Aryn Baker in Time Magazine:

Nearly four years after the U.S.-led coalition overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan is still stumbling on the path to peace and stability. The country is nowhere near as violent as it was before; it has a new constitution that enables the establishment of civil institutions like an independent judiciary; and foreign investment is trickling in. Outside the capital Kabul, however, much of the hinterland remains poor and lawless, often controlled by rival warlords and drug barons who do not answer to the central authorities. The presidential election that Hamid Karzai won last year should have given the divided country a unifying leader. But Karzai has been hamstrung by the lack of a parliament or local government bodies, and many Afghans derisively call him “mayor of Kabul.”

Afghanistan will only become a true democracy when citizens can turn for help to locally elected leaders, rather than armed warlords. That’s why this week’s polls are potentially so important.

More here.

From LiveScience.com:

Nobody knows how many people sit wrongfully convicted in prison due to errors in fingerprint matching. But a new study suggests there could be a thousand or more unknown identification errors a year in the United States.

Criminologist Simon Cole of the University of California at Irvine examined all 22 known cases of fingerprint mistakes made since 1920.

Most of the 22 cases were revealed only through “extremely fortuitous circumstances,” such as a post-conviction DNA test, the intervention of foreign police and in one case a deadly lab accident that led to the re-evaluation of evidence, Cole said today.

One highly publicized example was the case of Brandon Mayfield, a Portland lawyer held for two weeks as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings in 2004. FBI investigators matched prints at the scene to Mayfield, and an independent examiner verified the match. But Spanish National Police examiners insisted the prints did not match Mayfield and eventually identified another man who matched the prints.

The FBI acknowledged the error and Mayfield was released.

Cole thinks the high-profile cases are the tip of an iceberg of wrongfully accused, cases that are sometimes swept under the rug or lead to convictions. Other studies have shown an error rate of 0.8 percent in matching prints. Multiplied across all cases processed by U.S. crime labs in 2002, that would b e 1,900 mistaken fingerprint matches.

More here.

From New Scientist:

Certain questions define the way we see the world. How did the universe begin? What is matter made of? What shaped our planet? How did the amazing diversity of life arise? We take many of the answers for granted, but maybe we shouldn’t.

When we asked 10 of the biggest names in science to explain the significance of their discipline we were surprised by their response: who would have thought understanding quantum theory was relevant to the abortion debate? Or that a diamond ring can take you back to Pangaea? Set your mind spinning with our guide to the World’s 10 Biggest Ideas…

1. The big bang

2. Evolution

3. Quantum mechanics

4. The theory of everything

5. Risk

6. Chaos

7. Relativity

8. Climate change

9. Tectonics

10. Science

Carl Limbacher in NewsMax:

The Vatican is sending investigators to each of the 229 Catholic seminaries in the U.S. to search for “evidence of homosexuality.”

The Vatican probe was revealed in a document, obtained by the New York Times, meant to guide investigators who visit the seminaries.

It surfaced as Catholics await a Vatican ruling on whether homosexuals should be barred from the priesthood.

At each seminary, investigators will conduct confidential interviews with faculty members and seminarians, as well as everyone who graduated in the last three years, the Times reports.

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

Douglas Martin in the New York Times:

Stanley Burnshaw, a consummate man of letters who was not only a poet, critic, translator, editor, publisher and novelist, but also skilled at setting type by hand, died yesterday on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 99.

Mr. Burnshaw roamed the peaks of the literary world, famously dueling with Wallace Stevens over poetry and politics; publishing and editing work by his friend Robert Frost; writing a biography of Frost; and publishing important books by Lionel Trilling.

His own creative career spanned more than 70 years: five of his poems were published in 1927 in “The American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature,” of which Lewis Mumford was an editor, and he published his final book, a poetry anthology, in 2002.

More here.

Lewis Beale in the Los Angeles Times:

Rushdie says the idea first came to him in 1999. “The germ of the book came in two bits,” he notes. “One was this image of the murder scene with which the book begins. It then connected for me with having been in Kashmir and having met a group of traveling players not unlike the one in the book. Somehow, I realized this murderer was Kashmiri, he might come from that village and, somehow, that might give me a way of uniting the two worlds.”

Yet Rushdie had to set “Shalimar” aside for a while because it wasn’t coming together. He picked it up again partly, he says, because of Sept. 11. “What that made me see was this idea that the world was interconnected and is one of the things that everyone saw in this city on that day,” Rushdie says. “And it made me think that what was wrong with my original conception was that I hadn’t made the canvas big enough. You have to go back into Strasbourg, back into India. By enlarging the story, you get to see how different bits of the world connect.”

More here.

Abraham Verghese in the New York Times Magazine:

With the first busloads of Katrina refugees about to arrive in San Antonio, the call went out for physician volunteers, and I signed up for the 2 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift. On the way, riding down dark, deserted streets, I thought of driving in for night shifts in the I.C.U. as an intern many years ago, and how I would try to steel myself, as if putting on armor.

Within a massive structure at Kelly U.S.A. (formerly Kelly Air Force Base), a brightly lighted processing area led to office cubicles, where after registering, new arrivals with medical needs came to see us. My first patient sat before me, haggard, pointing to what ailed her, as if speech no longer served her. I peeled her shoes from swollen feet, trying not to remove skin in the process. Cuts from submerged objects and immersion in standing water had caused the swelling, as well as infection of both feet. An antibiotic, a pair of slip-ons from the roomful of donated clothing and a night with her feet elevated – that would help.

The ailments common among the refugees included diarrhea, bronchitis, sore throat and voices hoarse or lost. And stress beyond belief. People didn’t have their medications, and blood sugars and blood pressures were out of control.

More here.  [Thanks to Sughra Raza.]

From National Geographic:

The idea of mother and daughter, and possibly even grandmother, chasing the same male would repulse most humans. But to female greater horseshoe bats, sharing a strong breeding partner can ensure fit offspring and strengthen the social group. During their life span, most female greater horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus ferrumequinum) revisit and breed with a specific male, according to a new study.

More here.

From The Guardian:

Being right isn’t enough, says Peter Preston. Here, in 20 graceful, witty, prophetic essays, is everything that’s good about American journalism ( and a rich slice of American society, too). The editor of Harper’s magazine writes like a dream, researches like a punctilious professor of classical history and finds his lonely judgments vindicated time and again. The difficulty – and it is a difficulty – is that that good side comes with a greyer side that readers outside America can’t ignore, a built-in impotence verging on tragic irrelevance. But let’s hit the high spots first.

More here.

From Newtopia Magazine:

The destruction of New Orleans represents a confluence of many of the most pernicious trends in American politics and culture: poverty, racism, militarism, elitist greed, environmental abuse, public corruption and the decay of democracy at every level.Katrina should become a metaphor for America’s failed representative democracy. Americans need to remember that government is a necessary good and not a necessary evil as right-wing conservatives and Republicans believe. When our corrupt or incompetent leaders fail and cause loss of life they should be prosecuted for criminal negligent homicide. In this case it means prosecuting the Mayor of New Orleans, the Governor of Louisiana, the head of FEMA, and President George W. Bush.

More here.

From The New York Times:

SOME fearless outside referee had to barge in and try to adjudicate the culture wars, so let us rejoice that it’s Zadie Smith. She brings almost everything you want to the task: humor, brains, objectivity, equanimity, empathy, a pitch-perfect ear for smugness and cant, and then still more humor. Born in 1975 – safely past the 1960’s, the birth of our blues – she’s not much burdened by heavy dogmatic baggage of her own. Being from England, she is one wry remove from the ground zero of these battles, America. She can’t reconcile the warring camps – no one can – but “On Beauty” is that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left. (Not that they’ll necessarily be laughing in the same places.) Yet Smith is up to more as well: she wants to rise above the fray even as she wallows in it, to hit a high note of idealism rather than sink into the general despair. How radical can you be? Blame it on her youth.

More here, and see also this.

Francine Prose in Slate offers a bad review of Cotzee’s writing in his new book Slow Man.

“Here is Coetzee:

The blow catches him from the right, sharp and surprising and painful, like a bolt of electricity, lifting him up off the bicycle. Relax! he tells himself as he flies through the air (flies through the air with the greatest of ease!), and indeed he can feel his limbs go obediently slack. Like a cat he tells himself: roll, then spring to your feet, ready for what comes next. The unusual word limber or limbre is on the horizon too.

There’s nothing wrong with this, I suppose, except that it’s larded with clichés, starting with ‘bolt of electricity’ and continuing on to ‘flies through the air with the greatest of ease.’ The fact that writer and character recognize them as such hardly makes the passage more fun to read.”

I’ll still take a look.  And at the end, she leaves us with this trite but not so correct observation.

“I find myself coming up against the deceptively simple fact that if we are not interested in the language a writer uses, we find it hard to stay interested in the book . . .”

I find myself coming up against the not so deceptive and not so simple belief that style is not exactly just a matter of taste.  I may find a painting or work of art unappealing, but I have little doubt that Timothy Don can change my mind by helping to see it in a new way.  Justification in aesthetic judgment may be more complicated than in moral or scientific judgment.  But certainly it’s not a matter of “I like chocolate” and “you like vanilla”.

Steve Connor in The Independent:

A record loss of sea ice in the Arctic this summer has convinced scientists that the northern hemisphere may have crossed a critical threshold beyond which the climate may never recover. Scientists fear that the Arctic has now entered an irreversible phase of warming which will accelerate the loss of the polar sea ice that has helped to keep the climate stable for thousands of years.

They believe global warming is melting Arctic ice so rapidly that the region is beginning to absorb more heat from the sun, causing the ice to melt still further and so reinforcing a vicious cycle of melting and heating.

The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a “tipping point” beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically.

More here.  [Thanks to Josh Smith.]

Via Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, a site devoted to discussions of different types of map projections:

“There is an endless variety of geographical maps for every kind of purpose.  When looking at two different world maps one can wonder why the differences: do we draw the world as a rectangle, or an oval?  Shouldn’t it be a circle?  Should grid lines be parallel, straight or curved?  Does South America’s ‘tail’ bend eastwards or westwards?  What’s the ‘right’ way (or, more properly, is there one?) to draw our unique planet?

One important concern of cartography is solving how to project, i.e. transform or map points from an almost spherical lump of rock (our Earth) onto either flat sheets of paper or not-so flat phosphorus-coated glass.”

I was intrigued by polyhedral maps, printable cut-out forms of which are provided by the site.

“Several approaches were presented for reducing distortion when transforming a spherical surface into a flat map, including:

• first mapping the sphere into an intermediate zero-Gaussian curvature surface like a cylinder or a cone, then converting the surface into a plane
  • partially cutting the sphere and separately projecting each division in an interrupted map

Both techniques are combined in polyhedral maps:

1. inscribe the sphere in a polyhedron, then separately project regions of the sphere onto each polyhedral face
2. optionally, cut and disassemble the polyhedron into a flat map, called a “net” or fold-out

Intuitively, distortion in polyhedral maps is greater near vertices and edges, where the polyedron is farther from the inscribed sphere; also, increasing the number of faces is likely to reduce distortion (after all, a sphere is equivalent to a polyhedron with infinitely many faces).  However, too many faces create additional gaps and direction changes in the unfolded map, greatly reducing its usefulness.”

From PEN:

“PEN American Center expressed shock today that world-famous Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk will be brought before an Istanbul court on December 16 and that he faces up to three years in prison for a comment published in a Swiss newspaper earlier this year.

The charges stem from an interview given by Orhan Pamuk to the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger on February 6, 2005, in which he is quoted as saying that ‘thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it.’

Pamuk was referring to the killings by Ottoman Empire forces of thousands of Armenians in 1915-1917. Turkey does not contest the deaths, but denies that it could be called ‘genocide.’ The ‘30,000’ Kurdish deaths refers to those killed since 1984 in the conflict between Turkish forces and Kurdish separatists. Debate on these issues has been stifled by stringent laws, which often result in lengthy lawsuits, fines, and prison terms.

Orhan Pamuk will be tried under Article 301/1 of the Turkish Penal Code, which states, ‘A person who explicitly insults being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be imposed to a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years.’ To compound matters, Article 301/3 states, ‘Where insulting being a Turk is committed by a Turkish citizen in a foreign country, the penalty to be imposed shall be increased by one third.’ Thus, if Pamuk is found guilty, he faces an additional penalty for having made the statement abroad.”

Christopher Grimes in the Financial Times:

Four years on, there is an architectural renaissance in New York that would have been difficult to imagine in the weeks that followed 9/11. Since the 1960s, the shape of New York’s skyline has been under the control of savvy developers who made fortunes erecting uniform brick apartment towers and boxy office buildings. Architects wanting to do something new had little choice but to look to Europe or Asia. This is changing: New York is once again becoming a city where adventurous architecture can happen. Many of the world’s top architects are, like Foster, working in the city for the first time.

The outbreak of adventurous design is extremely broad-based. There are public works, most spectacularly Santiago Calatrava’s design for a new transportation centre near the World Trade Center site. There are the midtown office towers: Foster’s Hearst building, Renzo Piano’s design for The New York Times and Cesar Pelli’s new office for Bloomberg LP, all departures from the corporate glass boxes that dominate midtown Manhattan. There are great new cultural designs, including Yoshio Tanaguchi’s elegant expansion of the Museum of Modern Art. Restorations include David Childs’ plan to convert the 1912 beaux-arts Farley Post Office into a desperately needed new Pennsylvania Station. And then there is the High Line, one of those priceless ideas that is often conceived but too rarely executed: the plan is to convert a 1.45-mile-long stretch of disused elevated train track into a public park 30 feet above Chelsea and the Meatpacking District. But perhaps the most heartening of all is the return to interesting residential design, spurred on by Richard Meier’s work on Manhattan’s west side.

More here.

From Jazbah:

Independent filmmaker, Sabiha Sumar, has earned much acclaim for her films which deal with political and social issues such as the effects of religious fundamentalism on society and especially on women. Sabiha’s documentary ‘For a Place Under the Heavens’ features conversations with women from varying backgrounds. The film steps us through Pakistan’s short history and how each government has contributed to the rise of fundamentalism. Though we hear a lot about women’s oppression, the image of four professional, confident and independent women discussing Pakistani politics and religion conveys an important message: Pakistani women are not all passive and silent. One telling moment is the film is when Sabiha talks to Mufti Nizamuddin who is well respected as a Islamic scholar. He asserts that it is the fault of women that they have been left behind and that they have not demanded their rights, “Islam does not stop women from moving forward. They can come forward and take charge.” When asked if men in Pakistan will be willing to give up power if women were to demand it, he responds, “It would take a revolution. No one relinquishes power easily.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Currently doctors treat extensive burns by creating a graft. A piece of healthy skin from a victim is stretched up to six times its original size. The process creates holes in the skin so that it resembles a fine mesh fabric. The graft is then placed over the victim’s burned skin and, as the patient recovers, new skin cells grow to fill in the holes. The new trial will test whether spraying extra cultured skin cells in the holes of the mesh makes burns heal better or more quickly.

More here.

This is one of the best bits of writing about creationism/ID/evolution that I have seen, and it is by our own 3 Quarks columnist, Justin E. H. Smith, in Counterpunch:

Compared with the campaigns against abortion and homosexuality, the other two members of that trifecta of Godlessness, evolution may seem unimportant. The first two concern judgments about what is right and wrong, whereas with the latter it is only a matter of truth and falsehood. But it is precisely in debates about what is right and wrong that people should be taking up sides based on preference. When it comes to true-or-false questions, the traditional assumption has been that it does not matter what you prefer; all that matters is what the evidence imposes.

What is most troubling about creationism is how easily its defenders elide it with moral issues that invite us to take up positions based on things like principles. A society that outlaws abortion is just mean-spirited, but not for that reason delusional about the nature of reality; one that supresses a good scientific theory and replaces it with a fairy tale is simply retarded. And I mean this in the very literal sense that it is stunted, held back, left at the intellectual and emotional level of a three- year-old. Creationists would have all Americans frozen at that innocent stage where kitsch coloring books with scenes of smiling hippos on Noah’s ark, available at Christian supply stores (did Christ, by the way, need ‘supplies’?) throughout the country, seem to provide an adequate account of origins.

The advance of creationism, in short, is among the surest signs that in the US truth is increasingly something that is decided upon by preference-based convention, rather than something that is imposed, like it or not, by reality. And what is preferred in this case is infantile submission to the authority of the men who control church, school, and state.

More here.  [Look for Justin’s first column at 3QD on Monday.]

Last year the President of Sri Lanka, Chanrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, gave a very good speech at the Asia Society, about which I wrote in my very first Monday Musing: Cake Theory and Sri Lanka’s President. The president is again in town for the UN Summit, and I had the pleasure of meeting her again last night, again at the Asia Society, and again, she delivered an excellent speech. Imagine my pleasant surprise, when halfway through the speech, after speaking of John Rawls and Amartya Sen, she referred to my Monday Musing column:

And equal civil and political rights are required for people to have equal access to healthcare. The political philosopher John Rawls captures this point by talking not just about equal basic liberties but about the equal worth of basic liberties. Similarly, Professor Amartya Sen refers to “Development as Freedom” in order to emphasize that development is not simply to increase growth rates in order to increase per capita income and purchase more goods, but to improve health, education, housing, so that people will have improved quality of life.

But it is not just political philosophers who are concerned about the practical implications of treating people as equals. We have interesting developments in what is called “game theory” among economists that develops mathematical models for dealing with the technical challenges of equal division of goods among “n” persons in day to day situations. In a friendly critique of the talk I gave last year at the Asia Society, a web blog – pointed out some of these important technical advances in conflict resolution, curiously known as cake theory, because these models use cake cutting as a metaphor for dividing goods equally.

Read the rest of the speech here.