New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

How the Dutch got their cycle paths

Having displayed my ignorance of the history of my adopted country yesterday, today I discovered yet something else about its recent history: how cycle paths came about. As the wide majority of people in the country, I do a large chunk of my transportation on a bike (and by train for the longer distances), and the place that biking occupies in people’s lives is one of my very favorite aspects of living in this country. While growing up in car-infested São Paulo, I did quite a bit of biking before being able to drive (going to school etc.), which was quite unusual; but symptomatically, the day I turned 18 I got my driver’s license and never mounted a bike again until I came to live in the Netherlands at age 23. Ultimately, it is mostly a matter of infra-structure: driving and parking is often a nightmare around here, so, in the wide majority of situations, one is much better off biking. There are cycle paths virtually everywhere, including routes that are not allowed for cars; cycle paths make it safe and pleasant to bike around. Foreigners are often surprised that we don’t wear helmets to bike in the Netherlands, but rather than indicating Dutch recklessness when biking (although there is a lot of that too, especially in cities like Amsterdam), it in fact indicates how safe it is to bike here.

Sócrates: making political history with football

As widely covered in the international media, the Brazilian football player Sócrates passed away yesterday. Football fans around the world are familiar with his feats in the field (and a search on youtube will yield countless videos with his best moments). Here, however, I’d like to highlight the political significance that Sócrates has had in Brazil, in particular for the transition from a military dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s, as this aspect of his life is bound to be less well-known outside Brazil.

Sócrates himself claimed to be an anti-athlete. He was a heavy smoker and a heavy drinker (the drinking habit in particular eventually led to health complications and ultimately his demise), also during his career as a player. Moreover, he had a degree in medicine (he only started to focus on his football career at age 24, when he moved to Corinthians in 1978, the team that is most strongly associated with his club career), was extremely articulated (not that there is an incompatibility between being a football player and an intellectual!), and highly politically engaged. Here is an accurate account from the Guardian obituary:

Socrates is dead

The other great Socrates, the football player, is dead. I'll try to write a post tomorrow on all he meant to me and so many others. I was a kid in the early 1980s, a fanatic supporter of Corinthians, and Socrates was the best. Not only his football, but also his politics, made him a hero to us all.

But more tomorrow, for now I'm still digesting the news.

Borg and McEnroe: the proletarian and hieroglyphic styles in tennis

Commenting on Jeff's post from Saturday, I mentioned Deleuze's characterization of Bjorn Borg's tennis style as "proletarian," and John McEnroe's as involving "Egyptian postures." Here are some images below the fold. But above it, this one for fans of early 80s athletic hair. 

Baseball WorldCUP FINAL: Cuba - Netherlans 1:2

 

Sports Sunday 7: Women and children first!

It was meant as a sanction against a particular club, but maybe smart marketing execs at other clubs and in other sports will see the potential. Look at the joy and exuberance on the faces of these fans.

Excerpts from the CNN story: 

The Turkish Football Federation had planned to make Istanbul favorite Fenerbahce play two games in an empty stadium after fans invaded the pitch after a friendly against Ukraine's Shakhtar Donetsk during the summer, according to a Turkish Weekly report.

But new rules say those games will be open only to women and children under age 12, National Turk reports. Admission is free.

The policy got its first test Tuesday night in Istanbul, as 45,000 women and children turned out to watch Fenerbahce and Manisaspor face off in the Turkish Super League....What they were hearing was something unexpected in the usual partisan atmosphere of Fenerbahce Istanbul’s Sükrü Saracoglu stadium: cheers for the visiting team.

Players from both teams greeted their female fans before kickoff, tossing flowers into the stands, Turkish Weekly reported...

“This memory will stay with me forever. It’s not always that you see so many women and children in one game,” Fenerbahce captain Alex de Sousa said at a post-game news conference, National Turk reported.

There's so much to think about in this story: gendering practices, emotional contagion, shared joy, mirror neurons ... A good case study would unravel all sorts of fascinating dimensions to the multiplicity* actualized here, to the differential field* of which this event is a crystallization, lightning flash, or hurricane.

*"Multiplicity" and "differential field" are technical terms for Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.

Sports Sunday 6: the Idea of football

Today's Sports Sunday post will do double-duty, marking the beginning of the American football season, and being a discussion of a Deleuzean "Idea" as developed in Chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition. Jeff Bell has done some wonderful posts on Deleuze in his Continental Connections Thursday series; so I thought I'd get in on the fun as well. 

Deleuze's Ideas, or "multiplicities." must be undetermined, determinable and bearing an Ideal of determination. They are transcendental, but they do not provide the conditions of possibility of objects of experience, but the conditions of the genesis of real objects.

An Idea is a set of differential elements, differential relations, and singularities. Ideas structure the intensive processes that give rise to the behavior patterns of systems, and they mark the thresholds at which systems change behavior patterns. In a word, the virtual Idea is the transformation matrix for material systems or bodies. Bodies are determined "solutions" to the "problem" that lays out the manifold options for incarnating bodies of that nature.

For Deleuze, singularities are turning points of systems; they are remarkable points as opposed to ordinary ones. This mathematical sense of singularity should be distinguished from the logical sense of singularity in which the unique is distinguished from the generic. We can combine them by saying that a mathematical singularity indicates a threshold whereby a logically unique or singular system changes behavior patterns.

Let me give you an example from the world of sports. Let's take the Idea of football games. Or better, let's start with a given, American football. What is the Idea that conditioned the genesis of American football?

Sports Sunday 5: Guts and Glory

I know it's a melodramatic title, but sometimes sport is, well, melodramatic. As when, at the end of the video on our first Sports Sunday post, the commentator mentioned the "guts" of the runners. One of the legends of the sport, Steve Prefontaine, was reknowned for his guts, that is, his willingness to hurt himself. This was never more prominent than in the 1972 5000 meter final, one of the great Olympic races ever (but not the greatest, it must be said). The announcer's calls -- "Gahmoudi is bankrupt, and so is Prefontaine!" and "Prefontaine dies in the final strides" -- are indicative of what gave Pre his aura. 

What's also wonderful about this race is Prefontaine's willingness to run to win rather than run to get a silver or bronze medal. The discussion of the race in this film makes it clear that a more prudent and less glorious strategy would have secured the bronze for him, something that the bronze medalist himself admits in a shamefaced way. This brings us back to the restricted vs general economy or investment-return vs pure expenditure notion of the first post in the series. Pre's lesson: only getting close to pure expenditure -- when someone "dies in the final strides" -- is worthy of glory.

Sports Sunday 4: my achilles heel

The past five years, I've suffered from Achilles tendinitis, now and again. At first, I did what everyone says, stretching my calf muscle, because that's what causes the pain, tight calves, right? Well, that didn't work, and the reason is that the problem isn't tight calf muscles (muscles are never "tight," [edit: in the sense of "too short,"] even if the stretch reflex kicks in before would like it to), but weak calf muscles. If you follow this link, you'll see  the biomechanics behind this claim. Or, you could follow this link and find out everything about the Achilles tendon.

Briefly put, the calf muscle's function in running and walking (actually there are two muscles here, the gastrocnemius and the soleus) is to stabilize the foot during the foot strike. During this time, the muscles produce an eccentric contraction, meaning that they contract while lengthening (think of lowering a weight in an arm curl: your bicep is undergoing an eccentric contraction then). If the calf muscles aren't strong enough, the foot wiggles about, irritating the tendon in its sheath. (There are more complications here, as the entire kinetic chain from hip to foot is involved, but the calf is often -- but not always -- the culprit.)

So what should you do if you're hit by Achilles tendinitis?

I almost met The Rock

For what it's worth- Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock, has been working out at the Baton Rouge Downtown YMCA. I just missed him the other day and today everybody was talking about (1) how he looks even bigger in real person than on the movie screen, and (2) what a prince of a man he is.

I already knew he was a prince of a man. I tried to explain what a legendary wrestler he was, but my enthusiasm was not as infectious as it should have been.

Sports Sunday 3: Secretariat at the Belmont, 1973

Today's video is of one of the most magnificent sporting achievments I've ever seen, Secretariat's victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes.*

The announcer's call is deeply embedded in my experience of the race (I saw it live on TV and heard the call then). I don't know why, but it's very affecting for me when the announcer, Chic Anderson, says "He is moving like a tremendous machine!"

I've never been able to figure out why it's so moving. I don't think it's just nostalgia; I remember being strongly moved at the time.

Maybe it's the strange mixing of categories -- we love the personality, the courage, the pride and swagger of race horses, all things to which we can relate (and not in some crude "anthropomorphism," for we are not "projecting" pride onto a race horse, we are recognizing it) and then the "machine" remark pops up. Is it that Secretariat was so dominant it's as if the other poor beasts were running against a machine? 

Or maybe it's just the awe-struck tone in Anderson's voice that works; the semantic content is, if not irrelevant, perhaps secondary?

*I recognize that powerful ethical arguments can be made against horse racing, or at least in favor of drastic reform of many of its practices.

Sports Sunday 2: you don't need to stretch your muscles

I thought in this series of Sports Sunday posts that I would alternate theory and practice. Last week we talked about "giving your all" in terms of Bataille's notion of pure expenditure. This week, a much more mundane topic, though not without some philosophical interest I hope.

We often talk about tight muscles and the need to stretch them. But that's not really right. Most people's muscles are plenty long enough (insert apocryphal Abraham Lincoln quote about "long enough to reach the ground"), but often the protective "stretch reflex" kicks in at a point in the range of motion that is not what is desired. 

So what do you do? This is where the (I hope) interesting philosophy happens. I've found in doing ROM improvement exercises that anthropomorphizing your muscles really helps: you have to teach them that they are safe at a point just as the stretch reflex kicks in.

How? I talk to my muscles, telling them in my interior voice that they are safe. Of course, they really do have to be safe, so you need supports, and you need to concentrate on the support your limbs feel at the point of contact -- for instance, your heel in the doorway hamstring excercise. And you have to breathe deeply and evenly. A more advanced technique is to gently tense the target muscle (along with core muscles and the pelvic floor if you want) on the inhalation and relax it on the exhalation. 

I'm not a mutant yet, but I can increase my ROM when I do my exercises consistently. Of practical interest to philosophers is the ability to decrease neck and upper back tension and associated pain (including migraines) by increasing the ROM of the pectoralis muscles and neck muscles. Of course, to be really effective, you also need to strengthen and relax the antagonist muscles that produce the kind of "computer neck" I'm talking about, as well as adopt proper ergonomic habits. 

Sports Sunday 1: Giving your all

Riffing on Marcel Maus's essay on the gift, Georges Bataille went back to Nietzsche to develop a notion of pure expenditure unrelated to an investment-return economy. The distinction of restricted economy (investment-return) and general economy (pure expenditure) plays a big role in Derrida's writings on the gift (inter alia, Given Time and The Gift of Death), as well as in Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "anti-production" in Anti-Oedipus, which comes back to Nietzsche and the movement of debt. 

Obviously there are lots of restricted economy operations in big-time track-and-field, aka "athletics" outside the States, but I've always liked seeing sport, at least in a transcendental Idea sense, as pure expenditure or "ritual sacrifice of excess energy," a phrase I remember reading years ago, but can't seem to find on the web.

In any case, the end of this race, a completely ordinary 800 meter race at the US National Championships in 2007, provides a good actualization (?), example (?), instantiation (?) approximation (?) of pure expenditure or "giving your all."

Skip ahead to 2:27 to see the start of the race, or if you just want the homestretch, go to 4:08. Here's a photo too.

"Why we should care about women and philosophy"

(VIa Feminist Philosophers)

A great post at the somewhat controversial blog The Philosophy Smoker on why we should care about women and philosophy. An extract:

"If you care about justice–if you care about whether people are being treated the way they ought to be treated–you care about this.

But you should also care about this if you care about philosophy in itself; if you care about discovering philosophical truth; if you care about reading insightful philosophy papers; if you care about being made aware of novel philosophical ideas; if you care about solving philosophical puzzles. We should want as many smart people as possible working in philosophy. But a prominent group of people are being systematically edged out. This is bad for the people who are being edged out–it’s a serious injustice that I don’t mean to minimize–but it’s also bad for us men. It is as bad for us as the Negro-League era was for Major League Baseball. Think of it: in 1945, Jackie Robinson tried out for the Boston Red Sox, and the Red Sox did not sign him. So in 1946, when the Red Sox were losing the World Series in 7 games to the Cardinals, Jackie Robinson was playing for the Montreal Royals. This situation was, obviously, extraordinarily bad for black people who wanted to be professional baseball players. It was bad for Cool Papa Bell; it was bad for Josh Gibson; it was bad for Buck O’Neil. These players were victims of a profound injustice. But it was also bad for Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr, who were, to a lesser extent, also victims of this injustice. Women and minorities have actual philosophical contributions to make. Many of these contributions are going unmade because the people who would make them are being edged out of the profession before they have a chance to do it. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not good for us. It’s bad for everyone."

New APPS High Five, No.1

Well, I see that John has been kind enough to set up a "Sports" category over there in the sidebar. And so I'll begin my first contribution to New APPS over there, though I'll point out in advance that it won't treat sport in isolation, but rather as a filtered list of annotated links that read sport in its multiple intersections with philosophy, art, politics and science.

So welcome to the first edition of the News APPS High Five, presented by sportsBabel, sports links so hot even philosopher-geeks need to wear sweatbands.

* * *

1. Copyright and Football, Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman, Freakonomics

A very interesting article about the particular "innovation culture" that is football, and how creativity thrives -- particularly in the professional game -- despite the fact that any innovation can be copied almost instantly without any "legal" protection. One personal critique of the article is that the innovation culture of football is treated essentially as a dialectic in which offenses and defenses are continually engaged in a game of one-upmanship to find temporary competitive advantage on the field of play. But it fails to consider the regulatory environment of competition -- that is, the political (and increasingly economic) structures of the football league proper. Intellectual property laws are certainly part of said environment, but so is almost every rule change made by the league an opportunity for competitive advantage. And when we are describing the professional leagues of the NFL or NCAA we cannot discount the role of television in rule changes and thus the equation of innovation.

2. How Baseball Explains The Nature Of Language, Alva Noë, NPR

Noë uses the case of baseball to discuss writing, speech and the broader project of linguistics. For me, a strength of the article perhaps lies in where it doesn't quite reach: namely, that while speech is about 70,000 years older than writing, it is gesture that precedes them both. Sport is first and foremost a gestural practice! And when put together with his assertion that "the linguist works is in the domain of style" it suggests important questions about gesture and style (and sport for that matter), particularly as they concern aestheticization or politicization.

The august moral dignity of the NCAA cannot be compromised

Word comes that Reggie Bush will forfeit the 2005 Heisman Trophy because the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletics Association) has ruled him ineligible for accepting money from an agent while still playing football in college. 

I have seen many disgustingly hypocritical organizations in my life, but the NCAA ranks at the top. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the NCAA is a cartel, which licenses universities to establish franchises that participate in its branded market niche, university atheletics. It's a scam unique to the United States, other countries having had the good fortune of avoiding this particular institutional setup.