Hello,

The period for nominating entries is now over.

To browse the full list of nominees and then vote, go here.

Voting will end on Saturday, June 16 at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Good luck to all!

Yto Barrada. La Cage Aux Singes 2008/2011.

From the solo show titled Riffs.

“…The show´s title is inspired by music, where “Riff” stands for a rhythmic figure, a musical phrase that some players add to a written score. Riff relates also to the rugged Rif mountains of Morocco, home to insurgencies and a splinter Republic, and to the art deco Rif Cinema, which houses the Tangier Cinémathèque.”

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to David and Margaret Gullette!

Chris Vaughan in Metapsychology:

Why would a work on legalizing prostitution have thirty five pages of closely printed notes and a bibliography running to almost sixteen pages? The answer lies in the incendiary nature of the subject matter. Emotions frequently run high when it comes to discussing the sex trade and there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. Ronald Weitzer, Professor of Sociology at George Washington University is determined to bring some calm dispassionate reasoning based on solid research to the debate. Too often, he says, this debate is still stuck in what Popper termed the pre-scientific stage. Arguments are formulated on impressionistic, untested assumptions. Hence when it comes to prostitution, given that only a minority of the population ever experience prostitutes in the flesh as it were – between 15 – 18 per cent across the Western world – then the debate is coloured by impressions gathered from the media, from literature, from films and plays and from the more high profile street prostitutes on view in any large city.

My own impressions were formed when the neighbourhood where I live, at the time a decaying inner city suburb of large Victorian houses, many of them sublet, was invaded by a posse of street prostitutes who had been driven out from the city's traditional 'red light' area by angry residents taking direct action. His broadly researched description of this form of selling sex match my own observations as we, as residents, strove with the help of the police, the civil courts, city officers and social workers to get them to desist or move on and stop using our neighbourhood as their place of work and all the attendant ills it visited on us. He lists these: the initial transaction is in a public place: the sex act takes place in a public or semi-public place: many underage prostitutes are runaways in a new locale with no resources and little recourse but to engage in some kind of criminal activity – theft, drug dealing, selling sex. They sell sex out of dire necessity or to support a drug habit.

More here.

Rebecca Foresman in The New Yorker:

Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the collection “Native Guard,” was named U.S. Poet Laureate last Wednesday. Her poetic voice has deftly positioned her to inherit the laureate tradition and usher it into the future. Trethewey’s writing mines the cavernous isolation, brutality, and resilience of African American history, tracing its subterranean echoes to today.

Her poem, “Native Guard,” for example, draws its title and narrative focus from the so-called Union Army regiment of black soldiers, primarily liberated slaves, who watched over Confederate prisoners of war. Trethewey, in an agile shift from poetry to prose, past to present, and national to personal history, continues her investigation of race relations in her non-fiction book, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.” Here, Trethewey applies an autobiographical lens to the vertiginous power dynamics and fractured identity politics of being black in America. She delves into her memories of childhood as the daughter of an interracial marriage, deemed illegal under Mississippi law at the time of her parents’ union.

More here.

David Luban in the Boston Review:

This week, U.S. officials announced that they had killed al Qaeda’s second-in-command with a drone strike. The news came soon after the New York Timespublished the fullest account to date of the process by which the United States selects lower-profile targets for drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen. The most startling revelation was that President Obama personally supervises the “nomination” of potential targets and gives final approval for killing them.

The lengthy Times story isn’t based on a leak—it is clearly news that the White House wants the world to know. The reporters interviewed three dozen current and former Obama advisors to assemble their picture of the target-selection process. In his new book, Kill or Capture: The War on Terror and the Soul of the Obama Presidency,Newsweek reporter Daniel Klaidman notes that Obama’s presidential campaign “is painting a portrait of a steely commander who pursues the enemy without flinching.” Three days after the drones article, the Times ran an equally detailed article, again with obvious White House consent, about U.S. cyberattacks against Iran, reporting that “Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings . . . was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory.” This image of the president firmly in command of the drone campaign is precisely what the White House wishes to convey in the run-up to the election.

So why did the president put his hand on the helm? The Times reports:

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.

This image of a president schooled in just war theory is remarkable. At least one Catholic Web site has poured scorn on “the wise, judicious philosopher-king consulting Aquinas and Augustine before sending a drone missile on a ‘signature strike’ on a group of picnickers in Yemen or farmers in Pakistan.”

