From PhysOrg:

Intense, passionate feelings of love can provide amazingly effective pain relief, similar to painkillers or such illicit drugs as cocaine, according to a new Stanford University School of Medicine study.

“When people are in this passionate, all-consuming phase of love, there are significant alterations in their mood that are impacting their experience of pain,” said Sean Mackey, MD, PhD, chief of the Division of Pain Management, associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of the study, which will be published online Oct. 13 in PLoS ONE. “We're beginning to tease apart some of these reward systems in the brain and how they influence pain. These are very deep, old systems in our brain that involve dopamine — a primary neurotransmitter that influences mood, reward and motivation.” Scientists aren't quite yet ready to tell patients with chronic pain to throw out the painkillers and replace them with a passionate love affair; rather, the hope is that a better understanding of these neural-rewards pathways that get triggered by love could lead to new methods for producing pain relief.

More here.

Human Chain is a book that is serious about its own visionary burden. Like Caolite inside his fairy hill, the poet remembers being in a dugout “under the hill, out of the day / But faced towards the daylight, holding hands” where an imagined camera angle will “Discover us against weird brightness”. The light here, and in other poems, is that of “the dome of the sky” over Virgil’s Lethe, and some of the finest achievements in the volume look straight into that efflorescence, not least the central sequence, “Route 110”, in which the Aeneid ghosts memories of Heaney’s home and youth, ending with “the age of births”, where a grandchild is “one / Whose long wait on the shaded bank is ended”. Family, and the love in a family, provide Heaney with his own governing pietas. The human chain of the title is partly that formed by the generations, and if this gives a poignancy to the poet’s vivid evocations of memory – the kinds of long look at the past which he knows can feel like a last look – it also makes triumphant sense of the centrality of the Virgilian father to Heaney’s imaginative scheme. Heaney knows that if memory is a way of meeting the paternal shade again, it is at the same time the confirmation of ultimate parting – that the riverbank field may offer a glimpse of the future, in the generations to come, but must also confirm the finality of oblivion in the waters of Lethe.

more from Peter McDonald at the TLS here.

From his childhood in segregated Mobile, Alabama, to his run-ins with a nay-saying scientific establishment, the engineer Lonnie Johnson has never paid much heed to those who told him what he could and couldn’t accomplish. Best known for creating the state-of-the-art Super Soaker squirt gun, Johnson believes he now holds the key to affordable solar power.

Logan Ward in The Atlantic:

In March 2003, the independent inventor Lonnie Johnson faced a roomful of high-level military scientists at the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Virginia. Johnson had traveled there from his home in Atlanta, seeking research funding for an advanced heat engine he calls the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter, or JTEC (pronounced “jay-tek”). At the time, the JTEC was only a set of mathematical equations and the beginnings of a prototype, but Johnson had made the tantalizing claim that his device would be able to turn solar heat into electricity with twice the efficiency of a photovoltaic cell, and the Office of Naval Research wanted to hear more.

Projected onto the wall was a PowerPoint collage summing up some highlights of Johnson’s career: risk assessment he’d done for the space shuttle Atlantis; work on the nuclear power source for NASA’s Galileo spacecraft; engineering help on the tests that led to the first flight of the B-2 stealth bomber; the development of an energy-dense ceramic battery; and the invention of a remarkable, game-changing weapon that had made him millions of dollars—a weapon that at least one of the men in the room, the father of two small children, recognized immediately as the Super Soaker squirt gun.

Mild-mannered and bespectacled, Johnson opened his presentation by describing the idea behind the JTEC. The device, he explained, would split hydrogen atoms into protons and electrons, and in so doing would convert heat into electricity. Most radically, it would do so without the help of any moving parts.

More here.

Sari Nusseibeh and Amos Oz were jointly awarded the Siegfried Unseld Prize in Berlin on September 28, 2010. “A Tragic Struggle” and “The Magic Within Us” are drawn from their acceptance speeches.

From the New York Review of Books:

A Tragic Struggle by Amos Oz

When I was small my parents told me: One day, not during our lifetimes but during yours, our Jerusalem will develop into a real city. I didn’t understand what they were telling me. Jerusalem was the only real city in my life then—even Tel Aviv was just a dream. But today I know that when my parents said “real city,” they meant a city with a river in the middle and bridges over it—a European city. And in Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s they nearly succeeded in creating a little Europe, with good manners—Frau Doktor and Herr Direktor, peace and quiet between two and four in the afternoon, and red shingled roofs. I know that my parents’ love for Europe is called unrequited love. And I know that this feeling of love unrequited by the land of one’s birth is also felt by millions of Israeli Jews who fled or were expelled from Islamic countries—from Iraq, Morocco, and Egypt. Jewish Israel is a refugee camp. Palestine is also a refugee camp.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a tragic struggle between two victims of Europe—the Arabs were the victims of imperialism, colonialism, repression, and humiliation. The Jews were the victims of discrimination, persecution, and finally of a genocide without parallel in history. On the face of it, two victims, especially two victims of the same oppressor, should become brothers. But the truth, both when it comes to individuals and when it comes to countries, is that some of the worst fights break out between two victims of the same oppressor. The two sons of an abusive father will each see in his brother the face of his cruel father.

