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The notion that computers can think, or that one day they will do so, is rooted in one of two complementary misunderstandings. The first relates to the nature of computers and the second to the nature of thought. That these misunderstandings have had such a powerful hold on the minds of many otherwise intelligent people is due to a tendency to take useful metaphors – describing what computers do and how they do it – as literal truth.
Consider, first, misunderstanding about the nature of computers. Most people would agree that the computers we have at present are not conscious: the latest Super-Cray with gigabytes of memory is no less zomboid than a pocket calculator. But there is the feeling that at some stage, as a result of increasing computational power and in something called "complexity", the artefact that possesses this power and this complexity will wake up to its own existence, or at the very least, experience the transactions which take place in, through, and around it.
Consciousness Awakening on Vimeo by Ralph Buckley (Photo credit: Ralph Buckley)
We should treat this claim with extreme scepticism because those who say that conscious computers are around the corner are not able to specify what features conscious computers will have in addition to those possessed by our current unconscious ones. There was a fashion in the 1980s and 1990s for invoking alternative architectures – in particular parallel rather than serial processing – as the basis for computers that would be aware of themselves. This fashion has now passed and the conceptual cupboard of the conscious-computers-round-the-corner brigade is now empty. We therefore have no reason for expecting that computers will be anything other than extremely complex devices in which unconscious electrical impulses pass into and out of unconscious electrical circuits and interact with any number of devices connected directly or indirectly to them.
As for thought, this has been even more profoundly misunderstood. Some have argued that thought does not require consciousness, so that computers can think, or will one day think, even though they will never be conscious. Thoughts, like other so-called conscious activities, are merely causal way-stations between inputs such as sense experience and outputs such as behaviour. They do not have to be conscious; indeed, consciousness contributes nothing to their causal efficacy. It requires no equipment or subtle argument to demonstrate that this is nonsense. All you need is to focus on the thoughts you are having now. To deny that thought is conscious is self-refuting: you cannot deny the consciousness of your thoughts without being conscious of doing so. And to claim that conscious thought, or indeed consciousness, has a central role in our lives belongs to an extreme behaviourism that is not able to explain even ordinary human behaviour.
David Stove once ran a contest
to find the Worst Argument In The World, but he awarded the prize to
his own entry, and one that shored up his politics to boot. It hardly
seems like an objective process.
If he can unilaterally declare a
Worst Argument, then so can I. I declare the Worst Argument In The
World to be this: "X is in a category whose archetypal member gives us a
certain emotional reaction. Therefore, we should apply that emotional
reaction to X, even though it is not a central category member."
Call it the Noncentral Fallacy. It sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?
It sounds dumb only because we are talking soberly of categories and features. As soon as the argument gets framed in terms of words,
it becomes so powerful that somewhere between many and most of the bad
arguments in politics, philosophy and culture take some form of the
noncentral fallacy. Before we get to those, let's look at a simpler
example.
Suppose someone wants to build a statue honoring Martin
Luther King Jr. for his nonviolent resistance to racism. An opponent of
the statue objects: "But Martin Luther King was a criminal!"
Any
historian can confirm this is correct. A criminal is technically
someone who breaks the law, and King knowingly broke a law against
peaceful anti-segregation protest - hence his famous Letter from
Birmingham Jail.
But in this case calling Martin Luther King a
criminal is the noncentral. The archetypal criminal is a mugger or bank
robber. He is driven only by greed, preys on the innocent, and weakens
the fabric of society. Since we don't like these things, calling someone
a "criminal" naturally lowers our opinion of them.
The opponent
is saying "Because you don't like criminals, and Martin Luther King is a
criminal, you should stop liking Martin Luther King." But King doesn't
share the important criminal features of being driven by greed, preying
on the innocent, or weakening the fabric of society that made us dislike
criminals in the first place. Therefore, even though he is a criminal,
there is no reason to dislike King.
This all seems so nice and logical when it's presented in this
format. Unfortunately, it's also one hundred percent contrary to
instinct: the urge is to respond "Martin Luther King? A criminal? No he
wasn't! You take that back!" This is why the noncentral is so
successful. As soon as you do that you've fallen into their trap. Your
argument is no longer about whether you should build a statue, it's
about whether King was a criminal. Since he was, you have now lost the
argument.
Ideally, you should just be able to say "Well, King was
the good kind of criminal." But that seems pretty tough as a debating
maneuver, and it may be even harder in some of the cases where the
noncentral Fallacy is commonly used.
Now I want to list some of these cases. Many will be political1, for which I apologize,
but it's hard to separate out a bad argument from its specific
instantiations. None of these examples are meant to imply that the
position they support is wrong (and in fact I myself hold some of them).
They only show that certain particular arguments for the position are
flawed, such as:
"Abortion is murder!"
The archetypal murder is Charles Manson breaking into your house and
shooting you. This sort of murder is bad for a number of reasons: you
prefer not to die, you have various thoughts and hopes and dreams that
would be snuffed out, your family and friends would be heartbroken, and
the rest of society has to live in fear until Manson gets caught. If you
define murder as "killing another human being", then abortion is
technically murder. But it has none of the downsides of murder Charles
Manson style. Although you can criticize abortion for many reasons,
insofar as "abortion is murder" is an invitation to apply one's feelings
in the Manson case directly to the abortion case, it ignores the latter's lack of the features that generated those intuitions in the first place2.
