Category: Uncategorized (Page 4 of 25)

Two Thoughts on Art: I spent Sunday and part of Monday in New York City, where I learned two things:

1. The art in the Metropolitan Museum is really good. Giovanni Bellini is one of my favorite artists of all time. I’ve long been enamored of his San Zaccaria Altarpiece, which is even more impressive seen in context — the altarpiece isn’t so much in the church as part of the church, as San Zaccaria’s architecture continues unbroken into the painted space. (And when you put the 50-Euro-cent coin into the slot and turn on the lights nearby, the details are extraordinary.)

In any case, after briefly getting lost in the Metropolitan Museum this weekend (reminding me of one of my favorite childhood Sesame Street specials), I noticed a Bellini Madonna and Child in the Met collection.

The focus here is clearly on the Madonna — the child might as well have been a vase of flowers or a loaf of bread for how her hands are placed — but the Internet image doesn’t do justice to the lifelike glow of her appearance, or the humanity of her expression. It’s amazing how you can walk through a room of painted figures, even some beautifully rendered, but then you suddenly stare at one of them and get the feeling that another soul is staring back.

2. The art at the U.N. is really bad. As longtime readers will know, I’m no fan of socialist realism. But the U.N. walls are covered with Symbolic Murals done largely in that style, depicting muscular Workers, women Pursuing the Arts of Peace, children Displaced By War, etc. Many of the murals require substantial explanation, which I overheard helpful U.N. tour guides providing. (Explanations are also available on the website: “The blue and gold silk tapestry on the walls and in the draperies by the East River windows features the anchor of faith, the growing wheat of hope, and the heart of charity.”)

I understand–and in a general sense, agree with–the message of “Food Not Bombs” which the art conveys. But surely the U.N., as an organization, should be committed to the principle that sometimes you need to use the bombs, in order that others may provide the food. (Cf. the wall posters with statistics on military spending–which reminded me of something I’d seen before.) Don’t get me wrong; the art at the U.S. Capitol building can be pretty terrible too. But at a certain point, the self-important allegory gets a little top-heavy, especially if the political content is questionable as well.

The Benlolo Brothers: A reader points out a new development in the Domain Name Registry of America scam I wrote about in July 2003. According to the Globe and Mail (subscription required), the authors of the scam, the Benlolo brothers, have received their just deserts for a different offense:

Pair trade mansions for prison:

Brothers who stole $4-million in scams believe they did nothing wrong

The Globe and Mail

Saturday, October 2, 2004

By Gay Abbate

Alan and Elliot Benlolo were living a good life with their mansions, flashy vehicles and a seemingly endless supply of money. But yesterday, the brothers were forced to exchange their palatial homes for cells in a federal penitentiary, for running two scams that netted them about $4-million.

They were also ordered to pay $2.3-million in fines and restitution.

. . .

The Ontario Superior Court judge sentenced each brother to 42 months in prison for a stock-swap fraud and to three years for their latest venture, a phony telephone invoice venture. They will serve the two sentences concurrently and be eligible for parole after 14 months.

. . .

The stock swap offered investors around the world stock in non-existent microchip companies in 1999 and 2000. The brothers had pleaded guilty in July to being part of a fraudulent international scheme.

For their phone-invoice scheme, they enlisted their younger brother Simon and a friend, Victor Serfaty. They mailed out thousands of phony invoices in 2000, telling small businesses they owed $25.52 for advertising on their yellow-page Internet directory.

Only those reading the fine print would realize the invoice was not real.

. . .

Alan served six months in a United States jail in 1999 for mail fraud. The U.S. government is still trying to collect a $1-million judgment from a civil lawsuit.

“I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Underlings”: From the Associated Press:

U.N.: Robot Use to Surge Sevenfold by 2007

GENEVA (AP) — The use of robots around the home to mow lawns, vacuum floors, pull guard duty and perform other chores is set to surge sevenfold by 2007, says a new U.N. survey, which credits dropping prices for the robot boom.

The increase in domestic robots coincides with record orders for industrial robots, the U.N.’s annual World Robotics Survey adds.

