3quarksdaily

"There was no next course"

"Famous for its sweet dates, Wadi Kutum is among the most valuable farmland in north Darfur, and the Tunjur were careful to register it long before other farmers realised the importance of legal title to land. The Jalul farmers were resentful, scratching at the arid uplands in an attempt to grow a few heads of millet. Their sheikh did his best to keep up pretences. In the evening he served a lavish meal of goat and rice, and gave us directions to where we could find his sons and camels. When we finished, having eaten more than enough, he called out to his niece: 'Bring the next course!' There was no next course."

Alex de Waal visited Darfur, Sudan, in 1985, meeting with Sheikh Hilal, whose son Musa Hilal now leads the Janjaweed militias terrorizing the region. The full article, "Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap," from the London Review of Books, is here.

The Future Dictionary of America. McSweeney's, 208 pp., $28.

"The Future Dictionary of America enters the pantheon of satirical dictionaries like Flaubert's and Bierce's with a notable distinction: It is jam-packed with winningly offbeat suggestions for making the world a better place. Its jaundiced eye is interconnected to both a brain and a heart, not to mention a first aid kit, a hammer and a tiny vial of fingernail polish in a color called Burnt Icicle... In a world in which everyone has an opinion but no one has any advice, this book is manna." More of Henry Alford's review here in Newsday.

Critic with a Cause

In his new incarnation as defender of the realm, Christopher Hitchens predictably cannot help vilifying Edward Said toward the end of his review of Said's posthumous book, From Oslo to Iraq. This, despite the fact the he and Said were longtime friends (Hitchens even offended Saul Bellow at a dinner party once with his vigorous defense of Said and his views), and despite his still-obvious admiration for Said, both as an intellectual polymath, as well as a man of rare moral character. The review is here in yesterday's Washington Post. (More worth reading as part of our continuing effort to comprehend what happened to Christopher Hitchens, than for any insight into Said or his work. See my earlier posts about the Hitch here and here.)

Evolvability is a selectable trait

"Concomitant with the evolution of biological diversity must have been the evolution of mechanisms that facilitate evolution, because of the essentially infinite complexity of protein sequence space. We describe how evolvability can be an object of Darwinian selection, emphasizing the collective nature of the process. We quantify our theory with computer simulations of protein evolution. These simulations demonstrate that rapid or dramatic environmental change leads to selection for greater evolvability. The selective pressure for large-scale genetic moves such as DNA exchange becomes increasingly strong as the environmental conditions become more uncertain. Our results demonstrate that evolvability is a selectable trait and allow for the explanation of a large body of experimental results." Paper by David J. Earl and Michael W. Deem here in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Pollutants cause huge rise in brain diseases

"The numbers of sufferers of brain diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease, have soared across the West in less than 20 years, scientists have discovered. The alarming rise, which includes figures showing rates of dementia have trebled in men, has been linked to rises in levels of pesticides, industrial effluents, domestic waste, car exhausts and other pollutants, says a report in the journal Public Health." There is more here in The Observer.

Prions speed evolution

"Prions, the twisted proteins usually linked to disease, could help organisms adapt to tough situations by subtly altering the proteins manufactured by a cell. The discovery backs the idea that proteins as well as DNA are vital in driving evolution." More here in Nature.

The Shining, starring... Bunnies

We normally try to stay away from frivolous stuff, but sometimes we can't help it. This is pretty cute: The Shining in 30 seconds. WARNING: may take a while to load if you are using a dialup connection (425K file). (Thanks to Mark Blyth.)

Some more on Milosz, Herbert and the Experience of Art and Conscience in the East Bloc

Thinking about Milosz's death, I remembered a poem written by Zbigniew Herbert and translated by Milosz, allegedly dedicated to Czeslaw Milosz, with Herbert in the role of Fortinbras to Milosz's Hamlet, and also on the problem of surviving--a trope worth considering now, 15 years after the collapse of the experiment, folly, nightmare, tragedy, what have you, in Eastern Europe.

Elegy of Fortinbras

for C.M.

Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man
though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant
nothing but black sun with broken rays
I could never think of your hands without smiling
and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests
they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this
The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart
and the knight’s feet in soft slippers

You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier
the only ritual I am acquainted with a little
there will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts
crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing exquisite those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule
one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit

Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life
you believed in crystal notions not in human clay
always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras
wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit
you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince

(translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz)

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911-2004

Czeslaw Milosz died Saturday in Krakow, Poland. Milosz, a Polish exile, was the recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. His words captured the effort to survive and salvage decency in a world ruined by war and totalitarianism. His fellow East bloc-exiled poet and Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky once said of him, "I have no hesitation whatsoever in stating that Czeslaw Milosz is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest."

