What are some of the best movie sword fights ever?

Are the eyes really windows to the soul?

Amanda Knox: What's in a face?

Amanda Knox was convicted of murder and her reputation sullied around the world, in large part because of her facial expressions and demeanour. Her story reveals how our instincts about others can be dangerously superficial, writes Ian Leslie


Ian Leslie
The Guardian, Friday 7 October 2011





The eyes are not windows to the soul. They are organs for converting light into electro-magnetic impulses Photograph: PIETRO CROCCHIONI/EPA

In the days and weeks following the discovery of Meredith Kercher's body, Italian police found no physical evidence linking Amanda Knox to the murder. But then, they didn't need it: they could tell Knox was guilty just by looking at her. "We were able to establish guilt," said Edgardo Giobbi, the lead investigator, "by closely observing the suspect's psychological and behavioural reaction during the interrogation. We don't need to rely on other kinds of investigation." Giobbi said that his suspicions were first raised just hours after the murder, at the crime scene, when he watched Knox execute a provocative swivel of her hips as she put on a pair of shoe covers.

Little about Knox's behaviour during that time matched how the investigators imagined a wrongfully accused woman should conduct herself. She appeared too cool and calm, they said – and yet also, it seems, oddly libidinous. One policeman said she "smelled of sex", and investigators were particularly disturbed by a video that first appeared on YouTube, shortly after the investigation began, which showed Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in each other's arms outside the cottage in which Kercher was murdered, as the investigation proceeded inside.

In fact, the video is anything but sexy. Knox, looking wan and dazed, exchanges chaste kisses with Sollecito, who rubs her arm consolingly. But the police professed shock. "Knox and Sollecito would make faces, kiss each other, while there was the body of a friend in those conditions," tutted Monica Napoleoni, head of Perugia's murder squad. A detective said he complained to Knox when she sat on Sollecito's lap, describing her behaviour as "inappropriate". Knox later explained to Rolling Stone magazine, via an intermediary, that she had been pacing up and down when Sollecito pulled her on to his knees to comfort her. The only strange thing about this is that an explanation for simple physical affection became necessary.

The Italian police's overheated interpretation of Knox's behaviour was a particularly pungent manifestation of a universal trait, one that frequently leads criminal investigators and juries astray: overconfidence in our ability to read someone else's state of mind simply by looking at them. This is not a uniquely modern error, born of pop psychology books. Shakespeare was wary of it. In Macbeth, he has Duncan remark how hard it is "to find the mind's construction in the face". It's a warning that law enforcement officers often seem unable, or unwilling, to heed.

In 2008 a group of Norwegian researchers ran an experiment to better understand how police investigators come to a judgment about the credibility of rape claims. Sixty-nine investigators were played video-recorded versions of a rape victim's statement, with the role of victim played by an actress. The wording of the statement in each version was exactly the same, but the actress delivered it with varying degrees of emotion. The investigators, who prided themselves on their objectivity, turned out to be heavily influenced in their judgments by assumptions about the victim's demeanour: she was judged most credible when crying or showing despair.

In reality, rape victims react in the immediate aftermath of the event in a variety of ways: some are visibly upset; others are subdued and undemonstrative. There is, unsurprisingly, no universal reaction to being raped. The detectives were relying on their instincts, and their instincts turned out to be constructed from inherited and unreliable notions about women in distress.

Professional interrogators remain stubbornly convinced of their ability to tell if a person is being truthful simply by observing them. The lawyer and fraud expert Robert Hunter has termed this misapprehension "the demeanour assumption". He points out that it underpins the notions of oral evidence and jury trials; those who watch witnesses give evidence are assumed to be best placed to judge whether they are telling the truth.

It's not just police or legal professionals who make this error. We all have an inherent bias towards assuming that we can discern a person's inner mental state simply by observing them. Whether it's coining new theories on what the Mona Lisa was thinking, or wondering about the stranger opposite us on the tube, we possess an endless capacity to speculate on a person's character, thoughts, and motivations based on the slender evidence of a facial expression. The eyes, it is said, are windows to the soul. They are not. They are organs for converting light into electro-magnetic impulses. But this has never stopped us dreaming of them that way.

Amanda Knox wasn't able to communicate her thoughts and feelings directly, either to the police or to the wider public. Her Italian, at the time of the murder, was poor, and her arraignment meant that she couldn't speak to the media. But there were plenty of pictures to go on. There was, therefore, an even greater emphasis on her expressions and physical behaviour than there would normally be in such a situation, right from the beginning.

This focus on the superficial shaped not just Knox's fortunes in the original trial, but her reputation around the world. Italian prosecutors were quick to leak stories about Knox doing cartwheels while in custody, because they knew the image, even if only imagined, would lead people to conclude that she was guilty. When the press published pictures of Knox with a smile on her face, readers around the world reacted the same way: no innocent person accused of a crime would behave like this. An Italian friend of Kercher's, Giacomo Silenzi, was widely quoted: "Her eyes didn't seem to show any sadness, and I remember wondering if she could have been involved." The tape of Knox embracing Sollecito was played over and over, often with a commentary suggesting there was something odd or distasteful about it.

It is astonishing how quick we are to draw conclusions about how a person ought to look or behave in circumstances we haven't ourselves even come close to experiencing. How many of us have returned to our home after a night away to discover that our flatmate has been brutally murdered? How many of us can know what it feels like to be at the sharp end of a punishing interrogation, in a foreign country, carried out by men in uniform who seem absolutely convinced that they know what happened, who are as certain as we are confused, fearful and exhausted? None of us. And yet we feel free to blithely pronounce, from a great distance, on whether someone in this situation is "acting weird" or not.

What does it stem from, this over-confidence in facile intuitions about what other people are thinking? It probably has something to do with our innate difficulty in recognising that other people are as fully rounded and complex as we are. Emily Pronin, a psychologist at Princeton University, points out that there is a fundamental asymmetry about the way two human beings relate to one another in person. When you meet someone, there are at least two things more prominent in your mind than in theirs – your thoughts, and their face. As a result we tend to judge others on what we see, and ourselves by what we feel. Pronin calls this "the illusion of asymmetric insight".

You know when you're hiding your true thoughts and feelings – pretending to be fascinated by your boss's endless anecdote, or grinning your way through an agonising first date – but you nonetheless tend to assume the other's appearance tells the full story of how they feel: if she's smiling, it's because she's genuinely enjoying herself.

Studies have found that people over-estimate how much they can learn from others in job interviews, while at the same time maintaining that others can only get a glimpse of them from such brief encounters. The model we seem to work with is something like this: I am infinitely subtle, complex and never quite what I seem; you are predictable and straightforward, an open book.

Of course, the asymmetry is likely to be particularly lopsided when we don't know the person; when we have only seen pictures of them on TV, in newspapers and magazines. We know for sure that they don't know us, and yet we're almost equally certain that we've got their number. We only had to look at Knox's various expressions – in her Facebook and MySpace photos, and in pictures of her on the way to court – to make snap judgments about what kind of person she was, or what was running through her mind when the picture was taken. Even this week, photographs of her smiling as she boards a plane home have been interpreted as a sign of callousness.

An inclination to oversimplify the minds and motivations of others lies at the root of sexism and racism, and all forms of inter-group conflict, violent and benign. Liberals and conservatives tend to think that those on "their" side are reasonable, reflective, and thoughtful, while those on the other side are not just wrong, but simplistic and dim. Part of the reason that Knox became unpopular in Europe, and especially Italy, is that people projected on to her what they regarded as the worst qualities of Americans: arrogance, greed and brashness.

Our unwillingness to devote much effort to understanding how others might actually think or feel is exemplified by the popular assumption that Knox's initial admission to police that she had been present at the scene of the murder, and her false implication of the bartender, Diya "Patrick" Lumumba, revealed a guilty conscience. "She lied!" declared her critics, slamming the collective gavel in condemnation. But of course we know, empirically, that under the extreme duress of an intense interrogation, a terrified person will say almost anything the police want them to say. Quite apart from falsely implicating others, people will falsely implicate themselves.

The Innocence Project is an American organisation devoted to exonerating those wrongfully convicted of serious crimes, frequently murder, by using DNA evidence. Of the 250 people they have successfully exonerated, a quarter had confessed under interrogation (Knox has indicated an interest in working for the Innocence Project, now she is free). Because we find it hard to imagine that we might do the same, we assume that others wouldn't do it either: a confession is still regarded by lawyers as the nuclear weapon of evidence, the one thing that, even in the absence of physical evidence, can guarantee conviction.

Most us know, when we reflect rationally, that other people are as complex and difficult to read or predict as we are, and we do compensate for the natural imbalance in our encounters with others. The trouble is, we rarely compensate enough. Thinking about what others might be thinking and feeling is hard work. It requires intellectual application, empathy, and imagination. Most of the time we can barely be bothered to exert such efforts on behalf of our friends and partners, let alone on people we read about in the news. We fall back on guesses, stereotypes, and prejudices. This is inevitable, and not always a bad thing. The trouble comes when we confuse our short-cuts with judgment.

Amanda Knox's face proved to be her misfortune. It was pretty enough to incite the fantasies of Italian cops and tabloid editors, and just expressive enough to provide a richly textured canvas for a public all too willing to pronounce on the soul it concealed.

Ian Leslie is the author of Born Liars; Why We Can't Live Without Deceit. He is on Twitter @mrianleslie.

How to Make Banana Bread

Banana Bread, a set on Flickr.

From Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads Revised and Expanded.

Hana Banana-Nut Loaf
(One Medium Loaf)

Hana, on the island of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, is at the other end of an incredibly tortuous 52.5 mile road--crossing 57 narrow bridges--built in 1910 for horse-drawn wagons. (A T-shirt--"I Survived the Road to Hana"--celebrates the drive.) Much of it is less than 2 lanes wide. It is the last remote place in Hawaii where one can go to get away from hordes of tourists and yet arrive at an outstanding hotel, the Hana-Maui, hedged on one side by the Pacific and the other by a 15,000-acre cattle ranch.

The road is through rain forests, across volcanic slopes, over open range, and along beaches of black and gold sand and lava cliffs glistening with ocean spray.

Four hours later, at the end of the road, I found April Sue Noelani Tanaka Burns, whose marvelous smile was an Aloha warmer than the word. Noelani, which means "heavenly mist," was twenty-five when she took over from her mother as head baker at the Hana-Maui in 1984. Her banana-nut bread has become famous with hotel guests, who carry home as gifts as many loaves as they eat while in residence. Noelani's recipe calls for the expensive Hawaiian nut, the macadamia, but I have used almonds with equal success. (Jimmy's note:  walnuts also work.) Also, I have added (as an option) shredded coconut because I like the flavor it gives and it reminds me of the stately palms along the Hana coast.

INGREDIENTS                6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) butter, room temperature
                                     1/3 cup sugar
                                     2 eggs, room temperature
                                     1-1/2 cups mashed bananas
                                    1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour (Jimmy:  you can use up to 1/2 c whole-wheat)
                                    1 teaspoon baking soda
                                    1/2 teaspoon baking powder
                                    1/4 teaspoon each salt and vanilla extract
                                    1 cup coarsely broken macadamia nuts
                                    1/2 cup shredded coconut (optional)


BAKING PAN          1 medium (8"-x-4") baking pan, greased or Teflon, sides and bottom lined with                                     buttered wax paper  (Jimmy:  or use banana leaves if you have them;                                               heat both sides first over a flame.)

PREHEAT                  Preheat the oven to 350°.

BY HAND OR MIXER

12 mins.

In a mixing or mixer bowl cream the butter and sugar together and add the eggs, one at a time. Mix in the banana purée. This can be done by hand or with a mixer flat beater. Stir in 1 cup flour and add the baking soda, baking powder, salt, and vanilla extract. Stir to blend and add the remaining 1/2 cup flour. Add the broken nuts and coconut, if desired.

Stir only to blend the ingredients thoroughly and moisten the flour. Don't overstir or the loaf will be tough.

BY PROCESSOR

8 mins.

Attach the steel blade.

The sequence for preparing the ingredients differs from above.

Put the nuts in the work bowl; pulse only twice. Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Pulse to blend. Remove and reserve the mixture.

Put the eggs and sugar in the work bowl and process to mix, about 30 seconds. Add the butter and pulse several times to mix thoroughly with the eggs and sugar. Add the bananas and vanilla extract. Pulse to mix. Add the flour-nut mixture, drop in the coconut, and pulse only until the dry ingredients disappear. Don't overmix.

SHAPING
3 mins.

Pour and spoon the mixture into the prepared pan. Level with the spatula.

BAKING
350°

1 hour

Place the pan on the middle shelf of the moderate oven and bake for about 1 hour, or until dark brown and a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean.

(If using a convection oven, reduce heat 50°.)

FINAL STEP

Gently lay the loaf on its side on a metal cooling rack and tug at the ends of the wax paper to slip the loaf from the pan. Allow the bread to cool before cutting.

Neuroscience Highlights Through the Ages

From The Scientist magazine, October 2011 issue.

Why do people like to own dogs?

Excerpts from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's new book.

- People often need to suspend their self-promotion, and have someone in their lives they do not need to impress.  This explains dog ownership.

- You don't become completely free by just avoiding to be a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

- The tragedy is that much of what you think is random is in your control and, what's worse, the opposite.

- Randomness is indistinguishable from complicated, undetected, and undetectable order; but order itself is indistinguishable from artful randomness.

More below.

******

Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Attica on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where the mystery rites were performed. Procrustes had a peculiar sense of hospitality; he abducted travelers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveler to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; those who were too short were stretched (his name was said to be Damastes, or Polypemon, but he was nicknamed Procrustes, which meant “the stretcher”).

