Bullet
……………..
I have a bullet made of icy silver to give you.

I prepared it last night with dirty, sweet, infallible blood. I prayed
with it for hours. I attended it with candles and the most secret
invocations.

First off, I blinded it, because a bullet must never see the ominous
air or the body it will encounter. After, I deafened it, so that it
wouldn’t hear the cries or threats or music of the flesh and bones
while shattering.

I only left it lips so it could whistle.

Understand what I say:

whistles are bullets’ words: they are their ruthless final kisses
piercing the smoothness of the night; their wonder and their plea,
their breath.

by Carlos López Degregori
translation by Robin Myers
2010

Bala
…………………
Tengo esta bala de helada plata para ti.

Anoche la preparé con sucia, infalible, dulce sangre. Recé horas
con ella. La acompañé con velas y las más secretas jaculatorias.

Primero la cegué porque una bala nunca debe ver el aire ominoso
ni el cuerpo que encontrará. Después la ensordecí para que no
escuche los gritos ni las amenazas ni la música de la carne y los
huesos partiéndose.

Sólo le dejé los labios para que pudiera silbar.

Entiéndeme:

los silbidos son las palabras de las balas: son sus besos últimos y
desaforados adentrándose en la lisura de la noche: su extrañeza,
su ruego, su respiración.

by Carlos López Degregori

From Seed:

Conventional wisdom says that gifted artists like Vincent van Gogh and Sylvia Plath had something in their constitution that made them much more susceptible to depression, and thus, to suicide. One of the smartest people I ever knew, a former high school classmate who was also a world-class rower, took his own life as pressures for perfection at his Ivy-League university became too much for him. Such stories, painful and tragic, lend credence to the belief that smart people are more likely to commit suicide. But do we remember these stories because they are commonplace, or are they notable only because they are also actually rare?

Because of the relative rarity of suicide, researching its causes is problematic. Most studies therefore investigate attempted suicide, which is much more common. Since attempted suicides are very strongly correlated with actual suicides, they can serve as a reasonable proxy measurement.

Two studies by Martin Voracek seem to uphold the notion that more intelligent people are more likely to commit suicide.

More here.

From BBC News:

Have you ever failed to notice a friend's radical new haircut? Or missed a road sign showing a change in the speed limit? This failure to notice what should be very apparent is something we unconsciously experience every day as our brains filter the barrage of visual information which we are flooded with. And apparently it has a name; it is called change blindness. Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London, have invented a unique spot-the-difference-style computer game in order to study it. Milan Verma, a scientist at Queen Mary, explains: “It's the phenomenon where seemingly striking or obvious changes are not noticed.” He and his colleagues are asking volunteers to play the game – which involves looking at a screen as it flashes between two images of the same scene.

“It flicks between a pre-change version and a post-change version of the scene,” Dr Verma explains. “The volunteers simply have to press the button and tell us exactly when they spot the change.” Trying out the game at Dr Verma's office, my initial reaction was self-satisfaction; I spotted the difference in the first scene – a picture of a butterfly with orange stripes on its wings – almost immediately. In the pre-change scene the colourful insect had two stripes – one on each wing, and on the post-change, there was just one. Easy. Next? But I was quickly reminded that I am just as “change blind” as the next person. As an image of an iceberg scene with five penguins on it flashed in front of me, I stared blankly, unable to see a difference. “I'll let you off – there is a lot going on in this image,” Dr Verma reassured me. “But it's quite a big change.” He had to give me a clue – directing me to the area of the image where the change occurred – before I realised that a whole chunk of iceberg was missing in the post-change image.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down and wildcards added. Thanks to all the participants. (Details about the prize here.)

Once again, Carla Goller has provided a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll and tell your friends.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Richard Dawkins, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (given here in alphabetical order by blog name)

1. Cosmic Variance: Free Energy and the Meaning of Life
2. My Growing Passion: The Evolution of Chloroplasts
3. Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed digesting genes from ocean bacteria
4. Observations of a Nerd: Evolution: The Curious Case of Dogs
5. Scientific Blogging: MSL: Mars Action Hero
6. The Loom: Skullcaps and Genomes
7. The Primate Diaries: Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play to Reaping an Unjust Reward
8. The Thoughtful Animal: Does oral sex confer an evolutionary advantage? Evidence from bats
9. University of Oxford Science Blog: Oxford and the Royal Society's Origins

We'll announce the three winners on June 21, 2010.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added up to three others that we also liked.

