From Nature:

I’d never have guessed, in the days when I used to paw through my grubby book of logarithms in maths classes, that I’d come to look back with fondness on these tables of cryptic decimals. In those days the most basic of electronic calculators was the size of a laptop and about as expensive in real terms, so books of logarithms were the quickest way to multiply large numbers. Of course, logarithms remain central to any advanced study of mathematics. But as they are no longer a practical arithmetic tool, one can’t now assume general familiarity with them. And so, countless popular science books contain potted guides to using exponential notation and interpreting logarithmic axes on graphs. Why do they need to do this? Because logarithmic scaling is the natural system for magnitudes of quantities in the sciences.

That’s why a new claim that logarithmic mapping of numbers is the natural, intuitive scheme for humans rings true. Stanislas Dehaene of the Federative Institute of Research in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and his co-workers report in Science ¹ that both adults and children of an Amazonian tribe called the Mundurucu, who have had almost no exposure to the linear counting scale of the industrialized world, judge magnitudes on a logarithmic basis.

More here.

[Thanks to S. Javed Raza.]

From The New York Times:

THE symphony of Manhattan Island, composed and performed fortissimo daily by garbage trucks, car speakers, I-beam bolters, bus brakes, warped manhole covers, knocking radiators, people yelling from high windows and the blaring television that now greets you in the back of a taxi, is the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.

The other day, in a paint-peeling hangar of a room at the foot of the island, David Byrne, the artist and musician, placed his finger on a switch that did exactly the opposite: it made such music on purpose. The switch was a white key on the bass end of a beat-up Weaver pump organ that was practically the only thing sitting inside the old Great Hall of the Battery Maritime Building, a 99-year-old former ferry terminal at the end of Whitehall Street that has sat mostly dormant for more than a half-century.

The organ’s innards had been replaced with relays and wires and light blue air hoses. And when the key was pressed, a 110-volt motor strapped to a girder high up in the room’s ceiling began to vibrate, essentially playing the girder and producing a deafening low hum — like one of the tuba tones played by the mother ship in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Or, if you were less charitably inclined, like a truck on Canal Street with a loose muffler. Mr. Byrne ran his fingers up the keyboard, causing more hums and whines, moans and plunks and clinks until he came to a key that seemed to do nothing.

More here.

Meera Subramanian in Science & Spirit:

When Nargis Baria died at the age of eighty-five in Mumbai, India, her only child, a daughter named Dhun, initiated the death rituals of their Zoroastrian faith. Her mother’s body was dressed in white, prayers whispered in her ear, and after three days a summoned dog’s dismissal indicated that the spirit had moved on. It was time for the nassesalars, or pallbearers, to carry the body to the Towers of Silence, circular structures of stone located on fifty-seven, park-like acres in the heart of Mumbai, surrounded by the upscale high rises of Malabar Hill. They removed her clothing and placed her body in the middle of three concentric circles, one each for women, men and children. At the center was a well where the bones, the last of the last remains of a human body, would be swept in a few days time.

All the proper components of dokhmenashini, the Zoroastrian method of handling their dead, were in place, but the vultures that once completed the cycle by scavenging an exposed corpse in less than five minutes were missing. The custom, so ancient it was described by Herodotus 2,500 years ago, has come to an abrupt end in the past decade, as the vulture population of South Asia has plummeted. In addition to playing a crucial role in processing the human cadavers of this small religious group, vultures filled a vital ecological niche as scavengers of the dead and decaying matter that litters India’s countryside. Now everything has changed, and religious scholars and scientists alike are trying to make sense of the shift.

More here.

David Carkeet at GreenHarbor.com:

Admit it: You want to be the sole survivor of an airline disaster. You aren’t looking for a disaster to happen, but if it does, you see yourself coming through it. I’m here to tell you that you’re not out of touch with reality—you can do it. Sure, you’ll take a few hits, and I’m not saying there won’t be some sweaty flashbacks later on, but you’ll make it. You’ll sit up in your hospital bed and meet the press. Refreshingly, you will keep God out of your public comments, knowing that it’s unfair to sing His praises when all of your dead fellow-passengers have no platform from which to offer an alternative view.