I've been a fan of his work for a long time, especially of this one, which captures so much . . .

To Raja Rao

Raja, I wish I knew
the cause of that malady.

For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
I felt I should be somewhere else.

A city, trees, human voices
lacked the quality of presence.
I would live by the hope of moving on.

Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,
of real trees and voices and friendship and love.

Link, if you wish, my peculiar case
(on the border of schizophrenia)
to the messianic hope
of my civilization.

Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,
in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.
Building in my mind a permanent polis
forever deprived of aimless bustle.

I learned at last to say: this is my home,
here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,
on the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,
in a great republic, moderately corrupt.

Raja, this did not cure me
of my guilt and shame.
A shame of failing to be
what I should have been.

The image of myself
grows gigantic on the wall
and against it
my miserable shadow.

That's how I came to believe
in Original Sin
which is nothing but the first
victory of the ego.

Tormented by my ego, deluded by it
I give you, as you see, a ready argument.

I hear you saying that liberation is possible
and that Socratic wisdom
is identical with your guru's.

No, Raja, I must start from what I am.
I am those monsters which visit my dreams
and reveal to me my hidden essence.

If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever
that man is a healthy creature.

Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness
had to make our agony only more acute.

We needed God loving us in our weakness
and not in the glory of beatitude.

No help, Raja, my part is agony,
struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,
prayer for the Kingdom
and reading Pascal.

(Berkeley, 1969)

Visualizing the Blogosphere

Recently, I mentioned to Abbas that a topology of the blogosphere would be useful. I had in mind a visual representation that would show the traffic between blogs. This kind of visualization would, for example, help us to see whether and to what extent the blogosphere is segmented according to like-mindedness. I haven’t found one which has that information, but I have come across some other representations of the blogosphere.

My favorite: “a map of the city that shows where the bloggers are, organized by subway stop. Find out who's blogging in your neighborhood!” A similar site, the location of bloggers in DC, can be found here. The one here shows bloggers in the UK.

I personally like this one, “3D Artists Around the World. . . a geo-coded database of 3D artists, dynamically displayed on world map. Individual points are overlaid on the map every few seconds. Mouse over a point to obtain the artist's name and location. Click on the point to visit their site.”

A brief article in e-zine InfoVis.net about visualization of the blogosphere has more links.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

This news is terrifying for aspiring slacker, yours truly.

"Just in time for back-to-school season, researchers have turned procrastinating monkeys into workaholics by suppressing a gene that encodes a receptor for a key brain chemical. The receptor, for the neurotransmitter dopamine, is important for reward learning. By suppressing it, researchers at the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland caused monkeys to lose their sense of balance between reward and the work required to get it. . ."

Woolf's Lost London Essay

"The truth was she did not want intimacy; she wanted conversation. Intimacy has a way of breeding silence, and silence she abhorred. There must be talk, and it must be general, and it must be about everything. It must not go too deep, and it must not be too clever, for if it went too far in either of these directions somebody was sure to feel out of it, and to sit balancing his tea cup, saying nothing."

This lovely passage comes from a lost Virginia Woolf essay originally written for Good Housekeeping in 1931. Woolf originally wrote a series of six lyrical essays on London for the magazine, but when they were published as the book The London Scene in 1975, only five appeared, "The Docks of London," "Oxford Street Tide," "Great Men's Houses," "Abbeys and Cathedrals," and "'This is The House of Commons'." In "'This is The House of Commons'," Woolf remarks: "The mind, it seems, like to perch, in its flight through empty space, upon some remarkable nose, some trembling hand; it loves the flashing eye, the arched brow, the abnormal, the particular, the splendid human being." This is as good as it gets; a nice encapsulation of Woolf's entire philosophy; writing as a great house of commons. London, of course, was the Dublin of Woolf's Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway.

The London Scene is set to be republished in September by Snowbooks in the UK with the sixth essay finally added. The Guardian has republished the essay for the first time in over 70 years.

A Debate on Whether Psychoanalysis is a Science or Just a Historical Curiosity

Few issues inflame heated discussion in the scientific community as the scientific standing of psychoanalysis. (One editor cannot but help add "that Viennese quack" after any mention of Freud. I began thinking about the issue of what kind of knowledge is critical theory after coming upon Raymond Geuss' concise and brilliant The Idea of a Critical Theory.)

Now Butterflies and Wheels, one of more intelligent on-line journals/debate fora, has an exchange on Psychoanalysis as Science with Norman Holland insisting:

"Current objections to psychoanalysis as untestable and unscientific ignore two facts. First, a large body of experimental evidence has tested psychoanlaytic ideas, confirming some and not others. Second, psychoanalysis itself, while it does not usually use experimentation, does use holistic method. This is a procedure in wide use in the social sciences and even in the "hard" sciences." (Read the full article here.)

