“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

— Michelangelo, born this day in 1475

“Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”

‘A maverick romantic lyricist in a turbulent age’

If you don’t know Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, then by all means introduce yourself.  But he left us a great deal more enchanting, hypnotic music.  The Cello Sonata is a new favorite of mine: just when you are trying to decide whether the theme is meditative or just brooding, a surprise pops out of nowhere.  The Canzone of the Piano Concerto has been recast as a popular flute solo, but I think the original is even better.

Samuel Barber would have been 100 years old today.

It takes only a handful of individuals to really make a difference...

In a study published in Proc Natl Acad, researchers from the UCSD and Harvard provide the first laboratory evidence that cooperative behavior is contagious and that it spreads from person to person to person. When people benefit from kindness they ‘pay it forward’ by helping others who were not originally involved, and this creates a cascade of cooperation that influences dozens more in a social network.

— Press release in Science Daily
Research article by James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis

I don’t have much faith in these lab experiments in psychology - people behave differently from in the real world, and the sample population of people who partricipate in psych studies is not representative.  Nevertheless, in this case I think they’ve got it right.
— JJM

On the resilience of joy

In November of 1755, Lisbon was devastated by an earthquake that left the city in ruins, with more than 10,000 dead. 

700 Km away in Paris, Voltaire found his philosophical tenets shaken.  How can anyone believe in an all-powerful, beneficent God?

Voltaire wrote a poem explicating his newfound pessimism.  In a preface, he wrote

The author of the poem on The Disaster of Lisbon is not an adversary of the illustrious [Alexander] Pope, whom he has always admired and loved: he thinks like him on practically all matters; but, pierced to the heart by the misfortunes of mankind, he wishes to attack the abuse that can be made of that ancient axiom ‘All is for the best’. He adopts in its place that sad and more ancient truth, recognized by all men, that ‘There is evil upon the earth’; he declares that the phrase ‘All is for the best’, taken in a strict sense and without hope of an afterlife, is merely an insult to the miseries of our existence.

Voltaire’s poem occasioned a controversy between him and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, in a long ‘Reply to M. de Voltaire’, explained pessimism such as Voltaire’s as being the product of the unnatural and unhealthy life of the pampered and privileged intellectual. Ask a humble craftsman or a Swiss peasant whether evil predominated over good in human life, as Voltaire suggests, and you would get a very different answer. 
—   Read article and full text of the poem in English and in French

Ce monde, ce théâtre et d’orgueil et d’erreur
Est plein d’infortunés qui parlent de bonheur.

In this theater of hubris, amid gaunt devastation
Live many a poor soul who speaks of elation.
— Voltaire

Turning a data explosion into a knowledge explosion

Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West—our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data—as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world’s civilizations, and many of the world’s most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome.  

— from a New Republic article by Lisbet Rausing 

The way that information is managed touches all areas of life. At the turn of the 20th century new flows of information through channels such as the telegraph and telephone supported mass production. Today the availability of abundant data enables companies to cater to small niche markets anywhere in the world. Economic production used to be based in the factory, where managers pored over every machine and process to make it more efficient. Now statisticians mine the information output of the business for new ideas.

— from an Economist article by Kenneth Cukier

“The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see the rebel’s outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage--anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself.”

—Chris Hedges

Paracelsus

TRUTH is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
This perfect, clear perception—which is truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.

— Robert Browning (more of the poem here)

Bach, continued...

Imagine Bach at the end of his life.  He had been a devoted head of family, who lost his much beloved first wife at a tender age, and endured, too, deaths of ten of his twenty children.  He had a sense of his legacy, though few of his peers appreciated it, and he had worked assiduously to prepare the gifts he would leave to future generations. At 65, he had weak lungs, and was completely blind.  An operation to try to recover his sight had turned out disastrously.

But his disposition remained unfailingly positive to the end.  Bach had a mathematical mind, combined with a deep and literal faith in the Christian God. He was ready to meet his Creator.

Unable to write, he dictated to his son-in-law his final creation, a contrapuntal work based on a simple chorale melody, I step before thy throne, O God.  The transparent serenity of this piece is a testament to Bach’s unwavering faith.  There is no hint of tragedy or even of drama, not a trace of self-consciousness.  Each of the four chorale phrases is developed to a conclusion which is, like death itself, both inevitable and completely unexpected.

Listen to my own performance of Bach’s last composition – JJM

Who was Norman Borlaug?

Before there were GM crops, the old-fashioned way to increase crop yields was to cross different strains to create varieties that resisted pests and harsh weather, while yielding larger harvests in shorter times.  In the mid-20th century, Norman Borlaug was the world’s  foremost practitioner of this art. 

Borlaug left his roots as an Iowa farm boy to work for Dupont as a chemist, then left Dupont at the end of World War II to breed wheat in Mexico.  Within a few years, he had developed a fast-maturing variety that could be grown in two crops each year, which yielded nevertheless more grain in each crop than the varieties that had been used before.

(It turns out that the key was to outcross with dwarf varieties.  Over the milennia, natural selection in grasses such as wheat had favored plants that squandered their energy growing higher so they could grab more sunlight. This is a zero sum game, however, and in a field full of short plants, the short plants did just fine.)

In the 1960s, Borlaug went to work on rice.

Biologist Paul R. Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.’ Ehrlich said, ‘I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971,’ and ‘India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.’

Borlaug bought the time that the developing world needed to bring down fertility rates and tame the population bomb.

Norman Borlaug, born this day in 1914, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, lived to see the maturity of the Green Revolution, and died last September at the age of 95.

It began in mystery and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

– Diane Ackerman

Silence of the Stars

When Laurens van der Post one night in the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen he couldn’t hear the stars singing, they didn’t believe him.  They looked at him, half-smiling.  They examined his face to see whether he was joking or deceiving them.  Then two of those small men (who plant nothing, who have almost nothing to hunt, who live on almost nothing, and with no one but themselves) led him away from the crackling thorn-scrub fire and stood with him under the night sky and listened.  One of them whispered, ‘Do you not hear them now?’ And van der Post listened, not wanting to disbelieve, but had to answer, ‘No.’  They walked him slowly, like a sick man, to the small dim circle of firelight and told him they were terribly sorry; and he felt even sorrier for himself and blamed his ancestors for their strange loss of hearing, which was his loss now. 

— David Wagoner     (Traveling Light)