In The Daily Mail (yes, THAT Daily Mail), Patrick French profiles Shakeel Ahmad Bhat (via Amitava Kumar):

Don’t you hate Islamic Rage Boy? ‘MoBlows’, writing on the Jihad Watch website, certainly does.

“I just want to put my fist down his throat,” he says. The ‘boy’ in question rose to prominence earlier this year when he was photographed at a demonstration in Srinagar, capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.

Later, he was spotted waving his fist at another camera during a protest against the awarding of a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie.

With his straggly beard and big shouting mouth, Rage Boy certainly looks like a threat.

His scary face now appears on boxer shorts and bumper stickers, and he scores more than a million results on Google.

A regular spoof diary appears online in his name and he has come to stand for all that is most frightening about radical Islam.

But who is the real person behind the cartoon and what does he believe in? I travelled to Kashmir in search of the poster-boy of fundamentalism.

In Discovery News:

A real da Vinci code is indeed hidden within Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” according to a book to be published in Italy next week.

But rather than conspiracy theories, the new code points to a hidden musical score, a sacred text and a three-dimensional chalice.

“This is not another spin-off of Dan Brown’s novel. It’s real,” musician Giovanni Maria Pala told Discovery News in an exclusive interview. “I’ve always been intrigued by the possibility of finding a (piece of) music in the Last Supper, but I would have never imagined to find myself decoding a secret message by Leonardo.”

Indeed, Leonardo was an accomplished lyre player who also enjoyed hiding puzzles in his work.

Pala, who will publish his findings next week in the book “La Musica Celata” (which translates to “The Hidden Music”) claims to have discovered nothing less than a sacred hymn and text, along with mystic symbols in da Vinci’s degraded masterpiece.

“I was first struck by the tablecloth, which features horizontal lines but also vertical lines in correspondence with the pieces of bread. This made me think immediately of music notes on a pentagram. I tried to play the notes, but it did not work. Looking at single details wasn’t the correct approach,” Pala said.

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

Steve Paulson interviews the couple at Salon:

“I’ve always been obsessed with the mind-body problem,” says philosopher Renee Feuer Himmel. “It’s the essential problem of metaphysics, about both the world out there and the world in here.”

Renee is the fictional alter ego of novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. In her 1983 novel, “The Mind-Body Problem,” Goldstein laid out her own metaphysical concerns, which include the mystery of consciousness and the struggle between reason and emotion. As a novelist, she’s drawn to the quirky lives of scientists and philosophers. She’s also fascinated by history’s great rationalist thinkers. She’s written nonfiction accounts of the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20th-century mathematician-philosopher Kurt Gödel.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Goldstein would end up living with Steven Pinker, a leading theorist of the mind. He’s a cognitive psychologist at Harvard; she’s a philosopher who’s taught at several colleges. Although they come out of different disciplines, they mine much of the same territory: language, consciousness, and the tension between science and religion. If Boston is ground zero for intellectuals, then Pinker and Goldstein must rank as one of America’s brainiest power couples.

More here.

From Matthew Hedman’s introduction to his book, at the University of Chicago Press website:

From our twenty-first-century perspective, events from the past can often seem impossibly remote. With today’s complex technology and constantly shifting political and economic networks, it is sometimes hard to imagine what life was like even a hundred years ago, much less comprehend the vast stretches of time preceding the appearance of humans on this planet. However, thanks to recent advances in the fields of history, archaeology, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and astronomy, in some ways even the far distant past has never been closer to us. The elegantly carved symbols found deep in the rain forests of Central America, uninterpretable for centuries, now reveal the political machinations of Mayan lords. Fresh interdisciplinary studies of the Great Pyramids of Egypt are providing fascinating insights into exactly when and how these incredible structures were built. Meanwhile, the remains of humble trees are illuminating how the surface of the sun has changed over the past ten millennia. Other ancient bits of wood are helping us better understand the lives of first inhabitants of the New World. Fossil remains, together with tissue samples from modern animals (including people) suggest that anthropologists may be close to solving the long-standing puzzle of when and how our ancestors started walking on two legs. Similar work might also help biologists uncover how a group of small, shrew-like creatures that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs gave rise to creatures as diverse as cats, rabbits, bats, horses and whales. The origins of the earth and the solar system are being explored in great detail thanks in part to the rocks that fall from the sky, while the history of the universe can be read in the light from distant stars. The cosmic static that appears on our television sets even allows cosmologists to look back to the very beginning of our universe.

