From Seed:

You’re at breakfast enjoying a mouthful of milk when it happens: the zygomatic muscles, anchored at each cheekbone, tug the corners of your mouth backwards and up. Orbicular muscles encircling your eyeballs slowly squeeze tight beneath wrinkling skin. A 310-millisecond-long noise explodes from your throat, extending to a frequency of 10,000 Hertz. Five shorter pulses of the “h” sound follow, five times per second, hovering around 6 Hertz, each lasting a fifteenth of a second. Your heart reaches 115 beats per minute. Blood vessels relax. Muscle tone softens. Abdominal muscles clench. The soft tissue lining your upper larynx vibrates 120 times per second as air blasts past. The milk spews forth. You are laughing.

Laughter, real laugh-till-you-cry laughter, is one of many human emotional expressions. Arguably, laughing and its tearful counterpart, crying, are the loudest, most intrusive non-linguistic expressions of our species. But for all of that familiarity, they are little-understood behavioral mysteries parading in the light of everyday experience. Though evolutionary biologists have long explored the mammalian origins of emotional expression, human laughs and cries only rarely become subjects of cognitive neuroscience. But that may not stay the case. Laughing and crying, being live demonstrations of emotion and its social expression, provide new entryways into the tangled pathways of the brain.

More here.

Steve Mirsky in Scientific American:

Here’s another idea that’s really been vexing me. Human embryonic stem cells are bad, I’ve been told, because they come from aborted embryos or from surplus embryos created for in vitro fertilization. And using these cells in potentially lifesaving research is morally wrong because even if that embryo was only a few cells or just one cell, it has the potential to be a human being. To some people’s thinking, it already is a human being. On the other completely gestated hand, what are called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) are allegedly good because no embryos are involved. An iPSC is a tissue-specific adult cell that, with special treatment, has reverted to a fully pluripotent form capable of producing any other kind of cell in the body. In fact, it’s theoretically capable of being implanted into a welcoming womb and developing into a human being. Oh, the result would be a clone and therefore pure evil, but it would definitely be a human. So what I don’t get is why aren’t people who are against using embryonic stem cells in research just as against using iPSCs? Is it because of the evil clone thing?

By the way, freezers in fertility clinics all over the country are filled with those surplus embryos, which some consider to be human beings with all the rights and privileges thereof. And there’s a thought experiment in which a fully developed human baby-type person (that detailed description is meant to ward off semantic issues about who’s a human or what’s a baby) is in the clinic sitting on one of those freezers when a fire breaks out—whom do you save, the crying baby or as many of the frozen embryos as you can? (Hint: if you leave the baby, you don’t get invited to the spaghetti dinner at the thought-experiment firehouse.)

More here.

Jonathan Raban in the NYRB blog:

Trying to follow the impending British general election from afar, I’ve been reading The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley, chief political commentator for the Observer. Eight hundred pages long, and crammed with “inside” political gossip (or credible intelligence, if you prefer), it’s a book as hard to admire as it is to put down. Though the text is bespattered with authenticating footnotes (many say no more than “Conversation, Cabinet minister”), it reads like airport fiction. Its flawed (and credible) hero is Tony Blair, its cardboard villain Gordon Brown.

The End of the Party seems to have gone to the printers in November 2009. The plot of the book then appeared unassailable. David Cameron’s Conservatives’ lead over Labour in the polls stood at twelve, fifteen, sometimes twenty points, pointing to Brown’s humiliation in the 2010 election (which will almost certainly take place on May 6). The commentariat had appointed Cameron as Britain’s next prime minister, and Gordon Brown and his party were yesterday’s men.

But for the last few months and weeks, the polls have been tightening. The Conservatives are still ahead (averaging out polls over the last twenty days, the useful site UK Polling Report puts the Conservatives at 38 percent, Labour at 31 percent, and the Liberal Democrats at 19 percent). Because the Lib Dems have 63 seats in the present parliament, it’s going to be a far tougher battle than was predicted a few months ago for either the Conservatives or Labour to gain an overall majority. There’s now much talk of a hung parliament and a minority government working in coalition with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats.