And Francis Crews rejoins:

"[Norman] Holland maintains that important parts of psychoanalytic theory have been experimentally confirmed . . . As he recognizes, this judgment stands at odds with the tacit, all but unanimous verdict of North American psychology faculties. Where psychoanalysis appears at all in the catalogs of well-regarded university departments of psychology, it usually figures as a prescientific historical curiosity, not as a viable body of theory. . . Holland asserts that this snub bespeaks not a considered scientific assessment but rather “a deep-seated prejudice against psychoanalysis” on the part of psychology professors and textbook authors. The academic establishment, he holds, has turned its back on a mountain of studies validating key portions of psychoanalytic doctrine . . ."

Three hours, one ficus, and eleven dimensions...

In "The Universe According to Brian Greene," Jonah Lehrer profiles the already-high-profile Greene, physics wunderkind at Columbia University, author of the book The Elegant Universe, and host of the PBS television series of the same name. The article can be found here in the interesting magazine Seed. (Thanks to Steven Pinker for drawing my attention to this publication.)

The Internet as Research Laboratory

Back in the good ole days of grad school, my nerdier colleagues and I would joke (sort of) about having a panel at the American Political Science Association on things like "Trembling-hand Perfect Equilibria in Alpha-Quadrant Negotiations between the Federation and the Dominion" or "Klingon Martial Cultures, Federation Citizen-Militias, Romulan Political Officers and Genetically Engineered Janissaries: Towards a non-Teleological Hermeneutic of Security Studies." That was very geeky, yes.

But with the advent of the Internet and large virtual communities, scholars (and not just computer scientists) have found new laboratories among the fetishes of geeks.

Edward Castranova's research was among the first to bring new scholarly uses of Internet communities to the attention of social scientists. (His story is fascinating.) For a long time, the dilemma of social science, in the words of the economist Edward Chamberlain, was that scholars "cannot observe the actual operation of a real model under controlled circumstances. Economics [and for that matter social science in general] is limited by the fact that resort cannot be had to the laboratory techniques of the natural sciences."

Castranova realized that massive multiplayer online role playing games offer a way around this dilemma. For example, in the on-line world of Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima-Online, everyone begins with the same endowments. What happens when equals interact in a dynamic environment?

And since your character can be either male or female, these virtual worlds are labs for examing how gender is valued. "The average avatar [character] price is 333 dollars; the price discount for females is 40 to 55 dollars, depending on methods." This despite the fact that there are no differences in talent among these virtual charater-types.

Moreover, these communities could be measured in real world terms in interesting ways, usually through eBay, as in Castronova's estimation of the economy of "'Norrath', populated by an exotic but industrious people. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria."

(Read the interview with him, here.)

Now a linguist has found an interesting use for "Hot or Not." "Amy Perfors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, US, placed photos with fake names on a website called “Hot or Not”, which allows viewers to rank strangers’ photos for attractiveness. She found that men labelled with names including “front vowels,” such as the “aaa” sound in Matt were rated as more attractive by website viewers than photos labelled with “back vowel” names, such as the “aw” sound in Paul. The opposite was true for women’s names." Check out the study, here, or just the synopsis, here.

I'm waiting for an internet as laboratory research methodology graduate class.

Co-operation has brought the human race a long way in a staggeringly short time

From The Economist:

“Our everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations.” This is the intriguing first sentence of a very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides: “The Company of Strangers”, by Paul Seabright, a professor of economics at the University of Toulouse. (The book is published by Princeton University Press.) Why is everyday life so strange? Because, explains Mr Seabright, it is so much at odds with what would have seemed, as recently as 10,000 years ago, our evolutionary destiny. It was only then that “one of the most aggressive and elusive bandit species in the entire animal kingdom” decided to settle down. In no more than the blink of an eye, in evolutionary time, these suspicious and untrusting creatures, these “shy, murderous apes”, developed co-operative networks of staggering scope and complexity—networks that rely on trust among strangers. When you come to think about it, it was an extraordinarily improbable outcome.

More here.

Two score and seventeen years ago...

"Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance."

Unless one is a block, a stone, a worse than senseless thing, it is impossible to remain unmoved by Jawaharlal Nehru's stirring words on the occasion of India's hard-won independence from British rule. Listen to a recording of the speech here, or read the text here.

John Maynard Smith, (1920—2004)

Earlier this year, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of our time, John Maynard Smith, died. Lamentably, his name remains largely unknown outside his field. His prodigious oevre includes contributions to aeronautical engineering and game theory, in addition to biology. He was trained in biology by the legendary J.B.S. Haldane.