More here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Gottlob Frege was one of the founders of the movement known as analytic philosophy. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Frege expert Michael Dummett explains why he is so important for philosophy.

Listen to Michael Dummett on Frege (13 mins 20 secs)

Click on the grey panel below to hear a short anecdote: Michael Dummett recalls meeting Ludwig Wittgenstein for the first and only time:

When Dummett met Wittgenstein (1min 27 secs)

Simon Tay in Foreign Affairs:

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the economies of North America and Europe remain fragile while those of Asia continue to grow. This is especially true in the cases of China and India, which both boast near double-digit rates of growth and have therefore inspired confidence around the region. But too many commentators discuss China and India with breathless admiration — extrapolating, for example, that growth will continue at a breakneck pace for decades. In doing so, they treat emerging economies as if they were already world powers, echoing the hubris that preceded the Asian currency crisis of 1997-98.

Pranab Bardhan's Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India is a welcome corrective to that view. It succinctly summarizes the challenges facing China and India, including environmental degradation, unfavorable demographics, poor infrastructure, and social inequality — threats that the leaders of China and India understand. Even as others have lavished praise on China, and Chinese citizens have grown stridently nationalistic, Chinese President Hu Jintao and others in the current leadership have been cautionary. As Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in 2007, the country's development is “unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” In India, meanwhile, although the government has orchestrated campaigns to highlight the country's growth and reform, its plans to develop roads and other infrastructure are a prominent and expensive recognition of the country's enduring gaps.

A more contentious claim offered by Bardhan is that internal reform — not the global market — has been the key driver of both countries' growth. Rather than focusing on India's information technology sector or China's export-led industrialization, Bardhan highlights less glamorous domestic sectors. Examining the rural economy — in which a majority of Chinese and Indians work — he concludes that growth is driven from below. He shows, for example, how China's steepest reductions in poverty had already happened by the mid-1980s, before the country began attracting sizable foreign trade and investment. The main causes of China's decline in poverty, Bardhan argues, were investments in infrastructure and reforms to town and village enterprises, which are predominantly agricultural.

The book thus suggests that the fates of China and India are in their own hands — and do not depend on the West, as many assume. If that is correct, then these giants can continue to grow despite the global economic crisis, towing much of Asia along with them. This would have great implications for geopolitics and economics. To the contrary, however, neither China nor India can ignore external conditions.

Valeriu Nicolae in Eurozine:

On 28 July, French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced a series of measures to deal with Roma communities in France. These include plans to shut down around 300 illegal camps, the expulsion from France of all Roma from Romania and Bulgaria who have committed public offences, an exchange of policemen between France and Romania, and targeted checks by the fiscal authorities on Roma who possess expensive SUVs.

Two days later, in a declaration on the Roma, Sarkozy said he wanted to revoke the French citizenship of immigrants with French passports who endanger the life of police officers. The government then started to fly Roma back to Romania. Most were ineptly “bribed” not to return with euro 300, a measure that makes little sense given that most of these Roma, just as high-ranking French officials, will promise whatever it takes to take advantage of whatever is on offer. The collection of biometric data in an effort to ensure Roma do not return to France is both expensive and irrelevant.

Blatant racism

Targeting Roma alone – or, indeed, migrants from Romania, Bulgaria or elsewhere – cannot be seen as anything but racist. If the same policies were applied equally to all French citizens involved in cases of bribery, nepotism, corruption, financial mischief, embezzlement – fancy words for robbery and other crimes – a good part of the French political class would have to be expelled or lose their citizenship.

If we believe French media coverage of the Bettencourt scandal, in which it is alleged that the French President received campaign funds above the legal limit, even the president himself might be sent back to Hungary or Greece. Former junior ministers in his cabinet, one of whom flew to Martinique on a charter jet for just over euro 116 000, and another who bought over euro 12 000 worth of cigars, all paid for with public money, might also be forced to emigrate if the French government were to treat all criminals equally.

My Legacy

The business man the acquirer vast,
After assiduous years surveying results, preparing for
…… departure,
Devises house and lands to his children, bequeaths stocks,
…… goods, funds for school or hospital,
Leaves money to certain companions to buy tokens,
…… souvenirs of gems and gold.

But, I, my life surveying, closing,
With nothing to show to devise from its idle years,
Nor houses nor lands, nor tokens of gems or gold for my
……. friends,
Yet certain remembrances of the war for you, and after you,
And little souvenirs of camps and soldiers, with my love,
I bind together and bequeath in this bundle of songs.

by Walt Whitman
from Walt Whitman Complete Poetry and Collected Prose
Viking Press, 1982

From Nature:

In an approach that many doctors and scientists hope will form the medical care of the future, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has for the past year and a half been offering people with cancer a novel diagnostic test. Instead of assessing tumours for a single mutation that will indicate whether a drug is likely to work or not, the hospital tests patients for some 150 mutations in more than a dozen cancer-causing genes, with the results being used to guide novel treatments, clinical trials and basic research. This form of personalized medicine tailors treatments on the basis of the molecular and genetic characteristics of a patient's cancer cells, potentially improving the treatment's outcome.

Now Britain is set to test whether an entire health-care system is ready for the approach. Plans were unveiled this week to deploy broad genetic testing for selected cancer patients in Britain's government-run health-care provider, the National Health Service (NHS). This form of 'stratified medicine' uses genetic information to group patients according to their likely response to a particular treatment.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Early humans may have evolved as prey animals rather than as predators, suggest the remains of our prehistoric primate ancestors that were devoured by hungry birds and carnivorous mammals. The discovery of multiple de-fleshed, chomped and gnawed bones from the extinct primates, which lived 16 to 20 million years ago on Rusinga Island, Kenya, was announced today at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's 70th Anniversary Meeting in Pittsburgh.

At least one of the devoured primates, an early ape called Proconsul, is thought to have been an ancestor to both modern humans and chimpanzees. It, and other primates on the island, were also apparently good eats for numerous predators. “I have observed multiple tooth pits and probable beak marks on these fossil primates, which are direct evidence for creodonts and raptors consuming these primates,” researcher Kirsten Jenkins told Discovery News.

More here.

Perfect translation, in the common-sense fantasy of one-to-one correspondence, is of course impossible. Even the simplest message, moved from one language to another, inevitably gets warped: It loses its music, its cultural resonance, and the special pace at which it surrenders its information. This warpage is magnified, by a factor of roughly 10 million, in the case of Madame Bovary. Flaubert fetishized style; he wrote slowly and revised endlessly. He worked on the novel for nearly five laborious years, and his letters from the period are a running commentary of agony. “Writing this book,” he wrote, “I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.” At that time, the loose-baggy-monster tradition of the novel was still in ascendance: Bovary’s contemporaries include Moby-Dick, Bleak House, and Les Misérables. Flaubert’s novel, however, demonstrates the kind of perfect control seen more often in poetry: seamless sentences that unite, seamlessly, into paragraphs, which then flow seamlessly into episodes and chapters—craftsmanship so advanced that the craftsmanship disappears. As Michael Dirda once put it, “You can shake Madame Bovary and nothing will fall out.”

more from Sam Anderson at New York Magazine here.

The Vagankovo cemetery is close to the tracks leading to the Belorussian Station. Between the trunks of the cemetery maples you can glimpse trains setting out for Warsaw and Berlin. You can see the blue Moscow-Minsk expresses and the shining windows of restaurant cars. You can hear the quiet hiss of suburban trains and the earth-shaking rumble of heavy goods trains. The Vagankovo cemetery is close to the main road to Zvenigorod, with its cars and vans full of clutter being transported to dachas. The Vagankovo cemetery is also close to the Vagankovo market. From up in the sky comes the racket of helicopters. From the station comes a resonant voice – a train controller giving clipped, precise instructions about the composition of trains. While in the cemetery there is eternal peace, eternal rest.

more from this extraction from Vasily Grossman’s The Road at Literary Review here.

It was in the living room. My father was reading the newspaper. I was reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes sat up with a whistle. “By Jove, Peterson!” said he, “this is treasure trove indeed. I suppose you know what you have got?” “A diamond, sir? A precious stone. It cuts into glass as though it were putty.” “It’s more than a precious stone. It is the precious stone.” “Not the Countess of Morcar’s blue carbuncle!” I ejaculated. I looked up from my book. “Hey, Dad.” “Hmm?” “What does ‘ejaculate’ mean?” He put down the newspaper and sighed. I never did find out who stole the Countess’s blue carbuncle. Kids today have different options. “You already know a lot about your penis,” Karen Gravelle begins, in “What’s Going on Down There?: Answers to Questions Boys Find Hard to Ask.” In “Sex, Puberty, and All That Stuff: A Guide to Growing Up,” Jacqui Bailey writes, “Whether her hymen is holey or whole, a girl is always a virgin if she has not had sexual intercourse.” Lynda Madaras’s “On Your Mark, Get Set, Grow!” includes a chapter subtitled “All About Erections,” although I’m pretty sure the Bette Davis joke is lost on her readers: they’re in fourth grade.

more from Jill Lepore at The New Yorker here.

Deborah M. Gordon in the Boston Review:

It is easy to imagine that the lives of the ants resemble our own. An ant might feel, as people sometimes do, lost in the crowd. If you look at a city from far away, you see a hive of activity: people going back and forth from home to job and collecting packages of food and things produced by other people, things to be stored in their chambers or turned into garbage taken away by other people. Each person is a tiny speck in the flow of a system that no one has much power to change.

Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant colonies of fable and film often are invested with the hierarchical organization characteristic of human societies, a real ant colony operates without direction or management. New research is showing us how ant colonies get things done without anyone being in charge. Ants, it turns out, have much to teach us about the decentralized networks that operate in many biological systems, in which local interactions produce global behavior, without the guidance of any central intelligence or authority.

Many of our stories about ants concern how hard they work and how they are reconciled to the anomie of life as a pawn in a larger system. Sometimes we imagine that the ants like it that way. Proverbs 6:6 admonishes the sluggard to emulate the hard-working ants. In Aesop’s fables, the ants show perseverance and foresight. Homer’s Iliad tells of a race of myrmidons, ants transformed by Zeus into selfless human soldiers. T. H. White, writing during the Cold War, sent the young King Arthur into an ant colony that is a totalitarian hell, with microphones blaring commands.

More here.

Physics can account not only for how the universe works but for why it is there at all. No divine help required. It is quantum physics all the way down—accompanied by just the right lot of elementary particle physics and string theory. The archbishop of Canterbury, with the concurrence of eminent colleagues across the religious spectrum, begs to differ with Hawking. “Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the universe,” he announced. But tell that to Pope Pius XII, who half a century ago proclaimed support for the “fiat lux” in the early glimmers of a big-bang cosmology. Or tell it to the group of Cambridge physicists around the same time who were pushing for a no-first-moment account: a steady-state cosmology that would wipe out the big bang, undermining an overly religious moment of creation. Once you start reading God’s presence—or his absence—into the ever-evolving equations of physics, it is hard to keep him from coming and going, creating a stir in the process. Hawking, who briefly left the door open for the mind of God two decades ago, surely knew he would stir an outcry by slamming it shut. In fact, it was no doubt part of his grand design.

more from Peter Galison at Slate here.

More recent in what has been named “ordeal art” was the late spring retrospective of Marina Abramovic at the Museum of Modern Art; an exhibition titled “The Artist is Present,” and the backdrop to a history-making endurance performance by Abramovic of the same name. For this, the longest performance staged in a museum, the artist sat motionless and silent eight to ten hours a day for nearly three months at the center of MoMA’s atrium. A preceding interview with the New York Observer stated that “Ms. Abramovic . . . expects her new piece to be one of the most physically and mentally punishing pieces she has ever undertaken” [1] — a far more meaningful statement taken in the context of her oeuvre. In 1973, Abramovic gave her first performance, Rhythm 10, which involved stabbing her fingers twenty times. For Rhythm 2, the artist swallowed psychopharmaceuticals to induce seizures and stupor. In 2004, for The House with an Ocean View, she fasted on display for twelve days, housed within three massive squares bolted to the interior of the Sean Kelly Gallery. Although the performances may look like irrational feats of masochism, Abramovic’s work is rooted in ancient religious and philosophic traditions.

more from Amanda Johnson at Curator here.

America is disappointed. The economic recovery, such as it is, has produced few jobs and little growth, the war in Afghanistan is going poorly, and Washington’s political culture, which President Obama took office promising to reform, is as vitriolic and paralyzed as ever. As a supporter put it to Obama at a Sept. 20 town hall meeting, ”I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I’m one of those people. And I’m waiting, sir. I’m waiting.” There’s no question that the president has failed to live up to the expectations of many of his supporters–expectations he created with his empyrean campaign rhetoric. But it turns out that human beings are easy to disappoint. Research suggests that even when people know that someone has nothing but bad options to choose from, they still blame the decider for a bad outcome. And while disappointment and regret and even anger are often spoken about in similar terms, psychologists see them as distinct emotions, triggered by different sorts of events and motivating us to act in different ways. Even disappointment itself comes in flavors: Being disappointed with a person feels different from being disappointed with an outcome, and demands a different response.

more from Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe here.

From The Telegraph: