The Dish

Above is a new proposal for a world leaders’ retreat. Subtopia explains:

Floating amidst some yet unseen mirage aglaze over the pink Nevada floorscape is a proposed new retreat for the world’s top brass to quietly converge and unwind within the pleasant confines of this preeminent orb of privatopic escape. Reminiscent perhaps of a fallen Death Star, or a desert pearl settled in the valleys of some of America’s most remote real estate, The Universitas Leadership Sanctuary is hailed by the Guardian as a globular sphere of monkish architecture, a miniaturized vacation planet that is “part monastery and part conference centre” intended to strip presidents, prime ministers and the most powerful people on Earth of their monumental stresses, and restore them to proper world governing condition.

Could we put it on Mars?

Raymond Tallis explains why neuroscience can’t fully describe our experience of literature or the world:

Under normal circumstances, experiences are had by a person, not by a stand-alone brain. The brain of an experiencing person is not isolated, like the famous “brain in a vat” of Hilary Putnam’s thought experiment: it is in a body. Corresponding to this is the fact that when, for example, I see something I like, or someone I love, my brain, or some small part of it, is not the only part of me to light up. My heart may beat faster, or more thickly; a smile may appear on my face; and my step may be a little jauntier. The effects do not stop there. My body is located in a currently experienced environment; and, since I am human, that environment is situated in a world that is extended in all spatial, temporal, cultural directions. This world, too, may be transformed by my encounter with the loved one’s face, and I may think differently about it. For the extraordinary thing about human beings – and what captures what is human – is that they transcend their bodies; that human experience is not solitary sentience but has a public face; it belongs to a community of minds.

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)

A sad day for Catholic education, when a reasonable, extremely well-educated, respectful lecturer on morality and homosexuality is barred from even engaging in a debate on a Catholic campus. I’ve made forceful arguments and enjoyed really stimulating discussions over the years at Notre Dame, Boston College, Marquette, Fordham, and many other places of Catholic learning. When will the church realize that allowing the truth to emerge from reason is not a threat to God or the church? Why are we so afraid of the truth?

Strange advertisements for binoculars in 70s/80s era style.

A reader writes:

I read with great sadness the article you posted about Dr. Torres.  In the summer of 1986, I walked into a dingy office at the New York City health department to report for the first day of my summer internship following my freshman year at Cornell.  They had already given out all the best assignments and I got to pick from the last two that had been passed over by all the other students: work in the NYC morgue or go down to St. Vincent’s hospital and work on an AIDS project.  Later that day I found myself in Dr. Torres’ office.

The work involved a review of medical records of patients with what was then referred to as "ARC" or AIDS Related Complex.  Looking back now the study seems quite primitive, even foolish, but at the time very few people were doing this work.  I still remember several doctors rolling their eyes when I described the work I was doing with Dr. Torres (he wasn’t quite yet the star he would become a few years later).

As you can imagine Greenwich Village in the summer of 1986 was not a very happy place.  People were very scared.  People were dying at ridiculously young ages.  While Dr. Torres was quite charismatic and always friendly, watching all your patients die had to have been devastating to him and his colleagues.  It still haunts me and I was just an observer.

I fear, perhaps like you, that this will be the legacy left to our troops when they return from Iraq. Dr. Torres times 100,000.

It’s a very encouraging column, and it will always be on the good side of the ledger of the Bush administration: that they gave a damn about people with HIV when they didn’t have to. PEPFAR is still up for renewal, and the repeal of the ban on all travel and immigration into the US for people with HIV is finally in the Senate version. No other civilized country still has this ban, enacted by Jesse Helms decades ago. And yet there is still some Republican resistance to lifting it. The president and his friends who have done so much to alleviate the stigma of HIV in America and the world need to tell their GOP allies that there is nothing to fear in removing this anachronism. It will simply treat HIV as it does every other similar disease and require all immigrants to prove that their illness will not become a public charge on government services or expenditure. And it will end an unwarranted stigma and allow the US to be treated once again as a leader – rather than an immigration outlier like Sudan and Saudi Arabia – in the way it treats all non-citizens with HIV.

Humans’ long development phase may have more purpose than you think.

(Hat Tip: aldaily)

Has it ground to a halt? From an Iraqi sculptor on the NYT blog:

As for me, I have stopped doing art since the early days of the invasion. I lost the desire to do it: the scenes of death and horror we see every day filled my mind and made me stop thinking about beautiful things anymore. I know that many Iraqis feel the same way, because they are just like me, seeing death and killing around them every day.

So every time I pick up my pen and try to sketch, I find myself drawing scenes of death, and when I try to think of it as a way to let off steam a little, I start to feel pity for the person who is going to see it. Since art is a way of communicating, then I’m going to add more frightening thoughts. This is when I decide to stop.

Many of my fellow artists have fled the country, going to places where the might find a bit of hope and a space to breath clean air again in order to be again as creative as they once were.

But those murals on the massive concrete walls we’ve constructed to separate sects? Who’s painting them?

Scientific American reviews Stein’s Expelled:

It speaks to their anti-intellectualism and fundamental misunderstanding of science that for the makers of Expelled (and ID advocates more generally) the answer "we don’t know yet" is a badge of shame. "We don’t know yet" is what defines the fruitful frontier for science; it is what directs scientists’ curiosity and motivates them to spend years on research. Research starts where knowledge and certainty drop off. It’s one of the many ironies of Expelled that Ben Stein says he wants this movie to free people to ask questions about science, but the ID theories he defends would close off inquiry with nonanswers.

Like the decision to call evolution Darwinism, the omission of science from Expelled was a deliberate choice.

In fact, it was crucial to the film’s strategy. Because they know Americans revere freedom of speech and fairness, the producers cast the conflict between evolution and ID as purely a struggle between worldviews—a difference of opinions, a battle of ideologies—in which one side is censoring the other. They know that the public will instinctively want to defend the underdog, especially when that opinion aligns with the religious beliefs many of them already share.

It is a terrific strategy, but with one caveat: that airy skirmish of opinions must never, ever touch the ground of solid evidence. Because if it does, if viewers are ever allowed to notice that evolution is supported by mountains of tangible, peer-reviewed evidence gathered by generations of scientists, whereas ID has little more than a smattering of vanity-press pamphlets from a handful of cranks… the bubble pops.

Seeing music:

(Hat tip: Notcot)