Ethiopia is building the world's busiest airport

The Sound of The Ancestors: An Authentic West African Drum Solo

YouTube:

Akinmola Boluwatife Samuel is a dynamic musician, vocalist, and drummer who blends traditional African rhythms with contemporary expression. With a B.A. in music from Lagos State University, where he was awarded Drummer of the Year in recognition of his exceptional talent. Boluwatife leads the _African Folk Band_, infusing Apala tradition jazz, and call and response vocal form into his music. As a husband and father, family inspires his artistry, fueling his commitment to storytelling through rhythm and melody. His work celebrates Africa's rich musical heritage, captivating audiences worldwide.

Listen carefully to how he has tuned the deums. 

Five countries generate half of Africa's GDP

GDP growth projection for 2025:

🇪🇹 Ethiopia: 6.5%
🇰🇪 Kenya: 5%
🇪🇬 Egypt: 4.1%
🇲🇦 Morocco: 3.6%
🇳🇬 Nigeria: 3.2%
🇩🇿 Algeria: 3%
🇦🇴 Angola: 2.8%
🇿🇦 South Africa: 1.5%

According to IMF.

— Stats Globe (@statsglobe) August 2, 2025

Nollywood: The World's Third Largest Film Industry

Afropop Worldwide · Nollywood - Nigeria's Mirror

Original article here. 

"Nollywood - Nigeria's Mirror" takes us to Lagos, the third largest film industry in the world. Scholars Jonathan Haynes and Onookome Okome serve as guides as we negotiate the intricacies and eccentricities of Nollyood's past and digital future. Nollywood films dramatize key tensions in contemporary Nigerian life, such as the relationship between tradition and cosmopolitanism. Distributed through pirate DVD networks across Africa, the Caribbean and the Diaspora at large, Nollywood films are a global phenomenon - and we'll find out why. We'll also be joined by Christopher Kirkley of the Sahel Sounds blog, who transports us to northern Nigeria and into the electronic sound world of Hausa film music.

An earlier post about Nollywood: Nollywood Millionaire. 

"Take Five," five ways

From Wikipedia:

"Take Five" is a jazz standard composed by Paul Desmond. It was first recorded in 1959 and is the third track on Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Frequently covered by a variety of artists, the track is the biggest-selling jazz song of all time and a Grammy Hall of Fame inductee.

Dave Brubeck was inspired to create an album based on odd time signatures during his state-sponsored 1958 Eurasia trip. The track was written after the Quartet's drummer, Joe Morello, requested a song in quintuple (5/4) meter. Desmond composed the melodies on Morello's rhythms while Brubeck arranged the song. The track's name is derived from its meter, and the injunction, "Take five", meaning "take a break for five minutes". The track is written in E♭ minor and is in ternary (ABA) form.

Released as a promotional single in September 1959, "Take Five" became a sleeper hit in 1961, and then went on to become the biggest-selling jazz single of all time. The track still receives significant radio airplay.

Yesterday I cruised YouTube for recordings. I listed to over a dozen. Most of them had the same time feel as Brubeck's original recorder. The instrumentation would be different and the tempo might be faster of slower, but the basic time feel was the same, a jazz swing. But I found four versions that were distinctly different, though I assume there are others out there. I've presented them below, after Brubeck's original recording.

Jazz Swing: Dave Brubeck Quartet (1959, the original recording)

Salsa: Tito Puente (1985)

I heard Tito Puente live at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in the early 1980s. They were hot! hot!! hot!!! People were dancing in aisles. Not bad for a place originally built to present the European classics. Pictures of some of them – Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and the rest – lined the walls. I wonder what they were thinking about Puente. I'd like to think they were savvy enough to smile. [Note: They take it in four, but four with a clave.]

Ska: New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble (2009)

I know next to nothing about ska, but this is a good performance. I like it. [Also in four.]

Pakistani: Sachal Studios (2011)

This is interesting. It's a large group, lot's of fiddles. The arrangement borrows heavily from Brubeck's original. The major difference is in the percussion, which is a tabla player, a very good one, and that gives the whole thing a different underlying rhythmic pulse.

Africans: Chyke Martins and Udoh Band (2024)

I love this, so smooth and slinky. Listen to Martins throw in a bit of "Summertime" at 4:30.

The invention of the West

Steven Poole reviews, Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West (2024), in The Guardian. The opening paragraph:

Like the railway and the telegraph, western civilisation was invented in the 19th century. It had located its noble roots in classical Athens and Rome, and from then, so the story went, white Europeans embarked on a smooth progression of gradual sophistication and enlightenment that culminated, not coincidentally, in the glories of the British empire.

That’s not quite how it all got started, argues ancient history professor Josephine Quinn in this fascinating account of the cultural and martial doings around the Mediterranean in the two millennia BC, and thence up to the middle ages. For her, “civilisational thinking” itself is the enemy, not only in historiography but in modern geopolitics. [...]

But “western civilisation” would not exist without its Islamic, African, Indian and Chinese influences.

I agree. A bit later:

With such relentless trade and travel comes, naturally, cultural commingling. “Overseas exchange meant that Cretans could pick and choose from different cultural options, and they did,” Quinn remarks. Cultural appropriation was not yet an affront; indeed, it could be a strength, as we learn later from Polybius’s remark about the upstart Romans: “They are unusually willing to substitute their own customs for better practice from elsewhere.”

The book is rich in marvellous detail, and succeeds in making the pre-classical world come to life. There is something of the modern wheedling teenager in the complaining minor royal who ends a letter to the king of Egypt with the line “Send me much gold”.

Still later, after this and that:

Meanwhile, it didn’t take until the 19th century for the idea of “the west” to arrive, as Quinn notes. The “earliest known version of a binary polarity setting Europe against Asia”, she observes, is found already in Herodotus’s tales of the Persian wars; and Frankish Christians began thinking of themselves as “European” in the wake of the Arab conquest.

Doubtless, though, those fusty 19th-century gentlemen historians were blinkered, in the same way that we shall appear blinkered to historians a century hence. Quinn makes this point beautifully when discussing the “stories of warrior women in the Steppe” in the first millennium BC, which were long dismissed as fantasy by scholars. “There was no room in civilisational thinking for cultures run aggressively and successfully by women,” she observes. “In recent decades, however, more than one hundred women’s graves containing axes, swords and occasionally armour have come to light in Russia and Ukraine.”

I've been making a similar argument for a long time. Although it has long been convention to trace "the West" back to ancient Greece and to Israel, and those genealogical connections are real, the idea that there this cultural entity, "the West," extends back into ancient times is more on the order of a founding myth than a summary history. It should be obvious on the face of it that if any contemporary citizen of a Western country were transported back in time to the ancient world, anywhere, they'd find themselves in a very strange culture that they do not at all recognize. For that matter, the England of Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I would be barely recognizable as English by contemporary speakers of the language. The language would be difficult to understand and to speak, and the customs strange.

In "The Evolution of Cognition" David Hays and I point out that contemporary Western culture would have been impossible without arithmetic imported from the Arab world. In "Culture, Plurality, and Identity in the 21st Century" I point out that the idea of a Western cultural identity is relatively recent and was preceded and facilitated by the idea of Christendom that emerged in Europe in the 16th century.

H/t 3QD.

Three Against Two the Tumbuka Way

I'm bumping this to the top on the principle that I need to do more posts about music. This doesn't actually add a post to the blog, but it brings one out of the past and into the present.

