Jennifer Oullette in Discovery News:

Cosmology suffered a great loss yesterday with the passing of Andrew Lange, co-leader of the BOOMERang experiment, which provided the first experimental evidence that our universe is flat, and offered strong support to the supernova evidence for dark energy. Lang was a professor of physics at Caltech, and that tight-knit community is reeling from the news that Lange apparently took his own life. I only met Lange once, but my husband Sean, a Caltech colleague, knew him well and offers his own eulogy (of sorts) over at Cosmic Variance:

It’s hard to convey how unexpected and tragic this news is. Very few people combined Andrew’s brilliance as a scientist with his warmth as a person. He always had a sparkle in his eye, was enthusiastically in love with science and ideas, and was constantly doing his best to make Caltech the best possible place, not just for himself but for everyone else around him. He was one of the good guys. The last I spoke with him, Andrew was energetically raising funds for a new submillimeter telescope, organizing conferences, and helping plan for a new theoretical physics center. We are all walking around in shock, wondering how this could happen and whether we could have done anything to prevent it.

The only way I can think to honor Lange is to tell you a bit more about his most famous work. BOOMERang stands for Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics, and it's essentially a balloon-borne telescope designed to make measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation — the “afterglow” of the Big Bang that still pervades our universe. The first flight, in 1997, concentrated on North America, while two subsequent flights in 1998 and 2003 circled the South Pole.

More here.

Catherine Bennett in The Guardian:

There is still time to sign up for one of the most rational dates of 2010: next week's mass homeopathy overdose. At 10.23am on Saturday 30 January, anti-homeopathy activists, organised by the Merseyside Skeptics Society, will down entire bottles of homeopathic remedies outside branches of Boots, the better to demonstrate that these preparations are worthless.

Even though sales of Hahnemann's potions are likely to be unaffected, there remains a chance that the survival of hundreds of sceptics might persuade officials at Nice, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, to re-examine the funding of homeopathy within the NHS. It remains one of the world's great mysteries that the health service, with its austere, cash-strapped commitment to evidence-based medicine, should continue to spend an estimated £4m a year on sugar pills. Just a few months ago, it refused to prescribe an effective liver cancer drug, because it would not be “cost-effective”.

More here. [Thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein.]

A 24th-century digital archaeologist peers back through the murk of time to the early 21st, seeking, amid the welter of sounds, images, objects, the perfectly emblematic object or personification of that remote and fevered time. Such a symbol, she assumes, must be an image or an artefact, for no one except antiquarians could imagine that ancient screeds of print could have anything to say about the epoch now known as DigiOne. She pauses for a moment in her memory archive, arrested by names with a cultic ring to them, presumably typical of archaic cyber-time: Gaga, Kaka, Banksy, Bono? But then up through the ether shimmies a dazzling apparition, tagged to 2007, a diamond-encrusted skull, fashioned by one D Hirst, entitled “For the Love of God” and, apparently, exhibited in a White Cube. Noticing that shortly after it was given to the world, the financial citadels of capitalism crumbled in panic, she writes a memo to self: “Poss blogothesis? ‘Diamond, Cube, Sphere: Solid Forms in the Age of Meltdown?’” For it can’t be fortuitous that the skull, with its mega-carat cranial studs, was produced at the tipping point of what historians came to call the Great Derivative Delirium?

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

When, one evening in 1976, Philip K. Dick invited Tim Powers to his Fullerton apartment, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he often passed with the science-fiction titan: a wide-ranging conversation, fueled by wine and beer, about religion, philosophy and Beethoven. The night began the usual way. But it took a strange turn as Dick’s wife, Tessa, and her brother began grabbing lamps and chairs. “She and her brother were carrying things out of the house,” recalls Powers. “I said, ‘Phil, they’re taking stuff, is this OK?’ ” ” ‘Powers, let me give you some advice, in case you should ever find yourself in this position,’ Dick said. ‘Never oversee or criticize what they take. It’s not worth it. Just see what you’ve got left afterward, and go with that.’ “And then,” Powers recalls, “her brother said, ‘Could you guys lift your glasses? We want the table.’ ”

more from Scott Timberg at the LAT here.

