Today, September 18th, is Samuel Johnson's 300th birthday. The English essayist, poet, novelist, and witty conversationalist whom we know mostly through the anecdotes recorded by his friend and biographer, James Boswell, and his other friends, became famous in his day for his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755.

Dennis Baron in Behind the Dictionary, at the Visual Thesaurus:

It may have been Noah Webster, who was half a century younger, whose name would become synonymous with dictionary, but no lexicographer rivaled Samuel Johnson in turning out elegant, opaque, intricate, and occasionally witty definitions for words both familiar and obscure.

Johnson defined lexicographer as “a harmless drudge” (s.v.) and dictionary-making as “dull work” (s.v. dull, sense 8), but he surely enjoyed cranking out definitions for odd words like dandiprat, “an urchin,” fopdoodle, “a fool,” giglet, “a wanton,” and jobbernowl, “a block head.”

Besides the occasional definitional joke, like Johnson's often-repeated definition of oats, we also find in his dictionary words whose meaning has changed: fireman, “a man of violent passions,” pedant, “a schoolmaster,” and jogger, which Johnson characterizes as movement that is far from aerobic, and he liberally illustrates his definitions with citations from well-known literary and scientific sources…

More here.

Louisa Gilder in the New York Times:

Dirac is the main character of a thousand humorous tales told among physicists for his monosyllabic approach to conversation and his innocent, relentless application of logic to everything. Listening to a Dirac story is like slipping into an alternate universe: Dirac reads “Crime and Punishment” and reports it “nice” but notes that in one place the sun rises two times in a day; Dirac eats his dinner in silence until his companion asks, “Have you been to the theater or cinema this week?” and Dirac replies, “Why do you wish to know?”

His work was as sui generis as his social skills. “The great papers of the other quantum pioneers were more ragged, less perfectly formed than Dirac’s,” explained Freeman Dyson, who took Dirac’s course as a precocious 19-year-old. Dirac’s discoveries “were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another. He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought.” (Most notably, Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter in 1928 because his just discovered relativistic electron equation required it.) “It was this purity that made him unique.”

More here.

The two ’68s in the two Europes bespeaks of a paradigmatic division that has not vanished today. It has not vanished because the starting points were different: the meanings and goals differed. Both Europes strived for salvation, but one strived for salvation from consumerism and corporate interests, while the other sought salvation from socialist ideals and communist practice. For the former, the critics of capitalism, socialism was the alternative; for the latter, the critics of obligatory fraternity, there was no freedom in these premises. The intellectual Left of the West did not understand the anti-humanism of the Soviets, nor that of China’s communist party. For these intellectuals and its youth following, it was important to protest against the given social order and violation of rights, but also to take the opportunity to riot in Red Army outfits. It was the time for cultural revolution. The political and cultural fashion was to question capitalism at its roots. Besides, the French tradition of socialist collectivism was inseparable from the thinking of Parisian leftists.

more from Tomas Kavaliauskas at Eurozine here.

The Satanic Ritual Abuse (or SRA) conspiracy fad of the 1980s may have torn apart families, destroyed the lives of innumerable innocent people and set the credibility of clinical psychology back at least 50 years — but for fans of sleazy, poorly researched, exploitative true-crime books, it was a godsend. While cognoscenti hold a special place in their hearts for such early fabrications as Michelle Remembers and The Satan Seller, the pièce de résistance of the genre was Maury Terry’s enthralling 640-page bestseller,The Ultimate Evil, which attributed the Manson, Zodiac and Son of Sam murders to a global satanic underground masterminded by a sinister cult known as the Process Church of the Final Judgment, led by the shadowy and charismatic Robert de Grimston, who had disappeared from public view in the early ’70s. The only problem was that, by the time Terry’s 1987 magnum opus briefly rekindled the flames of the dwindling SRA media frenzy, de Grimston had reverted to his birth name of Robert Moor and was working an office day job on Staten Island, while the Process Church itself — from which he’d long been excommunicated — had morphed into the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Kanab, Utah, the largest no-kill animal shelter in America. Somewhere between these mundane and sensationalist extremes lay the truth about the Process Church and its role in the cultural upheavals of the ’60s, but reliable accounts were fragmentary and scattered.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a lyric poet of genius, described by his contemporary Robert Musil as “having done nothing except be the first person to bring German poetry to perfection”. “Never before”, Musil claimed in 1927, has a poet achieved “such elevated and even tautness of expression, such gemlike stillness within never-ceasing movement”; his is a condition of “lofty endurance, wide-reaching openness, almost painful tension”. By the time of Rilke’s death, however, Musil regarded him as having turned into “a delicate, well-matured liqueur suitable for grown-up ladies”. Musil’s assessment, and indeed the language of his tribute, help to explain why C. P. Snow could treat Rilke virtually as a benchmark for obscurity in the 1950s, calling him “an extraordinarily esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer”. Nonetheless, he remains popular with a very disparate readership, “venerated like an upscale Khalil Gibran” (as George C. Schoolfield wryly observes), yet still the subject of a huge body of serious academic scholarship.

more from Robert Vilain at the TLS here.

