsody sing.

What we Cannot Do Ourselves, we Cannot Understand in Others

2005-10-05T22:45:00.000-07:00

What we Cannot Do Ourselves, we Cannot Understand in Others

Successful social communication is based, above all, on the ability to understand the actions of other people. But how can we imagine what other people are thinking, or what intentions they have? Psychologists and neuroscientists trace it back to a kind of simulation that goes on in our brain as soon as we observe a person acting. The actions of the observed person are, so-to-speak, internally imitated.

Indeed, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Neurosciences in Munich, in cooperation with scientists from the University of Bournemouth in England and Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, have shown that we understand the actions of another person, apparently, on the basis of our own "action inventory". In other words, our own mind and body give us the foundation to understand what other people are doing, thinking, or feeling. Evidence for this comes out of an experiment involving two patients that, because of an extremely rare illness, lost the ability to perceive their own body. (Nature Neuroscience, October 2005)

In the recently published study, Simone Bosbach and Wolfgang Prinz showed, with their colleagues, that two specific patients have deficits in their ability to interpret the actions of other people. These two patients are currently the only known cases worldwide with this kind of clinical picture. Its psychological consequences are dramatic. Both patients report that, at the beginning of their illness, most of all, they had the feeling that they had "lost" their entire body. Since then, they have learned to carry out simple body movements. However in order to do that they have to be able to see their body. In the dark, the patients lose complete control over their bodies, because they are no longer able to determine, for example, the position of their arms and legs relative to the body, with the help of the sensory receptor cells in the joints and muscles.

Normal people can do this without any problems, thanks to the self-perception of their own body (proprioceptive feedback). This self-perception also lets our brains know when, and in which range, muscles contract or expand, and to which extent joints bend or stretch. This sense makes us able to pose in certain body positions and to carry out movements, and it is also decisive for the psychological consciousness of having a body.

Bosbach and her colleagues confronted the patients with short video films in which people are asked to lift boxes. Each box was a different weight. Both patients were given the task, in the first part, of guessing the weight of the box that the person in the film was lifting. The patients received no other clues; they had to guess the weight of the box solely from the motion sequence of the lifter. It turned out that the patients were able to complete the task as correctly and unerringly as the control subjects. Apparently they were able solve the problem using their knowledge that, for example, a slow body movement signifies a heavy load and a faster movement, which gives the impression the subject was unloading something, suggests a lower weight.

In the second part of the task, the patients also saw videos of people who were lifting boxes. However, this time, in some cases, the people in the film were deceived about the actual weight of the boxes. So the actor, for example, received the information before lifting the box that he was lifting 18 kilograms - when indeed the box weighed only three. The patients then had to state whether the person in the video had the right or the wrong expectation regarding the weight of the box. Again, the only source of information for the patients to make their judgment was body movement. If the people in the film were deceived about the weight of the box, they tended to show a characteristic discrepancy in the movement, between the phases in which they prepared themselves to lift the box (expecting a heavy one) and the phase in which they were actually lifting the box (which was clearly lighter than expected). This discrepancy was not present when the person had a correct expectation of the weight.

In the second task, normal control subjects didn’t have a problem correctly evaluating the situation. The two patients, on the other hand, had great difficulties. They were notably poorer than the control subjects in determining whether the person in the video had guessed correctly the weight of the box correctly, or had been deceived.

Finally, in a further experiment the scientists inverted the task. They asked the patients themselves to lift boxes and filmed them while they did so. During the recording, in some cases, the patients were deceived about the weight of the box before they lifted it. Then, healthy control subjects had to judge, after they saw the video, whether the patient had expected the correct or the false weight. In this task, the control subjects failed, because the sequence of motion of the patient, in the case of the false expectations, did not show the characteristic discrepancy between the preparation for the movement and its carrying out. This means that the patients, because of their lack of self-perception, were unable to adjust their movements to their expectations of the weight of the box. In other words, the patients did not have the option to attune themselves to the weight of the box before trying to pick it up. For the same reason, they were not able to judge other people’s expectations based on their movement.

Models of movement, which are activated in the brain when we observe the actions of another person, hold information and knowledge about the way our own body functions. The possibilities and limitations of movement of our own body are the reference from which we process and interpret the actions of another person. In other words, we understand in others that which we can do ourselves, and what we cannot do ourselves, we cannot also understand in others. Feedback from our own bodies apparently plays a role in our intuitive knowledge of the intentions of other people. In this way, we can predict not only the consequences of other people’s actions, but we are able to "put ourselves in the position" of the other person. Such a mechanism is the basis for sympathy and empathy, and thus decisive for the success and continuity of social relationships.

Original work:

Bosbach, S., Cole, J., Prinz, W. & Knoblich, G.
Inferring another's expectation from action: the role of peripheral sensation
Nature Neuroscience online : 28 August 2005, Print-Version: Nature Neuroscience (2005), Vol. 8, 1295-1297

Source: Max Planck Society

Tall women are more ambitious

2005-10-05T22:44:00.000-07:00

Study: Tall women are more ambitious

Two Scottish researchers say they've determined tall women are more ambitious in their careers and less inclined to start a family than shorter women.

Psychologists Denis Deady of Stirling University and Miriam Law Smith of St Andrews University questioned 1,220 women from Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia, The Scotsman reported Wednesday.

The psychologists said they found taller women were less broody, had fewer children and were more ambitious. They were also more likely to have their first child at a later age.

Deady and Smith told The Scotsman they decided to conduct the research after studies suggested taller women had fewer children because they struggled to find a mate. Deady and Smith say their research disproves that theory.

"We think that tall women may have higher levels of testosterone, which may cause them to have more 'masculine' personalities," said Deady, who also stressed that did not mean taller women were unattractive.

The research appears in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International

making a point

2005-09-28T22:38:00.000-07:00

AI systems may blow weathermen away

2005-09-28T22:37:00.000-07:00

New Scientist Technology - AI systems may blow weathermen away

Weather forecasters could find themselves pushed out of a job by an artificial intelligence system designed to write clearer, less ambiguous reports.

