More here.

Christopher Hitchens on religion (no thanks), Iraq (not a mistake), and his own loud reputation.

Boris Kachka in New York Magazine:

One of the most annoying things about Christopher Hitchens is that, even at his most vitriolic, he makes at least as much sense as the majority of sober journo-intellectuals buzzing around Washington. This despite the fact that he is one of the last defenders of Bush’s Iraq war—a position that has cost the former Nation contributor a multitude of friends and gotten him new ones like Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens, who started questioning his faith at age 9 (and wrote a polemic against Mother Teresa called The Missionary Position), has finally written the ultimate attack book, God Is Not Great. He spoke to us about his favorite religious stories, Karl Rove (infidel?), and the one time he found himself praying.

You say in your acknowledgments that you’ve been writing this book your whole life. Do you think it’ll mean as much to others as it means to you?
No, it’s one small step for C.H. into one enormous argument dominated by giants in philosophy and theology and science.

So what makes it different from recent atheist screeds by the likes of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins?
I don’t think Richard Dawkins would mind me saying that he looks at religious people with this sort of incredulity, as if, “How possibly can you be so stupid?” And though we all have moods like that, I think perhaps I don’t quite.

More here.

One of my longtime friends (from my undergraduate days at Johns Hopkins), and sometime writer at 3QD, is Abhay Parekh. He has started his own blog:

Some people love to solve mathematical brainteasers, but most consider it a silly waste of time. There is something really inefficient (and even dumb) about allocating so much time and toil on these mental boondoggles! Yet sometimes brainteasers can serve as “toy” versions of much more important problems. Since they have a small number of variables, you can “play” with these problems and subsequently make headway on more involved ones. Most great scientists have used toy problems that somehow captured the essence of a bigger problem to make significant discoveries. In this post I will look at such an “impractical” problem and show that it can actually instruct. This is an old teaser but I actually have a twist to the solution that I think is new. I’ll present that in my next post. Today all I will do is pose the problem and give some hints.

The Oddball Problem: You are given n identical looking balls. n-1 of them weigh the same, but one of them is either heavier or lighter than the others (you don’t know which). Given a two pan weighing machine what is the minimum number of weighings you need to do to be sure that you have identified that odd ball? You can only use the weighing pan as follows: put some balls in the left pan, some in the right pan and observe one of three possible outcomes: either the left pan is heavy or the right pan is heavy, or they are even.

Since you don’t know if the odd ball is heavier or lighter things get a bit tricky. This problem is often posed with 12 balls. Here’s a problem worth working on:

Show that for 12 balls you can always identify the oddball in 3 weighings!

More here.

From Science:

Cutting calories does more than just shrink your waist size–it also increases the lifespan of organisms ranging from yeast to flies to mice. Earlier studies in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans pointed to a mysterious interplay between longevity and two regulatory genes called DAF-16 and SMK-1 . In these roundworms, which had abnormally reduced insulin signaling, SMK-1 and DAF-16 together lengthen lifespan when nutrients are scarce. But in subsequent experiments on worms with normal insulin signaling, molecular biologist Andrew Dillin at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in San Diego, California, showed that one member of the pair–DAF-16–wasn’t necessary for longer life. So he and his colleagues predicted that SMK-1 might regulate another gene to help lean worms live long.

The team screened the complete C. elegans genome and found 15 genes closely related to DAF-16. Working with a technique called RNA interference, they inactivated each of the genes in turn. This revealed that a gene called PHA-4 , which regulates gut development in the roundworm embryo, is essential to diet-induced longevity. Without this gene, diet-restricted worms lived no longer than control worms maintained on a normal diet, while diet-restricted worms with the intact gene lived about 62% longer than controls.

More here.

From Nature:

Allergic reactions to metal are on the rise, although no one knows why. Now research suggests that bacterial infections experienced while wearing metal objects may be responsible. How an allergy to metal develops is a matter of much speculation. Yasuo Endo at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, and his colleagues had noticed that in previous animal experiments looking at metal allergies, researchers often used a chemical trigger or ‘adjuvant’ to encourage an allergy to form. In mice, researchers used hydrogen peroxide to stimulate the animals’ immune system and encourage a reaction. Endo and his team suspected that something was similarly provoking allergic reactions to form in humans — but not hydrogen peroxide, as we rarely come into contact with it. Instead, they focused their attention on a set of molecules called lipopolysaccharides, commonly found in bacteria, which are known to be able to provoke other immune responses.

