///
Foolish, Not Social
Sankha Ghosh

Returning home do you feel you talked too much?
Cleverness, do you feel very tired?
…………………………………..
Do you feel like sitting quiet in the blue cottage
Burning incense, after a bath, on return?
…………………………………..
Do you feel like wearing a human body at last
After taking off the demon’s dress?
…………………………………..
Liquid time carries moisture into the room.
Do you feel like an ananta-shayana on her floating raft?
…………………………………..
If you feel like that, come back. Cleverness, go away.
Does it really matter?
Let them say foolish, let them say unsocial.

///

John Keay in the Times Literary Supplement:

Until fifty years ago, it was widely assumed that China had no tradition of scientific thought and innovation. Meticulous observation and reasoned deduction were taken to be European traits, as was the application of scientific principles to industrial production. The Chinese were supposed to be good at imitating, not originating; and the notion that the West’s scientific and industrial revolutions owed anything to the East’s inventiveness seemed laughable. We now know better. Ancient China’s precocity in almost every field of scientific achievement has since been acknowledged – in medicine, metallurgy, ceramics, mechanics, chemistry, physics, mathematics. Ridicule has turned to awe, tinged with trepidation.

This dramatic reversal is credited to one man, the redoubtable Dr Joseph Needham, plus a small team of devoted disciples and a monumental work of scholarship. All three provide rich matter for Simon Winchester’s Bomb, Book and Compass, while the stature of Needham’s great work may be judged by the appearance of a new volume on ferrous metallurgy, the twenty-fourth in his Science and Civilisation in China series. Fifty years since the first volume appeared, and thirteen since Needham died, the work of assessing pre-Qing China’s scientific achievement goes on. “Sci[ence] in general in China – why [did it] not develop?”, wondered Needham in an aide-memoire jotted down in 1942. Later touted as “the Needham question”, this conundrum about why so promising a tradition failed to generate its own industrial revolution has never been satisfactorily answered – by Needham or anyone else. But the idea behind it – that China did indeed once excel in science – has generated an industry of its own. Mining the world’s most richly documented culture for references to scientific and technological practice now provides employment for a host of scholars; many of them enjoy the resources on offer at Cambridge University’s specially built Needham Research Institute; and seldom has there not been a volume of Science and Civilisation in China making its stately progress across the print floor of the University Press.

More here.

Sean Carroll and the other folks over at the always excellent Cosmic Variance have set up a page for donating to public schools. We at 3QD strongly urge you to support their worthy effort. Sean at CV:

Each year, DonorsChose does a Blogger Challenge, where they harness the power of the internet to bring money to deserving classrooms in public schools across the U.S. In the past we have wimped out and supported other bloggers, but this year we’re stepping up to the plate. Big time.

Cosmic Variance Challenge 2008

It’s a simple and compelling model: individual classrooms isolate a pressing need, and donors can choose which projects to support. We’ve picked out a number of great projects that will help students learn about science in fun, hands-on ways, and we’re going to be adding a few more soon.

We’ve set a fundraising goal of $10,000 over the next month. That sounds like a lot, but it is enormously less than the capacity of our readers; we get about 5,000 hits per day, so that’s a pitiful $2/visitor. But most visitors, we understand, are wimps. So if we get $20/person from the 10% of visitors who are not wimps, we hit the goal. But it’s okay to go over! If we fall short, you should all feel embarrassed.

Mostly we just want to crush the folks at ScienceBlogs, who have put together their own challenge. Crush them, I say. Sure, they have a zillion blogs, several of whom have many times our readership. So what? This is a matter of how awesome the reader are, not how many of them there are. We will also be asking other friendly bloggers to either set up their own donation pages, or hop aboard our bandwagon — if anyone wants to advertise the challenge, we can list them as an affiliate on the challenge page.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

At one point in this excellent new novel, a boy named Mau desperately needs to find milk for a starving infant. Unfortunately, he’s on a virtually deserted island, and there just aren’t any cows or nursing mothers around.

There is only one possible source of nourishment for the baby, and Mau risks his life to procure it. Even now the thought of what the boy does still makes me shudder. In a lifetime packed with both extensive reading and vivid nightmares, I can honestly say that I have never come across anything quite so . . . well, there is no adequate word to describe an act that is as heroic as it is disgusting. For this scene alone, no reader is ever likely to forget Terry Pratchett’s Nation. Not that I would short-change the memorability of its ghosts, cannibals, bloodthirsty mutineers, forbidden burial grounds and secret treasure. Exciting in themselves, these also play their part in Pratchett’s latest examination of some fundamental questions about religious belief, the nature of culture and what it means to be human.

