In the Economist:

ONE of life’s little mysteries is why particular people fancy each other—or, rather, why they do not when on paper they ought to. One answer is that human consciousness, and thus human thought, is dominated by vision. Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the other senses. However, as the multi-billion-dollar perfume industry attests, beauty is in the nose of the beholder, too.

ScientificMatch.com, a Boston-based internet-dating site launched in December, was created to turn this insight into money. Its founder, an engineer (and self-confessed serial dater) called Eric Holzle is drawing on an observation made over a decade ago by Claus Wedekind, a researcher at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.

In his original study Dr Wedekind recruited female volunteers to sniff men’s three-day-old T-shirts and rate them for attractiveness. He then analysed the men’s and women’s DNA, looking in particular at the genes that build a part of the immune system known as the major histocompatability complex (MHC). Dr Wedekind knew, from studies on mice, that besides fending off infection, the MHC has a role in sexual attractiveness. It changes odours in ways the mice can detect (with mice, the odours are in the urine), and that detection is translated into preferences for particular mates. What is true for mice is often true for men, so he had a punt on the idea that the MHC might affect the smell of human sweat, as well.

A debate over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free looks at the issue. Soumaya Ghannoushi:

Representations of the Muslim woman serve a dual legitimising function, at once confirming and justifying the west’s narrative of itself, and of the Muslim other. The victimised Muslim woman is the lens through which Islam and Muslim society are seen. In medieval times she was cast as an intimidating powerful queen or termagant (like Bramimonde in the Chanson de Roland, or Belacane in Parzival) reflecting an intimidating powerful Muslim civilisation. And when the power balance began to shift in Europe’s favour in the 17th and 18th centuries, she was made to mirror her society’s fallen fortunes. She turned into a harem slave, leading little more than a dumb animal existence, subjugated, inert, abject, powerless, and invisible. She is the quintessential embodiment of a despotic, deformed, and backward Islam.

Brian Whitaker responds:

In their articles, both Mahadin and Ghannoushi set out a broadly non-interventionist argument – that we should heed “the cries of the downtrodden” but not appoint ourselves as their guardians or benefactors (Ghannoushi’s latest article) or, as Mahadin puts it, “that the politics of resistance can only be formulated by those ‘who wish to be otherwise than they are'”.

These are not merely the views of a couple of Cif writers: they reflect a broad swathe of opinion in postcolonial countries and particularly in the Middle East – not only among Islamists but also among the more secular nationalists and, of course, the authoritarian regimes that tend to rule there.

In the NY Sun, Tyler Cowen reviews Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets:

I opened this book expecting to learn about why crime is high, how the drug trade works, or why so many people seem to make dysfunctional lifestyle choices. That’s not what I got. Most of all this is a story of male friendship and bonding — that’s right, I mean the bonding between the researcher and the criminal.

J.T., the gang leader at the center of the story, and of Mr. Venkatesh’s research, becomes wrapped up in the idea of having his own biographer. Eventually it became his obsession that Mr. Venkatesh record the details of his life, including the shakedowns. In part, this was J.T.’s narcissism, and in part he needed the motivation of an observer. Most of all, J.T. seemed to enjoy having an audience: “I realized that he had come to rely on my presence; he liked the attention, and the validation,” Mr. Venkatesh reports. None of J.T.’s underlings were qualified for the role of courtier, but the highly intelligent and nonjudgmental Mr. Venkatesh was perfect.

Others are not quite so generous toward Mr. Venkatesh. Ms. Bailey, one neighborhood figure, told him: “You want to act like a saint, then you go ahead … But you are also hustling. And we’re all hustlers … You’re a hustler, I can see it. You’ll do anything to get what you want. Just don’t be ashamed of it.” Mr. Venkatesh himself does not shy away from telling us about the more lurid appeal his project had for him: “By now I had spent about six years hanging out with J.T., and at some level I was pleased that he was winning recognition for his achievements. Such thoughts were usually accompanied by an equally powerful disquietude that I took so much pleasure in the rise of a drug-dealing gangster.”

