From The Telegraph:

The top 100 authors dominate sales. As The Bookseller has explained, some 100,000 titles are published every year, but these authors account for £1 in every £6 spent on books and a fifth of revenue. J K Rowling, who has seven of the decade’s top 10 bestsellers, sold 29 million books with a sales value of £215 million, but Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was the bestselling book of the decade, selling 5.2 million copies to 4.4 million for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Nielsen has also charted the top 100 books of the decade. After Rowling and Brown, Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, two million copies) was the most successful author, followed by Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 1.75 million), Robert Atkins, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the highest book selected by Richard and Judy. Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves was in the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers and Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat outsold Jamie Oliver’s highest seller.

Author Volume sold Value

1 J K Rowling 29,084,999 £225.9m

2 Roger Hargreaves 14,163,141 £26.6m

3 Dan Brown 13,372,007 £74.1m

4 Jacqueline Wilson 12,673,148 £69.9m

5 Terry Pratchett 10,455,397 £77.2m

6 John Grisham 9,862,998 £65.9m

7 Richard Parsons 9,561,776 £49.2m

8 Danielle Steel 9,119,149 £51m

9 James Patterson 8,172,647 £53.8m

10 Enid Blyton 7,910,758 £31.2m

More here.

From MSNBC:

Cloud science? Solar-power primacy? Affordable clean-energy cars? Space colonies? Super-centenarians galore? These are some of the visions put forward for the next 50 years in science and technology. The past 50 years have set a precedent of sorts for the next half-century: Back in 1960, folks may have assumed their children would be riding rockets to other planets, finding signs of alien life and interacting with intelligent machines – all of which are featured in Arthur C. Clarke's “2010: Odyssey Two” as well as the film based on the book.

The issues that scientists and engineers faced from then up to now have turned out to be more complex than they seemed in 1960. Getting to the moon wasn't a sustainable proposition, and right now it's not clear when anyone will ride a U.S.-made rocket out of Earth orbit again. The evidence for life or even livability beyond Earth is still not in hand, although there have been tantalizing hints from Mars. And for better or worse, machines have not yet reached anything close to HAL 9000's level of intelligence. That doesn't mean scientists have been standing still: In some ways, we've come farther in the past half-century than we did in any previous century – as evidenced by this 50-year timeline of discovery. Among the leading fields have been medicine and genetics, information technology and cosmology.

In the next 50 years, we may well fall short of the breakthroughs we expect – but unexpected discoveries will pop up to keep life interesting. Here are a few of your predictions for the next decade and the next half-century:

Jeff Simmons, San Diego: Augmented reality (textual/graphical information superimposed over reality) will become an integral part of our lives. Once interfaces such as glasses, windshields and other mobile surfaces become display technologies connected wirelessly to mobile devices (think smartphones on steroids) we will come to depend on this flow of just-in-time information: Want to work on your car's engine? View a schematic that gives you the part's location and the steps to carry out. Looking at a product? See comparative pricing and reviews. Looking at a piece of art? Learn more about the artwork and the artist. Looking at a person you've met before? See their name, where you last met, birthdate, etc. … and the list goes on.

More here.

Men and Death

Men charge around on earth, in air,
smashing Death to smithereens,
and yet pretending It's not there,
sun-struck, forever in their teens.

Women, to propagate the race,
love foolish men (and so they must),
have mud more often in their face,
go down more easily to dust.

by Luann Landon

publisher: Mezzo Cammin, Val 4, Issue 1

Francine Prose in Lapham's Quarterly:

Long before Muhammad, St. Ambrose forbade women to teach in church and John Chrysostom suggested that women be veiled in public. One early Christian philosopher after another (quite a few of them saints, such as St. Jerome) emphasized the fact that woman’s only purpose on earth, indeed her only route to salvation, was to provide her husband with children. For anything else that was necessary, for work or companionship, advice or entertainment, he would sensibly and naturally choose another man. In St. Augustine’s essay “On Marriage and Concupiscence,” the author of Confessions sounds remarkably like the Southern Baptist Convention. “Nor can it be doubted that it is more consonant with the order of nature that men should bear rule over women, than women over men. It is with this principle in view that the apostle says, ‘The head of the woman is the man,’ and ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands.’”

More here.

Fractals made of circles do funny things to mathematicians.

Dana Mackenzie in American Scientist:

The program drew an endless assortment of fractals of varying shapes and ingenuity. Every couple minutes the screen would go blank and refresh itself with a completely different fractal. I have to confess that I spent a few idle minutes watching the fractals instead of writing.