The team injected small groups of mice with a nickel salt solution, with some groups also receiving a dose of lipopolysaccharides. Ten days later, the mice were injected with the same nickel salt in the ear, and the team measured the resulting inflammation. Mice that didn’t get the lipopolysaccharide dose in the first injection had almost no reaction to the nickel within a day of the second exposure; but mice that did receive lipopolysaccharides had an almost immediate, strong reaction to the metal.

More here.

Judith Harris in Prospect Magazine:

It wasn’t until the 1970s that behavioural geneticists worked out productive techniques for answering questions about nature vs nurture. None of these methods is perfect, but they each have different flaws. It is therefore noteworthy that they all produced essentially the same results. Two results, actually—one surprising, the other not.

The unsurprising result was that genes matter. About half the variation in the measured characteristic—the differences from one person to another—could be attributed to differences in their genes.

The surprising result had to do with the environment. The aspects of the environment that don’t seem to matter are all those that are shared by all the children who grow up in a given family—which includes most of the things the word “home” makes you think of. Whether the home is headed by one parent or two, whether the parents are happily married or constantly rowing, whether they believe in pushing their children to succeed or leaving them to find their own way in life, whether the home is filled with books or sports equipment, whether it is orderly or messy, a city flat or a farmhouse—the research shows, counterintuitively, that none of these things makes much difference.

More here.

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst reviews Impotence a Cultural History by Angus McLaren, in The Telegraph:

In the 1980s it was reported that in parts of West Africa enraged mobs had killed a number of “penis snatchers”: witches who had been accused of leaving their victims as smooth between the legs as Action Man.

Like many stories involving impotence, it provoked winces of sympathy as well as comic sniggers, especially from men who recognised that in cultures where ideals of “manhood” were based more on sexual potency than on, say, being good at crosswords, “penis snatching” was more or less equivalent to “body snatching”.

The sad truth that emerges from Angus McLaren’s cultural history of impotence is that this amounts to just about every Western culture since the Ancient Greeks. Impotence may have produced a far richer vocabulary than headaches or piles – pillock, fumbler, bungler, and dozens more – but when it comes to explaining why they have no lead in their pencils, men’s creative energies have usually been diverted in a single direction: finding someone else to blame.

Early witch hunters in Europe warned how easily simple spells could cause impotence in otherwise virile men. By the Renaissance, these causes had expanded to include idleness, abstinence and over-soft beds.

More here.

Alan Dershowitz campaigns against tenure for Norman Finkelstein. in Counterpunch:

The feud between Alan Dershowitz, a senior professor at Harvard Law School, and Norman Finkelstein, a junior professor of political science at DePaul University, is back in the news. Finkelstein is up for tenure this year, and Dershowitz has been waging an aggressive campaign against him. Both Finkelstein’s department and an outside committee voted in favor of tenure, but the dean then recommended against it. As of this writing, the university has not made a final decision.

To date, the coverage of the dispute has not included any serious attempt at evaluating the merits of Dershowitz and Finkelstein’s charges and countercharges. It’s clear enough that these guys don’t like or respect each other, and that each claims the other’s work is a travesty. But the question remains: Who’s right, and who’s wrong? Answering that question ought to be relatively straightforward, and it is high time that someone other than Finkelstein or Dershowitz tried to do it publicly.

The feud began when Finkelstein charged that Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel (2003) was partially plagiarized and wholly false. Finkelstein ultimately published his critique as part of a book of his own, entitled Beyond Chutzpah (2005). The book quotes Dershowitz as offering, in an interview, to “give $10,000 to the PLO” if anyone can “find a historical fact in [The Case for Israel] that you can prove to be false.” (p. 91) Finkelstein maintains, to the contrary, that “[t]he genuine challenge is to unearth any meaningful historical fact in The Case for Israel.” (p. 91) Finkelstein goes on to quote one assertion after another from The Case for Israel, examine Dershowitz’s supporting evidence, and then adduce his own evidence that the assertions are false and Dershowitz’s evidence is worthless.

