Yeah! I am still here

 Once again apologies for being so callous at keeping up the blog.  The way I have gone about posting on this blog is sort of how I have muddled through things, in general.  Not particularly great but not giving up entirely either.  I will come back with some philosophical musings at a good time later but for now just wished to update on our domestic life.   

Betoo, i.e. Priya, has graduated from St Xaviers and started her first job with a Japanese advertising company in Mumbai.  Basically, has done all of us super proud☺She managed the job all by herself.  I hope she enjoys her time there and as and when the time is right, go for a higher degree from a reputed place.   Time will tell.  For now, she knows what she needs to do.  Billy, i.e. Saumitra, cleared std X board exams and made us even more proud, especially his mother.   He has decided to join the engineering rat race much against our suggestion that he take up humanities with mathematics and economics but well, let the children be.  Here, a short word about Saumitra.  Being the younger sibling the poor guy has all his life played a second fiddle to his dominant older sister who beats him hands down in the personality department.  She is outgoing, he is an introvert.  She is articulate and makes friends easily, he not exactly.  She is much better read and so on.   You get the picture.   At the same time, one of our family life's most endearing aspect, like with many other normal families, is sibilings' love.  Both of them dote on each other and while they do have their fights, at times rather vicious, and - with declining frequency, thank God, even fisticuffs, they really love each other.  One of the things that really unites them, baselessly though, is their supposedly tyrannical father.  But we will come back to this in future.  I wanted to talk about Saumitra and how I am unable to place him in terms of his inherent bent or strength.  He is certainly not like his sister in terms of aptitude and other attributes that I described above.  And yet, he tends to surprise us, and I suppose himself too, if one were to apply the conventional measures of success usually applied for young students in India.   There are a few things he is certainly good at, for his age that is.   He possesses a sense of irony, a wry sense of humour and spatial intelligence.  E.g. he learnt to solve the Rubik's Cube entirely by himself.  The first person to do so in our combined families, which given the generous size of Dipti's, is saying a lot.  Watch the video below for what his schoolteacher observed about him on the day to honour students who did well in std X board examinations. 

So, I hope to come back again with more focussed theme for a post.  Just to put it here, the country is reeling under an intense heat wave, all the talk about climate change is true I suppose.  Delhi recorded a high of 52.3 degrees celsius last week, its highest ever recorded temperature.  Hope, it was an aberration.   Bye for now.

The Great Cataloguing has begun!

 A few days back I started cataloguing my books.  This is intended to be an exhaustive exercise and so far, starting from April 18th, I have catalogued some 180 odd books and I think we are about two-fifth of the way.  The exercise is purely a labour of love, as you dear reader have noted by now, your blogger loves nothing more than reading good stuff, from anywhere in the world.  

I am entering the information in excel and hope to upload the whole thing here when completed.  By the way, there have been some surprises too! E.g. a few books, about five so far, are now available for a significant higher price that I paid for them. A detailed large format ("coffee table") book on the life of Charlie Chaplin that I purchased in Frankfurt in 2009 for Euro 24 is now available on Amazon for eight times the price and it is in mint condition too.  When I spotted this book in a shop window then, the owner was just about to down the shutters and I had to plead with him to allow me to buy it.  Lucky buy plus a nice return on investment.  Not that I wish to sell it.   Some books are not available in the edition and format that I have.  E.g. Alan Moorehead's The White Nile.  The ordinary paperback on Amazon is available for Rs. 2200.  Mine is a large format with glossy paper.  It is just not in mint condition or else would have good value.  Anyway, hope to revert back with the full catalogue and some more book stories.  Ciao.  

Updated on Dec 4, 2021

The Great Cataloguing continues with about 300 titles recorded so far and some more to go.  Part of the break in this task was caused by our second relocation to Mumbai / Bombay and all the attendant issues.  E.g. Priya has joined St Xaviers College here to pursue an undergraduate degree in Journalism and Mass Media.  I know she can write but she needs to up her game.  Not intending to be tough on her but then writing skill requires tremendous work.  Its not unlike the hours and hours of "riyaaz"  that a musician spends honing her skills.  Hoping for the best for her or Minime. 

King Cobra and I: Romulus Whitaker (Agumbe)

 Kingdom of the cobra

ROMULUS WHITAKER

JUST inland from the west coast of southern India a spine of ancient hills rises 2000 metres above the scorched plains. Hidden valleys of very wet, dark, primeval rainforest still harbour wonders that no biologist has seen or described. One of the top predators that rule these valleys is a giant reptile: the king cobra.

I was fortunate to grow up in these Western Ghats, having done my schooling in the Palni Hills between 1952 and 1960, and thereafter I spent my life pursuing my passion for reptiles. After a failed attempt at college in the USA, a stint in the US Army and the honour of working for the late William Haast at the Miami Serpentarium, I returned to India to set up the Madras Snake Park. But I always made sure I had plenty of time to wander the forests of the Western Ghats searching for and studying king cobras and the other delightful reptiles that live there.

In 1973 my short article in the WWF Newsletter ‘Save Silent Valley’ sounded the alarm for what became one of India’s first big environmental controversies. And we won, the dam was never built and Silent Valley was saved. But over the decades I’ve seen the forests and wildlife disappear, despite the best efforts of dedicated conservationists. Forests have been cut down at an alarming rate for infrastructure projects and to feed humanity’s insatiable appetite for wood, tea, coffee, and rubber. Wildlife is trapped, shot, snared and poisoned till some species are just not seen any more.

