What Leonardo Could Have Done With a CAT Scan

From The New York Times:

Anatomyslide_2 Photography, X-rays, CAT scans and newer imaging technologies have replaced the artist in helping scientists understand the human form. Artists haven’t given up, however; they’ve moved on. One result is “Visionary Anatomies,” an exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington through May 20 (information at nationalacademies.org/arts). It includes paintings, prints, collages and other works by 11 artists who use anatomical and medical concepts to illustrate their own ideas.

More here.

And Speaking of Mark Trodden…

He has a good post on his very good new blog Orange Quark:

A pharmacist in California refuses to fill the prescriptions of AIDS sufferers, because that would be interfering with God’s plans for gays. Another pharmacist, in Michigan, won’t provide arthritis medication, because gnarled hands are God’s way of stopping masturbation…

The rest of the post is here.  And no, John Stewart, we don’t like all and only blogs with the word “quark” in their name!

Sean Carrol’s Moral Dilemma

CarrolSean Carrol of Preposterous Universe has a very nice essay-like post on the temptations of money in academic life. After a bit of understandable see-sawing, Sean has made the right decision, and we at 3 Quarks applaud him for that, as well as for writing about it honestly (and providing much interesting information about Charles Townes, the Templeton Foundation, etcetera). And a salute, as well, to Mark Trodden for giving Sean good advice.

Read more about Sean’s moral dilemma here.

London 1945

‘Wartime London is a great literary subject. The ravages were so terrible (pieces of children littered the bomb sites), so poignant (treasures such as the Guards’ Chapel and the Great Synagogue lost, five million books destroyed in a single night in a bombing raid), and so surreal (walking back from lunch at Simpson’s, an editor of the Evening Standard noticed that the blast from a V-1 flying bomb had stripped the leaves from the trees and replaced them with human flesh).’

From Benjamin Schwartz’s Atlantic review of London 1945 by Maureen Waller.

Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah

Sara Wheeler reviews The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith, in The Guardian:

The Hall of a Thousand Columns is the second volume of a trilogy in which Tim Mackintosh-Smith trails Ibn Battutah, the Tangier-born adventurer who voyaged over most of the known world between 1325 and 1355 — a period when Islamic culture was travelling fast. Taking up where his first book left off, and with his hallmark combination of irreverence and empathy, Mackintosh-Smith again peers at the Battutian landscape across a gulf of seven centuries. He has confected a curiously addictive blend of history, travel and jokes. But above all he engages with ideas, and his aim is that of the novelist — to send a bucket down into the subconscious.

More here.

The mathematics of love

A talk with John Gottman from Edge.org:

Gottman200_1We were able to derive a set of nonlinear difference equations for marital interaction as well as physiology and perception. These equations provided parameters, that allowed us to predict, with over 90 percent accuracy, what was going to happen to a relationship over a three-year period. The main advantage of the math modeling was that using these parameters, we are not only be able to predict, but now understand what people are doing when they affected one another. And through the equations we were now really able to build theory. That theory allows us to understand how to intervene and how to change things. And how to know what it is we’re affecting, and why the interventions are effective. This is the mathematics of love.

More here.

Robert Peary: liar, thief, and murderer?

Dewey Hammond reviews True North: Peary, Cook, and the Race to the Pole by Bruce Henderson, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

PearyHistory has long credited Peary with discovering the North Pole, the Holy Grail of Arctic exploration, in 1909. He was truly an Arctic pioneer. He was also a power-hungry liar and thief, and likely a murderer, too. To top it off, he might not have been the first to reach the Pole and may never have succeeded at all, according to Henderson’s investigative narrative, which relies heavily on the letters, diaries and firsthand testimony of fellow explorers and native Inuit hunters.

More here.

What America can learn from Big Tobacco about democratizing the Middle East

Joseph Braude in The New Republic:

When it comes to fomenting non-violent change in the Arab world, where is America’s legendary ingenuity and know-how? You’re not going to like the answer. The Americans who have been most effective at promoting their agenda in Middle Eastern societies, by any objective measure of success, are neither Washington wonks nor overseas diplomats. They are the owners of big tobacco companies.

More here.

Gilbert Achcar Interviewed by David Barsamian

Gilbert Achcar lived in Lebanon for many years before moving to France where he teaches politics and international relations at the University of Paris. His latest book, published by Monthly Review Press, is The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder.

