as a man thinketh....,

PaulGraham | You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.

You don't have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.

I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. [3]

Even Newton fell into this trap. After publishing his theory of colors in 1672 he found himself distracted by disputes for years, finally concluding that the only solution was to stop publishing:

I see I have made myself a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free of Mr Linus's business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do for my privat satisfaction or leave to come out after me. For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or become a slave to defend it. [4]

Linus and his students at Liege were among the more tenacious critics. Newton's biographer Westfall seems to feel he was overreacting:

Recall that at the time he wrote, Newton's "slavery" consisted of five replies to Liege, totalling fourteen printed pages, over the course of a year.

I'm more sympathetic to Newton. The problem was not the 14 pages, but the pain of having this stupid controversy constantly reintroduced as the top idea in a mind that wanted so eagerly to think about other things.

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something. Fist tap Dale.

the function of attention and will

Video - J.G. Bennett on education.

From The Dramatic Universe, Vol II, page 74-77 By J.G. Bennett

To find our way through the bewildering maze of theories of the Will, we must turn again to the basic connection between Will and Relatedness. If Will is the source of all relationships within and beyond Existence, we should be able to discover elements of our experience that have wholly the character of relatedness. Such elements should be neither the terms of a relationship nor the events in which relationships are manifested; but the very relationship itself. We do not have to seek far, for we find the first such element in the power of attention. It is easy to see that attention is not the doer of our actions. We can act without attention and, when we have the sense of making a voluntary action, we can readily observe that our attention is detached both from the source of the initiative and from the action itself. Moreover, attention is never an action. There is no function of attention. Attention cannot be accounted for in terms of nerve-impulses, although it is undoubtedly a determining factor in deciding how the impulses shall be transmitted. Going further, we can readily establish that attention is not the same as Being. Being cannot fluctuate from moment to moment. It is what it is-the measure of the potentialities latent in a given whole. Even if we ascribe changes in total state to Being and regard their character and range of variation as a test of the quality of Being, we still find that they are not the same as attention. Of all the elements of our experience, attention is pre-eminently that which is evidence in favour of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary action. Indeed, there are no means of deciding whether a given action is voluntary or involuntary except by observing the attention that precedes and accompanies it. Whatever significance we may attach to the word `will', we can scarcely help associating it with the notion of voluntary as `distinct from involuntary actions; and so, here at last, we have found a strong argument for concluding that through the study of attention we could learn about the nature of Will.

There arises, however, an obvious question as to the connection between attention and consciousness. We connect consciousness with Being, and we might very well argue that attention is no more than the focussing of consciousness. But focussing a lens is a different act from the passing of light through it. We can, moreover, readily verify from observation that the laws that govern attention are quite different from those that apply to the states of consciousness. For example, attention relates, but consciousness is what it is, in and for itself. Attention can be directed, but consciousness has neither direction nor place. Consciousness is never experienced as voluntary or intentional. Consciousness is a quality of existence. Attention does not exist; it is neither an extensive nor an intensive magnitude. Moreover, it is not rel!lted to sensitivity. In other words, it IS not one of the three states of hyle nor any combination of them. There is no such thing as `energy of attention'. Attention can direct energies, but it is not itself an energy. Consciousness, in all its manifestations, is a form of energy. There are as many levels of consciousness as there are levels of energy. The liberation of energy of a given quality is accompanied by a corresponding state of consciousness, even without the intervention of attention-which often follows rather than precedes the change of consciousness.

Consciousness fluctuates-sometimes under the direction of attention, sometimes quite independently of it. On the other hand, attention does not necessarily depend upon consciousness. We can readily find examples of unconscious attention-when we perform a series of connected actions that depend upon attention, but where neither the actions themselves nor the attention directing them are in the sphere of our consciousness. – In short, we may say that attention appears to be a power that is neither an activity nor an energy. The word `power' is here to be understood as that which directs energy and activity, but is different from either. We have to distinguish between powers that establish relationship-i.e., triads-and forces that produce action, i.e., dyads. Also a power must be distinguished from a state of being-tetrad-that carries its own form of order and organization. A power is more abstract than a state of being, but more concrete than a force. These powers are properties of the Will.

The power of choice and the power of decision are two further properties of the Will that, although closely connected With attentlon, are nevertheless distinct from it. These powers are connected with the property we have called ableness-to-be, and we might be tempted to refer all such powers to the hyparchic regulator and, hence, to regard choice as a functional activity. This would strike at the root of any doctrine of Value, for evidently choice and decision would be no more than reflex mechanisms unless they derived from a discrimination of values. We choose that which at the given moment appears to us to be the most `worth while', the most `interesting', the most `desirable'; in a word, the most `valuable' course of action. It is precisely because choice and decision are properties of the Will that they can relate us to a system of values. If they were functional only, they could do no more than bind us to facts. This is the argument of Plato's Gorgias, and it has not been bettered.

Here it is necessary to observe that the powers of attention, choice and decision are exercised by men far more rarely than might be supposed from the frequency with which they appear in discussion about human behaviour. We do attend, choose and decide: but It IS very seldom that our choice and our decision are voluntary. On the contrary, we have the paradox-contrary to Kant's supposition-that the Will in man is scarcely ever free, and that the evil state of man results not from choice but from failure to choose. Nearly all that man does is the result of the operation of laws over which he has no control. This is so mainly because he does not understand them. Only seldom, and then nearly always in trivial situations, do a man's actions stem from the exercise of his will-power.

The connection between Will as Power and Will as the Principle of Relatedness is not hard to establish. Attention is a relationship, and so are decision and choice. Attention cannot be described as a dyad of `observer and observed', for it is an element that is independent of both and yet relevant to both. The considerations put forward in the Introduction regarding the nature of relatedness are exemplIfied in every manifestation of Will.

