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Neuroscientist Asif Ghazanfar, whose lab uses monkeys to study auditory and visual perception, set up an experiment to test whether monkeys are capable of following filmic narratives the way people are:

Ghazanfar and his postdoc, Stephen Shepherd, tracked the eye movements of monkeys and people as they watched identical 3-minute clips from three films: the BBC’s “Life of Mammals,” Disney’s “The Jungle Book,” and Chaplin’s “City Lights.” The movies were converted into black and white and played without sound. As it turned out, humans and monkeys have similar cinematic tastes. … “There was a surprising degree of overlap,” Ghazanfar says. The gaze paths of humans and monkeys overlapped 31 percent of the time. A small part of this correlation is due to our shared visual reflexes: Both humans and monkeys are attracted to bright spots. But the bulk of the overlap was driven by the two species’ shared interest in complex scenes, particularly faces, body movements, and social interactions.

But the researchers also found two intriguing differences between the monkey and human gaze paths.

First, “humans appear to look at the focus of actor’s attention and intentions to a much greater extent than do monkeys,” Ghazanfar and Shepherd wrote in a fascinating review published in the film journal Projections. Second, “humans appear to pay attention to related details in a movie for much longer than monkeys do, suggesting that humans integrate events over time in a fundamentally different way.”

In other words, it seems that what makes people different is our ability to follow a narrative. Whereas monkeys look and react to scenes quickly, people fixate on one actor and integrate complex events over time. In a clip showing two monkeys, for example, people tended to look squarely on the monkey sitting quietly in the center of the screen. Monkeys, in contrast, looked at the more active second monkey, even thought it was jumping out of view of the camera. “Monkeys were reacting moment-by-moment instead of assembling and testing a narrative explanation for the scene before them,” the researchers wrote.

In a recent interview, Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler divulged the unlikely influence behind the band’s new album, Reflektor – the 19th century Christian philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard:

I studied the Bible and philosophy in college and I think in a certain sense that’s the kind of stuff that still makes my brain work. There’s an essay by Kierkegaard called The Present Age that I was reading a lot that’s about the reflective age. This is like in [1846], and it sounds like he’s talking about modern times. He’s talking about the press and alienation, and you kind of read it and you’re like, “Dude, you have no idea how insane it’s gonna get.” [Laughs.] …

It reads like it was written here, basically. He basically compares the reflective age to a passionate age. Like, if there was a piece of gold out on thin ice, in a passionate age, if someone went to try and get the gold, everyone would cheer them on and be like, “Go for it! Yeah you can do it!” And in a reflective age, if someone tried to walk out on the thin ice, everyone would criticize them and say, “What an idiot! I can’t believe you’re going out on the ice to try and risk something.” So it would kind of paralyze you to even act basically, and it just kind of resonated with me — wanting to try and make something in the world instead of just talking about things.

Paul Elie digs up the relevant passage from The Present Age:

A Revolutionary Age is an age of action; the present age is an age of advertisement, or an age of publicity: nothing happens, but there is instant publicity about it. A revolt in the present age is the most unthinkable act of all; such a display of strength would confuse the calculating cleverness of the times. Nevertheless, some political virtuoso might achieve something nearly as great. He would write some manifesto or other which calls for a General Assembly in order to decide on a revolution, and he would write it so carefully that even the Censor himself would pass on it; and at the General Assembly he would manage to bring it about that the audience believed that it had actually rebelled, and then everyone would placidly go home—after they had spent a very nice evening out.

Jon Pareles offers more context for the big ideas behind Reflektor:

The album’s lyrics allude to Kierkegaard’s ideas about a “reflective age,” when passion and story line have been replaced by ambiguity and passive contemplation. And they trace a loose plotline similar to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice: the musician who plays songs that are so beautiful that they persuade Death to give his lover a second chance, though the musician will only lose her again. (Auguste Rodin’s statue of Orpheus and Eurydice is on the album cover.) The songs move through love, rebellious self-affirmation, a struggle to stay together and, at the end, a ghostly mourning. Six minutes of wordless sound at the end of the album, in billowing, burbling, sustained loops reminiscent of Terry Riley’s late-1960’s compositions, may be a glimpse of an eternal next world.

