From the Telegraph:

‘Mooo! Mooo!’ Umberto Eco says by way of opening when I meet him in his high-ceilinged apartment overlooking the piazza Castello in Milan.

‘I’m supposed to do this exercise for my throat,’ the 73-year-old Italian philosopher and novelist explains. ‘Mooo! Mooo! I had an operation on my vocal chords and am still recovering.’ I tell him I will understand if he needs to rest his voice during our interview, or indeed if he needs to moo from time to time.

Though he has a paunch and unexpectedly small, geisha-like feet, Eco has an energetic stride – as I discover when he leads the way along a winding corridor and I try to keep up with him. We pass through a labyrinthine library containing 30,000 books – he has a further 20,000 at his 17th-century palazzo near Urbino – and into a drawing-room full of curiosities: a glass cabinet containing seashells, rare comics and illustrated children’s books, a classical sculpture of a nude man with his arms missing, a jar containing a pair of dog’s testicles, a lute, a banjo, a collection of recorders, and a collage of paintbrushes by his friend the Pop artist Arman.

Although Eco is still best known for his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980), a medieval murder mystery that sold ten million copies, it is as an academic that he would like to be remembered…

More here.

From the London Times:

Science feeds on mystery. As my colleague Matt Ridley has put it: “Most scientists are bored by what they have already discovered. It is ignorance that drives them on.” Science mines ignorance. Mystery — that which we don’t yet know; that which we don’t yet understand — is the mother lode that scientists seek out. Mystics exult in mystery and want it to stay mysterious. Scientists exult in mystery for a very different reason: it gives them something to do.

Admissions of ignorance and mystification are vital to good science. It is therefore galling, to say the least, when enemies of science turn those constructive admissions around and abuse them for political advantage. Worse, it threatens the enterprise of science itself. This is exactly the effect that creationism or “intelligent design theory” (ID) is having, especially because its propagandists are slick, superficially plausible and, above all, well financed. ID, by the way, is not a new form of creationism. It simply is creationism disguised, for political reasons, under a new name…

More here.

JR Minkel in Scientific American:

The central dogma of modern biology holds that genetic information is inherited in the form of DNA, copied into RNA and expressed as protein; pride of place goes to DNA. But the spectacular discovery that a species of plant can summon up genes its parents have lost highlights biologists’ increasing recognition of RNA as a more versatile and important molecule in its own right.

RNA already has a special place among biological molecules. It can store genetic information, as DNA does, but it can also adopt complex three-dimensional shapes and catalyze chemical reactions on itself, as proteins do. “RNA is DNA on steroids,” says Robert Reenan, a geneticist at the University of Connecticut. “It can do just about anything.” Life probably began as an “RNA world,” in which concatenations of RNA molecules pulled double duty as genetic template and reproductive machinery.

More here.

Michael Schirber at Space.com:

Constantly buffeting the Earth and its satellites, the solar wind can gust from 750,000 to 1.5 million mph. Astronomers would like to predict the dramatic changes in this constant barrage of charged particles so as to better protect the craft that orbit Earth.

Recent research shows that the solar speeds can be accurately measured by observing a relatively deep layer of the Sun’s atmosphere – far beneath where the winds are thought to originate.

In what could be a boon to space weather forecasts, scientists discovered a relation between solar wind speed and fluctuations in the chromosphere – a region a few thousand miles thick on the outer surface of the Sun.

More here.

Maggie McKee in New Scientist:

Would-be wormhole travellers may have to choose between danger and unpredictability for their journeys through space-time, a new study suggests. The research may spell doom for time machines, but it suggests the universe will survive to a ripe old age instead of being ripped apart by a particularly repulsive form of dark energy.

As fans of science fiction know, wormholes provide short-cuts through space and time, sucking in objects at one end and spitting them out at the other. The distance from one point to the other would be much shorter than conventional travel across the universe.

A useful analogy in helping to visualise the wormhole phenomenon is to imagine a sheet of paper – which represents the universe – which is then folded neatly in half. Next, near the edge furthest from the fold, a pin is pushed through the paper. This creates a “wormhole” connecting two distant points in the universe…

More here.

Timothy Noah in Slate:

Paul Krugman wins. John Tierney loses.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The New York Times will soon start charging to read its op-ed columnists online. The Times is offering its columnists as an all-or-nothing deal, but I proposed that each columnist be priced according to his or her value. I invited readers to allocate a $25 fee among the eight op-ed regulars. (The fee is actually going to be $49.95, but I made the rough estimate that access to the Times archive, which is also to be included in the package, will represent half the value.) An even allocation, I noted, would be a subscription price of $3.13 to read any given columnist online for one year. But not all Times op-ed columnists are equally worth reading. Hence my reader poll…

More here.

From The Village Voice:

The ’50s were tainted with anti-intellectualism: People who read books were assumed to be leftist, queer, or possibly both. Today that willed ignorance has merged with religious extremism to become an anti-art, anti-science obscurantism that presages a new Dark Age. And nature is warning us that the depletion of natural resources means it may be dark in more than intellectual ways. With so many forces arrayed against it, what chance does our theater have in the next 50 years? The answer, I suspect, is: pretty much the same chance it had 50 years ago. We know what the human spirit does when forced into a corner. It fights back. The history of all tyrannies is a history of rebellions; the history of art is a history of building alternatives to the received idea. The fat corporate cats who have hopes of reducing middle-class Americans (artists included) to unpensioned wage slaves with no governmental safety net are fools, living at the end of their empire, not at its beginning. I’m not proposing that every artist become a political rebel; art has more complex purposes and tactics than that. But so little good currently exists in our society that it seems natural to expect artists to reject it more strongly, to move toward the good.

Technology has enhanced the theater in many spectacular ways, but going back to the bareness of the human body and voice, on a bare platform, in “found” costumes—theater as it was before the Industrial Revolution—might even prove pleasurable as well as practical.

More here.

Via Crooked Timber, I have learned that Paul Ricouer, a truly engaging scholar, has died. The Guardian has this obituary.

“The aim of all Ricoeur’s work – some 20 books and 600 essays in all – was to teach us to feel the full force of authentic intellectual discomfort.

After the second world war, Ricoeur’s aversion to polemics allowed him to be overshadowed by more flamboyant colleagues. For nearly 10 years, he taught history of philosophy at Strasbourg, deliberately immersing himself in a new philosophical system each academic year. So it was with massive prep- aration behind him that he moved to the Sorbonne in Paris in 1957, where he kept a cool head through two decades of raging philosophical warfare.

The Symbolism Of Evil (1960) gave a new formulation to Ricoeur’s sense of philosophical responsibility. His key term now was ‘hermeneutics’, meaning the art of interpretation. . . The purpose of thinking was not to gain knowledge, but to learn to consider the world in the light of our irremediable ignorance.

In the 1960s and 70s, Ricoeur was drawn unwillingly into controversy: he found the so-called structuralist movement philosophically dogmatic, especially in its antagonism to subjectivity and to realities independent of language. His lucid criticisms of such masters as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser were all the more devastating for their generosity and restraint – qualities that were seldom reciprocated. His powerful, but unlacanian book, Freud And Philosophy (1965) was scandalously neglected in France.”

Here is the obituary from the Telegraph, and one from the BBC.

UPDATE: Scott McLemee remembers Ricouer in Inside Higher Ed.

From The New York Times:

My father’s death was the envy of all his friends. He hit a perfect drive off the eighth tee one spring morning and fell over dead of a heart attack. He was 73 and had never spent a day in the hospital. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of so-called procedures he ever had to endure. Of course, given the outcome, we all might have been better off if he had submitted to a few more of them after that day of nausea a few months before his death. Dad’s doctor decided it had been a teeny-tiny heart attack.

I might give the same advice to myself. After all, ever since my father’s death I have known perfectly well the number of the truck that is fated to hit me. All through the generations on both sides of my family, as far as I know, it’s been heart attacks and strokes. A legacy, no doubt of Norwegian genetics and a love for cookies and butter. My dad was the only person I ever knew who buttered his chocolate chip cookies. Dad wasn’t afraid of doctors, just impatient with bureaucracy and suspicious of anything he could characterize as “rigmarole.”

More here.

As dozens of Nobel Prize winners can attest, students at this university aren’t exactly normal. There is a place or persona or maybe a state of mind called Tetazoo. That stands for “Third East Traveling Animal Zoo,” the name of a dormitory hall at MIT. At the moment, several of its scruffy denizens, including Sam Kendig, 22, are ramming sectional couches down a corridor of classrooms as fast as low-tech human power can, past lab-coated professors and graduate students, none of whom blink an eye. After all, it’s the weekend of the amazing Mystery Hunt—more about that soon—when such peculiar behavior is normal. And in the institute’s 140-year history, these corridors have been traversed by 59 Nobel laureates and 30 astronauts, as well as Dr. Dolittle author Hugh Lofting, architect I. M. Pei, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, inventor Raymond Kurzweil, Ford Motor Company honcho William C. Ford, suspected Al Qaeda agent Aafia Siddiqui, and NPR’s “Car Talk” guys. At a guess, none of them were normal, either. No one seems to be normal at MIT.

Think about it. The World Wide Web was born at MIT in 1994. That same year, firms founded by MIT graduates generated $232 billion and employed a million people worldwide. Now Treo phones and Google are part of everyday life. We’re all nerds. And there’s a pretty good case to be made that whatever the students on the MIT campus are interested in at this moment will utterly change our lives again in about a decade. The MIT culture is a fecund environment where some of the finest creative minds on the planet not only nurture ideas but also figure out how to use them. The definition of technology is, after all, “the science of the application of knowledge to practical purposes.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

In her introduction to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Zadie Smith says of Alden Pyle, the American of the title: “His worldly innocence is a kind of fundamentalism.” She goes on: “Reading the novel again reinforced my fear of all the Pyles around the world. They do not mean to hurt us, but they do.”

Greene has Pyle travelling with books such as The Role of the West and The Challenge to Democracy. A modern-day Greene could substitute the works of the real-life Thomas Friedman – a contemporary quiet American. Like Pyle, Friedman is “impregnably armed by his good intentions and his ignorance”. In The World Is Flat Friedman has produced an epyllion to the glories of globalisation with only three flaws: the writing style is prolix, the author is monumentally self-obsessed, and its content has the depth of a puddle.

More here.

Husain Naqvi wrote of the waning influence of cultural critics yesterday in his Critical Digressions column here at 3QD. This is by Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times:

In the 1950 movie “All About Eve,” the theater critic is a dapper, cynical charmer with the Old World moniker Addison DeWitt. He’s no hero, but his wry assessments can make or break a production. Characters repeat his phrases throughout the film, in both scornful and reverent tones.

Almost a half-century later, the television show “The Critic” presented an animated schlemiel, paunchy and balding, voiced by the nerdy comic endomorph Jon Lovitz. This character’s influence on the world in which he lives is nonexistent: His impact comes down to serving as the butt of jokes.

Does the 1994-95 series tell us something about the way Americans view those who make cultural judgments for a living? In the decade since that show’s run, many critics report, they’ve gotten even less respect. Or ceased to matter entirely.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Toward the end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, when music had already been banned and women excluded from Islamic rituals by being immured in their homes, and when new non-Quranic punishments—such as being buried alive—had been promulgated for homosexuals, an arcane point arose among the fierce Islamists who ran the place: Should paper bags also be haram, or forbidden? The point was an exquisitely delicate one. It was known that such bags were made from recycled paper. It had been alleged that old and torn copies of the Quran had been thrown, or must have been thrown, somewhere and sometime, into the vats of pulp. Was there, therefore, not a real risk that each paper bag might contain a profaned fragment of the divine word? The thought of toilet paper being made in this manner may have been too obscene even to consider, but in the event, paper bags were banned, just as most reading material had already been.

It’s essential that we understand the deep irrationality that underlies all faith and that can take these fetishistic forms…

More here.

Joel Kotkin in The New Republic:

Hip cities like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Boston are the new role models, [Richard] Florida has argued; and non-hip locales are duly forewarned, as a headline in The Washington Monthly put it, that cities “without gays and rock bands are losing the economic race.”

In some respects, of course, the last ten or so years have been a good time for American cities. Most urban areas, particularly New York, became safer and cleaner than they were in the ’80s. And, certainly, we are no longer living in the dark days of the ’70s–an era symbolized by the 1981 cult classic Escape from New York. These trends have made urban life more attractive to some and thereby stimulated residential construction as well as slowed–and in some cases reversed–the flight from cities of jobs.

But these developments notwithstanding, the renaissance of American cities has been greatly overstated–and this unwarranted optimism is doing a disservice to cities themselves…

More here.

Also from Scientific American:

Food craving, defined as an intense desire to eat a specific foodstuff, is a common occurrence across all cultures and societies. These yearnings, and those associated with nonfoodstuffs such as pagophagia (the practice of consuming ice) and geophagia (literally earth-eating), are not linked to any obvious nutrient insufficiency. In some individuals food cravings and dietary restriction may be related; however, these observations are inconsistent with the majority of published studies.

More here.

John D. Barrow and John K. Webb in Scientific American:

Some things never change. Physicists call them the constants of nature. Such quantities as the velocity of light, c, Newton’s constant of gravitation, G, and the mass of the electron, m_e, are assumed to be the same at all places and times in the universe. They form the scaffolding around which the theories of physics are erected, and they define the fabric of our universe. Physics has progressed by making ever more accurate measurements of their values.

And yet, remarkably, no one has ever successfully predicted or explained any of the constants. Physicists have no idea why they take the special numerical values that they do. In SI units, c is 299,792,458; G is 6.673 X 10^-11; and m_e is 9.10938188 X 10^-31–numbers that follow no discernible pattern. The only thread running through the values is that if many of them were even slightly different, complex atomic structures such as living beings would not be possible. The desire to explain the constants has been one of the driving forces behind efforts to develop a complete unified description of nature, or “theory of everything.” Physicists have hoped that such a theory would show that each of the constants of nature could have only one logically possible value. It would reveal an underlying order to the seeming arbitrariness of nature.

More here.

Michael Schirber in Space.com:

In a reversal of roles, a planet has gravitationally bullied its star to rotate in step with the planet’s orbit. The star’s behavior is similar to that of our Moon, which turns just fast enough to keep one face always pointing at the Earth.

It is unusual, however, to see the larger body – in this case a star 1.4 times the mass of the Sun – being tidally locked by a smaller body.

“This is truly a stellar story of ‘tail wags dog,’” said Jaymie Matthews of the University of British Columbia at the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society in Montreal last week.

More here.

Anupreeta Das and Amanda Paulson of the The Christian Science Monitor, via USA Today:

Somit Basak’s tutoring style is hardly unusual. The engineering graduate spices up lessons with games, offers rewards for excellent performance, and tries to keep his students’ interest by linking the math formulas they struggle with to real-life examples they can relate to.

Unlike most tutors, however, Mr. Basak lives thousands of miles away from his students — he is a New Delhi resident who goes to work at 6 a.m. so that he can chat with American students doing their homework around dinnertime.

Americans have slowly grown accustomed to the idea that the people who answer their customer-service and computer-help calls may be on the other side of the globe. Now, some students may find their tutor works there, too…

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]

Futurist Andrew Zolli on the imaginary cover stories from the future created by members of industry body Magazine Publishers of America:

What’s particularly interesting is not just the consistency of themes (robots, cloning and climate change are heavily represented) but a kind of consistent visual rhetoric of technology used by the editors. The “future” is still conveyed with a kind of cliche’d visual language that’s all about shiny, hard, quantitative, often ‘consumable’ technology gadgets…

…None of the participants envision a future of integrated, organic technologies that are likely to appear, or new political and personal realities, for instance.

More on Zolli and the business of predicting the future from the March edition of I.D. magazine.

The New Yorker publishes a piece about Kerry and McCain’s friendship around Vietnam from back in 1996.

The site of the nightmare from which America found it so difficult to awaken is becoming a place in which tourists sleep; the unlikely friendship of two American politicians made it possible. “John Kerry and John McCain did a noble service to this country,” Senator Kennedy told me. “I know that kind of talk doesn’t ring any bells anymore, but it’s true. A noble service.” In Vietnam, they are revered as the men who ended the war. And the most potent symbol of the new era is what has become of the Hanoi Hilton. As for the hotel replacing the prison, McCain told me, “When I saw it, they asked me what I thought. I said, ‘I hope room service is better than it was when I was here.’ “