The LHC really became a collider just before Christmas. The collisions recorded back then were not at particularly high energy, but three experiments have now published results; my experiment, Atlas, being the latest, with the paper being accepted for publication only last week. Before storming onward, it is a good moment to see what these results actually tell us. The detectors (Alice, CMS and Atlas) are really just huge digital cameras designed to record what happens when protons smash together. The first thing you do with a new collider and detector is measure the particles produced in an “average” collision. Measuring average, typical events tells us various things. We know the proton is full of quarks, stuck together by the strong nuclear force. How it behaves at high energies is not very well known, and these measurements will help. They also help us understand backgrounds to rarer events, for example, those where a Higgs particle (which is thought to bestow mass on elementary particles) might be produced, and inform models of massive air-showers, which happen when cosmic rays hit the upper atmosphere. You can see in the Atlas paper that the models don’t fit the data quite right. The model builders are already tuning up to improve this.

more from Jon Butterworth at The Guardian here.

The ideas of France’s philosophers, the refinement of its language, and the sumptuousness of its fashion defined the eighteenth century. French paintings from the Age of Enlightenment gleam from the walls of great museums from St. Petersburg to New York. What would the Wallace Collection be without Watteau, the Frick without Fragonard? Yet sculpture contributed as much to this era as France’s other arts. Certainly there are well-known examples around the world—Jean- Antoine Houdon’s statue of George Washington in Richmond, for example, or Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s equestrian monument to Peter the Great on the Neva. But the full richness of eighteenth-century French sculpture—as spirited as it was virtuoso—has been little noted outside its homeland. All the more reason to celebrate the decision of the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt, in collaboration with the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, to gather together a glittering selection of French sculpture from the days of Voltaire to the First Empire. The show includes both statues and smaller works—among them, above all, a remarkable ensemble of portrait busts. The Liebieghaus galleries are not large and do not always offer enough space for the works to achieve the full effect of their magic and wit. Nevertheless, what an experience! It feels like entering a Paris salon in the days of Madame du Deffand and eavesdropping on the philosophes in brilliant conversation.

more from Willibald Sauerländer at the NYRB here.

As some of you are no doubt aware, I’m in the process of putting together a megadungeon/setting book inspired by my ongoing Dwimmermount campaign. I have no firm release date in mind but it’ll likely be in the Fall of this year. Like its predecessor project, The Cursed Chateau, it’ll be compatible with any class-and-level fantasy RPG, but this time around I’m probably going to be hewing more closely to Labyrinth Lord, since it’s the retro-clone that’s actually closest to the way I play OD&D these days. Anyway, I’m in the midst of getting its maps together, employing the talented Tim Hartin (proprietor of Paratime Design and the blog Gamma Rites) to produce them. The initial release will include six levels of Dwimmermount, although they’ll only go four levels “deep,” as there are several side levels. One of the principles I hold dear when working on Dwimmermount is that there should be multiple routes between the various levels and sub-levels. Likewise, the levels and sub-levels don’t all stack neatly on top of one another but sprawl in a variety of directions. This is, in my opinion, an antidote to monotony and a key to keeping a megadungeon interesting and challenging over the course of long-term play.

more from James Maliszewski’s wonderful world-headquarters of ultimate nerdom here.

In July 1917 — the point at which Miranda Carter opens this enterprising his­tory of imperial vicissitudes and royal reversals — George V, king of Great Britain and emperor of India, resolved to change his name. In that scorching summer, King George was a worried man. His Russian cousin, Czar Nicholas II, had recently lost his throne and was under house arrest. In Germany, another imperial cousin, Wilhelm II, had been stripped of his proudest title, “supreme warlord.” Deprived of power, Wilhelm discovered a hitherto absent sense of humor. Hearing that the English king had decided to bury his German connections by proclaiming himself a member of the newly formed House of Windsor, the emperor pondered the possibilities for a forthcoming Shakespearean production: “The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.”

more from Miranda Seymour at the NYT here.

Golden Lines

“Astonishing! Everything is Intelligent!”
…………………………….Pythagoras

Free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker
on this earth in which life blazes in all things?
Your liberty does what it wishes with the powers it controls,
but when you gather to plan, the universe is not there.

Look carefully in an animal at a spirit alive;
every flower is a soul opening out into nature;
a mystery touching love is alseep inside metal.
“Everything is intelligent!” And everything moves you.

In the blind wall, look out for the eyes that pierce you:
the substance of creation cannot be separated from a word . . .
Do not force it to labor in some low phrase!

Often a Holy Thing is living hidden in a dark creature;
and like an eye which is born covered by its lids,
a pure spirit is growing strong under the bark of stones!

Gerard De Nerval / 1854

translated by Robert Bly

Jon Meacham in The New York Times:

It is only a brief moment, a seemingly inconclusive ­exchange in the midst of one of the most significant interviews in human history. In the Gospel of John, Jesus of Nazareth has been arrested and brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. Improbably polite, reflective and reluctant to sentence Jesus to death (the historical Pilate was in fact brutal and quick-tempered), Pilate is portrayed as a patient questioner of this charismatic itinerant preacher. “So you are a king?” Pilate asks, and Jesus says: “You say that I am a king. I was born for this, and I came into the world for this: to testify to the truth. Everyone who is committed to the truth listens to my voice.” Then, in what I imagine to be a cynical, world-weary tone, Pilate replies, “What is truth?”

Jesus says nothing in response, and Pilate’s question is left hanging — an open query in the middle of John’s rendering of the Passion. I have always thought of Pilate’s question as a kind of wink from God, a sly aside to the audience that says, in effect, “Be careful of anyone who thinks he has all the answers; only I do.” The search for truth — about the visible and the invisible — is perhaps the most fundamental of human undertakings, ranking close behind the quests for warmth, food and a mate. With apologies and due respect and affection to my friends Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, that perennial search for an answer to Pilate’s question usually takes religious form. “All men need the gods,” as Homer has it, and nothing since then — not Galileo, not Darwin, not the Enlightenment, nothing — has changed the intrinsic impulse to organize stories and create belief systems that give shape to life and offer a vision of what may lie beyond the grave.

More here.

[H/t: Jennifer Ouellette]

(via Kottke):

Brian Switek in Laelaps:

The ability of our species to make and use tools clearly separated us from all other organisms, at least until it was discovered that chimpanzees, too, made and used tools. More than that, studies since the 1960's have confirmed that different populations of chimpanzees have distinctive tool cultures affected by the contingencies of their surroundings, and a recent study published two years ago in PNAS illustrates that these cultures of tool use among non-human primates stretch back at least 4,300 years.

Since September of 1979 primatologists have studied the wild chimpanzees of the Tai National Park in the western African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, and in this particular location the chimpanzees use a variety of tools. Among the most common tools are twigs used to get at different kinds of food (be it honey in a tree or the brains of a monkey they have killed), but the Tai chimps also frequently use stone hammers and anvils to crack open nuts. Naturally this process modifies the stones used in the process, and this made some researchers wonder whether chimpanzees might have an archaeological record all their own.

To find out, scientists Julio Mercader, Huw Barton, Jason Gillespie, Jack Harris, Steven Kuhn, Robert Tyler, and Christophe Boesch looked for signs of ancient chimpanzee sites within the Tai forest. They found three, all of which were within about 200 meters of each other in an area of the park still inhabited by chimpanzees and dated to a span of time between 4,300 years ago and 2,200 years ago. From these sites the researchers gathered a large collection of modified stones, most of which (206 pieces) came from a single site, but the question was whether they were truly looking at a chimpanzee-made assemblage or one that had been artificially made by flowing water.

Drake Bennett in Slate:

Academics, on the other hand, can't seem to get enough of The Wire. Barely two years after the show's final episode aired—and with Simon's new show, Treme, premiering next month on HBO—there have already been academic conferences, essay anthologies, and special issues of journals dedicated to the series. Not content to write about it and discuss it among themselves, academics are starting to teach it, as well. Professors at Harvard, U.C.—Berkeley, Duke, and Middlebury are now offering courses on the show.

Interestingly, the classes aren't just in film studies or media studies departments; they're turning up in social science disciplines as well, places where the preferred method of inquiry is the field study or the survey, not the HBO series, even one that is routinely called the best television show ever. Some sociologists and social anthropologists, it turns out, believe The Wire has something to teach their students about poverty, class, bureaucracy, and the social ramifications of economic change.

The academic love affair with The Wire is not, as it turns out, a totally unrequited one. One of the professors teaching a course on the show is the sociologist William Julius Wilson—his class, at Harvard, will be offered this fall. Simon has said that Wilson's book When Work Disappears, an exploration of the crippling effects of the loss of blue-collar jobs in American cities, was the inspiration for the show's second season, which focused on Baltimore's struggling dockworkers.

Wilson's class, a seminar, will require students to watch selected episodes of the show, three or more a week, he says. Some seasons, like the fourth, with its portrayal of the way the public school system fails poor children, will get more time than others. Students will also read works of sociology: two books by Wilson, as well as Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street, Sandra Susan Smith's Lone Pursuit, Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America, and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh's Off the Books, works that explore poverty, incarceration, unemployment, and the underground economy.

Asked why he was teaching a class around a TV drama, Wilson said the show makes the concerns of sociologists immediate in a way no work of sociology he knows of ever has.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Lady Gaga…wants nothing more than to stand out there, alone on the stage surrounded by a numberless, raving throng. She wants to bring back the super-fan.

“When I'm writing music, I'm thinking about the clothes I want to wear on stage. It's all about everything altogether — performance art, pop performance art, fashion. For me, it's everything coming together and being a real story that will bring back the super-fan. I want to bring that back. I want the imagery to be so strong that fans will want to eat and taste and lick every part of us.”

That's Gaga in an interview with MTV News a couple of years ago. She's always known in her bones that super-fans are the Holy Grail of Pop Fame, the fame of the true legends: Elvis, the Beatles, Marilyn. There hasn't been someone really worthy of having super-fans for a long time. The diffusion and fracturing of culture has been too profound. No one performer can be big enough, anymore, to command that much attention. Sure, there are instances of super-fandom here and there, amongst a particular demographic or sub-group: the Jonas Brothers, for instance, and the kids who love them. But having real super-fans means cutting across all those distinctions. It means having moments where you hold an entire culture in the palm of your hand. It means you can push the buttons of millions of people, drive them wild and outside of themselves simply by walking on to the stage.

Lady Gaga's latest offering to her fans is a music video for her song “Telephone.” It starts in a women's prison. There's a vicious catfight, some lesbian kissing, and a pair of sunglasses made from burning cigarettes. The story moves on to the choreography of sandwich-making and then a mass murder at a roadside diner. Fabulous stuff.

I was struck, though, by the strange realism of the video, especially in the prison. It is no mistake, I think, that Quentin Tarantino is referenced throughout (Lady Gaga and Beyoncé leave the prison in the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill). Though Tarantino is often criticized for an overuse of irony and a “meta” style, his movies are at their best when a sudden rush of violence, perfectly orchestrated, brings you very much into a real moment. Those moments in Tarantino movies are disturbing, all the more because he so easily manipulates the viewer in and out of them. The ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs is not funny or pleasant or cool. It is scary and wrong and it sticks in your craw, for real.

Last Saturday afternoon, on a Japanese-landscaped hillside at the outskirts of Atlanta, several clusters of people were constructing mathematically inspired sculptures of metal, bamboo and balloons. Nearby, a magician showed a mathematician how to “throw” a knot. Others had their photographs taken in an optical illusion they had built, an “impossible box” that from one perspective made people look simultaneously behind and inside it. Around a goldfish pond, groups did puzzles, origami, juggling and card tricks. A magician, a philosopher and a software engineer argued about Wittgenstein. It was the high point of a four-day conference in honor of Martin Gardner, 95, a public intellectual whose most famous pulpit was “Mathematical Games,” written for Scientific American between 1956 and 1981. Mr. Gardner’s column illuminated the beauty of math and logic in discussions of fractals, origami, optical illusions, puzzles and pseudoscience. It challenged readers to discover how finely math and logic are interwoven through the world.

more from Robert Crease at the WSJ here.

Over the past decade, some of the most glowing stars in the firmament of the art world have been Iranian – from Shirin Neshat, acclaimed since the late 1990s for her films, videos and photographs, to painters such as Farhad Moshiri and Charles Hussein Zenderoudi, whose work has fetched prices upwards of $1 million at recent auctions in Dubai. Buoyed by the West’s growing fascination with all things Middle Eastern and the Gulf’s flowering art market, the future for Iranian artists seems bright. But until recently there was scant global buzz about prior generations of Iranian artists – none of whom, perhaps, seems more significant now than Ardeshir Mohassess, a prominent political caricaturist who many of today’s successes count as a major inspiration. Ardeshir (as he preferred to call himself) rose to fame during the 1960s and 1970s, under the reign of Shah Mohammed-Reza Pahlavi, and was renowned for his deft and bitingly satirical drawings, which meld reportage with the conventions of Qajar portraiture and the flatness and decorativity of Persian miniatures. In his heyday, he was lionised by the Iranian intelligentsia and his work was broadly published. But after moving to New York in 1976, he gradually fell into obscurity.

more from Carol Kino at The National here.

“Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good God, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry.” Whereas Byron drank soda water to preserve his figure and Shelley wrote a treatise on the natural diet, Keats ate his nectarine, and we taste it 200 years later. Keats was always the man for me. I read his letters in my mid-teens, before I knew much of his poetry. He was warm, earthy, self-mocking, funny and endlessly interested in gossip, weaving a brilliant weft under and over the letters’ darker warp of sickness, death and mental anguish. In the Keats-Shelley house in Rome, you can stand in Keats’s bedroom and see the flowers on the ceiling that he saw when he lay dying. All the furniture was burned, as it had to be by law, because he had died of tuberculosis. He’d foreseen the whole ugly business from the first moment that he coughed up arterial blood, because his medical training forbade self-deception as much as his nature forbade self-pity. “I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die.”

more from Helen Dunmore at The Guardian here.

In an 1886 missive to Theo from Antwerp—a personal favorite of mine—van Gogh brilliantly assesses the painterly strengths and weaknesses of Rubens. He writes that he views Rubens as “superficial, hollow, bombastic . . . altogether conventional,” admitting nonetheless that he is a wonderful painter who expresses moods of “gaiety” and “serenity” through his combinations of colors. His portraits are “deep and intimate,” van Gogh writes, and have remained fresh “because of the simplicity of the technique.” Nonetheless, he objects to Rubens’s attempts to portray human sorrow: “Even his most beautiful heads of a weeping Magdalen or Mater Dolorosas always just remind me of the tears of a pretty tart who’s caught the clap, say, or some such petty vexation of human life—as such they’re masterly, but one needn’t look for anything more in them.” So what did van Gogh see as his own strengths and weaknesses? In an early letter to Theo (May 8, 1875), he quotes Renan: “Man is not placed on the earth merely to be happy; nor is he placed here merely to be honest, he is here to accomplish great things through society, to arrive at nobleness, and to outgrow the vulgarity in which the existence of almost all individuals drags on.” This is a vision he lived. But at what cost? In one of his late letters to his brother (July 2, 1889), van Gogh says that he was “infinitely too harsh . . . in claiming that it was better to love painters than paintings.” The reader now has to ask similar questions. Van Gogh becomes less likable and more lovable, more familiar and yet somehow ever stranger. In reading and studying these books, we can at once achieve both ends.

more from Tyler Cowen at Bookforum here.

From The New York Times:

To illustrate what a growing number of literary scholars consider the most exciting area of new research, Lisa Zunshine, a professor of English at the University of Kentucky, refers to an episode from the TV series “Friends.” (Follow closely now; this is about the science of English.) Phoebe and Rachel plot to play a joke on Monica and Chandler after they learn the two are secretly dating. The couple discover the prank and try to turn the tables, but Phoebe realizes this turnabout and once again tries to outwit them. As Phoebe tells Rachel, “They don’t know that we know they know we know.” This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings are equipped with this capacity and what particular brain functions enable them to do it are questions that have occupied primarily cognitive psychologists.

Now English professors and graduate students are asking them too. They say they’re convinced science not only offers unexpected insights into individual texts, but that it may help to answer fundamental questions about literature’s very existence: Why do we read fiction? Why do we care so passionately about nonexistent characters? What underlying mental processes are activated when we read? Ms. Zunshine, whose specialty is 18th-century British literature, became familiar with the work of evolutionary psychologists while she was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the 1990s. “I thought this could be the most exciting thing I could ever learn,” she said. At a time when university literature departments are confronting painful budget cuts, a moribund job market and pointed scrutiny about the purpose and value of an education in the humanities, the cross-pollination of English and psychology is a providing a revitalizing lift.

Jonathan Gottschall, who has written extensively about using evolutionary theory to explain fiction, said “it’s a new moment of hope” in an era when everyone is talking about “the death of the humanities.” To Mr. Gottschall a scientific approach can rescue literature departments from the malaise that has embraced them over the last decade and a half. Zealous enthusiasm for the politically charged and frequently arcane theories that energized departments in the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s — Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis — has faded. Since then a new generation of scholars have been casting about for The Next Big Thing.

The brain may be it. Getting to the root of people’s fascination with fiction and fantasy, Mr. Gottschall said, is like “mapping wonderland.”

More here.

Ultimate Problems

In the Aztec design God crowds
into the little pea that is rolling
out of the picture.
All the rest extends bleaker
because God has gone away.

In the White Man design, though,
no pea is there.
God is everywhere,
but hard to see.
The Aztecs frown at this.