"He had the trained eye of a field biologist and an inspiring knowledge of natural history to draw on, and also made major contributions to our understanding of bacteria, genetics, and the evolution of animal signaling. The complete biologist, with expertise and bold hypotheses to offer on every topic from the origins of life to the evolution of human language and culture, he was also one of biology’s best explainers. He was, in fact, what every philosopher should try to be and few succeed in becoming: a connoisseur of beautiful ideas. To him, a puzzle about the twofold cost of sex, or hypercycles, or the evolution of honest signalling, or any other problem of evolutionary theory, was like a new species of butterfly to a lepidopterist–something to be examined with rigorous attention to detail, so it can be understood from the ground up, its life cycle and prospects and kin all framed and mapped with loving care and brilliant insight. Even his most technical articles can be grasped in their essentials (with effort!) by non-experts thanks to his lucid style and abhorrence of jargon, but he also lavished attention on more accessible versions of the best specimens for a wider reading public. I suspect that almost as many professors as students have gratefully clung to these beacons of authority and clarity in the storm-tossed seas of theoretical controversy."

That is from an obituary by Daniel Dennett here; there is an obituary by Richard Dawkins here; one by David Harper here.

Here is an interview with JMS in The Evolutionist. More obituaries and other information can be found here.

"You storm through until you reach the people"

"There is much to admire in what Turabi lays out for the Islamic future," said Mahmood Ibrahim of the Islamist thinker behind the Sudanese regime of General Omar Ahmed al-Bashir, who came to power in a 1989 army coup ("Dialogue With Hassan al-Turabi Reveals Enigmatic, Complex Islamist Intellectual," Al Jadid, Fall, 1998). "He talks of freedom for the people, an end to oppression and discrimination, elimination of national chauvinism, borders, war, and tension among people." When Ibrahim published this article, the US had just struck Sudan with cruise missiles in retaliation for the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, on the grounds that soil near the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum had tested positive for a chemical ingredient called EMPTA, a precursor for VX nerve gas. (No further test has ever confirmed the intelligence reports.) The 9/11 Commission Report now concludes that the Clinton administration believed EMPTA was being manufactured with bin Laden's financial support. "The argument for hitting al Shifa," the Commission says, "was that it would lessen the chance of bin Laden having nerve gas for a later attack." With reference to the current disaster in Darfur, however, it is Turabi who again comes to mind. According to Ibrahim, he said that if peaceful measures fail, "you storm through using other means until you reach the people." Turabi "reached" the people of Darfur - Turabi and Bashir split in 1999, and Turabiist elements were involved in the Darfurian rebellion which the government has put down with the grim ethnic cleansing by the Janjaweed militias. According to Sudan Vision, an "independent" daily, the Darfur crisis has been "made up through Western publicity."

Reinventing Pakistan

On this, the 57th anniversary of my homeland, Pakistan's, birth, could we for a few moments not think about military government, nuclear proliferation, or terrorism, but about Pakistan's beautiful and rich cultural variety?

"Pakistan is witnessing an explosion of music, part of a revolution in art and media with potentially far greater appeal to its young people than the sermons of religious conservatives urging them to abandon modernity and confront perceived threats to Islam. Over the past three years, a dozen independent television channels have sprung up, from general networks to specialized news, fashion and music stations. Combined with a boom in advertising, increasing economic growth and rapid cable and satellite penetration, these outlets are fueling not only a new industry, but also a new culture—one not limited to a narrow Westernized elite."

That quote is from novelist Mohsin Hamid's lovingly written article in Smithsonian Magazine.

Our younger twin, India (which turns 57 tomorrow), has sent a message of congratulation.

"Rising from the Rails"

"What have the poet Claude McKay, the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, the explorer Matthew Henson, the musician "Big Bill" Broonzy and college president Benjamin Mays in common?

They all worked for the Pullman Company, which until 1969 ran the sleeper service on the U.S. railroads, and was at one time "the largest employer of Negroes in America and probably the world." Blacks, preferably those with "jet-black skin," supplied "the social separation... vital for porters to safely interact with white passengers in such close quarters."

Former Boston Globe journalist Tye (The Father of Spin) interviewed as many surviving porters as he could find as well as their children, and immersed himself in autobiographies, oral histories, biographies, newspapers, company records-wherever the porter might be glimpsed, including fiction and film. Entertaining detail abounds: Bogart was a solid tipper; Seabiscuit traveled in a "specially modified eighty-foot car cushioned with the finest straw." So does informing detail: the long hours, the dire working conditions, the low pay, the lively idiom, the burdensome rules."

This from a Publisher's Weekly write up of Larry Tye's recent book "Rising from the Rails", a fascinating account of Pullman porters, touching upon many related topics and personalities including the civil rights movement, A. Phillip Randolph, E.D. Nixon, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, etc.
More importantly, in putting together this book Larry Tye has brought surviving Pullman porters unexpected recognition and a celebration of their lives. He has included as many ex-porters in readings, interviews, and other book release functions across the country, as possible. One ex-porter died a mere four days after attending a Library of Congress function with Larry, and several others have died since Larry interviewed them.
More about "Rising from the Rails" and Larry Tye here.