One day, a new design popped up on the screen (see the figure above). It was different from all the other fractals. It was made up of simple shapes—circles, in fact—and unlike all the other screen-savers, it had numbers! My attention was immediately drawn to the sequence of numbers running along the bottom edge: 1, 4, 9, 16 … They were the perfect squares! The sequence was 1-squared, 2-squared, 3-squared, and so on.

Before I became a full-time writer, I used to be a mathematician. Seeing those numbers awakened the math geek in me. What did they mean? And what did they have to do with the fractal on the screen? Quickly, before the screen-saver image vanished into the ether, I sketched it on my notepad, making a resolution to find out someday.

As it turned out, the picture on the screen was a special case of a more general construction.

More here.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

Arthur Koestler was arrested by Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces in the city of Málaga on February 9, 1937. Koestler had come to Spain, in the midst of the Civil War, as a correspondent for a British paper called the News Chronicle, and although Málaga had been abandoned by Republican troops and most of its inhabitants several days earlier, and although the reporters Koestler was travelling with had fled, he had stayed behind. Why is not clear. Michael Scammell, in his compendious new biography, “Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic” (Random House; $35), suggests a number of possibilities: Koestler felt loyal to the acting British consul, Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who had a house in the city and with whom he had become friendly; he was disgusted by the cowardice of the deserters and wanted to show bravery himself; he couldn’t face the thought of leaving his typewriter behind; and he hoped to get a really big scoop. These motives—loyalty, courage, obsessiveness, and ambition—are all plausible, because they are all characteristic of the man.

He paid a price. The officer who arrested him, Captain Luis Bolin, had sworn, based on things that Koestler had already published about the Franco insurgency, “to shoot K. like a mad dog” if he ever got hold of him. Koestler was taken first to the Málaga jailhouse, which was crammed with prisoners picked up in the city and the surrounding villages during the Fascist advance. From his cell he could hear men being escorted outside to be shot, sometimes fifty at a time. In the week following the fall of the city, six hundred prisoners were executed. After a few days, he was transferred to Seville, to a prison that had been built by the Republican government and was now in the hands of the Nationalists.

More here.

Andrew Sullivan in his blog, The Daily Dish:

The Daily Dish nominates not Ben Bernanke but Neda Agha-Soltan. Neda was just one young woman, eager to protest the coup that rigged and then stole the June elections in Iran. She was shot in the street by the coup regime, as shown in the grueling video….that electrified the Iranian people. Wiki tells us that

Nedā (ندا) is a word used in Persian to mean “voice”, “calling,” or “divine message,” and she has been referred to as the “voice of Iran.”

The most remarkable event of this past year, it seems to us, was the uprising for freedom, sanity and peace in Iran. We witnessed it thousands of miles away but the miracle of technology meant we also lived it alongside those far braver than we will hopefully ever have to be. Neda remains the symbol of that uprising and her awful secular martyrdom will never leave the psyche of the Iranian people.

We saw them this year as we hadn't before: like us, eager for change, confident in their own capacities, able to see through the lies and the certainties and the violence that marks the vicious regime they live under. We saw this movement as a spontaneous revolt against transparent injustice, but also as a response in a way to the American people, who also rose up in 2008 to demand new leadership, less confrontation, and less fundamentalism in government.

Next year will be a crucial one.

As the Ashura holiday approaches and as the death of Montazeri has infused Iranians with yet more courage to face down the neo-fascist goons who police this comically inept regime, the Green Movement faces yet another test.

More here.

From Vice Magazine:

Before The Wire, David Simon was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. During his time there, he wrote two meticulously researched and richly human books about his city. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) was the result of a year spent with the murder police of a town where murder seems to be a major mode of employment. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997, with writing partner Ed Burns) was the result of a year spent among the families, addicts, and dealers of one of Baltimore’s more infamous drug corners. Homicide resulted in the long-running cop show Homicide: Life on the Street, which was cool and everything, better than most cop shows, but also kind of just a cop show. The Corner resulted in an HBO miniseries that was pretty much a direct antecedent to what The Wire would end up tackling.

After The Wire, Simon and Ed Burns, who is a former Baltimore cop and schoolteacher, adapted Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill into an HBO miniseries. It stands as the most effective document yet produced on the daily reality of the life of marines in the current Iraq war.