 

Western music is based on so-called duple rhythms, patterns of two or multiples of two. There are triple rhythms as well, the waltz for example, but they aren't as prominent. What Western rhythm rarely does is superimpose the two.

Not so in much of the third world, where three against two is a way of life. Here's a passage from Beethoven's Anvil (pp. 116-117) that describes a technique for learning three-against-two that is ascribed to an origin myth. Imagine that, a culture that makes rhythm part of it's origin myth.

* * * * *

The Tumbuka of Malawi, in southeastern Africa, have an origin myth that is coupled with a thigh slapping routine. The myth concerns Mupa, who discovered the rhythms used in vimbuza music, the music played for the trance dancing central to Tumbuka healing. Mupa discovered the rhythms while slapping his thighs. He began with a simple alternation—slap the right thigh with the right hand, left thigh with the left hand, in even alternating strokes—but that quickly grew boring. So he began figuring out more interesting ways to generate rhythms. I won’t recite the whole story—you can find it in Steven Friedson’s book, Dancing Prophets—but I will briefly describe the thigh-slapping routine that Mupa developed.

First, take a comfortable seat with your feet resting on the floor. Gently slap one thigh (say, the right thigh with the right hand) and then the other; do this repeatedly with an even rhythm at a comfortable tempo. Now, group your strokes into groups of three by slapping your knee on the first of each group of three. You will probably have to count to do this. You could use number names and say “one two three” but any three syllables will do. Just repeat the sequence over and over and slap your knee on the first syllable in the series. Not only is the physical gesture a little different from before, so is the sound. Notice that the initial stroke in your groups—set in bold type—will alternate between your right and left knees:

(1) R knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh (1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh

A full cycle is thus six strokes long, divided into two groups marked by initial knee slaps. Emphasize the knee slaps so that they are just a little louder, thus strengthening the triple grouping. Practice this at a comfortable pace until you can do it with little or no thought. then you may want to pick up the pace and see how fast you can go.

Next we are going to superimpose THREE (two-stroke groupings) on the TWO groupings that consist of three strokes each. We will do this merely by thinking. Continue the same pattern but now concentrate on only one hand at a time, perhaps your right. I find it helps simply to look at the appropriate thigh. In the following representation the right strokes have been set in bold type while the initial strokes of the two groups of three have been set in italics:

(1) R knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh (1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh

One could also choose to concentrate on the left-hand strokes:

(1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh (1) R Knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh

Either way, get six beats in two different ways. When you use knee slaps as your marker, the six beats are divided into two groups or three beats each. When you use left or right side as your marker, they are divided into three groups of two beats each. Further, you can switch your concentration back and forth from the right-hand strokes to the left-hand ones.

If you are not already practiced in this sort of thing, you should be slow and deliberate. As you become comfortable, pick up the pace. You will reach a point where you no longer explicitly think in six, with overlays about how each stroke must be executed, and think instead in three/two.

The pattern of physical gestures you establish by practicing this exercise can then be applied to playing the ng’oma drum, the lead or master drum of Tumbuka music. The thigh stroke and knee stroke of the exercise become two different ways of striking the drum. But the basic pattern the Mupa left his people forms the core pattern of Tumbuka drumming; all other patterns derive from it.

* * * * *

See also: Three Against Two: Splitting the Mind in Two.

A.I. in Africa (Rokhaya Diagne)

Dionne Searcey, As a Teen, She Loved Video Games. Now She’s Using A.I. to Try to Quash Malaria. NYTimes, Nov. 3, 2023. From the article:

While some of her cohorts are most passionate about sensor fusion or robotics, Ms. Diagne is into artificial intelligence and machine deep-learning. She helped create an award-winning networking app to meet others with similar interests — like Tinder but for tech nerds. And she founded a start-up called Afyasense (she borrowed “afya,” or health, from Swahili, an East African language) for her disease-detection projects using A.I.

“She is someone with whom talking is a pleasure due to the quality of the questions she asks and also the answers she gives,” said Ismaïla Seck, a leader in Senegal’s growing A.I. community.

Like many other young people in Africa’s tech boom, Ms. Diagne is at the center of overlapping phenomena on the continent — a growing, educated middle class raising even more educated children who, with each tap on a keyboard, have adopted a sense that the continent’s biggest problems can be solved.

Ms. Diagne wants to use A.I. to improve health outcomes in the region, a choice she made after a range of childhood illnesses landed her in Dakar hospitals, which struggled to provide consistent, quality care.

“I know the mistakes that are unfortunately made,” she said.

Ms. Diagne’s drive has earned her recognition. Her malaria project recently won an award at an A.I. conference in Ghana and a national award in Senegal for social entrepreneurship, as well as $8,000 in funding.

There's more at the link.

Into the Future: From Tyler Cowen through Kim Stanley Robinson to Kisangani 2150

I'm bumping this one to the top both on general principle, but more specifically, for it comments on the future of computing. I note that I wrote this before GPT-3 surprised everyone with it's language prowess, but I don't see that as any reason to modify the views I express here. I also call attention to my remarks about fiction.

* * * * *

 

Once I’d finished Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation I decided to take a look at his next book:

Tyler Cowen. Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. Dutton (2013).

As the title indicates, the book looks toward the future, something I’m interested in these days. So I poked around, found things of interest, and made some notes.

I found Cowen’s remarks on Freestyle chess most interesting and have some notes on that in the next section. I skip over several chapters to arrive at his treatment of science in Chapter 11, where I spend an inordinate amount of time quarreling with his guesstimates about the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Then I move to the last chapter, “A New Social Contract?”. That brings us to the heart of this post.

For the world Cowen sketches in that last chapter seems roughly compatible with the one Kim Stanley Robinson created in New York 2140, which, as far as I can tell, takes place somewhat beyond the (unspecified) time horizon Cowen has in Average Is Over. I dig out an unpublished essay of Cowen’s, “Is a Novel a Model?”, and use it to situate the two books in the same ontological register. I argue, in effect, that New York 2140 takes more or less the world Cowen projects in Average, pushes it through climate change, cranks some parameters up to eleven, and concludes with a replay of the 2008 financial crisis, albeit to a rather different conclusion.

Then we arrive where I’m really going, the “Heart of Deepest Africa”, Kisangani, a commercial city in the center of the Congo Basin. What will life be like in Kisangani in 2150, a decade after the institutional upheaval that ends Robinson’s book? I don’t answer the question, I merely pose it.

Pour yourself some scotch, coffee, kombucha, whatever’s your pleasure. This is going to be a long one.

Freestyle chess and beyond

Cowen introduces Freestyle chess in Chapter 5, “Our Freestyle Future”. Freestyle chess is played by teams that include one or more humans and one or more computers (p. 78):

A series of Freestyle tournaments was held staring in 2005. In the first tournament, grandmasters played, but the winning trophy was taken by ZackS. In a final round, ZackS defeated Russian grandmaster Vladimir Dobrov and his very well rated (2,600+) colleague, who of course worked together with the programs. Who was ZackZ? Two guys from New Hampshire, Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen, then rated at the relatively low levels of 1,685 and 1,395, respectively. Those ratings would not make them formidable local club players, much less regional champions. But they were the best when it came to aggregating the inputs from different computers. In addition to some formidable hardware, they used the chess software engines Fritz, Shredder, Junior, and Chess Tiger.

