Salman Rushdie in The Guardian:

The surface of The Remains of the Day is almost perfectly still. Stevens, a butler well past his prime, is on a week's motoring holiday in the West Country. He tootles around, taking in the sights and encountering a series of green-and-pleasant country folk who seem to have escaped from one of those English films of the 1950s in which the lower orders doff their caps and behave with respect towards a gent with properly creased trousers and flattened vowels. It is, in fact, July 1956 – the month in which Nasser's nationalisation of the Suez Canal triggered the Suez Crisis – but such contemporaneities barely impinge upon the text. (Ishiguro's first novel, A Pale View of Hills, was set in post-war Nagasaki but never mentioned the bomb. The Remains of the Day ignores Suez, even though that débâcle marked the end of the kind of Britain whose passing is a central subject of the novel.)

Nothing much happens. The high point of Mr Stevens's little outing is his visit to Miss Kenton, the former housekeeper at Darlington Hall, the great house to which Stevens is still attached as “part of the package”, even though ownership has passed from Lord Darlington to a jovial American named Farraday who has a disconcerting tendency to banter. Stevens hopes to persuade Miss Kenton to return to the hall. His hopes come to nothing. He makes his way home. Tiny events; but why, then, is the ageing manservant to be found, near the end of his holiday, weeping before a complete stranger on the pier at Weymouth? Why, when the stranger tells him that he ought to put his feet up and enjoy the evening of his life, is it so hard for Stevens to accept such sensible, if banal, advice? What has blighted the remains of his day?

More here.

John Quiggin in Crooked Timber (image from Wikimedia Commons):

One of the standard ploys in journalism, marketing and political commentary is the generation game. The basic idea is to label a generation ‘X’ or ‘Y’, then dissect its attitudes, culture, and relationship with other generations. The most famous generation, of course, is that of the Baby Boomers, born between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, and their most enduring contribution to the generation gap is the ‘Generation Gap’ between children and their parents.

The generation game is played with particular vigour in cultural commentary, but its reach seems to be extending all the time. No US Presidential election would now be complete without voluminous commentary on the generational backgrounds of the contenders. There is even a branch of economics called generational accounting, which is supposed to show whether one generation is subsidising another through the tax and welfare system.

At first sight, discussion of this kind can carry with it an air of fresh insight, but most of it stales rapidly. Much of what passes for discussion about the merits or otherwise of particular generations is little more than a repetition of unchanging formulas about different age groups Ð the moral degeneration of the young, the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old, and so on.

Demographers have a word (or rather two words) for this. They distinguish between age effects and cohort effects. The group of people born in a given period, say a year or a decade, is called a cohort. Members of a cohort have things in common because they have shared common experiences through their lives. But, at any given point in time, when members of the cohort are at some particular age, they share things in common with the experience of earlier and later generations when they were at the same age.

Daniel Mason in Lapham's Quarterly:

In his 1943 study of the psychology of medicine men, historian Erwin Ackerknecht surveyed a vast anthropological literature and distinguished between two patterns of initiation into the healing arts. For one group, medical knowledge was obtained through carefully practiced ritual, induced by fasting, drugs, or ceremonies invoking spirits who could lead the healer to a cure. For the second, Ackerknecht cited Russian travelers to Siberia, who had reported rituals among the Yakuts that were anything but methodical:

He who is to become a shaman begins to rage like a raving madman. He suddenly utters incoherent words, falls unconscious, runs through the forests, lives on the bark of trees, throws himself into fire and water, lays hold on weapons and wounds himself, in such ways that his family is obliged to keep watch on him.

Despite the ubiquity of the word shaman today, its diffusion is recent. It comes from saman, from the Tungus—known today as the Evenk—people of Siberia, and the first outsiders to take detailed note were exiled Russian intellectuals. After a trickle of reports in the late nineteenth century, shamanism arrived in the West in two principal waves: during the Russo-American cooperation in the 1897-1902 Jesup North Pacific Expedition, and later, in more popular works, describing convulsive “pre-shamanic psychosis” as a disease unique to the North Asian steppes. From then, the word proved infectious, acquiring the hazy meaning of any healer who works by mysterious means. Seeking a definition for his monumental survey, Shamanism, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade worried over these loose boundaries between medicine man, sorcerer, medium, physician. At the same time, he felt there was an essence—an archaic “technique of ecstasy”—that could be found in a spectrum of practices from around the world.

Ronald K. Fried interviews the writer in Tottenville Review:

INTERVIEWER

Critics have questioned your choice—or your right, really—to write about what used to be called the underclass. But isn’t that what urban novelists have always done—from Balzac through Dickens and Bellow? Is there something censorious about this criticism?

MARTIN AMIS

Not only censorious, I think self-righteous is a better word. I think it’s also primitive and illiterate. Writers have always had this freedom. I’ve been doing that for forty years without being challenged once on it. So I just think it was a new touchiness and also the search for self-righteousness.

INTERVIEWER

Is it a species of political correctness—telling the novelist what he can and cannot write about?

MARTIN AMIS

I don’t know. It’s weird isn’t it? Because you’d think that what we call political correctness had peaked some time ago, and to get this now, it’s very odd. Particularly since I’ve been doing it for so long—and during that high noon of PC—without it coming up. My slogan is writing is freedom and to hell with everything else.

INTERVIEWER

Lionel Asbo follows The Pregnant Widow, which had autobiographical elements, while the new novel describes characters who are more outside your immediate experience. Does this require a different part of your imagination—a different set of muscles?

MARTIN AMIS

Well, The Pregnant Widow started life as an autobiographical novel and I wasted a lot of time trying to do it and it was just completely dead. And it was illuminating in a way. I realized that what gives a novel life is not verisimilitude or truth to life. On the contrary, only very few novelists have been able to write from their own lives, Saul Bellow being the towering example. But most of us can’t do it that way. Bellow found a way of being universal in writing about things quite close to his own life, whereas we have to search for universality by a different route.

Hiromi Lorraine Sakata in Outlook India:

Many of us in the Northwest feel a certain privileged connection with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan because of his six-month residency at the University of Washington Ethnomusicology Program from September 1992 to March 1993. Students and staff from across campus registered for his classes, and others from off-campus and even out-of-state came to register for his classes through University Extension, just for the chance to sit with him in small groups to learn qawwali.

Those were heady days for many of us in Seattle, when Nusrat could be seen walking around the block in his Adidas athletic clothes, at a public swimming pool with some of his students, riding one of the Washington State ferries, or shopping at a local Pakistani-Indian grocery store where surprised customers recognized him, spoke to him, and sent him gifts of halaal lamb, rice, etc. His 5-bedroom home in Lake City was always full of friends, students, family, musicians, fans and promoters. Nusrat enjoyed his relative anonymity in Seattle which permitted him to do what he could never dream of doing in Pakistan.

Nusrat’s decision to accept his teaching position at the University of Washington was not an easy one to make. On the negative side was the fact that the position was for Nusrat alone, not for his entire qawwali party. The livelihood of approximately 100 people (families of his ensemble) depended on the performances of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and his Party. How could he take six months out of his full performance schedule and still help the members of his ensemble maintain their livelihood? On the positive side was the full health care benefits provided to full-time faculty members. Even his ensemble members could see that Nusrat needed the time to seek special medical attention at a top-rated medical facility.

More here. [Thanks to Raghu Desikan.]

From Smithsonian:

Not long ago, Dr. Mohamed Babu, of Mysore, South India, noticed something strange about the ants scurrying around on the floor of his kitchen: After drinking some spilled milk, their abdomens turned white. Realizing the insects’ bodies were transparent, he got an idea for a stunning set of photographs, he told the Daily Mail.

Mixing different varieties of food coloring along with sugar, water and a waxy base, he set out small droplets of liquid on a white plastic sheet outside in his garden and let the ants do the rest. “As the ant’s abdomen is semi-transparent, the ants gain the colors as they sip the liquid,” he said.

More here.

From Nature:

A trio of researchers has encoded a draft of a whole book into DNA. The 5.27-megabit tome contains 53,246 words, 11 JPG image files and a JavaScript program, making it the largest piece of non-biological data ever stored in this way. DNA has the potential to store huge amounts of information. In theory, two bits of data can be incorporated per nucleotide — the single base unit of a DNA string — so each gram of the double-stranded molecule could store 455 exabytes of data (1 exabyte is 10¹⁸ bytes). Such dense packing outstrips inorganic data-storage devices such as flash memory, hard disks or even storage based on quantum-computing methods. The book, which is fittingly a treatise on synthetic biology, was encoded by geneticists George Church and Sriram Kosuri at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Boston, Massachusetts, and Yuan Gao, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. They report their work in Science¹ this week.