Computer scientists at the University of Aberdeen, UK, were asked to generate an "artificial weatherperson" by operators of offshore oil rigs, who wanted more clarity in their forecasts. The vocabulary used by different forecasters can be vague and highly variable, says Ehud Reiter, who led the Aberdeen team.

While this is simply an irritation to most of us, it can be a big headache for the offshore oil industry, where unexpected bad weather can damage equipment and threaten safety.

When Reiter and his team compared past weather bulletins with the raw forecast data on which they were based, they found a striking variability in the choice of words used by different forecasters. For instance, when they talked of "evening" weather, some meant conditions around 6 pm, while others meant much nearer midnight. "Late morning" could mean anywhere between 9 am and noon. The UK's Met Office is also reviewing how effectively its forecasters communicate.

To remove such uncertainties, the team programmed a natural language generation (NLG) software package to transform data on the forecast weather into an unambiguous written bulletin (Artificial Intelligence, vol 167, p 137).

Similar systems could be used to clarify the medical notes of hospital critical care beds to prevent the phrases used to describe a patient's condition being misinterpreted.

From issue 2518 of New Scientist magazine, 28 September 2005, page 27

Scale-Free Networks - Computerworld

2005-09-26T00:05:00.000-07:00

Scale-Free Networks - Computerworld

DEFINITION: Scale-free networks, including the Internet, are characterized by an uneven distribution of connectedness. Instead of the nodes of these networks having a random pattern of connections, some nodes act as "very connected" hubs, a fact that dramatically influences the way the network operates.

NOVEMBER 04, 2002 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Using a Web crawler, physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1998 mapped the connectedness of the Web. They were surprised to find that the structure of the Web didn't conform to the then-accepted model of random connectivity. Instead, their experiment yielded a connectivity map that they christened "scale-free."
Barabasi and his team had been doing work that modeled surfaces in terms of fractals, which are also scale-free. Their discoveries about networks have been found to have implications well beyond the Internet; the notion of scale-free networks has turned the study of a number of fields upside down. Scale-free networks have been used to explain behaviors as diverse as those of power grids, the stock market and cancerous cells, as well as the dispersal of sexually transmitted diseases.

Put simply, the nodes of a scale-free network aren't randomly or evenly connected. Scale-free networks include many "very connected" nodes, hubs of connectivity that shape the way the network operates. The ratio of very connected nodes to the number of nodes in the rest of the network remains constant as the network changes in size.

In contrast, random connectivity distributions—the kinds of models used to study networks like the Internet before Barabasi and his team made their observation—predicted that there would be no well-connected nodes, or that there would be so few that they would be statistically insignificant. Although not all nodes in that kind of network would be connected to the same degree, most would have a number of connections hovering around a small, average value. Also, as a randomly distributed network grows, the relative number of very connected nodes decreases.

Significant Differences

The ramifications of this difference between the two types of networks are significant, but it's worth pointing out that both scale-free and randomly distributed networks can be what are called "small world" networks. That means it doesn't take many hops to get from one node to another—the science behind the notion that there are only six degrees of separation between any two people in the world. So, in both scale-free and randomly distributed networks, with or without very connected nodes, it may not take many hops for a node to make a connection with another node. There's a good chance, though, that in a scale-free network, many transactions would be funneled through one of the well-connected hub nodes - one like Yahoo Inc.'s Web portal.

Because of these differences, the two types of networks behave differently as they break down. The connectedness of a randomly distributed network decays steadily as nodes fail, slowly breaking into smaller, separate domains that are unable to communicate.

Resists Random Failure

Scale-free networks, on the other hand, may show almost no degradation as random nodes fail. With their very connected nodes, which are statistically unlikely to fail under random conditions, connectivity in the network is maintained. It takes quite a lot of random failure before the hubs are wiped out, and only then does the network stop working. (Of course, there's always the possibility that the very connected nodes would be the first to go.)

In a targeted attack, in which failures aren't random but are the result of mischief, or worse, directed at hubs, the scale-free network fails catastrophically. Take out the very connected nodes, and the whole network stops functioning. In these days of concern about cyberattacks on the critical infrastructure, whether the nodes on the network in question are randomly distributed or are scale-free makes a big difference.

Epidemiologists are also pondering the significance of scale-free connectivity.

Until now, it has been accepted that stopping sexually transmitted diseases requires reaching or immunizing a large proportion of the population; most contacts will be safe, and the disease will no longer spread. But if societies of people include the very connected individuals of scale-free networks—individuals who have sex lives that are quantitatively different from those of their peers—then health offensives will fail unless they target these individuals. These individuals will propagate the disease no matter how many of their more subdued neighbors are immunized.

Now consider the following: Geographic connectivity of Internet nodes is scale-free, the number of links on Web pages is scale-free, Web users belong to interest groups that are connected in a scale-free way, and e-mails propagate in a scale-free way. Barabasi's model of the Internet tells us that stopping a computer virus from spreading requires that we focus on protecting the hubs.

Matlis is a freelance writer in Newton, Mass.

aphoristically speaking

2005-09-25T16:38:00.000-07:00

"Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable longing to see the
truth."
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC-43 BC.); Roman orator, philosopher,
statesman.

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time."
Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910); Russian novelist.

"It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward.
Ignorance is never better than knowledge"
Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) US Italian-born physicist

TECHNORATI TAG

2005-09-11T18:29:00.000-07:00

More blogs about memorandada.

Foolish Things

2005-09-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

"If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

Anatole France (1844-1924); French writer.
--

VIEW: New York, the Dada capital —Norman Manea --- Excerpts

2005-09-08T16:39:00.000-07:00

Romania is often called the Land of Dada, not because one of its sons, Tristan Tzara, was a founder of Surrealism, but because of the absurdity and paradoxes of its daily life, particularly in its politics. In exile, I immediately identified with another capital of Dada, the “cosmic republic, that speaks all languages in a universal dialect,” as Johannes Baader put it. Here, the old and the new are accomplices in celebrating life “in all its incomprehensibility” — exactly the subversiveness that the Dadaists loved.