More here.

Angelique Richardson in the Times Literary Supplement:

Reading Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species straight after publication, Friedrich Engels wrote to tell Karl Marx that it was quite splendid. Excepting, that is, its “clumsy English method”. Turning to it on his sickbed a year later, Marx responded that “although it is developed in the crude English style, this is the book which contains the natural history basis for my view”. Closer to home, Darwin’s readers were not always more enamoured of his style. Within weeks of its appearance, George Eliot wrote that she thought the book “ill-written”, and that she didn’t think it would be very popular. But few could doubt its significance, and writers were among the first to see this. Hitting the bookshops in November 1859, it sold out on the first day, Darwin’s publisher John Murray told him. Eliot said “it will have a great effect in the scientific world . . . . So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty!”, and Thomas Hardy, who read it as a teenager, declared himself to be one of its first champions. Rereading the Origin (“slowly again for the nth time, with the view of picking out the essentials of the argument for the obituary notice”), T. H. Huxley remarked that “nothing entertains me more than to hear people call it easy reading”. “Exposition”, he insisted, “was not Darwin’s forte – and his English is sometimes wonderful.” This wonderful English, the extraordinary prose that could puzzle Darwin’s Victorian readers, is the subject of George Levine’s new book, from which Darwin emerges as an artist as well as a scientist, a master of argument, analogical reasoning, hypothesis and anecdote.

More here.

Geoff Dyer in The Observer:

I'd heard that the title essay of Jonathan Franzen's new collection was about his punishing experiences on a rough and tiny island. Some of what happened there is by now well known. The inhabitants of this island welcomed him by printing the wrong version of his novel Freedom, necessitating the pulping of its entire first print run. Then at the party – marked, as a consequence of this error, by the absence of the book it was intended to launch – a gatecrasher plucked Franzen's glasses from his face, ran off into the night and demanded a ransom of several thousand pounds. (He's blind as a mole without his specs, apparently; probably the result of having subjected his peepers to every page of William Gaddis's The Recognitions and about half of JR.)

When the plane lifted off from Heathrow, Franzen must have breathed a sigh of relief and said to himself that it would be a cold day in hell before he'd set foot on that loud-dump again. So I admired the courage it took to revisit the site of these serial traumas in print.

Except, it turns out, the essay is about another, less ferocious place: Más Afuera, the island way down in the South Pacific where Alexander Selkirk (the model for Robinson Crusoe) was a castaway. Franzen retreats there after months of promoting his book, armed with a tent, a copy of Defoe's novel and some of the ashes of his friend David Foster Wallace. Once installed on the island – installed in the sense of barely able to erect his tent – Franzen reflects on the ludicrousness of the endeavour (“I hadn't felt so homesick since, possibly, the last time I'd camped by myself”), the rise of the novel in the age of Defoe and on his “friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete” with Wallace.

More here.

Marcella Sirhandi in Islamic Arts:

Lubna graduated from Mina Art School in Karachi, Pakistan in 1967, and at a very young age became one of the most recognized painters in the country. In the 1960s she painted colorful abstract compositions, exhibited at the Arts Council as well as newly established galleries in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. She sold her work at a time when collectors were few and very selective.

In the 1970s, she became famous for her White series, delicate minimalist paintings with cotton ball shapes delineated by calligraphic lines and sweeps of black and red paint. The press reacted as never before. Each journalist, trying to outdo one another, saw something symbolic in these paintings, from the erotic to the sublime. These paintings were purely formalist concerns but Lubna enjoyed the spin. In 1973, when she was in her 20s, Lubna was awarded second prize in the National Exhibition in Pakistan, an exhibition dominated by senior Pakistani artists.

At the height of her career in Pakistan, Lubna and her family moved to Sacramento, California. Lubna took up drawing, print making and painting small watercolors in her new home. Her drawings expressed feelings of alienation from her home in Pakistan. California was truly a foreign place for her. Her watercolors held similar meaning with falling figures and limbs detached from their bodies. Several exhibitions, including one-person shows, followed both in California, the United Kingdom and on her periodic return to Pakistan. By the year 2000, Lubna was gripped by political concerns. She produced the Ja-namaaz series to address her grievances. Pakistan, her homeland, had become increasingly dependent on foreign institutions. She painted prayer rugs mocking allegiance to these institutions, including the White House, the IMF and even McDonalds.

