Julian Barnes in Guardian:

Just as it's a fair bet that Borges's famous summing-up of the Falklands war – “two bald men quarrelling over a comb” – will outlast in the public memory details of the actual events, so the four crunch words used by Voltaire to characterise Admiral Byng's death have endured better than the actual rights and wrongs of the matter. Voltaire's treatment of the case has a sharper edge to it because during his two-year exile in England (1726-28) he had known Byng as a young navy captain; 30 years later, despite their two countries being at war, he intervened (even taking an affidavit from the opposing French admiral) in an attempt to save the Englishman from execution. In the novel, Candide, having tired of the wit and corruption of France, arrives at Portsmouth on a Dutch ship from Dieppe. “You are acquainted with England,” he says to his travelling companion Martin, “are they as great fools in that country, as in France?” “Yes, but in a different manner,” replies Martin, citing the two countries' current squabble over “a few acres of snow” in Canada. As their ship docks, they observe a kneeling, blindfolded figure on the deck of a man-of-war. Candide enquires about the matter. He is told that an English admiral is being punished “because he did not put a sufficient number of his fellow creatures to death”; the court has found that in an engagement with the French admiral, “He was not near enough to his antagonist.” “But,” Candide replies, with an innocent's logic, “the French admiral must have been just as far from him.” True, comes the reply, “But in this country it is found requisite, now and then, to put one admiral to death, pour encourager les autres.”

More here.

From PhysOrg:

Pollock's signature style involved laying a canvas on the floor and pouring paint onto it in continuous, curving streams. Rather than pouring straight from the can, he applied paint from a stick or a trowel, waving his hand back and forth above the canvas and adjusting the height and angle of the trowel to make the stream of paint wider or thinner. Simultaneously restricted and inspired by the laws of nature, Pollock took on the role of experimentalist, ceding a certain amount of control to physics in order to create new aesthetic effects. Mahadevan, collaborating with art historian Claude Cernuschi and physicist Andrzej Herczyński, both at nearby Boston College, took an interest in Pollock when his colleagues suggested that the artist may have exploited the same aspects of fluid dynamics that Mahadevan has studied in the past.

Instabilities in a free fluid jet can form in a few different ways: the jet can break into drops, it can splash upon impact with a surface, or it can fold and coil, as when a stream of honey lands on a slice of toast. The artist Robert Motherwell produced drips and splashes by flicking his brush; Pollock's technique, on the other hand, is defined by the way a relatively slow-moving stream of paint falls onto the canvas, producing trails and coils. In a sense, the authors note, Pollock was learning and using physics, experimenting with coiling fluids quite a bit before the first scientific papers on the subject would appear in the late 1950s and '60s.

More here.

In the City of Light

The last thing my father did for me
Was map a way: he died, & so
Made death possible. If he could do it, I
Will also, someday, be so honored. Once,

At night, I walked through the lit streets
Of New York, from the Gramercy Park Hotel
Up Lexington & at that hour, alone,
I stopped hearing traffic, voices, the racket

Of spring wind lifting a newspaper high
Above the lights. The streets wet,
And shining. No sounds. Once,

When I saw my son be born, I thought
How loud this world must be to him, how final.

That night, out of respect for someone missing,
I stopped listening to it.

Out of respect for someone missing,
I have to say

This isn’t the whole story.
The fact is, I was still in love.
My father died, & I was still in love. I know
It’s in bad taste to say it quite this way. Tell me,
How would you say it?

The story goes: wanting to be alone & wanting
The easy loneliness of travelers,

I said good-bye in an airport & flew west.
It happened otherwise.
And where I’d held her close to me,
My skin felt raw, & flayed.

Descending, I looked down at light lacquering fields
Of pale vines, & small towns, each
With a water tower; then the shadows of wings;
Then nothing.

My only advice is not to go away.
Or, go away. Most

Of my decisions have been wrong.

When I wake, I lift cold water
To my face. I close my eyes.

A body wishes to be held, & held, & what
Can you do about that?

Because there are faces I might never see again,
There are two things I want to remember
About light, & what it does to us.

Her bright, green eyes at an airport—how they widened
As if in disbelief;
And my father opening the gate: a lit, & silent

City.

by Larry Levis
from Blackbird, Fall 2006

Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker:

In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer to home. They’d heard about some students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first computer-dating service.