The king cobra is arguably the most intelligent of all snakes. It is the largest venomous snake in the world, growing to over five metres in length. While its venom is not as toxic as the spectacled cobra’s, it makes up for it in quantity. It can inject 6 ml of venom in a single bite compared to a mere 2 ml of the much smaller spectacled cobra. King cobras may live for 30 years or more. Their sense of sight and smell are extraordinary and they generally slip away into the forest before any human even sees them. Not much is known about king cobra numbers in the wild, but the more we destroy our rainforests, the less space there is for a mighty predator.

 

In March the monsoon rains are still a few months away. I and my team of researchers at the Agumbe Rain-forest Research Station are often witness to what is aptly called a ‘combat dance’ by king cobras. The snakes are so keen on the fight that they pay no heed to us, watching nearby. This ritual wrestling match can last for an hour or more, only ending when one male obviously has the upper hand. With a show of dominance the larger male pins the loser down and raises high, hood distended, displaying the broad yellow bands. The vanquished snake hastily retreats after the match is over. It is dangerous for the defeated male to continue to hang around the stronger king cobra; he could become a meal as they are cannibalistic.

As I hike through the forest I revel in the sights and sounds of this, my favourite place on earth. I watch the flight of Draco, the brilliant flying lizard as it soars on bright orange wings between trees. I’m reminded of my childhood when I’d been entranced by depictions of those giant flying reptiles, pterodactyls. Higher up in the towering trees, whitemaned lion-tailed macaques, a critically endangered monkey, quietly feast on Cullenia and jackfruit and the forest air pulsates with cicada and bird calls. The forest is dry and the leaf litter crackles underfoot. Further along a grey langur catches sight of me and whoops an alarm call. The whole troop flees by leaping several metres across to the next tree. I mimic their alarm call but that doesn’t draw them any closer.

I carefully edge past an innocuous looking plant, which is a stinging nettle locally called ‘terror of elephants’ and recall the time when I accidentally brushed against it and suffered stings, chills and fever for days. As the sun is about to set, I reach a dry riverbed, tired and sweaty, and make camp. I start a fire going between two boulders to prepare a simple dinner.

 

Just then, a rustling of dry leaves makes me alert – a snake! I jump over a log in hot pursuit, heading the snake off. It is a gorgeous, darkly hued spectacled cobra, heavy with eggs, and using a stick I carefully hold the snake by the tail. The hooded snake rears up and hisses in defence. Spectacled cobras are often active at dusk and after nightfall here in the forest, perhaps to avoid the snake-eating king cobras that rule by day. I get a picture of its unusual hood marking which looks like a W and let it go.

A nine foot female king cobra on her recently constructed nest. Agumbe, Karnataka. Photos: Romulus Whitaker	A twelve foot male king cobra at Agumbe, Karnataka.

 

Back at the camp, the fire has died out and the dinner burnt. In the fading light, I say to hell with it, I’m too tired to start all over again. Instead I brew some tea and unwrap a packet of Parle glucose biscuits. Settling into my hammock, strung between two trees and off the damp ground, I munch my makeshift dinner and ruminate on all the threats faced by the forests of the Western Ghats. A big worry is that the steady encroachment into the rainforest will not leave enough space to support a big predatory snake. There is no such place as ‘deep in the jungle’ anymore. Human activity has been encroaching more and more into the pristine forest.

Of course one way to save these forests is to turn people onto the magic of fantastic creatures like the king cobra. People in the Malnad area of Karnataka already revere this snake by tradition which is a great start. By protecting the big chunks of forest that this large snake needs to survive you also protect thousands of life forms that are found only here, in the Western Ghats. This is the same argument that the tigerwalas used to set up India’s 50 tiger reserves. But both king cobras and tigers use human dominated landscapes too, so it’s not just pristine forest that needs protection. It’s people who need to be convinced and congratulated for their tolerance. And with these thoughts I drift off to sleep.

 

I wake up in the morning scratching my many tick bites from the day before. I dab calamine around my neck and under the waistband of my undies, but the urge to itch is great, even though it’s just going to get worse. Ticks are real torture now, in the dry season and I fondly remember the leeches during the rains, hell, they just take a little blood.

March is the mating season of the king cobra and it seems like a risky business. The big male is a snake-eater, and the smaller female may be in danger. But when the male is on the pheromone track of a female, his testosterone levels are peaking and it’s not food he’s thinking about. If the female is ready, mating is a tender act. If she needs persuasion, the male will caress, poke and even butt her repeatedly until she raises her tail to allow his hemipenis to enter. The courting and mating may last three hours. With diminishing and fragmented forests, it is getting more and more complicated for wild king cobras to find each other and they often have to cross through tea fields, plantations and even swim rivers and reservoirs to reach another chunk of forest.

A king cobra's mesmerizing stare. (Photo: Janaki Lenin)

Over the past decade and a half of study it is now clear that a courting pair of wild king cobras will stay together for days and even weeks after which the male king cobra will go his way perhaps in search of other females to mate with.

