AN HOUR at the zoo is enough to convince most people that apes and monkeys are close kin to humankind. Some say that an hour watching proceedings in any parliament is enough to show that humans are close kin to monkeys. Either way, we know that the primate family is an intimate one, with the great apes – gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, orang-utans and humans – particularly closely related. It did not take genetics to tell us this, however, nor comparative anatomy. We now know that we share many of our genes with insects too, and the anatomies of all mammals are just resized and repositioned versions of one another. The key to understanding the true closeness of apes, ourselves included, is ethology. When Jane Goodall first sat in the Gombe rainforest, giving with fortuitous naivety anthropomorphic interpretations of the chimpanzee behaviour she witnessed, she was initiating a rethink: about apes, about humanity’s relationship with them, and ultimately about humanity itself.

more from the New Scientist here.

Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm. The two intersect only in such absurd anomalies as the poet laureateship. But whereas Andrew Motion does his bit to keep the monarchy in business, one of the greatest of English poets played his part in subverting it. John Milton, who was born in Cheapside 400 years ago today, published a political tract two weeks after the beheading of Charles I, arguing that all sovereignty lay with the people, who could depose and even execute a monarch if he betrayed their trust. We are not used to such revolutionary sentiments in our poets. When he left Cambridge, Milton refused to take holy orders and, in his first great poem Lycidas, he mounted a blistering assault on the corruption of the clergy. He was a champion of Puritanism at a time when that meant rejecting a church in cahoots with a brutally authoritarian state.

more from The Guardian here.

From Nature:

Society must respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancement. That response must start by rejecting the idea that 'enhancement' is a dirty word, argue Henry Greely and colleagues.

Today, on university campuses around the world, students are striking deals to buy and sell prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin — not to get high, but to get higher grades, to provide an edge over their fellow students or to increase in some measurable way their capacity for learning. These transactions are crimes in the United States, punishable by prison. Many people see such penalties as appropriate, and consider the use of such drugs to be cheating, unnatural or dangerous. Yet one survey estimated that almost 7% of students in US universities have used prescription stimulants in this way, and that on some campuses, up to 25% of students had used them in the past year. These students are early adopters of a trend that is likely to grow, and indications suggest that they're not alone.

In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and potential abuse. Still, cognitive enhancement has much to offer individuals and society, and a proper societal response will involve making enhancements available while managing their risks.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Imagine you’re in a dark room, running your fingers over a smooth surface in search of a single dot the size of this period. How high do you think the dot must be for your finger pads to feel it? A hundredth of an inch above background? A thousandth? Well, take a tip from the economy and keep downsizing. Scientists have determined that the human finger is so sensitive it can detect a surface bump just one micron high. All our punctuation point need do, then, is poke above its glassy backdrop by 1/400,000th of an inch — the diameter of a bacterial cell — and our fastidious fingers can find it. The human eye, by contrast, can’t resolve anything much smaller than 100 microns. No wonder we rely on touch rather than vision when confronted by a new roll of toilet paper and its Abominable Invisible Seam.

Biologically, chronologically, allegorically and delusionally, touch is the mother of all sensory systems. It is an ancient sense in evolution: even the simplest single-celled organisms can feel when something brushes up against them and will respond by nudging closer or pulling away. It is the first sense aroused during a baby’s gestation and the last sense to fade at life’s culmination. Patients in a deep vegetative coma who seem otherwise lost to the world will show skin responsiveness when touched by a nurse.

More here.

Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

The student population of my school in New Delhi was composed of girls from practically every part of India belonging to several different linguistic groups and religions. Nearly fifty percent of the Punjabi and Bengali students came from families who had lost their ancestral homes in the partition of India in 1947, my own being among them. In middle school, a class mate whose folks had moved to India from the Pakistani city of Lahore, once casually commented that her father's family used to observe Muharram in their hometown before the partition. At the time I didn't think much of what my friend had said. We were young and many of us had heard interesting pre-partition tales from our parents. It is only now, on thinking back, that her story acquires a special meaning and given the subsequent deterioration in Hindu-Muslim relations in general and between India and Pakistan in particular, also a certain amount of poignancy. You see, the remarkable thing about my friend's Muharram story was that she was not a Muslim, but a Hindu Brahmin.

