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April 28, 2006

 

Invention and Creativity


The Roger Milliken Science Center
The following is alleged to be a (bogus?) bonus question given on a recent undergraduate chemistry final examination.

The answer by one student was so "profound" and delightful that I wanted you to have the pleasure of enjoying it as well. Since the student is a young person, readers should be understanding if the rhythm of the student’s commentary becomes somewhat “bawdy” at times.

Subject: Discussion of the interaction(s)between the concepts of exothermic (gives off heat) and endothermic (absorbs heat), as well as the opposite. Your deliberation should indicate an awareness of contemporary relational psychology as seen through various publicly acknowledged categorical perspectives, such psychology, psychoanalysis, a non-conflictual model or framework of philosophy, hard science and religion. Your discussion should be entirely clear to the average person, working or non-working, and the conclusion(s) should be creatively surprising, engendering feelings of satisfaction and pleasure. While extremely rigorous, the tone of the discussion should convey a strong sense of interest in the need to promote a renewed public attentiveness toward efforts to bolster current or creatively develop new techniques to reduce the tension/stress sometimes induced by practical and interpersonal demands in everyday life.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Mot of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law that gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we
need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell. Because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay constant, the volume of Hell must expand proportionately as souls are added.

This leaves two major possibilities, although there surely may be more:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which might it be?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Sandra during my freshman year that "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is endothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is extinct...leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being. This clear proof of a divine being explains why, just last night, Sandra kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A" GIVEN IN THE CLASS.

April 27, 2006

 

Capote: The Great American "Drama Queen"


A very recent review by Stephen Metcalf (Slate Magazine) of the film Capote presents one of the most compelling and intelligent examinations of this film to date:

The Great American Drama Queen: How Capote the film explains Capote the writer.

Along with everyone else who waited to see Capote on DVD, I had heard two things about it. First, of course, was that in playing Truman Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman had delivered the performance of a lifetime. Second was that although Capote was a superlative film, it was also a small one.

About Hoffman, what more needs to be said? To transform himself into Capote, he parted with one of his great natural assets, that oak-and-gravel basso, trading it for Capote's famous lisps and trills with their odd levitations and sudden plunges—a unique instrument, to say the least. But the performance is not an impersonation, and, as Hoffman himself insists on one of the DVDs well-produced featurettes, Capote is not a biopic.

Which leads us to the second notion, that it was an accomplished but modest movie. True, in contrast to that awful midwife of race sentimentality Crash, none of Capote's importance shows up as self-importance. But tact should never be mistaken for lack of ambition. Capote is not only an American tragedy, as its director Bennett Miller has said, but an important one, and a little history can help us remember why.

In 1959, Truman Capote traveled from New York City to Holcomb, Kansas, with the backing of The New Yorker magazine and with his childhood friend Harper Lee, to write about the brutal murder of a family of small-town farmers. While Capote worked on his initial magazine articles, the killers, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, were apprehended; as Hickock and Perry were tried, convicted of capital murder and eventually hanged, Capote spun their story into a full-length book.

Capote's creation of In Cold Blood, a masterpiece that made the author of Breakfast at Tiffany's only more famous, is the stuff of legend. Famously, Capote ingratiated himself with the Kansas locals, who had initially looked upon this epicene miniature in a pillbox hat as a kind of freak; and famously, he fell semi-in-love with Perry Smith, the more vicious (yet more sensitive) of the two killers.

The extent to which Capote manipulated Smith into believing that he, Capote, a man with money and connections, could help a nobody like Smith win an appeal has long been disputed. So too has the extent to which Capote, a raconteur whose "lies were better than other people's truths," as one friend put it, embroidered reality in creating his nonfiction potboiler.

The misapprehension of Capote as a small movie begins with its own dedication to small moments. Early on it is a comedy of manners, in which a small town adjusts itself to the presence of a New York literary god, even as the New York literary god adjusts himself to the small town, in order to get it to talk.

As the film progresses, so does Capote's obsession with Smith, whom he came to regard as a version of himself. "It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house," Capote told Harper Lee, "then one day, he walked out the back door, and I walked out the front." Lee, increasingly the moral center of the movie, replied "You kidding?"

