“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.

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.)

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 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)

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.

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. . .”

“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.

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 Frederick 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 . . .”

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.)

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.