H, according to Michael Rosen, author of Alphabetical:

In Britain, H owes its name to the Normans, who brought their letter “hache” with them in 1066. Hache is the source of our word “hatchet”: probably because a lower-case H looks a lot like an axe. It has certainly caused a lot of trouble over the years. A century ago people dropping their h’s were described in the Times as “h-less socialists.” In ancient Rome, they were snooty not about people who dropped their Hs but about those who picked up extra ones. Catullus wrote a nasty little poem about Arrius (H’arrius he called him), who littered his sentences with Hs because he wanted to sound more Greek. Almost two thousand years later we are still split, and pronouncing H two ways: “aitch”, which is posh and “right”; and “haitch”, which is not posh and thus “wrong”. The two variants used to mark the religious divide in Northern Ireland – aitch was Protestant, haitch was Catholic, and getting it wrong could be a dangerous business.

Perhaps the letter H was doomed from the start: given that the sound we associate with H is so slight (a little outbreath), there has been debate since at least AD 500 whether it was a true letter or not. In England, the most up-to-date research suggests that some 13th-century dialects were h-dropping, but by the time elocution experts came along in the 18th century, they were pointing out what a crime it is. And then received wisdom shifted, again: by 1858, if I wanted to speak correctly, I should have said “erb”, “ospital” and “umble”.

Civil wars are less common than they used to be:

Of 150 large intrastate wars since 1945, fewer than 10 are ongoing. Angola, Chad, Sri Lanka and other places long known for bloodletting are now at peace, though hardly democratic. And recently civil wars have been ending sooner. The rate at which they start is the same today as it has been for 60 years; they kick off every year in 1 to 2 percent of countries. But the number of medium-to-large civil wars under way – there are six in which more than 1,000 people died last year – is low by the standards of the period. This is because they are coming to an end a little sooner. The average length of civil wars dropped from 4.6 to 3.7 years after 1991, according to Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, a professor at the University of Essex.

So far, nothing has done more to end the world’s hot little wars than winding up its big cold one.

From 1945 to 1989 the number of civil wars rose by leaps and bounds, as America and the Soviet Union fueled internecine fighting in weak young states, either to gain advantage or to stop the other doing so. By the end of the period, civil war afflicted 18 percent of the world’s nations, according to the tally kept by the Centre for the Study of Civil War, established at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, a decade ago. When the cold war ended, the two enemies stopped most of their sponsorship of foreign proxies, and without it, the combatants folded. More conflicts ended in the 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall than in the preceding half-century. The proportion of countries fighting civil wars had declined to about 12 percent by 1995.

James Gibney tires of the endless investigations:

So far, Republicans have yet to unearth a grand political conspiracy or cover-up by the Obama administration involving Benghazi. This week, they’ll interrogate Central Intelligence Agency security officers who were on site. That will shine more light on some decisions that, absent the fog of war, might have been made differently. Yet if something truly damaging was likely to surface, it surely would have done so by now. Put another way, could the architects of the current health-care debacle really engineer a cover-up capable of withstanding the frantic digging of five congressional committees?

What Congress could do, if it really cared about preventing future attacks:

Congress should be making sure the State Department actually implements the review board’s recommendations, which cover knotty areas from language training and building security to threat analysis. Past experience suggests compliance will be spotty at best.

But that is not, I suspect, what it’s about. This story thrives on the far right – i.e. most of the right – because it advances a couple of memes. The first is that Obama failed as commander-in-chief because an al Qaeda group in North Africa used the anniversary of 9/11 to attack a diplomatic compound disguising a CIA base. So he tried to cover it up, by claiming it was a response to an incendiary video. But the trouble with this argument, it seems to me, is that it cannot connect to a broader theme about the president. He has done far more damage to al Qaeda than his predecessor, decimated their ranks in the region whence 9/11 came, ramped up surveillance, and killed Osama bin Laden. So the political logic of the Benghazi obsession is weirdly off-track. But it’s what they always intended to say about the first black president whose middle name is Hussein from the get-go: that he’s soft on terrorism, so they stick with it, even though it’s patently untrue.

The real force behind the powerful meme, I’d wager, is the usual (usual!) argument that the president is a covert traitor and ally to al Qaeda.

So he deliberately left American diplomats to be gunned down by Jihadists in Benghazi, barely lifted a finger to help them, lied about it to cover his tracks, and generally cares more about foreign people with dark skin than those on sovereign American soil. They need to prove this horrifying truth because it would blow up this presidency and render it totally illegitimate. And they still dream of erasing the first black president from the history books as an asterisk. The whole thing is eerily similar to the way the far right in the 1950s believed Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer and ally. (That meme now extends to FDR as well in the fever swamps!)

I have no problems with endless hearings if that’s what the GOP wants. But we should have few illusions about the paranoid fantasies that fuel this foul stuff. I’d be offended and enraged by their disgusting insinuations of treason – “and where was the president that night?” etc – but seriously, after six years of this stuff, my rage buttons are worn down.

A new, ridiculously early NBC poll finds Christie trailing Clinton by 10 points. Aaron Blake thinks the top-line numbers are misleading:

The most telling numbers in the NBC poll … are Christie’s deficit in the South (43-35) and slim lead among white voters (41-37). Regardless of who the GOP nominee is in 2016, he or she isn’t going to lose the South or come close to losing white voters. Christie’s under-performance in the NBC poll is all about people not knowing who he is.

And a closer look at the NBC numbers above suggests Christie is actually better-positioned than Mitt Romney was in 2012. While Romney lost the Hispanic vote by 44 points, Christie trails by just 11 (and is notably already ahead of Romney’s 27 percent showing, despite a about a quarter of Latino voters being undecided). And while Romney lost young voters by 23 points, Christie trails by just 14. All of this despite Christie’s name ID deficit.

If Christie could lose by only those margins among those demographics, he would probably win.

I stick to my view that Christie would be a formidable opponent to Clinton. I just can’t see how he gets past the primaries. And his total vacuousness on national policy is a sight to behold. He’s not a candidate right now; he’s a walking attitude.

Yesterday, Noam Scheiber made the case that she is. Bouie is skeptical:

It’s noteworthy that, in his piece, Scheiber doesn’t say much about Warren’s signature on a secret letter urging Clinton to run for the Democratic nomination. At most, he argues, it’s a pledge that won’t stand if Warren decides the presidency is key to advancing her policy agenda.

But, to my eyes, that letter says everything about where Clinton stands vis a vis the rest of the Democratic Party. In short, 2016 won’t be 2008, where Clinton was a powerful but contentious figure in the party, and a well-organized challenger could capitalize on grassroots anger and establishment discontent to derail her path to the nomination. Now, Clinton is a wildly popular figure, with one of the highest statures in American politics. Among Democrats, 67 percent favor her for the nomination (compared to 4 percent for Warren) , and in an early poll of potential New Hampshire primary voters, she has the highest favorability ratings—near 80 percent—of any potential candidate. This is a far cry from 2006, where—at most—she had support from a plurality of Democrats.

Scott Lemieux agrees:

One thing to add is that the younger voters who are more supportive of economic populism are also the least likely to vote in primaries, which will make it harder to break Clinton’s hold on the party’s base. And as admirable as Warren is as a public figure, given that she ran 7 points behind Obama in Massachusetts whether she can appeal to a broad enough based of Democratic voters in a wide enough variety of states to pose a serious threat to Clinton is an open question.

Drum thinks, in Scheiber’s piece, that Warren comes across as “a novelty candidate, the kind who enter the race mostly because they want the exposure it gives their cause, not because they have any chance of winning—or even of seriously affecting who does win”:

Now, maybe Scheiber is being unfair to Warren. Maybe she’s not quite as messianic as all that, and maybe over the next few years she’ll start to develop considered views on non-banking subjects at the same time that she develops shrewder political skills. That would make her a more dangerous contender. But if Scheiber is right about her, I think he’s pretty much undermined his own case.

