Over at Edge, video presentations of Eric Weinstein; Nouriel Roubini; Nassim Taleb, a panel discussion of Eric Weinstein, Nouriel Roubini, Richard Freeman, and Nassim Taleb; Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander; a panel discussion of Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Bill Janeway, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose; and Doyne Farmer. (Scroll towards the bottom.) John Brockman's introduction:

In December, Edge published “Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?” by Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, and Lee Smolin. The paper was prompted by a suggestion by Eric Weinstein for an “Economic Manhattan Project”.

This led to the Perimeter Institute conference: “The Economic Crisis and its Implications for The Science of Economics”. According to the organizers, “Concerns over the current financial situation are giving rise to a need to evaluate the very mathematics that underpins economics as a predictive and descriptive science. A growing desire to examine economics through the lens of diverse scientific methodologies — including physics and complex systems — is making way to a meeting of leading economists and theorists of finance together with physicists, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists in an effort to evaluate current theories of markets and identify key issues that can motivate new directions for research.”

Richard Lewontin reviews some recent books on Darwin in the NYRB:

The Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution, the theory of natural selection, is based on three principles:

1) Individuals in a population differ from each other in the form of particular characteristics (the principle of variation).

2) Offspring resemble their parents more than they resemble unrelated individuals (the principle of heritability).

3) The resources necessary for life and reproduction are limited. Individuals with different characteristics differ in their ability to acquire those resources and thus to survive and leave offspring in the next generations (the principle of natural selection).

It seems amazing that two naturalists could independently arrive at the same articulated theory of evolution from a consideration of the characteristics of some species of organisms in nature, their geographic distribution, and their similarities to other species. This amazement becomes considerably tempered, however, when one considers the social consciousness and economic milieu in which the theory arose, a milieu marked by the rise of competitive industrial capitalism in which individuals rose in the social hierarchy based, presumably, on their greater entrepreneurial fitness.

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Paul Di Filippo’s short novel “Cosmocopia” (Payseur & Schmidt: 106 pp., $65) is an art book, in multiple senses of the phrase. There is an artist at its center: Frank Lazorg, whose career describes a trajectory from commercial to fine art, beginning in the 1950s with comics, focusing on “hyper-real yet fantastical book covers for paperback-original novels” during the next two decades (“a gallery of demons and brawny warriors, luscious-bottomed maidens and brawling barbarians, aliens and otherworldly explorers”) and concluding — or so it seems — with vivid depictions of “mental landscapes, surreal collages, visions of dimensions beyond.” A stroke has left him physically weak and creatively impotent. “Cosmocopia” is the story of his artistic redemption, a tried-and-true mode, which Di Filippo transforms into a fable at once ludicrous and heartfelt. “Cosmocopia” is also an art book because it costs 65 clams, comes handsomely bound as a horizontal artifact and shares space in a large box with a 513-piece jigsaw-puzzle of a Jim Woodring illustration inspired by the work (putting the pieces together is tough because everything’s gray). The set also includes a deliciously fiendish full-color scene (also by Woodring) of Lazorg at his demented peak, painting his model blood-red.

more from the LA Times here.

The public’s memory of what Nazi Germany was and did has been, in recent years, mangled and trivialized. Widely seen but misleading films and politicized accusations of countries perpetrating “holocausts” against various groups have debased people’s sense of the real nature of the Germans’ deeds during World War II. Which is why Richard J. Evans’s “Third Reich at War” couldn’t have come at a better time. The book may well be not only the finest but also the most riveting account of that period. If any work of accurate history has a chance to correct the distortions of public memory, this is it. The story of Germany between its invasion of Poland in 1939 and its collapse in 1945 is a complex one. Its details have been reported in thousands of publications. In this book — the last in a magisterial trilogy covering the entire history of the Third Reich — Evans, a professor of history at Cambridge, brilliantly weaves together the diverse strands of the monumental evil at the heart of that story. The result is a narrative tapestry we can now see whole.

more from The NYT here.

