They are also wrong, and indeed wicked. Heinz ketchup is something like a precious work of art: it's that rarest of things, an instance of perfection. It may be that many have forgotten one of the most interesting articles ever written about the human palate; if you have, read it again. It starts with the question of why there are so many 'gourmet' mustards and spaghetti sauces ('gourmet' is in scare quotes in deference to Ogden Nash); but there is only one ketchup.
It turns out the reason is that ketchup, and particularly Heinz ketchup, happens to be perfect.
There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker--it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar--so now ketchup was also sweet--and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating--about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.There are some things a civilization ought to preserve, and art is one of them; art that approaches perfection especially. The man who thinks to improve our lives by removing the sublime, even if it comes in a ketchup bottle, that man is an actual enemy of humanity.
A blog post by the creator of the interesting webcomic and site "Lovecraft is Missing." It's worth reading the post in full - or you can read the rest of this post first, and see the kicker that speaks to all of us:
Liberty Mutual (yes, the insurance company) says:
"In 2006, Liberty Mutual created a TV commercial about people doing things for strangers. The response was overwhelming. We received thousands of positive emails and letters from people all over the country commenting on the ads.
We thought, if one TV spot can get people thinking and talking about responsibility, imagine what could happen if we went a step further? So we created a series of short films, and this website, as an exploration of what it means to do the right thing."
Hence "The Responsibility Project."
I love it! Well done, down to earth examples designed to spark comment and thought, and the concept itself is sorely needed in today's culture. Kudos, too, to NBC, for partnering up with them.
If quality and ethics were a factor in media personnel decisions, Maureen Dowd would have been demoted or fired some time ago. Christian Lowe details the new-told lie:
"Yes, the president's Oct. 29 trip to Dover Air Force base in the dark of night to greet a C-17 carrying fallen Americans killed in Afghanistan was a vivid example of the reality of that war and should pause to those who call for increased commitment there. And it was honorable of Obama to see for himself the human cost of his decisions -- as every commander and chief should.
But to reflexively defend the photo op engineered to create news about the president's "sobering reminder" by claiming that the man who got us into Afghanistan in the first place never faced them is just plain bunk....
We wrote a wide-ranging investigative piece on the conduct of the services during the killed-in-action notification process and the support they provided along the way.... For, unlike Dowd, who I doubt has ever spoken with the family of a fallen servicemember, I was forced to confront the world I obliquely reported from afar -- to hear the quavering voices of mothers whose sons had been obliterated by roadside bombs. And you know who else did that very same thing dozens of times in his eight years as president?"
You can guess where this is going...
This phrasing ["You Lie!"] is not a "breach of protocol," as the NYT would have it, but part of another protocol. Kenneth R. Greenberg, scholar of dueling (and baseball, oddly enough; he had some interesting things to say on the intersection of those two things in the post-war American South), noted:Now, another scholar named Greenberg -- I don't know if they are related -- wrote a piece on the Jews of Savannah, Georgia. I believe this is the piece, although you can't see the relevant part if you don't have access to an academic library. If memory serves, it recounts the story of how Jews in Savannah were accepted into the community early compared to the rest of the country, as proved by the fact that they were challenged to duels and fought them; for, as Kenneth Greenberg describes at length, gentlemen dueled only with equals. If they were challenged in the terms of honor, and allowed to fight as honorable men, then they were equals in fact.Only certain kinds of insulting language and behavior led to duels. The central insult that could turn a disagreement into a duel involved a direct or indirect attack on someone's word -- the accusation that a man was a liar. To "give someone the lie," as it was called, had always been of great consequence among men of honor. As one early-seventeenth-century English writer noted, "It is reputed so great a shame to be accounted a lyer, that any other injury is canceled by giving the lie, and he that receiveth it standeth so charged in his honor and reputation, that he cannot disburden himself of that imputation, but by the striking of him that hath given it, or by chalenging him to the combat."
Three breaths before Rep. Wilson shouted out that President Obama was a liar, President Obama had said that "prominent politicians" who spoke to concerns about potential end-of-life issues were spreading "a lie." Every Congressman present understood themselves to be a prominent politician; those who had expressed concerns about that issue, then, stood accused to their faces of lying. Rep. Wilson, of South Carolina, responded in anger and in kind.
It may be hard to understand if you aren't from the South, or a similar culture: but "giving the lie" in this case is the furthest thing from a mark of racial disrespect. It is a mark of accepted equality.
If a Southerner accepts you as an equal, and you call him a liar to his face, you will have to fight him. That is courtesy, not discourtesy: he wouldn't bother to fight you if he didn't respect you. He would snort at you, or strike you, but he would not respond to you in the language of honor.
Of course, these days we do not duel, and the only way such an encounter can terminate is with an apology. One was offered, and accepted -- the wager of battle, such as it is today, has been fulfilled according to the ancient forms. It may look strange to places that have not known such wagers in their lifetimes, but this sort of exchange was once the lifeblood of American politics. The South, as always, sustains.
| Direct Link
| 40 Comments
|
| Printer-Friendly
Off for some painful minor surgery, which falls into the category of "things you know won't make you happy (but might later on, mayhap after you can, like, eat again)." At the other end of this particular scale, I offer Cracked.com's combination of links to real science and viciously acerbic wit.
Presenting, "5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)". With the recurring sub-headings of "So, what the problem?" and "Wait, it gets worse..." An excerpt:
"Most of us get out of bed everyday purely because it edges us one step closer to some kind of financial future we want. If we won the lottery, most of us would show up to the office the next day wearing an ankle-length fur coat and enough bling to make Mr. T look Amish, and only stay just long enough to take a dump in our boss's inbox.
So What's the Problem?
Hey, remember when we said earlier that most people wouldn't do the body-switching thing for fear they'd wake up in Nigeria...."
As things head for a lull - and possibly an outright defeat - in Iran, WSJ online has a good piece about a gentleman named Mohsen Kadivar:
"Mr. Kadivar's chief claim to fame rests on a three-part work of political philosophy titled "The Theories of the State in Shiite Jurisprudence." At heart, it is a devastating theological critique of the Ayatollah Khomeini's notion of "the rule of the jurist" (Velayat e Faqih), which serves as the rationale for the near-dictatorial powers enjoyed by the Supreme Leader."
That kind of argument on the regime's own terms is useful and valuable. Ultimately, the defeat of Khomeinism is going to require an ideological shattering, as well as a physical shattering. Religious critique from within is a vital part of that, though certainly not exclusive. The decision that ordinary Iranians have taken are also part of it - and on Jack Wheeler's site, he carries a piece by an Iranian philosophy professor in Tehran:
Found myself directed to Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's "A World Split Apart" speech the other day, in the wake of his recent death. While I would point out that the "spiritual training" he referred to had the flip side of many training failures, and that spiritual development must be freely chosen in order to be meaningful, his late 1970s speech remains thought provoking to this day.
Here's a time line of his life. For those who don't know him, Solzhenitsyn was the writer of the Gulag Archipelago trilogy, which chronicled the horrors of the Soviet Union's concentration camps. The Left has always hated him for that, and expended a great deal of effort to characterize him as a liar while the Soviet Union still stood. Those efforts were, in fact, a large part of the reason I became disillusioned with the Left at a very young age. I could not stand with the promoters of, and liars on behalf of, concentration camps.. and of course, the opening of Soviet archives would later show that authors like Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest had in fact been telling and documenting the truth.
The brain, they have found, appears to make up its mind 10 seconds before we become conscious of a decision -- an eternity at the speed of thought.That cannot be the whole truth, obviously. Clearly some decisions are not made this way, because some have to be made in far less than ten seconds -- turning the wheel of the car to avoid an accident, for example. We would normally say that these choices are the least likely to be products of free will, because there is not time for deliberation beforehand.Their findings challenge conventional notions of choice.
"We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. "But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."
In the extended entry, I will sketch a response drawing on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics that shows how free will is in fact responsible for those decisions -- and must therefore be preserved in the "ten second problem" also. It may not be quite what we thought it was, but free will is not implausible.
I've been getting more and more into data visualization as an aspect at work (think Tufte), and have started following some of the excellent blogs on the subject. On one of them, Flowing Data, the author just made a point about context - which applies both to my criticisms of newsmedia, and to my efforts to but a basic quantitative frame around some of the policy claims that are made - that is so perfectly written that, to quote Jack Black "You bastard! That's so good - that should have been mine..."
Without further ado, Nathan from Flowing Data:
If I were to skip straight to the part in The Shawshank Redemption when Andy Durfesne climbs out of the pipe of poo (and put it on mute), someone who never saw the movie might see an escaped convict who steals money from a warden and fleas to some random place in Mexico called Zihuatanejo. Out of grief, the warden kills himself and Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding eventually teams up with Andy to commit more crimes.Those of us who have seen the movie though know this isn't the case. Why? Because we saw the whole movie and have context.
Context Matters
As Andrew, a FlowingData reader, put it, "For statistics to be useful, it needs to be explained in a context." When I get my hands on some data, whether I'm analyzing or visualizing, I want to know the context of data first. I want to know who collected the data, how it was collected, when it was collected, and what was done to it before it arrived in my hands. Without that meta-information, I could easily make an incorrect assumption about the data or misrepresent it somehow in a visualization - which is very bad.
Simply put, we use visualization and statistics to tell stories with data. If we don't have all the information, then we can't tell a complete story.
Can we just tattoo that on the inside of the eyelids of all journalists, commentators, and policymakers?
Kerry Dupont just pointed this Paul Graham essay out to me:
The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.
I feel so much better...but is she trying to tell me something?