….
Like America itself, although so utterly different, New York can only be comprehended “synthetically.” This festively incoherent capital of Dada is a spectacular fusion of freedom and pragmatism. Misery and magnificence, seduction and neurosis create and recreate the dynamic, unmistakable spectrum of New York life.
In this city you learn to limit yourself. It is impossible to take in at once all of the innumerable symphonic or jazz concerts, or parades celebrating ethnic or sexual minorities. You can’t attend all the lectures, panel discussions, and auctions where everyday dramas and dreams are bartered. You can’t sit in all the taxis driven by those loquacious ambassadors from India and Russia and Haiti, from Pakistan and Ghana and Guatemala. At best you can grab a mere crumb of this frenetic global kaleidoscope.
In the end, in New York you own nothing more than the instant, the now, the right now. Again I look over Central Park. “Dada covers things with an artificial tenderness,” wrote Tzara. “It is snowing butterflies that have escaped from a prophet’s head.” —DT-PS

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_7-9-2005_pg3_5

unity in diversity

2005-09-08T16:34:00.000-07:00

“It is above all our differences that unite us.”

As the Surrealist poet André Breton said,

protocols and rubrics

2005-09-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

When browsing Sam Johnson’s Dictionary the other day I came across his definition of protocol. He stresses its sense as “a first draft” of a document. He makes the interesting point that the originality of a document cannot be proven without being shown its linkage to a Protocol.

Another word which caught my eye was rubric. Protocol and rubric come close in meaning, particular as to when it relates to the fundamental message that is inherent in a document.

In the world of modern communications both these word have taken on new dimensions due to their application in Information Technology.
Here are some definitions of protocol and rubric from www.dictionary.com that follow the Johnsonian meanings

The first copy of a treaty or other such document before its ratification.

A preliminary draft or record of a transaction.

French protocole, from Old French prothocolle, draft of a document, from Medieval Latin pr(image placeholder)tocollum, from Late Greek pr(image placeholder)tokollon, table of contents, first sheet : Greek pr(image placeholder)to-, proto- + Greek koll(image placeholder)ma, sheets of a papyrus glued together (from koll(image placeholder)n, to glue together, from kolla, glue).]

1 : an original draft, minute, or record of a document or transaction2 a : a preliminary memorandum often formulated and signed by diplomatic negotiators as a basis for a final convention or treaty b : the records or minutes of a diplomatic conference or congress that show officially the agreements arrived at by the negotiators
A set of formal rules describing how to transmit data,especially across a network. Low level protocols define theelectrical and physical standards to be observed, bit- andbyte-ordering and the transmission and of the bit stream. High level protocols deal withthe data formatting, including the syntax of messages, theterminal to computer dialogue, character sets, sequencing ofmessages etc.

See also handshaking.

Rubric

A class or category: “This mission is sometimes discussed under the rubric of ‘horizontal escalation’... from conventional to nuclear war” (Jack Beatty).

A title; a name.

A part of a manuscript or book, such as a title, heading, or initial letter, that appears in decorative red lettering or is otherwise distinguished from the rest of the text.

A title or heading of a statute or chapter in a code of law.

Ecclesiastical. A direction in a missal, hymnal, or other liturgical book.

An authoritative rule or direction.

A short commentary or explanation covering a broad subject.

Red ocher.

[Middle English rubrike, heading, title, from Old French rubrique, from Latin rubr(image placeholder)ca, red chalk, from ruber, rubr-, red. See reudh- in Indo-European Roots.]

Function: noun: an established rule, tradition, or custom
n 1: an authoritative rule of conduct or procedure 2: an explanation or definition of an obscure word in a text [syn: gloss] 3: directions for the conduct of Christian church services (often printed in red in a prayer book) 4: a heading that names a statute or legislative bill; may give a brief summary of the matters it deals with; "Title 8 provided federal help for schools" [syn: title, statute title] 5: a title or heading that is printed in red or in a special type 6: category name; "it is usually discussed under the rubric of `functional obesity'" v : adorn with ruby red color

help him discover it

2005-09-04T16:44:00.000-07:00

"You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in
himself."

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); Italian astronomer and physicist.

TECHNORATI TAG

2005-08-29T00:02:00.000-07:00

memorandada

TECHNORATI TAG

2005-08-25T23:49:00.000-07:00

memorandada

Is extreme weather down to climate change?

2005-08-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Is extreme weather down to climate change?

With fires raging through southern Europe - a region experiencing its worst drought for decades - and some of parts of the continent submerged by floods, it is tempting to ascribe such extreme weather to the effects of global warming

But climate change researchers are reluctant to make such links.

"You can say that due to the Earth getting warmer there will be on average more extreme events," said Malcolm Haylock, of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, UK, "but you can't attribute any specific event to climate change."

Dozens of wildfires have been raging out of control across Portugal, confounding attempts to contain them.

Portugal, like other areas of southern Europe and North Africa has been experiencing searing heat and drought this summer.

Meanwhile, floods have brought chaos to a large swathe of central Switzerland, triggering landslides and cutting roads and railway lines.

Growing consensus

There is a growing consensus, based on past climate records and other data, that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the Earth's climate.

Many climate scientists now believe the data points to global temperatures rising by about two tenths of a degree C per decade for the foreseeable future.

But as far as the droughts and floods are concerned, climate scientists have found it more difficult to find long-term trends in rainfall.

Firmly Uncommitted

2005-08-22T23:57:00.000-07:00

“Firmly Uncommitted” – Oxymoron of the Week?

Only a politician could claim he is “firmly uncommitted” – this quote from the Adelaide Advertiser shows how language is abused by those who make it … the journalists and the politicians

Joyce's Telstra tightropeBy Political Editor PHILLIP COOREY in Canberra20aug05
SENATOR Barnaby Joyce has flown back to Queensland warning that the National Party could be wiped out if he made the wrong decision on selling the rest of Telstra.Now firmly uncommitted to any position, Senator Joyce said he needed to get out of Canberra and discuss the proposed sale with his colleagues at home. …..
……
http://www.theadvertiser.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,16322715%255E911,00.html

testing the thesaurus @ dictionary.com

2005-08-18T22:16:00.000-07:00

Checking out the dictionary.com definitions of orthogonal and rectilinear --- it's fascinating to find that orthogonal has a very extensive entry, while rectilinear has only a simple entry

however when you go to http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=orthogonal there is only one sense of the word ie SQUARE and only 14 synonyms

whereas for rectilinear http://thesaurus.reference.com/search?q=rectilinear we get two senses of the word SQUARE and STRAIGHT and 57 different synonyms

what can we can make of this ?

surely something marvellous to contemplate

I am sure Renee Descartes would have had something to say - but it would be in French and he would use twice as many words

I guess the ground between the two is occupied by the Greek and Latin roots and commonalities of these words

I guess we should really should go back and ask our old friend Claude Ptolemy

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Ptolemy.html

The ultimate compliment ?

2005-08-18T22:02:00.000-07:00

"The ultimate compliment we can pay reality is to view its simulacrum"

Barry Humphries in the Introduction to the "Penguin Leunig" 1974

narcissism

2005-08-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

Dictionary.com/narcissism

A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem

the latter part of this definition doesn't quite gel with the broader more common meaning - Excessive love or admiration of oneself.

is this an example of one of those words which can have totally opposite meanings -- eg resigned

It's warm out today

2005-08-16T18:18:00.000-07:00

As the sun slowly sinks in the west , the weather as a topic of conversation goes on .. and on .

What a shame the distinction between climate and weather is one of the most confused issues on the planet. I guess we could blame the Weather Channel -- since we have never been better informed about heat waves in Tashkent and "unseasonal" blizzards in Van Diemans Land

Record-Breaking Heat: Is Global Warming to Blame?

2005-08-16T18:17:00.000-07:00

Record-Breaking Heat: Is Global Warming to Blame?

The dog days of summer are here, and many people are feeling the heat. From California to southern Europe, heat records are breaking.

Is this the result of global warming—the rise in Earth's temperature fueled by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?

"You can't point your finger and say, This is caused by global warming," said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Summer weather is just naturally hot, he said. High-pressure systems, which lead to stifling-hot days, are a typical weather pattern this time of year. But this summer feels hotter in a lot of places:

• New Yorkers cranked up their air conditioners over the weekend to seek relief from a heat wave, setting an all-time record for energy consumption, Con Edison, a regional power company, reported Monday.

• During July's heat wave in the western U.S., Big Bear Lake, California, which sits 6,790 feet (2,070 meters) above sea level, set an all-time record high of 94ºF (34.4ºC).

• Denver, Colorado, tied its all-time high of 105ºF (40.6ºC) on July 20.

• Las Vegas, Nevada, tied a 1942 record of 117ºF (47.2ºC) on July 19.

• And much of southern Europe is in the grips of a heat wave that is exacerbating widespread drought and fueling a spate of forest fires.

It's Hot, But …

This summer's heat is "not all that unusual" and not linked to global warming, said Jim Laver, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center in Camp Spring, Maryland.

"The way we like to explain it is, the climate varies from year to year, even within the summer season, and the variability is a lot larger than any long-term trend," he said.

Bottom of the class

2005-08-12T21:44:00.000-07:00

The Mercury: Bottom of the class [13aug05]

THE University of Tasmania is ranked among the bottom of the class of Australian universities.

In a controversial league table that compares teaching performance, used by the Federal Government to reward top-performing institutions with extra funding, the University of Tasmania was ranked a lowly 34 out of 38.

The university scored just 12 points - just more than one-third of the score achieved by another regional university, the University of Wollongong, which topped the rankings.

The rankings were based on seven criteria with different weightings, including good teaching, drop-out rates and student pass rates.

While the University of Tasmania ranked poorly, another Tasmanian institution, the Australian Maritime College, was ranked second, less than four points behind Wollongong University.

Where listeners become producers

2005-08-08T22:14:00.000-07:00

Where listeners become producers - Next - Technology - smh.com.au

With its long reliance on talk formats and call-in programs, radio was arguably the first open-source media form. Now a new US Public Radio International program, Open Source from PRI, will test whether the collective intelligence permeating the web can make not just loud radio but smart radio. Not only does the program pull from unfiltered voices and opinions found on blogs, Open Source uses its own blog (radioopen source.org) to cull ideas and sources from its listeners.

Listeners are invited to make suggestions on Open Source's blog, where they are posted along with ideas from the program's five producers. When the comment flow starts and suggestions are made - including recommendations for guests - the audience can watch the program come together, sometimes over the course of a week, other times in an afternoon.

And even when the program goes off the air, listeners can continue the discourse online. Recent programs have looked at Muslims in Europe, recovery from war in Bosnia and poker in the days before it became a staple on TV.

Christopher Lydon, the program's host, who created it with its executive producer Mary McGrath, said, "We are trying to push talk radio to a new range with the kind of internet extensions in both getting the signal out and harvesting the energy and insight that comes on the web."

Why practice doesn't make perfect

2005-08-08T18:17:00.000-07:00

New Statesman - Why practice doesn't make perfect

Why practice doesn't make perfect
Book Reviews
Edward Skidelsky
Monday 23rd May 2005

Truth: a guide for the perplexed
Simon Blackburn Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 238pp, £14.99
ISBN 0713997184

Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, is feeling harassed. What troubles him is "the minds of other people". Astrology, feng shui, Christianity and other manifestations of mass irrationality are flourishing shamelessly. "If only people would be sensible. If only they would submit to the order of reason." However, what really irks Blackburn is not these popular aberrations, but that intellectual sophistry - variously labelled multiculturalism, postmodernism or relativism - which gives them licence and even encouragement. Truth is a riposte to such woolly-mindedness. Its urbane and witty prose belies a formidably austere rationalism.

