Martin Rees in New Statesman:

Einstein averred that “the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible”. He was right to be astonished. It seems sur­prising that our minds, which evolved to cope with life on the African savannah and haven’t changed much in 10,000 years, can make sense of phenomena far from our everyday intuitions: the microworld of atoms and the vastness of the cosmos. But our comprehension could one day “hit the buffers”. A monkey is unaware that atoms exist. Likewise, our brainpower may not stretch to the deepest aspects of reality. The bedrock nature of space and time, and the structure of our entire universe, may remain “open frontiers” beyond human grasp. Indeed, our everyday world presents intellectual challenges just as daunting as those of the cosmos and the quantum, and that is where 99 per cent of scientists focus their efforts. Even the smallest insect, with its intricate structure, is far more complex than either an atom or a star.

Everything, however complicated – breaking waves, migrating birds, or tropical forests – is made up of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

1. What Are Fermi Bubbles?

No, this is not a rare digestive disorder. The bubbles are massive, mysterious structures that emanate from the Milky Ways center and extend roughly 20,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. The strange phenomenon, first discovered in 2010, is made up of super-high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray emissions, invisible to the naked eye. Scientists have hypothesized that the gamma rays might be shock waves from stars being consumed by the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

2. Rectangular Galaxy

“Look, up in the sky! It’s a…rectangle?” Earlier this year, astronomers spotted a celestial body, roughly 70 million light-years away, with an appearance that is unique in the visible universe: The galaxy LEDA 074886 is shaped more or less like a rectangle. While most galaxies are shaped like discs, three-dimensional ellipses or irregular blobs, this one seems to have a regular rectangle or diamond-shaped appearance. Some have speculated that the shape results from the collision of two spiral-shaped galaxies, but no one knows for now.

More here.

In the Economist:

So prolific was his output that it was inevitably uneven. Some of the early novels will last the best. They are panoramic, richly-textured reflections on Mexican history, its underlying contradictions of world view between Indian and Spaniard and their sometimes awkward melding in mestizaje and in the country’s revolution of 1910-17. “La Región Más Transparente” (translated as “Where the Air is Clear”), his ambitious debut novel set in Mexico City, reflects on the challenge to Mexican identity posed by modernity. “The Death of Artemio Cruz”, published in 1962, chronicles the descent from the idealism of revolution to the cynicism of the long rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) through the life of a politician and newspaper tycoon enriched by graft.

The creative antagonism of the relationship between Spain and America was an obsession for Mr Fuentes, recurring in “Terra Nostra”, a sprawling historical fantasy, and “The Buried Mirror”, an extended essay. The narrator in “Artemio Cruz” imagines in a baroque church

the façade of the Conquest, severe yet jocund, with one foot in the dead Old World and the other in the New, which did not begin here but on the other side of the ocean: the New World arrived when they arrived; façade of austere walls to protect their avaricious, sensual, happy hearts. You will enter the nave, where all that was Spanish will be conquered by the macabre smiling lavishness of Indian saints, angels, and gods.

Mr Fuentes was a leading figure in the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, a friend of both Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa (as well as of Octavio Paz until their relationship was destroyed by an intemperate attack on Mr Fuentes in Mr Paz’s literary magazine). Many thought it unjust that he alone of these four did not receive the Nobel prize.

He was no magical realist. His inspirations were Cervantes and Borges. His language was complex. He employed multiple voices and styles. His upbringing in two cultures, Latin American and Anglo-Saxon, made him both a Mexican and a universal writer.

Several economist, including Paul Krugman and Mark Weisbrot, have been arguing for a Greek exit from the Eurozone. Here's Nouriel Roubini making the case in Project Syndicate:

The Greek euro tragedy is reaching its final act: it is clear that either this year or next, Greece is highly likely to default on its debt and exit the eurozone.

Postponing the exit after the June election with a new government committed to a variant of the same failed policies (recessionary austerity and structural reforms) will not restore growth and competitiveness. Greece is stuck in a vicious cycle of insolvency, lost competitiveness, external deficits, and ever-deepening depression. The only way to stop it is to begin an orderly default and exit, coordinated and financed by the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund (the “Troika”), that minimizes collateral damage to Greece and the rest of the eurozone.

CommentsGreece’s recent financing package, overseen by the Troika, gave the country much less debt relief than it needed. But, even with significantly more public-debt relief, Greece could not return to growth without rapidly restoring competitiveness. And, without a return to growth, its debt burden will remain unsustainable. But all of the options that might restore competitiveness require real currency depreciation.

CommentsThe first option, a sharp weakening of the euro, is unlikely, as Germany is strong and the ECB is not aggressively easing monetary policy. A rapid reduction in unit labor costs, through structural reforms that increased productivity growth in excess of wages, is just as unlikely. It took Germany ten years to restore its competitiveness this way; Greece cannot remain in a depression for a decade. Likewise, a rapid deflation in prices and wages, known as an “internal devaluation,” would lead to five years of ever-deepening depression.

Yanis Varoufakis on why Greece cannot pull of an Argentina-like decoupling:

When Argentina defaulted and broke the peg, the ill effects on its trading partners (China, Brazil etc.), as well as on the broader macro-economy in which it was functioning, were negligible. If Greece leaves the euro, however, the results will most certainly prove catastrophic for our ‘economic ecology’, and in a never-ending circle of negative feedback, will bite our struggling nation back.

To begin with, Greece must exit not only the Eurozone but also the European Union. This is non-negotiable and unavoidable. For if the Greek state is effectively to confiscate the few euros a citizen has in her bank account and turn them into drachmas of diminishing value, she will be able to take the Greek government to the European Courts and win outright. Additionally, the Greek state will have to introduce border and capital controls to prevent the export of its citizens euro-savings. Thus, Greece will have to get out of the European Union.

Setting aside the domestic ramifications over loss of agricultural subsidies, structural funds and possibly trade (following the possible introduction of trade barriers between Greece and the EU), the effects on the rest of the Eurozone will also be cataclysmic.

Transcript of the commencement address, from The Atlantic:

THE PRESIDENT: I will begin by telling a hard truth: I’m a Columbia college graduate. (Laughter and applause.) I know there can be a little bit of a sibling rivalry here. (Laughter.) But I’m honored nevertheless to be your commencement speaker today — although I’ve got to say, you set a pretty high bar given the past three years. (Applause.) Hillary Clinton — (applause) — Meryl Streep — (applause) — Sheryl Sandberg — these are not easy acts to follow. (Applause.)

But I will point out Hillary is doing an extraordinary job as one of the finest Secretaries of State America has ever had. (Applause.) We gave Meryl the Presidential Medal of Arts and Humanities. (Applause.) Sheryl is not just a good friend; she’s also one of our economic advisers. So it’s like the old saying goes — keep your friends close, and your Barnard commencement speakers even closer. (Applause.) There's wisdom in that. (Laughter.)

Now, the year I graduated — this area looks familiar — (laughter) — the year I graduated was 1983, the first year women were admitted to Columbia. (Applause.) Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. Music was all about Michael and the Moonwalk. (Laughter.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do it! (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: No Moonwalking. (Laughter.) No Moonwalking today. (Laughter.)

More here.

Jag Bhalla in The Wilson Quarterly:

The stories we’ve been told about the role of competition in our evolution have been unnaturally selective. Sound-bite pop science, of the “red in tooth and claw” and “selfish gene” variety, has left out much that is essential to human nature. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm aims to resurrect some of those missing elements in Moral Origins. In his view, cooperation, along with the traits and rules needed to make it work, was as essential to our survival as large brains.

More here.