How do you know he is everywhere?
And how did he get out of the pea?

by William Stafford

Edith Grossman in Guernica:

Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican writer, begins his essay “Translation: Literature and Letters” with the sentence: “When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate.” He states that children translate the unknown into a language that slowly becomes familiar to them, and that all of us are continually engaged in the translation of thoughts into language. Then he develops an even more suggestive notion: no written or spoken text is “original” at all, since language, what ever else it may be, is a translation of the nonverbal world, and each linguistic sign and phrase translates another sign and phrase. And this means, in an absolutely utopian sense, that the most human of phenomena—the acquisition and use of language—is, according to Paz, actually an ongoing, endless process of translation; and by extension, the most creative use of language—that is, literature is also a process of translation: not the transmutation of the text into another language but the transformation and concretization of the content of the writer’s imagination into a literary artifact. As many observers, including John Felstiner and Yves Bonnefoy, have suggested, the translator who struggles to re-create a writer’s words in the words of a foreign language in fact continues the original struggle of the writer to transpose nonverbal realities into language. In short, as they move from the workings of the imagination to the written word, authors engage in a process that is parallel to what translators do as we move from one language to another.

More here. (Note: I just finished the translation of Don Quixote by Ms. Grossman and it is fantastic, with the added bonus of an erudite and brilliant introduction by the great Harold Bloom. I strongly recommend it.)

Peter Dreier in AlterNet:

In their 6,327-word Nation article, Cloward (a professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work at the time ) and Piven (an anti-poverty researcher and activist who joined the Columbia faculty later that year), proposed organizing the poor to demand welfare benefits in order to pressure the federal government to expand the nation's social safety net and establish a guaranteed national income. To put their strategy into practice, Cloward and Piven worked with George Wiley to create the National Welfare Rights Organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s had affiliates in 60 cities and had some success increasing participation in the federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children program by organizing protests at welfare offices and pressuring politicians and welfare administrators to change the rules.

Because it focused exclusively on welfare recipients, however, NWRO's narrow constituency base guaranteed that it would remain a marginal force in the nation's politics. In 1970, NWRO organizer Wade Rathke moved to Arkansas to start ACORN, which he hoped would build a broader multi-racial movement for economic justice. In its early days, Cloward (who died in 2001) and Piven served as unofficial advisers to the group. ACORN eventually grew into the nation's largest community organizing group, with chapters in 103 cities in 37 states.

Cloward and Piven soon concluded that a successful anti-poverty movement had to combine grassroots protest with electoral politics. During the Reagan years in the early 1980s, they wrote a widely-read book, Why Americans Don't Vote, which examined deliberate efforts throughout the 20th century to deny the franchise to immigrants, the poor, and African Americans. They also used their contacts among unions, community groups, and social workers to help build a movement to expand voting among the poor. Their idea led to the National Voter Registration Act, usually called the “motor voter” law, which President Clinton signed in 1993, at a White House ceremony at which Piven spoke and received one of the president's pens.

Cloward and Piven were obviously committed to combining scholarship and activism. Not surprisingly, conservatives have been attacking their ideas for decades. But the demonization of the couple by the extreme Right has escalated since Obama's election.

A few weeks after Obama's victory, James Simpson penned an article for the right-wing American Thinker entitled, “Cloward-Piven Government,” describing their “malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government.”

Are Democrats doomed? Can a ‘Big Tent’ be too big? Christian at OkCupid.com uses stats from the dating site to make the case (via The Browser):

Time and again in American politics, Republicans have voted as a unit to frustrate our disorganized Democratic majority. No matter what's on the table, a few Democrats will peel away from the party core; meanwhile, all Republicans will somehow manage to stay on-message.

Thus, they caucus block us.

. . .

Articles noting this phenomenon anecdotally appear all the time, and despite the recent hopeful spate of Democratic victories, it's undeniable that the Republicans form an exceptionally effective opposition party. Today, we're going to perform a data-driven investigation of why this might be—and discover some fascinating things about the American electorate along the way. Our data set for this post is 172,853 people.

I should start off by pointing out that the Left/Right political framework we're usually handed is insufficient for a real discussion, because political identity isn't one-dimensional. For example, many Libertarians have Left-leaning ideas about social policy, and Right-leaning ideas about personal property. Where do they fit on a single ideological line?

There are many methods of looking at the political spectrum, but the best way I've come across is to hold social politics and economic politics separate, and measure a person's views on each in terms of permissiveness vs. restrictiveness on a 2-dimensional plane. Like so:

As you can see, I've superimposed some 'party' labels, to add some real-world context. One could quibble with the names I've chosen, but I feel that, in a broad sense, they fit: Democrats have a permissive social outlook and believe in restricting the financial sector (through regulation); Republicans essentially believe the reverse. In their corner, Libertarians would like to end restrictions across the board, and, down in the lower right, we have people who prefer that all aspects of life be guided by some authority: religion, the government, whatever.