Blackburn is not, mind you, one of those old-fashioned dons described by Hilaire Belloc, who "shout and bang and roar and bawl/The Absolute across the hall". His is a more subtle approach. He has no desire to resurrect the notion of the "one true world" lurking behind and validating our beliefs; he accepts the work of demolition carried out by such philosophers as Nietzsche and William James. His claim is rather that the cardinal concept of truth, and its companions reason and objectivity, survive this demolition intact. For their true foundations lie not in metaphysics or theology, but in our everyday practices of judging, criticising, measuring and assessing. Every time we engage in these practices, we extend an implicit endorsement to the values of truth. Trendy intellectual nostrums vanish like mist in the face of workaday success. "Even that great public sceptic about the value of science, Prince Charles, never flies a helicopter burning homoeopathically diluted petrol."

There is something very British about the confidence that Blackburn reposes in everyday belief and practice. The 18th-century sceptic David Hume found his doubts regarding the existence of the external world happily vanquished by a well-roast goose and a bottle of port. More recently, the Oxford philosopher Peter Strawson has argued that belief in human freedom, being implicit in our everyday practices of praise and blame, is immune to the onslaughts of psychology and sociology. Theory - so runs the general pattern of argument - can huff and puff as long as it likes, but it can never dislodge the granite of custom and habit. Mere cleverness is impotent against the deeper structures of human existence.

Blackburn is in this tradition. His tactic is to show how sceptics such as Richard Rorty unwittingly affirm the very concept of truth they seek to deny. Rorty is notorious for identifying truth with "what your contemporaries let you get away with". Yet he insists that this identification is not a licence to bullshit, because the contemporaries he has in mind are not just any old mob, but the most "enlightened" and "curious" of our "fellow enquirers". But his position is now practically indistinguishable from that of his opponents, because "enlightened", "curious" and "enquirers" are simply the epithets we give to those who possess, or seek to possess, the truth. Similarly, Nietzsche's declaration that "there is only a perspective seeing" inadvertently rehabilitates the very objectivism it is designed to debunk, for a perspective is necessarily a perspective "on" an independent reality. The concept of truth is, it seems, inescapable. Rorty and Nietzsche shrug it off only to find themselves once again enmeshed in its coils.

The implication of these and other passages is that we should all just simmer down. What looks at first glance like a momentous struggle, with repercussions for all our intellectual practices, fizzles out on analysis into a purely technical controversy. Such differences as remain between "realists" and "anti-realists" are of concern only to professional philosophers. The rest of us can safely ignore them and carry on interpreting and experimenting as we have always done. We must not let our confidence be sapped by the "apres-truth chit-chat" of coffee-house intellectuals.

I sympathise with Blackburn's stress on confidence. Too much self-consciousness is the death of any intellectual enterprise; it diverts attention away from the issue at hand and into fruitless methodological perplexities. But where Blackburn strikes me as over-optimistic is in his assumption that our intellectual practices are in themselves perfectly healthy, that the virus of doubt enters only from without. "Our words may sound insecure, but our practice is as robust as may be." Honest toilers in laboratory and library need only insulate themselves against the hypochondria of the coffee-house chatterers and everything will be OK. But what if the germs of intellectual self-doubt are incubated not in the coffee house, but in the laboratory and library? What if practice contains the seeds of its own disintegration?

Blackburn himself provides an amusing example of the disintegration of a practice. When the celebrity artist Tracey Emin lost her cat and put up "lost cat" notices around her London neighbourhood, these were immediately taken down and treasured as valuable works of art. Had she prefixed them with the words "This is not a work of art" they would have been viewed as still more valuable works of art. Emin can do nothing but produce works of art: and this only means that the whole notion of a "work of art" has lost its meaning. Emin is, in Blackburn's analogy, like an archer who fires arrows randomly into a barn door and then draws targets around them. What looks at first glance like a 100 per cent success rate is, in fact, the collapse of any independent standard of success or failure. Conceptual art exists in a normative vacuum. And what fills the vacuum is not creativity, as its apologists would have us believe, but money, fashion and celebrity.

I don't know exactly why aesthetic standards have so disintegrated, but I am sure it is less a consequence of external philosophical influences than of internal developments in the world of art. One would have to look at the curricula of art schools, at the dynamics of the art market and at the roles of curators, collectors and critics. The point is that the collapse of artistic norms is an institutional fact, not the projection of a group of malicious coffee-house intellectuals. Everyday practice is not the secure bedrock that philosophers such as Blackburn take it to be; it is perpetually on the brink of subsidence.

Art does not aim at truth - at least not in the ordinary sense of the term. Yet why shouldn't more strictly intellectual pursuits suffer the same collapse exemplified by Tracey Emin and her cat? Here, too, a combination of institutional and popular pressures can easily overwhelm the finely balanced structures of mutual respect that sustain any rigorous, norm-governed activity. Flattery, whether by the state or by the market, always menaces truth. No practice is so "robust" that it can be left to fend for itself. Even natural science, the most self-assured of the intellectual disciplines, could easily succumb - perhaps, indeed, already has succumbed - to the blandishments of commerce. The investigation of the deep structures of physical reality would then give way to a kind of avaricious tinkering. Science would become what its critics have always accused it of being: an instrument of exploitation, with no claim to represent the world "as it really is".

Thus while Blackburn is right to shift the focus of debate away from theory and on to practice, he is wrong to assume - and it is a very British assumption - that practice can look after itself. Truth calls out for a sequel, more sociological than philosophical, outlining the institutional conditions of serious, disciplined inquiry. Rorty and his ilk are not the problem. It is the quiet hollowing-out of our own intellectual practices that should instead be arousing our concern.

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.

Charles Krauthammer: Let's Have No More Monkey Trials

2005-08-07T18:51:00.000-07:00

TIME.com -- Charles Krauthammer: Let's Have No More Monkey Trials

The half-century campaign to eradicate any vestige of religion from public life has run its course. The backlash from a nation fed up with the A.C.L.U. kicking crèches out of municipal Christmas displays has created a new balance. State-supported universities may subsidize the activities of student religious groups. Monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments are permitted on government grounds. The Federal Government is engaged in a major antipoverty initiative that gives money to churches. Religion is back out of the closet.

But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."

Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology. Schönborn's proclamation that it cannot exist unguided--that it is driven by an intelligent designer pushing and pulling and planning and shaping the process along the way--is a perfectly legitimate statement of faith. If he and the Evangelicals just stopped there and asked that intelligent design be included in a religion curriculum, I would support them. The scandal is to teach this as science--to pretend, as does Schönborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. "The Catholic Church," he says, "will again defend human reason" against "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity,'" which "are not scientific at all." Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.

In this slippery slide from "reason" to science, Schönborn is a direct descendant of the early 17th century Dutch clergyman and astronomer David Fabricius, who could not accept Johannes Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. Why? Because the circle is so pure and perfect that reason must reject anything less. "With your ellipse," Fabricius wrote Kepler, "you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me increasingly absurd the more profoundly I think about it." No matter that, using Tycho Brahe's most exhaustive astronomical observations in history, Kepler had empirically demonstrated that the planets orbit elliptically.

This conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer.

How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes "monkey trial"? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton's universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein's revisions. There are gaps in Einstein's universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.

To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.

Email the Columnist

ethics @ bizschool

2005-08-04T18:03:00.000-07:00

AMITAI ETZIONI, A PROFESSOR AT GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY AND AUTHOR OF "The Moral Dimension," recently had an article in The Washington Post titled,

"When It Comes to Ethics, B-Schools Get an F."

Etzioni taught ethics at the Harvard Business School in 1987-89. The school had received a gift of $20 million to fund the teaching of ethics. The faculty debated this at length. Etzioni says, "Reactions ranged from distrust to outright hostility."

A finance professor who was teaching students how to increase profits by breaking implicit contracts was worried.

A marketing professor pointed out that much of what they were teaching was a form of dissembling, such as increasing sales by putting small items in large boxes.

An economist was opposed, saying they were there to teach science, not ethics. A course was begun, but it was one to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible, Etzioni says. His students told him repeatedly that companies could not afford to be guided by ethics; they would lose out to ruthless competitors. This was what they were being taught.

He tells of a study of 2,000 graduates of the 13 top business schools. It found that studying for an MBA weakened their moral character. The percentage who said maximizing shareholder value was a corporation's prime responsibility went from 68 percent when they entered the MBA program to 82 percent by the end of the first year.

The lesson I see in this is that moral values must be taught beginning in grade school. Graduate school is too late.

Without objectivity there is no democracy

2005-08-04T17:51:00.000-07:00

The nasty truth about the noble lie Ali Hossaini - openDemocracy: "Without objectivity there is no democracy "

The nasty truth about the noble lie
Ali Hossaini
16 - 10 - 2003

The long walk to freedom takes place across language. What happens when words are abused by power, cheapened by war, or corrupted by media? This philosopher-TV executive surveys openDemocracy’s debate on journalism and war, and asks whether George Orwell’s dystopian vision of thought-killing ‘Newspeak’ has been realised in contemporary American journalism.

For twenty years essayists have ventured to ask if George Orwell’s vision for Nineteen Eighty-four is coming true. The answers have been as varied as the writers and the features of Oceania, Orwell’s fictional nation, they’ve chosen to consider.

Take a piece on surveillance by cyber novelist William Gibson for the New York Times (June 2003). Cameras are now cheap, miniaturised and, courtesy of local government, ubiquitous. Constant surveillance fits the classic definition of ‘Big Brother’. Yet Gibson argues that the market has headed off dystopia. Cameras work both ways, as the Rodney King affair showed, and cheap electronics makes every citizen a watchdog.

I think Gibson is right about surveillance, but let’s not dismiss the case for 1984. Two-way TVs are a nasty thought (unless you’re a paid Nielsen family), but far more insidious forces were at work in Oceania’s media, particularly in its portrayal of war.

All is fair in war

There was a time when war meant an armed conflict between two nations. War was an existential threat, and called for extraordinary actions that range from killing enemies to killing the truth. Even politicians remind us that “truth is the first casualty of war”, harking back to Plato’s doctrine of the “noble lie”.

Noble lies run headlong into journalistic ethics, which are based on the opposite principle: that society works best when based on truth. How do we decide which of these principles is right? There’s no magic formula for ethics, so I would argue that the answer depends on your political preferences. There are no givens in life, but by unpacking some of these issues, we can define the proper role of journalists, particularly in times of war. Orwell’s famous novel is helpful here because war was a permanent condition of Oceania.

People suspend their habitual ethics during war. Mild-mannered liberals may kill, lie and follow absolute leaders when threatened. The question is: how far this should go? Plato despised democracy, and he expected leaders to weave noble lies for the greater good.

The contemporary political relevance of the idea of the ‘noble lie’ is explored in relation to the powerful cadre of neo-conservatives influenced by Leo Strauss (for whom Plato’s anti-democratic dictums are fundamental) by Danny Postel’s conversation with Shadia Drury, elsewhere in this edition of openDemocracy.

Citizens of democracies have no such expectation, because we are, presumably, the leaders, and only an informed citizenry can make good decisions.

As Des Freedman points out in “Witnessing Whose Truth?”, journalists have been willing to suspend their objectivity during times of war, essentially abandoning democratic values for a temporary aristocracy. Freedman notes that the ‘embedded’ reporters of the recent Gulf war are nothing new; they are simply the most obvious examples of a media business that operates in a larger context of obligations, values and financial relationships.