The starting point for appreciating that there is a distinctive part of our psychology for morality is seeing how moral judgments differ from other kinds of opinions we have on how people ought to behave. Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking. This is the mind-set that makes us deem actions immoral (“killing is wrong”), rather than merely disagreeable (“I hate brussels sprouts”), unfashionable (“bell-bottoms are out”) or imprudent (“don’t scratch mosquito bites”).

The first hallmark of moralization is that the rules it invokes are felt to be universal. Prohibitions of rape and murder, for example, are felt not to be matters of local custom but to be universally and objectively warranted. One can easily say, “I don’t like brussels sprouts, but I don’t care if you eat them,” but no one would say, “I don’t like killing, but I don’t care if you murder someone.”

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

Few cities have withstood the kind of violence and carnage that Beirut has. Though destroyed by a civil war lasting 15 long years, it seemed to be on the verge of an economic and cultural renaissance in 2006 when it was bombed again during the Israeli invasion. Beirut is a city that has learned to start over, to rebuild itself on top of its ruins, but it is also a place where memories are long and myths are persistent. In his new novel, “Yalo,” Elias Khoury grapples with the idea of truth and memory, what we choose to remember and what we prefer to forget. In fact, “Yalo” is composed of confessions — whether forced or voluntary, true or laced with self-aggrandizement, redemptive for the confessor or entirely useless.

more from the LA Times here.

Over the ages, philosophy has offered valuable guidance on profound questions of truth, beauty and existence, yet still unresolved is the conundrum of how to respond to a bad book review.

This neglect no doubt has helped contribute to a feud between the prominent philosophers Colin McGinn and Ted Honderich. That, and perhaps a slight to an ex-girlfriend 25 years ago, terror in the Middle East and, oh yes, a fundamental disagreement on the nature of consciousness.

The spat started in the summer, when Mr. McGinn, a British-born philosophy professor at the University of Miami, wrote a scathing review of Mr. Honderich’s book “On Consciousness” in the July 2007 issue of The Philosophical Review, a quarterly journal edited by the faculty of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

From Discovery:

The mosques of the medieval Islamic world are artistic wonders and perhaps mathematical wonders as well. A study of patterns in 12th- to 17th-century mosaics suggests that Muslim scholars made a geometric breakthrough 500 years before mathematicians in the West. Peter J. Lu, a physics graduate student at Harvard University, noticed a striking similarity between certain medieval mosque mosaics and a geometric pattern known as a quasi crystal—an infinite tiling pattern that doesn’t regularly repeat itself and has symmetries not found in normal crystals (see video below). Lu teamed up with physicist Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University to test the similarity: If the patterns repeated when extended infinitely, they couldn’t be true quasi crystals.

Most of the patterns examined failed the test, but one passed: a pattern found in the Darb-i Imam shrine (seen in the first video above), built in 1453 in Isfahan, Iran. Not only does it never repeat when infinitely extended, its pattern maps onto Penrose tiles—components for making quasi crystals discovered by Oxford University mathematician Roger Penrose in the 1970s—in a way that is consistent with the quasi crystal pattern. Among the 3,700 tiles Lu and Steinhardt mapped, there are only 11 tiny flaws, tiles placed in the wrong orientation. Lu argues that these are accidents possibly introduced during centuries of repair. “Art historians always suspected there must be something more to these patterns,” says Tom Lentz, director of Harvard University Art Museums, but they were never examined with “this kind of scientific rigor.”

More here. (The video images are a MUST see).

Jeffery Rosen in The New York Times:

FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: A Biography of the First Amendment. By Anthony Lewis.

Throughout his long career as an author and a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Anthony Lewis has been one of the most inspiring advocates of a heroic view of the American judiciary. Each year I read aloud to my criminal procedure students the final paragraphs of “Gideon’s Trumpet,” Lewis’s definitive account of the 1963 Supreme Court case that recognized a constitutional right to court-appointed counsel. They never fail to bring a lump to the throat — at least to mine. In his new book, “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate,” Lewis offers a similarly heroic account of how courageous judges in the 20th century created the modern First Amendment by prohibiting the government from banning offensive speech, except to prevent a threat of serious and imminent harm. “Many of the great advances in the quality — the decency — of American society were initiated by judges,” he writes. “The truth is that bold judicial decisions have made the country what it is.”

