Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence? I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?

more from Peter Singer at The Opinionater here.

THE SMART SET: Do you think Silly Bandz will still be popular when school starts again next fall?

SANDER: Yes. I think there will be new kinds. Like maybe an ocean abyss pack, with goblins, sharks, giant squid. That would be cool. Maybe a daily life pack, with like a lunch box, and a shirt, and a person, and a newspaper. There might be a bird pack, with different kinds of birds. A backyard pack, with maybe a ball, and a tree, and rake, maybe. Maybe a person pack. Who knows?
WES: I think the same as Sander. Maybe there will be a new nature pack, with like leaves, nature, squirrels, and birds and stuff.

THE SMART SET: Do you think Silly Bandz will be popular for a long time? How long, do you think?

SANDER: Yeah. They are just so popular now and everyone has them. I think they'll still be popular for a few more years, until another company gets big ideas for other stuff to trade.
WES: Yes, because I'm going to really like them next year, so I think they'll definitely still be popular.

more from The Smart Set here.

There is not much about being human that one cannot learn from the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). This epic poem is the Northern European myth of power and revenge, distilling centuries of wisdom about psychology and politics into a simple but tragic story: the tale of Siegfried, a hero who comes to power purely through his own strength and daring, and is crushed by the political elite. His widow, Kriemhild, then takes on the members of the establishment who killed him, and step by step slaughters them all because they refuse to give up one of their own. The grandmother of all medievalist fantasy and of superhero comics, the Nibelungenlied has it all in terms of a gripping yarn, too: it gives you the treasure, the dragon, the most valiant knights, the most beautiful ladies, the invincible hero, the spectacular battles, the mysteries, the mermaids, and the dead. If I have begun by shamelessly giving away the tragic ending in order to elicit interest, I am only copying one of the poem’s favourite techniques. The real thrill of the epic is not in finding out what happened, but how and why it happens – why a hero and an entire dynasty are brutally murdered.

more from Bettina Bildhauer at the TLS here.

Sady at Tiger Beatdown:

[T]he Lynn Hirschberg profile of M.I.A...: It got under my skin. It disturbed me, in many visceral and icky ways. It seemed, to me, exemplary of the ways and means by which women who use their voices politically are knocked down, knocked over, and fucked up for the public’s entertainment. And people liked it. People I like, people I admire, at least one person I’m particularly close to: They responded, joined in the group-kick, were eager to denounce M.I.A. as a liar and a fake and a fraud and a bitch and a bad activist. And over what? Over passages like this:

Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. “I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

The fact is, valuable things were uncovered in that piece. M.I.A. has been inconsistent, and misleading, about her father’s involvement with the Tamil Tigers. And I appreciated that voices other than M.I.A.’s were given the chance to speak out, in a widely read forum, about Sri Lankan politics and the Tigers; the allegation that she’s being overly and dangerously simplistic, in her unconditional support of the Tigers, is probably true. What I don’t appreciate, however, is the fact that these things were only brought up as a means of destroying M.I.A.’s political credibility — shortly before attacking her credibility on more or less every other front.

M.I.A. is a fake, the article more or less says; no matter what she says or writes or records about global capitalism being a bad thing, no matter how fiercely she would seem to defend marginalized people, she’s just a shallow, narcissistic, bossy, stupid woman who only wants your attention, only wants to be famous, only wants to be a star. And did you hear that she was having contractions when she sang “Paper Planes” at the Grammys? Shocking! Provocative! Fame-whorey! Regular-whorey! Unfeminine! Selfish! Bad mother!

Although her publicist had a wheelchair ready and a midwife on call, Maya, who has a deep and instinctive affinity for the provocative, knew that this Grammy moment was not to be missed. It had everything: artistic credibility, high drama, a massive audience. The baby would just have to wait. The combination of being nearly naked, hugely pregnant, singing incendiary lyrics and having the eyes of the world upon her was too much to resist.

Granted, there are a few common-sense things to be pointed out here: That it’s not unusual for women to work throughout their pregnancies, that lots of women go to work on the day that they’re scheduled to go into labor, that labor itself is a long process (the profile even notes that M.I.A.’s son wasn’t born until three days after the performance) and so many women often continue to work throughout the early stages of labor, especially if they’re doing something important or time-sensitive that can’t be re-scheduled — like, say, performing at the Grammys.

[H/t: Amanda Marcotte]

Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex life as, say, slutty Lydia Bennet? E M Forster was a virgin until the age of thirty-nine, when he had his first ‘full’ sexual experience (a ‘hurried sucking off’, Wendy Moffat informs us) with a passing soldier on a beach in Alexandria. By that point, five of Forster’s six novels were written and the last, A Passage to India, drafted. Until he was thirty, with much of his oeuvre behind him, he did not, he later confessed, ‘know exactly how male and female joined’. ‘Muddle and mystery’ between the sheets as well as in the Marabar caves. Does a writer’s carnal experience matter? D H Lawrence, the most unzipped of British novelists, believed it did. His chauvinist sneer at Austen as a ‘narrow-gutted spinster’ indicates that some rumpy-humpy would have done wonders for her fiction.

more from John Sutherland at Literary Review here.

No one knows what the future of the music business will look like, but the near future of listening to music looks a lot like 1960. People will listen, for free, to music that comes out of a stationary box that sits indoors. They’ll listen to music that comes from an object that fits in the hand, and they’ll listen to music in the car. That box was once a radio or a stereo; now it’s a computer. The handheld device that was once a plastic AM radio is now likely to be a smart phone. The car is still a car, though its stereo now plays satellite radio and MP3s. But behind the similarities is a series of subtle shifts in software and portability that may relocate the experience of listening—even if nobody has come close to replacing the concept of the radio d.j., whose job lingers as a template for much software. “Of the twenty hours a week that an average American spends listening to music, only three of it is stuff you own. The rest is radio,” Tim Westergren told me. Westergren is the founder of Pandora, one of several firms that have brought the radio model to the Internet.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

Hopper carried a unique wound from childhood. At age 6, early in World War II, he was told that his father had been killed: This was a deliberate lie for security purposes (his dad was an agent in the OSS, forerunner of the CIA); only his mother knew the truth. The agony of that loss, followed by the trauma of discovering the lie, left him with a lifelong mistrust of both women, and male authority. Small wonder Dean’s passion for honesty mattered so much to him. Small wonder that after his friend’s sudden death, Hopper fought director Henry Hathaway on From Hell to Texas (1958), running up a legendary 87 takes of a simple bit on the last day of principal photography and derailing what had been a highly promising mainstream acting career. Small wonder that when he came back in triumph with Easy Rider in 1969, he burnt this success to the ground with his next directorial effort, The Last Movie (1971). As if having crushed every other authority he could rebel against, he rebelled against himself — embracing exile once again on the margins of the mainstream, where the pressures were entirely internal. Finally — considering how these agonies had piled onto one another by the time he was pushing 50 — it is no wonder that his most symphonic on-screen performance should be as Frank Booth, the baby-talking, stimulants-happy killer and misogynist at the dark heart of Blue Velvet (1986). Hopper’s greatness in this role is that he enacts every terrible impulse in a man — from murder to sexual assault, from fascist crocodile tears to infantile self-pity — and owns these repugnant furies from the inside, with the naked honesty of an artist who is actually free of them for the first time. The film itself marked his survival, and the definitive rebirth of Hopper’s career.

more from F.x. Feeney at the LA Weekly here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

Why are palindromes so far down on the hierarchy of literary genres? Roughly speaking, they seem to stand at the same distance from the rigorous formal experiments of an author like Georges Perec as bawdy limericks stand to Shakespeare's sonnets. This may be due to their own inherent tendency towards bawdiness, which I think can be explained by the fact that one must make use of concise, monosyllabic grunt-like words, and these words tend, at least in English, to be both part of our core Anglo-Saxon heritage, and generally to denote less than lofty things.

At the same time, the formal restrictions imposed in palindromy do exactly what Perec's did, exactly what makes restrictive rules of composition interesting: they force you up to the boundary of meaninglessness, and so challenge you to find that acceptable level of near-nonsense that nonetheless seems to say something.

To speak for a moment not of palindromy but of homonymy, years ago I heard the spoken sentence, “A strict syntax limits semantics,” but understood by this that “A strict sin tax limits some antics.” As it happens, both are true. Now I think orthography is a sub-syntactic feature of sentences (perhaps someone can fill me in here), but the principle is the same: it limits the range of things that can be said.

More here.

From the website of NPR:

Edward Tufte has a big backyard that stretches for hundreds of acres near Cheshire, Conn. Over the years, he's filled that space with giant metal sculptures as big as the trees.

“I think it was Richard Serra who said that the market for big, outdoor landscape pieces is like the market for Canadian experimental poetry,” he says. “So I can never be accused of being market-driven in the art world.”

Tufte is an accomplished grand-scale sculptor, but he is perhaps more famous for making charts, graphs and diagrams beautiful. He's been called the “DaVinci of Design” and the “Minister of Information.” His books — with titles like The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — are widely read by Web architects, scientists and basically anyone else who's interested in presenting data creatively and clearly.

And, the new edition of Microsoft Office will include a Tufte creation: the “sparkline.” It's a small graphic, the size of two short words, which can be embedded in text to depict stock markets or baseball stats.

If that weren't enough, Tufte has also been recruited by the White House to join the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, to advise and devise ways to track how the $787 billion stimulus package is being spent.

More here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Dawn:

The Israeli bulldozer that crushed Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old American-Jewish pro-Palestinian activist, stands ever-ready to crush challenges to absolute Israeli supremacy. That the peace flotilla was attacked in international waters, and that a Hamas leader was murdered by the Mossad in Dubai, send identical messages: Israel knows no boundaries.

With such a bloody-minded adversary, none of the 700-plus persons on the six peace boats had illusions of a pleasure cruise. Nevertheless, they probably felt reasonably secure. After all, the world was watching — on board was a Holocaust survivor, white-as-lilies members of parliament from European countries, and even a six-month baby of unknown colour and descent.

So, even discounting those from Muslim countries, including three from Pakistan, the constellation of those calling for an end to Gaza’s blockade was impressive. The hope of a violence-free ending was reasonable. But that did not happen.

Why did Israel choose to murder nine peace-seeking foreigners in broad daylight? Although it claims otherwise, this had little to do with “restoring Israel’s deterrence” or capping the peashooters in Gaza. Instead, one must listen to Moshe Yaalon, then chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, who said in 2002 that “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people”. By massacring the Mavi Marmara’s activists — whose names and religion are still unknown — Israel wants Gazans to know that even the international community cannot save them.

More here.

Splinter
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''
I like you, a twenty-year-old poet writes to me.
A beginning carpenter of words.

His letter smells of lumber.
His muse still sleeps in rosewood.

Ambitious noise in a literary sawmill.
Apprentices veneering a gullible tongue.

They cut to size the shy plywood of sentences.
A haiku whittled with a plane.

Problems begin
with a splinter lodged in memory.

It is hard to remove
much harder to describe.

Wood shavings fly. The apple cores of angels.
Dust up to the heavens.

by Ewa Lipska
translation by Robin Davidson & Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska
from The New Century
Northwestern University Press, 2009

From Salon:

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books. According to USA Today, another study, to be published later this year in the journal Reading Psychology, found that simply giving low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation “may be as effective as summer school” in preventing “summer slide” — the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year. An experimental, federally funded program based on this research will be expanded to eight states this summer, aiming to give away 1.5 million books to disadvantaged kids.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the USA Today article comes at the very end, where one Chicago schoolteacher tells the reporter that the importance of getting books into the house “seems so simple, but parents see it differently.” They're as “excited” as their kids are when the books come in the door. It's not that the parents are hostile or even indifferent to books. Most likely, books and reading feel like the privilege and practice of an unfamiliar world: a resource that's out there somewhere, but not entirely accessible.

More here.

From American Scientist:

The basic argument of intelligent design was famously set forth in the watchmaker analogy of William Paley in 1802: The complexity and functionality of a watch imply a watchmaker; analogously, the complexity and functionality of living things also imply a designer, albeit one vastly more potent than a mere watchmaker. This argument rests on a simple analogy between the design of human artifacts and the design of natural forms. For the analogy to work, we must first accept that we design our inventions with purpose and foresight. On this point, most evolutionists and creationists agree. What distinguishes these two camps is that, when accounting for the origin of living things, proponents of intelligent design summon a divine creator, whereas evolutionists credit natural selection. Thus, evolutionists share with creationists the same understanding of design; they differ only in how they invoke it.

Discussions of design are prominent in the writings of evolutionists from Darwin to Dawkins. Pondering the implications of his theory of natural selection for Paley’s “old argument of design in nature,” Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography that we can no longer argue that “the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.” A century later, Richard Dawkins pursued the issue of design and divided the world “into things that look designed (such as birds and airliners) and things that don’t (rocks and mountains).” He further divided those things that look designed into “those that really are designed (submarines and tin openers) and those that aren’t (sharks and hedgehogs).”

More here.

From the archives of the NYRB:

It is, of course, sheer folly to imagine that one can pass judgments which are either accurate or just upon poems written in a language which one does not know.

Irrespective of their relative merits, some poets lose less in translation than others. Even in the crudest prose translation a non-Italian reader can immediately recognize that Dante is a great poet, because much of the impact of his poetry depends upon his use of similes and metaphors drawn from sensory experiences which are not confined to Italians but common to all peoples, and upon his gift for aphoristic statements expressed in the simplest everyday words for which every language has a more or less exact equivalent: e.g., “That day we read in it no further.”

Translation also favors poets like Hölderlin and Smart, who were dotty; for their dislocation of normal processes of thinking are the result of their dottiness, not their language, and sound equally surprising in any: e.g., “…now the heroes are dead, the islands of Love are almost disfigured. Thus everywhere must Love be tricked and exploited, silly.”

A poet like Campion, on the other hand, whose principal concern is with the sound of words and their metrical and rhythmical relations, cannot be translated at all. Take away the English language in which his songs were written, and all that remains are a few banal sentiments.

The most notorious case of an untranslatable poet is Pushkin. Russians are unanimous in regarding him as their greatest poet, but I have yet to read a translation which, if I did not know this, would lead me to suppose that his poems had any merit whatsoever.

Complete ignorance, however, is perhaps less likely to lead one’s critical judgment astray than a smattering of a language. Ignorance at least knows it does not know. When one recalls the fantastic overestimation of Ossian by the German Romantics or of Poe by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, one thinks twice before expressing enthusiasm for a foreign poet.

IN THE CASE OF Mr. Voznesensky, at least I know that he is greatly admired by many of his fellow countrymen, and, after reading literal prose translations of his poems, studying metrical models, and listening to tape-recordings of him reading his own work, I am convinced that his admirers are right.

Rachel Shabi in The Guardian:

The Israeli government has been forced to apologise for circulating a spoof video mocking activists aboard the Gaza flotilla, nine of who were shot dead by Israeli forces last week.

The YouTube clip, set to the tune of the 1985 charity single We Are the World, features Israelis dressed as Arabs and activists, waving weapons while singing: “We con the world, we con the people. We’ll make them all believe the IDF (Israel Defence Force) is Jack the Ripper.”

It continues: “There’s no people dying, so the best that we can do is create the biggest bluff of all.”

The Israeli government press office distributed the video link to foreign journalists at the weekend, but within hours emailed them an apology, saying it had been an error. Press office director Danny Seaman said the video did not reflect official state opinion, but in his personal capacity he thought it was “fantastic”.

Government spokesman Mark Regev said the video reflected how Israelis felt about the incident. “I called my kids in to watch it because I thought it was funny,” he said. “It is what Israelis feel. But the government has nothing to do with it.”

More here.  Decide for yourself whether you think it’s funny:

Hello,

The voting round of our science prize (details here) is over. A total of 1475 votes were cast for the 80 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a “trophy” logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own sites. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Rangle: The Science Education with makeshift equipment
2. Facto Diem: Prime Years of Life
3. Mental Floss: Everybody Hurts (Even Crabs)
4. Bad Astronomy: A lunar illusion you'll flip over
5. Daylight Atheism: A Sense of Kinship
6. The Primate Diaries: Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play to Reaping an Unjust Reward
7. University of Oxford Science Blog: Oxford and the Royal Society's Origins
8. Health Net Navigation: Reflections of Med 2.0 Conference
9. My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts
10. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
11. 3 Quarks Daily: The [Non-] Theory of Psychological Testing
12. Scientific Chick: Cell phones: Curing brain diseases since 2010
13. Scientific Blogging: MSL: Mars Action Hero
14. Professor Astronomy: In Defense of Wasteful Science
15. Neurotopia: The Hyena Mating Game
16. The Language of Bad Physics: The Language of Science – it's “just a theory”
17. The Thoughtful Animal: Does oral sex confer an evolutionary advantage? Evidence from bats
18. Observations of a Nerd: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs
19. 3 Quarks Daily: Sigmund Freud – “A Dream of Undying Fame”
20. A Schooner of Science: Chemistry of Kissing

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Richard Dawkins on June 11. We will also post the list of finalists here on that date.

Good luck!

Abbas

So, Alyosha, Maybe it's True
…………………..
So, Alyosha, maybe it is true
that we live in perhaps.
Perhaps the earth . . . perhaps the sky . . .
chemical winds, auroras, tides,
chalk hills and blistered pines
and the microtonal bells.

And those who swallow ink
(the ringers of bells),
perhaps they will inherit
the bogs and salt marshes,
the swamp grass and samphire,
jacket with torn pockets, shredded cuffs.

Will inherit the sea-foam, the dust,
the ferrous mud
that reabsorbs us.

by Michael Palmer
from Thread
Publisher: New Directions, New York,
forthcoming

From The Telegraph:

In mid-October 2008, when it looked like the presidency might really be within Barack Obama’s grasp, some campaign workers resorted to desperate last-minute tactics. Faced with a prospective voter in Nevada who said she didn’t trust black people, a young Obama volunteer replied: “One thing you have to remember is that Obama, he’s half white and he was raised by his white mother. So his views are more white than black really.”

At the time, it seemed profoundly depressing that such means of persuasion were necessary. After all, those views had been used by people on the other side of the racial divide, too – “just because you are our colour doesn’t make you our kind”, the civil rights activist Al Sharpton had said. Now, perhaps, it’s possible to see that sentiment as an important part of who Obama is: not just the first African American president of the United States but, as David Remnick puts it in The Bridge, “the first President who reflect[s] the variousness of American life”, a “shape-shifter” who had to “fashion an identity in a prolonged and complicated way”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:

1) Would it be safe during the “interactive discussions” for someone to mention the new evidence supporting Dr. Summers’s controversial hypothesis about differences in the sexes’ aptitude for math and science?

2) How could these workshops reconcile the “existence of gender bias” with careful studies that show that female scientists fare as well as, if not better than, their male counterparts in receiving academic promotions and research grants?

Each of these questions is complicated enough to warrant a column, so I’ll take them one at a time, starting this week with the issue of sex differences. When Dr. Summers raised the issue to fellow economists and other researchers at a conference in 2005, his hypothesis was caricatured in the press as a revival of the old notion that “girls can’t do math.” But Dr. Summers said no such thing. He acknowledged that there were many talented female scientists and discussed ways to eliminate the social barriers they faced. Yet even if all these social factors were eliminated, he hypothesized, the science faculty composition at an elite school like Harvard might still be skewed by a biological factor: the greater variability observed among men in intelligence test scores and various traits. Men and women might, on average, have equal mathematical ability, but there could still be disproportionately more men with very low or very high scores. These extremes often don’t matter much because relatively few people are involved, leaving the bulk of men and women clustered around the middle. But a tenured physicist at a leading university, Dr. Summers suggested, might well need skills and traits found in only one person in 10,000: the top 0.01 percent of the population, a tiny group that would presumably include more men because it’s at the extreme right tail of the distribution curve.

“I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong,” Dr. Summers told the economists, expressing the hope that gender imbalances could be rectified simply by eliminating social barriers. But he added, “My guess is that there are some very deep forces here that are going to be with us for a long time.”

More here.