The Unwritten Sequence
E. V. Ramakrishnan

Reader, this is the story of a sequence
I very much wanted to write:

An unwed mother
gives birth to twins:
a precocious child
who grows up to be a leader of people
and a mentally retarded one given to wandering naked.
The mother grieves for
the gifted and cares for the dimwitted.
Her agony is great but the whole village stands by her.
The weaver, the farmer,
the healer, the barber, the mason
and the carpenter were to be portrayed in detail.
There is also a policeman
who goes in search of the absconding
leader and returns with his missing brother.
Finally, and this was to be the climax,
the leader is killed in what looks like
a fake encounter.
At the burial,
The dimwitted brother wears a shirt
for the first time in his life.

I could never complete the sequence.
Perhaps what I knew of the weaver,
the farmer, the healer, the barber,
the mason and the carpenter was not
adequate or what I knew of the police-
man exceeded the needs of the poem.
I could never decide whether I was with
the precocious and the gifted
or with the dimwitted and the lost.

from: Terms of Seeing: New and Selected Poems;
Konark Publishers, New Delhi, 2006

From Himal Southasian:

China has the world’s fastest-slowing economy. According to official statistics, gross domestic product skyrocketed a staggering 13.0 percent in 2007. In fact, in all likelihood that figure was even higher, with poor sampling procedures failing to properly take into account the output of small manufacturers, which at the time constituted the most productive part of the economy. Even without that extra bump, however, this put China in the top echelons in terms of economic growth.

Last year, however, the economy tumbled. GDP growth, Beijing tells us, was 10.6 percent in the first quarter, 10.1 percent in the second, 9.0 in the third, and 6.8 percent in the fourth. The decline continued this year, with growth reported as 6.1 percent in the first quarter, the lowest rate since China began issuing quarterly GDP statistics in 1992. The falloff is even more dramatic if we dig a bit beneath these numbers. China’s National Bureau of Statistics reports GDP by comparing a quarter with the corresponding one during the preceding year. If, instead, it compared a quarter to the preceding one – as most countries do – it would have reported essentially no growth during the fourth quarter and, possibly, a contraction. And we have to remember that small manufacturers are suffering more than other producers, so current statistics still do not reflect the real drop-off in output. When other distortions in the statistics – some the result of fakery – are taken into account, it becomes clear that no economy is currently falling faster than China’s.

More here.

From The New York Times:

If I were Donald Rumsfeld’s son, I’d give him “Horse Soldiers” for Father’s Day. During his tenure as George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Rumsfeld championed a mode of warfare that relied on limited numbers of soldiers armed with high-tech equipment and backed by precise, devastating air power. The Rumsfeld doctrine clashed with the Powell doctrine, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s theory that wars are best won with overwhelming ground forces, specific political goals and a clear exit strategy. Rumsfeld carried the day, and has left us in a hell of a fix in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Back in early 2002, though, Rumsfeld’s idea looked pretty good. In late 2001, small units of elite Special Forces soldiers, working with C.I.A. operatives and Air Force bombers, joined forces with Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance to defeat the country’s ruling Taliban. They didn’t need tanks and 100,000 troops. They rode into battle on horses. Doug Stanton tells the story of that brief shining moment in “Horse Soldiers,” a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work. This isn’t Afghanistan for those who enjoy (I use the word loosely) Iraq through the analytical lens of a book like “The Assassins’ Gate,” by George Packer. It’s for those who like their military history told through the eyes of heroic grunts, sergeants and captains. Think of Stephen E. Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers” or Stanton’s own best seller, “In Harm’s Way,” the story of the survivors of the cruiser Indianapolis, which sank in shark-infested waters during World War II.

More here.

Paterson
William Carlos Williams

Sunday in the Park
1. (a fragment)

Walking —

look down (from a ledge) into this grassy
den
(somewhat removed from the traffic)
above whose brows
a moon! Where she lies sweating at his side:

She stirs, distraught,
against him—wounded (drunk), moves
against him (a lump) desiring,
against him, bored .

flagrantly bored and sleeping, a
beer bottle still grasped spear-like
in his hand .

while the small, sleepless boys, who
have climbed the columnar rocks
overhanging the pair (where they lie
overt upon the grass, besieged—

careless in their narrow cell under
the crowd’s feet) stare down,
from history!
at them, puzzled and in the sexless
light (of childhood) bored equally,
go charging off .

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Friedrich Hayek described it as “one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by men”. The sociologist Georg Simmel noted that it “means more to us than any other object of possession because it obeys us without reservation”. Yet if some marketing gurus are to be believed, its pre-eminent position in the psychology of consumers is on the wane. The object in question is money. It is not just the lending of money that is in crisis. A variety of business models are emerging which look set to challenge the previously unquestioned role of monetary prices in the relationship between retailers and consumers. Where products are intangible or experiential in nature, it is these models that look set to survive the current bout of creative destruction sweeping the high street. The eyeballs of London commuters are now fought over by the distributors of free newspapers, London Lite and Thelondonpaper. Radiohead released their highly acclaimed album In Rainbows, on a pay-what-you-want basis via their website. Michael O’Leary of Ryanair has said that his goal is to offer all flights for free in the future. Google terrifies various publishing and software industries by making free what was previously sold, probing the limits of copyright. Examples such as these have led Chris Anderson, business guru and editor of Wired magazine, to declare that “$0.00 is the future of business”.

more from The Liberal here.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film. After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades—even if it’s now close to aesthetic kudzu. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984” is less a critical survey of a highly influential aesthetic than a feel-good class reunion. Rather than opt for scholarship and tough choices, curator Douglas Eklund cultivated a gang’s-all-here coziness. It’s a huge show, with hundreds of objects, books, posters, films, and videos, and works by 30 artists. Had a museum outside New York originated a show this baggy, it’s doubtful that the Met would have had anything to do with it. (Though it’s fantastic that the fuddy-duddy Met is finally thinking about recent art. It needs to do so, more often and better.) But if you do pick your way through this hodgepodge, you’ll find a spirited introduction to a lively moment. In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction.

more from New York Magazine here.

“The difference between poets and novelists is this,” writes the poet Randolph Henry Ash to the poet Christabel LaMotte in A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, “that the former write for the life of the language—and the latter write for the betterment of the world.” In Byatt’s novel this has the glint of irony: a fictional poet contemplating his independence from the medium in which, unbeknown to himself, he exists. But it also contains the germ of a modern stereotype. The idea that poets and novelists possess separate and incompatible temperaments, like fortune-tellers and pharmacists, that poets are preoccupied with language (“for the life of the language”) while novelists are engrossed by society (“for the betterment of the world”), is a commonplace—perhaps also a consequence—of the paced battlements of the contemporary literary world. In this account, poets and novelists are not merely working at different kinds of writing. Their minds also work differently. Poets are introspective, miniature, and self-fascinating (“I am the personal,” Wallace Stevens declares in “Bantams in Pine-Woods”). Novelists are expansive, systematic, prone to looking through other people’s mail. Novelists are hardy gossips, bred to realism. Poets are post-Romantic waifs of imagination. Poets’ thoughts move cyclically, in rich depths of metaphor, while novelists’ thoughts accumulate in a straight line.

more from Poetry here.

From MSNBC:

They're making antimatter at the Large Hadron Collider?! That little jolt of reality is what sets the plot in motion for “Angels & Demons,” Hollywood's follow-up to “The Da Vinci Code.” The good news is that you don't have to worry about an antimatter bomb blowing up the world. Physicist Michio Kaku says so. The better news is that the antimatter being made at Europe's CERN physics lab is used for good, not for evil. The physicists who do real-life research with antimatter and other exotic substances see “Angels & Demons” not as a threat but as an opportunity. CERN is just one of the scientific institutions to capitalize on the “science behind the story.”

The US/LHC research group has organized an entire lecture series around the movie, including virtual lectures you can watch on the Web. And at 1 p.m. ET next Tuesday, the National Science Foundation will present a Webcast featuring CERN's director-general, Fermilab's Boris Kayser and Nobel-winning physicist Leon Lederman – who literally wrote the book on “The God Particle.” CERN has been through this before, back in 2000 when “Da Vinci” author Dan Brown's book version of “Angels & Demons” came out. “The hits on our public Web site went up by more than a factor of 10, and I guess this will happen again now that the movie is coming out,” said Rolf Landua, who led the research team for the ATHENA antimatter-making experiment at CERN.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

When Zhao Ziyang, the former Chinese premier who in 1989 had opposed using military force against student protesters, died four years ago, China's top leaders formed an “Emergency Response Leadership Small Group,” declared “a period of extreme sensitivity,” put the People's Armed Police on special alert and ordered the Ministry of Railways to screen travelers heading for Beijing. If this is how the men who rule China reacted to Zhao's death at home, how then will they respond to the posthumously published “Prisoner of the State,” a book in which Zhao repeatedly attacks the stonewalling and subterfuge (and sycophancy, mendacity, buck-passing and back-stabbing) of people whose allies and heirs remain in power today?

Whatever the fallout, one element will likely stay constant: This same group of men — mostly from a set of quarreling families bound together by common interests and long used to surviving turmoil and 180-degree policy shifts — will remain in power. Like a seal on a rolling ball, they are good at staying on top.

More here.

This Saturday, if you're interested:

It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Chris Marker is a devoted inhabitant of the virtual world Second Life. After all, one could call the playful French filmmaker and multimedia artist’s kitty—and alter ego—Guillaume-en-Egypt a trailblazing avatar (when asked for pictures of himself, he offers images of the cat instead). Now Marker, who rarely interacts with the public, will give a live guided tour of his Second Life archipelago, Ouvroir, and museum, in a special event at the Harvard Film Archive this Saturday, May 16. Of course, Marker will appear only in the form of his Second Life avatar, who will meet and converse with moderating avatars Haden Guest, the director of the archives, and Naomi Yang, of Exact Change Press (publishers of Marker’s important CD-ROM Immemory). At the end of the tour, he will also take questions from an audience avatar. The interaction will be screened live at the archive’s theater, and the event also includes projections of other Marker video and film pieces.

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Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

With the new Star Trek out, it’s long past time (as it were) that we laid out the rules for would-be fictional time-travelers. (Spoiler: Spock travels to the past and is Kirk’s grandfather.) Not that we expect these rules to be obeyed; the dramatic demands of a work of fiction will always trump the desire to get things scientifically accurate, and Star Trek all by itself has foisted half a dozen mutually-inconsistent theories of time travel on us. But time travel isn’t magic; it may or may not be allowed by the laws of physics — we don’t know them well enough to be sure — but we do know enough to say that if time travel were possible, certain rules would have to be obeyed. And sometimes it’s more interesting to play by the rules. So if you wanted to create a fictional world involving travel through time, here are 10+1 rules by which you should try to play.

0. There are no paradoxes. This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

Barry Schwabsky in The Nation:

“On Saturday, September 30, 1967,” as artist Robert Smithson was careful to specify, he embarked on a trip from New York's Port Authority Bus Terminal to his hometown. He was about to undertake what in his now-famous text he would call “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” (It's not clear whether the piece should be called an essay or a story; perhaps it's best to call it an artwork made of writing and pictures.) The monuments in question were things like concrete abutments for a highway under construction and a pumping derrick connected to a long pipe. As he stepped off the bus at his first monument, a bridge connecting Bergen and Passaic counties across the Passaic River, Smithson noticed that “Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an overexposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a series of detached 'stills' through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge, it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank.”

Writing in a tone derived in part from the deceptive objectivity of the French nouveau roman (he quotes from Mobile, Michel Butor's collage-travelogue of the United States) and in part from British new-wave science fiction (he entertains himself on the bus ride with the New York Times and Brian Aldiss's dystopian sci-fi novel Earthworks), Smithson evokes a vacant reality made only of “memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” Critics fascinated with Smithson's apparently post-Duchampian idea that banal objects become art simply by being looked at a certain way–that “a great artist can make art by simply casting a glance,” as he would write a year later–have often overlooked the way Smithson framed his saturnine view of postindustrial culture through the eye of the camera.