 

I come across fresh langur dung as I head back to our research station and scoop some of the pasty stuff up and stash it in a plastic bag. It’s the end of a long day and I head down to a pool in the river and strip down for a nice cool soak. Emerging from the river, I perch on a rock and bait a hook with a little ball of the langur crap and chuck the line into the deep end. I get a hit almost immediately – such is the eagerness of the carp for monkey poop! A local tribesman taught me this trick one day by showing me langurs feeding high up in trees over the stream and the carp swirling around in the water below for the droppings falling in the water. I scrape the crap from under my fingernails carefully before cleaning the fish on the riverbank and take it back to grill.

 

We’ve all heard that a king cobra can kill an elephant, but this what I’d call a typical encounter scenario: A king cobra is up in a tree. A lone elephant comes foraging by. His mobile trunk grabs the leaves of the palm tree close to the king cobra. To her the elephant trunk must look like a snake. The startled king cobra hoods up. The trunk doesn’t smell quite right and the elephant is getting closer and closer. The perceptive snake avoids an encounter by leaving her vantage point, gracefully sliding down in the bushes on the other side of the tree. The elephant hasn’t noticed and keeps feeding on the juicy palm leaves. I think it’s pretty unlikely that a king cobra would ever feel the need to bite an elephant.

Crawling slowly away she picks up a scent with her sensitive tongue – that of a ratsnake. She relentlessly tracks the snake down to a tree hollow where it has taken shelter. Without hesitation she grabs the ratsnake in mid-body, her jaws clamping down on the two metre long snake like a vice. Her venom is a potent cocktail of toxins causing paralysis and enzymes which break down body tissue. The rat snake retaliates by biting the king cobra but she does not let go until the smaller snake is paralyzed and ready to swallow. The whole thing is over 20 minutes later.

As the weeks pass by clouds build up into towering thunderheads. A light rain showers the forest as a preamble of what’s to come soon. The rising humidity causes frog calls to reach a deafening crescendo.

The time has come for the spectacled cobra to lay her 20 pearly white soft eggs. She seems to know that the best place is in the heart of a termite mound, where she will guard her clutch until they hatch. The termites regulate the temperature and humidity inside the mound creating the perfect incubation conditions for the eggs and will make the mother cobra’s life bearable over the two months that she is resigned to being with her eggs without food, without water.

Later, in May, rains arrive in earnest and the downpour lasts several days. In other parts of the Western Ghats it sends the elephants out of the thick-forested valleys up onto the open grasslands, away from the dreaded leeches. The Nilgiri tahr retire to their cliff top hangouts to avoid being taken by wild dog and black panthers. Mists swirl above the canopy and onto the grasslands making the elephants and their grazing partners gaur, the world’s largest wild cattle, seem like giant ghosts. Lots of little creatures escape the flooded forest floor and seek shelter in our field station bungalows. I routinely find frogs, centipedes, slugs, snails and an occasional snake sharing quarters with me.

 

I trudge through the dripping forest to see what new things have emerged with the rains. I equip myself with leech socks, cloth leggings which tuck into my shoes and smear some snuff powder mixed with petroleum jelly around my ankles to ward off the little suckers. I’m a wimp compared to my tribal friends who just scrape them off with their bush knives as they walk along. Just try not to stand still for too long or you get covered with them. As I walk I find many kinds of millipedes, beetles, tree crickets and katydids, orchids in bloom and a vast array of mushrooms and lichens. Scorpions emerge after dark and it’s a total delight to use a UV torch to see them glow in the dark! I find large tarantulas waiting to ambush prey at the mouth of their burrows in embankments.

 

I spend the morning searching along the stream that borders the Agumbe field station and return to the research station to find some villagers waiting for me. There’s a snake in one of the houses. It’s just a short walk to the village where the men point to a crack in the mud wall of a hut and say that’s where the snake has taken refuge. I think it could be a krait from the villagers’ description. The crack is narrow and I have a glimpse of shiny scales where the snake is hiding. There is no way for me to pull it out and the villagers insist that I bash the wall down to get the snake out. Soon the hut wall is in shambles and a beautiful black, glossy krait emerges, startled by the bright daylight. I bag the snake, am profusely thanked by the hut owner and I carry it off to the nearby forest to release it.

A king cobra spreads its hood to warn you – STAY BACK! (Photo: Romulus Whitaker)

Two months go by and in the termite mound the spectacled cobra is aroused from her half-asleep state by stirrings beneath her. Tiny heads, complete with fangs and venom poke up between her coils. Her vigilance has paid off. 20 miniature versions of herself have hatched into the world. The future of at least some of her progeny is secure and there are plenty of frogs and rats in rice fields to gorge on. In fact, as far as spectacled cobras are concerned, converting forests to agriculture, life can only get better!

I return to my research station at Agumbe where a training camp is teaching the basics of tree climbing. We know that king cobras are semi-arboreal and we want to explore the canopy. There have been very few studies in the tree canopy of the Western Ghats and we feel it is a crucial part of the king cobra’s realm.

While I’m getting familiar with the king cobra’s terrestrial world, I’ve never explored its kingdom in the sky. Thanks to Icon Films who made the BBC documentary ‘The King Cobra and I’, a team of tree climbing experts taught us the basics. After a day of practice I winch my way 30 metres up to the canopy. On my quiet way up I encounter a giant Malabar squirrel that flees, chattering in alarm, a pit viper coiled around an orchid perhaps lying in wait for the bat that cannot resist the flower’s alluring fragrance. It’s a whole new world up here. Rock bees, butterflies, beetles buzz, flutter and forage among the flowers.

 

In contrast to the claustrophobic dark cool forest below, up in the canopy the sun is brilliant. I set up camera traps for the night. In the midst of rigging up the gear I witness two adult male black-footed grey langurs having an altercation over the ripening fruits of a fishtail palm. Both of them get so involved in their squabble they don’t notice me, just 20 metres away, hanging there in my harness next to the tree trunk with my binoculars. It whets my appetite for more and that first night we get wonderful camera trap video clips of a brown palm civet hunting among the leafy branches and a slender loris which comes right up to the camera, curious about the infrared light perhaps.

Meanwhile, the female king cobra with her home range fortunately close to our research station and heavy with developing eggs, is about to perform the most remarkable feat a snake is capable of, for the king cobra is the only snake out of the over 3000 species in the world to make an elaborate nest. She chooses her nest site in a secluded bamboo thicket and every day spends hours sweeping up the long thin leaves into bundles that she actually transports with tightened body coils. It takes her a week to accumulate and pack down a suitable pile of leaves. She then forces her way into the mound and forms a hollow inside and lays her 30 or more leathery eggs.

 

The female king cobra will either spend the next two months lying on her eggs or in some cases leave them to their fate. There are plenty of egg predators like mongoose, wild boar, civets, monitor lizards and even other snakes, which would happily make a meal of them. But she has made a perfect incubation chamber and perhaps her lingering scent dissuades predators and her eggs will be safe. The only problem is, she had made her nest just 50 meters away from a farm house where a couple with their two children live.

Luckily the farmer is typical of the Agumbe people and has a reverence for king cobras. He knows about the ARRS research and conservation work and sends us word that there is a king cobra nest near his house. When we get there we carefully probe the mound with a thin bamboo pole and find that the female is no longer in attendance. This certainly makes life easier. We put a temperature probe into the egg chamber and tell the farmer that one of our research team guys will come every day to take the temperature reading and that we will put a plastic shield around the nest so when the babies hatch we can take them away to let them go into the jungle.

This pleases the farmer and his teenage daughter, Keerthi, who has been listening to us tells us that she’s a zoology student at college in the nearby town and would be happy to do the temperature readings every day. What a find this was, a perfect arrangement to have the local residents involved in king cobra research.

 

Seventy-five days later I get a call from Keerthi that the eggs are hatching and a few of the hatchling king cobras are visible. We arrive at the nest, now surrounded by a metre high plastic sheet buried a foot deep. Keerthi’s father and mother are doting parents. Looking up at the bamboo over the nest we immediately spy a couple of coils of baby king cobras. After the king cobras hatch they instinctively climb up the bamboo culms. It’s much safer from predators up there. The others must be around too and sure enough we spot two tiny heads peering out from the leaf litter around the nest. We let them hang out here for a few days until they shed their skins. This is when the first pangs of hunger will stir them into actively looking for prey and a good time for us to turn them loose in the landscape.

Three days later we return and gently bag the 23 hatchlings and let them all go next to a stream in the forest nearby. The arrival of the monsoon releases a myriad of frogs and insects, food for other baby snakes. This is the right time for baby kings to hatch, as tiny snake hunters they will find just what they need: baby snakes of other species.

And this is also when they are going to run into trouble. Most of them will be taken by predators. If just one of these tiny kings survives to adulthood, then the amazing nest building efforts of the female king cobra will have been worthwhile. The vulnerability of these brilliantly banded little snakes is just the beginning of their problems as pressures continue to reduce rainforest habitat in the Western Ghats. Think about it: These forests aren’t just the habitat of king cobras, my favourite snake, they are the source of most of the water we depend on, collected from the copious rains to form the major rivers of south India.

And just to update you all, Ajay Giri is the Field Director of the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station which is administered by the Madras Crocodile Bank/Centre for Herpetology. Ajay and his team are able, in these troubled COVID-19 times, thanks to our excellent rapport with local police and village authorities, to carry on the king cobra telemetry project and rescue king cobras when they get into people’s houses. We are presently radio tracking one female and two male king cobras in the Agumbe area. The project is generously supported by the Deshpande Foundation, Oracle Corporation and the King Cobra Conservancy (https://www.thekingcobra.org) to name just a few.

 

We are in touch with king cobra research and conservation efforts in Thailand, Borneo and other parts of India including the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh where king cobras are often killed. To educate people over there we encouraged the production of an educational film, interviewing the wonderfully tolerant people of Agumbe, ‘Living with the King’ by the Gaia Group (https://youtu.be/eQXwq MLclc4).You must see this exciting film, which has been dubbed in Telugu and is being shown widely in Andhra and Telengana. And if you want to see the Emmy award winning film ‘King Cobra’ we made for Nat Geo, way back in 1997 go to https://www.youtube. com/watch?v= VkEhBeLYhek

Soon going to be 49! (In the age of Corona)

 Visiting this blog after five years!  I must have been busy or lost?  Anyway, I am not wasting this opportunity anymore.  From here on, I am going to be more active.  Plus, there is so much to share and put out.  BTW,  I turn 49 next Sunday....wow! 

The Mirrors Behind Rembrandt’s Self­-Portraits

By STEPH YIN JULY 13, 2016

(New York Times)


At age 18, Francis O’Neill, an aspiring young painter, went on a train trip around Europe and was struck by the Rembrandt masterpieces he saw in galleries. Like many before him, he was astounded by Rembrandt’s technical accuracy. “I thought, ‘What sort of magic has this guy imbued in himself?’ ” said Mr. O’Neill, who today produces art and teaches from his studio in Oxford, England. Now, Mr. O’Neill thinks he’s found an answer to that question — and he says it has more to do with optics than magic. In a paper published Wednesday in the Journal of Optics, Mr. O’Neill lays out a theory that Rembrandt set up flat and concave mirrors to project his subjects — including himself — onto surfaces before painting or etching them. By tracing these projections, the 17th ­century painter would have been able to achieve a higher degree of precision, Mr. O’Neill said. His research suggests that some of Rembrandt’s most prominent work may not have been done purely freehand, as many art historians believe.


He is not the first to suggest that old master painters used optics for their famous portraits. In 2001, David Hockney, a renowned British painter, and Charles Falco, an optical sciences professor at the University of Arizona, published a book in which they argued that master painters secretly used mirrors and lenses to create hyperrealistic paintings, starting in the Renaissance. Their theory, known as the Hockney­Falco thesis, generated controversy among scientists and art historians, some of whom took the findings as an implication that old master painters had “cheated” to produce their works. One of the theory’s most outspoken critics was David G. Stork, an optics expert who claimed to find discrepancies in the painting analyses done by Mr. Hockney and Dr. Falco. In turn, Dr. Falco accused Dr. Stork of fabricating data.


After learning of the Hockney­Falco thesis, Mr. O’Neill spent a decade studying Rembrandt’s work, which he believed displayed many features consistent with the use of optics, such as higher resolution in the center and blurriness along the edges. Mr. O’Neill started tinkering with mirrors to find the best ways to achieve projections. He found that arranging mirrors in a zigzag projected an inverted image that he could then trace onto a metal plate or canvas. For the projection to work, one of the mirrors had to be concave, or curved inward, to concentrate light onto one point. In his paper, which he wrote with Sofia Palazzo Corner, an independent researcher in London, Mr. O’Neill presents recurring themes in Rembrandt’s work that point to the Dutch artist’s use of mirrors, particularly in self­ portraits. Among these themes is Rembrandt’s use of chiaroscuro, a contrast of light and dark, which is a signature of the lighting conditions necessary for projections. “You’re bouncing light in a zigzag, so it goes from your face to the flat mirror, to the curved mirror and then to the surface you’re working on,” Mr. O’Neill said. “For the face to be brightly illuminated, the rest of the room has to be dark — similar to if you’re watching something on an overhead projector.” Another piece of evidence he points to is Rembrandt’s off­center gaze in many self­portraits. This suggests that Rembrandt might have been looking at a projection surface slightly off to the side, rather than straight onto a flat mirror, Mr. O’Neill said. He believes such a setup also would have made it easier for Rembrandt to create animated self­portraits, including one called “Rembrandt Laughing,” painted around 1628. If Rembrandt were not using a projection, he would have had to hold a laughing expression while looking back and forth between his canvas and a mirror, “the physical discipline of which seems quite extreme,” Mr. O’Neill said. With a projection, however, Rembrandt could have just traced himself without having to move his eyes.



Dr. Falco praised Mr. O’Neill’s new evidence. But the new study did not convince the critic of his and Mr. Hockney’s work, Dr. Stork, who countered that the image produced by two mirrors would appear upside down on the projection surface. “If the artist is painting over it with downward strokes, then when you take the painting and turn it right side up, all those brushstrokes would go upward,” he said. “But in every Rembrandt, not a single brushstroke goes in that direction.” There is no historical documentation that Rembrandt ever used optics, he added. “Rembrandt had lots of people in and out of his studio, and not one of them mentioned a projector in a note to a friend or wife? That seems unlikely,” Dr. Stork said. Mr. O’Neill, however, believes that the use of optics was common enough during Rembrandt’s time that the presence of mirrors in an art studio would not necessarily stand out. Furthermore, he said, it’s possible that Rembrandt used optics to get the proportions and placement of details right, and then finished his paintings freehand — which would explain the lack of upward brushstrokes. Even with the use of optics, Rembrandt was deserving of the title “old master,” Mr. O’Neill said. “People have accused me of being jealous, or trying to discredit Rembrandt, but that’s not at all what I’m trying to do,” he said. “If you gave a projection to someone on the street and told them to make a masterpiece, they would never give you a Rembrandt.” Far from trying to undermine artists like Rembrandt, Mr. O’Neill said, he is interested in how the use of optics “makes us look at artists as scientists.” At the same time scientists had just started using lenses to look at things invisibly small through microscopes and at the stars through telescopes, artists were using lenses to study the world around them, he said. As for whether he has successfully painted a self­portrait using his optical setup, Mr. O’Neill said he’s sure that day will come. “Someone will say, ‘prove it,’ and then I’ll show them how it’s done,” he said.

What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’

By Adam Davidson  (March 19 2016)

Donald Trump loves the word ‘‘deal.’’ The book he released with a co-writer in 1987 to summarize his views of the world was called, of course, ‘‘The Art of the Deal.’’ His view of trade with China is summarized in this quotation from his speech announcing his candidacy for president: ‘‘When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China, in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.’’ When asked last fall how he, as president, would guarantee health care for the uninsured, he answered, ‘‘I would make a deal.’’ He plans to make a deal with pharmaceutical companies to lower prices, make a deal with hospitals to treat the uninsured. On immigration, of course, he promises the greatest deal of all time, one that would compel Mexico to pay for a wall along its border with the United States.

I have spent much of the past few months trying to make sense of Trump’s policy proposals. His website lists his major priorities as, in order: health care reform, China-United States trade agreements, Veterans Affairs reform, tax reform, gun rights and immigration reform. There are no other issues addressed at length. It’s a puzzling mix. Any serious economic proposal to ‘‘make America great again’’ would surely mention education, fiscal policy, entrepreneurship and trade with the entire world, not just China — issues he makes little or no reference to. No doubt Trump’s list of priorities reflects the issues that he and his advisers perceive, probably correctly, to be red meat for Republican primary voters. But tellingly, it’s also a set of issues for which the ‘‘deal’’ — that is, Trump’s unique ability to make deals — can be presented as his crucial promise.

The centrality of the ‘‘deal’’ to Trump­onomics is especially strange when you consider how tangential that concept is, or at least should be, to a modern economy. In Microeconomics 101, deals are an afterthought: Transactions have the most socially optimal outcome when buyer and seller reach a mutually beneficial agreement. The very idea of a ‘‘good’’ deal for one party and a ‘‘bad’’ deal for another suggests a suboptimal outcome; an economy built on tough deal-making, with clear winners and losers, will always be a poorer one. Meanwhile, in macroeconomics — which covers the big, broad issues that a president typically worries about — the concept of the ‘‘deal’’ hardly exists at all. The key issues at play in a national or global economy (inflation, currency-exchange rates, unemployment, overall growth) are impossible to control through any sort of deal. They reflect underlying structural forces in an economy, like the level of education and skill of the population, the productivity of companies, the amount of government spending and the actions of the central bank.

It’s easy to dismiss Trump as a loutish ignoramus who simply doesn’t understand how modern economies function. But I’ve come to see him as a canny spokesman for a different sort of economy, one that often goes by the technical name ‘‘rent seeking.’’ In economics, a ‘‘rent’’ is money you make because you control something scarce and desirable, whether it’s an oil field or a monopolistic position in a market. There is a bit of ‘‘rent’’ in nearly every transaction. When you pay rent on an apartment, some of the money is for the value the landlord has added to the property, by upgrading the kitchen, say. But much of the money your landlord makes comes from the fact that he or she controls property in a desirable location. If you think of the transactions that make people the most frustrated, they are, most likely, rent-seeking transactions in which some force is imposing a better ‘‘deal’’ for one party. Your cable service costs more and is less responsive because local monopoly allows the company to make a better ‘‘deal’’ for itself. The owner of the local pro-sports team can make a ‘‘deal’’ with the city for a new stadium, or else the team packs up and leaves town. Without real competition, one or both sides of a rent-seeking transaction lack leverage, and so decisions can be hashed out only by powerful people making deals in back rooms.

I learned a great deal about rentier economies, as they’re sometimes known, when I spent a year in Baghdad, covering the American occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2004. I met many of Iraq’s leading businesspeople, and they always talked about ‘‘deals.’’ As one explained to me, there would be some business opportunity — building a hospital, say, or getting a license to import a new line of cars — and Saddam Hussein’s family would essentially auction off the opportunity to the handful of wealthy businesspeople whom they deemed trustworthy. Success came not from being better at building hospitals or more efficient at importing cars. It came from understanding the internal family politics of the Husseins and the power of the state bureaucracy.

As an economic journalist, when trying to explain the idea of rent-seeking, I have always used one quintessential example from the United States — a sector in which markets don’t function, in which excess profits are held by a few. That world is Manhattan real estate development. Twenty-three square miles in area, Manhattan contains roughly 854,000 housing units. But there are many more people than that who want to own property there. A Manhattan pied-à-terre has long been a globally recognized sign of wealth and status — especially in recent years, as billionaires the world over have come to see a Manhattan condo, even one rarely visited, as a vessel for laundered wealth or a hedge against political upheaval at home.

Manhattan real estate development is about as far as it is possible to get, within the United States, from that Econ 101 notion of mutually beneficial transactions. This is not a marketplace characterized by competition and dynamism; instead, Manhattan real estate looks an awful lot more like a Middle Eastern rentier economy. It is a hereditary system. We talk about families, not entrepreneurs. A handful of families have dominated the city’s real estate development for decades: Speyer, Tishman, Durst, Fisher, Malkin, Milstein, Resnick, LeFrak, Rose, Zeckendorf. Having grown up in Manhattan myself, I think of these names the way I heard Middle Easterners speak of the great sheikhs who ran big families in Jordan, Iraq and Syria. These are people of immense power and influence, but their actual skills and abilities are opaque. They do, however, make ‘‘deals.’’

In recent weeks, hearing Trump talk, I’ve realized that his economic worldview is entirely coherent. It makes sense. He is not just a rent-seeker himself; his whole worldview is based on a rent-seeking vision of the economy, in which there’s a fixed amount of wealth that can only be redistributed, never grow. It is a world­view that makes perfect sense for the son of a New York real estate tycoon who grew up to be one, too. Everything he has gotten — as he proudly brags — came from cutting deals. Accepting the notion of a zero-sum world, he set out to grab more than his share. And his policies would push the American economy to conform with that worldview.

Many economists and political scientists now think that the United States economy has shifted, over the past few decades, toward one in which a higher proportion of the economy comes from so-called rents: Wall Street’s maneuvering through the regulatory process, ‘‘free-trade’’ deals whose thousands of pages of rules wind up proscribing winners and losers. The left, right and center of the economics profession all agree that reducing rent-seeking behavior, and improving overall growth, is essential if we want to ‘‘make America great again.’’

But this descent into a rentier economy would only accelerate with a mentality like Trump’s in the White House. The native-born population of the United States is aging rapidly; without immigrants the nation would quickly face a disastrous level of debt. Middle-class workers may be struggling now in a changing economy, but a clampdown on global trade would only make that worse. Any health care reform that revolved around the president’s ability to ‘‘deal’’ would inherently be one more prone to corruption. In a rentier state, every ambitious person knows that the way to become rich and powerful is to grab the sources of wealth and hold onto them, by force if necessary. It’s no accident that, around the world, rentier states tend to be run by unelected dictators — the ultimate dealmakers in chief.

Why Women Compete With Each Other (NYT: Nov 1, 2015)

By Emily Gordon

Los Angeles — I HAD a tightly knit group of female friends in elementary school — we called ourselves the Sensational Six. As the dominant girl force in our little universe, we felt important and exclusive; a unit in matching handmade sweatshirts. Time went by and all of my classmates and I watched as puberty reached down to form us, shapeless little lumps of children, into young men and women, into haves and have­nots. I had an early growth spurt and was a full head taller than the boys in my class, dwarfing the girls. This made me a have­not, and I made it my life’s effort to shrink down and be like my friends, tiny and adorable. One day on the bus as I chatted with a fellow Sixer, I watched her examining our legs, propped up on the seat in front of us. “Look,” she said, innocently enough, “your legs are, like, twice as big as mine.” And she was right. Women compete, compare, undermine and undercut one another — at least that is the prevailing notion of how we interact. It’s considered exceptional, or at least noteworthy, that famous women like Amy Schumer and Beyoncé and Taylor Swift acknowledge that other women are talented, and frequently work with those other women without, in most cases, being catty about it. This makes them feminist heroes. Feeling on guard around other ladies is normal for a lot of women, and it’s exhausting. 

I exhausted  myself for years trying to understand how other girls could have gone from my closest allies to my scariest foes. I write an advice column and get a fair number of questions from women asking how to handle not trusting other women, so I know I’m not alone. A good amount of research has been done on female competitiveness, both in condescending and eye­opening ways. A literature review by Tracy Vaillancourt in 2013 found that women by and large express indirect aggression toward other women, and that aggression is a combination of “self­promotion,” making themselves look more attractive, and “derogation of rivals,” being catty about other women. There are two main theories of why women are competitive in indirectly aggressive ways. Evolutionary psychology, which uses natural selection to explain our modern behaviors, says that women need to protect themselves (read: their wombs) from physical harm, so indirect aggression keeps us safe while lowering the stock of other women. Feminist psychology chalks up this indirect aggression to internalizing the patriarchy. As Noam Shpancer writes in Psychology Today, “As women come to consider being prized by men their ultimate source of strength, worth, achievement and identity, they are compelled to battle other women for the prize.” In short: When our value is tied to the people who can impregnate us, we turn on each other. 

I watched this happen among our Sensational Six — watched as our pastimes shifted from having goofy singalongs, to trying on clothes, to pointing out one another’s flaws, to primping before a mirror, and the final stop, making boys laugh. We were still friends, but we were suddenly aware of a new dimension. I went to a different middle school than my friends did and that new dimension persisted, except that now I was taking it in with fresh eyes. And because of my size and my status as a new kid, I stayed an outsider. Here’s where I took a page from nature and decided that my indirect aggression, rather than self­promotion or discounting my rivals, would take the form of what’s called warning coloration. I took myself out of the battle.  If I was unappealing, then I would advertise — like those butterflies with the warning spots — that I was not to be considered a worthy opponent. I would be ugly on my own terms. I wore artfully ripped clothes and enormous combat boots and old men’s pants. In high school, I decided that all of my female friends were stupid and traded them for guy friends. I loved horror movies and heavy metal, and used these interests to become a “guys’ girl.” I thought that by segregating myself, I would save myself from the awareness that I wasn’t ever going to be pretty/perfect/cool enough, and occasionally I would get to make out with a male pal because hormones were running rampant. When another guys’ girl joined our group, she and I became fast friends by lamenting how stupid girls were, and when we met new boys, we threw each other under the bus to flirt with them. I felt sick when she did this to me, felt a sick thrill of power when I did it to her. Instead of openly hating women, I used hate’s sneaky little sister and told myself that I pitied women who worked hard to be conventionally attractive, who had jobs that utilized their feminine wiles, who were “too girlie.” “Poor her,” I’d cluck at parties, “wanting attention so badly. I wonder who hurt her. Let’s discuss this art rock band I saw last week.” Selfpromotion: check. Degradation of rivals: check. 

In my 20s, there were two girls in my social group in New York — brash, gorgeous creatures — that owned every single room they entered. I hated them on sight, even as I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I thought they were magical, but with a dark magic that could steal my husband. Once I found myself in a bar bathroom alone with them and, feeling cornered by their spectacular perfection, mumbled something. One responded by complimenting my coat; the other started talking about the guy she was there with and how he was acting funny. I saw them for who they were: magnanimous, charming creatures, but also kind and obsessive and weird. My negative view of them had nothing to do with them at all. It was just a warped mirror. Research tells us that women are compelled to level the playing field by any means necessary to make sure we have access to the best genetic material, but since these are not real concerns in our modern lives, our competitiveness becomes something a bit more private and understandable. That’s the third theory of female competitiveness that I’d like to propose: We aren’t competing with other women, ultimately, but with ourselves — with how we think of ourselves. For many of us, we look at other women and see, instead, a version of ourselves that is better, prettier, smarter, something more. We don’t see the other woman at all. It’s a fun­house mirror that reflects an inaccurate version of who we are, but we turn on her anyway, because it’s easier. But we don’t need to lower the stock of other women, either for the future of the species or for our own psyches. When we each focus on being the dominant force in our own universe, rather than invading other universes, we all win. Emily V. Gordon is the author of “Super You: Release Your Inner Superhero” and an executive producer of “The Meltdown With Jonah and Kumail.”

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior

Reproduction of Amy Chua's article on Parenting published in WSJ.  I plan to offer my own comments in the next post.

By 

AMY CHUA

Updated Jan. 8, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

Amy Chua with her daughters, Louisa and Sophia, at their home in New Haven, Conn.

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can't. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me "garbage" in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn't damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn't actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage.

From Ms. Chua's album: 'Mean me with Lulu in hotel room... with score taped to TV!' Chua family

As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early. My friend Susan, the host, tried to rehabilitate me with the remaining guests.

The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty—lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. (I also once heard a Western father toast his adult daughter by calling her "beautiful and incredibly competent." She later told me that made her feel like garbage.)

Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, "You're lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you." By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they're not disappointed about how their kids turned out.

I've thought long and hard about how Chinese parents can get away with what they do. I think there are three big differences between the Chinese and Western parental mind-sets.

Newborn Amy Chua in her mother's arms, a year after her parents arrived in the U.S. Chua family

First, I've noticed that Western parents are extremely anxious about their children's self-esteem. They worry about how their children will feel if they fail at something, and they constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are notwithstanding a mediocre performance on a test or at a recital. In other words, Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.

For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If the child comes home with a B on the test, some Western parents will still praise the child. Other Western parents will sit their child down and express disapproval, but they will be careful not to make their child feel inadequate or insecure, and they will not call their child "stupid," "worthless" or "a disgrace." Privately, the Western parents may worry that their child does not test well or have aptitude in the subject or that there is something wrong with the curriculum and possibly the whole school. If the child's grades do not improve, they may eventually schedule a meeting with the school principal to challenge the way the subject is being taught or to call into question the teacher's credentials.

If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn't get them, the Chinese parent assumes it's because the child didn't work hard enough. That's why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

Sophia playing at Carnegie Hall in 2007. Chua family

Second, Chinese parents believe that their kids owe them everything. The reason for this is a little unclear, but it's probably a combination of Confucian filial piety and the fact that the parents have sacrificed and done so much for their children. (And it's true that Chinese mothers get in the trenches, putting in long grueling hours personally tutoring, training, interrogating and spying on their kids.) Anyway, the understanding is that Chinese children must spend their lives repaying their parents by obeying them and making them proud.

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Third, Chinese parents believe that they know what is best for their children and therefore override all of their children's own desires and preferences. That's why Chinese daughters can't have boyfriends in high school and why Chinese kids can't go to sleepaway camp. It's also why no Chinese kid would ever dare say to their mother, "I got a part in the school play! I'm Villager Number Six. I'll have to stay after school for rehearsal every day from 3:00 to 7:00, and I'll also need a ride on weekends." God help any Chinese kid who tried that one.

Don't get me wrong: It's not that Chinese parents don't care about their children. Just the opposite. They would give up anything for their children. It's just an entirely different parenting model.

Here's a story in favor of coercion, Chinese-style. Lulu was about 7, still playing two instruments, and working on a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.

Lulu couldn't do it. We worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever we tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, Lulu announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off.

"Get back to the piano now," I ordered.

"You can't make me."

"Oh yes, I can."

Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.

Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her—and that he didn't think threatening Lulu was helpful. Also, he said, maybe Lulu really just couldn't do the technique—perhaps she didn't have the coordination yet—had I considered that possibility?

"You just don't believe in her," I accused.

"That's ridiculous," Jed said scornfully. "Of course I do."

"Sophia could play the piece when she was this age."

"But Lulu and Sophia are different people," Jed pointed out.

"Oh no, not this," I said, rolling my eyes. "Everyone is special in their special own way," I mimicked sarcastically. "Even losers are special in their own special way. Well don't worry, you don't have to lift a finger. I'm willing to put in as long as it takes, and I'm happy to be the one hated. And you can be the one they adore because you make them pancakes and take them to Yankees games."

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to Lulu. I used every weapon and tactic I could think of. We worked right through dinner into the night, and I wouldn't let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, and I lost my voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even I began to have doubts.

Then, out of the blue, Lulu did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own imperturbable thing—just like that.

Lulu realized it the same time I did. I held my breath. She tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming.

"Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in my bed, and we snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When she performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for Lulu—it's so spunky and so her."

Even Jed gave me credit for that one. Western parents worry a lot about their children's self-esteem. But as a parent, one of the worst things you can do for your child's self-esteem is to let them give up. On the flip side, there's nothing better for building confidence than learning you can do something you thought you couldn't.

There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids' true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly. I think it's a misunderstanding on both sides. All decent parents want to do what's best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.