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Morning
Robert Creeley

dam's broke,
head's a
waterfall.
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Peter Ward in Scientific American:

When you ask for opinions about what future humans might look like, you typically get one of two answers. Some people trot out the old science-fiction vision of a big-brained human with a high forehead and higher intellect. Others say humans are no longer evolving physically—that technology has put an end to the brutal logic of natural selection and that evolution is now purely cultural.

The big-brain vision has no real scientific basis. The fossil record of skull sizes over the past several thousand generations shows that our days of rapid increase in brain size are long over. Accordingly, most scientists a few years ago would have taken the view that human physical evolution has ceased. But DNA techniques, which probe genomes both present and past, have unleashed a revolution in studying evolution; they tell a different story. Not only has Homo sapiens been doing some major genetic reshuffling since our species formed, but the rate of human evolution may, if anything, have increased. In common with other organisms, we underwent the most dramatic changes to our body shape when our species first appeared, but we continue to show genetically induced changes to our physiology and perhaps to our behavior as well. Until fairly recently in our history, human races in various parts of the world were becoming more rather than less distinct. Even today the conditions of modern life could be driving changes to genes for certain behavioral traits.

If giant brains are not in store for us, then what is? Will we become larger or smaller, smarter or dumber? How will the emergence of new diseases and the rise in global temperature shape us? Will a new human species arise one day? Or does the future evolution of humanity lie not within our genes but within our technology, as we augment our brains and bodies with silicon and steel? Are we but the builders of the next dominant intelligence on the earth—the machines?

More here.

From MSNBC:

But the Christmas season isn't just for Christians anymore: Even atheists are picking up on the holiday spirit, with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and like-minded deep thinkers putting on a show called “Nine Lessons and Carols for the Godless.” The London show looks at marvels such as the big bang, evolution and the nature of consciousness from a totally secular perspective. Dawkins told the Telegraph that he was taking part in the show because he was “fed up with atheists being portrayed as Scrooges, trying to rain on Christmas.” Whether you're more concerned about the soul or the solstice, December provides a good opportunity for reflecting on cosmic themes. You don't have to be a religious believer to get into that reflective frame of mind. “You just have to be an astronomical believer,” Ann Druyan, the widow of the late astronomer (and agnostic) Carl Sagan, told me today.

“There's a sense of sadness, but also tremendous hope – more hope for the future than I've had for a long time,” Druyan said. One big reason for that is last month's election of President-elect Barack Obama – the candidate for whom Druyan went doorbell-ringing this year. Obama's recent choices for science-related posts have added to her optimism. “I think Carl would have worked to get Obama elected,” Druyan said. “I think he would have been very excited.” Although it's been 12 years since Sagan left this life, his legacy is, if anything, more lively than ever. Druyan is tickled to hear that people are selling WWSD (What Would Sagan Do?) T-shirts and that there are thousands and thousands of Carl Sagan videos on YouTube. (It hasn't gotten to the “billions and billions” level … yet.)

Read more here and listen to Carl Sagan deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture in 1977 on the topic of the planets.

Greece has been torn apart by the worst riots in decades, now entering their third week. Bands of self-declared anarchist youths have rampaged through the streets of Athens and other major cities causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage, setting off a spiral of unrest in which the nation’s unions, among other groups, have taken part. Both shops and hotel lobbies have been ransacked, and hospitals, airports, and transport have been brought to a standstill. What sparked the riots was the accidental police shooting of a 15-year-old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos. But as usual in such cases, there was much more in the way of causes lying beneath the surface. Youth unemployment is high throughout the European Union, but it is particularly high in Greece, hovering between 25 and 30 percent. With few job prospects, rampant poverty in the face of nouveau riche prosperity, a public university system in shambles, a bloated government sector in desperate need of an overhaul, and a weak, defensive conservative government with only a one-seat majority in parliament, it is a ripe period for protests, which have had as their aim the fall of Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.

more from The Atlantic here.

GS: If you go to a Russian restaurant, the first thing you see on every menu is zakuski. Which literally means “the thing you follow it with.” “It” being vodka. Appetizers are built around vodka. The mystery of Russia centers on what will happen at the end of the day, or the middle of the day. That being the drinking of the 150 grams (5.29 ounces) of vodka. When I go back there, and I go back every year, I have to acclimate like you would in Denver. Everyone, especially the men, brings their own bottle of vodka. Each finishes their bottle and they enter that land of no return. I’m not a religious person by any means, but you feel this kind of strange communion. With people who, if you had met them on the street, you’d think, “My goodness, look at this strange specimen.”

