Pimp My Ride

Kannu

I forgot to say that I like your new haircut. But I still think I can give you a better haircut than those poxy hairdressers. One day you will realise the benefits of cutting your own hair, its liberating, it saves a heck of a lot of time, it saves money and best of all, it will manage to upset a whole bunch of women in your life and that's fun. But at this moment, when you are in teenagerhood, hair has a vastly bigger significance. The fate of the world depends upon the hair style. That is fine, that's what the teenaged girls are also looking for. But then when you realise that hair is nothing but a holdover artefact from our evolutionary times to keep us warm (its fur after all), the importance level reduces. What actually matters is what's below the hair rather than the hair itself. Thankfully, you are a smart fellow so I am also happy with that. Remember what I keep on saying, everything evens out, if you have less hair to comb, you have more face to wash.

But that's not the point of this missive, this is about libertarianism. This is the operating philosophy that I follow. There are literally thousands of philosophies out there, and you can judge them on several basis. Here is a very short survey you can do to find out what your operating philosophy is all about.
http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz

Here's what this website defines libertarianism as: Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.

I know you are still young, but I hope to raise you and Diya by those principles. We make you take responsibility over your own career and choices, there isnt much bureaucracy other than few things like having to water the garden and to empty the dishwasher, no taxes, you are trained on how to manage your own money and are doing well on your investments, not doing much on the charity side for some strange reason, but we will work on that, we are happy with what you want to do with your lifestyle - girls, whatever, you have had the choice to imbibe in alcoholic drinks (but not ciggies) etc. etc.

Anyway, here is a story about a presidential candidate in the USA and how he is a pure libertarian. Interesting views. Obviously he doesnt have a hope in hell's chance of becoming the president, but those views exist and hopefully the huge overhang of debt that we have will be removed.

Check out the austrian school of economics here, its an interesting read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School
One thing which bothers me is the ability of running this giant ponzi scheme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme) of using debt to pay for today's spending while future generations pick up the bill. At this moment, the amount of debt being racked up by all the bloody governments means that YOU and DIYA will be paying for our mistakes for couple of generations. Learn from our mistakes, son. Never let governments become too big, they steal your money and they steal your liberty. Friedman said this, "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.". Some more great quotes from him here. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/milton_friedman.html

Happy reading son.

Love

baba

 

Pimp My Ride
http://www.tnr.com/print/article/representative-ron-paul-2008-republican-primary-president

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The first thing I learned from driving around Nevada with Ron Paul for a couple of days: People really hate the Federal Reserve. This became clear midway through a speech Paul was giving to a group of Republicans at a community center in Pahrump, a dusty town about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. Pahrump is known for its legal brothels (Heidi Fleiss lives there), but most of the people in the audience looked more like ranchers than swingers. They stood five deep at the back of the room and listened politely as the candidate spoke.

Until Paul got to the part about the Fed. “We need a much better monetary system,” he said, a system based on “sound money, money that’s backed by something.” Paul, who is small and delicate and has a high voice, spoke in a near monotone, making no effort to excite the audience. They cheered anyway. Then he said this: “The Constitution gives no authority for a central bank.” The crowd went wild, or as wild as a group of sober Republicans can on a Monday night. They hooted and yelled and stomped their feet. Paul stopped speaking for a moment, his words drowned out. Then he continued on about monetary policy.

Wow, I thought. The constitutionality of a central bank is not an issue you see on many lists of voter concerns. (How many pollsters would think to ask about it? How many voters would understand the question?) Yet a room full of non-economists had just responded feverishly when Paul brought it up. Hoping for some context, I went outside and found a Paul staffer. He didn’t sound surprised when I told him about the speech. “It’s our biggest applause line,” he said.

Our biggest applause line? There are two ways to interpret a fact like that: Either the Ron Paul movement is more sophisticated than most journalists understand, or a lot of Paul supporters are eccentric bordering on bonkers.

One thing you can say for certain: The crowds at Ron Paul rallies aren’t coming to be entertained. Stylistically, a Paul speech is about as colorful as a tax return. He is the only politician I’ve ever seen who doesn’t draw energy from the audience; his tone is as flat at the conclusion as it was at the beginning. There are no jokes. There’s no warm-up, no shout-out to local luminaries in the room, no inspiring vignettes about ordinary Americans doing their best in the face of this or that bad thing. In fact, there are virtually none of the usual political clichés in a Paul speech. Children may be our future, but Ron Paul isn’t admitting it in public.

Paul is no demagogue, and probably couldn’t be if he tried. He’s too libertarian. He can’t stand to tell other people what to do, even people who’ve shown up looking for instructions. On board the campaign’s tiny chartered jet one night (the plane was so small my legs were intertwined with the candidate’s for the entire flight), Paul and his staff engaged in an unintentionally hilarious exchange about the cabin lights. The staff wanted to know whether Paul preferred the lights on or off. Not wanting to be bossy, Paul wouldn’t say. Ultimately, the staff had to guess. It was a long three minutes.

Being at the center of attention clearly bothers Paul. “I like to be unnoticed,” he says, a claim not typically made by presidential candidates. “That’s my personality. I see all the excitement and sometimes I say to myself, ‘Why do they do that?’ I don’t see myself as a big deal.” Ordinarily you’d have to dismiss a line like that out of hand—if he’s so humble, why is he running for president?—but, in Paul’s case, it might be true. In fact, it might be the key to his relative success. His fans don’t read his awkwardness as a social phobia, but as a sign of authenticity. Paul never outshines his message, which is unchanging: Let adults make their own choices; liberty works. For a unified theory of everything, it’s pretty simple. And Paul sincerely believes it.

Most Republicans, of course, profess to believe it too. But only Paul has introduced a bill to legalize unpasteurized milk. Give yourself five minutes and see if you can think of a more countercultural idea than that. Most people assume that the whole reason we have a government is to make sure the milk gets pasteurized. It takes some stones to argue otherwise, especially if nobody’s paying you to do it. (The raw-milk lobby basically consists of about eight goat-cheese enthusiasts in Manhattan, and possibly the Amish.) Paul is pro-choice on pasteurization entirely for reasons of principle. “I support the right of people to drink whatever they want,” he says. He mocks the idea that “only government can make sure we’re safe, so we need the government to protect us. I don’t think we’d all die of unsafe food if we didn’t have the FDA. Someone else would do it.” If you know Ron Paul primarily from watching the Republican debates, you probably assume he spends most of his time ranting about September 11 and the Iraq invasion. In fact, his real passion is Austrian economics. More even than the war, Paul despises paper currency, which he considers a hoax, “fiat money.” He can become emotional talking about it. Caught in traffic in downtown Vegas on the way to an event, Paul looked out the window at the casinos and mused aloud: “Can you imagine when all those slot machines used real silver dollars? All that silver … ” His words trailed off, as in a pleasant daydream.

Paul trusts coins, and he has bought them all his life, first as a childhood collector, then as an investor. During the 1980s, as he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate and the White House, he became involved in a coin business, Ron Paul Coins. Numismatics, he says, is a labor of love. “You only make five or ten dollars a coin. You’ve got to sell a lot of coins to get rich. I was just promoting something I believe in.” It’s a rare person who admits something like this. Everybody knows the gold standard is for cranks. It’s complicated, unwieldy, and basically incompatible with the modern world. Worse, it’s boring. Paul doesn’t care. “It’s been over one hundred years since that issue has been talked about in a presidential election,” he told me with apparent pride.

Over dinner at the coffee shop in the Saddle West Hotel, Casino, and RV Resort, Paul and his staff talked about little else. There were eight or nine of us at the table, with the 72-year-old obstetrician-congressman at the head in a gray suit, working over a chicken platter and discussing hard money. It had the feel of a familiar conversation, a dialogue that doesn’t really end but that never diminishes in intensity. At one point, Paul’s assistant checked his BlackBerry for the latest gold and silver prices and read them aloud to the table.

For Paul, the original sin in monetary policy took place in 1933, when FDR uncoupled the currency from gold. This removed limits from federal spending, allowing Congress an endless supply of money it could print at will, while leaving citizens vulnerable to the inflation that inevitably resulted. But, worst of all from Paul’s point of view, it was compulsory. Private currencies are forbidden, so Americans had no choice but to participate. The whole system is a mandatory Ponzi scheme, built on faith in the government. Except that, now that the bottom has dropped out of the dollar, it’s clear there’s no reason to have faith in the government or its money.

That’s Paul’s essential argument. His solution: allow competing currencies.

If individuals want to circulate gold or silver coins (or scrip backed by metal reserves), let them. Give citizens the chance to decide which money they trust.

The owners of NORFED, an Indiana coin company, gave it a shot. The company minted and sold thousands of silver Ron Paul dollars, complete with the candidate’s face in profile, before federal agents showed up in November and confiscated their entire remaining inventory. In its affidavit for a search warrant, the FBI accused NORFED of trying to “undermine the United States government’s financial systems by the issuance of a non-governmental competing currency for the purpose of repealing the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Code.” That may be a crime, but it’s also pretty close to Ron Paul’s stump speech.

It’s hard to think of a presidential candidate who’s ever drawn a coalition as broad as Ron Paul’s. At any Paul event, you’re likely to run into self-described anarcho-capitalists, 9/11-deniers, antiwar lefties, objectivists, paleocons, hemp activists, and geeky high school kids, along with tax resisters, conspiracy nuts, and acolytes of Murray Rothbard. And those are just the ones it’s possible to categorize. It’s hard to say what they all have in common, except that every one is an ideological minority—or, as one of them put it to me, “open-minded people.” To these supporters, Paul is a folk hero, the one person in national politics who doesn’t judge them, who understands what it’s like to be considered a freak by straight society.

Which is odd, because, in person, Paul doesn’t seem like a freak. He seems like someone’s grandfather. I first met up with Paul after a rally at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He apparently hadn’t known I was coming but accepted my arrival with Zen-like calm, welcoming me into the seat next to him in the minivan and offering me baked goods from a plate on his lap. We were both finishing our brownies when he mentioned they’d been baked by a supporter. I stopped chewing. Where I work, this is a major taboo (Rule One: Never eat food sent by viewers), and my concern must have shown. Paul grinned. “Maybe they’re spiked with marijuana,” he said.

If so, it would have been his first experience with illegal drugs. Though Paul argues passionately for liberalizing marijuana laws and is beloved by potheads (Timothy Leary once held a fund-raiser for him), he has never smoked pot himself. He sounded shocked when I asked him. “I have never seen anyone smoke marijuana,” he said. “I don’t think I’d be open to using it.” For some people, libertarianism is the philosophical justification for a zany personal life. Paul, by contrast, describes his hobbies as gardening (roses and organic tomatoes) and “riding my bicycle.” He has never had a cigarette. He doesn’t swear. He limits his drinking to an occasional glass of wine and goes to church regularly. He has been married to the same woman for 50 years. Three of their five children are physicians.

Ron Paul is deeply square, and every bit as deeply committed to your right not to be. “I don’t gamble, but I’m the gambler’s best friend,” he says, boasting of his support for online casinos. He is a Second Amendment absolutist who doesn’t own a gun. “I’ve only fired one a couple of times in my life. I’ve never gotten around to killing anything.” It’s an impressively, charmingly principled world view, though sometimes you’ve got to wonder how much Paul has in common with many of the people who support him.

Before we left the speech in Pahrump and headed across the state, I’d called a friend of mine in Carson City named Dennis Hof. Dennis owns the Moonlite BunnyRanch, probably the most famous legal brothel in the country and the setting for an HBO series called “Cathouse.” Dennis isn’t very political, but he’s smart, and I suspected he might lean libertarian. I told him Ron Paul was speaking the next morning in Reno. He said he’d drive down to see it.

I wasn’t planning on showing up at Paul’s press conference with a bordello owner and two hookers, but unexpected things happen on the road.

I’d arrived with the campaign at the Best Western Airport Plaza Hotel in Reno at two in the morning the night before, and, at some point while I was sleeping, the power in the hotel went out, disabling my alarm. By the time I woke up, Paul and his staff had left. So I called Dennis for a ride. He was there in ten minutes, in an enormous stretch limo with a BunnyRanch logo on the side. He’d brought two of his girls, Brooke and Air Force Amy, as well as his driver, a middle-aged man in a cowboy hat and Western wear. It was a conspicuous group.

Probably because they didn’t fully understand who I was coming with, the Paul people waved the limo through a roadblock outside the auditorium and brought us in through the loading dock. A Paul aide informed us that press conferences are for press only. That’s us, said the girls, and we walked right in.

The other, actual journalists looked confused. Dennis is built like a linebacker and was dressed entirely in black. Brooke and Air Force Amy looked like hookers because they are. All three slapped on Ron Paul stickers (“we could use these as pasties,” Air Force Amy said, giggling) and sat near the front. Pretty soon, Paul showed up and did his 15 minutes on liberty and Austrian economics. If he noticed there were prostitutes present, he didn’t show it.

The first time I heard Paul talk about monetary policy, I’d felt like a hostage, the only person in the room who didn’t buy into the program. Then, slowly, like so many hostages, I started to open my mind and listen. By the time we got to Reno, unfamiliar thoughts were beginning to occur: Why shouldn’t we worry about the soundness of the currency? What exactly is the dollar backed by anyway? And, if the gold standard is crazy, is it really any crazier than hedge funds? I’d become Patty Hearst, ready to take up arms for the cause, or at least call my accountant and tell him to buy Krugerrands. I looked over at Dennis and the girls. They looked like they might be having the same thoughts.

Once the press conference ended, Paul left to do interviews with local TV reporters. Dennis and the girls stood at the podium and had their pictures taken under the Ron Paul sign. Air Force Amy hammed it up. What I really want more than anything, she told me, is to get my picture taken with Dr. Paul. She meant it.

I considered trying to explain to her that I was not actually affiliated with Ron Paul, merely writing about him for a political magazine back in Washington. But I didn’t. Instead, I led all three of them into the back room where Paul was doing his interviews.

Paul was talking on camera and never saw us. But his staff was on high alert. They looked more uncomfortable than I have ever seen a campaign staff look. Air Force Amy didn’t appear to notice. Dressed in red, her Dolly Parton hairdo and 36DDs at full attention, she sidled up to Lew Moore, Paul’s campaign manager, and made her pitch. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Air Force Amy, and I’d like a picture with Ron Paul.” I knew right away it wasn’t going to happen. “I’ve got a concern, I’ve got to be honest,” Moore said, tense but trying to be nice. “If that picture surfaces, it could be very damaging to him politically.” Dennis stepped in to take up Air Force Amy’s cause, but Moore wasn’t budging. “The mainstream in the early primary states is not moving in that direction,” he said.

I really thought Air Force Amy was going to cry. She looked crushed. Like a child of alcoholic parents, she immediately started to rationalize away the pain. “It wasn’t Ron’s decision,” she told Moore. “It was yours. So I can’t take it personally.” But it was obvious that she did. It was awful. There wasn’t much left to say, so Dennis and the girls and I left and went downtown to a casino for pancakes. There were no hard feelings. They wore their Ron Paul stickers all through breakfast. If I’d had one, I would have worn it too.

Tucker Carlson is an anchor on MSNBC.

This article originally ran in the December 31, 2007 issue of the magazine.

Throwing acid on women

This pisses me off. Seriously and totally pisses me off and makes me want to go medieval on them. This is why I actually applauded the attempts by the Iranian woman who wanted to punish her attacker by asking acid to put out his eyes. Before you call me barbaric and thinking about an eye for an eye, this is what she was left with.

Yes, eye for an eye is good. Same with rapists whose penis’s should be hacked off with a blunt shovel and paedophiles should be physically tortured till their gonads pop out of their eyes. Bastards. As it so happens, this brave woman actually forgave her attacker at the last moment. That’s the level of her humanity, you bastard, may you rot here on earth, forget about hell.

And then I read two stories today. First where in Bangladesh, men were sentenced for life terms for an acid attack. Excellent news, these bastards need to be locked away for life. Good for you, Bangladesh.

Dhaka, Sep 10: Four Bangladeshi men have been sentenced to life in prison for throwing acid on a girl who rejected their advances, a media report said.

The incident had taken place in 2006 in northeastern Habiganj district along the border with India, the Daily Star reported.

The four men were identified as Abdul Quaiyum, Haris Miah, Auli Miah and Alkas Uddin.

They were convicted and sentenced in absentia by the district and sessions court in Habiganj of breaking into the house of Abdur Rahman and hurling acid on his 18-year-old daughter Mayarunnesa in February 2006.

Only Haris Miah was arrested, while the others are still at large.

And then in that lovely country, Pakistan, it was doubly heinous.

QUETTA: Four female school teachers received burn injuries on their faces after they were attacked by unidentified men in Quetta on Saturday.

Police informed that the teachers were on their way home in a van when the attackers riding a motorbike threw concentrated acid on their faces, and then fled.

You bastards have ruined 4 women and also stopped students from learning from them.

This is what you left her with. And knowing about Pakistan, I very much doubt that it will be doing anything to these bastards as compared to what Bangladesh did. And before you think I am taking off on Pakistan, this bloody behaviour is horrid and perhaps even worse in India where bride burning and dowries and acid throwing is far more given that its a bigger country. More women are devastated in India. May the lot of them burn themselves. May the acid sprinkling fleas of 1000 camels infest their groin. Bastards.

More progress at SIFE

The chaps at LSE SIFE are quite ambitious, I love that. This trading game project is really catching fire. They went and sold it to a Malaysian University SIFE unit and they are spreading the word there. More about that later as my hopes to help them in Malaysia needs a bit of digging first.

Second, am going to go speak to the new SIFE recruits and get them all excited motivated. Plus if things work out, I will run investment classes for the volunteers. Teach these undergraduate students how to invest. I wonder if I can replicate what I did with Kannu with them?

Third, there seems to be very good progress with the Transformation Trust and extending the trading game to other schools in London. Watch this space.

The lady who introduced me to the Transformation Trust, Annie Natarajan, has managed to rope me into another initiative. lol, as a member of their advisory board. That’s also quite exciting, to help schools across the world to share best practises. I just got involved briefly in the initial proposals and Annie tells me that we have already got the first donation. Well done. The pilot will be touching some schools in India, Kenya and Brazil. Cant wait to get motoring on that.

Fourth, SIFE Nottingham is working on a pilot project with IT4CH with Pat. They are also pretty aggressive, they are trying to work to getting more donations of computers into our storage offices which we can then sell to get funds to purchase equipment for hospital schools and poor sick children at home.