The new nuke porn is hard-core, more graphic and full-frontal than the Cold War version of the genre. Instead of the anticipatory excitement (Fail-Safe, Strangelove) or the post-coital tristesse (On the Beach) of First Era nuke porn, we get real-time blast-burns and melting flesh. There was always an erotic component to apocalyptic literature—those end-of-the-world sects were notorious for their doom-fueled orgiastic behavior—but I always wondered why most nuke porn was about looking forward to the approaching act or looking back on its consummation but rarely about looking directly at it. Yes, Strangelove ended with a suite of stock footage of mushroom clouds exploding (to the strains of “We’ll Meet Again”), but while we saw the explosions there, we never confronted face to face—in the way film and fiction can—the actual experience of being inside a nuclear blast. (The most notable exception being, of course, the few seconds of—did it happen or was it averted?—nuking footage in Terminator 2. Remember the playground scene where the nuke turns the frolicking moms and kids into scary X-rays?* It’s a key transition between the old nuke porn and the new.) But now the genre has entered a new era—an era of looking “directly at it”—a fact that didn’t really register with me until I read Whitley Strieber’s airport novel, Critical Mass, in which we get the nuke porn equivalent of the “money shot.” You know Strieber, right? Mr. Airport Extreme. He’s the auteur of what some might see as another strange form of porn, those alien-abduction fantasies that feature anal probes. He was among the first to bring UFO abductions complete with probes into the airport “bookstore.”

more from Slate here.

Here
Octavio Paz

My steps along the street
resound
in another street
in which
I hear my steps
passing along this street
in which

Only the mist is real

from: Octavio Paz – The Collected Poems 1957-1987
carcanet Press Ltd. Manchester, Great Britain, 1988

Aqui
Octavio Paz

Mis pasos en esta calle
Resuenan
en otra calle
donde
oigo mis pasos
pasar en esta calle
donde

Sólo es real la niebla

She was the only daughter of a Swiss banker, and one of the richest and cleverest young women of her generation in Europe. She wrote among much else one celebrated novel— Corinne, or Italy (1807)—which invented a new heroine for her times, outsold even the works of Walter Scott, and has never been out of print since. She personally saved at least a dozen people from the French revolutionary guillotine. She reinvented Parisian millinery with her astonishing multicolored turbans. She dramatically dismissed Jane Austen as ” vulgaire.” She snubbed Napoleon at a reception. She inspired Byron’s famous chauvinist couplet, “Man’s love is of his life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence.” And she once completely outtalked the poet Coleridge at a soirée in Mayfair. For these things alone she should be remembered. Though married to the handsome Swedish ambassador (or possibly because she was so married), she took numerous lovers, and had four children, the most brilliant of whom—a girl, Albertine—was certainly illegitimate. She had a running and highly personal vendetta with Bonaparte, who hated bluestockings and once leaned over and remarked leeringly on her plunging cleavage: “No doubt, Madame, you breast-fed your children.” He followed this up by censoring her books for being anti-French, actually pulping one of them in mid-printing (On Germany), and exiling her from France on at least three separate occasions between 1803 and 1812.

more from the NYRB here.

The murder of Julius Caesar was a messy business. As with all assassinations, it was easier for the conspirators to plan the first blow than to predict what would happen next – never mind to have an exit strategy in reserve, should things go wrong. At a meeting of the Senate on the Ides of March in 44 BC, Tillius Cimber, a backbencher, gave the cue for the attack by kneeling at Caesar’s feet and grabbing his toga. Then Casca struck with his dagger; or tried to. Clumsily missing the target, he gave Caesar the chance to stand up and defend himself by driving his pen (the only instrument he had to hand) into Casca’s arm. This lasted just a few seconds, for at least twenty reinforcements were standing by, weapons at the ready, and quickly managed to dispatch their victim. But they had no time to take careful aim, and several of the assassins found themselves wounded by the ancient equivalent of friendly fire. According to the earliest surviving account, by the Syrian historian Nicolaus of Damascus, Cassius lunged at Caesar, but ended up gashing Brutus in the hand; Minucius missed too, and struck his ally Rubrius in the thigh instead. “There must have been a lot of blood”, as T. P. Wiseman crisply remarks in Remembering the Roman People.

more from the TLS here.