The FIFA World Cup started yesterday. I’ll watch a few games here and there, but I don’t follow it closely. Alan Jacobs does, however, and he explains that the beauty of the game depends almost entirely on the offside rule: “Almost all of the wonderful patterns and geometries of soccer are generated by this one rule, which also generates something that many non-fans greatly dislike: a paucity of goals. But soccer fans get exasperated when goals flow too freely. Scoring should not be easy, and, as with gold and diamonds, there’s a link between rarity and value. The true fan delights in players who have not just the physical gifts but also the imagination to circumvent the rules that seem designed specifically to prevent scoring.”
A history of ancient Jewish graffiti: “‘You will come to an evil end if you rob this grave’ and ‘My beloved was here’ ranked among the most popular messages for graffiti writers in ancient Jewish communities. Starting some 3,000 years ago, Jews scratched walls at homes and public spaces with prayers, warnings, blessings on deceased relatives, and store advertisements. They even used graffiti to mark rows of theater seats that were reserved for Jewish groups. In the margins of the texts, they sketched outlines of ships, people, menorahs, and synagogue columns.”
Why do we kill ourselves? Depression—or the “abnormal activity of neural circuits”—can be treated partially by medicine but not completely. That’s because depression is not only a biological problem. Ultimately, we kill ourselves, says Walker Percy, because we don’t know who we are. “We do not know where we came from, why we are here, or what comes at the end. We do not know what it means to have a good life or a good death.”
The University of Chicago gets rid of SAT and ACT requirements.
A restraining order has been issued against Stan Lee’s business partner, Keya Morga: “Morgan, a memorabilia collector, inserted himself in Lee's life as his caregiver after Lee's wife Joan died in July, according to a statement of facts filed with the request for the restraining order. The documents claim that Morgan allegedly isolated Lee from his family and that last week he moved Lee from his longtime home into a condominium.”
A new photo of Nicholas II’s heir has been found: “The picture shows Alexei Nikolaevich, 13, on a riverboat eight weeks before he was killed in 1918 with the rest of the ruling Romanov royal family following their exile.”
Essay of the Day:
Tom Bartlett went to the Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson earlier this year. It was not what he was expecting:
“Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist, and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anesthesiologists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two, and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and beer, and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it’s unclear how to make progress or where you’d even begin.
“Then just, like, see what happens.
“The cover of the program for the Science of Consciousness conference, held recently in Tucson, shows a human brain getting sucked into (or perhaps rising from?) a black hole. That seems about right: After a week of listening to eye-crossingly detailed descriptions of teeny-tiny cell structures known as microtubules, along with a lecture about building a soundproof booth in order to chat with the whispery spirit world, you too would feel as if your neurons had been siphoned from your skull and launched deep into space.
“Oh, by the way, attendees could also take a gong bath, during which you’re bathed in the musical vibrations of a gong being struck. Or lie down in a curiously unsupervised and unstable-looking sensory-deprivation chamber. Or take a black-light yoga class, which involves — as the name suggests — doing yoga in a room illuminated by black light accompanied by a DJ pumping out frenetic techno beats. Meanwhile, a company offered demos of a brain-stimulation device that had to be inserted way too far up one nostril. And an enthusiastic fellow demonstrated his Spontaneous Postural Alignment technique, in which a misaligned subject’s elbow is tapped with a gold medallion while the healer intones, ‘boy-yoi-yoing.’”
Photos: Soccer fields around the world
Poem: Joseph Mirra, “Who Are We to Judge?”
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