Let’s say your jet blows apart at 35,000 feet. You exit the aircraft, and you begin to descend independently. Now what?

First of all, you’re starting off a full mile higher than Everest, so after a few gulps of disappointing air you’re going to black out. This is not a bad thing. If you have ever tried to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you know what I mean. This brief respite from the ambient fear and chaos will come to an end when you wake up at about 15,000 feet. Here begins the final phase of your descent, which will last about a minute. It is a time of planning and preparation. Look around you. What equipment is available? None? Are you sure? Look carefully.

More here.

Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

That’s Freeman Dyson in the NYRB, where he reviews some new books on the topic and offers a different view:

[William Nordhaus] writes that “no such technology presently exists, and we can only speculate on it.” The “low-cost backstop” policy is displayed in his tables as an abstract possibility without any details. It is nowhere emphasized as a practical solution to the problem of climate change.

At this point I return to the Keeling graph, which demonstrates the strong coupling between atmosphere and plants. The wiggles in the graph show us that every carbon dioxide molecule in the atmosphere is incorporated in a plant within a time of the order of twelve years. Therefore, if we can control what the plants do with the carbon, the fate of the carbon in the atmosphere is in our hands. That is what Nordhaus meant when he mentioned “genetically engineered carbon-eating trees” as a low-cost backstop to global warming. The science and technology of genetic engineering are not yet ripe for large-scale use. We do not understand the language of the genome well enough to read and write it fluently. But the science is advancing rapidly, and the technology of reading and writing genomes is advancing even more rapidly. I consider it likely that we shall have “genetically engineered carbon-eating trees” within twenty years, and almost certainly within fifty years.

Edward G. Lengel in The Washington Post:

As we observe Memorial Day, a hard truth remains: Americans haven’t forgotten about the doughboys [of WWi or ‘The Great War’]. We just didn’t want to hear about them in the first place. The war’s last and greatest battle involving U.S. soldiers, fought in the Meuse-Argonne region of eastern France during the autumn of 1918, sucked in more than 1 million U.S. troops and hundreds of airplanes and tanks. Artillery batteries commanded by men such as the young Harry S. Truman fired more than 4 million shells — more than the Union Army fired during the entire Civil War. More than 26,000 doughboys were killed and almost 100,000 wounded, making the clash probably the bloodiest single battle in U.S. history. But as far as the American public was concerned, it might as well never have taken place. “Veterans said to me in their speeches and in private that the American people did not know anything about the Meuse-Argonne battle,” Brig. Gen. Dennis Nolan wrote years later. “I have never understood why.”

Back then, civilians justified their indifference by claiming that the veterans refused to share their stories. In reality, the ignorance was self-imposed.

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin offers some thoughts (see also interesting discussion following the post).

[I]n the long run, the absence of this most bloodily futile of wars from historical memory has been a huge boon to the war party. With a historical memory of war dominated by the “Good War” against Hitler and the Axis, it’s unsurprising that Americans have been much more willing than the citizens of other democratic societies to accept war as part of the natural order of things.

In Europe by contrast, the Great War and its consequences are still ever-present, and the Second World War is correctly seen as the inevitable product of the First.

Daniel Trilling reports on Derek Walcott’s salvos against V. S. Naipaul, in The New Statesman:

The setting of the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica was idyllic, the content less so. On the second day, the Nobel Prize-winning Caribbean poet Derek Walcott premiered a stinging attack in verse on his contemporary (and fellow Nobel laureate), the Trinidadian-born novelist V S Naipaul.

“I’m going to be nasty,” announced Walcott at the end of an enthusiastically received reading session, and proceeded to read “The Mongoose”, a long, vituperative poem which opened with the couplet: “I have been bitten. I must avoid infection/Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.”

The poem launches a savagely humorous demolition of Naipaul’s later novels Half a Life and Magic Seeds: “The plots are forced, the prose sedate and silly/The anti-hero is a prick named Willie.” Further on, Walcott expresses disbelief that this latter-day Naipaul can be the same author as the one who wrote the masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas.

The motivation for this attack seems to be a mix of the personal and the political. Walcott criticises newspaper editors for indulging Naipaul’s controversial public persona.