And now, today, as I type this, Simon is filming his new HBO series down in New Orleans. It’s called Tremé, and it is said to take as its center the lives of local musicians. But I have a feeling that would be like saying that The Wire took as its center the Baltimore drug trade. Sure, it started there. But given Simon’s obsessions with the American city and the decreasing institutional value of life in this great country of ours, we’re pretty much guaranteed that Tremé will have the same reach and impact as The Wire. In other words, I wish I could be cryogenically frozen until the day this show debuts, because I can’t fucking wait.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

That time is now.

To err on the side of caution, I am stuffing the rest of this post below the fold. My tale is rich with deep scientific significance, resplendent with surprising insights into how evolution works, far beyond the banalities of “survival of the fittest,” off in a realm of life where sexual selection and sexual conflict work like a pair sculptors drunk on absinthe, transforming biology into forms unimaginable. But this story is also accompanied with video. High-definition, slow-motion duck sex video. And I would imagine that the sight of spiral-shaped penises inflating in less than a third of second might be considered in some quarters to be not exactly safe for work. It’s certainly not appropriate for ducklings.

So, if you’re ready, join me below the fold.

More here.

Losing Track

Long after you have swung back

away from me

I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore

on the tide

and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:

am I a pier

half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion

I lose track,

the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before

I know I'm

alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black

timbers of me,

a light growth of green dreams drying.

by Denise Levertov

From Harvard Magazine:

What if the stem cells in our bodies live on, even as we age? What if they are just asleep, quiescent, like forgotten sentinels nodding off at remote outposts, waiting for orders? If only scientists could discover how to send them messages, could they be reawakened? “When you’re little and fall off your bike,” says Cabot professor of the natural sciences Douglas Melton, “you barely remember it the next day and a week later you don’t remember it at all. I ride my bike all the time, and if I fall off now, I remember it for weeks.” Bruises last longer when you get older. But is the slowness of repair due to some deficiency that arises with age, that stops normal processes from working well? Or is it due to the absence of some youthful factor?

Amy Wagers, an associate professor of stem-cell and regenerative biology, has begun to answer this most provocative of questions—could we marshal the body’s own repair mechanisms to slow the process of aging?—with a simple experiment. Using mice that have been surgically joined so that their bloodstreams become shared, Wagers investigated whether the blood of a young animal might awaken the muscle stem cells in an old one and enhance muscle repair.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

More here.

Tony Karon in The National:

The key character in the US president Barack Obama’s Afghanistan fairy tale is Pakistan – the erstwhile protector and enabler of the evil Taliban, but only out of ignorance, despair and an exaggerated fear of India. If only, goes the story, Pakistan could see that the Taliban is plotting to destroy it and recognise that its true interests lie with the noble purposes of the United States, it would ignore India, turn on the Taliban and flush out the insurgents to be crushed by US firepower. And so, a steady stream of US officials has traipsed through Islamabad this year, bearing carrots and brandishing sticks, trying to get Pakistan to see the light.

But the Pakistan of Washington’s imagination is a little like the Iraq of Bush Administration’s pre-war imagination – the one that was going to greet its invaders with sweets and flowers. But the US is choosing to ignore the writing on the wall. Just last week, back to back visits by two of the most senior commanders in the US military, General David Petraeus and Admiral Mike Mullen, failed to convince their Pakistani counterparts to go after the Pakistan-based Afghan Taliban and the allied Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks. Instead, Pakistan’s own counterinsurgency effort will be confined to the Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the local extremist group challenging the Pakistani state.

The explanation given to the Americans by Pakistan’s generals is usually that Pakistan doesn’t have the resources to tackle all the militant groups on its soil at once. They ask the Americans, their key benefactor, to be patient, suggesting that once the TTP has been dealt with, they will be in a position to tackle other problems. That, of course, is a polite rebuff in the spirit of “maybe some other time”.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. James Wood and Zadie Smith were doing battle in the sky. James was in silver armor and upon it the starlight did twinkle so. Zadie was in flowing white gowns. Her face was aglow with what I can only describe as a honey radiance. Still, I could see her freckles, which, I recall, pleased me to no end even as the terrible battle raged on and on. Twice, James smote her a heavy blow. Twice, Zadie raised herself up and hurled herself back upon him with swirling gowns and not an infrequent flash of thigh. Then the heavens went dark again and these two titans were seen to retire, he to one side of the galaxy and she to another. I thought I saw them both smile as the dream dissolved and the reality of a new day roused me from this nocturnal emanation.

James was mean to Zadie once in the real world. Without rehashing the whole thing, he accused her of laziness and self-absorption, of silly tricks and meager powers of concentration. He described what she — along with a few other young writers — was doing as Hysterical Realism. That now-famous piece in The Guardian included these devastating sentences:

This kind of realism is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs. Recent novels by Rushdie, Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith and others have featured a great rock musician who played air guitar in his crib (Rushdie); a talking dog, a mechanical duck and a giant octagonal cheese (Pynchon); a nun obsessed with germs who may be a reincarnation of J Edgar Hoover (DeLillo); a terrorist group devoted to the liberation of Quebec who move around in wheelchairs (Foster Wallace); and a terrorist Islamic group based in North London with the silly acronym Kevin (Smith).

This was in the early autumn of 2001, the heady days just after the 9/11 attacks when everyone felt that the world had changed somehow and that the frivolity of the recent past just wouldn't do. Zadie took the criticism standing up.

More here.

Joe Kloc in Seed Magazine:

The Hopi people of the southwestern US have a story: During a long drought when corn wouldn’t grow, the tribe began running out of food. Two children made a toy hummingbird that, as they tossed it into the air, came to life. It flew to the center of the Earth and begged the god of fertility for help. And he made it rain.

For as long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about weather, trying, in the absence of scientific certainty, to understand its influence on our lives. In the small body of research there has been on the topic, we’ve found that wind and heat can make us cranky, violent, sick, and suicidal. We honk more horns, have more headaches, kill more people and, according to a recent study, even fight more wars.

“Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa,” reads the title of a paper published in PNAS in November that looked at the relationship between temperature and armed conflict in the sub-Sahara. Researchers found that violence was more likely to erupt in years with hotter weather. “If the temperature goes up by just one degree, crop yields can decline by 20 percent or more,” explains Marshall Burke, one of the study’s authors. “Since 75 percent of poor Africans are engaged in agriculture for their livelihoods, these small changes can have big influence on their incentives to join rebellions.” It’s a frighteningly simple logic that suggests a frighteningly simpler one: The hotter Africa gets, the more violent a place it will become.

More here.

Gilbert Garcin. Le moulin de l’oubli – Mill of oblivion. 1999.

“Gilbert Garcin spent most of his life managing a lamp factory in France. At 65, he retired and took up a trick photography workshop. For the past ten years he has been creating comical, surrealistic photographs which warmly highlight sometimes cold, existential questions. Garcin inhabits this strange world and ponders it together with the viewer; with Garcin you have a dedicated, but perplexed, guide.”

In February, (2009) Gilbert's work was celebrated at the Festival at Rennes.

More here, here, and here.

By Evert Cilliers

Here's the story as I see it.

In 2008, after eight years of Bush/Cheney, the horrors and wrongs of this worst-of-all presidencies were plain to see — like Dresden after the fire-bombing, or a maroela tree after an elephant chomped it. The country had been wrecked by the dotty ideology-driven actions of extremist nutters: the false prophets of anti-science, anti-common-sense, anti-democracy, free-market-gone-crazy, conservatism-gone-fundamentalist, male-belligerence-gone-psycho.

Economically we were down the toilet and halfway to the sewer. Internationally we were pariahs. Psychologically we ping-ponged between genuine anxiety and false bravado. Worst of all: morally, we were hollowed out. Wars. Torture. Human rights abuses. Tora Bora. FEMA. Washington corruption. Wall Street fraud. Foreclosures. Unemployment. Deficits. Off-budget accounting. 30% interest charges on credit cards. Debt. Debt. Debt. Had we been ruled by the Kremlin, we couldn't have done worse. It was as if America had become a nation of 300 million suffering Jobs, struck down by the vengeful hand of an old-testament God.

It was the worst of times, and the best of times only for the nicely rich, dah-links.

But this most horrible of horrorshows opened up a great opportunity. The longing for change ached in every sensible American heart. The time for a progressive moment in our history had arrived.

Enter Barack Obama. Fueled by a compelling story, inspiring oratory, obvious decency, a challenging intellect and seemingly progressive liberal beliefs, he stepped into the moment with dazzling ability. He benefited from the progressive moment and took full advantage of it. After all, he was one of a very few voices who had spoken up against the Iraq War when it was political suicide to do so. He was the dewy rose in the scratchy patch of weeds.

Read more »