Fae L. Korsmo in Physics Today:

In his essay “Six Cautionary Tales for Scientists,” Freeman Dyson warns against “the game of status seeking, organized around committees. It is not that committees are the root of evil, he writes, but that when presented with a choice between incremental, practical solutions and grand schemes that attract attention, committees have every incentive to choose the latter—even if the choice has a high probability of failure. Often the committees present the grand scheme as the only choice, an all-or-nothing proposition.

It is tempting to look back on the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58 as an audacious plan launched by a small committee of prominent scientists—an organized campaign that would involve planes, ships, and rockets. Walter Sullivan’s thorough account of the IGY is called, appropriately, Assault on the Unknown (McGraw-Hill, 1961). Visible legacies of the IGY include the launch of the first artificial Earth-orbiting satellites, the Antarctic Treaty, the World Data Center system, the discovery of the Van Allen belts, and the monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide and glacial dynamics. The IGY also led to the establishment of Earth sciences programs in many developing countries. Surely this was a grand scheme in a world that was still recovering from a devastating world war.

Yes and no. The IGY represents the largest set of coordinated experiments and field expeditions to be undertaken during the cold war. East met West, North met South, and all the physical sciences concerned with the atmosphere, continents, and oceans were represented.

More here.

Max Roach, someone whom I’ve had the good fortune of hearing live many times, is dead. In the NYT:

Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died Wednesday night at his home in New York. He was 83.

His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be ill for several years.

As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.

Darcy of Secret Society, who regularly teaches me a lot about jazz, has promised more on Roach; so look for it.

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

“When a country gets a capital inflow [such as the United States has now], generally speaking things are pretty good,” observes Jeffry Frieden, Stanfield professor of international peace. “It allows you to invest more than you save, and consume more than you produce. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that,” he notes. Firms do it all the time, and so do households. They borrow on the expectation that they will be more productive and better able to pay the money back in the future. The United States, for example, was “the world’s biggest debtor for a hundred years,” Frieden notes, “but the money was used to build the railroads and the canals and the factories and to improve the ports and to build our cities. It was used productively, and it worked. The question to ask now is not, ‘Is the country living beyond its means?’ The question is, ‘Is the money going to increase the productive capacity of the economy?’ Because if it just goes to getting everybody another iPod,” he warns, “then unless iPods make people more productive, there is going to be trouble down the road when the debt has to be serviced.”

More here.

I’ve seen this performance myself and it’s quite a show, really:

[Thanks to Ram Manikkalingam.]

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

The story of the Pakistani novel in English starts with tragedy and unrealised potential. In 1948, within a year of partition, 36-year-old Mumtaz Shahnawaz was killed in a plane crash, leaving behind the first draft of her partition novel, A Heart Divided. Her family published it in the 1950s, but the question of what the novel might have been had she worked on it further remains unanswered.

As with any nation, but particularly a new one, Pakistani literature’s story cannot be told without the backdrop of history. In 1947 the English language itself was a vexed and contradictory space: on one hand the language of colonialism; on the other hand the language in which undivided India’s politicians (Jinnah, Nehru, Gandhi, Liaquat et al) presented their demands for independence to the British. In the newly created state of Pakistan it was also the official language, while Urdu was the national language. However you look at it, English represented power and privilege. The corollary of this was to create a division, still in place, between English language writers and those who work in Pakistan’s other languages. The combination of English’s close links to officialdom and the ‘nation-building’ mindset of a newly independent people for whom patriotism was all-important did the English language novel few favours. While Urdu writers such as Saadat Manto, Intezar Hussein and Abdullah Hussain were producing dynamic, challenging work, the English-language novel was, in the 1950s, all but moribund.

Picture: Mohsin Hamid: Booker longlisted novelist and at the forefront of the new wave of Pakistani writing.

More here.

But Dick has also become for our time what Edgar Allan Poe was for Gilded Age America: the doomed genius who supplies a style of horrors and frissons. (In both cases, it took the French to see it; the first good critical writing on Dick, as on Poe, came from Europe, and particularly from Paris.) Like Poe’s, Dick’s last big book was a work of cosmic explanation in which lightning bolts of brilliance flash over salty oceans of insanity. Poe’s explanation of everything was called “Eureka.” Dick’s was “VALIS.” The second, literary Dick is now in the Library of America ($35), under the excellent editorial care of Jonathan Lethem, a passionate devotee, who also provides an abbreviated chronology of Dick’s tormented life. Four of the sixties novels are neatly packed together in the handsome black covers: “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (the original of “Blade Runner”), and his masterpiece, “Ubik.”

Dick’s fans are not modest in their claims. Nor are they especially precise: Borges, Calvino, Kafka, Robertson Davies are cited, in the blurbs and introductions, as his peers. A note of inconsistency inflects these claims—Calvino and Robertson Davies?—but they are sincerely made and, despite all those movies and all that praise, have a slight, useful tang of hyperbolic defensiveness.

more from The New Yorker here.

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.]