It remains to consider the connection, traced in Chapter 4, between Will and Understanding. First, we may note that understanding is a relationship, and not an activity nor a state of consiousness. Secondly, understanding is effectual only through the exercise of the powers of attention, choice and decision. Unless related by the power of attention, a man's understanding is useless to him. Unconscious choice is nothing but a change in the direction of functional activity. A decision that is not based upon understanding cannot be ascribed to the Will. These assertions are not self-evident, but they can be verified if we observe that all activity is the operation of laws. It very seldom happens that all the forces at work are contained within a given whole or system. In the case of human activity, a man is acted upon and reacts. Will is then only the operation of laws external to the man's own consciousness and being. When he understands what is happening in these regions of his being, he acquires the possibility of voluntary action; that is, of bringing the operation of the laws, at least in part, within the sphere of his own will. Thus the powers are present, but the exercise of the powers is possible only if there is understanding. Hence we may conclude-and very naturally-that the subjective aspect of Will consists in the exercise of powers, and that their exercise derives from Understanding.

ray kurzweil does not understand the brain

Pharyngula | There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he's a genius, when he's actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.

His latest claim is that we'll be able to reverse engineer the human brain within a decade. By reverse engineer, he means that we'll be able to write software that simulates all the functions of the human brain. He's not just speculating optimistically, though: he's building his case on such awfully bad logic that I'm surprised anyone still pays attention to that kook.

Sejnowski says he agrees with Kurzweil's assessment that about a million lines of code may be enough to simulate the human brain.

Here's how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.

About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.

I'm very disappointed in Terence Sejnowski for going along with that nonsense.

See that sentence I put in red up there? That's his fundamental premise, and it is utterly false. Kurzweil knows nothing about how the brain works. It's design is not encoded in the genome: what's in the genome is a collection of molecular tools wrapped up in bits of conditional logic, the regulatory part of the genome, that makes cells responsive to interactions with a complex environment. The brain unfolds during development, by means of essential cell:cell interactions, of which we understand only a tiny fraction. The end result is a brain that is much, much more than simply the sum of the nucleotides that encode a few thousand proteins. He has to simulate all of development from his codebase in order to generate a brain simulator, and he isn't even aware of the magnitude of that problem.

We cannot derive the brain from the protein sequences underlying it; the sequences are insufficient, as well, because the nature of their expression is dependent on the environment and the history of a few hundred billion cells, each plugging along interdependently. We haven't even solved the sequence-to-protein-folding problem, which is an essential first step to executing Kurzweil's clueless algorithm. And we have absolutely no way to calculate in principle all the possible interactions and functions of a single protein with the tens of thousands of other proteins in the cell! Fist tap Dale.

the first church of robotics

NYTimes | What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity — whether it’s the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science or stem-cell research.

If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?

Technology is essentially a form of service. We work to make the world better. Our inventions can ease burdens, reduce poverty and suffering, and sometimes even bring new forms of beauty into the world. We can give people more options to act morally, because people with medicine, housing and agriculture can more easily afford to be kind than those who are sick, cold and starving.

But civility, human improvement, these are still choices. That’s why scientists and engineers should present technology in ways that don’t confound those choices.

We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas out of our work. Fist tap Nana.

reclaiming the imagination

NYTimes | In science, the obvious role of imagination is in the context of discovery. Unimaginative scientists don’t produce radically new ideas. But even in science imagination plays a role in justification too. Experiment and calculation cannot do all its work. When mathematical models are used to test a conjecture, choosing an appropriate model may itself involve imagining how things would go if the conjecture were true. Mathematicians typically justify their fundamental axioms, in particular those of set theory, by informal appeals to the imagination.

Sometimes the only honest response to a question is “I don’t know.” In recognizing that, one may rely just as much on imagination, because one needs it to determine that several competing hypotheses are equally compatible with one’s evidence.

The lesson is not that all intellectual inquiry deals in fictions. That is just to fall back on the crude stereotype of the imagination, from which it needs reclaiming. A better lesson is that imagination is not only about fiction: it is integral to our painful progress in separating fiction from fact. Although fiction is a playful use of imagination, not all uses of imagination are playful. Like a cat’s play with a mouse, fiction may both emerge as a by-product of un-playful uses and hone one’s skills for them.

Critics of contemporary philosophy sometimes complain that in using thought experiments it loses touch with reality. They complain less about Galileo and Einstein’s thought experiments, and those of earlier philosophers. Plato explored the nature of morality by asking how you would behave if you possessed the ring of Gyges, which makes the wearer invisible. Today, if someone claims that science is by nature a human activity, we can refute them by imaginatively appreciating the possibility of extra-terrestrial scientists. Once imagining is recognized as a normal means of learning, contemporary philosophers’ use of such techniques can be seen as just extraordinarily systematic and persistent applications of our ordinary cognitive apparatus. Much remains to be understood about how imagination works as a means to knowledge — but if it didn’t work, we wouldn’t be around now to ask the question. Fist tap Nana.

artificial meat - food for thought?

Guardian | Artificial meat grown in vats may be needed if the 9 billion people expected to be alive in 2050 are to be adequately fed without destroying the earth, some of the world's leading scientists report today.

But a major academic assessment of future global food supplies, led by John Beddington, the UK government chief scientist, suggests that even with new technologies such as genetic modification and nanotechnology, hundreds of millions of people may still go hungry owing to a combination of climate change, water shortages and increasing food consumption.

In a set of 21 papers published by the Royal Society, the scientists from many disciplines and countries say that little more land is available for food production, but add that the challenge of increasing global food supplies by as much as 70% in the next 40 years is not insurmountable.

Although more than one in seven people do not have enough protein and energy in their diet today, many of the papers are optimistic.

A team of scientists at Rothamsted, the UK's largest agricultural research centre, suggests that extra carbon dioxide in the air from global warming, along with better fertilisers and chemicals to protect arable crops, could hugely increase yields and reduce water consumption.

fossil fuels allowed higher world population

victimization?

Video - Terry J. Lovell running down Big Don's view on this issue, chapter and verse. Terry Lovell is a professor of business at Yavapai Community College in Prescott, Arizona. He lives in nearby Prescott Valley, and is the producer of the Patriot Network Videos. He is also involved with the Heritage Foundation, and is also on a local radio station in the Prescott area. Fist tap Big Don.

tea party at the border

NYTimes | No migrant would have dared cross from Mexico into this particular stretch of Arizona on Sunday.

Hundreds of Tea Party activists converged on the border fence here in what is typically a desolate area popular with traffickers to rally for conservative political candidates and to denounce what they called lax federal enforcement of immigration laws. The rally brought a significant law enforcement presence as well as numerous private patrols by advocates of a more secure border.

But rallies, even daylong ones, are no way to seal the border. The Obama administration insists that its statistics show that significant financing increases in the federal Border Patrol have helped bring down crime at the border and make the smuggling of immigrants and drugs harder than ever.

But the activists who gathered Sunday had a decidedly different take. The border, in their view, is still far too easy to get across and has become so dangerous that some of them brought their sidearms for protection. Organizers urged participants to leave rifles in their cars.

“Instead of finding bugs in our beds, we’re finding home invaders,” said Tony Venuti, a Tucson radio host who attached a huge sign to the fence that told immigrants to head to Los Angeles, where they will be more welcome, and even offered directions for getting there.

temporary depression or the end of growth?

Post Carbon Institute | Among the mainstream media, world leaders, and America’s economists-in-chief (Treasury Secretary Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke) there is near-unanimity of opinion: these recent troubles are primarily due to a combination of bad real estate loans and poor regulation of financial markets.

This is the Conventional Diagnosis. If it is correct, then the treatment for our economic malady logically includes heavy doses of bailout money for beleaguered financial institutions, mortgage lenders, and car companies; better regulation of derivatives and futures markets; and stimulus programs to jumpstart consumer spending. All of these measures have been tried—and found wanting.

Is the diagnosis therefore fundamentally flawed? The metaphor needs no belaboring: we all know that tragedy can result from a doctor’s misreading of symptoms, mistaking one disease for another.

Something similar holds for our national and global economic infirmity. If we don’t understand why the world’s industrial and financial metabolism has seized up, we are unlikely to apply the right medicine and could end up making matters much worse than they would otherwise be.

To be sure: the Conventional Diagnosis is clearly at least partly right. The causal connections between subprime mortgage loans and the crises at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers have been thoroughly explored and are well known. Clearly, over the past few years, speculative bubbles in real estate and the financial industry were blown up to colossal dimensions, and their bursting was inevitable. It is hard to disagree with the words of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in his July 25, 2009 essay in the Sydney Morning Herald: “The roots of the crisis lie in the preceding decade of excess. In it the world enjoyed an extraordinary boom…. However, as we later learnt, the global boom was built in large part on a … house of cards. First, in many Western countries the boom was created on a pile of debt held by consumers, corporations and some governments. As the global financier George Soros put it: ‘For 25 years [the West] has been consuming more than we have been producing … living beyond our means.’” (1)

But is this as far as we need look to get to the root of the continuing global economic meltdown?

A case can be made that dire events having to do with real estate, the derivatives markets, and the auto and airline industries were themselves merely symptoms of an even deeper, systemic dysfunction that spells the end of economic growth as we have known it.

In short, I am suggesting an Alternative Diagnosis. This explanation for the economic crisis is not for the faint of heart because, if correct, it implies that the patient is far sicker than even the most pessimistic economists are telling us. But if it is correct, then by ignoring it we risk even greater peril.

lester brown on rising temperatures and rising food prices

climateprogress.org | It’s not news that Lester Brown is warning about our unsustainable approach to feeding the planet. But it is news that Scientific American has run a major article by him on how “The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse.”

Brown’s “Key Concepts”:

* Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos.
* Such “failed states” can export disease, terrorism, illicit drugs, weapons and refugees.
* Water shortages, soil losses and rising temperatures from global warming are placing severe limits on food production.
* Without massive and rapid intervention to address these three environmental factors, the author argues, a series of government collapses could threaten the world order.

Brown’s warnings, ignored for too long, are now being repeated at the highest levels. For instance, I previously blogged on the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, who laid out something very close to this collapse scenario in his speech yesterday to the government’s Sustainable Development UK conference in Westminster (see “When the global Ponzi scheme collapses (circa 2030), the only jobs left will be green“):

You can see the catastrophic decline in those [food] reserves, over the last five years or so, indicates that we actually have a problem; we’re not growing enough food, we’re not able to put stuff into the reserves….

I am going to look at 2030 because that’s when a whole series of events come together….

I will leave you with some key questions. Can nine billion people be fed? Can we cope with the demands in the future on water? Can we provide enough energy? Can we do it, all that, while mitigating and adapting to climate change? And can we do all that in 21 years time? That’s when these things are going to start hitting in a really big way. We need to act now. We need investment in science and technology, and all the other ways of treating very seriously these major problems. 2030 is not very far away.

music of the hemispheres

Sciencenews | “No one questions that listening to music at a very early age affects the spatial, temporal reasoning that underlies math and engineering and even chess,” Miller said.

Actually, a lot of researchers questioned the link between listening to music and smarts. In the original study, the “Mozart effect” was minor and lasted only minutes. Follow-up studies found the effect specific neither to the composer nor to music. Students listening to Mozart were just more stimulated than those listening to a relaxation tape or silence. And while arousal can improve learning, research suggests, the effects can be fleeting and aren’t limited to music. Assessments of the original report now tend to be dirges: In the May-June issue of Intelligence, researchers from the University of Vienna published a paper titled “Mozart effect–Shmozart effect.”