Here is an extract from Walcott’s poem, “The Mongoose”:

So the old mongoose, still making good money
Is a burnt out comic, predictable, unfunny
The joy of supplements, his minstrel act
Delighting editors endorsing facts
Over fiction, tearing colleagues and betters
To pieces in the name of English letters
The feathers fly, the snow comes drifting down
The mongoose keeps its class act as a clown
It can do cartwheels of exaggeration
Mostly it snivels, proud of being Asian
Of being attached to nothing, race or nation
It would be just as if a corpse took pride in its decay

From The New York Times:

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday. The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives. The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill. The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

More here.

Eric Ormsby reviews Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius by Silvan Schweber, in The New York Sun:

In four photographs of Albert Einstein, taken over a 30-year span between 1911 and 1942 and reproduced in Silvan Schweber‘s “Einstein & Oppenheimer: The Meaning of Genius” (Harvard, 432 pages, $29.95), he positions himself, whether in a group or alone, so that his left hand is caught by the camera. He holds that hand in a distinctive gesture, with his thumb and forefinger joined to form a little ellipse. Though he tends to face away from the camera, as though indifferent to appearances, he is clearly at pains to keep that left hand visible. The gesture is as much a signal as a symbol.

In “Einstein & Oppenheimer,” his unusual exercise in comparative biography, Mr. Schweber, an emeritus professor of physics and the history of ideas at Brandeis, explains that Einstein adopted the gesture from Hindu and Buddhist practices. Both the Hindu god Vishnu and the Buddha himself are often portrayed with their left hands in this posture; known in Sanskrit as the vitarka gesture, it represents “compassionate teaching” as well as, for Buddhists, the union of wisdom and method. In Einstein’s case, it serves as a sign not of the public figure he had become but of the man hidden within.

More here.

///
Ginza Samba
Robert Pinsky

A monosyllabic European called Sax
Invents a horn, walla whirledy wah, a kind of twisted
Brazen clarinet, but with its column of vibrating
Air shaped not in a cylinder but in a cone
Widening ever outward and bawaah spouting
Infinitely upward through an upturned
Swollen golden bell rimmed
Like a gloxinia flowering
In Sax’s Belgian imagination

And in the unfathomable matrix
Of mothers and fathers as a genius graven
Humming into the cells of the body
Or cupped in the resonating grail
Of memory changed and exchanged
As in the trading of brasses,
Pearls and ivory, calicos and slaves,
Laborers and girls, two

Cousins in a royal family
Of Niger known as the Birds or Hawks.
In Christendom one cousin’s child
Becomes a “favorite negro” ennobled
By decree of the Czar and founds
A great family, a line of generals,
Dandies and courtiers including the poet
Pushkin, killed in a duel concerning
His wife’s honor, while the other cousin sails

In the belly of a slaveship to the port
Of Baltimore where she is raped
And dies in childbirth, but the infant
Will marry a Seminole and in the next
Chorus of time their child fathers
A great Hawk or Bird, with many followers
Among them this great-grandchild of the Jewish
Manager of a Pushkin estate, blowing

His American breath out into the wiggly
Tune uncurling its triplets and sixteenths–the Ginza
Samba of breath and brass, the reed
Vibrating as a valve, the aether, the unimaginable
Wires and circuits of an ingenious box
Here in my room in this house built
A hundred years ago while I was elsewhere:

It is like falling in love, the atavistic
Imperative of some one
Voice or face–the skill, the copper filament,
The golden bellful of notes twirling through
Their invisible element from
Rio to Tokyo and back again gathering
Speed in the variations as they tunnel
The twin haunted labyrinths of stirrup
And anvil echoing here in the hearkening
Instrument of my skull.

//

From Science:

Francis Collins, the physician-scientist perhaps best known for piloting the human genome project, is stepping down as director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in Bethesda, Maryland. Collins said today that he will leave on 1 August to write a book and explore other opportunities, which might include getting involved in the presidential campaign or taking a nonprofit position.