 

In today’s video, Charles argues that the animal soul may resemble the human soul much more than we realize:

About his new book:

For Love of Animals is an honest and thoughtful look at our responsibility as Christians with respect to animals. Many Christians misunderstand both history and their own tradition in thinking about animals. They are joined by prominent secular thinkers who blame Christianity for the Western world’s failure to seriously consider the moral status of animals. This book explains how traditional Christian ideas and principles—like nonviolence, concern for the vulnerable, respect for life, stewardship of God’s creation, and rejection of consumerism—require us to treat animals morally.

His previous videos are here. A reader writes:

Thanks very much for this interesting series. Camosy says that we should not eat meat because we should live non-violent lives. I believe that violence should only be used in self-defense. When we eat eggs, meat, or dairy we are complicit in acts of violence against the innocent defenseless who do not threaten us. We would be choosing violence for no good reason. This is a compelling point. He goes on to say that animal products should only be used if there is a need, and that in modern society there is no need for these products. Eggs, meat, and dairy are totally unnecessary.

Camosy’s most important point is that factory-farmed animal products are a sin.

This should be obvious. Everyone should boycott those products completely, whether based on religion, basic morals, or both. Some people may feel that it is acceptable for them to use animal products that are not from factory farms. While I would not use them, I believe that these people are sincere. There is a massive problem with this approach though: there are almost no animal products that are not from factory farms, and the products that are labeled and marketed to suggest that they are not from factory farms really are from factory farms. When you see labels like “cage free”; “free range”; “grass fed”; “humane”; “natural”; “organic”; etc. you can very safely assume that these are all factory-farmed products. One would have to avoid all eggs, meat, and diary sold in stores and at restaurants, visit the producers oneself, visit their suppliers, and see where and how the animals are slaughtered. It would be a full-time job for most people and it would yield little food.

Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

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It’s an uplifting story that also makes you want to despair of government. Three 20-year-old programmers from San Francisco have set up a website – thehealthsherpa.com – that already does a huge amount of the work that the government website cannot effectively handle yet. No, you can’t enroll in Obamacare on it, but you can quickly see your options. What a concept! Available information! Money quote:

“They got it completely backwards in terms of what people want up front,” said Liang. He added: “They want prices and benefits, so that they could make the decision.” Liang showed CBS News how it worked. “You come to our website and you put in your zip code — in this case a California zip code. You hit ‘find plans,’ and you immediately see the exchange plans that are available for that zip code.”

It didn’t work for me, because they don’t have New York or DC plans yet in their system (California is their strong suit). But I did get instant access to both states’ exchange sites – no clogged system at all:

Using information buried in the government’s own website built by high-priced government contractors, they found a simpler way to present it to users. “That’s the great thing about having such a small team,” said Kalogeropoulos. “You sit around a table and say, ‘Okay, how does this work?’ There’s no coordination meetings, there’s no planning sessions. It’s like, ‘Well, let’s read the document and let’s implement this.'”

They’re busy updating and adding new features, like calculations for the various tax subsidies, as the video shows. So why not use this site or encourage other young geeks to set up similar ones outside the government just to convey information that is currently buried in healthcare.gov? You can then use that information to call up an insurance company or broker or navigator and buy your insurance. Then ask yourself: how did three 20 year-olds manage this in weeks while the feds had three years and fucked it up so bad it seems like an episode of computer Hell?

One reason is small scale. It reminds me of the difference working for the Dish as an independent, small group of peers rather than embedded in a larger media organization. If we have an idea, we execute it. Before, we’d have to run it up endless ladders, wait for approvals, get last-minute delays, persuade some busy guy to help us, lobby for resources, and on and on. Now I just click my fingers and say: “Get on it, Special Teams!” and we have House ads. Well, not quite like that. But we never want to grow too much for exactly these reasons. In technology and creativity, smaller is better.

We know Obama has the skills to do this. He did it in both campaigns to stunning effect. But then he was out of government, out of all those cumbersome contracting rules, able to be more nimble. Why, one wonders, did he not fight the entrenched ways of doing things and innovate more aggressively? Why did he not focus on this in ways that were not simply urging his officials to make sure they got it right?