There’s also talk—unthinkable when Rawnsley finished his gravedigging job for Brown’s corpse—of the no longer inconceivable possibility of a Labour victory. On March 25, Andy Beckett wrote a long and characteristically thoughtful piece in the Guardian titled “What Happens If Cameron Loses?”; on March 28, Matthew D’Ancona, the former editor of the Spectator, imagined Gordon Brown relishing his first morning after an election that returns him to Downing Street, while the Conservatives tear themselves apart in their search for David Cameron’s replacement.

In the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

Speaking on Oahu a few years ago as first lady, Laura Bush praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another. Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who studies the Kaena Point colony, told me: “They were supposed to be icons of monogamy: one male and one female. But I wouldn’t assume that what you’re looking at is a male and a female.”

Young has been researching the albatrosses on Oahu since 2003; the colony was the focus of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, which she completed last spring. (She now works on conservation projects as a biologist for hire.) In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years — as far back as the biologists’ data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.

Young would never use the phrase “straight couples.” And she is adamantly against calling the other birds “lesbians” too. For one thing, the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs do except have sex, and Young isn’t really sure, or comfortable judging, whether that technically qualifies them as lesbians or not. But moreover, the whole question is meaningless to her; it has nothing to do with her research. “ ‘Lesbian,’ ” she told me, “is a human term,” and Young — a diligent and cautious scientist, just beginning to make a name in her field — is devoted to using the most aseptic language possible and resisting any tinge of anthropomorphism. “The study is about albatross,” she told me firmly. “The study is not about humans.” Often, she seemed to be mentally peer-reviewing her words before speaking.

A discovery like Young’s can disorient a wildlife biologist in the most thrilling way — if he or she takes it seriously, which has traditionally not been the case.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. “I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning,” she says. “I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears.”

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. “Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years,” she says.

The sewer bill, in fact, is what cost Pack and her co-workers their jobs. In 1996, the average monthly sewer bill for a family of four in Birmingham was only $14.71 — but that was before the county decided to build an elaborate new sewer system with the help of out-of-state financial wizards with names like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. The result was a monstrous pile of borrowed money that the county used to build, in essence, the world's grandest toilet — “the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants” is how one county worker put it. What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human shit into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack.

From The New Criterion:

Hemingway, remarks are not literature,” said Miss Stein imperiously. In Dorothy Parker’s case, however, the remarks, the snappy comebacks, live on, no matter how inexpert the witnesses (Mrs. Parker included). Even if she never really followed Clare Boothe Luce’s “Age before beauty” with “Pearls before swine” or wrote of the young Katharine Hepburn “She ran the gamut of emotions from A to B,” most of us, suffering from the delayed reaction times that wake us up a day or so later with the perfect rejoinder, envy the expert parry, the swift thrust of a Parker epigram, even a faux one. That she had no Boswell is, well, just as well, for the panache with which time has crowned her off-the-cuffs makes her loom larger in our cultural memory.

In life, however, she did not loom very large, around five feet by most accounts, and, though she battled weight problems periodically, she appears shrunken and mummified in photographs of her last years—too many Chesterfields, too much scotch. Born Dorothy Rothschild (“We’d never even heard of those Rothschilds!”), she first appeared while her Upper-West-Side parents were vacationing in New Jersey, getting back to her almost-native city just after Labor Day, 1893. Her Jewish father sent her to Catholic and Protestant schools, and, oddly, given her apparent lack of religious beliefs, the figure of the Virgin Mary appears in several of her most serious poems. She left school for good at fourteen and spent the next six years with her father, whose fortune had declined to the point that there was little estate to settle on his four children. After his death, she worked at a dance studio, either as an instructor or as a pianist, depending on whose account one reads.

More here.

The LHC really became a collider just before Christmas. The collisions recorded back then were not at particularly high energy, but three experiments have now published results; my experiment, Atlas, being the latest, with the paper being accepted for publication only last week. Before storming onward, it is a good moment to see what these results actually tell us. The detectors (Alice, CMS and Atlas) are really just huge digital cameras designed to record what happens when protons smash together. The first thing you do with a new collider and detector is measure the particles produced in an “average” collision. Measuring average, typical events tells us various things. We know the proton is full of quarks, stuck together by the strong nuclear force. How it behaves at high energies is not very well known, and these measurements will help. They also help us understand backgrounds to rarer events, for example, those where a Higgs particle (which is thought to bestow mass on elementary particles) might be produced, and inform models of massive air-showers, which happen when cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere. You can see in the Atlas paper that the models don’t fit the data quite right. The model builders are already tuning up to improve this.

more from Jon Butterworth at The Guardian here.