In the 21st century, the heroic First Amendment tradition may seem like a noble vision from a distant era, in which heroes and villains were easier to identify. But that doesn’t diminish the inspiring achievements of First Amendment heroism. Conservative as well as liberal judges now agree that even speech we hate must be protected, and that is one of the glories of the American constitutional tradition. Anthony Lewis is right to celebrate it.

More here.

A new study in the NEJM on violence related mortality in Iraq between 2002 and 2006 has produced number  lower than the one produced by Lancet studies.  In the Washington Post:

A new survey estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of the country. Roughly 9 out of 10 of those deaths were a consequence of U.S. military operations, insurgent attacks and sectarian warfare.

The survey, conducted by the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization, also found a 60 percent increase in nonviolent deaths — from such causes as childhood infections and kidney failure — during the period. The results, which will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine at the end of the month, are the latest of several widely divergent and controversial estimates of mortality attributed to the Iraq war.

The three-year toll of violent deaths calculated in the survey is one-quarter the size of that found in a smaller survey by Iraqi and Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the journal Lancet in 2006.

Tyler Cowen asks “I am curious to see who will offer mea culpa and who will not.  “The two estimates aren’t as different as they look” is one way of spinning it; “I was wrong” is another.” Kieran Healy and Daniel Davies respond. Davies:

Anyone trying to pretend that people who defended the Lancet studies against ill-informed criticism in some way “wanted” the death count to be higher and are “disappointed” by the IFHS survey

This is not so much a “no apology” as a heartfelt “Kiss My Arse”, with a side order of “Try Saying That To My Face, Sunshine”. This is and always was a pure, simple and disgusting insult. Anyone who ever did this, went straight on my shit-list and has been on a permanent 100% discount factor for their views on Iraq ever since. I’ve even lodged standing instructions with the Grice United Fund to make sure they don’t accidentally respect your opinions on my behalf.  Which brings us on to the subject of …

In general, I just don’t agree with Tyler’s implicit view that there’s something illegitimate about making your case forcefully and not giving the kid gloves treatment to people who try to push weak, uninformed or fraudulent arguments against it (I’m glad to note that, revealed preference reveals, Alex Tabbarrok agrees with me on this one).

In sighandsight, Robin Meyer-Luch on what Web 2.0 means for information and journalism:

In early December, the deputy editor-in-chief of the online edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, felt the unexpected need to unleash a tirade against the “destructive forces of the free-opinion market” on the Internet. In the “faceless and characterless ‘many-to-many’ communication on the web,” knowledge is “trampled into a grass-roots democratic mush.” The “staggeringly unsuspecting public” has been taken in by the idiotic promises of decentralized information, when in fact web forums have little to offer except superficial knowledge, vulgar remarks, and slander. Graff, however, gets caught up in a breathtakingly structural-conservative, know-it-all attitude, which prevents him from making any kind of sophisticated contribution to the debate. For him, the reversibility and decentralization of the Internet are the breeding ground of brazen user-empowerment, serving solely as an end in itself and providing no sort of edification whatsoever – a kind of user-generated discourse delirium.

Graff, like Schirrmacher, is playing on the anxiety of journalism‘s entropic death on the net. They fear that “good journalism” could perish in the fever of participation, or, at the very least, lose its significance. What is most certainly a difficult path to a new digital information economy is reformulated as a history of loss.

Miguel Helft in the New York Times:

Mr. Wales expects his new Internet search engine, Wikia Search, an early version of which is being made available to the public Monday at www.wikia.com, to follow a similar trajectory.

“We want to make it really clear that when people arrive and do searches, they should not expect to find a Google killer,” Mr. Wales said. Instead, people who use the Wikia search engine should understand that they are part of the early stages of a project to build a “Google-quality search engine,” Mr. Wales said.

Like Wikipedia, Mr. Wales plans to rely on a “wiki” model, a voluntary collaboration of people, to fine-tune the Wikia search engine. When it starts up Monday, the service will rank pages based on a relatively simple algorithm. Users will be allowed and encouraged to rate search results for quality and relevance. Wikia will gradually incorporate that feedback in its rankings of Web pages to deliver increasingly useful answers to people’s questions.

More here.  [Thanks to Karen Ballentine.]

Tim Penn at The Knackered Hack:

Tsoy and Kino are noteworthy for a number of reasons in the history of 20th century culture, and arguably much more iconic than all those indie bands that we neurotic boy-outsiders modelled ourselves after in our youths — those that were invariably selling out while pretending not to. [I’m fine with that, by the way.]

Tsoy died in a car accident in 1990. So deep was his influence on the culture, 65 Soviet youth reportedly committed suicide after his death, thus compounding the individual tragedy. As an icon, Tsoy was one of those rare agencies who was breathing life back into a society that had suffered from seven decades of some of the worst repression in human history.

My most recent research on the band suggests that little if any of their material is copyright. This is not surprising because you could say that the Soviet Russian concept of self-publishing ( “samizdat” or, in the case of the cassette of their songs that I own, “magnitizdat“), was the original creative commons: copy and pass along.

What makes Tsoy the definitive amateur though was that, despite a burgeoning career as Russia’s leading rock musician in the late ’80s, when he was finally signed to the state record company, he reportedly maintained his employment as a boiler operator.

More here.

Witold Rybczynski in Slate:

Thirty years ago, Piano and Richard Rogers designed the Pompidou Center, which heralded high-tech architecture and culminated a decade later in Norman Foster’s Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. Since then, Foster has moved away from high tech, as evidenced in his sleek Hearst Building, just up Eighth Avenue from the Times. So has Piano, whose addition to the Morgan Library in New York typifies his current low-key approach. However, in the New York Times Building (designed in association with FXFowle) Piano returns to his Pompidou roots; not exposed pipes and ducts—those were always impractical—but dramatic structural details that say, “This is how I am made.”

Read the photo-essay here.

Legends grew up around Hans-Jürgen Krahl, the Frankfurt student leader and disciple of philosopher Theodor Adorno, even during his lifetime. Second only to Rudi Dutschke, Krahl personified the charisma of the self-proclaimed ‘anti-authoritarian’ youth movement of the 1960s, with its mixture of permanent action and esoteric theoretical jargon. In February 1970, Krahl was killed in a car accident at the age of 27. For many, this was the horrifying, almost fateful consequence of the life he had led. Others stylised Krahl’s early death as a beacon of despair directed at the authoritarian tendencies within the student movement. More than the death of one man, for them the the fatal accident marked the end of the young emancipatory movement in Germany. Another, less heroic interpretation sees his death as the result of the extreme personal and political tension of Krahl’s life, which could only meet a catastrophic end.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Just before New Year’s, I attended a garden wedding in the Nairobi suburbs, where the maid of honor, who flew in from California for the event, greeted the guests in Kamba, Luo, and English. By the following Tuesday, I was glued to CNN International back home in New York City, watching with horror news footage which showed the smouldering ruins of a church in Eldoret, a sanctuary to which members of one ethnic group had fled, in vain, to escape retaliation from another tribe.

Which is the real Kenya? The cosmopolitan, multicultural society in which marriages between people from different backgrounds and regions are wholly unremarkable? Or the nation rent by “tribal clashes,” whose ethnic violence has been broadcast around the world since last Sunday’s rigged election?

more from n+1 here.

Painting is dead. Painting isn’t dead. Painting is dead! No, it isn’t! Yes, it is! Isn’t! Is! Shut up shut up shut up shut up!!! Okay, now that we have that out of the way… Painting isn’t the denial-plagued zombie elephant in the room — art theory is. It’s one of the lines Leonard Cohen left out: Everybody knows a work of art that doesn’t speak for itself is a failure as a work of art. Fortunately, in spite of the best efforts we critics have mustered to impose Artforum’s Rules of Order on the rabble, art — and particularly the medium non grata of painting — just won’t shut up.

