Dylan Evans in The Guardian:

It all started with Stephen Hawking, whose first popular book, A Brief History of Time, hit the bookshops in 1988. Very soon, others (myself included) jumped on the bandwagon, and popular science soon gained its own section in many bookshops.

With the boom, inevitably, there came a torrent of rubbish. The stylistic innovations of the trendsetters soon became, in the hands of the disciples, stale recipes, recycled over and over in formulaic and uninspiring ways. Even the titles began to seem repetitive: The Panda’s Thumb, Galileo’s Finger, Einstein’s Brain … What a pity nobody had the chutzpah to write a book about Newton’s penis.

A decade and a half later, there are signs that the popular science boom is running out of steam.

More here.

Alan Boyle reports for MSNBC:

You’d think explaining the beginnings of the universe would be enough for astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. But no: In “Origins,” a new book and public-TV miniseries, the director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium goes beyond the Big Bang to take on the rise of the solar system, life and intelligence as well. Any one of those subjects is worthy of being covered in a documentary series at least as ambitious as “Origins,” which premieres Tuesday and Wednesday on PBS. And indeed they have been, in productions ranging from “Evolution” to “Life Beyond Earth” to the granddaddy of them all, Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos.”

So why is Tyson tying all these cosmic subjects together in a four-hour package? He says that’s the very point he’s trying to bring home. “Only in the last five years have there been the right kinds of advances in the right kinds of fields to be able to do a miniseries on origins,” he told MSNBC.com. “This is ‘Origins’ with a big O, so it’s not just origins of human beings. This is origins of the whole shebang.” Tyson shows how scientists are blending astrophysics, geology, chemistry, biology and even paleontology to knit together insights about the structure of the universe, the creation of planets and the foundations of life itself.

Read more here.

One of the most consistently interesting and eccentric arts collectives in New York City is called The Flux Factory. Headed by the polymathic Morgan Meis, Flux comprises a large gang of diversely talented artists who, in addition to regularly putting up beautifully-curated shows in their own space (a former factory), have graced the city with lovely thought-provoking performances and happenings. Some of my favorites have been: Counter Culture, The Impossible Tea Party, and Classics on Tape. Their recent curated shows have included: Absolute Zero Nowhere, Cute and Scary, What the Book?, and the edible exhibit, All You Can Art.

[Disclosure: Morgan is a 3 Quarks Daily editor, and I am on the advisory board of Flux.]

Holland Cotter writes on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Arts Section:

Maybe because Queens has no cultural center – or rather because it has several, but spread miles apart – it has become the home of many of those self-created communities known as artists’ collectives. One, Flux Factory, occupies a floor in a converted factory in Long Island City, an environment that feels a little like a cross between a youth hostel and a space station.

Much of their work is conceptual and performance based, as was the case in a three-month residency they did a few years ago at the Queens Museum of Art. Wearing bright orange coveralls, they clocked in every morning and more or less made up their work as they went. They began with an empty gallery and continually modified the space with gridlike screens and temporary barriers while doing their own projects: making collages, tabulating statistics, building contraptions. The result was a single installation, an accumulation of accumulations, a combination of theater, child’s play and ritual, a Rube Goldbergian version of everyday life.

This May they will present “Novel: A Living Installation Flux Factory,” in which three novelists – Laurie Stone, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Baille – will live on-site, dining together, giving weekly public readings and trying to complete their novels by June 4. The point? To present the act of writing as both the private activity and audience-conscious public performance that it is. To suggest that art is always an activity as much as a product, and that any activity can be art. And to remind us that all of art’s sacred-cow concepts – creativity, inspiration, solitary genius – are fit subjects for laboratory testing.

Read the full article here. Morgan published a delightful piece in Harper’s Magazine about their 3-month project at the Queens Museum of Art entitled “The Devil’s Work,” which you can, and should, read here. Finally, Flux is known for their amazing parties, and there is one tonight: Flux Valley High’s Prom Night. If you live in NYC, come by. Oh, and for more information, here is the Flux Factory website.

Pierogi, 2000, now just Pierogi gallery, has been in Williamsburg, New York for ten years. Hard to imagine for anyone who has watched the surprising, often ridiculous, always dynamic, transformation of Williamsburg from toxic wasteland to still basically toxic hipster Mecca. Here’s Francis Richard from Artforum.

So where are the next alternatives, and what will happen as the Williamsburg generation ages? One might as well ask where a new politics will come from, or what if Mayor Bloomberg’s administration really does replace the East River–side waste-transfer station with promised green space? As Ji warns, “The gallery is ongoing. It’s not history, and it’s dangerous to make a summary. Pierogi is very well positioned; its strength is that it’s close to the community and has people who understand the art-making process and have good eyes.” In other words, it’s the conversation that will keep Pierogi and its environs vital. “The space was designed to be primarily a forum for exchange, and it has kept that quality even as it has evolved,” says another artist, Daniel Zeller. “One feels this upon entering—it’s high-minded without feeling that way. Pierogi is a place where art is the most important thing in the world, but not as important as the people who get to experience it, make it, and talk about it.” Check back in ten years.

Every year at about this time fancy-pantses from around the world pay 1000 bucks or so for the right to roam around the Armory and buy art. As Holland Cotter from the New York Times tells us, the youngsters are in this year.

Once upon a time, when the Armory Show – then called the Gramercy Art Fair – fit into a bunch of bedroom suites in a midsize hotel, artists of extreme youth were a novelty. “He’s barely out of art school, you know. And he’s so unusual. He’s into painting! Can you imagine?”

Well, now we can imagine. Today, in an Armory Show that is big enough to sink the Queen Mary 2, young artists are something of a glut on the market. A fair number are still in art school. Almost all of them paint, or paint and draw, or paint and draw and make collages, and do so well and quickly. . . .

For sure, the days of look-alike videos and everyone talking about “identity” and acting worried that there aren’t enough artists of color around are over. Now people are making things you can buy and sell and put on the wall of your loft. Art you can live with, for heaven’s sake. A whole new generation of bond-market collectors is being turned on by drawings the size of stock certificates.

I posted Gary Sernovitz’s assessment of Dale Peck a couple of weeks ago.

N+1, a pretty interesting new journal, publishes these thoughts on the Intellectual Situation.

For the magazine’s [The New Republic] regular readers, a kind of repetitive stress injury set in. Some of the best critics were sent to do dirty work on minor figures. Lee Siegel, who commenced with deserving targets, was in a few years’ time trolling the publishers’ mid-lists in search of small fry. (He is now the magazine’s TV critic.) Somehow TNR got the best people and encouraged their worst instincts. Academic experts in their own field were invited in to garrote colleagues they didn’t understand. It was called being a “public intellectual. ” So our heroes embarrassed themselves. . . .
It didn’t have to be this way: if only they had allowed more positive individuality, cultivated something new, and still kept an old dignified adherence to the Great Tradition, running continuously to them (as they hoped) from the New York Intellectuals, whose ashes were in urns in the TNR vaults if they were anywhere. This was a magazine that began with Edmund Wilson! They went too far, and they flipped. Even they must be tired of themselves. If you pinned a work of art to their nose in their sleep, they would bat it away with the same gesture. The defense of standards became a new vulgarity. And what can we do? We still have thirty-six weeks on our discount subscription! Forget about it. — We’re young yet: so we’ll go and be among the young.

Michael Shermer writes in The American Scientist:

According to Greek legend, Poseidon’s son Theseus sailed to Crete to slay the monster Minotaur. After his triumphant return to Athens, his ship was preserved as a memorial. As the vessel aged, decaying planks were replaced with new ones; eventually, all the original timber was replaced. Philosophers know the story of Theseus’s ship as a classic example of the problem of identity. What was the true identity of the ship, the shape or the wood? A more contemporary example may be found in the form of my first car, a 1966 Ford Mustang with a 289-cubic-inch engine and a speedometer that pegged at 140 m.p.h. As a young man high in testosterone but low in self-control, by the time I sold the car 15 years later there was hardly an original part on it. Nevertheless, my “1966” Mustang was now considered a classic, and I netted a tidy profit. Like Theseus’s ship, its essence—its “Mustangness”—was intact.

The analogy holds for human identity. The atoms in my brain and body today are not the same ones I had when I was born. Nevertheless, the patterns of information coded in my DNA and in my neural memories are still those of Michael Shermer. The human essence, the soul, is more than a pile of parts—it is a pattern of information.

As far as we know, there is no way for that pattern to last longer than several decades, a century or so at most. So until a technology can copy a human pattern into a more durable medium (silicon chips perhaps?), it appears that when we die our pattern is lost. Scientific skepticism suggests that there is no afterlife, and religion requires a leap of faith greater than many of us wish to make.

Whether there is an afterlife or not, we must live as if this is all there is. Our lives, our families, our friends, our communities (and how we treat others) are more meaningful when every day, every moment, every relationship and every person counts. Rather than meaningless forms before an eternal tomorrow, these entities have value in the here-and-now because of the purpose we create.

Humans have an evolved sense of purpose—a psychological desire to accomplish goals—that developed out of behaviors that were selected for because they were good for the individual or the group. The desire to behave in purposeful ways is an evolved trait; purpose is in our nature. And with brains big enough to discover and define purpose in symbolic ways that are inconceivable to millions of preceding and coexisting species, we humans are unique.

Read more here.

Jordan Ellenberg writes in Slate:

In his recent New York Times review of Incompleteness, Edward Rothstein wrote that it’s “difficult to overstate the impact of Gödel’s theorem.” But actually, it’s easy to overstate it: Goldstein does it when she likens the impact of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem to that of relativity and quantum mechanics and calls him “the most famous mathematician that you have most likely never heard of.” But what’s most startling about Gödel’s theorem, given its conceptual importance, is not how much it’s changed mathematics, but how little. No theoretical physicist could start a career today without a thorough understanding of Einstein’s and Heisenberg’s contributions. But most pure mathematicians can easily go through life with only a vague acquaintance with Gödel’s work. So far, I’ve done it myself.

More here.

Jocelyn Selim in Discover Magazine:

A Roman-era container of white cosmetic cream, found during an archaeological dig in London, offers a glimpse at vanity 2,000 years ago, when a pale, even complexion apparently was the rage.

Richard Evershed, a chemist at the University of Bristol, analyzed the cream’s ingredients and recreated the ancient recipe, which consisted mainly of rendered animal fat and starch that was probably obtained from boiling grains. “It shows a surprising degree of technological sophistication,” he says, noting that the color came from a white tin oxide which was almost certainly synthetic.

More here.

Slavoj Zizek in the London Review of Books:

A small note – not the stuff of headlines, obviously – appeared in the newspapers on 3 February. In response to a call for the prohibition of the public display of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, a group of conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from ex-Communist countries, demanded that the same apply to Communist symbols: not only the hammer and sickle, but even the red star. This proposal should not be dismissed lightly: it suggests a deep change in Europe’s ideological identity.

Till now, to put it straightforwardly, Stalinism hasn’t been rejected in the same way as Nazism. We are fully aware of its monstrous aspects, but still find Ostalgie acceptable: you can make Goodbye Lenin!, but Goodbye Hitler! is unthinkable. Why? To take another example: in Germany, many CDs featuring old East German Revolutionary and Party songs, from ‘Stalin, Freund, Genosse’ to ‘Die Partei hat immer Recht’, are easy to find. You would have to look rather harder for a collection of Nazi songs. Even at this anecdotal level, the difference between the Nazi and Stalinist universes is clear, just as it is when we recall that in the Stalinist show trials, the accused had publicly to confess his crimes and give an account of how he came to commit them, whereas the Nazis would never have required a Jew to confess that he was involved in a Jewish plot against the German nation. The reason is clear.

More here.

Essay in the New York Times Book Review:

This year is the 100th anniversary of the most famous sociological tract ever written, ”The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” by Max Weber. It was a book that stood Karl Marx on his head. Religion, according to Weber, was not an ideology produced by economic interests (the ”opiate of the masses,” as Marx had put it); rather, it was what had made the modern capitalist world possible. In the present decade, when cultures seem to be clashing and religion is frequently blamed for the failures of modernization and democracy in the Muslim world, Weber’s book and ideas deserve a fresh look.

Weber’s argument centered on ascetic Protestantism. He said that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination led believers to seek to demonstrate their elect status, which they did by engaging in commerce and worldly accumulation. In this way, Protestantism created a work ethic — that is, the valuing of work for its own sake rather than for its results — and demolished the older Aristotelian-Roman Catholic doctrine that one should acquire only as much wealth as one needed to live well.

More here.

Timothy Ferris reviews A Life of Discovery: Michael Faraday, Giant of the Scientific Revolution, by James Hamilton, in the New York Times Book Review:

In 1812 a bookbindery customer gave Faraday tickets to four lectures at the Royal Institution by Humphry Davy, the medium’s superstar. Glimpsing a future for himself (he would eventually succeed Davy as England’s most famous scientist and popularizer), Faraday printed notes he took at the lectures and presented them to Davy bound in leather, along with a letter expressing, as Faraday later wrote, ”my desire to escape from trade, which I thought vicious and selfish, and to enter into the service of Science, which I imagined made its pursuers amiable and liberal.”

Davy, widely regarded as the foremost chemist of his day, was skeptical about employing a lad who had little schooling and knew nothing of mathematics, but when a brawl obliged him to fire the laboratory ”fag and scrub” he hired Faraday. Faraday took a pay cut but gained two attic rooms, free coal and candles and access to the Royal Institution’s laboratory.

More here.

Clay Risen writes in The New Republic:

In a world where telecommunications evaporates distances, there seems to be little drawback to shifting work overseas. But as more companies move operations outside their offices, they are finding that offshoring has limits–and those limits are more significant than many once thought. First, there’s cost, traditionally the number-one factor in offshoring decisions. Amazingly, even India, with its billion-plus people, is facing potential worker shortages. As early as 2003, the country’s National Association of Software and Services Companies was warning of a 235,000-worker shortfall. Demand, of course, increases prices, or, in this case, wages. Late last year Hewitt Associates, a major human-resources consulting firm, released a study that showed rapidly rising wages among Indian workers–11.4 percent during 2004 (14.5 percent in the IT sector), following similar double-digit growth during 2003. All of which led Vivek Paul, president of IT at India’s offshoring giant Wipro, to warn in November that his country was quickly losing its low-cost advantage.

More here.

About three weeks ago I posted something by Carl Zimmer on the evolution of the eye here, but then forgot to post the second part. Here it is:

In my last post, I went back in time, from the well-adapted eyes we are born with, to the ancient photoreceptors used by microbes billions of years ago. Now I’m going to reverse direction, moving forward through time, from animals that had fully functioning eyes to their descendants, which today can’t see a thing.

This may seem like a ridiculous mismatch to my previous post. We start out with the rise of eyes, a complex story with all sorts of twists and turns, with gene stealing, gene borrowing, gene copying; and then we turn to a simple tale of loss, of degeneration, of a few genes mutating the wrong way and–poof!–billions of years of evolution undone.

In fact, loss is never such a simple matter. I can illustrate this fact with two disparate beasts: fleas and cavefish.

More here.

From The Economist:

Last November, engineers in the healthcare division of General Electric (GE) unveiled something called the “LightSpeed VCT”, a scanner that can create a startlingly good three-dimensional image of a beating heart. This spring Staples, an American office-supplies retailer, will stock its shelves with a gadget called a “wordlock”, a padlock that uses words instead of numbers. In Munich, meanwhile, engineers at BMW have begun prototyping telematics (combining computing and telecoms) and online services for a new generation of luxury cars. The connection? In each case, the firm’s customers have played a big part (GE, BMW) or the leading role (Staples) in designing the product.

More here.

Some very good posts by Sean Carrol at Preposterous Universe today. First, there is this:

A post you shouldn’t miss (and likely have already seen) from Kevin Drum. This is a map of links between political blogs, taken from this study. Blue for liberals, red for conservatives.

 

There’s been a lot of discussion about the fact that conservatives tend to link to each other more than liberals do; I have no idea why. But the obvious disconnect between the hemispheres is more obvious as well as more interesting: liberal blogs tend to link to each other, as do conservative blogs, and not so much across the divide. (The bloggy version of a phenomenon that has already been noticed in book-buying habits.) And it’s a shame, much as I am guilty of it as anyone else.

Then, there is this, followed by Sean’s schedule for his late night talk show:

• Mon:Steven Weinberg, Jeanette Winterson, Angelina Jolie
  Musical guest: Medeski, Martin and Wood
• Tue: Larry Summers, Lisa Randall, Cornel West
  Musical guest: Robert Randolph and the Family Band
• Wed: Sir Roger Penrose, Jonathan Lethem, Christopher Walken
  Musical guest: The Bad Plus
• Thu: Richard Dawkins, Tom Stoppard, George Clooney
  Musical guest: Luciana Souza
• Fri: Gary Wills, Richard Friedman, Sister Wendy
  Musical guest: Leonard Cohen
• Mon: Sir Martin Rees, Toni Morrison, Shaquille O’Neal
  Musical guest: Jason Moran
• Tue: Kathleen Sullivan, Karl Iagnemma, Sir Ian McKellen
  Musical guest: Queen Latifa
• Wed: Donald Rumsfeld, Howard Zinn, Uma Thurman
  Musical guest: Bootsy Collins
• Thu: Wendy Freedman, Richard Posner, George Carlin
  Musical guest: Sergio Assad
• Fri: Brian Greene, Barak Obama, Jodie Foster
  Musical guest: Either/Orchestra

And check out Michael Bérubé’s post which started the late nite idea, here.

I’ve never really been a fan of Gary Kasparov’s style (personal style, that is, not his style of chess).  But his retirement is a milestone in chess, which in the 1970s and 1980s became a symbol and surrogate for the grand political fissuers in the world.  More importantly, the reasons for retirement seem to me to be quite decent ones, especially given the course of politics in Russia under Putin.

He said Friday he wanted to concentrate more on politics in Russia. He has emerged as an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin and is playing a leading role in the Committee 2008: Free Choice, a group formed by prominent liberal opposition leaders.

‘As a chess player, I did everything I could, even more. Now I want to use my intellect and strategic thinking in Russian politics,’ Kasparov said Friday in a statement cited by the Interfax news agency.

‘I will do everything in my power to resist Putin’s dictatorship. It is very difficult to play for a country whose authorities are antidemocratic,’ he said.

Alexander Roshal, chief editor of a popular Russian chess magazine called 64, said Kasparov had no peers in the chess world.

‘There’s no one else of his caliber. No one comes close. He saw that, and said ‘you go on without me,” Roshal said.

Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, is visiting the United State to deliver the keynote address for the Asian American Hotel Owners Association Conference.  Modi is a long-time member of the RSS, a quasi-paramilitary organization that forms the core of the Hindu fascist movement in India, and is in many ways an heir of the Black Hundred and the SA. (Textbooks in Gujarat paint a generally favorable account of Hitler and Nazism, and contain only a one sentence mention of the Holocaust and no mention of political repression and Nazi totalitarianism.)

Under his ministership Gujarat suffered some of the worst communal violence in post-independence India.  An estimated 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered over four days in the end of February and beginning of May 2002.  A Human Rights Watch report concluded that the  government was complicit in the pogrom and members of it were deeply involved in its organization. 

