Tahir Mehdi in Dawn:

A huge number of Muslims from Uttar Pradesh migrated in 1947 to Sindh in Pakistan. People with Urdu as their mother tongue are 21 per cent of the province’s population now. Or every fifth inhabitant of Sindh belongs to third or second generation of migrants from India at large and UP in particular. Any reference to forefather’s villages, towns or jagirs still makes many eyes sparkle and send others into nostalgic tailspins. They all had migrated, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly in pursuit of a peaceful society and prosperous family lives and their children’s text books kept on reminding them over the next many decades that the cherished dream could never be realised with Hindus roaming around all over and dominating every thing.

The same Uttar Pradesh recently elected members for its 403-seat state (provincial) assembly. Muslims still live in that Indian state that is bigger than Pakistan in population. UP’s population according to a 2011 census is 199.6 million and 19.8 per cent of these are Muslims. Or every fifth inhabitant of the present-day UP is a Muslim. Muslim candidates were serious contenders for around half of the general seats of the state. In fact 68 of them won to become a member legislative assembly (MLA) and another 64 stood second in contests.

Almost every party fielded Muslim candidates. Samajwadi Party’s Adil Sheikh defeated speaker of state assembly Sukhdev Rajbhar, former minister Nand Gopal Gupta was drubbed by SP’s first-timer Haji Parvez Ahmed and four-time BJP winner Inder Dev Singh lost the battle to Mohammad Ghazi. No one cried foul, no allegations of rigging were hurled, no conspiracy theories of undermining Hindutva made rounds and above all no one saw the infamous ‘foreign hand’ behind the defeat of caste Hindus at the hands of ‘pariah’ Muslims.

More here.

Richard Anderson in The Nation:

Public universities in California may have been dethroned as being cheaper than private schools for middle-income students. According to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, schools like Harvard and Princeton provide a cheaper alternative to schools like San Jose State and University of California, Berkeley.

Private schools are generally even cheaper than Cal State Fullerton. To go to Harvard, it costs $4,000 for a family with an annual income of $30,000. At CSUF, it costs $16,331 for a full-time student.

According to the Bay Area News Group, a family of four making $130,000 a year would have to pay $24,000 for tuition, room, board and other expenses to send one child to a CSU. Harvard costs $36,000, but financial aid makes it the cheaper option.

Financial aid drops Harvard tuition costs down to $17,000 a year, under San Jose State’s $23,557 and even under the $19,500 it costs to go to UC Berkeley. While Princeton may be slightly more expensive ($19,830) than UC Berkeley, it is still considerably cheaper than San Jose State.

Private schools used to be considered more expensive than public, but that trend has changed for a couple of reasons.

According to the Social Security Administration’s website, in order for a college student under the age of 22 to receive Supplemental Security Income, the maximum he or she can earn annually is $6,600. However, Harvard’s maximum limit for receiving aid is much higher.

More here.

Vincent declared himself an artist in 1880, at the age of twenty-seven. He had only ten years left to live. Those years are chronicled with missionary zeal. Crisis follows crisis with numbing regularity. Perhaps that is how it was; what we lack in a treatment of this sort is a sense of what it meant, then and since. The pursuit is indefatigable but the life is shapeless. The death is re-examined, plausibly, but the significance of the life is never considered. A brief epilogue serves to reunite Vincent with Theo in the wheatfields of Auvers. It is as if the authors’ curiosity is sated with his interment. “Finally, Vincent had his reunion on the heath.” So it ends. The starry, starry afterlife is a void. The depth of his self-knowledge is unplumbed. What are we to make of this remarkable creature and his torments? How are we to weigh his work? On these questions Van Gogh: The Life keeps its silence. Vincent Van Gogh subscribed to an art of feeling – “heart-broken, and therefore heartbreaking”. He was a great painter, and very nearly a great writer. His painting is peculiarly life-affirming. His writing is truly heartbreaking. “I do not say that my work is good, but it’s the least bad that I can do. All the rest, relations with people, is very secondary, because I have no talent for that. I can’t help it.”

more from Alex Danchev at the TLS here.

