From MSNBC:

The space rock that recently plowed into Jupiter and gave it a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean served up a not-so-gentle reminder of the rough and tough side of our universe. The punch to Jupiter was most likely delivered by an undetected comet and prompted some astronomers to warn that a similar surprise could one day strike Earth and send humans the way of the dinosaurs. Click the “Next” arrow above to learn about nine more bouts of violence in outer space.

More here. (Note: This post is dedicated to Professor Sean Carroll whose fantastic lectures on Dark Energy and Dark Matter have openend an entire new universe for me! These lectures are available through the Teaching Company and anyone remotely interested in the subject must hear them)

Emily Yoffe in Slate:

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, “My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner.” We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days “refreshing my search like a drugged monkey.”

We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls.

More here.

Meera Subramanian in Search Magazine:

A week after I arrived in India in late January, a group of self-proclaimed morality police stormed Amnesia, a swank and dimly lit bar in the city of Mangalore. Cameras were rolling as the jean-clad vigilantes of the right-wing Hindu group the Sri Ram Sene, which translates to the “Army of Lord Ram,” physically attacked the jean-clad women and men who had been, moments before, leisurely sipping drinks. I read about the attack in the paper and then, to see more, logged on and watched the clips on YouTube. The purveyors of Hindu ethics groped and pulled the hair of their declared transgressors and chased them out into the streets, tripping them as they tried to run away and kicking them while they were sprawled on the sidewalk and scrambling to get up.

I was in the land of my father again, my home away from home, the place I have visited numerous times over the course of my life to connect with an immense and loving and deeply devout extended family. With each arrival, I witness the culture lines shift, a tug-of-war between what was and what might be.

The pub attack made the Internet buzz and newspaper headlines scream, “The Hindu face of the Taliban.”

Greg Grandin in The Nation:

“Why William Appleman Williams, for God’s sake?” asked Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1999 when he learned that Williams’s The Contours of American History had been voted one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library. Schlesinger had spent the better part of half a century fighting the influence of Williams, describing him in 1954 as “pro-communist” to the president of the American Historical Association. In 1959 the New York Times picked Schlesinger’s The Coming of the New Deal and Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy as best books of the year, calling the first, in a nod to a liberalism still vital, a “spirited study” and the second a “free-swinging attack” on US foreign policy, hinting at the raucous dissent to come. But forty years later, Schlesinger considered the fight won. The victory of the United States in the cold war had disproved Williams’s jeremiads against an American empire careening toward disaster, while the concomitant collapse of the left had confirmed Schlesinger’s position as curator of America’s historical sensibility–liberal, democratic, pragmatic. Schlesinger was one of the Modern Library’s jurors, and his own The Age of Jackson made the cut. Still, he couldn’t keep Williams, dead for nearly a decade, out of the pantheon. For God’s sake.

John Tierney in the NYT blog Tierney Lab:

To investigate [the hypothesis], the researchers quizzed male and female undergraduates — some involved in romantic relationships, some unattached — about their ideal romantic partner.

Next, each of the experimental subjects was told that he or she had been matched by a computer with a like-minded partner, and each was shown a photo of an attractive person of the opposite sex. (All the women saw the same photo, as did all the men.) Half of the subjects were told that their match was already romantically involved with someone else, while the other half were told that their match was unattached. Then the subjects were all asked how interested they were in their match.

To the men in the experiment, and to the women who were already in relationships, it didn’t make a significant difference whether their match was single or attached. But single women showed a distinct preference for mate poaching. When the man was described as unattached, 59 percent of the single women were interested in pursuing him. When that same man was described as being in a committed relationship, 90 percent were interested. The researchers write:

According to a recent poll, most women who engage in mate poaching do not think the attached status of the target played a role in their poaching decision, but our study shows this belief to be false. Single women in this study were significantly more interested in the target when he was attached. This may be because an attached man has demonstrated his ability to commit and in some ways his qualities have already been ‘‘pre-screened” by another woman.

I’m probably missing something, but wouldn’t a successful poach indicate that the man’s commitment was less than credible?

A braham Lincoln seems to be the man of the hour. Barack Obama, who has consciously modeled himself on the six- teenth president and launched his campaign from Lincoln’s Springfield, celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of his predecessor’s birth with a speech stressing his pertinence at this historic moment. At the same time, a group of prominent histo- rians rated the American presidents and placed Lincoln at the very top of their list. This won’t surprise anyone: his “greatness” is widely accepted, even by those who know little about the man. And most of us know little about him, despite the many hundreds of books on the subject that have been written over the last century and a half. As a publisher once told H. L. Mencken, “there are four kinds of books that never, under any circum- stances, lose money in the United States—first, detective stories, secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly debauched by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism, and other claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.” Too many of the books on Lincoln, unfortunately, are as full of claptrap as any occultist text. Back in 1962, Edmund Wilson complained, with justice, that “There has undoubtedly been written about [Lincoln] more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other Ameri- can figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe; and there are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”

more from Brooke Allen at The Hudson Review here (must click article to download pdf).

The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. Much of the 21st century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay. Indeed, the 1 billion city dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life 9,000 years ago. What makes today’s slums different from the Dickensian inner-city tenements of London in the 19th century is that they are peri-urban—that is, they are largely on the far edges of established cities, neither countryside nor city, usually about 20-30 miles from the city centers. These sprawling outer zones one sees in China, Indonesia and across Latin America house not only peasants coming to the city, but people being forced out of the cities by eviction or rising rents.

more from Mike Davis at NPQ here.

On September 29, 1781, Dr Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of this year’s unavoidable Darwin) wrote to Joseph Banks, asking for permission to dedicate a small book of translations to him. The translations were of the botanical writings of Carl von Linné, now better known as Linnaeus. In the letter (collected in the first of six volumes of The Scientific Correspondence), Darwin explained that he and the Lichfield botanical society had decided to translate Linnaeus’s Latin into English with a view to “propagating the knowledge of Botany”, and hoped to secure Banks’s blessing for their enterprise, given “the knowledge of your general love of science & your philanthropy to wish that science to be propagated amongst your countrymen”. Darwin’s translation appeared two years later as A System of Vegetables according to their Classes, etc, and was prefaced by the dedicatory letter, which congratulated Banks on the rare and excellent example you have given, so honourable to science, of foregoing the more brilliant advantages of birth and fortune, to seek for knowledge through difficulties and dangers, at a period of life when the allurements of pleasure are least resistible, and in an age when the general effeminacy of manners seemed beyond that of former times to discourage every virtuous exertion, justly entitles you to the preeminence you enjoy in the philosophical world.

more from Jim Endersby at the TLS here.

The Second Fortune

Between what is and what is not
we walked, the Huntress loosed a shot.

Before and after, we were there –
the arrow pierced but singing air.

That, my love, was quite an art,
to be together and apart

yet we, transparent, without fear –
what were we but singing air?

by Theo Dorgan

from: What This Earth Cost Us; Dedalus Books,
Dublin, 2008

From Salon:

I confess the idea of babies carrying on philosophical investigations never crossed my mind until I met Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik, a cognitive scientist with cross-training in philosophy and common sense, has spent her career carefully and cleverly teasing out the previously unsuspected complexity of a baby's thoughts. In her new book, “The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life,” Gopnik incisively and compassionately highlights the extraordinary range of mental capabilities of even the youngest child.

What makes Gopnik's book stand out from the myriad recent books on consciousness is her overarching insight into the sophisticated ways that even infants think and scheme. Citing her work and that of colleagues, Gopnik makes a convincing case that, from a very early age, even before the acquisition of language, we are actively engaged in assessing everything from statistics (probabilities) to right vs. wrong in a moral sphere. Recently I sat down with Gopnick for a conversation about how each of us began our thinking, and how kids might presently be looking at the world.

More here.

From Orion Magazine:

WHEN I WAS FIVE and my sister was two, my father started to lose his balance. He stumbled down the sidewalk, tripped up the stairs. Clumsiness became extreme. Newspapers were reporting that children who had radiation to reduce their tonsils were developing thyroid cancer as adults. He went in for a thyroid examination, only to have the doctor note his swaying and order a CT scan of his head instead. It showed a tumor on his brain stem. Surgery removed the growth but left him deaf in one ear, a better outcome than expected. Then my mother reminded him to go back for the thyroid test, and he ended up having an operation for thyroid cancer. By the time he healed from that, I was seven.

During his recovery, he read me The Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White—the story of Louis, a trumpeter swan born mute, unable to make the honking cry that marks his species. As a fluffy gray cygnet in Canada, Louis doesn’t mind, but when he migrates to the Red Rock Lakes in Montana, he finds he is unable to woo a mate. In a dramatic scene of broken glass and a fainting salesgirl, his father steals a trumpet from a music store in Billings to give his son a voice. Anxious to pay off the debt, Louis gets a series of gigs playing trumpet at a camp in Ontario, leading the Swan Boat in the Boston Public Garden, and performing jazz in a Philadelphia night club.

More here.

Matt Walker in the BBC:

Experiments show that a sagebrush plant can recognise a genetically identical cutting growing nearby.

What’s more, the two clones communicate and cooperate with one another, to avoid being eaten by herbivores.

The findings, published in Ecology Letters, raise the tantalising possibility that plants, just like animals, often prefer to help their relatives over unrelated individuals. The ability to distinguish self from non-self is a vital one in nature.

It allows many animals to act preferentially towards others that are genetically related to themselves; for example, a female lion raising her young, or protecting other more distantly related cubs in her pride.

But the evidence that plants can do the same is limited and controversial.

Some experiments have shown that if a plant’s roots grow near to those of another unrelated plant, the two will try to compete for nutrients and water. But if a root grows close to another from the same parent plant, the two do not try to compete with one another.

However, in these experiments, when two cuttings of the same plant are then grown alongside each other, their roots still compete for resources. That implies that two separate plants cannot recognise that they are genetic kin.

[H/t: Dan Nexon]

Sumedha Senanayake in Dissent:

Much of the existing Sri Lankan media has also been incensed by the international criticism over the government’s handling of the military offensive, with editorials accusing the West of kowtowing to LTTE supporters. The United States has especially been singled out for its perceived double standard for carrying out its war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, but chastising the Sri Lankan government as it teeters on the brink of eradicating its own terrorist menace, the LTTE—a group labeled a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, and Canada.

But the dearth of dissenting views in the Sri Lankan media is more due to fear of reprisal from the state than a sense of patriotic zeal. The government does not tolerate dissent from journalists and media outlets that criticize its operation against the LTTE—and those who do are ruthlessly suppressed.

My uncle, a doctor, lamented to me of a lost friendship with a well-known Sunday Times defense columnist. He had received a phone call from the columnist’s wife, saying that he could no longer maintain contact with him because he was being followed and feared that further contact would endanger my uncle. According to a January 2009 Amnesty International report, at least fourteen media workers have been unlawfully killed since the beginning of 2006 and more than 20 journalists have fled the country because of threats. One of the most widely reported incidents was the murder of Lasantha Wikrematunga, editor of the English-language Sunday Leader, who was shot by unknown gunmen in Colombo. In an editorial written by Wikrematunga and published posthumously, he accused the government for his death.*

The Sri Lankan government, meanwhile, has framed the military offensive as a massive humanitarian mission, dubbing it the “the world’s largest hostage rescue operation.”

Reading Moby Dick –at 30,0000 Feet

At this height, Kansas

is just a concept,

a checkerboard design of wheat and corn
……………..

no larger than the foldout section

of my neighbor's travel magazine.

At this stage of the journey
……………..

I would estimate the distance

between myself and my own feelings

is roughly the same as the mileage
……………..

from Seattle to New York,

so I can lean back into the upholstered interval

between Muzak and lunch,
……………..

a little bored, a little old and strange.

I remember, as a dreamy

backyard kind of kid,
……………..

tilting up my head to watch

those planes engrave the sky

in lines so steady and so straight
……………..

they implied the enormous concentration

of good men,

but now my eyes flicker
……………..

from the in-flight movie

to the stewardess's pantyline,

then back into my book,
……………..

where men throw harpoons at something

much bigger and probably

better than themselves,
……………..

wanting to kill it,

wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt

to prove that they exist.
……………..

Imagine being born and growing up,

rushing through the world for sixty years

at unimaginable speeds.
……………..

Imagine a century like a room so large,

a corridor so long

you could travel for a lifetime

and never find the door,
……………..

until you had forgotten

that such a thing as doors exist.

Better to be on board the Pequod,
……………..

with a mad one-legged captain

living for revenge.

Better to feel the salt wind
……………..

spitting in your face,

to hold your sharpened weapon high,

to see the glisten
……………..

of the beast beneath the waves.

What a relief it would be

to hear someone in the crew
……………..

cry out like a gull,

Oh Captain, Captain!

Where are we going now?

by Tony Hoagland

From The Telegraph:

Neville Cardus was one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the 20th century. Born in Manchester in 1888 and raised in genteel poverty by his mother and aunt, who belonged to the oldest profession, he had achieved an international reputation as a writer on music and cricket by the time he died, a knight of the realm, in February 1975.

His autobiography, published in 1947, is one of the outstanding memoirs of English letters, and should perhaps be included on school reading lists, to remind the modern generation of how much we have lost. For this “uneducated boy in an illiterate home”, as Cardus called himself, enjoyed a life so rich that it seems sinful not to pass on its fruits. Christopher Brookes wrote a fine biography, His Own Man, in 1986. Now comes this book by Robin Daniels, which is ostensibly a memoir, but which really attempts to place Cardus in a critical context. It is all here: the familiar tale of the self-taught adolescent, who immersed himself in books and music, absorbed Walter Pater and Bernard Shaw, and did all sorts of jobs before he found a university at the old Manchester Guardian, whose high-minded editor, C P Scott, said of the paper’s readers: “Let them educate themselves up to us.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

In 1998 Judith Rich Harris, an independent researcher and textbook author, published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. The book provocatively argued that parents matter much less—at least when it comes to determining the behavior of their children—than is typically assumed. Instead Harris argued that a child’s peer group is far more critical. The Nurture Assumption has recently been reissued in an expanded and revised form (Free Press, 2009). Scientific American Mind contributing editor Jonah Lehrer chatted with Harris about her critics, the evolution of her ideas and why teachers can be more important than parents.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND: Freud famously blamed the problems of the child on the parents. (He was especially hard on mothers.) In The Nurture Assumption, an influential work that was published 10 years ago, you argued that parents are mostly innocent and that peers play a much more influential role. What led you to write the book?

JUDITH RICH HARRIS: It wasn’t just Freud! Psychologists of all persuasions, even behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner, thought the parents were responsible, one way or the other, for whatever went wrong with a child. One of my purposes in writing the book was to reassure parents. I wanted them to know that parenting didn’t have to be such a difficult, anxiety-producing job, that there are many different ways to rear a child, and that no convincing evidence existed that one way produces better results than another.

But my primary motive was scientific. During the years I spent writing child development textbooks for college students, I never questioned the belief that parents have a good deal of power to shape the personalities of their children. (This is the belief I now call the “nurture assumption.”) When I finally began to have doubts and looked more closely at the evidence, I was appalled. Most of the research is so deeply flawed that it is meaningless. And studies using more rigorous methods produce results that do not support the assumption.

More here.

Andrew Gelman and John Sides in the Boston Review:

Each American presidential election eventually turns into a story. In 1960 Nixon stumbled in the debates and lost to a more vigorous Kennedy; in 1988 Dukakis was self-defeatingly passive in response to an aggressive Republican campaign; in 1992 Bush lost core supporters when reneging on his “read my lips” pledge came back to haunt him. These stories about the meaning of the election begin to coalesce during the campaign. Once the votes are counted, the stories solidify into conventional wisdom and supply convenient ways to judge what the election was about, why it came out the way it did, and what the result suggests about the future. Because these stories become part of the public understanding, they have real political importance. And because they are so important, there is strong pressure to provide explanations as soon as the election is over; people debate the future by arguing about what just happened.

Political scientists often complain about these quick and simple accounts. While piles of data are available—tracking polls, exit polls, election results themselves—commentators often fixate on a single piece of data and exaggerate its significance in order to produce a crisp and usable story. In 2004 a poorly worded exit-poll question (mixed with some editorial-page hyperventilation) made “values voters” the key to Bush’s reelection. Subsequent research failed to confirm this (see Stephen Ansolabehere and Charles Stewart III, “Truth in Numbers,” Boston Review, February/March 2005). Similarly, commentators often seize upon a “key moment” or a turning point in a campaign: Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad is frequently cited in accounts of the 1964 election, even though Johnson’s lead over Goldwater did not change at all after the advertisement aired.

The 2008 campaign was, in this regard, little different from its predecessors. Like them, it produced a variety of narratives, some of which rapidly morphed into the stories that now circulate about the outcome. But a broad survey of available evidence tells a different tale, one that is also more equivocal than popular discourse currently allows.