Esther Addley in The Guardian:

It was a chance conversation on March 23 1985 (“in the afternoon, as I recall”) that first started Josh Silver on his quest to make the world's poor see. A professor of physics at Oxford University, Silver was idly discussing optical lenses with a colleague, wondering whether they might be adjusted without the need for expensive specialist equipment, when the lightbulb of inspiration first flickered above his head.

What if it were possible, he thought, to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be “tuned” by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?

More than two decades after posing that question, Silver now feels he has the answer. The British inventor has embarked on a quest that is breathtakingly ambitious, but which he insists is achievable – to offer glasses to a billion of the world's poorest people by 2020.

Some 30,000 pairs of his spectacles have already been distributed in 15 countries, but to Silver that is very small beer. Within the next year the now-retired professor and his team plan to launch a trial in India which will, they hope, distribute 1 million pairs of glasses.

More here.

Jordan Lite in Scientific American:

Inbreeding is the source of jokes about British royalty and is associated with increased birth defects among offspring. The practice is so reviled that 31 U.S. states ban marriage between first cousins or allow it only if the couple has undergone genetic counseling or at least one partner is sterile or no longer fertile because of age.

But those laws “seem ill-advised” and “should be repealed,” a geneticist and medical historian write in today's PLoS Biology. “Neither the scientific nor social assumptions that informed them are any longer defensible.”

The US “cousin marriage” prohibition stretches back to the 1858, when Kansas barred such marriages; Texas was the most recent state to pass a ban, in 2005, write Diane Paul, a political scientist emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and Hamish Spencer, head of zoology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. (European countries didn’t ban the practice because there, “the rich and noble were marrying” their cousins, Spencer tells us. “In America it was immigrants and the rural poor — a much easier target of legislation than your monarch.”)

First cousins share about an eighth, or 12.5 percent, of their genes, according to a 2002 study in the Journal of Genetic Counseling. Because of that overlap, there's a 1.7 percent to 2.8 higher risk of intellectual disability and genetic disorders, including seizures and metabolic errors among children whose parents are first cousins than among the general population, says Robin Bennett, a certified genetic counselor and lead author of that research.

That elevated risk is “comparable to a 40-year-old woman having children and we consider that perfectly acceptable,” Spencer tells ScientificAmerican.com. “I can't imagine a law saying they're not allowed to have children.”

More here.

Christopher Maag in the New York Times:

Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.

“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.

A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”

The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.

Now the underground success of Muslim punk has resulted in a low-budget independent film based on the book.

More here.

Ed Regis in Scientific American:

[F]or all the research that went into it, Spore comes off as a mixed success at replicating the inner workings of evolution by natural selection. On the plus side, in both the game and the real world, there is competition among individuals: Darwin’s well-known “struggle for existence.” In both, the more fit survive, and the less so die out, duplicating the basic evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest. In the game and in real life, simple entities develop into more complex ones, a pattern that is a common, though not an inevitable, feature of Darwinian evolution. Finally, in both Spore and in nature, life-forms tend to be bilaterally symmetrical, even though exceptions occur in real-life creatures such as amoebas as well as in some of Spore’s unicellular organisms.

Spore encompasses five stages of development: cell, creature, tribe, civilization and space. There are some potent differences, however, between evolution as it actually operates and Spore’s animated version of events. For one, in the “cell” and “creature” stages of the game, organisms win “DNA points” when they achieve certain goals. Evolving to a higher level of existence is a matter of acquiring DNA points, much as travelers might accrue frequent-flier miles in an effort to go places. In the real world, in contrast, organisms evolve through random genetic mutations, by sexual reproduction and by other mechanisms but not merely by amassing DNA.

Perry Link translates the document in the NYRB:

During the last two decades of the twentieth century the government policy of “Reform and Opening” gave the Chinese people relief from the pervasive poverty and totalitarianism of the Mao Zedong era, and brought substantial increases in the wealth and living standards of many Chinese as well as a partial restoration of economic freedom and economic rights. Civil society began to grow, and popular calls for more rights and more political freedom have grown apace. As the ruling elite itself moved toward private ownership and the market economy, it began to shift from an outright rejection of “rights” to a partial acknowledgment of them.

In 1998 the Chinese government signed two important international human rights conventions; in 2004 it amended its constitution to include the phrase “respect and protect human rights”; and this year, 2008, it has promised to promote a “national human rights action plan.” Unfortunately most of this political progress has extended no further than the paper on which it is written. The political reality, which is plain for anyone to see, is that China has many laws but no rule of law; it has a constitution but no constitutional government. The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change.

The stultifying results are endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor, pillage of the natural environment as well as of the human and historical environments, and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially, in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

On 16 December, ten days into the unrest in Greece sparked by the killing of a 15-year-old boy by the police, a group of Greek students occupied the National Broadcasting Network. Interrupting a report on a parliamentary address by the prime minister, they raised a banner that read: ‘Stop Watching – Everyone on the Streets!’ Those who joined them would have missed the footage broadcast the same night on Al Tsantiri News, in which hooded men were seen smashing shop windows in Athens with iron clubs, then a short time later chatting amiably with the police. Al Tsantiri (a play on Al-Jazeera) is known for sending up the news in the style of the Daily Show, but this wasn’t a joke. The footage confirmed what many Greeks already suspected: that the government was using agents provocateurs to increase the violence and discredit the protests.

From Scientific American:

Charles Darwin wasted no time applying his theory of evolution to human psychology, following On the Origin of Species (1859) with The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Ever since, the issue hasn’t been whether evolutionary theory can illuminate the study of psychology but how it will do so. Still, a concerted effort to explain how evolution has affected human behavior began only in the 1970s with the emergence of sociobiology. The core idea of sociobiology was simple: behavior has evolved under natural and sexual selection (in response to competition for survival and reproduction, respectively), just as organic form has. Sociobiology thereby extended the study of adaptation to include human behavior.

In his 1985 critique of sociobiology, Vaulting Ambition, philosopher Philip Kitcher noted that, whereas some sociobiology backed modest claims with careful empirical research, the theoretical reach of the dominant program greatly exceeded its evidential grasp. Kitcher called this program “pop sociobiology” because it employed evolutionary principles “to advance grand claims about human nature and human social institutions” and was “deliberately designed to command popular attention.”

Times have changed. Although some self-identified sociobiologists are still around, the current fashion is evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology maintains that adaptation is to be found among the psychological mechanisms that control behavior rather than among behaviors themselves. But, as the old saw goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Although some work in evolutionary psychology backs modest claims with careful empirical research, a dominant strain, pop evolutionary psychology, or Pop EP, offers grand and encompassing claims about human nature for popular consumption.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

Two new biographies testify to the talents and suffering of the 18th century's most celebrated wit.

Born to a small-town bookseller in 1709 — the year that Richard Steele launched a media revolution with the Tatler, the first popular British periodical — Johnson lived through seven and a half decades in which the periodical press ignited revolution in the American colonies and, by the time of his death in 1784, was helping erode the ancien regime in France. Slowly he won acclaim for his wit and sharply worded opinions in the new media. At the height of the British Empire, he denounced the very notion of imperialism. A benefactor of the poor and a foe of slavery, he opposed the revolt of the American colonies. “How is it,” he demanded, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Nowadays Johnson's novel Rasselas and his drama “Irene” are seldom opened outside a classroom. But even people who haven't read any of his works know of his monumental 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. Its two gargantuan volumes not only encompassed the voice and history of a people; they also shepherded wandering linguistic traditions into a single parade with himself as grand marshal. Johnson's insubordinate diction enlivens every page. Ink is “the black liquor with which men write.” Purist: “one superstitiously nice in the use of words.” Lexicographer: “a harmless drudge.” With this feat of showmanship, he turned himself into a forceful influence on other writers. He became that legendary sage and raconteur, Dr. Johnson.

More here.

In his first interview since the world financial crisis, Gao Xiqing, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings, explains why he’s betting against the dollar, praises American pragmatism, and wonders about enormous Wall Street paychecks. And he has a friendly piece of advice.

James Fallows in The Atlantic:

Americans know that China has financed much of their nation’s public and private debt. During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama and John McCain generally agreed on the peril of borrowing so heavily from this one foreign source. For instance, in their final debate, McCain warned about the “$10 trillion debt we’re giving to our kids, a half a trillion dollars we owe China,” and Obama said, “Nothing is more important than us no longer borrowing $700billion or more from China and sending it to Saudi Arabia.” Their numbers on the debt differed, and both were way low. One year ago, when I wrote about China’s U.S. dollar holdings, the article was called “The $1.4 trillion Question.” When Barack Obama takes office, the figure will be well over $2 trillion.

During the late stages of this year’s campaign, I had several chances to talk with the man who oversees many of China’s American holdings. He is Gao Xiqing, president of the China Investment Corporation, which manages “only” about $200billion of the country’s foreign assets but makes most of the high-visibility investments, like buying stakes in Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, as opposed to just holding Treasury notes.

Gao, whom I mentioned in my article, would fit no American’s preexisting idea of a Communist Chinese official. He speaks accented but fully colloquial and very high-speed English. He has a law degree from Duke, which he earned in the 1980s after working as a lawyer and professor in China, and he was an associate in Richard Nixon’s former Wall Street law firm.

More here.

Sander Gliboff in American Scientist:

Decades of intense study of Darwin’s life, intellectual development, and social and political context have generated new kinds of questions about a number of matters: the interpersonal networks supporting him; the lives of the admirers and critics of his ideas; the dissemination and reading of evolutionary works; the sources of evolutionism in earlier French, German and British thought; and Darwin’s reception by various national and social groups. In the spirit of these expanding horizons of Darwin scholarship, The Tragic Sense of Life, by Robert J. Richards, provides not only a biography of the controversial German evolutionist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), but also an important piece of the emerging picture of the Darwinian Revolution in its international and intergenerational dimensions.

Darwin biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore once remarked that the many previous books on their subject had been “curiously bloodless affairs.” Richards could almost say the same now about the Haeckel literature—were it not for the frequent attacks that have battered and bloodied the reputation of Haeckel, who has been accused of everything from scientific fraud and incompetence to racism, anti-Semitism and proto-Nazism.

More here.

Natalie Angier in the New York Times:

Deceitful behavior has a long and storied history in the evolution of social life, and the more sophisticated the animal, it seems, the more commonplace the con games, the more cunning their contours.

In a comparative survey of primate behavior, Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland found a direct relationship between sneakiness and brain size. The larger the average volume of a primate species’ neocortex — the newest, “highest” region of the brain — the greater the chance that the monkey or ape would pull a stunt like this one described in The New Scientist: a young baboon being chased by an enraged mother intent on punishment suddenly stopped in midpursuit, stood up and began scanning the horizon intently, an act that conveniently distracted the entire baboon troop into preparing for nonexistent intruders.

Much evidence suggests that we humans, with our densely corrugated neocortex, lie to one another chronically and with aplomb. Investigating what they called “lying in day-to-day life,” Bella DePaulo, now a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her colleagues asked 77 college students and 70 people from the community to keep anonymous diaries for a week and to note the hows and whys of every lie they told.

More here.

Elif Karakoc. Love is old, love is new. Love is all, love is you. 2007.

More here and here.

Sarah Kerr in the New York Review of Books:

Well beyond his sometimes nomadic life, Roberto Bolaño was an exemplary literary rebel. To drag fiction toward the unknown he had to go there himself, and then invent a method with which to represent it. Since the unknown place was reality, the results of his work are multi-dimensional, in a way that runs ahead of a critic's one-at-a-time powers of description. Highlight Bolaño's conceptual play and you risk missing the sex and viscera in his work. Stress his ambition and his many references and you conjure up threats of exclusive high-modernist obscurity, or literature as a sterile game, when the truth is it's hard to think of a writer who is less of a snob, or—in the double sense of exposing us to unsavory things and carrying seeds for the future—less sterile.

The contours of his life are becoming well known. Bolaño died of liver failure in 2003 in Spain, where he had long resided. He was born in southern Chile in 1953—a wrenchingly different place and era. His father had been a champion amateur boxer and his mother was a teacher who encouraged her dyslexic son's love of poetry. In 1968, the family moved to Mexico City, where Bolaño began to acquire a cosmopolitan self-education through the happily random method of shoplifting books. (As an adult his taste was wide enough to appreciate Paracelsus, Max Beerbohm, and Philip K. Dick.)

In 1973, playing his small part in the political fever of the day, he returned to Chile to support the embattled socialist cause of Salvador Allende. What happened next seems to live on in his fiction's patterns of abrupt cessation.

More here.

///
Morning
Robert Creeley

dam's broke,
head's a
waterfall.
.

Peter Ward in Scientific American:

When you ask for opinions about what future humans might look like, you typically get one of two answers. Some people trot out the old science-fiction vision of a big-brained human with a high forehead and higher intellect. Others say humans are no longer evolving physically—that technology has put an end to the brutal logic of natural selection and that evolution is now purely cultural.

The big-brain vision has no real scientific basis. The fossil record of skull sizes over the past several thousand generations shows that our days of rapid increase in brain size are long over. Accordingly, most scientists a few years ago would have taken the view that human physical evolution has ceased. But DNA techniques, which probe genomes both present and past, have unleashed a revolution in studying evolution; they tell a different story. Not only has Homo sapiens been doing some major genetic reshuffling since our species formed, but the rate of human evolution may, if anything, have increased. In common with other organisms, we underwent the most dramatic changes to our body shape when our species first appeared, but we continue to show genetically induced changes to our physiology and perhaps to our behavior as well. Until fairly recently in our history, human races in various parts of the world were becoming more rather than less distinct. Even today the conditions of modern life could be driving changes to genes for certain behavioral traits.

If giant brains are not in store for us, then what is? Will we become larger or smaller, smarter or dumber? How will the emergence of new diseases and the rise in global temperature shape us? Will a new human species arise one day? Or does the future evolution of humanity lie not within our genes but within our technology, as we augment our brains and bodies with silicon and steel? Are we but the builders of the next dominant intelligence on the earth—the machines?

More here.

From MSNBC:

But the Christmas season isn't just for Christians anymore: Even atheists are picking up on the holiday spirit, with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and like-minded deep thinkers putting on a show called “Nine Lessons and Carols for the Godless.” The London show looks at marvels such as the big bang, evolution and the nature of consciousness from a totally secular perspective. Dawkins told the Telegraph that he was taking part in the show because he was “fed up with atheists being portrayed as Scrooges, trying to rain on Christmas.” Whether you're more concerned about the soul or the solstice, December provides a good opportunity for reflecting on cosmic themes. You don't have to be a religious believer to get into that reflective frame of mind. “You just have to be an astronomical believer,” Ann Druyan, the widow of the late astronomer (and agnostic) Carl Sagan, told me today.

“There's a sense of sadness, but also tremendous hope – more hope for the future than I've had for a long time,” Druyan said. One big reason for that is last month's election of President-elect Barack Obama – the candidate for whom Druyan went doorbell-ringing this year. Obama's recent choices for science-related posts have added to her optimism. “I think Carl would have worked to get Obama elected,” Druyan said. “I think he would have been very excited.” Although it's been 12 years since Sagan left this life, his legacy is, if anything, more lively than ever. Druyan is tickled to hear that people are selling WWSD (What Would Sagan Do?) T-shirts and that there are thousands and thousands of Carl Sagan videos on YouTube. (It hasn't gotten to the “billions and billions” level … yet.)

Read more here and listen to Carl Sagan deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture in 1977 on the topic of the planets.

Greece has been torn apart by the worst riots in decades, now entering their third week. Bands of self-declared anarchist youths have rampaged through the streets of Athens and other major cities causing hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage, setting off a spiral of unrest in which the nation’s unions, among other groups, have taken part. Both shops and hotel lobbies have been ransacked, and hospitals, airports, and transport have been brought to a standstill. What sparked the riots was the accidental police shooting of a 15-year-old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos. But as usual in such cases, there was much more in the way of causes lying beneath the surface. Youth unemployment is high throughout the European Union, but it is particularly high in Greece, hovering between 25 and 30 percent. With few job prospects, rampant poverty in the face of nouveau riche prosperity, a public university system in shambles, a bloated government sector in desperate need of an overhaul, and a weak, defensive conservative government with only a one-seat majority in parliament, it is a ripe period for protests, which have had as their aim the fall of Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis.

more from The Atlantic here.

GS: If you go to a Russian restaurant, the first thing you see on every menu is zakuski. Which literally means “the thing you follow it with.” “It” being vodka. Appetizers are built around vodka. The mystery of Russia centers on what will happen at the end of the day, or the middle of the day. That being the drinking of the 150 grams (5.29 ounces) of vodka. When I go back there, and I go back every year, I have to acclimate like you would in Denver. Everyone, especially the men, brings their own bottle of vodka. Each finishes their bottle and they enter that land of no return. I’m not a religious person by any means, but you feel this kind of strange communion. With people who, if you had met them on the street, you’d think, “My goodness, look at this strange specimen.”

MDM: Your compatriot Anton Chekov described the perfect eight-course meal for a journalist: “Glass of vodka, daily shchi with yesterday’s kasha; two glasses of vodka, suckling pig with horseradish; three glasses of vodka, horseradish, cayenne pepper and soy sauce; four glasses of vodka; seven bottles of beer.”

GS: That’s a nice meal. Marinated mushrooms are great with vodka, duck is good, too. Nice fatty duck. It’s a marvelous drinking culture. Now a lot of the middle-class Russians are switching to beer. A Western influence.

MDM: I understand the government is pushing it. To get them off the vodka.

more from Modern Drunkard here.

Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

Among the South American writers well known to North American readers, Jorge Luis Borges is the cool, cerebral one. His austere little fable titled “The Library of Babel,” first published in 1944, describes a universal library—universal both in the sense that it fills the universe and also in the sense that it contains at least one copy of everything:

All—the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language . . .

The list goes on, but you get the idea. The secret behind this limitless collection of implausible texts lies in simple combinatorics. All those documents—and plenty more!—are guaranteed to be present somewhere on the shelves of the library because the books include every possible sequence of symbols that can be assembled from a fixed alphabet in a certain number of pages.

In William Goldbloom Bloch’s mathematical companion to “The Library of Babel,” the first task is to calculate the number of distinct books that can be created in this way. There’s not much to it. Borges tells us that the alphabet of the books is restricted to 25 symbols (22 letters, the comma, the period and the word space). He also mentions that each book has 410 pages, with 40 lines of 80 characters on each page. Thus a book consists of 410 × 40 × 80 = 1,312,000 symbols. There are 25 choices for each of these symbols, and so the library’s collection consists of 25^1,312,000 books.

More here.