“It’s a short-lived effect and it spawned a huge industry of baby Einstein, baby Mozart CDs, all sorts of stuff,” says Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “But the science behind it is pretty thin.”

Yet even though listening to Mozart won’t make you smarter, a growing body of evidence suggests that playing his music will. Musical training doesn’t just make you a better musician — the acquired skills seem to transfer to other areas, various studies have found. And research focused on the brain’s particular relationship with music and language suggests that engaging the mind with musical training could remedy language impairments such as dyslexia.

“There really is now so much evidence showing that musical experience has a pervasive effect on how the nervous system gets molded and shaped throughout our lifetimes,” says Nina Kraus, head of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “This kind of transformation comes about only with active engagement with sound. My daddy always said, ‘You never get something for nothing.’ You’re not going to get big biceps by watching wrestlers — you’ve got to do it.”

In the long run, musical training appears to improve a suite of verbal and nonverbal skills. Playing an instrument may add finesse to how people move their bodies. Making music makes you hear better, fine-tuning the ability to extract a signal from noise. Musical training also may improve grammar skills, the ability to grasp meaning from words and to distinguish a question from a command.

Until recently, establishing cause and effect for music’s mental impact has been difficult. But long-term studies peering into brain structure and activity are now showing that musical training changes the brain in lasting ways.

birth of the beat

Sciencenews | “Babies are born with a musical readiness that includes a basic sense of timing and rhythm,” declares Trevarthen, of the University of Edinburgh.

Scientists have been finding that these chubby-cheeked cherubs heed a musical sense that moves them and grooves them long before they utter a word. Within a day or two after birth, babies recognize the first beat in a sound sequence; neural signs of surprise appear when that initial “downbeat” goes missing. Classical music lights up specific hearing areas in newborns’ right brains. Even more intriguingly, babies enter the world crying in melodic patterns that the little ones have heard in their mothers’ conversations for at least two months while in the womb (SN: 12/5/09, p. 14).

But infants do much more than pick up beats and mimic melodies, says Trevarthen. An inborn musical knack gets parlayed by babies into emotional banter with attending adults, who possess their own musical feel for infant care. Adults around the world intuitively speak to infants using a singsong, vocally exaggerated mix of words and sounds known as motherese.

Trevarthen rejects the notion that babies passively absorb adults’ googly-eyed gab. Instead, he holds, infants intentionally prompt musical exchanges with adults, and infants know when they’re being invited by a grown-up to interact. Here, the currency of communication consists of coordinated exchanges of gestures, facial expressions, coos, squeals and other sounds. Trevarthen and like-minded researchers call this wordless conversation “communicative musicality.” Babies’ natural musical aptitude gets them in sync with mothers. Within weeks of birth, mom and baby compose brief musical vignettes that tune up a budding relationship.

“Our brains possess a storytelling sense that is an essential component of musicality from the beginning,” says Trevarthen.

From his perspective, musical story­telling prepares infants to learn the rhythms and format of a native language. Adult forms of music, as well as dance and drama, spring from the intricately structured yarns spun by babies and mothers.

New research probing these early musical stories indicates that moms and tots vocally express and share emotions in finely calibrated ways that differ in some respects across cultures. Other findings suggest that mothers everywhere prod babies to sing and act out simple songs as a prelude to learning cultural practices.

And women who suffer from personality and mental disorders fail to connect musically with their babies, investigators find. Infants whose first relationship strikes a sour note may display social and emotional problems later in childhood.

But like healthy babies, Trevarthen notes, these unfortunate tykes try their darndest to relate musically with whoever is available.

Trevarthen’s views draw criticism, though, from many cognitive psychologists and musicologists. They regard music as a universal practice, with still-mysterious evolutionary origins, that infants learn from their native cultures without the help of an innate timekeeper. From their first days, babies seamlessly learn to keep a beat and to prefer the same melodies that adults do, from this perspective. Some critics suspect that Trevarthen and his colleagues, not babies and mothers, are telling musical stories.

more than a feeling

Sciencenews | “It’s like the brain is on fire when you’re listening to music,” says Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “In terms of brain imaging, studies have shown listening to music lights up, or activates, more of the brain than any other stimulus we know.”

That music can activate so many brain systems at once is the reason it packs such a mental wallop. It exerts its most profound effect in the brain’s emotional core, the limbic system. There, music changes virtually all areas of the brain responsible for regulating emotion, as neuroscientist Stefan Koelsch of Freie Universität Berlin describes in the March Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Music automatically engages areas essential to pleasure and reward. So much so, in fact, that the same pleasure centers in the brain light up whether you’re listening to a favorite tune, eating chocolate or having sex.

These dramatic effects make music a valuable instrument for probing the brain’s emotional circuitry. Koelsch and others are now using music as a tool to see how the brain processes a wide range of feelings such as sorrow, joy, longing and wonder. (Click here for a link to audio clips from some of Koelsch's experiments.) Some of these emotions, so easily felt in response to music, are otherwise difficult to evoke in an experimental setup. Other researchers are using music to explore how children with autism spectrum disorders process emotion. While these kids often have difficulty recognizing how others feel, they readily respond to the sentiments of a song.

Using music to study and stimulate the brain’s emotional circuits may lead to new therapies for treating a wide range of emotional disorders, including depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, scientists say. By understanding how music activates and coordinates the various emotional mechanisms in the brain, scientists may find ways to rewire a brain affected by illness or injury, or provide a work-around for damaged or underperforming brain regions.

Despite the long list of potential benefits for health and happiness, Koelsch contends that the deep, complex experience that music delivers is primarily a social, rather than an individual, phenomenon (see “Not just a pleasant sound,”). Ages before people walked around with little wires in their ears to listen to music anytime, anywhere, tunes piped on flutes and reeds were probably used in tribal rituals to unify hunters and warriors about to do battle. Today, music helps pull people together at weddings, funerals and countless social events.

