divine numbers

apparently there has been a new study on that most magical of numbers, 7.  researches have long known about 7 (plus or minus 2) being the number the maximum number of things we can recall with short-term, or working, memory.  in this new study, however, researchers tried to create a model of brain activity to explain how the firing and suppressing of neurons involved in this process explains why it gets exponentially more difficult (for normal minds) to continue adding to this working memory.  it seems, as has been demonstrated repeatedly with human subjects, 7 seems to be the breaking point.  as the article states,

As a sentence or a string of numbers gets longer, it becomes exponentially harder for the excited cluster to suppress the others from firing, resulting in pathways that are weak or barely there. Recalling seven items requires about 15 times the suppression needed to recall three. Ten items requires inhibitory powers that are 50 times stronger, and 20 or more items would require suppression hundreds of times stronger still. That, Rabinovich explained, is normally not biologically feasible.

now, I’m not troubling myself with the details of the study here because it’s not what is interesting me right now.  instead, I’m thinking back to all the sermons heard and lessons learned in Sunday school about how 7 was the number of God.  7 days in creation, 7 days in the week, 7 days of Passover (ignoring that these are all pretty much the same thing…), 7 spirits of God, 7 churches in Asia,

the 10 commandments are found in the 70th chapter of the Bible (ignoring, of course, the later, sometimes arbitrary origin of those divisions), 7 loaves of bread,

7 deadly sins,

and so on.

of course, 7’s magicalness extends beyond the Bible: in addition to it simply being a lucky number, we have the 7 chakras in Hinduism, 7 heavens in Islam (as well as 7 fires of hell), Judaism’s 7-branched candelabrum (of the temple, not Hanukkah),

7 lucky Japanese gods of fortune

and, of course, the 7-layer whopper released in Japan last month.

so assuming that this new study is true — heck, let’s up the ante and say that the number 7 is not just the statistical average of things that can be held in short-term memory but in fact “written” into the brain’s hardwiring — I can’t help but think about how this story could and should be interpreted in light of the importance of the number in various cultures and their myths and religions.  one the one hand, there’s the could.  some people will surely see this as evidence that God — whose number is 7, remember? — created us in such a way that his number could be found implanted within our brains.  oh, the trickster!  glory!

on the other hand, there’s the should.  that the number 7 may be found across various cultures because of the structure of our brains.  now again, this is taking this study beyond face value and assuming way more than necessary, but it’s illustrative of a larger problem of how we interpret evidence.  for instance, you often hear about how the conditions on this planet, nay, universe, are perfect for life.  if the earth moved an inch in its orbit, we would all burn of freeze (nobody really knows the physics, they just know this).  everything we need for life and health is bountifully provided on the planet by the plants (and animals, if you’re one of those ).  and when we’re not inconsiderately interfering, the planet is fairly good at balancing itself out and maintaining homeostasis.  in short, clear evidence of design and of the hand of a beneficent creator.

the problem, of course, is that this type of thinking is backward.  it involves looking at the end product, irrespective of how it developed, concluding that things couldn’t have been any other way — that this was the intended product, or even the only imaginable one — and consequently marveling at the fact that conditions or means just happened to exactly what was necessary.  it entails looking first at the nutrients we need to develop and survive and then at what’s available in the world, which, lo and behold, match up quite nicely.  what are the odds?!  this is essentially how I learned to look at the world — excuse me, creation — growing up in church.  it is, like many other un or pseudoscientific views preferred by the church over time, alarmingly egotistic.

the correct view, of course, even crudely understood, is just the opposite.  the essential nutrients and conditions of life are not there to meet our needs as we are, but rather we are the way we are — and life is the way it is — because “we” evolved as we were able to break down those nutrients for energy and as “we” were capable of surviving — better, thriving — in those environments.  God didn’t create bluish/grayish eyes — much less give them specifically to me — so that people whom he wanted to live in cold environments with less sunlight could thrive; rather, the genetic mutation spread — and in recent evolutionary memory, at that — because of benefits for those who were already living in those environments.  I mean, that’s a pithy, pathetic explanation, but it’s immediately more reasonable that the former position, as humbling as that might be.

this doesn’t provide any really satisfying answer as to why the number 7 can be found in so many cultures, playing such an important role, but I’m not interested enough right now to sift through any explanations there might be.  plus, let’s not pretend that 7 is really that prevalent around the globe, or that it’s even all that important in the Bible.  rather, this is an instance of the human tendency to look for patterns and to bias all the instances of what we’re looking for — ignoring all the other numbers that are just as important/mundane.

book review: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality

I am ashamed to say that after a handful of degrees relating to religion in antiquity, especially Christianity, I had never come across this book before now.  not that I expect much from GWU, but for shame, HDS!

