How Poverty Taxes the Brain

To paraphrase Maugham son, poverty is a dull dreary affair and my earnest advise is to have nothing to do with it. It's really soul destroying son. It does reduce brainpower and it really does pain the mind. Hunger ruins everything. Poverty removes any kind of rational decision making. Which is why I keep on telling you to learn to save and invest. 

But I disagree that you can separate the poor out of the context. Both are entwined and both need to be addressed. A welfare state helps but too much can breed complacency and sloth as we have see. Do you know there are 3 million households in this country where nobody has a job? So you can say that it's because of a recession or rise of single households. Or that there are a million households where nobody ever held a job? Or hundreds of thousands of households where nobody in 3 generations ever held a job? Living in benefits? That's Jo life. That's a life for cattle. 

Love

Baba

How Poverty Taxes the Brain
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/08/how-poverty-taxes-brain/6716/

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• Emily Badger
• Aug 29, 2013

Shutterstock

Human mental bandwidth is finite. You’ve probably experienced this before (though maybe not in those terms): When you’re lost in concentration trying to solve a problem like a broken computer, you’re more likely to neglect other tasks, things like remembering to take the dog for a walk, or picking your kid up from school. This is why people who use cell phones behind the wheel actually perform worse as drivers. It’s why air traffic controllers focused on averting a mid-air collision are less likely to pay attention to other planes in the sky.

We only have so much cognitive capacity to spread around. It’s a scarce resource.

This understanding of the brain’s bandwidth could fundamentally change the way we think about poverty. Researchers publishing some groundbreaking findings today in the journal Science have concluded that poverty imposes such a massive cognitive load on the poor that they have little bandwidth left over to do many of the things that might lift them out of poverty – like go to night school, or search for a new job, or even remember to pay bills on time.

The condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points

In a series of experiments run by researchers at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Warwick, low-income people who were primed to think about financial problems performed poorly on a series of cognition tests, saddled with a mental load that was the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep. Put another way, the condition of poverty imposed a mental burden akin to losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults.

Italian archaeologists have grape expectations of their ancient wine

Kids

I thought you will like to read about what the Italian archaeologists are doing. Specially given that we were in Sicily couple of weeks back. Fascinating exercise eh? I wonder how their wine will turn out. 

Love

Baba

Italian archaeologists have grape expectations of their ancient wine
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/22/italy-wine-archaeology

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The University of Catania's vines are secured with canes and woven juniper leaves. Photograph: Mario Indelicato

Archeologists in Italy have set about making red wine exactly as the ancient Romans did, to see what it tastes like.

Based at the University of Catania in Sicily and supported by Italy's national research centre, a team has planted a vineyard near Catania using techniques copied from ancient texts and expects its first vintage within four years.

"We are more used to archeological digs but wanted to make society more aware of our work, otherwise we risk being seen as extraterrestrials," said archaeologist Daniele Malfitana.

The representation of Italian nudes due to Indians?

What a curious argument. I quote:

We discovered innumerable lands, we saw innumerable people and different languages, and all were naked.1 (Amerigo Vespucci, letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, 1500)

This essay proposes that we question the current understanding of the Italian Renaissance nude by examining contemporaries’ perceptions of nakedness. Despite the importance of the nude for the development of Western art, there have been few studies that consider how the revival of the nude form in fifteenth-century Italy was understood by people at the time.2 Most scholars, understandably, see the new fashion for portraying naked figures in the fifteenth century as a direct reflection of the enthusiasm for classical antiquity during this era. Without denying the crucial importance of antique precedents, I wish here to investigate another possibility: that travellers’ accounts of naked natives encountered on European voyages of exploration, particularly those to sub-Saharan Africa, influenced the creation of what has been called a ‘Renaissance anthropology’ – debates about the nature of mankind.3 This provided a new conceptual filter through which the nude figure was seen – and in some cases, these accounts may have directly affected the iconography of otherwise puzzling images.

The article has four main inter-related areas of focus:

• the increased nakedness of depictions of Adam and Eve from the early fifteenth century, placed in the context of Renaissance understandings of the development of early mankind – and an emphasis on nakedness as a symbol of human potential;
• a survey of Italian travel accounts that invoke stereotypes of nakedness as a symbol for peoples understood to have no civic society, religion or social differentiation;
• the increased presence of black Africans in Italian cities (particularly as slaves) over the course of the fifteenth century – with an analysis of Pisanello's Luxuria in this context;
• Florentine links with the Portuguese voyages to Africa, and descriptions of battling tribesmen, as a means of interpreting Antonio del Pollaiuolo's Battle of Naked Men, a seminal work in the development of the nude form.

I was specially caught by mention of Niccolo dei Conti, who visited India from Italy around 1439AD. He was the second Italian trader who visited India after Marco Polo (1295 or so). He seems to have married an Indian and travelled all over the Middle East, India and South East Asia. Amazing fella (hereis a great biography of the chap) but the interesting hypothesis is that the travel accounts from Africa and India helped to influence the portrayal of nudes in Italian art. I am not that close to all the various permutations of Italian Art, but it is interesting to note the time period after which nudes become common…how curious.

When India invaded Hyderabad

This was a fascinating article dating back to 1950 which I read recently. It talks about how the state of Hyderabad merged into India after independence. Its amazing how much has changed since then. The state of Hyderabad is going to be bifurcated by Telengana being born. I didn't realise how much communism had its roots in this area and how much Nehru worried that it can become the source of a Maoist central hub..Also how many Muslims were killed by the Hindu’s after the “police action”. Estimates range between 50,000-200,000 and some even higher. But I would like to quote the last section intoto.

It would seem beyond all cavil that the new regime was both
welcomed, and justly welcomed, by the great majority of the
population of Hyderabad. Even for the Muslim minority, the
regime is on paper fair, substantially undiscriminating. But it
would, indeed, be hardly human if at least the lower Hindu
officials took no advantage of their new power to deviate from
the ideal of impartiality. More calamitous is the plight of the
village Muslim, who probably was not personally implicated
in Razakar activities, but, glad enough to escape with his life,
lost his home and goods at the time of the invasion and has but
the little man's chance of getting them back. On a larger scale,
the entire Muslim community suffered at once from insecurity,
from the social and economic revolution which dislodged it as
the ruling class. The Muslims' status as a community had been
intimately bound up with an antique social structure which was
now being discarded. In the new society their problem is not
that of being given a status that they can call unjust, but the
difficulty of building up for themselves any status at all. The
loss of privilege is itself a downfall, in which legal justice may
go with economic disaster. No social revolution, however neces-
sary or just, can fail to disrupt the group which it abruptly ousts
from power. In theory, the Hyderabad Muslims in the new
order took their place indiscriminately along with everyone else;
in practice, they, who had been seated as it were on the platform,
have had to find themselves places on the floor already fully
occupied by firmly established, and defiant, crowds. Even in a
democracy the position, economic and other, of a small minority
depends not only on the justice of the laws but also on the degree
to which that minority is accepted by the major group. And in
Hyderabad, although the laws be democratic, society will be
Hindu.
Apart from the initial blow and the long-term readjustment
to the loss of social integration and of function, the Muslims

suffered also an inner dismay. It is too early yet to say whether
this psychological upheaval may not prove in the end the most
significant. It is part of the spiritual crisis through which Islam
is passing in the modern world. The two chief factors in this
crisis were both acute in the Hyderabad instance: the impact of
an unassimilated modernity on an old-world way of life and its
Weltanschauung; and the loss of power.
One wonders how the group, or anyway its leaders, could have
lost their heads so starkly as they did before the invasion.
Originally, the Nizam apparently felt that the British with-
drawal from India, coupled with partition, would lead to chaos;
and that out of the confusion he, with an army, wealth and
prestige, stood a fair chance of emerging as a major power in a
Balkanized India. The hope was not at first absurd, but should
have faded within six months. After this, he made, as to power
dynamics, a series of astonishing miscalculations, both interna-
tionally and in home affairs; until he allowed a vicious group of
men within the state to acquire power to a point where he could
no longer control them. He emerges as a clever man utterly desti-
tute of wisdom. The Razakar leaders were ruthless fanatics and
criminals who played for sordid stakes and lost. The mass of
Muslims was poor and ignorant, leading lives in which there
was little of significance except their religion and its social
solidarity. They are traditionally gullible, ardent but easily
misled. Several hundred thousand, however, had nothing to do
with the Nizam or the Razakars; but the innocent, too, suffer
for the mistakes of their community's leaders. The most signifi-
cant blundering was that of the middle classes, the one group
who might have saved the situation but failed utterly in both
understanding and judgment.
Brought up in an isolated, anachronistic society, with a point
of view that throughout much of the world would have seemed
normal only a few centuries back, the Muslims of Hyderabad
sincerely believed that their group's portion was to rule, the
Hindus' portion to learn to be content. The Muslims reposed,
too, a remarkably blind faith in the legal validity of their posi-
tion, and it will be generally conceded that in the dispute with
India, Hyderabad's case was on the whole considerably the