Music is universal. It occurs in all human cultures in some form, and extends deep into human history. Archaeologists have unearthed flutes made of bone that date back nearly 40,000 years. And scientists say that long before someone went to the trouble of carving a flute, humans banged out tunes using sticks and stones. Given that music gave early flutists and their fans no direct biological advantage over rival creatures — sweet melodies couldn’t put food on the stone slab or guarantee grandchildren — researchers have long wondered why humans developed the capacity to perform and enjoy it.

Though music may not have evolved for survival purposes, modern-day imaging techniques reveal that it can have the same effects on the brain as many survival-related activities. In 2001, neuro­scientists Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre of McGill University in Montreal asked people to listen to music deemed so moving by these participants that it “sent shivers down the spine.” Blood, now at Harvard, and Zatorre showed that music activates neural systems of reward and emotion similar to those stimulated by food, sex and addictive drugs.

did agriculture fundamentally alter human sexuality?

gizmodo | • Before humans settled down into civilization, we were small bands of hunter-gatherers who had no notion of sexual monogamy. Within our relatively small tribes, most humans had multiple partners, primarily from within the tribal group, although occasionally we'd have a dalliance with a stranger to keep the DNA pool zesty. Children had multiple social "fathers", jealousy was nearly nonexistent, and relatively easy access to calories kept us fit, happy, and satisfied well into our 70s and 80s—provided we managed to get past the perils of high mortality rates expected from a wild environment and primitive medicine.

• Upon the discovery of agriculture, nomadic wandering was no longer possible—someone has to stick around to water the crops—so the ideas of property and inheritance became sadly useful. Domesticated food could become scarce, unlike the effectively endless bounty of hunter-gathering (ignoring the occasional climate-torqued famine or run of bad luck), so hoarding became necessary to ensure calories even in lean times. It's a lot of work to farm, so it became important to ensure that you weren't wasting your precious grains on someone else's offspring, especially if it meant you own kid was getting short shrift. Hence monogamy, marriage, and the unfortunate concept of partners as property, manifested in agrarian societies as a tendency to view women as chattel.

• Our genes, still tuned toward sexual novelty, cause us to really hate being monogamous, but societal pressures—including centralized codified religion—force men and women into an arrangement that brings with it just as many problems as it solves. Men cheat, women wither in sexual shackles (or, you know, cheat), wars erupt over resources or sexual exclusivity, cats and dogs almost start sleeping together except they're afraid the neighbors might find out—Old Testament, real wrath of God-type stuff.

While that glosses over so much good stuff from Sex at Dawn—our sexual similarities to our closest relatives, the bonobos; the dismantling of the idea that most animals are monogamous; humans' absolutely scandalous appetite for sex and our correspondingly massive genitals—I hope it's a fair summation of the part that's relative to my point (which is coming, I swear!): Agriculture fundamentally altered human sexuality.

britain reels as austerity cuts begin

NYTimes | Last month, the British government abolished the U.K. Film Council, the Health Protection Agency and dozens of other groups that regulate, advise and distribute money in the arts, health care, industry and other areas.

It seemed shockingly abrupt, a mass execution without appeal. But it was just a tiny taste of what was to come.

Like a shipwrecked sailor on a starvation diet, the new British coalition government is preparing to shrink down to its bare bones as it cuts expenditures by $130 billion over the next five years and drastically scales back its responsibilities. The result, said the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a research group, will be “the longest, deepest sustained period of cuts to public services spending” since World War II.

Until recently, the cuts were just election talking points, early warnings of a new age of austerity. But now the pain has begun. And as the government begins its abrupt retrenchment, the implications, complications and confusions in the process are beginning to emerge.

hmmm.....,

USAToday | At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.

Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.

The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.

Public employee unions say the compensation gap reflects the increasingly high level of skill and education required for most federal jobs and the government contracting out lower-paid jobs to the private sector in recent years.

"The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.

Chris Edwards, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, thinks otherwise. "Can't we now all agree that federal workers are overpaid and do something about it?" he asks.

gop's four deformations of the apocalypse

NYTimes | The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.

It is also an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves. Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.

The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.

The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector. Here, Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation. As a result, the combined assets of conventional banks and the so-called shadow banking system (including investment banks and finance companies) grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008.

The fourth destructive change has been the hollowing out of the larger American economy. Having lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore. In the past decade, the number of high-value jobs in goods production and in service categories like trade, transportation, information technology and the professions has shrunk by 12 percent, to 68 million from 77 million. The only reason we have not experienced a severe reduction in nonfarm payrolls since 2000 is that there has been a gain in low-paying, often part-time positions in places like bars, hotels and nursing homes.

David Stockman was President Ronald Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget.

still more advanced civilization that will survive..,

Video - the interconnected worldview and practices of the Gamo people.

the results of keeping drugs illegal

gilbertgrace | The law did have an effect on me. However, a lot of people did dabble during the 60s and 70s - now we have a hepatitis-C epidemic, thanks to the fact that those who dabbled in heroin had to do it under cover, sharing injecting equipment. Our society now faces the fact that 250,000 people have hepatitis-C, 20% to 30% of whom will end up with cirrhosis and need liver transplants. So our keeping the drug illegal in the 70s, all based on good thinking, led to consequences we just had no idea about but are now having to deal with.

Keeping drugs illegal gives government something to focus on as they fight the war on drugs rather than the war on dismay, despair, isolation and fear which has driven the drug use in the first place. This approach gives work to Customs agents, Federal Police and others, resulting in great news stories, such as large quantities of drugs being shown in people's underwear or in condoms which they hold up and say, "I wonder where they inserted this?". People think that is wonderful and get a chuckle out of it, but these drugs kill people. The people who are bringing them into the country are making millions of dollars at the expense of young people's lives. Despite the war on drugs, we are now seeing more heroin back in Sydney than ten years ago, thanks to the war on drugs and the war on terrorism which has allowed Afghanistan to now start producing more heroin than ever before.