Cowen later notes (p. 81):

The top games of Freestyle chess probably are the greatest heights chess has reached, though who actually is to judge? The human-machine pair is better than any human – or any machine – can readily evaluate. No search engine will recognize the paired efforts as being the best available, because the paired strategies are deeper than what the machine alone can properly evaluate.

And that was before AlphaZero entered the picture [1].

Cowen then uses Freestyle chess as his model for man-machine collaboration in the future of work. That’s a reasonable thing to do. But I have a caveat.

Most task environments are ill-defined and open-ended in a way that chess is not. From a purely abstract point of view, and given an appropriate rule for converting a stalemate into a draw, chess, like the much simpler tic-tac-toe, is a finite game. That is, there are only a finite number of games possible. So, in point of abstract theory, one could list all possible games in the tree and label each path according to how it ends (win, lose, or draw). Then to play you simply follow only paths that can lead to a win or, if forced, to a draw. However the number of possible games is so large that this is not a feasible way to play the game, not even for the largest and fastest of computers.

However, while computers have been able to beat any human at chess for over two decades they still lag behind six year olds in language understanding, though they can be deceptive in “conversation”. Linguistic behavior isn’t the crisply delimited task world that chess is and so presents quite different challenges to computational mastery. The so-called “common sense” problem is pretty much where it was dropped with the eclipse of symbolic-AI over a quarter of a century ago. Cowen isn’t mindful of this issue, which bleeds into many task domains, and so tends to over-generalize from Freestyle chess. I don’t think that over-generalization does much harm to is overall argument, but it does lead him to overplay his hand when he discusses the future of science.

A new kind of science?

So let’s skip to Chapter 11, “The End of Average Science” (p. 206):

For at least three reasons, a lot of science will become harder to understand:

1. In some (not all) scientific areas, problems are becoming more complex and unsusceptible to simple, intuitive, big breakthroughs.
2. The individual scientific contribution is becoming more specialized, a trend that has been running for centuries and is unlikely to stop.
3. One day soon, intelligent machines will become formidable researchers in their own right.

On the first, it seems to me we made a good start on that early in the 20th century and relativity and even more so with quantum mechanics. Still, Cowen cites mathematical proofs that run on for pages and pages and take years for other mathematicians to verify. Are we in for more of that? Maybe yes, maybe no, who knows? And maybe, as I’ve been suggesting in connection with cognitive ranks theory [2], fundamentally new scientific languages will precipitate out of the chaos and return us to a regime where intuition can lead to breakthroughs. In the past pre-Copernican astronomy had a horrendously complex model of the relations between the earth, sun, moon, and other plants, with epicycles upon cycles. But then Copernicus suggests we center the model on the sun and Kepler abandoned circular orbits for elliptical ones and the model became at once simpler (fewer parts), but also more sophisticated. This more sophisticated model was so sensitive that observed anomalies in the orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune.

I agree that specialization is here to stay (#2). As for machines becoming formidable researchers (#3), color me bemused and skeptical. Let’s skip ahead (217-218):

Most current scientific research looks like “human directing computer to aid human doing research,” but we will move closer to “human feeding computer to do its own research” and “human interpreting the research of the computer.” The computer will become more central to the actual work, even to the design of the research program, and the human will become the handmaiden rather than the driver of progress.

An intelligent machine might come up with a new theory of cosmology, and perhaps no human will be able to understand or articulate that theory. Maybe it will refer to non-visualizable dimensions of space or nonintuitive understandings of time. The machine will tell us that the theory makes good predictions, and if nothing else we will be able to use one genius machine to check the predictions of the theory from another genius machine. Still, we, as humans, won’t have a good grasp on what the theory means and even the best scientists will grasp only part of what the genius machine has done.

I sorta’ maybe kinda’ agree with the first paragraph, but stop at the point that it implies that second paragraph.

First, I’ve got a philosophical problem. Here we have an expert in cosmology, the best humankind has to offer. She’s examining this impossible-to-understand theory and the verification of predictions offered by a genius machine. How is she to tell whether she’s examining valid work or high-falutin’ nonsense? If she can’t understand what they’re doing, why should she believe the two genius machines? I’m sure this one can be argued, but I don’t want to attempt it here and now. So let’s just set it aside.

Let’s instead consider a weaker claim, simply that we’ll have genius machines whose capacity to propose theories, in cosmology, evolutionary biology, post-quantum mechanics, whatever, is as good as any human. How likely is that? I don’t know, but I want to see an argument, and I can’t see that Cowen has offered one. Nor can I see what he’d offer beyond, “computers are getting smarter and smarter by the day”.

 

In the opening chapter Cowen mentions Ray Kurzweil, one of the prime proponents of the inevitability of computational superintelligence that surpasses human intelligence. He neither endorses nor denies Kurzweil’s claims on that score, but he’s put them on the table. He goes on to assert (p. 6), “It’s becoming increasingly clear the mechanized intelligence can solve a rapidly expanding repertoire of problems.” OK. He mentions Big Blue’s chess victory over Kasparov in 1997 and Watson conquering Jeopardy! in 2010. Exciting stuff, yes.

And then (p. 7):

We’re on the very of having computer systems that understand the entirety of human “natural language,” a problem that was considered a very tough one only a few years ago. Just talk to Siri on your iPhone and she is likely to understand your voice, give you the right answer, and help you make an appointment.

And so on.

On this one I line up with the kids who think that understanding natural language is still a very tough problem, and, yes, I’m aware of the remarkable progress that’s been made since Cowen published this book only six years ago. But understanding natural language (I don’t know why Cowen used scare quotes there when he should have put them around “understanding”) just gets more and more difficult the more we’re able to get our machines to do. Back in 1976 I co-authored an article with David Hays in which we predicted that the time would come when a computer model would be able to “read” a Shakespeare play in a way that would give us insight into what one’s mind does while reading such a text [3]. We didn’t offer just when this might happen, but in my mind I was thinking 20 years.

Well, nothing like that was available in 1996. Not only that, but the framework in which we’d hazarded that prediction had collapsed. Whoops! We still don’t have machines that can read Shakespeare in an interesting way, nor do I see any on the horizon. And yet you can query Siri and get useful answers on a wide range of topics, something that wasn’t possible in 1976, though the Defense Department spent a lot of money trying to make it happen (and I read those tech reports as they were issued).

What’s going on? There’s a lot I could say, but not here. And certainly others know much of the story better than I do, especially the technical details.

Sex among the Aka, hunter-gatherers of the Central African Republic [sex is work of the night]

2. The Aka report having sex about 3 times a night, with some days of rest between (all data are self-reported). Here, these frequencies are converted to weekly for comparison with neighboring Ngandu farmers and the US: pic.twitter.com/EVIprY0hkv

— Ed Hagen (@ed_hagen) August 26, 2022

3. The Aka and Ngandu both report that having sex is mainly to have children, which warms my sociobiological heart: pic.twitter.com/hwTAnO0jdZ

— Ed Hagen (@ed_hagen) August 26, 2022

There are seven more tweets in the stream.

Tell me about the blues: Did they originate in New Orleans?

In a recent post Ted Gioia considers the possibility that the blues originated in New Orleans. After considerable discussion:

All this is significant and enlightening, but insufficient to prove that New Orleans was the birthplace of the blues. But it does suggest that blues was a significant ingredient in its commercial music scene at a fairly early stage. My considered judgment is that New Orleans was the source of “blues-inflected jazz”—but that’s a very different claim than citing it as the home of all blues. And as all the available evidence shows, early jazz borrowed ingredients from every imaginable source—military music, spirituals, opera arias, etc. The fact that an idiom showed up in a New Orleans jazz performance is no proof that it was invented in New Orleans.

After further discussion of just how the blues wound up in New Orleans and how innovation spreads he says:

My assessment of the totality of this evidence suggests that the blues has very old roots, originating with performers who found new ways of playing African-inflected music in the New World—but typically in rural areas where they could remain immune to many of the influences linked to commercial trends in American music. The blues style eventually became urbanized in the closing years of the 19th century, and New Orleans was probably the first city where this style of music rose to prominence. It almost certainly arrived there as part of the larger migration from country to city—just as it later participated in the ensuing emigration of African-Americans from South to North. The idea that this path of dissemination went the other way around—with city musicians from New Orleans relocating to remote sharecropper plantations—is much harder to accept. That simply wasn’t the way people moved in those years.

* * * * *

This is the fourth post in my series, “Tell me about the blues.” The series is tagged with the label, tell me blues.

Three Against Two: Splitting the Mind [augmented with new material]

I'm bumping this to the top of the queue with the addition of a tweet linking to a study of hemispheric timing (see last two sections below, Two Hemispheres, Splitting the Mind? You can download a slightly different version of the original post at THIS LINK).

* * * * *

Interesting new paper about the perennial question of lateralization and timing, from Chris Kell's lab in Frankfurt https://t.co/AeoVe5x9Zo Differential contributions of the two human cerebral hemispheres to action timing

— David Poeppel (@davidpoeppel) November 21, 2019

Abstract from the article: Anja Pflug, Florian Gompf, et al., Differential contributions of the two human cerebral hemispheres to action timing, eLife 2019;8:e48404 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.48404:

Abstract: Rhythmic actions benefit from synchronization with external events. Auditory-paced finger tapping studies indicate the two cerebral hemispheres preferentially control different rhythms. It is unclear whether left-lateralized processing of faster rhythms and right-lateralized processing of slower rhythms bases upon hemispheric timing differences that arise in the motor or sensory system or whether asymmetry results from lateralized sensorimotor interactions. We measured fMRI and MEG during symmetric finger tapping, in which fast tapping was defined as auditory-motor synchronization at 2.5 Hz. Slow tapping corresponded to tapping to every fourth auditory beat (0.625 Hz). We demonstrate that the left auditory cortex preferentially represents the relative fast rhythm in an amplitude modulation of low beta oscillations while the right auditory cortex additionally represents the internally generated slower rhythm. We show coupling of auditory-motor beta oscillations supports building a metric structure. Our findings reveal a strong contribution of sensory cortices to hemispheric specialization in action control.

* * * * *

Three against two is one of the most important rhythm ‘cells’ in all of music. What do I mean, three against two? You play three evenly spaced beats in one ‘stream’ in the same period of time you play two evenly spaced beats in another ‘stream.’ It sounds simple enough but, the problem is that three and two do not have a common divisor, making the ‘evenly spaced’ part of the formula a bit tricky. The two patterns coincide on the first beat, but the second and third beats of the three-beat stream happen at different times from the second beat of the two-beat stream. And if you think that’s a lot of verbiage for something that ought to be simple, when then you’re beginning to get the idea.

In some cultures, including many in Africa, young children are taught 3 against 2 at a very young age. For them it IS easy. That’s not the case, however, in European derived musical traditions. Three against two is not part of basic toddler pedagogy and, as a consequence, learning to do it is a bit more difficult when, and if, the time comes – for some, it never comes. Thus, within the context of the Western classical tradition, three against two is considered moderately difficult rather than being fundamental. Such rhythms are exceptional in classical music, but they are common enough that any moderately skilled keyboard player must know how to execute them.

Go Slow, Count it in Six

In playing percussion or a keyboard instrument it is easy to alternate notes from one hand to the other and it is easy to play notes simultaneously with both hands. It is also easy to play two or four or eight notes with one hand against one note with the other hand or, for that matter, three or six notes with one hand against one note with the other. And, of course, it is easy to repeat such figures time after time after time. It is, however, distinctly more difficult to play three notes with one hand against two with the other. The problem is that, once the first note is struck by both hands, none of the successive notes in the pattern line up nor are they equidistant from one another. The patterns are incommensurate, as we see in the following diagram:

Three Against Two

Let’s consider the advice Joseph Hoffman offered on this problem. Hoffman was a piano virtuoso whose career spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1909 he published a book of Piano Questions, which consisted of “direct answers to two hundred fifty questions asked by piano students” which he had originally published in the Ladies’ Home Journal over a period of two years. One of the questions he answered was “How must I execute triplets played against two-eighths?” — a typical 2-against-3 pattern. Here is the first part of Hoffman’s answer:

In a slow tempo it may serve you to think of the second eighth-note of the triplet as being subdivided into two sixteenths. After both hands have played the first note of their respective groups simultaneously, the place of the aforsaid sixteenth note is to be filled by the second note of the couplet.

Work isn't all it's cracked up to be [more naps!]

Cassady Rosenblum, Work is a False Idol, NYTimes, Aug. 22, 2021.

The lying flat movement, or tangping as it’s known in Mandarin, is just one expression of this global unraveling. Another is the current worker shortage in the United States. As of June, there were more than 10 million job openings in the United States, according to the most recent figures from the Labor Department — the highest number since the government began tracking the data two decades ago. While conservatives blame juiced-up pandemic unemployment benefits, liberals counter that people do want to work, just not for the paltry wages they were making before the pandemic.

Both might be true. But if low wages were all that’s at play, we would expect to see reluctant workers at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, and content workers at the top. Instead, there are murmurs of dissent at every rung, including from the inner sanctums of Goldman Sachs, where salaries for investment bankers start at $150,000. According to a leaked internal survey, entry-level analysts at the investment bank report they’re facing “inhumane” conditions, working an average of 98 hours a week, forgoing showers and sleep. “I’ve been through foster care,” said one respondent. “This is arguably worse.”

In the United States, Black activists, writers and thinkers are among the clearest voices articulating this spiritual malaise and its solutions, perhaps because they’ve borne the brunt of capitalism more than other groups of Americans. Tricia Hersey, a performance artist and the founder of the Nap Ministry, an Atlanta-based organization, is one of them. Ms. Hersey says she discovered the power of naps during a draining year of graduate school at Emory University, an experience that inspired her to bring the gospel of sleep to fellow African Americans whose enslaved and persecuted ancestors were never able to properly rest.

Note:

But it’s worth noting that Mr. Luo acknowledged the necessity of making a living, and @hollabekgrl didn’t say she never wanted to work at a job or hone a craft; she said she doesn’t want a “career,” a corporate-flavored word that conjures images of PowerPoints and power suits. While jobs are sustenance, careers are altars upon which all else is sacrificed.

The role of clothing in cultural evolution [agriculture, Rank 2]

Sam Dresser, The clothing revolution, Aeon.

