Gautam Bhatia in the NY TImes Magazine:

One evening a few years ago, I found myself on the road that heads south out of Delhi, in the city’s fastest-developing suburb: Qutab Enclave. The area along the road was one big construction site. Many new structures sat between piles of rubble, and workers milled around concrete mixers on brown hot ground, half dug, half built. Pigs and stray dogs strolled near new plate-glass outlets for Reebok, Benetton and Levi’s.

As the head of a small architecture practice in Delhi, I had just made a routine visit to the site of a house under construction nearby when I decided to take a look at the newly-erected headquarters of a leading software company. This was one of the first so-called e-buildings in India — what its makers described as intelligent, user-friendly architecture. In my own practice, I try to conform to the ideals of hand craft, low cost and no maintenance, and having just examined the hand-applied mud plaster of the house I was working on, the idea of a peek into a high-tech extreme machine seemed all the more intriguing.

More here.

Nicholas Ostler review’s the book by David Crystal, in the New Statesman:

David Crystal is the prophet par excellence of the English language. With this book he has set his sights high, aiming not to write a history of a language (as he did in The Stories of English), nor a synopsis of worldwide languages (as in his monumental Cambridge Encyclo-paedia of Language), but to show, in a single volume, how language works.

The task is not a small one. Asking how something works implies that it can be revealingly viewed as a mechanism – which is why it makes sense to ask how a clock works but not, say, a rose or a grasshopper. With language, there is simply too much going on for there to be a single answer. So Crystal is forced to jump from one thing to another, with the result that the thing never quite forms into a workable whole. Still, he is in good company in this respect: Noam Chomsky has aimed all his life to characterise the properties of language – the “abstract organ” that develops in us all – but in practice has mostly confined himself to the mechanism of sentence structure.

Crystal casts an engaging eye over the linguistic horizon, giving us the fruits of others’ studies while building up an overarching framework into which most language questions fit. He wants to provide the interested non-expert with an outline of every major aspect of language as linguists understand it – rather as he might, say, in the course of a railway journey from London to Edinburgh.

More here.

In the recurring dream
my mother stands
in her bridal gown
under the burning lilac,
with Bernard Shaw and Bertie
Russell kissing her hands;
the house behind her is in ruins;
she is wearing an owl’s face
and makes barking noises.
Her minatory finger points.
I pass through the cardboard doorway
askew in the field
and peer down a well
where an albino walrus huffs.
He has the gentlest eyes.
If the dirt keeps sifting in,
staining the water yellow,
why should I be blamed?
Never try to explain.
That single Model A
sputtering up the grade
unfurled a highway behind
where the tanks maneuver,
revolving their turrets.
In a murderous time
the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.
It is necessary to go
through dark and deeper dark
and not to turn.
I am looking for the trail.
Where is my testing-tree?
Give me back my stones!

from, The Testing-Tree

There has been much debate over Dan Brown’s novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.” With that one word, “renowned,” Brown proves that he hails from the school of elbow-joggers—nervy, worrisome authors who can’t stop shoving us along with jabs of information and opinion that we don’t yet require. (Buried far below this tic is an author’s fear that his command of basic, unadorned English will not do the job; in the case of Brown, he’s right.) You could dismiss that first stumble as a blip, but consider this, discovered on a random skim through the book: “Prominent New York editor Jonas Faukman tugged nervously at his goatee.” What is more, he does so over “a half-eaten power lunch,” one of the saddest phrases I have ever heard.

more from The New Yorker here.

“Every song is a cry for love,” crooned Ireland’s Brian Kennedy during Saturday night’s 51st Eurovision Song Contest. He obviously hadn’t heard Lordi, the Finnish horror rock sensation which beat him and acts from 21 other countries to clinch the most emphatic ever victory in the annual festival of kitsch pop.

Dressed as bloodthirsty orcs and warning Europe to “get ready to get scared” the rockers from Arctic Lapland took the stage as Eurovision outsiders and left as winners who had taken the contest to what Terry Wogan described as a new level of foolishness with their song Hard Rock Hallelujah.

more from the Guardian Unlimited here.