From Seed Magazine:

Open any biology textbook with decent evolution coverage, and you’ll find a version of a familiar diagram—a bat’s wing, a dolphin’s fin, a horse’s leg, a human’s arm. These vertebrate-limb structures are homologous, their similarities the result of shared origins in an ancestral mammal with a general-purpose limb. Evolution has modified each, but all have a common internal structure, a common embryological origin, and a fossil history that reveals a shared phylogenetic origin.

Comparative biology seems to make it clear that the limbs of invertebrates such as insects have different origins. There is little correspondence to what we see in our own structure: Insect limbs lack bones altogether. Embryologically, insect limbs arise as repeated segmental bulges in the cuticle. The comparative evolutionary history of vertebrates and invertebrates is most telling. The ancient chordate ancestors of our finned or limbed modern vertebrates were completely limbless, little more than undulating ribbons of eel-like swimmers, and our appendages are evolutionary novelties, less than 500 million years old. The arthropods, on the other hand, have been flourishing elaborate limbs for as long as they appear in the fossil record, beginning with tracks laid down in the pre-Cambrian, easily 500 million years ago. The last common ancestor of insects and mammals was a legless worm, and each of our lineages independently worked out how to build limbs, so they can’t be homologous.

More here.

Two Takes on God:

To God

God almighty, I’d be well shot of you.
I love you not, nor do I love the word,
the now made flesh, well-kneaded, tender-simmered
meatball of fair poetry. All that would claim to truth
and fain be worshipped I’ll refute

until my tongue be parched. For I’m a wordwright,
I work holes and fissures tight, hammer bulkheads
against fate’s lightning strikes, sink nails
where your thunder threatens, and curse the wiles
of the deadly serpent that you send, oh God.

I shall stand there, face to face
when your dark mirror breaks; but as David
with his slingstone. As long as I last I’ll protect
my heart, the shaky stronghold at the ravine you are
so wondrously creating – by scoops of your hand.

I mark off world, resist all higher power
and thieving urge: you filch the dear lives constantly
of all those dear to me and those with whom I like to share
the rage at leaving, the taste of which you’ve put
way back in the first kiss – your death, your ash, your soot.

by Anneke Brassinga

translation: John Irons
from: Wachtwoorden
publisher: De Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2005

Read more »

From Science:

Squirrel monkeys can now see your true colors, thanks to gene therapy. Researchers have given the colorblind primates full color vision as adults by injecting their eyes with a human gene. The result raises questions about how the brain understands color, and it could eventually lead to gene-therapy treatments for colorblindness and other visual disorders in humans. In the world of squirrel monkeys, seeing colors is for girls. Whereas some females enjoy full color vision, males of the South American genus see only blues and yellows (see picture). They lack a gene that allows color-sensitive cells in the eye, called cones, to distinguish red and green from gray–the same distinction that confounds most colorblind humans.

Seeking a possible treatment for the human condition, vision scientist Jay Neitz and colleagues at the University of Washington, Seattle, assembled six adult squirrel monkeys, four colorblind males and two female controls. The researchers tested them daily for a year, using a computer program that presented the primates with colorful clumps of dots on a screen of similarly varied gray dots (see video). The results established each monkey's color vision, revealing that the female controls could see colors as a normal human would, while the male monkeys could not distinguish green and red clumps from the gray background. The team then injected the retinas of two of the colorblind monkeys with a virus that introduced the human gene for the red-detecting pigment in cone cells. The researchers were not optimistic. Unlike the malleable brains of young animals, adult brains are far more rigid and tend to have a harder time rewiring themselves. Many patients blinded in childhood, for example, remain blind when their eyes are repaired in adulthood, because their brains never developed the circuitry for processing what they see. Twenty weeks after the gene therapy, however, the monkeys began to spot red and green dots in the computer color tests, and soon after they were regularly acing the trials. “That's when we broke out the champagne,” says a still-surprised Neitz.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The plot of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is ridiculous. A group of Jewish American soldiers are recruited by a Tennessee mountain man played by Brad Pitt to kill Nazis during the Second World War. Along the way they discover a plan to screen a new propaganda film by Goebbels at a cinema in Paris. All the top Nazis will be there, Hitler included. Exterminating them in one fell swoop will end the war. A few twists later, that is exactly what happens. So what's the point? What is it about this counterfactual and openly farcical scenario that so intrigued Mr. Tarantino?

It must have something to do with the relationship between film and reality. The fate of Europe hangs, in this case literally, on a movie. Directors, actors, and even film critics are central players in events of world historical importance.

To the David Denbys of the world (he's a film critic at The New Yorker), this premise amounts to “moral callousness.” Tarantino, he says, is “mucking about with a tragic moment of history. Chaplin and Lubitsch played with Nazis, too, but they worked as farceurs, using comedy to warn of catastrophe; they didn’t carve up Nazis using horror-film flourishes.” In Denby's eyes, Tarantino will exploit any subject matter, even the most serious of real-world issues, in the name of schlock. A talented nihilist, he is the most dangerous species of auteur. Though this tells us little about Tarantino it does reveal something about Denby's conception of the relationship between movies and the real world. Movies that Denby doesn't like are therefore morally contemptible and should be kept out of the real world.

More here.

My artist friend Hartwig Thaler was asked to make a sculpture to commemorate the Pope's visit to Brixen last year. He chose a very cool place to put it: at the top of an ugly unused pylon from an old unused skilift which overlooks the city. This is a short video showing the sculpture being put up. (Yeah, Hartwig is the guy with the beard!)

The filmmaker on her feel-good (sort of) movie, Palestinians in the Windy City, and how personal experiences can trump political arguments.

Michael Archer in Guernica:

During the first Gulf War, Palestinian-American filmmaker Cherien Dabis’s family, living in Ohio, received death threats; the Secret Service even came to her high school to investigate a rumor that her seventeen-year-old sister threatened to kill the President. When Dabis entered Columbia University’s film school in September 2001, she found history repeating itself. “There was, and still is, incredible suspicion and fear of Arabs, even if they’re American. That was when I realized that it was time to sit down and write my version of the coming-to-America story.”

That version is Amreeka, which distributor National Geographic Entertainment is hailing as the first Arab-American film to get major theatrical distribution. The film, which opened in New York and Los Angeles on September 4 and expands to twenty more markets on September 18, follows the immigration of Muna and her son Fadi from Palestine to Chicago, where they come to live with Muna’s sister, Raghda, and her family. While the story opens in Palestine, where Muna and Fadi must deal with checkpoints, it mostly follows the mother and son’s struggles once they’ve arrived in the United States. Muna’s seed money is confiscated by customs agents, forcing her to work secretly at White Castle; Fadi has to deal with racist comments and bullying at school; and Muna’s sister’s family is strained when anti-Arab sentiment begins to erode her husband’s business.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Politicians and researchers have predicted for nearly four decades that a cure for cancer is near, but cancer death rates have hardly budged and most new cancer drugs cost a fortune while giving patients few, if any, added weeks of life. For this collective failure, the man atop the nation’s regulatory agency for new cancer drugs increasingly — and supporters say unfairly — gets the blame: Dr. Richard Pazdur. Patient advocates have called Dr. Pazdur, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s cancer drug office, a murderer, conservative pundits have vilified him as an obstructionist bureaucrat, and guards are now posted at the agency’s public cancer advisory meetings to protect him and other committee members.

“The industry is not producing that many good drugs, so now they’re looking for scapegoats in Rick Pazdur and the F.D.A.,” said Ira S. Loss, who follows the drug industry for Washington Analysis, a service for investors. In 10 years at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Pazdur, 57, has helped to loosen approval standards for cancer medicines and made it easier for dying patients to get experimental drugs. But he demands that drug makers prove with near certainty that their products are beneficial, a requirement that he repeated at a public advisory hearing on Sept. 1 in the slow, loud tones of someone disciplining a dog. After he spoke, the committee of experts voted to reject both drugs.

Critics say that Dr. Pazdur’s resolve has cost thousands of lives and set back the pace of discoveries. “Patients are right to be angry and frustrated with Richard Pazdur,” said Steven Walker, co-founder of the Abigail Alliance, a patient advocacy group. “He is a dinosaur.”

More here.

Johann Hari reviews Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's Half the Sky, in Slate:

They start with an extraordinary fact that shows how deep this abuse runs. Today, now, more than 100 million women are missing. They have vanished. In normal circumstances, women live longer than men—but China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population, India has 108, and Pakistan has 111. Where have these women gone? They have been killed or allowed to die. Medical treatment is often reserved for boys, while violence against women is routine. More girls are killed in this “gendercide” each decade than in all the genocides of the 20th century. This year, another 2 million girls will “disappear.”

But this isn't considered a story. While we rightly roared at racial apartheid, we act as though gender apartheid is a natural, immutable fact. With absolutely the right Molotov cocktail of on-the-ground reporting and hard social science, Kristof and WuDunn blow up this taboo. They ask: What would we do if we believed women were equal human beings, with as much right to determine their life story as men? How would we view the world differently?