Boswell has a number of goals in this book — all of which are academic and not masked political activism (in fact, he’s often quite reserved in his claims) — and he is most successful in demonstrating, first, how weak and ultimately indefensible the biblical case against homosexuality is, and second, how the origins of unprecedented hostility towards homosexuality in phases of European history (up to the high middle ages) did not grow organically out of Christianity or any specific theology/exegesis, but rather were part of larger political and cultural trends.

one particular goal of the book is to lay out the inconsistent and problematic history of the various “natural” arguments against homosexual relations and how various phases of historical Christianity were unconcerned with them.

as Boswell shows, the biblical, theological, and historical (in terms of Christian teaching) case against usury was much stronger and much more consistent throughout church history — until it became convenient and popular enough to change this view, of course. so why go on painting homosexuality and homosexuals as unnatural and particularly sinful?

the book is also very effective in demonstrating the extent to which homosexuality was part of the sexual landscape in antiquity, and even how gay subcultures and literature reemerged and flourished in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. there was even a place for more “erotic” homosexual literature, even if much of it was technically detailing non-physical love between monks or clergy.  indeed, it makes you wonder which otherwise heterosexual persons in our society — given that sexuality is more of a spectrum of sorts, and knowing how much more common it has been when it has been idealized and hasn’t had to stay underground — would give themselves (exclusively or not) over to homosexual relations.  I’m thinking the dude bros and frat boy hazers.

in the end, one puts the book down amazed at how far in the wrong direction European views strayed (and were kept astray?) until the modern period.  but it also reminds you that things have been, and can be again, different.  for the better.

sweet somnolence

on this rainy, dreary morning, a beautiful cover that is sure to be stuck in my head all day.

Scandinavians dominate my playlists, especially the Swedes.

from lewd idiom to lofty truth

there’s a video making the rounds on the ol’ internets of a pastor named Steven Anderson who rails against men — excuse me, males, certainly not men — who pee sitting down.  every single German, according to his authoritative three-and-a-half-month visit and handful of experiences, pees sitting down.  and that, my friends, is where this country is headed.  people are afraid to tell it like it is (like the KJV is, that is) and pee standing up!  those compromising scholars who have produced alternative, “soft” translations of the Bible, and certainly President Obama (probably) pees sitting down!

he takes this from a few old testament passages that use the fairly crude though entertaining idiom “who piss against the wall,” meaning men, and then expounds on what an essential quality of manliness is: peeing standing up.  he is a treasure.

anyway, I actually looked into it (if you can call a few minutes of internet searching “looking into” something) and found that, indeed, in Germany, as well as in Japan, it is fairly common for men to pee sitting down.  this may be a bit too much of a disclosure, but I decided sometime last spring or summer that I would start doing this in our home.  I mean, I’ve always considered myself a conscientious urinator and all, but when we went to wash our bathroom rungs once, just a few minutes in a closed, small laundry room and it became apparent that there was still a, shall we say, “unwelcome” smell to them.  why shouldn’t I save us the trouble of having to do more washing and cleaning up?  (not that we stopped washing our rugs now and then, but still.)  anyway, I’ll stop there, apart from adding that I wouldn’t do this anywhere — only for friends and family and/or in places where I can trust the overall cleanliness of the toilet.

and there’s this:

anyway, I guess I should be thankful to Pastor Anderson for making explicit what I had been suspecting all along.

toe-tapping in absentia

so sometimes I blog a ton, and then I blog a’none.  I guess sometimes I have more important things to do, such as dream up all the tattoos I can’t afford to get.  in the meantime, here’s a video of Blind Pilot, another folksy band that Emily and I have been listening to lately.  it’s catchy and sure to make you happy.

also, Emily “accidentally” made about three dozen amazingly delicious chocolate chocolate-chip cookies yesterday, so I may be swinging to the higher end of my weight range these days.  oh well — at least they’re vegan, so they could be worse for us.

bulk shopping

Emily and I are excited about these new bags we just bought, which can be used for shopping for the various bulk items we get a Whole Foods or elsewhere.  it’s another small step in trying to reduce some of our waste (though the paper or plastic we’d use before is recyclable).

we hope to find something to use for the various spices we buy.  maybe we can just use small plastic bags and reuse them?  I saw a bamboo “tree” online today that is used for drying plastic bags so you can reuse them.  my mom always reused freezer bags when she could.

we also bought a few glass jars for storing some more of our bulk items.  we figure that we make beans enough to justify buying them in bulk and not buying cans each week (so again, less waste), though this means a bit more prep time for our meals.

now all we need is a giant kitchen to store everything in…

book review: Push

this is really an incredible novel, not just in terms of its plot or emotional impact, but also in terms of its structure, creativity, and — OK, yes — emotional impact.  it’s written from the perspective of an overweight, underloved pregnant 16-year-old in the mid-80s who has been emotionally and educationally neglected, not to mention abused in more than one horrible way.  although she likes school, she has never learned to read, and so much of this novel is about her progress in learning to read as she prepares for her baby and tries to escape the patterns of abuse and pain in her life.

what is most impressive about the writing is its complete use of vernacular and incorrect spellings that match speech.  unlike Junot Diaz’s novel, there aren’t numerous writers and so you don’t skip in and out of better writing.  if anything, it only gets harder as the novel includes her journal writing as she’s learning to spell and to write.  her journal also includes some of the poetry she starts writing, which, as much of the rest of the novel, is raw and inspired, even if simple.

that’s about all I’ll write to avoid spoilers.  it’s a short novel altogether, and since I could hardly put it down, I finished it in less than 24 hours, I think.

I’m not sure how much I’ll enjoy the film, which looks too heavy on the inspirational side — though to be fair, some of the material is a bit too raw to appeal to all audiences.  I just hope that they don’t water it down.  also, for the record, Monique is nowhere near as fat as she should be to play the mother!

messages undeciphered

I used to think that if you drank your mochas and your lattes at just the right pace, you’d get a special message, in Arabic, from the heavens (or wherever else messages come from), based on the way the side of the mug gets stained.  unfortunately, I never knew, and know not still, Arabic.  but now I’m thinking that maybe it’s Sanskrit.  take a look at this message I received from a maple latte from the Bard:

any thoughts?  better yet, any translations?  and is that a tall, creepy white alien at the bottom of my mug?  where is Professor Trelawney when you need her?

article review: “The Age of Mass Intelligence”

a few weeks back, I reviewed Susan Jacoby’s brief article titled “The Dumbing of America.”  it’s hard to argue with some of her points regarding the apparent mindlessness of much of mass culture.  after all, Glenn Beck has not one but several best-selling books in stores and online.  god help us.  however, as I noted then, I’d want to see figures and numbers regarding rates of literacy and book consumption, among other things.  some of that is presented in the article under review by John Parker, but this time to make the opposite case, namely, that intelligence is not decreasing but increasing.  or rather, that interest in “intelligence things,” those things typically associated with the higher culture supposedly gasping for air, is on the increase.

one of the first things Parker cites are increasing rates of museum attendance in several Western countries.  numbers have been rising steadily in the last decade, partly due to renewed efforts to reach out to new audiences (along with the fact that museums are now free in England — though not special exhibits, which are also on the increase), but also due, he argues, to a vigorous interest in culture and in learning.  in a similar vein, surveys conducted at a British book festival revealed people from all sorts of backgrounds and professions.

another significant area to consider — as Jacoby has — is book sales.  “One of the commonest complaints by cultural doomsayers,” he says, “is that nobody reads good books any more.”  as already mentioned, the top sellers on, say, Amazon.com usually leave much to be desired in the way of intelligence.  do we really have anything to learn from Glenn Beck?  Steven Harvey?  does Dan Brown’s blunt writing really do much for our literary sensitivities?  (not that we can’t be entertained, of course.) why are diet books always doing so well, while we keep getting bigger and more preventable-disease-ridden — nutrition isn’t actually that hard to figure out!

despite this, however, Parker points out, among other things, Oprah’s book club, which as recommended a number of really great modern books, along with some classics like Tolstoy and Faulkner.  the ensuing sales were substantial.  similarly, a bookstore in London asked some modern writers to set up tables of recommended books, many not the easiest to read, and sales jumped by over 1,000% for those authors.

