In news@nature:

Hold the doors please: teams are scrambling in Utah this weekend to prove that their technologies are the best if you want to get to space in an elevator. The 2007 Space Elevator Games will take place at the Davis County Event Center, after a week of frenetic preparations and qualifying rounds hampered by rain and high winds.

The idea of a space elevator is to allow cheap and easy transport of supplies and people to and from a station (or space hotel) in orbit around Earth. The idea has been around for decades, but the technologies needed to support it have yet to be created.

To promote development, the California-based non-profit Spaceward Foundation has hosted an annual competition since 2005, supported by a cash prize from NASA. Competing teams don’t have to build an actual elevator, but instead aim to build a super-strong tether (similar to what would be needed to support a real elevator), or get a robot to climb a suspended ribbon.

Over at MIT, a video of Marvin Minsky’s discussion of AI and commonsense:

Marvin Minsky is worried that after making great strides in its infancy, AI has lost its way, getting bogged down in different theories of machine learning. Researchers “have tried to invent single techniques that could deal with all problems, but each method works only in certain domains.” Minsky believes we’re facing an AI emergency, since soon there won’t be enough human workers to perform the necessary tasks for our rapidly aging population.

So while we have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case. For “a machine to have common sense, it must know 50 million such things,” and like a human, activate different kinds of expertise in different realms of thought, says Minsky.

Minsky suggests that such a machine should, like humans, have a very high-level, rule-based system for recognizing certain kinds of problems.

Richard Skinner in Ekklesia:

Now I think the critics of Richard Dawkins are in the main quite right. I say ‘in the main’ because Dawkins does make a number of valid points, particularly relating to the role of religion, and Christianity in particular, in the life of this country; but I agree that a large proportion of his book is indeed based on error. However, I don’t think it right for us to say, “Ah, well, not only theologians but even atheists have demonstrated where Dawkins has gone wrong, therefore we don’t have to take his views seriously.”

We do have to take his views seriously, for more than one reason. Wilson suggests, and I agree with him, that Christians should be grateful to Dawkins, because “he has gathered together all of the best arguments against God’s existence in one place, with the intention of debating them publicly.” Quite so, but I think there’s another reason to listen to Dawkins. It’s this: theological writers and others can point out at length that what Dawkins does is to set up a straw man – or rather, a straw God – and then demolish it; they can show that Dawkins has not really got to grips at all with a true understanding of God and the religious dimension; but the straw God that Dawkins sets up and then demolishes is often uncomfortably close to the notion of God that we Christians all too frequently seem to talk about, pray to and worship.

What Dawkins demolishes in this book may well be a misrepresentation of God, but it is a misrepresentation, an idol, that we Christians all too have often set up and espoused as the real thing. We should listen to Dawkins because doing so can help us reflect on what we claim to believe, or think we believe, or imply that we believe. His views can act as an acid to eat away the false and phoney elements of our faith.

In Dissent, Michael Walzer, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Sohail Hashmi, and Gerard Powers debate the case for withdrawing from Iraq. Sohail Hashmi:

The civil war may continue, and it may even escalate. But, quite frankly, this is a war we cannot win for the Iraqis.

On the other hand, the shock of America’s departure may just provide the catalyst for the Iraqis to start working to resolve their own problems. America’s departure from Iraq may well provide the impetus for regional powers to play a constructive role, rather than watching Iraq burn as if it is in another city rather than in their own backyard. The terrorists won’t give up their battle, and they may even claim they have won. But so what? They are claiming that already. They are claiming that today.

That’s her, ladies and gentlemen. That’s my wife. Yes, we are actually married.

If elected, I pledge that same woman—who is a full six years younger than my eldest son—will be by my side at all state dinners, dressed to the nines, causing the Chinese delegation’s jaws to drop in amazement at her gravity-defying rack.

This is my solemn vow to all Americans.

I am aware of the critics who doubt my ability to deliver on this promise. “What about Jackie Kennedy?” they ask. “Wasn’t she a hotter first lady?” If all America cares about is hotness from the neck up, then yes. Though Jackie looked good in a pillbox hat, she never possessed that I-have-obvious-father-issues sort of hotness the people of this country appreciate so deeply. Go on, close your eyes and try picturing Jackie Kennedy on the cover of some magazine spilling out of a bikini. You can’t do it, can you? Now try the same mental experiment with Mrs. Fred. The results speak for themselves.

