Elaine Glaser in New Humanist:

In the pre-modern era, there was no distinction between sciences and the arts. They were intertwined enterprises. In his famous 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge University CP Snow lamented the fact that, as a result of increasing specialisation, they now occupied entirely different spheres.

This set off a debate that has been raging ever since. But in recent years it’s taken some odd twists. Science, even among the most literary and philosophical of public intellectuals, has taken ascendancy over the arts as the more dominant discipline. And Snow’s two cultures have been replaced by a new dichotomy – between science and religion. Meanwhile the humanities, floundering somewhere in between, are in danger of being lost in the maelstrom.

In that first, ground-breaking lecture, Snow condemned scientists for their “self impoverishment” which resulted from their dismissal of the literary and artistic culture, and then denounced members of the literati for being Luddite in their attitude to science. His argument was ostensibly a plea for intellectual unity and educational reform. At times, however, his complaint about the two-cultures-divide became particularly a complaint about the lack of public understanding of science.

Mark Buchanan in Physics World:

This is how discovery works: returns on research investment do not arrive steadily and predictably, but erratically and unpredictably, in a manner akin to intellectual earthquakes. Indeed, this idea seems to be more than merely qualitative. Data on human innovation, whether in basic science or technology or business, show that developments emerge from an erratic process with wild unpredictability. For example, as physicist Didier Sornette of the ETH in Zurich and colleagues showed a few years ago, the statistics describing the gross revenues of Hollywood movies over the past 20 years does not follow normal statistics but a power-law curve — closely resembling the famous Gutenberg— Richter law for earthquakes — with a long tail for high-revenue films. A similar pattern describes the financial returns on new drugs produced by the bio-tech industry, on royalties on patents granted to universities, or stock-market returns from hi-tech start-ups.

What we know of processes with power-law dynamics is that the largest events are hugely disproportionate in their consequences. In the metaphor of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007 best seller The Black Swan, it is not the normal events, the mundane and expected “white swans” that matter the most, but the outliers, the completely unexpected “black swans”. In the context of history, think 11 September 2001 or the invention of the Web. Similarly, scientific history seems to pivot on the rare seismic shifts that no-one predicts or even has a chance of predicting, and on those utterly profound discoveries that transform worlds. They do not flow out of what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called “normal science” — the paradigm-supporting and largely mechanical working out of established ideas — but from “revolutionary”, disruptive and risky science.

All of which, as Sornette has been arguing for several years, has important implications for how we think about and judge research investments. If the path to discovery is full of surprises, and if most of the gains come in just a handful of rare but exceptional events, then even judging whether a research programme is well conceived is deeply problematic. “Almost any attempt to assess research impact over a finite time”, says Sornette, “will include only a few major discoveries and hence be highly unreliable, even if there is a true long-term positive trend.”

This raises an important question: does today’s scientific culture respect this reality? Are we doing our best to let the most important and most disruptive discoveries emerge?

Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books:

When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen. In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can “let the past be past”—whether or not we can “get beyond it and look forward.” Torture, for Dick Cheney and for President Bush and a significant portion of the American people, is more than a repugnant series of “procedures” applied to a few hundred prisoners in American custody during the last half-dozen or so years—procedures that are described with chilling and patient particularity in this authoritative report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.^[2] Torture is more than the specific techniques—the forced nudity, sleep deprivation, long-term standing, and suffocation by water,” among others—that were applied to those fourteen “high-value detainees” and likely many more at the “black site” prisons secretly maintained by the CIA on three continents.

Torture, as the former vice-president's words suggest, is a critical issue in the present of our politics—and not only because of ongoing investigations by Senate committees, or because of calls for an independent inquiry by congressional leaders, or for a “truth commission” by a leading Senate Democrat, or because of demands for a criminal investigation by the ACLU and other human rights organizations, and now undertaken in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Poland.^[3] For many in the United States, torture still stands as a marker of political commitment—of a willingness to “do anything to protect the American people,” a manly readiness to know when to abstain from “coddling terrorists” and do what needs to be done. Torture's powerful symbolic role, like many ugly, shameful facts, is left unacknowledged and undiscussed. But that doesn't make it any less real. On the contrary.

Torture is at the heart of the deadly politics of national security.

More here.

