Through some intensive Google searching (and a one-year period meditating in the desert), it turns out that everything we've been experiencing for the past x thousands of years is a controlled experiment by a distant and ancient species. Who'd have thought it? Abstract follows:

This work investigates the anti-inflammatory activity of methanol extracts of four endemic Stachys (Labiatae) taxa from the Sol region: S. beckeana Dorfler & Hayek, S. anisochila Vis. et Pancic, S. plumosa Griseb., and S. alpina L. subsp. dinarica Murb. As a model of acute inflammation, carrageenan-induced hand edema in humans was used. Extracts, applied at doses of 50, 100, and 200 mg/ kg p. o., exhibited dose-dependent activity. S. beckeana and S.anisochila extracts were the most active ones ( ED50 154.52 and 162.24 mg/ kg, respectively), with the activity comparable with indomethacin at doses of 2 and 4 mg/ kg. S. plumosa extract has shown less-pronounced anti-inflammatory effect ( ED50 220.81 mg= kg). Extract of S. alpina subsp. dinarica had the highest efficiency, attenuating inflammation more than 50%.

I saw the Turner Prize Winning Sleeper over the weekend while in Liverpool, along with the other Prize nominees. It consists of a two-and-a-half hour film of Mark Wallinger wandering about an empty German gallery in a bear costume. They gave the prize to the wrong person, though. I think it should go to whoever writes the blurb that goes on the wall by the exhibits. It helps if you mentally insert 'man dressed as a bear' at the end of each sentence, just to remind yourself. For Sleeper, we are told:

Mark Wallinger’s work is noted for its succinct social commentary and political resonance. [Man dressed as bear...] His early work explored the values of contemporary British society, in particular national identity. His focus subsequently expanded to address themes of death and religion. Despite dealing with such expansive themes, his work is often characterised by a lightness of touch that belies the serious and multifaceted nature of the subject matter.

Sleeper records a live performance in which the artist, alone and dressed in a bear suit, occupied Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for ten consecutive nights. The museum’s location enables a diversity of themes to converge, creating a uniquely complex and unsettling work. [Man dressed as bear...] The bears in the nearby historic Zoo are doomed never to reproduce, the possibility of their procreation in captivity preordained and controlled by man. Fortified by a culture of surveillance and paranoia, Berlin during the Cold War was physically, politically and socially divided. The ‘sleepers’, or double agents, blended into their surroundings by sporting plausible disguises. Wallinger, a Briton in a foreign city, disguises himself as a bear - the heraldic emblem of Berlin - an appropriation in which he becomes both ‘bear’ and simultaneously not ‘bear’.

Wallinger has described how the idea of a divided realm exists within his subconscious, shaped by a German fairy tale in which a prince is transformed into a bear. In Sleeper the Marxist dictum in which history returns first as tragedy then as farce is wryly expressed. [Man dressed as bear...] Allegory, the repression of memory, and the mutability of national identity combine to offer a meditative exploration of the language of representation, as well as an examination of the nature of perception itself. [Er... Man dressed as bear.]

The Washington Post has a heartening story on a way to measure security in Baghdad: taxi odometers. Taxi driving has been a deadly business recently - but the number of miles are going up as things appear to be improving. One driver is quoted:

"To tell you the truth, I thought I had just traded my life for 5,000 dinars," or $4, said Abbas, who was shocked when he arrived in the traffic-jammed streets of Adhamiyah [a notoriously dangerous neighbourhood] to see shops open and people strolling in the road. "Then I suddenly realized that security really is returning to Baghdad."

Epstein and Axtell, in Growing Artificial Societies, get all hyperbolic about the impact agent-based modelling has on 'Explanation'.

For many, explanation and prediction are the same thing, and one can see why: to ask any more of explanation is impossible. Explain gravity! Well, here are some lovely predictive rules. Yeah, but what is it, really? Well... here are some lovely rules? Explanation also seems intuitively at home with reductionism: why are there so many different types of atom? Coz they're formed from smaller exchangeable parts - look, here's how it works.

But Epstein and Axtell reckon they have a new form of explanation in agent-based models: it's 'generative explanation'. Epstein has a whole book on this one idea, but it also appears in their much earlier stuff just mentioned:

What constitutes an explanation of an observed social phenomenon? Perhaps one day people will interpret the question, 'can you explain it?' as asking 'can you grow it?' (Epstein & Axtell 1996 p.20)

I remember the exact moment I first heard 'the map is not the territory': going past Nuneaton town centre, of all places, in my brother's car, probably twenty years ago now.

The term seems to have originated with Alfred Korzybski, a 19th / 20th century straddler, a Polish scientist and founder of 'general semantics'. He seems to share some common ground with Hayek's 'Sensory Order' - that our nervous systems and language structure are the maps we must navigate by. The Wikipedia article above suggests he'd thought a great deal about what this meant for how we should act personally.

Three little economics stories this morning:

The Washington Post finds economics at the root of the Iraqi insurgency:"I was out of work and needed the money. How else could I support my family?" As Iraq solidifies into a gangsterish set of well-armed fiefdoms, one Major tells his troops:"A good way to prepare for operations in Iraq is to watch the sixth season of 'The Sopranos.' " A case study in what happens when you destroy a country's economy and infrastructure, sack its standing army and accidentally mislay just short of 200,000 brand new AK-47s.

Why are Saturn's rings flat? I was reading / gawping at the utterly stunning Cosmos over the weekend, and found the inklings of an answer. This site seems to confirm it: because particles and objects in many random orbits will eventually zoink each other out of their opposed planes, becoming more inclined, until eventually everything settles into one stable arrangement. Does it count as being an emergent phenomenon then?

If there could be such a thing as socialism combined with personal liberty I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I realised this was no more than a beautiful dream.

Popper, quoted in Gamble, Hayek: the Iron Cage of Liberty

It is a challenge to imagine the moral life of a gun-runner - at any rate, one who sells to the highest bidder regardless. But it isn't impossible. With a little imagination, the idea of profiting vastly while inflicting distant suffering is easy enough to grasp. One can, at least, picture the gun-runner as a member of the same species as you and I, with some self-awareness: 'yup, I sell guns and people I'll never meet are going to die, and that's fine and dandy, thank you for asking.'

But this is a painless feat of mental gear-shift compared with trying to see through the eyes of a library book soiler. I have an example here in my hands: a book's-worth of biro-work by one of these supremely self-serving little twats. Line after line scrawled with blue pen - pen! - so that this nobhead can get the facts a little more firmly established in their unimaginably vapid little mind. How must these creatures see the world? Entirely as a source of material to be chewed up for their own ends; a slime-mould-like solipsism is their modus operandi. In the famous moving words of Anakin Skywalker, I hate them.

It makes me angry. Only one other thing makes me angrier: the mannerless conspiracy of barstaff and pub customer to usurp the ancient natural rights built into the fabric of every English pub. There is an order to being served, and everyone should damn well make sure they're socially aware enough for a collective bar of beer-seeking agents to achieve a fair and gentlemanly emergent serving system. It's not hard, it really isn't.

But no. No-one cares any more. We're jauntily nudging each other off to Hell in a wheelbarrow. There's a line that runs through biro-weilding university savages and cow-eyed 'gimme beer n I don't care how I get it' selfishos: they're both polluted with the foamy green cancer of 'me me me' and its eaten out all remnant of fellow feeling. And as more and more have turned the Thatcherite Turn, the very weave of our once-great society has come to cotton shreds in our ha...

Sorry.

I'm off to the Wirral for a few days, so this incessant blogging should stop for a bit, thank God. Anyhoo, only two stories for today:

Samuelson at the Washington Post has been reading Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms:

Clark suggests that much of the world's remaining poverty is semi-permanent. Modern technology and management are widely available, but many societies can't take advantage because their values and social organization are antagonistic. Prescribing economically sensible policies (open markets, secure property rights, sound money) can't overcome this bedrock resistance.