Why do those radio announcers with melodious vocal timbre so often turn out to be singularly unattractive when you meet them in person? “While there is a clear connection among age and sex and the pitch of a person’s voice, there’s no connection between pitch of voice and height, weight or any other dimension of an individual’s size… However, there are ‘telltale’ signs of body size in the ‘shape’ or resonance of the voice.” A university study is examining the connections.
Category: ideas
Moby Bush?
Jason Epstein equates Moby Dick to the current Bush Administration. “Melville’s great novel is prophetic even if the resemblance of the Pequod to George Bush’s White House is imperfect. Though Ahab’s missing leg and the destroyed Twin Towers are symbolically comparable losses, as is Dick Cheney’s lost opportunity to kill Saddam Hussein in 1991, Iraq will not crush and sink the United States as the whale crushed and sank the Pequod. Nor is George W. Bush a grizzled monomaniac whose mere glance strikes terror, but the callow instrument of neoconservative ideologues, obsessed since the end of the cold war with missionary zeal to Americanize the world, as previous empires had once hoped with no less zeal to Romanize, Christianize, Islamicize, Anglicize, Napoleonize, Germanize, and communize it.”
Echoes Of Other Language
“Is there such a phenomenon in poetry as a ‘shadow language,’ that is, a concealed or tacit foreign language which exerts a strong and sometimes fruitful pressure on the native tongue of a poet? In one sense, of course, the answer is an obvious yes. Much of traditional English poetry would have been the poorer without the pressure of, say, Latin or French.”
Science And Our Growing Illiteracy
Arguably, science has never been more important in our lives. “Science offers a way of finding out about, and changing, the world around you. As such, it is increasingly central to all our lives. It touches everything that we hold dear, from communication, to nutrition, to reproduction – and now promises to take us into a strange world of cyberspace, biotechnology and nanoscience. The pride and scorn for science, that saw most people through the 20th-century, is now giving way to fear. Why the change? Jargon and methodology, more than ever, are raising the wall between the cognoscenti and Everyone Else.”
Battle For The Soul Of American Science
Traditional science is under attack in the US. “A new climate has emerged under the Bush administration: one driven partly by close relationships with big business, but just as much by a fiercely moral approach to the business of science.” Instead of attacking theories like evolution in favor of creationism, critics propose alternative “scientific” ideas like “intelligent design.” “The approach is not exclusively religious, nor exclusively rightwing, but is spreading worry as never before through the nation’s laboratories and lecture halls. These aren’t the old wars of science versus religion. The new assaults on the conventional wisdom frame themselves, without exception, as scientific theories, no less deserving of a hearing than any other.”
Has Conceptualism Hit A Dead End?
Battles over the legitimacy of conceptual art occupied a good part of the 20th Century. In the 21st Century those concluding that art has taken a wrong turn with conceptualism are a growing chorus. “The world of fine art now appears exclusively concerned with semiotics, ?the crisis in representation? and other academic matters. Visiting a gallery in the hope of being made to stare in wonder is, according to the prevailing critical theory, ‘sentimental’ and ‘naïve’. Beauty, it would seem, is merely something to be analysed in a cloud of righteous deconstruction. However, the rapidity with which conceptual art evaporates from our consciousness undermines such grandiose pretensions. Once the tribal rituals of endorsement or derision have passed, the oeuvres of our more prominent artists actually evoke very little sense of meaning or avant-garde unease.”
Education – Ticket To Nerd-dom
Some communities in America have great distrust of “mindwork.” “There was lots of room for people who wanted to learn to become mechanics or electricians, for those were tangible, practical jobs that existed in the world. Mind work, beyond figuring the price of cotton or how to pay bills or the technicalities of being mechanics or electricians, was troubling, not well understood, and generally to be feared. There was a strange inconsistency in that persons educated out of practical usefulness still served as a source of pride to their families. Folks could respect you, for example, for earning a doctoral degree and could exclaim loudly to neighbors about your success; they just had little practical use for you and many times didn’t know what to do with you. To become thus educated is to become a nerd, and black nerds are strange creatures indeed.”
Stupidity As Science
Did you know that: crosswalks increase pedestrian accidents, many tanning lotions contain carcinogens, computers vastly increase the consumption of paper, and that better hygiene creates susceptibility to bacteria? A new book catalogs stupidity and the detriments of ideas that were supposed to help.
Only 200 US Colleges Reject More Students Than They Accept
“In the ongoing debate about affirmative action, with the Supreme Court expecting to decide a case involving admissions procedures at the University of Michigan, the term meritocracy is a canard. American education is not meritocratic, and it never has been. Merit, defined as quantifiable aptitude and achievement, is just one of the variables that decide educational outcomes. Success in college admissions, as in almost every sphere of life, is a function of some combination of ability, connections, persistence, wealth, and special markers?that is, attributes valued for the difference they make to the mix. There are more than two thousand four-year colleges in the United States. Only about two hundred reject more students than they accept. The vast majority of American colleges accept eighty per cent or more of those who apply.”
“War Porno” And The Voyeurization Of America
The constant barrage of exciting video, exploding tank columns, belligerant journalists who make themselves the story, and endless nationalistic jingoism from the American media have congealed into a phenomenon best described as “war porno,” says Joanne Ostrow. “Here we are in the middle of Act 2, just past the rescue of Jessica Lynch as a riveting subplot, awaiting the promised climactic act break in which we monitor the siege of Baghdad around the clock. We are at our posts, remotes in hand. You can tell you’re a glutton for war porno when you arrange your day around Pentagon briefings to track Donald Rumsfeld’s crankiness.”