Late 1857. George Eliot prepares her assault on the novel. The form is mature, and she is mature—approaching forty. The pen feels as natural in her hand as a fork, yet, despite the power and the pleasure she draws from wielding it, this supreme literary form is forbidding. An intellectual, unquestionably, but an artist? George Henry Lewes, the man with whom she shares her life (and whose undivorced status has caused much of society to close its doors to the couple—doors that will swing open again when she is famous), is encouraging her: The three increasingly ambitious stories she has turned out as Scenes of Clerical Life have stilled any doubts as to her flair for drama and dialogue. A delighted public is snapping up the book. Dickens has written to the mysterious author: “The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of”; as for her pseudonym, “I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman.” Clever man. Now, she tells her publisher, she seeks a “large canvas.” She has in mind an incident her Methodist aunt recounted to her two decades earlier, of “how she had visited a condemned criminal,—a very ignorant girl, who had murdered her child and refused to confess; how she had stayed with her praying through the night, and how the poor creature at last broke out into tears, and confessed her crime.” She sets the action at the turn of the century, in the north central England of her pious girlhood, researching the customs, the agriculture, the botany of the region; she reads Robert Southey’s The Life of Wesley, taking diligent notes on Methodism. Then she writes rapidly and confidently—the greatest and most harrowing section, as she will later relate, goes even faster than the rest—finishing the book in just over a year. Adam Bede goes on sale in February 1859 and is not only a tremendous success (the most popular of Eliot’s novels during her lifetime) but something more, something every first novelist aspires to (preposterously, crazily, but why else break your heart locking yourself away for years on such a dubious labor?): one of the glories of the form.

more from Bookforum here.

From Scientific American:

An architectural marvel when it opened 11 years ago, the new Denver International Airport’s high-tech jewel was to be its automated baggage handler. It would autonomously route luggage around 26 miles of conveyors for rapid, seamless delivery to planes and passengers. But software problems dogged the system, delaying the airport’s opening by 16 months and adding hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns. Despite years of tweaking, it never ran reliably. Last summer airport managers finally pulled the plug–reverting to traditional manually loaded baggage carts and tugs with human drivers. The mechanized handler’s designer, BAE Automated Systems, was liquidated, and United Airlines, its principal user, slipped into bankruptcy, in part because of the mess.

Such massive failures occur because crucial design flaws are discovered too late. Only after programmers began building the code–the instructions a computer uses to execute a program–do they discover the inadequacy of their designs. Now a new generation of software design tools is emerging. Their analysis engines are similar in principle to tools that engineers increasingly use to check computer hardware designs.

More here.

From Nature:

It freshens breath, protects teeth and even, if you believe the commercials, makes you immensely popular. But Finnish researchers are hoping that chewing gum could soon pull off an even more ambitious trick: helping to stave off cancer. They have made a gum containing a compound that mops up a chemical called acetaldehyde, which has been linked to cancers of the mouth, oesophagus and stomach. The active ingredient, called cysteine, is slowly released through chewing the gum.

The anti-cancer chew could help those most at risk, such as smokers and heavy drinkers, suggests Mikko Salaspuro of the University of Helsinki, who developed the idea with his colleague Martti Marvola. Smoking and drinking are linked to up to 80% of these cancers in developed countries. Smoke and alcohol both raise the levels of acetaldehyde in the mouth and upper digestive tract. Cysteine, a building block of proteins, reacts with the compound to take it out of harm’s way.

More here.

Alex Katz. Beach Sandals, 1987. Aquatint, spitbite.

More on this master American painter here and here.

More images of his work.

Carl Zimmer in his always excellent blog, The Loom:

Nothing gets the blood boiling like a manimal. For many people, the idea of breaching the human species barrier–to mingle our biology with that of an animal–seems like a supreme affront to the moral order. In his January state of the union address, President Bush called for a ban on “creating human-animal hybrids.”

These so-called chimeras, according to their opponents, devalue humanity by breaching our species barrier. “Human life is a gift from our creator, and that gift should never be discarded, devalued or put up for sale,” Bush declared. Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas expanded on this sentiment in his Human Chimera Prohibition Bill of 2005. Chimeras, according to the bill, “blur the lines between human and animal.” They must be banned because “respect for human dignity and the integrity of the human species may be threatened by chimeras.”

Some opponents cite the Bible as proof that chimeras are wrong–in particular, I Corinthians 15:39: “All flesh is not the same flesh: but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds.” Others rely on their own sense of disgust as a reliable guide to the wrongness of chimeras. “When we start to blend the edges of things, we’re uneasy,” explains Grant Hurlburt, a psychiatrist and member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. “That’s why chimeric creatures are monsters in mythology in the first place.”

So let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that a nefarious plot to create human-ape hybrids was discovered in some distant country.

More here.

From the New York Review of Books:

At the beginning of Philip Roth’s 1979 novella The Ghost Writer, the twenty-three-year-old narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, tremulously approaches the secluded New England home of a famous but reclusive Jewish writer, E.I. Lonoff. Of this Lonoff we are told that he has long ago forsaken his urban, immigrant roots—the cultural soil from which, we are meant to understand, his vaguely Bashevis Singeresque fiction sprang—for “a clapboard farmhouse…at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires.” Long out of circulation, he is considered comical by New York literary people for having “lived all these years ‘in the country’—that is to say, in the goyish wilderness of birds and trees where America began and long ago had ended.” Still, young Nathan, an aspiring novelist, admires Lonoff extravagantly, not only because of “the tenacity that had kept him writing his own kind of stories all that time,” but because

having been “discovered” and popularized, he refused all awards and degrees, declined membership in all honorary institutions, granted no public interviews, and chose not to be photographed, as though to associate his face with his fiction were a ridiculous irrelevancy.

A young man’s admiration; a young man’s perhaps self-congratulatory idealization of a figure who, it is all too clear, he would like one day to be.

If, thirty years ago, readers felt safe in identifying the ingenuous, ambitious, hugely talented Newark-born Nathan Zuckerman with his creator, anyone familiar with Roth’s recent biography will find it difficult not to identify the author today with Lonoff.

More here.

Terence M. Hines in the Skeptical Inquirer:

The one question that my students always ask when I introduce the topic of alien abductions is how could anyone possibly really believe that such a thing had happened to them if they weren’t just plain barking mad. It takes a fair amount of background in memory and related subjects to understand the psychology of the alien-abduction experience. In Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens, Susan Clancy has masterfully combined this background information with her own important research on alien-abduction claimants. She writes with the skill of an experienced novelist telling an exciting story. Consider the opening paragraph:

“Will Andrews is an articulate, handsome forty-two-year-old. He’s a successful chiropractor, lives in a wealthy American suburb, has a strikingly attractive wife and twin boys, age eight. The only glitch in this picture of domestic bliss is that his children are not his wife’s-they are the product of an earlier infidelity. To complicate matters further, the biological mother is an extraterrestrial.”

Following that opening, it took me only a very pleasant fall afternoon to read this book from cover to cover. The title of each chapter is a question, and the first chapter is titled, “How do you wind up studying aliens?”

More here.

Heather Whipps in LiveScience.com:

Maybe she’s smiling because she found the secret to immortality.

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” widely considered the world’s most recognizable work of art, turns 500 this year. Maybe.

The sitter’s enigmatic smirk is just one of the mysteries that historians, scientists and conspiracy theorists have been debating since the artist touched his last brushstroke to the canvas.

Even the year it was painted is not known for sure. It is widely believed to have been finished in 1506, but experts say that’s no more than a good guess. Toting it with him his entire life, da Vinci likely touched it up in subsequent years.

The painting currently hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. It is set behind a wall of bulletproof glass and watched over by armed guards.

So what’s all the fuss about?

More here.

From Dawn:

RAY Kurzweil loves the future. Not the vague concept that most of us carry around — essentially a picture of a world like today’s but worse, thanks to global warming, population growth, resource depletion and war. Kurzweil’s rather cheerier vision is a place where super-smart computers augment the brains of their human creators, while nanotechnology — microscopic robots — eliminate disease, reverse the ageing process, and provide unlimited quantities of any desired resource. Clean water? Got it. Copper, aluminum, diamonds? Go ahead and close those mines. Worried about pollution? Don’t be. Nanotech will break down that waste and reconvert its molecules into anything from hamburgers to the latest Shakira DVD. (Shakira in 2030 will look just like Shakira in 2006.) Kurzweil claims that nanotech will become feasible in about 20 years; computer augmentation of the brain will begin a decade or two later. Many people reading this article will still be alive.

Combine the prospect of radically increased mental capacity — possible by linking your biological brain, via a series of tiny implanted nanocircuits, to a computer — with the possibility of a halted ageing process, and you have a recipe for virtually eternal life for radically intelligent people in a pollution-free environment. Even global warming won’t be a problem, once nanotech-designed solar cells become practical. It all sounds a bit idyllic, but Kurzweil makes no apologies: he loves this future. Who wouldn’t?

