Wilfred M. McClay in The Wilson Quarterly:

What does it mean to speak of the “burden” of the humanities? The phrase can be taken several ways. First, it can refer to the weight the humanities themselves have to bear, the things that they are supposed to accomplish on behalf of us, our nation, or our civilization. But it can also refer to the near opposite: the ways in which the humanities are a source of responsibility for us, and their recovery and cultivation and preservation our job, even our duty.

Both of these senses of burden— the humanities as preceptor, and the humanities as task— need to be included in our sense of the problem. The humanities, rightly pursued and rightly ordered, can do things, and teach things, and preserve things, and illuminate things, which can be accomplished in no other way. It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization’s past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life possible.

The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual finger- painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without them.

From Wired:

Human memory alteration has received renewed attention with recent evidence that memories, when recalled, become mutable. Scientists have long known that short-term memories needed to be “consolidated” into long-term storage, but once there, they were assumed to be fairly fixed. In recent years, scientists like McGill’s Karim Nader have called that into question, arguing that “reactivating” memories opens neurochemical space to change or even erases the recollection. Over the last few years, researchers have begun the search for drug therapies that would exploit this second chance at remembering. The new Cambridge research suggests that, at least in rats, administering a drug that blocks the action of a key memory-forming brain chemical can disrupt memory reconsolidation.

Everitt’s team conditioned rats to associate the switching on of a light with cocaine. Then the rats learned behaviors that would get the light switched on and cocaine administered. The light, in that way, became a “drug-associated memory.” Switching on the light allowed the researchers to activate that memory, causing the rats to launch into their cocaine-craving behavior. But when the researchers administered a single dose of the brain chemical blocker and then flipped on the light, the rats’ drug-seeking behaviors were reduced for up to a month. Though the memory alteration appears temporary, if the results can be translated to humans, it could open up a wide variety of new treatments for memory-linked psychological conditions. Drugs that work like the one used in the study already exist and are FDA approved including the cough suppressant dextramethorphan and memantine, an Alzheimer’s drug.

More here.

From Nature:

Two photons can be connected in a way that seems to defy the very nature of space and time, yet still obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of ‘entangled’ photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart. The researchers found that when each photon reached its destination, it could instantly sense its twin’s behaviour without any direct communication. The finding does not violate the laws of quantum mechanics, the theory that physicists use to describe the behaviour of very small systems. Rather, it shows just how quantum mechanics can defy everyday expectation, says Nicolas Gisin, the researcher who led the study. “Our experiment just puts the finger where it hurts,” he says. The study is published in Nature. In the everyday world, objects can organize themselves in just a few ways. For example, two people can coordinate their actions by talking directly with each other, or they can both receive instructions from a third source.

In both these cases, the information is communicated at or below the speed of light, in keeping with Einstein’s axiom that nothing in the Universe can go faster. But quantum mechanics allows for a third way to coordinate information. When two particles are quantum mechanically ‘entangled’ with each other, measuring the properties of one will instantly tell you something about the other. In other words, quantum theory allows two particles to organize themselves at apparently faster-than-light speeds. Einstein called such behaviour “spooky action at a distance”, because he found it deeply unsettling. He and other physicists clung to the idea that there might be some other way for the particles to communicate with each other at or near the speed of light. But the new experiment shows that direct communication between the photons (at least as we know it) is simply impossible.

More here.

///
Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher
Nissim Ezekiel

To force the pace and never to be still

Is not the way of those who study birds

Or women. The best poets wait for words.
………………………………

The hunt is not an exercise of will

But patient love relaxing on a hill

To note the movement of a timid wing;

Until the one who knows that she is loved

No longer waits but risks surrendering –

In this the poet finds his moral proved

Who never spoke before his spirit moved.
…………………………..…………………………………

The slow movement seems, somehow, to say much more.

To watch the rarer birds, you have to go

Along deserted lanes and where the rivers flow

In silence near the source, or by a shore

Remote and thorny like the heart’s dark floor.

And there the women slowly turn around,

Not only flesh and bone but myths of light

With darkness at the core, and sense is found

But poets lost in crooked, restless flight,

The deaf can hear, the blind recover sight.

///

Don Loeb and Peter Railton over at bloggingheads.tv.

Isaac Hayes comes on just like a fearsome festival stand-in—even if his bodyguards are armed only with walkie-talkies, his costume is Sunset Strip African, and the ritual he performs is far more Apollo than Kwotto.

After the MC has asked for a “warm round of applause for the Number One Black Entertainer in the World,” and the band has broken into the “Theme from Shaft,” a black Verushka, her icy beauty accented by her gleaming bald head, stalks onto the stage. She prowls about in a red and white imitation zebra poncho, glaring at the audience. A concubine, perhaps?

Finally, she crooks her finger at stage right. A pause as the anticipation builds and then Isaac Hayes enters. Tall and broad-shouldered, he appears to be cleverly disguised as a grass hut. He moves rigidly, as if on stilts, to the woman; upon closer examination he turns out to be wearing a sort of British magistrate’s wig fashioned out of straw, a long mantle of African cloth and a grass skirt. But there is no doubt that he is an imposingly strong, handsome man.

more from Rolling Stone’s 1972 feature on Hayes here.

One of the most revealing insights into Britain’s recent social history comes early in “My Son the Fanatic,” Hanif Kureishi’s tender and darkly prescient 1997 film. It’s morning in an unnamed city in northern England, and Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant taxi driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, sell his electric guitar. “Where is that going?” Parvez asks Farid as the buyer drives off. “You used to love making a terrible noise with these instruments!” Farid, played by Akbar Kurtha, looks at his father with irritation. “You always said there were more important things than ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” he says impatiently in his thick northern English accent. “You couldn’t have been more right.”

This seemingly casual exchange cuts to the heart of almost everything that has animated Kureishi in nearly three decades as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and essayist. This is, after all, the man who co-edited “The Faber Book of Pop” and whose films and novels — including “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “The Buddha of Suburbia” — are filled with raucous sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But this is also the man who had the presence of mind to poke around in English mosques in the late ’80s and early ’90s, sensing that something might be stirring there, as indeed it was.

more form the NYT Magazine here.

David Gargill in Abu Dhabi’s The National:

Bilal is folded in an awkward crouch, ski goggles obscuring his face, from patchy moustache to widow’s peak, to protect his eyes from the yellow paintballs whizzing overhead. He can’t afford to focus on the camera – his ballistic antagonist has cornered the market of his attention. His locution is clipped, his lips pursed, barely elastic enough to emit words. “I’ll update you later on the slaughter,” he mutters, and the video cuts out. Now Bilal is standing beside the gun as its chrome proboscis wobbles like a caffeinated compass needle over his left shoulder, probing the room for quarry it can no longer see. “I’m filling the pod [with 200 rounds] every 10 minutes,” he says in disbelief. “May as well just stand here and keep filling.” Bilal’s desperation to keep the gun loaded is confounding, as though there’s some inexplicable symbiosis between tormentor and tormented.

“People online giving me so much hope,” he whispers tearfully. “Somebody said, ‘Imagine an entire nation living like this,’” and with that he breaks down, steely-eyed and shaky, his gaze fixed even as his sobs rock him in place. “My intent is to raise awareness of my family in Iraq,” he announces, his resolve replenished by memory, “and I’m going to continue doing it until next Monday.”

This powerful amalgam of hope and despair, spite and pathos, which Bilal initially called Shoot an Iraqi, unfolded last spring in Chicago’s FlatFile Gallery. (It was later renamed Domestic Tension to allay the concerns of Susan Aurinko, the gallery’s owner.) For 30 days, Bilal lived in a 4.6 by 9.8 metre performance space, while people around the world watched – and targeted him – through a webcam attached to a remote-controlled paintball gun, capable of firing over a shot per second at the Iraqi in question.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

From Science:

They’re still a ways off, but invisibility cloaks and microscopes with superresolution could now be a big step closer to reality thanks to a pair of results to be reported this week. For 8 years, physicists and engineers have tinkered with metamaterials, patterned arrays of bits of metal and insulator that bend and manipulate microwaves and shorter wavelength radiation in strange ways. Now, a team has made three-dimensional miniaturized metamaterials that work with near-infrared and visible light. That’s a key step toward superlenses and cloaks for visible light, some say. Others say the claims are overblown.

Metamaterials put a kink in the way light usually passes from one medium into another. Suppose light from the setting sun shines on a pond. As light waves strike the surface, their direction will change so that they flow more directly down into the water. (See diagram.) Such “refraction” arises because the light travels more slowly in water than in air, giving water a higher “index of refraction.” Still, the light continues to flow from west to east. Were water a “left-handed metamaterial,” however, the light would undergo “negative refractions” and bend back toward the west. Refraction is the key to how ordinary lenses focus light, and in theory, negative refraction would allow a flat slab of metamaterial to function as a lens that could focus light infinitely tightly.

Physicists unveiled the first left-handed metamaterial for microwaves in 2000. Looking a bit like a high-schooler’s science-fair project, it was an assemblage of metallic rods and rings that interacted with and bent microwaves in strange ways. Since then, researchers have been pushing to shorter and shorter wavelengths, and with the new studies, the visible realm is within sight. On Thursday online in Nature, Xiang Zhang, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues will describe a metamaterial that works for near-infrared light and, unlike previous materials for such light, is three-dimensional.

More here.

From The New York Times:

A decent backyard magic show is often an exercise in deliberate chaos. Cards whipped through the air. Glasses crashing to the ground. Gasps, hand-waving, loud abracadabras. Something’s bound to catch fire, too, if the performer is ambitious enough — or needs cover. “Back in the early days, I always had a little smoke and fire, not only for misdirection but to emphasize that something magic had just happened,” said The Great Raguzi, a magician based in Southern California who has performed professionally for more than 35 years, in venues around the world. “But as the magic and magician mature, you see that you don’t need the bigger props.”

Eye-grabbing distractions — to mask a palmed card or coin, say — are only the crudest ways to exploit brain processes that allow for more subtle manipulations, good magicians learn. In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality. For the scientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, it raised hope that magic could accelerate research into perception. “Here’s this art form going back perhaps to ancient Egypt, and basically the neuroscience community had been unaware” of its direct application to the study of perception, Dr. Martinez-Conde said.

More here.

Namit Arora in Shunya’s Notes:

The road to Dholavira goes through a dazzling white landscape of salty mudflats. It is close to noon in early April and the mercury is already past 100F. The desert monotones are interrupted only by the striking attire worn by the women of the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral tribes that still inhabit this land: Ahir, Rabari, Jat, Meghwal, and others. When I ask the driver of my hired car to stop for a photo, they receive me with curious stares, hoots, and giggles.

This is the Rann of Kutch, an area about the size of Kuwait, almost entirely within Gujarat and along the border with Pakistan. Once an extension of the Arabian Sea, the Rann (“salt marsh”) has been closed off by centuries of silting. During the monsoons, parts of the Rann fill up with seasonal brackish water, enough for many locals to even harvest shrimp in it. Some abandon their boats on the drying mudflats, presenting a surreal scene for the dry season visitor. Heat mirages abound. Settlement is limited to a few “island” plateaus, one of which, Khadir, hosts the remains of the ancient city of Dholavira, discovered in 1967 and excavated only since 1989.

More here.

From the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly:

According to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, there should be millions more women and girls living in India than there are. The acclaimed economist compared the natural ratio of men to women globally with the ratio in India, and twenty years ago had calculated that India was “missing” about thirty-seven million women. That number has escalated to fifty million today.

Rita Banerji ’90, whose photographs bravely document some of India’s least treasured citizens, explains, “Perhaps ‘missing’ is too innocuous a term for what is actually happening—the systematic and targeted annihilation of a group [through] female feticide, female infanticide, dowry-related murders, an abnormally high mortality rate for girls under five due to starvation and intentional medical neglect, and the highest maternal mortality rate in the world.

Numbers tell the story in chilling detail:

• Some one million female fetuses are aborted each year.
• Midwives in some regions regularly kill the infant girls they deliver for as little as $1.50.
• Dowry-related murders of women stand at about 25,000 cases a year.
• A UNICEF report found that the mortality rate for girls under five is more than 40 percent higher than for boys the same age.
• WHO and UNIFEM estimate that one pregnant woman dies every five minutes in India.

These conditions persist due to a deep-rooted mind-set Banerji describes as “unresisting acceptance of female genocide.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Stephen Soldz in the Boston Globe:

Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.

Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques, which included locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding.

Jane Mayer, in her new book, “The Dark Side,” reports that the central idea was the psychological concept of “learned helplessness.” Individuals are denied all control over their world, lose their will, and become totally dependent upon their captors.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

Tim De Chant in the Chicago Tribune:

When Tom Koulentes is not advising students at Highland Park High School or chasing after his own kids, he spends time behind his small Des Plaines home researching climate change.

Koulentes is recording his garden’s natural history, from the weigela’s first leaf to the butterfly bush’s last bloom, for Project BudBurst, a new nationwide research program based on the observations of ordinary people. He is looking for local signs like an early bloom or a late-falling leaf that stem from planetwide changes.

Only a handful of researchers study plants to chronicle global warming, but millions of gardeners quietly keep watch on their plants. BudBurst seeks to tap that potential, asking “citizen scientists” to monitor plants alongside trained scholars.

“If just scientists were working on this, there’s no way we could obtain a data set of this size,” said Kay Havens, director of plant science and conservation at the Chicago Botanic Garden, and one of the project’s organizers.

More here.  Project website here. [Thanks to Bill Brooks.]

Tim Penn in The Knackered Hack:

Having effectively called the top of the dotcom bubble with his first book, Irrational Exuberance, and documented the emerging US housing bubble in his second edition of the same, you’d think that Yale economist Robert Shiller would have been treated with significant reverence by our economic and financial institutions (both public and private) over the past few years. And you’d think that he would already have been asked to make a material contribution to resolving the crisis. In fact, you’d think that writing Irrational Exuberance would alone have been enough to forestall the second crisis. But then, if you thought that, you’d be me. And you’d be wrong. Again.

If you’re unfamiliar with Robert Shiller then understand that he is perhaps the most eminent and considered examiner of modern investment bubbles. It was two days after Shiller and a colleague testified before the Federal Reserve Board in December 1996 that then Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan sent stock markets into a mini-crash by coining the now legendary phrase “irrational exuberance” in the context of stock market behaviour. Influential indeed. Shiller’s book Irrational Exuberance came out in March 2000, after which the dotcom boom finally collapsed.

More here.

Klaus Winichner. Untitled 2006.

Paint on paper

More here.

His issue may be just a quibble, but in Three Penny Review, P. N. Furbank considers the language of The Selfish Gene:

Dawkins is a sparkling and sometimes an eye-opening writer, but what cannot help striking one is the extreme abuse of language that he (and not only he) commits in this talk of “the biology of selfishness and altruism.” For, according to any proper use of language, what he speaks of as animal “altruism” is not altruism at all, any more than what he speaks of as “selfishness” can rightly be called by that name. He speaks respectfully of the concept of “reciprocal altruism,” introduced by R. L. Trivers in 1971, though, implying as it does a bargain, it is plainly a contradiction in terms; and what he himself refers to as “altruism” might almost, in some cases, be said to be its opposite.

I think this is rather more than a mere quibble. The concept of altruism, rightly understood, is, after all, one of the great achievements of civilized culture, and the choice of acting altruistically in a given situation will be one of the most deeply thought-through decisions a person may ever make (even if, as could happen, he or she might have only a minute or two to make it in). But what is relevant here is that it seems to go directly against the expectations of “kin-selection.” This is the point made by the parable of the Good Samaritan. The injured traveler fallen among thieves receives no help whatever from his fellow Jews, who take care to pass by on the other side. It is left to a Samaritan, a man with no kin-relation whatever to the victim and even, by tradition, his enemy, to come to his aid.

The answer to the question at the end of the article is”yes”.  Chris Petit in the Guardian:

Godard wrote his own epitaph early, in Alphaville (1965): “You will suffer a fate worse than death. You will become a legend.” There is no bigger personality cult in terms of film director as artist, and Godard has always been an assiduous curator, understanding the need, as Warhol did, of making a spectacle of himself. But while professing openness he remains opaque and, in a sense, the film-maker known as Jean-Luc Godard may not exist, any more than the musician known as Bob Dylan does, except as several simulacra. For this reason, the scattered asides in Richard Brody’s exhaustive new biography, Everything is Cinema, perform the book’s most useful task, catching the less canny, unguarded Godard.

He suffers from vertigo (how appropriate). He admits to having no imagination and taking everything from life. When he was given a camera to use by film-maker Don Pennebaker, Pennebaker was touched by his incompetence, which included the beginner’s mistake of zooming in and out too much. He was introduced to the fleshpots of Paris in the 1950s by an early mentor, film director Jean-Pierre Melville. Financial transactions with prostitutes were treated as potential mises en scène (Vivre sa vie, Sauve qui peut); cinema as whore. His handwriting features in many of his films; ditto his voice. He plays tennis, or did (he’s nearly 80 now). When he passed on production money from a film to Italian revolutionaries, they used it to open a transvestite bar. He smoked a fat version of Gitanes called Boyards. In his Marxist days, he still travelled first class. He tried to avoid writing scripts whenever possible. His once great friend François Truffaut called him “the Ursula Andress” of the revolutionary movement. He is Protestant in temperament and an unforgiving moralist. He drops names. He lay in a coma for a week after a motorcycle accident. He can be nasty. He has been known to suffer hopeless crushes. In late adolescence he was committed by his father into psychiatric care. His on-set tantrums are legendary. He is the Saint Simeon Stylites of cinema, atop his pillar, or, as Truffaut described him, nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal. For all his utopian ideals, conflict and rejection are the dominant impulses of his life and work.

Or at least the first 2 minutes of the movie:

Olivia Judson in the NYT:

Suppose you have two groups of pregnant female rats. Rats in the first group can either eat as much regular lab-rat chow as they like, or they can eat their fill of human junk food — cookies, doughnuts, marshmallows, potato chips, muffins, chocolate. Rats in the second group only get chow, but again, can eat as much as they like. After the rats have given birth, continue the different regimens while the pups are suckling. Then give both groups of pups access to the chow and the junk food.

Experiments like this have found that pregnant females with access to junk food ate, on a daily basis, roughly 40 percent more food (by weight) and 56 percent more calories than rats that just had chow. Moreover — and this is the interesting bit — pups whose mothers ate junk food while pregnant and lactating had a greater taste for food high in fat and sugar than those whose mothers did not. The junk-food pups ate more calories and were more prone to gaining weight.

What goes for rats does not necessarily go for humans. Nonetheless, such results are thought-provoking. As everyone knows, humans are getting fatter and fatter. According to the World Health Organization, 400 million adults around the world weighed in as obese in 2005. In the United States, more than a third of women between 20 and 39 are obese, some of them extremely so. For the first time in history, large numbers of obese women are having children.