It marks a significant gain on previous projects — the largest of which encoded less than one-six-hundredth of the data — but organic flash drives are still many years away. There are a number of reasons why the method is not practical for everyday use. For example, both storing and retrieving information currently require several days of lab work, spent either synthesizing DNA from scratch or sequencing it to read the data. The work illustrates the potential of nonconventional approaches, says Stuart Parkin, who is developing dense forms of inorganic storage media at the IBM-Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center in San Jose, California. “You could say that the physical sciences have exhausted the playground of concepts, and we now need to go beyond that world,” he says. “This coupling of the biological world to the physical world will lead to some very interesting storage devices in the next decade.”

More here.

What of the animal that kills itself,
How long may it reign?
— Anon

Trouble Spot: General Post Office, 1986

Here, father, is this where it started?
Here we became strangers to each other?
Was it here?

You thought most of what we said was nonsense –
Even when we agreed with you:
Inheritors of the event who never knew the smell
Of gunpowder, or of terror,
Who never fired a shot in anger,
Worse yet,
Never stood up to one . . .

We retreated from you into the Pale of Irish;
That was our familiar terre guerre,
And the Ulsterman
In you
Could not follow our tracks
Or tame our barbarism –
Spenser’s civilitie
Had beguiled you.

We took after our mother’s tribe:
The high-blown ways of Munster;
You were the recalcitrant old badger
Run to ground by howling spaniels.

In later years, we tried again;
You learned to be charitable,
But we still had to tread carefully;
Your intelligence and sense of justice
Never practised deception;
I am the same age as the state
And neither turned out as you wished . . .

In this place, father, you are the unknown
Youth who went missing –
Neglect and awkwardness hide the key from my mind –
But I hear now the Northern accent
Of the elder man I loved with hard devotion:
Do you remember the rebuke you delivered
Before it became fashionable?
You spoke thus:

I see no cause for rejoicing
That Irishmen once again
Are killing other Irishmen
On the streets of Belfast.
.
.
by Máire Mhac an tSaoi
from The Miraculous Parish / An Paróiste Míorúilteach
O'Brien Press / Cló Iar-Chonnacht, Dublin, 2011
© Translation: 2011, Louis de Paor

If walks are themselves narratives, then their literature has to beguile the reader with an illusion of grounded actuality, of honest movement through space and time, or it loses us. Pain is part of the story, as it was (and still is) for pilgrims: in the “porcelain snow” of Tibet near the sacred mountain of Minya Konka, an altitude-sick Macfarlane follows routes sacred for thousands of years, where worshippers have performed the kora – body-length prostrations – “for thirty-two miles of tough rocky path, over the 18,000-foot Drolma pass”. Macfarlane’s own account of “pedestrian life at 15,000 feet” – all “ragged breathing” and cold felt in the bone – may not match the rigours of the polar explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s masterpiece The Worst Journey in the World (1922), the most extraordinary and compellingly written slog of them all, but it makes the pilgrims’ efforts seem yet more remarkable.

more from Adam Thorpe at the TLS here.

In sculpture, the inert becomes animate, or if not actually animate, certainly worked through by mind, infused with life, meaning and finality by mind. Although Aristotle’s example is of a sculptor working in bronze, maybe the paradigm sculptural case is the worker in stone. The typical sculptural instruments are chisel, hammer, knife, capable both of strength, necessarily so, but also delicacy. Aristotle would, of course, have known this well enough. Greek temples were virtual repositories of stone sculpture, both inside, with colossal statues of Athene, Zeus and other gods, and outside, as part of the architecture. And there were, of course, the kouroi, those astonishing marble figures, often life-sized, their faces and figures human in a way Egyptian sculpture is not, but without the illusionistic smoothness and softness of Hellenistic sculpture.

more from Anthony O’Hear at the Fortnightly Review here.