More here.

Dear Reader,

Thanks very much for participating in our contest. For details of the prize you can look at the announcement here, and to read the nominated posts you can go here for a complete list with links.

If you are new to 3 Quarks Daily, we welcome you and invite you to look around the site after you vote. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full sitehere. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed. If you have a blog or website, and like what you see here, we would very much appreciate being added to your blogroll. Please don’t forget!

Voting ends on June 16 at 11:59 pm NYC time.

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on June 17, 2012. Winners of the contest will be announced on or around June 25, 2012.

Now go ahead and submit your vote below!

PLEASE BE AWARE: We have multiple ways of detecting fraud such as multiple votes being cast by the same person. We will disqualify anyone attempting to cheat.

Cheers,

Abbas

Kishwar Desai in The Independent:

Why is it that, most of the time, life-changing events appear to come out of nowhere? Or are we always unconsciously preparing for that moment, and the destiny-diverting collision (even with a book) is never as coincidental as it seems? There are few books that I have read which have not shaped my mind and fate in some way, especially when I was growing up. Whether it was the PG Wodehouse Jeeves series, or the collection of Oscar Wilde stories I constantly enjoyed…or Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Daphne du Maurier. I was a greedy monster, devouring them all.

From PhysOrg:

Religious practices that strongly control female sexuality are more successful at promoting certainty about paternity, according to a study published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study analyzed genetic data on 1,706 father-son pairs in a traditional African population—the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa—in which Islam, two types of Christianity, and an indigenous, monotheistic religion are practiced in the same families and villages. “We found that the indigenous religion allows males to achieve a significantly lower probability of cuckoldry—1.3 percent versus 2.9 percent,” said Beverly Strassmann, lead author of the article and a biological anthropologist at the University of Michigan.

In the traditional religion, menstrual taboos are strictly enforced, with women exiled for five nights to uncomfortable menstrual huts. According to Strassmann, the religion uses the ideology of pollution to ensure that women honestly signal their fertility status to men in their husband's family. “When a woman resumes going to the menstrual hut following her last birth, the husband's patrilineage is informed of the imminency of conception and cuckoldry risk,” Strassmann said. “Precautions include postmenstrual copulation initiated by the husband and enhanced vigilance by his family.” Across all four of the religions practiced by the Dogon people, Strassmann and colleagues detected father-son Y DNA mismatches in only 1.8 percent of father-son pairs, a finding that contradicts the prevailing view that traditional populations have high rates of cuckoldry. A similar rate of cuckoldry has been found in several modern populations, but a key difference is that the Dogon do not use contraception.

More here.

Alphabetical list of blog names followed by the blog post title:

(Please report any problems with links in the comments section below.)

For prize details, click here.

And after looking around, click here to vote.

1. 13.7: Physics Vs. Philosophy: Really?
2. 3 Quarks Daily: In the Kingdom of Decay
3. Above the Market: We Suck at Math
4. Accidental Blogger: Psychology’s Quest for Scientific Respectability
5. Aetiology: Hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS): history and implications
6. Alien Plantation: Agave de Mayo
7. Amy Shira Teitel: Was NASA’s First Launch Delay its Most Significant?
8. Antimatter: A tribute to Stephen Hawking
9. Astrobites: Let’s Lasso Us Some Space Rocks: Asteroid Mining And You
10. Astrobites: The WISE way to deal with 2.7 million images: a public data release
11. Astrobites: This star lives in exciting times, or, How did Betelgeuse make that funny shape?
12. Astronomy Picture of the Day: Red Aurora Over Australia
13. Azimuth: Information Geometry
14. Backreaction: The hunt for the first exoplanet
15. Baloon Juice: I’m Shocked! Shocked To Find That There Are Neutrinos Going On Here
16. Basic Space: Supernova turns inside out and kicks neutron star
17. Beach Chair Scientist: An important call for more forage fish to remain in the sea
18. Big in Science: Why Your Next Doctor May Be A Computer
19. Boing Boing: What Fukushima can teach us about coal pollution
20. Boundary Vision: Do scientific explanations have to ruin wonder? Stargazing and more with songwriter Jim Fitzpatrick
21. Cedar’s Digest: Purple Doesn’t Exist: Some thoughts on Male Privilege and Science Online
22. Context and Variation: Vaginal pH Redux: Broader Perspectives on Douching, Race… and Lime Juice
23. Cool Physics: Einstein, Darwin & the 21st Century…
24. Cosmology Science Blog: Cosmic Microwave Angular Resolution Surprise
25. Cosmology Science Blog: Observation of two early yet mature galaxies: Rare objects or is Big Bang model inaccurate?
26. Delfikorakle: Pizza and Panini
27. Denim and Tweed: Baby steps versus long jumps: The “size” of evolutionary change, and why it matters
28. Disease Prone: Antibiotics with a side of steak
29. Do the Math: Can Economic Growth Last?
30. Doing Good Science: Methodology versus beliefs: What did Marcus Ross do wrong?
31. Don’t Mind the Mess: The Whole Truth About Autism
32. Double X Science: From alchemist to chemist: What kind of chemistry is that?
33. Double X Science: Pregnancy 101: Peas made me puke, but not just in the morning
34. Double X Science: Real science vs. fake science: How can you tell them apart?
35. Double X Science: The path from science to alarmism: How science gets twisted before it gets to you
36. Eastern Blot: Make history, not vitamin C
37. Empirical Zeal: The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains
38. Empirical Zeal: What it feels like for a sperm, or how to get around when you are really, really small
39. Eruptions: The Mysterious Missing Eruption of 1258 A.D.
40. Eruptions: The Right (and Wrong) Way to Die When You Fall Into Lava
41. From the Lab Bench: Old News for Carbon Dioxide, New Threats for Climate Change
42. Gaines, On Brains: Seeing into the future? The neuroscience of déjà vu
43. Galileo’s Pendulum: Is Cosmology in Shambles?
44. Good Thinking: Mammograms and PSA Tests: What Your Doctor Needs to Tell You
45. If We Assume: Plots as Art
46. Information Processing: “Only he was fully awake”
47. Inkfish: Life Advice: Think More about Death
48. Inspiring Science: Through the gut: how plants in food regulate genes in animals
49. Katie Ph.D.: What exactly is a genetically modified plant?
50. Not Exactly Rocket Science: A world within a tumour – new study shows just how complex cancer can be
51. Nottingham Science Blog: Interview : Prof Alfonso Aragón-Salamanca
52. Of Particular Significance: What’s a Proton, Anyway?
53. Percolator: Birds Lose Their Magnetic Maps as Scientists Reverse Direction
54. Physics Buzz Blog: Physicist Uses Math to Beat Traffic Ticket
55. Puff the Mutant Dragon: Do vaccines contain toxic chemicals?
56. Quantum Diaries: Helicity, Chirality, Mass, and the Higgs
57. Resonaances: How to make a line
58. Science Sushi: Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming > Conventional Agriculture
59. Science Sushi: Time – and brain chemistry – heal all wounds
60. Scientific American: Why Is Memory So Good and So Bad?
61. Scientific American Guest Blog: Catalytic Clothing–Purifying Air Goes Trendy
62. Scientific American Guest Blog: Reflections on biology and motherhood: Where does Homo sapiens fit in?
63. Scientific American Guest Blog: The educational value of creative disobedience
64. Scientific American Guest Blog: Too Good to Be True: Sea Mammals, Plastic Pollution and a Modern Chimera
65. Scientific American Guest Blog: Trayvon Martin’s Psychological Killer: Why We See Guns That Aren’t There
66. Scientific American Guest Blog: Your Appendix Could Save Your Life
67. Sentence First: “Who to follow” is grammatically fine
68. Shtetl-Optimized: My visit to D-Wave: Beyond the roast-beef sandwich
69. Side Effects: Antidepressant Withdrawal Syndrome: Findings, Recommendations, and Resources
70. Skulls in the Stars: The secret molecular life of soap bubbles (1913)
71. Southern Fried Science: Climbing Mount Chernobyl
72. Starts With A Bang!: So, you’ve learned that the Sun is going to explode…
73. Starts With A Bang!: The Most Astounding Fact About The Universe
74. Starts With A Bang!: Why is there something instead of nothing?
75. Talk Nerdy To Me: My Evening With Stephen Hawking
76. The Beast, the Bard, and the Bot: Are Humans Still Evolving?
77. The Crux: What Is the “Bible of Psychiatry” Supposed to Do? The Peculiar Challenges of an Uncertain Science
78. The Dayside: Sine-wave speech recognition in Mandarin
79. The Hammock Physicist: Einstein Got It Wrong, Can You Do Better?
80. The Loom: Neanderthal Neuroscience
81. The Mermaid’s Tale: Forget bipedalism. What about babyism?
82. The Neurocritic: Little Evidence for a Direct Link between PTSD and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy
83. The Neurocritic: The Disconnection of Psychopaths
84. The Primate Diaries: Freedom to Riot: On the Evolution of Collective Violence
85. The Scorpion and the Frog: Decisions, Decisions
86. The Scorpion and the Frog: Snakes Deceive to Get a Little Snuggle
87. The Scorpion and the Frog: The Love Hormone of 2012
88. The Scorpion and the Frog: Why This Horde of Idiots is No Genius
89. The Sky’s the Limit: Saturn’s Rings Explained…
90. The Spectrum of Riemannium: Time of Flight
91. The Stochastic Scientist: Carbon monoxide as therapy?
92. The Thoughtful Animal: Can You Hear Me Now? Human Noise Disrupts Blue Whale Communication
93. The Thoughtful Animal: Contagious Yawning: Evidence of Empathy?
94. The Thoughtful Animal: Four Loko Is Just Like The Copenhagen Philharmonic
95. The Thoughtful Animal: Hyenas Give Up Eating Garbage for Lent, Hunt Donkeys Instead
96. The Thoughtful Animal: Music and Memory: Robert Sherman, Voice of Your Childhood, Dies at 86
97. The Trenches of Discovery: The War of the Immune Worlds
98. Theobrominated: How can a flower like this exist?
99. Three-toed Sloth: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You
100. Uncertain Principles: Watching Photons Interfere: “Observing the Average Trajectories of Single Photons in a Two-Slit Interferometer”
101. viXra log: Higgs Boson Live Blog: Analysis of the CERN announcement
102. Weird Things: Oh quantum causality, we hardly knew ye…
103. Where is Yvette?: Artie Aardvark’s Amazing ASTRON Adventures
104. Why We Reason: Does Pinker’s “Better Angels” Undermine Religious Morality?
105. World Science Festival: E.O. Wilson’s Controversial Rethink of Altruism
106. Write Science: Pigeons, the Internet, and the Meaning of Science
107. Write Science: Smartphones and the Enduring Silence of the Cosmos

Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books:

In 1972, I found myself on a panel whose subject was the poetry of the future. It was at the Struga Poetry Festival in Macedonia. I wasn’t scheduled to participate, but the American poet who was supposed to, W.S. Merwin, begged me to take his place, since he wanted to visit some monastery with his girlfriend. Being older, much more famous, and immensely admired by me, he couldn’t be refused and I went to the morning panel without any idea of what I was going to say. To my horror, the other panelists had come well-prepared, reading either from copious notes or as in the case of a poet from the Soviet Union, from a lengthy typewritten text that confidently predicted a golden age of poetry in a world turned Communist and living in harmony for the first time in human history.

My turn came next, though I was in near-comatose condition from uninterrupted drinking, smoking and talking since my arrival to the festival after a twenty-hour long journey from San Francisco with barely any sleep. Nevertheless, roused back to life by the drivel of the previous speaker, I said that predicting the future of poetry is a total waste of time, because poetry has not changed fundamentally in the last twenty-five centuries and I doubted it would do so in the next hundred years. Since that was all the energy I had, I fell silent and didn’t open my mouth again for the rest of the session. As for my fellow-panelists, I have no memory of any of them responding to anything I said as they continued arguing with each other about the future of poetry.

What I said that day was as much of a surprise to me as it must have been to the other people in the room, for I was then known as a surrealist poet, someone who routinely proclaimed a belief in the avant-garde. I and my friends were like those old-time Marxists who were sure that they understood the laws of history. We were convinced that abstract painting was an advance over figurative painting, that free verse was superior to meter and rhyme. To me, novelty was an essential requirement in the arts, and it still is.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Probably the biggest single misconception I come across in popular discussions of dark matter and dark energy is the accusation that these concepts are a return to the discredited idea of the aether. They are not — in fact, they are precisely the opposite.

Back in the later years of the 19th century, physicists had put together an incredibly successful synthesis of electricity and magnetism, topped by the work of James Clerk Maxwell. They had managed to show that these two apparently distinct phenomena were different manifestations of a single underlying “electromagnetism.” One of Maxwell’s personal triumphs was to show that this new theory implied the existence of waves traveling at the speed of light — indeed, these waves arelight, not to mention radio waves and X-rays and the rest of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum.

The puzzle was that waves were supposed to represent oscillations in some underlying substance, like water waves on an ocean. If light was an electromagnetic wave, what was “waving”? The proposed answer was the aether, sometimes called the “luminiferous aether” to distinguish it from the classical element. This idea had a direct implication: that Maxwell’s description of electromagnetism would be appropriate as long as we were at rest with respect to the aether, but that its predictions (for the speed of light, for example) would change as we moved through the aether. The hunt was to find experimental evidence for this idea, but attempts came up short. TheMichelson-Morley experiment, in particular, implied that the speed of light did not change as the Earth moved through space, in apparent contradiction with the aether idea.

So the aether was a theoretical idea that never found experimental support. In 1905 Einstein pointed out how to preserve the symmetries of Maxwell’s equations without referring to aether at all, in the special theory of relativity, and the idea was relegated to the trash bin of scientific history.

More here.

In a written exchange, associate professor Michael Alfaro and postdoctoral scientist Sharlene E. Santana described their investigation with American Scientistsenior editor Catherine Clabby.

Catherine Clabby in American Scientist:

What inspired your research into primate faces?

When you see the faces of primates, you see an extraordinary diversity of shapes, colors and patterns, so we wondered what were the factors behind this diversity. Social behaviors seemed to be a very likely candidate underlying the diversity of primate faces, so that drew us in to further explore how behaviors can shape the evolution of anatomy in these mammals. Neotropical primates were ideal to start our studies of facial diversity because they are a single evolutionary radiation spanning a wide variety of habitats and social systems, and they have an extraordinary variation in their facial features.

Are the faces of primates really that different from the faces of other mammals?

What is particular about primates is their high reliance on facial cues to interact socially, more so than many other mammals. Primates use characteristics of their faces and facial expressions to recognize individuals in their groups and to assess each other’s behaviors. Related to this, primates have evolved a very well-developed visual system and neural centers for facial recognition. Such an important role in communication has shaped the evolution of primate faces, along with ecological and physiological functions.

More here.

Mark Edmundson in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Who hasn't at least once had the feeling of being remade through music? Who is there who doesn't date a new phase in life to hearing this or that symphony or song? I heard it—we say—and everything changed. I heard it, and a gate flew open and I walked through. But does music constantly provide revelation—or does it have some other effects, maybe less desirable?

For those of us who teach, the question is especially pressing. Our students tend to spend hours a day plugged into their tunes. Yet, at least in my experience, they are reluctant to talk about music. They'll talk about sex, they'll talk about drugs—but rock 'n' roll, or whatever else they may be listening to, is off-limits. What's going on there?

When I first heard Bob Dylan's “Like a Rolling Stone” in 1965, not long after it came out, I was amazed. At the time, I liked to listen to pop on the radio—the Beatles were fine, the Stones were better. But nothing I'd heard until then prepared me for Dylan's song. It had all the fluent joy of a pop number, but something else was going on too. This song was about lyrics: language. Dylan wasn't chanting some truism about being in love or wanting to get free or wasted for the weekend. He had something to say. He was exasperated. He was pissed off. He'd clearly been betrayed by somebody, or a whole nest of somebodies, and he was letting them have it. His words were exuberantly weird and sometimes almost embarrassingly inventive—and I didn't know what they all meant. “You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat / Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat.” Chrome horse? Diplomat? What?

More here.

Jim Holt in the New York Times:

A kerfuffle has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.

This is hardly the first occasion on which physicists have made disobliging comments about philosophy. Last year at a Google “Zeitgeist conference” in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was “dead.” Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy “murky and inconsequential” and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that “philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.”

Why do physicists have to be so churlish toward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science. “Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us,” Voltaire wrote back in the 18th century. And in the last few decades, philosophers have come to see their enterprise as continuous with that of science. It is noteworthy that the “moronic” philosopher who kicked up the recent shindy by dismissing the physicist’s book himself holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics.

More here. [Photo shows David Albert.]