From Edge:

I recently paid a visit to the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London to see Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a long-time friend with whom I have a mutual connection: we both worked closely with the late James Lee Byars, the conceptual artist who, in 1971, implemented “The World Question Center” as a work of conceptual art.

I was delighted to find the walls of Obrist’s office covered with single pages of size A4 paper on which artists, writers, scientists had responded to his question: “What Is Your Formula?” Among the pieces were formulas by quantum physicist David Deutsch, artist and musician Brian Eno, architect Rem Koolhaas, and fractal mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

Within minutes we had hatched an Edge-Serpentine collaboration for a World Question Center project, which would further the reach of Obrist’s question by asking for responses from the science-minded Edge community, thus complementing the rich array of formulas already assembled from distinguished artists such as Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Gilbert & George, and Rosemarie Trockel.

For the purposes of this collaboration, the question was been broadened to:

“WHAT IS YOUR FORMULA? YOUR EQUATION? YOUR ALGORITHM?”

More here.

Greg Miller in ScienceNOW Daily News:

Capsaicin, the compound that puts the fire in jalapeños and habañeros, has already been marketed as a balm for stiff joints and arthritis. But a new study harnesses capsaicin’s special affinity for pain-sensing neurons in a more clever way, using it to open tiny channels on the cells’ surfaces so that another drug–an anesthetic–can get inside. The work could lead to treatments that dull pain without causing numbness or temporary paralysis.

Many local anesthetics work by blocking sodium channels, pores on the surface of neurons that let ions flow into the cells to generate the electrical impulses neurons use to communicate. Blocking sodium channels blocks more than just pain, however. It also shuts down nerves carrying touch information, as well as those that control movement. That’s why people sometimes leave the dentist’s office drooling, slurring their speech, and unable to feel their tongues.

In The Nation:

Has feminism become more inclusive?

Feminism was always diverse, but the mainstream movement that got the most attention was the white upper middle class women part of it. But women were always working, always active, especially women of color and queer women. But those women weren’t being acknowledged, weren’t being called feminists publicly, weren’t having their work paid attention to. Now with younger feminists across the board, I hear all the time, oh young women aren’t doing anything, and I’m like where have you been? I could name 10 women under thirty five who are directors of feminist organizations, but it’s not like ‘NOW is inviting them anywhere..

In the Boston Review, Owen Fiss and Luis Moreno-Ocampo debate the International Criminal Court. Fiss:

Pragmatic considerations, not structural necessities, may well have led some African nations to turn to international institutions. Justice requires not only a public judgment and the imposition of some form of punishment, but also that this judgment and punishment be the product of a fair trial, indeed countless trials. Fairness requires that these trials be held on a particularized basis, focusing on the individual or group of individuals responsible for a specific event or series of events. Courts must be staffed and lawyers appointed, parties must have the opportunity to gather and present evidence and to rebut contradictory evidence, and some system must be in place for reviewing the initial verdict. As a result, human rights trials require an enormous commitment of resources—time, energy, and money—that will be diverted from other pressing projects. It is estimated that the Rwanda tribunal has already spent more than $1 billion. The Sierra Leone tribunal spends about $35 million a year. The ICC will spend more than $120 million dollars in 2007 alone.

Human rights trials not only consume enormous resources; they also challenge the power of the regime, especially when the need arises to arrest suspects, compel witnesses to testify, and inflict punishment. Those who are prosecuted are likely to resist, and if, as is often the case, they were military commanders of either rebel or government forces, they may be able to call upon the loyalty of those they once led. Sometimes the perpetrators will have fled the country. Yet international tribunals often suffer from these same deficits of power—indeed, in some cases international tribunals may have even less power (to detain suspects, for example)—although effective resistance to their work does not put the authority of the ruling regime in question.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo:

The drafters were well aware that rendering justice in the context of massive crimes or peace negotiations would present particular difficulties. Careful decisions were made: a high threshold of gravity for the jurisdiction of the court was established; a system of complementarity was designed whereby the court may intervene only as a last resort, when states are unable or unwilling to act; and the UN Security Council was given a role in cases of threats to peace and security.

Fiss ignores this development and suggests that delegating responsibility to international tribunals “qualifies the commitment of the nation-state to human rights and lessens the meaning of the human rights trial that eventually takes place. Half a loaf is better than none, but it is still half a loaf.”

From Dissent:

Question: Atheism seems to sell in the United States. There are “New Atheist” best sellers. At the same time, “New Atheists” claim to be repressed by widespread American religious sensibilities. Why is atheism having such resonance?

Mitchell Cohen: Best sellers have contexts. The context today is a reaction against politicized and intolerant religious fundamentalists who have acted aggressively to impose their views of the world on American politics and public life for several decades. A strong intellectual challenge to them has been long overdue.

At the same time, I think we should avoid talking about “best-sellers” and about the relation between religion and politics in the U.S. in a simplistic way. Two decades ago Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was a best seller even though it is pretty incomprehensible if you lack familiarity with Heidegger, Deconstructionism and Leo Strauss. The context? Thousands probably purchased this conservative tome because they heard about the “culture wars” and that universities were full of professors teaching subversive ideas.

More here.

I recall that the Italian city states of the Renaissance had shifted from using citizen armies to mercenaries over time, as they became the fiefdom’s of narrower interests. Michiavelli thought they helped undermine republican liberty. Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

Private security contractors outnumber now outnumber uniformed military personnel in Iraq. According to Singer, there are 160,000 armed civilian contractors in the country today. Some are under contract to U.S. federal agencies, including the State Department. Others are hired by private interests because the American occupying force cannot maintain adequate security.

Private security companies claim to support the U.S. military, but in fact, the interests of the two groups frequently conflict. Contractors answer to their clients, not to the generals on the ground, and certainly not to the public. Contractors are hired to protect the individuals who sign their checks—even if they undermine the overall counterinsurgency effort in the process.

These unaccountable private forces are actively undermining the U.S. mission in Iraq by inflaming popular opinion against the occupation. According to Singer, Iraqi civilians see security contractors as an extension of the U.S. military.

The more damage the contractors do, the more troops are needed to fight the insurgency. As the need for boots on the ground increases, so does the temptation to hire more contractors.

After forty years of studying dreams, Hobson seems seduced again by the mysteries that originally brought him to the field. Hard science can never adequately describe that murky, intuitive feeling in the morning—the sense that you spent the night somewhere else. When Freud abandoned his Project for a Scientific Psychology, there were problems beyond primitive technology: Deconstructing a dream is about as mathematical as pinpointing the coordinates of the Garden of Eden. The fascination endures because it’s just out of reach, never fulfilled. Hobson was equipped with far more scientific knowledge than Freud could ever hope for, but he still finds himself making imaginative leaps, translating images into themes and symbols and fantasies. The concept of dreaming is born from this impulse: it’s too hard to resist a good story.

more from The Believer here.

To build an intellectual argument through storytelling has its pitfalls, and one of the common charges against Naipaul is that he overgeneralises from the particular. In this book, for example, India is condemned for its materialism because an Indian publisher produced a shoddy version of a book by Naipaul’s father. This is Naipaul in his dinner-party mode, snappily assertive, brooking no dissent. But the Powell essay isn’t guilty of that fault. The particulars illustrate the book’s essential argument that Naipaul had to find a new way of writing, entirely his own, because he could find no models that fitted his experience. He couldn’t, in the end, understand why Powell was a writer. Where was the need? European society was already “over-written-about” when Powell set out in 1930. Dickens, Eliot, the great Russian and French novelists—they’d crawled all over it: “very little about these great European societies had been left unsaid. The societies themselves had been diminished for various reasons… a diminished society couldn’t be written about in the old way, of social comment.” Poor Tony. The world had changed, his material was dead. Naipaul writes: “It is hard to be first. It is possibly harder to come near the end.”

more from Prospect Magazine here.

“GIVEN THE FINE ARTS, architecture, painting, and sculpture, I feel caught in the middle,” Frank Stella said recently. For anyone with a passing knowledge of the work he has made over the course of the past fifty years, the statement is hardly surprising; for anyone who has kept up in the past fifteen, neither is the comment that followed: “Now I can’t stop thinking about architecture.” The oddity comes with what Stella said next: “I can only blame the pursuit of abstraction.”

It may seem a little unfair, in order to decipher this last remark, to begin years ago and worlds away, with the “Black Paintings.” Has any other artist’s early work ever so thoroughly conditioned his subsequent reception? But Stella’s “pursuit” did commence circa 1958 with those allover bands of black derived from support and frame, each subsequent canvas delivering a fresh blow to the flat picture plane’s promise of spatial illusionism and, in turn, exemplifying the high modernism whose critical articulation coincided with their making. “What you see is what you see” telegraphed how tautologically his odyssey began: For him, abstract painting was its own justification, intrinsically worthy. To hear Stella now describe his architectural forays as another stop on a quixotically ongoing crusade toward abstraction sounds peculiar, and maybe a little self-indulgent. Architecture is perhaps the least autonomous of all media, demanding collaboration, viability, use, habitation—is it even possible to conceive of its practice in the absence of these things, as an activity valid in and of itself?

more from artforum here.

From The Washington Post:

For a peek into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s roiling state of mind, go directly to Chapter 9 of his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” which is officially being released today as the court opens its new term. The chapter’s very title, “Invitation to a Lynching,” conjures up one of the vilest periods in American history and makes clear that Thomas sees himself as a persecuted black man who was hunted by white enemies. If there was any remaining mystery about whether Thomas has gotten over the confirmation hearings and sexual harassment allegations that humiliated him 16 years ago, the justice makes plain he hasn’t. His words speak to a level of bitterness that he previously has not communicated during his tenure on the court. What is perhaps most revealing, however, especially in the last two chapters of the book, is how Thomas has come to define his racial identity through the prism of literature. In Thomas’s eyes, he is both Richard Wright’s tragic Bigger Thomas in “Native Son” and Harper Lee’s doomed Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” two of the most powerful portrayals of racial division in American literature.

Thomas’s accuser, Anita Hill, was not a white woman but a black, Yale-educated law professor who had worked for him at two federal agencies. She testified that Thomas repeatedly made lewd, graphic sexual comments to her while trying against her wishes to pursue a romantic relationship.

More here.

From Newsweek:

Nobody is suggesting that all religious people are violent, intolerant, racist, bigoted, contemptuous of women and so on. It would be absurd to suggest such a thing: just as absurd as to generalize about all atheists. I am not even concerned with statistical generalizations about the majority of religious people (or atheists). My concern here is over whether there is any general reason why religion might be more or less likely to bias individuals towards all those unpleasant things in Christopher Hitchens’s list: to make them more likely to exhibit them than they would have been without religion. I think the answer is yes.

The nineteen men of 9/11, having washed, perfumed themselves and shaved their whole bodies in preparation for the martyr’s paradise, believed they were performing the highest religious duty. By the lights of their religion they were as good as it is possible to be. They were not poor, downtrodden, oppressed or psychotic; they were well educated, sane and well balanced, and, as they thought, supremely good. But they were religious, and that provided all the justification they needed to murder and destroy. Their madrassas and their mullahs had given them good reason to think they were on a fast track to paradise.

More here.

Brian Urquhart reviews Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite by Carne Ross, in the New York Review of Books:

Diplomacy is one of the world’s oldest professions, although diplomatic practice as we know it is a relatively recent development. Using ambassadors and envoys, often distinguished personalities of the time (Dante, Machiavelli, Peter Paul Rubens), was an accepted practice throughout recorded history. It was also regarded, in Europe at least, as “a kind of activity morally somewhat suspect and incapable of being brought under any system.”

The establishment of the international rules of diplomacy, including the immunity of diplomats, began with the Congresses of Vienna (1815) and Aix-la-Chapelle (1818). The rules were a European creation gradually adopted in the rest of the world. Further international conventions update them from time to time. Diplomats have enjoyed a surprising degree of immunity from criticism for the often violent and disorderly state of international affairs.

The history of diplomacy abounds with double-edged bons mots on the nature of ambassadors and diplomacy: “honorable spy”; “splendide mendax“; “a process of haggling, conducted with an utter disregard of the ordinary standards of morality, but with the most exquisite politeness”; and the sixteenth-century Sir Henry Wotton’s famous comment, allegedly in jest, that “an ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”In Independent Diplomat, Carne Ross has little patience with the qualified admiration and curiosity with which ambassadors have traditionally been regarded. He tells the story of the disillusionment and rebirth—also in diplomacy—of a fifteen-year veteran of one of the most internationally respected diplomatic establishments, the British Foreign Service.

More here.

Chris Gaylord in the Christian Science Monitor:

In the push to harvest alternative energy, scientists have tapped a number of novel sources: the sun, corn, old cooking oil. But how about the simple act of walking?

For two architecture students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., the sound of footsteps is an echo of energy gone to waste. They figure that the stomp of every footfall gives off enough power to light two 60-watt bulbs for one second.

“Now imagine how many people walk through a train station each morning, or walk down the street in Hong Kong,” says James Graham, who, with fellow MIT graduate student Thaddeus Jusczyk, is helping to develop the growing field of “crowd farming.”

They devised a special floor of sliding blocks that can turn motion energy (such as from a footstep) into electrical energy. As commuters march across the floor, it would collect tiny flickers of power from each stride and channel that energy.

More here.

From English comedian, writer, actor, novelist, filmmaker and television personality Stephen Fry’s blog:

Fame. It’s an embarrassing thing to talk about, for all that it is a national/global obsession. It is one of the few apparently desirable human qualities that … no, what am I talking about … it is not a quality. It is not like courage, mercy, kindness, strength, beauty or patience; or laziness, dishonesty, greed or cruelty for that matter. What is different about fame, I was going to say, is that it is so contingent. If you are tolerant or strong or wise, you are tolerant and strong and wise wherever you are on the planet that day. You don’t become bigoted, feeble and dim-witted the moment you cross a continent. Famous people however, can become entirely unknown the second they leave their homeland. Only the World Famous are famous everywhere, and there are precious few of them. They used to claim Mohammed Ali was about as well-known as a human could be, the same was said of Charlie Chaplin and Elvis. Who now? Osama bin Laden? Michael Jackson? Robbie Williams can walk around Los Angeles without being recognised and they say Johnny Carson was so surprised/irked/mortified at going unremarked in London whenever he showed up, as he did regularly for Wimbledon Fortnight, that he arranged for British TV to carry his Tonight Show at a reduced rate. Martha Stewart can travel by Tube unspotted, but not by Subway. And so on. As for myself, well, I mean next to nothing in Italy, but seem to strike a chord in Russia. Don’t ask.

Fame has this unusual property. It exists only in the mind of others. It is not an intrinsic characteristic, feature or achievement. Fame is wholly an exterior construct and yet, for all that it is defined by other people’s knowledge of a given person, they cannot dismantle or deactivate the fame that their knowledge engenders. What an ugly sentence. I mean this. We cannot, however much we may want to, make someone unfamous.

More here.  [Thanks to The Knackered Hack.]

From The Economist:

If Indian newspaper reports are to be believed, the children of Punjab are in the throes of a grey revolution. Even those as young as ten are sprouting tufts of white and grey hair. Some are going blind. In Punjabi villages, children and adults are afflicted by uncommon cancers.

The reason is massive and unregulated use of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals in India’s most intensively farmed state. According to an environmental report by Punjab’s government, the modest-sized state accounts for 17% of India’s total pesticide use. The state’s water, people, animals, milk and agricultural produce are all poisoned with the stuff.

Ignorance is part of the problem. The report includes details of a survey suggesting that nearly one-third of Punjabi farmers were unaware that pesticides come with instructions for use. Half of the farmers ignored these instructions. Three-quarters put empty pesticide containers to domestic uses.

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

I stayed on at the Lotus Guesthouse and struggled with my article for the Major American Adventure-Travel Magazine. Every time I researched some upscale mountain trek in the Nepal Himalayas or two-week scuba diving excursion off the coast of Papua New Guinea, I couldn’t help but ponder how pointless it all was. I began to e-mail my editor pointed questions about how one should define the “extremes of human experience.” How was kayaking a remote Chinese river, I asked, more notable than surviving on its shores for a lifetime? How did risking frostbite on a helicopter-supported journey to arctic Siberia constitute more of an “adventure” than risking frostbite on a winter road-crew in Upper Peninsula Michigan? Did anyone else think it was telling that bored British aristocrats — not the peoples of the Himalayas — were the ones who first deemed it important to climb Mount Everest? My editor’s replies were understandably terse.

more from The Smart Set here.

IN THE PAST few weeks, the secretive nation of Burma suddenly landed on the world’s front pages, as small demonstrations by monks spiraled into massive protests and triggered a violent crackdown by the military government. Such an impromptu uprising surprised many observers. Searching for explanations, some have cited the rising price of fuel, which is subsidized in Burma; this summer, the regime allowed the price to skyrocket, adding to the economic misery of average Burmese people.

But behind the unrest also lies a larger explanation, one that makes the isolated country a critical test of foreign policy. Burma’s brutal ruling junta, which has long kept power through force and fear, is taking the next step and transforming itself into one of the world’s few totalitarian regimes.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Cosma returns to the topic (definitely worth reading):

People seem to be experiencing more than the usual difficulty grasping what I was getting at in my posts on accent and intelligence. This is my fault, for trying to be cute rather than trying to be clear. (I realize I’m too murky even when I am trying to be clear.) I am already heartily sick of the subject, which is turning into the huge time-suck I was afraid it would be, and which presents a depressing prospect from every point of view, not least those which make it clear how rare it is for anyone to change their mind on any aspect of it for any cause at all. (I do wonder if I should’ve stuck with the original title of “Duet for Leo and Razib.”) My aim here is to lay everything out cleanly and explicitly, and be done with this matter.

I was originally going to do just one post, explaining why I called the general factor of intelligence a “statistical myth”, why I don’t put any real faith in what I regard as even the best of the current estimates of IQ’s heritability, and the evidence for IQ’s malleability. But the thing grew unwieldy, and the only thing which I find more dreary, right now, than discussing heritability and malleability is explaining why factor analysis can’t do what people want it to, so I’ll save that for later, and stick to the heritability and plasticity of IQ here. Whether IQ means anything or not, it is, unlike general intelligence, unquestionably something we can measure, so we can consider how heritable and malleable it is. I am going to assume that you know what “variance” and “correlation” are, but not too much else.

To summarize: Heritability is a technical measure of how much of the variance in a quantitative trait (such as IQ) is associated with genetic differences, in a population with a certain distribution of genotypes and environments. Under some very strong simplifying assumptions, quantitative geneticists use it to calculate the changes to be expected from artificial or natural selection in a statistically steady environment. It says nothing about how much the over-all level of the trait is under genetic control, and it says nothing about how much the trait can change under environmental interventions. If, despite this, one does want to find out the heritability of IQ for some human population, the fact that the simplifying assumptions I mentioned are clearly false in this case means that existing estimates are unreliable, and probably too high, maybe much too high.

From The New York Times:

A couple of weeks ago, while I was out of town on business, our cat, Cleo, died of liver failure. My husband and daughter buried her in the backyard, not far from the grave of our other cat, Manny, who had died just a few months earlier of mouth cancer. Cleo was almost 16 years old, she’d been sick, and her death was no surprise. Still, when I returned to a home without cats, without pets of any sort, I was startled by my grief — not so much its intensity as its specificity. It was very different from the catastrophic grief I’d felt when I was 19 and my father died, and all sense, color and flooring dropped from my days. This was a sorrow of details, of minor rhythms and assumptions that I hadn’t really been aware of until, suddenly, they were disrupted or unmet. Hey, I’m opening the door to the unfinished attic now. Doesn’t a cat want to try dashing inside to roll around in the loose wads of insulation while I yell at it to get out of there?

I’ve just dumped a pile of clean laundry on the bed and I’m starting to fold it. Why aren’t the cats jumping up for a quick sit? Don’t they know everything is still warm? We expect the bonds between children and parents, or between lovers or close friends, to be fierce and complex, and that makes them easy to understand. We expect the bonds between people and their pets to be simple and innocent, an antidote to human judgment and the fog of human speech, and that can make the bond paradoxically harder to track or explain. How do we feel about the nonhuman animals whose company we crave?

More here.