Fifth, SIFE Nottingham has decided to do a project in Sri Lanka. Here’s the blurb on the email that they sent:

A group of 13 SIFE Nottingham students returned from Sri Lanka 4 weeks ago. To summarise our project, Future for Jaffna is a charitable organisation established under a trust deed. We aim to empower widows of the civil war in North Sri Lanka to create their own businesses, ranging from food processing to sewing and tailoring businesses. The ultimate aim is to establish a community and entrepreneurial/business centre in Jaffna, where the widows can sell their products, and where people can receive help in setting up their own business. Finally, we are looking into an environmental sub-project, mobilising rural communities through the production of biofuels.
We are partnering with a local charity, CORD Sri Lanka who monitor livelihood projects with widows. Their widows receive funding via a rigid scheme from the Bank of Ceylon; we do have more specific details on this scheme.
We require funding for the business start-ups for Future for Jaffna to be successful. This may be via a local bank, offering an independent finance scheme, or through raising funds through sponsorship and donations, and setting up a microfinance scheme. A key objective for us is to raise £5,000, at which point we will meet the £5,000 income requirement for registration by the Charity Commission, opening the floodgates to funding opportunities.

So I have got them hooked up with some of my colleagues in Sri Lanka. I think this should be a good thing to help push forward. Still under discussion on how exactly the firm can help them but broadly, i think we could provide advisory services to these poor ladies. I didn't know we were the only international firm operating there. Good stuff, makes me proud to work for such a nice firm.

I love September, after the hiatus of the Summer, its good to get back in track.

From Scroll to Screen

Interesting evolution, Son. And now we have audio books...I wonder what you will tell your son in 25 years time? :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html

The Mechanic Muse

From Scroll to Screen

Illustration by Joon Mo Kang

By LEV GROSSMAN

Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.

Related

• The Mechanic Muse: The Jargon of the Novel, Computed (July 31, 2011)

The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was circa 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. But if you go back further there’s a more helpful precedent for what’s going on. Starting in the first century A.D., Western readers discarded the scroll in favor of the codex — the bound book as we know it today.

In the classical world, the scroll was the book format of choice and the state of the art in information technology. Essentially it was a long, rolled-up piece of paper or parchment. To read a scroll you gradually unrolled it, exposing a bit of the text at a time; when you were done you had to roll it back up the right way, not unlike that other obsolete medium, the VHS tape. English is still littered with words left over from the scroll age. The first page of a scroll, which listed information about where it was made, was called the “protocol.” The reason books are sometimes called volumes is that the root of “volume” is volvere, to roll: to read a scroll, you revolved it.

Scrolls were the prestige format, used for important works only: sacred texts, legal documents, history, literature. To compile a shopping list or do their algebra, citizens of the ancient world wrote on wax-covered wooden tablets using the pointy end of a stick called a stylus. Tablets were for disposable text — the stylus also had a flat end, which you used to squash and scrape the wax flat when you were done. At some point someone had the very clever idea of stringing a few tablets together in a bundle. Eventually the bundled tablets were replaced with leaves of parchment and thus, probably, was born the codex. But nobody realized what a good idea it was until a very interesting group of people with some very radical ideas adopted it for their own purposes. Nowadays those people are known as Christians, and they used the codex as a way of distributing the Bible.

One reason the early Christians liked the codex was that it helped differentiate them from the Jews, who kept (and still keep) their sacred text in the form of a scroll. But some very alert early Christian must also have recognized that the codex was a powerful form of information technology — compact, highly portable and easily concealable. It was also cheap — you could write on both sides of the pages, which saved paper — and it could hold more words than a scroll. The Bible was a long book.

The codex also came with a fringe benefit: It created a very different reading experience. With a codex, for the first time, you could jump to any point in a text instantly, nonlinearly. You could flip back and forth between two pages and even study them both at once. You could cross-check passages and compare them and bookmark them. You could skim if you were bored, and jump back to reread your favorite parts. It was the paper equivalent of random-access memory, and it must have been almost supernaturally empowering. With a scroll you could only trudge through texts the long way, linearly. (Some ancients found temporary fixes for this bug — Suetonius apparently suggested that Julius Caesar created a proto-notebook by stacking sheets of papyrus one on top of another.)

Over the next few centuries the codex rendered the scroll all but obsolete. In his “Confessions,” which dates from the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine famously hears a voice telling him to “pick up and read.” He interprets this as a command from God to pick up the Bible, open it at random and read the first passage he sees. He does so, the scales fall from his eyes and he becomes a Christian. Then he bookmarks the page. You could never do that with a scroll.

Right now we’re avidly road-testing a new format for the book, just as the early Christians did. Over the first quarter of this year e-book sales were up 160 percent. Print sales — codex sales — were down 9 percent. Those are big numbers. But unlike last time it’s not a clear-cut case of a superior technology displacing an inferior one. It’s more complex than that. It’s more about trade-offs.

On the one hand, the e-book is far more compact and portable than the codex, almost absurdly so. E-books are also searchable, and they’re green, or greenish anyway (if you want to give yourself nightmares, look up the ecological cost of building a single Kindle). On the other hand the codex requires no batteries, and no electronic display has yet matched the elegance, clarity and cool matte comfort of a printed page.

But so far the great e-book debate has barely touched on the most important feature that the codex introduced: the nonlinear reading that so impressed St. Augustine. If the fable of the scroll and codex has a moral, this is it. We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.

The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. Indeed, the codex isn’t just another format, it’s the one for which the novel is optimized. The contemporary novel’s dense, layered language took root and grew in the codex, and it demands the kind of navigation that only the codex provides. Imagine trying to negotiate the nested, echoing labyrinth of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas” if it were transcribed onto a scroll. It couldn’t be done.

God knows, there was great literature before there was the codex, and should it pass away, there will be great literature after it. But if we stop reading on paper, we should keep in mind what we’re sacrificing: that nonlinear experience, which is unique to the codex. You don’t get it from any other medium — not movies, or TV, or music or video games. The codex won out over the scroll because it did what good technologies are supposed to do: It gave readers a power they never had before, power over the flow of their own reading experience. And until I hear God personally say to me, “Boot up and read,” I won’t be giving it up.

Lev Grossman is the author of the novels “The Magicians” and “The Magician King.” He is also the book critic at Time magazine.

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Proposed cap of £500 per week is critiqued

First the story.

The government's benefits cap could make more than 80,000 children homeless and push many thousands more into poverty, says the Children's Society. In a devastating critique of the plan to limit the amount even the largest families can claim in benefits, Bob Reitemeier, its chief executive, said there would be a huge "human and social cost" if the reforms went ahead.

The welfare reform bill, which proposes a £500 a week cap on the amount families can claim for housing, childcare and sustenance, is set to return to parliament in the House of Lords on Tuesday after making unsteady progress through the Commons earlier this year.

The society says 200,000 children will have their lives affected by the changes to the amount their parents can claim and 27,600 adults and 82,400 children could be made homeless.

While supporters of the benefits cap claim it would simply mean families would be forced to move into cheaper accommodation, government figures suggest 70% of those who will be hit are already living in social housing.

Reitemeier said changes to the proposed legislation were urgently needed. "The reason we are so concerned about children is that three in four of the people that are going to be affected by the benefits cap are children and I don't think that's publicly understood", he said. "There are some main concerns: one is that the children will be made homeless, possibly 80,000 children, which would be a significant change to their lives.

"Secondly, what we think could happen is that those children already in poverty, below 60% of the median income line, will fall into severe poverty, less than 40% of the median income. This has a very human and social impact on their lives."

The Children's Society also believes that children, who are nine times as likely as adults to be hit by the cap because of the prevalence of large families among those claiming benefits, will experience lower levels of wellbeing. It says it understands the element of unfairness in people who are on benefits having large families catered for, but that the government should ensure children do not suffer for their parents' decisions.

The £500 cap is based on the average annual household wage of £26,000. The charity proposes that instead the government should work out the level of the cap – the universal credit – by basing it on the average household income of working families with children, which would include in-work benefits.

So here’s the thing, the government thinks that that the average wage is a good level to compensate people who have fallen on bad times. But people want to raise it? In other words, when you have problems, the state will take money from people (at least 50% yes?) who earn (that’s right, they earn and work) less than what you will get as a household. Hmmm. That is fair? And why would they be made homeless? And why shouldn't they move into cheaper accommodation? I didn't realise that I was paying taxes to give to people who can live in more swanky accommodation? These people are frikking nuts.

Let me throw another statistic at you. Did you know that the number of households in which NO ADULT HAS EVER WORKED IS 370,000? that’s right, you read right, nobody has worked in these households, EVER. And they rely on benefits. Which are currently much more than the average tax payer and citizen. And these frikking muppets want them to have more? WTF?

STOP SPENDING MY MONEY, you morons!

The Theory of Everything - Esquire

Son

As a fellow enthusiast of physics, and the big bang theory, you might appreciate this article, good overview o the current state.

The Theory of Everything - Esquire
http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ1206THEORY_188

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EIGHTEEN MONTHS TO GO. And now some nights Nima Arkani-Hamed can’t sleep. Because in eighteen months someone will flip a switch in something called the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. And when that switch is flipped, billions of protons will fly around a seventeen-mile loop at nearly the speed of light until they smash together hard, harder than any subatomic particles have ever been smashed together on earth. It’s the greatest, most anticipated, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. And if Arkani-Hamed is right, it could help prove that the laws that govern the universe at every scale—from the smallest quarks to the largest black holes—are one and the same. Or else, of course, it could prove that Arkani-Hamed is full of shit.