MDM: Your compatriot Anton Chekov described the perfect eight-course meal for a journalist: “Glass of vodka, daily shchi with yesterday’s kasha; two glasses of vodka, suckling pig with horseradish; three glasses of vodka, horseradish, cayenne pepper and soy sauce; four glasses of vodka; seven bottles of beer.”

GS: That’s a nice meal. Marinated mushrooms are great with vodka, duck is good, too. Nice fatty duck. It’s a marvelous drinking culture. Now a lot of the middle-class Russians are switching to beer. A Western influence.

MDM: I understand the government is pushing it. To get them off the vodka.

more from Modern Drunkard here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Among the South American writers well known to North American readers, Jorge Luis Borges is the cool, cerebral one. His austere little fable titled “The Library of Babel,” first published in 1944, describes a universal library—universal both in the sense that it fills the universe and also in the sense that it contains at least one copy of everything:

All—the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language . . .

The list goes on, but you get the idea. The secret behind this limitless collection of implausible texts lies in simple combinatorics. All those documents—and plenty more!—are guaranteed to be present somewhere on the shelves of the library because the books include every possible sequence of symbols that can be assembled from a fixed alphabet in a certain number of pages.

In William Goldbloom Bloch’s mathematical companion to “The Library of Babel,” the first task is to calculate the number of distinct books that can be created in this way. There’s not much to it. Borges tells us that the alphabet of the books is restricted to 25 symbols (22 letters, the comma, the period and the word space). He also mentions that each book has 410 pages, with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page. Thus a book consists of 410 × 40 × 80 = 1,312,000 symbols. There are 25 choices for each of these symbols, and so the library’s collection consists of 25^1,312,000 books.

More here.

Samia Altaf in The Wilson Quarterly:

“She’s what?” I heard my companion ask in a ­panic-­stricken tone. “Dead! Oh, my God, do you hear that?” she said to me. “The director of the nursing council is dead.” She stood still for a minute, as if paying her respects. “How did she die?” she said, again turning to the ­fellow.

The man looked offended at our misapprehension. “Late. Mrs. S.,” he said. Ah, Mrs. S. wasn’t dead. She would be ­late.

My companion, a Canadian, was new to this part of the world and understandably confused by the way Urdu, the national language, is translated into English, the “official” language, especially by people who have minimal schooling. Mrs. S. had gone from merely being late to being “the late Mrs. S.” In a way, this slip of the ­tongue—­or of the ear?—was quite symbolic. For in its efforts to make any effective contribution to the changing needs of the health care system, the Pakistan Nursing ­Council—­the federal institution that oversees nursing and all related ­professions—­might as well have been ­dead.

We told the man that we would ­wait.

For the past several weeks, my Canadian colleague and I had been traveling through Pakistan as we prepared recommendations for a technical assistance program funded by the Canadian government. She was the external consultant on this project, and I was the local consultant.

More here.

Margalit Fox in the New York Times:

Carol Chomsky, a linguist and education specialist whose work helped illuminate the ways in which language comes to children, died on Friday at her home in Lexington, Mass. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, her sister-in-law Judith Brown Chomsky said.

A nationally recognized authority on the acquisition of spoken and written language, Professor Chomsky was on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1972 until her retirement in 1997. In retirement, she was a frequent traveling companion of her husband, the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, as he delivered his public lectures.

Carol Chomsky was perhaps best known for her book, “The Acquisition of Syntax in Children From 5 to 10” (M.I.T. Press), which was considered a landmark study in the field when it appeared in 1969. In it, she investigated children’s tacit, developing awareness of the grammatical structure of their native language, and their ability to use that awareness to extract meaning from increasingly complex sentences over time.

More here. [Photo shows Carol and Noam Chomsky.]

Israeli blockade 'forces Palestinians to search rubbish dumps for food'.

Peter Beaumont in The Guardian:

Figures released last week by the UN Relief and Works Agency reveal that the economic blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza in July last year has had a devastating impact on the local population. Large numbers of Palestinians are unable to afford the high prices of food being smuggled through the Hamas-controlled tunnels to the Strip from Egypt and last week were confronted with the suspension of UN food and cash distribution as a result of the siege.

