The Boston Marathon bombings - terrorism, Islamophobia, or something even scarier?

Bomb at the Boston Marathon

A couple of twisted young men kill innocent people at the Boston marathon, and it’s called terrorism. Other twisted young men kill innocent people - at a Batman movie premier in Aurora, Colorado, or at a political rally in Tuscon, Arizona, or at a primary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut - and there is no mention of terrorism.

What’s the difference? The Boston murderers were Muslims of Chechen origin, the other murderers were “regular” Americans. It’s easy to believe the different coverage is down to xenophobia or Islamo-phobia, and I don’t doubt there is plenty of that going on.

But there may be something deeper going on as well, which is about the way the brain processes information, something that is much harder to correct than xenophobia.

Apparently, new information coming to the brain is not absorbed directly. The brain makes sense of new information by referencing it to old or familiar information. Familiar information becomes a benchmark or a norm. New information is compared and contrasted to this familiar norm. Distinctive features of the new information are made sense of, are explained, by the attributes in which they most obviously differ from the norm. 

For instance, in the corporate world I inhabit, the "norm" is that powerful people are white men. So when a woman exhibits a particular behaviour, say domineering or bullying behaviour, the mind finds an explanation for that behaviour, in her gender. The mind thinks "She's being domineering because she is a woman. Maybe she is over-compensating, trying to get ahead in a man's world." Equally, when a woman is self effacing, the mind thinks "She's being self-effacing because she is a woman, she is the product of generations of gender stereo-typing." The same behaviour observed in a white male might be explained by his biography or personality, but not by his gender.

Critically, this habit of the mind is involuntary. Research shows that it affects passionate liberals as much as bigots, even when the passionate liberals are fully aware of this unreasonable pattern of thought. 

The same mental mechanism looks for an explanation for what happened, a cause, in the bombers' Chechen background - "they did what they did because of what happened in Chechnya". That is less stupid than jumping to the conclusion that the bombings were a part of an Islamist terrorist plot. That doesn't make it true. 

The reality is that it is almost impossible to know why what happened happened.  The mind doesn't accept this vacuum, it fills it up with a plausible story. "Islamist plot", "right wing bigotry", "misunderstood immigrants", whatever - any story will do. The stories don't have to be true. They just need to protect us from accepting that God plays dice with the universe.

God's dice

Why Bollywood does beautiful forevers

Bollywood India

For the same reason that Sweden does crime fiction.

Camilla Lackberg

Sweden's best selling crime writer, Camilla Lackberg, explained to The Independent why a country as sedate as Sweden has spawned such a crop of world-beating crime writers. Her thesis is it's because Sweden is so safe. "Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars."

Basically, fiction provides the ingredient missing in real life.

Which is precisely why Bollywood is syrupy sweet. India still is poor. Life in India still is tough. Fiction needs to provide the sweetness that is so elusive in real life.

Another India

Learning monetary policy from Monopoly

Ben Bernanke, Mervyn King and D Subbarao ought to play more Monopoly. That would teach them a thing or two about the perils of an expansionary monetary policy.

I learnt about the dangers of monetary expansion last weekend, when my daughter challenged me to a game. I nearly lost inside half an hour. I landed on three houses at Oxford Street and had to mortgage King’s Cross and Liverpool station to survive; the end seemed nigh. But then I picked up £200 as I passed Go, then another £150 from Community Chest, and an hour later both my daughter and I were in rude financial health.

In effect, I’d been bailed out by an expansionary monetary policy.

Monopoly has fixed nominal prices (i.e. a hotel room on Pall Mall always costs £625). However the real price of that hotel room is constantly declining. The Bank pumps £200 per player into the economy every round, so money supply is constantly increasing, so “sticky” prices keep getting smaller compared to the money in the game, so, on average, everybody feels richer.

Hotels on Pall Mall and Vine Street are life-threatening early on. As the game develops, the board fills up with houses and hotels, and landing at a hotel on Pall Mall is a mere flea-bite. By now the action has shifted to Mayfair and Park Lane. If the dice roll such that all players survive long enough, even a hotel on Mayfair stops being life-threatening.

From that point on, the players are no longer playing Monopoly, they are playing Comfortable Oligopoly. In this game, the veneer of competition is maintained, but the Bank ensures that nobody actually goes bust, despite the fact that nobody is taking any real risks or making valuable things. There is no natural way of ending this meaningless game. My daughter and I stopped our game only when higher authorities stepped in and decreed that it was lunchtime.

So, policy makers, play a few endless games of Monopoly. Learn that in the short term, monetary expansion can save a few dads from going bust. Learn also that monetary expansion that goes on and on and on robs the world of meaning, until the real economy finally breaks through and produces lunch.

PS: I wonder if the great monetarists Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas suffered through a few endless games of Monopoly?

Umwelt

Umwelt: this word deserves to be in more common use. It means "the world as it is experienced by a particular organism".

It comes from zoology, specifically ethology, I found it in this book on dog behaviour. Umwelt has the sense that a dog's, or any organism's, experience of the world is bounded by its range of perception. This range of perception forms a bubble the animal lives within. This perceptual bubble in turn limits (and distorts) the range of emotion and action the organism is capable of.

Human experience is equally circumscribed by perceptual bubbles (except that the more interesting perceptual bubbles are cognitive, or maybe maybe linguistic, rather than sensory). We need a word for those bubbles. Let umwelt be that word.

Let umwelt takes its rightful place in the English lexicon, alongside gestalt, zeitgeist, schadenfreude and cousin weltanschauung.

The wind beneath my wings does NOT make me fly high

Bette Midler singing "Wind beneath my wings"

Actually, it's the wind above my wings that makes me fly.

Air flows faster over the upper surface of the wing, which lowers pressure, and therefore provides lift and enables flight. The mechanics are the same for a airplane wing, a frisbee, a sail, a swinging cricket ball or an eagle's wing. Similarly, the spoiler blades at the back of F1 racing cars are designed so the wind passes beneath the wings. This pulls the car down towards the tarmac, and provides stability.

This science is complex enough to provide many engineers with a lifetime of work, but is neither new nor controversial. It follows from Bernoulli's principle, which I was taught in 8th class by Kanaka Eshwaran-Miss (aka Kinetic Energy-miss).

So why does Bette Midler keep showing up on Muzak tracks around the world singing:

"I can fly higher than an eagle,
'cause you are the wind beneath my wings"?

Wrong! The wind above her wings makes her fly high. The wind beneath her wings brings her down to earth. Ignoramus. Fancy dress Fatima! Bougainvillea! Pithecanthropus! Odd-toed ungulate!! Nit-witted ninepin! Squawking popinjay!

F1 car, that uses wind beneath the wings to stay low

Airplane, that uses wind above the wings to fly high

PS: I'm kidding. It's fun to win an argument conclusively in an age of "it depends".

My beloved homeland: the 1990s

I’m homesick.
I want to go home,
to a place where I feel safe,
to a place where I know stuff,
like I know that democracy is good,
that capitalism will save us from poverty,
that the Rio summit will save the planet,
and that Sanjay Manjrekar’s immaculate technique will elevate him to Gavaskar-esque greatness.

I want to know that MTV VJ Sophiya Haque is cool, achingly so,
and that institutions reinvent themselves,
sort of, like, Tony Blair reinvented the Labour Party.

I want to know that if I follow my passion,
try really really hard,
give all I’ve got to give,
give with my body, mind and soul,
that I will find not just success, but fulfilment.

Papa I want to go,
Mama I want to go,
Show me the way to go home.

How do you solve a problem like Maria Sharapova?

Maria Sharapova and Grigor Dimitrov, in Milan

News from the Aussie Open is that Maria Sharapova has a new boyfriend, fellow tennis pro Gregor Dimitrov. Is this guy Maria's Mr Right?

The great Tamil lyricist Kannadasan might be on the pro-Dimitrov side of the argument. One of the greatest love songs he ever wrote, naan pesa nenaipadellam nee pesa vendum, goes: "naan kaanum ulagangal nee kaana vendum", meaning, "you should see the world's I see". This is a deep insight. Understanding each other's worlds is a critical (and under-celebrated) aspect of love. As an East European tennis pro, Grigor Dimitrov has a better chance of really getting Maria's world, than, say, a Tam Bram management consultant.

On the con side of the argument is yin-yang balance, a theme I've riffed on before. Maria is one tough cookie, she has plenty of yang in her soul. She needs a guy with dollops of yin-energy for them to be in harmony. Ex-boyfriend Andy Roddick clearly didn't fit the bill. Apparently, ex-fiancee Sasha Vujacic did't either.

Maria Sharapova and Roger Federer, in Sao Paulo

The problem is, professional sportsmen with yin-energy are rare. But they do exist. Roger Federer is a great example.

So will Grigor Dimitrov be Maria's Mr. Right? It depends, on whether Grigor can be more like Roger Federer than like Andy Roddick, and I'm not talking about winning grand slam titles.