Bara Imambara, Lucknow. A “complex built by Asaf-ud-daulah, Nawab of Lucknow, in 1784, also called the Asafi Imambara.” Architect Hafiz Kifayat ullah Shahjahanabadi.

In honor of Syed Ali Raza, who would have been 100 on November 29th, 2013. He was born just outside this “city of Nawabs” and attended Shia College in Lucknow maturing into a most exceptionally gifted, unique, and principled man. Abbas, Azra, and I, along with our 4 older siblings are exceedingy fortunate to be his children!

Do read about the then novel idea of “Food for Work” and the bold architectural design of this amazing structure here and here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in Newsweek:

When Riazuddin—that was his full name—died in September at age 82 in Islamabad, international science organizations extolled his contributions to high-energy physics. But in Pakistan, except for a few newspaper lines and a small reference held a month later at Quaid-e-Azam University, where he had taught for decades, his passing was little noticed. In fact, very few Pakistanis have heard of the self-effacing and modest scientist who drove the early design and development of Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Riazuddin never laid any claim to fathering the bomb—a job that requires the efforts of many—and after setting the nuclear ball rolling, he stepped aside. But without his theoretical work, Pakistan’s much celebrated bomb makers, who knew little of the sophisticated physics critically needed to understand a fission explosion, would have been shooting in the dark.

A bomb maker and peacenik, conformist and rebel, quiet but firm, religious yet liberal, Riazuddin was one of a kind. Mentored by Dr. Abdus Salam, his seminal role in designing the bomb is known to none except a select few.

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

The term “filter bubble” entered the public domain back in 2011when the internet activist Eli Pariser coined it to refer to the way recommendation engines shield people from certain aspects of the real world.

Pariser used the example of two people who googled the term “BP”. One received links to investment news about BP while the other received links to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, presumably as a result of some recommendation algorithm.

This is an insidious problem. Much social research shows that people prefer to receive information that they agree with instead of information that challenges their beliefs. This problem is compounded when social networks recommend content based on what users already like and on what people similar to them also like.

This the filter bubble—being surrounded only by people you like and content that you agree with.

And the danger is that it can polarise populations creating potentially harmful divisions in society.

Today, Eduardo Graells-Garrido at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona as well as Mounia Lalmas and Daniel Quercia, both at Yahoo Labs, say they’ve hit on a way to burst the filter bubble. Their idea that although people may have opposing views on sensitive topics, they may also share interests in other areas. And they’ve built a recommendation engine that points these kinds of people towards each other based on their own preferences.

More here.

Alex Rosenberg and Tyler Curtain in 3:AM Magazine:

In physics our knowledge exceeds our understanding. In economics the reverse is true. Seeing why helps us make sense of both of these disciplines.

In physics we’ve reached the point where we know the nature of things to twelve decimal places. We reached that point by starting with common sense and correcting its predictions until we arrived at quantum mechanics—a theory that we literally can’t understand, despite the fact that we know it to be as close to the truth as any theory we have in any science. It took about 350 years—from Newtonian gravity to Schrödinger’s cat—to get to the point where knowledge exceeds understanding in physics.

Economics is harder than physics. It must be. It’s not much younger a science, having gotten its start with Adam Smith in 1776, a good 83 years before Darwin was able to put biology on a scientific footing. If economics were as easy as physics, it would have made more progress by now.

As far back as John Stuart Mill philosophers of science have been trying to figure out exactly why economics is harder than physics. They have given a variety of answers.

We think a large part of the reason is that unlike the physicists, the economists have been unwilling or unable to let go of the notion that their understanding of economic affairs counts as knowledge about economic behavior. Like physics, economics starts with common sense—in this case firm convictions about how we are driven to make choices by our desires and our beliefs, which the economists label preferences and expectations.

Giving up firmly held convictions isn’t just a problem for economics. Physics had the same problems: humans have difficulty relinquishing the conviction that motion requires force, that there is a preferred direction in space, that every event has a cause. But progress—as measured by prediction—required relinquishing our sense that we already know how things work. In the social sciences, it’s been almost impossible to give up trying to explain things by making sense of them in the form of stories we understand.

More here.

Thomas Laqueur reviews Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, in the LRB:

Fifty years ago, Barbara Tuchman’s bestseller The Guns of August taught a generation of Americans about the origins of the First World War: the war, she wrote, was unnecessary, meaningless and stupid, begun by overwhelmed, misguided and occasionally mendacious statesmen and diplomats who stumbled into a catastrophe whose horrors they couldn’t begin to imagine – ‘home before the leaves fall,’ they thought. It was in many ways a book for its time.

Tuchman’s story begins with Edward VII’s funeral on 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was Edward’s least favourite nephew, Wilhelm II of Germany. Wilhelm loved and admired the British and they loved the kaiser: to him, the Timessaid, belongs ‘the first place among all the foreign mourners’; even when relations were ‘strained’, he ‘never lost his popularity amongst us’. Four years before Armageddon the German emperor was decidedly not the antichrist he would become. The book ends with the Battle of the Marne – ‘one of the decisive battles of the war’ – which ended the German hope for a quick victory and set the stage for four years of deadlock and misery.

Tuchman says nothing about Austria-Hungary and Serbia on the eve of the war, and nothing about the Russo-Austrian and Serbo-Austrian fronts once it began. ‘The inexhaustible problem of the Balkans divides itself naturally from the rest of the war,’ she thinks, and in any case nothing much happened there in the period she covers. More surprising is that in the first third of the book there isn’t a word about Serbia. The assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 goes by in two sentences, one of which, a quotation from the oracular Bismarck, may be all she needs: ‘some damn foolish thing in the Balkans’ would ignite the next war.

Why was this story so compelling in the 1960s? I think because at the height of the Cold War the world needed and embraced a morality tale of the sort Tuchman offered.

More here.

Via io9:

There Will Be Blood / Through Numbers from Ali Shirazi on Vimeo.

Huma Yusuf in The New York Times:

LONDON — Upon first moving here from Pakistan two years ago, I was inundated with restaurant recommendations: Tayyabs and Lahore Kebab House, Daawat and Brilliant. I spent many weekends sampling curries and kebabs in the east and halwa in the south. In the end, I settled on a Drummond Street standby. For members of the South Asian diaspora, having a favorite curry restaurant is like belonging to a tribe: It requires absolute loyalty and the occasional sacrificial ritual, like waiting in line for a table for two hours in cold, wet weather. But the appeal extends far beyond homesick immigrants. London now has more curry shops than Mumbai. Across Britain, some 10,000 restaurants and takeout joints serve kormas, vindaloos and other variants. At the British Curry Awards this week more than 40,000 nominations poured in from fans. (Among the winners, Karma, in Whitburn, for Best Spice Restaurant Scotland, and Shampan 4 at the Spinning Wheel, in Westerham, Kent, for Best Newcomer.) Prime Minister David Cameron took the stage between choreographed dance sequences and declared the foreign dish now central to British identity: “To all those who think being British depends on your skin color, wake up and smell the curry!”

But now curry is under threat, both from the state and the market. Cameron’s favorite curry house in Oxfordshire was raided by border officials last month, and three Bangladeshis suspected of immigration infractions were arrested. Stringent laws have made it nearly impossible for restaurants to bring chefs from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, creating a shortfall of qualified talent. Acknowledging the scale of the problem at the curry awards ceremony, the prime minister pledged to help: “So let me promise you this: We will work through this together. We’ll continue to help you get the skilled Asian chefs you need.”

More here.