But let’s start at the beginning.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Eight years ago, when Erik Ramsey was 16, a car accident triggered a brain stem stroke that left him paralyzed. Though fully conscious, Ramsey was completely paralyzed, essentially “locked in,” unable to move or talk. He could communicate only by moving his eyes up or down, thereby answering questions with a yes or a no. Ramsey’s doctors recommended sending him to a nursing facility. Instead his parents brought him home. In 2004 they met neurologist Philip R. Kennedy, chief scientist at Neural Signals in Duluth, Ga. He offered Ramsey the chance to take part in an unusual experiment. Surgeons would implant a high-tech device called a neural prosthesis into Ramsey’s brain, enabling him to communicate his thoughts to a computer that would translate them into spoken words.

Today Ramsey sports a small metal electrode in his brain. Its thin wires penetrate a fraction of an inch into his motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement, including the motion of his vocal muscles. When Ramsey thinks of saying a sound, the implant captures the electrical firing of nearby neurons and transmits their impulses to a computer, which decodes them and produces the sounds. So far Ramsey can only say a few simple vowels, but Kennedy believes that he will recover his full range of speech by 2010.

More here.

All eight short films that competed can be found here.

Brian Stelter in the New York Times:

The president of Pakistan apparently believes an Internet hoax alleging that Oliver L. North warned of the dangers posed by Osama bin Laden 20 years ago.

President Asif Ali Zardari, in an interview with the Fox News Channel that was televised on Tuesday, claimed that Mr. North installed a security system for his home in the late 1980s “because he was ‘scared of Osama bin Laden.’ ”

That rumor emerged on the Internet shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has been thoroughly debunked by a number of reliable sources, including the United States Senate’s Web site and Mr. North himself.

More here.  And see also this:

Flirting with Palin earns Pakistani president a fatwa

Issam Ahmad in the Christian Science Monitor:

With some overly friendly comments to Gov. Sarah Palin at the United Nations, Asif Ali Zardari has succeeded in uniting one of Pakistan’s hard-line mosques and its feminists after a few weeks in office.

A radical Muslim prayer leader said the president shamed the nation for “indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt.”

Feminists charged that once again a male Pakistani leader has embarrassed the country with sexist remarks. And across the board, the Pakistani press has shown disapproval.

More here.

Malin Rising and Hillel Italie of the AP:

Bad news for American writers hoping for a Nobel Prize next week: the top member of the award jury believes the United States is too insular and ignorant to compete with Europe when it comes to great writing.

Counters the head of the U.S. National Book Foundation: “Put him in touch with me, and I’ll send him a reading list.”

As the Swedish Academy enters final deliberations for this year’s award, permanent secretary Horace Engdahl said it’s no coincidence that most winners are European.

“Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world … not the United States,” he told The Associated Press in an exclusive interview Tuesday.

He said the 16-member award jury has not selected this year’s winner, and dropped no hints about who was on the short list. Americans Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates usually figure in speculation, but Engdahl wouldn’t comment on any names.

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S. writers are “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” dragging down the quality of their work.

“The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

His comments were met with fierce reactions from literary officials across the Atlantic.

More here.

Emily Mitchell in The New Statesman:

Edward Steichen’s decision in 1923 to go to work for Condé Nast as principal photographer for Vanity Fair and Vogue was one of the most controversial and long-debated in the history of photography. Prior to then, Steichen had exemplified the photographer-as-artist, at a time when the medium was still struggling for acceptance as a legitimate art form. With Alfred Stieglitz, he had been a founding member of the Photo-Secession, which, like the Linked Ring group in Britain, championed the Pictorialist aesthetic of softened lines and contrasts that deliberately made photographs more like paintings. Steichen had also been a promoter of the avant-garde, bringing new works by French artists, including Henri Matisse and Auguste Rodin, to America for exhibition.

He therefore seemed an unlikely choice to enter the functional world of magazine photo graphy, with its emphasis on commerce and mass appeal. But in 1923 Steichen was, in his own words, “sick and tired of being poor”, and so, when he was offered this steady and well-paid work, he took it, declaring his intention to do it for just a few years and then return to being an art photographer and painter. In fact, he was to stay with Condé Nast for almost two decades.

Some saw Steichen’s decision to go commercial as the moment when he broke with his purist past and with Stieglitz, an absolute believer in art for art’s sake. Certainly, Steichen took flak at that time and subsequently for selling out. When he was appointed to be head of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1946, a number of his fellow photographers, including Ansel Adams and the previous director of MoMA’s photography department, Beaumont Newhall, protested against the choice because they viewed his work after the First World War as “illustrative” rather than artistic and aimed at “swaying large masses of people”.

Others argue that Steichen’s magazine photo graphs constitute an important aspect of his art, one that is as much a continuation of his earlier work as a departure from it.

Continuing with Analytic Marxism day over here at 3QD (Brenner being the first of the day), Pranab Bardhan in the FT:

As the petro-authoritarianism of Russia flexes its muscles and the economic prowess of China struts in Olympic glory, developing countries in the world might start rethinking about the lectures on democracy and development they have heard all these years from the West. This is at a time when advanced capitalist democracies are reeling under the shock of unregulated financial overreach and years of living beyond their means, a far cry from the end-of-history triumphalism of capitalist democracy of less than two decades back.

The Chinese case in particular is reviving a hoary myth of how particularly in the initial stages of economic development authoritarianism delivers much more than democracy. This is also backed by the memory of impressive economic performance of other East Asian authoritarian regimes (like those in South Korea and Taiwan in the recent past). The lingering hope of democrats had been that as the middle classes prosper in these regimes, they then demand, and in the latter two cases got, the movement toward political democracy.

But the relationship between authoritarianism or democracy and development is not so simple. Authoritarianism is neither necessary nor sufficient for economic development. That it is not necessary is illustrated not only by today’s industrial democracies, but by scattered cases of recent development success: Costa Rica, Botswana, and now India. That it is not sufficient is amply evident from disastrous authoritarian regimes in Africa and elsewhere.

Four giants stalked the Antarctic in the years before the First World War. Of Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott you will know. Of Douglas Mawson you may not. Now, thanks to Beau Riffenburgh’s latest book, you can. Mawson is probably the least celebrated character from a period that is dubbed the Age of Heroes. He was an Australian geologist, a man of outstanding endurance, a muscular Christian and his country’s first world-class explorer. He accompanied Shackleton on the 1907-9 Nimrod expedition, during which he not only reached the South Magnetic Pole but became the first man to climb Antarctica’s live volcano, Mount Erebus. He stood more than six feet tall in his socks, believed in God and the Empire, and had no doubts about himself whatsoever. Such was his ability that when Scott planned his trip to the South Pole, one of the people he most wanted on the team was Mawson. He offered him every inducement, including a place on the coveted final stretch to the Pole. Mawson declined. Not for him such glory-seeking antics. Instead he would simultaneously lead his own scientific expedition to an unexplored sector. The consequences were almost as miserable as if he’d accepted Scott’s offer.

more from Literary Review here.

First time tear gas, second time robo-polls: If Karl Marx were on hand today to record the progress of our long cultural civil war, one suspects this would be the law of history he would coin to describe its bewildering phases. The novelist Norman Mailer was physically present for the tear-gas part—which is to say, at the famous “police riot” during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. His classic account of the proceedings, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, has been reissued in a fortieth-anniversary edition this year, and in it we can find him sneering at the Republicans, whom he regarded as the party of “the Wasp”; cheering on the hipster left, the culture war’s original instigators; and booing the old-style machine Democrats, who would soon defect to the right. The certainty that we were heading into many decades of political idiocy grows larger and larger in Mailer’s consciousness until by the end he is in a funk of resignation and dread. “We will be fighting for forty years,” he writes on the book’s final page. As indeed we have been.

more from Bookforum here.