The Stateline program on 4 February said it all, I think, sadly and innocently in some ways. We saw the story of a man who had committed suicide on the front lawn of some young people in western Sydney because these young, unemployed, under-engaged drug using teenagers had just heckled him and heckled him to the point of his killing himself - an extraordinary tale. Cannabis and other drug use were blamed to a significant degree for this outcome, whilst the issues of poor parenting, lack of work or social support systems were addressed far less clearly. The current system completely failed that man. If the kids who caused him to take his life were charged with his death and sent into the penal system, is there much hope that they would be rehabilitated? My answer is "No, there is not a lot of hope that they would come out of it better people." Our system failed everybody in that story - yet it was presented as a very intense, thoughtful look at drugs in our society.

Our current system criminalises the drug use that makes life bearable for some; it hardens the minds and hearts of those who do end up in the penal system; it ignores the bleedingly obvious societal factors which lead to dysfunctional drug use in the first place; and it allows this system to run beneath the surface of the law, out of reach of the police for much of the time, making millions of dollars and ending hundreds of tragic lives."

the neuronal basis of civilization?

Video - VS Ramachandran outlines the function of mirror neurons.

thermogene collision

Video - A vision of how our genetic imperatives will clash with Peak Oil and net energy descent

greatest depression geography

thumper die-off narrative....,

Video - rapture, tribulation, left behind.....,

matt simmons (april 7, 1943 – august 8, 2010)

EVWorld | A visionary or a gadfly, Simmons helped alert the world to peak oil.

News of Matt Simmon's untimely death came to me this morning in an email link to the August 9, 2010 Reuters new story, Oil guru Matthew Simmons dies in Maine.

I had had the pleasure of talking with Matt on a number of occasions over the years, even persuading him to join EV World's nascent Editorial Advisory Board, on the stipulation, he informed me, that I not ask his advice.

He first came to my attention back in 2004, when he was interviewed by Julian Darley on the topic of Peak Oil. I would interview him about his newly released book, "Twilight in the Desert " the summer of 2005.

I can still vividly recall his describing to me his wading through a three feet-high stack of Saudi oil field engineering reports, the consensus of which convinced him that Saudi Arabia's oil fields were in serious trouble, a conclusion that was not only the underlying premise of his book, but also earned him the reputation of an oil and gas industry gadfly, as well as a favorite cable news guest as oil prices briefly crested -- propelled mainly by greedy speculators -- at nearly $150 a barrel the summer of 2008. A year earlier he correctly predicted that the price would climb to over $100.

We finally would meet in person the Fall of 2005 at the first Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference in Denver and then again in Boston in 2006. At the Denver conference, he took a moment to thank me for helping publicize Twilight.

Over time, Matt became increasingly concerned about the imminence of Peak Oil and the serious impact it is likely to have on our culture. The founder of Simmons & Co. International, which today is one of the largest investment banking companies specializing in the energy industry, he also founded The Ocean Energy Institute, the mission of which is to promote research and development of offshore wind resources. In June, he announced he would retire from the investment bank business, but not before creating yet another sensation by alleging that the BP oil gusher is a "sideshow." The real problem, he contended is a huge seafloor fissure 5-7 miles away from the original blown wellhead. It is releasing, he estimated 120,000 barrels of oil a day. Little word has since appeared about that potential problem.

Matt, age 67, was discovered dead in the hot tub of his Maine summer home. The local coroner listed the cause of death as "accidental drowning" complicated by heart disease. He leaves his wife and five daughters, and a lot of grateful people whom he helped wake up to our challenging energy future, one he didn't live to see, but one I sure he hoped he'd helped make a little less turbulent by speaking out. Fist tap Dale.

colonization from without and from within

howtosavetheworld | Colonization is a loaded word, depending on whether you are the colonizer or the colonized. Throughout the history of our civilization, colonizers (imperialists, conquistadors, missionaries and, most recently, globalization corporatists) have asserted that colonized people were “savages” who needed external rule imposed on them “for their own good”. It matters little whether such assertions were honest, well-intentioned and misguided, or blatant excuses for theft, murder and oppression. The whole world is now substantially a single homogeneous colony, a single culture imposed and enforced by political and media propaganda, economic coercion, and of course, brute force.

The world “colonize” is from the Latin (whose speakers were accomplished at it) meaning “to inhabit, settle, farm and cultivate”. This definition carries no pretense of doing anything for the benefit of the “colonized” peoples. It just means taking over the land and resources, with or without violence and displacement. The words “culture” and “cultivate” also referred strictly to farming activities until, a mere two centuries ago, their meaning was expanded to include the intellectual, political, economic and social activities of civilization.

Such is the malleability of the human mind and conscience, that colonization occurs, to a greater or lesser extent, at four different levels, and the fact that the more interior forms of colonization are less obvious and often sub-conscious merely makes them, and their effect, more insidious. The four levels, depicted in the chart above, are, reading from the outside-in:

1. External colonization — where people from one land move into and colonize another land (e.g. various recent invasions of Afghanistan; NAFTA)
2. Internal colonization — where a dominant culture undermines and exterminates another culture within the same area (e.g. the ongoing brutality that the dominant European culture subjects indigenous peoples to, worldwide)
3. Self-colonization — where a group of people undermines and exterminates diversity within their own culture (e.g. McCarthyism, groupthink and hazing)
4. Personal colonization — where an individual molds her/himself to better fit in with her/his group and/or culture. Fist tap Dale.

separating the mind from essence..,

from Gurdjieff's "Views from the Real World," pp. 148-150

As long as a man does not separate himself from himself he can achieve nothing, and no one can help him.

