The Filter^

TS Eliot

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

An End to a Tragedy

Shoko Asahara has been sentenced to death. From the BBC:

The verdict is the culmination of a nearly eight-year trial, during which Asahara has remained largely silent...It is still not clear exactly why Asahara ordered the Tokyo attack. The group mixed Buddhist, Hindu and Christian tenets and believed some kind of Armageddon was imminent.

I re-read Haruki Murakami's, Underground, an account of the Tokyo gas attack, last September, in remembrance of September 11. In his usual understated elegance, he writes in the Preface:

The date is Monday 20 March 1995. It is a beautiful clear spring morning. There is still a brisk breeze and people are bundled up in coats. Yesterday was Sunday, tomorrow is the Spring Equinox, a nation holiday...It promised to be a perfectly run-of-the-mill day. Until five men in disguise poke at the floor of the carriage with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas, puncturing some plastic bags filled with a strange liquid...

While the Japanese public finds it difficult to comprehend the tragedy because it was conducted by seemingly normal people, ones that do not look out of place while travelling in the Tokyo subway, the Bush administration is trying ever so hard to persuade the American public that the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11 were evil and utterly different to the Western civilisation.

All the Useless Processing Cycles

The ever-informative OSNews has a story on an old friend - the Commodore 64! Apparently, a bus station in Brisbane uses one to display travel information:

If a 1 mhz CPU with 64kb RAM is still useful commercially, think about the under-utilised computing power a Pentium 4 2.88 ghz CPU produces. Use your idle CPU wisely by getting involved with projects like SETI@home.

The Philosophy of Lust

Anthony's Science of Love remains me of the Seven Deadly Sins series by OUP. Lust is covered by Simon Blackburn. Summarising his position in the New Statesman:

There are many dimensions of excess. A desire might be excessive in its intensity if, instead of merely wanting something, we are too preoccupied by it or are unduly upset by not getting it...We should no more criticise lust because it can get out of hand than we criticise hunger because it can lead to gluttony, or thirst because it can lead to drunkenness.

PS: Please don't confuse Simon Blackburn with Simon Blackman, whose keen interest in co-authoring articles with economists based at Liverpool University and his encyclopaedic knowledge in ECON111 Mathematics deserve another post!

"It's unfair that you want all your products marketed globally but you don't want any jobs to go."

Reporting from India, Thomas Friedman gives his view on outsourcing, in the New York Times today:

"How can it be good for America to have all these Indians doing our white-collar jobs?" I asked 24/7's founder, S. Nagarajan.

"Well," he answered patiently, "look around this office." All the computers are from Compaq. The basic software is from Microsoft. The phones are from Lucent. The air-conditioning is by Carrier, and even the bottled water is by Coke, because when it comes to drinking water in India, people want a trusted brand. On top of all this, says Mr. Nagarajan, 90 percent of the shares in 24/7 are owned by U.S. investors. This explains why, although the U.S. has lost some service jobs to India, total exports from U.S. companies to India have grown from $2.5 billion in 1990 to $4.1 billion in 2002. What goes around comes around, and also benefits Americans.

Friedman's piece is an excellent illustration of comparative advantage. If you have a bit of free time, I urge you to read Paul Krugman's "Ricardo's Difficult Idea", in which the theoretical aspect of international trade is beautifully explained.

The Science of Love

A summary from I get a kick out of you from the Economist.

Researchers took brain scans of students who described themselves as 'madly in love'.
Interestingly,

the brain areas active in love are different from areas activated in other emotional states, such as fear or anger. Parts of the brain that are love-bitten include the the one responsible for gut feelings,.... which generate the euphoria induced by drugs such as cocaine.

Love, it seems, can literally be an addiction.

In Helen Fisher's book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love there are three types or love:

1. Lust
In the aftermath of lustful sex, there are increases in chemicals such as endogenous opioids, the body's natural equivilant of heroin.
2. Attraction
A more refined version of lust, it allows people to home in on a particular mate.

This state is characterized by feelings of exhilaration, and intrusive, obsessive thoughts... this mental state might share neurochemical characteristics with the manic stage of manic depression, or obsessive compulsive disorder.

This suggests that anti-depressants jeapordise the ability to fall in love, since Prozac might be staving off romantic feelings.
3. Attachment
Characterised by calm, social comfort and emotional union.

Fisher says that since these three types are independant, it's possible to love more than one person at once. And since promiscuity leads to a bigger stake in the gene-pool, a rather pessimistic future exists for their interplay.

It seems to me, that if you're going to ban cocaine, than to be consistant people who are 'madly in love' are just as destructive....

Fat People - A reader writes...

A particular issue that has stealthily crept between my retina and nestled like a wet cat on the (vast)hearth of my frontal lobe, whispering perversions and incantations to the part of my brain responsible for luke warm political and consumer problems, is, alas, obesity. Yet the issue has taken on a sinister twist, and i regret to inform you, world, that it is no longer a simple case of two-too many fish fingers for supper.

I consider this to be the true sequel to a recent post highlighting the growing (ahem) trend of showing footage of anonymous fat people plodding down Dunstable high street, and the personal privacy issues that ensue. The headless fatties are upon us once more, squeezing their whale-like blubber through a million transitors and emiting pale glowing images to thousands of worried gorgers in every town. The supposition that head removal is identity removal is a false premise; who would not recognise THAT burgundy tie adorning pink shirt and grey slacks. I mean come on, everyone knows its your dad. The sad fact is, or was (wait for it), that this was clearly a case of pointing fun at Captain Rotund in order to shame him into surgery (many current affairs programming commissions rely on funding from cosmetic companies, maybe), and was dressed up in ethical attire.

HOWEVER, recent footage, and i cite BBC2's The Daily Politics, Feb 24th as evidence, of people who are NOT PARTICULARLY FAT AT ALL has been used in addressing this issue; again, sans head. The psychological impact of such footage will be massive (sorry), the implicit suggestion being that it is not those of above average proportion with the problem, but those with no head. This is the only continuous factor present across all media. Of course, we can all see that the headless themselves pose no real difficulty, due to a lack of actual existence in society, but watch what happens when we reverse the logic: no person with a head is obese, and hence the problem dissipates.

But thank lordy god that i was here to point that out. Thank Allah.

Get Ready to Shrove

Today is Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent, which means it's an excuse to stuff our faces with pancakes! Here's a quick recipe:

mix:
4oz plain flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
a pinch of salt
beat and add:
one egg
add:
1/2 pint of milk, stir gradually to make smooth
add:
1 teaspoon melted butter

Cook in a hot frying pan, flip pancakes when they bubble to brown the other side.

Pretty Deep

While most cinema-goers will identify Jackie Chan as the prime export of Hong Kong cinema, to many who live in the "Fragrant Harbour", it is Tony Cheung that remains dearest in their hearts. An interview with Cheung can be found in today's Guardian:

...He has been called Hong Kong's answer to Johnny Depp, partly because of his adoring female fans and age-proof pin-up looks (he's 41), but also for his ability to switch between small art films and big commercial ones without missing a step...

In the article, Wong Kai-Wai's 2046 is also mentioned. When it was first announced, the significance of the year 2046 was quickly picked up by Hong Kongers - it is when the guaranteed 50 years of unchanged Capitalistic way of life in Hong Kong, as stated in the Basic Law, ends. It has been in production for over four years, with rumoured participations of björk and Gong Li (either is unlikely to be involved...)! We should see the finished product at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

In the meantime, check out Wong's In the Mood for Love, featuring Tony Cheung, a film that is even more minimalist than Lost in Translation, but with the same sense of tragedy and unresolved passion. Highly recommended.

Mankiw and free-trade

President Bush's Chief Economic Advisor, N. Gregory Mankiw (Greg to his mates), has caused a furor after saying

"When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically....
Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade...
More things are tradable than were tradable in the past, and that's a good thing."

With high US resentment over manufacturing jobs being outsourced overseas, the comments have been leapt on by polititians and commentators, with Rep. Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.) calling for his resignation:

He ought to walk away, and return to his ivy-covered office at Harvard"

Mankiw's words are of the tamest possible nature, a restatement of one of the most luminous contributions to modern civilisation. He is hardly a cut-throat free marketeer, for example his dog is called Keynes, and he has even rescinded his comments:

"My lack of clarity left the wrong impression that I praised the loss of US jobs"

It is a hideously depressing picture: a world-respected economist is forced to apologise for stating our main lesson.

Here's the story from
The Washington Post
The BBC