In a sense, these three companies’ cloud services do represent three different concepts of God. Google is an Old Testament, theist-style cloud all the way: He through whom all blessings and punishments come, who must be praised and supplicated; without the Cloud, you are nothing and have nothing. iCloud represents more of a Deist ideal. The Cloud exists, but its presence is more to be felt than seen; if it does its job right, iCloud will instill great doubt that it even exists, or that it takes any notice of us at all. Amazon is a form of agnosticism. You don’t know if you really believe in it or not, but you do know that on the third weekend of every month this pointy building near the center of town throws a really great bake sale.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced I’m on to something with these ideas about God and iCloud. Some atheists derisively describe God as “Your magic friend who lives in the clouds,” after all. I’m perfectly fine with that concept, if this new magical friend makes sure I’ll never again find myself 3000 miles from home with a hard drive that’s making crunchy noises instead of retrieving the Keynote files I’ll need for the four hours of talks I traveled there to deliver.

I mean, at the time I prayed to my previous, analog God for deliverance… and a fat lot of good that did me.

via Andy Ihnatko.

Do psychopaths enjoy reading books about psychopaths? In his engagingly irreverent new best seller, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (Riverhead, $25.95), the journalist Jon Ronson notes that only about one in 100 people are psychopaths (there is a higher proportion in prisons and corporate boardrooms), but he wonders if this population will be overrepresented among readers of his book. After all, people do enjoy learning about themselves, and psychopaths in particular have an enhanced sense of their own importance. And they might like what Ronson has to say. He approvingly quotes experts who argue that psychopaths make “the world go around.” Despite their small numbers, they cause such chaos that they remold society — though not necessarily for the better. If you aren’t sure whether you are a psychopath, Ronson can help. He lists all the items on the standard diagnostic checklist, developed by the psychologist Robert Hare. You can score yourself on traits like “glibness/superficial charm,” “lack of remorse or guilt,” “promiscuous sexual behavior” and 17 other traits. As one psychologist tells Ronson, if you are bothered at the thought of scoring high, then don’t worry. You’re not a psychopath.

One of the traits on the checklist is “callous/lack of empathy.” This is the focus of another new book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Basic Books, $25.99), by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychologist best known for his research on autism. Baron-Cohen begins by telling how, at the age of 7, he learned that the Nazis turned Jews into lampshades and bars of soap, and he goes on to provide other examples of human savagery. To explain such atrocities, he offers an ambitious theory grounded in the concept of empathy, which he defines as “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.” For Baron-Cohen, evil is nothing more than “empathy erosion.”

Now, one might lack empathy for temporary reasons — you can be enraged or drunk, for instance — but Baron-Cohen is most interested in lack of empathy as an enduring trait. Once again, you might want to know where you stand, and Baron-­Cohen ends his book with a 40-question Empathy Quotient checklist.

via NYTimes.com.

New political understandings are being launched each day, it seems. From one quarter comes what we might call Praetorian Realism, an acknowledgment of Samuel Huntington’s scenario for the military disciplining of civil chaos in modernizing lands.1 From another comes Matrix Realism, emphasizing the army’s role in the institutional order of the Arab countries.2 In this expansive intellectual climate, with its growing range of options, perhaps there’s room for one more entrant. Let’s call it Tribal Realism, the aim being to bring anthropological insights to bear on our political prospects abroad. Tribal Realism might have a number of practical applications, but its immediate goal would be to vet Western political speeches to delete all references to “the people” of Libya, or Iraq or Afghanistan. It will then try to decompose this popular collective noun into its actual constituent parts. Admittedly, removing such a warmly democratic term as “the people” will leave a sizeable hole in the prevailing rhetoric, exposing speechwriters for assorted presidents and prime ministers to a pressing need for workable replacements, but the benefits should outweigh the costs.

For one thing, it will expose the enemy, too. From his Bedouin tent, Colonel Muamar Qaddafi has said he would not dream of harming “his people”, let alone shooting and shelling them, and he undoubtedly means it. Correctly understood, however, Qaddafi’s people are, first, his family, consisting of his wives and children; next, his clan; then, his tribe; and finally, by a no doubt deplorable process of geographical attenuation, those tiny insignificant figures in the direction of Benghazi, who hardly count at all. Once we grasp this meaning of the term “people”, we will see that Qaddafi is telling the truth. In the colonel’s ethical universe those who deserve his exclusive concern are the men and women he regards as kin. In contrast, that unruly rabble to the east may legitimately be hunted down and mercilessly killed. That is what desert chieftains have historically done when they could. That is what men like Qaddafi see as their duty to do, and that is what his numerous dependents—“his people”—expect him to do.

via The American Interest Magazine.

We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science. Science in Muslim societies already lags far behind the scientific achievements of the West, but what adds a fair amount of contemporary angst is that Islamic civilization was once the unrivaled center of science and philosophy. What's more, Islam's "golden age" flourished while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages.

This history raises a troubling question: What caused the decline of science in the Muslim world?

Now, a small but emerging group of scholars is taking a new look at the relationship between Islam and science. Many have personal roots in Muslim or Arab cultures. While some are observant Muslims and others are nonbelievers, they share a commitment to speak out—in books, blogs, and public lectures—in defense of science. If they have a common message, it's the conviction that there's no inherent conflict between Islam and science.

via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Last month, nearly a dozen scholars gathered at a symposium on Islam and science at the University of Cambridge, sponsored by the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Programme in Science & Religion. They discussed a wide range of topics: the science-religion dialogue in the Muslim world, the golden age of Islam, comparisons between Islamic and Christian theology, and current threats to science. The Muslim scholars there also spoke of a personal responsibility to foster a culture of science.

One was Rana Dajani, a molecular biologist at Hashemite University, in Jordan. She received her undergraduate and master's degrees in Jordan, then took time off to raise four children before going to the University of Iowa on a Fulbright grant to earn her Ph.D. Now back in Jordan, she is an outspoken advocate of evolution and modern science. She has also set up a network for mentoring women, and she recently started a read-aloud program for young children at mosques around Jordan.

As if that weren't enough, Dajani helped organize a committee to study the ethics of stem-cell research, bringing together Jordanian scientists, physicians, and Islamic scholars. (The traditional Muslim belief is that the spirit does not enter the body until 40 days after conception, which means many human embryonic stem cells can be harvested for research.)

"Being a Muslim, living in a Muslim world, Islam plays a big role in our everyday lives," she says. "We need to understand the relationship between Islam and science in order to live in harmony without any contradictions."

For these scholars, the relationship between science and Islam is not a dry, academic subject. Many of the hottest topics in science—from the origins of the universe and the evolution of humans to the mind/brain problem—challenge traditional Muslims beliefs about the world.

"Remember, these are human issues," says Nidhal Guessoum, an Algerian-born astrophysicist at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, who was also at the Cambridge symposium. "It's not an experiment in the lab. I'm talking about my students, my family members, the media discourse that I hear every day on TV, the sermons I hear in the mosque every Friday."

Actor Peter Falk reportedly died last night at age 83, at his home in Beverly Hills. According to his daughter, reports USA Today, Falk had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease and dementia.

As an actor, Falk was a performer who was more than he at first seemed: he had a famously raspy, tough-guy manner of speech, but performed subtly in a wide range of roles, from comedy to gangster movies to the art films of John Cassavetes and Wim Wenders. His most beloved role, though, and the one for which he's immortalized on TV, was as a cigar-chewing, trenchcoat-wearing detective on NBC's Columbo—who was, himself, the very definition of a character who was more than he looked like, and used it to his advantage.

Lt. Columbo, hero of the show that began airing in 1971, was a role that seemed tailor-made for Falk (though other actors originated it, beginning with a TV movie in 1960), if you can credibly use the phrase "tailor-made" and "Columbo" in the same sentence. (It is, I believe, a constitutional requirement that Lt. Columbo be described as "rumpled.") He looked like he might have just rolled off a park bench or stumbled out of a bar in early-morning light. He was sheathed in wrinkles and looked like a cigar smelled. (He was, as Falk describes him in the documentary clip below, "a schlepper.") He had a roughed-up style, a working-class accent and a pleasantly addled aspect—thanks, partly, to the fact that Falk had a glass eye from age three, because of a tumor.

All of which led his quarry, the criminals that he investigated, to underestimate him—which, of course, was the entire point of Columbo. It was a whodunit in which the audience knew who did it; so the thrill came in seeing how Columbo would outwit his targets and catch them up in their lies. He did it with dogged determination, genius and a cheerful willingness to be underestimated. Also, with persistence: his signature move was to turn from an interrogation, letting the suspects think they had outfoxed him, and then turn back to ask "Just one more thing..." which would be their undoing.

via TIME.com.

AT FIRST GLANCE, this could be Italy—the promenade, the sidewalk cafés and ice-cream parlors, the streetscape of conjoined little apartment houses in mustard, terra-cotta, ocher, olive, or beige. Even the name of the place, Lavasa, sounds vaguely Italian.

But look again, and this clearly isn’t Italy. It’s too clean, too new. There are too few tourists. There are hardly any people at all, actually. Which only makes it all the more improbable that Lavasa is, in fact, in India—land of auto rickshaws and slum dogs, of sweat and dust and litter. With only a handful of residents, Lavasa is a city-in-waiting. But its corporate backers believe it will soon represent nothing less than a new model of urban development and governance in India—a country where the phrase city planning has long been a contradiction in terms.

Lavasa sits in the Western Ghats, some 130 miles southeast of Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital, and 40 miles west of Pune, a growing hub for software programming and computer animation. If all goes according to its master plan, Lavasa will eventually house more than 300,000 people in five distinct “towns.” It will also have a world-class medical campus, luxury hotels, boarding schools, sports academies, a Nick Faldo–designed golf course, a space camp, and, its developers hope, animation and film studios, software-development companies, biotech labs, and law and architectural firms—in short, all of the knowledge industries at the heart of the “new India.” Those industries have yet to buy in, but residential sales have been brisk: in Dasve, the first of Lavasa’s five towns, scheduled to be completed this year, the houses are almost sold out.

via The Atlantic.