Andrew Tabler in the New York Times Magazine:

The Middle East is abuzz with talk of “Shiitization.” Since the war in Lebanon last summer, newspapers, TV news channels and Web sites in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have reported that Sunnis, taken with Hezbollah’s charismatic Shiite leader Hassan Nasrallah and his group’s “resistance” to Israel, were converting to Shiite Islam. When I recently visited the semi-arid plains of eastern Syria, known as the Jazeera, Sunni tribal leaders whispered stories of Iranians roaming the Syrian countryside handing out bags of cash and macaroni to convert families and even entire villages to Shiite Islam.

Much of the buzz is surely propaganda from the region’s Sunni governments, which are known to whip up fears of Shiite plots when it suits them. But there are signs in Syria of a possible shift. Over time, could this predominantly Sunni country change its religious orientation — solidifying its ties to Iran and creating strong repercussions throughout the Middle East?

More here.

Patricia Crone in openDemocracy:

[J]ust what is jihad?

Well, actually there are two kinds, depending on whether the Muslims are politically strong or weak. I shall start with the type associated with political strength, because that’s the normal type in Islamic history. I shall get to the second in connection with the question of modern relevance.

The normal type of jihad is missionary warfare. That’s how you’ll find it described in the classical law-books, from about 800 to about 1800. What the Quran has to say on the subject is a different question: the rules it presupposes seem to be a good deal more pacifist than those developed by the jurists and exegetes. But it is the work of the latter which came to form the sharia – the huge mass of precepts on which the public and private lives of Muslims were based (at least in theory), down to the coming of modernity, which still regulates their devotional lives today, and on which Islamists (or “fundamentalists”) would like once more to base the entire arena of public life.

The scholars said that jihad consisted in backing the call to Islam with violence, where necessary. It was “the forcible mission assisted by the unsheathed sword against wrongheaded people who arrogantly refuse to accept the plain truth after it has become clear”: thus a scholar who died in 1085. The idea was that God was the only ruler of the universe. Humans who refused to acknowledge this were in the nature of rebels, who had to be brought to heel. At the very least, they had to submit to God politically, by being brought under Muslim government. But ideally, they would submit to him in religious terms as well, by converting.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel in The Nation:

Last Wednesday, at the Center for American Progress (CAP) in Washington, the CAP Task Force on Poverty released the results of fourteen months of work in its report, From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half.

The report offers twelve concrete recommendations to reduce over the next ten years, creating a stronger middle class and setting our country on a course to end American poverty in a generation.

Sen. Edward Kennedy and Ways and Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, were both on hand to pledge their leadership on what Task Force co-chair Peter B. Edelman, professor of Law at Georgetown University, called “a national shame…. There should be no one [in this country] who’s poor.”

This is one of the great scandals of our times. In the richest industrialized nation in the world, 37 million Americans–one in eight citizens–live below the official poverty line (just $19,971 income for a family of four); in 2005, more than 90 million Americans had incomes below 200 percent of the poverty threshold (less than $40,000 for a family of four); the United States ranks 24th out of 25 developed nations in the share of the population with an income below 50 percent of the national median income–and the US is dead last among 24 rich nations when the same measurement is used to assess child poverty.

More here.

In New York Magazine, Sam Anderson reviews Michael Chabon’s new novel.

If you should ever have the good fortune to match wits with me in a game of chess—and if so, let me congratulate you here in advance on what will surely be one of the more confidence-boosting episodes of your life—you’ll find that, as soon as we’ve exchanged our rooks and bishops and knights, and our queens have committed mutual regicide, and we’re left with a handful of pawns and kings scattered over the board like loose change, something curious will happen: My life force— the potent concoction of vim, vigor, piss, vinegar, and other vital fluids that I’ve been spritzing your way all game in an effort to distract you from my blunders—will drain out of me and soak into the carpet, and I’ll get sullen, and refuse to move, and then make long enthusiastic speeches in sign language in an attempt to knock over the board, and after a while, if the game keeps going, I’ll consciously slow my heart rate until I slip into a vegetative state. Your best course of action, when this happens, is just to tip my king over and tell me the next day that I did it myself, and then to help yourself to the contents of my wallet. I’ll pay you the rest in a couple of months.

I offer this unsolicited tutorial for a couple of reasons. First, because Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its impending blockbuster superfame—is largely about chess, in particular the game’s knack for snagging people in its cold little gears and grinding all the spirit out of them.