Modernism is a strange artistic formation. In it, time and again, originality – which remains anachronistically the goal – lies on the other side of subservience. There is no such thing, it turns out in practice, as well-tempered learning in modernism, reasonable apprenticeship, picking and choosing the imitable. And this is a problem particularly for a genteel art culture – for a culture like England’s, whose arrogance over the past century has been most powerfully manifest in its false moderacy. But I get ahead of myself. Two things need establishing. First, that Picasso’s instigation, difficult as it was, did prove time and again in other nations a spur to major art. What Malevich and Tatlin were able to do with Picasso’s Cubism between 1912 and 1917; how Mondrian thought through the same style’s implications in Paris, and what he did, on returning to Holland, to make what he had learned usable in a shared project; the long-distance Picasso-olatry of the New York School; even the scrupulous Cubism of the Czechs before 1914 – these are moments that sum up, for me, the true intensity and dignity of modernism. And for a culture signally to lack such a moment is a weakness – maybe even an indictment.

more from T.J. Clark at the LRB here.

One evening, as I was taking the vaporetto no. 2 from Ponte dell’Academia to the San Marco stop on the Riva delgi schiavoni, I noticed that entire sections on this part of the Grand Canal were without light. Huge palaces were steeped in darkness, as if nobody lived there. These are the summer residences of the rich. But among them are also palaces that belong to the city and that the city is selling off, explained a friend of mine who lives here. Because change comes in many ways, not just with the poor wretches who make it in one piece to Lampedusa or some other patch of Italian soil; not just through food, fashion, custom and music, but also via banks, investments, money-laundering, corruption of the local administration. And while Europeans ponder future changes and whether to put up a wall around Europe (if only they knew what its boundaries were), while they contemplate measures that will contain immigrants at that same imaginary border and Europe’s culture and the values that need to be preserved (although globalization, in other words Americanization, has already utterly changed them), the Chinese are freely investing, buying palaces in Venice in order to turn them into hotels, thus making even more money out of Europe’s cultural treasures. From the Venetian viewpoint, in comparison with the investments of the Chinese – nota bene, some people here call it money-laundering – fear of Muslim immigrants in France and Germany and further north looks almost pathetic. My neighbour says that Venice is increasingly turning not into a museum, as I romantically thought, but a Disneylandish amusement park owned by the Chinese, who alone profit from it.

more from Slavenka Drakulic at Eurozine here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Three decades ago, Diana L. Eck—master of Lowell House and Wertham professor of law and psychiatry in society (a scholar of South Asian religions, despite her chair’s title)—wrote Banaras: City of Light, exploring Hinduism through its holiest pilgrimage site. Her perspective has become ever more expansive, as she has explored the interconnected pilgrimage sites throughout India. Now she explicates that interwoven world-view of the sacred and the profane in India: A Sacred Geography (Harmony Books, $27)—a sweeping examination of texts, places, and beliefs that may also help to explain to Western readers the rise of place-based Hindu nationalism in Indian politics. From chapter 2, “What Is India?”

…Students of Hinduism or travelers in India quickly become aware of what prolific mythmakers Hindus have been. The Hindu tradition is famous for its mythologies, and for the multitude of gods and goddesses one encounters in the temples and public spaces of India. Less well known, however, is the fact that Hindus have been equally avid geographers who have described with considerable detail the mountains, river systems, and holy places of India. For the most part, Hindu mythology has been studied by one group of scholars, primarily historians of religion, while the geographical traditions have been studied and catalogued by another group, primarily British and Indian civil servants, historical and cultural geographers. The great geography scholar Bimala C. Law speaks for this latter group when he confesses, “One finds it tedious to read the legendary history of tīrthas or holy places, but to a geographer it will never be a fruitless study.”

More here.

For Fear of Ruining My Life

For fear of ruining your life, or ruining you, or mine,
I stuff myself into a bottle like a bad genie.

Yet, since hope is an expansion, it will be unconfined.
This glass the color of jade is crackling and cracking.

The jailer is bladed. The genie is panicking.
Through each new fracture—a delicate beaming.
.

by Maria Gapotchenko
from Clarion, Issue 15
2011

From The Guardian:

Words are competing daily in an almost Darwinian struggle for survival, according to new research from scientists in which they analysed more than 10 million words used over the last 200 years. Drawing their material from Google's huge book-digitisation project, the international team of academics tracked the usage of every word recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the 209-year period between 1800 and 2008.

The scientists, who include Boston University's Joel Tenenbaum and IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies' Alexander Petersen, said their study shows that “words are competing actors in a system of finite resources”, and just as financial firms battle for market share, so words compete to be used by writers or speakers, and to then grab the attention of readers or listeners. There has been a “drastic increase in the death rate of words” in the modern print era, the academics discovered. They attributed it to the growing use of automatic spellcheckers, and stricter editing procedures, wiping out misspellings and errors. “Most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10 to 20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words,” the scientists write in their just-published study. “The words that are dying are those words with low relative use. We confirm by visual inspection that the lists of dying words contain mostly misspelled and nonsensical words.” But it is not only “defective” words that die: sometimes words are driven to extinction by aggressive competitors.

More here.

Stefan Nicola at Bloomberg:

Not since the allies leveled Germany in World War II has Europe’s biggest economy undertaken a reconstruction of its energy market on this scale.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is planning to build offshore wind farms that will cover an area six times the size of New York City and erect power lines that could stretch from London to Baghdad. The program will cost 200 billion euros ($263 billion), about 8 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in 2011, according to the DIW economic institute in Berlin.

Germany aims to replace 17 nuclear reactors that supplied about a fifth of its electricity with renewables such as solar and wind. Merkel to succeed must experiment with untested systems and policies and overcome technical hurdles threatening the project, said Stephan Reimelt, chief executive officer of General Electric Co. (GE)’s energy unit in the country.

Utilities running gas-generating plants in Germany lost 10.92 euros a megawatt-hour today at 12:16 p.m. local time, based on so-called clean-spark spreads for the next month that take account of gas, power and emissions prices. That compared with a profit of 20.95 euros in October 2009, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. U.K. generators earned 2.06 pounds ($3.27), down from a profit of 7.02 pounds in October.

“Germany is like a big energy laboratory,” Reimelt said in an interview.

More here.

From Nature:

The ability to see objects hidden behind walls could be invaluable in dangerous or inaccessible locations, such as inside machinery with moving parts, or in highly contaminated areas. Now scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge have found a way to do just that.

They fire a pulse of laser light at a wall on the far side of the hidden scene, and record the time at which the scattered light reaches a camera. Photons bounce off the wall onto the hidden object and back to the wall, scattering each time, before a small fraction eventually reaches the camera, each at a slightly different time. It's this time resolution that provides the key to revealing the hidden geometry. The position of the 50-femtosecond (that’s 50 quadrillionths of a second) laser pulse is also changed 60 times, to gain multiple perspectives on the hidden scene. “We are all familiar with sound echoes, but we can also exploit echoes of light,” says Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture Research Group at the MIT Media Lab which carried out the study.

More here.