Paul Newman was blessed with abnormally good looks and abnormally good scripts, but also something more: that magical quiddity that makes you celebrate someone for his strokes of good fortune. On the evidence of dozens of performances, he possessed no inclination to self-celebration, and so inspired no inclination to resentment. My two favorite stars, after the untouchable Cary Grant, are Newman and Nicholson. But if it’s Jack’s world and we just live in it, Newman always seemed happy to live in ours. He was inclined to “ordinary happiness,” as a professor of mine once beautifully put it, or the prerogative of the celebrity to freely choose the parameters of normal human satisfaction. His channel to godliness paved by good looks, charisma, and infallible instinct in front of a camera, he nonetheless married long, loved well, and did good works. (If there is more to this story—aside from racing cars—then I don’t want to know.) Who could begrudge him that twinkle? It was always on our behalf, never his.

more from Slate here.

We rarely editorialize here, but I had to note that Sarah Palin’s performance in this interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, an interview chock full-o-surreal softballs, perhaps inspires even less confidence than her performance during the Couric interview.  Over at Townhall:

HH: Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?

SP: Oh, I think they’re just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying you know what? It’s time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that’s kind of taken some people off guard, and they’re out of sorts, and they’re ticked off about it, but it’s motivation for John McCain and I to work that much harder to make sure that our ticket is victorious, and we put government back on the side of the people of Joe six-pack like me, and we start doing those things that are expected of our government, and we get rid of corruption, and we commit to the reform that is not only desired, but is deserved by Americans.

HH: Now Governor, the Gibson and the Couric interview struck many as sort of pop quizzes designed to embarrass you as opposed to interviews. Do you share that opinion?

SP: Well, I have a degree in journalism also, so it surprises me that so much has changed since I received my education in journalistic ethics all those years ago. But I’m not going to pick a fight with those who buy ink by the barrelful. I’m going to take those shots and those pop quizzes and just say that’s okay, those are good testing grounds. And they can continue on in that mode. That’s good. That makes somebody work even harder. It makes somebody be even clearer and more articulate in their positions. So really I don’t fight it. I invite it.

HH: Have you followed the attacks on you, say, via Drudge or the blogs? Some of them are just made up and out of left field, others are just mocking. Do you follow those?

SP: No, I sure don’t, and thank God I don’t have time to follow those. You know, I think that those shots, too, though, no matter what we’re taking and receiving, it’s nothing compared to what real shots are against Americans in this world.

Via DeLong, listen to the discussion over at On Your Call:

[H]ow is the current crisis changing the way you understand the basic structure of our economy? On the next Your Call, we’ll have a conversation about economic crisis in the US and its long-term effect on capitalist economies. The current financial meltdown has sparked a debate on whether capitalism is the ideal methodology for wealth creation. What do you think? Is this the end of global capitalism, as we know it?

From The Telegraph:

Andrew Mellon, the American billionaire and Treasury Secretary, was not unduly disturbed by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system,” he explained to President Hoover a few weeks later. “High costs of living will come down. People will work harder, live a moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” Among those less competent people, it transpired, was Mellon. In February 1932, by which time the financial turmoil had evolved into the worst global depression of the century, he was relieved of his duties, and the new Roosevelt administration began an intensive investigation into his income tax returns. When he died in 1937 the investigation was still going on; so too, unfortunately, was the Depression.

At a time when commentators are divided between gloom at the meltdown of the markets and glee at the promise of a return to austerity, the story of Andrew Mellon seems disturbingly familiar. The Wall Street Crash has become the paradigmatic case of boom turning into bust, and few people have not heard the stories of ticker-machines running out of control, brokers hurling themselves from high windows, savings disappearing up in smoke, and the cocktail parties of the Roaring Twenties suddenly turning into the dole queues of the Hungry Thirties. Given the events of the past few weeks, Selwyn Parker’s sprightly new history could hardly be better timed.

If nothing else, Parker’s account of the Crash of 1929 bears out Mark Twain’s famous remark that if history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.

More here.

From Nature:

Only humans and a handful of other primates will attempt to make peace between warring third parties. But now there is a new diplomat on the block: the cleaner wrasse. Cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) feed on the parasites that attach themselves to the outsides of other fish, and even throw in a calming massage with their pectoral fins. In return for the services, client fish don’t attack their cleaners and return regularly to their territories to supply them with more food.

The cleaner-fish scenario is a textbook example of mutualism, in which each species benefits, but ecologist Karen Cheney at the University of Queensland, Australia, suspected that there was more to it. Cheney had seen little evidence of aggression between reef-fish clients at cleaning stations and few instances of predation. Fish also often stayed inside cleaner territories long after the cleaning was over, suggesting that the territories could be functioning as a safe haven.

More here.