clever men from australia

Things I Didn’t Know – it’s an unexpected title for a memoir by Robert Hughes, a man who has long seemed to have a handle on pretty much everything. You want to understand the links between post-Einsteinian physics and cubism, between the dream of socialism and the dread of tower blocks? Read The Shock of the New. Need a socio-cultural history of the US? Read American Visions and Culture of Complaint. In his latest book, Hughes is hard on his first – though, four decades since The Art of Australia was published, it remains obstinately in print. So, too, The Fatal Shore, Hughes’s unimpeachable 20-year-old history of Britain’s transportation of convicts to his home country. Add to the list his near- encyclopaedic books on Barcelona, Goya and eschatological iconography (Heaven and Hell in Western Art), as well as his primer on marine ecology (A Jerk on One End), and you are left with a short list of things that this Argus-eyed Aussie might not know.

more from The New Statesman here.



debating with string

Twine

The essence of string theory is a literal assertion: Elementary ­particles—­electrons, photons, quarks, and their numerous ­cousins—­are not ­point­like objects but “strings” of energy forming tiny, wiggly loops. If a stringy loop vibrates one way, it manifests itself as an electron. If it shimmies some other way, it looks like a quark. Wacky as this idea may sound, there are good reasons why physicists so fervently embraced it. Smolin, the more elegant writer, is far better at conveying the conceptual import of physical theorizing with a minimum of technical detail. Neither book, though, is easy reading for the ­uninitiated.

To put it very briefly, what turned interest in string theory from an oddball enthusiasm to a mainstream occupation was a twofold realization that came in 1984. That’s when two of the early string pioneers, John Schwarz of Caltech and Michael Green, who was based in London, published a paper showing that just a handful of possible string theories were free of mathematical inconsistencies that plagued tradi­tional ­particle-­based models, and also had sufficient capacity (the number and variety of internal vibrations, roughly speaking) to accom­modate all the known elementary particles and their interactions. There was one little difficulty: The systems these theories described existed only in 10 ­dimensions.

more from the Wilson Quarterly here.

Human History in a Hurry

From FogCityJournal.com:

Suppose that an alien comes into orbit around our planet, and requests that a single human come aboard and in less than one hour brief the alien about the human history of planet earth. Here is Human History in a Hurry…

5×10^9 (about 5 billion years ago) – a supernova explosion just 1 light year away from the solar nebula sends a massive shockwave into the solar/planetary disc, resulting in a large number of planets (about 10, more at first in unstable orbits). Shortly thereafter one of these protoplanets crashes into the early earth, and like a billiard ball hit on its side, the collision produces a rapidly spinning earth, setting the stage for the evolution of a biphasic (waking and sleeping) system of learning, two time zones ahead.

5×10^8 (about 500 million years ago) – the first fish, our veterbrate ancestors.

5×10^7 (about 50 million years ago) – the first monkeys, beginning the brainbranch of evolution with a prominent cerebral cortex equipped with a biphasic/circadian system with its continuous interaction of learning from the waking state, reorganized during sleep. (LB now gives the alien a copy of the theory of learning, published by the University of Chicago Press, in 1969, when the first humans were landing on the moon. The moon is the result of collision described at 5×10^9.)

5×10^6 (about 5 million years ago) – the first humans, the big brained biped.

5×10^5 (about 500,000 years ago) – the first helpless offspring, for at least 5 years. The pelvic outlet within the hips of the human female can get no bigger, due to biomechanical restrictions for walking and especially for running. For the first time in evolution, there is huge brain growth after birth, inside the cranium of the helpless neonate/infant/toddler.

More here.

Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love

Opfer_1

In 1919, the novelist and critic Waldo Frank published “Our America,” a manifesto for a new generation of American artists. Surveying the cultural situation of the United States, on the brink of what already looked to be the American century, Frank saw “an untracked wilderness but dimly blazed by the heroic ax of Whitman.” Yet a new generation of trailblazers, he thought, was about to emerge from the complacent materialism of postwar America. Writers like Sherwood Anderson and Van Wyck Brooks—along with masters of new genres like Alfred Stieglitz and even Charlie Chaplin—promised not simply to create a modern art but to renew the spirit of the country: “In this infancy of our adventure, America is a mystic Word. We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her.”

“Our America” was an intellectual sensation, going through three editions in its first six months. None of Frank’s readers, however, rose more eagerly to his challenge than twenty-year-old Hart Crane, working behind the candy counter of a drugstore in Akron, Ohio.

more from the New Yorker here.

The Man Time Forgot

From Time:

Hadden1005 TIME has always been regarded as the brainchild of founder Henry Luce. But is it possible that Britton Hadden, the co-founder of TIME, who died in 1929 at the age of 31, was actually more influential in the creation of the magazine than Luce? That’s the contention of Isaiah Wilner, 28, the author of the newly published The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine (HarperCollins). In writing his book, Wilner was given full access to Time Inc.’s voluminous archives. TIME’s publishing reporter, Andrea Sachs, spoke with Wilner:

TIME: How did you decide to write this book?

Wilner: Back when I was at the Yale Daily News, I used to work every night beneath this portrait of Britton Hadden, and it was a very mysterious picture. He had almost a Mona Lisa smile. So I started wondering about who he was. I began reading his old editorials in the bound volumes of the Yale Daily News, and his style in those old papers sounded just like the early voice of TIME. It was very flip, brash, clever, a lot of short sentences. It was full of energy. That’s when I started thinking much more seriously about the plaque in the building’s lobby, which has Britton Hadden’s name and the inscription: “His genius created a new form of journalism.” I began to think, if this were the case, how come I’d never heard of him?

More here.

Selfish Impulse Set Free by Magnetic Pulse to Brain

From Scientific American:Impulse_2

The ultimatum game brings out conflicting impulses in human beings. In the game, a researcher offers two players a set amount of money and explains that if they agree on how to divvy it up they will keep that money for themselves. If they don’t, neither will get anything. One player then offers the other a split. Our thirst for fairness dictates that most players will reject a patently unfair division–such as offering only $4 out of a total of $20. Yet, self interest would argue that even $4 is better than nothing, which is what will otherwise result. Brain imaging studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex is engaged when players ponder an offer and now new research finds that damping down activity in that region can set free our selfish side.

More here.

Hacking Diebold Voting Machines

John Allen Paulos in his Who’s Counting column at ABC News:

Jap_2Elections and electronic voting machines invite consideration of the following thought experiment. You go to your local voting station, walk into the booth, pull the curtain, and see a well-dressed man standing inside with a little note pad. He asks whom you’re voting for, appears to record what you say in his note pad, tells you he’ll add your vote to his running total, thanks you, and asks you to send the next voter into the booth.

Whatever objections you have to this voting scenario should be reserved for the more familiar one involving Diebold and other voting machines. It’s long been known that electronic machines run proprietary software and don’t keep paper records of the votes cast. Similarly, the man in the voting booth also runs proprietary “mental software” whose commitment to honesty we have no way of ascertaining and simply supplies us with the vote total at the end of the day. He’s probably honest and careful and, since he seems to be taking notes, his total is likely to be accurate, but would you trust such a voting system?

More here.

Ig Nobel prizes hail ‘digital rectal massage’

Jeff Hecht in New Scientist:

Ig20nobel“I have always hoped to win a real Nobel prize for medicine,” Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine told New Scientist. Nevertheless, he settled for the Ig Nobel prize in medicine instead, handed out along with nine other Ig Nobel prizes in a Thursday evening ceremony at Harvard University in Massachusetts, US.

It might be some consolation to note that a real Nobel prize winner was pushing a broom on stage to sweep away the paper airplanes traditionally thrown by the audience. The Annals of Improbable Research, which produces the Ig Nobel ceremony, points out that the 10 years that Harvard physicist Roy Glauber has spent sweeping the stage did not affect his selection as a physics laureate in 2005.

Fesmire, a specialist in emergency medicine and cardiology, probably did not have a real Nobel in mind when he published “Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage” in Annals of Emergency Medicine (vol 17, p 872). He was, it transpires, attempting to help a man who walked into the emergency room after hiccuping for 72 hours at up to 30 times a minute.

More here.

A Nobel Prize for The Shadow Network

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Tobacco20virus_1This morning it was announced that two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and or Medicine, for their 1998 discovery of a hidden network of genes. It may seem odd that a network of genes could lurk undiscovered for so long. But the cell is very much a mysterious place. In the 1950s, scientists established the basic model for how genes work. A gene is made of DNA, the cell makes a single-stranded copy of a gene in a molecule called RNA, and it then uses the RNA as a template for building a protein. This so-called Central Dogma proved to be correct for many thousands of genes, but not all of them. In many cases, a gene’s RNA is not a mere messenger. It grabs onto other RNA molecules or proteins, and carries out some important chemistry of its own.

More here.

Books@Google

Jason Epstein in the New York Review of Books:

In 1998 two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded Google.com, a search engine that uses a better technology than had previously existed for indexing and retrieving information from the immense miscellany of the World Wide Web and for ranking the Web sites that contain this information according to their relevance to particular queries based on the number of links from the rest of the Internet to a given item. This PageRank system transformed the Web from its original purpose as a scientists’ grapevine and from the random babble it soon became a searchable resource providing factual data of variable quality to millions of users. And once again it was the exigencies of commerce that transformed Google itself from an ingenious search technology without a business plan to a hugely profitable enterprise offering a variety of services including e-mail, news, video, maps, and its current, expensive, and utterly heroic, if not quixotic, effort to digitize the public domain contents of the books and other holdings of major libraries. This new program would provide users wherever in the world Internet connections exist access to millions of titles while enabling libraries themselves to serve millions of users without adding a foot of shelf space or incurring a penny of delivery expense.

Spurred by Google’s initiative and by the lower costs, higher profits, and immense reach of unmediated digital distribution, book publishers and other copyright holders must at last overcome their historic inertia and agree, like music publishers, to market their proprietary titles in digital form either to be read on line or, more likely, to be printed on demand at point of sale, in either case for a fee equal to the publishers’ normal costs and profit and the authors’ contractual royalty, thus for the first time in human history creating the theoretical possibility that every book ever printed in whatever language will be available to everyone on earth with access to the Internet.

More here.

Thursday, October 5, 2006

The Psychic Appeal of Manual Work

Matthew B. Crawford in The New Atlantis:

I began working as an electrician’s helper at age fourteen, and started a small electrical contracting business after college, in Santa Barbara. In those years I never ceased to take pleasure in the moment, at the end of a job, when I would flip the switch. “And there was light.” It was an experience of agency and competence. The effects of my work were visible for all to see, so my competence was real for others as well; it had a social currency. The well-founded pride of the tradesman is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

I was sometimes quieted at the sight of a gang of conduit entering a large panel in a commercial setting, bent into nestled, flowing curves, with varying offsets, that somehow all terminated in the same plane. This was a skill so far beyond my abilities that I felt I was in the presence of some genius, and the man who bent that conduit surely imagined this moment of recognition as he worked. As a residential electrician, most of my work got covered up inside walls. Yet even so, there is pride in meeting the aesthetic demands of a workmanlike installation. Maybe another electrician will see it someday.

More here.

radio

“—science per se—”
my God, when I hear them on the radio saying that,
it slays me.
Is there a science that’s not per se?
I don’t get out much, rarely get to see any lakes,
gardens only sporadically and then behind fences,
or in allotments, that’s about the size of it,
I rely on ersatz:
radio, newspaper, magazines—
so how can people say such things to me?

more from Gottfried Benn’s “Radio” at Poetry Magazine here.

an enigmatic portrait of that old enigma, Thomas Hardy

Angier_10_06

Let’s get the obvious question out of the way: do we need another biography of Thomas Hardy? Yes, we do. First of all, because Hardy is one of the most mysterious writers in English literature; and second of all, because this one is by Claire Tomalin, who always brings an acute and original intelligence to bear. Here she ranges herself with the calmer Hardy scholars, Michael Millgate in particular: no evidence for an affair with his cousin Tryphena, for example, or for a family model for Tess. She mops our brows, too, about Hardy’s famous response to seeing a woman hanged. Did he find her still an attractive woman at the point of death? ‘Only too likely, surely, but hardly culpable’; merely expressing the painful truth that she was young and beautiful, and at the same time dead.

more from Literary Review here.

one muslim, one jew

Goldbergcoverc

Jeffrey Goldberg’s wonderful new book, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide, opens with a scene worthy of Graham Greene. “On the morning of the fine spring day, full of sunshine, that ended with my arrest in Gaza, I woke early from an uneven sleep, dressed, and pushed back to its proper place the desk meant to barricade the door of my hotel room,” he writes. It was six months into the second Intifada, and Mr. Goldberg (no relation) was on assignment for The New Yorker. After breakfast with an “unhappy terrorist” with a penchant for Russian literature and a visit to the freshly bombed base of Yasir Arafat’s personal bodyguard unit, he repaired to a café. There, he was seized by gunmen from one of Gaza’s security services—he couldn’t determine which one—and accused of being an Israeli spy.

more from The NY Observer here.

the universe is one gigantic swirling vortex of vomit

Lovecraftandfelis

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Talesand Amazing Stories, “where…they ought to have been left.”[1] Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult— there is no other word—that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

Since then, though, for a writer who depended entirely on the meager sustenance of the pulps and whose brief career brought him sometimes to the brink of actual starvation, whose work did not appear in book form during his lifetime (apart from two slender volumes, each of a single story, published by fans) and did not attract the attention of serious critics before his death in 1937, Lovecraft has had quite an afterlife. His influence has been far-reaching and, in the last thirty or forty years, continually on the increase, if often in extraliterary ways.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

The Mathematized Natural World, Women and the Sciences

In the New York Times, Margaret Wertheim, author of Pythagoras’ Trousers, on math and physics in Western culture and its implications for women in the sciences.

Pythagoras introduced numbers into this mix and put them on the male side of the ledger. In the Pythagorean system, thinking about numbers, or doing mathematics, was an inherently masculine task. Mathematics was associated with the gods, and with transcendence from the material world; women, by their nature, were supposedly rooted in this latter, baser realm…

The Pythagorean association of mathematics with transcendence was easily imported into a Christian context, giving rise to the idea of the Judeo-Christian god as a mathematical creator. When Stephen Hawking links a theory of everything to the mind of god today, he is reiterating an essentially Pythagorean view. But this godly-mathematical connection also sat easily with the Catholic tradition of a male-only priesthood. Thus, from the start, women were excluded from this academic field and its associated sciences…

Many women who have gone into science since the 1970’s continue to be stunned at how slow change has been. Gail G. Hanson, distinguished professor of physics at the University of California, Riverside, and the only woman to have won the W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in experimental particle physics, said by phone: “At this point there seems to be an acceptance of women in science at relatively junior levels. But once we get to more senior levels, a kind of antagonism sets in.”

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Dr. Hanson discovered quark jets, the work for which she would later be awarded the Panofsky Prize. Yet throughout her research career, she said, she has continued to be treated like a junior colleague, not like a leading researcher.

Amnesty Appeals for the Lives of Seven Iranian Women

Via Lindsay Beyerstein, Amnesty urgently appeals to its members and concerned people to write to the Iranian government in regard to this impending stoning of seven women in Iran.

Amnesty International has issued an urgent appeal calling on its members to write letters to the Republic of Iran asking them not to stone seven women.

Nearly all of the women have been sentenced to die by stoning for adultery. Officially Iran had placed a moratorium on the cruel and painful practise in 2002, but Amnesty claims sentencing continues. The group has received credible reports that two people were stoned to death in May.

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has ruled that treating adultery and fornication as criminal offences does not comply with international human rights standards.

“The sentence of execution by stoning for adultery breaches Iran’s commitment under article 6(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that death sentences will be imposed ‘only for the most serious crimes’,” Amnesty wrote in its appeal.

Under Shari’a law, a prisoner is buried up to her breast, her hands restrained. Rules also specify the size of the stones which can be thrown so that death is painful and not imminent. Both men and women can be sentenced to die by stoning.

Ali Eteraz has some suggestions for action and a template letter to Iran’s Minister of Justice.

Executive Unbound

And in Reason Online, more on the Military Commission Act.

The new trial procedures, though problematic in some ways, are a clear improvement over the Bush administration’s original rules, which the Supreme Court overturned because they were not authorized by Congress. But these protections are available only to the detainees the government decides to try. The rest, including the vast majority of current detainees, can be imprisoned indefinitely based on the findings of Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which perfunctorily confirm the government’s detention decisions.

The Military Commissions Act does not seem to require even this pro forma review. It says an “unlawful enemy combatant” is a person who is not part of a country’s uniformed armed forces but “who has engaged in hostilities or has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.” It does not say who makes that determination or what evidence, if any, is required.

Alternatively, an unlawful enemy combatant is anyone so labeled by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, which can apply its own definition. The act apparently would permit a tribunal to decide a detainee must be an unlawful enemy combatant because he’s named Muhammad or because he has a beard.

The law bars detainees who are not U.S. citizens from challenging their detention in federal court, so they have no legal recourse outside the executive branch. The government can arrest “aliens,” including legal visitors and residents, and hold them indefinitely, based on nothing more than the president’s unilateral determination that they qualify as unlawful enemy combatants.

To recognize the danger of giving the executive branch this kind of unreviewable power, you need look no further than the men sent to Guantanamo Bay because they were falsely identified as Al Qaeda or Taliban hangers-on by Afghan warlords hungry for bounty money.

The Consequences of the Military Commission Act

Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights in The Nation:

Twice in the past five years the Supreme Court has insisted that habeas corpus applies to these prisoners and ruled that the Bush Administration must apply the law. Yet last week Congress buckled in the face of election-year rhetoric about “terrorism” from the White House and passed new legislation denying our clients the right to challenge their detentions, or even to see the evidence against them. While I’m convinced that this law will not stand in court, we are still facing at least a year of challenges before it is declared unconstitutional.

ut it is not only our clients who are in jeopardy under this new legislation. Americans need to remember the sweeps and mass detentions after September 11, 2001, when thousands of noncitizens were rounded up and treated as terrorists–which none of them turned out to be. Habeas corpus was their remedy; they could go to court and force the Administration to justify their detentions. Now noncitizens can be rounded up, detained forever and never get their case into a court.

And yet, even more sadly, the tossing aside of habeas corpus was only one of the draconian features of the Military Commission Act.

Another nasty piece of the legislation authorizes the President, on his own authority, to detain anyone, citizen or noncitizen, anywhere in the world, whom he deems to be an “unlawful enemy combatant.” The definition of that term is broadly worded and would allow the President to imprison almost anyone.

If you are unlucky enough to be a noncitizen and the President detains you as an unlawful enemy combatant, you can never test the legality of your detention in court because habeas corpus has been abolished. You are there forever… or until the President changes his mind. If you are lucky enough to be a citizen, your habeas rights will not get you out quickly: The President can now detain any citizen he chooses, without charges, simply by declaring that the prisoner is an enemy combatant.

Talk Talk

From The Atlantic Monthly:

Boyle The battle between the sexes continues unabated in T. C. Boyle’s latest novel. Decked out as a thriller — complete with a heroine thirsting for justice, a wily villain scrambling to stay one step ahead, cross-country chases, and close escapes — it is also another T. C. Boyle story of relationships gone awry, of strong women and the slightly awestruck men who orbit them. (The eternal mystery of Woman has always fascinated Boyle; most of his novels exalt females as somehow more-than-human presences who dwell among lesser, mortal males.)

The strong woman in question this time around is a deaf English teacher with a brittle personality, a chip on her shoulder, and a formidable will. Unlike most Boyle heroines, she’s not very likable, but she does elicit a certain grudging respect. (Her sidekick/boyfriend, an affable nonentity, serves mainly as a foil.) The real star is her nemesis, a slick crook building a career as an identity thief. By turns conciliatory and vengeful, doting and irresponsible, debonair and crude, he steals her identity and your sympathy; when their paths finally cross, you’re rooting for them both.

More here.