April 29, 2007

  • April 28, 2007
    Guest Columnist

    Planet of the Apes

    By ROBERT WRIGHT

    This week the mystery deepened: Why no space aliens?

    On Tuesday, scientists reported finding the most “Earthlike” planet ever, Gliese 581c. Its sun is cooler than ours, but also closer, so Gliese is in that climatic comfort zone conducive to water — hence to life, hence to evolution, hence to intelligent beings with advanced technology. Yet they never phone.

    It’s actually a serious question, long pondered by sci-fi types. Since a civilization whose technological evolution was ahead of ours by even a few centuries could contact us from far, far away (and certainly from Gliese, a mere 20 light-years away), what does it mean that we haven’t heard a thing from any corner of this vast universe?

    That life got started on few or no other planets? That on other planets giant asteroids kept pressing evolution’s reset button? Or, distressingly, that when civilizations reach the technological level we’ve reached, they tend to wipe themselves out, or at least bomb themselves back into the Stone Age?

    O.K., that last one is pretty wild speculation. But you have to admit that current events aren’t wildly at odds with it. There’s an apocalyptic vibe in the zeitgeist, and it’s not hard to imagine how the technological sophistication that got us to the brink of global civilization could be our undoing. Let us count the ways.

    (1) Classic nuclear Armageddon. This threat is in remission. Economic interdependence dulls enmity among nuclear powers, and crisis-averting lines of communication have gotten stronger since the cold war. Still, things can change.

    (2) Eco-apocalypse. Solving climate change and other global environmental problems is a political nightmare. Nations are tempted to play “free rider” and not join in the sacrifices, since they’ll share the rewards anyway. The good news is that past environmental problems have featured negative-feedback loops: when negligence makes the problem bad enough, political will appears.

    (3) Terrorism. Alas, the negative-feedback loop — bad outcomes lead to smart policies — may not apply here. We reacted to 9/11 by freaking out and invading one too many countries, creating more terrorists. With the ranks of terrorists growing — amid evolving biotechnology and loose nukes — we could within a decade see terrorism on a scale that would make us forget any restraint we had learned from the Iraq war’s outcome. If 3,000 deaths led to two wars, how many wars would 300,000 deaths yield? And how many new terrorists?

    Terrorism alone won’t wipe out humanity. But with our unwitting help, it could strengthen other lethal forces.

    It could give weight to the initially fanciful “clash of civilizations” thesis. Muslim states could fall under the control of radicals and opt out of what might otherwise have become a global civilization. Armed with nukes (Pakistan already is), they would revive the nuclear Armageddon scenario. A fissure between civilizations would also sabotage the solution of environmental problems, and the ensuing eco-calamity could make people on both sides of the fissure receptive to radical messages. The worse things got, the worse they’d get.

    So while no one of the Big Three doomsday dynamics is likely to bring the apocalypse, they could well combine to form a positive-feedback loop, a k a the planetary death spiral. And the catalyst would be terrorism, along with our mishandling of it.

    Disheartened? There’s more: to avoid mishandling things, we may have to forsake our beloved evolutionary heritage.

    We may more often have to resist the retributive impulse that worked fine in the environment where it evolved but now often misfires. We may have to appreciate how our moral condemnations — which can help start wars — are subtly biased by our primate brains in self-serving ways that, in some contexts, no longer serve our selves.

    We may have to cultivate our moral imagination, putting ourselves in the shoes of people who hate us. The point wouldn’t be to validate the hate, but to understand it and so undermine it. Still, this understanding involves seeing how, from a certain point of view, hating us “makes sense” — and our evolved brains tend to resist that particular epiphany.

    If salvation indeed means transcending engrained irrationality, then the odds may well be against us. But look at the bright side: if you do run into any space aliens, they’re likely to be reasonable creatures.

March 7, 2007

  • APPRECIATIONS; Mr. Noodle

    By LAWRENCE DOWNES
    Published: January 9, 2007
    New York Times

    The news last Friday of the death of the ramen noodle guy surprised those of us who had never suspected that there was such an individual. It was easy to assume that instant noodle soup was a team invention, one of those depersonalized corporate miracles, like the Honda Civic, the Sony Walkman and Hello Kitty, that sprang from that ingenious consumer-product collective known as postwar Japan.

    But no. Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, was looking for cheap, decent food for the working class when he invented ramen noodles all by himself in 1958. His product — fried, dried and sold in little plastic-wrapped bricks or foam cups — turned the company he founded, Nissin Foods, into a global giant. According to the company’s Web site, instant ramen satisfies more than 100 million people a day. Aggregate servings of the company’s signature brand, Cup Noodles, reached 25 billion worldwide in 2006.

    There are other versions of fast noodles. There is spaghetti in a can. It is sweetish and gloppy and a first cousin of dog food. Macaroni and cheese in a box is a convenience product requiring several inconvenient steps. You have to boil the macaroni, stir it to prevent sticking and determine through some previously obtained expertise when it is ”done.” You must separate water from noodles using a specialized tool, a colander, and to complete the dish — such an insult — you have to measure and add the fatty deliciousness yourself, in the form of butter and milk that Kraft assumes you already have on hand. All that effort, plus the cleanup, is hardly worth it.

    Ramen noodles, by contrast, are a dish of effortless purity. Like the egg, or tea, they attain a state of grace through a marriage with nothing but hot water. After three minutes in a yellow bath, the noodles soften. The pebbly peas and carrot chips turn practically lifelike. A near-weightless assemblage of plastic and foam is transformed into something any college student will recognize as food, for as little as 20 cents a serving.

    There are some imperfections. The fragile cellophane around the ramen brick tends to open in a rush, spilling broken noodle bits around. The silver seasoning packet does not always tear open evenly, and bits of sodium essence can be trapped in the foil hollows, leaving you always to wonder whether the broth, rich and salty as it is, is as rich and salty as it could have been. The aggressively kinked noodles form an aesthetically pleasing nest in cup or bowl, but when slurped, their sharp bends spray droplets of broth that settle uncomfortably about the lips and leave dots on your computer screen.

    But those are minor quibbles. Ramen noodles have earned Mr. Ando an eternal place in the pantheon of human progress. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Give him ramen noodles, and you don’t have to teach him anything. LAWRENCE DOWNES

March 14, 2006

  • Sunday, Feb. 26 — Sarah Vowell


    The charges of cronyism against the current administration have piled up higher than the rotting rubble in New Orleans:  “Heck of a job, Brownie” is fast replacing “Way to go, Einstein” as the wiseacre-to-dummy putdown du jour.  And what of Harriet Miers, the good friend/lame nominee for the Supreme Court the president defended as “plenty bright?”


    Then there’s the 24-year-old political appointee who was rewarded for working on the president’s re-election campaign with a job as a press aide at NASA, where he was accused of trying to silence a top climate scientist who is, go figure, concerned about global warming.  That, and he demanded that the apparently too science-y NASA website insert the word “theory” after every use of “Big Bang.”


    (To be fair, he resigned after it turned out that he’d lied on his resume about graduating from college, so he might have dropped out before his class got to the textbook chapter titled “Just Big Bang:  That’s What Jesus Calls It, Too.”)


    Plus, in a word, Abramoff.


    All of which is appalling.  At this point, five years after oil and gas lobbyists started scoring Interior Department appointments overseeing national parks and the Bureau of Land Management, I’m heartened that I can still scrape up a glimmer of dismay.  And yet, there is a tiny, honest voice in my head that has never let me condemn the president too loudly for wanting to work only with his allies and friends.  Because that’s pretty much how I live my life, too.


    The other day, I was on a plane where “Good Night, and Good Luck.” was the in-flight movie.  I’d already seen it, but watching it again afforded me the opportunity to look beyond its grand central theme and curl up with the film’s lovely periphery.


    Around the edges, a second, softer movie flickers, an unpretentious but sly portrait of what real camaraderie looks and feels like.  By opening with a party where Edward R. Murrow and his old staff are gussied up and drinking and giggling and taking pictures with their arms around one another as a saxophone plays “When I Fall in Love,” the viewer figures out right away that this is more than Murrow vs. McCarthy circa “High Noon.”  This guy has backup.


    My favorite scene starts with George Clooney as the producer Fred Friendly and David Strathairn as Murrow a couple of minutes before Murrow goes on the air with a potentially controversial report about a Red Scare flare-up in Michigan.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a subtler, truer image of partnership.  And not just in the way the two men talk to each other, either confessing their fears or joshing around or both.


    When Friendly counts down the seconds left until Murrow goes live, Friendly sits just off-camera and taps Murrow’s leg with his pen when it’s time.  The gesture is mundane and loving all at once.


    I’m lucky enough to have a Friendly of my own.  Is there anything better than figuring out what you’re supposed to do with your life and getting paid to do it?  Yep, doing it alongside the calm and tweedy person you regard as the brother you never had.


    “Good Night, and Good Luck.” taps this understandable yearning for solidarity, for affectionate toil, for a shared mission, that’s also behind the allure of the founding fathers, the Boston Red Sox, the Clash.  Part of me can’t blame the president for his pro-crony tendencies because I also have them to an almost sickening degree.


    Then I remember — wait, neither I nor any crony of mine has ever slept through the soggy downfall of an entire city, or failed to track down the genocidal maniac who still has a few American items left to check off on his mass-murder To Do list, or sent our soldiers to wage a berserk war criss-crossing the most dangerous roads in the world in flimsy vehicles with the protective capability of Vespa scooters.  (But my comrades and I would like to apologize for that reading we “organized” at a noisy Chinatown restaurant in ’98, when the short stories were drowned out by egg roll orders.)


    Bonhomie, as our ex-cronies the French call it, should have its limits.  Seems as if American voters picked the current president because they thought he’d be a fun hang at a cookout — a jokey neighbor who charred a mean burger and is good at playing Frisbee with his dog.  What we should be doing is electing a president with the nitpicking paranoia you’d use to choose a cardiologist — a stunted conversationalist with dark-circled eyes and paper-cut fingertips who will stay up until 3 tearing into medical journals in five languages trying to figure out how to save your life.


     

January 1, 2006

July 23, 2005

May 11, 2005