stronger in law. Along with their false sense of traditional and
legalistic security went perhaps the opposite - a subconscious
fear. They were frightened by what, in the explosive weeks fol-
lowing partition, had happened to millions of their coreligion-
ists in northern India; frightened, perhaps, by the awareness of
what would happen to them, once they lost supremacy at home.
Such a dread, growing more intense and irrational, may have
inhibited them from facing facts, as well as driven them to
aggression. Or, more rationally, there were those who felt that
any concession to Hindu India would in any case eventuate in
their doom; and that therefore resistance, at whatever cost, could
not be wrong. Also, there was present that curious confusion
between the moral and material strength of Islam which besets
many Muslims.
However it may have arisen, the Muslims' hybris, the over-
weening pride that led them to extravagant folly, brought them,
as in a Greek drama, to disaster. That their fate was to some
degree deserved, their suffering therefore self-inflicted, is in-
tegral to the tragedy.

Alawites in Syria and Alevis in Turkey: Crucial Differences

It's getting horribly dirty in Syria son. Very complicated. Syrian history, in some ways, is even more complicated than say Jerusalem and Israel. For a supposedly holy land, the land has been drenched with blood far too much. 

Anyway, one particular view on the two of many sects in Syria. 

Love

Baba

Alawites in Syria and Alevis in Turkey: Crucial Differences :: Center for Islamic Pluralism
http://www.islamicpluralism.org/2084/alawites-in-syria-and-alevis-in-turkey-crucial

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by Stephen Schwartz
Gatestone Institute
August 17, 2012http://www.islamicpluralism.org/2084/alawites-in-syria-and-alevis-in-turkey-crucial

Prophet Muhammad names Imam Ali as his successor, according to Shia tradition, depicted in a 14th c. CE manuscript -- Image Via Wikimedia Commons.

Sectarian differences, threatening to ensnare Muslims outside Syria's borders, have emerged as a key aspect of the horrific bloodshed there. Since February 2011 the Syrian protestors, mainly following Sunni Islam, have mobilized against the Baathist government of Bashar Al-Assad, as a further chapter in the "Arab Spring." As of the end of July 2012, fatalities in the Syrian fighting are estimated at more than 20,000.

In Syria, Al-Assad's state, military, and irregular militias draw significantly on a small – and, to the world, mysterious – variant of Shia Islam known as Alawites. Of Syria's population of 22 million, at least two million are Alawites; it is common to see them credited with 12 percent of the country's inhabitants. They mostly reside in the Syrian province of Latakia, from the northwest border with Turkey along the Mediterranean coast, and in southern Syria. Alawites are also found in Lebanon, and among Syrians and Lebanese abroad.

In Turkey, northward beyond the uneasy Syrian-Turkish frontier, and concentrated in eastern Anatolia, another Shia sect, the Alevis, comprise, according to many estimates, a quarter of the Turkish census, or 20 million out of 80 million. They include, in addition, a million in the Turkish diaspora in Germany, and still more in the ranks of emigrants from Turkey to the Netherlands and other Western European lands.

It is easy to conflate the Alawites and Alevis. Superficially the Alawites and the Alevis may seem related closely or even identical, especially because of their corresponding names; moreover, about a half million Arab Alawites also live on the Turkish side of the border with Syria.

