Noam Chomsky at CNN:

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks beginning in Jerusalem proceed within a framework of assumptions that merit careful thought.

One prevailing assumption is that there are two options: either a two-state settlement will be reached, or there will be a “shift to a nearly inevitable outcome of the one remaining reality — a state'from the sea to the river',” an outcome posing “an immediate existential threat of the erasure of the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state” because of what is termed “the demographic problem,” a future Palestinian majority in the single state.

This particular formulation is by former Israeli Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yuval Diskin, but the basic assumptions are near universal in political commentary and scholarship. They are, however, crucially incomplete. There is a third option, the most realistic one: Israel will carry forward its current policies with full U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic support, sprinkled with some mild phrases of disapproval.

The policies are quite clear. Their roots go back to the 1967 war and they have been pursued with particular dedication since the Oslo Accords of September 1993.

The Accords determined that Gaza and the West Bank are an indivisible territorial entity. Israel and the U.S. moved at once to separate them, which means that any autonomy Palestinians might gain in the West Bank will have no direct access to the outside world.

More here.

Sextus Propertius

Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer, the summer passed so quickly.
Are there seasons where you are? Do you walk on sparkling and sharp
rocks? I think of you often. Tragic gestures, sunglasses,
careful deliberate steps . . . You know how it is. How all went wrong,
how stupid, how perhaps the wrong person finally went and died. All
bottoms fall out. All bottoms fall out. “Terrible!” we shouted,
“terrible, fantastic!” Right now when I’m writing it’s October with
snow in the air; saddle, bridle, disinfect wounds, state your ID number
and address, carry out necessary repair work on the south side.
Change to winter tyres. Whatever love is – no one found protection
against it. Are you together now? The clouds float slowly over the
fields, the wind is mild. I’d love to know how it ends. Is your
heart transparent like crystal? When we meet I’ll
ask about those hyacinths.

by Tua Forsström
from Etter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar
publisher: Söderström Förlags, Helsinki, 1998
translation: 2009, Stina Katchadourian

Sarah Waheed in HimalSouthAsian:

‘Bu’ is about the sexual exploits of a young college educated man named Randhir. It opens in Randhir’s apartment during the rainy season, explaining how he found himself with a Ghatan girl lying in bed with him, “clinging to his body”. The word “Ghatan” leaps off the page. It refers to a tribal or low-caste group of migratory laborers in Maharashtra, associated with the Western Ghats of India. Incidentally, in colonial legislation over familial litigation about intermarriage, conversion and adoption in Bombay, the term ‘Ghatan’ was also used to refer to lower-caste Hindu converts to Christianity. In ‘Bu’, the reader is told that Randhir had seen the Ghatan before, as she worked at a nearby hemp factory. Randhir is lonely, because “the war was on, and most of the Christian girls of Bombay who were easily available in the past had joined the auxiliary force, many opening dancing schools near the Cantonment where only white soldiers were allowed”. Feeling jilted by a former Christian lover who lives in his building, Randhir spots the Ghatan woman from his balcony. She is dark-complexioned and “earthy”, standing beneath a tamarind tree in the rain, and Randhir calls her up to his flat. What follows is a narration of their sexual encounter. Randhir is drawn to the woman’s odour, one that is “both pleasurable but which simultaneously disgusts him”. The story ends with another description of Randhir’s flat during the rainy season, in a jagged doubling that is common in Manto’s narratives. This time, he is not clinging to the sleeping woman lying on his bed. This other nameless woman is fair and her whiteness is revolting for Randhir. She is his newly-wed wife, “the daughter of a first class magistrate”, but Randhir has no sexual desire for her, and the story ends with him yearning for the odour of the Ghatan woman.

Manto and the editors of Adab-e-Latif first faced the proscription of the short story through the Defense of India Rules, under a clause that sought to curb publication of material against the government. The first time the short story was noticed by the state was when it caught the attention of officials in the War Department in the spring of 1944. In a flurry of memos, ‘Bu’ was deemed objectionable because of its references to the Women’s Auxiliary Corps of the British Indian Army.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The essence of male beauty is down to the way males use their genes rather than what genes they have, according to a new study into the sexual attractiveness of turkeys. Geneticists have long puzzled over why individuals of the same sex show a greater or lesser degree of sexual attractiveness. In other words – why are some people better looking than others when they're genetically similar?

In a new study, published today in the journal PLoS Genetics, scientists turned to male wild turkeys to solve the problem. They found that among turkeys that are brothers (and therefore share the majority of their genes), 'dominant' males show higher expression of genes predominantly found in males, and a lower expression of genes predominantly found in females, than their subordinate brothers. Therefore, dominant males were both masculinised and defeminised in terms of their gene express ion. A male's attractiveness is a function of how they express their genes, rather than the genes themselves.

More here.

First from last month, Alex B. Berezow in the LA Times:

Psychology isn't science.

Why can we definitively say that? Because psychology often does not meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally, predictability and testability.

Happiness research is a great example of why psychology isn't science. How exactly should “happiness” be defined? The meaning of that word differs from person to person and especially between cultures. What makes Americans happy doesn't necessarily make Chinese people happy. How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can't use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale. Today, personally, I'm feeling about a 3.7 out of 5. How about you?

The failure to meet the first two requirements of scientific rigor (clear terminology and quantifiability) makes it almost impossible for happiness research to meet the other three.

Next, Ashutosh Jogalekar responds in the Scientific American blog The Curious Wavefunction:

At the heart of Berezow’s argument is psychology’s lack of quantifiability and dearth of accurate terminology. He points out research in fields like happiness where definitions are neither rigid nor objective and data is not quantifiable.

Happiness research is a great example of why psychology isn’t science. How exactly should “happiness” be defined? The meaning of that word differs from person to person and especially between cultures. What makes Americans happy doesn’t necessarily make Chinese people happy. How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can’t use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale. Today, personally, I’m feeling about a 3.7 out of 5. How about you?

This is absolutely true. But you know what other fields suffer from a lack of accurate definitions? My own fields, chemistry and drug discovery. For instance there has been a longstanding debate in our field about how you define a “druglike” molecule, that is, a chemical compound most likely to function as a drug. The number of definitions of “druglike” that have sprung up over the years are sufficient to fill a phonebook. The debate will probably continue for a long time. And yet nobody will deny that work on druglike compounds is a science; the fact is that chemists use guidelines for making druglike molecules all the time and they work. In fact why talk about druglike compounds when all of chemistry is sometimes regarded as insufficiently scientific and rigorous by physicists? There are several concepts in chemistry – aromaticity, hydrophobic effects, polarizability, chemical diversity – which succumb to multiple definitions and are not strictly quantifiable. Yet nobody (except perhaps certain physicists) denies that chemistry is a science.

Noam Chomsky in AlterNet:

According to received doctrine, we live in capitalist democracies, which are the best possible system, despite some flaws. There's been an interesting debate over the years about the relation between capitalism and democracy, for example, are they even compatible? I won't be pursuing this because I'd like to discuss a different system – what we could call the “really existing capitalist democracy”, RECD for short, pronounced “wrecked” by accident. To begin with, how does RECD compare with democracy? Well that depends on what we mean by “democracy”. There are several versions of this. One, there is a kind of received version. It's soaring rhetoric of the Obama variety, patriotic speeches, what children are taught in school, and so on. In the U.S. version, it's government “of, by and for the people”. And it's quite easy to compare that with RECD.

In the United States, one of the main topics of academic political science is the study of attitudes and policy and their correlation. The study of attitudes is reasonably easy in the United States: heavily-polled society, pretty serious and accurate polls, and policy you can see, and you can compare them. And the results are interesting. In the work that's essentially the gold standard in the field, it's concluded that for roughly 70% of the population – the lower 70% on the wealth/income scale – they have no influence on policy whatsoever. They're effectively disenfranchised. As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little bit more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, i.e. they determine the policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it's plutocracy.

More here.

Liam Heneghan in Aeon:

When people ask me what experiences made me want to be an environmental scientist, I usually think first of adventures with pets, shell-collecting along Dublin’s strands, maintaining the aquarium with my father, and much later, the college summers I spent collecting insects in Ireland’s national parks. But it seems clear to me now that time spent indoors, reading and being read to, had an equally powerful affect on me. Reading introduced me to nature — the sort of ordinary but wholly involving nature I encountered right outside my door.

I’ve been thinking about the environmentally salutary implications of children’s books a lot lately, and not only for their value in minting the next generation of naturalists. Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods (2005) has launched a movement encouraging this more sedentary generation of children to get out of doors, but I wonder if there might also be an environmental benefit to be gained by fortifying those intimate indoor moments when parents read to their children. Are there special books that parents should choose for the Great Indoors? Are there special ways to read them?

Having now spent some time examining the content of contemporary children’s bookshelves — visiting the local library, compiling and analysing lists of children’s classics, chatting with friends and neighbours who have small children — I have come to the conclusion that reading about nature might be simply unavoidable, since it is hard to find kids’ books that are not about our furred and feathered friends, or their prehistoric ancestors.

More here.

Jerome Taylor in The Independent:

Over the past 10 years the holiest site in Islam has undergone a huge transformation, one that has divided opinion among Muslims all over the world.

Once a dusty desert town struggling to cope with the ever-increasing number of pilgrims arriving for the annual Hajj, the city now soars above its surroundings with a glittering array of skyscrapers, shopping malls and luxury hotels.

To the al-Saud monarchy, Mecca is their vision of the future – a steel and concrete metropolis built on the proceeds of enormous oil wealth that showcases their national pride.

Yet growing numbers of citizens, particularly those living in the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, have looked on aghast as the nation's archaeological heritage is trampled under a construction mania backed by hardline clerics who preach against the preservation of their own heritage. Mecca, once a place where the Prophet Mohamed insisted all Muslims would be equal, has become a playground for the rich, critics say, where naked capitalism has usurped spirituality as the city's raison d'être.

Few are willing to discuss their fears openly because of the risks associated with criticising official policy in the authoritarian kingdom.

More here.

Tim Martin in The Telegraph:

From Smithsonian:

Not many people want to live to be 120. That’s one of the findings of a Pew Research Center report that came out last week. In fact, almost 70 percent of those surveyed said an ideal lifespan would be somewhere between 79 and 100 years.

…Which brings me to one more question: How realistic is the notion that science can one day make 100 the new 60? For starters, we’re not only living longer–life expectancy in the U.S. is now close to 79–but the period of truly dismal health before death is getting shorter. That’s one of the main findings of a Harvard University study published last month–that most people no longer are very sick for six or seven years before they die. Instead, that stretch of poor health has shrunken to about a year or so. Thanks to medical science, we are becoming more like light bulbs–we work well, then go out fast. “People are living to older ages,” said lead researcher David Cutler, “and we are adding healthy years, not debilitated ones.”

…Here’s other recent research on the battle against aging:

• Now find out something good about marshmallows: Hot cocoa doesn’t just hit the spot on a winter morning; It also may be keeping your brain sharp. A new study from Harvard University says that two cups of cocoa a day was enough to increase the blood flow in the brains of older people. It also apparently helped their memories work faster.
• Didn’t see that coming: Living through a traumatic experience may actually help men live longer. Research just published in PLOS One says that male survivors of the Holocaust tend to live longer than men who didn’t experience it. That may seem counter-intuitive, but the researchers say it could reflect a phenomenon known as “post-traumatic growth,” where high levels of psychological stress serve as stimuli for developing personal skills and strength and a deeper meaning to life. The same longevity effect was not seen in women Holocaust survivors.
• In with the bad air: A study by M.I.T. professor Michael Greenstone has quantified the impact of the heavy air pollution from coal-burning power plants in China. By comparing statistics from a more urbanized region where power was supplied mainly by coal plants with a more rural one without any power plants, Greenstone concluded that regular exposure to coal pollution can take more than five years off a person’s life.
• Now will you get your beauty sleep?: If you don’t get enough sleep, you aren’t doing your skin any favors. That’s the conclusion of a study that found that the skin of poor sleepers ages quickly and also takes longer to recover from sunburn and dirty air.
• This explains many things: And finally, researchers in Japan found that aging animals like sweets less and are more willing to put up with bitter tastes.

More here.

Partition

by W. H. Auden

Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.
“Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It's too late
For mutual reconciliation or rational debate:
The only solution now lies in separation.
The Viceroy thinks, as you will see from his letter,
That the less you are seen in his company the better,
So we've arranged to provide you with other accommodation.
We can give you four judges, two Moslem and two Hindu,
To consult with, but the final decision must rest with you.”

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep the assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The working definition of “scientism” is “the belief that science is the right approach to use in situations where science actually isn’t the right approach at all.” Nobody actually quotes this definition, but it accurately matches how the word is used. The problem should be obvious — the areas in which science is the right approach are not universally agreed upon. So instead of having an interesting substantive discussion about a real question (“For what kinds of problems is a scientific approach the best one?”) we instead have a dopey and boring definitional one (“What does the word `scientism’ mean?”).

I don’t know of anyone in the world who thinks that science is the right tool to use forevery problem. Pinker joins Alex Rosenberg, who has tried to rehabilitate the word “scientism,” claiming it as a badge of honor, and using it to mean a view that “the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything.” But even Alex firmly rejects the idea that science can be used to discover objective moral truths — and others think it can, a view which is sometimes labeled as “scientism.” You can see the confusion.

Someone might respond, “but `scientism’ is a useful shorthand for a set of views that many people seem to hold.” No, it’s not. Here are some possible views that might be described as “scientism”:

• Science is the source of all interesting, reliable facts about the world.
• Philosophy and morality and aesthetics should be subsumed under the rubric of science.
• Science can provide an objective grounding for judgments previously thought to be subjective.
• Humanities and the arts would be improved by taking a more scientific approach.
• The progress of science is an unalloyed good for the world.
• All forms of rational thinking are essentially science.
• Eventually we will understand all the important questions of human life on a scientific basis.
• Reductionism is the best basis for complete understanding of complicated systems.
• There is no supernatural realm, only the natural world that science can investigate.

The problem is that, when you use the word “scientism,” you (presumably) know exactly what you are talking about. You mean to include some of the above supposed sins, but not necessarily all of them. But if you aren’t completely explicit about what you mean every time you use the term, people will misunderstand you.

Indeed, you might even misunderstand yourself.

Massimo Pigliucci in Rationally Speaking:

Interestingly, the word pseudoscience can also be used to deflect genuine criticism: oh, you are just throwing pseudoscience at me in order to dismiss what I do without argument, says the ufologist (or astrologist, or homeopath, or…). And of course it is perfectly true that both scientism and pseudoscience can indeed be used inappropriately, just like the term science itself can and has been invoked to prop up all sorts of bad doctrines (scientific psychoanalysis, scientific Marxism, phrenology, eugenics, and so forth).

So the problem isn't with the fact that some people misuse a given term, the problem is whether that term actually refers to something worth talking about. Science surely does; and so does pseudoscience. Things are no different for scientism, but we need to talk about concrete examples rather than conceptual generics.

Unfortunately, Pinker's essay is remarkably short on specifics. It reads like one long whining session against the injustices perpetrated on science by unknown and unnamed postmodernists (the favored bugaboo of defenders of scientism) and religious fundamentalists. Indeed, there are only two specific examples throughout the piece of what Pinker thinks are unfair attacks on science: one by historian Jackson Lears, the other by Leon Kass, former G.W. Bush bioethics advisor.

Kass' piece is indeed a religiously (mis-)informed ramble about the evil of materialism (quite a rich accusation, coming from a political party that has made the pursuit of material goods for their self-selected elite a national platform), so Pinker is right in dismissing it. But Lears' target are the writings of Sam Harris, a textbook example of the excesses of scientism if there is any to be found out there! And therein lies the problem: just as in the case of pseudoscience, the devil, so to speak, is in the details.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

A high-octane debate has broken out among the world’s physicists about what would happen if you jumped into a black hole, a fearsome gravitational monster that can swallow matter, energy and even light. You would die, of course, but how? Crushed smaller than a dust mote by monstrous gravity, as astronomers and science fiction writers have been telling us for decades? Or flash-fried by a firewall of energy, as an alarming new calculation seems to indicate?

This dire-sounding debate has spawned a profusion of papers, blog posts and workshops over the last year. At stake is not Einstein’s reputation, which is after all secure, or even the efficacy of our iPhones, but perhaps the basis of his general theory of relativity, the theory of gravity, on which our understanding of the universe is based. Or some other fundamental long-established principle of nature might have to be abandoned, but physicists don’t agree on which one, and they have been flip-flopping and changing positions almost weekly, with no resolution in sight.

“I was a yo-yo on this,” said one of the more prolific authors in the field, Leonard Susskind of Stanford. He paused and added, “I haven’t changed my mind in a few months now.”

Raphael Bousso, a theorist at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “I’ve never been so surprised. I don’t know what to expect.”

You might wonder who cares, especially if encountering a black hole is not on your calendar. But some of the basic tenets of modern science and of Einstein’s theory are at stake in the “firewall paradox,” as it is known.

The penal regimes of pre-modern European states were harsh and violent, heavy on deterrence and the symbolism of retribution. Towns such as Nuremberg needed professional executioners to deal with an ever-present threat of criminality through the public infliction of capital and corporal sentences. Punishing malefactors with lengthy periods of incarceration was an idea for the future, and would probably have struck 16th-century people as unnecessarily cruel. Methods ranged from execution with the sword (the most honourable) to hanging (the least), and from the relatively quick and merciful to the dreadful penalty of staking a person to the ground and breaking their limbs one after the other with a heavy cartwheel. This was not a world of mindless violence: the punishments Schmidt imposed were carefully prescribed by the city authorities, down to the number of ‘nips’ (pieces of flesh torn from the limbs with red-hot tongs) convicts were to receive on their way to the gallows. This gruesome regimen can be reconstructed because, over the course of 45 years, Schmidt kept a personal journal – not a diary in anything like the modern sense, but a usually terse and impersonal chronological record of all the punishments he had inflicted, including some details of the crimes behind them. The journal is not a new discovery (a version of it was printed as long ago as 1801), but Joel Harrington, drawing on a previously unused, near-contemporary copy, is the first historian to realise its full potential.

more from Peter Marshall at Literary Review here.

Through his early years there, Ramanujan was reading widely in modern American poetry, in particular that of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. He had accumulated a substantial body of poems to add to the writings of his twenties, publishing them every now and then in minor American journals. In the mid-1960s, Girish Karnad, who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was now working at Oxford University Press’s office in Madras, wondered if the Press might consider Ramanujan’s work for the new ‘Oxford Poets’ series edited by the poet Jon Stallworthy. Karnad could not persuade the aesthetically conservative Roy Hawkins, OUP’s general manager in India, to give the typescript his official endorsement (“I don’t know why you call this poetry. Looks like prose cut up and pasted to look like verse to me”) and had to send them to London as a personal recommendation. To his delight, Stallworthy liked the poems. On the 5th of August 1964, Karnad wrote to Ramanujan in Chicago: Dear Ramanujan A hurried note before I get down to the work for the day. I’m sorry I can’t give you more definite news but things—so far as ‘The Striders’ is concerned—are warming up.

more from Nakul Krishna at Caravan here.

Teju Cole in The New Inquiry:

1
Eyes closed please. While one man led prayers at Christ Happyhome Church in Sango Ota, three of his accomplices robbed the congregation.

2
Shamsudeni was sleeping in Nyanya when Abubakar sneaked into his house, crept into his bed, and woke up part of him.

3
Ude, of Ikata, recently lost his wife. Tired of arguing with her, he used a machete.

4
Some moms make empty threats. Not Anyah, of Lafia, who brought Joseph into this world and, over a land dispute, took him out of it.

5
“He doesn’t.” “She won’t let me.” Court testimony from Saratu and Isa, of Kaduna, who last did it ten years ago.

More here.

Kevin Drum in Mother Jones:

The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.

And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to “fill 'er up with ethyl,” they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

More here.