IT’S A FOOL’S ERRAND, this quest for a theory of everything. And Arkani-Hamed is only the most recent of thousands of theoretical physicists to embark on it. The idea seemed logical enough when Einstein first set out on it in the 1920s. If general relativity explains the universe from afar—why gravity pulls the earth around the sun—and quantum mechanics explains the world up close—how atoms, protons, and neutrons react to electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces—surely there must be a way to put the two theories together. After all, whether cosmic in size or minuscule, the particles and forces that govern our universe were all born at the same primordial moment. Yet Einstein failed. And in the interim, armies of physicists, equipped with similarly well-intentioned yet ultimately faulty or unprovable ideas, have followed him to the same well-trod dead end.

Since the mid-1980s, the leading contender for a grand unifying theory has been string theory. The idea is deceptively simple: At the core of every particle in the universe is a tiny thread of energy. Each of these filaments vibrates like a violin string, and its rate of vibration determines its vital characteristics, or tone. There are neutrino strings and electron strings, photon strings and graviton strings. When played together, they compose the symphony of the universe. Or at least, that’s the theory.

There’s a problem, though. The strings have too much range. So much, in fact, that for string theory to agree with the established laws of physics and mathematics, there must be not three but at least ten dimensions (including time) that are curled up and tucked away. And because each of these multidimensional landscapes requires a different string tuning, there are potentially billions and billions of different versions of string theory relating to billions and billions of different universes.

Then there’s the problem of testing string theory. That’s how science works. We hypothesize, then we test. And if a hypothesis passes muster, it becomes law. But the strings that supposedly make up our universe are so infinitesimal—one string is to an atom as a single atom is to the entire solar system—that critics argue that we may never be able to build a collider powerful enough to find them, even the collider that Arkani-Hamed stays up all night thinking about.

So here’s the latest tally: Number of years since string theory became dominant: 20. Number of potential string-theory solutions: 10⁵⁰⁰ (the number of atoms in the galaxy squared and then squared again). Number of testable theories: 0. In other words, Arkani-Hamed better be at least partially right, because the natives are getting restless.

IF THE PROBLEM WITH STRING THEORY, as some critics claim, is that it’s a closed-minded boys club whose lifetime members hopelessly shuffle and redeal the same deck of equations ad nauseum, then the solution may be found at the Jane Bond, a bar in the staid Canadian college town of Waterloo. The Jane Bond has a decidedly grungy 1970s flair. Tattooed hipsters talk with awed reverence of Brooklyn while DJs spin eclectic and esoteric music next to the bathroom, near the disco ball. And then there are the physicists from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics who have made the Jane Bond their watering hole. They talk theory sometimes. But mostly they just bullshit.

“You want to know the true story?” goads a young postdoctoral researcher at that magical hour in any bar when only bad things can happen. “It’s the post-9/11 theocons.” Just like the rest of America, he continues, the science establishment is afraid of anything new. It doesn’t want to consider any alternatives. “The string theorists just masturbate to their same ideas.” At this, the rest of the table—a mixed group of young cosmologists, quantum-information theorists, and quantum-gravity buffs—breaks into nervous laughter. Yes, their friend is drunk. But he’s right in a general sense, they concede. There is a growing fissure in the physics world between the haves (string theorists) and the have-nots (everyone else). But not at Perimeter, they caution. Perimeter is different.

The first thing you notice when walking through the concrete-and-glass hallways of PI are the lounges with blackboards. They are ubiquitous. And at each one there are usually two or three young physicists—mostly men, most in their late twenties or thirties—arguing over equations. The feeling is more dorm-room TA session than serious discussion about the origins of the universe. Sneakers and jeans rule. The researchers come and go as they please, and they work as they please. And when they grow too tired of drilling through equations and erasing equations and drilling through them some more, they might take a break. There’s a squash court near the billiard table, a few floors below the bistro and bar. But don’t get the wrong idea. Foosball aside, the physicists at PI are doing serious work.

Perimeter was founded by Mike Lazaridis, founder and co-CEO of Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry. As the story goes, Lazaridis, who went to college in Waterloo, thought the scientific world was much too focused on areas of research that promised immediate results and fast returns on investment. Nobody was willing to fund basic research into arcane fields, like the foundations of quantum mechanics. So in 2000 he cut a check for $66 million and convinced two partners and the Canadian government to chip in tens of millions more. His plan was to build a physics institute that was different, a place where physicists would have the freedom to probe more foundational physical questions. Along with executive director Howard Burton, he envisioned a true community of scholars, where physicists from disparate disciplines would cross-pollinate in a noncompetitive environment. It now has sixty-four resident researchers, including ten faculty members.

Taking up residence here is a bit like joining the priesthood. You’re segregated from the rest of the world, and your job is to get into God’s head and figure out how the big damn machine works. And though you can work with others, often you’re alone, stuck with only the equations and pictures in your head. It’s like exploring a forest, says Andrei Starinets, a postdoctoral researcher from the former Soviet Union who studies string theory and black-hole physics. You can see the forest ahead, he says; it’s tall and lush and filled with swamps. The task is to figure out how to enter, which path will have the least sinkholes and booby traps. So that’s what he and his colleagues do all day. They gather in PI as if it were a fort, planning a means of attack, looking for the paths of least resistance. This means twisting and retwisting equations as if the search for a unified theory were the world’s biggest game of sudoku.

Here’s how Laurent Freidel, a faculty member in quantum gravity and particle theory, describes the search: “You feel that there is a beast running in the woods. And you don’t let it go, you don’t stop. And sometimes if you need to, you don’t stop at all for two or three days in a row. But that’s the fun part, when you’re on track and when you know something’s out there. There are no rules. You need intuition to make a connection. And then you have to gather evidence; the more evidence you gather, the more you know you’re on the right track. The key for me is not to let go, to continue until I reach it. And there’s always a way.”

Last year, when Freidel discovered a possible rigorous mathematical solution for the strong force—which acts as the glue between protons, neutrons, and nuclei, and which to that point had been studied only by approximation—he didn’t sleep for two weeks straight. “His wife ran into me,” recalls a colleague, “and she said, ‘Can you do something? He’s going insane.’ “

On the third floor of Perimeter, at the far end of the hall, is a small office with a small sofa wedged next to an overflowing bookshelf. And on that couch, dressed more like a New York artist than a theoretical physicist—black, black, and more black—is Lee Smolin. One of PI’s initial faculty hires, Smolin, fifty-one, began his career in string theory before becoming fed up with the lack of progress and turning instead to loop quantum gravity, an alternate possible unified theory. Unlike string theory, which critics describe as background dependent—i.e., space and time are constant and unexplained—LQG posits that space, time, and even people are all formed from the same network of interconnected loops and nodes, which take on electrical charges when twisted. If the tension between string and antistring theorist was once a family argument, Smolin, the author recently of The Trouble with Physics, is the person who decided to air the dirty laundry.

“This is an experiment,” says Smolin of PI. “Like any experiment, it’s a risk and it could fail. The most important question is, Will important science get done here? And I think there are already examples of things that happened here that would not have happened elsewhere, because the people would not have been in touch with each other.”

Things like safer cryptography, recent advances in loop quantum gravity, and a possible refutation of special relativity, the law that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

But what about the big questions? Was it really necessary to blow up the model of how a science institute should function in order to break the stalemate in theoretical physics and eventually discover a theory of everything? “I think that the pragmatic, antiphilosophical thing played itself out,” says Smolin, referring to results-oriented physics.

“I think what’s going to succeed in the big-open-questions part of gravity unification and so forth are going to be approaches that take the foundations and the fundamental questions more seriously than they have been. And why do I believe that? Because if these problems could have been solved by this very pragmatic approach, they would have been. Because a lot of really smart, motivated people have been working on these problems for three decades in that frame of mind, and if it were possible to solve these problems, they would have done it. I should say, we would have done it. Because it was my generation.”

FAR AWAY FROM WATERLOO and Perimeter, both in geography and state of mind, stands an old clock tower surrounded by vast fields of overgrown grass and hickory trees. It was here that Albert Einstein first began pondering a grand unified theory in earnest. And it is here at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, that some of the world’s most prominent string theorists—including their master guru of sorts, Edward Witten—now gather in their own fort. If PI is a model of the theoretical-physics think tank of the future, then IAS—like the storied Ivy League university next door—is a reminder of the well-mannered past. You won’t find a bar or a foosball table here. But tea is served daily at 3:00 P.M.

At six two, Witten is big both in size and presence. He began focusing on string theory in the mid-1980s, soon after the first string revolution suggested that it was a viable theory of everything. Ten years, a MacArthur grant, and a Fields Medal in mathematics later, he ushered in the second revolution by postulating that the five main competing string models of the time were all part of a bigger, more complex model, which he termed “M-theory.” His synthesis—the name of which is still a matter of fierce debate in the physics world. Mother? Membrane? Magic? Masturbation?—broke a logjam that had snared progress in string theory for nearly a decade and added to his mystique as perhaps the true heir to Einstein.

But now string is at another logjam, in which there are literally billions of possible string-theory solutions and perhaps no means of testing any of them. “Well, you can’t have your best year every year,” he says of the frustration in the field, weighing every word very carefully in a voice that is just a few decibels above a whisper. “I’ve lived through two periods, the mid-eighties and the mid-nineties, where for about six or seven years, roughly, there were a lot of really interesting results that were also relatively easy. And I’ve also lived through several periods by now where you have to work a little harder to get something interesting.”

To Witten, the game is far from over for string, and he hopes the something interesting will be found in Geneva. When it begins tests about a hundred yards below the border of Switzerland and France in spring 2008, the Large Hadron Collider and its 1,232 thirty-nine-ton superconductor magnets will propel billions of protons with seven times the strength of the current strongest particle collider in Illinois, and will mimic the conditions of the universe a millionth of a millionth of a second after the big bang.

At the very least, Witten believes, the LHC should be able to explain the lack of symmetry between electromagnetism, which shapes many of the phenomena of daily life, and “weak interactions,” which affect the decay of subatomic particles and are related to radiation. “There’s something deeply, deeply wrong if the LHC doesn’t discover that,” says Witten. Both interactions appear nearly identical at the atomic level (they are grouped together as “electroweak interactions” in the standard model) yet behave very differently in the real world.

One possible explanation is the Higgs boson, or “God particle,” which has never been seen or measured but which theorists speculate could be responsible for giving all particles mass. According to Witten, its discovery would be a simple, long-theorized solution to the problem of electroweak “breaking,” yet carries numerous pitfalls of its own. For example, the value of the Higgs mass has only been estimated so far; an actual measurement may well require adjustment of that value, which could carry huge implications for how the whole machine—our universe—is put together and whether other universes tuned with different Higgs bosons might exist.

A different, even more extreme explanation for the symmetry breakdown is known as supersymmetry, which theorizes a set of counterparts to our known subatomic particles that are embedded in the architecture of space-time. Besides explaining electroweak interactions, the discovery of supersymmetric particles, with cool names such as squarks, sleptons, and selectrons, would be a huge boon to string theorists, whose model of the universe depends upon them.

Finally, there are the wild-card explanations, such as very large dimensions or low-scale string theories, or perhaps solutions that physicists have not yet even dreamed of. Each of these would vastly change our entire outlook of the universe and our place in it. Luckily for us all, perhaps, the chance of discovering them any time soon is rather unlikely.

JUST DOWN THE HALL from Witten is another leading theoretical physicist who also speaks in hushed tones. Like his mentor, Witten, twenty years ago, Juan Maldacena, a thirty-eight-year-old Argentine, is regarded as one of the great young thinkers of his time. Need proof? Well, here’s the song:

You start with the brane

and the brane is B.P.S.

Then you go near the brane

and the space is A.D.S.

Who knows what it means?

I don’t, I confess

Ehhhh! Maldacena!

Sung to the tune of “Macarena,” those words were used to serenade Maldacena at the 1998 string-theory conference in Santa Barbara. The occasion was Maldacena’s newly published work on black holes, which became known as the Maldacena conjecture. It’s complicated stuff, but by demonstrating a relationship between quarks and black holes, Maldacena showed that quantum field theory could be used to solve string equations. This was huge, a method of inquiry that might finally bridge the gap between the forces that govern the cosmos and the forces that govern particles. Nearly overnight, thousands of string theorists got to work on Maldacena’s work. And at the conference, it was an occasion to sing and dance.

But there’s more. The way Maldacena solved his conjecture—by converting complicated five-dimensional equations into four-dimensional equations, then back again—was a discovery in and of itself, leading to an even more jarring conclusion: Gravity and time could be an illusion. Just like the shimmering holograms we grew up with—say, Michael Jordan jumping out of a shiny silver sticker for a slam dunk—our universe could be a giant hologram: a massive two-dimensional plane encoded with quantum information at the edges that makes it appear three-dimensional. It’s a mind fuck, for sure, but the payoff could be huge. Holograms could provide an explanation of how a theory of everything might relate to the whole universe and beyond.

Think of our universe, or dimensional landscape, as a giant DVD floating among an infinite number of other DVDs. Each two-dimensional DVD was built in the same factory according to the same theory of everything, yet each one is embedded with a different movie. While our DVD shows a three-dimensional universe ruled by the standard model, the DVD landscape next door could be embedded with a five-dimensional movie and a separate, slightly different standard model. If we could view all of these separate landscapes in four dimensions—perhaps the equivalent of a universal HD-DVD player—we might be able to glimpse the underlying architecture that they all share.

If Maldacena is right, the holographic principle could reveal the order behind everything; there might be an infinite number of universes, but they’d all be ruled by the same laws, just experienced slightly differently.

Still a mind fuck, but not crazy.

FOR CRAZY, YOU HAVE TO GO about 250 miles north. At thirty-four, Nima Arkani-Hamed, born in Houston to Iranian physicists, is in the sweet spot of his career: young enough to still have fresh, insubordinate ideas; old enough to have the wherewithal and grounding to push fresh and insubordinate ideas. His office at Harvard is clean and minimal, all polished wood offset by a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall blackboard. He’s made a career of producing models of the universe that are staggeringly elegant. And so it figures that when he speaks—and he speaks a lot—it is with authority and simplicity. Plus there is his overwhelming sense of urgency, excitement, and swagger—forget the antistring polemicists! They’re just reactionaries! This could be the greatest discovery of our time!

Nima, as everyone calls him, first stunned the physics community in 1998 by postulating—along with Savas Dimopoulos and Gia Dvali—that unknown extra dimensions could be far larger than anyone ever thought possible, perhaps even nearly a millimeter wide. This was counter to everything physicists had theorized about hidden dimensions, which were believed to be only one hundredth of a thousandth of a trillionth of a centimeter wide. In an insular community where hidden universes, parallel realities, and black holes are discussed with the nonchalance of the weather, this was crazy talk. But nobody could find any mathematical or theoretical evidence to disprove it.

Much of Nima’s work relates to the theory of the multiverse to which Maldacena’s work on holograms alludes. In this model, as described by Nima’s colleague Lisa Randall, our universe is just one of a nearly infinite number of universes floating through the soup of space-time like the bubbles in a glass of champagne. Each universe is a completely self-contained habitat—no particles or forces can go in or out—with one big exception: Gravity can travel freely, slipping from one membrane of strings, or universe, to another.

This is a big deal, because it offers a possible solution to what is called the hierarchical problem—why gravity is far, far weaker than the current theories might predict. (When compared with the electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity appears to be ten million billion times weaker than it should be.) Nima’s answer is as simple as it is astounding: The gravity that affects us has been deflected and diffused by other universes, like a bottle of whiskey that has been passed around the galaxy a few too many times. By the time the bottle reaches us, all that’s left is a few fingers of backwash.

But here’s the exciting part: Because Nima’s proposed extra dimensions are so large, we may actually be able to see this cosmic shell game between universes in real time with the LHC—gravity from one dimension disappearing into the next. While a long shot by all accounts—including Nima’s—this would be near irrefutable experimental evidence of string theory. The world, in fact, would be on a string.

And yet there’s more. Because the most

controversial ideas Nima hopes to test with the LHC don’t deal with gravity but with the question of why there are 10⁵⁰⁰ possible string-theory solutions rather than just one. Unlike Maldacena and Witten, who believe that the near-infinite number of string theories may one day be reconciled into a single solution, Nima thinks each string solution could randomly apply to a different universe, and he hopes to prove it. It just happens that humans live in a universe tuned precisely to support life as we recognize it.

The idea is that each possible string theory, when coupled with a cosmological constant that varies randomly, corresponds to a different universe in the multiverse. The reason humans and all life exist in our universe is chance—the conditions just happened to be finely tuned in a way that allowed it. Termed the anthropic principle, it’s a theory that drives many physicists insane, both because humans recapture their role at the center of our galaxy from Copernicus and because it seems utterly untestable: How could we ever test or even perceive the conditions in other universes if we’re stuck in our own?

Nima may be in the minority, but he is undeterred. In fact, he’s convinced that just as Maldacena showed how quantum mechanics could be used to show what happens in the formation and decay of black holes, quantum mechanics could help describe the contours of the multiverse we can’t otherwise see. And just like many of the other aspects of string theory, the answer could stem from the LHC’s experiments. It’s a possible outcome that Witten acknowledges but despairs over. It would mean that science has finally jumped a barrier from being fully experimental to mostly theoretical.

Yet Nima is steadfast. “The mantra of string theory ten years ago was that the theory was smarter than you,” he says. “So people would work on it, and there would always be more things coming out than went in. Well, exactly that—just follow the theory where it leads you, and it leads to this precipice. And now we have to decide what to do. So now a number of people are deciding to jump. … And I think that those of us that decided to take the plunge are staring at the true nature of the beast for the first time.

“I think this is the correct answer, and we are going to have to come to terms with it. And coming to terms with it is going to require a revolution of comparable magnitude to the revolution going from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics. So I think something similar is at stake. And the struggles we are having right now feel a lot like the sort of birthing pains in the twenty-five years from 1900 to 1925, when quantum mechanics started off as a twinkle in the eye of Planck and ended up as a full-fledged theory. I think we are sort of in the 1908, 1909 part of that period right now.”

Which is to say, he thinks this moment is comparable to the most potent and revolutionary period in the history of physics, when Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and Einstein entirely changed the way we look at the atoms that make up our universe and our place in it.