From Now I Know:

When we think of the term “filibuster,” the definition that springs to mind is the political one, a legislative tactic sometimes used in the United States Senate, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and in many other Westminster-style legislatures. But it has a second, deprecated meaning, one related to military actions. In that sense, Wikipedia defines a filibuster as a person “who engages in a unauthorized military expedition into a foreign country to forment or support a revolution.” The classic example of a filibuster? Meet William Walker, pictured above.

Walker was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1827. A savant of sorts, he graduated from college by age fourteen and went to Europe to study medicine. By his early twenties, Walker had a medical degree and was licensed to practice law in the States. But he wanted more. He wanted to be a king. So he did what anyone would do: he hired himself an army.

Walker's dream was to create a slave ownership-friendly republic which, much like the Republic of Texas before it, would find itself invited to join the U.S. as a full state. At first, he attempted to take control of parts of Baja California in Mexico, and while he was briefly successful, the Mexican government managed to force him out. He returned to California, where he was put on trial for violating the Neutrality Act of 1794, but at the time, western Americans believed strongly in the notion of Manifest Destiny, and Walker was acquitted. He used his retained freedom to take another stab at his dream.

Read more »

Rondel of Merciless Beauty

Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.

Only your word will heal the injury
To my hurt heart, while yet the wound is clean –
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene.

Upon my word, I tell you faithfully
Through life and after death you are my queen;
For with my death the whole truth shall be seen.
Your two great eyes will slay me suddenly;
Their beauty shakes me who was once serene;
Straight through my heart the wound is quick and keen.
.

From The Telegraph:

From Nature:

For many psychologists, the clearest sign that their field was in trouble came, ironically, from a study about premonition. Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, showed student volunteers 48 words and then abruptly asked them to write down as many as they could remember. Next came a practice session: students were given a random subset of the test words and were asked to type them out. Bem found that some students were more likely to remember words in the test if they had later practised them. Effect preceded cause. Bem published his findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) along with eight other experiments¹ providing evidence for what he refers to as “psi”, or psychic effects. There is, needless to say, no shortage of scientists sceptical about his claims. Three research teams independently tried to replicate the effect Bem had reported and, when they could not, they faced serious obstacles to publishing their results. The episode served as a wake-up call. “The realization that some proportion of the findings in the literature simply might not replicate was brought home by the fact that there are more and more of these counterintuitive findings in the literature,” says Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, a mathematical psychologist from the University of Amsterdam.

Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in personal file drawers or circulating in conversations around the water cooler. “There are some experiments that everyone knows don't replicate, but this knowledge doesn't get into the literature,” says Wagenmakers. The publication barrier can be chilling, he adds. “I've seen students spending their entire PhD period trying to replicate a phenomenon, failing, and quitting academia because they had nothing to show for their time.”

More here.

Darcy James Argue is an old friend of 3QD and a ridiculously talented composer and bandleader. We are huge fans of his 18 piece steampunk big band Secret Society, which played at the 2nd 3QD ball. Secret Society’s first album Infernal Machines was released 3 years ago and garnered a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Large Ensemble Album in 2011. Last year, Darcy collaborated with graphic artist Danijel Zezelj in an amazing multimedia piece called Brooklyn Babylon, which debuted at the 2011 BAM Next Wave Festival. Secret Society is now about to record Brooklyn Babylon, the much-anticipated followup to Infernal Machines. You can support them by helping fund their recording over at Kickstarter. (A $10 donation gets you a digital download of the entire album. $100 gets you a signed copy of the Brooklyn Babylon graphic novel, a digital download of the entire album, a signed CD, and a signed limited-edition poster print of Brooklyn Babylon.)

Consider a donation. (Video by Marc Faletti.)

Claudia Dreifus in the New York Times:

You are an M.I.T.-trained mathematician and physicist. How did you come to work on obesity?

In 2004, while on the faculty of the math department at the University of Pittsburgh, I married. My wife is a Johns Hopkins ophthalmologist, and she would not move. So I began looking for work in the Beltway area. Through the grapevine, I heard that the N.I.D.D.K., a branch of the National Institutes of Health, was building up its mathematics laboratory to study obesity. At the time, I knew almost nothing of obesity.