Collins, 58, took the helm of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) NHGRI in 1993 as it was gearing up to sequence the human genome, then a controversial $3 billion proposal. The quest heated up when a private company, Celera, jumped in, spurring fierce competition. Both public and private efforts published a rough draft in 2001 and the full sequence was completed in 2003. Under Collins, the institute also advanced the sequencing of the genomes of many model organisms, from yeast to the platypus, that have spurred the study of evolution at a molecular level. Collins championed the public sharing of genome data and pushed for legislation to protect people against discrimination based on their genes. A law codifying that protection was signed by President George W. Bush last week. Collins told reporters today that his time at NIH has been “marvelous,” despite the recent slump in the NIH budget, which he says has made it “much tougher.” However, his reasons for leaving have nothing to do with NIH leadership or budget; he says that it is simply the fact that “the time seems right” to explore job possibilities with more freedom than if he were still in a federal position.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The simplest way to explain what Rauschenberg did is to say that he made the canvas three-dimensional and worldly. Or to put it another way, he thought of the canvas as something you could walk inside and inhabit. There’s a famous quote that has come to define Rauschenberg’s practice. It goes, “I operate in the gap between art and life.”

There’s a piece by Robert Rauschenberg that now lives at the MoMA. It’s called “Bed” (1955). It isn’t exactly a painting and it isn’t exactly a bed. There are bed elements — an actual sheet, a pillow, a quilt. Rumor has it that these bed elements were once the very things that Rauschenberg slept on. But there are painting elements as well. First of all, it is framed and up on the wall. Secondly, there’s the paint, smeared and splattered mostly around the top half of the work.

Arthur Danto, the art critic for The Nation, makes an insightful point about these early works (Rauschenberg called them Combines). He notes that Rauschenberg felt a need to arrange a bunch of objects and then to throw paint over them. It is as if he is still under the thrall of paint, convinced that it is the paint itself that is making the difference between art and not-art. But he’s also trying to cure himself, and by extension the art world dominated by painterly Modernism, of this addiction. Slowly he realized that he didn’t need the paint at all. He became indifferent to its authority. Even when he came back to paint and painting throughout his career, he did so as a free man.

More here.

Reading this made me nauseous. Afif Sarhan and Caroline Davies in The Observer:

For Abdel-Qader Ali there is only one regret: that he did not kill his daughter at birth. ‘If I had realised then what she would become, I would have killed her the instant her mother delivered her,’ he said with no trace of remorse.

Two weeks after The Observer revealed the shocking story of Rand Abdel-Qader, 17, murdered because of her infatuation with a British soldier in Basra, southern Iraq, her father is defiant. Sitting in the front garden of his well-kept home in the city’s Al-Fursi district, he remains a free man, despite having stamped on, suffocated and then stabbed his student daughter to death.

Abdel-Qader, 46, a government employee, was initially arrested but released after two hours. Astonishingly, he said, police congratulated him on what he had done. ‘They are men and know what honour is,’ he said.

Rand, who was studying English at Basra University, was deemed to have brought shame on her family after becoming infatuated with a British soldier, 22, known only as Paul.

She died a virgin, according to her closest friend Zeinab. Indeed, her ‘relationship’ with Paul, which began when she worked as a volunteer helping displaced families and he was distributing water, appears to have consisted of snatched conversations over less than four months.

More here.  [Thanks to Akbi Khan.]

In the NYT (also see the video):

“You pop it in your mouth and scrape the pulp off the seed, swirl it around and hold it in your mouth for about a minute,” he said. “Then you’re ready to go.” He ushered his guests to a table piled with citrus wedges, cheeses, Brussels sprouts, mustard, vinegars, pickles, dark beers, strawberries and cheap tequila, which Mr. Aliquo promised would now taste like top-shelf Patrón.

The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste. Dr. Bartoshuk said she did not know of any dangers associated with eating miracle fruit.

During the 1970s, a ruling by the Food and Drug Administration dashed hopes that an extract of miraculin could be sold as a sugar substitute. In the absence of any plausible commercial application, the miracle fruit has acquired a bit of a cult following.

Our own Asad Raza in Tennis magazine:

The claycourt season has reached its championship round: the French Open.  As most in the world of tennis begin their capaigns at Roland Garros, it’s a good time to investigate some of the myths surrounding la terre battue.

No. 1: Claycourt tennis is for claycourt “specialists,” who disappear once the game switches to the grass of Wimbledon and the hardcourts of the U.S. Open Series.

This, more than any other long-held belief about the red stuff, is now a myth.  Rafael Nadal, the dominant clay player of this–and perhaps any–era, has singlehandedly destroyed this perception by appearing in the last two Wimbledon finals.  The world’s second-best clay player, Roger Federer, also happens to have won the last five Wimbledons and four U.S. Opens.

Beyond them, the next three highest-ranked men’s players in the world–Novak Djokovic, Nikolay Davydenko, and David Ferrer–are excellent clay-court players as well.  And in women’s tennis, the surface specialization that once beset men’s tennis doesn’t exist: the best player of the last year, recently retired Justine Henin, won four of the last five French Opens.

For today’s top players, prowess on clay is the norm, not the exception.

No. 2: Playing on clay means attacking players must change their tactics.

Djokovic, Davydenko, Andy Roddick, and others in Rome were asked how they adapted their games from hardcourts to red clay.  Not a single one said making they made tactical changes, other than the occasional dropshot: instead, all mentioned increased patience and wiser shot selection.

More here.

At a 2007 Guggenheim panel, Richard Prince declared, “It was my job to, kind of, shoot the sheriff,” presumably implying that he was the slayer of photography, unmasking the grammar of images. But these aesthetic elements were caught in a crossfire in the seventies; what happened wasn’t the work of a lone gunman, and one of the sharpest shooters of all was Louise Lawler.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors’ homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage. All the while, she’s revealed how the installation of artworks is never neutral. Lawler photographed Jasper Johns’s White Flag hanging over a collector’s bed, Jeff Koons’s $80 million Rabbit near someone’s refrigerator, a woman casually gesturing with a Picasso sculpture in hand, a Gerhard Richter nude resting on its side on a museum floor, and Warhols galore in auction houses, art fairs, apartments, and galleries.

more from New York Magazine here.

Throughout his productive life, Adorno sought to mobilize the powers of aesthetic negation against the hypocrisies of bourgeois rectitude. In this respect, his studies during the early ’20s with the Vienna School’s Alban Berg proved to be of lasting value. Like his teacher Schoenberg, Berg was an exponent of atonality. In Adorno’s view, dissonance alone, and not pleasing harmony, gave the lie to modern society’s illusions of fulfillment and wholeness. It is no small irony, then, to observe that on his return to Germany, Adorno became a vigorous advocate of Enlightenment. These were the values that, during their twelve-year reign of terror, the Nazis had destroyed. (Goebbels once ob­­served that with Hitler’s accession to power, the year 1789 had been effaced from history.) In pathbreaking essays such as “Education Toward Maturity and Responsibility” and “Education After Auschwitz,” Adorno repeatedly advocated the Kantian precept of moral autonomy. He realized that only by nurturing the values of autonomous citizenship could one effectively guard against the dangers of a totalitarian relapse: “The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy, if I might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating.” In his conduct and activities as a critical intellectual, Adorno, to his credit, realized that Nazism’s success in Germany was the result of failed, rather than excessive, Enlightenment. Only by reversing the standpoint of Dialectic of Enlightenment—i.e., the radical Nietzschean critique of Enlightenment that the book embraced—did Adorno succeed during the ’50s and ’60s in becoming a latter-day Melancthon: a Praeceptor Germaniae.

more from Bookforum here.

UNTIL RECENTLY, IF you were a historian and you wanted to write a fresh account of, say, the Battle of Leyte Gulf in World War II, research was a pretty straightforward business. You would pack your bags and head to the National Archives, and spend months looking for something new in the official combat reports.

Today, however, you might first do something very different: Get online and pull up any of the unofficial websites of the ships that participated in the battle – the USS Pennsylvania, for example, or the USS Washington. Lovingly maintained by former crew members and their descendants, these sites are sprawling, loosely organized repositories of photographs, personal recollections, transcribed log books, and miniature biographies of virtually every person who served on board the ship. Some of these sites even include contact information for surviving crew members and their relatives – perfect for tracking down new diaries, photographs, and letters.

Online gathering spots like these represent a potentially radical change to historical research, a craft that has changed little for decades, if not centuries.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.