"Genetic engineering to cure diseases is eugenics!"
Okay, you've got me there: since eugenics means "trying to improve the
gene pool" that's clearly right. But what's wrong with eugenics? "What's
wrong with eugenics? Hitler did eugenics! Those unethical scientists in
the 1950s who sterilized black women without their consent did
eugenics!" "And what was wrong with what Hitler and those unethical
scientists did?" "What do you mean, what was wrong with them? Hitler
killed millions of people! Those unethical scientists ruined people's
lives." "And does using genetic engineering to cure diseases kill
millions of people, or ruin anyone's life?" "Well...not really." "Then
what's wrong with it?" "It's eugenics!"
Sometimes it takes going through a bad
marriage to figure out what makes a good marriage. Five strategies for a
successful, happy marriage from divorced people who learned these
lessons the hard way. Elizabeth Bernstein has details on Lunch Break.
Photo: AFP/GettyImages.
Want great marriage advice? Ask a divorced person.
People who lose the most important relationship of their life tend to
spend some time thinking about what went wrong. If they are at all
self-reflective, this means they will acknowledge their own mistakes,
not just their ex's blunders. And if they want to be lucky in love next
time, they'll try to learn from these mistakes.
Research shows that most divorced people identify the same top five
regrets—behaviors they believe contributed to their marriage's demise
and that they resolve to change next time. "Divorced individuals who
step back and say, 'This is what I've done wrong and this is what I will
change,' have something powerful to teach others," says Terri Orbuch, a
psychologist, research professor at the University of Michigan's
Institute for Social Research and author of the new book "Finding Love
Again: 6 Simple Steps to a New and Happy Relationship." "This is
marriage advice learned the hard way," she says
Dr. Orbuch has
been conducting a longitudinal study, funded by the National Institutes
of Health, collecting data periodically from 373 same-race couples who
were between the ages of 25 and 37 and in their first year of marriage
in 1986, the year the study began. Over the continuing study's 25 years
so far, 46% of the couples divorced—a rate in line with the Census and
other national data. Dr. Orbuch followed many of the divorced
individuals into new relationships and asked 210 of them what they had
learned from their mistakes. (Of these 210, 71% found new partners,
including 44% who remarried.) This is their hard-earned advice.
In May 2009, a wealthy 20-year-old was drag racing through the city
streets of Hangzhou, China, when his Mitsubishi struck and killed a
pedestrian in a crosswalk. The car was traveling so fast that the
victim—a 25-year-old telecom engineer of a modest, rural background—was
flung at least 20 yards. Afterward, bystanders and reporters
photographed the driver, Hu Bin, as well as his rich friends, who
nonchalantly smoked cigarettes and laughed while waiting for the police
to arrive at the scene.
These images, soon posted online, provoked a public outcry. Anger
over the callous behavior of these wealthy Chinese youths was followed
by accusations of a police cover-up.
First, the local authorities admitted that they had underestimated the
speed Hu’s vehicle was traveling by half. (Incredibly, the police had
first suggested that Hu was going no more than 43 mph.) Public furor
rose again when Hu received a three-year prison sentence, an
exceptionally light punishment in a country where drunk drivers guilty
of similar accidents can receive the death penalty.
But the most stunning allegation was that the man appearing in court
and serving the three-year sentence wasn’t Hu at all, but a hired body
double.
The charge isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound. The practice of
hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official
Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president
who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to
“confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently
charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives
of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a
motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for
roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally
demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his
living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for
each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so
common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”
The recently
opened Shard is already a familiar landmark on the London skyline, but
how might the UK's urban landscapes look if some of the most
architecturally ambitious plans of past centuries had been fully
realised?
Economic and social factors across the ages meant that some
of the grandest designs of renowned architects such as Lutyens and Inigo
Jones were never completed.
Here are five ambitious building projects that never made it off the drawing-board.
House of God: Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral
Sir Edwin Lutyens, proposed architect of Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral was Anglican
Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral designed in 1903 by Giles Gilbert Scott - a Catholic
Foundation stone of Lutyens' plan laid in 1933 but building never finished
Lutyens also designed large sections of Delhi
Lutyens died New Year's Day 1944
The famed architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was commissioned in 1929
to build a new Catholic cathedral in Liverpool. The building he planned
was monumental.
"It would have been 60ft (18m) higher than St Peter's in
Rome, it would have been twice the height of St Paul's in London," says
Anthony O'Brien, Dean of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral, which now
stands on the original site.
Lutyens' aim was to build a vast brick and granite cathedral
topped with a 510ft (155m) dome. The cathedral was to be perched on a
high point in the city, its vantage point and sheer size would have
dominated the skyline.
"Right from the beginning, Liverpool Cathedral seemed
incredibly ambitious. Lutyens was always intensely competitive in his
work," says Jane Ridley, biographer and great-granddaughter of the
architect.