My class mate belonged to the Punjabi community of Dutts, in more communally harmonious times also known as the Hussaini Brahmins. They, along with their Shia Muslim friends and neighbors, used to commemorate and grieve the deaths of Imam Hussain and his disciples in the bloody battle of Karbala during the 7th century power struggle among early Muslims.

More here. [Photo by Feroz Shakir.]

The season of year-end lists is upon us. Here is a metalist, from Lifehacker:

1. Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks
   “Dozens of Google search guides detail the tips you already know, but today we're skipping the obvious and highlighting our favorite obscure Google web search tricks.”
2. Top 10 Harmless Geek Pranks
   “Since the dawn of time, geeks have been playing harmless pranks on their beloved (but unsuspecting) associates, and it's up to all of us to carry the torch forward.”
3. Top 10 Ways to Stay Energized
   “You can overcome a late night of net surfing, a rough morning, or just the post-lunch stupor without becoming an over-wired mess.”
4. Top 10 Software Easter Eggs
   “The best easter eggs aren't painted pink and stuffed with jelly beans—they're the undocumented and unexpected fun features hidden deep inside various software apps.”
5. Top 10 BitTorrent Tools and Tricks
   “BitTorrent is the go-to resource for downloading everything from music and movies to software and operating systems, but as its popularity continues to grow, so do the number of tools available for making the most of it.”
6. Top 10 Firefox 3 Features
   “The newest version of our favorite open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox 3, offers dozens of new features and fixes, but only a handful will make the most dramatic difference in your everyday browsing.”
7. Top 10 How To Videos
   “Your crafty older relatives used to have to mail-order their video tutorials or wait for “This Old House” reruns to get their DIY on, but the age of streaming video has been good to those who like to tinker and try out neat tricks.”
8. Top 10 Things You Forgot Your Mac Can Do
   “From pure eye candy to outright productivity-boosters, read on to get reminded of some of the more obscure things you can do with your Mac, fresh out of the box.”
9. Top 10 Telephone Tricks
   “When getting things done involves making phone calls, you want to spend the least amount of time and money on the horn as possible—and several tricks and services can help you do just that.”
10. Top 10 Computer Annoyances and How to Fix Them
    “Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, but too much of the time they can be frustrating, time-wasting, stubborn machines.”

More here.

Graeme Wood in Culture + Travel, reproduced on his own website:

Residents of Vidracco (pop. 500) knew the newcomers were different. Since 1977, they had been showing up one-by-one in the little Piedmontese valley, marching in from Turin like bugs following a trail of syrup. They kept to themselves. Their chitchat, when it came, zoomed right past the commonplace – nothing on the latest Juventus game, or the sorry state of farming in the valley. Instead, they spoke eagerly of “esoteric physics,” astral-plane travel, and Vidracco’s remarkable “synchronic energy lines,” supposedly unique on earth. And they rarely came out at night.

One day in 1992, Vidracco found out why. Backed by carabinieri and motivated by a tip, a magistrate showed up and demanded that the newcomers unlock a nondescript wooden door in the side of the mountain, next to their compound (called “Damanhur,” after the ancient Egyptian city). Inside, a cramped passage led to a section of wall decorated in pharaonic themes. The Damanhurians pointed a garage door opener at the flat stone surface, and clicked its button. Gears whirred, and a wall-section fell away.

Damanhur’s handful of citizens – dozens at first, but by now 330 — had been working in shifts, under cover of darkness, scratching at the earth with picks and shovels, and building shrines deep in the steep, forested mountain. Behind a series of false walls lay a revelation as mysterious as King Tut’s tomb, but grander — as ethereal as the Sistine Chapel, but weirder. In all, they had dug out over 8000 cubic meters, a space larger than Big Ben, excavated mostly by hand, with neither building permits nor technical expertise. They had decorated these “Temples of Humankind” with a rainbow of wall paintings, Tiffany stained glass, and mosaics. Endless halls snaked around the innards of the mountain, lit with candles and reeking of incense and paint.

More here.

Joe Deal. From the Beach Cities Series, Zuma Beach. 1978.

More here and here.

Hello Readers (and Writers!),

Well, we received around ninety submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were very good (with a few incomprehensible and even insane pieces thrown in, just to test our sanity, I suppose) and it was hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. So hard, in fact, that we ended up deciding that we will dramatically expand the number of 3QD columns by doubling them. Hence, today we welcome to 3QD the top twenty people (in the combined ratings of the editors). Without further ado, these are, in alphabetical order by last name (this is not a ranking of any kind):

1. Namit Arora
2. Evert Cilliers
3. Norman Costa
4. Gerald Dworkin
5. Richard Eskow
6. Sam Kean
7. Affinity Konar
8. Kris Kotarski
9. Colin Marshall
10. Katherine McNamara
11. Maniza Naqvi
12. Alan Page
13. Jonathan Pfeiffer
14. Daniel Rourke
15. Olivia Scheck
16. David Schneider
17. Aditya Dev Sood
18. Jeff Strabone
19. Bryant Urstadt
20. Manisha Verma

Three of these people (Norman Costa, Affinity Konar, and Aditya Dev Sood) will begin writing at 3QD today. I will be in touch with the rest of you to schedule a start date. The “About Us” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers no later than the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was sometimes tiring, but still a pleasure to read them all. If you didn't make it this time, we will keep you in mind for the future. And congratulations to the new columnists!

Best wishes,

Abbas

From Craig's List:

So you've just moved into a new “gentrifying” neighboorhood that's full of urban culture, cheap(er) rents, and wonderful friendly people. An odd lack of organic food stores and greenmarkets, but you can't have everything. So one day you're doing something FUCKING RETARDED like walking back from the store alone at 1 am or walking home from the subway while texting your sorority sisters back in the fucking midwest or something while SIMULTANEOUSLY listening to an ipod with the bright white headphones and you get fucking mugged. Congrats, YOU'RE A FUCKING DUMBASS. No, it's not 1990, when men where men, crackheads would fucking cut you and the robbery rate was about a billion times higher than it is now, but it's still new york and you were still fucking dumb enough to think that paying $1200 for a studio in a shitty neighboorhood is somehow hipper than moving to fucking Queens.

Anyway, here's some helpful tips for the next time someone jacks your shit.

1) Pay attention. Granted, you weren't paying attention to start with or you wouldn't have gotten mugged, but now that you've been hit from behind / had a gun shoved in your face, pay attention.

2) Follow directions. Give the friendly mugger what he wants. Don't talk back or fight. In all likelyhood, you're a pussy hipster retard, and are, by NYC law, unarmed.

3) You've been paying attention right? Remember some simple things in this order: sex, clothing color, clothing type, headwear, and direction of flight.

4) Congratulations! You've just been robbed and you're still alive. What now? Well, don't go back to your apartment and call the cops thirty minutes later. Don't call your mom in Kansas and tell her first. CALL THE COPS AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. You'd be amazed at how many people fuck up this simple step. Pay phones still exist as do 24/7 bogies. Go there, call the cops.

5) It may take a while for the cops to show up. The 911 system, at best, will result in a five minute wait before we're even notified. Then we have to drive there without killing anyone. Be patient. For that matter, tell the 911 operator exactly where you are. Nothing makes a responding cop happier than having to scour the area for your dumb ass while the perp gets away.

More here.

The talk at my Thanksgiving table—as no doubt at every Indian-American household—was all Bombay. We watched CNN through eating, with its hysterical headline blazing, “Mumbai: City Under Siege.” Years of suicide bombings had suddenly given way to a wholly unexpected takeover of the major hotels, more typical of James Bond-villainy than latter-day jihadism. They differed in their attire as well: News reports insisted on pointing out that the attackers and hostage-takers wore jeans and t-shirts. When I was younger, I used to travel through Bombay in order to get to my ancestral city, Bangalore. A bus would take you from the international to the domestic airport, along a vertiginous swath of blue-tarped slums. The air was oppressed by humidity; the rain didn’t wet you, it slimed you. And those slimed shantytowns, shadowed—as every traveler ritually points out—by white stalagmites of luxury towers everywhere, had always been proof to me that it was a city of absolute evil. But poverty was only one of its evils. A Hindu family friend once took me on a drive that led through a large Muslim ghetto, its streets dusty and narrow. “Everywhere the Muslims go, they make the place dirty,” he said.

more from n+1 here.

In The Know: How Can We Make The Iraq War More Handicap Accessible?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” which forms the basis for the new David Fincher movie starring Brad Pitt, originally appeared in Collier’s on May 27, 1922 (earlier the story had been rejected by Metropolitan), and was then featured in Fitzgerald’s second story collection, “Tales of the Jazz Age.” Fitzgerald was, at the time, the most famous young writer in America, thanks to the smash success of his first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” published in 1920. He’d become the voice of the youthful and disillusioned post- World War I generation, of the exuberant and half-decadent Jazz Age. He wrote with his finger on the pulse of popular culture and with an eye to the nation’s swiftly changing mores. A typical Fitzgerald story of this period would be “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” combining bored youth, quick repartee and rivalry among girls thinking of sex with the kind of effortless grace and eloquence that were already his trademarks.

more from the LA Times here.

From Prospect Magazine:

What is the meaning of Obama? It is, of course, impossible to evaluate a presidency that has yet to occur, notwithstanding premature declarations that he will be a “transformational” president to compare with giants like Lincoln and the two Roosevelts. But it is not too early to analyse the meaning of his election. The fact that a mostly white democracy has elected a biracial chief executive is epochal in itself. Liberal democracy is now firmly rooted in much of the world, but many, if not most, liberal societies today would not choose to be led by someone who does not look like a member of the dominant tribe. Its history of slavery and apartheid notwithstanding, that can no longer be said of the United States of America.

The nightmare of the racist right in the US has always been “race-mixing.” It was particularly moving therefore to see a mixed-race president, who had begun his presideantial race in Abraham Lincoln's Springfield, Illinois, conclude it on election night with an address to a jubilant multiracial crowd in Chicago's Grant Park, named after the general who defeated the slave south in the civil war. There were many ghosts among that crowd. But Obama was not elected because the American people chose to set an example of colour-blind democracy for the world. He was elected because the 2008 presidential election was a referendum on George W Bush's two disastrous terms. And whether Obama's election marks a transformation or a restoration depends on how the regime of his predecessor is viewed. If Bush's presidency was an aberration, then Obama's election can be seen as a restoration. On the other hand, if Bush's presidency was typical of an earlier pattern, then Obama's election can be viewed as a novel departure.

In my view, Obama's election was a restoration, not a transformation.

More here.

From Science:

With a tanking economy and global violence on the rise, there's at least one thing to smile about: A pair of scientists is reporting that happiness can spread through social networks, meaning that friends of the cheery contract the happiness bug themselves. The data behind the new findings come from, of all things, a massive study of cardiovascular disease. In 1948, researchers began collecting health and other information on U.S. adults as part of the Framingham Heart Study. Today, the project has data on more than 14,000 people, and it has helped researchers identify many of the major risk factors behind heart disease and stroke. Because the Framingham leaders, trying to track volunteers over many years, worried about losing contact with them, they asked all subjects to provide the name of a friend who would know how to find them if necessary. Often, those friends were also part of the study.

Nicholas Christakis, formerly a hospice physician at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, used these data to create a social network of nearly 5000 people. The duo then matched the information with various health data. Last year, they reported that weight loss and weight gain could “spread” through the network, meaning that a guy whose friends were overweight was more likely to pack on the pounds himself (ScienceNOW, 25 July 2007). Christakis and Fowler published a similar finding on smoking earlier this year.

Now, the two have turned to something more ethereal: mood.

More here.

William Ayers in the New York Times:

In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

More here.

Taimur Khan in The National:

Even though Karachi smouldered for most of the decade, the perennial narratives of Pakistan as a chaos-ridden failed state permanently on the brink of becoming Talibanistan were flawed; local resilience and toughness proved them only half true. During my visits, I saw the shrines of Sufi saints, unique to South Asian Islam and especially to Sindhi culture, teeming with worshippers; the Urdu bazaar in the old city was packed with people buying books; and when the Indian cricket team finally came to play, the city revelled for days. After September 11, the economy grew at a pace that rivalled India’s, and, as in India, there was for the first time the formation of a broad middle class. Last year, an outburst of bourgeois consciousness helped force out Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler, and demanded elections that many hoped signalled a meaningful shift towards democracy and away from military-feudal rule. The West was outwardly enthralled because it seemed that Pakistan was finally on the teleological road to liberal democracy, the only modernity it cares about.

Two weeks ago I visited family in Karachi for the first time in three years. The fragile optimism I encountered in 2005 has evaporated. In the Nineties the upper middle class was comforted by the fact that no matter how bad things became in the short term, the status quo would always reassert itself: the military would always intervene to protect its interests, which overlapped with theirs. The army and intelligence agencies may have been fighting proxy wars in Afghanistan and on the border with India, but internally, the state maintained a surface equilibrium. But now the military is fighting a full-scale war on its home turf with the Pakistani Taliban. The idea that the army can maintain internal control has been revealed as fiction.

More here.

From Rocket Scientist:

There are a bunch of good reasons to kiss the English system of measurement goodbye, not the least of which is that we’re the last damn country to be using it, including England. Here are a few of them.

*If math makes your eyes roll up into your head, skip to the end.

Units are ambiguous. You know a difference between a pound-force or a pound-mass? Most people don’t. So how much in an ounce? Troy, fluid, standard and, of course, there’s an ounce-force, too. How about a mile? There’s a survey mile, statute mile, Scottish mile, ancient English and Roman miles, Irish mile, international mile and no less that three different nautical miles. Note that the US uses no less than three of these forms of mile. Know how many different kilometers there are? Yep, just the one and they use the same damn one all over the world. The same liters, Newtons, kilograms… One and only one and everyone uses it, even us.

Different units for the same damn parameter. How many units do we have for distance? There’s, of course, all the different flavors of mile, foot and inch. Also furlong, mil, angstrom, parsec, league, yard… In metric there are meters and factors of 1000 of meters. That’s all. In volume, there are cubic inches and cubic feet, also gallons, pints, quarts, barrels, etc. In metric, there are liters and factors of 1000 of liters. The other side of the coin is that, by knowing the unit, you know the parameter. Newtons are force. Kg are mass. Pounds, of course, can be either. Ounces can be a measure of weight or a measure of force or a measure of volume.

More here.

Years ago, as an architecture student traveling in Europe, I sought out Le Corbusier’s home in Paris. I had the address from his books, over which I had pored for hours in the university library. Some of his writings were more than 40 years old, but their rousing rhetoric still made architecture seem more like a noble crusade than a mundane profession. Perhaps that’s why I imitated his spidery ink sketches and his military-looking stenciled lettering. I admired Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings, but the old man — he had recently died — with his capes and flowery pronouncements, was a figure from another era. I had been taught that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a great architect, but his buildings left me unmoved — Mies is not for the young. “Corbu,” on the other hand, though he was 76, continued to produce designs that surprised and inspired — an unusual, spread-out one-story hospital for Venice, for example, with skylights instead of windows so you could see the sky while lying in bed. For a tyro, such invention was irresistible.

more from the NY Times here.