Barsamian The official Bush story about explaining what happened, the reasons behind the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, is that the United States was attacked because of its “values” and that it is the “beacon of democracy.”

I think this is one of the most absurd explanations I’ve ever heard. That is, to believe for one second that people would come from their part of the world and commit suicide in another place in order to kill as many people as possible because they don’t like the way the people there live and the kind of values they embody there is something which is completely absurd. It’s much more convenient for the Bush Administration to say that all these people hate us because of the values we cherish, as George W. Bush, puts it. If it is because of that, you have no way of dealing with that except through force, because you won’t surrender the values you cherish. But actually, if you say the truth, that these people hate us because of our policies in their part of the world, because of what the United States is busy doing in the Middle East, then the logical conclusion that follows is, Well, why the hell are we doing that, and why are we putting ourselves in such dangers?

More here.

In the beginning was … quark-gluon plasma; a perfect liquid?

From MSNBC News:

Bigbangsoup2_1   Scientists using a giant atom smasher said on Monday they have created a new state of matter — a hot, dense liquid made out of basic atomic particles — and said it shows what the early universe looked like for a very, very brief time. For a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang that scientists say gave rise to the universe, all matter was in the form of this liquid, called a quark-gluon plasma, the researchers said.

Linked to string theory: The string theory calculation describing how gravity behaves near a black hole can also explain how quarks move in a quark-gluon plasma, experts said.

More here.

An Assembly of Ghosts

Eric Hobsbaum writes about the World Political Forum meeting in the London Review of Books:

I missed meeting Mikhail Gorbachev four years ago, at a centenary conference of the Nobel Peace Foundation in Oslo, which matched a selection of Nobel Peace Prize winners with a selection of academics. I had accepted the invitation because he was going to be there, but he didn’t show up, and my opposite number turned out to be Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, an admirable figure no doubt, but not the man who did more single-handedly to save the world from the danger of nuclear war than anyone. And who, single-handed, ensured that the transition in the USSR and the Soviet empire did not end in a bloodbath, as it did in Yugoslavia.

This year I was luckier.

More here.

Istanbul: Memories of a City by Orhan Pamuk

David Flusfeder in The Telegraph:

The Turkish word for melancholy is hüzün; in Pamuk’s view, the city is soaked with the stuff, and so are its writers: “For the poet, hüzün is the smoky window between him and the world.” Istanbul is a black and white city, Pamuk says, and in this combination of memoir and sad urban love letter the pages are illustrated with dozens of rather beautiful black and white photographs, whose romantic purpose is to allow the foreign reader to experience the same pangs as the city’s inhabitants. In the ruins of Ottoman greatness, there now stands “a pale, poor, second-class imitation of a Western city”, where only the mosques and the packs of wild dogs survive from the city visited by rapt or disgusted Orientalists a century and a half ago.

More here.

Scientists: Ancient Signal Directs Appetite for Nutrition

Amanda Onion at ABC News:

Foods_050408_tNeuroscientists working separately at the University of California at Davis and at New York University School of Medicine have revealed an ancient “switch” in some mammals that signals the appetite to seek foods with perfect nutritional balance.

The mechanism has been found in rats, mice, slugs, even yeast and, the researchers say, there’s every reason to believe it also exists in people.

More here.

Vollmann’s New Novel: Europe Central

‘…the high priest of contemporary underground American fiction, William T. Vollmann, now turns his voracious eye to the Old World, ravaged by the Second World War, and presents us with his latest novelistic expanse, Europe Central. Wide-reaching and hugely ambitious, this work tells the stories of major and minor figures on the German and Russian Fronts. They include people such as the Sixth Army commander, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who led the Germans at the siege of Stalingrad, the Russian General A. A. Vlasov, who crossed over to the Reich after his capture and formed a German-collaborationist Russian army, and Kurt Gerstein, an SS officer who risked his life in an attempt to inform the world about the Holocaust as it took place. There are also portraits of artists, poets and film-makers: Kathe Kollwitz, Anna Akhmatova and Roman Karmen.’

From Daniel Lukes’ review in  the TLS.

50th anniversary of Einstein’s death

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s death.  From the BBC, on that day:

“In a statement issued following the scientist’s death, US President Dwight Eisenhower said: ‘No other man contributed so much to the vast expansion of the 20th century knowledge.

‘Yet no other man was more modest in the possession of the power that is knowledge, more sure that power without wisdom is deadly.

‘To all who live in the nuclear age, Albert Einstein exemplified the mighty creative ability of the individual in a free society.'”

(The link to Bertrand Russell’s comments on Einstein’s life and work doesn’t appear to work.)

3QD Monday Musing: Paterson

This is the second of 3 Quarks Daily’s Monday columns. Abbas started us off in fine form last week with a wholly fabricated yarn about his meeting with the president of Sri Lanka and talking to her about cake. He even presented some doctored photos.

I will change gears a bit with some real information about places that actually exist. In this case, Paterson, New Jersey. Now you may ask, with some puzzlement and bemusement, why Paterson. Especially if you’ve been there. Granted, history has not been so kind to Paterson. A once booming industrial town known as Silk City, it was recently described to me by a resident as ‘a complete shit hole’. 102covercl_1

But it isn’t a complete shit hole. It is a special place. I’m not sure exactly what it is about Paterson that makes it special but I’ll try and jot down a few notes in that direction.

First of all, Paterson is wonderful because it is a ruin and ruins are beautiful. But that is too aesthetic and trite. The shallow romantic love of ruins is wistful and nostalgic, full of longing. I am talking about a love of ruins that is more like the attitude that Walter Benjamin took toward the Parisian arcades of the mid-19th century.

Ruins are interesting because when a world falls apart you have that much more of an opportunity to understand it. It lays itself bare. And Paterson isn’t just any kind of ruin, it is an American ruin. This is the city that William Carlos Williams wrote a five volume poem about. He picked Paterson as the place where he could write according to his precept “no ideas but in things.” He was trying to find an American idiom, like Whitman. He was trying to deal with America.

Paterson became Paterson because of its beautiful falls. But it wasn’t their beauty that mattered, it was the power to turn the mills. The weird American dynamic between nature and the c109294pr3ity is right there in about two hundred yards of Paterson real estate, from the Great Falls down the street to the forgotten and decaying mills. A few blocks away can be found the truly sad and melancholic park in honor of Lou Costello (of Abbott and Costello fame). There, the drunks flout the posted suggestion that alcoholic beverages be consumed elsewhere.

In all that has fallen apart about Paterson, New Jersey, there is much that comes together. Paterson is about the meanness, and stupidness, and brutality that is America. The very failure that is Paterson is kind of perfect. But there is something tantalizing about it too. There is that infinite potentiality of Americanness lurking just beneath the surface of Paterson. It seems like that was what intrigued Williams too. Why can’t Paterson be more like what it gives you in glimpses and glimmers? Of course, that is a question that goes beyond Paterson to human civilization in general. But who wants to talk about human civilization in general. Right now, we have Paterson.

Have a lovely week.

People Everywhere Mourn Marla Ruzicka’s Death

My friend Fred Abrahams wrote to give me this sad news about his friend Marla. April Pedersen of Democracy in Action describes courageous and admirable Marla thus:

Marla_1It is with deep sadness and regret that I am writing to inform you that Marla died on Saturday at the age of 28 in a suicide bomb attack. Faiz, CIVIC’s Iraq Country Director, was also killed. It is tragically ironic that two beautiful people who devoted their lives to helping innocent victims of war have now become them.

The attack occurred on the Baghdad Airport road as she traveled to visit an Iraqi child injured by a bomb, part of her daily work of identifying and supporting innocent victims of this war.

Only a few hours before her death, Marla sent me this photo of Harah. She was 3 months old when she was thrown from a vehicle just before it was destroyed by a U.S. rocket attack. Her entire family was killed. Hers just one example of the hundreds of lives Marla and Faiz touched with their heroic work.

More here.  And the always-intelligent Veronica Khokhlova has more about Marla here. Oh, and in case you are interested, this is what Fred had to say about Marla:

Would be more jovial but I just heard the sad news that my friend Marla
Ruzicka was killed in Iraq.  She was a rambunctious 27-year-old who won
my respect when she organized the Afghani families of civilian victims
to demonstrate in front of the US embassy in Kabul for compensation. 
She was doing similar work in Iraq – fighting for civilian victims to
get compensation from the US military.  She was tireless, charmingly
naive, committed and undeterred.