From the BLAST website:

Filmmaker Paul Devlin grew up in a family of scientists. He spent summers at the high energy accelerator, Fermilab, where his particle physicist father was on the team searching for the top quark. One brother attended MIT and the other became a prominent astrophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the summer of 2005, this brother, Mark Devlin, invited Paul to Arctic Sweden to document the launch of Mark’s groundbreaking telescope, BLAST. BLAST stands for Balloon-bourne, Large Aperture, Sub-millimeter Telescope, and is designed to gather information on how our universe evolved by discovering thousands of the most ancient galaxies in order to unlock the mystery of how the first generation of stars were formed. To see these celestial births, it must go through a risky launch on a NASA high-altitude balloon and float above the opaque atmosphere for several days on its way to Arctic Canada.

When Paul arrives, tensions within the collaboration are high as technical obstacles and the worst weather in decades have delayed the experiment for weeks.

More here. [Go to Press Kit.] The film’s financing is interesting: “BLAST is opening itself up, via ArtistShare (the first film to do so on ArtistShare), to interested participants on several levels. If you want to be Executive Producer, $150k gets you there. Want to participate on other levels, from $50k down to $19.95? No problem: There are a total of nine levels of participation.”  [Thanks to Craig Peters.]

The Hazaras cherish education and hard work, but their Shiite Muslim faith and Asian features have long made them a target. Will they find a better life in the post-Taliban era?

Phil Zabriskie in National Geographic:

At the heart of Afghanistan is an empty space, a striking absence, where the larger of the colossal Bamian Buddhas once stood. In March 2001 the Taliban fired rockets at the statues for days on end, then planted and detonated explosives inside them. The Buddhas had looked out over Bamian for some 1,500 years. Silk Road traders and missionaries of several faiths came and went. Emissaries of empires passed through—Mongols, Safavids, Moguls, British, Soviets—often leaving bloody footprints. A country called Afghanistan took shape. Regimes rose and collapsed or were overthrown. The statues stood through it all. But the Taliban saw the Buddhas simply as non-Islamic idols, heresies carved in stone. They did not mind being thought brutish. They did not fear further isolation. Destroying the statues was a pious assertion of their brand of faith over history and culture.

It was also a projection of power over the people living under the Buddhas’ gaze: the Hazaras, residents of an isolated region in Afghanistan’s central highlands known as Hazarajat—their heartland, if not entirely by choice. Accounting for up to one-fifth of Afghanistan’s population, Hazaras have long been branded outsiders. They are largely Shiite Muslims in an overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim country. They have a reputation for industriousness yet work the least desirable jobs. Their Asian features—narrow eyes, flat noses, broad cheeks—have set them apart in a de facto lower caste, reminded so often of their inferiority that some accept it as truth.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Dear Reader,

On the occasion of our 1,000th post at 3QD I had written a short note to our readers. It is now my privilege to announce that in the less-than-three-years since that time we have done more than 9,000 more posts, and this happens to be the ten thousand and tenth post at 3QD. I had planned to do it as the 10,000th post, but forgot yesterday! 🙁

The actual 10,000th post was done early this morning by my sister Azra (on Elias Khoury’s new novel), whose record of consistency in posting two interesting items daily is truly remarkable. As far as I know she has never missed a single day, six days a week, in the last three years. She is the Cal Ripken, Jr. of 3QD. (He played in a record 2,632 straight baseball games spanning sixteen seasons.) My friend Morgan continues to scour the web for intellectually stimulating material and consistently manages to surprise and please me with his finds. My sister Sughra comes up with a fascinating art image, and links to more information to go along with it, every Monday without fail. And last, but by no means least, my friend and colleague, Robin Varghese, in addition to his usual erudite selection of links, has also taken over some of the other duties I used to perform at 3QD (and also stepped up his number of daily posts) so that I can have some time to do other work during my sabbatical in Italy. 3QD takes a lot of person-hours to do daily because we look at a very large number of sources before making our selections of what to post. I could not possibly do it on my own (at least while maintaining the current variety). So my heartfelt thanks go to Azra, Morgan, Sughra, and Robin.

A little more than two-and-a-half years ago I wrote the first Monday column at 3QD. Since that time, we and our guest columnists have published approximately 500 (yeah, count ’em!) original essays, making Mondays our most heavily trafficked day. (The champion is my prolific nephew Asad Raza who has written 46 excellent essays for 3QD so far, and shows no signs of slowing. Thanks, Asad!) But I would like to express my gratitude and my congratulations to all our guest contributors for making Mondays at 3QD so special.

And finally, I would like to thank you, Dear Reader, for visiting our site and engaging in such stimulating conversation with us through the comments section and in private emails. Please tell all your friends and colleagues about 3QD. And best wishes for a great 2008!

Yours,

Abbas

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

Last week I wrote about a new study that identified a fossil mammal as the closest relative to whales, helping to shed light on how whales moved from land to sea. The mammal, Indohyus, was a small four-legged creature that probably spent a fair amount of time in water and ate vegetation. The authors of the new study proposed that the ancestors of whales originally lived this way. Gradually, the whale lineage became more adapted to life in water and shifted to eating meat, as exemplified by early whales like Ambulocetus, which was something like a furry alligator.

In the comment thread, Noumenon asked this question:

I don’t understand how Indohyus and Ambulocetus, both dated to around 47 mya, can both be the ancestors of today’s whales. You say carnivory was an important transition for whales. Then Indohyus would have had to split off before Pakicetus, before whales became carnivorous.

Via email, I got a similar question from a biologist I know who is working on a book about evolution. He had read about the discovery in this article by Ian Sample in the Guardian, who declared:

Fossil hunters have discovered the remains of the earliest ancestor of the modern whale: a small deer-like animal that waded in lagoons and munched on vegetation.

So how can an ancestor be younger than its descendants?

More here.

In Al-Ahram:

Amina, Samira and Mohamed are among a growing number of young people in Egypt today who have remained single for a myriad of reasons.

According to a recent Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS) report, nine million Egyptians over the conventional marrying age of 35 are single. Surprisingly, the number of unmarried females is only 3.5 million, compared to 5.5 million unmarried males.

The report findings induced some MPs to say spinsterhood was becoming a threat to social stability, urging the government to take urgent steps to facilitate marriage. They suggested a handful of measures, such as providing young people with access to cheaper flats in newly established cities, starting campaigns to raise people’s awareness of the importance of reducing marriage costs, facilitating collective weddings and launching fundraising campaigns to provide young people with marriage loans.

To address the dire social consequences of the late marriage phenomenon, a collective effort between governmental and non-governmental parties — namely the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Communications, the National Council for Women, several social research centres and a number of NGOs — resulted in the launch of a campaign in 2005 under the slogan: “Marriage delay is not the end of the world”. The campaign target was single young women in several governorates; its aim being to integrate them into voluntary social and cultural activities that would render them active and productive members of society. As promising as it sounds, this campaign, which began in mid-2005, has faltered, as it seems to have been planned as a short-term project, with no strategy in place for its maintenance and progress.

Another slightly bizarre response to the singles phenomenon was adopted by Hayam Darbouk, the founder of the Right to Life NGO, whose motto is: “One wife is not enough.”

Jennifer 8. Lee n the NYT:

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil’s national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

Her prime pieces of evidence are the centuries-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 etching of a man making them in a bakery – decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.

Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong in an uncommon disagreement on who’s stimulus packages are better: Krugman for Edwards and Clinton; DeLong for Obama.  Krugman in the NYT:

John Edwards, although never the front-runner, has been driving his party’s policy agenda. He’s done it again on economic stimulus: last month, before the economic consensus turned as negative as it now has, he proposed a stimulus package including aid to unemployed workers, aid to cash-strapped state and local governments, public investment in alternative energy, and other measures.

Last week Hillary Clinton offered a broadly similar but somewhat larger proposal. (It also includes aid to families having trouble paying heating bills, which seems like a clever way to put cash in the hands of people likely to spend it.) The Edwards and Clinton proposals both contain provisions for bigger stimulus if the economy worsens.

And you have to say that Mrs. Clinton seems comfortable with and knowledgeable about economic policy. I’m sure the Hillary-haters will find some reason that’s a bad thing, but there’s something to be said for presidents who know what they’re talking about.

The Obama campaign’s initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I’m sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from “morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending.” Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure — doesn’t that sound familiar?

DeLong:

Madeleine Bunting reviews The Selfish Capitalist: The Origins of Affluenza by Oliver James, in The Guardian:

Oliver James is an assiduous trawler of the densest psychological and psychiatric studies to retrieve the nuggets of wisdom buried therein. He’s also a modern day missionary, fired with a passionate desire to relieve the growing emotional suffering in rich countries, which has led the World Health Organisation to predict that depression is on track to become the second most widespread disease, after heart disease, in the developed world by 2020. His writing career has been an attempt to marry these two impulses (which can often tug in opposite directions) and thus bring to a wider public the growing body of research, particularly in the US, into what constitutes human well-being and why it appears to be in decline.

More here.

John Allen Paulos at ABC News:

Last year’s wildly popular Beyond Belief 1.0 scientific conference primarily focused upon and championed irreligion. The Beyond Belief 2.0 conference held at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., this past November was wider in scope. Rather than aiming to be another undiluted atheist lovefest, it attempted to consider changes in the ideas of the Enlightenment that are necessary given advances in various disciplines since the 18th century.

At least that was the stated aim, but any gathering that included the diverse luminaries in attendance would be guaranteed to roam all over the intellectual landscape. Despite the roaming and the diversity, however, the conference remained — pardon the adolescent alliteration — an unbeliever’s utopia, a heathen’s heaven, a pagan’s paradise.

The complete video of the conference proceedings is available online HERE, and I urge readers to view it and related material for themselves. The video’s marquee names include philosophers Daniel Dennett, David Albert and Patricia Churchland, physical scientists Stuart Kauffman, Sean Carroll and Harold Kroto, biologists and cognitive scientists V.S. Ramachandran, David Sloan Wilson, Lee Silver and host Roger Bingham, writers Rebecca Goldstein, David Brin and Robert Winter, various stars, such as Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers and Michael Shermer, and a host of others.

More here.  And read an excerpt from Paulos’s new book Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up here. Reviews of the book are here.  I have read the book and recommend it very highly. Buy it here.

From American Scientist:

Prepared by math professor Larry Riddle of Atlanta’s Agnes Scott College, this well-organized site presents the biographies of 184 notable women in mathematics, from Theano, who carried on the Calabrian school of her husband Pythagoras after his death, to Ukrainian mathematician Svetlana Jitomirskaya, whose work on non-perturbative quasiperiodic localization received the American Mathematical Society’s Satter Prize in 2005.

The biographies are well composed and referenced, and Riddle has provided both alphabetical and chronological indexes, the latter of which provides a useful timeline of women’s recognized contributions to mathematics since the sixth century B.C.

There’s also a well-maintained list of links to external resources that support and recognize women’s contributions in mathematics, science and engineering—a valuable starting point for those who want to explore further.

Professor Riddle’s site is here.  [Photo shows Svetlana Jitomirskaya.]

From NoUtopia:

A Thank You Note
Wislawa Szymborska

There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.

My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.

I don’t wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.

Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.

My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.

And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.

It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.

They don’t even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

“I don’t owe them anything”,
love would have said
on this open topic.

From India Profile:

Every year the Shia Muslims commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. For ten days the people mourn the death of the Imam, his family and followers. They wear black, attend meetings and carry out processions to express their grief.

It was in Karbala where Hussein fought his last battle and died. “Put your trust in God and know that man is born to die, and that the heavens shall not remain, everything shall pass away, except the presence of God.” Those were Hussein’s passing words to his old weeping sister before he washed, anointed himself with musk and rode his horse into the face of thousands of soldiers. The place where the water of Euphrates was cut off to Hussein and his family came to be known as Kerbala (Kerb meaning anguish and bela vexation. Hussein refused to bow to the forces of evil choosing a bloody death. His spirit rose like a phoenix and flew across lands away from the desert of his home. Evoking the strength and humility of Hussein wrote Anees, the poet, master of elegy: “Yeh to na keh sakey kay Shah-e-zulmanain hoon, Maula ne sur jhuka ke kaha main Hussein hoon` (He never could say he was master of earth and sky. He merely bent low his head and said ‘I am Hussein’).

More here.

Laila Lalami in The Los Angeles Times:

Yalo by Elias Khoury

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.

Khoury was born in Beirut’s Ashrafiyyeh district (also known as “Little Mountain”) at a crucial historical moment: 1948, the year that witnessed the founding of the state of Israel and the resulting dispossession that Palestinians call the Nakba (“catastrophe”). These twin events have had a profound significance for him as a novelist, playwright, journalist and literary critic. In 1967, at age 19, he visited Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, and, revolted by what he saw, he enrolled in Fatah, the largest political faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization. Three years later, in the aftermath of Black September, he left Jordan for Paris, where he finished his college education. With Yalo, Khoury returns to Beirut in the 1980s with a book that is a series of jagged narratives shifting in time, location and point of view. The novel gives us, like pieces of a puzzle, the story of Daniel Jal’u, nicknamed Yalo. He is a soldier who, after 10 years spent on one of the many sides of Lebanon’s sectarian civil war, gradually becomes a deserter, a thief, a vagabond in Paris, a night watchman in Beirut, a traitor to his benefactor, an arms smuggler, a voyeur and eventually a rapist. Then Yalo falls in love with the young Shirin, and that single act of affection ends in his capture; she turns him in to the police and accuses him of rape.

More here.

Stanley Fish continues on the value of the humanities over at his NYT blog.

Of the justifications for humanistic study offered in the comments, two seemed to me to have some force. The first is that taking courses in literature, philosophy and history provides training in critical thinking. I confess that I have always thought that “critical thinking” is an empty phrase, a slogan that a humanist has recourse to when someone asks what good is what you do and he or she has nothing to say. What’s the distinction, I have more than occasionally asked, between critical thinking and just thinking? Isn’t the adjective superfluous? And what exactly would “uncritical thinking” be? But now that I have read the often impassioned responses to my column, I have a better understanding of what critical thinking is.

Joseph Kugelmass responds again over at The Valve.

If by “critical thinking” one means merely the capacity for analysis, and the willingness to analyze something independently, then it is true that other venues besides the academy produce critical thinking. Nonetheless, skills specific to the interpretation and production of texts differ in enormous ways from the skills specific to the analysis of sports events. Otherwise, every head coach would also be a Cicero.

This variance obtains with each of the spurious alternatives you present to us here. Talk radio, while marginally interactive (since one caller at a time can speak to the host), imposes such limits on the level of the conversation that I’m frankly amazed you would compare it to a college seminar. Political analysis is rarely interactive at all: just watching a pundit talk does not produce skilled, independent political thought.

3QD friend Sam Anderson has won one of the country’s most prestigious awards for book criticism. At the NY Magazine website:

[F]or us the best surprise of all wasn’t one of the book nominations; it was the announcement that New York‘s book critic, Sam Anderson, was the winner of the Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, the most prestigious award for book criticism in the country. Good work, Sam!

For those of you who don’t know Sam’s writing, here are two excellent pieces.  Also, from Sam’s list of 2007’s best books:

9. MOST TRAGIC FIGURE
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf)
Danticat’s uncle Joseph lost his wife to illness, his larynx to cancer, his home and church (and almost his head) to a Haitian mob—until finally, at 81, he fled to Miami, where he was finished off by the hellishly inept bureaucracy of U.S. Immigration: detained, interrogated, and allowed to die in custody. Danticat tells his story with almost inhuman restraint.

Dennis Overbye in the NYT:

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit.

Sean Carroll elucidates over at Cosmic Variance:

The point about Boltzmann’s Brains is not that they are a fascinating prediction of an exciting new picture of the multiverse. On the contrary, the point is that they constitute a reductio ad absurdum that is meant to show the silliness of a certain kind of cosmology — one in which the low-entropy universe we see is a statistical fluctuation around an equilibrium state of maximal entropy. According to this argument, in such a universe you would see every kind of statistical fluctuation, and small fluctuations in entropy would be enormously more frequent than large fluctuations. Our universe is a very large fluctuation (see previous post!) but a single brain would only require a relatively small fluctuation. In the set of all such fluctuations, some brains would be embedded in universes like ours, but an enormously larger number would be all by themselves. This theory, therefore, predicts that a typical conscious observer is overwhelmingly likely to be such a brain. But we (or at least I, not sure about you) are not individual Boltzmann brains. So the prediction has been falsified, and that kind of theory is not true.

In the LRB, Simon Blackburn, Jerry Coyne, Philip Kitcher, Tim Lewens, Steven Rose pen a joint response to Jerry Fodor’s response to letters on the issue:

Jerry Fodor persists with two provocative claims: first, that natural selection explanations are incoherent; second, that there is some alternative explanation for adaptive phenomena such as camouflage or beak shape (Letters, 29 November).

To show the incoherence of anything, you have to address it in the form in which its professional expositors deploy it. In large numbers of articles and books, published from 1859 to the present, evolutionary biologists use the following style of explanation. A characteristic of an organism (the colour of an animal’s coat, say) is as it is because of a historical process. In some ancestral population there was a variant type that differed from the rest in ways that enhanced reproductive success. (White polar bears, for example, more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.) If the variant has a genetic basis, its frequency increases in the next generation.

Is this incoherent? Nothing Fodor says bears on that question.

Fodor:

[T]hey offer some potted polar bear history: ‘White polar bears . . . more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.’ I don’t know whether this story is true (neither, I imagine, do they), but let’s suppose it is. They ask, rhetorically, whether I think it’s incoherent. Well, of course I don’t, but that’s because they’ve somehow left out the Darwin bit. To get it back in, you have to add that the white bears were selected ‘because of’ their improved camouflage, and that the white bears were ‘selected for’ their improved camouflage: i.e. that the improved camouflage ‘explains’ why the white bears survived and flourished. But now we get the incoherence back too. What Darwin failed to notice (and what paradigm adaptationists continue to fail to notice) is that the theory of natural selection entails none of these. In fact, the theory of natural selection leaves it wide open what (if anything) the white bears were selected for.

What a difference a decade makes. When I worked in Moscow in 1994 and 1995 for the National Democratic Institute, an American nongovernmental organization, I could not have imagined the present situation. The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be considered the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” as Putin claims, would have occurred to only a few hard-core, extremist (loony) Communist Party members. Suddenly, this view is not only mainstream but is shared by the youngest generation of Russians— even as they drink Starbucks coffee while surfing the Internet. Alongside Big Macs and iPods, a cottage industry of Soviet nostalgia has sprung up, complete with T-shirts, books, movies, bars, and restaurants. Stores even sell postcards of Stalin.

If Russians feel nostalgia for Soviet days, the run-up to the December elections stirred my own memories of a year of living not at all dangerously in what we thought of then as the new Russia. My thoughts, and those of so many others, go back to the era not only in Russia but also in the United States— the 12 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The United States’s efforts to promote democracy abroad had not yet become singed by the war in Iraq, and the democratic balance in its three branches of government seemed reasonably stable.

more from The American Scholar here.

Mr. Kirsch’s method as a critic differs sharply from the one prevalent among writers on poetry, many of whom feel the need to take a side in the argument between believers in the expressive, communicative, imitative power of poetry, and those who believe it is a medium whose meaning is internal, closed in its own horizon, constructed and conditioned solely by the inner tensions of any particular poem. (It’s odd that these views are seen as opposed.)

But Mr. Kirsch takes poets on in their own terms, reading them by their own lights even as he locates them in the poetic tradition — in particular their relation to the Romantics, a relationship he sees as key to understanding contemporary poetry. This is not merely to say Mr. Kirsch is gentle or ecumenical, but rather that he understands the difficulty of writing about poems, even the longest and most perfectly composed of which are fleet, fragmented, and elusive in a way particularly inhospitable to the kind of scrutiny that novels and essays bear up so well under. When Mr. Kirsch praises, he does not praise first and foremost in the service of any critical ideology.

more from The NY Sun here.

Has any pop group’s comeback been analysed as much as that of the Spice Girls? Plumb the newspapers since their reunion tour began in Vancouver on 2 December, and Mel B, Mel C, Geri Halliwell, Emma Bunton and the ubiquitous Victoria Beckham have been labelled the lot: they are washed-up old crones, backbiting bitches, merciless money-grubbers, Top 40 turkeys – their comeback ballad “Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)” only reached number 11 – and a short-frocked, sloganeering riot squad who destroyed feminism for ever. Unpacking girl power in the Observer, the critic Kitty Empire protested, “Has there ever been a redder herring?” Before seeing the show, I’d have agreed. Afterwards, despite a less-than-consummate performance from the Girls, I wasn’t so sure.

more from The New Statesman here.