Lizzie Buchen in Wired:

Size matters in particle physics: The bigger the machine, the more violently physicists can smash atoms together and break open the deepest mysteries of the subatomic world. But a revolutionary new technology could eventually render some gargantuan particle accelerators passé.

Using simulations, a team of German and Russian physicists have pioneered a new technique for particle acceleration, called proton-driven plasma-wakefield acceleration (PWFA). The technique may one day allow machines a fraction of the size of today's accelerators to create the highest-energy particles ever.

“This could be a major step forward,” says Allen Caldwell of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, coauthor of the study, which appeared in Nature Physics Sunday. “The dream is that it will lead to much more compact — and therefore much cheaper — electron accelerators.”

Progress in particle physics is contingent on the power of particle accelerators, and as particle colliders grow, the price tag and bureaucratic hurdles grow with them. Government pocketbooks are becoming increasingly tight — in December both the U.S. and the U.K. pulled out of the proposed $7 billion International Linear Collider, which may never actually be built. So to continue searching for answers to physics' greatest questions — dark matter, extra dimensions, supersymmetry — physicists may have to find a fundamentally new way to accelerate particles. Caldwell and his colleagues hope proton-driven PWFA will pave the way.

More here.

As a boy I owned, and kept in a drawer containing my personal treasures, a pamphlet entitled Pipes and Pipemen. On the cover was a drawing of a bouffant-haired man (this was the mid-Seventies) puffing on a pipe with eyes half-closed in rapture. Inside was some purple stuff about ‘the pleasures of the briar’, followed by a list of all the men who’d won the Pipe Smoker of the Year award. I knew some of these men, and their pipes, from watching children’s television. There was the bucolic broadcaster Jack Hargreaves (Pipe Smoker of the Year 1969), who was apparently a very important player at Southern Television, but who was always dressed as though about to go fly-fishing. When, as a panellist on the programme How!, it was his turn to explain some scientific curiosity to his audience of eight- to fourteen-year-olds, there would be a good few seconds of preliminary pipe-puffing – very relaxing for Jack, but very tense-making for us children as we fretted: ‘Is he ever going to take that thing out of his mouth and begin?’

more from Granta here.

I suspect that many professional philosophers, including ones such as myself who have no religious beliefs at all, are slightly embarrassed, or even annoyed, by the voluble disputes between militant atheists and religious apologists. As Michael Frayn points out in his delightful book The Human Touch, the polite English are embarrassed when the subject of religion crops up at all. But we have more cause to be uncomfortable. The annoyance comes partly because of the strong sense of deja vu. But it is not just that old tunes are being replayed, but that they are being replayed badly. The classic performance was given by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, written in the middle of the 18th century. Hume himself said that nothing could be more artful than the Dialogues, and it is the failure to appreciate that art that is annoying. In the Dialogues, there are three principal characters. The first is Philo, a religious sceptic, whose voice is clearly that of Hume himself. Cleanthes is an apologist whose stock in trade is the argument that design is evidence of the existence of a deity: the familiar argument that the delicate and wonderful adjustments of nature irresistibly point to the existence of a divine architect – all nature declares the Creator’s glory.

more from the Times Higher Education here.

BY THE SPRING of 1844 Henry David Thoreau had accomplished almost nothing. He was 26 years old and had spent the better part of his life more or less adrift. In the seven years after graduating from Harvard, Thoreau tried to support himself in a variety of ways, as a teacher, tutor, writer, surveyor, and as a general handyman. He lived for a time with his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and later in New York City with Emerson’s brother, only to return to Concord to reside once again with his own family. Then, in the summer of 1845, Thoreau built a solitary cabin at Walden Pond, and set about the great venture in simplified living for which he would become famous. Over the course of the next two years – some of the most productive of Thoreau’s life – he recorded meticulous observations of nature in his journal, revised the manuscript of his first major work, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” and completed the first draft of his magnum opus, “Walden, or Life in the Woods.”

more from The Boston Globe here.

The Armful
Robert Frost

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

From Nature:

Researchers in China today announced a discovery that challenges a canonical belief in reproductive biology: that women are born with a set number of immature egg cells, called oocytes, which become depleted with age. In a paper in Nature Cell Biology,¹ the Chinese team reports that it has found precursors to oocytes in adult mice. When the researchers transplanted those cells into sterilized mice, they produced offspring — a finding that feeds into an ongoing debate about the limits of mammalian fertility.