A campaign was launched among the city's Catholic community to raise funds.
"In order to finance the building, the parishioners were
asked to donate any old gold or jewellery that would contribute to the
cost of the building," says Geraldine Judge, a church community worker
in Liverpool.
Work began in 1933 with the building of the crypt. That's as far as it got.
"The crypt is complete. It is a great Lutyens building in its
own right. It is staggeringly big. It is like walking into a colossal
Edwardian railway terminus," says broadcaster Jonathan Glancey.
Why didn't it happen? The cost was always prohibitive, but work halted with the
outbreak of World War II and as the conflict progressed Lutyens lost
enthusiasm.
The grand project ran out of steam after his death in January 1944.
Wikipedia has a great article about the movie "No Country for Old Men" (2007), I think it's one of the best movies of the past decade and deserves all the accolades that it has received.
”THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect”
Richard Gilmore relates the Yeats’ poem to the Coens’
film. “The lament that can be heard in these lines,” he says, “is for
no longer belonging to the country of the young. It is also a lament for
the way the young neglect the wisdom of the past and, presumably, of
the old … Yeats chooses Byzantium because it was a great early Christian city in which Plato’s Academy,
for a time, was still allowed to function. The historical period of
Byzantium was a time of culmination that was also a time of transition.
In his book of mystical writings, A Vision,
Yeats says, ‘I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or
since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and practical life were
one, that architect and artificers…spoke to the multitude and the few
alike.’ The idea of a balance and a coherence in a society’s religious,
aesthetic, and practical life is Yeat’s ideal …It is an ideal rarely
realized in this world and maybe not even in ancient Byzantium.
Certainly within the context of the movie No Country for Old Men,
one has the sense, especially from Bell as the chronicler of the times,
that things are out of alignment, that balance and harmony are gone
from the land and from the people.”
Differences from the novel
Tasha Robinson lists the differences between the Coen brothers award-winning script and the Cormac McCarthy novel:
“• The book is less removed about the end of the interaction between Chigurh (the Javier Bardem
character) and Moss' wife …; it spells out the fact that he shoots her.
She also doesn't refuse to call heads or tails on his coin: She calls
it incorrectly, though they then have pretty much the same conversation
they have in the film, about how he, not the coin, is deciding her fate.
• The book is also more specific about how Chigurh ended up in the car
of the deputy he kills at the beginning of the film; he murdered a man
for a snotty remark, then permitted himself to be captured ‘to see if I
could extricate myself by an act of will.’ Explaining some aspects of
his life to Carson Wells (the Woody Harrelson character) before killing him, Chigurh describes this as a vain, foolish act.
• The first hotel confrontation between Moss and Chigurh plays out very
differently; rather than punching out the lock and wounding Moss,
Chigurh apparently steals a key from the murdered clerk and quietly
enters Moss' room, and Moss hides and takes him captive at gunpoint, so
they have a chance to see and know each other. Then Moss runs and the
chase/shootout begins.
• There's a scene where Chigurh delivers the recovered cash to some
higher-up whom he's never met before, but whom he's clearly decided is
now his employer; he presents the money and they come to terms after a
brief ‘How did you find me?’ ‘What difference does it make?’
conversation.
• There's also a protracted scene toward the end where Sheriff Bell
interviews one of the kids who witnessed Chigurh's car accident, and
apparently stole Chigurh's gun out of his car afterward.
• The chase scene with the dog that follows Moss downstream until he
manages to dry out his gun and shoot it is an invention of the film, and
doesn't appear in the book in any way.
• Where the film last sees Moss alive heading off to have a beer with a
lady who calls to him from poolside at her hotel, the book has a lengthy
interlude between him and a young female hitchhiker, whom he gives
money and advice ... He actually dies because he puts down his gun when
the Mexicans following him take her hostage.”
Robinson adds that “the list of plot changes above may seem long, but
they represent a small percentage of the actual story, which mostly
plays out in the film exactly as McCarthy puts it on the page, scene for
scene, conversation for conversation. A lot of the speeches and
wittiest exchanges are verbatim from the book.”
Other listed differences include:
“• [The film] omits all references to Bell's experience in World War II,
which is a key to understanding his character in the novel. In the
novel, in the scene with Uncle Ellis, Bell tells a long story about how
he received a medal of honor in the war, which he feels he did not
deserve because he ran away and left his men. Bell is haunted by his
guilt about this incident, which the film completely omits.
• The opening [voice-over narration] is composed of lines taken from 3
different passages of first-person narration: (90; 63-4; 3-4). As one
can see from the page numbers, the filmmakers took passages out of their
contexts and reworked them into one coherent statement.
• [In the] shoot out between Chigurh and Moss after Moss escapes from
Hotel Eagle: This scene intensifies the dramatic action in which Moss
barely escapes in the truck and then waits for Chigurh and wounds him,
momentarily turns the tables as Moss hunts Chigurh who escapes. In the
novel, Chigurh gets involved with battling the Mexicans and loses track
of Moss.”