'Snow': Headscarves to Die For

"This seventh novel from the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk is not only an engrossing feat of tale-spinning, but essential reading for our times. In Turkey, Pamuk is the equivalent of rock star, guru, diagnostic specialist and political pundit: the Turkish public reads his novels as if taking its own pulse. He is also highly esteemed in Europe: his sixth novel, the lush and intriguing 'My Name Is Red,' carried off the 2003 Impac Dublin Literary Award, adding to his long list of prizes. He deserves to be better known in North America, and no doubt he will be, as his fictions turn on the conflict between the forces of 'Westernization' and those of the Islamists." Review here by Margaret Atwood, and Alexander Star interviews Pamuk here, both from the New York Times Book Review.

Rama and the Brain

Other than molecular biology/genetic engineering, the field which currently promises the most revolutionary changes, not just in the world around us but also in how we think about that world and about ourselves, is cognitive science. Not very many people realize that over the last couple of decades, cognitive scientists have quietly been mapping the brain, figuring out how we think and perform the mental miracles that we do even in routine mentation. One of the most interesting figures in this effort has been V.S. Ramachandran, a man who has designed and performed ingenious experiments to show how the mind actually works. This is no mere theorizing, à la Freud; this is hard science, and the brain is shown to be a thing of extreme beauty. Rama, as he is affectionately known, delivered the 2003 Reith Lectures for the BBC, which have been collected into book form as A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers. I have not had such immense pleasure reading a presentation of scientific theory since I first read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins more than twenty years ago. Rama is a writer of sharp wit, and his delightfully wry sense of humor shows frequently in his lively prose. Not only this, Rama's earlier book for the general reader, Phantoms in the Brain, is also a tour de force in expository writing, and I recommend that highly as well.

Disgust is an adaptation for survival but what is the point of it now?

"What, precisely, is so bad about sex between adult siblings, bestiality, and the eating of corpses? Most people insist such acts are morally wrong, but when psychologists ask why, the answers make little sense. For instance, people often say incestuous sex is immoral because it runs the risk of begetting a deformed child, but if this was their real reason, they should be happy if the siblings were to use birth control - and most people are not. One finds what the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt called 'moral dumbfounding', a gut feeling that something is wrong combined with an inability to explain why." Rest of the article by Paul Bloom here in The Guardian.

Genocide

There is a genocide going on in Sudan right now. It would seem to me that if we really want to be a global community, if we really consider ourselves internationalists of any stripe we ought to consider this problem our problem, everyone's problem. And something needs to be done about it NOW.

Nebraska Strikes Again

Today's announcement of our new U.S. poet laureate, Ted Kooser, filled me with a state pride I haven't felt...well, ever. Although he's not a native Nebraskan in the strictest of senses (he was born in the lesser-known Iowa), he lives there now, and I have no doubt that he will represent the great Cornhusker state with the same panache that has characterized the already existing pantheon of Nebraskan cultural deities, which includes Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Johnny Carson, Henry Fonda, Willa Cather, Darryl Zanuck, Malcolm X, and, of course, Dick Cavett (yes, Cornhuskers all...even if, come to think of it, they all did display an odd refusal to come back after they made it big...). Anyway, here are a few choice, bite-sized bits of Kooser's work that even a non-indigene can appreciate: After Years, and Selecting a Reader. If, for some peculiar reason, you're still feeling poetry-ish, here are two poems by a fella whose work kind of reminds me of Kooser's, Stephen Dunn (a New Yorker, but there's still a midwestern odor) "Biography in the First Person" and "I Come Home Wanting to Touch Everyone". And perhaps just one more, a great poem about the midnight flaneur by the poet best known for his unfortunate appearances in commencement day speeches, Bobby Frost.

Hurricanes and Happenstance

A walk with a dear friend through the tumultuous summer storms of New York City reminded us both of the amazing Citibank Tower story. The New Yorker piece from almost ten years ago is a great read. A more clinical analysis is available here.

Last Glimpses

If you are an admirer or avid reader of Edward W. Said, whom Abbas quotes in his post titled Insight and Foresight, you may want to check out a newly released documentary featuring him, called "Selves and Others". This film, playing at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in the East Village, may contain some of the last footage of EWS, before his tragic death last year.
A New York Times write up about the film says:
"'Selves and Others' allows the highly articulate Said, a professor at Columbia University and an outspoken advocate of a Palestinian homeland, to lay out his views without the help of an on-screen interlocutor. Sitting at his desk at Columbia or in his study at home, Said offers a concise summary of his thought, with an emphasis on his most influential book, 'Orientalism' (1978)."

I, Carnivore?

"Food is polysaturated with culture," writes Steven Shapin of the LoCarbista philosophy. "Atkins posits a primitive dietetics as a justification for new departures and a resource for condemning a pathological present: 'We tend to take it for granted that the way we eat now is the way we always ate. Nothing could be further from the truth. For most of man's fifty million years on earth, we have lived off the flesh and fat of other animals...Man was a hunter and our eating habits were largely carnivorous.' Hunting, and eating the fruits of the hunt, was natural and healthful. So Atkins articulates a secular version of the biblical story about agriculture, and consuming the crops raised in the sweat of our brows, as punishments for original sin." In "The Great Neurotic Art," London Review of Books.

Magic and the multiverse

"Martin Gardner gives quantum-mechanical fantasies a good kicking in Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?" Book review by Nicholas Lezard here in The Guardian.

Honesty in Inference

"Theoretical physicist Edwin T. Jaynes, who died in 1998, is best known as pioneer and champion of the principle of maximum entropy, which states that of all possible probability distributions that agree with what you know about a problem, the one that leaves you with the most uncertainty is best—precisely because it does not imply more than you know. As important as the principle is in practice, surprisingly little space is devoted to it in Jaynes's magnum opus, Probability Theory: The Logic of Science." Book review by Tommaso Toffoli here in American Scientist Online.

The Induce Act could stifle tech innovation

"The Induce Act, also known as the IICA, says that anyone who 'intentionally aids, abets, induces, or procures' a copyright violation can be sued for copyright infringement. That surely applies to the file trading networks, which make it easy to find and download a free copy of any song you desire. Apple's iPod could also come under fire for its huge hard drive, which would cost about $10,000 to fill with legally downloaded music. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has prepared a sample complaint against the iPod, pointing out the dangers of the Induce Act against established, respectable companies and technologies." More here from ReasonOnline.

Insight and Foresight

"So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression."

If you think that is a fairly accurate description of the US attitude toward the Arab world at the moment, consider that the late Edward W. Said wrote that passage more than twenty-four years ago, here, in The Nation. Said is, of course, inimitable and irreplaceable. Nevertheless, one could not have hoped for a better heir to his courageous erudition, his sharp insight, and his intellectual accessability than Rashid Khalidi. Professor Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, and his new book Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East is reviewed here in Foreign Affairs, and also here in the New York Times.

Darfur: we need to pay attention NOW

"The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution last Friday giving the government of Sudan 30 days to comply with its July 3 agreement to put a stop to violence against civilians in Darfur and to allow aid through to the 1.2 million people in refugee camps, or else. Or else what remains to be seen--the watered-down resolution doesn't specify--but the ghosts of Auschwitz and Rwanda are clearly haunting the concerned nations of the world, military intervention may be on the horizon. (Britain, for one, has already said it would back such an intervention if Sudan doesn't put an end to the violence in Darfur.) Sudan's military is openly bracing for that possibility, calling the U.N. resolution a 'declaration of war on Sudan,' and the Sudanese government's actions to date suggest they are more interested in creating the illusion of compliance so they can continue their campaign of genocide. As pressure builds for action, it's important to step back and consider what an international military intervention in Sudan might require: the results of this exercise might surprise you." More here from The New Republic.

The Streets and Dizzee Rascal

"Despite having invented the English language and those clever TV shows, Britain hasn’t withstood our cultural colonization any better than the rest of the world. In the eighties and nineties, British m.c.s generally sounded like variants of their American counterparts. Having an adorable accent didn’t disguise the fact that you’d borrowed your style from Rakim, or Run-DMC, or Nas. The debt is finally being erased. The music coming out of Birmingham and London today sounds nothing like American hip-hop. You can’t even call it hip-hop—though it wouldn’t exist without hip-hop." More here from The New Yorker.

Social status influences brain structure, at least in rats

"Assertiveness really is all in the mind. Dominant rats have more new nerve cells in a key brain region than their subordinates, a study reveals." More here from Nature.

High tech apparel may determine who takes home the gold

"Drug use may be the most prominent controversy surrounding this summer's Olympic Games in Athens. But the second burning question concerns an entirely legal approach to getting the winning edge: namely, whether or not form-fitting fast-suits made from high-tech fabrics will decide which athletes bring home a medal. These new garments will be most visible in high profile events such as swimming, but rowers and cyclists are sporting them as well. Although to the casual observer the suits might bring to mind costumes for the next Spiderman movie, they are less about good looks and more about their ability to reduce drag and thereby increase speed." More here from Scientific American.

Early Bird Had the Brains to Fly

"As any ostrich knows, getting off the ground requires more than just wings and feathers. A thorough study of the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, provides evidence of the specific neural machinery thought to be necessary for flight." More here from Scientific American.

Fairytales for Adults

"Lee Bontecou has imagination aplenty. At the retrospective of her work that has just arrived at the Museum of Modern Art after a national tour, museumgoers respond gratefully to the ingenuity and wit and complexity of the wall reliefs, drawings, sculptures, and mobiles that she has been doing since the late 1950s. There's a magnetism to Bontecou's achievement. Her eerie imagery casts a spell. And yet this mood spinner of an artist lacks the feeling for formal completeness that could turn her imaginary forays into self-contained worlds." More here from Jed Perl in The New Republic.

Why Cartier-Bresson, The Peintre Manqué, Became Photographer

Hilton Kramer in the New York Observer:

I was glad to see that The New York Times featured its obituary of Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) on the front page. After all, no other photographer of his time lived and worked so long or commanded the admiration of so many artists, critics, editors, museum curators and connoisseurs of photography—not to mention the public at large—and none bore worldwide fame with a more appealing combination of intelligence, authority, insouciance and self-deprecating irony. In high spirits, Henri (as I shall speak of him here) was as amusing as his most amusing pictures, and he was certainly a master of comedy in many of his photographs. Yet what was deepest about both the man and his work was the gravity of his moral candor.

More here.

El Bulli and the Mass Market Food Aesthetic

Some of us have this odd fascination with El Bulli, the over-the-top experimental restuarant in Roses, Spain. Sara Dickerman, one of the smartest food (as cultural anthropology) writers I know, had an insightful take on El Bulli and the new haute cuisine some time ago. It's still worth a read.

"The form of [El Bulli Chef Ferran] Adrià's food, for example, echoes that of mass-market snacks. His liquid-filled ravioli are reminiscent of the liquid center of the '80s phenomenon, Freshen Up gum; the mushroom-gelee "slurps" resemble the suckable packets of yogurt sold in grocery stores today, and his phyllo "pizza" snack, coated in tomato powder and parmesan, seems a step away from a Dorito."

Randomized Trials of Economic Development Projects

The Poverty Action Lab has deployed a new method of evaluating policies designed to reduce poverty and improve education, among others--learning the lesson from the natural sciences, the PAL uses randomized trials. The results are often fascinating, well if you're the policy type anyway.

Some of their findings:

Deworming (e.g., of hookworms, round worms and similar parasites which infect more than 25% of the world) is a cheap way of improving education attendance in the Third World.

Village councils in India (panchayats) invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant the needs of the gender of the council leader.

There remains discrimination against African-American names in job applications. "White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews," even when qualification and experience are accounted for.

The pro-war uses of stochastic, context-free grammar--take that Noam Chomsky!

Sometime ago, I came across this, a self-writing, right-wing, pro-war blog.

"R. Robot ('Debasing the Political Discourse @ Superhuman Speed') is a rhetoric simulator. He shuffles grammatical chunks into into thousands of loathesome new templates. He's a Perl CGI script, hooked up to a Movable Type engine for good measure -- making him the first blogger who is also a computer program (to the best of our knowledge. . . He writes his columns instantly. . . His adjectives and nouns are taken from a Newt Gingrich memo called 'Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.' It recommends using words like 'candid,' 'pristine,' and 'reform' for your team's ideas, and imagery like 'machine,' 'abuse of power,' and 'decay' for the other guy's. Most of R.'s grammar engrams are lifted from some of the most lovable editorials of the pre-Quagmire era. Those were heady times, when the like of Ann Coulter, Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan and the late Michael Kelly took fearlessly to their PowerBooks. For those too young to remember, these mighty scribes of '02 saw themselves as the lone voices warning of a shocking Fifth Column: that is, people who disagreed with landing the U.S.A. in its current predicament. If not for these scribes, an uninformed world never would have seen the Warbot -- and we all would have been helpless to stop Al Gore, Harry Belafonte, and Saddam Hussein from teaming up to betray the world."

Test it out. Enter your name or someone else's in the field below the control panel, and watch the satisfying slander, er, libel.

Borges: A Life

"Edwin Williamson's new life of the great writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is thoroughly engrossing, and fans of the Argentine's ficciones will want to read it without delay. But like socialist literature of the 1930s, this biography wants to fit unruly human life into a theoretical mold. Throughout these pages, Borges is made to appear a divided man, one who desperately, and until his final years unsuccessfully, yearns for spiritual unity. Williamson discovers polarities everywhere. As a child Borges is torn between admiration for his martial ancestors (symbolized by the sword) and an equal admiration for the romantic violence of raffish knife-fighters and petty criminals (the dagger). As a young man, he is caught between the example of his father, the bookish, philandering would-be artist, and the demands of his controlling mother, whom he never disobeys, no matter how stultifying her attentions, how suffocating her devotion. Worst of all, as an adult, Borges repeatedly desires the love of a good woman or even a bad one, but though his spirit may sometimes be willing, his flesh is apparently always weak: Whether traumatized by memories of an unsuccessful adolescent visit to a prostitute or fearful of offending imperious Mama, he can never, his biographer strongly suggests, actually bring himself to go to bed with anybody."

More from Michael Dirda's review in the Washington Post.

Sick of Nature

"I am sick of nature. Sick of trees, sick of birds, sick of the ocean," writes David Gessner, "Today's nature writing is too often pious, safe, boring. Haven't these people re-read Thoreau lately?" From the Boston Globe.

Don't worry; be happy

"An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug [Prozac] nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater." Nargis Raza pointed out this report to me from the BBC.

Is Human Spaceflight Obsolete?

"Risk is high, cost is enormous, science is insignificant. Does anyone have a good rationale for sending humans into space?" James A. Van Allen (discoverer of the eponymous Van Allen belt) asks, then answers, here in Issues in Science and Technology Online.

Al Yankovic does Bob Dylan

By way of Norman Geras (author of two excellent books, Marx and Human Nature and The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg), Al Yankovic (of "Eat It" and "O Ricky" fame) has written a song in, er, a tribute-parody to Bob Dylan. It appears on his ablum Poodle Hat. Every line in the song is a palindrome.

Bob by Al Yankovic

Lyrics:

I, man, am regal - a German am I
Never odd or even
If I had a hi-fi
Madam, I'm Adam
Too hot to hoot
No lemons, no melon
Too bad I hid a boot
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Warsaw was raw
Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Rise to vote, sir
Do geese see God?
"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod
Rats live on no evil star
Won't lovers revolt now?
Race fast, safe car
Pa's a sap
Ma is as selfless as I am
May a moody baby doom a yam?

Ah, Satan sees Natasha
No devil lived on
Lonely Tylenol
Not a banana baton
No "x" in "Nixon"
O, stone, be not so
O Geronimo, no minor ego
"Naomi," I moan
"A Toyota's a Toyota"
A dog, a panic in a pagoda

Oh no! Don Ho!
Nurse, I spy gypsies - run!
Senile felines
Now I see bees I won
UFO tofu
We panic in a pew
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
God! A red nugget! A fat egg under a dog!
Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog

Clash of the Titans

The big story leading into the Olympics is the battle between the Australian swimming god Ian 'Thorpedo' Thorpe and the young but highly-rated American Michael Phelps, whose goal as detailed in this profile is to equal Mark Spitz's take of seven gold medals in 1972. Thorpe is the most famous and adored athlete in Australia, where swimming is widely popular. Famously outspoken, he backed off a bit from his claim that Phelps' ambition was impossible in the first interviews from Athens today. Incidentally, Ryan McGinley, a downtown New York photographer best known for transposing the Nan Goldin aesthetic to the Vice magazine generation, shot the U.S. swim team for the Times magazine. They are beautiful photographs; the best things I've seen by McGinley.

A Collegelands Catechism

I was first taken by Paul Muldoon when I came upon Madoc in college. Not too long ago, the Newshour did an interview with Muldoon after he’d won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In it there was a brief clip of a multimedia ‘reading’ of Muldoon’s “A Collegelands Catechism”. I looked for it only to find that you had to be a Princeton student to download it . . . but no longer. Enjoy, seriously, look at this virtual "perfomance"..

Is a New Aesthetic Being Born? Fredric Jameson on William Gibson

Fredric Jameson's piece on William Gibson's Pattern Recognition in the New Left Review has much to recommend it, though not necessarily its prose. It's still worth a read.

"[C]yberpunk constitutes a kind of laboratory experiment in which the geographic-cultural light spectrum and bandwidths of the new system are registered. Indeed, an inspection of this literature already provides a first crude inventory of the new world system: the immense role—and manifest in [William] Gibson’s evocations, all the way down to Pattern Recognition itself—of Japan as the monitory semiotic combination of First-World science-and-technology with a properly Third-World population explosion. Russia now also looms large, but above all in the form of its various Mafias (from all the former Republics), which remind us of the anarchy and violent crime, as well as of the conspiratorial networks and jobless futures, that lurk just beneath the surface of capitalism. . . Europe’s image ambiguity—a kind of elegant museum or tourist playground which is also an evolutionary and economic dead end—is instructive . . . But it is by way of its style that we can best measure the new literature on some kind of time-continuum; and here we may finally return to the distinctiveness of Pattern Recognition, where this style has reached a kind of classical perfection."

Fredric Jameson's Reflections on William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition: a contemporary dialectic of style, as the Verne of cyberspace turns to the branded present and its nauseas