My recent work shows that clothing wasn’t just the unique adaptation of a more-or-less hairless mammal to the changing natural environments. The development of clothing led to innovations with many repercussions for humanity, beyond survival in cold climates. A need for portable insulation from the cold in the Palaeolithic promoted major technological transitions. These include stone toolkits for working animal hides and, subsequently, bone tools such as pointed awls and needles to make tailored garments. Later, during the coldest stage of the last ice age, Homo sapiens in middle latitudes devised multi-layered outfits with an inner layer of underwear. Equipped with effective protection from wind chill, our species could penetrate into the frigid Arctic Circle, further north than cold-adapted Neanderthals had managed to venture. From the northeastern corner of Siberia, modern humans strolled across an exposed land bridge to enter Alaska by 15,000 years ago, if not earlier, to likely become the first hominins to set foot in the Americas. At the Broken Mammoth site in Alaska, archaeologists have unearthed the fragile technology that made the journey possible: a 13,000-year-old eyed needle.

Until recently, the scientific study of clothing was largely the work of physiologists who have explored its thermal properties, which are now well understood. The physiology of clothing allows us to say precisely how much clothing people must wear to survive at sub-freezing temperatures and at differing wind-chill levels. Early hominins in Africa had begun to harness fire between 1 and 2 million years ago, perhaps for cooking more than warmth. Fire was utilised as hominins spread into Europe and northern China, where Homo erectus retreated into caves to escape wind chill. However, even if earlier hominins were more hairy than modern humans, whenever they found themselves in cold conditions beyond certain well-defined survival thresholds, they needed to carry portable insulation while out in the open. For modern humans, exposure times for frostbite can be less than an hour, and life-threatening hypothermia can develop overnight, even in cities. From a thermal perspective, two aspects of clothing are important. First is the number of layers, with each extra layer increasing the total insulation value. The second aspect is whether garments are fitted, or tailored, to enclose the body, especially the limbs. Fitted garments offer superior protection from wind chill, a major risk factor for frostbite and hypothermia.

Alas, clothing doesn't survive well over time and so the archaelogical record is poor.

All the evidence we have for ice-age clothing is indirect but, nonetheless, the available evidence shows that people had tailored clothes in the last ice age. The world’s oldest eyed needles are found in southern Russia 40,000 years ago, and one needle in Denisova Cave is said to be 50,000 years old. In the vicinity of Moscow at a site called Sunghir, 30,000-year-old human burials have thousands of beads neatly arranged on the skeletons.

But...

Scientific efforts to shed light on the prehistory of clothes have received an unexpected boost from another line of research, the study of clothing lice, or body lice. These blood-sucking insects make their home mainly on clothes and they evolved from head lice when people began to use clothes on a regular basis. Research teams in Germany and the United States analysed the genomes of head and clothing lice to estimate when the clothing parasites split from the head ones. One advantage of the lice research is that the results are independent from other sources of evidence about the origin of clothes, such as archaeology and palaeoclimatology. The German team, led by Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, came up with a date of 70,000 years ago, revised to 100,000 years ago, early in the last ice age. The US team led by David Reed at the University of Florida reported a similar date of around 80,000 years ago, and maybe as early as 170,000 years ago during the previous ice age. These findings from the lice research suggest that our habit of wearing clothes was established quite late in hominin evolution.

I love it! Piecing things together through an understanding of causal linkage. Sherlock would love it, too.

And then we've got complex clothing:

My work draws on the known thermal physiology of clothes to distinguish two basic forms of clothing: simple and complex. Simple clothing is loose, not fitted, and consists of just a single layer. Examples of simple garments include capes or cloaks draped over the shoulders, and loincloths. Simple clothes can provide a certain amount of insulation in cold weather, although these loose garments can offer only limited protection from wind chill. Simple clothes made from thick furs were probably sufficient when hominins began to occupy northern Europe during colder glacial stages from half a million years ago. Complex clothes are closely fitted around the body and can have cylinders attached to enclose the limbs properly; additionally, they can have up to four or five layers. Complex clothes were a more recent development, and represent a quantum leap in clothing technology, allowing humans to defeat wind chill and survive in the coldest places on Earth. [...]

Complex clothes required scrapers but also hide-cutting tools, called blades, to cut the hides into regular shapes and make the cylinders for sleeves and leggings. The separate shapes had to be sewn together carefully, hence we start to find more dedicated hide-piercing tools, called awls, later refined into the iconic ice-age clothing tool, the eyed needle.

Technologies come and go:

Another clue pointing to the role of climate change is how these technologies sometimes disappeared during warm climate phases. We see this happen in southern Africa, for example, where stone blades and bone awls appear during a cold climate phase around 75,000 years ago. With a return to milder environmental conditions 60,000 years ago, hide-cutting blade tools and hide-piercing bone awls disappear from the archaeological record, only to reappear later towards the coldest phase 22,000 years ago, the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Apparently, Stone Age people wore clothes in cold weather, and went naked when clothes were not needed. Clothes became a social necessity for people more recently, perhaps after many generations of wearing clothes on a regular basis, mainly in the colder middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere from the LGM onwards. Once clothes replaced body painting for personal decoration and display, the need to wear clothes was uncoupled from climate.

Australia:

The pattern of clothing in Aboriginal Australia can challenge a number of cherished theories about the origin of clothing. For one, routine Aboriginal nakedness implies that humans didn’t invent clothes due to some inherent sense of modesty. Neither, as hunter-gatherers, did we need clothes for the sake of appearance. Along with African peoples such as the San who used antelope cloaks for warmth, habitually naked foragers relied on traditional techniques such as body painting, tattooing and scarification to dress themselves, and they got dressed up more elaborately for ceremonies and other special occasions, without clothes.

Australian evidence, or absence of evidence, is likewise pertinent to the origins of agriculture. It’s no coincidence that neither textile clothing nor agriculture featured in the traditional Aboriginal lifestyles.

Clothing and the Anthropocene:

When the Pleistocene ended 12,000 years ago, there was a new development with clothes. Global temperatures increased dramatically and, along with the melting of continental ice sheets and the rise in sea levels, environments became wetter and more humid. Adapting to these moist conditions, people shifted to making their clothes with fabrics woven from natural fibres such as wool and cotton. Compared with leathers and furs, fabrics are better at managing moisture. The woven structure is permeable to air and moisture and, in warm climates, wind penetration can help to cool the body. Moisture from higher sweating rates could evaporate more easily from the skin and also from the fabric, adding to the cooling effect. The warm and wet period after the last ice age, called the Holocene, coincides with a momentous transition, the beginning of the Neolithic era when people started to engage in agriculture.

The agricultural transition was a turning point in humanity’s relationship to the natural world, altering the environment profoundly and enabling the rise of cities and civilisations. My surprising suggestion is that there was a connection between the textile revolution and the agricultural revolution. By implication, this technological change in clothes led to the Anthropocene, a phase of humanly induced global warming that started with agriculture and was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution.

Paradigm shift?

The prevailing narrative in anthropology privileges food in the transition to agriculture, and the whole concept of hunting and gathering refers essentially, if not exclusively, to the food economy.

Nevertheless, anthropologists including Robert Kelly at the University of Wyoming have been saying for some time, and for a number of reasons, that the hunter-gatherer category has reached the end of its useful life. Yet we’re still encumbered with outdated food-focused terms such as foragers and hunter-gatherers to denote pre-agricultural lifestyles. By definition, the shift from foraging to farming must have begun in the food economy. Not necessarily so, in my view.