Craig Kennedy adds that “one key difference is that of focus. The
novel belongs to Sheriff Bell. Each chapter begins with Bell’s
narration, which dovetails and counterpoints the action of the main
story. Though the film opens with Bell speaking, much of what he says in
the book is condensed and it turns up in other forms. Also, Bell has an
entire backstory in the book that doesn’t make it into the film. The
result is a movie that is more simplified thematically, but one that
gives more of the characters an opportunity to shine.”
Jay Ellis elaborates on Chigurh’s encounter with the man behind the counter at the gas station. “Where McCarthy
gives us Chigurh’s question as, ‘What’s the most you ever saw lost on a
coin toss? (55)’, he says, ‘the film elides the word ‘saw’, but the Coens
of course tend to the visual. Where the book describes the setting as
‘almost dark’ (52), the film clearly depicts high noon: no shadows are
notable in the establishing shot of the gas station, and the sunlight is
bright even if behind cloud cover. The light through two windows and a
door comes evenly through three walls in the interior shots. But this
difference increases our sense of the man’s desperation later, when he
claims he needs to close and he closes at ‘near dark’; it is darker, as
it were, in the cave of this man’s ignorance than it is outside in the
bright light of truth.”
Film ending and final scene
"Aren't you so pleased to see a different take on the same cat and mouse game?"
Dana Stevens of Slate criticized the film ending. “Even in their best films”, she said, “the Coens have trouble with endings (witness the mood-destroying Sam Elliot speech that weighs down the final minutes of the otherwise delightful The Big Lebowski). The last scene of No Country for Old Men, in which [Sheriff] Bell recounts his dreams to his wife Loretta (Tess Harper) is a tacked-on chunk of Meaning that seems to bear no relation to the tragically futile bloodbath we've just witnessed.”
Curt Holman of CL Atlanta also argues that “there's something deflating about the film's final scenes. McCarthy raises the ancient problem of human evil: Is it an inherent flaw of human nature, or the net result of random fate? McCarthy
seems to conclude that it's a generational thing. ‘Anytime you quit
hearing 'Sir' and 'Ma'am’, the end is pretty much in sight,’ says
[Sheriff] Bell, and you suspect he's only half-kidding.”
Actor Josh Brolin,
however, defended the ending of the film. "I love that people are
talking about this movie. I love that people leave the movie saying, 'I
hate the ending. I was so pissed.' Good, it was supposed to piss you
off," the 39-year-old star told MTV News.
"You completely lend yourself to [my] character and then you're
completely raped of this character. I don't find it manipulative at all.
I find it to be a great homage to that kind of violence." After being
chased by Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh the entire movie, Brolin
meets his violent end off-screen. Soon after, his wife is brutally
murdered off-screen as well. After all that build-up, all that
destruction, the film ends, not with an orgasmic culmination of
violence, but with a quiet monologue from Sheriff Tom Bell Tommy Lee Jones. "If you were expecting something different, Brolin
argues, that "says more about you than the movie. You wanted to see his
death, why? Because you're used to it. Aren't you so pleased to see a
different take on the same cat and mouse game?" he asked.
Ciro Discepolo emphasizes that “the key to understand the whole film … is the two dreams that Tommy Lee Jones
relates to his mate in the final scene,” he said. “In his first dream,
the sheriff sees his own father handing over some money that he would
lose: old generations handed over to us values we have lost. The other
dream shows the sheriff and his father riding a horse. They have to pass
through a narrow and dark mountain pass. His father overtakes him and
lights a natural torch; he then settles down and lights a fire that
gives light and warmth, then he waits for his son. This is the hope that
the country – that country and every country – could eventually find
out the right way to a place with a warm fire and much more light.”
Lucia Bozzola explains the meaning of the "dream" in the final scene.
"Considering that [Sheriff] Bell opened the film by musing that his law
enforcement progenitors wouldn’t know what to make of the violence
nowadays", she said, "not to mention all of the references to Chigurh as
a ghost, it’s not that tough to figure out why Bell’s dream matters, or
why he’s chosen this path. He’s never going to be able to do what his
father did as far as law and order because there’s always going to be a
specter that’s ahead of him. Or a Terminator. If he’s going to survive
in this country, a good man has to give up. I suppose this is how the
West was lost."
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
“At a time like this that’s all you can think to say?”
“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”
“I don’t think I’m quite familiar with that phrase.”
“I would not say such things if I were you!”
“I do not suppose you could speed things up?”
“Skip to the end!”
“That is the sound of ultimate suffering.”
“Inconceivable!”
In her new book, an MIT professor shares her ambivalence about the overuses of technology, which, she writes, "proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies."
Sherry Turkle, has been an ethnographer of our technological world for three decades, hosted all the while at one of its epicenters: MIT. A professor of the social studies of science and technology there, she also heads up its Initiative on Technology and Self. Her new book,Alone Together, completes a trilogy of investigations into the ways humans interact with technology. It can be, at times, a grim read.Fast Companyspoke recently with Turkle about connecting, solitude, and how that compulsion to always have your BlackBerry on might actually be hurting your company's bottom line.
Thetitle of your book,Alone Together, is chilling.
If you get into these email, Facebook thumbs-up/thumbs-down settings, a paradoxical thing happens: even though you're alone, you get into this situation where you're continually looking for your next message, and to have a sense of approval and validation. You're alone but looking for approval as though you were together--the little red light going off on the BlackBerry to see if you have somebody's validation. I make a statement in the book, that if you don't learn how to be alone, you'll always be lonely, that loneliness is failed solitude. We're raising a generation that has grown up with constant connection, and only knows how to be lonely when not connected. This capacity for generative solitude is very important for the creative process, but if you grow up thinking it's your right and due to be tweeted and retweeted, to have thumbs up on Facebook...we're losing a capacity for autonomy both intellectual and emotional.
You only mention Twitter a few times in the book. What are your thoughts on Twitter?
I think it's an interesting notion that sharing becomes part of actually having the thought. It's not "I think therefore I am," it's, "I share therefore I am." Sharing as you're thinking opens you up to whether the group likes what you're thinking as becoming a very big factor in whether or not you think you're thinking well. Is Twitter fun, is it interesting to hear the aperçus of people? Of course! I certainly don't have an anti-Twitter position. It's just not everything.
You write in your book that we today seem to view authenticity with the same skittishness that the Victorians viewed sex.
For some purpose, simulation is just as good as a real. Kids call it being "alive enough." Making an airline reservation? Simulation is as good as the real. Playing chess? Maybe, maybe not. It can beat you, but do you care? Many people are building robot companions; David Levy argues that robots will be intimate companions. Where we are now, I call it the "robotic moment," not because we have robots, but because we're being philosophically prepared to have them. I'm very haunted by these children who talk about simulation as "alive enough." We're encouraged to live more and more of our lives in simulation.
IN THE days and weeks after 9/11 a number of writers asked what the future of fiction could be after such a rupture. The comments echoed philosopher Theodor Adorno’s comment: “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
Ten years on it is abundantly clear that fiction does, of course, have a future. Some novelists have tackled the events of that September day head on; others have used the episode as a spur to look at the Western world shaken out of its complacency. The quality of the output, as in all areas of fiction, is highly variable.
Jay McInerney’s “The Good Life” was a rather crass before-and-after view of a couple forced to re-examine their relationship following the events of 9/11; Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” had a number of touching moments but was ultimately too long to carry itself. Don Delillo’s “Falling Man” was a strange sort of novel which lacked the density of his other work, but it did capture some of the most chilling elements of the events: “By the time the second plane appears,” Keith comments as he and Lianne watch the endlessly cycling video of the attacks, “we're all a little older and wiser.”
There are three important reasons why it is hard to write a good 9/11 novel. The first is that the attack on the World Trade Centre was such a huge and overpowering event that it often overshadows and dominates the fictional elements of a novel: literary novelists normally shy away from choosing such a big and unbelievable event as the backdrop to a story. Mr McInerney’s book is the poorer, I think, because his characters seem so paper-thin beside the burning towers and anguished souls the television footage depicted. For this reason non-fiction has often been the better medium to convey the most moving and poignant record of the day.
The second is that all fiction of every genre hinges around some kind of crisis, internal or external, that a book has to see its way through. This can take many forms. But 9/11 is in a sense a bigger crisis than many novels can contain or capture: it’s a situation where truth is both bigger and stranger than fiction.
That is probably why many authors have taken 9/11 as a jumping-off point to look at a group or type of person they had not thought to before. Martin Amis wrote a short story in the voice of one of the 9/11 hijackers. John Updike’s “Terrorist” traced the world of a would-be suicide bomber, for example. The setting for that book, like Updike’s other work, was suburban middle-America, and many of the characters were also recognisable from earlier books, but his central figure, a teenager who becomes radicalised, sits uneasily in this context—uneasy both for the character and sadly the novel too.
You hear it all the time: We humans are social animals. We need to spend time together to be happy and functional, and we extract a vast array of benefits from maintaining intimate relationships and associating with groups. Collaborating on projects at work makes us smarter and more creative. Hanging out with friends makes us more emotionally mature and better able to deal with grief and stress.
Spending time alone, by contrast, can look a little suspect. In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at worst, and are often presumed to be suffering from social anxiety, boredom, and alienation.
But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.
“There’s so much cultural anxiety about isolation in our country that we often fail to appreciate the benefits of solitude,” said Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University whose book “Alone in America,” in which he argues for a reevaluation of solitude, will be published next year. “There is something very liberating for people about being on their own. They’re able to establish some control over the way they spend their time. They’re able to decompress at the end of a busy day in a city...and experience a feeling of freedom.”
Solitude has long been linked with creativity, spirituality, and intellectual might. The leaders of the world’s great religions — Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses — all had crucial revelations during periods of solitude. The poet James Russell Lowell identified solitude as “needful to the imagination;” in the 1988 book “Solitude: A Return to the Self,” the British psychiatrist Anthony Storr invoked Beethoven, Kafka, and Newton as examples of solitary genius.
But what actually happens to people’s minds when they are alone? As much as it’s been exalted, our understanding of how solitude actually works has remained rather abstract, and modern psychology — where you might expect the answers to lie — has tended to treat aloneness more as a problem than a solution. That was what Christopher Long found back in 1999, when as a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst he started working on a project to precisely define solitude and isolate ways in which it could be experienced constructively. The project’s funding came from, of all places, the US Forest Service, an agency with a deep interest in figuring out once and for all what is meant by “solitude” and how the concept could be used to promote America’s wilderness preserves.
“Aloneness doesn’t have to be bad,” Long said by phone recently from Ouachita Baptist University, where he is an assistant professor. “There’s all this research on solitary confinement and sensory deprivation and astronauts and people in Antarctica — and we wanted to say, look, it’s not just about loneliness!”
Matt Zoller Seitz @ Salon.com says that the planned NBC version of the brilliant "Prime Suspect" shows why network TV shouldn't mess with great imports.
Prime Suspect, Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren)
Pictured: Maria Bello as Det. Jane Timoney
The idea of remaking the story of Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison (Helen Mirren) for American network TV seems wrongheaded. The problem is the venue. The U.S. broadcast TV model -- with its 42-minutes-a-week, 22-weeks-a-year format, frequent commercial interruptions, and still-oppressive content restrictions -- is the enemy of every fine quality that the original "Prime Suspect" possessed.
More important, American TV is averse to letting race, class, politics and other touchy elements drive stories because it might make viewers and sponsors skittish. That's why the American crime show's favorite bad guy is the serial killer, a mythologically exaggerated monster whose existence lets filmmakers titillate and terrify while declining to engage with society at large.
Jane Tennison never dealt with effete, wisecracking, Hannibal Lecter-type bogeymen. She lived in reality. Over 15 years,"Prime Suspect" dealt frankly with sex, sexism, race, class and the intrusion of politics into police work. It did so subtly, prizing plausibility and never delivering a jolt without reason. And it treated time as an ally instead of an enemy. One of the pleasures of "Prime Suspect" was the opportunity to re-engage with it after a long break and discover that Tennison had risen in rank or settled into a new job or a new relationship. The gaps between installments enhanced the sense that you were seeing excerpts from a life in progress.
You can't do any of that on NBC. You can't re-create or even approximate "Prime Suspect" in a commercial broadcast network series that airs 22 episodes a year. The material can't breathe in the same way. And forget about being unflinching. What passes for unflinching on NBC is "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," an entertaining but mostly absurd procedural that bears about as much qualitative relation to "Prime Suspect" as "Training Day" does to "Serpico." And don't even get me started on TNT's "The Closer," a fitfully entertaining series that has wrongheadedly been described as an American answer to "Prime Suspect," presumably because its main character is a strong-willed female detective. (It's not a subtle psychological drama, it's a suck-up-to-the-star spectacle about a mercurial Southern belle following her muse and dazzling the nonbelievers. "Prime Suspect" writes in plain script, "The Closer" in big block letters.) Not many American cop shows, broadcast or cable, have engaged with reality as directly as "Prime Suspect" -- and the best of those were produced not in Hollywood, but in Baltimore: "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Corner," and "The Wire."
My friend Keith Uhlich, a Time Out New York film critic and a devotee of series TV, has a theory that broadcast network shows provide viewers with two sources of drama. One is the conflict between characters. The other is the conflict between the series and the system that produces it.
When we watched the Fox network series "The X-Files," for example, the main draw was Fox Mulder and Dana Scully vs. a vast and unknowable conspiracy. The secondary draw was series creator Chris Carter and company vs. the Fox network and the network TV assembly line generally. Every time you watched that series -- or "NYPD Blue," or "Lost," or "24" or "ER" any other U.S. network program of note -- there was an extra-dramatic sense of anticipation. You wanted to see if the writers would manage to transcend network content restrictions, format limitations, behind-the-scenes meddling by executives and sponsors -- not to mention the pitiless pressure of having to churn out 22 episodes a year even if they didn't have enough stories to justify it -- and produce great TV. Or just good TV.
As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some answers.
By John Donvan and Caren Zucker
Image credit: Miller Mobley/Redux
In 1951, a Hungarian-born psychologist, mind reader, and hypnotist named Franz Polgar was booked for a single night’s performance in a town called Forest, Mississippi, at the time a community of some 3,000 people and no hotel accommodations. Perhaps because of his social position—he went by Dr. Polgar, had appeared in Life magazine, and claimed (falsely) to have been Sigmund Freud’s “medical hypnotist”—Polgar was lodged at the home of one of Forest’s wealthiest and best-educated couples, who treated the esteemed mentalist as their personal guest.
Polgar’s all-knowing, all-seeing act had been mesmerizing audiences in American towns large and small for several years. But that night it was his turn to be dazzled, when he met the couple’s older son, Donald, who was then 18. Oddly distant, uninterested in conversation, and awkward in his movements, Donald nevertheless possessed a few advanced faculties of his own, including a flawless ability to name musical notes as they were played on a piano and a genius for multiplying numbers in his head. Polgar tossed out “87 times 23,” and Donald, with his eyes closed and not a hint of hesitation, correctly answered “2,001.”
Indeed, Donald was something of a local legend. Even people in neighboring towns had heard of the Forest teenager who’d calculated the number of bricks in the facade of the high school—the very building in which Polgar would be performing—merely by glancing at it.
According to family lore, Polgar put on his show and then, after taking his final bows, approached his hosts with a proposal: that they let him bring Donald with him on the road, as part of his act.
Donald’s parents were taken aback. “My mother,” recalls Donald’s brother, Oliver, “was not at all interested.” For one, things were finally going well for Donald, after a difficult start in life. “She explained to [Polgar] that he was in school, he had to keep going to classes,” Oliver says. He couldn’t simply drop everything for a run at show business, especially not when he had college in his sights.
But there was also, whether they spoke this aloud to their guest or not, the sheer indignity of what Polgar was proposing. Donald’s being odd, his parents could not undo; his being made an oddity of, they could, and would, prevent. The offer was politely but firmly declined.
What the all-knowing mentalist didn’t know, however, was that Donald, the boy who missed the chance to share his limelight, already owned a place in history. His unusual gifts and deficits had been noted outside Mississippi, and an account of them had been published—one that was destined to be translated and reprinted all over the world, making his name far better-known, in time, than Polgar’s.
His first name, anyway.
Video: The authors reveal how they tracked down Donald and discuss the significance of his long, happy life.
Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.
That was 67 years ago. Today, physicians, parents, and politicians regularly speak of an “epidemic” of autism. The rate of ASDs, which come in a range of forms and widely varying degrees of severity—hence spectrum—has been accelerating dramatically since the early 1990s, and some form of ASD is now estimated to affect one in every 110 American children. And nobody knows why.
There have always been theories about the cause of autism—many theories. In the earliest days, it was an article of faith among psychiatrists that autism was brought on by bad mothers, whose chilly behavior toward their children led the youngsters to withdraw into a safe but private world. In time, autism was recognized to have a biological basis. But this understanding, rather than producing clarity, instead unleashed a contentious debate about the exact mechanisms at work. Differing factions argue that the gluten in food causes autism; that the mercury used as a preservative in some vaccines can trigger autistic symptoms; and that the particular measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is to blame. Other schools of thought have portrayed autism as essentially an autoimmune response, or the result of a nutritional deficiency. The mainstream consensus today—that autism is a neurological condition probably resulting from one or more genetic abnormalities in combination with an environmental trigger—offers little more in the way of explanation: the number of genes and triggers that could be involved is so large that a definitive cause, much less a cure, is unlikely to be determined anytime soon. Even the notion that autism cases are on the rise is disputed to a degree, with some believing that the escalating diagnoses largely result from a greater awareness of what autism looks like.
There is no longer much dispute, however, about the broad outlines of what constitutes a case of autism. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the so-called bible of psychiatry—draws a clear map of symptoms. And to a remarkable degree, these symptoms still align with those of one “Donald T,” who was first examined at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, in the 1930s, the same boy who would later amaze a mentalist and become renowned for counting bricks.
In subsequent years, the scientific literature updated Donald T’s story a few times, a journal entry here or there, but about four decades ago, that narrative petered out. The later chapters in his life remained unwritten, leaving us with no detailed answer to the question Whatever happened to Donald?
There is an answer. Some of it we turned up in documents long overlooked in the archives of Johns Hopkins. But most of it we found by tracking down and spending time with Donald himself. His full name is Donald Gray Triplett. He’s 77 years old. And he’s still in Forest, Mississippi. Playing golf.
The question that haunts every parent of a child with autism is What will happen when I die? This reflects a chronological inevitability: children with autism will grow up to become adults with autism, in most cases ultimately outliving the parents who provided their primary support.
Then what?
It’s a question that has yet to grab society’s attention, as the discussion of autism to date has skewed, understandably, toward its impact on childhood. But the stark fact is that an epidemic among children today means an epidemic among adults tomorrow. The statistics are dramatic: within a decade or so, more than 500,000 children diagnosed with autism will enter adulthood. Some of them will have the less severe variants—Asperger’s syndrome or HFA, which stands for “high-functioning autism”—and may be able to live more independent and fulfilling lives. But even that subgroup will require some support, and the needs of those with lower-functioning varieties of autism will be profound and constant.
by Brian May [founding member of Queen] @ googleblog.blogspot.com
I was first introduced to Freddie Mercury—a paradoxically shy yet flamboyant young man—at the side of the stage at one of our early gigs as the group “SMILE.” He told me he was excited by how we played, he had some ideas—and he could sing! I'm not sure we took him very seriously, but he did have the air of someone who knew he was right. He was a frail but energised dandy, with seemingly impossible dreams and a wicked twinkle in his eye. A while later we had the opportunity to actually see him sing ... and it was scary! He was wild and untutored, but massively charismatic. Soon, he began his evolution into a world-class vocal talent, right in front of our eyes.
Freddie was fully focused, never allowing anything or anyone to get in the way of his vision for the future. He was truly a free spirit. There are not many of these in the world. To achieve this, you have to be, like Freddie, fearless—unafraid of upsetting anyone's apple cart. Some people imagine Freddie as the fiery, difficult diva who required everyone around him to compromise. No. In our world, as four artists attempting to paint on the same canvas, Freddie was always the one who could find the compromise—the way to pull it through. If he found himself at odds with any one of us, he would quickly dispel the cloud with a generous gesture, a wisecrack or an impromptu present. I remember one morning after a particularly tense discussion he presented me with a cassette. He had been up most of the night compiling a collage of my guitar solos. "I wanted you to hear them as I hear them, dear," he said. "They're all fab, so I made them into a symphony!" To create with Freddie was always stimulating to the max. He was daring, always sensing a way to get outside the box. Sometimes he was too far out ... and he'd usually be the first to realise it. With a conspiratorial smile he would say "Oh ... did I lose it, dears?!" But usually there was sense in his nonsense—art in his madness. It was liberating. I think he encouraged us all in his way, to believe in our own madness, and the collective mad power of the group Queen. Freddie would have been 65 this year, and even though physically he is not here, his presence seems more potent than ever. Freddie made the last person at the back of the furthest stand in a stadium feel that he was connected. He gave people proof that a man could achieve his dreams—made them feel that through him they were overcoming their own shyness, and becoming the powerful figure of their ambitions. And he lived life to the full. He devoured life. He celebrated every minute. And, like a great comet, he left a luminous trail which will sparkle for many a generation to come. Happy birthday Freddie! Posted by Dr. Brian May, CBE. Guitarist.
Our new record was ‘officially’ released today. This means that you’ll find the digital version on various different Digital music stores like iTunes, AmazonMP3 and eMusic, and you’ll be able to stream the music from services such as Spotify and Deezer.
The physical versions (CD and Vinyl) are only available from our Bandcamp site and at gigs.
Unfortunately, you will not find our record in any record stores. The reason for this is because we do not have a record label, which means we have no access to distribution. Without a distributor, you cannot sell your CD’s in record stores. If you work for a distributor and you’re interested in carrying our CD or Vinyl, or both, feel free to contact us!
If you choose to purchase our music or use one of the ‘legal’ streaming services, here’s an overview of where the pennies go.
If you listen to the album all the way through, we’ll get 0.029 EUR.
If you listen to the album 10 times on Spotify, we’ll get 0.29 EUR
If you listen to it a hundred times, we’ll get 2.94 EUR
If you listen to the album 1,000 times (once a day for 3 years!) we’ll get 29.47 EUR!
If you use the free version of Spotify, it won’t cost you anything. Spotify will make money from ads. If you use any of the paid versions, we have no idea how they carve up the money. They only disclose this information to the Major record labels…
We’ve been getting 0.006 EUR/play from them. That’s 0.052 EUR/album play. If you listen to the album 10 times on Deezer, we’ll get 0.52 EUR. If you listen to it a hundred times, we’ll get 5.2 EUR. If you listen to the album 1,000 times (once a day for 3 years!) we’ll get a whopping 52 EUR!
If you use the free version of Deezer, it won’t cost you anything and Deezer will make money from the ads. If you use any of the paid versions, we have no idea how they carve up the money either.
The album will cost you 8.91 EUR to buy from Apple.
There’s a 70-30% split there too, so we will keep 6.28 EUR/album.
That being said, it costs us 35 EUR/year to keep an album on iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon (105 EUR per year for all 3 of our albums!) so we don’t make any money until 24 people have bought a digital copy of the album on iTunes, or 150 single songs, or if we get tens of thousands of listens on Spotify! In most cases, it’s actually more economically viable not to sell the music at all.
But what about if you buy the Digital version directly from us?
We allow people to pay what they want for the digital version. If you choose to pay 5 EUR, Paypal takes 0.37 EUR, Bandcamp takes 0.75 EUR. Uniform Motion keeps 3.88 EUR. it doesn’t cost us anything to have a page on bandcamp.
If you decide to pay nothing, well, we get nothing, but at least you didn’t give money indirectly to major record labels, which seems to be the case with Spotify!!
If you buy a CD, directly from us for 10 EUR, Paypal takes 0.515 EUR, Bandcamp takes 1.5 EUR. So there’s slightly less than 8 EUR left for us. But hold on a second, it costs a fair bit to make the CD.
The CD itself costs 1.2 EUR, the booklet costs about 50 cents, the CD packaging is 1.8 EUR and the sticker on the front costs 35 cents.
If you buy a 12” Vinyl from us at 15 EUR, Bandcamp takes 2.25 EUR, Paypal takes 0.646 EUR so there’s 12.10 left. The cost of the Vinyl itself is 3.06 EUR
The labels cost 1.3 EUR. For a total of 4.36 EUR
So there’s 7.75 EUR left for us.
However, we had to press 250 of these (because that’s the minimum order), so it’s very unlikely we’ll make any money on them.
We need to sell 72 copies before we break even on the vinyl edition. We’ve sold about 30 so far.
If we break even, we’ll lower the price a little bit. :)