Tio kept offering the image of the insabbiati, those “caught in the sand”, as the perfect representation of this caste. He said we were creatures facing death with a much greater awareness of the frailty of life and thus with an enhanced compulsion to survive; creatures that could not – or did not get the chance to – live in their native matrix and, consequently, desperately sought to make a new life in unknown lands and under harsh conditions; creatures that often became fodder for the people in power in their new environments, thus providing the hosts with good nourishment.

Since then, the image of the insabbiati has served me both as a guide and as a metaphor. As a guide, it has helped me to struggle against the depression of the exilic condition, the harsh realities of exclusion, the longings for my native land, and the free-floating angst of feeling worthless because of the difficulties of integration and acceptance. As a metaphor, it has given me a perspective on history by recognising that displacement – or, to use the gentler word, migration – is not only a condition that rules much of the animal kingdom but also much of humanity, that, as the title of this paper brashly declares, all history is the history of migration.

more from Eurozine here.

One of the major discoveries is that the depths are full of lights. There is no light from the surface, so creatures make their own. As many as 80-90 per cent of the animals collected in nets are bioluminescent – like fireflies. In fact, ‘In the ocean bioluminescence is the rule rather than the exception’, writes a scientist contributor. Deep-sea animals light themselves up to locate scarce food, to attract prey (like moths to a flame), to confuse predators and to signal to potential mates. The most spectacular light shows in the ocean are like burglar alarms, aiming to scare off a predator by attracting the attention of a larger predator. The vampire squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis, a red (as hell) animal much featured in the book (and dubbed the unofficial mascot of the deep by one biologist), defends itself by spitting viscous bioluminescent clouds from the ends of its arms, which can glow for up to ten minutes while the squid makes its getaway.

more from Literary Review here.

I got my Codex for the relative bargain of two hundred and seventy-five dollars. It’s the 1983 Abbeville Press edition, the only American edition of the book ever printed. “Organized in eminently logical fashion,” the jacket copy tells me, “it describes a system of knowledge that—at least in its structure—mirrors our own: here are botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, engineering, anatomy, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and urban studies, each describing its object with a peculiarly recognizable exactitude.” It continues, in a tone not unlike that of a carnival barker: “Discover for yourself, reader, such wonders as the purple-caged citrus, the spider-web flower, the parfait protea, and the ladder weed. This is a world inhabited by weird half-sentient flora such as the tadpole tree and the meteor-fruit, by the lacy flying-saucer fish, the wheeled caterpillar-rumped horse, and the metamorphic bicranial rhino. The planet’s sentient species are here as well—races like the Garbage-Dwellers, the Road-Traffic and the Yarn People, and the exotic Rodent-Skin Wearers… Nor can we forget to mention the Homo-Saurians, whose unusual sexual life-cycle is graphically described.” One presumes the “Homo-Saurians” are the couple-cum-gator on the book’s cover (the illustration also appears inside the book). The jacket copy cheerfully concludes that “merely to name these creatures is to confront the limits of our language.” Well, yeah.

more from The Believer here.

From MSNBC:

Spider silk could stop a Boeing 747 in flight, is stronger than bullet-proof Kevlar and more elastic than nylon, biologists say. “All spiders spin at least one kind of silk and some spiders can produce seven different types,” said Cheryl Hayashi, a University of California-Riverside biologist.

Most spider silks vary in their strength and elasticity. “Dragline silk is the strongest silk because it supports the weight of the spider,” said Hayashi’s colleague Randy Lewis at the University of Wyoming. This silk attaches the arachnid to the web and provides support like a rapeller’s rope as the spider drops below the web to avoid prey.

Most people thinking of spider silk envision an insect-catching orb web, a wagon-wheel shaped net with its spokes made from strong silk. The center of the wheel, the capture spiral, is made from flagelliform silk that is covered with sticky adhesive droplets. Once dinner is caught, spiders use achniform silk to wrap and immobilize their prey, Hayashi said.

“Spiders are incredibly fascinating in the way they make and are able to manipulate their silks,” she said. “They can even recycle their silk by eating it — it’s a good source of protein.”

More here.