Case studies: A hard look at GM crops

Kannu

Two topics specifically raise more heat than light, global warming and Genetically Modified crops ( if you excuse the inadvertent pun). 

So what we have to do is not to get into debates but listen carefully to the arguments. 

Climate change is happening and we need food productivity. Between these two conceptual positions and the public debate, there is too much noise. 

Love

Baba. 

Case studies: A hard look at GM crops : Nature News & Comment
http://www.nature.com/news/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm-crops-1.12907

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Palmer amaranth has taken root as a herbicide-resistant ‘superweed’ in many US cotton fields.

Polaris/eyevine

In the pitched debate over genetically modified (GM) foods and crops, it can be hard to see where scientific evidence ends and dogma and speculation begin. In the nearly 20 years since they were first commercialized, GM crop technologies have seen dramatic uptake. Advocates say that they have increased agricultural production by more than US$98 billion and saved an estimated 473 million kilograms of pesticides from being sprayed. But critics question their environmental, social and economic impacts.

Researchers, farmers, activists and GM seed companies all stridently promote their views, but the scientific data are often inconclusive or contradictory. Complicated truths have long been obscured by the fierce rhetoric. “I find it frustrating that the debate has not moved on,” says Dominic Glover, an agricultural socioeconomist at Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands. “The two sides speak different languages and have different opinions on what evidence and issues matter,” he says.

Here, Nature takes a look at three pressing questions: are GM crops fuelling the rise of herbicide-resistant ‘superweeds’? Are they driving farmers in India to suicide? And are the foreign transgenes in GM crops spreading into other plants? These controversial case studies show how blame shifts, myths are spread and cultural insensitivities can inflame debate.

GM crops have bred superweeds: True

Jay Holder, a farming consultant in Ashburn, Georgia, first noticed Palmer amaranth (Amaranthus palmeri) in a client’s transgenic cotton fields about five years ago. Palmer amaranth is a particular pain for farmers in the southeastern United States, where it outcompetes cotton for moisture, light and soil nutrients and can quickly take over fields.

Mystery Solved? A New Theory About Why Egypt Stopped Building Pyramids

Quite an interesting theory son. When I first saw the bent pyramid, I felt so sorry for it. It looks crooked, old, etc etc. specially after seeing the great pyramids and then the stepped pyramid, this one looks sad...

 

Love

Baba

Mystery Solved? A New Theory About Why Egypt Stopped Building Pyramids - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/mystery-solved-a-new-theory-about-why-egypt-stopped-building-pyramids/275738/

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Is it possible they were too perfect?

Rebecca J. Rosen May 10 2013, 9:58 AM ET

STRUCTUREmag

When structural engineer Peter James arrived at the Bent Pyramid, 25 miles south* of Cairo, his task was to secure the structure’s remaining “cladding” — its smooth exterior envelope. But why was it crumbling in the first place?

The foundation seemed completely stable. The prevailing theory — that “the missing cladding was removed by local opportunist thieves” — didn’t inspire confidence: That could explain the destruction at the lower levels, but the damage extended far up the pyramid and “in an apparently random manner, with no signs of indentations from temporary scaffolding or of any symmetrical cutting of the blocks to aid removal,” James writes in STRUCTURE, a structural engineering trade publication. The damage just did not look like the result of thieves. Rather, as James puts it, it “appears to be caused by a giant whose hand has swept across the face of the pyramid with enormous energy, sucking out the facing and leaving the ragged empty sockets.
”

So what was causing the crumbling? James presents a new explanation: thermal movement — that is to say the expansion and contraction of the limestone with temperature fluctuations — has ground down the rocks and shifted their positions.

During the day, the temperature rises to 40°C (104°F) across the face of the outer casing, then at night cools to 3⁰C (37⁰F) because of the lack of cover and exposure to the prevailing winds. This gives an average daily temperature fluctuation of 37°C (67°F). The photographs of the Bent Pyramid show how thermal expansion has caused the blocks to move to the edges, where they have detached. It also shows how individual stones, unsupported, can cantilever and snap off and subsequently fall to the ground.


He estimates that the motion can amount to 1¼ inches per 328 feet. As the stones move, dust and sand would fall from the stones and fill in the spaces between them. The spaces into which they could contract at night would shrink, and over time they would be pushed out of position. “Multiply this endless movement by the number of days that the pyramid has been erected and you have the reason why all the outer casing has moved to the extremities, where it has buckled or displaced against blocks moving in the opposite direction and then fallen off,” James writes. “It may then have been picked up by opportunists and removed from the site.
”

The Bent Pyramid is one of the best preserved and, as a result, it provides a unique opportunity for studying how the crumbling is happening. James theorizes that the reason the Bent Pyramid retains its casing, while the Red Pyramid and the Great Pyramid “have virtually none” is that, ironically, the Bent Pyramid had worse construction to begin with. As the Egyptians became more skilled, and developed more accurate construction techniques, the voids between the stones disappeared, and the structures were less able to absorb the ebbs and flows of the limestone. The other, more perfect pyramids may have developed exterior cracks rather quickly, and, James hypothesizes, may be why eventually the Egyptians moved their burial grounds to the Valley of the Kings. The pyramids’ perfection became their imperfection; their smooth facades broken by the precision of their construction.

How The London Boroughs Got Their Names

Kids

You may like these horrible histories behind the names of London boroughs. Fascinating. We live in deep historical places kids. We have had Saxons, Celts, Vikings, Romans, Normans and some Picts as well. This was a violent place. Harrow and Stanmore. Absolutely full of warfare but also long periods of peace. Fascinating. 

You have been to the museum of London. Remember this? 

Love

Baba

How The London Boroughs Got Their Names
http://londonist.com/2013/07/how-the-london-boroughs-got-their-names.php

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Fifty years ago today, the London Government Act 1963 received Royal Assent. It paved the way, two years later, for radical changes in London’s political boundaries. The 32 boroughs that we still know, love and pay our council tax to, were created. (The tiny City of London — also known as the Square Mile — holds different political status to the 32 boroughs, and carried on as normal after the Act.)

Many former boroughs (Finsbury and St Pancras, for example) disappeared overnight, though you can still see their names on old street signs around town. The new, bigger, amalgamated boroughs needed new names. In most cases, ancient appellations were chosen. So here’s our guide to the etymology of London’s boroughs. Find out which areas are named after sheep, chalk, crocuses…and a hill in Yorkshire.

Barking and Dagenham

Barking is an ancient, Anglo-Saxon phrase, first recorded as Berecingas. The name either derives from a local chieftan called Bereca or means “the settlement by the birch trees”. Dagenham is also ancient, first recorded as Dæccanhaam in 666 AD. ‘Haam’ means ‘home’ or ‘homestead’ and Dæcca was presumably a local land-owner or leader.

The Major Pipeline

this was fascinating, how does your university major link up with your eventual career?

This is just a cropped version of the graph, see the site for a better picturisation, fascinating where people end up with..Funny thing was on the managers, pretty much everybody is ending up in there, heh.

Tax Farming and the Origins of State Capacity in England and France

Fascinating comparison.

How did modern and centralized fiscal institutions emerge? We develop a model that explains (i) why pre-industrial states relied on private individuals to collect taxes; (ii) why after 1600 both England and France moved from competitive methods for collecting revenues to allocating the right to collect taxes to a small group of financiers—an intermediate institution that we call cabal tax farming— and (iii) why this centralization led to investments in fiscal capacity and increased Fiscal standardization. We provide detailed historical evidence that supports our prediction that rulers abandoned the competitive allocation of tax rights in favor of cabal tax farming in order to gain access to inside credit, and that this transition was accompanied by investments in standardization. Finally (iv) we show why this intermediate institution proved to be self-undermining in England, where it was quickly replaced by direct collection, but lasted in France until the French Revolution.

You know something, whenever I hear people fulminating about bankers and credit and and and, I just feel sad. More life changes, more it remains the same. The situations we are going through has been seen before, quite a lot of times. People forget that once taxation goes through the roof, people do tend to revolt. Typically, its the rulers (governments in today’s parlance) who usually bugger up the economy and then go for the tax take to try to make up for those stupid policy decisions. But the British were better at this, one of the reasons why we are still celebrating the birth of Prince George while the French are, well, French.