From MSNBC:

Robots with oxygen-breathing muscles, aircraft that change the shape of their wings while in the air and other technical advances may be on the way, thanks to a new generation of artificial muscles. Scientists have designed the muscles to run on fuels rather than batteries or electricity from power cords. The new study appears in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society. While the artificial muscles don’t look like bulging biceps or well-defined quads, they are, nonetheless, like natural muscles in important ways: they run on a combination of oxygen and energy-rich fuels and are capable of doing work — such as lifting a metal weight up and down.

More here.

From Science:

Massive grasshoppers called wetas once hopped throughout New Zealand. Now threatened or endangered in most of that country, their scarcity could spell trouble for some of their food sources. Researchers have found that these omnivorous insects sometimes munch on fruits, passing seeds through their guts unharmed. This behavior is essential to the well-being of plants, as the journey through the gut seems to be a rite of passage necessary for some seeds to germinate, says Kevin Burns, an ecologist at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Insects are not known for eating fruits and dispersing undigested seeds. But because New Zealand originally lacked rats, which can spread seeds, Burns and his Victoria University colleagues Catherine Duthie, a graduate student, and George Gibbs wondered if the mouse-sized wetas had taken over the seed-dispersal job often held by these furry species. That role would make sense, as wetas are known as “invertebrate mice” because of their size and nocturnal habitats, Burns points out.

More here.

Following his ludicrous hack job on Daniel Dennett’s brilliant and sincerely argued new book, Leon Wieseltier has turned his sights on another well-respected and innovative thinker far beyond his apparently meager comprehension: Stanley Fish. Once again, he believes that rudely sneering at someone is a suitable substitute for discussion and argument. So why do I bother to give him space here? Because his vicious attacks may possibly influence some of those not intimately familiar with the subtle topics that Fish has brought up. And because I want to strongly urge those at 3QD who study English professionally (Asad? Jonathan? Anyone?) and are therefore more qualified to speak of Fish, to explain what is really at issue here, as no doubt they will do it better than I.

Here’s what Wieseltier writes in The New Republic:

Forgive my tardiness, but last month The New York Times published an article that compared liberals unfavorably to fundamentalist mobs. The piece appeared on the paper’s fun op-ed page, on the occasion of the “cartoon riots” that were provoked by the publication in a conservative Danish newspaper of scornful images of the Prophet–no, that’s not accurate. The riots were provoked by Muslim politicians and diplomats for whom the Western blasphemy was an Allah-sent opportunity to divert the attention of various Muslim societies from what ails them. What would modern Arab satrapies do without medieval Muslim masses? A bloodletting, then, followed by brandy and cigars; and the robed zealots in the streets are glad to do the work of the suited cynics in the private planes. Scores of people died in the cartoon riots. It was not the cartoons that killed them; it was their conviction that violence is a variety of cultural criticism. The intensity of their feeling about their faith was all that they (and in their view, anybody else) needed to know in the world. 

And there in the Times was Stanley Fish, extolling them precisely for this. How contrarian. Fish is the author of a book called The Trouble With Principle–now there’s a danger!–and has made a handsome career as a cheap button-pusher; he is one of those intellectuals who prefers any kind of radicalism to any kind of liberalism.

More here.

Matt Donnelly in Science and Theology News, via Cosmic Variance:

Science & Theology News asked three leading scientists – Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Krauss and Sean M. Carroll [close friend of 3QD from the beginning!] — to comment on topics in science-and-religion as well as in popular culture. What follows are their answers…

ON STEVEN JAY GOULD AND “NON-OVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA”

CHOMSKY: Steve Gould [was] a friend. But I don’t quite agree with him [that science-and-religion are “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”]. Science and religion are just incommensurable. I mean, religion tells you, ‘Here’s what you ought to believe.’ Judaism’s a little different, because it’s not really a religion of belief, it’s a religion of practice. If I’d asked my grandfather, who was an ultra-orthodox Jew from Eastern Europe. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he would have looked at me with a blank stare, wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. And what you do is you carry out the practices. Of course, you say ‘I believe in this and that,’ but that’s not the core of the religion. The core of the religion is just the practices you carry out. And yes, there is a system of belief behind it somewhere, but it’s not intended to be a picture of the world. It’s just a framework in which you carry out practices that are supposed to be appropriate.