Regina Nuzzo in Nature:

The gut may know better than the head whether a marriage will be smooth sailing or will hit the rocks after the honeymoon fades, according to research published today in Science¹. Researchers have long known that new love can be blind, and that those in the midst of it can harbour positive illusions about their sweetheart and their future. Studies show that new couples rate their partner particularly generously, forgetting his or her bad qualities, and generally view their relationship as more likely to succeed than average². But newlyweds are also under a lot of conscious pressure to be happy — or, at least, to think they are. Now a four-year study of 135 young couples has found that split-second, 'visceral' reactions about their partner are important, too. The results show that these automatic attitudes, which aren’t nearly as rosy as the more deliberate ones, can predict eventual changes in people’s marital happiness, perhaps even more so than the details that people consciously admit.

The researchers, led by psychologist James McNulty of Florida State University in Tallahassee, tapped into these implicit attitudes by seeing how fast newlyweds could correctly classify positively and negatively themed words after being primed by a photo of their spouse for a fraction of a second. If seeing a blink-of-the-eye flash of a partner’s face conjures up immediate, positive gut-level associations, for example, the participant will be quicker to report that 'awesome' is a positive word and slower to report that 'awful' is a negative one. Researchers used the difference between these two reaction times as a measurement of a participant’s automatic reaction.

More here.

Isabel Kershner in the New York Times:

There is one picture of Palestinian children studying around a small table by the dim light of gas lamps in the Beach Camp in Gaza, and another of children peeking over a sandy dune, with rows of small, uniform shacks of a desolate refugee camp in the background. In a third, a family walks across the Allenby Bridge, the father carrying two bulging suitcases, a young son clutching a white ball, heading east over the Jordan River.

These are a few of the black and white images, many of them powerful and haunting, that will eventually constitute a digital archive compiled by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the first part of which was unveiled Thursday at a gallery in the Old City here. Together, they capture the Palestinian refugee experience from the 1948 war onward, giving form to a seminal chapter in Palestinian history, identity and collective memory.

For decades, about half a million negatives, prints, slides and various forms of film footage have been hidden away in the archive of UNRWA, the organization that assists Palestinian refugees. Stored in buildings in Gaza and Amman, Jordan, the materials had begun to grow moldy.

More here.

David Hockney and others have speculated—controversially—that a camera obscura could have helped the Dutch painter Vermeer achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. But no one understood exactly how such a device might actually have been used to paint masterpieces. An inventor in Texas—the subject of a new documentary by the magicians Penn & Teller—may have solved the riddle.

Kurt Anderson in Vanity Fair:

In the history of art, Johannes Vermeer is almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, like a character in a novel. Accepted into his local Dutch painters’ guild in 1653, at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, he promptly begins painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. After his death, at 43, he and his minuscule oeuvre slip into obscurity for two centuries. Then, just as photography is making highly realistic painting seem pointless, the photorealistic “Sphinx of Delft” is rediscovered and his pictures are suddenly deemed valuable. By the time of the first big American show of Vermeer paintings—at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1909—their value has increased another hundred times, by the 1920s ten times that.

Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius.

At the beginning of this century, however, two experts of high standing begged to differ. Why, for instance, did Vermeer paint things in the foreground and shiny highlights on objects slightly out of focus? Because, they say, he was looking at them through a lens.

More here.

Aatish Bhatia in his blog Empirical Zeal at Wired:

Archerfish are incredible creatures. They lurk under the surface of the water in rivers and seas, waiting for an insect to land on the plants above. Then, suddenly, and with unbelievable accuracy, they squirt out a stream of water that strikes down the insect. The insect falls, and by the time it hits the water, the archerfish is already waiting in place ready to swallow it up. You have to marvel at a creature that excels at what seems like such an improbable hunting strategy – death by water pistol squirt…

…Technically, the term archerfish doesn’t refer to a single species of fish but to a family of 7 different freshwater fish, that fall under the genus Toxotes. They strike with remarkable accuracy, and just a tenth of second after the prey is hit, they quickly move to the spot where it will hit the water. Unlike most baseball players who have to keep their eyes on a fly ball to track it, in less than the blink of an eye, the archerfish is in place, waiting for the insect to arrive.

If that isn’t impressive enough, consider this. When these archerfish squirt water, their eyes are underwater. If you’ve spent any time in a swimming pool, you’ll know that light bends when it enters water. A less astute fish might not correct for this bending of light, and would be tricked into thinking that the insect is somewhere it isn’t. But not the archerfish. This little aquatic physicist is able to seamlessly correct for the bending of light. And it isn’t a minor correction – when the perceived angle of the target is 45 degrees, its true angle is off by as much as 25 degrees.

More here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

“There were short days in winter when the City seemed to glitter with half-revealed secrets. Days when it rained steadily; when lights were lit early in shops and offices; when the shining streets were domed by the humps of glossy umbrellas. On such days a common goodwill seemed to fall naturally from harassed people, hurrying here and there to catch bus, train, or tram. In face of discomfort, a vision of home, with firelight, tabby-cats, and rich cups of mellow tea, seemed to buoy up men and women.”

As the summer heat continues, our hero escapes to Wales for a short holiday, then later returns to London and falls in love with a young but preternaturally wise Russian woman. Meanwhile, like ghosts or diabolical guardian angels, the now ubiquitous “pests of the air” have grown increasingly menacing. More and more often, an individual bird will suddenly imprint on a single person and never let him or her out of sight, always fluttering nearby. People go mad or commit suicide. Sometimes they are found savagely clawed and pecked to death. Inexorably, “The Birds” builds to a spectacular, cinematic finale, half holocaust, half apocalypse.

more here.

Mark Ford at The Guardian:

Basil Bunting's Collected Poems opens with “Villon”, drafted when he was 25 and then handed over, like The Waste Land four years before it, to Ezra Pound for dramatic cuts and improvements. We know relatively little about the 15th-century French poet François Villon, beyond the fact that he was involved in a murderous brawl, was banished from Paris and spent time in jail. He was clearly a hell-raiser and a vagabond, which made him popular with modernist types who sought models of poetic virility and were keen to distance themselves from the effeteness and dandyism of the fin‑de-siècle. Pound, although he was tone-deaf, wrote an opera based on “Le Testament de Villon”; in his book of essays The Sacred Wood TS Eliot compared the same work favourably to Tennyson's In Memoriam.

“Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain,”Bunting writes of Villon, “hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies.” Bunting emerges from Richard Burton's thoroughly researched and enthralling biography as living a life far more active and variegated than the bookish Eliot's, and even than the pugnacious, controversial Pound's. Like Villon, Bunting had several spells behind bars.

more here.

Steve Donaghue at The Quarterly Conversation:

It was madness to write; it was madness to cart around Italy in an enormous wooden chest; it was madness to preserve after its creator died; it was madness to publish; it would be madness to read, and there is no word but madness for the utterly staggering task editors Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (and a small cadre of seven translators who, if they divided their labors equally, would each have been responsible for a chunk of text equal in length to Anna Karenina) have performed in a new book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux (whose funding of it was also madness): they have given to the world the first complete, fully indexed, and fully annotated English-language translation of the Zibaldone ever done.

It was Nietzsche (an admirer of the Zibaldone, along with Sainte-Beuve, Herman Melville, Walter Benjamin, and Samuel Beckett) who once wrote that if you stare into the abyss long enough, the abyss stares into you, and the equivalent here has happened with stark inevitability: the editors have partaken in full measure of their author’s madness. Under ordinary circumstances, it might be mordantly funny to hear Caesar and D’Intino claim, of a 4,526-page jottings-book collected over sixteen years, that it’s “not directed in any teleological sense,” but such amusement dries up quick when confronted with the aggravated tone of unshared obsession:

even after publication, there was no impact on anthropologists, historians, linguists, psychologists, philosophers, political scientists, aestheticians, musicologists, and scientists, who would yet have found treasure there, anticipations and astonishing intuitions. Such obtuseness, inexplicable in itself, damaged the poet too, in the long run, if it is true that the fame of some of the great exemplars of the European canon (suffice it to mention Novalis, Coleridge, Baudelaire) rests also upon solid theoretical and philosophical writings.

more here.