In the purest of poetic justice, Procrustes was hoisted by his own petard. One of the travelers happened to be the fearless Theseus who slayed the Minotaur later on in his heroic career. After the customary dinner, Theseus made Procrustes lie in his own bed. Then, to make him fit in it to the customary perfection, he decapitated him. Theseus thus followed Hercules’ method of paying back in kind.

In more sinister versions (such as the one in Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca), Procrustes owned two beds, one small, one large; he made short victims lie in the large bed, and the tall victims in the short one.

Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts—we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences. Further, we seem unaware of this backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit—but do so by surgically altering the limbs of their customers. For instance few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse.

Since aphorisms lose their charm whenever explained, I only hint for now the central theme of [The Bed of Procrustes]—I relegate further discussions to the postface. These are standalone compressed thoughts revolving around my main idea of how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t know more deeply discussed in my books The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.




Preludes •
The person you are the most afraid to contradict is yourself.
•
An idea starts to be interesting when you get scared of taking it to its logical conclusion.
•
Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.
•
To understand the liberating effect of asceticism, consider that losing all your fortune is much less painful than losing only half of it.
•
To bankrupt a fool, give him information.
•
Academia is to knowledge what prostitution is to love; close enough on the surface but, to the nonsucker, not exactly the same thing.
•
In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.
•
I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
•
Education makes the wise slightly wiser; but it makes the fool vastly more dangerous.
•
The test of originality for an idea is not the absence of one single predecessor, but the presence of multiple but incompatible ones.
•
Modernity’s double punishment is to make us both age prematurely and live longer.
•
An erudite is someone who displays less than he knows; a journalist and consultant, the opposite; most others fall somewhere in between.
•
Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion.
•
If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice; if it increases, you suffered injustice.
•
I wonder if those who advocate generosity for its rewards notice the inconsistency, or if what they call generosity is an attractive investment strategy.
•
Those who think religion is about “belief” don’t understand religion, and don’t understand belief.
•
Work destroys your soul by stealthily invading your brain during the hours not officially spent working; be selective about professions.
•
In nature we never repeat the same motion. In captivity (office, gym, commute, sports), life is just repetitive stress injury. No randomness.
•
Using, as excuse, others’ failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.
•
Compliance with the straightjacket of narrow (Aristotelian) logic and avoidance of fatal inconsistencies are not the same thing.
•
Economics cannot digest the idea that the collective (and the aggregate) are disproportionately less predictable than individuals.
•
Don’t talk about “progress” in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.
•
If you know, in the morning, what your day looks like with any precision, you are a little bit dead—the more precision, the more dead you are.
•
There is no intermediate state between ice and water but there is one between life and death: employment.
•
You have a calibrated life when most of what you fear has the titillating prospect of adventure.
•
Nobody wants to be perfectly transparent; not to others, certainly not to himself.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, randomness, human error, probability, and the philosophy of knowledge. He managed to transform his interests into three successful careers, as a man of letters, businessman-trader-risk manager, and university professor. Although he spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in 31 languages. He is widely recognized as the foremost thinker on probability and uncertainty.

Excerpted from The Bed of Procrustes
2010 © Copyright by N. N. Taleb
Published by Random House

Occupy LA Oct 9 2011

Occupy LA Oct 9 2011, a set on Flickr.

Occupy Los Angeles
Protest at City Hall in L.A! We are the 99%. This is Direct Democracy.

CicLAvia Oct 9 2011

CicLAvia Oct 9 2011, a photo by George Gibbs on Flickr.

       

Seven and a half miles of streets were car-free from 10 AM - 3 PM on Sunday October 10th 2010. In October 2011, we’re doing the initial route again, and adding new spurs to El Pueblo/Olvera Street and South LA, for a total of ten miles.

CicLAvia makes the streets safe for people to walk, skate, play and ride a bike. There are activities along the route. Shop owners and restaurants are encouraged to open their doors to people along the CicLAvia.

Ciclovías started in Bogotá, Colombia, over thirty years ago as a response to the congestion and pollution of city streets. Now they happen throughout Latin America and the United States.

Connecting communities and giving people a break from the stress of car traffic. The health benefits are immense. Ciclovías bring families outside of their homes to enjoy the streets, our largest public space. In Los Angeles we need CicLAvia more than ever. Our streets are congested with traffic, our air is polluted with toxic fumes, our children suffer from obesity and other health conditions caused by the scarcity of public space and safe, healthy transportation options. CicLAvia creates a temporary park for free, simply by removing cars from city streets. It creates a network of connections between our neighborhoods and businesses and parks with corridors filled with fun. We can’t wait to see you at CicLAvia!