Ewen Callaway in New Scientist. (Note, Monte Carlo simulations are hardly new. I think Fermi used them in the 1930s or 1940s.):

Richard Florida in The Atlantic:

In Der Spiegel, an interview with Frederick Taylor on the military logic of bombing Dresden:

For Saundra
Nikki Giovanni

i wanted to write
a poem
that rhymes
but revolution doesn't lend
itself to be-bopping

then my neighbor
who thinks i hate
asked – do you ever write
tree poems – i like trees
so i thought
i'll write a beautiful green tree poem
peeked from my window
to check the image
noticed that the school yard was covered
with asphalt
no green – no trees grow
in manhattan

then, well, i thought the sky
i'll do a big blue sky poem
but all the clouds have winged
low since no-Dick was elected

so i thought again
and it occurred to me
maybe i shouldn't write
at all
but clean my gun
and check my kerosene supply

perhaps these are not poetic
times
at all

From lensculture:

photography and text by
George Georgiou

Turkey is a strategically important nation, poised geographically and symbolically between Europe and Asia. But the tensions at the heart of Turkey are becoming increasingly severe. A struggle is taking place between modernity, tradition, secularism, Islamism, democracy and repression — often in unlikely and contradictory combinations. Usually these tensions and our gaze are focused almost exclusively on Istanbul, the Kurdish issue, or religion, ignoring the far deeper complexities of a large country searching for a modern identity.

While living in Turkey for four-and-a-half years, I was surprised at how quickly change was taking place: landscapes, towns, and cities reshaped, an extensive road network under construction, town centers “beautified,” and large apartment blocks springing up at a rapid rate around every town and city. Almost always, the architecture and infrastructure follow the same blueprint. Cities are becoming carbon copies of each other.

More here.

Brad Gooch opens “Flannery,” his biography of Flannery O’Connor, with a lost moment: an account of how when O’Connor was 5, the Pathe newsreel company sent a cameraman to her home in Savannah, Ga., to film a chicken she had trained to walk backward. Such an image highlights O’Connor’s lifelong fascination with birds, but most telling is that even at this age, she was elusive, standing just outside our grasp. “O’Connor’s screen debut,” Gooch writes, “exists in all its fragility in a Pathe film archive. . . . For all of four seconds, O’Connor, a self-possessed little girl, is glimpsed in glaring afternoon light, a wisp of curls peeking from beneath her cap, calmly coping with three chickens fluttering in her face.” Here we have a stunning metaphor for not only her writing but also her existence: brief, glancing, almost impossible to pin down.

more from the LA Times here.

Carl also discusses Darwin and Darwin-mania in Time:

It's only fitting to recognize the accomplishments of a great biologist. But there's a risk to all this Darwinmania: some people may come away with a fundamental misunderstanding about the science of evolution. Once Darwin mailed his manuscript of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life to his publisher, the science of evolution did not grind to a halt. That would be a bit like saying medicine peaked when Louis Pasteur demonstrated that germs cause diseases.

Today biologists are exploring evolution at a level of detail far beyond what Darwin could, and they're discovering that evolution sometimes works in ways the celebrated naturalist never imagined. “The biological problems we're dealing with are much more complex,” says Massimo Pigliucci, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. “That said, it's a lot of fun. I'm not complaining.”

In addition to being Valentine's day, today is the 20th anniversary of Khomeini's fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses (one of Rushdie's best and most beautiful novels).

Rumor has it that before publication, Rushdie was speaking of his novel, still in-progress, to a few people at a dinner at Edward Said's. When he got to the part about the story of Mahound, Eqbal Ahmad reportedly blurted out something like, “Are you mad? He'll kill you!” referring to Khomeini. Years later, when someone at the dinner brought up this near-prophetic remark to Rushdie, he allegedly replied, “Eqbal was wrong. I'm still alive.”

Lawrence Pollard in the BBC:

It must be both the most talked about and the least read book of recent times. Since it came out in 1988 The Satanic Verses has seemed more a principle to be argued over than a book to discuss.

From the very first call for it to be banned – made by Indian MP Syed Shahabuddin – its critics have proudly announced they didn't have to read it to know it was wrong.

And anecdotally, as I have been sitting re-reading the book, many colleagues have come up and admitted they had either bought it but never opened it or started and given up. So what is it like?

The Satanic Verses is three stories, told in three styles, threaded together in one novel.

In the first story, two contemporary Indians fall out of an exploding aeroplane and survive. One seems to become an angel floating around London, the other grows horns and cloven hoofs.

In another story a poor Indian girl of great beauty, surrounded by butterflies, leads a pilgrimage of Muslim villagers into the Arabian Sea, where they drown.

And in the third, most controversial strand, a prophet founds a religion in the desert. Although this story makes up only 70 of the 550 pages of the novel, it is the part which provoked the furious reaction we now call the Satanic Verses controversy.

From The New York Times:

LORDS OF FINANCE The Bankers Who Broke the World

By Liaquat Ahamed

“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.” So wrote the great economic iconoclast John Maynard Keynes in an essay titled “The Great Slump of 1930,” published in December of that year. Thirteen months had passed since the crash of 1929; the world was living, in Keynes’s words, in “the shadow of one of the greatest economic catastrophes of modern history.” I shuddered when I read this quotation in “Lords of Finance,” a magisterial work by Liaquat Ahamed, a veteran hedge fund manager and Brookings Institution trustee. A grand, sweeping narrative of immense scope and power, the book describes a world that long ago receded from memory: the West after World War I, a time of economic fragility, of bubbles followed by busts and of a cascading series of events that led to the Great Depression.

The “delicate machine” Keynes referred to was of course the global economy. By 1930, when he wrote his essay, the West was in bad shape. A combination of divisive postwar politics, a refusal to abandon economic orthodoxy and a series of policy errors by the world’s four most important central banks — the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the German Reichsbank and the Banque de France — had led to the near collapse of capitalist economies in the West. “Industrial production had fallen 30 percent in the United States, 25 percent in Germany and 20 percent in Britain,” Ahamed writes. “Over 5 million men were looking for work in the United States, another 4.5 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain.”

And yet — and this is why I shuddered — it was also a moment not unlike the one we’re living through now.

More here.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

To begin with, any romantic partnership is essentially an alliance, and alliances are a core concept on international relations. Alliances bring many benefits to the members (or else why would we form them?) but as we also know, they sometimes reflect irrational passions and inevitably limit each member's autonomy. Many IR theorists believe that institutionalizing an alliance makes it more effective and enduring, but that’s also why making a relationship more formal is a significant step that needs to be carefully considered.

Of course, IR theorists have also warned that allies face the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment: the more we fear that our partners might leave us in the lurch (abandonment), the more likely we are to let them drag us into obligations that we didn't originally foresee (entrapment). When you find yourself gamely attending your partner’s high school reunion or traveling to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner every single year, you’ll know what I mean.

Realists have long argued that bipolar systems are the most stable. So if any of you lovers out there are thinking of adding more major actors to the system, please reconsider. As most of us eventually learn, trying to juggle romantic relationships in a multi-polar setting usually leads to crises, and sometimes to open warfare. It's certainly not good for alliance stability.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

John Allen Paulos in his excellent Who's Counting column at ABC News:

A quite different illustration of our short-sightedness comes courtesy of Robert Louis Stevenson's “The Imp in the Bottle.” The story tells of a genie in a bottle able and willing to satisfy your every romantic whim and financial desire. You're offered the opportunity to buy this bottle and its amazing denizen at a price of your choice. There is a serious limitation, however.

When you've finished with the bottle, you have to sell it to someone else at a price strictly less than what you paid for it. If you don't sell it to someone for a lower price, you will lose everything and will suffer excruciating and unrelenting torment. What would you pay for such a bottle?

Certainly you wouldn't pay 1 cent because then you wouldn't be able to sell it for a lower price. You wouldn't pay 2 cents for it either since no one would buy it from you for 1 cent since everyone knows that it must be sold for a price less than the price at which it is bought. The same reasoning shows that you wouldn't pay 3 cents for it since the person to whom you would have to sell it for 2 cents would object to buying it at that price since he wouldn't be able to sell it for 1 cent. Likewise for prices of 4 cents, 5 cents, 6 cents, and so on.

We can use mathematical induction to formalize this argument, which proves conclusively that you wouldn't buy the genie in the bottle for any amount of money. Yet you would almost certainly buy it for 1,000 dollars. I know I would. At what point does the argument against buying the bottle cease to be compelling?

More here.

John M. Broder and Matthew L. Wald in the New York Times:

Steven Chu, the new secretary of energy, said Wednesday that solving the world’s energy and environment problems would require Nobel-level breakthroughs in three areas: electric batteries, solar power and the development of new crops that can be turned into fuel.

Dr. Chu, a physicist, spoke during a wide-ranging interview in his office, where his own framed Nobel Prize lay flat on a bookcase, a Post-it note indicating where it should be hung on the wall.

He addressed topics that included global warming, renewable energy sources like solar and wind power, the use of coal and a proposed repository for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

More here.

Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

It's not often that a book or a movie makes me cry. A few weeks ago I watched Fateless, a film that brought tears to my eyes. For quite some time afterwards I could not get over the sepia tinted images of melancholy, gloom and suffering. Even more difficult to shake off was the impression made by the detached incomprehension of the young protagonist caught in the violent maelstrom.

Fateless is based on a novel by Imre Kertesz, a Nobel Prize winning Hungarian author who spent a year in Nazi concentration camps as a young boy. The movie is the account of one year in the life of fourteen year old Gyuri (Gyorgy ) Koves (some have speculated, Kertesz himself) after being shipped to Auschwitz, later shifted to Buchenwald and finally to Zeitz, a lesser known concentration camp in 1944. Through it all we experience the young boy's plight not as mere viewers but often as “Gyuri,” the teenager who has been transported from a life of middle class predictability to one of unfamiliar, unprecedented horror which is in equal parts, carefully planned out regimental cruelty and random violence. As Primo Levi pointed out in his brilliant books about Auschwitz, one needs some distance in time and place from carnage and degradation to truly recognize the scars left by past traumas. With proximity to pain, over time, mindless brutality and soul sapping privation can begin to look routine and mundane. And tragedy is multiplied many times over when children's fates are shaped by the corruption of the adult soul.

More here.

///
The Question of Influence
Bill Schneberger

Where do I get it
Who does it come from
How did it get here
What shall I do with it
When will it stop
Why do I ask

Is it
From the history of man
The myth of art
The silence of nature
The structure of form

Is it
From the commerce of art
The mountain not seen
The absence of stars tracking the sky
The lack of conception

Is it
From unfinished pieces
The loss of my father
The clatter of my heart
The want of something

Or

Is it
From never having seen Schenectady
And everything that happens in circles
///

Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss in The NYT:

OFFICIALLY, of course, the urban fire escape is primarily an emergency exit, but in New York, this prosaic adornment of countless five- and six-story apartment houses has assumed myriad other functions: faux backyards, platforms for criminal getaways, oases for marginalized smokers and makeshift bedrooms popular during an age before air-conditioning.

And they are often visual knockouts, too. Strikingly designed fire escapes have complemented some of the city’s grandest structures, like the Puck Building on Lafayette Street, and enhanced even the dreariest structures.

First built in New York well over a century ago, mandated by the 1867 tenement law, fire escapes soon became a canvas for the virtuosity of local foundry workers, including recently arrived European immigrants. Throughout the city, these artisans created ornate objets d’art constructed and molded from wrought and cast iron. The designs that resulted present a decorative smorgasbord, and include such rich details as arabesques, filigree lacework and rosettes.

Alexander Provan in The Nation:

New Humanist asks Jerry Coyne, Steve Jones, James Randerson, and John von Wyhe (reprinted in eurozine):

The historian
NH: What would you tell him?

John van Wyhe: Although he would have thought little about it, and perhaps cared even less, as an historian I would have to tell him about the way the story of his life has evolved over the years. Initially he was the great scientific saint who banished religion from the realms of science, then he was a Freudian puppet reacting to his supposedly tyrannical father (thus “killing God” with his theory of evolution was like patricide), then he was said to have discovered evolution on the Galapagos in a eureka moment when he observed the beaks of the finches, then he was said to have held back his theory for 20 years because he was terrified of the consequences of publishing. At every anniversary a new myth like this appears, none of which has any grounding in the evidence. So what new myth(s) will be invented about Darwin in 2009, the bicentenary of his birth?…

The biologist
NH: What would you tell him?

Jerry Coyne: So much to tell, and so little time! I'd tell him about all the amazing fossils that have been discovered since the Origin was published: transitional forms that link major groups such as reptiles with mammals, land animals with whales, fish with amphibians. These fossils constitute even more support for evolution – evidence that Darwin never had, although he predicted that transitional fossils would exist. He'd probably be most interested in the group of hominid fossils found in Africa dating back as far as six million years ago. These clearly show our ancestry from apes and completely confirm Darwin's guarded prediction, made in 1871, that “it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent”.

///
Personal Helicon
Seamus Heaney

For Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult digniity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
///

From The Washington Post:

In the fall of 1959 an obscure white journalist and novelist named John Howard Griffin, a native of Texas, went to a dermatologist in New Orleans with what can only be called an astonishing request: He wanted “to become a Negro.” A man of conscience and religious conviction, he was deeply troubled by the racial situation in his native South. He was “haunted” by these questions: “If a white man became a Negro in the Deep South, what adjustments would he have to make? What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin color, something over which one has no control?”

The dermatologist agreed to cooperate with Griffin's project, darkening his skin “with a medication taken orally, followed by exposure to ultraviolet rays.” Griffin, who had arranged with the editors of Sepia, the prominent black magazine, to write about his experiences, was in a hurry to get started and asked for “accelerated treatments,” which he soon supplemented with stain. He also shaved his head, “since I had no curl.” He did not look in the mirror until the process was complete, and when he did, he saw “the face and shoulders of a stranger — a fierce, bald, very dark Negro.” He was stunned:

“The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. . . . I looked into the mirror and saw reflected nothing of the white John Griffin's past. No, the reflections led back to Africa, back to the shanty and the ghetto, back to the fruitless struggles against the mark of blackness. . . . I had tampered with the mystery of existence and I had lost the sense of my own being. This is what devastated me. The Griffin that was had become invisible.”

Thus began Griffin's six-week odyssey through the South, a journey that took him from New Orleans to Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. In March of the next year Sepia published his story, and in 1961 an expanded version was published as a book, “Black Like Me.” The cumulative effect of the magazine story, the book and all the attendant publicity — Griffin was interviewed by the television journalists Dave Garroway and Mike Wallace and featured in Time magazine — was astonishing. The book became a bestseller. It awoke significant numbers of white Americans to truths about discrimination of which they had been unaware or had denied.

I was one of them. In 1961, I was 21 years old, newly graduated from Chapel Hill. I had written sympathetically about the emerging black protests for the student newspaper, but I was deeply ignorant about the truths of black life in America. That it took a white man to begin my awakening is, in hindsight, distressing, but Griffin's story managed to put me in a black man's shoes as nothing else had. (My first readings of James Baldwin's essays were still a couple of years in the future.) “Black Like Me” had a transforming effect on me, as apparently it did on innumerable others. That it has remained in print for more than four decades is testimony to its continuing influence, in great measure because it is taught in high schools and colleges.

Read now, for the first time since 1961, “Black Like Me” has lost surprisingly little of its power.

More here.