Winning hearts and minds

Democratic polities have been willing to suspend individual rights during war, and war has been defined as a situation where the nation is under arms. For the past 200 years, wars have had distinct beginnings, and democratic nations had little question that things would return to ‘normal’ when hostilities ceased. Wartime powers are temporary. What happens when a nation is in perpetual war?

Orwell gave a telling answer to this question. Big Brother, the Everyman of dictators, learned that security trumps rights. By creating a state of permanent insecurity and blaming it on shadowy enemies, Big Brother’s government changed the terms of public discourse. In a chilling inversion of American values, the people of Oceania decided it was better to live “unfree” than die.

20th century nations never had to endure Oceania’s fate because war is by nature public and self-limiting. They end, if only because propaganda wears thin and combatants run out of money. In contrast, Oceania’s leader guarded the definition of war by taking control of language. My argument is that the control of language – particularly on the concept of war – is the key to dictatorial power. From that perspective we can see some dangerous trends in the politics of my country, the United States.

Without objectivity there is no democracy

Many factors have contributed to decline of objective journalism over the past decades. Some of them are economic, caused by the self-censorship of journalists who don’t want to offend their corporate employers, but another trend has been the rise of relativism.

Truth (capital ‘T’) seems a bit old-fashioned these days. Politicians have always lied – as Joseph Goebbels said, the bigger the better – but generally there has been someone around, whether it’s the intelligentsia, the clergy or the political opposition, to call them on it. Every Nixon has his Woodward & Bernstein, eventually. Now the situation is different, and the reason stems from the current state of our intellectual culture, which shuns anything that sounds absolute. Facts are for the naïve.

David Loyn’s article “Witnessing the Truth” uses his experience as a BBC correspondent to argue against advocacy journalism, however well-intentioned. In contrast, Des Freedman, argues that the only antidote to journalistic bias is a rising market for alternative views. News outlets will take a critical stance if it enhances sales. The economic logic is sound, but philosophy might offer a more productive way of approaching the problem of bias.

The truth, relatively speaking

Two currents converged to create our current relativism. Postmodern philosophy has for decades made a concerted effort to eliminate the verities of life. For Jean-Francois Lyotard and his brethren the Truth is just another meta-narrative, with no privileged grip on things as they are. The other current, probably more powerful, derives from scientific progress. Today’s facts are tomorrow’s fiction. Under such conditions, it’s easy to believe that everything you know is wrong.

I think it’s a terrible mistake to apply these lessons to life, particularly politics. Like quantum physics, philosophy works beyond the range of perception. Arguments about the limits of knowledge may make sense, but the key word is limits. It is a mistake to import the lessons of philosophy into everyday life without careful consideration. Think of Samuel Johnson’s response to Bishop Berkeley’s arguments against the existence of matter. He kicked a rock and said, “Thus I refute you.” Funny, definitely; but hardly an end to the philosophical argument.

Reality may not be as it seems, but even sceptics have not denied the importance of truth in human relations. Julian Baggini explains why objectivity is a critical factor in communication. In “The Philosophy of Journalism”, he contrasts truth, which has a brittle absolutism, with the notion of ‘truthfulness’, which is the best effort of a journalist to overcome her individual perspective.

Aiming for truthfulness, Baggini says, enables journalists to separate the social function of truth from its intellectual traps. The grand question of truth has not been answered. It probably won’t be. But the ambiguity of reality only holds for the musings of philosophers. Outside the classroom, there are standards of truth, and they don’t require formal proof. Instead they require common assent; they are what any reasonable person of sound faculties could verify. Philosophy can also justify this stance with another concept, intersubjectivity.

Collective reality is reality

Intersubjectivity refers to the fact that our minds function in a similar way. We are individuals, but our experience is shared. It accounts for the fact that we communicate, and it has a basis in evolution, which prepared us to live in coordinated groups. We share consciousness, and the medium of sharing is not a mysterious psychic faculty but ordinary language. Language forms the social environment, and it constitutes us as individuals. Not isolated individuals, but members of a group that entails roles, rights and responsibilities. Our psychology is intimately tied to society, and, without this complexity, we couldn’t survive.

Truthfulness plays a central role within our environment. Its function has little to do with the absolute certainty sought by philosophers and scientists. Instead it serves to coordinate members of society. Honest reporting is not just facts. It is good intent, and it conveys a reasonable nature that considers the needs, thoughts and agendas of other people. Facts are established through the intersubjectivity, which demands that another reasonable being, one with equally good intentions, would make the same report. Only then do they become objective. An objective report is something that can be defined by a quorum of reasonable people.

What happens, then, when objectivity is replaced by a partisan attitude? The language is perverted, because, as David Loyn points out, journalism operates in the framework of objectivity. Loyn uses his own experience to describe the dangers of abandoning that framework. When journalists become participants instead of reporters, they cast standards to the wind. Judging right and wrong should be reserved to the citizenry, not the institutions that convey information.

Lies are the simplest example of perversion, and we condemn liars because they distort the fabric of good intent, what we also call ‘trust’, for their own gain. Lies don’t only bend the social fabric. They also twist the fabric of reality, because the liar creates a false world. We are physical bodies, but we are also mental beings, and the mental world is made up of words. Language is the medium of our awareness, and, like material substances, it is vital to our survival.

Word warfare

Americans started playing fast and loose with the word ‘war’ in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson declared a ‘War on Poverty’ (while fighting an undeclared war in Vietnam). It was a worthy cause, and it was also a noble lie because you can’t literally fight poverty. Little harm was done because everyone understood the phrase as a metaphor.

Next came the ‘War on Drugs’. Again you can’t literally fight drugs, but this war brought low-intensity conflict at home and abroad that has lasted for decades. Like a traditional war, the War on Drugs includes military violence, but it is also combined with police action at home, an unusual precedent for war.

Finally, we have the ‘War on Terrorism’. We’ve already been warned that the conflict will be conducted in secrecy over decades. The front is everywhere, although average citizens, leaders no more, may know little about its prosecution.