Arthur Danto in the NYT's Opinionator tries to answer: “Is performance art really art at all?”:

We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question. The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of “The Republic.” There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations — by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls “ideas,” the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only know how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter’s knowledge is higher than the artist’s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body or, more strenuously, bodies locked in love. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist’s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances.

This famous design of the universe and its degrees of reality was clearly constructed to put art in its place — the domain of illusions, shadows, dreams. The artist is cognitively useless. And yet the Greeks wanted to build their curriculum on mere poetry – on “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”! I treat this in my essay “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. ”

It explains why philosophers tend to have little use for art. Several of Plato’s dialogues stress the inferiority of art — for example “Ion,” “The Statesman” and “The Laws.” The political message of “The Republic” is that philosophers, at home in the realm of ideas, should be kings. Artists don’t even belong in the Republic!

Meanwhile, the mimetic theory, as it is called, had a certain power. Aristotle, in his “Poetics,” characterizes plays and epics as imitations of actions, such as the death of Hektor. Ion the rhapsode tells stories from the epics, moving his audience to tears. There are no records of ancient performances, which might have been ordeals, demonstrating the performer’s stamina or strength.

But a performance is not the imitation of an action, but the action itself. It is art and reality in one.

Xinran suggests 5 books on China, over at 5 Books:

Tell me about your first book, Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin.

This book is believed by many to be the greatest Chinese novel ever written. For me it is like a bible for everything to do with Chinese culture. Cao belonged to the Han Chinese clan and the book is a huge family novel written in the 18th century. The family’s fortunes were tied up with the Kangxi dynasty and the book is all about the relationship between the family members and all the different classes.

It really is a wonderful book which has been translated by Penguin since 1970 and reprinted again and again. But many Westerners don’t know about this book, which is a shame because it is such a powerful book which I really love.

Why is it so important to you?

Well, it is such a good guide to our culture. In the book more than 100 people, buildings, poems, paintings and dreams are described in great detail. So you really find out the lifestyles of the people living there. I have read this book again and again ever since my childhood.

For example, there is a part which sums up how important food is in Chinese society. Xueqin writes about an aubergine recipe, which is a famous dish in the book, where the mother describes to her daughter and grandchildren how you need to wash the aubergines in snow, soak them with spring dew, pickle them with flowers from summer to season them and the thorns from autumn. And these are known as four season aubergines. That is so beautiful. And why I think this book is so important is because it has helped Chinese culture to survive despite all the political upheavals and civil wars which have taken place since it was written.

Tim de Lisle offers some answers in Intelligent Life:

On a long July afternoon in 1966, in north-west London, England’s footballers won the World Cup. By the time they beat West Germany, after extra time, with the help of a dubious goal, it was too late for the early editions of the Sunday papers. Only on the Monday was Fleet Street able to register the moment in its full glory. The Mirror, then the most popular daily ever published in Britain, with sales of 5m, knew a piece of history when it saw one. Its front-page splash proudly announced: A BOUNCING BABY GIRL FOR PRINCESS ALEX. Winning the World Cup was not as big as the birth of Marina Ogilvy, the Queen’s first cousin once removed.

The Sun didn’t lead with the football either, preferring a story about a pay squeeze; for weeks there had been a sterling crisis, and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, had loomed far larger than any footballer. Even the two papers’ sports pages, which in those days were tucked inside, went less than crazy. The Mirror had two pages reflecting on the final, the Sun a little less…

Forty years later, the World Cup was held in Germany. The England team had known only frustration in the meantime, yet they somehow loomed much larger. Every match they played was a front-page lead for both the Mirror and the Sun, and the fever had spread. The Times ran a 16-page World Cup supplement every day for three weeks…

The 2006 World Cup generated thousands of hours of television time, countless phone-ins and fan forums, endless blogs and eight hit records. It’s not just football: something similar happened in rugby with the 2003 World Cup and in cricket with the 2005 Ashes. And it’s not just Britain: each World Cup or Olympics makes more noise around the world than the last. American sport, in its different way, self-contained and tightly regulated, is getting bigger too: the television audience for the 2010 Super Bowl, 116m according to Nielsen, was the biggest ever recorded in America for any programme. With another World Cup starting on June 11th, half the nations of Europe have been strafed with giant images of the Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo in Armani Y-fronts, muscles rippling like a Greek god. Which raises the question: how did sport get so big? Whodunnit, and where, and when, and why?

Tony Judt in Transformations of the Public Square:

Students frequently tell me that they only know and care about a highly specialized subset of news items and public events. Some may read of environmental catastrophes and climate change. Others are taken up by national political debates but quite ignorant of foreign developments. In the past, thanks to the newspaper they browsed or the television reports they took in over dinner, they would at least have been ‘exposed’ to other matters. Today, such extraneous concerns are kept at bay.

This problem highlights a misleading aspect of globalization. Young people are indeed in touch with likeminded persons many thousands of miles away. But even if the students of Berkeley, Berlin and Bangalore share a common set of interests, these do not translate into community. Space matters. And politics is a function of space—we vote where we live and our leaders are restricted in their legitimacy and authority to the place where they were elected. Real-time access to likeminded fellows half a world away is no substitute.

More here.

The murder of Ötzi the Iceman is perhaps the most challenging cold case in history. Archaeologists used a splay of forensic methods to piece together a detailed picture of his life – and death.

John Pickrell in Cosmos:

It sounds like the opening to a television forensics drama. On a sunny September day in 1991, a German couple hiking through the Alps make a gruesome discovery.

Initially, the corpse partially jutting out of the melting ice is thought to be from a recent mountaineering accident. But on closer inspection, a far more stunning revelation emerges. The body is that of a murder victim; a murder that transpired five millennia ago.

Dated to around 5,300 years old, the remarkably well-preserved Neolithic Iceman came to be known as Ötzi, after the Ötztal region of the Austrian-Italian border where he was found.

In the years since his discovery, he has been subject to countless, delicate examinations. Now, three recent studies give us the most definitive account of how the Iceman came to be slain.

“The unique thing about this find is that a man has been preserved in full dress with all his equipment,” says Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where Ötzi resides today.

More here. [Thanks to Graeme Wood.]

From PhysOrg:

Workers in Wildlife Conservation Societies around the world are using a new technique to lure big cats to their heat-and-motion-sensitive cameras and keep them there long enough to enable them to be identified. The new technique is to spray the area with cologne, but not just any fragrance – it has to be Calvin Klein's “Obsession for Men”. The idea began in the Bronx Zoo in 2003, when general curator Pat Thomas decided to test the effects of 24 fragrances on two cheetahs. The zoo had long sprayed perfumes on rocks in the cats’ enclosure to keep them curious, but Thomas decided to be a little more scientific and test individual scents. The results showed “Obsession for Men” was a clear winner, with the cats spending an average of 11.1 minutes in savoring the scent and obviously loving the musky perfume, rubbing their cheeks against trees that had been sprayed. Other scents did not perform so well for the cats, with Revlon’s “Charlie” occupying them for only 15.5 seconds, and Estée Lauder’s “Beautiful” keeping them interested for a mere two seconds.

After Thomas’s trials, word spread through the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), and use of the cologne has spread from zoos to protected areas of jungle in wildlife conservation regions, where it is finding success in luring big cats of all kinds to cameras placed along remote animal trails. In Guatemala, for example, Roan Balas McNab uses the perfume in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, one of the largest protected regions in South America, to attract jaguars to the area around the cameras and keep them there long enough for the individuals to be identified by their unique patterns of spots. Since the cologne has been used the number of cats lingering in the vicinity of the cameras has increased threefold, and this will help the researchers to better estimate the size of the population of the reclusive cats. Researchers studying the cats have also been able to capture on video rarely seen events such as mating rituals near the cameras.

More here.

Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all. And assume, too — here we have to get fictitious, as philosophers often do — that if we choose to bring about the world with no sentient beings at all, everyone will agree to do that. No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence? I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe. In my judgment, for most people, life is worth living. Even if that is not yet the case, I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now. But justifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?

more from Peter Singer at The Opinionater here.

THE SMART SET: Do you think Silly Bandz will still be popular when school starts again next fall?

SANDER: Yes. I think there will be new kinds. Like maybe an ocean abyss pack, with goblins, sharks, giant squid. That would be cool. Maybe a daily life pack, with like a lunch box, and a shirt, and a person, and a newspaper. There might be a bird pack, with different kinds of birds. A backyard pack, with maybe a ball, and a tree, and rake, maybe. Maybe a person pack. Who knows?
WES: I think the same as Sander. Maybe there will be a new nature pack, with like leaves, nature, squirrels, and birds and stuff.

THE SMART SET: Do you think Silly Bandz will be popular for a long time? How long, do you think?

SANDER: Yeah. They are just so popular now and everyone has them. I think they'll still be popular for a few more years, until another company gets big ideas for other stuff to trade.
WES: Yes, because I'm going to really like them next year, so I think they'll definitely still be popular.

more from The Smart Set here.

There is not much about being human that one cannot learn from the Nibelungenlied (Song of the Nibelungs). This epic poem is the Northern European myth of power and revenge, distilling centuries of wisdom about psychology and politics into a simple but tragic story: the tale of Siegfried, a hero who comes to power purely through his own strength and daring, and is crushed by the political elite. His widow, Kriemhild, then takes on the members of the establishment who killed him, and step by step slaughters them all because they refuse to give up one of their own. The grandmother of all medievalist fantasy and of superhero comics, the Nibelungenlied has it all in terms of a gripping yarn, too: it gives you the treasure, the dragon, the most valiant knights, the most beautiful ladies, the invincible hero, the spectacular battles, the mysteries, the mermaids, and the dead. If I have begun by shamelessly giving away the tragic ending in order to elicit interest, I am only copying one of the poem’s favourite techniques. The real thrill of the epic is not in finding out what happened, but how and why it happens – why a hero and an entire dynasty are brutally murdered.

more from Bettina Bildhauer at the TLS here.

Sady at Tiger Beatdown:

[T]he Lynn Hirschberg profile of M.I.A...: It got under my skin. It disturbed me, in many visceral and icky ways. It seemed, to me, exemplary of the ways and means by which women who use their voices politically are knocked down, knocked over, and fucked up for the public’s entertainment. And people liked it. People I like, people I admire, at least one person I’m particularly close to: They responded, joined in the group-kick, were eager to denounce M.I.A. as a liar and a fake and a fraud and a bitch and a bad activist. And over what? Over passages like this:

Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. “I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.

The fact is, valuable things were uncovered in that piece. M.I.A. has been inconsistent, and misleading, about her father’s involvement with the Tamil Tigers. And I appreciated that voices other than M.I.A.’s were given the chance to speak out, in a widely read forum, about Sri Lankan politics and the Tigers; the allegation that she’s being overly and dangerously simplistic, in her unconditional support of the Tigers, is probably true. What I don’t appreciate, however, is the fact that these things were only brought up as a means of destroying M.I.A.’s political credibility — shortly before attacking her credibility on more or less every other front.

M.I.A. is a fake, the article more or less says; no matter what she says or writes or records about global capitalism being a bad thing, no matter how fiercely she would seem to defend marginalized people, she’s just a shallow, narcissistic, bossy, stupid woman who only wants your attention, only wants to be famous, only wants to be a star. And did you hear that she was having contractions when she sang “Paper Planes” at the Grammys? Shocking! Provocative! Fame-whorey! Regular-whorey! Unfeminine! Selfish! Bad mother!

Although her publicist had a wheelchair ready and a midwife on call, Maya, who has a deep and instinctive affinity for the provocative, knew that this Grammy moment was not to be missed. It had everything: artistic credibility, high drama, a massive audience. The baby would just have to wait. The combination of being nearly naked, hugely pregnant, singing incendiary lyrics and having the eyes of the world upon her was too much to resist.

Granted, there are a few common-sense things to be pointed out here: That it’s not unusual for women to work throughout their pregnancies, that lots of women go to work on the day that they’re scheduled to go into labor, that labor itself is a long process (the profile even notes that M.I.A.’s son wasn’t born until three days after the performance) and so many women often continue to work throughout the early stages of labor, especially if they’re doing something important or time-sensitive that can’t be re-scheduled — like, say, performing at the Grammys.