KRAUSS: Science and religion are incommensurate, and religion is largely about practice rather than explanation.  But religion is different than theology, and as the Catholic Church has learned over the years, any sensible theology must be in accord with the results of science.

CARROLL: Non-overlapping magisteria might be the worst idea Stephen Jay Gould ever had.  It’s certainly a surprising claim at first glance: religion has many different aspects to it, but one of them is indisputably a set of statements about how the universe works at a deep level, typically featuring the existence of a powerful supernatural Creator.  “How the universe works” is something squarely in the domain of science.  There is, therefore, quite a bit of overlap:  science is quite capable of making judgments about whether our world follows a rigid set of laws or is occasionally influenced by supernatural forces.  Gould’s idea only makes sense because what he really means by “religion” is “moral philosophy.”  While that’s an important aspect of religion, it’s not the only one; I would argue that the warrant for religion’s ethical claims are based on its view of the universe, without which we wouldn’t recognize it as religion.

More here.

From IT Conversations:

The capacity of humans to deceive each other is well documented by history and personal experience. Less well known, however, is the capacity of most living things to deceive each other – species deceiving other species, members of their own species and themselves. We are, it seems, not that different from parasites, insects and bacteria in this regard.

Dr. Robert Trivers talks about the evolutionary basis of deception in this address from Pop!Tech 2005. The first half of this talk focusses on the biological examples of deception in the natural world, with explanations for the evolutionary advantages of deception and self-deception.

Later in the talk, Dr. Trivers supplies easily recognizable examples of common human self-deception. He then delves into an overtly political criticism of human deception and self-deception, with an emphasis on current events.

This talk was from the What Do We Know session at Pop!Tech. The other speaker in this session was Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The question and answer period for these talks is included in this program.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

Ira Stoll in the New York Sun:

Never mind the eccentric way this volume has been published by Rizzoli, which seems not to have English language typesetting software in house. (In the first few pages of the book, both the words “have” – “have”- and “whore” – “who-re” – are hyphenated, as if they were being pronounced in a bad Italian accent.)

The more serious problem is the sweeping nature of her condemnation of Islam and Muslims. She faults them for the fact that “they breed like rats”; for requiring their meat to be slaughtered in a “barbaric” manner she says is similar to kosher butchery; for having their own schools, hospitals, and cemeteries; for immigrating; and for wanting accommodation of their religious holidays and Sabbath in schools and workplaces.

Much of her complaint about Islam, in other words, might as well be directed at Orthodox Jews, and a good deal of it at American Catholics. Ms. Fallaci’s cry of alarm – “Wake up, West, wake up! They have declared war on us, we are at war! And in war we must fight” – rings less alarmingly when it turns out that what she’s alarmed about is religions having their own cemeteries. Anyone familiar with the graveyard behind the Congregational church in any traditional New England town – or, for that matter, the Trinity Church graveyard in Lower Manhattan – realizes that, in itself, isn’t much of a threat at all.

Ms. Fallaci makes clear that her aversion is not to Islamist terrorism alone or to Islamic extremism but to Islam and Muslims in general. “Moderate Islam does not exist,” she writes, calling it “an illusion,” an invention of naive Westerners.

More here.

Tim Adams in The Observer:

Daniel Dennett has something of the look of those seventeenth-century puritan preachers who would talk for hours about the sins of the flesh. The gospel he has spent most of his life spreading, however, has nothing to do with supernatural vengeance; quite the opposite. His full white beard is worn more in homage to Charles Darwin than the Almighty.

When I went to see him at the little office in the corner of a quadrangle at Tufts University he has occupied for 30 years, he was examining on his computer screen the cover of his new book, Breaking the Spell. His book seeks to demonstrate that religion, chiefly Christianity, is itself a biologically evolved concept, and one that has outlived its usefulness. In America, these days, that is the most virulent form of fighting talk.

More here.

