John Lloyd, John Mitchinson and James Harkin in The Telegraph:

When we came to write our first volume of facts – 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off – last year, we set ourselves the goal of producing 1,000 nuggets of information that seemed to us unforgettable. We pooled 10 years of extraordinary comparisons (there are 1,000 times as many bacteria in your gut as there are stars in the Milky Way); astonishing statistics (a single male human produces enough sperm in two weeks to impregnate every fertile woman on the planet); unexpected truths (the Bible is the most shoplifted book in the United States) and memorable absurdities (Richard Gere’s middle name is Tiffany), and then counted up what we had. It turned out we had a file of 1,227 facts, which seemed both more interesting and more appropriate than the 1,000 we’d originally targeted. In the course of editing and arranging that material we discovered something surprising: the facts seemed to have a mind of their own. Far from being inert bits of trivia, they behaved much more like molecules, bristling with energy and a desire to form strong attractions with other facts to make longer and more meaningful sentences. All we had to do was keep trying the best combinations.

…Once you are in the Fact Zone, everywhere you look, astonishing new facts seem to demand inclusion. And, to adapt a line of Groucho Marx: if you don’t like them, we’ve got others….

Stephen Wolfram in his Blog:

Computational knowledge. Symbolic programming. Algorithm automation. Dynamic interactivity. Natural language. Computable documents. The cloud. Connected devices. Symbolic ontology. Algorithm discovery. These are all things we’ve been energetically working on—mostly for years—in the context of Wolfram|Alpha, Mathematica, CDF and so on.

But recently something amazing has happened. We’ve figured out how to take all these threads, and all the technology we’ve built, to create something at a whole different level. The power of what is emerging continues to surprise me. But already I think it’s clear that it’s going to be profoundly important in the technological world, and beyond. At some level it’s a vast unified web of technology that builds on what we’ve created over the past quarter century. At some level it’s an intellectual structure that actualizes a new computational view of the world. And at some level it’s a practical system and framework that’s going to be a fount of incredibly useful new services and products. I have to admit I didn’t entirely see it coming. For years I have gradually understood more and more about what the paradigms we’ve created make possible. But what snuck up on me is a breathtaking new level of unification—that lets one begin to see that all the things we’ve achieved in the past 25+ years are just steps on a path to something much bigger and more important.

More here.

Robert Long on the appeal of Marilynne Robinson’s literary—and liberal—Calvinism, in The American Conservative:

Gilead not only won the Pulitzer but sold enough copies to become “one of the most unconventional conventionally popular novels of recent times”—as James Woodput it in the New Yorker—thanks to passages like this one, near the end of the book(and of Ames’s life):

Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? … Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave—that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.

Chief among the “precious things” Robinson honors is America’s religious heritage. She is in a sense a culture warrior, striving against what her essays call our “impulse … to disparage, to cheapen and to deface, and to falsify, which has made a valuable inheritance worthless.”

For this reason her nonfiction, like her novels, attracts the attention of thoughtful conservatives. In a Weekly Standard review of last year’s essay collection When I Was a Child I Read Books, Houston Baptist University professor Micah Mattix praises Robinson’s contrarian projects: defending America’s Puritans (and their forefather, John Calvin) from their caricature as dour fundamentalists, championing the Old Testament as wise and humane, and critiquing the reductionist materialism of the New Atheists. To all this, Robinson brings a “penchant for the ignored fact and the counterintuitive argument.”

The thread that unites these concerns is a tradition neglected today by left and right: liberal Christianity.

More here.

Joel Shurkin in Physics Buzz (Image credit: Alexandre Dulaunoy via flick):

The problem of random traffic jams on most roads, said Berthold Horn, an electrical engineer and computer scientist at MIT, is sometimes described as an issue of fluid dynamics. Other scientists point to chaos theory and fractals to explain the phenomenon.

An analogy Horn uses is dilatant fluid, a fluid that gets thicker as stress is applied. For example, if you put enough corn starch into a swimming pool, you could walk across it on the surface. The content of the pool would remain a liquid but it would thicken under the pressure of your step. YouTube is full of examples, Horn said.

The water in the pool is called a Newtonian liquid because no matter what you do with it — shake or stir — it remains a liquid. Once you add the corn starch, it becomes a non-Newtonian liquid and solidifies under pressure.

Ketchup, incidentally, is the reverse. It is mostly a solid in the bottle until you shake or squeeze it, then it becomes a liquid. The non-Newtonian properties of ketchup are the reason it is so hard to get it out of a glass bottle.