[H/t: Amanda Marcotte]

Jane Austen went to the grave a virgin, leaving six full-length novels behind her. Would those novels have been better had Miss Austen had as lively a sex life as, say, slutty Lydia Bennet? E M Forster was a virgin until the age of thirty-nine, when he had his first ‘full’ sexual experience (a ‘hurried sucking off’, Wendy Moffat informs us) with a passing soldier on a beach in Alexandria. By that point, five of Forster’s six novels were written and the last, A Passage to India, drafted. Until he was thirty, with much of his oeuvre behind him, he did not, he later confessed, ‘know exactly how male and female joined’. ‘Muddle and mystery’ between the sheets as well as in the Marabar caves. Does a writer’s carnal experience matter? D H Lawrence, the most unzipped of British novelists, believed it did. His chauvinist sneer at Austen as a ‘narrow-gutted spinster’ indicates that some rumpy-humpy would have done wonders for her fiction.

more from John Sutherland at Literary Review here.

No one knows what the future of the music business will look like, but the near future of listening to music looks a lot like 1960. People will listen, for free, to music that comes out of a stationary box that sits indoors. They’ll listen to music that comes from an object that fits in the hand, and they’ll listen to music in the car. That box was once a radio or a stereo; now it’s a computer. The handheld device that was once a plastic AM radio is now likely to be a smart phone. The car is still a car, though its stereo now plays satellite radio and MP3s. But behind the similarities is a series of subtle shifts in software and portability that may relocate the experience of listening—even if nobody has come close to replacing the concept of the radio d.j., whose job lingers as a template for much software. “Of the twenty hours a week that an average American spends listening to music, only three of it is stuff you own. The rest is radio,” Tim Westergren told me. Westergren is the founder of Pandora, one of several firms that have brought the radio model to the Internet.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

Hopper carried a unique wound from childhood. At age 6, early in World War II, he was told that his father had been killed: This was a deliberate lie for security purposes (his dad was an agent in the OSS, forerunner of the CIA); only his mother knew the truth. The agony of that loss, followed by the trauma of discovering the lie, left him with a lifelong mistrust of both women, and male authority. Small wonder Dean’s passion for honesty mattered so much to him. Small wonder that after his friend’s sudden death, Hopper fought director Henry Hathaway on From Hell to Texas (1958), running up a legendary 87 takes of a simple bit on the last day of principal photography and derailing what had been a highly promising mainstream acting career. Small wonder that when he came back in triumph with Easy Rider in 1969, he burnt this success to the ground with his next directorial effort, The Last Movie (1971). As if having crushed every other authority he could rebel against, he rebelled against himself — embracing exile once again on the margins of the mainstream, where the pressures were entirely internal. Finally — considering how these agonies had piled onto one another by the time he was pushing 50 — it is no wonder that his most symphonic on-screen performance should be as Frank Booth, the baby-talking, stimulants-happy killer and misogynist at the dark heart of Blue Velvet (1986). Hopper’s greatness in this role is that he enacts every terrible impulse in a man — from murder to sexual assault, from fascist crocodile tears to infantile self-pity — and owns these repugnant furies from the inside, with the naked honesty of an artist who is actually free of them for the first time. The film itself marked his survival, and the definitive rebirth of Hopper’s career.

more from F.x. Feeney at the LA Weekly here.

Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog:

Why are palindromes so far down on the hierarchy of literary genres? Roughly speaking, they seem to stand at the same distance from the rigorous formal experiments of an author like Georges Perec as bawdy limericks stand to Shakespeare's sonnets. This may be due to their own inherent tendency towards bawdiness, which I think can be explained by the fact that one must make use of concise, monosyllabic grunt-like words, and these words tend, at least in English, to be both part of our core Anglo-Saxon heritage, and generally to denote less than lofty things.

At the same time, the formal restrictions imposed in palindromy do exactly what Perec's did, exactly what makes restrictive rules of composition interesting: they force you up to the boundary of meaninglessness, and so challenge you to find that acceptable level of near-nonsense that nonetheless seems to say something.

To speak for a moment not of palindromy but of homonymy, years ago I heard the spoken sentence, “A strict syntax limits semantics,” but understood by this that “A strict sin tax limits some antics.” As it happens, both are true. Now I think orthography is a sub-syntactic feature of sentences (perhaps someone can fill me in here), but the principle is the same: it limits the range of things that can be said.

More here.