although the majority of the population may not be aware of the major literary awards in their country, not to mention those of other countries, there are still major audiences awaiting the announcement each year of the nominees for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer, the Man Booker Prize (in England), and the Prix Goncourt (in France), among many others.  literary festivals are also on the rise.  (on a frustrated note, Boston had one a week or two ago, which would have been awesome to attend if we were still living there…)

what about other forms of entertainment?  take TV, for instance.  while there is “no shortage,” as Parker puts it, “of chewing gum for the eyes,” there are also a number of really smart shows out there — in terms of dialogue, plot, or overall writing — with impressive ratings.  but then again, it’s sort of hard to overlook the endless lineup of reality-show trash with perhaps even more staggering numbers.  the same can be said for podcasts: while there are certainly some stimulating examples, the overwhelming majority is fluff or worse.  if nothing else, a case could be made that intelligence isn’t dying or that we aren’t all dumbing down, regardless of what we end up saying about to what extent mass culture remains dumb.

but Parker is making the case for “mass intelligence,” not just a pocket of elites.  he next moves on to figures for classical music, specially for Classic FM, which are impressively on the rise.  however, to what extent are audiences really versed in this genre (is that the right word?) of music?  there are any number of “intro do” and “for dummies” books on this and a number of other topics.  how familiar with the canons of classical music or, say, literature must audiences be before we label them intelligent — or better, cultured — or not?  (and is this really a marker of “culture” and intelligence anyway?)

essentially, the case Parker is making with this is that an interest in things traditionally associated with “culture” in the West — things bemoaned by many as on a steady decline — is actually steadily on the rise.

a final area under review is higher education, which, obviously, has been on the rise throughout developed countries.  he first points to this (somewhat feebly) as positive evidence in his argument, but then he moves on to examination the extent to which this rising standard of higher education has contributed to the increased interest in things like museums, music, and other traditional culture indicators.

education is tricky, as much of the demand for more degrees is due to economic reasons, and there’s a case to be made (and plenty of people to make it) that the standards are being lowered with educational spread.  but this gets into debates about educational standards and curricula, none of which is covered here (and which I’ll save for another day, maybe).

as a final thought, I think it’s worth admitting how difficult this issue is.  what standards do we hold up for measure culture and intelligence?  the traditional Western canon?  if so, why?  there’s much to be praised about that canon, of course, but there is so much more.  I hope that there aren’t too many people who would make the claim that literature from other cultures, and especially literature from minority cultures working under the radar at a given time, doesn’t have any place in this picture (and whatever people there are, I don’t really want to know them).  African American writers and musicians are as essential to an appreciation of American culture as an Enlightenment thinker, as is the history of feminist writing in this country.  we need subversive and counter-cultural literature and music.

but all of this relates to the issue of what are the cultural “standards” by which we have a discussion about rising or lowering (non)intelligence levels.  if nothing else, Parker has added to the debate by offering a statistical look at some of those traditional areas that are often used as indicators of a decline in intelligence today.

next up: Jacoby takes on Tim de Lisle, the editor the magazine in which the present article appeared, in order to hash out some of these issues in a debate hosted on The Economist’s website.

und was mache Ich jetzt?

oh lordy, have you seen and used Google translate?  you can upload or paste entire documents into its text field, or you can paste the link to an entire web site and get a fairly decent translation in seconds!

I’ve had a Google translator box on my homepage for a while now, which I use when translating (it’s sometimes better than other, more official dictionary sites, especially when it comes to more modern terms and slang).  but I had never actually tried to use it for anything more — in fact, I didn’t even know about this until someone linked to an article I thought should have been in German but was in an only slightly awkward English.

check out these screen shots:

so now what do I do with myself?  I have to reevaluate how much time I want to spend learning modern languages.  I at least want a decent working vocabulary in whatever language I learn, and I want to understand the principles of the grammar, so that even when using a tool like this, I can make corrections where I see errors and I can know what’s going on.  plus the learning is part of what’s fun for me!

but as I’ve posted before, it’s just not possible for me to keep up on all the languages I have learned on a regular, weekly (even monthly) basis, and it will only get worse.  now with programs like these — which will only get better — it looks like there’s a new argument in favor of learning more languages generally rather than specializing in any one.  it’s not always important to me to read everything in the original — that will never be entirely possible and I have other things to read and do …

but I do love the languages I learn and want to spend time with them.  so this is one reason I’ve been reading more poetry lately, in English and in other languages.  I have a book of Paul Celan’s German poetry coming soon, and I hope to get some classical Greek and Latin lyrical poets in the near future.  I think this will be a more “economical” choice for me when it comes to enjoying and keeping up with the languages I learn.  who knows, maybe one day I’ll get back into Hebrew and check out some biblical poetry!