From The New York Times:

Some people resent reductionism because it sweeps away many mysteries. Behind spooky phenomena, reductionists have shown, are the ordinary ticktocks of nature’s machinery, the concealed ropes and pulleys of cosmic-scale Penn and Teller tricks. Indeed, reductionism has reinforced the old philosophical suspicion that there is something vaguely unreal about ”reality”: as the Greek philosopher Democritus said, it’s all just atoms and the void. To a hyper-reductionist, the invisibly small microworld is more ”real” than everything else. Bigger objects — cats, toasters, people, the sun, galactic superclusters — are just second-order consequences. The atoms or quarks or leptons (or ”strings,” if you follow the latest trendy theories) are what count, while you and I are just ephemera.

More here.

From The New York Times:

TOM WOLFE was so taken with Michael S. Gazzaniga’s ”Social Brain” that not only did he send Gazzaniga a note calling it the best book on the brain ever written, he had Charlotte Simmons’s Nobel Prize-winning neuroscience professor recommend it in class. In ”The Ethical Brain,” Gazzaniga tries to make the leap from neuroscience to neuroethics and address moral predicaments raised by developments in brain science. The result is stimulating, very readable and at its most edifying when it sticks to science.

Take the issue of raising intelligence by manipulating genes in test-tube embryos. Gazzaniga asks three questions. Is it technically possible to pick out ”intelligence genes”? If so, do those genes alone determine intelligence? And finally, is this kind of manipulation ethical? ”Most people jump to debate the final question,” he rightly laments, ”without considering the implications of the answers to the first two.” Gazzaniga’s view is that someday it will be possible to tweak personality and intelligence through genetic manipulation. But because personhood is so significantly affected by factors like peer influence and chance, which scientists can’t control, we won’t be able to make ”designer babies,” nor, he believes, will we want to.

More here.

Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005, at Stanford:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college.

More here.  [Thanks to James Edward Kolb.]

Nat Hentoff reviews Julia Blackburn’s book in the Wilson Quarterly:

No other jazz singer could get inside lyrics as evocatively as Billie Holiday. “Billie must have come from another world,” trumpet player Roy Eldridge once said, “because nobody had the effect on people she had. I’ve seen her make them cry and make them happy.” Even the famously demanding Miles Davis sang her praises: “She doesn’t need any horns. She sounds like one anyway.”

Lady Day—as tenor saxophonist Lester Young nicknamed her (he often dubbed a female musician “Lady”)—has been the subject of several books and an inauthentic movie (Lady Sings the Blues), but the life that became the music has never been so deeply revealed as it is in With Billie, a collection of more than 150 interviews with musicians, junkies, lovers, narcotics agents, relatives, and a decidedly heterogeneous group of friends. Linda Kuehl conducted many of the interviews in the 1970s, for a biography she didn’t live to complete. Now, Julia Blackburn, a novelist and biographer, has assembled and edited the transcripts, producing a portrait that’s both panoramic and intimate.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Richard Dawkins: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (Free Press) is a genuinely frightening book about terrorism, and the central role played by religion in justifying and rewarding it. Others blame “extremists” who “distort” the “true” message of religion. Harris goes to the root of the problem: religion itself. Even moderate religion is a menace, because it leads us to respect and “cherish the idea that certain fantastic propositions can be believed without evidence”. Why do men like Bin Laden commit their hideous cruelties? The answer is that they “actually believe what they say they believe”. Read Sam Harris and wake up.

Nadeem Aslam: A novelist votes every time he writes a sentence. Ian McEwan’s Saturday (Jonathan Cape) is a lovely and profoundly serious act of engagement with our age. The collapsing of the Twin Towers on 9/11 gave many people – including, I feel, Saturday’s protagonist Perowne – their first glimpse of another kind of world that had been existing alongside ours for some time. It is almost as though the Towers had been blocking a view. Saturday possesses a brilliant understanding of what we see in that view, and what we could possibly do about some of the horrors to be found there.

More here.

From The London Times:

  The Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology Unit at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, is the largest unit in the world performing regular clinical trials involving 10,000 twin volunteers. The basis of its studies on twins is relatively simple, focusing on the principle that identical twins have the same genes, non-identical twins don’t. Twin studies compare traits in these two groups. Twins from both groups are likely to have been exposed to similar environmental influences, but only twins in the identical group have the same genes. The Twin Research Unit finds out which traits and illnesses are partly influenced by the genes that we are born with. It has identified an important genetic component in the following conditions:

Osteoarthritis, previously believed to be caused by “wear and tear”

Short-sightedness

Perfect pitch

Acne

Cataracts — a disease of ageing, but its severity is down to your genes

Migraine, high blood pressure and coronary artery disease — which also seem to involve the same gene

Infidelity — the tendency for both twins to be either faithful or unfaithful was strongest in identical pairs.

More here.

From The Village Voice:

Years ago, in the basement of Yale University’s rare-book library, I stumbled upon two Louis XV armchairs that once belonged to Gertrude Stein. They were upholstered in needlepoint by Alice B. Toklas according to Picasso’s designs. Those chairs long haunted me. They evoked a knowledge remote from the arid deserts of Kant and Hegel to which my studies had confined me—a distinctly feminine savoir faire, a domestic sublime, redolent of the body and warm with conviviality. High culture in an armchair! That premise informs “The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons,” a provocative and engaging show currently at New York’s Jewish Museum. It focuses on 14 Jewish women whose elegant drawing rooms or beachside bungalows, in cultural meccas from 18th-century Berlin to 1940s Santa Monica, attracted a dazzling array of artists, politicians, and intellectuals.

More here.

Iran moves towards elections that are not quite free and fair but are nonetheless a barometer of political moods and movements, perhaps even a watershed.  The phenomenon of blogging elections has reached the Iranian elections, and OpenDemocracy is blogging the latest elections from the Islamic Republic.

“Despite all the early polls indicating a Rafsanjani win there are some very strong signs especially in blogosphere that Moeen the reformist candidate may end up as the winner.

As you know Presidential candidates are all trying to induce cynical voters to go to the polls on Friday and are struggling hard to appeal to young voters.

Rafsanjani as chairman of the powerful Expediency Council has been the centre of political gravity of the regime for quarter of century. Appealing to the youth vote during a nationally televised campaign broadcast created by one of Iran’s leading commercial filmmakers, he even sheds a tear when a young girl complained of restrictions in the Islamic republic.”

Rafsanjani!?!

Mehrdad Mashayekhi believes that the elections will mark a departure from previous models of Iranian politics.

“Iranian society is in the midst of an epoch-making renaissance in its political culture and discourse. This transformation in political values, norms, symbols and everyday codes of behaviour is most evident in educated circles, especially amongst the opposition political elite.

Since the ‘Islamic’ revolution of 1978-79, two distinct political models have assumed hegemonic positions in the opposition movement; first, the anti-imperialist/ revolutionary paradigm, dominant in the 1970s and early 1980s, which I have elsewhere referred to as ‘the problematic of dependency’; and second, the Islamic-reformist paradigm, assuming prominence in 1997 and leading the challenge to the clerical establishment from within the system until 2003.

Since 2003, there are strong indications that a new political paradigm is emerging. The new model of political dissent is democratic, secular and characterised by republican values.”

From The Guardian:

Salman Rushdie is to take part in this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival after a 20-year absence. Organisers of the world’s largest literary festival said they were overjoyed to welcome Rushdie back to Edinburgh and would take whatever steps necessary to protect the author, who was subjected to death threats over his book the Satanic Verses. Rushdie will appear alongside other literary heavyweights such as Margaret Atwood, Dario Fo, Doris Lessing, John Irving and Andre Brink. They are among 500 writers who will take part in this year’s festival, which runs from August 13 to 29.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Fascination hangs over “Irving Penn: Platinum Prints,” which opens Sunday at the National Gallery of Art here. It is an often beautiful but overdetermined and subtly morbid show of 70 images, taken between 1946 and the late 1970’s, and 12 collages made in 1989. These works, along with 20 not on view, have been given to the museum by Mr. Penn.

Most visual artists, regardless of medium, want their work enshrined in a museum, and preferably on their terms. Clyfford Still donated large groups of paintings to prominent museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seemingly to guarantee that entire galleries could be devoted to his work alone. Donald Judd went so far as to build his monument, in the abandoned military and industrial structures of Marfa, Tex. From the darkroom, Mr. Penn has conducted his own enshrinement project. In the end, this exhibition’s main subject is not so much his achievement as how he wants it represented.

More here.

Three terms that would make any innovation enthusiast drool: Mesh networks, open source and music, all combined into one with Roadcasting, a project by   Carnegie-Mellon alumni which is a collaborative and mobile system that allows anyone to have a radio station and broadcast while on the move, specifically in cars. The system is still a  prototype.

“The Quicktime-formatted promotional video for the roadcasting project begins with a black screen that quickly dissolves into a still black-and-white image of a driver sitting behind the steering wheel, wearing a look of frustration and boredom. The narration begins: “Everyone has experienced the headaches of FM radio. There’s the endless commercials, the same old songs over and over again, and the difficulty of finding something that you want to hear. Welcome to the next generation of radio: roadcasting.”

The terrestrial radio industry is already fighting a multi-front battle with the ascendant satellite radio business and nascent podcasting community. Now it has another technological innovation to worry about: roadcasting.”

More Here

China offers lots of opportunities for companies who make business in it. And many companies can’t resist, even if it means that some insignificant words such as “Democracy” or “freedom” disappear from the vocabulary. Technology review is looking at how Microsoft behaves and does not forget yahoo! and google in its hall of fame:

“Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.’s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities — such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

“Prohibited language in text, please delete,” the message says.”

From MSNBC:

Two Brazilian doctors and amateur art lovers believe they have uncovered a secret lesson on human anatomy hidden by Renaissance artist Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Gilson Barreto and Marcelo de Oliveira believe Michelangelo scattered his detailed knowledge of internal anatomy across 34 of the ceiling’s 38 panels. The way they see it, a tree trunk is not just a tree trunk, but also a bronchial tube. And a green bag in one scene is really a human heart.

More here.

Patrick Wright reviews Disruptive Pattern Material; An Encyclopedia of Camouflage: Nature – Military – Culture, in the London Review of Books:

‘I well remember at the beginning of the war,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in 1938, ‘being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not seen it and Picasso, amazed, looked at it and then cried out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism.’ Stein went on to suggest that the entire First World War had been an exercise in Cubism. Hailing Picasso as the first to register an epoch-making change in the ‘composition’ of the world, she concluded that a great convulsion had been necessary to awaken the masses to his discovery: ‘Wars are only a means of publicising the thing already accomplished.’

Stephen Kern has pointed out that the Cubist quality of camouflage was quite widely perceived during the war. The artist Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, who was one of the forces behind France’s camouflage initiative, claimed to have used Cubist means to ‘deform objects totally’ and deliberately to have employed avant-garde artists in his section de camouflage, where they proved adept at ‘denaturing any form’. The Expressionist painter Franz Marc was among the artists who worked to the same end on the German side and, as Roy Behrens points out in this flamboyantly peculiar Encyclopedia of Camouflage, ships painted in the disruptive ‘dazzle’ schemes developed by the British artist Norman Wilkinson were said to resemble ‘Cubist paintings on a colossal scale’.

More here.

Bjorn Cary at MSNBC:

Scientists have discovered giant sinking mucus “houses” that double the amount of food on the sea floor.

The mucus houses, or “sinkers,” are produced by tadpole-like animals not much bigger than your index finger. As sinkers drop to the sea floor, small sea critters and other food particles get stuck to the mucus and end up on the bottom of the ocean.

For years scientists have observed loads of life at the bottom of the ocean. But they weren’t able to find enough food — carbon — to support all that life. Sinkers, previously overlooked, may help fill that gap.

More here.

Mark Peplow in Nature:

It’s official, says one group of researchers: Blade II is a bad film. Their study turns patterns of attendance into a single number that claims to grade a film’s quality.

The number attempts to gauge of how good the ‘word of mouth’ was around a given film, based on the behaviour of the harshest critics of all, the paying public.

César Hidalgo, now a graduate student in physics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and his colleagues, decided to study the ‘word of mouth’ effect in the film world simply because reviews often have a huge impact on audience numbers and there are copious data on ticket sales.

More here.

Edward Rothstein in the New York Times:

Why was “Don Quixote” originally written in Arabic? Or rather, why does Cervantes, who wrote the book in Spanish, claim that it was translated from the Arabic?

Much is being said this year about “Don Quixote,” in celebration of the 400th anniversary of its publication. And indeed, much has always been said about this extraordinary epic, narrating the misadventures of a half-mad hidalgo who seeks to re-establish the traditions of knight errantry. Faulkner reread it annually; Lionel Trilling said all prose fiction was a variation on its themes.

But aside from its literary achievements, “Don Quixote” sheds oblique light on an era when Spain’s Islamic culture forcibly came to an end. Just consider Cervantes’s playful account of the book’s origins. One day in the Toledo marketplace, he writes, a young boy was trying to sell old notebooks and worn scraps of paper covered with Arabic script. Cervantes recounts how he acquired a book and then looked around for a Moor to translate it. “It was not very difficult” to find such a Moor, he writes. In fact, he says, he could have even found a translator of Hebrew.

More here.

Sean Carrol at Preposterous Universe:

Update: Well, that was fast. Before I even got the post published, word is out that Mukhtaran Bibi may have been released! Who knows exactly what prompted the decision, but perhaps a well-timed blog campaign actually had some effect. On the other hand, it may just be a sham, as Kristof suggests (via Majikthise) — so it’s worth keeping the pressure on.

Update again (6/16): Apparently, she is still not free to travel. Perhaps unsurprising to see the US State Department joining in the “soothing” but misleading public statements.

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Ezra Klein points to a post by Tom Watson about the arrest of Mukhtaran Bibi. Nicholas Kristof tells the backstory:

Last fall I wrote about Mukhtaran Bibi, a woman who was sentenced by a tribal council in Pakistan to be gang-raped because of an infraction supposedly committed by her brother. Four men raped Ms. Mukhtaran, then village leaders forced her to walk home nearly naked in front of a jeering crowd of 300.

Ms. Mukhtaran was supposed to have committed suicide. Instead, with the backing of a local Islamic leader, she fought back and testified against her persecutors. Six were convicted.

Then Ms. Mukhtaran, who believed that the best way to overcome such abuses was through better education, used her compensation money to start two schools in her village, one for boys and the other for girls. She went out of her way to enroll the children of her attackers in the schools, showing that she bore no grudges.

More here.

Taking a cue from our own J.M. Tyree (see here), David Brooks writes in the New York Times:

I was emptying some boxes in my basement the other day and I came across an essay somebody had clipped on Ernest Hemingway from the July 14, 1961, issue of Time magazine. The essay was outstanding. Over three pages of tightly packed prose, with just a few photos, the anonymous author performed the sort of high-toned but accessible literary analysis that would be much harder to find in a mass market magazine today…

The sad thing is that this type of essay was not unusual in that era. If you read Time and Newsweek from the 1950’s and early 1960’s, you discover they were pitched at middle-class people across the country who aspired to have the same sorts of conversations as the New York and Boston elite.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Naqvi.]