“In April 2002, Human Rights Watch released a 75-page report titled “We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Complicity and Participation in Communal Violence in Gujarat. The report, based on investigations conducted in Ahmedabad in March 2002, revealed that the violence against Muslims was planned well in advance of the Godhra massacre [an alleged massacre of Hindu nationalist activists in a train by some Muslims, though the commission set up by the Railway Minister to investigate the fire concluded that it was an accident] and with extensive state participation and support. State officials of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party that also heads India’s national coalition government, were directly involved in the attacks. In many cases, the police led the charge, killing Muslims who tried to block the mobs’ advance. The violence was unprecedented in its organization and unmatched in its brutality in the state of Gujarat. Pregnant women’s bellies were cut open and fetuses were pulled out before the women were killed. When a six-year-old boy asked for water, he was made to drink petrol. According to eyewitnesses, “A lit matchstick was then thrown inside his mouth and the child just blasted apart.”

The groups most responsible for the anti-Muslim violence include the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council, VHP), the Bajrang Dal (the militant youth wing of the VHP), and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps, RSS). Collectively they form the sangh parivar (or “family” of Hindu nationalist groups). The BJP is the political wing of the sangh parivar.”

Modi belongs to the BJP, which has taken no steps to discipline him.

There is a campaign to protest his visit to the United States. 

“Activists in groups such as the Coalition Against Genocide are trying to get the organization to rescind its invitation. They have failed. AAHOA is unrepentant. Another speaker at the convention is [was] Chris Mathews of Hardball, but even he has so far not succumbed to the pressure. The campaign needs help from one and all. Call Chris Mathews’ assistant, Tina Urbansky (202-737-7901) and let her know what you think. Write to AAHOA’s current president: Fred Schwartz, AAHOA, 66 Lenox Pointe, NE, Atlanta, GA. 30324. If you live in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida or thereabouts and want to be involved in the protest against this state terrorist, check out the website www.coalitionagainstgenocide.org.”

(Chris Mathews apparently will not speak at the convention.)

Here, you can find a petition that calls for:

“The Indian government take immediate steps to punish the perpetrators of the pogrom and to rehabilitate the victims.

AIANA and AAHOA rescind their invitation to Mr. Modi and appeal to the co-sponsors of the AAHOA convention to withdraw their support.

The Indian and the US governments work together to curtail the fund-raising and other activities in the US of hate groups such as the one Mr.Modi belongs to.”

Julie Salamon writes in the New York Times:

When Gregory Rabassa talks about Clarice Lispector, it is evident that his infatuation with her isn’t purely literary. “Those blue eyes, right out of Thomas Mann, ‘The Magic Mountain,’ ” he sighed, during a recent interview. “She was so beautiful.”

Mr. Rabassa is a renowned translator, of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Amado and Mario Vargas Llosa – and of Lispector, who became, in the mid-20th century, one of Brazil’s most influential writers, described as the Kafka of Latin American fiction. Her works have been translated into film and dance and she is famous in literary circles. But she is almost unknown outside of them, particularly in the United States, where all her books combined sell a few thousand copies a year, mainly in Latin American studies courses on college campuses.

More here.

Sean Wilsey writes about Rats: A Year with New York’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan, in the London Review of Books:

And then there is Robert Sullivan’s delightful and revolting Rats, the most exhaustive, nauseating and pleasurable compendium of rat facts ever set down. Facts such as: wherever there are human beings, there are rats. China is where the rat originated, and where you can find it on restaurant menus. Rat populations increase in times of war. New York City battled an epic rat infestation at the World Trade Center site after 9/11, and was obliged to fill the ruins with poison. A third of the world’s food supply is consumed or destroyed by rats. Rats have eaten cadavers in the New York City coroner’s office. Rats have attacked and killed homeless people sleeping on the streets of Manhattan. There are more rodents currently infected with plague in North America (mostly in rural western states: Wyoming, Montana, Colorado) than there were in Europe at the time of the Black Death. Whenever we see a rat, it’s a weak rat, forced into the open to look for food; the strong ones stay out of sight. Brown rats survived nuclear testing in the Pacific by staying deep down in their burrows. There have always been rats in the White House…

More here.