From Nature:

A study showing how HIV could prevent the brain from making new neurons offers an explanation for why some AIDS patients get dementia — and suggests a possible treatment. Researchers aren’t sure what causes the condition, which afflicts 10-30% of people with HIV and causes symptoms including forgetfulness and leg weakness. If untreated with antiretroviral drugs, sufferers can turn comatose. Biologists have two theories to explain AIDS-related dementia. It could be that when HIV infects a type of white blood cell called a macrophage, the cell pumps out inflammatory chemicals to battle the infection that also, unfortunately, wipe out neurons.

Or HIV could inflict its damage more directly. One previous study showed that a protein in the virus’s shell — called gp120 — can stop brain stem cells from dividing. Such new stem cells are needed to make new neurons. Neural stem cells in the transgenic mice also contained more of a protein called p38 than normal mice. In healthy cells, p38 guards against cancer by halting cell division when DNA strands get broken. If HIV prompts so much p38 that it stops normal cells from dividing, “it’s the opposite of cancer”, says Lipton. The researchers also found other proteins linked to p38 in the neural stem cells of the gp120-expressing mice.

More here.

Paul Gauguin’s Polynesian paintings are beautiful, mysterious things. In the 1890s, they suggested to the French men who saw them in Paris that traveling to Tahiti might include sex with gorgeous women, and maybe even men. What a Parisian woman felt looking at these paintings, I could only guess. Did she look over her shoulder to see if she’d been caught looking too closely? How did she respond to the question, not rhetorical I think, that Gauguin asks in the title of one painting, “What! Are you jealous?” In his own writings Gauguin tends to drastically synthesize the complexity of his artistic production into self-promotional statements such as, “I am beginning to think simply, to feel only a very little hatred for my neighbor – rather, to love him.” For me, it was a visceral-aesthetic response to Gauguin’s paintings, to their uncanny erotic beauty, that drew me in and sent me on a transformative journey of my own.

more from The Smart Set here.

A Pact With Sudden Death

Clearly the song will have to wait
Until the time when everything is serious.
Martyrs of fixed eye, with a special sigh,
Set down their goads. The skies have endured

Too long to be blasted into perdition this way,
And they fall, awash with blood and flowers.
In the dream next door they are still changing,
And the wakening changes too, into life.

“Is this life?” Yes, the last minute was, too –
And the joy of informing takes over
Like the crackle of artillery fire in the outer suburbs
And I was going to wish that you too were the “I”

more from the TLS here.

On this 60th anniversary of Indian independence, I post this, Satyajit Ray’s documentary of my favorite figure from the Indian national struggle, not least because he really wasn’t a nationalist and because of his deep decency, Rabindranath Tagore.

Part 2 can be found here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here.

Wiki Scanner tracks and lists anonymous edits to wikipedia entries by organizations (or at least by someone with access to their network), via Salon. E.g., for the Republican Party, 3 most recent at the time of posting: Harry Potter, Cheese Sandwich and Baath Party.

In Outlook India:

How, then, is education in India doing, 60 years after Nehru spoke of putting an end to “ignorance”—as well as “poverty”, “disease”, and “inequality of opportunity”? No honest assessment could be favourable. The staggeringly high rates of illiteracy, particularly among women and girls, the well-known problem of teacher absenteeism (in many areas it reaches the figure of 20 per cent), the scourge of “private tuition”—all these make the promise of educational opportunity utterly meaningless for large segments of India’s population. At one end we have the shiny success of the IITs, at the other the dismal daily reality of government schools in many urban and most rural areas. Kerala has shown that it is possible to produce virtually universal male and female literacy through an ideal-driven combination of intelligent planning and determined administration; the rest of the nation, however, has been slow to follow the slender southern state’s lead.

These well-known problems, however, are not India’s only—or even her greatest—dangers where education for democratic citizenship is concerned. With the ascendancy of the IITs has arisen a dominant conception of education that is technical, indeed mechanistic, given to force-feeding and regurgitation and suspicious of critical independence of mind. Education, in this picture, is about the implanting of useful skills that will ultimately lead to both personal and national enrichment. It should, therefore, focus on these technical skills and on the rote learning of whatever historical and political information is strictly necessary to deploy them in profitable ways. As Rabindranath Tagore once wrote of schools he knew, “Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can.” He already saw that the globalisation of the economy was leading to an educational imbalance, “obscuring (our) human side under the shadow of soul-less organisation”.

Elaine A. Ostrander in American Scientist:

A pekingese weighs only a couple of pounds; a St. Bernard can weigh over 180. Both dogs, though vastly different in appearance, are members of the same genus and species, Canis familiaris. How dog breeds can exhibit such an enormous level of variation between breeds, and yet show strong conformity within a breed, is a question of interest to breeders and everyday dog lovers alike. In the past few years, it has also become a compelling question for mammalian geneticists.

The “dog genome project” was launched in the early 1990s, motivated by scientists’ desire to find the genes that contributed to many of the ills suffered by purebred dogs. Most dog breeds have only been in existence for a few hundred years. Many exhibit limited genetic diversity, as dog breeds are typically descended from a small number of founders, created by crossing closely related individuals. Further, breeds often experience population bottlenecks as the popularity of the breed waxes and wanes. As a result of this population structure, genetic diseases are more common in purebred dogs than in mixed-breed dogs. Scientists have been motivated to use dog populations to find genes for diseases that affect both humans and dogs, including cancer, deafness, epilepsy, diabetes, cataracts and heart disease. In doing so we can simultaneously help man and man’s best friend.

More here.

Linda Colley looks at two books about Hillary Rodham Clinton, in the London Review of Books:

Hillary Clinton is manifestly a beneficiary and exemplar of a massive, historically recent and still ongoing transformation. ‘I represented a fundamental change in the way women functioned in our society,’ she wrote in Living History (2003); and, at one level, her life has indeed been a succession of hard-won firsts, and of admirable striving against prejudice, condescension and limited expectations. Yet some of her responses, and some of the circumstances of her career, have been traditional and backward-looking.

She was born in 1947 in Chicago. Her father, Hugh Rodham, was a dour, mean and staunchly Republican small businessman. Her mother, Dorothy, was mildly a Democrat and a suppressed, efficient housewife. Hillary’s upbringing in the suburb of Park Ridge seems to have been almost as close, insular and parsimonious as the future Margaret Thatcher’s in Grantham. Both girls, though, were afforded similar avenues of escape. Like Thatcher, Hillary Clinton was brought up in Methodism, with its stress on action, seriousness and good works. She was also – again like Thatcher – permitted a first-class education.

More here.

Go here.

From Scientific American:

Neuroscientists have long believed that the tremors, stiffness and sluggish gait characteristic of Parkinson’s disease resulted from the death of neurons in a section of the midbrain that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine, which helps to maintain proper motion control.

A new study in mice, however, suggests that the disorder may actually be caused not only by hobbled dopamine-producing cells but also by neurons in the locus coeruleus region of the brain stem that produce norepinephrine, a chemical related to dopamine and associated with everything from anxiety to attention to blood pressure regulation. The new finding could lead to new therapies for combating the debilitating condition.

More here.

…and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge…”

One day after I have celebrated the 60th anniversary of my own nation‘s birth and independence from colonial rule, I cannot refrain from quoting, once again, Nehru’s inimitably beautiful words spoken at India’s independence (a day after Pakistan’s in 1947, and therefore 60 years ago today), as a way of expressing congratulation to my sisters and brothers in that country ineluctably and inexorably forever twinned to my own:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

At the dawn of history India started on her unending quest, and trackless centuries are filled with her striving and the grandeur of her success and her failures. Through good and ill fortune alike she has never lost sight of that quest or forgotten the ideals which gave her strength. We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

Nehru’s speech continued here.

Salman Hameed in Science and Religion News:

Science sections of bookstores are lined up with books that have God somewhere in the title (The Language of God, The God Gene, God in the Machine, God’s Equation, etc). Its all about selling books and about getting attention in the media. Astronomers also have a special penchant for this. For example, we have fingers of god – an observational effect that makes clusters of galaxies appear elongated in our direction and to some it seems that cosmic fingers are pointing towards us. Some also described the variations in cosmic background radiation as the fingerprint of Creation. But here is an excellent article in defense of using such metaphors, and it focuses on the Higgs Boson – now also known as the God particle: What’s in a name? Parsing the ‘God Particle’ as the Ultimate Metaphor

In a stroke of either public relations genius or disaster, Leon M. Lederman, the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, referred to the Higgs as “the God particle” in the book of the same name he published with the science writer Dick Teresi in 1993. To Dr. Lederman, it made metaphorical sense, he explained in the book, because the Higgs mechanism made it possible to simplify the universe, resolving many different seeming forces into one, like tearing down the Tower of Babel. Besides, his publisher complained, nobody had ever heard of the Higgs particle.

More here.  [Photo shows Lederman.]

John Tierney in the New York Times:

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

(Headline meant sarcastically.) Melissa Lafsky over at the NYT Freakanomics blog:

Picking up women has been getting plenty of press these days, leading up to this week’s premiere of the VH1 reality show The Pick-Up Artist. The show follows eight “socially inept” men through an eight-week boot camp on seduction techniques, led by a self-proclaimed Lothario called “Mystery.” The headliner (whose real name is Erik Von Markovik) initially found fame after being profiled in Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, and went on to co-write his own book, How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed: The Mystery Method.

Under particular discussion is a pickup technique that Mystery advocates known as “negging” — a move that involves interjecting an insult during an initial conversation with a woman. The motivation behind the insult is, as Esquire’s A.J. Jacobs puts it, to “lower her self-esteem, thus making her more vulnerable to your advances.” While this tactic has provoked considerable ire, by all accounts from Strauss and his skirt-chasing Svengali, it seems to work.

Meanwhile, the psychologists Steve Stewart-Williams and William F. McKibbin have been researching the topic of men insulting women, publishing a study called “Why Do Men Insult Their Intimate Partners?” in the July Journal of Personality and Individual Differences.

The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.–W.H. Auden “Partition”

In the South Asian subcontinent, August 14th and 15th commemorate events that are joyous, traumatic and shameful all at once. With the displacement of millions and the deaths of hundreds of thousands accompanying independence (and the birth of Salim Sinai), the chaotic birth of the new states on the subcontinent, while not unique in kind, was unprecedented in scale. The very first foreseeable and immanent task of both new states was the protection of minorities, a task neither met with any competence. In the BBC, a report on the two men that cleaved and scarred the subcontinent:

But [Christopher] Beaumont [private secretary to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission] – who later in life was a circuit judge in the UK – is most scathing about how partition affected the Punjab, which was split between India and Pakistan.

“The Punjab partition was a disaster,” he writes.

“Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment.

“The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation.

“Thousands of people died or were uprooted from their homes in what was in effect a civil war.

“By the end of 1947 there were virtually no Hindus or Sikhs living in west Punjab – now part of Pakistan – and no Muslims in the Indian east.

“The British government and Mountbatten must bear a large part of the blame for this tragedy.”

Gabrielle Walker in Discover:

Near the west end of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, buried under the river plain of the Rhône, workers are fitting together the final pieces of the machine that hopes to unlock one of the biggest mysteries of the universe. It has taken over 20 years, $8 billion, and the combined efforts of more than 60 countries to create this extraordinary particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, built and operated by CERN, the European physics consortium.

The “large” in Large Hadron Collider is something of an understatement. “Enormous” is closer: The collider’s underground tunnel carves a circle 17 miles in circumference, traversing the border between Switzerland and France. At four locations it passes through caverns crammed with detectors the size of buildings. In a deliberately constructed rivalry, two of these detectors—along with their armies of scientists, engineers, and technicians—will vie with each other to discover the obscure but wildly important particle known as the Higgs boson.

More here.

Reading Witold Gombrowicz means confronting an artistic vision of extraordinary intensity, withering in its austerity, imperious in its dismissal of convention and cant, solicitous only of the truth, no matter how unpleasant or embarrassing.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act. Action will delineate and define you. You will find out from your actions. But you must act as an “I,” as an individual, because you can be certain only of your own needs, inclinations, passions, necessities. Only this kind of action is direct and is a genuine extricating of yourself from chaos, self-creation. As for the rest: isn’t it mere recitation, execution of a preordained plan, rubbish, kitsch?

Here in his Diary, Gombrowicz proves as demanding of himself as he is of the world he recreates in his novels, stories, and plays. A relentless opponent of hypocrisy, pretension, and the romantic attitude toward life, he castigated the dehumanization rampant in the world around him.

more from Context here.

Peter Pesic in American Scientist:

“Music is a science,” wrote the great composer and theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1722, “which should have definite rules; these rules should be drawn from an evident principle; and this principle cannot really be known to us without the aid of mathematics.” David J. Benson’s book Music: A Mathematical Offering gives the latest and fullest view of music in the light of mathematics. A professor of mathematics at the University of Aberdeen as well as a keen amateur singer, Benson has assembled a fascinating variety of topics that make his book a uniquely rich source, whether for classroom use, reference or self-study. He has constructed the different sections that flow from his general introduction to be independent, allowing readers to follow their own interests and predilections.

This book goes into mathematical details that many general accounts avoid, and here Benson deserves special praise for his skill and clarity. He does expect his readers to be familiar with standard college calculus, but he always presents his arguments with enough helpful explanation, good examples and exercises to put his audience at ease.

More here.

August is the Mississippi of the calendar. It’s beastly hot and muggy. It has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.

August is when the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when Anne Frank was arrested, when the first income tax was collected, when Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe died. Wings and Jefferson Airplane were formed in August. The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour debuted in August. (No August, no Sonny and Cher!)

August is the time when thugs and dictators think they can get away with it. World War I started in August 1914. The Nazis and Soviets signed their nonaggression pact in August 1939. Iraq invaded Kuwait Aug. 2, 1990. August is a popular month for coups and violent crime. Why August? Perhaps the villains assume we’ll be too distracted by vacations or humidity to notice.

more from Slate here.