. . .

By the end of 2007, some 4.1 million domestic robots will likely be in use, the study says. Vacuum cleaners will still make up the majority, but sales of window-washing and pool-cleaning robots are also set to take off, it predicts.

Hey, as long as they’re not eating old people’s medicine for food. (The URL itself is also great: “http://nytimes.com/aponline/
international/AP-Robots-Among-Us.html“.)

Making Apologies: Faced with pictures like this, I’m not sure what to say:

One correspondent, however, offers an apology of his own:

Dear Iraqis,

Please accept our apologies for liberating you from a murderous tyrant who gassed civilians, systematically starved his own people, started and lost two wars with neighbors, and became a pariah in the world community.

As a token of our regret, please accept these Baathist thugs and Islamic fundamentalists from Iran and Jordan.

We’re so sorry that, if you must know, we’re packing up and going home, so France and Germany (who your deposed leader successfully bribed) will cease to be mad at us.

Good luck building a democracy without anyone’s help!

Sincerely,

People of the United States

Cutting-Edge Legal Research: From the Berkeley Technology Law Journal:

“I keep hearing all this talk lately about trolls, and at first I thought, ‘I do not need to pay any attention to this, I am from Iowa and we have no trolls there.'”

Mark Janis, Symposium Transcript, 19 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1053, 1101 (2004).

News Inflation: The A.P. ran a story a few days ago reporting that oil prices had pushed past $50 a barrel:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, will raise its production capacity by nearly 5 percent to 11 million barrels a day in an attempt to rein in prices that topped $50 a barrel for the first time, the oil ministry said Tuesday. . . .

Word of the decision came as crude oil topped $50 per barrel on Tuesday, pushing past the psychological milestone for the first time.

Traders bid oil over $50 a barrel in Asian trading after the November crude contract settled at a 21-year high of $49.64 on Monday on the New York Mercantile Exchange in a reaction to the slow recovery of U.S. oil production that was damaged by Hurricane Ivan and unrest and terrorism fears in key producers Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Nigeria.

To their credit, in the very last paragraph, they also note that the $50-a-barrel figure (and the talk of a “21-year high”) is historically meaningless:

Still, adjusting for inflation, today’s prices are still more than $30 a barrel below the level reached in 1981 after the Iranian revolution. Economists also point out that the country is more energy efficient than it was two decades ago — due to conservation measures taken after prices skyrocketed and because the industrial sector has shrunk dramatically.

This sort of thing has bothered me for a long time. I’m not sure why reporters and editors–who should know better–continue to write breathless articles on large nominal figures (the most expensive hurricane in history, etc.), even when the real figures are completely unexceptional. Or, for that matter, why they repeat claims that the deficit is “the largest in history,” when what really matters is deficit as a share of GDP. In many ways, this “news” is only news to people who’ve never heard about inflation.

I’m sure it makes for good copy, and probably sells more papers than “Deficit Large, But Not Unprecedented.” Maybe the news value is in the fact that other people pay attention to nominal values–the “psychological milestone.” (But isn’t that psychology itself a creature of the media?) And it’s also a perennial source of scare headlines, since as inflation continues, virtually any monetary quantity will eventually become “the largest in history.” But aren’t there some editors out there sufficiently committed to accuracy to keep these non-stories from running?

Adventures in Contract Enforcement: It all started as an uneventful Halloween. Then Cookie Monster repossessed our television…

On Halloween night in 1991, three Rent-A-Center employees in Utica, N.Y., dressed up, respectively, as the Cookie Monster, a gorilla and an alien life form and knocked on a customer’s door. Once inside, they successfully repossessed a home-entertainment system on which payments hadn’t been made in almost three months. Gary Gerhardt, the store manager who blessed this plan, calls the ruse “a last-ditch effort,” adding, “it was the only way we could think to get someone in the door.”

From Alix M. Freedman, A Marketing Giant Uses its Sales Prowess to Profit on Poverty, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 22, 1993, p. A12.

We Will Not Tolerate a Nuclear Bhutan:Josh notes that Lichtenstein has now ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and we can all sleep more soundly. (This presumably comes after that nation’s first nuclear test rendered much of the small principality uninhabitable.) A number of nations, such as Cuba and North Korea, have never even signed the treaty. Other non-signatories to the treaty, however, include:

• The Bahamas.
• Barbados.
• Bhutan.
• Dominica. (No, not the Dominican Republic, but Dominica. According to its official website, “The youngest island in the Caribbean, erosion has yet to dull the sharpness of her terrain. Beautiful dramatic angles are everywhere. Energetic rivers run vigorously.” On nuclear power, perhaps? For why else would the first item under “Things to See & Do” be “Our Boiling Lake”?)
• Niue. (Don’t believe this one exists? It’s not surprising — the Niue Tourism Office describes it as “undiscovered,” “unspoiled,” and “unbelievable.”)
• St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
• Tonga.
• Trinidad and Tobago.

All in all, I’d say Lichtenstein’s the least of our problems. We’re looking at the prospect of a nuclear-armed Caribbean any day now. And as Tom Lehrer wrote,

Luxembourg is next to go,

And (who knows?) maybe Monaco.

We’ll try to stay serene and calm

When Alabama gets the bomb.

Thought for the Day: From Hannah Arendt’s On Violence:

In a head-on clash between violence and power, the outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi’s enormously powerful and successful strategy of nonviolent resistance had met with a different enemy — Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of England — the outcome would not have been decolonization, but massacre and submission. However, England in India and France in Algeria had good reasons for their restraint. Rule by sheer violence comes into play where power is being lost; it is precisely the shrinking power of the Russian government, internally and externally, that became manifest in its ‘solution’ to the Czechoslovak problem…

The Many Perils: I received my renter’s insurance policy in the mail this morning, and was surprised to learn of the various “perils” against which my apartment is now protected. I had no idea the world was so perilous a place. Among the standard set — fire, lightning, theft, windstorm, hail (except for “loss to watercraft”) — I’m also protected against “Explosion,” “Vehicles,” and “Riot or Civil Commotion, including pillage and looting” (should the Vikings return, and their dragon-prowed ships drop anchor in the port of New Haven).

Another clause offers coverage for damage caused by “Aircraft, including self-propelled missiles and spacecraft.” I wonder which Allstate actuary sat down and calculated the chances of damage due to falling spacecraft; yet it’s comforting to know, in case I end up with a chunk of Mir sticking out of my apartment, that I’ll be insured. (There’s no limitation on the spacecraft’s initial point of departure, so presumably I’m also protected against any UFOs that should make crash landings in Connecticut. A full-scale alien invasion, of course, would be outside the coverage limit, which does not include “War or warlike acts, including but not limited to insurrection, rebellion or revolution,” unless the aliens are sufficiently playful as to be categorized under “Vandalism and Malicious Mischief.” I’d also be out of luck if the aliens use their toxic chemicals on us, since the policy does not cover “any bodily injury which results in any manner from the discharge, dispersal, release, or escape of vapors, fumes, acids, toxic chemicals, toxic gases, toxic liquids, toxic solids, waste materials or other irritants, contaminants or pollutants.” Unless, of course, “such discharge . . . is sudden and accidental.” No comment.)

A few other miscellaneous perils go uncovered, including “Nuclear action, meaning nuclear reaction, discharge, radiation or radioactive contamination,” which will not be considered “loss by fire, explosion or smoke.” Nor am I protected against “Earth movement of any type, including but not limited to earthquake, volcanic eruption, lava flow, landslide, subsidence, mudflow, pressure, sinkhole, erosion, or the sinking, rising, shifting, creeping (!), expanding, bulging, cracking, settling, or contracting (!!) of the earth.” (Damage caused by the expansion or contraction of the universe receives no mention.) Finally, there’s no information on whether I’m insured against damage caused by asteroids (unless considered “Falling Objects”), ravenous wolves, monster attacks, or a giant swarm of bees. I’ll be on the phone to Allstate first thing Monday morning.

UPDATE: My brother writes to remind me that there’s another grave peril Allstate doesn’t cover: Robots. Attack by Robots.