I didn’t even know what a calorie was. I quickly read every scientific paper I could get my hands on.

I could see the facts on the epidemic were quite astounding. Between 1975 and 2005, the average weight of Americans had increased by about 20 pounds. Since the 1970s, the national obesity rate had jumped from around 20 percent to over 30 percent.

The interesting question posed to me when I was hired was, “Why is this happening?”

Why would mathematics have the answer?

Because to do this experimentally would take years. You could find out much more quickly if you did the math.

Now, prior to my coming on staff, the institute had hired a mathematical physiologist, Kevin Hall. Kevin developed a model that could predict how your body composition changed in response to what you ate. He created a math model of a human being and then plugged in all the variables — height, weight, food intake, exercise. The model could predict what a person will weigh, given their body size and what they take in.

However, the model was complicated: hundreds of equations. Kevin and I began working together to boil it down to one simple equation.

More here.

Laura Secor in The New Yorker:

On February 29th, two days before parliamentary elections in Iran, I joined a few dozen foreign correspondents—along with official handlers—in the parking lot of the Laleh, a formerly five-star Tehran hotel with tatty rooms, an ornate lobby, and a surfeit of eyes. We had come to Iran to cover the election, but we were told upon arrival that there would be a compulsory program. Its first order of business was a bus trip to the Alborz Space Center, where we would learn about Iran’s new remote-controlled satellite.

Our bus, clearly in no hurry, rumbled westward along streets of low-slung storefronts until we’d left the capital; it traversed the neighboring city of Karaj, passing a string of industrial plants, and reached a clearing in the midst of sprawl. The space center was a modest glass-fronted building an hour and a half’s drive from any conceivable election activity in Tehran.

The regime had bused us all this way to show us a PowerPoint presentation. No one at the space center seemed to speak English, so one of our handlers stepped in to translate. He said jokingly, “I am not a member of Iran’s space program, so please don’t put that in your reports. I really don’t want to be the next Iranian scientist to be assassinated.” (Since 2010, four scientists connected to Iran’s nuclear program have been killed.)

More here.

From The Guardian:

I'm an expert. Many of us are. My first wife never said the word “love” without a sneer; my present wife is a true believer. So I've looked at love from both sides now. But if Robin Dunbar is to be believed, I really don't know love at all. Remember those PG Tips ads where they dressed chimpanzees as human beings and made them drink tea? This book is rather like those ads in that it confuses the animal and the specifically human. Why do we kiss, it asks. To taste our potential partner's saliva and decide if they are healthy enough to breed with, a bit like dogs sniffing at each other. A bad taste, a bad smell and off we go with someone else. Sometimes the truth is disturbing, but is this really why my wife and I are still kissing after all these years? It seems to me more like a way of having sex with our mouths – which is wonderful if you like sex, and disgusting if you don't. It certainly isn't something a dog would do.

Dunbar believes emotions such as love and social institutions such as marriage are strategies to maximise the reproduction of our genes. In biological terms, the most successful of all humans has been Genghis Khan – around 0.5% of all males alive today are descended from him and his brothers. But the Great Khan's reproductive strategy of mass rape is something of an aberration. Modern societies derive from communities of hunter-gatherers who practised serial monogamy. Love and marriage are the emotional and social expressions of a reproductive strategy that goes back 200,000 years or so. Why do we pair up? Not so that men can help feed and raise children – women would do this better on their own (the time men spent hunting was largely time wasted, unlike the time women spent gathering). Dunbar runs through a range of biological comparisons – wolves (“resolutely monogamous”, but male wolves vomit up food for the mother and pups; unlike many human males they really are good dads), goats, baboons, gorillas – and concludes that we are like marmosets. Women need husbands to protect them from being attacked by other men. Men don't get much out of love and marriage (except, of course, the reproduction of their genes); women get security. But women don't just want security. According to Dunbar (who doesn't see that this is a major hole in his argument), all women would have needed to do is gang together into large groups in order to defend themselves. If only they had kicked out the worthless hunters, who didn't catch enough to feed themselves, let alone anyone else, and only chased big game to show off, they could have managed perfectly well. Why are there no societies of vegetarian Amazons? Presumably because big-game hunting was a useful way of testing men's fitness for reproduction. So love and marriage are the result of a complicated trade off between safe sex and exciting sex. We are marmosets who dream of being gorillas.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The turtle is a closer relative of crocodiles and birds than of lizards and snakes, according to researchers who claim to have solved an age-old riddle in animal evolution. The ancestry of the turtle, which evolved between 200 and 300 million years ago, has caused much scientific squabbling — its physiology suggesting a different branch of the family tree than its genes do. “The evolutionary origin of turtles has confounded the understanding of vertebrate evolution,” the scientists wrote in a paper published Wednesday in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Until the latest study, that is — which claims to have been the biggest of its kind. “Our study conclusively shows that the genetic story is that turtles are more closely related to birds and crocodilians,” research team member Nicholas Crawford from Boston University told AFP. Anatomy and fossil studies of turtles and their reptilian relatives generally place the shelled creatures in the family of lepidosaurs — snakes, lizards and tuataras (rare lizard-like animals). Genetic studies, however, say they have more in common with crocodiles and birds — which fall into the archosaur group of animals that also included the extinct land-bound dinosaurs. The latter finding has now been confirmed by the most exhaustive genetic study on the topic ever done, said Crawford — having gathered “ten times as much” information as previous research efforts.

More here.

A Stranger's Arms

In any dream of confession
I enter the chapel barefoot
Having come straight
From a stranger's arms
On the crooked side of town
Where a song came to us in fragments
From a safe room.
“…down to Georgia
Gonna weep no more.”

It's okay
That I have lost my shoes
And wear only a crepe dress
Although it's 10 days
Before Christmas.
I am warm with wine
And crossing myself
With tepid holy water.

When I speak
To the smoke screen
Of the priest's face
I tell him
How the stars
Drag me down with wishing,
How I am reluctant to be
Only one song
In the whole universe.

by Corrine Dewinter

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The Beastie Boys were a trio, a threesome. Musically, this presents certain difficulties. You could call it a theological problem. How do you unify a trinity? How do you balance the three individual voices without ending up in cacophony?

The fact that the Beastie Boys were rappers made it all the more difficult. Rappers don't sing; they rap. So harmony is out. There will be no blending of voices. No barbershop tricks were going to solve the problem for the Beasties. These three fellows from Manhattan and Brooklyn would have to develop a new style of rapping altogether. The style was perfected on their second album, Paul's Boutique, but it was already present in their debut album License to Ill. Maybe the fact that the Beastie Boys started almost as a gag (three white Jewish kids from New York make a rap album) had a freeing effect on their music. Taking themselves less than seriously, they were able to have a loose approach to rhythm and lyrics. They would finish one another's sentences, combining thoughts and rhymes, as if their three-partite mind was connected bodily and spiritually.

Without exactly intending to, the Beastie Boys helped solve one of rap's biggest problems in the early- to mid-1980s, which was rap's simplistic rhyme scheme. Early rap can often feel like a nursery rhyme set to music. The rhyming is too often obvious and formulaic. The stress is always on the last syllable of the line. No offense to Kurtis Blow (an innovator in his own place and time), but the lyrics to his less-than-fantastic song “Basketball” are a case in point:

Basketball is my favorite sport
I like the way they dribble up and down the court

It is straight iambics all the way through, with a hard caesura and stress to end each line. In a word: boring. (Blow's thoughts on basketball did not exactly kindle the imagination either, but that is another point.) Something had to change.

More here.