SO THAT IS WHY Nima can’t sleep. Much will be at stake when the LHC powers up. Supersymmetry, with those dreamed-about shadow particles string theorists have bet their careers on, could be a no-show, accelerating the end of string theory and giving renewed life to different ideas, like loop quantum gravity. Perimeter’s unorthodox approach to research would be celebrated as prescient, Smolin and other vociferous critics of string theory remembered as visionaries with the guts to shout that the emperor has no clothes. Or else, of course, the pendulum and the Higgs boson could swing the way string theorists predict—and hope against all galactic hope—that it must. With a single selectron or graviton, M-theory and the holographic principle could begin their slow shift from the category of conjecture to principle; the theory of everything would be tantalizingly closer than ever before, our lonely place in the cosmos, trapped in an obscure two-dimensional universe within a sea of other two-dimensional universes, glimpsed for the first time.

Like Nima, we are all overlooking a steep precipice.

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Swamp Dreams

Here's an interesting article son. Malls are the natural evolution of the high street. The reason why I raise this is that they are now morphing outside their primary purpose, shopping. In our local mall, we have shopping AND entertainment. But then there is sports now and slowly the next element is coming in and that's tourism. I wouldn't be surprised if museums and exhibitions are included. I also think housing units and integrated transport systems will come up soon as well.

Dubai is an example where life revolves around malls. People go there to just walk around. They don't need to shop. Just enjoy themselves. Teenagers hang out there. Have you noticed that old people usually congregate there as well? Sit around the millie's cookies shop? It's a social area. I have seen the same behaviour in USA uk china hong kong and has started to show up in countries like india. Saw that in gurgaon and of all the places, Bhopal. Your dadu actually likes to hang out in one of the malls sometimes!

So if you are ever interested in retail, then this needs to be a bit on your mind.

Swamp Dreams
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/american-dream-meadowlands-2011-8/

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The water-park element of the development, currently under construction, is modeled after Hawaii.
Rendering courtesy of Triple Five Worldwide

Out on the edge of the Meadowlands, where the Hackensack River begins a grand and gentle sweep west, a ruin rises from the fields of mosquito-­patrolled phragmites and mostly empty parking lots. It sits between the New Jersey Turnpike’s vast superhighway and the older roads that serve paintball parks and low-slung manufacturers: a ­giant edifice that resembles a ship washed ashore. Or perhaps it was sent here from space, by a race of creatures who mistook Carlstadt, New Jersey, for a ­regional capital and crashed on landing beside Moonachie Creek.

Then again, to call it a ruin is misleading. To say that this empty giant indoor shopping center—larger than the malls at nearby Paramus, Short Hills, Woodbridge, and Wayne combined—is some kind of after suggests there was a before, a time when people ate at Cheesecake Factories or tried on Ray-Bans at Sunglass Huts. This is not the case.

For this ruin has never been ruined, or might be considered pre-ruined, given that it has only ever been a plan, or a series of plans. What is currently half-built is the product of the last plan, hatched in the Bush era, that, even before the economic downturn killed it, was loudly and universally derided—Governor Chris Christie called it, boldly, the “ugliest damn building in New Jersey and maybe America.” But after almost a decade of talks and schemes, of construction starts and stops in which the stalled mall passed from one developer to another (and the parking lot started to sink into the swamp), construction has begun again. The mall is now in the hands of Triple Five, the Alberta-based developer of some of the largest malls in North America. The company was hand-picked by Christie, who has praised its owners for “their commitment and vision.” This is a considerable understatement.

If you disregard military bases and airports, and maybe the dam the Chinese government is beginning to regret it built on the Yangtze, the mall currently under construction at the Meadowlands will be one of the biggest feats of construction in history: the world’s largest commercial space, with at least six zeros attached to all the calculations. There is to be an astonishing 7.5 million square feet of retail space. Every year, the mall’s developers expect 55 million people—almost the population of Italy—to show up for, say, breakfast and some jeans and maybe a luxury item, as well as a show or a ­fighter-jet flight simulation or a grande decaf latte beneath a TV screen that will make Times Square seem like a rec room from the seventies. There will be the first indoor ski slope in North America: 800 feet long, sixteen stories high, with fresh snow made daily. There will be a skating rink the size of a small lake. And in the water-themed part of the structure, there will be a gigantic room modeled after Hawaii, with a tropical climate, a pool featuring six-foot waves, and possibly some kind of whale or unusual fish, explained to shoppers by sea-life educators.

If things go according to plan—a Yangtze dam–size if—the first stage of the complex will be completed in 2014, in time for the Super Bowl, which will be held that year across the parking lot. It is to be called ­American Dream at Meadowlands.

“I will probably be going to Hawaii with the girls,” Governor Christie is saying, imagining a family outing to the Meadowlands. He’ll be heading to the faux tropics, while his wife and sons will be skiing on the faux mountain next door.

Christie is standing on an incomplete balcony of questionable safety, in the unfinished sports court of American Dream, speaking to a crowd of regional journalists who have arrived one morning this spring to tour the mall under construction. New Jersey has offered Triple Five up to $350 million in state subsidies, making American Dream one of the few ­government-supported endeavors Christie hasn’t enjoyed saying no to. In fact, the governor is noticeably revved up, taken by the mall’s bigness, and charmed by its developers, whose enthusiasm roughly approximates the scale of the project itself.

Triple Five is run by the Ghermezians, an Orthodox Jewish family of four brothers and their nephews from Edmonton, Alberta. Nader Ghermezian, the company’s chairman, is standing next to Christie, playing Teller to Christie’s Penn. He has spent a career promising absurdist marvels, cutting ribbons on indoor lakes. “Today, we are proud to announce that we will be developing the world’s largest and most comprehensive retail, entertainment, amusement, recreation, and tourism project ever built,” he declares.

Numbers fly from Ghermezian like French fries out of a Burger King. “We will create 30,000 permanent jobs,” he says, citing an “economic benefit” of $3.8 billion that will be injected in the area’s economy. He points out that 25 million people live within driving distance, and begins to paint a picture of Newark Airport as less a gateway to the Greater New York area and more like a pipeline to American Dream at Meadowlands. (There are plans for Newark baggage check-in at the mall, and chartered flights destined specifically for American Dream.) “We are going to bring them in from far away,” he says. “From Europe, from South America, from all over the world!”

But Ghermezian also imagines that ­American Dream will end up being a time-saver for New Yorkers. “How would you like to go skiing in the middle of summer?” he asks. “Come here instead of going to Aspen!” When American Dream opens, he expects it will be that much harder to justify leaving the New York area at all. “You don’t have to go anywhere—Rome, Paris, Milan—for shopping. We will have them all here in the Meadowlands in New Jersey.”

Ghermezian is channeling something—a little Robert Moses, a little Norman Bel Geddes designing Futurama for the 1939 World’s Fair. He is not bashful, and he betrays no doubt that his dream will be realized. “So let’s work together, let’s be positive,” he says, and then adds, with steely confidence: “We will have a water park in here.”

Before it was a mall, or even a sports stadium, the Meadowlands was a place where people planned and plotted, where they dreamed of big things and sometimes even realized them, though mostly not. In 1824, Diedrich Knickerbocker, Washington Irving’s Dutch pseudonym, saw the meadows as nothing but emptiness, marked by Snake Hill, the extant rise that, before the pre-ruins of American Dream, was the biggest thing on the horizon: “It appears proudly overshadowing a gentle river, which rolls gracefully by its side, and stands like a giant amidst the desert, frowning upon the monotonous landscape around.”

Even during Irving’s time, however, there were developers who believed the swampy, mosquito-infested “wasteland” could be converted into the most productive farmland the world had ever seen. Just after the War of 1812, General Robert Swartwout bought land and diked it, planning grasses and a giant dairy farm to supply the growing populace of New York. “How can the success of such a work be denied when the most invincible proofs are before us?” Swartwout asked, just before his success was denied, the dikes breaking, the farmland sinking, the site eventually becoming an insane asylum. After the Civil War, Samuel Pike, a New York real-estate developer and distiller, founded the Iron Dike and Land Reclamation Company, also with an eye toward farmland creation. His special iron dikes avoided the erosion of the previous projects, though it is said that corn stalks that grew on the reclaimed land produced no corn. Pike sold his land to the railroads. “The enterprise of bringing it into cultivation bids fair to be a success,” the Times reported of the next giant land-reclamation scheme, before it, too, failed. In 1896, Cornelius C. Vermeule proposed developing the Meadowlands into an industrial city. This plan never got off the ground, either.

In the mid-1900s, a sea-plane base is said to have prospered for a time, and people are thought to have camped in the Meadowlands for the 1939 World’s Fair. But the area was mostly abandoned and the farms were slowly reclaimed, piecemeal, by illegal dumping and the tides. Swarms of mosquitoes—dark clouds of aedes sollicitans, their stingers geared for blood—were frequently said to fly from the marshes to Newark, and were even blamed for infestations in New York. In the fifties, sand drains allowed engineers to build on swamps that had previously proved impervious to development: thus the New Jersey Turnpike, which led to the stadium and racetrack, which led to more plans to do something with the land adjacent, which brings us to American Dream.

The land in question is owned by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority. It was first planned to be developed by Kajima International, a Japanese company that in 1996 proposed a retail-entertainment “pleasure dome.” By 2002, the project had gotten nowhere, and soon control over the land was granted to the Mills Corporation, a maker of giant malls named after mills (Franklin Mills in Philadelphia, St. Louis Mills in St. Louis, etc.). It was the not-so-halcyon days of the James McGreevey governorship, when shopping seemed as if it would never stop, when malls were the rage. Mills, adopting the pleasure-dome idea, approached the $1.3 billion project with gusto. It called the development Meadowlands Xanadu.