Luke Harding in The Guardian:

They are questions that would test the mettle of even the most ardent German patriot. Name three German philosophers, a poem by Goethe, a German Nobel prize winner and the doctor who discovered the cholera virus.

Stuck? Then you would struggle to qualify for German citizenship under new plans by authorities to test would-be citizens on their German cultural knowledge.

The state of Hesse wants to introduce the values and knowledge test for all those applying for a German passport. Other sample questions are to list three German composers, including the creator of the “Ode to Joy”; name a work by Friedrich Schiller; list three mountains in middle Germany and describe the famous “motif” painted by the 19th-century German artist Caspar David Friedrich. There are also questions on the constitution.

More here.  [Thanks to Michael Blim.]

Chapter 2, Part 2 Spiritualism and Nihilism: The Second Decade

Just as Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907 made Matisse’s Portrait of Mme Matisse of 1905 seem passé, so Kandinsky’s First Abstract Watercolor of 1910 made Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon seem outmoded.

What was innovative and unique just a few years earlier — the trend-setting last word in advanced art — instantly became an old idea of art, indeed, that fatally ironic thing, a cliché of radicalism. Kandinsky’s First Abstract Watercolor was much more daring and imaginative than Matisse’s bold use of a green gesture to define the line of his wife’s nose — it made her face radiantly fresh — and Picasso’s schematized abstract figures and African masks, with their own peculiar kind of freshness and “greenness.” Both were strident, triumphant invasions of barbarism into high art — the brutal take-over of civilized culture by uncivilized expression. But Kandinsky’s First Abstract Watercolor was not simply another avant-garde shock administered to a reluctant public, another deliberate production of avant-garde difference, another mischievous manipulation of the known: It was an artistic leap into the unknown, inviting the public to a new kind of experience. (Whether made in 1910 or 1913, as some scholars think, it carries Kandinsky’s ideas about art to a consummate extreme.)

more from Donald Kuspit at artnet Magazine here.

Though the cultural climate of southeastern Pennsylvania has surely changed in the two-and-thirty years between my boyhood and Kidd’s, the soil must still be fertile for the young homebody and media maven, “for all of us”, as Kidd wrote in his epic album Peanuts: The Art of Charles M Schultz (Pantheon, 2001), “who ate our school lunches alone and didn’t have any hope of sitting anywhere near the little red-haired girl and never got any valentines and struck out every time we were shoved to the plate for Little League”.

In a field, book-jacket design, where edge, zip and instant impact are sine qua non, Kidd is second to none. Can he draw? Presumably, yet the mark of his pen or pencil rarely figures into his work. His tool is the digital computer, with its ever more ingenious graphics programs. In the ever-expanding electronic archives of scannable photographic imagery, he is a hunter-gatherer.

more from The Guardian Unlimited here.

Federico Fellini was great with people, terrible with money. He adored his wife and was flagrantly unfaithful. He loved whiling away the hours in cafés, but was a workaholic. He was a scamp, a victim, a victimizer. And he was a great director. “He believed in chance meetings, in love affairs, and in friendships,” writes his biographer Tullio Kezich, a film critic and a friend of Fellini for more than 40 years, “all of which came to him with incredible speed, and were like constant revelations that tended to endure. He lived inside of things with indomitable curiosity and unflappable openness. He abandoned himself to what Dostoevsky called ‘the river of life.’”

more from the NY Observer here.

From Harper’s:

Percentage of Americans who say that fighting terrorism should be one of the nation’s top two priorities: 6[Harris Interactive (Rochester, N.Y.)]

Number of people whom Coalition forces have imprisoned in Iraq at some point since March 2003: 48,526[Detainee Operations, Multi-National Force—Iraq (Baghdad)]

Percentage of these who have been convicted of a crime: 1.5[Detainee Operations, Multi-National Force—Iraq (Baghdad)]

Margin by which total votes for Democrats in the last three Senate elections exceeded those for Republicans: 2,900,000[Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives]

Number of seats won by Democrats and Republicans, respectively: 46, 56[Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives]

More here.

