Neuroscience of Personality and Love Therapy

Radiance House Social Bot Dario Nardi Check out their iPhone apps.

Assorted Poetry Blogs

BLOODAXE BLOGS

Guardian on Poetry

The Best American Poetry

Verse

Samuel Menashe passed away

Samuel Menashe in Ireland, writing one of his short poems in the sand:
'Pity us / By the sea / On the sands / So briefly'

More here

It's easy to learn a language

MyLanguageExchange.com just maintains lists of people who know certain languages and want to learn others. Anyone can search the database, but only gold members, who pay $24 a year, can send e-mail easily to others.

Each person sets up a profile and includes a short description of age, location and what he or she would like to talk about. There is a big demand to practice English, and I found many possible pen pals.

Marie, 40, was born in Spain but lives in France near the Bordeaux region. She wants to improve her English and “perhaps find a job in sales export.” Serge, a Parisian who is retired, studies genealogy and wants to improve his English, Spanish and Swedish.

MyLanguageExchange.com claims it has more than 1.5 million members studying 115 languages.

I find the right partner through what are essentially classified ads. If I wanted to study Luxembourgish, the Germanic tongue of Luxembourg, there were 11 people looking to study English. There are 32 willing people who are fluent in Tswana, a Bantu language generally spoken around Southern Africa, mainly in Botswana. An e-mail or two is all it takes to find a study partner.

Maria, one of 113 people ready to help with Uyghur, which is spoken in western China, says she is also fluent in Mandarin but wants to practice Russian, Hindi and English. It is a big database.

-Learning a Language From an Expert, on the Web

Other similar Language Learning Sites;
Livmmocha
RhinoSpike
RosettaStone.com
GermanPod101.com
ChinesePod.com

Skype Forums

Some sites, like UsingEnglish.com, englishcafe.com and Englishbaby.com, are devoted to helping people practice English but add the elements of sharing photos and interests like a dating service.

Thomas Ricks want to know Worst War Memoir Ever

Thomas Ricks a reviews War Memoir of General Mark W. Clark and doesn't like it;

First question: Is there a relationship between the quality of generalship and the quality of a memoir? I think there is, if only because the more adept and successful generals have more interesting stories to tell. In this sense, war memoirs invert Tolstoy's famous observation that all happy families are alike. All successful generals are different, but all defeated generals are essentially similar-or at least their memoirs are. Two of the best generals' memoirs of World War II, I think, are Slim's and Eisenhower's. Likewise, the best Civil War memoir is Grant's. By contrast, what would Fredendall or Short have to say?

Clark wasn't a failure, but he was mediocre. So his memoir is worse than his record would indicate.

One Author to read 2010- Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk’s appeal has not been lost on politicians. Daniel Cohn-Bendit has credited Pamuk with helping him to ‘understand the importance of Turkey joining the European Union’...

One woman in The Black Book fears that, having spent half her life trying to be someone else, she is now condemned to spend the next half ‘being someone else who regretted all those years she had not spent being herself’. The hero of that novel, a lawyer called Galip (after the 18th-century mystic poet Sheikh Galip), shaken by the disappearance of his wife, Rüya (‘dream’), manages to piece himself together, but only after assuming the identity of the newspaper columnist his wife seems to have run away with; as he loses himself in the back alleys of Istanbul, he begins to suspect that the journalist, the enigmatic Celâl (after the Sufi poet Jelal ud-Din Rumi), is the secret author of his fate. Galip is one of the luckier characters in Pamuk, transported to the shores of a stable identity by a mystical journey; most are left hanging, swinging between East and West, between the mosque and the mall. To the characters in Snow, Islamism is a powerful, almost erotic temptation, since it promises to eradicate this vertiginous sense of dislocation: it’s no accident that one of the Islamist leaders in that novel is a dashing, charismatic seducer of his female followers, beguiling them with his blue eyes and his fiery vision of a cleansed and virtuous Muslim society.

-Wanting to Be Something Else

David Brooks favorite blogs

Fortunately there are a few Web sites that provide daily links to the best that is thought and said. Arts and Letters Daily is the center of high-toned linkage on the Web. The Browser is a trans-Atlantic site with a superb eye for the interesting and the profound. Book Forum has a more academic feel, but it is also worth a daily read.

-The Sidney Awards II

An impressive critique of UK Prime Minister

via Stumbling and Mumbling

Assorted

Letter from Birmingham Jail

The Origin of Singaporean Crime Policy

How Much Should Judges Make?

Chief Justice Roberts, in his report on the state of the judiciary at the end of 2006, cited a few kinds of data to support his argument that low pay is leading to a crisis. One was that 38 judges left the federal bench between 2000 and 2005, some citing the need to make more money.

Judge Richard A. Posner, a prominent federal appeals court judge in Chicago, called this “crying wolf” in his recent book, “How Judges Think.” The chief justice had lumped retirements and resignations together, Judge Posner said. Only 12 federal judges had resigned out of a total of 1,200 active and senior judges in the years in question, a small number in absolute terms and a smaller percentage than in the six years ending in 1974.

Judge Posner did not dispute that low pay may mean that there are fewer judges coming from private firms, but he did not see why that should matter so long as there appear to be plenty of qualified candidates.

Yes we can, Mr Geithner

Matt Taibbi takes on Thomas Friedman

In The World is Flat, the key action scene of the book comes when Friedman experiences his pseudo-epiphany about the Flat world while talking with himself in front of InfoSys CEO Nandan Nilekani. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, the money shot comes when Friedman starts doodling on a napkin over lunch with Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The pre-lunching Friedman starts drawing, and the wisdom just comes pouring out:

I laid out my napkin and drew a graph showing how there seemed to be a rough correlation between the price of oil, between 1975 and 2005, and the pace of freedom in oil-producing states during those same years.

Friedman then draws his napkin-graph, and much to the pundit’s surprise, it turns out that there is almost an exact correlation between high oil prices and “unfreedom”! The graph contains two lines, one showing a rising and then descending slope of “freedom,” and one showing a descending and then rising course of oil prices.

Friedman plots exactly four points on the graph over the course of those 30 years. In 1989, as oil prices are falling, Friedman writes, “Berlin Wall Torn Down.” In 1993, again as oil prices are low, he writes, “Nigeria Privatizes First Oil Field.” 1997, oil prices still low, “Iran Calls for Dialogue of Civilizations.” Then, finally, 2005, a year of high oil prices: “Iran calls for Israel’s destruction.”Take a look for yourself: I looked at this and thought: “Gosh, what a neat trick!” Then I sat down and drew up my own graph, called SIZE OF VALERIE BERTINELLI’S ASS, 1985-2008, vs. HAP- PINESS. It turns out that there is an almost exact correlation! Note the four points on the graph:

-Flat N All That

Mad Scientists

Mad Scientist Hall of Fame: Muwahahahaha!

- Dr. Evil: Megalomaniacal doctor with antisocial personality disorder (and pathological dislike of his own son, Scotty)
- Nikola Tesla: Real-life mad scientist with obsessive compulsive disorder (and he talked to aliens)
- Lex Luthor: Villain and supergenius with manic mood disorder (and premature baldness

Keywords: Forensic Psychology,

Assorted Writing Tips

Stiglitz the Omniscient;

When writing a novel, one of the things you have to decide is point of view. If you focus on one character, your point of view might be limited to what that character sees.

One point of view for the author to take is that of an omniscient observer. As you read, you know that the author knows what is coming (you keep getting hints) and understands all sorts of things that the characters are innocent about.

Stiglitz always writes as the omniscient observer. He knows exactly what should have been done to prevent or solve each of the 100 financial crises that he cites.

This omniscient-observer vantage point has its limits. It does not convey the uncertainty and trade-offs that policymakers face in real time. For example, as the housing bubble was inflating, there were not many Congressional voices raised against lending to first-time homebuyers.

From NYT's Paper Cuts;

The Economist article contained a passage that would never pass muster in an American news story:

“Recently, independent voters passed Republicans to become the biggest group in the state. Some of this is due to Colorado’s growing Hispanic population, some of it is due to Californians and some of it reflects the general unpopularity of the national Republican Party. But there is a more important reason for the Republicans’ woes: their elected representatives are bonkers.”

To most American readers, that last sentence certainly looks like an opinion, and should never be presented as news in a responsible publication. (As an editor, I’d never let it get through.) But consider this: what if Colorado’s congressional delegation really is bonkers, and the Economist correspondent was merely doing his job by informing his readers of that “fact.” Sometimes judgments, even if they aren’t as solid as hard facts, are more than merely matters of opinion.

A long goodbye;

It seems fitting to begin with the ancestors. One of the exceptional characteristics of this newspaper is the degree to which it still follows the principles and methods begun 163 years ago by its founder, James Wilson, and perfected by his son-in-law, Walter Bagehot. The Economist was launched to campaign for free trade and all forms of liberty, what proponents and detractors alike today call globalisation, blended with what George Bush likes to call “the freedom agenda”. It did so with a formula that was three parts factual description and one part strongly held opinion or argumentative analysis. That is what we continue to attempt today.

We do not do so merely out of loyalty to our founders: if those principles had turned out to be wrong, they would have been ditched long ago. And their application must always evolve. I, for one, had Bagehot grumbling in his grave when, in 1994, we declared the British monarchy to be “an idea whose time has passed”, in flat contradiction to his great 1867 book, “The English Constitution”. But in general what is striking about the past 13 years is how strongly this period has fitted Wilson's original view, how it made his principles feel more relevant than ever, and how in some respects our world is one whose issues he would have recognised.

Writing resources;

I would recommend them in the following order:

1. William I. Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, “The Elements of Style”

2. William Zinsser, “On Writing Well”

3. Deirdre N. McCloskey, “Economical Writing”

4. Keith Hjortshoj, “The Transition to College Writing“

City at the end of Time

Podcasts

The great grammar debate
Is learning formal grammar essential to becoming a good writer and communicator? Or is it more important to develop a feeling for language that can be applied in different contexts?

John Milton: 400 Years On

Restructuring secondary education

Being your own therapist - Buddhist style

Is being gay in your biology?

Cuba: socialism with salsa

Post traumatic stress disorder

Oral cancer

Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

Pole to Pole: A vet on the ice with seals

The Wallace-Darwin papers on biological evolution - 150 years ago

Buckminster Fuller

Chinese contemporary art

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century

Goldman Says Economic Recovery Requires More Saving

Public Bailout of Bank’s Recklessness
In response to the ongoing sub-prime crisis, the recently published Crosby Report recommends that the Government uses public money to swap bank’s seriously damaged mortgage-backed securities for pristine government bonds. Matthew Watson from the Department of Politics and International Studies at Warwick University talks about these recommendations, and how the global ‘credit crunch’ is affecting Labour’s popularity with the electorate.

Chilli, Chocolate, and Chips: Foods that Originate from the New World

Mahmoud Darwis' Legacy

Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet

this poet--was put under house arrest by the Israeli military occupation for close to a decade and only because he wrote poetry that offended Israeli occupiers of Palestine

- Angry Arab

Related;
Links to Darwish's poems

Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim

Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim

This book represents an unusual collaboration between Tom Corwin—who is a musician, producer and author, and Craig Frazier—who is a designer, illustrator and author. Tom will read from the book accompanied by a visual and live musical presentation. Craig will reveal his developmental sketches and process. Together they will describe their own 'creative boomerang' that gave Mr. Fooster wings.

Next Big Thing in Book Marketing; Karaoke Books

Do we Need another Good magazine

NEED magazine creates exposure for humanitarian aid via an educational, artistic, visual narrative of human stories.

Related; Good Magazine

How to Manipulate Irrational Voters

The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Mind, by George Lakoff

Or download the podcast

Responsibility of Artists- To defeat the lie

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89;

He wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged “not to participate in lies,” artists had greater responsibilities. “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!”...

Many in the West did not know what to make of the man. He was perceived as a great writer and hero who had defied the Russian authorities. Yet he seemed willing to lash out at everyone else as well — democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: “In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been.”

In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned President Gerald R. Ford to avoid seeing Mr. Solzhenitsyn. “Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in a memo. “Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn’s views of the United States and its allies.” Mr. Ford followed the advice.

The writer Susan Sontag recalled a conversation about Mr. Solzhenitsyn between her and Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet who had followed Mr. Solzhenitsyn into forced exile and who would also become a Nobel laureate. “We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn’s views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on,” she said. “And then Joseph said: ‘But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers — 60 million victims — it’s all true.’ ”...

In the autumn of 1961, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 43-year-old high school teacher of physics and astronomy in Ryazan, a city some 70 miles south of Moscow. He had been there since 1956, when his sentence of perpetual exile in a dusty region of Kazakhstan was suspended. Aside from his teaching duties, he was writing and rewriting stories he had conceived while confined in prisons and labor camps since 1944.

One story, a short novel, was “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer. With little sentimentality, he recounts the trials and sufferings of “zeks,” as the prisoners were known, peasants who were willing to risk punishment and pain as they seek seemingly small advantages like a few more minutes before a fire. He also reveals their survival skills, their loyalty to their work brigade and their pride.

The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk. “Shukov felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote. Shukov was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, and his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, and he had swiped some extra gruel, and had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.

“The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding: “Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper. He sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had shared a cell 16 years earlier. Mr. Kopelev, who later became a well known dissident, realized that under Mr. Khrushchev’s policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, or The New World, the most prestigious of the Soviet Union’s so-called thick literary and cultural journals. Mr. Kopelev and his colleagues steered the manuscript around lower editors who might have blocked its publication and took it to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor and a Politburo member who backed Mr. Khrushchev.

On reading the manuscript, Mr. Tvardovsky summoned Mr. Solzhenitsyn from Ryazan. “You have written a marvelous thing,” he told him. “You have described only one day, and yet everything there is to say about prison has been said.” He likened the story to Tolstoy’s moral tales. Other editors compared it to Dostoevsky’s “House of the Dead,” which the author had based on his own experience of incarceration in czarist times. Mr. Tvardovsky offered Mr. Solzhenitsyn a contract worth more than twice his teacher’s annual salary, but he cautioned that he was not certain he could publish the story.

Mr. Tvardovsky was eventually able to get Mr. Khrushchev himself to read “A Day in the Life.” Mr. Khrushchev was impressed, and by mid-October 1962, the presidium of the Politburo took up the question of whether to allow it to be published. The presidium ultimately agreed, and in his biography “Solzhenitsyn” (Norton, 1985), Michael Scammell wrote that Mr. Khrushchev defended the decision and was reported to have declared: “There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”

The novel appeared in Novy Mir in early 1963. The critic Kornei Chukovsky pronounced the work “a literary miracle.” Grigori Baklanov, a respected novelist and writer about World War II, declared that the story was one of those rare creations after which “it is impossible to go on writing as one did before.”

Novy Mir ordered extra printings, and every copy was sold. A book edition and an inexpensive newspaper version also vanished from the shelves.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not the first to write about the camps. As early as 1951, Gustav Herling, a Pole, had published “A World Apart,” about the three years he spent in a labor camp on the White Sea. Some Soviet writers had typed accounts of their own experiences, and these pages and their carbon copies were passed from reader to reader in a clandestine, self-publishing effort called zamizdat. Given the millions who had been forced into the gulag, few families could have been unaware of the camp experiences of relatives or friends. But few had had access to these accounts. “A Day in the Life” changed that...

In an interview last year with Der Spiegel, Mr. Solzhenitsyn said that Russians’ view of the West as a “knight of democracy” had been shattered by the NATO bombing of Serbia, an event he called “a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.” He dismissed Western democracy-building efforts, telling the Times of London in 2005 that democracy “is not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet.”

In 2007, he accepted a State Prize from then-President Putin — after refusing, on principle, similar prizes from Gorbachev and from Yeltsin. Mr. Putin, he said in the Der Spiegel interview, “inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible — a slow and gradual restoration.”

Related;