Now, think of the stream of traffic as a liquid. When you reach a certain number of cars in a certain area simultaneously, Horn said, the traffic “thickens,” and everyone slows down because everyone is reacting to the car in front of them.

Horn, thinks he has found the solution in luxury cars–adaptive cruise control, which uses radar to monitor the car ahead of you. If that car slows down, so does yours, in direct proportion to what the other car is doing.

What Horn wants to do is watch the rear as well.

He calls it bilateral control: To keep traffic moving, you also have to look behind you.

More here.

Talal Asad in Critical Inquiry:

Steven Pinker has recently argued that the modern world has become far less violent (“more civilized”) than at any time in history. True, there may have been massive destructions of human beings in the twentieth century butproportionately these were less significant than the violence of premodern times when human populations were less dense on the globe. He explains this decline in human violence in terms of the growth in refined feelings attributable to the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason and to the gradual development of bodily and emotional self-control—to what Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process”—as well as to the emergence of the state. Thus the modern state is seen not only as the crowning achievement of liberal democracy but also as the basis of a wealthy civilization founded on capitalism in which general concern for human well-being can flourish. This is consistent with a widespread belief that, since the end of the eighteenth century, peoples in Euro-America have become increasingly free and humane because freedom and humanity naturally reinforce each other.

But the conditions of benevolence are more complicated than this story would suggest. Take the modern US prison system, for instance. What are we to make of the fact that US correctional system, with all its cruelty, contains a far higher proportion of prisoners to the total US population than it ever did before? Pinker thinks the very high rate of African-Americans in prison is evidence of a “decivilizing” process (the felons come largely from dysfunctional families) and sees the prison system as the necessary incarceration of actual and potential perpetrators of violence. The legal historian James Whitman has, however, a provocatively different view: It is precisely the political culture of liberal democracy, he declares, by which this modern statist form of violence is to be explained. Democratic politics enters more directly into the shaping of criminal legislation in America than it does in Europe largely because politicians who seek election want to be seen as being “tough on crime.” By contrast, democratic politics don’t permeate the European criminal justice systems, both because framing the law is largely a bureaucratic expertise and because judges and prosecutors are not publicly elected in European countries as they are in the United States. Hence the paradox: the more pervasive the principle and practice of political freedom in liberal democratic society, the greater the probability of punitive vindictiveness.

In sum: it may not be the benevolent values of “our moral culture” that matter but the contrary work done by legal disciplines and political structures.

More here.

Dan Burt at Granta:

Prostitution, gambling, fencing, contract murder, loan-sharking, political corruption and crime of every sort were the daily trade in Philadelphia’s Tenderloin, the oldest part of town. The Kevitch family ruled this stew for half a century, from Prohibition to the rise of Atlantic City. My mother was a Kevitch.

Not all Jewish boys become doctors, lawyers, violinists and Nobelists: some sons of immigrants from the Pale became criminals, often as part of or in cahoots with Italian crime families. A recent history calls them ‘tough Jews’: men like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, who organized and ran Murder Incorporated for Lucky Luciano in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, and Arnold Rothstein, better known as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, who fixed the 1919 baseball World Series. The Kevitch family were tough Jews.

Their headquarters during the day was Milt’s Bar and Grill at Ninth and Race, the heart of the Tenderloin, two miles north of Fourth and Daly. At night one or more male clan members supervised the family’s ‘after hours Club’ a few blocks away. We called Milt’s Bar the Taproom and the after hours club The Club.

more here.

Geoff Shullenberger at Dissent:

According to two recent books, many people today believe in the Internet the way that the denizens of the Age of Faith believed in God, or that many on the left once believed in Marxism: as the exclusive source of universal personal and political salvation and the basic organizing principle of history. Varieties of this twenty-first century faith can be found in the most disparate places. While the geek elite of Silicon Valley are its natural constituency, other converts include young Egyptians who took part in the 2011 uprising, free-market libertarians, members of the Obama administration, “hacktivists,” open government activists, and a growing tribe of calorie-counting “self-trackers.”

Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier are themselves lapsed true believers in the Internet gospel, though Morozov tells us he was only “one of those people . . . very briefly,” whereas Silicon Valley insider Lanier was a seminal figure in developing some of the technologies and ideologies he now criticizes. Both assert that the widespread and quasi-messianic enthusiasm for the Internet underwrites a technocratic agenda inimical to the survival of democracy.

more here.