From MSNBC:

A computer scientist has developed a method to weave stringy DNA molecules into nanometer-scale, two-dimensional patterns ranging from smiley faces to a map of the Americas. Experts say the “DNA origami” procedure laid out by Paul Rothemund of the California Institute of Technology could be adapted to create nano-computers, new drug delivery systems or even molecular-scale chemical factories. “We are arriving at a new frontier in our pursuit of ever-smaller structures,” Lloyd Smith, a chemist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, where Rothemund’s research was published.

More here.

Via Politcal Theory Daily Review, Michael B. Katz, Mark J. Stern, and Jamie J. Fader examine inequality and gender, in the Journal of Social History.

Throughout American history, male/female has defined an enduring binary embodied in access to jobs, income, and wealth. Women’s economic history shows how for centuries sex has inscribed a durable inequality into the structure of American labor markets that civil and political rights have moderated but not removed. This economic experience of women reflects the paradox of inequality in America: the coexistence of structural inequality with individual and group mobility. Women, like African Americans, have gained what T.H. Marshall labeled civil and political citizenship. No longer are they legally disenfranchised, and discrimination on account of race and gender is against the law. They have also increased their social citizenship, as represented by access to jobs and education, and women, in particular, benefit from many programs of the welfare state. Yet, they remain unequal. On the whole, they earn less than men, end up in occupational ghettos, bump up against glass ceilings, and find themselves, in relation to men, as poor as ever.

The process of internal differentiation characteristic of the history of groups defined by sex, race, or ethnicity provides the key to understanding how the paradox of inequality works. As a group, women, like blacks, experienced mobility that disrupted the processes which had systematically excluded them from access to jobs and income. But their assaults on durable categorical inequalities had their limits. Men/whites re-drew category boundaries, retaining their hold on economic advantage while women/blacks assimilated into and reproduced existing economic and occupational hierarchies among themselves. In the United States, group mobility did not challenge structural inequality—instead, it reinforced it. This process of differentiation—the key to the paradox of inequality—is very important to understand. It is one of the primary ways that inequality works in America, and it poses serious issues and dilemmas for public policy.

The Research Unit on Political Economy (Mumbai) looks at “India’s Place in the U.S. Strategic Order” and related issues. (Hat tip: Richard Rubin.)

While the US government is always interested in securing large contracts for American arms manufacturers, that does not explain its decision, as Condoleezza Rice put it, to “make India a global power”. That decision is dictated by broader strategic considerations.

First, the US is not worried by India’s ambitions: it knows that India is unable to project power across Asia independently. For example, India’s plans for a rapid-reaction force which could be deployed immediately in countries along the rim of the Indian Ocean cannot be pursued without fast long-range aircraft with aerial refueling capabilities, Airborne Early Warning and Command aircraft, attack helicopters, and a carrier in addition to the INS Virat. A significant share of this would have to be imported from the US. Any drawn-out intervention abroad would require even greater infrastructure, which India lacks. (In fact, even the European Union countries are not equipped with the infrastructure for sustained projection of military force independent of the US. This was demonstrated during the Balkans crisis, when they were forced at last to turn to the US to intervene.)

Moreover, given the balance of military strength, India’s attempts to project power cannot be sustained in the face of US opposition. Indeed, Vajpayee reportedly confessed that strategic partnership with the US was essential to his 20-year programme to attain great-power status; “otherwise India’s ability to project power and influence abroad anywhere would be greatly compromised.”

The second reason for the US to promote Indian ambitions is that it suits US interests to do so. This is spelled out with brutal candour in at least three important US sources.

Nir Rosen explores the origins of sectarian violence in Iraq, in the Boston Review.

Political parties didn’t overtly begin to speak in the name of sectarian groups until 2005. For Shias, it wasn’t necessary: after the war Iraq’s Shia triumphalism was shared by all Shia parties; Iraq was now theirs and could not be taken away except by the Americans. There was no threat of Sunnis retaking the country because they had never taken it before: they had been given it, first by the Ottomans and then by the British. Iraq’s Sunnis, unsurprisingly, felt intimidated, and they increasingly came to view Shias as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shias were the majority or that Shias had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis were the primary victims of American military aggression and viewed Shias as collaborators. As Shias became the primary victims of radical Sunni terror attacks against Iraqi civilians, they came to view Sunnis as Baathists, Saddamists, or Wahhabis. Yet Shias showed restraint amid daily attacks meant to provoke a civil war; they knew the numbers were on their side.

The attacks against Shia civilians did nothing to weaken their increasing power in Iraq, validated by the January 2005 elections. With many Sunni leaders boycotting the elections in protest of the occupation, the new government and the constitutional committee emerged with a large Shia majority. Throughout the region, sectarian tensions began to increase, and Sunnis in Jordan and Saudi Arabia were feeling threatened by the Shia renaissance in Iraq.

More here.

In openDemocracy, K.A. Dilday looks at the anti-discrimination lawsuit against craigslist.

In the United States, a lawsuit has been filed against the internet ad site Craigslist for violating fair-housing practices. Cited in the lawsuit were ads for roommates that said such things as “African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won’t work out”, and “Requirements: Clean Godly Christian Male”. Craigslist began as a personal project in San Francisco, a way for people to look for and advertise employment. It now has sites for people in London, Johannesburg, Paris and many other cities around the world.

In the United States, most of the articles about the lawsuit against Craigslist have focused on the questions of regulating the internet, of making it conform to the same standards and laws as other media. But I wonder what we are really accomplishing…

“Discriminatory housing advertisements contaminate the housing market, stigmatize the people who are discouraged or excluded from housing, and mislead people into thinking that it is normal and acceptable to select tenants on the basis of race, gender, religion or family status”, wrote Laurie Wardell, one of the attorneys filing the lawsuit against Craigslist.

Yet what these laws do is perpetuate an illusion. They do not protect people. Early in the days of Craigslist I remember reading a question posted by a frustrated black man who was looking for a room to rent in New York. He felt that when he went to view apartments to share, people of other races changed their minds about him when they met him because they didn’t want to live with a black man. His question was, should he put his race in his ad and replies to ads or not? My instinct would have been to tell him not to, but I was swayed by the blunt wisdom of one man who replied succinctly: “Yes, put your race in. Why waste your time going to meet bigots?”

Slobodan Milosevic will not be much mourned across the former Yugoslavia that he tore apart. His vision of Serb nationalism brought bloodshed from Croatia to Bosnia and then Kosovo, first through the tanks of the Yugoslav National Army, then through Belgrade-backed Serb paramilitaries and, finally, through the police squads of the Ministry of the Interior. In a few brutal years, more than a quarter-of-a-million people died in Milosevic’s failed wars.

But while Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb ciphers – Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic – must bear the bulk of the responsibility for the killing, an assessment of the career of Europe’s last mass murderer poses uncomfortable questions for a world that let him prosecute his crimes.

more from The Observer here.

Monuments maybe every sculptor’s dream, but they can be a mixed blessing. They communicate beyond the artworld with a big public, and put the sculptor in a line from Stonehenge, the Gothic Cathedrals, Rodin. But they consume disproportionate energies to their aeshetic return.

A sculptor can have any number of new ideas in the maquette studio for the time and energy, usually demanding assistance, needed to realise a single piece at a monumental scale. A maquette, thanks in part to the dollshouse effect, inspires a natural empathy: literally issuing from the hand, it conveys tangible emotion, a felt quality, that will inevitably get lost when transformed into a relatively depersonalized monolith. The biggie is seen by more people, but people who are rushing to catch a train, or sit with their backs to the piece to enjoy a sandwich, or delinquent kids looking for a surface on which to skateboard or graffiti. Alienation, starting with the production process, is felt all around.

more from Artcritical here.

From Scientific American:

An international team of scientists has discovered a massive new planet thanks to an effect described by Einstein 70 years ago. Microlensing–which occurs when a star crosses in front of another star and bends the light from the more distant star, magnifying it like a lens–predicted extra brightness for a red dwarf star roughly 9,000 light years from Earth. Based on the more than 1,000 images from the MDM Observatory in Arizona, team leader Andrew Gould of Ohio State University and his fellow astronomers calculate that this new planet has roughly 13 times the mass of Earth–making it about the size of Neptune–and orbits its star at about the distance of the asteroid belt in our own solar system.

More here.