But Capote is not really a study of Capote's relationship with Smith. As Smith idled in his cell, poring over a copy of Walden given to him by Capote, Capote was reading early chapters of his work-in-progress to a rapt New York audience. Later Capote summed up his feeling for Smith, hardly even noticing his words. "Do you hold him in esteem, Truman?" Lee asked him. "Well. He's a goldmine."

Capote's enormous power comes from its embodiment of all the virtues that Capote the man eventually rejected: tact, self-control and reticence. The film's palette is autumnal, one nice nugget from the DVD reveals how the color scheme of the film excluded entirely all reds and blues in favor of muted yellows and browns, and the film's pacing is deliberate, even stately.

The movie argues, as others have, that the experience of courting Perry Smith in order to write In Cold Blood broke something within Capote and speeded his transition from the boy-sylph of apparently limitless talent, who published Other Voices, Other Rooms when he was 23, to the bitchy society lapdog of the 1970s talk-show circuit. As a closing inter-title points out, Capote never published another book before dying of alcoholism in 1984.

Within a year of publishing In Cold Blood, Capote had thrown the Black and White Ball, an affair at the Plaza Hotel that established, to the terror-laced glee of the haute mode, who was in and who was out in New York society. It was a harbinger of the Studio 54 Capote.

A depressing anecdote dating from the '70s has Capote inviting the gossip columnist Liz Smith and John Berendt, later to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, up to his apartment in the U.N. Plaza. Capote was said to have left the room, then returned with a giant bowl of cocaine, which Smith guessed at the time represented $10,000 worth of the drug. As suddenly as he had brandished it, Capote snatched it away, saying, "No. No. I'm not going to give you any. You're not good enough. Neither one of you is good enough."

Capote's surface modesties aside, the moment in which a writer of importance confronts a man of no importance is not a small one, especially in America, and especially if the man of no importance is about to be blotted out forever by forces that lie beyond his comprehension. This Capote at least dimly understood, and the film has him saying of Smith, "The book I'm writing will return him to the realm of humanity."

Less dimly understood, by Capote and by (at least in the film's telling) his New Yorker editor William Shawn, is how In Cold Blood instigated a new kind of writing, the so-called "nonfiction novel."

It's an awful phrase (as Norman Mailer once said, "Nonfiction novel sounds like a prescription for some nonspecific disease"). But the mixing of the high (Capote's refined literary sensibility) with the low (the "true crime" genre) in order to gain access to reality has a long literary pedigree.

It extends back to the Gospels and Peter's denial of Jesus, which, as Erich Auerbach famously (and beautifully) argued, destroyed forever the classical connection between the seriousness of high style and aristocratic characters. As Auerbach wrote in Mimesis:

Of course this mingling of styles is not dictated by an artistic purpose. On the contrary, it was rooted from the beginning in the character of Jewish-Christian literature; it was graphically and harshly dramatized through God's incarnation in a human being of the humblest social station, through the existence on earth amid humble everyday people and conditions, and through his Passion which, judged by earthly standards was ignominious.

What Auerbach said of Peter, "He is the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense," applies as well to Perry Smith. The upending of strict canons of high and low runs through Dante's choice, according to Auerbach, a choice that laid the foundation for European literature, to write his epic in vulgar Italian, and not high Latin.

It was there when Capote knew he had to go to Kansas; and every time a literary journalist, as heir to Capote, establishes the humanity of his subject through simple detail. All this Capote eventually forsook for "You're not good enough."

Adapted by the Author from:
Stephen Metcalf
Slate Magazine
April 26, 2006


April 25, 2006

 

Bloggers: Important New Internet Alert!



An Astonishing Scientific Discovery!


Alert Box,
www.useit.com/alert box
notes
that
a
new
study
of
eye-tracking
visualizations has found that people run
their
eyes
over
Internet
pages
in
an
F-shaped
pattern,
interestingly
enough.

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Tuesday, April 25, 2006 0 Comments

April 24, 2006

 

BLANG: A Simply Elegant View


Blang
The Elegant Being of "Blang":

The cyberworld appropriates words from other contexts. It started with 'widows and orphans.' And 'quarantine.' The word 'virtuoso' comes to mind. It could now mean somebody who is more comfortable in the virtual world than in the real world.


Adapted by the Author from:
 The New York Times
4/23/2006

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Monday, April 24, 2006 0 Comments

April 16, 2006

 

Easter Cats: Sweet Sugar and Evil Devil



posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Sunday, April 16, 2006 0 Comments

April 11, 2006

 

THE BUSH-SHRUB COLLAPSES


SHRUB COLLAPSING

ANDREW SULLIVAN
10 Apr 2006

[BUSH'S] new poll numbers seem to me to reflect the unraveling of this presidency. What's stunning is not the approve/disapprove numbers, which are consistent with other polls, i.e. mid-to-upper 30s approve, mid-to-upper 50s disapprove.

What's stunning is that almost half the sample - 47 percent - strongly disapproves. I came to the conclusion that Bush was an incompetent abetting something much more dangerous before the last election, hence my reluctant endorsement of the pathetic Kerry.

But the broad middle of American opinion has taken longer to see what this administration is and what Republicanism has become. These are pretty stunning numbers given the relatively strong economy - strong in part because it's been propped up by an unsustainable Keynesian stimulus.

Historians will figure this out, but my own view is that Katrina did it. Katrina was the equivalent of Toto pulling back the curtain. Once Bush's passivity, indolence and arrogance were put on full display, once it was apparent that the government was not working, and that Bush was the reason, people figured out why the war in Iraq was such a shambles. And so the mystique required to sustain patriarchal authority was shattered.

I think this is largely irreparable because it's about a basic assessment of a single man. What worries me is that we have almost three more years. If we face a confrontation or a crisis, this president will not be able to carry Americans with him. Our enemies will take comfort from this. Which is why re-electing him was such a terrible risk.

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Tuesday, April 11, 2006 0 Comments
 

THE INTERNET RULES: A Psychoanalytic Perspective


.NET .COM .ORG
Some writers and bloggers presently claim that "the internet" rules as a world-wide mode of interpersonal expression and communication. Even if this were so, the explorers in this field during its opening stages certainly didn't think or sound that way. For many (if not most) of the early pioneers involved in the internet, the issue of power and control was never part of their early internet instincts and/or experiences and experiences and/or instincts. Yes, it is possible to have it in either or both ways.

Some might say, "Oh, the power of the unconscious!!" Unfortunately, that argument generally is made (one must try hard not to split infinites, although not all splitting is bad for one) by those who never held a belief in the unconscious, or who long ago gave up the belief in it (in favor of either one or another of many secular stances or a commitment to one of the somewhat heatedly competing religious faiths). On the other hand, a life characterized by solitude, hope and (sometimes painful) introspection can lead most of one's unconscious into the realm of the preconscious. As a result, the access to and awareness of the unconscious can be a fairly direct one.

Currently, the issue of "the internet" is characterized by arguments about which one way, of the many ways, is better than which other way, of the many other ways. And embedded in those arguments is the unknowingness or ultimate uncertainty about where the path or paths not taken might have led.

One important contemporary perspective holds that any argument about the "the internet"should be seen as a duality, not as a polarity. And each of the dualities can interact and interpenetrate each other. In other words, mutative resolutions of differences should be co-constructed.

Of course the latter remarks certainly relate to conflicts in the contemporary political and religious worlds, as well as a political world contained/constrained by a commitment to a particual religious faith and the opposite position.

And what is my own orientation in the previous discussion? A sociologist or anthropologist might describe it as one of the "participant-oberver." In psychoanalysis, it might well be described as a post-modern form of dialectical social-constructivism.


Such a position certainly invites further and more in-depth discussion, which will follow in a later posting.

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Tuesday, April 11, 2006 0 Comments

April 09, 2006

 

She Loves Her Coffee: Snapshot du Jour


Freedom of the Press

A dazzling self-portrait as reflected in a French Press coffee pot ("Freedom of the Press," for patriots) by blogger and artist Kamala. She certainly does take immense pleasure in drinking the stuff--rather a lot! Zzzinnngggggg!!!

Photo compliments of:
BoingBoing.net

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Sunday, April 09, 2006 0 Comments
 

The Frick Collection: Miniature Masterpieces


Pieter Bruegel the Elder
The Three Soldiers (1568)
8" x 7"




Barna de Siena
Christ Bearing the Cross with a Dominican Friar (1350-1360)
8 1/2" x 12"

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Sunday, April 09, 2006 0 Comments

April 07, 2006

 

A Growing Sense of Quiet













"Every other creature on the face of the earth knows how to be quiet and still. A butterfly on a leaf, a cat in front of a fireplace; even a hummingbird comes to rest sometime. But humans are constantly on the go. We seem to have lost the ability to just be quiet, to simply be present in the stillness that is the foundation of our lives. Yet if we never get in touch with that stillness, we never fully experience our lives."

“Within a single speck of dust, the whole earth is contained. When a single blossom opens, the entire universe arises. But before the particle of dust appears, before the blossom opens, how will you see it? If you cut away all complications and bring out your own treasure, you will see that there are originally no seams, no gaps, not a single flaw or scar, and that everything is perfect and complete, above and below, in front and behind.”

--John Daido Loori

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Friday, April 07, 2006 0 Comments

April 06, 2006

 

George Mason: Ending with Inspiration and a Positive Outlook


George Mason University

If there was any doubt whether George Mason's feel-good vibe was pierced by a Final Four loss to Florida, it vanished by 10 a.m. Sunday morning. As the Patriots gathered in the lobby of their downtown Indianapolis hotel and prepared to depart for home, cuddly shooting guard Lamar Butler clutched assistant coach Scott Cherry's infant son in his arms and cooed.

Coach Jim Larranaga's sons wandered the lobby, liberally dispensing hugs and posing for pictures. The elder Larranaga was introduced to Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and he never broke from his we're-so-happy-to-be-here routine." "Governor, how are you," a beaming Larranaga said. "I don't think I ever met a governor until Mark [Warner]. Now it's two in a row. I'm on a roll! Who's the next governor I can meet?" Count Kaine among the Patriots' legion of new fans; a few minutes later, he approached Butler." Can I come say hi quick?" he asked. "I'm the governor of Virginia."

There were some tears in the postgame locker room Saturday night, but even then the Patriots were remarkably upbeat, laughing and ribbing each other while Butler asked straggling reporters whether they'd like any more quotes. The Patriots had pledged to have more fun than any team in this tournament, and it seems they succeeded.

"You know, you have a lot of different ways to look at things, and we always choose the positive," Larranaga said. "We're going to try to keep the loss to Florida in perspective, but really keep the wins that led us to the Final Four in the forefront."

At some point, the focus will turn to the future, on the basketball court and beyond. Three seniors -- Butler, Jai Lewis, and Tony Skinn -- will move on; all three were invited to this week's Portsmouth Invitational Tournament, a pre-draft camp.

But help will arrive in many places. Guard John Vaughan and forward Jesus Urbina will return from season-ending injuries. Next year's recruits include Louis Birdsong, who led Mount St. Joseph to a 38-1 record and was named the Baltimore area's player of the year, and Darryl Monroe, who averaged 18.7 points a game for Central Florida Community College.

Sophomore starters Will Thomas and Folarin Campbell played their best basketball of the season in the NCAA tournament, while top reserves Gabe Norwood, Sammy Hernandez and Jordan Carter all have remaining eligibility.

"This team is definitely going to have the chance to compete next year and hopefully try to do something special again," Skinn said. "I'm still a little salty about last night, and I know my teammates are as well, because we're competitors. But I think maybe in the next 48 hours, once that sinks in, we'll be able to reflect on what we've done. We've done something special."

Their exploits brought unprecedented attention to their school and their basketball team this week. "George Mason" was Google's most-requested search Saturday, and a youth basketball association has already requested a 1,000-seat block of tickets for a game next season.

More than half of the university's 16-member Board of Visitors attended Saturday's game, and President Alan G. Merten is scheduled to meet with senior administrators this week to discuss how to best wring lasting benefits from the basketball team's renown. He said that the school's enrollment targets could be revised upward and hinted that the university has already explored ways to retain the 56-year-old Larranaga, who figures to draw interest from major programs this month but has said he would like to retire at George Mason.

"You can just say the university administration has spent time over the last two weeks dealing with the future of the basketball program," Merten said.

But the Patriots' legacy will extend beyond their roster and dilemmas. They came to stand for every non-major school in the country during their tournament run. Larranaga has expressed both a hope that the Patriots will offer inspiration to other unknown teams, and a concern his team's success will create pressure on his peers.

"I don't know the ripple effect this will have," said Larranaga, who remained behind in Indianapolis to collect a coaching award. "I hope it's a positive one. I am concerned that it won't be, that more people will create unrealistic expectations on mid-major programs and coaches. There's always too much emphasis placed on winning at all costs, and I would just hope that people would enjoy what we did."

The Patriots certainly did. During the trip home, they autographed basketballs, pennants, T-shirts and magazines, for each other, for students and for school employees. When they finally arrived at Patriot Center, they were greeted by dozens of fans clapping and holding signs; one called George Mason "America's Most Beloved Team Ever."

The Patriots unloaded their luggage and walked to their cars, where they were hounded again. Butler, the face of the team, soon attracted a ring of 30 or 40 admirers, who clamored for photographs and asked for autographs and oohed and ahhed.

"Look at that smile," one female fan squealed.

As Butler left the RCA Dome court Saturday night, he had tears in his eyes. Now, on a sunny afternoon, left by himself in the middle of a mob of fans, he grinned.

"They've never done anything like this before," said fourth-year George Mason student Romana Muzzammel. "Why wouldn't we be excited?"

By Dan Steinberg
The Washington Post
Monday, April 3, 2006

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Thursday, April 06, 2006 0 Comments

April 03, 2006

 

George Mason University: Still America's "Cinderella"



Back before George Mason University’s basketball team was two wins away from a national championship, the school had a different set of all-stars: its economics department.

It counts two Nobel laureates and is a groundbreaker in research into how changing incentives affect people’s behavior.

But perhaps the two sets of stars have something to learn from each other.

Basketball, as it turns out, makes an intriguing laboratory for testing economic theories against how things work in the real world — a specialty of George Mason’s economists.

The Washington Post called some of George Mason’s other big men to ask how they might apply their pet areas of research to examining their team’s recent success. In case you have trouble keeping them straight: Economists have game theory; the basketball players have just got game.

There’s another big difference. “I don’t remember anywhere near this big a celebration when Vernon won the Nobel Prize,” said GMU economics professor Alex Tabarrok, referring to colleague Vernon L. Smith, who shared the $1 million prize in 2002.

George Mason’s economics department was put on the map by its other Nobel winner, James Buchanan, who broke ground in using economic tools to analyze political decision making and the impact of laws on society. It’s called public choice theory, and its lessons are particularly useful for the basketball court.

Think of a basketball game as a vastly simplified proxy for the real world. There are laws that govern behavior (the rulebook), people who enforce those laws (referees), and a way to measure who is succeeding and who isn’t (the score).

Just as lawmakers can change the way wealth is distributed by changing tax and other rules, changes to the rules of basketball can have sometimes unpredictable effects on what teams score the most, and how.

Peter Boettke, a George Mason economist and avid basketball fan, offers an outlandish example: “I can change one rule in basketball and Michael Jordan will no longer be the best basketball player of all time. You could change the rules to require the game be played on stiletto heels. Then Cindy Crawford would be the best player.”

He and a student are beginning research that would use economic techniques to examine what he suspects are myths.

For example, some sports commentators argue that contemporary basketball players are weaker shooters than their predecessors, who had better fundamental skills. Boettke plans to examine whether the the three-point line is the actual reason for apparently weaker shooting percentages.

After all, awarding an extra point for more distant shots creates an incentive for players to shoot from farther away than they used to, which produces lower shooting averages.

If his research into basketball yields any interesting conclusions, he said he may slip them to GMU Coach Jim Larranaga before publishing them — after all, the coach is more likely to find some use for them. “All we egghead academics do is sit back and ask, ’What are the rational choice mechanics of all of this’ and try to have fun with it,” Boettke said.

He figures that George Mason’s recent success has to do with the incentives facing the very best young basketball prospects.

Elite players commonly drop out of college to join the NBA early, so the advantage enjoyed by top college programs able to recruit them is smaller than it was. What is at work may be a version of what game theorists call “prisoner’s dilemma.”

Elite players may have more incentive to position themselves to be hot NBA prospects than to do the things — passing the ball, for example, instead of shooting — that would make their teams more successful. George Mason’s players, who have been long-shot professional basketball prospects, may have fewer competing incentives and might therefore be more inclined to work as a team.

Neil Irwin
The Washington Post
April 02, 2006

posted by D. Patrick Zimmerman, Psy.D.  # Monday, April 03, 2006 0 Comments

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