To govern oneself is a very difficult thing--it is a problem for the future; it requires much power and demands much work. But this first thing, to separate oneself from oneself, does not require much strength, it only needs desire, serious desire, the desire of a grown-up man. If a man cannot do it, it shows that he lacks the desire of a grown-up man. Consequently it proves that there is nothing for him here. What we do here can only be a doing suitable for grown-up men.

Our mind, our thinking, has nothing in common with us, with our essence--no connection, no dependence. Our mind lives by itself and our essence lives by itself. When we say "to separate oneself from oneself" it means that the mind should stand apart from the essence. Our weak essence can change at any moment, for it is dependent on many influences: on food, on our surroundings, on time, on the weather, and on a multitude of other causes. But the mind depends on very few influences and so, with a little effort, it can be kept in the desired direction. Every weak man can give the desired direction to his mind. But he has no power over his essence; great power is required to give direction to essence and keep essence to it. (Body and essence are the same devil.)...

Speaking of the mind I know that each of you has enough strength, each of you can have the power and capacity to act not as he now acts....

I repeat, every grown-up man can achieve this; everyone who has a serious desire can do it. But no one tries....

In order to understand better what I mean, I shall give you an example: now, in a calm state, not reacting to anything or anyone, I decide to set myself the task of establishing a good relationship with Mr. B., because I need him for business purposes and can do what I wish only with his help. But I dislike Mr. B. for he is a very disagreeable man. He understands nothing. He is a blockhead. He is vile, anything you like. I am so made that these traits affect me. Even if he merely looks at me, I become irritated. If he talks nonsense, I am beside myself. I am only a man, so I am weak and cannot persuade myself that I need not be annoyed--I shall go on being annoyed.

Yet I can control myself, depending on how serious my desire is to gain the end I wish to gain through him. If I keep to this purpose, to this desire, I shall be able to do so. No matter how annoyed I may be, this state of wishing will be in my mind. No matter how furious, how beside myself I am, in a corner of my mind I shall still remember the task I set myself. My mind is unable to restrain me from anything, unable to make me feel this or that toward him, but it is able to remember. I say to myself: "You need him, so don't be cross or rude to him." It could even happen that I would curse him, or hit him, but my mind would continue to pluck at me, reminding me that I should not do so. But the mind is powerless to do anything.

This is precisely what anyone who has a serious desire not to identify himself with his essence can do. This is what is meant by "separating the mind from the essence."

And what happens when the mind becomes merely a function? If I am annoyed, if I lose my temper, I shall think, or rather "it" will think, in accordance with this annoyance, and I shall see everything in the light of the annoyance. To hell with it!

And so I say that with a serious man--a simple, ordinary man without any extraordinary powers, but a grown-up man--whatever he decides, whatever problem he has set himself, that problem will always remain in his head. Even if he cannot achieve it in practice, he will always keep it in his mind. Even if he is influenced by other considerations, his mind will not forget the problem he has set himself. He has a duty to perform and, if he is honest, he will strive to perform it, because he is a grown-up man.

No one can help him in this remembering, in this separation of oneself from oneself. A man must do it for himself. Only then, from the moment a man has this separation, can another man help him....

The only difference between a child and a grown-up man is in the mind. All the weaknesses are there, beginning with hunger, with sensitivity, with naiveté; there is no difference. The same things are in a child and in a grown-up man: love, hate, everything. Functions are the same, receptivity is the same, equally they react, equally they are given to imaginary fears. In short there is no difference. The only difference is in the mind: we have more material, more logic than a child.

on essence..,

LiveScience | Our personalities stay pretty much the same throughout our lives, from our early childhood years to after we're over the hill, according to a new study.

The results show personality traits observed in children as young as first graders are a strong predictor of adult behavior.

"We remain recognizably the same person," said study author Christopher Nave, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside. "This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts."

The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Tracking personalities

Using data from a 1960s study of approximately 2,400 ethnically diverse schoolchildren (grades 1 – 6) in Hawaii, researchers compared teacher personality ratings of the students with videotaped interviews of 144 of those individuals 40 years later.

They examined four personality attributes — talkativeness (called verbal fluency), adaptability (cope well with new situations), impulsiveness and self-minimizing behavior (essentially being humble to the point of minimizing one's importance). Fist tap Nana.

plenty of advanced civilization that will survive

LATimes | Here in this medieval city in eastern Ethiopia, the humans and the hyenas are living in peace.

The truce began two centuries ago (or so the story goes) during a time of great famine.

There was drought in the hills where the wildlife roamed, and hungry hyenas had sneaked into Harar and eaten people.

Distressed, the town's Muslim saints convened a meeting on a nearby mountaintop. There, they devised a solution: The people would feed the hyenas porridge if the hyenas would stop their attacks.

The plan worked, and a strange, symbiotic relationship was born.

City leaders went on to create holes in the sand-colored stone walls that surround Harar to give the hyenas nightly access to the town's garbage. And in the 1960s, a farmer started feeding hyenas scraps of meat (goat, donkey, sometimes camel) to keep them away from his livestock.

That farmer was the first hyena man. Today the title belongs to Youseff Mume Saleh. Fist tap Big Don.

new hypothesis for human evolution and nature

Physorg | It's no secret to any dog-lover or cat-lover that humans have a special connection with animals. But in a new journal article and forthcoming book, paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University argues that this human-animal connection goes well beyond simple affection. Shipman proposes that the interdependency of ancestral humans with other animal species -- "the animal connection" -- played a crucial and beneficial role in human evolution over the last 2.6 million years.