We would start by supporting the millions of women who are fighting back. This isn't merely a story of victims; it is predominantly a story of heroines.

From an article originally in German in the Frankfurter Rundschau, over at signandsight:

People have accused Lars von Trier of making a misogynist film because he shows this incredibly sensitive and extremely aggressive woman who is burnt like a witch at the end. Can you relate to these accusations?

No. As far as I'm concerned the woman could just as well have been a man. During the filming I kept imagining that I was playing Lars. I kept thinking of all the panic attacks that I have ever had to play. I can't relate to what people said afterwards about his so-called misogyny. Because everything that he inflicts on the female character, he is going through himself. Of course his fear of women is in there, his fear of his mother, his relationship to children. Although he's a man, there's a close connection between him and this woman, through the pain. She experiences what he experiences. Which is why I never saw him as someone looking on from outside, but as an ally, who led me through the role and understood me.

But can you understand why the film has had such a mixed reception?

To be honest, I expected as much. But most of all I was expecting the audience in Cannes to react in disgust. But the opposite was the case. It was film critics who reacted badly, not the audience. The press is clearly much more reactionary by comparison. But I hope this won't be the case in the rest of the world.

Sarah Sewall in the Boston Review:

The Genocide Prevention Task Force is the latest high-profile attempt to address this dilemma by advocating for U.S. leadership to prevent mass killings. Chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, the 2007 effort was sponsored by three quasi-official institutions: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Its mission was to provide the next president of the United States with a blueprint for action to address genocide before it occurs. (Full disclosure: the principal financial backing for the Task Force came from the Humanity United Foundation, which also supports my mass atrocity research; I participated in the Task Force as an expert working group member.)

The fourteen-member Task Force consciously sought to avoid the debates associated with the legal definition of the word genocide, which requires sophisticated judgments about the intention of murderers and the effect of their actions upon the identity of groups. Instead, the Task Force concerned itself with genocide as “large-scale and deliberate attacks on civilians.” Despite the introduction of new definitional questions, this is a sensible approach since the fundamental problem is extensive violence against innocents, regardless of its purpose.

An interview with Murray Gell-Mann in Discover:

You’ve known some of the greatest physicists in history. Whom do you put on the highest pedestal?

I don’t put people on pedestals very much, especially not physicists. Feynman [who won a 1965 Nobel for his work in particle physics] was pretty good, although not as good as he thought he was. He was too self-absorbed and spent a huge amount of energy generating anecdotes about himself. Fermi [who developed the first nuclear reactor] was good, but again with limitations—every now and then he was wrong. I didn’t know anybody without some limitations in my field of theoretical physics.

Back then, did you understand how special the people around you were?

No. I grew up thinking that the previous people were the special ones. Even though I knew most of them. I didn’t know Erwin Schrödinger [a pioneer of quantum mechanics]; I passed up a chance to meet him for some reason. But I did know Werner Heisenberg fairly well. He was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, which is one of the greatest achievements of the human mind. But by the time I knew him, although he was not extremely old, he was more or less a crank.

How so?

He was talking a lot of nonsense. He had things that he called theories that were not really theories; they were gibberish. His goal was to find a unified theory of all the particles and forces. He worked on an equation, but the equation didn’t have any practical significance. It was impossible to work with it. There were no solutions. It was just nonsense. Anyway, it was interesting that Wolfgang Pauli [discoverer of the exclusion principle], who did not go in for particularly crazy things—at least not in physics—was taken in by Heisenberg’s stuff for a little while. He agreed to join Heisenberg in his program.

But then Pauli came to the United States, where various people worked on him—including Dick Feynman, and including me. Many of us talked to Pauli and said, “Look, you shouldn’t associate yourself with this. It’s all rubbish, and you have your reputation to consider.” Pauli agreed, and he wrote a letter to Heisenberg saying something like: “I quit. This is all nonsense. There’s nothing to it. Take my name off.”

From Scientific American:

Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies?

More here.

Elisabeth Weise in USA Today:

One of the most prestigious prizes in medicine is being awarded this year to scientists working on stem cells and leukemia — and to New York's mayor for his fight to cut tobacco use.

The Lasker Awards, which are announced today, have been given since 1945. They recognize the contributions of scientists, physicians and public servants internationally working to cure, treat and prevent disease.

“It's right up there with the Nobel Prize,” says Gary Sieck, a research director at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. “The people who get it are at the top.”

The Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award goes to three scientists whose turned a fatal cancer, myeloid leukemia, into a manageable condition with their discovery of the drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate).

More here.