pretty -magnified crystalised cocktails

These are lush.
"Bevshot images are made by first crystallizing the drink of choice on a lab slide. Using a standard light microscope with a camera attached, the light source is polarized and passed through the crystal. This creates the magnificent colors we see in our favorite drinks featured on this site."
Alcoholic Cocktails Under the Microscope | Bored Panda:
My faves:

Turning vegetarian won't stop hunger -but it'll help

A worthwhile article from priyamvada Gopal -whom I'd not heard of before. I liked her sensitivity borne of her Indian background to the way that diet can be used oppressively and belligerently and so she is right to be wary of diet-based moral highground campaigns: we have probably all encountered food fascists. I hope I'm not one of them, but when people ask me why I'm vegetarian I try to convey something of what Ms Gopal says:

...a report from leading scientists warning that catastrophic food shortages can only be avoided if the world switches to a mainly vegetarian diet in the next 40 years. With many regions like the Sahel in Africa already facing near-famine conditions, 2 billion people already malnourished, and an estimated 2 billion increase in the world population by 2050, a global plant-based diet seems not just desirable but inevitable.

And so she does categorically state that:

 there are strong environmental and health reasons to reduce our dependence on animal farming and for the better-off to drastically cut meat and dairy consumption,

And it is hard to see how that implication can be avoided. The economic power of the global north pull resources away from the economically disadvantaged and this costs lives and health. I find it hard to consider eating meat, knowing that by doing so I'd be contributing to a 'supply system' which is skewed to starve the poor to enable us to eat something that is, ironically, killing 'us' through overconsumption.

But she is right when she goes on to say:

we must resist the temptation to abstractly denote a universal vegetarian lifestyle as the sole or simple answer

Because in an interconnected system it is not as simple as that: do my micro decisions really make a difference? Would a 'much-less-meat' culture guarantee that the resources released actually were re-allocated back to the poor? -or would 'we' find further ways to denude the two thirds world of their daily bread? That last couple of questions really points to the necessity to accompany reducing or eliminating meat from our collective diets by political action to address the accumulation of economic power systematically impoverishing the less powerful and already-poor. As Gopal says "the inequitable commandeering of global resources". And then she expresses well what I have just tried to say:

Wealth concentration generates disparate purchasing power that allows richer nations as well as the better-off in every nation to consume – and waste – a disproportionate share of food, fuel, water and other resources. Arable land itself is put towards profit through speculation, mining and logging, rather than feeding people.

And whether I can make a difference: well, in a small way perhaps, but mostly by encouraging others to reduce or eliminate consumption of meat. At least not eating meat is an everyday way to make a contribution to the solution -however indirect and fraught that is in a complex obliquitous world and it is a way that complements -is even an icon and index of- political effort on behalf of the global poor.
So, while I take issue with her article's title: Turning vegetarian will not solve the food crisis because it looks a bit like she's discounting it and offering comfort to the meat-addicted or insouciant. I do however, agree very much with her main thesis:

The excessive consumption of animal products clearly poses an imminent danger to both planet and human existence. But addressing this cannot take the form of a coercive herbivorous moralism. We need a comprehensive reordering of the global economy and our priorities as human beings to end the limitless scandal that is widespread hunger.

I would have to add, as I have written in my book Praying the Pattern, those of us who regularly prayer "Give us today our daily" bread, must recognise that the normal means that God uses to answer that for those of us in the West are mis-serving and so preventing the provision of daily bread for many in the world. How can we pray 'give us our daily bread' without recognising that 'us' includes all who look to God? And so some of us praying it routinely find that this petition is answered inadequately. And, then, how can we recognise that without beginning to do something to try to redress the balance and enable that prayer to be answered for them as well as us.

Vid games: violence? Nah -characters are overcompensates

There's a lot of moral panic and other sillinesses about video games. This article does a nice job of examining what some of the bigger-picture issues are rather than the shallow-knee-jerkers.
For example, a bit of truth-telling, getting past the cultural mythology:

games are inherently wussy. The stereotype of the bespectacled dweeby gamer is an inaccurate cliche, but there's no denying games are far from a beefy pursuit. Which is why shooty-fighty games go out of their way to disguise that. Every pixel of Modern Warfare 3 oozes machismo. It's all chunky gunmetal, booming explosions and stubbly men blasting each other's legs off. Yet consider what genteel skills the game itself requires. To succeed, you need to be adept at aiming a notional cursor and timing a series of button-pushes. It's about precision and nimble fingers. Just like darning a sock in a hurry. Or creating tapestry against the clock.