Lev Mendes at The Point:

The classic Woody Allen films possess something of the anxious intensity of youth (and a lot of the tormented eroticism of adolescence). But while the older director’s energy has certainly kept up—he continues to release, on average, a new film every year—a good deal of his early fervor has not. One gets the impression at times that for Allen filmmaking has become a kind of make-work, prized for its reflexive busyness above all. (Allen himself tends to reinforce this impression in interviews, as when he recently described directing as “a great distraction from the real agonies of the world.”) It is hardly surprising, then, that many of his later offerings have had a slighter, somewhat derivative air.In the much-maligned Anything Else (2003), for example, the whole image of New York and its highbrow inhabitants appeared out-of-touch and oddly passé. The film’s struggling young comedian lives in a beautiful Upper East Side walk-up and prattles on endlessly about psychoanalysis. The details were all wrong.

In light of this, it is easier to understand why viewers welcomed Allen’s Zelig-like transformation into an international director—his escape into a Europe of his own making. Yet, the films of the last decade also come through as less personally invested, their success increasingly dependent on the brilliance of Allen’s cinematographers and carefully chosen actors.

more here.

From Wikipedia:

The Monty Hall problem is a probability puzzle, loosely based on the American television game show Let's Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975 (Selvin 1975a), (Selvin 1975b). It became famous as a question from a reader's letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant's “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade magazine in 1990 (vos Savant 1990a):

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Vos Savant's response was that the contestant should switch to the other door. (vos Savant 1990a) The argument relies on assumptions, explicit in extended solution descriptions given by Selvin (1975a) and by vos Savant (1991a), that the host always opens a different door from the door chosen by the player and always reveals a goat by this action—because he knows where the car is hidden. Leonard Mlodinow stated: “The Monty Hall problem is hard to grasp, because unless you think about it carefully, the role of the host goes unappreciated.” (Mlodinow 2008) Contestants who switch have a 2/3 chance of winning the car, while contestants who stick have only a 1/3 chance. One way to see this is to notice that, 2/3 of the time, the initial choice of the player is a door hiding a goat. When that is the case, the host is forced to open the other goat door, and the remaining closed door hides the car. “Switching” only fails to give the car when the player picks the “right” door (the door hiding the car) to begin with. But, of course, that will only happen 1/3 of the time. Many readers of vos Savant's column refused to believe switching is beneficial despite her explanation. After the problem appeared in Parade, approximately 10,000 readers, including nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to the magazine, most of them claiming vos Savant was wrong (Tierney 1991). Even when given explanations, simulations, and formal mathematical proofs, many people still do not accept that switching is the best strategy (vos Savant 1991a). Paul Erdős, one of the most prolific mathematicians in history, remained unconvinced until he was shown a computer simulation confirming the predicted result (Vazsonyi 1999).

More here. (Note: Posting this interesting problem because it was correctly solved by the woman with the highest recorded IQ)

From How Stuff Works:

The term IQ, or Intelligence Quotient, generally describes a score on a test that rates the subject's cognitive ability as compared to the general population. IQ tests use a standardized scale with 100 as the median score. On most tests, a score between 90 and 110, or the median plus or minus 10, indicates average intelligence. A score above 130 indicates exceptional intelligence and a score below 70 may indicate mental retardation. Like their predecessors, modern tests do take in to account the age of a child when determining an IQ score. Children are graded relative to the population at their developmental level. What is this cognitive ability being measured? Simply put, IQ tests are designed to measure your general ability to solve problems and understand concepts. This includes reasoning ability, problem-solving ability, ability to perceive relationships between things and ability to store and retrieve information. IQ tests measure this general intellectual ability in a number of different ways. They may test:

• spatial ability: the ability to visualize manipulation of shapes
• mathematical ability: the ability to solve problems and use logic
• language ability: This could include the ability to complete sentences or recognize words when letters have been rearranged or removed.
• memory ability: the ability to recall things presented either visually or aurally

…Because IQ tests measure your ability to understand ideas and not the quantity of your knowledge, learning new information does not automatically increase your IQ. Learning may exercise your mind, however, which could help you to develop greater cognitive skills, but scientists do not fully understand this relationship. The connection between learning and mental ability is still largely unknown, as are the workings of the brain and the nature of intellectual ability. Intellectual ability does seem to depend more on genetic factors than on environmental factors, but most experts agree that environment plays some significant role in its development.

But can you increase your IQ score?

More here.

.
O she buzzed in my ear “I love you” and I dug at
the tickle with a forefinger with which I knew her.

At the post office I was given the official FBI
Eldridge Cleaver poster — “Guess he ain't around here.”

The escaping turkey vulture vomits his load of rotten
fawn for quick flight. The lesson is obvious & literary.

We are not going to rise again. Simple as that.
We are not going to rise again. Simple as that.

I say it from marrow depth I miss my tomcat gone now from
us three months. He was a fellow creature and I loved him.
.

by Jim Harrison
from The Shape of the Journey
Copper Canyon Press, 1998

Roy Scranton at The Opinionater:

The biggest problem climate change poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, or how we should put up sea walls to protect Alphabet City, or when we should evacuate Hoboken. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

The choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.

If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.

more here.

James Polchin at The Smart Set:

Some of the final works you encounter in this show are drawings and phallic sex toys from the collection of George Witt, a 19th century British doctor and later banker who amassed a large collection of contemporary and ancient erotic art. He left his entire collection to the British Museum in 1865, where the trustees placed it in its newly established “Secretum” or secret museum in the museum’s vaults. Stowed away with Witt’s collection were other sexual artifacts the museum acquired in the years to come and where its shunga art was hidden for decades, out of sight except for those well-educated men from Oxford and Cambridge who could handle such material.

A year before the Comstock Act, and about the same time as Hall was wandering the shops of Yokohama, American art critic James Jackson Jarve, writing in Art Journal, decried shunga as “inconceivably monstrous, betraying a liking for the absolute vices as no European nation would outwardly tolerate in any condition of society.” Such criticism, like others of the era, liked these works to the moral flaws of the Japanese. The aesthetics became a symptom of the nation.

The history of looking and not looking at shunga is deeply intertwined with our fantasies and fears about boundaries, those undulating lines between West and the East, between pornography and art. In his journal in 1863, Goncourt described his excitement with some new albums of “Japanese obscenities” he recently purchased: “They delight me, amuse me, and charm my eyes. I look on them as being beyond obscenity, which is there, yet seems not be there, and which I do not see, so completely does it disappear into fantasy.”

more here.

Sadakat Kadri at the London Review of Books:

The problem is that Rajapaksa, for all his eagerness to seize the Commonwealth’s helm, has spent years undermining those values and principles. Though democratically elected, he has relied on his popular mandate to sidestep or get rid of all the safeguards that ordinarily stop democrats from turning into demagogues. Soon after winning his second presidential term, he abolished a law that would have prevented him standing for a third; two of his brothers, Basil and Gotabaya, head powerful ministries, while another one, Chamal, has become the speaker of parliament. His government refuses to acknowledge, let alone investigate, allegations of serious official misconduct: the claim, for example, that the Defence Ministry, run by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, bundles away – ‘white-vans’ – those it perceives as opponents in unmarked white vehicles. There is compelling evidence that tens of thousands of civilians died during the army’s final onslaught against the Tigers; and according to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, Sri Lanka has more citizens who have vanished without trace than any other country except Iraq. Free expression has suffered as much as all this suggests, with at least 22 outspoken journalists killed over the last seven years, all of them murdered by unidentified persons who remain at large. And the situation is not improving. The UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay reported last August that ‘surveillance and harassment appears to be getting worse… Critical voices are quite often attacked or even permanently silenced.’

more here.

Our own multiple-award-winning art critic Morgan Meis in n + 1:

Arthur Danto, the art critic for the Nation who died last month in New York, was a man with a big idea. Art, he believed, had ended. Of course, it is one thing to proclaim the end of art; it is another thing to prove it. But Danto tried. He was Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, studied with Merleau-Ponty in Paris as a young man, and wrote a couple of books about analytical philosophy in his early career. Unusually for a postwar American philosopher, Danto thought a lot about Hegel. It was from Hegel that he got the idea that art could end. The idea that art ended never meant, for Danto, that art has died or that people will not make art anymore. Just like Hegel did not mean by the “end of history” that the world was going to explode. “End” here means something more like “completion.” The end of art means that the practice of making art has come to a historical culmination. The end of art means that art doesn’t have a story, a narrative, anymore. After the end of art, there is no such thing as “Art”—there is only art.

Danto came to his realization about the end of art one day in New York City in the mid 1960s. Danto was himself painting in those days. He was also, as he readily admitted later, something of a snob and aesthete. One evening in the late spring of 1964, he stumbled into the Stable Gallery on 74th Street. At the Stable Gallery, Danto came face to face with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes. That’s the sculpture where Warhol took some paint and some cheap wood and made a few Brillo Boxes that look exactly like Brillo boxes. That’s to say, if you saw Warhol’s Brillo Boxes on the ground outside of a deli in midtown you would simply think that a delivery person was moving Brillo boxes into the store. There is nothing in the Brillo Boxes to suggest anything but Brillo boxes.

Danto was struck and confused by Brillo Boxes. Over time, he worked out a full-blown theory to deal with them.

More here.

Anna Pulley in Salon:

5. Cosmo: “Use your bra to bind his hands behind his back, then cover your nipples in yummy toppings and command him to lick them off.”

Ignoring for a moment why you would want to needlessly stretch out an expensive bra, and how many other better restraints exist in the world, does Cosmo think we all have mini-fridges full of Cocoa Puffs and slivered almonds by our bedsides? Because, there’s barely enough room for my Nutella bucket from Costco as it is.

6. Cosmo: “Sprinkle a little pepper under his nose right before he climaxes. Sneezing can feel similar to an orgasm and amplify the feel-good effects.”

A mini-fridge and a spice rack, got it. There’s nothing that aids an impending orgasm like a dry rub marinade. Besides, what’s sexier than sneezing? Crying, which is exactly what will happen if you’re one inch off.

7. Men’s Health: “According to new research, the smell of toast is a serious mood booster.”

A mini-fridge, a spice rack, and a toaster oven. Got it. We’re starting to think we know what the Beyond stands for in Bed, Bath &.

More here.

Liam Drew in Slate:

Some of you may be thinking that there is a simple answer: temperature. This arrangement evolved to keep them cool. I thought so, too, and assumed that a quick glimpse at the scientific literature would reveal the biological reasons and I’d move on. But what I found was that the small band of scientists who have dedicated their professional time to pondering the scrotum’s existence are starkly divided over this so-called cooling hypothesis.

Reams of data show that scrotal sperm factories, including our own, work best a few degrees below core body temperature. The problem is, this doesn’t prove cooling was the reason that testicles originally descended. It’s a straight-up chicken-and-egg situation—did testicles leave the kitchen because they couldn't stand the heat, or do they work best in the cold because they had to leave the body?

Vital organs that work optimally at 98.5 degrees Fahrenheit get bony protection: My brain and liver are shielded by skull and ribs, and my girlfriend’s ovaries are defended by her pelvis. Forgoing skeletal protection is dangerous. Each year, thousands of men go to the hospital with ruptured testes or torsions caused by having this essential organ suspended chandelierlike on a flexible twine of tubes and cords. But having exposed testicles as an adult is not even the most dangerous aspect of our reproductive organs’ arrangement.

More here.

Jessica Salley in Harvard Magazine:

I cannot remember the exact moment when I decided it was my dream to be a Rhodes Scholar. I think I was in fifth grade. It was around the time the Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie Winning London came out on home video.

…During the past three years, this fantasy crystallized into something more concrete: I could apply for the Rhodes. I had a decently high GPA, leadership positions, and a unique project in mind. I thought the fact that I am from Louisiana, a chronically underrepresented state, would give me traction, and I spent countless summer hours writing draft after draft of my recommendation requests and personal statement. Our House tutors informed us all, of course, that the Harvard nomination process is nearly as cutthroat as the Rhodes competition itself. Of about 100 prospective applicants, they would endorse fewer than half to submit their materials to the Rhodes committee.

But I had faith. I could envision myself in front of the Rhodes interview committee, wearing those penguin-esque robes to Oxford matriculation, walking on the shores of the River Thames, engaging in spirited debates with accented men in pubs. And, impossibly slim as I knew the odds were, logically, I thought that wanting it as badly as I did would be enough to see me through. At 11:28 a.m. on Friday, September 13, after 15 hours of pacing my room, attempting fitful sleep, and checking my e-mail so much my phone battery was half-drained by the end of my 10 a.m. class, I received a short message from my House fellowships tutor informing me that Harvard would not be endorsing my application for the Rhodes. My tired brain registered what this line meant. Not only had I not won the Rhodes, I wasn’t even allowed to apply. I stopped reading after the second line. Instead, I behaved exactly as I would have in fifth grade: I called my mom and burst into tears. My mother’s response, too, was the same as always. She reassured me that life is not always fair, but this didn’t mean no graduate school anywhere would accept me. When my heaving sobs dwindled finally to a quieter form of crying, she reminded me, “You can’t win every time.”

More here.