From The White Review:

In 1999, Ahdaf Soueif’s second novel, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, eventually losing out to JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. The next year, the Guardian commissioned her to travel to Palestine – her first visit – and write about her experiences of a people increasingly marginalised and oppressed by the Israeli state. Thus began a decade-long crusade in cultural activism, in the shadow of her friend and mentor Edward Said. ‘This conflict has been a part of my life all my life,’ she wrote in December 2000. ‘But seeing it there, on the ground, is different. What can I do except bear witness?’ Since then, she has put fiction to one side, reluctantly, and grown into Egypt’s – and perhaps the Arab world’s – foremost political voice in Britain. In 2008, she launched the Palestinian Festival of Literature, an annual event dedicated to bringing Palestinian and international writers and artists to audiences across Palestine. Her latest book, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, is a passionate and engaged chronicle of the events before and after the fall of Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011. A few days before the 25 January demonstration marking the anniversary of the revolution in Cairo, Soueif invited me into her south London home to discuss her writing career, Palestine, and the progress of democracy in Egypt. Below is a short extract from the interview, which can be read in full in The White Review No. 4.

^QThe White Review — Your latest book, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, is an incredibly fervent account of the revolutionary passion in Tahrir Square. But one gets the sense that, in light of the increasing repression by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces against the revolutionaries, there is not so much hope. How do you feel, a year on, about the chances of the revolution being completed?

Once we model the connectome—the million
billion points of contact between neurons in the brain—we’ll glimpse the anatomy of the mind.

Carl Zimmer in Discover:

Neuroscientists know that the brain contains some 100 billion neurons and that the neurons are joined together via an estimated quadrillion connections. It’s through those links that the brain does the remarkable work of learning and storing memory. Yet scientists have never mapped that whole web of neural contact, known as the connectome. It would be as if doctors knew about each of our bones in isolation but had never seen an entire skeleton. The sheer complexity of the connectome has put such a map out of reach until now.

The strange forest on Berger’s desktop is one small but crucial piece of the picture. It is just three neurons large—“a thousandth the width of a human hair,” Seung says—but it shows every detail of their connections down to the smallest bumps and spikes. Taking advantage of the latest advances in electron microscopy and computer-controlled imaging, Seung and his team are creating some of the most detailed three-dimensional reconstructions of cortical gray matter ever made.

Seung believes that by the end of this century, his successors will have mapped the connectome of an entire human brain. “Our descendants will look back on these achievements as nothing less than a scientific revolution,” he writes in his new book, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. As scientists gain the power to see the brain in its full complexity, he argues, they will finally be able to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the mind.

More here.

Bill McKibben in The Nation:

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti–Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the Daily Herald. “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office added in an official statement.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the “icebox of the nation,” broke its old temperature records—by twenty-two degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century’s worth of records. Winner, South Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That’s in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter.

More here.

Qazal (in vain)

What use if you've chanted all you know in vain?
Prayed, prostrated, bowed, but rose in vain?

Think you own the house in which you live?
That door leads nowhere; you open and close it in vain.

Think you soar? Think you touch the clouds?
You are earthbound; you stand on your toes in vain.

Think it was you who made the wheel turn?
The die was already cast—you chose in vain.

Is it piety that makes you feel so safe?
The mirror is dark; you pose in vain.

The lover's song falls on callous ears.
The nightingale serenades the rose in vain.

Is it you for whom the beloved waits?
Wake up! You're caught in passion's throes in vain.
.

by Sassan Tabatabai
from Uzunburun
The Pen & Anvil Press, Boston, 2011

Aaron David Miller in Foreign Policy:

There's no question that Obama understands and appreciates the special relationship between Israel and the United States. But Obama isn't Bill Clinton or George W. Bush when it comes to Israel — not even close. These guys were frustrated by Israeli prime ministers too, but they also were moved and enamored by them (Clinton by Yitzhak Rabin, Bush by Ariel Sharon). They had instinctive, heartfelt empathy for the idea of Israel's story, and as a consequence they could make allowances at times for Israel's behavior even when it clashed with their own policy goals. Obama is more like George H.W. Bush when it comes to Israel, but without a strategy.

If Obama is emotional when it comes to Israel, he's hiding it. Netanyahu obviously thinks he's bloodless. But then again, the U.S. president can be pretty reserved on a number of issues. Obama doesn't feel the need to be loved by the Israelis, and perhaps American Jews either. Combine that with a guy who's much more comfortable in gray than in black and white, and you have a president who sees Israel's world in much more nuanced terms, which is clearly hard for many Israelis and American Jews to accept. In Obama's mind, Israel has legitimate security needs, but it's also the strongest regional power. As a result, he believes that the Israelis should compromise on the peace process, give nonmilitary pressures against Iran time to work, and recognize that despite the uncertainties of the Arab Spring, now is the time to make peace with the Palestinians.

If Obama had a chance to reset the U.S.-Israel relationship and make it a little less special, he probably would. But I guess that's the point: He probably won't have the chance. If he gets a second term, he'll more than likely be faced with the same mix of Middle East headaches, conflicting priorities, narrow maneuvering room, and the swirl of domestic politics that bedevils him today. If the U.S. president fails to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace, it will be primarily because the Israelis, the Palestinians, and Barack Obama wouldn't pay the price, not because the pro-Israel community in America got in his way.

First, Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung in American Scientist:

The nonfiction publishing phenomenon known as Freakonomics has passed its sixth anniversary. The original book, which used ideas from statistics and economics to explore real-world problems, was an instant bestseller. By 2011, it had sold more than four million copies worldwide, and it has sprouted a franchise, which includes a bestselling sequel, SuperFreakonomics; an occasional column in the New York Times Magazine; a popular blog; and a documentary film. The word “freakonomics” has come to stand for a light-hearted and contrarian, yet rigorous and quantitative, way of looking at the world.

The faces of Freakonomics are Steven D. Levitt, an award-winning professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and Stephen J. Dubner, a widely published New York–based journalist. Levitt is celebrated for using data and statistics to solve an array of problems not typically associated with economics. Dubner has perfected the formula for conveying the excitement of Levitt’s research—and of the growing body of work by his collaborators and followers. On the heels of Freakonomics, the pop-economics or pop-statistics genre has attracted a surge of interest, with more authors adopting an anecdotal, narrative style.

Then a response by Stephen Dubner:

Given the nature of the Freakonomics work that Steve Levitt and I do, we get our fair share of critiques. Some are ideological or political; others are emotional.

We generally look over such critiques to see if they contain worthwhile feedback, or point to an error in need of correction. But for the most part, we tend to not reply to critiques. It seems only fair to let critics have their say (as writers, we’ve already had ours). Furthermore, spending one’s time responding to wayward attacks is the kind of chore you’d rather skip in order to get on with your work.

But occasionally an attack is so spectacularly ridiculous, so riddled with errors and mangled logic, that it’s worth addressing.

The following essay responds to two such attacks. The first one was relatively minor, a recent blog post written by a Yale professor. The second was more substantial, an essay by a pair of statisticians in American Scientist. Feel free to skip ahead to that one (at section III below), or buckle up for the whole bumpy ride.

Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber also jumps in.

Guy Gugliotta in Smithsonian Magazine:

Jonathan Bloch, a University of Florida paleontologist, and Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Nebraska, were crouched beneath a relentless tropical sun examining a set of Titanoboa remains with a Smithsonian Institution intern named Jorge Moreno-Bernal, who had discovered the fossil a few weeks earlier. All three were slathered with sunblock and carried heavy water bottles. They wore long-sleeved shirts and tramped around in heavy hiking boots on the shadeless moonscape whose ground cover was shaved away years ago by machinery.

“It’s probably an animal in the 30- to 35-foot range,” Bloch said of the new find, but size was not what he was thinking about. What had Bloch’s stomach aflutter on this brilliant Caribbean forenoon was lying in the shale five feet away.

“You just never find a snake skull, and we have one,” Bloch said. Snake skulls are made of several delicate bones that are not very well fused together. “When the animal dies, the skull falls apart,” Bloch explained. “The bones get lost.”

More here.