Painters in the contemporary art world, particularly those from L.A., have to maintain a chameleonesque indeterminacy about their artistic intentions — be all things to all people — or face ghettoization. Is this an abstract painting? Or a painting of a painting of an abstract painting, wink wink? It’s the emperor’s new clothes all over. The ultimate irony is that the emperor is actually decked out in an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — the plausible deniability cultivated by painters for the social sphere creates a temporary autonomous zone in the studio wherein a thousand flowers have blossomed. No one can pin them down, so they can get away with anything. The psycho art-market bubble hasn’t hurt production either.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From Nature:

Chimpanzees in Uganda have been spotted eating dirt along with fistfuls of leaves. This might help to increase the plants’ anti-malarial properties, say researchers. Many animals, including humans, are known to deliberately eat soil, a practice called geophagy. Though the animals and people might not be aware of it, the main reason for this is that munching on dirt can have health benefits. Soil contains scarce minerals, such as iron, and can counter diarrhea, absorb toxins, and facilitate digestion. Eating earth can also reduce hunger pangs during famine.

Now, it seems that soil might also boost the pharmaceutical properties of foods.

Sabrina Krief, a veterinarian at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, noticed that chimpanzees in Kibale National Park often ate soil shortly before or after eating the leaves of Trichilia rubescens . After finding that the leaves contained novel anti-malarial compounds, the researchers suggested that the apes were self-medicating.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Acacia trees are the iconic shrub of the East African savanna. Their thorny thickets house a host of creatures and provide sustenance to the local charismatic megafauna, from elephants to zebras. In light of this continual foraging, the plants have struck a mutually beneficial bargain with several species of ants. The insect armies swarm intrusive browsers in exchange for housing and food. But according to new research in Science, it appears that without such browsing—a state of affairs the acacia might be thought to long for—the trees suffer.

Zoologist Todd Palmer and his colleagues examined the interdependence of one such acacia species—the whistling thorn tree, Acacia drepanolobium—the ants it hosts and the herbivores that eat it. He compared six such trees in Kenya that have been surrounded by an electrified fence since 1995 (by entomologist Truman Young of the University of California, Davis) with six trees open to local giraffes, elephants and other acacia-eaters. In the absence of herbivores, the whistling acacia stopped producing little ant houses in hollow thorns—known as domatia—and excreting the sweet nectar that its bodyguard ants eat. But instead of spurring more growth, the acacias found themselves more than twice as likely to be providing a home to another type of ant—Crematogaster sjostedti—which do not defend the trees and rely on invasions of the bark-boring cerambycid beetle larvae to build the holes in which they dwell. “The cavity-nesting antagonistic ants actually promote the activities of the stem-boring beetle,” says biologist Robert Pringle of Stanford University.

More here.

Flann O’Brien’s fictional scientist and savant De Selby conceived a theory that darkness, far from being the absence of light, is really an accumulation of minutely small black corpuscles. I had attributed this wonderful notion to O’Brien’s joyful surrealism, but I learn from Pascal Richet, in A Natural History of Time, that in 1896 the physicist Gustave Le Bon actually announced to the Academy of Science in Paris the discovery of black light. Maybe the voraciously curious O’Brien had come across this absurdity – a forgotten footnote in scientific history. There was no shortage of similar oddities at the end of the nineteenth century, following the discovery of X-rays – those mysterious entities that could pass through flesh itself. N-rays, “a new type of radiation”, for example, were visible particularly to their discoverer, an otherwise respectable professor from Nancy called René Blondlot. Like radium, they emitted radiant matter. He said of them: “The observer should accustom himself to look at the screen just as a painter, and in particular an ‘impressionist’ painter, would look at a landscape. To attain this requires some practice . . . some people, in fact, never succeed”. Indeed they didn’t, for N-rays were a fiction.

more from the TLS here.

TARA DONOVAN’S PINS are hard to miss. There are thousands of them upstairs at the new Institute of Contemporary Art. They’re smushed together almost as if dropped into a trash compactor, except instead of being bent, they form a 3½-foot-tall block of sinewy, shiny metal. This is art, and it sits in the center of a gallery at the ICA, one of the signature pieces of the museum’s collection.

Stare at “Untitled (Pins),” and you’re likely to have questions. How does this cube stick together? Is it solid or a kind of pin shell? And what of the artist? Did Donovan get pricked as she manipulated the piece? Was she wearing protective gloves? What kind of care and persistence did it require for her to turn these thousands of glittering pins into such a perfect square?

One thing you might not expect: Donovan didn’t put “Untitled (Pins)” together at all. The New York City artist figured out how to shape a mass of pins and sent instructions to the museum; the work was assembled in July, and again in August, entirely by the hands of ICA employees.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.