Jim Holt in The New York Times:

There are two things I would hope for in a book about wisdom. First, some intellectual enlightenment as to what wisdom really is. Second, some practical ideas on how to be wiser in my own life. This book was a letdown in both respects. Yet reading it proved to be far from a waste of time. Stephen S. Hall is a veteran science journalist and the author of several previous books, most recently one about how the height of boys affects their life prospects, called “Size Matters.” As one might guess from that earlier title, Hall has a weakness for the arresting phrase. In the present book, bodies fall from the World Trade Center on 9/11 “like paperweight angels.” Montaigne’s pen is a “drill bit,” his essays are a “microscope.” The road to ­knowledge is “nettled with potential potholes.” (The nettle is a stinging plant, but it does not usually sting pavement.)

Nor can Hall resist a bit of spurious drama. One chapter opens with Inquisitor-like scientists “torturing” a gray-haired woman, when all they are really doing is giving her psychometric tests. His relentlessly fetching prose might be tolerable in a magazine piece — indeed, “Wisdom” germinated from an article he wrote on wisdom research for The New York Times Magazine — but at book length it becomes tiresome. All that is a matter of taste. It is in matters of substance that “Wisdom” can be most frustrating. Expectations raised by the importance of the topic and the obvious intelligence of the author are continually dashed by sketchy, hit-and-run exposition. Hall mentions five “strategies of emotion regulation” but divulges just one of them (“reappraisal”), leaving us to guess what the others might be. He says that “at least four distinct neurological approaches to problem solving” have been identified, yet I could count only two before he scudded off to a new theme. There’s both too little and too much here. One scientific study blurs into the next, amid a blizzard of truisms (“And finally, we must be open to change”) and references to Solon, the Buddha and Benjamin Franklin. If, as William James wisely observed, wisdom is knowing what to leave out, this is not a wise book.

But what is wisdom, really?

More here.

Ruth Franklin in The New Republic:

Heinrich von Kleist’s famous story “The Earthquake in Chile” is set in Santiago in 1647. A young Carmelite nun named Josephe, condemned to death for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, is about to be beheaded. Across town, her lover, Jeronimo Rugera, is preparing to hang himself in the prison where he has been incarcerated. Just as the bells announcing Josephe’s imminent execution begin to toll, a gigantic earthquake strikes: We now know that it measured around 8.5 on the Richter scale, just a little less than the recent 8.8 quake. The pillar on which Jeronimo was to hang himself becomes his support, and he escapes as the building collapses around him. His beloved, saved by the same “heavenly miracle,” finds him in the countryside, where the refugees from the city have gathered. (This quotation and the others come from Peter Wortsman’s new translation of Kleist’s Selected Prose, just out in an attractive new edition from Archipelago Books.) The same townspeople who earlier that day had gathered to watch Josephe’s execution now greet the pair with warmth and compassion. Had the past, they wonder, only been a bad dream? The earthquake seems to have acted as a great leveler, erasing the previous divisions of class and piety…

More here.

Tom Siegfried in Science News:

It’s science’s dirtiest secret: The “scientific method” of testing hypotheses by statistical analysis stands on a flimsy foundation. Statistical tests are supposed to guide scientists in judging whether an experimental result reflects some real effect or is merely a random fluke, but the standard methods mix mutually inconsistent philosophies and offer no meaningful basis for making such decisions. Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.

Replicating a result helps establish its validity more securely, but the common tactic of combining numerous studies into one analysis, while sound in principle, is seldom conducted properly in practice.

Experts in the math of probability and statistics are well aware of these problems and have for decades expressed concern about them in major journals. Over the years, hundreds of published papers have warned that science’s love affair with statistics has spawned countless illegitimate findings. In fact, if you believe what you read in the scientific literature, you shouldn’t believe what you read in the scientific literature.

“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”

More here.

Alicia Desantis in the New York Times:

The men and women in the room were part of “This Progress,” a work by the British-German artist Tino Sehgal that took over the rotunda for the last six weeks. In the piece, which closed Wednesday, visitors were ushered up the spiral ramp by a series of guides — first a child, then a teenager, then an adult and finally an older person — who asked them questions related to the idea of progress…

Asad Raza, the producer of the exhibition and the recruiter of most of the guides, said he had seen the work improve over time, as the guides became more relaxed and more willing to be themselves. “There was a kind of anxiety about being chosen for their intelligence,” he said. It could lead to grandstanding. By the end, he said, the piece had become more personal…

In the reading room where the adults gathered, a joke circulated in which a guide pushes a particularly annoying visitor over the edge of the ramp rail. Gesturing toward the body below, the guide would announce the title of the new work: “Tino Sehgal, ‘This Pancake,’ 2010.”

More here. [Photo shows 3QD's own Asad Raza, producer of the show.]

Over at Discovery News:

“We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory — to look at actual memory traces,” said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire.

“We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. Now that we’ve seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time.”

The results, reported in the March 11 online edition of Current Biology, follow an earlier discovery by the same team that they could tell where a person was standing within a virtual reality room in the same way.

The researchers say the new results move this line of research along because episodic memories — recollections of everyday events — are expected to be more complex, and thus more difficult to crack than spatial memory.

In the study, Maguire and her colleagues Martin Chadwick, Demis Hassabis, and Nikolaus Weiskopf showed 10 people each three very short films before brain scanning. Each movie featured a different actress and a fairly similar everyday scenario.

The researchers scanned the participants’ brains while the participants were asked to recall each of the films. The researchers then ran the imaging data through a computer algorithm designed to identify patterns in the brain activity associated with memories for each of the films.

Finally, they showed that those patterns could be identified to accurately predict which film a given person was thinking about when he or she was scanned.

Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West—our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data—as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world’s civilizations, and many of the world’s most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome. Well, why not imagine this library? Realizing such a dream is no longer a question of technology. Remarkable electronic libraries are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The nonprofit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts. To do research, only one in a hundred American college students turn first to their university catalogue. Over 80 percent turn first to Google.

more from Lisbet Rausing at TNR here.

How deep is Bruegel’s pessimism? I guess the question is inseparable from that of his relation to Christianity. (He was no fool: the question is insoluble.) And from the issue of comedy. How much was horror played for laughs? Does laughter take the edge off things? Consider the Triumph of Death in Madrid. How common a subject was it in Bruegel’s time? And where does the title come from? Of course the basic idea stems from the world of late-medieval prints and wall painting—the last time I saw it, the painting resonated immediately with a Dance of Death I had seen a fortnight before in the parish church at La Ferté-Loupière. But was not Bruegel aware that in turning a Dance of Death into a panorama of Death’s final solution—a disciplined army carrying out a scorched earth policy—he was steering into a different, more dangerous world? This is Hell, certainly, but also Last Judg-ment—with now the dead coming out of their graves not to accept reward or punishment but simply to take revenge on the living. In a way that seems typical, Bruegel insists on the closeness of the story he is telling to that of Christian resurrection of the body. Twice he shows members of the skeleton crew busily digging up the coffins of their comrades, and right at the center of the painting, in the mid-background, is a skeleton stepping from his grave (next to a horrible, blood-red filigree cross: signs of Christian burial are swallowed in the general tide of malignancy).

more from TJ Clark at Threepenny Review here.

Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering? Nabokov seems to have thought so, and pointed out that Tolstoy, unlike Homer, was able to describe childbirth in convincing detail. Yet you could argue the opposite view; after all, no novelist strikes the modern reader as more Homeric than Tolstoy. And Homer does mention Hector’s wife getting a hot bath ready for her husband after a long day of war, and even Achilles, as a baby, spitting up on Phoenix’s shirt. Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity—both are natural resources awaiting different forms of activation. The novel is peculiar in this respect, because while anyone painting today exactly like Courbet, or composing music exactly like Brahms, would be accounted a fraud or a forger, much contemporary fiction borrows the codes and conventions—the basic narrative grammar—of Flaubert or Balzac without essential alteration.

more from James Wood at The New Yorker here.

Down the Line

In the silence before the train
she stands on the unsheltered platform,
her mind brittle as porcelain,
nerves tight as a fist.

…………In a shoulderbag,
…………amongst all her scented things,
…………there are memories
…………of unclouded summers,
…………of nights loud with fairground noise,
…………a jukebox throbbing
…………its catchcries of love,
…………the air heavy with cigarette smoke,
…………the smell of oil and sweat,
…………freckled weather
…………when she walked the prom,
…………a tang of seaweed on her skin,
…………slim as an hourglass,
…………bright as a fallen angel.

She straightens her back
and the world moves under her
as the train grinds its teeth
and fists its way
into the station.

…………In another town down the line
…………there's a man
…………who'll comb the grey from her hair,
…………who'll keep the heaviness of time
…………from her mind, and from her waist,
…………a man she's never met
…………who'll slow her violent heartbeat.

by Louis De Paor

from Clapping in the Cemetary
publisher: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhàn, 2005

From Seed:

In mathematician Steven Strogatz’s recent book, friendship and integrals collide, yielding a math story of unusual poignancy.

Long after Steven Strogatz had become a professor at MIT and Cornell, he was still writing letters to his high school calculus teacher, Don Joffray. The two started swapping word problems and logic puzzles when Strogatz, who studies chaotic systems, was in college. Their jovial mini-treatises form the body of Strogatz’s most recent book, The Calculus of Friendship. But they always managed to keep a certain distance from each other, demonstrating, perhaps, the natural reserve for which mathematicians are known. Mr. Joffray, as Strogatz still refers to him, sent his congratulations on Strogatz’s engagement in a brief preface to a calculus problem, but Strogatz’s reply makes no acknowledgement. When he heard from secondhand sources that Joffray’s son had died, Strogatz wondered why Joffray never mentioned it, but never brought it up. After thirty years of omissions, it took a string of tragic events to bring their friendship into three dimensions.

Seed editor Veronique Greenwood spoke with Strogatz about the nature of friendship, why math isn’t about right and wrong, and how an elliptical swimming pool helped launch his teaching career.

Seed: How did this remarkable correspondence begin?

Steven Strogatz: When I was a junior in high school, I took calculus with Mr. Joffray. People often assume that he must have been my mentor, but I wouldn’t call him that. Mr. Joffray was not one of the three or four teachers that influenced me the most in high school. And in my senior year, I lost touch with him, because I had finished the available math courses and was working on my own. So it was especially peculiar that I would happen to write to him, starting my freshman year of college. But something about my relationship with him worked—it kept on going. About once a year, I would write to him about something I’d learned in college that I thought he might like—a problem or a proof—and it went on like that for several years. Things really got rolling when I was a junior in college, and he asked me a question that he didn’t know the answer to that had come up in one of his advanced placement courses. I could even tell you the question: He was imagining an elliptical pool with a 1-foot-wide border around the outside, and he wanted to know if the border would also be an ellipse. I mean, it’s certainly some kind of oval, but is it specifically the kind of curve that to a mathematician would qualify as an ellipse? Now it was no longer just me showing him things I was learning—he was actually asking for help. And, boy, I loved that! That was very exciting. It was very generous of him. I wanted to teach—I always wanted to teach—but I was a kid, and I didn’t have anyone to teach! Who would sit there listening to me? Well, he would.

Seed: You describe one of your first math teachers at Princeton, a renowned topologist—“he was so shy that he slithered along the wall when he entered the lecture room, as if hoping to become invisible.” And you tell the joke—How can you tell if a mathematician’s an extrovert? He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you.

More here.

From Science:

Thalidomide ranks as one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in modern history. Prescribed as an antinausea drug for pregnant women in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it caused severe birth defects in as many as 10,000 children before it was yanked from the market. Half a century later, scientists are still not sure exactly how the drug does so much damage, which includes shortened arms and legs, ear deformities, and malformations in the digestive system. Now, for the first time, researchers have found a specific protein that binds to thalidomide and may help explain its devastating effects on fetal development. The find could help scientists develop less-toxic versions of the drug, which has helped combat the cancer multiple myeloma and complications of leprosy.

Because of its use in those hard-to-treat diseases, thalidomide is still causing birth defects today—especially in Africa and South America where leprosy still rages. (In the United States, people given thalidomide for myeloma are instructed to use multiple forms of birth control and take frequent pregnancy tests.) Scientists are therefore eager to understand exactly how thalidomide does its damage so that they can preserve the benefits of the drug without its hazards.

Molecular and developmental biologists from Japan report in tomorrow's issue of Science that they have found a new clue. Hiroshi Handa of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and his colleagues developed tiny magnetic beads—just 200 nanometers in diameter—that can be attached to drugs and other compounds. When the bead-linked drugs are mixed with cell extracts, scientists can pick out proteins or other molecules that the drug binds to. They applied the technology to thalidomide, and their fishing expedition paid off.

Handa's team found that beads tagged with thalidomide bound to a little-known protein called cereblon, which is expressed widely in both embryonic and adult tissues. Further experiments showed that blocking production of cereblon in zebrafish can cause defects in fin development similar to those caused by thalidomide. In both zebrafish and chick embryos, adding a version of cereblon that doesn't bind to thalidomide seemed to blunt the drug's effects.

More here.

Smriti Rao in 80 Beats:

An international team of researchers has discovered how to extract DNA from fossilized bird eggs–including the eggshell of the enormous elephant bird that went extinct four centuries ago.

In a research breakthrough, scientists were able to isolate DNA from the eggshells of not just the extinct giant moa bird from New Zealand, but also a 19,000-year-old emu from Australia and the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar. The elephant bird’s egg is the largest known bird egg, with 160 times the volume of a chicken’s egg [New Scientist].

The discovery of these birds’ DNA could help scientists understand how they lived, and why they became extinct. The DNA was extracted from desiccated inner membranes in fossil eggshells, found in 13 locations in Australia, Madagascar and New Zealand [PhysOrg], and the work was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B…

By studying the elephant bird’s genetics, scientists can look for clues about the bird’s physiology and diet that may help them understand what made the giant avian go the way of the dodo.

More here.

Andrew Romano in Newsweek:

Late last week, President Barack Obama announced that he would be appointing a gentleman named Edward Tufte to the independent panel that advises the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (i.e., the team of inspectors general who track how stimulus funds are spent). It wasn't a particularly sexy announcement; no thrill went up Chris Matthews's leg or anything. But in its own quiet way, the news was heartening for anyone who believes that government can and should communicate more clearly with the American people—especially when it comes to the much derided (and misunderstood) Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Among fans, Tufte is known as “the Da Vinci of Data.” After receiving a B.A. and M.S. in statistics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, the Beverly Hills native launched his academic career by signing on to teach courses in political economy and data analysis at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs. Over time, he became increasingly interested in information design—charts, graphs, diagrams—and in 1982 he took out a second mortgage on his home in order to self-publish his first book on the subject, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It redefined the field and was later named one of Amazon's 100 best books of the century.

More here.

Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish:

Having forcibly evicted Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem, the new inhabitants sing songs in praise of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein. And you really think the decision to make the site of that massacre a national heritage site for Israel had nothing to do with this association? Maybe AIPAC will wake up one of these days and see the reality that less informed and educated observers cannot miss:

No, this is not representative of all Israeli opinion, as massive Israeli demonstrations against this latest provocation reveal, and as another brilliant column by Bradley Burston demonstrates. But open your eyes. Something is happening in the soul of Israel. And it carries great foreboding for peace … for the West, and above all, for Israel.

Sean Carroll reports on what goes on before and after the actual taping, in Cosmic Variance:

We got picked up at our hotel in a car that brought us to the Colbert studio, and hustled inside under relatively high security — people whispering into lapel microphones that we had arrived and were headed to the green room. Very exciting. The green room was actually green, which is apparently unusual. I got pep talks from a couple of the staff people, who encouraged me to keep things as simple as possible. They made an interesting point about scientists: they make the perfect foils for Stephen’s character, since they actually rely on facts rather than opinions.

Stephen himself dropped by to say hi, and to explain the philosophy of his character — I suppose there still are people out there who could be guests on the show who haven’t ever actually watched it. Namely, he’s a complete idiot, and it’s my job to educate him. But it’s not my job to be funny — that’s his bailiwick. The guests are encouraged to be friendly and sincere, but not pretend to be comedians.

We got to sit in the audience as the early segments were taped, which were hilarious. I feel bad that my own interview is going to be the low point of the show, laughs-wise. But I went out on cue, and fortunately I wasn’t at all jittery — too much going on to have time to get nervous, I suppose.

I had some planned responses for what I thought were the most obvious questions. Of which, he asked zero. Right off the bat Colbert managed to catch me off guard by asking a much more subtle question than I had anticipated…

More, including video of the interview, here.

Marco Roth on Tino Sehgal's piece at the Guggenheim in n+1:

As much as Tino Sehgal has managed to stage a classically harmonious meditation on the various senses of progress, his work also produces situations like these, for as much as it is a work of highly “conceptual art,” it is also theater and so comes under the psychological conventions of theater.

It’s unclear, in fact, whether the performance succeeds more as theater than as intellectual discussion. The accidental questions and observations that came to mind as we walked through mattered as much the enframing “theme” of enlightenment, or progress. “The blocking is great!” I thought, when Finn hopped up onto the impromptu proscenium, while also wondering how I talk to children, teens, equal grownups, and older adults. What would have happened if a few of the grownups were not as well-dressed as the others? What if some actually looked like homeless people? What if some had disturbing scars? What do all those French tourists make of it? Do they recognize the gallery of New Yorker types each of these ages also represent: the precocious child, the “know-it-all” teen, the busy, successful career woman, the witty and wise elders of the tribe? This catalog of “urbane” types is unchanged since Plato first began to blur the distinctions between theater, philosophy, and art, dialogue and dialectic.

A problem for Tino Sehgal as much as it was a problem for Plato is that performed conversation is still performance as much as it’s conversation. It’s one thing to perceive the stark whiteness and vertiginous openness of the Guggenheim as an ideal contemporary representation of the Athenian “agora,” and another to allow “the art of conversation” to take place unimpeded. Socrates and friends had the world all before them, at least until the master’s trial and death. The outcome of the historical Socrates’s actual dialogues were uncertain, but Plato’s readers are always being driven, guided, taken in hand, “You are quite right, Socrates!”

Steven Strogatz in the NYT’s Opinionator:

For more than 2,500 years, mathematicians have been obsessed with solving for x. The story of their struggle to find the “roots” — the solutions — of increasingly complicated equations is one of the great epics in the history of human thought.

And yet, through it all, there’s been an irritant, a nagging little thing that won’t go away: the solutions often involve square roots of negative numbers. Such solutions were long derided as “sophistic” or “fictitious” because they seemed nonsensical on their face.

Until the 1700s or so, mathematicians believed that square roots of negative numbers simply couldn’t exist.

They couldn’t be positive numbers, after all, since a positive times a positive is always positive, and we’re looking for numbers whose square is negative. Nor could negative numbers work, since a negative times a negative is, again, positive. There seemed to be no hope of finding numbers which, when multiplied by themselves, would give negative answers.

We’ve seen crises like this before. They occur whenever an existing operation is pushed too far, into a domain where it no longer seems sensible. Just as subtracting bigger numbers from smaller ones gave rise to negative numbers and division spawned fractions and decimals, the free-wheeling use of square roots eventually forced the universe of numbers to expand…again.

Historically, this step was the most painful of all.

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Just when you thought there was nothing left to say about Lenin, along comes a fine book that represents him afresh by concentrating on his life before achieving power. Vladimir Ilyich and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya spent seventeen years leading a parlous nomadic existence as underground agitators before their return to Russia in March 1917. Helen Rappaport treats her subject as “a rather inconsequential-looking man . . . with his dowdy wife” pursuing a secret goal. Whether his politics were right is not her concern. This is Lenin for a new generation of readers who can afford to look dispassionately on his human story. The result is a dramatic, atmospheric tale, about a dogged little fellow, bald with a red beard, who came off his bicycle when his tyre got wedged in a Geneva tramline, and was twice again knocked down in France cycling back from air shows, for which he had a passion. He sent his London landlady a picture album to mark his and Nadya’s happiest year anywhere, in digs near King’s Cross, in 1902–03.

more from Lesley Chamberlain at the TLS here.