To accomplish all this (and much more besides), scholars and scientists have had to develop a variety of clever ways to figure out when things happened.

More here.

Via NoUtopia.com:

The Just

Jorge Luis Borges

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

Translation: Alastair Reid

William Grimes in the New York Times Book Review:

Joel Hafvenstein returned to Afghanistan in late 2004 armed with nothing but good intentions. Employed by Chemonics, a private company with a contract from the United States Agency for International Development, he was part of a team trying to discourage cultivation of the opium poppy by providing an alternative income for poor farmers.

Within months the mission was in disarray, its American workers huddled in a fortified bunker after eight of its Afghan employees had been murdered. The next year’s poppy harvest would be the largest on record.

The sobering dispatches in “Opium Season,” a wrenching account of lofty hopes and bitter disappointments, shed a dismal light on American efforts to improve the lot of ordinary Afghans.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

LAST MONTH, two economists published a working paper suggesting an unusual way to diversify one’s investment portfolio: buy something called sukuk, or bonds that conform to the demands of Islam. The Koran, most Islamic scholars agree, forbids the charging of interest, so traditional bonds are off-limits to devout Muslims. But sukuk generate a steady income from actual, tangible assets, like a rented piece of land. Sukuk are also, it turns out, more stable than traditional sovereign bonds. While the sample size was small, the study by Selim Cakir, of the International Monetary Fund, and Faezeh Raei, a graduate student at the University of Texas, suggested that a portfolio that mixed sukuk with traditional bonds would do a better job than an all-bond portfolio of hedging against unpredictable seesaws in the financial markets.

One of the fastest growing areas of finance today is based on the 1,400-year-old strictures of shariah, or Islamic law. Sukuk are part of the field of “Islamic finance,” which – while it emerged in its modern incarnation in the late 1970s – has in recent years been attracting money at a precipitously quick clip. Sukuk issuance in 2007 is on pace to at least double last year’s total. And while exact figures are impossible to come by, industry analysts estimate that as much as $500 billion is now invested worldwide under Islamic guidelines. Most of the world’s leading banks and investment companies, including Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC have started offering financial tools and services that meet the Koran’s requirements.

More here.

From The New York Times:

What a charming and peculiar bulletin from the past is this little book from 1927, supposedly written by a man famous in his day as a cultural impresario and libertine but now remembered as the husband of Colette. Ostensibly a quasi-scientific tour of the male homosexual world in France, Italy and Germany in the 1920s, “The Third Sex” is by turns leering, sympathetic, philosophical, patronizing, exuberant, impenetrable, tender and hilarious, often all on the same page. As the translator, Lawrence R. Schehr, points out, Henri Gauthier-Villars, who used the pseudonym Willy, did not “write” this book any more than he “wrote” Colette’s Claudine novels, to which he cheerfully attached his name as well. No one knows who actually put the words on these pages. Willy’s interest, avarice and curiosity, however, caused the book to come into being; we might say he produced “The Third Sex,” which Schehr, a professor of French at the University of Illinois, has translated for the first time into English. Until recently, there was only one publicly available copy of it, in French, in the rare-book room of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Whoever wrote it, this slender volume offers a fascinating glimpse not so much of exotic homosexual practices but of something much more delicate and transitory: the moment just before homosexuality became an identity, before sexual acts had been organized into the solid categories we recognize and traffic in today.

More here.

Jerry Coyne and Philip Kitcher respond to Jerry Fodor’s piece in the LRB:

Jerry Fodor makes the striking claim that evolutionary biologists are abandoning natural selection as the principal, or even an important, cause of evolutionary change, and that ‘it’s not out of the question that a scientific revolution – no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory – is in the offing’ (LRB, 18 October). This is news to us, and, we believe, will be news to most knowledgeable people as well. The idea of natural selection is, in fact, alive and well, and remains the only viable explanation of the apparent ‘design’ of organisms – the remarkable fit between them and their environments and lifestyles – that once was ascribed to the divine.