But like many of its forebears, the Mills Corporation’s plan went down the tubes. The company got so far as to build a shell and even an indoor ski slope before skirting bankruptcy in 2007. The Sports and Exposition Authority was stuck with a half-building. Enter Colony Capital, a L.A.-based investment firm with an international background in casinos and hotels. “We are pleased to have the complex negotiations of the last few months behind us and are extremely excited about the project’s momentum,” Colony stated in 2006, immediately before it lost momentum. By 2009, the Xanadu site was a metaphor for the bad-deal rich economy: swampland and every­thing sinking.

Stephen Ross’s Related Companies flirted with the project next, in 2010. Ross’s team proposed changing the name from Xanadu to Meadowlands, and came up with a logo centered on the letter M. “The Meadow­lands will usher in a new era and a bold redefinition of what a retail destination can be,” read a Related brochure obtained by the Bergen Record. The ski slope, né Snow Dome during the Xanadu days, was renamed ­SnowPark. A 286-foot Pepsi Globe (or Ferris wheel) was also retained. But Ross’s Meadowlands Plan stalled, and Cabela’s, the outdoor store that was to be an anchor tenant, began threatening to opt out.

This is more or less where Christie stepped in. Some observers expected him to compare the development to other unwieldy projects, like the federally financed regional train tunnel he had recently squashed, and simply declare the mall dead. But he chose to double down, to go bigger and better, to show himself as an executive who gets big business moving. He met the Ghermezians at a Giants game and was reportedly impressed by their track record. Triple Five is the developer of the Mall of America (4.25 million square feet) in Minnesota, as well as the West Edmonton Mall (5.3 million square feet) in Canada, which reigned briefly as the Guinness Book of World Records’ largest mall before the opening of Beijing’s Golden Resources Mall (6 million square feet). With ­American Dream, Triple Five is looking to take back the No. 1 spot.

“Okay, so this is the ski slope,” Paul ­Ghermezian says, standing in an empty concrete room with a big hill in the ­middle of it. “It’s essentially a large refrigerator.”

Paul, Nader Ghermezian’s nephew, is in charge of the tour. He is tall and charming, relaxed and meticulous; he has inherited his uncle’s pitchman genes. “I grew up in the Rockies, so this is awesome,” he says. “You have to imagine the half-pipe. I already skied the equivalent of this. It’s in Madrid, and it’s a good time.”

He stays upbeat, enthusiastic. “It’s a great climate-controlled environment, so it’s not too cold,” he says. “And it’s real snow. This is something to really understand. It’s real snow!”

“You have to imagine the half-pipe. I already skied the equivalent of this in Madrid, and it’s a good time.”

Next stop, a mall-size sports bar, with a proposed TV set that Paul is bubbling over. “Our vision here is this wall, it’s going to be outfitted with the most amazing high-definition screen you’ve ever seen!” And then: “I told the management that I wanted a second one for my house,” he says, winking at the cameras.

Paul’s tour necessitates a lot of imagining, some of it fairly difficult (indoor skydiving, for instance). At the moment, walking around American Dream feels like entering a Battlestar Galactica episode in which a team boards an evacuated space station with a possible alien presence lurking. Workers’ lunch trash is scattered around rooms next to fancy terrazzo tiling; boxes of Kohler toilet fixtures are stranded near sheets of wallboard and rolls of insulation. If you didn’t know, you might not be able to tell whether the theater was on its way up or down. “This will be very similar to what was the Nokia Theater in Times Square,” we’re assured.

Toward the end of the tour, Paul finally gets the question he is looking for—why the name American Dream?

“Obviously, it’s a very vetted thing,” he says. After asking reporters for their theories, he says the name comes down from his uncles, who, after immigrating from Iran in the late fifties, believe they have lived the American Dream, albeit via Canada. “In all instances, they achieved it,” he says. “And they want to share that.

“We want people to live the American Dream, and what I mean by that is they have a great time,” he goes on. “There’s no feeling like it. And the tourists who come here are going to say, ‘This is America!’ ”

By this point we have ascended the mall’s roof, which looks out over the reeds and the parking lots and the disused radio towers across the muddied Hackensack River, beyond Secaucus, to the view of midtown Manhattan, creeping over the hills of Union City. Paul points to the city skyline, then unveils a revolutionary rethinking of the view, an American Dream in reverse. “When you look out at Manhattan, all our eyeballs are on them,” he says. “But when they look out, they’re going to see us. They’re going to say, ‘Wow, what’s going on out there?’—and they’re going to make that trip.” He waxes enthusiastic about the Jersey-centered panorama. “These investment bankers working late hours, looking out on the Meadowlands, they’re going to long to go to New Jersey,” he says. “You’re going to see children tugging at their parents—this is where we want to go!”

As you might imagine, some people have difficulty understanding why New Jersey needs to compete with China in the shopping-mall category, or why a ­biospherelike amusement park is necessary, or why this particular project needs to be built right now, during what can generously be called a precarious retail environment.

“I don’t know which is worse—if it fails or if it succeeds,” says Jeff Tittel, the director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club. “If it fails, New Jersey is going to be out of $350 million in taxpayer subsidies. And if it succeeds, it will be the worst traffic, and it will destroy shopping areas in cities and malls all over the state.” Even American Dream proponents acknowledge the traffic situation, though they predict that road improvements will accommodate the anticipated 150,000 additional cars. But Tittel, citing an average capacity of roughly 1,800 cars per hour per lane, thinks the project will be a Giants fan’s worst game-day-traffic nightmare. “I don’t think people understand the size and scope of it,” he says. “At the Port Authority, the bus will just sit there and never be able to leave the building.”

An equally pressing question is whether the mall will succeed on its own terms. Is it possible to build anything that can attract 55 million visitors a year? In New Jersey? Throughout the country, high-end malls have endured the recession surprisingly well, especially those with entertainment components. And as crazy as it may seem to shoppers in Cobble Hill or Nolita, retail experts say the region is facing a mall gap. “If you look at the Greater New York area,” says David Harris, an analyst with Gleacher & Company, “I know it’s hard to relate to for a lot of New Yorkers, but we are under-malled here.” It is true that older shopping centers are struggling throughout New Jersey, but the owners of the Nanuet Mall announced this spring that they would demolish it to build a fancier one in its stead.

On the other hand, maybe there’s a reason why the Xanadu–American Dream site has sat empty for so long. “If this project is viable, why hasn’t it been done over the years?” asks Deborah Howlett, the president of the New Jersey Policy Perspective. “Why does it take $350 million from the people of New Jersey?” She finds it particularly galling that the financing for the almost $4 billion megamall was arranged in a year when Christie slashed 5 percent of the school system’s annual funds. To make the deal, the government had to rewrite the Economic Redevelopment and Growth grant and the Urban Transit Hub Tax Credit Act. An affordable-housing element was scratched in negotiations, reducing the project to a giant version of a highway-side box store. “There will just be places for business,” Howlett says.

Still, even most of the development’s opponents appear resigned to the opinion that the Meadowlands’ future belongs to American Dream. Bill Sheehan, the executive director of Hackensack Riverkeeper, is a local environmentalist who has done much to help restore vast tracts of wetlands over the past decade. He took me on a tour of the place from the river, and as we boated past fields of lush spartina grasses teeming with osprey and egret, he, too, spoke of the megamall as if it were a fait accompli. “My feeling is, it has to be something because, No. 1, it’s there. It’s gotta open. The other reasons it’s gotta open—it’ll give the economy here a real kick in the ass. I just hope they figure out a way not to use so much power.”

The Meadowlands has always been a land of larger-than-life proposals, where failure mingles with success so frequently that sometimes the difference is debatable. Dreamers in the Meadowlands have seldom accomplished what they set out to do, but new ones keep arriving anyway, and the region is typically accommodating.

On a humid morning in East Rutherford, with mosquitoes patrolling the parking lot of the Sheraton Meadowlands Hotel and Conference Center, Paul Ghermezian is at the Starbucks inside, reminiscing about the family business. His family has always been willing to do anything to create a spectacle. He remembers the first time his uncles brought a submarine to the indoor lake at the West Edmonton Mall. “It was a real submarine—if you drop it in the ocean, it will work.”

Triple Five brought a submarine to Bloomington, Minnesota, too, when they were pitching the Mall of America to the local community. Now Paul sees the Mall of America concept imitated around the world. “You have a mall and you just put a country on the end of it,” he says disparagingly. “But none of these has conjured up the same level of success and cachet that we have.”

The Meadowlands project is especially significant to Paul. His uncles bid on the project a decade ago, before it became Xanadu, so this is their second time at bat. He acknowledges that there will be some difficulties. Parking may not be free, and thanks to Bergen County blue laws, a portion of the mall will not be allowed to sell clothes on Sundays. But he faithfully sticks to the vision his family has put together, and he works it hard. “This is going to be more grand than Vegas,” he declares. “It’s going to be more classy.

“The rest of the world—especially those emerging markets—have built really great facilities,” he continues, “and when you come back to the U.S. you see some of these places have not kept up.” His BlackBerry is filled with photos from shopping experiences around the world: a chandelier in a new Vegas store, benches in Mexico. He has been to the Golden Resources Mall in Beijing, and came away unimpressed. “It is basically a stacked retail experience, without any jazz.”

As we are finishing our conversation, mosquitoes begin to make their way into the Sheraton, and then deep into the Starbucks. One lands nearby, but Paul Ghermezian is not concerned. “Mosquitoes don’t like my blood,” he says. Then, looking at his watch, he gets up to drive through the maze of service roads for a meeting at his trailer on the edge of Moonachie Creek.

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(via Instapaper)

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Sent via iPhone. Apologies for formatting and typo errors

Rules for being a gentleman

Fail miserably at the third but i like the sentiment.

Nice Guys Never Win (Neither Do Mean Girls)

You are a nice boy and agreeable as well. I also think you are fairly good at stating your opinion but only sometimes. While saying 'I don't know' is a perfectly good response when you genuinely do not know but when it's a question of your salary or your fees or charges, you have to be pushy. You have to know your worth, son. You are a smart intelligent boy and you should be able to show the value you add. That in turn should be commensurate with the salary or fees you charge. Don't be too nice otherwise you get short changed and paid less. Be strong and know your worth! We do and we love you for it :)

Freakonomics » Nice Guys Never Win (Neither Do Mean Girls)
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/08/16/nice-guys-never-win-neither-do-mean-girls/

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Nice Guys Never Win (Neither Do Mean Girls)

 

For years, we’ve been hearing from fictional alpha males like Ari Gold and Gordon Gekko that nice guys finish last. Now, according to a collection of studies soon to be released in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, there appears to be some truth to the axiom. While nice guys don’t necessarily finish last, they rarely finish first. Researchers Beth A. Livingston of Cornell, Timothy A. Judge of Notre Dame, and Charlice Hurst of the University of Western Ontario, show how “agreeableness” negatively affects monetary earnings. Moreover, their research shows that this “agreeable gap” is more pronounced in men than women, who still trail their male counterparts. Here’s a full version of the study. And here’s the abstract:

Sex and agreeableness were hypothesized to affect income, such that women and agreeable individuals were hypothesized to earn less than men and less agreeable individuals. Because agreeable men disconfirm (and disagreeable men confirm) to conventional gender roles, agreeableness was expected to be more negatively related to income for men (i.e., the pay gap between agreeable men and agreeable women would be smaller than the gap between disagreeable men and disagreeable women). The hypotheses were supported across four studies. Study 1 confirmed the effects of sex and agreeableness on income and that the agreeableness – income relationship was significantly more negative for men than for women, controlling for each of the other Big Five traits. Study 2 showed that the differential effects of agreeableness on income for men versus women were replicated when job responsibility and occupational status were taken into account. A third study, using a policy-capturing design, yielded evidence for the argument that the joint effects of agreeableness and gender are due to backlash against agreeable men.

The paper goes on to state:

Nice guys do not necessarily finish last, but they do finish a distant second in terms of earnings. From a humanistic perspective, it seems remarkably unfair that men who are amiable would be so heavily penalized for not conforming to gender norms. Yet, seen from the perspective of gender equity, even the nice guys seem to be making out quite well relative to either agreeable or disagreeable women.

The authors are careful to tease out what exactly constitutes “disagreeable.” Rather than a raving psychopath, a disagreeable person is “more likely than people high in trait agreeableness to behave disagreeably in certain situations by, for instance, aggressively advocating for their position during conflicts (van de Vliert & Euwema, 2004).”

Women, on the other hand, experience a smaller gap in earnings in terms of their relative “niceness,” and still earn salaries well below their male counterparts.

Nice girls might not get rich, but “mean” girls do not do much better. Even controlling for human capital, marital status, and occupation, highly disagreeable women do not earn as much as highly agreeable men.

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Rescuing Endangered Languages Means Saving Ideas

Here's an interesting way of looking at languages. I never considered it so. So if you want to be in business or in law or in diplomacy, knowing more languages helps, son. One of the reasons why I am going to start learning Persian/Farsi.

It's good you are learning Latin but you should get Ma to enhance your Hindi. It's a very rich language and will stand you in good stead.

Incidentally, talking about languages and going extinct, it's my belief that gods and worshippers have the same status. When the worshippers of a god die out, the god also dies. Their existence as far as the human realm is concerned is finished. Yes you might have their statues, their paintings, even the hymns that were sung to them but if there are no worshippers, then there is no god. Baal was the sun god of the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians but he isn't worshipped now. You are named after the son of the sun god so you will appreciate this example. He was a jealous god, demanding human sacrifice in some cases. But his worshippers died out or were killed. And now the only thing left of him are paintings, statues and some hymns. Have a think about this argument, there are some very good logical and philosophical holes in this argument. See if you can pick them?

Also think about if we need to save these languages and if we don't, what will be the loss? And how much should we spend to save our history. Also look up the history of Esperanto as a language :)

Love

Baba

Rescuing Endangered Languages Means Saving Ideas - Miller-McCune
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture/rescuing-endangered-languages-means-saving-ideas-35246/

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August 19, 2011

Rescuing Endangered Languages Means Saving Ideas

While saving the world’s threatened languages may seem informed more by nostalgia than need, federally funded researchers say each tongue may include unique concepts with practical value.

By Emily Badger

Endangered languages don’t seem as self-evidently valuable as, say, endangered species essential to the functioning of a healthy ecosystem. If the world loses Chuj, a particularly endangered Mayan language of Central America, or Itelmen, a language with fewer than two dozen native speakers on an isolated peninsula in the far east of Russia, people will still be able to communicate. They’ll just do it in Spanish, or maybe Russian. And history will move on.

Human language, though, encapsulates more than just different ways to say to “hello.”

“The debate about the universality of language, that we all have the same ideas and therefore language is just a function of history, that we’re basically using verbs and nouns [to say the same thing] — that’s a hypothesis,” said Anna Kerttula, the program officer for Arctic Social Sciences at the National Science Foundation. “Or maybe it’s reached the level of theory. But that’s in no way been proven.”

THE IDEA LOBBY
Miller-McCune’s Washington correspondent Emily Badger follows the ideas informing, explaining and influencing government, from the local think tank circuit to academic research that shapes D.C. policy from afar.

As the famous example says, Eskimo have numerous words to describe what Americans would just call “snow” and “ice.” This suggests language systems don’t merely translate universal ideas into different spellings; they encode different concepts. And when we lose a language, we risk losing those concepts.

A lot of concepts are on the edge of oblivion — out of about 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, half are projected to disappear by the end of the century, if not sooner.

“That’s an amazing amount of knowledge,” Kerttula said.

She helps run a joint program of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities that’s been trying for seven years to fund efforts at recording and documenting endangered languages before they disappear. (The program received an infusion of $3.9 million last week to pay for 10 fellowships and 24 grants.) The project may sound like a punch line for another anti-science tirade from a small-government politician, but its work touches on fundamental questions about how the brain works, how people express ideas, how societies adapt and how human history has evolved. And of how researchers benefit.

“We’re talking about neuroscientists, we’re talking about computer scientists, we’re definitely talking about historians, anthropologists and biologists in some cases” working on nearly extinct language, Kerttula said.

Lingua Preservation!

Ten endangered languages the NSF/NEH Documenting Endangered Languages program has attempted to preserve:
1. Bangime, Northern Bali
2. Navajo, Southwestern U.S.
3. Kosati, Louisiana.
4. Witchita, Oklahoma.
5. Arawak, Brazil
6. Máíhiki, Peru
7. Cherokee, Southeastern U.S.
8. Chechen, the Caucasis
9. Southeastern Tepehuan, Mexico
10. Defaka, Nigeria

The National Science Foundation actually has physical scientists working with Inuit people to identify different aspects of ice that aren’t captured in the English language but could inform our understanding of the changing Arctic ecosystem.

“If you don’t understand and don’t have the language for what ice is, what ice should be, you’re not going to understand how it’s changing,” Kerttula said. “Language is critical in recognizing change in your environment.”

One researcher receiving the money allocated last week, Jürgen Bohnemeyer at SUNY Buffalo, wants to know: If people talk differently about objects in space, does that mean they also think differently about them? He’ll investigate how spatial concepts are represented in 25 languages on five continents.

Another researcher, Pedro Mateo Pedro, will study how children acquire Chuj, the endangered Mayan language. Other projects will document endangered native languages in Oklahoma and the construction of Cherokee grammar. Some will develop learning and training resources for communities to record their own language.

A few of the researchers will be working with languages spoken by fewer than 30 elderly people. But the designation “endangered,” Kerttula says, isn’t necessarily a measurement of the small number of people still speaking a language. Rather, she said, languages become endangered when children no longer speak them.

Out of 92 languages known to have been used in the Arctic, for example, she says 72 still have some speakers. All but one (Greenlandic) are endangered, the result of the steady encroachment of other dominant languages like English into the domains of public schools and legal systems, television and now the Internet.

“Pretty soon, all of the domains of your life are in English, and the only place where you get to speak your native language is to your grandmother,” Kerttula said. “So how long is that language going to last? It’s basically not.”

The government program’s efforts of course won’t save them all.

“With 7,000 languages, that means 3,500 languages are going to disappear, and we’re funding how many projects a year?” Kerttula asked rhetorically. The National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities aren’t the only ones doing this work; some individual states, for example, have programs that include keeping native languages on life support. But the number of programs worldwide is small, and for each language that one of them targets, there are exponentially more elements to understand, from grammar to vocabulary to the cognitive processes of children.

Kerttula is effusive about the individual projects now trying to do this. But, she adds, “It’s a Sisyphean task.”

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