Nice column in today’s NYTimes by Andy Martin. He’s fascinated by the question that puzzled so many people in the decades between 1940 and 1970, namely why was Jean-Paul Sartre so attractive to women? Sadly, he doesn’t really have an answer. Here’s his take on it:

I think it has to be said that a haircut can have significant philosophical consequences. Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist thinker, had a particularly traumatic tonsorial experience when he was only seven. Up to that point he had had a glittering career as a crowd-pleaser. Everybody referred to young “Poulou” as “the angel.” His mother had carefully cultivated a luxuriant halo of golden locks. Then one fine day his grandfather takes it into his head that Poulou is starting to look like a girl, so he waits till his mother has gone out, then tells the boy they are going out for a special treat. Which turns out to be the barbershop. Poulou can hardly wait to show off his new look to his mother. But when she walks through the door, she takes one look at him before running up the stairs and flinging herself on the bed, sobbing hysterically. Her carefully constructed — one might say carefully combed — universe has just been torn down, like a Hollywood set being broken and reassembled for some quite different movie, rather harsher, darker, less romantic and devoid of semi-divine beings. For, as in an inverted fairy-tale, the young Sartre has morphed from an angel into a “toad”. It is now, for the first time, that Sartre realizes that he is — as his American lover, Sally Swing, will say of him — “ugly as sin.”

“The fact of my ugliness” becomes a barely suppressed leitmotif of his writing. He wears it like a badge of honor (Camus, watching Sartre in laborious seduction mode in a Paris bar: “Why are you going to so much trouble?” Sartre: “Have you had a proper look at this mug?”). The novelist Michel Houellebecq says somewhere that, when he met Sartre, he thought he was “practically disabled.” It is fair comment. He certainly has strabismus (with his distinctive lazy eye, so he appears to be looking in two directions at once), various parts of his body are dysfunctional and he considers his ugliness to count as a kind of disability. I can’t help wondering if ugliness is not indispensable to philosophy. Sartre seems to be suggesting that thinking — serious, sustained questioning — arises out of, or perhaps with, a consciousness of one’s own ugliness…

It’s difficult to know where to start with the Wikileaks stash of documents reported on today by the Guardian, NYT and Der Spiegel.

1. Maybe we should begin with what we can learn from the continued existence of Wikileaks, despite all the best efforts of dozens of powerful companies and governments to exterminate it. There’s a thoughtlessness about journalistic acceptance of the proposition that Wikileaks confirms the truth of John Gilmore’s celebrated aphorism that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. The implication is that all one has to do is publish something on a website somewhere and then the truth is out. Sadly, that’s often not the case: one of the hard lessons we libertarians have learned over the last two decades is that it’s all too easy to censor the Web: all you need is a take-down letter from a lawyer in most cases, and nine out of ten ISPs or hosting services will take down a site, no questions asked. (That’s been the chilling effect of the ‘Demon Internet’ case.)

The indestructibility of Wikileaks, despite the best efforts of the cream of the world’s corporate and national security goons to muzzle it, stems from the amazing commitment, determination and technical know-how of the group of activists behind it. To get a feeling for what’s involved, it’s worth having a look at Raffi Khatchadourian’s remarkable New Yorker profile of Julian Assange, the prime mover behind the service. Most of the technical detail behind Wikileaks’s operations are hidden, but here’s what Khatchadourian found out:

As it now functions, the Web site is primarily hosted on a Swedish Internet service provider called PRQ.se, which was created to withstand both legal pressure and cyber attacks, and which fiercely preserves the anonymity of its clients. Submissions are routed first through PRQ, then to a WikiLeaks server in Belgium, and then on to “another country that has some beneficial laws,” Assange told me, where they are removed at “end-point machines” and stored elsewhere. These machines are maintained by exceptionally secretive engineers, the high priesthood of WikiLeaks. One of them, who would speak only by encrypted chat, told me that Assange and the other public members of WikiLeaks “do not have access to certain parts of the system as a measure to protect them and us.” The entire pipeline, along with the submissions moving through it, is encrypted, and the traffic is kept anonymous by means of a modified version of the Tor network, which sends Internet traffic through “virtual tunnels” that are extremely private. Moreover, at any given time WikiLeaks computers are feeding hundreds of thousands of fake submissions through these tunnels, obscuring the real documents. Assange told me that there are still vulnerabilities, but “this is vastly more secure than any banking network.”

And the moral of this? Using the Internet to further ‘disruptive transparency’ takes a lot more than simply posting stuff to a website.