Okay, so some of the comments can be a bit catty; but I guess that's part of trying to puncture the bubble of myth, but it makes a good point:

Behind the military manoeuvrings, the human story revolves around people backstabbing, bitching, making catty asides, breaking off friendships and betraying one another. Ignore the gunfire and it's like a soap opera set in a ballet school.

The disappointment is that this is about as far as the critique goes. That last quote seemed to promise a further consideration of the kinds of relating and assumptions that are being modelled and fostered. And then it would be a mere hop and a skip to noting that the metanarrative hooks into the myth of redemptive violence and considering how bad that is as a model for interpersonal relationships ...
Ah well, it looks like I may have done it after all.

Charlie Brooker: The trouble with video games isn't the violence. It's that most of the characters are dicks | Comment is free | The Guardian

Siphoning off public money

I'm taking some comfort in discovering other people, like me, are suspicious of the idea that privatisation and competition are bound to deliver a better-value-for-money service. Since privatisation of the railways it has seemed to me that, in effect, the system was one that appeared to be one where, in effect, the government paid shareholders and my question is why not cut out the shareholders? How would that not be cheaper?

Now,I'm not so naive as to think it is quite that simple. The riposte is that the impetus of competition would cause operators to look at cost savings and clever improvements to produce more service for less money and that the savings would then reward the investment of the shareholders in the form of dividends.

But I say that this assumes too much: first that we have an accurate benchmark for deciding what a publicly run service would cost and charge in order to say to the private sector: 'beat that'. if we don't have a clear view of what the putative savings are, we can't really know whether the companies are just, in the words of the title of the article referred to here, siphoning off money into their own pockets. If we are talking about a subsidised service, how can that not be happening? And given that subsidy has risen not fallen, it would seem that these suspicions are likely true -in spades.

I'm also skeptical that the savings they could produce would actually offset the costs of setting up a private system with all that entails about bidding and risk etc:

... costs of fragmentation and duplication; dividend payments to investors; contractors' profit margins; debt write-offs; and higher interest payments to keep Network Rail's debts off the government's balance sheet. Taken together, those privatisation costs amount to around GBP 1.2bn a year, according to a new thinktank report (Transport for Quality of Life's Rebuilding Rail), while genuine private investment is estimated at barely 1% of the total funding of the railway. It's hardly surprising that the mainly publicly owned rail systems in the rest of Europe – several of which now run bits of Britain's privatised rail – are cheaper.

The artificiality of privatising what is a natural monopoly incurs costs, it is hard to think that those costs would not normally overtop any supposed savings and efficiencies that competition might reasonably be expected to bring. Therefore, if we pay the shareholders, we must be simply giving them money for nothing, in effect. Let's just 'cut out the middle men' and all the costly apparatus that supports them in a manner to which they should not get used. And if you point out that the shareholders are our pension funds, then I simply reply that robbing the state Peter to pay the people's Paul is no solution either.

Worse, there's an incentive for private companies to exaggerate their bids and bear the cost of the penalty because it is less than continuing to make the payments to the government in the latter years of the contract:

Greening claims FirstGroup offers the best deal for taxpayers. In reality it's based on heroic growth expectations of 10.6% a year and payments to government that are heavily loaded on to the contract's last few years. The company in fact has an incentive to dump the franchise as those payments come due, because they dwarf the cost of the bond penalty. If FirstGroup – which is walking away from the Great Western franchise – defaults, it wouldn't be the first time. 

It's no way to run a railway. And in fact we should probably question the privatisation matter more widely than railways: remember the fiasco before the opening of the Olympics when we found that G4 Security had not been able to organise security as per contract from LOCOG? We have to remember that these are not real markets: they are artificial economic environments and so there's no guarantee that the contracts and arrangements have been put together in a way that would justify the belief that the market will deliver; what will be delivered is an outcome that arises from the interaction of the contract and the calculations of the winner bidder. That may or may not be what was intended. And in the meantime, there's no easy way back from a situation where the company simply leaves you in the lurch. 

