et cetera

In the latest issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion there is an article by Amy DeRogatis with the title “ “Born Again Is a Sexual Term”: Demons, STDs, and God’s Healing Sperm”, about “the intersection between sexuality and spiritfilled bodies in American Evangelicalism”. The article is oriented around a book with the title Holy Sex: God’s Purpose and Plan for Our Sexuality, which argues “that sexually transmitted diseases are, in fact, demons lodged in genetic material that can be transferred through body fluids and bloodlines”. Casting around for more information, I found the Google Books page—where it is categorised under Fiction / Erotica. Exactly.

Further searching reveals that one of the authors of the book, Terry Wier, is scientifically literate not only in molecular biology, but also in the neurobiology and cognitive science of human sexuality. Here is his technique for turning a homosexual into a heterosexual¹—

I dedicate to Wier this passage from Schiller²—

1. From Wayne R. Besen, Anything but Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth, Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 139–140 [↩]
2. From Anna Swanwick (Trans), The Maid of Orleans, in The Works of Frederick Schiller, Bell and Daldy, London, 1872, Volume 3, Historical Dramas, p. 396. [↩]

If you’d like to make a professional philosopher uncomfortable, try asking for clear examples of our discipline’s achievements in settling important questions:

Katie Couric: I’m just going to ask you one more time—not to belabor the point. Specific examples in the last 2600 years of sustained philosophical investigation…

Philosopher (visibly straining to look upbeat): I’ll… try to find ya some, and I’ll bring ‘em to ya!

David Christensen, “Disagreement as Evidence: The Epistemology of Controversy“, Philosophy Compass, forthcoming.

(Christensen is riffing, of course, on the train-wreck that was this).

A summary of the case histories published by Amatus Lusitanus (1511–1568) in his Centuriae, adapted from Paulo Fontoura, “Neurological practice in the Centuriae of Amatus Lusitanus“, in Brain, Vol. 132, No. 2, February 2009, pp. 296–308. [URI]

Couric: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.

Palin: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…

Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

Palin: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.

(Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin, 25 September 2008).

Senior officials of Russian energy company Gazprom, including personal associates of Vladimir Putin, met in Anchorage with Alaska’s Department of Natural Resources to discuss investing in energy projects in the state. Governor Sarah Palin said that she did not know about the meeting. Putin’s black labrador was given a satellite-monitoring collar. “She looks sad,” said Russian Deputy Minister Sergei Ivanov. “Her free life is over.” “She is wagging her tail,” said Putin. “That means she likes it.”

(Sam Stark, “Weekly Review“, in Harper’s, 21 October 2008).

In 1975, Andy Warhol peered into the future and saw . . . Damien Hirst? ‘Business Art is the step that comes after Art,’ Warhol wrote in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Not only was it OK for artists to make as much money as possible, but ‘making money is art’ and ‘good business is the best art.’ At the time Warhol was the master of Business Art—he established Andy Warhol Enterprises in 1957, and films, Interview magazine, books and TV programmes were to follow—but his operation was small beer by contemporary standards. Today, artists like Hirst set the bar for ‘good business’. On 15 and 16 September he bypassed his two major dealers (White Cube and Gagosian) and auctioned 223 pieces of new work directly at Sotheby’s. The sale beat its already sky-high estimates by a substantial margin, bringing a total of £111.5 million, ten times the old record for a single-artist auction, set by Picasso with 88 works in 1993. During those same two days Wall Street melted down.

(Hal Foster, “The Medium is the Market“, in The London Review of Books, Vol. 30, No. 19, 9 October 2008, p. 23).

The British funeral-services industry faced a backlog of hundreds of corpses as undertakers, unable to obtain credit, refused to perform burials for the poor until the government guarantees reimbursements.

(Paul Ford, “Weekly Review“, Harper’s, 14 October 2008).

And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.

(Exodus 32:24).