I say America deserves hotter.

more from The Onion here.

“Yes, we’ve got a video!”

“A package from the Transvaal … how strange!”

“Bad for society … when the kids start to get into it!”

It’ll be difficult for readers under the age of 30 to believe, but if you were watching TV between 1982 and 1984, these phrases are like “Garlic bread!”, “I’m Rick James, bitch!” and Andy Pipkin’s “Yeah, I know” all rolled into one. They helped cement The Young Ones’ reputation as the high watermark of 1980s comedy. This month marks 25 years since the airing of the first episode, Demolition, and sees the rerelease of all 12 shows on DVD. In a fittingly iconoclastic gesture, that episode ended with the entire cast being wiped out in a plane crash; but then logic and continuity were never the show’s strong points. Rather, it was their disregard for convention that people found most endearing about The Young Ones, and this stemmed largely from producer Paul Jackson, who cobbled together the best new acts appearing at The Comedy Store, then London’s pivotal alternative comedy venue. Bar the 1980 BBC2 showcase Boom Boom … Out Go The Lights, the cast and crew had virtually no TV experience, which Jackson turned to his advantage.

more from The Guardian here.

If I had read “Fire in the Blood” knowing nothing of its author or the circumstances of its composition, I would have guessed it was by some elegist of the French countryside like Jean Giono. Knowing that Némirovsky completed this book about the timeless fire of love at the very moment an all-too-historical fire of hatred was snaking through France adds a painful poignancy to the reading experience. One can’t help wondering whether the deeply held secrets at the heart of the plot had anything to do with Némirovsky’s own double life as she tried desperately to blend into an ordinary village in extraordinary times. With the return to print of four of Némirovsky’s earlier novels (including “David Golder”) planned for the coming months, we will soon be in a better position to judge precisely where this modest melodrama belongs in the larger achievement of a complex and remarkable writer.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times:

Children, even good children, hide some part of their private lives from their parents; and parents, having been young and furtive themselves, remember the impulse. So when Ruth Ramsey, the divorced 41-year-old mother who is the protagonist of Tom Perrotta’s new novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” learns that her teenage daughter, Eliza (who could be a grumpy, pimply poster child for “The Awkward Years”), has concealed a book from her, she’s not surprised. “She must have kept it hidden in a drawer or under a mattress,” she reflects — just as she herself once hid books like “The Godfather” and “The Happy Hooker.” But the book Eliza has been keeping under wraps is not a pulp fiction fable of vice and libertinage: it’s the Bible. And Eliza has yet another secret to spring on her mother: she and her little sister, Maggie, want to start going to church. To Ruth, a tolerant, progressive sex-ed teacher, her daughters’ embrace of “Goody Two-Shoes Christianity” comes as a slap in the face. “I don’t think you’re a born-again, fundamentalist, evangelical, nut-job Christian,” she tells Eliza, not imagining she would disagree. “I believe in God,” Eliza stubbornly replies. “And I believe that Jesus is His only son, and that He died on the cross for my sins.”

Ruth is a protective mother and wants a say in whom her daughters choose for friends. But can a parent tell her kids she thinks Jesus is a bad influence and retain the moral high ground?

More here.

From Science:

James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, has made many controversial remarks over the years. But telling a British newspaper that, in effect, blacks are intellectually inferior to whites seems to have landed him in unprecedented trouble. Last evening, as public criticism of those remarks swelled to a crescendo, the Board of Trustees of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in Long Island, New York, stripped Watson of his title as chancellor of the 117-year-old institution.

Watson has been at CSHL for nearly 4 decades, having become its director in 1968. He became president of the lab in 1994 and chancellor in 2004. Although not involved in the lab’s day-to-day administration, Watson undoubtedly remains its most celebrated public face–so much so that its fledgling graduate school bears his name. But now the institution is trying hard to distance itself from the 79-year-old Nobelist. In an article that ran in The Sunday Times magazine on 14 October, Watson explained that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours–whereas all the testing says not really.”

Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, said yesterday in a statement. “He has failed us in the worst possible way. It is a sad and revolting way to end a remarkable career.”

More here.

For once a major blockbuster exhibition at the Tate justifies its size: the imaginative world of Louise Bourgeois is so potent and all-encompassing that a show of more than 200 works, from small experimental objects to large installations, seems not a fraction too extensive. Bourgeois, born in Paris in 1911, is famous — in this age of confession and determinedly autobiographical art — for her troubled childhood. Whereas most artists of this type foist their traumas on us raw, Bourgeois cooks hers to a turn. What is more, she has the imagination and creative vision to translate and transform her source material, transcending its personal impetus and making it universal. As we know from the plethora of bloody breast-beating that passes for art among so many of today’s younger artists, the ability to transform experience is rare. In Bourgeois we have an adept of the art, with a restless and eclectic imagination, and capacity for a fertile invention. This display, spanning seven decades, represents a towering achievement.

more from The Spectator here.

An hour north of New York City, in the small Hudson River Valley town of Beacon, there sits an enormous art museum — indeed, with 240,000 square feet of gallery space, it is one of the largest museums to open in this country since the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1930s. Called Dia:Beacon, it houses a fabulous collection of contemporary art: massive torqued sculptures by Richard Serra, minimalist boxes by Donald Judd, string sculptures by Fred Sandback. A gallery the size of a football field is devoted to the iconic fluorescent-light sculptures of Dan Flavin; another gallery, every bit as large, displays 15 equally iconic scrap-metal sculptures by John Chamberlain. A single Andy Warhol wraps around all four walls of one big room. Twenty-five artists, almost all of them people who in the ’60s and ’70s helped to create the language of contemporary art, take up the entirety of Dia:Beacon. The art represents the permanent collection of the New York City-based Dia Art Foundation. Until Dia:Beacon was built, much of this art had spent decades in storage because Dia had no place to show it.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

In a six-decade career, Norman Mailer has written thirteen novels, nineteen works of nonfiction, two poetry collections, and one play. He’s directed four movies. He ran for mayor of New York, and in the living room of his Brooklyn Heights home, he built, in three weeks, with two friends, a vast Lego city, incorporating some 15,000 pieces, known as the city of the future, seeming to take as much pride in it as in any of his other creations. But even at 84, he has a vast ambition. And now he has created something like a religion. In a new book, On God, a dialogue with one of his literary executors, Michael Lennon, he lays out his highly personal vision of what the universe’s higher truths might look like, if we were in a position to know them. But his theology is not theoretical to him. After eight decades, it is what he believes to be true. He expects no adherents, and does not profess to be a prophet, but he has worked to forge his beliefs into a coherent catechism.

more from New York Magazine here.

Peter W. Galbraith in The New York Review of Books:

Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States
by Trita Parsi. 

Iran’s role in Iraq is pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted its permanent constitution in 2005, the American ambassador energetically engaged in all parts of the process. But behind the scenes, the Iranian ambassador intervened to block provisions that Tehran did not like. As it happened, both the Americans and the Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq’s central government. While the Bush administration clung to the mirage of a single Iraqi people, Tehran worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian Iraqis it supported — by then established as the government of Iraq — as much power as possible. (Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the US nor Iran succeeded in its goal, but even now both the US and Iran want to see the central government strengthened.)

Since 2005, Iraq’s Shiite-led government has concluded numerous economic, political, and military agreements with Iran. The most important would link the two countries’ strategic oil reserves by building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraqi government. According to a senior official in Iraq’s Oil Ministry, smugglers divert at least 150,000 barrels of Iraq’s daily oil exports through Iran, a figure that approaches 10 percent of Iraq’s production. Iran has yet to provide the military support it promised to the Iraqi army. With the US supplying 160,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran has no reason to invest its own resources.

Of all the unintended consequences of the Iraq war, Iran’s strategic victory is the most far-reaching.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers delving into the DNA of Neanderthal remains have found the human form of a gene crucial for the development of language.

The result indicates that this modern form of the gene could have appeared much earlier than previously thought — in the ancestors of humans and Neanderthals. However, the presence of this gene alone does not guarantee that Neanderthals actually spoke to each other using anything that we would classify as a language. Studies of their anatomy haven’t answered this question either: a bone in the Neanderthal throat called the hyoid resembles the human form, but the inner ear appears different.

More here.

Via a recently married Sean Carroll (congratulations to him and former 3QD contributor Jennifer Ouellette on their wedding!), Edge.org asked several scientists and other thinkers, “WHAT IS YOUR FORMULA? YOUR EQUATION? YOUR ALGORITHM?” Dan Sperber’s:

On HBO’s new look at the porn industry, in Campus Progress:

Sometimes forgotten in this heated debate [about porn] are the pornography performers themselves. “Thinking XXX,” a nuanced HBO documentary, seeks to add their voices to the fray. The film follows photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders as he assembles a portrait collection of 30 porn stars. In one portrait the actors are clothed; in a second, they are naked (a nod to Goya’s paintings The Clothed and Unclothed Maja).

Public intellectuals, from Gore Vidal to John Waters, offer commentary, as do a number of other artists, filmmakers, and authors. The commentators provide colorful explanations of pornography’s role in our culture. Vidal, for example, attributes America’s boob craze to a national infantilization of adults, and controversial performance artist Karen Finley says pornography stems from a longing for the maternal breast.

The porn stars featured in “Thinking XXX” have their own theories. The actresses alternately debase and venerate their profession.

In the Economist:

ONE of Russia’s most popular television shows is “Wait For Me”, a true-life tear-jerker that finds and reunites separated couples and families. Sometimes the stories it tells are run-of-the-mill melodramas that could have happened anywhere. But often they are tragically Russian, combining huge distances, lavish and indiscriminate cruelty and impenetrable bureaucracy: siblings separated 70 years ago when their parents were executed; lovers who lost one another in prison camps.

“Wait For Me” takes its name from the most famous Russian poem from the Soviet Union’s war with Germany. Konstantin Simonov, its author, was part of the first generation to grow up with the Soviet system’s mock classroom trials, playground games of “search and requisition”, and the “cult of struggle” inherited from the civil war. His aristocratic family was wrecked by the revolution; but like many children of undesirables, he disguised his background, transmuting the values he inherited into devout Stalinism.

Simonov wrote admiringly of the redemptive power of slave labour and the White Sea Canal, one of the gigantic Stalinist infrastructure projects built on the skeletons of prisoners. But it was “Wait for Me” that brought him fame, a dacha, foreign travel and the affections of the actress (herself hiding a tainted biography) to whom the poem had presumptuously been addressed. He copied Stalin’s pipe and moustache, and lent his voice to the dictator’s post-war anti-Semitic purges. The torture and exile of relatives did not dislodge his faith; nor did Stalin’s discombobulating death. Yet Simonov was also a brave war reporter, a generous friend and, eventually, conscience-stricken and remorseful.

The audio record of the October 12th conference entitled ‘In Defense of Academic Freedom’ (Diskord Magazine (University of Chicago, RSO), Verso Books (London), and Academic Freedom Committee (DePaul):

Dr. Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Listen now

Dr. Akeel Bilgrami, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Heyman Center, Columbia University Listen now

Dr. Tony Judt, University Professor and Director of the Remarque Institute, New York University Listen now

Dr. John Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago Listen now

Question and Answer period – Listen now

Mr. Evan Lorendo, Academic Freedom Committee, DePaul University Listen now

Dr. Mehrene Larudee, International Studies Program, DePaul University Listen now

Dr. Neve Gordon, Professor, Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University Listen now

Dr. Norman Finkelstein, author of Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict, The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah Listen now

[H/t: Jonathan Kramnick]

Under Chomsky’s sway for four decades, most of linguistics and related sciences focused on the structure and rules of language, at the expense of meaning. Pinker defies the old order, and he does it, fittingly, without letting rhetoric get in the way as he guides readers through the radically expanded landscape of work on language and thought in cognitive science. His book is a vast explainer, built out of his own research and the work of many careful researchers and scholars who have received little attention beyond the academic fields of semantics and experimental psychology. In one chapter, Pinker examines whether the particular language you speak influences the way you think. The idea that it does has generated a lot of attention (as well as irritation and indignation) in cognitive science over the years. Laying out the debate as he sees it, Pinker concludes that it does not, at least not in any dramatic or important way. For most of the book, however, he flips the terms, investigating a different relationship that is equally deserving of the spotlight: the way thought underpins language.

more from Slate here.

Tess Gallagher, the widow of Raymond Carver, one of the most celebrated American short-story writers of the 20th century, is spearheading an effort to publish a volume of 17 original Carver stories whose highly edited versions were published in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” his breakout 1981 book.

Largely as a result of that collection, which became a literary sensation, Carver was credited with popularizing a minimalist style. But many of his fans have been aware of reports that Gordon Lish, Carver’s first editor at Alfred A. Knopf, had heavily edited, and in many cases radically cut, the stories before publication to hone the author’s voice. At the time, Carver begged Mr. Lish to stop production of the book. But Knopf went ahead and published it, to much critical acclaim.

more from the NY Times here.