Europe’s geopolitical map, just 20 years after the breach of the Berlin Wall, looks like a foregone conclusion today — the natural upshot of Communism’s demise and the spread of liberal democracy. The Central Europeans are snugly in the European Union; NATO presides over a largely peaceful continent; and though spats between the West and an authoritarian Russia occasionally flare, this is surely understandable given all the givens. But this order of things was hardly inevitable, as Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, reminds us in “1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe.” Between the wall’s opening (November 1989) and Germany’s unification (October 1990), history lurched forward with no fixed destination. Sarotte describes a host of competing conceptions of post-cold-war Europe that flourished, mutated and perished in the maelstrom of events that led up to German unity. In the end, the visions of President George H. W. Bush and Chancellor Helmut Kohl prevailed — which may not necessarily have been the best of all possible outcomes, though Sarotte stops short of this conclusion.

more from Paul Hockenos at the NYT here.

Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker:

In August of 1929, Sigmund Freud scoffed at the notion that he would do anything as crass as write an autobiography. “That is of course quite an impossible suggestion,” he wrote to his nephew, who had conveyed an American publisher’s suggestion that the great man write his life story. “Outwardly,” Freud went on, perhaps a trifle disingenuously, “my life has passed calmly and uneventfully and can be covered by a few dates.” Inwardly—and who knew better?—things were a bit more complicated:

A psychologically complete and honest confession of life, on the other hand, would require so much indiscretion (on my part as well as on that of others) about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that it is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.

Freud ended by suggesting that the five-thousand-dollar advance that had been offered was a hundredth of the sum necessary to tempt him into such a foolhardy venture. Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention. Even when the most distinguished writers and thinkers have turned to autobiography, they have found themselves accused of literary exhibitionism—when they can bring themselves to put on a show at all. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions” appeared, shocking the salons of eighteenth-century Paris with matter-of-fact descriptions of the author’s masturbation and masochism, Edmund Burke lamented the “new sort of glory” the eminent philosophe was getting “from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices, which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents.” (The complaint sounds eerily familiar today.) When, at the suggestion of her sister, Virginia Woolf started, somewhat reluctantly, to compose an autobiographical “sketch,” she found herself, inexplicably at first, thinking of a certain hallway mirror—the scene, as further probing of her memory revealed, of an incestuous assault by her half-brother Gerald, an event that her memory had repressed, and about which, in the end, she was unable to write for publication.

From The New York Times:

The Egyptian Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb believed the West — in particular the United States — posed an existential threat to Islam. He feared that globalization, spearheaded by the American colossus, might eventually destroy Islam by tempting pious Muslims with freewheeling capitalism, the separation of religion from government and the unleashing of decadent “animalistic desires.” Qutb, in word and in deed, took up the sword against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular government. Nasser hanged him in 1966, but Qutb’s ideas transformed the world by inspiring Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda theology. Vali Nasr, in his outstanding new book “Forces of Fortune,” shows that Qutb was at least half wrong. Globalization, free trade and market economics aren’t a threat to Islam per se. What they are a threat to is the totalitarian vision of Islam that Qutb’s followers hope to impose.

Nasr, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, writes that the Middle East will liberalize when it is transformed by a middle-class commercial revolution. “The great battle for the soul of Iran — and for the soul of the region as a whole — will be fought not over religion, but over business and capitalism,” he says. What he calls the “Dubai effect” is only just beginning to be felt around the region. The cutting-edge skyscrapering emirate is hardly a normal society; neither is it a democracy or (as we now know) a country free of its own economic problems. But middle-class people from all over the Muslim world continue to travel there; they admire its business-friendly regulatory environment and its respect for personal liberty. They often go home and wonder why their own countries are so poorly governed.

More here.

Abigail Ticker in Smithsonian Magazine:

Venus flytraps’ considerable eccentricities have confined them to a 100-mile-long sliver of habitat: the wet pine savannas of northern South Carolina and southern North Carolina. They grow only on the edges of Carolina bays and in a few other coastal wetland ecosystems where sandy, nutrient-poor soil abruptly changes from wet to dry and there’s plenty of sunlight. Fewer than 150,000 plants live in the wild in roughly 100 known sites, according to the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

Instead of absorbing nitrogen and other nutrients through their roots, as most plants do, the 630 or so species of carnivorous plants consume insects and, in the case of certain Southeast Asian pitcher plants of toilet-bowl-like proportions, bigger animals such as frogs, lizards and “the very, very occasional rodent,” says Barry Rice, a carnivorous plant researcher affiliated with the University of California at Davis. The carnivores are particularly abundant in Malaysia and Australia, but they’ve also colonized every state in this country: the Pine Barrens of coastal New Jersey are a hot spot, along with several pockets in the Southeast. Most varieties catch their prey with primitive devices like pitfalls and sticky surfaces. Only two—the Venus flytrap and the European waterwheel, Aldrovanda vesiculosa—have snap traps with hinged leaves that snag insects. They evolved from simpler carnivorous plants about 65 million years ago; the snap mechanism enables them to catch larger prey relative to their body size. The fossil record suggests their ancestors were much more widespread, especially in Europe.

More here.

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

The year has barely begun, yet we already have a safe bet for best actress of 2010. Jenny, in Jon Amiel’s “Creation,” is certainly a hell of a role, beginning with an action sequence in the nude, switching to a flirtation scene—in which Jenny wears bloomers and a knitted top—with an ardent admirer, and closing with her demise, filmed in unremitting sorrow. So what if she’s an orangutan? A knockout is a knockout, whatever her descent.

In reality, there were two Jennys, both at London Zoo. Queen Victoria was introduced to one of them, in 1842, and pronounced her “painfully and disagreeably human.” One wants to ask: To whose pain, Ma’am, do you refer? The orangutan is one of the many organisms, simple and complex, that pass before Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany), a stratum of whose life is the subject of “Creation.” Bettany, with his jungly sideburns and smooth pate, offers a reasonable likeness of the great man, although he lacks the shaggy overhang of brow, extending far beyond the sunken eye sockets, which lent Darwin not only his solemn frown but, it must be said, his semi-simian air. I sometimes wonder if his tracing of our ancestry began not on his travels, or at his desk, but one morning when he glanced into his shaving mirror.

The book on which Jon Amiel concentrates is “The Origin of Species,” which was published in 1859, having been delayed for many years, and the task of his film is to register the cautionary tremors that preceded the quake. Darwin clearly foresaw the effect of his theories on society at large, especially on the faithful. “You’ve killed God, Sir!” his friend Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) exclaims, jumping the gun a little.

More here.

I came to the Great Plains looking for history and all I found was failure. It’s so windy here I can hardly stand. I can hardly see. All around me the Saskatchewan prairie grass bends and shivers, to the right, to the left, right, left, looking like it’s trying to find its sea legs. The clouds storm over the gray expanse of sky. The prairie is indifferent. It has looked the same for many years to many people, promising abundance and delivering the opposite. I came to find the town of Hoffer, but it’s not exactly clear where Hoffer begins, where I was before, or exactly where I am now. When I ask my family where the farm was, they say Hoffer, but sometimes Oungre, and Sonnenfeld, and around Hoffer, and also around Oungre. All I can see is grass and sky. In the tale of modern North America, the East was for recreating the old, the West was for creating the new, but the Plains just kicked your ass. Even the desert was more inviting than this. The desert calls to the music makers and dreamers of dreams, swimming pools, and movie stars. When the pioneers of yore offered their identities to the desert, it filled the void with romance. You went to the prairies, on the other hand, if you were trying to prove yourself, work hard. On the Prairie, you sacrificed your identity not for romance but for purpose. On the Prairie, pioneering wasn’t a path, the temporary road to eventual success, it was a lifestyle; identity was at one with the land.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Ormesby Psalter

East Anglican School, c. 1310

The psalter invites us to consider
a cat and a rat in relationship
to an arched hole, which we
shall call Circumstance. Out of

Circumstance walks the splendid
rat, who is larger than he ought
to be, and who affects an expression
of dapper cheer. We shall call him

Privilege. Apparently Privilege has
not noticed the cat, who crouches
a mere six inches from Circumstance,
and who will undoubtedly pin

Privilege’s back with one swift
swipe, a torture we can all nod at.
The cat, however, has averted
its gaze upward, possibly to heaven.

Perhaps it is thanking the Almighty
for the miraculous provision of a rat
just when Privilege becomes crucial
for sustenance or sport. The cat

we shall call Myself. Is it not
too bad that the psalter artist
abandoned Myself in this attitude
of prayerful expectation? We all

would have enjoyed seeing clumps of
Privilege strewn about Circumstance,
Myself curled in sleepy ennui,
or cleaning a practical paw.

by Rhoda Janzen

from Poetry, January 2007

From The Guardian:

“History,” Henry Ford once declared, “is more or less bunk” – but he was not above trying to make a little bit of it himself. Not content with being the most celebrated car manufacturer of his age, he also attempted to found an American Midwestern-style city at the heart of Brazil’s Amazon River basin. It was intended to be the centre of a rubber plantation (the size of Tennessee) that would save the Ford motor company from having to import latex from Malaya or Sumatra. A bold decision, it ended up as one of the greatest failures of Ford’s career – a case history combining some of the tragic elements of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness alongside the naive innocence of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Greg Grandin, a professor of history at New York University, has rescued the story of this gallant but doomed enterprise from the lumber room of legend. It is an extraordinary tale of pride and stubbornness, a struggle on behalf of capitalism by a man who was convinced that industrialisation had given him the strength and know-how to bring even a mighty river like the Amazon to heel.

More here.

From Science:

If you want to design a railway system, you could do worse than hire a slime mold. Researchers have shown that, when grown on a map of Japan, the gelatinous, funguslike organism connects points of interest in a pattern similar to Tokyo's train network. Engineers might be able to take a cue from the organism's approach to design more-efficient transportation systems.

The trick has to do with how slime molds eat. When Physarum polycephalum, a slime mold often found inside decaying logs, discovers bacteria or spores, it grows over them and begins to digest them through its body. To continue growing and exploring, the slime mold transforms its Byzantine pattern of thin tendrils into a simpler, more-efficient network of tubes: Those carrying a high volume of nutrients gradually expand, while those that are little used slowly contract and eventually disappear.

More here.

Greg Beato in Reason:

In the 16th century, when William Tyndale translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English, thereby unlocking the Word of God to the common man, he was rewarded for his efforts by being burned at the stake. So were most of the copies of his translation. In colonial times, it was illegal to print Bibles in North America; only certain printers in England and Scotland were authorized to publish the holy book. During the Revolution those imports stopped, creating, according to The Centennial History of the American Bible Society, a “famine of Bibles.” So in 1782 the Philadelphia printer Roger Aitken printed 10,000 copies of America’s first complete English Bible. The book came with a congressional endorsement, but when the war ended, cheap imports resumed, domestic competition exploded, and thousands of copies of the Aitken Bible failed to sell. In 1791, he wrote a letter to Pennsylvania’s tax man stating that he’d lost $4,000 on the venture. Today America is characterized by Biblical obesity, not Biblical famine. A 2003 survey conducted by Zondervan, one of the nation’s largest Christian book publishers, found that the average U.S. household contains 3.9 Bibles, and U.S. consumers purchase approximately 20 million new Bibles annually. “Business analysts describe Bible publishing as a mature industry with little prospect for strong growth,” The Boston Globe reported in 1986, but year in and year out, the Bible remains the best-selling book in America.

The glut, in fact, is what creates the demand. Long before Web 2.0 billionaires decided that $0.00 was a price point consumers would find even more tempting than Eve’s apple, Bible societies had started distributing millions of copies for free or at little cost to establish brand awareness, build a user base, and make the formerly expensive, scarce, and highly regulated item a ubiquitous presence in the culture.

More here.

Michael Dirda in the Washington Post:

Because of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry, to mention just a few of the most prominent authors, American readers have long been able to enjoy one terrific Indian novel after another. But Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer. Mueenuddin spent his early childhood in Pakistan, then lived in the United States — he attended Dartmouth and Yale — and has since returned to his father's homeland, where he and his wife now manage a farm in Khanpur. These connected stories show us what life is like for both the rich and the desperately poor in Mueenuddin's country, and the result is a kind of miniaturized Pakistani “human comedy.”

In the original Comédie humaine, Balzac had the ingenious notion of tying his various novels together by using recurrent characters. Eugène de Rastignac is the protagonist of Le Père Goriot but is subsequently glimpsed in passing or sometimes just referred to in several other books. In like fashion, Mueenuddin interlaces eight stories, while also linking them to the household of a wealthy and self-satisfied landowner named K.K. Harouni. In “Saleema,” for instance, Harouni's elderly valet, Rafik, falls into a heartbreaking affair with a young maidservant, and we remember this, with a catch in our throat, when in another story we see him bring in two glasses of whiskey on a silver tray.

More here. And here's a nice video of Daniel Mueenuddin and Mohsin Hamid from the Asia Society:

Austin Dacey in the Skeptical Inquirer:

Just as soon as anyone notes the dismal state of science in contemporary Muslim-majority countries, someone else with a little knowledge of history will observe that the Islamic world was once the center of the scientific world, and Arabic was once the lingua franca. From the eighth to the end of the fourteenth centuries, the most important work in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, optics, and medicine took place under Muslim rule.

Before Europe’s first university had opened in Bologna, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was amassing a library that reportedly housed as many as four hundred thousand volumes. There, under the patronage of the Abbasid dynasty, Arabic-speaking scholars—including Persians, Christians, Jews, and others—translated Greek texts by authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as material in Persian, Syriac, and Sanskrit. It was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that this ancient learning came to Europe, primarily by way of Muslim Spain. As late as the seventeenth century, European colleges still relied on the Canon, a medical textbook by Avicenna, the Latinized name of the medieval physician and polymath Ibn Sina.

This Golden Age is rightly held up as one of the glories of Arabic-Islamic civilization. However, it only makes more pointed the question of how Arabic-language science (defined broadly as natural philosophy) came to be so rapidly and totally surpassed by European science.

More here.

In the Believer:

COLUM McCANN: What are we doing here? Why aren’t we in a pub?

ALEKSANDAR HEMON: Because you live in the provinces, far away from everything.

CM: So, we’re here… to talk (as the bishop to the hooker). The next question is: why are we here? That, of course, is easy to answer. But, seriously, sometimes I wonder if we—I mean, we, us, as writers—have to increasingly justify ourselves, you know, like visual artists, whose primary mode of entry into their art seems to be the painstaking explanation of it. Forget the painting. There’s a whole business built up around it. The artists have to acquire a specific language. Have you read any of those “statements of purpose” (!) by some of the contemporary artists? It’s like stepping through acres of fresh tar. You pick one foot up only to find the other sinking further.

AH: Actually, I have not read any of those statements of purpose, but I can imagine what they look like. I wouldn’t be so hard on artists, though. On the one hand, every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate—it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it. On the other hand, art is so widely (and often thinly) spread, that anything can be it. A lot of it is nothing but a gesture, not an object, not a thing unto itself, and it literally does not exist without interpretation. I am all for interpretation, but for the past century or so, an interpretation can be slapped on everything and anything. Literature, on the other hand, is always something—it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is. Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language. So it’s easy for us.

CM: I happen to think that an ounce of empathy is worth a boatload of judgment. A writer can disease himself or herself with his or her own position, thinking about it too much. But, that said, I’m slightly off-put by our world getting increasingly rarefied, like the world of art, where we must justify ourselves with our meaning. Imagine constantly explaining ourselves. Like a football commentary or something…