The café is synonymous with Egyptian society and, more generally, the Arab world. Unlike their European counterparts, Egyptian cafes are chaotic places of informal and raw discussion. Café Riche, once the intellectual and literary hangout of Cairo, awoke from its long slumber as a tourist attraction, with what seemed like eternal appeal, during last year’s revolution. The wood paneling and white tablecloths speak to a forgotten Cairo era; one unashamed of its colonial pedigree, catering to foreign journalists replete with a selection of imported alcohol. These days, in post-revolutionary, perhaps revolutionary Cairo, Egyptian intellectuals and activists once again filter in for interviews in various languages beneath the high ceilings of the cafe.

more from Joseph Dana at the LA Review of Books here.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:

This is not an unbiased piece. I became sceptical of the cult of Arundhati Roy at a time when the dams on the Narmada were still being debated. Even in agreement I was taken aback by the easy generalisations and overdose of capitalised words that marked her piece, The Greater Common Good. It seemed to me, though, that the real problems with her writing went much deeper, and these became apparent only once the breathlessness of the prose was set aside.

In a crucial section of the essay, she claims:

According to a detailed study of 54 Large Dams done by the Indian Institute of Public Administration, the average number of people displaced by a Large Dam is 44,182. Admittedly, 54 dams out of 3,300 is not a big enough sample. But since it’s all we have, let’s try and do some rough arithmetic. A first draft. To err on the side of caution, let’s halve the number of people. Or, let’s err on the side of abundant caution and take an average of just 10,000 people per Large Dam. It’s an improbably low figure, I know, but …never mind. Whip out your calculators. 3,300 x 10,000 = 33 million. That’s what it works out to. Thirty-three million people. Displaced by big dams alone in the last fifty years. What about those that have been displaced by the thousands of other Development Projects? At a private lecture, N.C. Saxena, Secretary to the Planning Commission, said he thought the number was in the region of 50 million (of which 40 million were displaced by dams). We daren’t say so, because it isn’t official. It isn’t official because we daren’t say so. You have to murmur it for fear of being accused of hyperbole. You have to whisper it to yourself, because it really does sound unbelievable. It can’t be, I’ve been telling myself. I must have got the zeroes muddled. It can’t be true. I barely have the courage to say it aloud. To run the risk of sounding like a ‘sixties hippie dropping acid (“It’s the System, man!”), or a paranoid schizophrenic with a persecution complex. But it is the System, man. What else can it be?

Fifty million people.

Go on, Government, quibble. Bargain. Beat it down. Say something.

I feel like someone who’s just stumbled on a mass grave.

Rhetoric can win you the Booker, it can’t help you pass a course in elementary statistics.

The initial IIPA report she cites considers an average of 44,000 persons displaced per large dam. But it seems to have considered only the very largest of the dams in India, since even a dam like Bhakra displaced about 40,000 people. Roy, however, applies this figure to all of India’s ‘large’ dams, while condescending to reduce the number by a fourth to arrive at a figure of 10,000 per large dam.

She claimed, ‘It’s an improbably low figure, I know…’ Actually, it is an improbably large figure. The term ‘large’ she uses, applies to all dams whose height exceeds 15 metres. As far as displacement of people is concerned, what really matters is the area submerged by a dam, not its height. The vast majority of her ‘large’ dams have a reservoir area of less than 5 sq km, and to say each such dam displaces 10,000 people is a travesty.

More here.

Roald Hoffmann in American Scientist:

My first encounter with H₂ was typical for a boy in the age of chemistry sets that had some zing to them. My set, made by A. C. Gilbert Co., contained some powdered zinc. It had no acids, but it taught you to generate them from chemicals it included (for instance HCl from NaHSO₄ and NH₄Cl), or—the manual said—you could buy a small quantity from your local apothecary. Perhaps I got it there, asking politely for the acid in my best accented English a year or so after coming to Brooklyn from Europe. I poured some of the dilute acid on the zinc in a test tube, watched it bubble away, lit (with some fear) a match and heard that distinct pop.

Next, I encountered the gas, Henry Cavendish’s inflammable air, in a high school electrolysis experiment. We ran a current through water with a little salt dissolved in it, collected the unequal volumes of gases formed, each trapped in an inverted tube. Both gases gave small pyrotechnic pleasures—one, hydrogen, with that satisfying pop when a newly extinguished splint came near it; the other, oxygen, revived exuberantly the flame of the same splint.

Primo Levi, in an early chapter in his marvelous The Periodic Table, describes an initiation into chemistry that features the same experiment, with more fearsome results:

I carefully lifted the cathode jar and holding it with its open end down, lit a match and brought it close. There was an explosion, small but sharp and angry, the jar burst into splinters (luckily, I was holding it level with my chest and not higher) and there remained in my hand, as a sarcastic symbol, the glass ring of the bottom.… It was indeed hydrogen, therefore: the same element that burns in the sun and stars, and from whose condensations the universes are formed in eternal silence.

More here.

Patrick Clark in the New York Observer:

“The unethical tendency is a human universal,” said Paul Piff, a post-doctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. But not everyone bends and breaks the rules equally.

Mr. Piff’s research shows that the rich are more likely to cut off other drivers, or cheat in games of chance, and subjects who identified greed as a positive value were more likely to cheat. But greed isn’t the only factor. Creative people are more likely to cheat, he told us, as are the highly educated.

Unethical behavior seems to be driven by rank—the more status you have, the less dependent you’re likely to be on social relationships—and self-focus. Meanwhile, watching other people cheat changes our understanding of what’s socially acceptable. Successful people are more likely to cheat, increasing the chances that they’ll become still more successful. And, we suppose, increasing the chances that they’ll be surrounded by successful people who are more likely to cheat themselves.

“It’s something called social proof, and it’s one of the strongest forces in society,” said Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and the author of The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, a book-length work on the motivations for cheating.

Which might explain why it’s so rare to find a lone lawbreaker. If one Libor submitter was rigging rates for traders, it’s only natural that the others would feel entitled to a little bit of Bollinger.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

From Scientific American:

The brain can be a messy place. Thankfully, it has good plumbing: Scientists have just discovered a cleansing river inside the brain, a fluid stream that might be enlisted to flush away the buildup of proteins associated with Alzheimer's, Huntington's and other neurodegenerative disorders. The researchers, based at the University of Rochester (U.R.), University of Oslo and Stony Brook University, describe this new system in the journal Science Translational Medicine today. The study adds to the evidence that the star-shaped cells called astrocytes play a leading role in keeping the nervous system in good working order.

In most of the body, a network of vessels carry lymph, a fluid that removes excess plasma, dead blood cells, debris and other waste. But the brain is different. Instead of lymph, the brain is bathed in cerebrospinal fluid. For decades, however, neuroscientists have assumed that this fluid simply carries soluble waste by slowly diffusing through tissues, then shipping its cargo out of the nervous system and eventually into the body's bloodstream. Determining what's really going on has been impossible until recently. In this study, researchers led by U.R. neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard have identified a second, faster brain-cleansing system.

More here.

Mother to Son

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So, boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps.
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now—
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
.

by Langston Hughes
from The Selected Poems of Langston Hughes
publisher: Vintage Classics

Massimo Pigliucci's critique of the skeptic, atheist, rationalist community, over at Rationally Speaking:

The problem is that my experience (anecdotal, yes, but ample and varied) has been that there is quite a bit of un-reason within the CoR. This takes the form of more or less widespread belief in scientific, philosophical and political notions that don’t make much more sense than the sort of notions we — within the community — are happy to harshly criticize in others. Yes, you might object, but that’s just part of being human, pretty much every group of human beings holds to unreasonable beliefs, why are you so surprised or worried? Well, because we think of ourselves — proudly! — as a community of reason, where reason and evidence are held as the ultimate arbiters of any meaningful dispute. To find out that too often this turns out not to be the case is a little bit like discovering that moral philosophers aren’t more ethical than the average guy (true).

What am I talking about? Here is a (surely incomplete, and I’m even more sure, somewhat debatable) list of bizarre beliefs I have encountered among fellow skeptics-atheists-humanists. No, I will not name names because this is about ideas, not individuals (but heck, you know who you are…). The list, incidentally, features topics in no particular order, and it would surely be nice if a sociology student were to conduct a systematic research on this for a thesis…

* Assorted nonsense about alternative medicine. Despite excellent efforts devoted to debunking “alternative” medicine claims, some atheists especially actually endorse all sorts of nonsense about “non-Western” remedies.

* Religion is not a proper area of application for skepticism, according to some skeptics. Why on earth not? It may not be a suitable area of inquiry for science, but skepticism — in the sense of generally applied critical thinking — draws on more than just science (think philosophy, logic and math).

* Philosophy is useless armchair speculation. So is math. And logic. And all theoretical science.

* The notion of anthropogenic global warming has not been scientifically established, something loudly proclaimed by people who — to the best of my knowledge — are not atmospheric physicists and do not understand anything about the complex data analysis and modeling that goes into climate change research.

* Science can answer moral questions. No, science can inform moral questions, but moral reasoning is a form of philosophical reasoning. The is/ought divide may not be absolute, but it is there nonetheless.