Damien Hirst, The Golden Calf.
(White bullock in formaldehyde, hooves and horns cast in solid 18-carat gold, sold at auction for £10.3 million on 16 September 2008).

Recent blog posts by Michael Schaffer and Hendrik Herzberg nicely characterise the feeling of futility provoked by trying to track and understand all of the variables involved in the ongoing US election. It is very difficult to get a sense both of political events, and of the media and popular reactions to those events. Still, perhaps predictions are possible without understanding. Indeed, there is very good reason to think that the best available predictions in a case of this kind will go independently of understanding (see here and here for why). Unfortunately, the depression associated with attempting to understand politics is not lightened by examining the statistical factors behind political judgement instead. To wit:

Alexander Todorov, Anesu N. Mandisodza, Amir Goren, and Crystal C. Hall, “Inferences of Competence from Faces Predict Election Outcomes“, in Science, Vol. 308, No. 5878, 10 June 2005, pp. 1623–1626.

We show that inferences of competence based solely on facial appearance predicted the outcomes of U.S. congressional elections better than chance (e.g., 68.8% of the Senate races in 2004) and also were linearly related to the margin of victory. These inferences were specific to competence and occurred within a 1-second exposure to the faces of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective trait inferences can contribute to voting choices, which are widely assumed to be based primarily on rational and deliberative considerations.

Now of course, good polling methods will do better than facial appearance judgements with respect to predicting outcomes, and do not produce any depressing thoughts, unless we include the depressing thought that these polls tend to be close even in elections such as this one where the superior candidate is clear. (Still, I would be interested in seeing a test of facial appearance judgements on Obama and McCain). Even better than polling, however, are prediction markets:

Joyce E. Berg, Forrest D. Nelson and Thomas A. Rietz, “Prediction market accuracy in the long run“, in International Journal of Forecasting, Vol. 24, No. 2, April-June 2008, pp. 285–300.

“Prediction markets” are designed specifically to forecast events such as elections. Though election prediction markets have been being conducted for almost twenty years, to date nearly all of the evidence on efficiency compares election eve forecasts with final pre-election polls and actual outcomes. Here, we present evidence that prediction markets outperform polls for longer horizons. We gather national polls for the 1988 through 2004 U.S. Presidential elections and ask whether either the poll or a contemporaneous Iowa Electronic Markets vote-share market prediction is closer to the eventual outcome for the two-major-party vote split. We compare market predictions to 964 polls over the five Presidential elections since 1988. The market is closer to the eventual outcome 74% of the time. Further, the market significantly outperforms the polls in every election when forecasting more than 100 days in advance.

This is from a special issue of the journal on election forecasting, in which the introduction (published online on 25 March 2008) to the issue concludes:

To summarize, of the forecasters here who brave a clear prediction, all name the Democrats. Of course, these are mostly speculations about the forecasts that will be firmed up by later in the summer and early fall. Even so, they suggest that this may be a good year for the Democrats. But when, as forecasters, we climb out on the limb, we know it may get sawed off.

For times when the drum of expert judgements becomes deafening, the graph for the Iowa Electronic Markets 2008 US Presidential Election Winner Takes All Market can be seen here. Free markets might not be good for economies, but—in contrast to the human brain—they are surprisingly good at synthesising information.

The pastor whose prayer Sarah Palin says helped her to become governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witchhunt against a Kenyan woman who he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells.

Hannah Strange, “Palin linked electoral success to prayer of Kenyan witchhunter“, in Times Online, 16 September 2008.

“And face it—McCain and Weaver were maniacal about Ralph Reed and Norquist. They were sticking little pins in dolls because those guys had cost him South Carolina”.

Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr, “McCain and Team Have Many Ties to Gambling Industry“, in New York Times, 28 September 2008.

Mr. Fish, “A Cartoon“, in Harper’s, 26 September 2008.