Aside from a paradigm shift, the textile hypothesis invites a critical re-evaluation of the evidence we have about early agriculture. Archaeological evidence for textile fibres in early agricultural contexts has been present all along but overlooked, and this evidence for fibres does provide food for thought. [...]

The popular notion of agriculture as a superior food strategy reflects anachronistic perceptions of foraging as a harsh, precarious lifestyle. In contrast, archaeologists have now recognised the serious risks of famine and malnutrition in the early farming communities, and confirmed the relative ease of traditional foraging lifestyles, even in marginal environments such as Australian deserts. Anthropologists realise that foraging for food has many advantages, including the flexibility and security that derives from exploiting a wide resource base. These benefits highlight another enigma, namely, that many Neolithic societies continued to rely on foraging for much of their food supply, sometimes for thousands of years after they adopted agricultural practices. Similarly, evidence from northern Europe suggests that forager communities were inclined to resist the spread of agriculture.

It just keeps going and going.

Directly and indirectly, textiles tipped the balance in favour of agriculture. Food production did become a dominant feature, with more plant and animal species domesticated to feed humans. Even then, as the archaeologist Brian Hayden points out, agricultural foodstuffs often served as surplus products for feasting on special occasions, not everyday food staples. As the main reason for agriculture in the first instance, food alone is insufficient and problematic. An alternative textile scenario might sound implausible, requiring a revolution in how we look at the agricultural revolution. Yet this scenario does echo the analogous role of textiles in the Industrial Revolution, a pivotal point in history when factory-style production of cotton textiles was an impetus for industrialisation. Ironically, if both agriculture and industrialisation were intertwined with clothes, this would mean a human adaptation to cold weather could ultimately make the whole world warmer.

Hey, GPT-3, analyze this!

Reading The Human Swarm 8: What about the USA? [and in view of 1/6]

This is the 8th post in my extended consideration of Mark Moffett's The Human Swarm (2019). In it I consider the current polarized political situation in the USA. The events in Washington, D.C., of 1/6 make Moffett's thoughts on group identity and coherence more urgent.

Having finished chapter 24, “The Rise of Ethnicities”, I am within two chapters and a conclusion (which I’ve already read) of finishing Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm and am feeling the need to step back and reflect a bit. My primary reason for reading the book is, of course, that I’m interested in the material. But I’m also interested in what’s happening in the world around me, in particular, in American politics, which has become highly polarized over the last decade or two. What might The Human Swarm have to say about that?

Consider the following pair of tweets:

I totally agree. I can't make common cause with liars, cheats, people who glorify superstition and bigotry, and whose idea of morality is micromanaging other people's genitals. I have no intention in living in a country with a larcenous mad dictator. There can be no unity.

— Lyn Gerry (@LynGerry1) December 14, 2019

There’s a lot of that going around and it seems to be getting worse.

Identity is one theme in the book, one I’ve not addressed directly in these notes. Moffett notes that in even the simplest small-scale social bands, identity is an issue; individuals have to balance their need for a unique identity within the group with the group’s need for overall cultural coherence among its members. In larger societies different groups work to maintain their identities in the context of the overall identity of the group. And when a group’s need to maintain its own identity begins to infringe on the requirements of society-wide coherence pressures may bring about a split within the group.

Moffett discusses that dynamic within various animal societies and in human society. The question I’ve been thinking about is this: Is that where America is now, at the brink of dissolution? I don’t know.

Here’s a quick and crude look at the American state. It’s short, but nonetheless I think it’s at the right scale to outline the process. We’re talking about a long-term society-wide historical process. At this scale all the complexities of events fall away or, perhaps a better formulation, are absorbed in the global dynamics of the process.

Let’s call the nation’s founding set of circumstances the Originating Dispensation (OD). The OD consists, on the one hand, of a set of documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution chief among them, but they’re surrounded by various supporting documents, for example, the Federalist Papers. On the other hand, the OD also consists of a multiplicity of facts on the ground, chief among which are the specific groups of people who participated in the process. While the founding documents may have aspired to universal principles, the facts on the ground privileged males of means among all others, males over females, and whites over everyone else.

The OD was mightily stressed by the Civil War, but managed to pull things together and lasted for another century, reaching its high point in the 1950s. By that time a bunch of amendments had been made to the constitution, among others: slavery was eliminated and discriminated outlawed, incomes were taxed, and women were granted the right to vote. Through it all white men, mostly Protestant, ran the country, more or less. They formed the dominant culture. Then things began to unravel in the 60s, the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war movement, feminism, hippies and so forth.

The OD is still unraveling and I don't see how it can be put back together. Humpty Dumpty has fallen. Everyone genuflects to the Constitution, but the will to make it hold seems terribly weak.

Now let’s add just a bit of detail, just a bit.

During the fifties the country was still coasting on the national unity that had formed during World War II, the most extensive war that world had seen, one fought across all the continents of the Old World. That solidarity was, in effect, the founding crucible of the Civil Rights Movement, as though the nation was at last strong enough and secure enough to grant, in fact, the rights which had been extended to African American in law almost a century ago.

Let’s look at the last paragraph of chapter 25, “Divided We Stand” (yes, I’ve glanced ahead, p. 343):

Societies contain ethnicities and races that stick together despite the members’ prejudices about each other. The usual view, voiced by William Sumner more than a century ago, is that friction with outsiders draws a society together. Clearly that’s not always true. The external forces that promote civil peace primarily galvanize the dominant people while often straining their ties to a society’s other ethnicities when those groups are regarded as part of the problem. This tension among the members can cause a kind of social autoimmune disease, turning a society against itself.

In passing civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s did the dominant group overreach? Of course its dominance was weakened as well by pursuing war in Vietnam and thereby alienating the young, the sons and daughters of the men and women who’d waged the Second World War. I note in passing, as Moffett did, that Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps at the beginning of The Second World War (p. 338). The heirs of the OD weren’t fully confidence of their dominance.

The turmoil of the 60s and 70s gave way to the so-called culture wars of the 80s and 90s. The force of the nation’s founding documents, symbols, and myths was no longer strong enough to define a superordinate identity with which all citizens could identify. And so forth and so on through a parade of events, the Clinton impeachment, the Supreme Court decision that allowed George Bush to become President, the attack of 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror, fought to no end by an all volunteer military, Obama’s quixotic victory, and then the astonishing victory of Donald Trump, social media virtuoso and friend to Russian oligarchs. What would the 50s think of that? After all, the political atmosphere of the 50s was dominated by the Cold War against the predecessors of those oligarchs. But, in the world of identities and nations, is that really any stranger that the country’s ‘special relationship’ – to borrow a phrase from a different geopolitical context – with Japan?

I have no idea how that story will work out. The forces of cultural identity and economic interest are far more involved than those involved in the climate. At least we have half an idea about how to model the climate, we understand the underlying physical principles even if we can’t get enough data or computing power to run a really high quality simulation.

What are the basic principles underlying the international geopolitics of cultural identity? Moffet is telling us where to look.

Addendum 12.16.19: From Today's NYTimes,  Max Fisher, In Era of Hardening Identities, Trump Order on Jews Kindles Questions Old and New:

President Trump’s executive order targeting anti-Semitic and anti-Israel speech on campuses might be framed as a narrow legal matter, but it has touched on a defining issue of our time: Who belongs, and who decides?

The order is ambiguous as to whether it sees Jews as a distinct nationality or a minority race, but either interpretation aligns with Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with defining, and policing, the boundaries of identity.