‘War’ and ‘enemy’ have become arbitrary, even surreal, concepts in the 21st century. Along with ‘terrorist’, they are words used by officials to stigmatise independent thought. As Seymour Hersh recently discovered, even button-pushing journalists can be branded as terrorists if the truths they publish embarrass the government.

Language is the ultimate ground of freedom. It serves us because it offers commonly agreed definitions that provide a foundation for debate. When rulers wrest control of words, they render discussion impossible. The newspeak envisioned by Orwell had a drab, North Korean-type feel. Today’s newspeak is subtler. It doesn’t limit discussion outright; instead it perverts the categories of thought, confusing issues for anyone who lacks the sophistication to recognise what’s happened.

The ultimate warning in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four is about mind control. His fictional nation, Oceania, developed a sophisticated apparatus of punishment, surveillance and psychological conditioning. As totalitarian states go, it was far along, but its great, unfinished project was the revision of language. Dissent was possible as long it could be expressed, so the goal was to remove the means of expression, to shave disagreement to a single nub: “Big Brother is ungood.”

Orwell saw the practical consequence of giving power to liars. Unassailable by debate, and possessing vast channels of public media, their assaults on the truthfulness would lead to assaults on language. They would privatise goodness and define it as they please.

Orwell also realised that the assault on truthfulness required a larger context. Like the citizens of Oceania, we who are Americans are always at war, despite living in one of the most secure nations in history. Whose purpose does war serve? “You are either for us or against us.” Consider the psychological import of President Bush’s statement, uttered as the royal we.

For the person who makes it, it conveys self-conviction and a pathological fear of difference; for the dissenter, outrage and the dawning understanding that their interlocutor will not play nice. For the team player, it signifies a shift in boundaries. Good intent is redefined as support for the leader, and truth is what the leader says. The leader’s words are reality, and to contradict them with mere facts is treason. No argument is allowed, even if made in shared interest.

Keeping language in the hands of the people

Journalism plays a critical role in a global society that is connected by media. Most of us only know the world through reporters, so news is of vital importance: it conveys the world at large. Objectivity is essential to maintain a balance of power between leaders and citizens. And objective journalism is an area where theories of knowledge meet another branch of philosophy, ethics.

Humans exist in a web of mutual dependence, and survival calls from certain standards of behavior based on trust and good intent. Truthfulness forms a basis for trust. So, when we look for standards of truth, we don’t just rely on the shaky ontology of formal logic postmodern theory. Refined ethical behaviour sets the standard, and this is where journalists should seek justification for their craft.

Journalists can’t have an easy time of it. Picking the right words must be difficult in a multi-faceted world where partisans throw objectivity to the winds. The word ‘terrorist’ is now so overused that it essentially means “very bad person who disagrees with President Bush.” For a more complex take, look at the way media in different nations have reported the Iraq war. Each approach differs, if only slightly, from the others. Does this mean there is no truth?

Rather than debate metaphysics, let’s say the representatives of the nations represented in openDemocracy’s media monitor came together. They may bring different contexts to the discussion, but as long as they brought good intent, an attitude of truthfulness, we can imagine them establishing a common ground, probably one that synthesised their contrasting views.

Ethics is a practical science. As Aristotle said, virtue is something we cultivate and perfect through long efforts. It derives from experience not theory. There is no recipe for a good report, nor is there an argument that says a good report is impossible. Objectivity arises when journalists ask themselves the questions: How would a reasonable person remark on this situation? Am I leaving something out? Should I add some context, some relevant background that makes it comprehensible?

The choice of words is critical, and knowing what values to apply comes with practice. Narrowing the field of choices, or letting words take on strange, new meanings, doesn’t just subvert the ethics of journalism and human decency. It creates a perverse world where power controls the wellspring of thought.

AN ENERGY / AWARENESS / INFORMATION INTERPRETATION

2005-07-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

ZYGON Article

Abstract. Interpreting the universe as a medium-message process has explanatory value in both scientific and philosophical/spiritual contexts. From this perspective, reality is seen to comprise an enduring medium modulated by transient information. Physically, the medium is energy. Mentally, the medium is awareness. Algorithmically, the medium is an information generator, a programmatic entity that generates temporary informational patterns which modulate the medium's energy aspect in space and time to produce matter and physical phenomena and modulate the medium's awareness aspect to produce subjective experience, mind. In philosophical terms, the medium is Being; the medium modulated by the message is existence.

Keywords: AWARENESS; BEING; ENERGY; EXISTENCE; INFORMATION; REALITY.

Energy & Information

2005-07-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

Back in 1971 Myron Tribus and Edward C. McIrvine published a very important article in the special "Energy and Power" edition of Scientific American http://www.sciam.com

In their article titled "Power and Information" they developed the argument that the transfer of information involves a transfer of energy. They identified the thermodynamic concept of entropy with the probabilistic notion of uncertainity. As a system decays or randomizes (or loses energy) information is being lost.

One good quote is :

If we ask something without knowing what the possible answers are then we have not really posed a question; we have instead requested help in formulating a question"

This sound very much like Douglas Adam's HitchHiker's Guide dilemma where we asked what is the meaning of life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

Hello TSUN-Shine

2005-07-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

Angela Tsun -- a well named presenter on the Australian Weather Channel

http://www.weatherchannel.com.au/Magic94scripts/mgrqispi94.dll?appname=WC&prgname=WC&Template=AngelaTsun

TSUN shines on the Weather Channel

2005-07-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

They call it nomomancy --- where a person's name reflects their profession.

Angela Tsun , a presenter on Australia's Weather Channel would have to take the prize for one of the best examples of nomomancy

http://www.weatherchannel.com.au/Magic94scripts/mgrqispi94.dll?appname=WC&prgname=WC&Template=AngelaTsun

Angela Tsun -did a lady ever have a better name ?

2005-07-19T21:16:00.000-07:00

The Weather Channel - Angela Tsun