2. Then there’s the question of what the Wikileaks stash tells us about the war. Amy Davidson went digging and pulled up this interesting snippet. Dated November 22nd, 2009, it was submitted by a unit called Task Force Pegasus and describes how a US convoy was stopped on a road in southern Afghanistan at an illegal checkpoint manned by what appeared to be a hundred insurgents, “middle-age males with approx 75 x AK-47’s and 15 x PKM’s.”

These weren’t “insurgents” at all, at least not in the die-hard jihadi sense that the American public might understand the term. The gunmen were quite willing to let the convoy through, if the soldiers just forked over a two or three thousand dollar bribe; and they were in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public. According to a Times report this June (six months after the incident with Task Force Pegasus), Matiullah earns millions of dollars from NATO, supposedly to keep that road clear for convoys and help with American special-forces missions. Matiullah is also suspected of earning money “facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway.” (He denied it.)

That is good to know, says Ms Davidson, and she’s right.

The Obama Administration has already expressed dismay at WikiLeaks for publicizing the documents, but a leak that informs us that our tax dollars may be being put to use as seed money for a protection racket associated with a narcotics-trafficking enterprise is a good leak to have. And the checkpoint incident is, again, only one report, from one day. It will take some time to go through everything WikiLeaks has to offer—the documents cover the period from January, 2004 to December, 2009—but it is well worth it, especially since the war in Afghanistan is not winding down, but ramping up.

3. Finally, there’s the grotesque absurdity of the war itself. To someone of my age who lived through the Vietnam era, the parallels are very striking. What really takes my breath away now, though, is the intellectual and evidential poverty of the justifications for it — especially the threadbare mantra of the Labour and Coalition administrations that British soldiers are dying in Helmand in order to protect the good citizens of Bradford. In that context, George Packer had a good piece in the New Yorker on July 5, which said, in part:

With allies like Canada and Holland heading for the exits, American troops are dying in larger numbers than at any point of the war—on bad days, ten or more. The number of Afghan civilian deaths remains high, despite the tightened constraints of McChrystal’s rules of engagement. The military key to counterinsurgency is protection of the population, but the difficulty in securing Marja and the delay of a promised campaign in Kandahar suggest that the majority of Afghan Pashtuns no longer want to be protected by foreign forces. The political goal of counterinsurgency is to strengthen the tie between civilians and their government, but the Afghan state is a shell hollowed out by corruption, and at its center is the erratic figure of President Karzai. Since last fall, when he stole reëlection, Karzai has accused Western governments and media of trying to bring him down, fired the two most competent members of his cabinet, and reportedly threatened to join the Taliban and voiced a suspicion that the Americans were behind an attack on a peace conference he recently hosted in Kabul. In the face of his wild performance, the current American approach is to tiptoe around him, as if he would start behaving better if he could just be settled down. Meanwhile, aid efforts are in a bind: working with the government nourishes corruption; circumventing it further undermines its legitimacy.

The Wikileaks stash shows how badly “protection of the population” is going. So,

Obama is trapped—not by his generals but by the war. It takes great political courage to face such a situation honestly, but if in a year’s time the war looks much the way it does now, or worse, Obama will have to force the public to deal with the likely reality: Americans leaving, however slowly; Afghanistan slipping into ethnic civil war, with many more Afghan deaths; Pakistan backing the Pashtun side; Al Qaeda seizing the chance to expand its safe haven. These consequences would require a dramatically different U.S. strategy, and a wise Administration would unify itself around the need to think one through before next summer.

Maybe there was a chance after 9/11 of doing what no foreign power in history had ever managed to do — create a semblance of a unified nation-state from the chaotic patchwork of fiefdoms that is Afghanistan. But that was blown by the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq, which drained away the colossal effort that would have been needed to re-model Afghanistan. So now there’s no option except to accept the inevitable. The game’s over, and the West blew it. And, as far as I can see, there’s no Plan B.

From designboom:

“‘365’ is a knitting clock created by german designer siren elise wilhelmsen. according to wilhelmsen, time is a concept which unites us all, making it the lowest common denominator. on the one hand, time appears to be a as physical phenomenon, logical and easily divided into the past, present and future. on the other hand, time can be viewed very subjectively. how long a minute, an hour or a year takes can depend on how time is experienced in different situations. however, this does not alter the fact that a day has 24 hours, one hour
has 60 minutes and one minute has 60 seconds.”

Today is the opening round of the 2010 British Open. It’s being played at St Andrews, site of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, and tiresomely billed by the media with mock-reverence as “the home of golf”. Until this morning, their commentary was dominated by speculation about whether Tiger Woods’s swing has recovered from his various extra-marital flings. But now we have a new hero — Maurice Flitcroft, the worst golfer ever to compete in the championship.

I have to confess that I’d never heard of him until Radio 4’s Today programme had an item pegged to a newly-published biography with the lovely title The Phantom of the Open. Naturally, I went straight to Wikipedia, which has an interesting entry on him.

It describes him as a “chain-smoking crane driver” from Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire who also claimed to be a stunt diver. “I toured with a revue, and I used to jump into a tank on the stage, I was a stuntcomedy high diver. The revue used to tour all the country and I would dive into this tank. It wasn’t all glass, just the front so the spectators could see what was going on under the water.” His golfing fame stems from conning his way into the qualifying round for the 1976 Open by pretending to be a professional golfer. He wrote off to the R&A for an application form. This required the applicant to state whether he was an amateur or professional golfer. If the former, then he would be required to state his club handicap. But of course Flitcroft wasn’t a member of any club, and so he ticked the ‘Professional’ box and sent it off.

He went round in 121 — 49 over par and the worst score in the history of the tournament. One reporter memorably described it as “a blizzard of double and triple bogeys marred only by a solitary par”. He was christened “The Royal & Ancient Rabbit” (a ‘Rabbit’, in golfing parlance, is an incompetent player who hacks his way around the course, rarely if ever getting even close to a par).

Predictably, the R&A — as reactionary an assembly of Establishment boobies as ever wore blazers, and an institution that makes White’s look like the Bauhaus — was Not Amused, and so tried to ban him from further championships. But according to Wikipedia he entered several more times under pseudonyms: Gene Paceky (as in paycheque), Gerald Hoppy and James Beau Jolley.

Er, no. It’s the ‘Tyrannos’ from Logi Aerospace, which in conjunction with other companies and organisations including the South West Research Institute and Californian electric-vehicle firm ZAP has responded to a Pentagon call for a vehicle that would enable the US Marines to dodge IEDs without being as vulnerable as a helicopter. According to The Register, the vehicle offers full hover and is “fairly quiet”.

The Tyrannos is nominally intended to provide Marines with the ability to leapfrog over troublesome roadside bombs, mines, and ambushes while remaining able to drive on the ground as they normally might. However, it promises to be much quieter than ordinary helicopters in use and far easier to fly and maintain.

If the Tyrannos can do all its makers claim, it really does have the potential to become the flying car for everyman.

Lots of ducted-fan technology and a supercharged race engine. Does 240mph flat out. No word on emissions, though.

On balance, I think I’ll pass on this one. It’d never get me through Silver Street at rush hour.

One of the things I love about the Saturday edition of the Financial Times is that it often has the most unexpected obituaries. Here’s the latest — the life story of an Italian cavalry officer who is straight out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh. Sample:

Amedeo Guillet crammed rather a lot into his 101 years. He is best remembered for leading, on his white Arabian stallion, Sandor, a potentially suicidal cavalry charge against the tanks and 25-pounder artillery guns of Britain’s advancing “Gazelle Force” in the Horn of Africa in 1941. It was the last ever cavalry charge against British troops and earned the then Lieutenant Guillet the nickname Comandante Diavolo – the Devil Commander – from both his own men and an enemy that came to respect and even befriend him. Usually dressed like an Arab or Ethiopian tribesman, he became known in his native land as “Italy’s Lawrence of Arabia”.

On that misty January dawn in 1941 at Keru gorge, Eritrea, troops of Britain’s 4/11th Sikh regiment, the Surrey and Sussex Yeomanry and the 1st Bengal Cavalry were brewing tea before advancing against regular Italian forces. It was then that Guillet, wearing Arab clothes and screaming “Savoia!” – Savoy, his homeland – led 250 Ethiopian and Yemeni tribesmen in a galloping charge through the allied ranks, firing antique carbines, slashing with scimitars and tossing home-made grenades before retreating in a cloud of dust. The raiders’ loss was great – perhaps half their men – but the psychological damage they inflicted gave an important breather to retreating Italian regular troops…

Wow! He lived to be 102, and spent the last part of his life in Ireland chasing foxes — on horseback, naturally.

There’s an intriguing article in Newsweek about the decline in creativity in American schoolkids — as measured by the Torrance test.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University recently reanalyzed Torrance’s data. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

Conversation With a Univac, courtesy of Scott Lloyd, originally uploaded by gruntzooki.

Scott Lloyd and his wife found this old printout of an interactive session with a Univac and sent it along to BoingBoing. Thanks to Cory for posting it. Younger readers will be incredulous to discover that this is how one once interacted with computers. But it was.

Oh — a Univac was a time-shared mainframe computer.