More here.

From The Wshington Post:

YOU MUST SET FORTH AT DAWN A Memoir by Wole Soyinka: Near the beginning of this sprawling, delightful memoir, Wole Soyinka — Nobel laureate, novelist, playwright, poet and human rights activist — makes a confession: He’s actually “a closet glutton for tranquility.” But his lifelong “craving for peace” has always run counter to the other imperative that has shaped his public persona: his quest for justice, particularly in his native Nigeria.

This weighty memoir, then, gives two views of Soyinka, one of Africa’s best-known and most prolific literary figures. One is the poignant, almost detached observer of Africa’s post-independence history who longs for solitude and takes soothing hunting trips in the bush; the other is the angry activist at the center of political events. The two stories are intertwined, and the book alternates between conversational, humorous passages and enraged ripostes against a succession of corrupt and incompetent Nigerian dictators, particularly Gen. Sani Abacha, the tyrant who ruled from 1993 to 1998 and forced Soyinka into exile on fear of death.

More here.

From Nature:

Eating milk and other dairy products could increase a woman’s chance of having twins, a US doctor is proposing, based on a study of vegan women. The rate of twin births in the United States rose by more than 75% between 1980 and 2003. Some of this can be explained by the use of fertility treatments, which ups the risk of multiple births. But that can’t explain all of the jump, researchers say. Bearing twins is more risky for both mother and child than having a single baby, so scientists want to know what’s causing the rise.

Gary Steinman of the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, New York, carried out a simple comparison: he gathered together childbearing records for more than 1,000 vegan women who do not eat any animal products. He calculated that vegans were around five times less likely to bear twins than omnivorous women or vegetarians who eat dairy food.

More here.

From The New York Times:

“The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern.”

The opening sentence of “The Power Elite,” by C. Wright Mills, seems unremarkable, even bland. But when the book was first published 50 years ago last month, it exploded into a culture riddled with existential anxiety and political fear. Mills — a broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia — argued that the “sociological key” to American uneasiness could be found not in the mysteries of the unconscious or in the battle against Communism, but in the over-organization of society. At the pinnacle of the government, the military and the corporations, a small group of men made the decisions that reverberated “into each and every cranny” of American life. “Insofar as national events are decided,” Mills wrote, “the power elite are those who decide them.”

His argument met with criticism from all sides. “I look forward to the time when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet’s robes and settles down to being a sociologist again,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The New York Post.

More here.

Keelin McDonell in Slate:

On Thursday, a federal judge in New Hampshire sentenced a former Republican National Committee official to 10 months in prison for his involvement in a 2002 phone-jamming scheme. Three other men have also been convicted of tying up the phone lines of a union headquarters and five New Hampshire Democratic offices on Election Day. What is phone jamming?

Making repeated phone calls to a single number with the intention to intimidate or harass. Phones can be jammed either automatically (with a computer dialing system) or manually. In the New Hampshire case, employees at a telemarketing firm called six separate phone numbers by hand for about two hours. The telemarketers repeatedly called and hung up, placing a total of around 1,000 calls.

More here.

Slavoj Zizek in the London Review of Books:

A century ago, Freud included psychoanalysis as one of what he described as the three ‘narcissistic illnesses’. First, Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth moves around the Sun, thereby depriving humans of their central place in the universe. Then Darwin demonstrated that we are the product of evolution, thereby depriving us of our privileged place among living beings. Finally, by making clear the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, Freud showed that the ego is not master even in its own house. Today, scientific breakthroughs seem to bring further humiliation: the mind is merely a machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy merely a ‘user’s illusion’. In comparison, the conclusions of psychoanalysis seem rather conservative.

Is psychoanalysis outdated? It certainly appears to be. It is outdated scientifically, in that the cognitivist-neurobiologist model of the human mind has superseded the Freudian model; it is outdated in the psychiatric clinic, where psychoanalytic treatment is losing ground to drug treatment and behavioural therapy; and it is outdated in society more broadly, where the notion of social norms which repress the individual’s sexual drives doesn’t hold up in the face of today’s hedonism. But we should not be too hasty. Perhaps we should instead insist that the time of psychoanalysis has only just arrived.

More here.