The ideas of France’s philosophers, the refinement of its language, and the sumptuousness of its fashion defined the eighteenth century. French paintings from the Age of Enlightenment gleam from the walls of great museums from St. Petersburg to New York. What would the Wallace Collection be without Watteau, the Frick without Fragonard? Yet sculpture contributed as much to this era as France’s other arts. Certainly there are well-known examples around the world—Jean- Antoine Houdon’s statue of George Washington in Richmond, for example, or Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s equestrian monument to Peter the Great on the Neva. But the full richness of eighteenth-century French sculpture—as spirited as it was virtuoso—has been little noted outside its homeland. All the more reason to celebrate the decision of the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, in collaboration with the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, to gather together a glittering selection of French sculpture from the days of Voltaire to the First Empire. The show includes both statues and smaller works—among them, above all, a remarkable ensemble of portrait busts. The Liebieghaus galleries are not large and do not always offer enough space for the works to achieve the full effect of their magic and wit. Nevertheless, what an experience! It feels like entering a Paris salon in the days of Madame du Deffand and eavesdropping on the philosophes in brilliant conversation.

more from Willibald Sauerländer at the NYRB here.

As some of you are no doubt aware, I’m in the process of putting together a megadungeon/setting book inspired by my ongoing Dwimmermount campaign. I have no firm release date in mind but it’ll likely be in the Fall of this year. Like its predecessor project, The Cursed Chateau, it’ll be compatible with any class-and-level fantasy RPG, but this time around I’m probably going to be hewing more closely to Labyrinth Lord, since it’s the retro-clone that’s actually closest to the way I play OD&D these days. Anyway, I’m in the midst of getting its maps together, employing the talented Tim Hartin (proprietor of Paratime Design and the blog Gamma Rites) to produce them. The initial release will include six levels of Dwimmermount, although they’ll only go four levels “deep,” as there are several side levels. One of the principles I hold dear when working on Dwimmermount is that there should be multiple routes between the various levels and sub-levels. Likewise, the levels and sub-levels don’t all stack neatly on top of one another but sprawl in a variety of directions. This is, in my opinion, an antidote to monotony and a key to keeping a megadungeon interesting and challenging over the course of long-term play.

more from James Maliszewski’s wonderful world-headquarters of ultimate nerdom here.

In July 1917 — the point at which Miranda Carter opens this enterprising his­tory of imperial vicissitudes and royal reversals — George V, king of Great Britain and emperor of India, resolved to change his name. In that scorching summer, King George was a worried man. His Russian cousin, Czar Nicholas II, had recently lost his throne and was under house arrest. In Germany, another imperial cousin, Wilhelm II, had been stripped of his proudest title, “supreme warlord.” Deprived of power, Wilhelm discovered a hitherto absent sense of humor. Hearing that the English king had decided to bury his German connections by proclaiming himself a member of the newly formed House of Windsor, the emperor pondered the possibilities for a forthcoming Shakespearean production: “The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.”

more from Miranda Seymour at the NYT here.

Golden Lines

“Astonishing! Everything is Intelligent!”
…………………………….Pythagoras

Free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker
on this earth in which life blazes in all things?
Your liberty does what it wishes with the powers it controls,
but when you gather to plan, the universe is not there.

Look carefully in an animal at a spirit alive;
every flower is a soul opening out into nature;
a mystery touching love is alseep inside metal.
“Everything is intelligent!” And everything moves you.

In the blind wall, look out for the eyes that pierce you:
the substance of creation cannot be separated from a word . . .
Do not force it to labor in some low phrase!

Often a Holy Thing is living hidden in a dark creature;
and like an eye which is born covered by its lids,
a pure spirit is growing strong under the bark of stones!

Gerard De Nerval / 1854

translated by Robert Bly

Jon Meacham in The New York Times:

It is only a brief moment, a seemingly inconclusive ­exchange in the midst of one of the most significant interviews in human history. In the Gospel of John, Jesus of Nazareth has been arrested and brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. Improbably polite, reflective and reluctant to sentence Jesus to death (the historical Pilate was in fact brutal and quick-tempered), Pilate is portrayed as a patient questioner of this charismatic itinerant preacher. “So you are a king?” Pilate asks, and Jesus says: “You say that I am a king. I was born for this, and I came into the world for this: to testify to the truth. Everyone who is committed to the truth listens to my voice.” Then, in what I imagine to be a cynical, world-weary tone, Pilate replies, “What is truth?”

Jesus says nothing in response, and Pilate’s question is left hanging — an open query in the middle of John’s rendering of the Passion. I have always thought of Pilate’s question as a kind of wink from God, a sly aside to the audience that says, in effect, “Be careful of anyone who thinks he has all the answers; only I do.” The search for truth — about the visible and the invisible — is perhaps the most fundamental of human undertakings, ranking close behind the quests for warmth, food and a mate. With apologies and due respect and affection to my friends Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, that perennial search for an answer to Pilate’s question usually takes religious form. “All men need the gods,” as Homer has it, and nothing since then — not Galileo, not Darwin, not the Enlightenment, nothing — has changed the intrinsic impulse to organize stories and create belief systems that give shape to life and offer a vision of what may lie beyond the grave.

More here.

[H/t: Jennifer Ouellette]

(via Kottke):

Brian Switek in Laelaps:

The ability of our species to make and use tools clearly separated us from all other organisms, at least until it was discovered that chimpanzees, too, made and used tools. More than that, studies since the 1960's have confirmed that different populations of chimpanzees have distinctive tool cultures affected by the contingencies of their surroundings, and a recent study published two years ago in PNAS illustrates that these cultures of tool use among non-human primates stretch back at least 4,300 years.

Since September of 1979 primatologists have studied the wild chimpanzees of the Tai National Park in the western African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, and in this particular location the chimpanzees use a variety of tools. Among the most common tools are twigs used to get at different kinds of food (be it honey in a tree or the brains of a monkey they have killed), but the Tai chimps also frequently use stone hammers and anvils to crack open nuts. Naturally this process modifies the stones used in the process, and this made some researchers wonder whether chimpanzees might have an archaeological record all their own.

To find out, scientists Julio Mercader, Huw Barton, Jason Gillespie, Jack Harris, Steven Kuhn, Robert Tyler, and Christophe Boesch looked for signs of ancient chimpanzee sites within the Tai forest. They found three, all of which were within about 200 meters of each other in an area of the park still inhabited by chimpanzees and dated to a span of time between 4,300 years ago and 2,200 years ago. From these sites the researchers gathered a large collection of modified stones, most of which (206 pieces) came from a single site, but the question was whether they were truly looking at a chimpanzee-made assemblage or one that had been artificially made by flowing water.

Drake Bennett in Slate:

Academics, on the other hand, can't seem to get enough of The Wire. Barely two years after the show's final episode aired—and with Simon's new show, Treme, premiering next month on HBO—there have already been academic conferences, essay anthologies, and special issues of journals dedicated to the series. Not content to write about it and discuss it among themselves, academics are starting to teach it, as well. Professors at Harvard, U.C.—Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury are now offering courses on the show.

Interestingly, the classes aren't just in film studies or media studies departments; they're turning up in social science disciplines as well, places where the preferred method of inquiry is the field study or the survey, not the HBO series, even one that is routinely called the best television show ever. Some sociologists and social anthropologists, it turns out, believe The Wire has something to teach their students about poverty, class, bureaucracy, and the social ramifications of economic change.

The academic love affair with The Wire is not, as it turns out, a totally unrequited one. One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson—his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall. Simon has said that Wilson's book When Work Disappears, an exploration of the crippling effects of the loss of blue-collar jobs in American cities, was the inspiration for the show's second season, which focused on Baltimore's struggling dockworkers.

Wilson's class, a seminar, will require students to watch selected episodes of the show, three or more a week, he says. Some seasons, like the fourth, with its portrayal of the way the public school system fails poor children, will get more time than others. Students will also read works of sociology: two books by Wilson, as well as Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street, Sandra Susan Smith's Lone Pursuit, Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America, and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh's Off the Books, works that explore poverty, incarceration, unemployment, and the underground economy.

Asked why he was teaching a class around a TV drama, Wilson said the show makes the concerns of sociologists immediate in a way no work of sociology he knows of ever has.