As does Daniel Dennett:

He does provide two of his favourite foretastes, however: evo-devo and the famous case of the domesticated Russian foxes. These interesting developments both fit handsomely within our ever-growing understanding of how evolution by natural selection works. Briefly, evo-devo drives home the importance of the fact that in addition to the information in the genes (the ‘recipes’ for making offspring), there is information in the developmental processes (the ‘readers’ of the recipes), and both together need to be considered in a good explanation of the resulting phenotypes, since the interactions between them can be surprising. Of course the information in the developmental processes is itself all a product of earlier natural selection, not a gift from God or some otherwise inexplicable contribution. The foxes are a striking instance of how selection acting on one trait can bring other traits along with it – which may then be subject to further selection.

And Steven Rose, Colin Tudge, and Kit Evans.

In the FT, Simon Kuper reviews Bawer’s While Europe Slept, Laquer’s The Last Days of Europe, Phillips’ Londonistan, and Ye’or’s Eurabia (via Crooked Timber):

All these authors start with disclaimers that not all Muslims support terrorist jihad. This is then swiftly forgotten as the plans for jihad in Europe are outlined. Ye’or, for whom Muslims are always the same, describes jihad as a 1,400-year-old strategy. Like Bawer, she explains that “they’’ never got over losing Andalusia in 1492.

Mixed with the hysteria are kernels of truth. Phillips’ Londonistan rightly recalls that in the 1990s the British authorities let many radical jihadists settle in London. Some later plotted terrorism against the UK. Phillips leaps from this to claiming that Britons cannot see the terrorist threat. However, this is rather negated by the fact that almost all her information about British terrorism comes from British newspapers.

About 16 million nominal Muslims live in the European Union, less than 4 per cent of the EU population. A tiny minority are terrorists. Nobody sane denies that. But the “Eurabia’’ theorists – with the partial exception of Walter Laqueur, the most judicious of them – seem to regard the mass of Muslims as the enemy. Phillips sees “a continuum that links peaceful, law-abiding but nevertheless intensely ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other’’.

A favourite rhetorical trick of these writers is the pars pro toto: isolated examples of Islamic extremism come to stand for a vast Muslim movement. It’s true, as Laqueur twice notes, that one group said: “We shall hoist our flags over 10 Downing Street.’’ But this is atypical. European Muslims almost all vote for mainstream parties, mostly of the left. In surveys the great majority profess satisfaction with their lives in Europe.

Richard Pyle at Associated Press, via CNN:

Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur, died of renal failure early Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84. Mailer died at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author’s official biographer.

From his classic debut novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” to such masterworks of literary journalism as “The Armies of the Night,” the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.

Some of Mailer’s works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old “enfant terrible.”

Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.

More here.  Longer New York Times obituary here.  An interview with Mailer here.

At Trevor Paglen’s website:

A number of military bases and installations exist in some of the remotest parts of the United States, hidden deep in western deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land. Many of these sites are so remote, in fact, that there is nowhere on Earth where a civilian might be able to see them with an unaided eye. In order to produce images of these remote and hidden landscapes, therefore, some unorthodox viewing and imaging techniques are required.

Limit-telephotography involves photographing landscapes that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The technique employs high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent.

Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. In some ways, however, it is easier to photograph the depths of the solar system than it is to photograph the recesses of the military industrial complex. Between Earth and Jupiter (500 million miles away), for example, there are about five miles of thick, breathable atmosphere. In contrast, there are upwards of forty miles of thick atmosphere between an observer and the sites depicted in this series.

More here.

WALTER KIRN in The New York Times:

Theroux’s new book of three novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” is his attempt — brought off with mixed results but distinguished by worthy intentions and sturdy tradecraft — to display and explain contemporary India in all its swarming, seductive, anachronistic, disorienting dynamism. India’s contradictions seem to interest him most, especially its peculiar combination of ancient ascetic spirituality and information-age commercialism. Over here an ashram or a temple devoted to the quest for inner enlightenment or the veneration of Hindu gods, across the way a modern call center that fields complaints from Home Depot customers. Theroux hints in the book that India’s native novelists — or at least those who’ve won wide acceptance in America — have failed in some way to convey their country’s complexities, perhaps by emphasizing its picturesque folkways and exotic domestic customs as a way of enchanting Western readers. Theroux presumes to correct this situation by stripping some romance from the place.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers have found that plaque accumulation in the arteries is greater in women who use birth-control pills than in those who never have. Plaque is the hardened fat and cholesterol that can clog arteries and lead to heart disease and stroke. Researchers at Ghent University in Belgium studied more than 1,000 women who had taken oral contraceptives for a period of time and then stopped. They found a 20-30% increase in the amount of plaque for every decade the woman was on the pill. The results were presented this week at the American Heart Association meeting in Orlando, Florida, but have not yet been published.

Meanwhile, another study published this week in The Lancet confirms previous findings that the risk of cervical cancer is higher in women who are on the pill. That risk drops back down to normal levels within ten years of quitting the pill, they found.

More here.

Patrick West in Spiked:

But why marry a Beatle in the first place? The Beatles may have made some of the best pop music of the twentieth century, but they were largely horrible people who sent out a horrible message. OK, Ringo was just a nice simpleton who really can’t be blamed for much, and I did enjoy Thomas the Tank Engine. And, yes, yes, George Harrison was actually a decent cove, who wrote one of the great conservative anthems of our time, ‘Taxman’, and funded two of my favourite films: Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Withnail & I. But John Lennon was a truly horrible character: a drug-taking, allegedly wife-beating, air-headed utopian whose legacy is that ultimate Stalinist anthem: ‘Imagine.’

And then there’s Paul McCartney, the idiot, pouting sentimentalist who created the band Wings, sang about frogs and then did a clichéd bit of multi-racial rubbish with Stevie Wonder about ebony and ivory – which was not at all about black and white people living in harmony, but about two incredibly rich popstars playing the piano together.

More here.

Ray Fisman in Slate:

Another clear gender divide, this one less expected, emerged in our findings on racial preferences, reported in a forthcoming article in the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman’s race had no effect on the men’s choices.

Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women’s neutrality, not the men’s pronounced preference. We also found that regional differences mattered. Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason-Dixon Line revealed much stronger same-race preferences than Northern daters.

More here.

Zein Basravi and Brigid Delaney at CNN:

Pakistan has dominated headlines this week for violent demonstrations, declarations of a state of emergency, troops on the street and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto under house arrest.

Even before the violence that greeted Bhutto’s return to her homeland, Pakistan had an image problem: Terror training camps, violence against women, religious division and insurgency flare-ups are just some of the issues the country faced.

Leaders must have looked at India — its neighbor to the south — growing in prosperity and attracting investment and wondered if they could emulate its success.

This week, Pakistan’s leaders addressed the problem of “brand Pakistan” and asked whether the country needed an extreme makeover.

In a speech repeatedly broadcast on Pakistan state television in recent days, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz called on the people to help make the country a prosperous place by building the “brand of Pakistan.”

More here.

My sister Sughra and I have various jokes based on IKEA product names. David Byrne recently made his first trip to IKEA (with his sister). This is from his Journal:

IKEA is huge. We went up to the second floor where the shelves, sofas, tables and lamps are all arrayed into tasteful little room settings — rooms, but with mysterious tags hanging everywhere. Immediately I thought it was like entering a videogame world. Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity?

Why does everything have weird names? Every container, shelf, cabinet or appliance had some odd name, as if people from Planet Sweden anthropomorphized these objects, naming each one they encountered as best they could**:

BESTA
HEDDA
BJARNUM
LERBERG
INREDA
EKTORP
GRUNDTON
BERTA
KARNA

More here.

Parts three, four and five can be found here.

In 1992, a year before starting her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design, Kara Walker, then 22—and only five years from winning a MacArthur “genius” award—had an epiphany while looking at a nineteenth-century silhouette of a young black girl in profile. She later recalled that it “kind of saved me.”

Two years later, I had an epiphany in an MFA student’s studio in the same school, having just seen something—either a cutout silhouette or a drawing in what looked like chocolate—of a plantation worker. “What is that?” I asked. The young woman said, “It’s by my classmate Kara Walker.” I felt like a thunderbolt had hit the back of my head. This was an image of mad America. I was sickened, thrilled, and terrified.

There’s a good chance you’ll have some of those feelings, as well as a guttural jolt of what James Joyce called the nightmare of history, in Kara Walker’s bitterly beautiful, psychically naked, carnal charnel house of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The elevator doors open onto part of what saved Walker’s life—a 50-foot-long dream-doom-death machine, a tableau filled with a series of black-and-white cutout silhouettes. This is the first work Walker ever showed in New York. Seeing it here allows you to reexperience some of the toxic shock Walker released into the aesthetic air back then.

more from New York Magazine here.