Let's also recall that 'The market' invoked is usually a theoretical abstraction; a model based on the idea of 'perfect competition'. It is this little thought experiment which usually lies at the root of fetishising  The Market. But of course it is not in any way the situation in these artificial 'garden markets' (let alone in actual life where companies frantically flee perfect competition by differentiation and all sorts of little anticompetitive ruses -and who can blame them: no-one can live for long in the kind of uncertainty and constant vigilance presupposed by the PC model -it makes for bad staffing; how much more enterprises). 

What is needed is real world data filtered from the ideological spin of either left or right, to tell us how things work in actuality. And, impressionistically, I don't think that G4S have given any great confidence that private is always best: 

Whitehall bureaucrats don't have a monopoly on bungling. Private sector providers aren't necessarily the slick, smooth operators they can seem when they bid for work. Despite G4S's massive experience, it appears to have bitten off more than it can chew. If the banking crisis taught politicians anything, it should be that having shareholders, a whizzy logo and a worldwide corporate footprint is no guarantee of competence. (Heather Stewart)

 Rail is a gigantic scam for siphoning off public money | Seumas Milne | Comment is free | The Guardian:

Religion, evolution, reason

Andrew Brown's been writing an intriguing mini series in the Guardian in response to Robert Bellah's book on Religion since the axial age. There are some points he makes that are worth pondering further. One is to do with the 'invention' or 'discovery' of reason; we're so used to it that we forget that it may not always have been 'around' in human culture in the disciplined and methodical way we now approach it. And indeed, part of the story is about religion and not just in the inimical way that New Atheists would have us hear it (since the story begins before the so-called Enlightenment).

This isn't a universal conflict. "Reason" itself, as contrasted with myth, is a relatively recent invention. You could in fact understand the history that Bellah tells of religion up to the Axial age as a story of the invention of reason (or, for Platonists, and theists, its discovery).

The story involves understanding myth as something more than a mere fiction and being able te recognise the bona fides of cultures approaching existential issues and matters of public knowledge and indeed wisdom with different backgrounds and teloi than the Modern West.

Thus:

 If religions are best understood as ways in which we dramatise and come to understand the urge to power and the urge to nurture, it's obvious that they can never be displaced by science, nor vice versa. Science itself is a playground, or arena, for both urges.

In other words, I think, Science is not immune from its protagonists continuing to behave badly, to compete with malice, to deceive and do-down even while proposing that it is all about nurturing the common good and treading the way to a brighter future.

Nevertheless, moral imperatives are well to be grounded in some degree of reality else they'll not overcome the ingrained self-serving and confirmation-biases which would undercut ideologies of Reason: there is still a difficulty about deriving an ought from an is and any ought grounded in 'human nature' is too immediately self-defeated and open to challenge. Why should we follow the better angels of our nature? And who says they are better? And can we really argue with the Ayn Rand's of this world?

I think that this is part of What Brown is getting at when he writes:

Ever since that discovery [of reason], in all the places where it has been kept alive, reason and myth eat away at each other, and feed on the other's remains. Unless myth is felt as a truth larger than ourselves, and unless it is understood from the inside, it just won't work. But a working myth cannot be made entirely proof against reason. Perhaps the first discovery of this was by Adam and Eve. It was certainly obvious to the thinkers of the 18th century, whether or not they were Christians. You find it in Voltaire and Hume as well as Swift and Bishop Butler. They all understood that reason alone cannot justify the claim that we should live by reason alone.

It seems to me that the last bit there is a reflex of the incompleteness theorem in Maths and of the epistemological conclusions of mid 20th century philosophers that in order to know something, you first have to believe something.

Religion in Human Evolution, part 8: the invention of reason | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk:

When Worship is not really and what worship leaders' responsibilities are

I've been aware for a while that there's something similar between the way that the emotional impact of a football match or a music concert (rock or similar) has huge similarities to some forms of liturgy in some churches. And I remember George Verwer saying how it is possible to organise the crowd dynamics of a service or meeting to produce certain emotional effects.

A University of Washington study has found that megachurch worship experiences actually trigger an “oxytocin cocktail” in the brain that can become chemically addictive. The same has been found at large sporting events and concerts, but attenders to these gatherings don’t usually attribute the “high” to God.