The figures collected by the UN agency show that 51.8% – an “unprecedentedly high” number of Gaza's 1.5 million population – are now living below the poverty line. The agency announced last week that it had been forced to stop distributing food rations to the 750,000 people in need and had also suspended cash distributions to 94,000 of the most disadvantaged who were unable to afford the high prices being asked for smuggled food.

“Things have been getting worse and worse,” said Chris Gunness of the agency yesterday. “It is the first time we have been seeing people picking through the rubbish like this looking for things to eat.

More here.

Joshua Clover in The Nation:

Guy Debord's best lines were ghostwritten.

One particular frame, a blank back and forth between Pancho and Cisco–“The Situationist Cowboys,” as they would be known–has had a long and varied afterlife, leaping from student revolt to photocopied talisman to album art and T-shirt image for Manchester's Factory Records; of late it has shown up on the Poetry Foundation's website, making some point or another.

“What do you work on?” asks the first cowboy, in a white hat. “Reification,” comes the answer. “I see,” says white hat. “It's serious work, with big books and lots of papers on a big table.”

“Nope,” avers black hat, whom we understand to be speaking in the place of Debord. “I drift. Mostly I drift.” The phrase itself is a ghost. It captures the insouciance that in our era can no longer be attached to radical politics, to the ruthless critique of what exists. And exactly because such a combination, so urgently wished for, can no longer be imagined without this phrase, it is doomed to circulate without relief, like Dante's Paolo and Francesca borne about endlessly on an awful wind that is the wind of history. Also, it's a great pickup line.

If you survey the geography of modern letters, three books stand out as signposts marking the beginning of paths that lead decisively away from all that went before. Augustine’s “Confessions,” the first memoir of an inner life, is one such work. So is Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” which is the first inarguably modern novel. The third is James Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson,” the earliest recognizable modern biography. In our era, scholarship — particularly that of Edmund Wilson and Donald Greene — has been unsparing with regard to Boswell’s ignorance of some facts about his subject and his deliberate withholding of others. He was, in these critics’ estimation, a myth-maker. Fair enough — and so what?

more from the LA Times here.

It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher and slightly wacky astronomer. His version of Christianity is impossible to label. Educated by the Dominicans — the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy in those days — he revered certain scriptures and the writings of St. Augustine, always doubted the divinity of Jesus and flirted with dangerous new ideas of Protestantism, and yet hoped that the pope himself would clear him of heresy. Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.”

more from the NY Times here.

From The Telegraph:

When Dickens’s David Copperfield describes his schooldays, his memories quickly fall into the miserable grooves of “tear-blotted copy-books, canings, rulerings, hair-cuttings, rainy Sundays, suet puddings, and a dirty atmosphere of ink surrounding all”. But there is also a more cheering routine that punctuates his time at school: storytelling. Learning that the “romantic and dreamy” Copperfield has a ready fund of stories up his pyjama sleeves, the dashing Steerforth decides that “you shall tell ’em to me”. With a new episode to look forward to every bedtime, “We’ll make some regular Arabian Nights of it.”

To some extent, the passage is a joke about Dickens’s own career, given how often he published his novels in instalments – a Scheherazade who depended on drawing out stories for his livelihood rather than his life. But the joke is also shadowed by a genuine sense of threat. Copperfield’s recollection that “we commenced carrying [the plan] into execution that very evening” reminds us that the original Scheherazade spins out her narrative thread every night to save herself from a far more serious form of “execution”. For her, each sentence is potentially a death sentence; each full stop is potentially the end of both story and storyteller.

More here.

ALEX WITCHEL in The New York Times:

IN SPITE OF MYSELF: A Memoir By Christopher Plummer

Now that Plummer has published “In Spite of Myself: A Memoir,” it is the most welcome of surprises to discover that this actor writes and reports almost as well as he acts. No kidding. To be sure, in his writing he is a bit hammy, often playing fast and loose with time frames, tone and details, not to mention exercising profligate use of exclamation points — the man thinks in soliloquies. But the result for anyone who loves, loves, loves the theater, not to mention the vanished New York of the 1950s and ’60s, is a finely observed, deeply felt (and deeply dishy) time-traveling escape worthy of a long stormy weekend. Just grab a quilt and a stack of pillows. No need for a delectable assortment of bonbons. They’re in the book.

Plummer begins at the beginning. He grows up in Montreal, something of a poor little rich boy, the great-grandson of the Right Honorable Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, who was president of the Canada Central Railway and the country’s first native-born prime minister.

Plummer’s parents divorce early, and his father disappears. As older relatives die, the money falls away and his mother holds down two jobs while her teenage son, bound up in “a web of good manners and suppressed emotions,” finds release in the worlds of jazz, theater and night life. That also means drinking: “At an embarrassingly early age, I began to hit the sauce. Booze was a national sport up north. It was essential! — (a) to keep you warm, (b) to keep you from going mad, (c) to keep your madness going.”

More here.

Charlie Sorrel in Wired:

A British museum curator has built a working replica of a 2,000-year-old Greek machine that has been called the world's first computer.

A dictionary-size assemblage of 37 interlocking dials crafted with the precision and complexity of a 19th-century Swiss clock, the Antikythera mechanism was used for modeling and predicting the movements of the heavenly bodies as well as the dates and locations of upcoming Olympic games.

The original 81 shards of the Antikythera were recovered from under the sea (near the Greek island of Antikythera) in 1902, rusted and clumped together in a nearly indecipherable mass. Scientists dated it to 150 B.C. Such craftsmanship wouldn't be seen for another 1,000 years — but its purpose was a mystery for decades.

Many scientists have worked since the 1950s to piece together the story, with the help of some very sophisticated imaging technology in recent years, including X-ray and gamma-ray imaging and 3-D computer modeling.

Now, though, it has been rebuilt. As is almost always the way with these things, it was an amateur who cracked it. Michael Wright, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has built a replica of the Antikythera, which works perfectly.

More here.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa in The New Republic:

A lot of what has helped Latin America's economies in recent years — access to capital markets, foreign investments, remittances from emigrants, the price of natural resources — depends on the health of the global marketplace. Anytime the U.S. stock markets lose $30 trillion in a few months — 10 times Latin America's gross domestic product — the ripple effects will be felt south of the Rio Grande.

Rather than engage in reform, slash spending and put away some rainy-day money, Latin American governments preserved the status quo and boosted public expenditures by 10 percent annually in matters mostly unrelated to infrastructure, creating alarming new commitments. Except for Chile, which managed the revenue from its copper sales prudently, many of the nations that produce oil (Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador), minerals (Brazil, Peru) or agricultural commodities (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay) went on a binge. They will now find themselves starved for cash at a time when they are pledging new forms of government profligacy in the face of the global recession. The temptation to fund it via inflation will be irresistible.

More here.

Basharat Peer in The National:

I watched the video of Imran Babar’s phone call on a website at my parents’ house in Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, a day after he called India TV. His voice and accent betrayed his lower-middle-class origins in Pakistani Punjab, far from the Deccan Plateau in southern India – even as he spoke of the oppression of Indian Muslims. But I was struck when he turned to Kashmir, saying: ““What was the Israeli Army chief doing in Kashmir? What is he to the Indian government? An uncle?” His voice was growing agitated and he shouted, “Was he there to teach what the Israelis do in Gaza and what they did to Bait-ul-Muqadas [the al Aqsa Mosque]?”

Here was a Punjabi terrorist who claimed to speak in the name of Kashmiris and Palestinians alike, assuming the mantle of oppressed communities to rationalise the murder of innocents in hotels and train stations. I was rattled, sitting in Srinigar, watching the loud theatre of terror drown out the complexities of life in Kashmir – watching the cause of Kashmiri independence become linked, in the mind of the world, with the deeds of jihadists in Mumbai.

More here.

[Thanks to, well… Ruchira. 🙂 ]

William Grimes in the NYT:

Mr. O’Brien, once described by Christopher Hitchens as “an internationalist, a wit, a polymath and a provocateur,” was a rare combination of scholar and public servant who applied his erudition and stylish pen to a long list of causes, some hopeless, others made less so by his combative reasoning. When called upon, he would put down his pen and enter the fray, more often than not emerging bruised and bloodied.

As a diplomat, he helped chart Ireland’s course as an independent, anticolonialist voice in the United Nations and played a critical role in the UN’s intervention in the Congo in 1961. As vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana he fell out with the dictator Kwame Nkrumah over the question of academic freedom, and while teaching at New York University, he took part in an antiwar demonstration that resulted in his arrest.