And the order’s creation of special status for Jews, but not other religious minorities, follows Mr. Trump’s habit of welcoming some demographic groups into the rights and protections of American identity and excluding others. Tellingly, the singling out of Jews for special protection in the order left some feeling still more exposed.

Such preoccupations with identity have animated not just the Trump administration but much of the global populist backlash. Leaders and movements across the democratic world are increasingly focused on enforcing narrow national identities of the sort that defined the late 19th and early 20th centuries. [...]

What is National Identity?

The concept, scarcely 200 years old, holds that humanity is divided among fixed communities, each defined by a common language, ethnicity and homeland. Those communities are nations; membership is one’s national identity. The core tenet of nationalism so pervades today’s world that it feels almost self-evident: Any nation of people should have a country, and any country should consist of a nation.

The concept of an overarching identity tied to one’s country was invented not by ancient poets or warriors but by 19th-century European governments. As monarchies teetered and the church declined, governments saw engineering common languages and ethnic heritages as a way to justify their rule over polyglot empires, as well as an opportunity to marshal their populations for collective pursuits like industry or war. [...]

The world, unable to unwind a global order built on national identity, sought to manage its worst tendencies by promoting cultural pluralism, international integration and protections for minorities and migrants. These values did not so much replace national identity as sit uneasily alongside it, eventually leading to a backlash.

A Myth of Africa: Ritual Structure in Dusk of Dawn

The headnote aside, these notes date back to the 1990s. For those interested in formal matters, this is about ritual patterning in a piece of autobiographical non-fiction. [I'd originally posted this in 2010. I'm bumping it to the top of the queue because it's about time.]

Serendipity, fate, kismet, synchronicity, or just plain coincidence. Call it what you will.

I’d been planning to post these notes ever since I started my series on race in the symbolic universe. A couple of years ago Aaron Bady had a post at The Valve on the Western construction of Africa. And so this post of mine becomes something of an oblique counterpoint to that. While it too is about a Western construction of Africa, it is a specific construction, by a single individual, the great W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois was born in New England and died in Ghana. He was a Pan-Africanist whose need for a symbolic Africa was different from that which Bady describes in his post.

* * * * *

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. Dusk of Dawn. In W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings, ed. by Nathan Huggins, Library of American © 1986 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, pp. 549 - 802. First published in 1940 by Harcourt Brace.

Ritual Structure

No autobiography is a simple chronological account of the facts. There is always a plot, an argument, some special pleading, a mythological/symbolic dimension. This is very obviously so with Dusk of Dawn -- Du Bois tells us as much several times, first in the opening "Apology."

I believe that Dusk of Dawn has an overall form corresponding to ritual structure as expounded by Van Gennep and Durkheim. The center section of the book, in which De Bois describes his trip to Africa, corresponds to the marginal phase of ritual where the celebrants have left the secular world for the sacred but have not yet returned. It is in the center of the book, chapter 5 out of 9, that we find the romantic evocation of Africa.

Here’s how I explained this standard ritual structure in my essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

In “Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time” Edmund Leach has described the ritual structure of Durkheim's “states of the moral person” (Leach 1965a). They are: 1) secular life, 2) separation from the secular world and transition to 3) the marginal state where the ‘moral person’ is in a world discontinuous from the ordinary world, often being regarded as being dead, and from which a return to the secular is made by a process of 4) aggregation or desacralization, often symbolized by rebirth. Arnold van Gennep talks of separation, transition, and incorporation in The Rites of Passage (Van Gennep 1960). The ritual sequence involves two realms of being, the secular and the sacred, and is designed to order the transition of initiates between these two realms. The ontological problem is isomorphic to that of hypnosis. Secular life corresponds to ordinary waking consciousness; separation corresponds to induction; margin or transition corresponds to trance; and aggregation or incorporation to release – which leaves the person back at the initial state, ordinary consciousness, or secular life. Hypnosis and ritual both involve ontological transition.

This is the pattern that Northrup Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, associated with New Comedy in ancient Greece, and which Frye C. L. Barber have used in analysing Shakespeare’s comedies. It is thus a pattern with a strong literary pedigree.

What’s surprising about finding it in Dusk of Dawn is that that work is not a work of fiction, it is an autobiography, a work of fact. Fictions can be patterned to suit the needs of the author. Lives are not so readily patterned, what happened is what happened.

But one need not tell what happened in the order in which it happened. One can change the order in the telling while remaining truthful about the dates so that the reader can supply the chronological order. And that is what Du Bois does. His displaces his first trip to Africa, which took place later in his life, to an earlier part of his narrative. It is that displacement that signals to the reader that something special is going on here.

Here’s the chronology. The first four chapters take us to 1910. Then, ruoghly 15 pages into Chapter 5, Du Bois tells of his trip to Africa, which began late in 1923. Thus he has skipped 13 years in his chronology. This chapter and the next two are discursive and expository in nature, not narrative. It isn’t until chapter 8 that Du Bois rejoins the narrative, which he does at the point where he left off in Chapter 4, 1910.

Here then is the overall scheme of the book, with the secular/sacred designations being mine:

SECULAR

1. The Plot
2. A New England Boy and Reconstruction
3. Education in the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century
4. Science and Empire

SACRED

5. The Concept of Race
6. The White World
7. The Colored World Within

SECULAR

8. Propaganda and World War
9. Revolution

The rest of this post consists of my notes on those three central chapters. While I’ve touched them up a bit here and there, they’re still pretty much raw notes. As such they jump around a bit and, in particular, invoke Freud in a way that makes sense to me – after all, they are my notes – but may not make sense to anyone else. For that I apologize. Still, you should be able to get the drift.

Kisangani 2150, some materials for plotting routes to the future

Back on July 10 I announced the (mere) possibility of writing a book that takes Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 as its point of departure. Call it Kisangani 2150 (reconstructing civilization on a new model). I’m still liking the idea. Will I actually write the novel? As I said at the end of the post, probably not. But perhaps I’ll do something, maybe even some kind of collaborative web project. But who knows?

But “Kisangani 2150” is a useful rubric (a word, I believe, that I have from the late Dick Macksey) under which to gather materials about the future – something I think about a lot. By materials I mean both my own thoughts, but also the thoughts of others. The idea, as I indicated in that first post, is to imagine a post climate apocalypse world more or less within the parameters Robinson established in his novel, but nonetheless along somewhat different lines. After all, he set his novel in New York City. Kisangani is in the central Congo, a very different world. What were they likely doing in Kisangani when the events of New York 2140 transpired? And once those events had (quite possibly) altered the course of history, what would have been happening in Kisangani ten years after?

It’s the level of detail that’s important, down to the thoughts of individual people. Since Robinson’s already done such a good job of imaginatively realizing a possible future I can’t see any point in my trying to do it again from scratch. So, take that world as given, and work within and around it, from some other perspective.

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking about the Kisangani 2150 Project, as I’m now calling it. What materials do I have readily to hand?

Let me tell you about Zeal

There’s my friend Zeal. I wrote about him in 3 Quarks Daily: World Island: Zeal means hope [The World’s Got Talent]. He’s had this idea he calls World Island, which I’ve blogged about. You can find some documents at Scribd, PDFs of two PowerPoint presentations and the executive summary of the proposal we’d submitted to the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (aka GIPEC). He even submitted a proposal to the MacArthur Foundation fairly recently, though I was no longer working on the project at that time. World Island? Think of it as a combination of the best features of the United Nations, Disney World, a kid’s rumpus room, the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Japanese exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

I worked closely with Zeal for, say, three, four, five, years and have kept in touch with him. I went with him to many meetings with all kinds of people, people who were interested in the World island project. Many of them are the sorts of folks who’d be working at building the kind of world I’m imagining for Kisangani 2150. And they’ve got friends, children, cousins, nieces, and so forth. So I’m imagining chains of resonance emanating from Zeal in the early 21st century, rippling out over the next century, and then coalescing in Kisangani in the middle of the 22nd century.

How did I meet Zeal? At a meeting at Columbia University. I was introduced to him by Takeshi Utsumi, a Japanese American who has spent three or four decades traveling in the developing world on behalf of what he calls the Global University System. The idea is to funnel Japanese development money two centers in the developing world interested in distance education. Maybe one of those centers is in Kisangani, now. Maybe it persists through 2150. Who knows?

And then there’s Paul Sladkus and his Good News Broadcasting. More connections to conjure with.

Tyler Cowen’s Yonas project

Tyler Cowen is an economist who blogs at Marginal Revolution. He also travels a great deal. Last year he traveled to Ethiopia – in Africa, but a different part of Africa from Kisangani – where he met a man he calls Yonas (not his real name). He decided to donate the royalties of a recent book to Yonas:

So having written Stubborn Attachments, I now wish to live the book, so to speak. I am donating the royalties from the book to a man I met in Ethiopia on a factfinding trip earlier this year, I shall call him Yonas [not his real name].

He is a man of modest means, but he aspires to open his own travel business. He has a young and growing family, and also a mother to support. He is also hoping to buy a larger house to accommodate his growing family. In his life, he faces stresses – financial and otherwise — that I have never had to confront. When I visited his home, his wife had just had a new baby girl, but Yonas’s income depends on the vicissitudes of tourist demand, and by American standards it is in any case low.

I met Yonas when he served as my travel guide around Lalibela. I spent a full day with him, touring the underground, rock-hewn stone churches of that city. He struck me as reliable, conscientious, well-informed, and I was impressed by the quality of his English, which he had acquired on his own. He also took me by his village to meet his family, and they performed a coffee ceremony for me, cooking freshly ground coffee beans (it was delicious, something I had never imagined). Based on my impressions from that day, I believe an investment in Yonas will help his entire family and perhaps his broader community as well. Since then, he and I have kept in touch by email.

As another way of “living the content” of my book, I will be sending the funds via Stripe, Stripe Press being the publisher of this book. Stripe, a payments company, really has made it easy to send money across borders, thereby helping to knit the whole world together. I hope someday Yonas is able to apply for incorporation through Atlas, a Stripe service that helps entrepreneurs incorporate in Delaware, with his travel business, or with whatever else he may do.

What if Yonas succeeds in establishing his travel business? What if it is wildly successful and establishes offices throughout Africa, perhaps even in Kisangani?

* * * * *

You get the idea. On the ground NOW, but one can imagine plausible chains of resonance reaching to Kisangani in 2150.

What’s the key difference between the MacArthur Fellow’s Program and the (new) Emergent Ventures program? [TALENT SEARCH]

A couple weeks ago I was blogging away on The MacArthur Fellowship program and the general problem of finding talent. I was going full steam ahead in the direction of an abstract characterization of the problem when I got side-tracked. The next post was supposed to be that abstract characterization, to be followed by one on the role of culture in the mix. I figured that would be my last post on the subject.

We’re not there yet.

So let’s cut to the chase: What’s the key difference between the MacArthur Fellow’s Program and the Emergent Ventures program out of the Mercatus Center at George Mason?

The dialog begins

Well, for one thing, the MacFellows program has a lot of money and has been around while EV is just new and not so heavily funded.

OK.

MacFellows has this complicated system of nominators and review and all that while EV is mostly Tyler Cowen & friends.

OK. Keep going.

MacFellows gives you five years of money, no strings attached, no taxes to pay. EV...not sure what they give, but...

OK on MacFellows. The payouts not clear on EV, but they don’t have as much money at their disposal. Don’t know about the tax thing, but I doubt it. And, yes, minimal reporting.

But what are these folks after?

Well, MacFellows is looking for the best, unconventional creatives, those with GREAT potential...

Yeah, yeah, we know that. And we also know that they mostly pick the same good people everybody else picks. Sure, there are exceptions, Steven Wolfram for example, and that juggler, what’s his name, Moschen, Michael Moschen. What’s Cowen after?

Same thing, no? It says it right here on the web page, “talented individuals with unique ideas for changing the world.”

Well, yes, that’s what says. But he’s after moonshots.

Yeah, but that’s must a metaphor for the same folks the MacFellows are looking for, no?

Well, you see, I don’t think so. Cowen has said they expect a high rate of failure. In fact, he’s said they’d be doing something wrong if they didn’t get a high rate of failure. [About two minutes into this podcast.]

Sounds like he’s serious about taking risks.

Right. Whereas the MacFellows track record makes it pretty clear they’re not into taking risks. It’s pretty hard to imagine that they'd say that expect most of their fellowships to fail or that they'd even secretly think it.

So here’s the thing. Cowen clearly has venture capital as his model, seed or angel investment at that. Those guys expect most of their investments to fail. But if 10% succeed, and one or two them does go to the moon, they’re doing good. MacFellows is the standard philanthropic model with a few bells and whistles: five years, health insurance if you need it, no taxes and you can do whatever you want, including building a swimming pool or blowing it at the craps table in a 3rd rate Atlantic City casino. Plus all the secrecy and intrigue, which makes for great PR.

Yeah, that’s really different.

And there’s something else. Like I’d asked before, what are they after? Sure, Mercatus has that boilerplate about talented individuals bla bla bla. Same as MacFellows boilerplate. But as far as I can see, that’s all the MacFellows has, their boilerplate and, of course, their gang of secret nominators. Tyler’s got something else.

Tell us, Batman, tell us?

No, Robin, I won’t. I want you to dig for it. Read a bit. Actually, read a lot.

A lot?

Looking for holes

Yeah, I’m afraid so. He’s been blogging for years and written a lot of books. That’s what he’s looking for. Well, not exactly. Rather, what he’s looking for is holes in all that stuff, gaps that need filling.

Gaps that need filling?

Yeah, I know. It’s tough. Lotta gaps out there. Some need filling, some don’t.

Man, you’re out of it? You been smoking some of that Cheech and Chong?

No no hold on hold on. We’re getting there. Some gaps you pour water in them and the water just drains away. No matter how much water, it disappears. But other gaps, a little water, a little eye of newt, and Shazam! Everthing’s coming up roses.

You’re loosing me.

See, it’s like Lotus 1-2-3. Personal computers had been around since the early 70s, all kinds of personal computers, Apple, Atari, Amiga, North Star, IBM PC, Cromenco, Compaq, Commodore, Osborne, a jillion kinds and most of them never went anywhere except down the toilet, all water into one of those infinite gaps. The adults in the room dismissed it as a toy, a thing for hobbyists.

But then along comes Mitchell Kapor and he launches 1-2-3 in 1983. All of a sudden...

The adults realize, “Hey! we need this!” I get it, it filled one of those fertile gaps.

Yes yes.

And PC sales pick up. Now we’ve got a new industry.