Thing is how we assess this. I'm not against the idea that we might use good and culturally-relevant music in worship -it seems to have gone on for most of Christian history. But I am concerned when it is found to be chemically addictive. The point of worship together is to enable us to encourage each other to draw near to God and to be transformed by God. Some of that encouragement can be through the cultural media we employ. But it is really concerning when hiddenly the medium becomes the actual focus rather than God.

And my worry is that for the oxytocin junkies, faith struggles to survive the discovery that the worship 'high' is not necessarily the Holy Spirit. Yes, the Spirit can affect us that way, but that doesn't mean that there cannot be other things that can do that nor does it mean that the effect must always imply the presence of the Spirit.

Worship leaders who are involved in the 'high-producing' forms of liturgy, I would say, have a responsibility to be aware, in broad terms, of the bio-chemical ramifications of corporate worship. And, having taken cognisance of that, to plan worship to enable/encourage people to connect with God aside from the music-driven emotional roller-coastal. I wonder too, whether, we don't also have a responsibility to inform people of this and, in a sense, to gain informed consent.

The implication of George Verwer's perspective is that, if we know these effects, we are culpable if we don't take seriously our responsibility to our fellow worshippers not to mislead them or, in fact, to use them. This research ups the ante for church leadership; to ignore would be to abuse our congregants.

Out of Ur: When Worship is Wrong:

Avoiding tyrrany

Good point.
Motivational Monday � Cheese-Wearing Theology

Cliches -have a point (sic?)

After pointing out that the philosophers of language are wrong to be looking for a simple 'answer' to the questions about how language works and means, Prof Abhijit Banerjee reckons, in relation to cliches:

 cliches are categories with a particular type of social salience. Like categories, cliches are sets of images, stories and definitions compressed into seemingly simpler concepts that are labelled by some sort of an expression.

It seems to me that 'sets' and 'compressed' are key words there. I think that he's 'naming' the phenomenon of 'clumping' as it might be referred to in educational circles. We do it all the time; we learn that certain things have certain relationships and we find that insightful enough to wish to express it briefly in order to use the new 'unit' of meaning in sentences and to co-ordinate it with other 'units'. So cliches aren't so different from words or phrases given other labels, so what makes them deserve a different signifier?

Cliches are types of categories. Or better still, cliches are categories with a particular type of social salience

This relates to the matters touched on in the Homo Loquens tag-strand of this blog which I note is about categorisation and that categories are fluid enough to be able to nest one inside another and thus the link to clumping.

The cliche, it seems to me has some kind of kinship with Foucault's 'signature' (if I understand Agamben aright) where there is a certain meaning which is transferable to different domains or fields. Cliches capture a semantic 'something' that can be found in various situations, but where at one time it was perhaps insightful, it then passed to fashionable and from there it became a formerly-fashionable-but-now-dead-metaphor. It seems to me that the opprobrium for cliches is about their failure towards the end of their llife to produce insight.

The issue, then, is twofold: whether the application of the 'semantic something' is accurate and whether it is capable of serving the needs or aspirations of the interlocutors for insight. If those things don't take place then Banerjee's concern is realised:

Bad things happen not because somebody wants bad things to happen but because we don’t do our homework. We don’t think hard enough. We’re not open minded enough

This comment helps to connect metaphor and cliche to organisational life and thus to corporisations. There are metaphors and cliches that organisations tend to use ('bottom line'? Silos?) that tend to prompt and co-ordinate or prime behaviours and may consolidate groupthink. All of these things mean that the organisation is less able as a whole to respond intelligently and adaptively because the false friends and misdirection of the internal communications produced by cliched usage hide reality and derail insight. Sometimes bad things happen as a result.

This enable us to see the value of the poets (understood broadly): they can produce a turn of phrase which can capture or frame an insight or slice of reality which displaces (or at least challenges) an tired or ill-fitting (that is cliched) one. Sometimes a truth needs poetry to clump the 'molecule' of insight together from its constituent atoms of noticed-realities and relationships.

This is part of what Dominik rightly notes: "Humanity is engaged in a neverending struggle of personal and public negotiation of concepts" though I think that struggle is over-agonistic: perhaps 'negotiation' would suit me better; there are times when it is not an adversarial matter but co-operative and reflective. That aside, the comment though, enables us to see cliches as part of culture making, perhaps representing metaphors ('memes'?) at a particular point in their life-cycle in the cultural-negotiation ecology.

Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice with metahor hacking and getting it back again | Metaphor Hacker: