Posts tagged horizons of the possible

Ah, the two-week gap between when this post was written and this week's financial scariness.

advertising, cultural worlds, economics, horizons of the possible, poverty, psychology

Nate

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The finding from our first study, that when you make people feel poor they play more, is especially sad since playing the lottery is on average a massively losing proposition. The propensity of low income individuals to play the lottery has the perverse effect of exacerbating their poverty. Although there are no easy solutions to the problem, one obvious one would be to cease marketing and advertising that targets the poor. It probably makes sense for the state to sell lottery tickets, because otherwise they will be sold by organized crime. However, does it really make sense for the state to be inducing, through advertising, poor people to play who wouldn’t play in the absence of such inducement?

Similarly, states could promote and offer more games that appeal to wealthier players, such as Powerball, and not those popular with poorer players, such as instant scratch-off tickets. Another obvious solution, though one that is even less likely to be implemented, would be for the state to increase the payout on the tickets, and perhaps to increase the number of moderate size prizes.

Finally, a third option would be for financial institutions to issue investment instruments that have lottery-like qualities (for example, offered in small amounts, available at many convenient points of purchase, provide a small chance of a large upside) but offer a positive rate of return, providing the pleasure of playing the lottery without the steep cost. In many other countries “prize bonds” or other savings instruments are available that pay lottery winnings in place of, or in addition to, regular interest. Regulations in the United States have stymied the development of such offerings.

Odds are you won't want to take the time to read this whole essay—that's why we publish excerpts here at Culture Making!—but it makes one subtle and one smack-upside-the-head point. The smack: "E-learning" doesn't help students learn. At all. Does. Not. Work. Please, educators, stop throwing (our) money at it. The subtlety: Web reading isn't bad, it just isn't the kind of reading schools should be encouraging, which is slow and analog. In the age of technology, as Albert Borgmann has argued, we all have to choose to become analog ascetics. The mark of a quality education will soon become that it teaches students how to unplug, and why that's such a good thing.

books, horizons of the possible, internet, reading, technology and change

Andy

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The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IMing, Twittering, and Facebooking. The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in college classrooms can’t bridge them. Screen reading is a mind-set, and we should accept its variance from academic thinking. [Jakob] Nielsen concisely outlines the difference: “I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire — or its modern-day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector,” he says. “We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets — so long as the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts.”

So let’s restrain the digitizing of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology in young people’s lives, let’s frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off.

I love studies of animal language precisely because, of course, they're generally really just as much about human language and culture. The generous, absurd gesture of translating a Babylonian epic into ape-ish just underscores the point.

animals, gestures and postures, horizons of the possible, language, literature, poetry, translation

Nate

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There’s been increased interest lately in monkey languages after discoveries were made about how putty-nosed monkeys combine sounds to create a basic syntax:

* Hack-hack-hack-hack: “There’s an eagle over there!” * Pyow-hack-hack-pyow-pyow-pyow: “I’ve seen a leopard, let’s move away!” * Hack-hack-hack-pyow-hack-hack-hack-hack-hack “There’s an eagle over there, let’s move away!”

But research at the Great Ape Trust using the sign language Yerkish reveals the primates are capable of far more linguistic sophistication. Primate Poetics sets out a manifesto to enrich this new language, starting, ambitiously, with a translation of the epic Gilgamesh:

“We will learn Yerkish. We will translate human literature into Yerkish. We will invent words, word-tricks, word-jokes, word-games to show the apes new ways of using (their) language. We will become knowledgeable and original enough to be invited by the researchers of the Great Ape Trust to read our Yerkish translation of Gilgamesh to Kanzi, Panbanisha and all the others.

“We are not here to compare and to compete with the ape but to appreciate its language for its own beauty. This is emphatically not about some lone genius monkey penning the Great Primate Novel.”

Andy Warhol—who along with being a painter of soup cans was a volunteer at soup kitchens—would doubtless be pleased.

failure, finance, food and drink, horizons of the possible, poverty, wealth

Nate

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Campbell Soup Co. was the only stock in the S&P 500 that escaped yesterday’s historic sell-off. That’s right: 499 fell, and just one rose.

Could there be a clearer metaphor for Americans refocusing on the basics after a decade of greed and excess?

A great example of culture-making in America's prisons. Canned mackeral's value as a currency (as opposed to just a means of barter) is apparently that a) it's cheap, and b) few inmates actually want to eat it.

cultural worlds, food and drink, horizons of the possible, prison

Nate

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When Larry Levine helped prepare divorce papers for a client a few years ago, he got paid in mackerel. Once the case ended, he says, “I had a stack of macks.”

Mr. Levine and his client were prisoners in California’s Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. Like other federal inmates around the country, they found a can of mackerel—the “mack” in prison lingo—was the standard currency.

“It’s the coin of the realm,” says Mark Bailey, who paid Mr. Levine in fish. Mr. Bailey was serving a two-year tax-fraud sentence in connection with a chain of strip clubs he owned. Mr. Levine was serving a nine-year term for drug dealing. Mr. Levine says he used his macks to get his beard trimmed, his clothes pressed and his shoes shined by other prisoners. “A haircut is two macks,” he says, as an expected tip for inmates who work in the prison barber shop.

There’s been a mackerel economy in federal prisons since about 2004, former inmates and some prison consultants say. That’s when federal prisons prohibited smoking and, by default, the cigarette pack, which was the earlier gold standard.

Even for religious artists, Roger Kimball suggests, the goal of art in a secular age is not simply to directly serve the sanctuary. But if art ceases to acknowledge both religion and beauty, it "degenerates into a caricature of itself." This is a fine line drawn by a fine essay, well worth pondering if you are an artist or one who serves them.

art, beauty, horizons of the possible

Andy

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Fra Angelico, a deeply religious painter, was a great artist, but then so was Titian, a conspicuously worldly one. Bach was a pious soul and was possibly the greatest composer who ever lived, but what about Beethoven? If he was religious it was in a vastly different sense. Jane Austen was conventionally religious in her personal life, but her novels achieve greatness through their secular wit and wisdom. Art and ­ religion are both eulogistic words: Calling something a work of art endows it with a nimbus of value; the same is true of religious. But is that the same sort of value?

The twentieth-century Welsh Catholic poet David Jones had it right when he suggested that “no integrated, widespread, religious art, properly so-called, can be looked for outside enormous changes in the character and orientation and nature of our civilization”—changes, I think, that would be deeply at odds with our commitment to liberal democracy. Jones agrees that it would be nice if “the best of man’s creative powers” were “at the direct service of the sanctuary.” But that can happen only “if the epoch itself is characterized by those qualities.” It is not, he goes on to note, a matter of will: What is possible to the artist in the way of creating religious art “has little or nothing to do with the will or wishes of this or that artist.” Be a painter ever so pious, he cannot “change himself into an artist of some other culture-sequence.” Some things were possible in the Middle Ages that are not possible today.

The real threat to the arts, Jones thought, was the modern world’s increasing submission to technocracy, to a thoroughly instrumental view of life that had no room for what Jones called the intransitive—for the freedom and disinterestedness traditionally thought the province of religious experience, on the one hand, and aesthetic experience, on the other.

A sort of high-end storefront secular church emerges in London.

education, england, horizons of the possible, literature

Nate

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London’s new School of Life, based in a Merchant Street storefront, offers courses on “the five central themes of our lives—work, play, family, politics and love.” The school’s courses treat the classics (like Shakespeare’s sonnets or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina) as works with practical, not just academic, value. It’s a refreshing approach. “Real” college literature and philosophy courses are often too distracted with their cerebral exercises (”deconstructing the narrative,” or whatever) to consider whether these works of genius might have actual applications in everyday life.

An encouraging use of the world's fastest-spreading technology, from India's Bihar state, which has a reputation for backwardness even during non-flood times.

cell phones, communication, development, horizons of the possible, poverty, rescue

Nate

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One India reports on how mobile phones are used after the devastating floods in Bihar, India. While relief and aid have been very slow to get to Bihar, mobiles are proving to be a life saver.  According to One India, “[Mobiles] are playing the most crucial role in largescale evacuation and rescue of marooned people from far flung areas. The availability of mobile phones to all sections of people across the flooded regions and their 24 hour connectivity during the crisis period, greatly helped the rescue teams to locate the cut off villages and localities besides saving many lives even from remote areas.”

Through cell phones the marnooed people were also able to remain connected with the district officials to guide them about their need and the urgency of rescuing them.

What's interesting here—aside from the story itself, which sounds hopeful indeed—is the way the moringa tree is being passed between different (though surprisingly overlapping) cultural worlds: Africa and Asia and America, rich and poor, traditional and modern, folk and scientific. My ears prick up at the words that accompany (often in necessary quotation-marks) these handoffs: "discovered," "miracle," "awaits validation."

africa, agriculture, asia, cultural worlds, development, food and drink, horizons of the possible, migration

Nate

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As a child growing up in India, I greeted the appearance of one particular vegetable on my plate with exaggerated distaste: tender seedpods from the moringa tree, locally known as “drumsticks.” Imagine my surprise when I heard a health worker from sub-Saharan Africa describe this backyard tree as a possible solution to malnutrition in tropical countries – he called it a “miracle tree,” no less.

Ounce for ounce, says Lamine Diakite, a Red Cross official from French Guinea in West Africa, moringa leaves contain more beta carotene than carrots, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach, more Vitamin C than oranges, and more potassium than bananas. Its protein content is comparable to that of milk and eggs, and its leaves are still available for harvest at the end of the dry season, when other food may be scarce. Malnourished children gained weight when put on a timely dietary supplement made from the leaves, Mr. Diakite says. He passed around pouches of the green, hennalike powder at a recent international summit in Boston.

Until a decade ago, moringa was not widely known in Africa. Its leaves (boiled like spinach) were an occasional vegetable. Immigrant Indians prized the long, slender seedpods (stewed or cooked like green beans) as a delicacy. “But its nutritional value, newly ‘discovered,’ has been known for a long time,” says Lowell Fuglie, an international development administrator who has been instrumental in popularizing the moringa in Africa for the past 10 years. Laboratory analysis has corroborated traditional knowledge about the plant. It now awaits further validation by western science.

A glorious celebration of the toaster in its various vintage forms. The photo galleries in particular are worth getting lost in, come breakfast-time.

bread, food and drink, horizons of the possible, kitchens

Nate

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For inventors and engineers of toasters it seemed to be a big challenge to create as many as possible different technical solutions to ... well ... heat and rotate a simple square slice of bread.

• Perchers The bread stands alone
• Pinchers The bread is pinched at its place
• Turners The bread is turned horizontally
• Swingers The bread is turned vertically
• Sliders The bread slides in the toaster
• Drive Thrus The bread drives thru the toaster
• Tippers The bread tips out the toaster
• Floppers (Turn Overs) The bread flops out and flips over
• Droppers The bread falls through a trap door
• Pop-Ups The bread automatically jumps out of the top
• Drop/Turn-Ups The bread has been raised manually
• Flat Beds The toast lies on a grille

Technology makes many things possible, but often with a costly trade-off. Here's one novelist's attempt to compensate—I like how it's a very community-based solution, rooted in relationship and trust.

disciplines, horizons of the possible, internet, technology and change, writing

Nate

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Okay, I’ll admit it: work on my new novel, Finch, is going well because every morning my long-suffering yet often amused wife Ann hides the router box and my cell phone. I get up around 7am, I have my breakfast and watch something innocuous like BBC News or Frasier for about half an hour, and then get down to work. Around noon I take a break to get some lunch, then go back to it, usually at that point editing or organizing notes. Around 2:30 I call Ann on our landline and she tells me where the router box and the cell phone are (it has internet access on it) so I can finish up the afternoon with necessary emails and other work, before going to the gym.

The internet in its many forms is, for me, a harmful and insidious enemy of novel creation. A novel takes a great deal of uninterrupted thought, not to mention uninterrupted writing. A novel in gestation does not brook interference of this kind. This isn’t just a matter of procrastination or time-wasting. It directly affects quality and depth in my opinion. The sustained effort required by a novel should not include multi-tasking on other things, if you have the option.

Ten years ago this is not something I, or anyone else, would have had to worry about. In fact, I remember writing parts of one novel in an apartment that didn’t even have electricity. Or, heck, any furniture to speak of. I got up around dawn, went to my day job, and then came back and wrote until it got dark. Sometimes I’d go to a coffee shop so I could write longer.

The point is, some forms of modern technology are, in a certain context, dangerous. Sometimes in workshops, Ann and I will force students to write longhand just to cut them off from their laptops and all the stuff that comes flying up onto the screen. Some hate it. Some realize what they’ve been missing.

An interesting idea: applying fleet-management techniques to teenage drivers. I wonder, though, whether having the person who recieves the complaint be a parent rather than a manager effects the outcome (both in terms of deterrance and of punishment)? Somehow I doubt you'd get yelled at in quite the same way.

driving, horizons of the possible, safety, teenagers, transport

Nate

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By placing our How’s My Driving sticker on your car, other drivers now have an easy way to provide feedback about your teen’s driving. Utilizing this information, concerned parents can work with their teen to correct poor driving skills and reinforce safe driving behavior.

Every year nearly 10,000 teens die violently in automobile crashes. Young drivers account for 18% of all police reported automobile or truck crashes. This staggering fact should scare the parents of every teen driver.

When a report is received, parents are contacted via mail or e-mail with information regarding your teen’s driving behavior. Utilize this information to teach your teen accident reduction and defensive driving techniques.

Trucking companies utilizing “How’s My Driving?” driver monitoring programs have reported a 20% decrease in accidents and ticketing. It’s our hope that Tell-My-Mom.com can increase safety in teen driving in a similar fashion.

From a series where GOOD Magazine asked four grownups what they'd always wanted to learn to do, then sent them to lessons.

disciplines, education, horizons of the possible, music, piano, practice

Nate

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Two major ambitions defined my childhood. One was to become what I imagined headlines would refer to as “the first kid in space.” The second, which seemed more reasonable, was to become a great pianist. I realized when I was very small that I wasn’t like most people: I was double-jointed. I could bend the top joints of my fingers forward at will to create a sharp right angle, and pull my thumb all the way forward or backward to touch my wrist. This would, I thought, give me abilities at the keyboard that no other pianist could boast. I could only imagine the wild flourishes and the daring arpeggios I would master. I had a natural advantage, and I intended to use it.I was also a bit of what you might call a quitter back in those days. So when my mother took me down to the music Conservatory and the stern woman in charge told me I would have to learn the recorder—that fat, beige, orthopedic-looking thing—I walked away in disgust.

I nurtured no lack of rock-star fantasies and concert pianist daydreams over the next couple of decades, but I never touched another instrument—until now, at the probably-too-late age of 31. Maya, my enthusiastic and very patient teacher, begins the process by explaining the basics of music theory: tones, pitches, harmonics, chords, rhythm. I’m also learning how to read music, a completely different challenge than the instrument itself. Getting from this theoretical stage to actually playing a song feels like learning to dance by studying the properties of gravity. How do you turn these concepts and rules into something beautiful?

Well, for one, you play a lot of scales. I play them until my hands ache. I feel like every sullen adolescent forced to practice by well-meaning parents. When was the last time I actually had to practice something, anyway? I’m out of practice at practicing.