Paul Doyle, “Chelsea’s potency uninterrupted by limp Bordeaux”, in The Guardian, 17 September 2008.

In 1677, the most unpopular law of the old customary code was finally abolished in France. Congrès was defined by the Frutière dictionary as: “the practice of coitus ordered by decree of an ecclesiastical judge, performed in the presence of surgeons and matrons, to discover whether a man is potent, with a view to dissolving a marriage.”

The reason it was scrapped had, of course, nothing to do with public decency. Rather it was because the authorities belatedly came to realise that the exercise did not elicit conclusive proof of impotence. “Our organs do not always obey us when we would like them to, still less so in front of judges,” blubbed one contemporary, as quoted in Nina Epton’s delicious 1959 opus Love and the French.

I emphasise that these are the first two paragraphs of a review of a sporting match.

In related news, international voters prefer Obama to McCain by 4-1, and I hereby announce that I will be voting in this election, by proxy, since Chad and I resolved an argument over the obligation to vote by coming to the agreement that he will vote as I direct him to. Now let me think. The man with one car or the man with thirteen cars? The man who was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, or the man who graduated 894th out of a class of 899 at the Naval Academy? A vice presidential candidate who is a long-time member and current chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, or one who argues for her foreign policy credentials on the grounds that “you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska”? An energy policy grounded on the principle that government incentives are required to transition to green energy sources, or a policy grounded on a belief in the unfettered free market principles that have the US economy doing so well right now (with a vice presidential candidate who has said that “I’m not one though who would attribute [global warming] to being man-made”, and who when elected mayor of a small town repeatedly asked about the possibility of censoring books in the public library)? It’s a tough choice, America.

Roberto Bolaño would have had a lot of fun with this–

Scott Alan Carson, “The Stature and Body Mass of Mexicans in the Nineteenth-Century United States“, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, Autumn 2008, pp. 211-232.

Abstract
Data taken from nineteenth-century American prison records reveal that the statures of Mexicans born in Mexico declined, whereas the statures of Mexicans born in the United States increased. The body mass indexes of both Mexicans born in Mexico and in the United States, however, remained approximately constant throughout the nineteenth century. The evidence suggests that even though the two groups shared a common background, their biological living conditions differed markedly.

Data

This list seems to leave off the occupation poet. But then, in which category would it go?

There is an excellent article in the latest Harper’s by Alec Wilkinson, a veteran staff writer at The New Yorker, describing the work of a husband and wife team who spend nearly two hundred days a year travelling America with a boat to search for the drowned. This is Wilkinson’s first piece published with Harper’s, and I like very much that the brief biographical note appended to the article does not mention The New Yorker.

An aside.
One of these days I will write a long essay here about Harper’s and The New Yorker, explaining why Harper’s is clearly superior, flawed though it is by the omnipresence of Lewis Lapham’s imperious ego.

Another aside.
Lazily entering the phrase “new yorker” into my browser search bar just now, I forgot that I had it temporarily pointed at the OED, and discovered that the second possible disambiguation there is:

B. adj. (attrib.). Found in or characteristic of the magazine The New Yorker (founded 1925), noted for its urbane and sharply observed view of American life.

Followed by the following quotes:

1934 Fortune Aug. 75/1 No advertising man is believed, by the editors, ever to have understood a New Yorker joke. 1948 Hearst’s Internat. May 175/1 Literary critics and editors of other magazines are always referring to ‘The New Yorker style of writing’. 1959 Times Lit. Suppl. 2 Jan. 4/2 He surveys the established Old Guard.., the new ‘realists’.., the New Yorker School. 1992 New Yorker 3 Feb. 65/1 (advt.) The design is distinguished and very New Yorker: Eustace Tilley-patterned endpapers.

(A search for “harper’s” results in the suggestion to try harping, vbl. n.)

End asides.
One of the most remarkable sections of the article is a passage briefly enumerating the stories of the bodies this couple has found. The following is a small part of this: