Sven Steinmo:

At the turn of the 21st century, the United States remains the preeminent nation in the world. Its military and economic power goes virtually unchallenged, while American culture is felt in even the most remote parts of the globe. At the same time the forces of globalization impinge on the United States in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. The very same forces that have contributed to America’s position in the world make it impossible for America to stand apart from that world.

As such, the Tocqueville Initiative at the University of Colorado at Boulder is premised on the belief that America is best understood in comparative perspective. Under the direction of Professor Sven Steinmo, the Initiative is a new inter-disciplinary effort bringing together scholars, political leaders, students and the general public into a dialogue over the role of the United States in a globalizing world.

More here.

Efraim Karsh in The New Republic:

But in truth, France’s vote against the constitution is an important victory for European unity, because the document posed a serious threat to the great European experiment in peace and prosperity. What began 53 years ago as an idealistic attempt to use economic cooperation to heal a war-torn continent has deteriorated with the passage of time into a gigantic imperial machinery that has largely eroded the democratic values and objectives for which it was originally established.

As the European Coal and Steel Community evolved (in 1957) to the European Economic Community and then (in the mid-1980s) to the European Union, and as its membership expanded from the original six to a staggering 25, the organization’s vision of a confederation of states collaborating on an equal footing was increasingly replaced by the reality of an empire in the making–a consensual empire, yes, but an empire all the same, one in which a metropolitan center run by a new kind of bureaucratic political elite is responsible for more and more European decision-making and increasingly determined to remove control of lawmaking from member state governments.

More here.

Philip H. Gordon in The New Republic:

The humiliating political defeat inflicted on French President Jacques Chirac on Sunday–when 55 percent of voters rejected his appeals to support a new constitution for the European Union–has left more than a few Americans beaming with satisfaction. Even before the referendum, The Weekly Standard‘s William Kristol speculated that a no vote could be a “liberating moment” for Europe. After the ballots were counted, the American Enterprise Institute’s Radek Sikorski concluded that the result would be “quite good for transatlantic relations,” because it weakened “the most anti-U.S. politician in Europe.”

American glee at the sight of Chirac with mud on his face is understandable; he was, after all, the leading opponent of the Iraq war and has long championed a Europe capable of serving as a counterweight to U.S. power. But Americans should hold their applause, which they may soon come to regret.

More here.

‘It is time—well past time, in my view—for the United States to cease its Cold War-style reliance on nuclear weapons as a foreign-policy tool. At the risk of appearing simplistic and provocative, I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous…The whole situation seems so bizarre as to be beyond belief.’

Such is the view of Robert McNamara in Foreign Policy.

David Lodge reviews What Good Are the Arts? by John Carey, in the London Times:

Regular readers will know that John Carey is that rare creature, an academic who writes shrewdly, wittily and economically on a wide range of subjects in a style that non-specialists can understand and appreciate. There is a principle, central to the British tradition of philosophical discourse, known as Occam’s Razor, which forbids the unnecessary multiplication of facts. Carey’s favourite argumentative tool is more like a machete. He has a ruthlessly logical mind that cuts through obscurity, pretension, fallacious reasoning and unsupported assertion, and he has a knack of summarising and quoting from writers with whom he disagrees to devastating effect.

More here.

David Runciman reviews Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth by Michael Graetz and Ian Shapiro, in the London Review of Books:

What makes it so fascinating is that it is a mystery story. The mystery is this: how did the repeal of a tax that applies only to the richest 2 per cent of American families become a cause so popular and so powerful that it steamrollered all the opposition placed in its way? The estate tax was the most progressive part of the American tax system, because it rested on the principle that the wealthy few, if they were not willing to bequeath their money to charity, should not be permitted to pass it all directly to their heirs. It had been on the statute book for nearly a hundred years, and throughout that time it had been generally assumed that there was widespread support for the idea that unearned wealth passed between the generations, creating pockets of aristocratic privilege, was not part of the American dream. Because it was a tax that so obviously took from the relatively few to relieve the burden on the very many, there seemed no possibility that a sufficiently large or durable coalition of interests could ever be formed to get rid of it. Yet during the 1990s just such a coalition came into being, and not only did it hold together, it grew to the point where the clamour for estate tax repeal seemed irresistible.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The following tests were developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.

Take the interactive empathy quotient test.

Take the interactive systemising quotient test.

Baron-Cohen’s theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. He calls it the empathising-systemising (E-S) theory.

Empathising is the drive to identify another person’s emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. The empathiser intuitively figures out how people are feeling, and how to treat people with care and sensitivity.

Systemising is the drive to analyse and explore a system, to extract underlying rules that govern the behaviour of a system; and the drive to construct systems.

Read the full article here.

The tests work out your empathising quotient (EQ) and systemising quotient (SQ). The interactive version, which will calculate your results for you, requires Flash (version 5). Alternatively, the plain HTML version allows you to print off the questionnaire and calculate your own scores.

In either case, do both the SQ and EQ questionnaires then click on the link at the end for “your brain type”. This will tell you whether you have a male brain, a female brain or if you’re perfectly balanced.

Report your results as a comment on this post.

Liz Kalaugher in Nanotechweb.org:

Researchers at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Laboratories in the US have tested the adhesion of amino acids to semiconductors, metals and insulators used in electronic devices. The team used their results to design an inorganic nanostructure that selectively bound to a particular primary peptide sequence.

More here.

David L. Chandler in New Scientist:

A comet has been added to the list of potentially threatening near-Earth objects maintained by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Comet Catalina 2005 JQ5 is the largest – and therefore most potentially devastating – of the 70 objects now being tracked. However, the chances of a collision are very low.

The listing of Comet Catalina underscores the uncertainty in the knowledge of whether comets or asteroids pose a greater threat to Earth. Previous estimates of the proportion of the impact risk posed by comets have varied widely, from 1% to 50%, with most recent estimates at the lower end.

But comets are larger and faster-moving, on average, so their impacts could be a significant part of the overall risk to human life. And, unlike asteroids, they lie on randomly-oriented and usually highly elongated orbits. This makes them much more likely to remain undiscovered until they are very close to Earth.

More here.

W. Wayt Gibbs in Scientific American:

A growing number of dissenting researchers accuse government and medical authorities–as well as the media–of misleading the public about the health consequences of rising body weights.

Could it be that excess fat is not, by itself, a serious health risk for the vast majority of people who are overweight or obese–categories that in the U.S. include about six of every 10 adults? Is it possible that urging the overweight or mildly obese to cut calories and lose weight may actually do more harm than good?

Such notions defy conventional wisdom that excess adiposity kills more than 300,000 Americans a year and that the gradual fattening of nations since the 1980s presages coming epidemics of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and a host of other medical consequences…

More here.

Jim Rossignol writes:

Via Slashdot/science: a remarkable photo-essay recording the scrap-metal dealers of Kazakhstan, who trade the material from abandoned rocket booster stages that have fallen to Earth across their farmland.

A wonderful find by Jim – the pictures are equal parts magic and melancholy: