From Science:

Most children practice this mental trick: When asked to wait patiently for a promised treat–say, an hour of television–they occupy themselves with a toy or a book. Researchers have now shown that chimpanzees engage in similar self-distraction, a finding that further blurs the cognitive and behavioral boundary between humans and other primates.

The discovery comes from a study conducted at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Psychologists Theodore Evans and Michael Beran put each of four chimps in front of a container connected to a candy dispenser. The chimps could reach over and pick up the container to eat the accumulated candies at any time, but doing so stopped the dispenser from delivering any more. That allowed the chimps to delay the reward as long as they wanted–so that they could get more of it.

More here.

Ruchira Paul in Accidental Blogger:

In my introductory virtual exhibition I posted some original compositions. This post contains paintings which are copies of other artists’ works.  As a student and amateur artist, I have made many copies over the years, true and inspired –  of real objects, human beings, photographs and other artists’ works as my model. The exercise is akin to penmanship – for practice and to improve drawing skills and techniques. Occasionally, a copy turns out to be so satisfactory, that happily it becomes a work of art worth preserving . I display them in my home for my own enjoyment and am doing so now on the blog, for yours. These pictures are a testimony to my skills as an illustrator, much like a billboard artist – not my artistic flair. I have spoken with those in the know about the wisdom of putting them out for public consumption.  They assure me that as long as I do not offer such art for sale or claim them as my own, I am not violating any ethical boundaries, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery .. etc.

More here.

From Don’t Fear the Truth:

In case you live under a rock (or you watch Fox News for your information) the Internets have been ABUZZ for months and months over the Executive orders that Bush has been creating that give him greater and greater controls over US citizens, and the country. For example, in the event of a catastrophe (which is defined loosely, this could be a hurricane like Katrina) Bush is given control of the entire country, congress, law enforcement, state governments, etc. Everything.

This video is a radio broadcast interview of Paul Craig Roberts, he was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.

This is NOT some conspiracy theorist/some guy off the street. People laugh at the worries of some people that Bush is being given too much power, but this guy is saying the US is in danger of becoming a police state within one year.

Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

Earlier this month, members of the International Academy of Sex Research, gathering for their annual meeting in Vancouver, informally discussed one of the most contentious and personal social science controversies in recent memory.

The central figure, J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University, has promoted a theory that his critics think is inaccurate, insulting and potentially damaging to transgender women. In the past few years, several prominent academics who are transgender have made a series of accusations against the psychologist, including that he committed ethics violations. A transgender woman he wrote about has accused him of a sexual impropriety, and Dr. Bailey has become a reviled figure for some in the gay and transgender communities.

More here.

Michael Ware and Thomas Evans at CNN:

Nightmarish political realities in Baghdad are prompting American officials to curb their vision for democracy in Iraq. Instead, the officials now say they are willing to settle for a government that functions and can bring security.

A workable democratic and sovereign government in Iraq was one of the Bush administration’s stated goals of the war.

But for the first time, exasperated front-line U.S. generals talk openly of non-democratic governmental alternatives, and while the two top U.S. officials in Iraq still talk about preserving the country’s nascent democratic institutions, they say their ambitions aren’t as “lofty” as they once had been.

“Democratic institutions are not necessarily the way ahead in the long-term future,” said Brig. Gen. John “Mick” Bednarek, part of Task Force Lightning in Diyala province, one of the war’s major battlegrounds.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein reports:

Prominent skeptic and science blogger PZ Myers is in the middle of a legal battle because he had the temerity to pan some crank’s book (twice!).

The embittered author, Dr. Stuart Pivar, filed a lawsuit against Myers’ publisher in New York’s Southern District Court on August 16th.

Andrea Bottaro of Panda’s Thumb reports that Pivar is seeking $15 million in damages from Myers and his publisher Seed Media Company.

Pivar claims he was libeled why Myers described him as a “classic crackpot.” Here’s my favorite part of the complaint (pdf):

16. On July 12, 2007, Defendant Myers maliciously, and without cause, defamed Plaintiff by referring to him as “a classic crackpot.”

17. Upon information and belief, Defendant Myers’ references to Plaintiff as “a classic crackpot” were necessarily intended to disparage Plaintiff’s abilities as a scientific enquirer and were intended to hold Plaintiff up to ridicule and embarrassment in this specific area of Plaintiff’s professional endeavors.

Over at PZ Myers’ site, his statement.

Via Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber, a paper by some of my old teachers Jack Snyder, Robert Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon on the Iraq war:

Why did America invade Iraq? The glib answer is “because it could.” In the unipolar moment, the immediate costs and risks of using military force against Saddam Hussein’s hollow, troublesome regime seemed low to U.S. leaders.

But this explanation begs the important questions. Disproportionate power allows greater freedom of action, but it is consistent with a broad spectrum of policies, ranging from messianic attempts to impose a new world order to smug insulation from the world’s quagmires. How this freedom is used depends on how threats and opportunities are interpreted through the prism of ideology and domestic politics. In this sense, unipolarity was a permissive cause of the Bush Administration’s preventive war doctrine and its application in Iraq. America’s unprecedented power combined with the motivation and opportunity presented by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack to permit the President to reframe the assumptions behind American global strategy.

The free hand in strategy is an enduring feature of American foreign policy. Unipolarity simply gave it unprecedented latitude…

What changed in 2001 was not just the terrorist attack, but also the ideological and political environment that made the most of it. Three decades of increasing partisan ideological polarization on domestic issues culminated in the Bush Administration’s extending it into the realm of foreign policy. Even before September 11, the Bush Administration was well stocked with Republican hawks and neo-conservative ideologues who already had in their briefcases the blueprints to reframe American strategy. These ideological revolutionaries in foreign policy emerged as a result of the same underlying partisan incentives that had earlier polarized partisan stances on domestic policy. While the American public has remained centrist, less moderate activists in both parties have been able to exploit the primary system, money politics, and media message control to succeed by appealing mainly to their partisan bases.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The amazing thing about 1001 Paintings is thus the breeziness of it all. It is a dilettante’s book. Its intended reader is surely someone like the woman pictured on the cover, standing with her back to us, wearing a tasteful black dress and expensive, though not gaudy, earrings. She went to Brown, I think, where she studied English literature and wrote a thesis on Wordsworth. She still loves reading Keats when she gets the chance but her career in financial services and her role as board member for several non-profits prevents her from dedicating as much time to art and literature as she would like.

Yet, mock her as we might, our woman in black from Brown is right, because the dilettantes are always right, because paintings are for looking at, and because every claim about what painting “should be” gets shriveled and old and academic even before the canvas does. The dilettante doesn’t care much about what painting “should be,” only about what it is and has been. And the thing that keeps this standpoint from being utterly trivial is the hint of melancholy in it. The dilettante is interested in all things equally because in the long eye of time all things are equally transient. Looking can become delightful again from that perspective, but it is tinged with the mark of death. The dilettante acknowledges this mark, and then goes about the business of living.

Thus the title, 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die. Acknowledge death, move on. The answer that the book thus gives to the question “What is Painting?” is simple and clear. The answer is “Who cares?” More pertinent to this book is the question “What’s the next painting I should see?” I want to stress again that this is a remarkable question and, I think, an inherently good one. It is a question that completely ignores the “What Is?” style of inquiry and gets right to the looking. And that is a bold and liberating thing to do.

More here.

From BBC News:

A University of Newcastle study found that women naturally opted for redder shades when given a choice. Writing in the journal Current Biology, experts say it may have helped women gather ripe fruit, or pick healthy mates. Most earlier studies into colour suggest a universal liking for blue, regardless of sex. This is one of the few studies that have tried to spot differences between the likes of males and females. The Newcastle team, led by Dr Anya Hurlbert, tested more than 200 men and women in their 20s, asking them to choose between colours on the computer screen. Women were far more likely to choose blue shades with more red mixed in, and more likely to reject more green and yellow hues.

One of the problems facing the researchers was to work out if this reaction is the product of years of British “blue for a boy, pink for a girl” culture. To do this, the group tested were a mixture of white British and Chinese volunteers. While the Chinese volunteers, male and female, also tended to favour red shades, not surprisingly since red is a “lucky” colour in China, the difference between men and women persisted. According to the researchers, this strengthened the idea that the preferences might be based in biology, rather than culture.

More here.

From Science:

People who start their mornings by pouring cream and sugar into a steaming mug of coffee are usually trying to mask the beverage’s bitterness. But the reason coffee makes us pucker has eluded scientists for decades. Now, researchers have narrowed the search by identifying two chemical compounds responsible for bitter taste in coffees ranging from mild breakfast blends to intense espressos. According to work presented here at the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society, it turns out that the roasting process–not the raw beans–produces these compounds, a finding that could open the door to improved methods for processing coffee beans.

A cup of coffee is a complex brew of more than 30 chemical compounds that contribute to its taste, aroma, and acidity. Since the 1930s, scientists have separated and identified numerous chemicals responsible for many of the sensory components of a cup of joe, but few have investigated those that produce bitterness.

More here.

The always brilliant Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

Thanks to some heroic efforts on the part of folks who would just as soon lurk behind the scenes, we now have video captured from the C-SPAN broadcast of our science panel at YearlyKos. Here is my talk, conveniently divided into two pieces to appease the YouTube gods. They are a little fuzzy, but you get the idea. I used the mysterious beauty of dark matter and dark energy as an excuse to make some didactic points about science and rationality and politics. (If I weren’t an atheist, I would have made a good preacher.) You can also find videos of Chris’s talk and Ed’s talk at their respective sites; Tara, who felt sorry for me for being given the impossible task of making the universe sound interesting, has the Q&A up as well.

Part 1:

Part 2:

More here.

Just go here.  [Thanks to John Selogy.]

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Those of us in the fast-growing atheist community who have long suspected that there is a change in the zeitgeist concerning “faith” can take some encouragement from the decision of the New York Times Magazine to feature professor Mark Lilla on the cover of the Aug. 19 edition. But we also, on reading the extremely lucid extract from his new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West, are expected to take some harsh punishment. Briefly stated, the Lilla thesis is as follows:

• The notion of a “separation” of church and state comes from a unique historical contingency of desperate and destructive warfare between discrepant Christian sects, which led Thomas Hobbes to propose a historical compromise in the pages of his 17^th-century masterpiece, Leviathan. There is no general reason why Hobbes’ proposal will work at all times or in all places.
• Human beings are pattern-seeking animals who will prefer even a bad theory or a conspiracy theory to no theory at all, and they are thus (in an excellent term derived by Lilla from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) by nature “theotropic,” or inclined toward religion.
• That instinct being stronger than any discrete historical moment, it is idle to imagine that mere scientific or material progress will abolish the worshipping impulse.
• Liberalism is especially implicated in this problem, because the desire for a better world very often takes a religious form, and thus it is wishful to identify “belief” with the old forces of reaction, because it will also underpin utopian or messianic or other social-engineering fantasies.

Taken separately, all these points are valid in and of themselves. Examined more closely, they do not cohere as well as all that.

More here.

John Tierny in the New York Times:

The “single most underappreciated fact about gender,” he said, is the ratio of our male to female ancestors. While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.

“It would be shocking if these vastly different reproductive odds for men and women failed to produce some personality differences,” he said, and continued:

For women throughout history (and prehistory), the odds of reproducing have been pretty good. Later in this talk we will ponder things like, why was it so rare for a hundred women to get together and build a ship and sail off to explore unknown regions, whereas men have fairly regularly done such things? But taking chances like that would be stupid, from the perspective of a biological organism seeking to reproduce. They might drown or be killed by savages or catch a disease. For women, the optimal thing to do is go along with the crowd, be nice, play it safe. The odds are good that men will come along and offer sex and you’ll be able to have babies. All that matters is choosing the best offer. We’re descended from women who played it safe

More here.

Roger Boylan in the Boston Review:

He finds the right word, however unexpected. Any sampling of his work shows this; take a random sentence from the beginning of the story “Cloud, Castle, Lake”:

The locomotive, working rapidly with its elbows, hurried through a pine forest, then—with relief— among fields.

Whenever I reread this story I share anew the hardworking locomotive’s unexpected relief. And in Speak, Memory, that glowing memoir, we find an echo of Shakespeare (except for the pure Nabokovian parenthesis):

How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!

Or this, from the opening pages of The Gift (1963):

In the curds-and-whey sky opaline pits now and then formed where the blind sun circulated.

Opaline! The heart sings. And in the same opening pages Stendhal’s famous comment about the novel being a mirror carried along a highway is neatly subverted and made into art.

As he crossed toward the pharmacy at the corner he involuntarily turned his head because of a burst of light that had ricocheted from his temple, and saw, with that quick smile with which we greet a rainbow or a rose, a blindingly white parallelogram of sky being unloaded from the van—a dresser with mirror across which, as across a cinema screen, passed a flawlessly clear reflection of boughs sliding and swaying not arboreally, but with a human vacillation, produced by the nature of those who were carrying this sky, these boughs, this gliding façade.

This is what John Updike meant when he said that Nabokov wrote prose “the way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”

More here.

Abul Taher in the Times of London:

A miracle material for the 21st century could protect your home against bomb blasts, mop up oil spillages and even help man to fly to Mars.

Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of 1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than 1,300C.

Scientists are working to discover new applications for the substance, ranging from the next generation of tennis rackets to super-insulated space suits for a manned mission to Mars.

It is expected to rank alongside wonder products from previous generations such as Bakelite in the 1930s, carbon fibre in the 1980s and silicone in the 1990s. Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said: “It is an amazing material. It has the lowest density of any product known to man, yet at the same time it can do so much. I can see aerogel being used for everything from filtering polluted water to insulating against extreme temperatures and even for jewellery.”

Aerogel is nicknamed “frozen smoke” and is made by extracting water from a silica gel, then replacing it with gas such as carbon dioxide.

More here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

From Democracy Now:

The American Psychological Association has voted to overwhelmingly reject a measure that would have banned its members from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other US detention centers. The vote took place at the association’s annual convention this weekend in San Francisco.

With 148,000 members, the APA is the largest body of psychologists in the world. Unlike the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association allows its members to participate in detainee interrogations.

The issue came to a head this weekend during the association’s annual convention. A special series of sessions on ethics and interrogations was held over the three days with panel members that included psychologists, military interrogators, attorneys and human rights activists.

The sessions led up to the vote on Sunday by the APA’s policymaking council. While not banning psychologists from participating in interrogations, the council approved a resolution prohibiting involvement in interrogations that use at least 14 specified methods, including sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and mock executions.

More here.  [Thanks to Élan Reisner.]

Via Mtanga:

George Johnson in the New York Times:

It was Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip, where earlier this summer the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness was holding its annual meeting at the Imperial Palace Hotel. The organization’s last gathering had been in the staid environs of Oxford, but Las Vegas — the city of illusions, where the Statue of Liberty stares past Camelot at the Sphinx — turned out to be the perfect locale. After two days of presentations by scientists and philosophers speculating on how the mind construes, and misconstrues, reality, we were hearing from the pros: James (The Amazing) Randi, Johnny Thompson (The Great Tomsoni), Mac King and Teller — magicians who had intuitively mastered some of the lessons being learned in the laboratory about the limits of cognition and attention.

“This wasn’t just a group of world-class performers,” said Susana Martinez-Conde, a scientist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix who studies optical illusions and what they say about the brain. “They were hand-picked because of their specific interest in the cognitive principles underlying the magic.”

She and Stephen Macknik, another Barrow researcher, organized the symposium, appropriately called the Magic of Consciousness.

More here.

Andrew Waggoner in New Musicbox:

Music is everywhere; we have more of it, available in more forms, more often, than at any time in human history. I can go to the web and find O King of Berio, Baksimba dances from Uganda, something really obscure like Why Are we Born (not to have a good time) of the young Buck Owens, even Pat Boone’s version of Tutti Frutti; I can find all of the same at the mall. Surely this is a good thing. I can find renewal of spirit in Sur Incises of Boulez or stand aghast at the toxic grandiloquence of Franz Schmidt’s Book of the Seven Seals. Music is everywhere. Long live it.

Just give me five minutes without it; that’s all I ask, perhaps all I’ll need to bring it back into being for myself. Imprisoned by it as I am now, assaulted in every store, elevator, voice-mail system, passing car, neighbor’s home, by it and its consequent immolation in the noise of the quotidian, it is lost to me as anything other than a kind of psychic rape, a forced intimacy with sonic partners not of my choosing. When music is everywhere, it is nowhere; when everything is music, nothing is. Silence is as crucial to the musical experience as any of its sounding parameters, and not merely as a kind of acoustical “negative space.” Silence births, nurtures, and eventually takes back the musical utterance; it shapes both the formation of its textures and the arc of its progress through time.

More here.