“It provides a smoking gun,” says Jonathan Tilly of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the work but has previously published evidence that new eggs can be formed in adult mice in a series of argument-sparking papers.² Although the current work hasn't settled the question, Tilly says, it represents an addition to the “critical mass of data” suggesting that old ovaries can produce new eggs, a finding that some say could have implications for fertility medicine.

More here.

Dasha Shishkin. Watch What We Say.

Pen and ink drawing.

More here, here and here.

Thanks to Anjuli Raza Kolb.

Robyn Creswell in The National:

Adina Hoffman’s biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali is a triumph of sympathetic imagination, dogged research and impassioned writing. More than the story of one man’s life, it brings to light entire strata of historical and cultural experience that have been neglected or purposefully covered over. For readers of English, there is no comparable work – certainly nothing so densely detailed or eloquently argued – for understanding Palestinian intellectual life in the second half of the 20th century. And for all that, it is anything but dry or ponderous or, to invoke a cliché that no critic of biography seems able to do without, monumental. Instead, Hoffman’s book is an unconventional and avowedly personal study – the record of an engagement with a man and a literary tradition that both deserve a wider audience.

My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness is the first biography of any Palestinian writer in any language – hard to fathom, but true – and the choice of Muhammad Ali as a subject, especially in this light, is a surprising one. For most of his life Muhammad Ali has not been a poet but a Nazarene businessman, selling souvenirs from his shop near the Church of the Annunciation. “A Muslim who sells Christian trinkets to Jews” is his humorous self-description. He didn’t write his first poem until he was 40 years old, and though he has now published five volumes of poetry and a collection of short stories, it is still a relatively modest oeuvre.

More here.

Graham Usher in the London Review of Books:

Pakistan and India have been at war since 1948. There have been occasional flare-ups, pitched battles between the two armies, but mostly the war has taken the form of a guerrilla battle between the Indian army and Pakistani surrogates in Kashmir. In 2004 the two countries began a cautious peace process, but rather than ending, the war has since migrated to Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas on the Afghan border. ‘Safe havens’ for a reinvigorated Afghan Taliban and al-Qaida, the tribal areas are seen by the West as the ‘greatest threat’ to its security, as well as being the main cause of Western frustration with Pakistan. The reason is simple: the Pakistan army’s counterinsurgency strategy is not principally directed at the Taliban or even al-Qaida: the main enemy is India.

In the Bajaur tribal area, for example, the army is fighting an insurgency led by Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of one of Pakistan’s three Taliban factions, but it’s not because he is a friend of al-Qaida. What makes him a threat, in the eyes of Pakistan’s army, is that he is believed to be responsible for scores of suicide attacks inside Pakistan (including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto). He is also thought to have recruited hundreds of Afghan fighters, among them ‘agents’ from the Afghan and Indian intelligence services – ‘Pakistan’s enemies’, in the words of a senior officer.

More here.

Maywa Montenegro in Seed Magazine:

Ann Trason, Scott Jurek, Matt Carpenter. These are the megastars of ultra-distance running, athletes who pound out not just marathons, but dozens of them back-to-back, over Rocky Mountain passes and across the scorching floor of Death Valley. If their names are unfamiliar, it’s probably because this type of extreme running is almost universally seen as a fringe sport, the habit of the superhumanly fit, the masochistic, the slightly deranged.

But a handful of scientists think that these ultra-marathoners are using their bodies just as our hominid forbears once did, a theory known as the endurance running hypothesis (ER). ER proponents believe that being able to run for extended lengths of time is an adapted trait, most likely for obtaining food, and was the catalyst that forced Homo erectus to evolve from its apelike ancestors. Over time, the survival of the swift-footed shaped the anatomy of modern humans, giving us a body that is difficult to explain absent a marathoning past.

Our toes, for instance, are shorter and stubbier than those of nearly all other primates, including chimpanzees, a trait that has long been attributed to our committed bipedalism. But a study published in the March 1 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, by anthropologists Daniel Lieberman and Campbell Rolian, provides evidence that short toes make human feet exquisitely suited to substantial amounts of running.

More here.

Shireen Mazari in The News:

Despite our shock-weariness, the past week has been a traumatic one for Pakistan. In a curtain-raiser to the visit of members of the MPH (Mullen, Petreaus and Holbrooke) team, Pakistan has been ripped asunder with acts of terrorism and barbarity – across the land. Following from the horrors of Manawan, we saw the almost helpless personnel of the Frontier Constabulary targeted in Islamabad, US drones killing more women and children in FATA and the gruesome spectre of sectarian terrorism raising its head once again with an attack in Chakwal.

As if all that was not enough, we were confronted with the abhorrent video of the flogging of a teenage girl in Swat. Tragically, the whole debate seems to have been reduced to the timing of the event – as if that makes the crime, for that is what it is even under the Shariah laws of this country, any less horrific – and to the authenticity or otherwise of the video itself. The fact of the matter is that regardless of these issues, such inhuman acts against women have been taking place across the land, not only at the hands of the Taliban.

Which brings up the real issue – that is, of the state showing tolerance for such brutalities against women.

More here.

John Crace in the Guardian:

The opening sentence of their new book, The Spirit Level, cautions, “People usually exaggerate the importance of their own work and we worry about claiming too much” – yet by the time you reach the end you wonder how they could have claimed any more. After all, they argue that almost every social problem common in developed societies – reduced life expectancy, child mortality, drugs, crime, homicide rates, mental illness and obesity – has a single root cause: inequality.

And, they say, it's not just the deprived underclass that loses out in an unequal society: everyone does, even the better off. Because it's not absolute levels of poverty that create the social problems, but the differentials in income between rich and poor.

John Allen Paulos over at abcnews.com:

Suppose a man flirts with a woman and then asks her, “Will you solemnly promise to give me right now your telephone number if I make a true statement and, conversely, not give me your number if I make a false statement?”

Maybe he can soften the statement a bit, but let's assume that this is its gist.

Feeling that this is a flattering and benign request, the woman promises to give him her number if and only if he makes a true statement.

The man then makes his statement: “You will neither give me your telephone number now nor will you sleep with me tonight.”

What's the trick? Note that she can't give him her number since, if she were to do so, his statement would be made false, and so she would have broken her promise to give him her number only if he made a true statement. (This is the crux of it.) Therefore, she must not give him her number under any circumstances.

But if she also refuses to sleep with him, his statement becomes true, and this would require her to give him her number.

The only way she can keep her promise is to sleep with him so that his statement becomes false. The woman's seemingly innocuous promise ensnares her.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I suspect that the class of people for whom this seduction technique would prove effective is probably rather small. Nevertheless, it might make an interesting premise for a Star Trek episode or perhaps form part of a logicians' dating manual.

Consider now a slight variant of the above story. Suppose an investment con man is talking to a prospective client.

Nate Silver breaks down the meaning of the Rasmussen poll on American attitudes towards capitalism and socialism:

Evgeny Morozov asks if the Internet spread democracy in The Boston Review:

It is safe to say that the Internet has significantly changed the flow of information in and out of authoritarian states. While Internet censorship remains a thorny issue and, unfortunately, more widespread than it was in 2003, it is hard to ignore the wealth of digital content that has suddenly become available to millions of Chinese, Iranians, or Egyptians. If anything the speed and ease of Internet publishing have made many previous modes of samizdat obsolete; the emerging generation of dissidents may as well choose Facebook and YouTube as their headquarters and iTunes and Wikipedia as their classrooms.

Many such dissenters have, indeed, made great use of the Web. In Ukraine young activists relied on new–media technologies to mobilize supporters during the Orange Revolution. Colombian protesters used Facebook to organize massive rallies against FARC, the leftist guerrillas. The shocking and powerful pictures that surfaced from Burma during the 2007 anti–government protests—many of them shot by local bloggers with cell phones—quickly traveled around the globe. Democratic activists in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe used the Web to track vote rigging in last year’s elections and used mobile phones to take photos of election results that were temporarily displayed outside the voting booths (later, a useful proof of the irregularities). Plenty of other examples—from Iran, Egypt, Russia, Belarus, and, above all, China—attest to the growing importance of technology in facilitating dissent.

But drawing conclusions about the democratizing nature of the Internet may still be premature. The major challenge in understanding the relationship between democracy and the Internet— aside from developing good measures of democratic improvement—has been to distinguish cause and effect.