You have doubts about just how big a cultural presense The Smiths were in the 80s? Consider the following quote taken from the very first paragraph (it is, in fact, just the second sentence in the book) of a distinguished and deservedly well-respected text in the philosophy of language published in 1992: namely, the book Belief and Meaning, by Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian professor of philosophy at Columbia University (and also my mentor and friend):

Content is what is specified by sentences or propositions in that-clauses when we attribute intentional states to agents. Thus, in the attribution, “Smith believes that Bigmouth has struck again,” the sentence or proposition (Bigmouth has struck again) which follows the “that” specifies the content.

Given that instance of how seriously The Smiths were taken, or at least how ubiquitous they were in terms of cultural reference, it shouldn’t surprise that there is a website devoted to visually illustrating their songs. And here it is.

In Seed magazine:

David Byrne, the well known lead singer and songwriter of the seminal band Talking Heads, has had an extensive solo career, won an Academy Award for his work on The Last Emperor soundtrack, exhibited his artwork internationally, and authored five books, including, most recently, Arboretum. For 10 years, Daniel Levitin worked as a session musician, sound and recording engineer, and record producer. He is now the James McGill professor of behavioral neuroscience and music at McGill University and the author of The New York Times bestseller This Is Your Brain on Music. Recently at STK, in New York’s Meatpacking District, the two traded ideas about music, language, and memory.

DAVID BYRNE: So, in the penultimate sentence of your book, you write that music is a better tool than language for arousing feelings and emotions.

This ties into what we were discussing a few months ago, about music and visual art bypassing the filters that language seems to get snagged on, in emotionally affecting you.

DANIEL LEVITIN: Yes.

DB: When somebody tells us what this song is about, or what this painting is about, we’re kind of stuck because talking about the art, and the art itself, are almost separate areas. The music seems to have straight access to the so-called “reptile brain,” and we feel it immediately. But often it’s also touching all kinds of other parts of the brain. If it has lyrics, there’s language in it. If it has a strong rhythmic element it’s touching what you would call the motor parts of the brain and muscle. All kinds of stuff is involved. How do you think this all happens?

DL: My guess is it starts with trying to unite rationality with irrationality.

[H/t Roop Roy.]

In the US, today is Law Day. So the President reminds us to “celebrate the Constitution and the laws that protect our rights and liberties.” For the rest of the world it’s May Day, which actually followed, not preceded, the September Labor Day. But it remains the international day of labor, or labour. The irony is that its origins are thoroughly American. It was chosen as the day to celebrate labor by the anti-socialist US labor leader Samuel Gompers and has come to mark the Haymarket massacre of 1886 in Chicago. It still inspires occassions for pushing workers’ rights, especially in the world’s South. In Daily News and Analysis:

KOLKATA: Thousands of sex workers from different parts of West Bengal on Tuesday took out a May Day torch rally from the Sonagachi red light area, demanding social rights and the status of a regular worker.

Over 3,000 sex workers participated in the rally that started from Sonagachi at midnight and ended at College Square in north Kolkata on Tuesday.

Sonagachi is the largest red light district in West Bengal and one of the biggest in Asia with more than 10,000 sex workers living in the same area.

“We organised the torch rally involving all the sex workers of Sonagachi and many other districts with the hope to bring them under one roof of equality. Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), the apex body of sex workers in Bengal, has been fighting for the rights of sex workers since the inception of the organisation in 1995,” Mahasweta Mukherjee, a spokesperson of DMSC said.

Happy May Day!

What does this imply for B. L. Whorf? In [email protected]:

The language you speak may influence how you perceive colours, according to new research. Russian speakers, who have separate words for light and dark blue, are better at discriminating between the two, suggesting that they do indeed perceive them as different colours.

Russian speakers divide what the English language regard as ‘blue’ into two separate colours, called ‘goluboy’ (light blue) and ‘siniy’ (dark blue). And a test now shows that this seems to help them view light and dark blue as distinct.

Researchers led by Jonathan Winawer of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge presented Russian and English speakers with sets of three blue squares, two of which were identical shades with a third ‘odd one out’. They asked the volunteers to pick out the identical squares.

Russian speakers performed the task more quickly when the two shades straddled their boundary between goluboy and siniy than when all shades fell into one camp. English speakers showed no such distinction.

What’s more, when the researchers interfered with volunteers’ verbal abilities by asking them to recite a string of numbers in their head while performing the task, the Russian effect vanished. This shows that linguistic effects genuinely do influence colour perception.