"Establishing an intimate connection to other animals is unique and universal to our species," said Shipman, a professor of biological anthropology. Her paper describing the new hypothesis for human evolution based on the tendency to nurture members of other species will be published in the August 2010 issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

In addition to describing her theory in the scientific paper, Shipman has authored a book for the general public, now in press with W. W. Norton, titled The Animal Connection. "No other mammal routinely adopts other species in the wild -- no gazelles take in baby cheetahs, no mountain lions raise baby deer," Shipman said. "Every mouthful you feed to another species is one that your own children do not eat. On the face of it, caring for another species is maladaptive, so why do we humans do this?"

Shipman suggests that the animal connection was prompted by the invention of stone tools 2.6-million years ago. "Having sharp tools transformed wimpy human ancestors into effective predators who left many cut marks on the fossilized bones of their prey," Shipman said. Becoming a predator also put our ancestors into direct competition with other carnivores for carcasses and prey. As Shipman explains, the human ancestors who learned to observe and understand the behavior of potential prey obtained more meat. "Those who also focused on the behavior of potential competitors reaped a double evolutionary advantage for natural selection," she said.

india asks, should food be a right for the poor?

NYTimes | Inside the drab district hospital, where dogs patter down the corridors, sniffing for food, Ratan Bhuria’s children are curled together in the malnutrition ward, hovering at the edge of starvation. His daughter, Nani, is 4 and weighs 20 pounds. His son, Jogdiya, is 2 and weighs only eight.

Landless and illiterate, drowned by debt, Mr. Bhuria and his ailing children have staggered into the hospital ward after falling through India’s social safety net. They should receive subsidized government food and cooking fuel. They do not. The older children should be enrolled in school and receiving a free daily lunch. They are not. And they are hardly alone: India’s eight poorest states have more people in poverty — an estimated 421 million — than Africa’s 26 poorest nations, one study recently reported.

For the governing Indian National Congress Party, which has staked its political fortunes on appealing to the poor, this persistent inability to make government work for people like Mr. Bhuria has set off an ideological debate over a question that once would have been unthinkable in India: Should the country begin to unshackle the poor from the inefficient, decades-old government food distribution system and try something radical, like simply giving out food coupons, or cash?

The rethinking is being prodded by a potentially sweeping proposal that has divided the Congress Party. Its president, Sonia Gandhi, is pushing to create a constitutional right to food and expand the existing entitlement so that every Indian family would qualify for a monthly 77-pound bag of grain, sugar and kerosene. Such entitlements have helped the Congress Party win votes, especially in rural areas.

To Ms. Gandhi and many left-leaning social allies, making a food a legal right would give people like Mr. Bhuria a tool to demand benefits that rightfully belong to them. Many economists and market advocates within the Congress Party agree that the poor need better tools to receive their benefits but believe existing delivering system needs to be dismantled, not expanded; they argue that handing out vouchers equivalent to the bag of grain would liberate the poor from an unwieldy government apparatus and let them buy what they please, where they please.

climate killing golf courses?!?!?!?!?!

WSJ | The sustained record-breaking heat across much of the U.S. this summer, combined with high humidity and occasional heavy rain, is killing the greens on many golf courses. A handful of high-profile courses have already had to close, and if the heat continues, others are likely to follow. Golfers themselves deserve part of the blame for insisting that putting surfaces be mown short and fast even in weather conditions in which such practices are almost certain to ruin them.

Huntingdon Valley Country Club outside Philadelphia, which dates from 1897, shut two of its three nines two weeks ago because of serious turf disease caused by the hot, wet weather. The Philadelphia area in July had 17 days of 90-degree-plus weather, six more than average, mixed with flooding thunderstorms of up to 4 inches.

The U.S. Golf Association last week issued a special "turf-loss advisory" to courses in the Mid-Atlantic states, urgently advising greenkeepers to institute "defensive maintenance and management programs" until the weather crisis ends. Most of the danger is to greens planted in creeping bentgrass and annual bluegrass (also known as poa annua).

"Physiologically, these are cool-season grasses that do very well when the air temperature is 60 to 75 degrees," said Clark Throssell, director of research for the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America. "They can cope with a few days of 90-degree weather every summer, but when that kind of heat lasts for days at a time, they have extreme difficulty."

Temperatures for weather reports are measured in the shade, but greens baking in the midday sun can reach 120 or 130 degrees. When grass spends too much time in soil that hot, it starts to thin out, turn yellow and wither. Most bentgrass strains will collapse entirely with prolonged exposure to 106-degree soil. The grass doesn't go dormant—it dies.

the HUGE cost of public pensions

NYTimes | There’s a class war coming to the world of government pensions.

The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.

The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.

At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.

The figure comes from a study by the Pew Center on the States that came out in February. Pew estimated a $1 trillion gap as of fiscal 2008 between what states had promised workers in the way of retiree pension, health care and other benefits and the money they currently had to pay for it all. And some economists say that Pew is too conservative and the problem is two or three times as large.

So a question of extraordinary financial, political, legal and moral complexity emerges, something that every one of us will be taking into town meetings and voting booths for years to come: Given how wrong past pension projections were, who should pay to fill the 13-figure financing gap?

paring down...,

NYTimes | Faced with the steepest and longest decline in tax collections on record, state, county and city governments have resorted to major life-changing cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety that, not too long ago, would have been unthinkable. And services in many areas could get worse before they get better.

The length of the downturn means that many places have used up all their budget gimmicks, cut services, raised taxes, spent their stimulus money — and remained in the hole. Even with Congress set to approve extra stimulus aid, some analysts say states are still facing huge shortfalls.

Cities and states are notorious for crying wolf around budget time, and for issuing dire warnings about draconian cuts that never seem to materialize. But the Great Recession has been different. Around the country, there have already been drastic cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety, and there are likely to be more before the downturn ends. The cuts that have disrupted lives in Hawaii, Georgia and Colorado may be extreme, but they reflect the kinds of cuts being made nationwide, disrupting the lives of millions of people in ways large and small.