More here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

In the early 1990s Spassimir Paskov, then a graduate student at Columbia University, began analyzing an exotic financial instrument called a collateralized mortgage obligation, or CMO, issued by the investment bank Goldman Sachs. The aim was to estimate the current value of the CMO, based on the potential future cash flow from thousands of 30-year mortgages. This task wasn’t just a matter of applying the standard formula for compound interest. Many home mortgages are paid off early when the home is sold or refinanced; some loans go into default; interest rates rise and fall. Thus the present value of a 30-year CMO depends on 360 uncertain and interdependent monthly cash flows. The task amounts to evaluating an integral in 360-dimensional space.

There was no hope of finding an exact solution. Paskov and his adviser, Joseph Traub, decided to try a somewhat obscure approximation technique called the quasi–Monte Carlo method. An ordinary Monte Carlo evaluation takes random samples from the set of all possible solutions. The quasi variant does a different kind of sampling—not quite random but not quite regular either. Paskov and Traub found that some of their quasi–Monte Carlo programs worked far better and faster than the traditional technique. Their discovery would allow a banker or investor to assess the value of a CMO with just a few minutes of computation, instead of several hours.

It would make a fine story if I could now report that the subsequent period of “irrational exuberance” in the financial markets—the frenzy of trading in complex derivatives, and the sad sequel of crisis, collapse, recession, unemployment—could all be traced back to a mathematical innovation in the evaluation of high-dimensional integrals. But it’s just not so; there were other causes of that folly.

On the other hand, the work of Paskov and Traub did have an effect: It brought a dramatic revival of interest in quasi–Monte Carlo.

More here.

Was it a civil war twice over? Not only did the “war between the states” divide the American people, it sundered the larger English-speaking community stretching across the Atlantic. The conflict was followed with consuming interest by the British, it affected them directly, many of them fought in it — and it split them into two camps, just as it did the Americans. Now that Americans are taught that the war was a noble conflict waged by Lincoln and the forces of light against misguided and contumacious Southerners, it’s especially valuable to be reminded that this was far from how all the English saw it at the time. To be sure, almost no Englishman defended slavery, long since abolished in the British Empire. The British edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had sold an astonishing million copies, three times its American sales, and the Royal Navy waged a long campaign against the slave trade: on his first visit to Downing Street, President Obama was presented with a pen holder carved from the wood of one of the ships that conducted that campaign. But while some English politicians, like the radical John Bright and the Whig Duke of Argyll, ardently supported the North, plenty sided with the Confederacy.

more from Geoffrey Wheatcroft at the NY Times here.

Dante Alighieri (born Florence 1265, died Ravenna 1321) is, AN Wilson declares, “a modern poet”. This claim is justifiable. Over the past two centuries, Dante’s poetry has replaced the ancients as the model of what any poet should aspire to achieve in precision of word and brilliance of image. TS Eliot is Wilson’s favoured illustration. Many others could be mentioned, as diverse as Mandelstam, Borges, Beckett, Walcott and Heaney. Indeed, anyone writing about Dante’s Commedia is likely to find messages in today’s Inbox from at least three aspiring poets currently composing Commedias of their own – as, to cite one moving instance, from a Muslim scholar in embattled Basra. So do we need a history of Dante’s still-living life? Yes and no. Yes, insofar as Dante may be credited (alongside Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare) with having invented that modern “self” – compounded of quirks, follies and interesting secrets – into which biographies now so profitably inquire. As 19th-century readers enthusiastically recognised, the Commedia is full of celebrities from Dante’s own time, vividly three-dimensional in voice, gesture and passion. (The most famous case is that of Francesca da Rimini, murdered by her husband for adultery with her brother-in-law.)

more from Robin Kirkpatrick at the FT here.

We think of Europe in 1914 as a continent all too eager for war — volunteers jamming recruiting offices, festooned soldiers joyfully marching to battle and delirious crowds waving them off. To a significant extent, that vision is true, and for a time the Great War brought domestic unity and shared purpose to European nations deeply divided by class, gender and politics. In the euphoria of what everyone from emperors to foot soldiers believed would be a short, glorious and cleansing war that, in the Social Darwinism of the age, could only make Europeans more fit, came an overriding sense of purpose. In “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918,” Adam Hochschild challenges this image of the European home front. In this beautifully written and compellingly narrated story of Britain at war, Hochschild forces us to think about the Great War from the dual perspectives of those who prosecuted it and those who decried it. His primary focus is on well-known “divided families,” such as that of John French, hero of the Boer War, first commander in chief of the British Expeditionary Forces and last viceroy of Ireland, and his sister Charlotte Despard, militant suffragette, Labour Party activist, antiwar activist and, later, Sinn Fein member.

more from Marla Stone at the LA Times here.

James Lamont and Farhan Bokhari in the Financial Times:

The interference of the Chinese in what Delhi calls Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and considers Indian territory conjures in the minds of India’s security establishment bitter memories of a brief Chinese invasion of its Arunachal Pradesh state in 1962.

Some political analysts go so far as to refer to Pakistan as a “client state” of China and predict that the US will be displaced as the country’s long-term ally. They consider Pakistan as a test-bed for Chinese exports of sophisticated arms such as submarines as well as nuclear reactors and, in time, finance. “The pattern of trade and investment between Pakistan and China suggests that the US has little chance of retaining its status as Pakistan’s major ally,” says James Brazier, an analyst at IHS, a US-based political risk consultancy.

Referring to nearby Burma, he adds: “Pakistan’s relationship with China could soon resemble that of Myanmar, another former part of British India which is now closely dependent on China.”

Pakistan has made little secret about its fondness for Beijing. Aware that its stance irks India and the US, its leaders call China an “all-weather friend”, striking a deliberate contrast with others they consider less dependable. Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, has returned the compliment with his own rhetorical flourish. “No matter what changes might take place in the international landscape, China and Pakistan will remain forever good neighbours, good friends, good partners and good brothers,” he said in the days following Osama bin Laden’s killing by American forces on Pakistani soil in May.

More here. [Thanks to Mohsin Hamid.]

From The New York Times:

Some time in the 1920s, the Conservative statesman F. E. Smith — Lord Birkenhead — gave a copy of the “Nicomachean Ethics” to his close friend Winston Churchill. He did so saying there were those who thought this was the greatest book of all time. Churchill returned it some weeks later, saying it was all very interesting, but he had already thought most of it out for himself. But it is the very genius of Aristotle — as it is of every great teacher — to make you think he is uncovering your own thought in his. In Churchill’s case, it is also probable that the classical tradition informed more of his upbringing, at home and at school, than he realized. In 1946, in a letter to the philosopher Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss mentioned how difficult it had been for him to understand Aristotle’s account of magnanimity, greatness of soul, in Book 4 of the “Ethics.” The difficulty was resolved when he came to realize that Churchill was a perfect example of that virtue. So Churchill helped Leo Strauss understand Aristotle! That is perfectly consistent with Aristotle’s telling us it does not matter whether one describes a virtue or someone characterized by that virtue. Where the “Ethics” stands among the greatest of all great books perhaps no one can say. That Aristotle’s text, which explores the basis of the best way of human life, belongs on any list of such books is indisputable.

In his great essay “On Classical Political Philosophy,” Strauss emphasizes the continuity between pre-­philosophic political speech and its refinement by classical political philosophy. It is part of the order of nature (and of nature’s God) that pre-­philosophic speech supply the matter, and philosophic speech the form, of perfected political speech, much as the chisel of the sculptor uncovers the form of the statue within the block of marble. Before the “Ethics” men knew that courage was a virtue, and that it meant overcoming fear in the face of danger. Aristotle says nothing different from this, but he also distinguishes true virtue from its specious simulacra. The false appearance of courage may result, for instance, from overconfidence in one’s skill or strength, or from one’s failure to recognize the skill or strength of his opponents. The accurate assessment of one’s own superiority of strength or skill, which means one really has no reason to fear an approaching conflict, is another false appearance of courage. A false courage may also result from a passion that blinds someone to the reality of the danger he faces. In short, the appearance of courage may be mistaken for actual courage whenever the rational component of virtue is lacking.

More here.

Again

I’d left Paris for the beaches
in Spain. I’d sold
my dead father’s farm
and, in shame,
bought it back again
at a great loss . . . then
a plough found
a shelf of bismuth
and I sold just the north pasture
for big serial profits
and I am ashamed again:
the huge white bones of my father’s
favorite cow exposed
one late September morning!

It’s always been potatoes and bread
or millions of francs on speculation.
I am not stupid. I’m not dead.
But the bones of an old cow assemble
repeatedly now in a dream
where my naked lame father
sits in a tub of boiling milk
and screams at me
first my name and then his name
which is the same

name. The crimes of the verb to be
pushing a hard rain in general
across the city and its suburbs. . . .

by Norman Dubie
from Blackbird, Spring 2011

From PhysOrg:

Kangaroos adopt. It doesn't happen often, but to the astonishment of biologists at Wilsons Promontory National Park in Australia, sometimes a mother bends forward, opens her arms and invites someone else's youngster to hop into her pouch. Once made, the mix-up endures, lasting through the remaining weeks of “pouch life” and on during months of the “young-at-foot” stage, when the growing juvenile kangaroo continues to nurse. “It's a complete surprise to us,” said Graeme Coulson, a zoology professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Coulson described the baby swapping — in which two mothers end up with each other's young — this month at a joint meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists and the Australian Mammal Society in Portland, Ore. Although rare cases of marsupial fostering have previously been reported in captivity, and biologists have used fostering in breeding programs, this appears to be the first documented report of spontaneous adoptions in the wild, said Roberta Bencini, vice president of the Australian Mammal Society and professor of animal biology at the University of Western Australia. “That's really quite an unusual discovery,” said Bencini, who was not involved in Coulson's research. “I would like to find out why.” So would Coulson. The exchanges seem to have no apparent benefit for the mother, who squanders her own resources on another's offspring, Coulson said. His best guess is that the swaps are simply an error by one mother later compounded — or perhaps just accepted — by another.

More here.

Deep inside the stacks at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center lies a single box containing unpublished letters and handwritten essays by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Among the Ransom Center’s 36 million manuscripts and one million books are a Gutenberg Bible, rare first-editions, and holy relics of literature like James Joyce’s hand-corrected proofs of Ulysses. In the past decade alone, the Center has acquired the archives of Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, David Mamet, and David Foster Wallace. It’s a constant deluge; and every so often a stray file or two gets submerged—sometimes even for decades. The Borges papers were purchased in 1999; twelve years later, they remain uncatalogued. It’s appropriate that Borges has been neglected. For most of his life, the canonical writer of playfully ironic satires (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”), cosmic mind-benders (“The Aleph”), and sly thought-experiments (“On Rigor in Science”) found little recognition outside Argentine intellectual circles; much of his work had been published first in avant-garde magazines and almost none of it had been translated into English. Observing this state of affairs, the critic George Steiner noted that even basic details about Borges were “close-guarded, parsimoniously dispensed, often nearly impossible to come by, as were [his] poems, stories, essays—themselves scattered, out-of-print, pseudonymous.”

more from Eric Benson at Guernica here.

Down a dusty road in a remote far eastern suburb of Beijing a revolutionary-themed restaurant is busy preparing for the party of the year. This Friday, 1st July, marks the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 90th anniversary and The East is Red is expecting diners to run into the hundreds. They will come ravenous not just for the hearty cuisine but also for a heavy dose of communist nostalgia. A twice-daily show—ramped up for the anniversary —includes revolution-era songs, dance and drama, cherry picked from the chaotic days of the 1966-76 cultural revolution. I visit on a Tuesday evening, and despite the mid-week timing and isolated location the restaurant is around half full. The imposing doorway to the cavernous building is a colossal red star—inside are stirring statues of revolutionary heroes, murals of workers clutching Mao’s Little Red Book and an army of performers dressed in Red Guard uniforms. This is a family day out. Every customer, down to the smallest child, waves a red flag and many sway in the aisles to songs such as “Sing in Praise of the Motherland.” Across one wall gigantic red Chinese characters spell out the words: “May the Chinese Communist Party live ten thousand, 100 million years.”

more from Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore at Prospect Magazine here.

The so-called revisionist historians of the First World War can’t help appearing callous as they commend some of the strategic decisions of the British Army’s high command, while omitting to mention the massive suffering endured by its soldiers. Sometimes they remind one of Churchill’s comparison of Haig to a surgeon in the pre-anaesthetic era: if the patient expired under the knife, “he would not reproach himself”. By contrast, To End All Wars is a book that avowedly wears its heart on its sleeve. Nothing speaks more clearly or movingly of the spirit of futility that pervades Adam Hochschild’s perspective on the war than a recent discovery in the Saint-Symphorien military cemetery, east of Mons. There, by extraordinary coincidence, lie the first and last British soldiers to die in the war: sixteen-year-old John Parr of Finchley, North London, a golf caddy, who lied about his age in order to enlist, and George Ellison, a forty-year-old miner from Leeds, who survived all but the last ninety minutes of fighting. Parr and Ellison, killed within a few miles of each other, fighting to secure the same stretch of ground, are now buried under pine trees, seven yards apart.

more from Mark Bostridge at the TLS here.

In the wake of questions about Europe's future and the viability of the EU, in Eurozine:

I do not believe that nations should disappear nor do I believe in the prevailing wisdom that economic and monetary union can bring about political union, especially since the political forum continues to be the nation, and the best service one can render it from a democratic point of view is to respect the democratic structures within the framework of the nation-state. Therefore, I am in favour of a federation of nation-states. I am not asking the Germans and the French to give up being what they are, but I am saying to them: consider, in the real world, both your shared values and your shared interests. But, even if Europe does have these shared values, the nation is still an element of belonging that must be neither neglected nor given too much importance. We each have our own attachment to our national heritage. I am all the more inclined to say this because, as Freud said, we are nowadays fixated on small differences: Serbia and Montenegro, Flanders and Wallonia, Northern Ireland and the Republic; these are the things that we must fight against, not by preventing the existence of distinguishing features, but by saying to people: “Where does that get you?” Simultaneously, there are those values that lead us towards some form of convergence and, on the other side, moods of the times that urge us to create painful divisions. We have not heard the last of such divisions. And why is that? Because there is a malaise among people who are living through our times. They are frightened by globalization and, at the same time, attached to their territory, where they have attachments that are familial, geographical or otherwise. Between globalization on one side and local attachments on the other, the nation can no longer arrive at any kind of synthesis other than by exacerbating nationalism, and this can be seen in many European countries. Refusal of globalization, claiming that it is absolutely inimical, will not offer any solution either. Only by building a Europe that is a federation of nations can we find a response to this malaise, a response to the turmoil caused by globalization, a response that pays due respect to familial and geographical attachments; this is the way to create an equilibrium between globalization and the sovereign state that is prepared to delegate certain powers, by creating a strong and influential structure.

The reality is that, by building Europe, we have, it seems to me, a system that is ahead of the rest of the world. This is what we have to make our citizens realize. But our politicians see only the short term and the shifts in public opinion. As a result, there are two factors that are missing: awareness of our shared values and the challenge that Europe has to face. These two factors are a matter of survival or decline in the face of globalization and the kind of nationalism that is obsessed with minor differences. And this challenge is one that has to be faced by the strongest European power: Germany.

Germany is, in any case, in an extraordinary position. Never before has it been the lead nation in Europe to the extent that it is today. Previously, it accepted compromises and therefore concessions because of its past and also because of the political intelligence of Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, which I will never tire of praising. But today Germany holds the leadership. Does it realize this?

From more than a month ago in The Nation, Patricia Williams:

On the surface, Strauss-Kahn’s troubles are all about “women.” He has long had a reputation for salacious advances. On one hand, therefore, it’s tempting to assume the present accusations fit him as “in character.” On the other hand, given his prominence and the seismic stakes for the European Union, his well-advertised randiness, in the opinion of many, renders him the world’s easiest fall guy.

On the surface, furthermore, the case can be framed as one individual charging another with sexual crimes, period. Strauss-Kahn has been arrested, pleaded not guilty, released on bail, put under house detention. Ostensibly, he will be presumed innocent until a trial allows all the facts to be presented in an orderly fashion, witnesses to testify, motives to be assessed, credibility to be evaluated, irrelevant and extraneous information to be barred from consideration.

Unfortunately, what has unfolded is not that simple. The international media frenzy has all but obliterated any space for a presumption of innocence; and it has relentlessly impugned both Strauss-Kahn and his accuser in broad, vulgar stereotypes—not only about sex, but about wealth, Guinean colonials, socialism, fame, French masculinity, American Puritanism, Muslim women, Jewish identity and Africans as bearers of HIV. It will be very hard to see justice done against a backdrop of so much roiling passion, rumor-mongering and pure projection. The deliverance of due process requires restraint, not just in the media but among the citizens of America and of the world. So I would like to offer some modest caveats as this case proceeds through the digestive tract of a world obsessed with celebrity dirt.

First, we do not know what happened. We can choose to believe what we want, but it serves no civic purpose to allow one’s personal hunches to stand in the way of being open to the specific evidence-based possibilities that will be presented in a court of law. For example, French intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy’s publicly stated conviction that a proper first-class maid never cleans alone is spectacularly boneheaded. Even if it were true that housekeepers traveled only in “brigades,” it’s a generalization, a stereotype, irrelevant to whether DSK committed the crimes of which he is accused. At the same time, it is no less reflexively patronizing to conclude, as many women apparently have, that solely because the accuser is female or an immigrant or poor or Muslim or a widow that she could ever be anything other than truthful. And that is indeed all we know about her—that she is a poor Muslim widow from Guinea. Nor, of course, should we know much more about her identity, as a matter of due process. But, again, that process requires patience for victims’ stories to be played out in the appropriate place and time; it is not an invitation to plug the holes in our knowledge with bold imaginings.

Over at The Science Network: