From Science:

Alexander was the first commander to attempt to conquer the known world, and his army had just captured the Phoenician cities of Byblos and Sidon. In nearby Tyre, he saw a strategic outpost that would give him a supply and reinforcement port to control the Eastern Mediterranean. But Tyre proved a tough nut to crack. Besides being protected by 50-meter-high walls, the ancient city occupied an island a kilometer off the coast of present-day Lebanon, surrounded by seas as deep as 10 meters. History records that, after seven months of battle, Alexander’s army breached the island’s defenses by constructing a bridge of timber, stone, and rubble and then used battering rams to puncture an entryway into the cities’ walls–a feat that effectively led to the end of the Phoenician Empire.

But just how impressive was this achievement? Geoscientist Nick Marriner and colleagues at the European Center for Research and Teaching on the Geosciences of the Environment (CEREGE) in Aix-en-Provence, France, studied sediment records off the coast of Lebanon and microfossil evidence from core sites on the Tyrian peninsula. The team concludes that at no point did Alexander’s engineers contend with anything close to 10 meters of water. Instead, an outpouring of sediment over 5500 years from the nearby Litani delta formed an underwater platform between the mainland and Tyre. As the rise in sea level slowed and agriculture developed, sedimentation rates increased. In addition, Tyre acted as an immense shield to quash waves, allowing material to accumulate on its Lebanon-facing side. By 332 B.C.E., the bridge was within one to two meters of mean sea level.

Considered by some historians as his greatest military achievement, the story of Tyre–and the legend of Alexander the Great–might have read quite differently without an assist from Mother Nature.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

As I watched Queen Elizabeth II float serenely last week through her swooning colonial multitudes, here chatting with Goddard engineers on the wonders of the space age, there catching the president on blunders about the queen’s age, I couldn’t help but doff a small mental tiara to the great lady.

Such sober poise and unpompous stances! She’s majestic, all right, her regalness clearly born, made and thrust upon her every day of her life. In so many ways, Elizabeth reminded me of another monarch I admire: the honeybee queen, that stoical, beloved mother to the worker masses in a beehive. Sure, Her Highness may go in for pastel solids and Her Hymenoptera for fuzzy stripes, but both are tiny, attractive celebrities prone to being swarmed. “The queen bee, like the queen of England, is not the ruler, and she doesn’t tell anybody what to do,” said Gene E. Robinson, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “But she makes things work, and she makes everything better by being around.”

Dr. Robinson and other researchers are trying to understand the deep nature of the honeybee: why it behaves as it does, how a young bee knows it’s time to grow up and get out of the house, how an older bee finds its way back to the house after a hard day’s work, and what distinguishes a queen bee from the tens of thousands of worker bees that surround her.

More here.

Nick Knight. Gemma Ward.

Movie still

More here and here.

David Grossman in the New York Times Magazine:

“To our joy or to our misery, the contingencies of reality have a great influence on what we write,” says Natalia Ginzburg in her book “It’s Hard to Talk About Yourself,” in the chapter in which she discusses her life and her writing in the wake of personal disaster.

It is hard to talk about yourself, and so before I describe my current writing experience, at this time in my life, I wish to make a few observations about the impact that a disaster, a traumatic situation, has on an entire society, an entire people. I immediately recall the words of the mouse in Kafka’s short story “A Little Fable.” The mouse who, as the trap closes on him, and the cat looms behind, says, “Alas . . . the world is growing narrower every day.”

Indeed, after many years of living in the extreme and violent reality of a political, military and religious conflict, I can report, sadly, that Kafka’s mouse was right: the world is, indeed, growing increasingly narrow, increasingly diminished, with every day that goes by. And I can also tell you about the void that is growing ever so slowly between the individual human being and the external, violent and chaotic situation within which he lives. The situation that dictates his life to him in each and every aspect.

More here.

Hugh Wood in TLS:

Stephen Walsh
STRAVINSKY: The second exile

Cocteau (of all people) once declared that the artist should live in the shadows. Not so Stravinsky, who spent more than sixty of his eighty-nine years under full public gaze. Various images of him persist to this day: the cool young dandy who was one of the stars of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes; the enfant terrible who wrote The Rite of Spring; after the First World War, a severe neo-classicist, recalling the order of the past by writing wrong-note Bach; finally the seventy-year-old discovering Webern and setting out on new paths, leaving his admirers amazed for one last time.

Even during his lifetime an enormous literature grew up about him, and it must have multiplied tenfold since. Now, permanent records of everything he wrote and said, in notes and words, have been safely gathered into archive collections. But the legends and the anecdotes still circulate: everybody knows stories about Stravinsky. Personal testimony through acquaintance, or, in a few diminishing cases, long-lasting intimacy, still survives. Oddly, this embarras de richesses is a burden as well as a help to the biographer. Freshly gathered evidence has to be evaluated with extra care: followers and disciples remember things differently. Only the passage of time can wrap the true and the false in a blanket of oblivion.

More here.

Risa Maeda in Scientific American:

Japanese motorists may one day pump their cars full of sake, the fermented rice wine that is Japan’s national drink, if a pilot project to create sake fuel is a hit with locals in this mountain resort.

The government-funded project at Shinanomachi, 200 kilometres (124 miles) northwest of Tokyo, will produce cheap rice-origin ethanol brew with the help of local farmers who will donate farm waste such as rice hulls to be turned into ethanol.

“We want to present the next generation a preferable blue print — a self-sustainable use of local fuels,” said Yasuo Igarashi, a professor of applied microbiology at the University of Tokyo who heads the three year project. If the project catches on with locals then it could pave the way for similar endeavours across Japan that will see Japanese cars running on Japanese-made biofuels in the future, he added.

More here.

Nicholas Kristof’s May 10th column (behind the Times’ Select subscription wall):

“Our capacity to feel is limited,” Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon writes in a new journal article, “Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” which discusses these experiments. Professor Slovic argues that we cannot depend on the innate morality even of good people. Instead, he believes, we need to develop legal or political mechanisms to force our hands to confront genocide.

So, yes, we should develop early-warning systems for genocide, prepare an African Union, U.N. and NATO rapid-response capability, and polish the “responsibility to protect” as a legal basis to stop atrocities. (The Genocide Intervention Network and the Enough project are working on these things.)

is weirdly similar to John Allen Paulos’ March 4th piece that Abbas posted earlier.

At the annual meeting last month of the American Association for Advancement of Science, Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, recommended a review and overhaul of the 1948 Genocide Convention. He offered two related reasons. The first is that it has been completely ineffective, and the second is that it doesn’t accord well with our human tendency to be moved by dramatic individual tragedies and unmoved by mass killings.

The sentiment is not new. Stalin famously noted, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

What is new are a couple of experiments that elucidate this unfortunate tendency. Slovic remarks, “We have to understand what it is in our makeup — psychologically, socially, politically and institutionally — that has allowed genocide to go unabated for a century. If we don’t answer that question and use the answer to change things, we will see another century of horrible atrocities around the world.”

Michael Kinsley hits the nail on the head, in the NYT Book Review:

The big strategic challenge for a career like this [Hitchens’] is to remain interesting, and the easiest tactic for doing that is surprise. If they expect you to say X, you say minus X.

Consistency is foolish, as the man said. (Didn’t he?) Under the unwritten and somewhat eccentric rules of American public discourse, a statement that contradicts everything you have ever said before is considered for that reason to be especially sincere, courageous and dependable. At The New Republic in the 1980s, when I was the editor, we used to joke about changing our name to “Even the Liberal New Republic,” because that was how we were referred to whenever we took a conservative position on something, which was often. Then came the day when we took a liberal position on something and we were referred to as “Even the Conservative New Republic.”

As this example illustrates, among writers about politics, the surprise technique usually means starting left and turning right. Trouble is, you do this once and what’s your next party trick?

Christopher Hitchens had seemed to be solving this problem by turning his conversion into an ideological “Dance of the Seven Veils.” Long ago he came out against abortion. Interesting! Then he discovered and made quite a kosher meal of the fact that his mother, deceased, was Jewish, which under Jewish law meant he himself was Jewish. Interesting!! (He was notorious at the time for his anti-Zionist sympathies.) In the 1990s, Hitchens was virulently, and somewhat inexplicably, hostile to President Bill Clinton. Interesting!!! You would have thought that Clinton’s decadence — the thing that bothered other liberals and leftists the most — would have positively appealed to Hitchens. Finally and recently, he became the most (possibly the only) intellectually serious non-neocon supporter of George W. Bush’s Iraq war. Interesting!!!!

Colbert’s interview with Benjamin Barber:

In recent years, have there been any developments in philosophy of mind and in computer models of consciousness that you find especially compelling?

That’s hard to say. I think there’s been a kind of shift in feeling over the years, but I wouldn’t be able to say anything specific. You have to understand that I’m not professionally involved in the philosophy of mind in the sense of being in the thick of things. I do like to think that my ideas about the philosophy of mind will interest and have some effect on philosophers of mind, but I don’t spend my time in their company. I don’t go to their meetings; I don’t read their books or articles very much, so I’m really out of it. I couldn’t say. I went to a conference a few months ago in Tucson, and I could see that it was popular to talk about self-reference, and that might not have been popular when GEB came out 30 years ago. And in fact I think that’s why this book—the two philosophers who invited me to contribute to their anthology—I think it’s sort of like an idea whose time has come. I’m not saying that it’s going to sweep the world; it might or might not. But it wasn’t a very fashionable idea 30 years ago, and it’s much more fashionable today. That means that I think the atmosphere for a reception for my ideas may be better, but I don’t know whether there are any big developments that have actually changed things.

more from The American Scientist here.

One of Germany’s most singular achievements is to have associated itself so intimately in the world’s imagination with the darkest evils of the two worst political systems of the most murderous century in human history. The words “Nazi,” “SS,” and “Auschwitz” are already global synonyms for the deepest inhumanity of fascism. Now the word “Stasi” is becoming a default global synonym for the secret police terrors of communism. The worldwide success of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s deservedly Oscar- winning film The Lives of Others will strengthen that second link, building as it does on the preprogramming of our imaginations by the first. Nazi, Stasi: Germany’s festering half-rhyme.

more from the NYRB here.

From The Boston Globe:

In “The Canon,” Angier agitates energetically for scientific literacy by highlighting key elements of scientific thinking, and by devoting chapters to, as she puts it, the “sciences generally awarded the preamble ‘hard.'” The chapter on astronomy, for example, centers on the ineffable instant in which our universe blossomed out of the Big Bang. The section on molecular biology features a reprise of the high-speed commotion that prevails within a human cell even before it’s time to split the DNA and divide.

And one finds that Angier’s polemical edge, when she cares to display it, is as keen as ever: She writes, for example, that proponents of creationism and/or intelligent design strike her as subscribing to sadly “data-deprived ideologies.”

IDEAS: What was your goal with “The Canon”?

ANGIER: In order to follow science, even in the newspapers, you have to have some confidence that you get the basic lay of the land, the geography of the scientific continent. I was trying to convey the basic ideas behind scientific thinking in a way people would understand.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

For Tenet, the more painful criticism has come from someone who once appeared to view him with respect—Bob Woodward, perhaps Washington’s most influential reporter and the author of three best-sellers about the Administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Tenet acknowledges in his book that he has helped Woodward, and the two were known to be friendly. In fact, Tenet met with Woodward before writing his memoir, in order to seek Woodward’s advice. In the book-review section of the Post on May 6th, Woodward called Tenet’s account a “remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning” book. He accused Tenet of being “all over the lot” in his explanations of the slam-dunk comment, and, more significant, chastised Tenet for misunderstanding the relationship between C.I.A. directors and the Presidents they serve. Tenet, Woodward wrote, was “hampered by a bureaucrat’s view of the world, hobbled by the traditional chain of command, convinced that the CIA director’s ‘most important relationship with any administration official is generally with the national security adviser.’ ” Woodward then wrote, in a distinctly parental tone, “No. Your most important relationship is with the president.”

More here.

Today is the 195th birthday of Edward Lear, populariser of the limerick. This is from his 1846 work, A Book of Nonsense:

More here.  [Know a particularly good limerick? Leave it in the comments…]

Jen Phillips in Smithsonian Magazine:

Already this year researchers have announced the discovery of a bunch of new species: 6 types of bats, 15 soft corals, thousands of mollusks and 20 sharks and rays, to name a few. If a report issued in 2006 by the Census of Marine Life—conducted by more than 2,000 scientists in 80 countries—is any indicator, we will see a bumper crop of new animals in the years ahead, too. These discoveries, from the Hortle’s whipray to the Bali catshark, are partly the fruits of new technology like DNA bar coding, which allows scientists to use genetic differences to tell one species from another. But that isn’t the only reason: Evolution actually speeds up in the tropics, research has found, and global warming is making it happen that much faster.

More here.

Tony O’Brien in Metapsychology:

The theme of The Price of Truth is that the ideal of science as the objective, disinterested pursuit of knowledge is just that, an ideal, and that modern science is intimately tied up with the business world, and with financial incentives of one sort or another. While there are some who would see this state of affairs as a travesty, Resnik is more pragmatic. Drawing on examples of classical scientists, and from the current practice of science, Resnik argues for a middle road, one in which there can be room for financial incentives to encourage science, but where there are adequate restraints on the excesses of money to maintain the more communitarian goals of science. This position does not come without warnings, however. There are real risks from conflicts of interest, and ample evidence that in the absence of safeguards, these risks will come to fruition. Resnik canvasses the issues and calls for a balanced approach. Fittingly for a book on science, Resnik’s is a voice of reason, and if his call for balance doesn’t satisfy supporters of lasseiz-faire libertarians or principled conservatives, this is probably no bad thing. As Resnik is fond of saying, the truth lies somewhere in between.

More here.

It was Philip Larkin who said, in an obituary notice, that MacNeice could have written the words of ‘These Foolish Things’. To many people he’s still a poet of London and New York in the 1930s, worldly, suave and ironical. His poetry of the time was a cinematic one of city lights and cocktail bars, his philosophy an aesthetic of shining surfaces, ‘the sunlight on the garden’, ‘the dazzle on the sea’. The Irish light in his head was a metaphor for the variety of human experience and personality. His pleasure in things became, in his social poetry, a pleasure in people. His work enacted a struggle between darkness and light. The darkness derived from a psychiatric disorder in his mother which proved incurable; from a sheltered childhood in ‘darkest Ulster’, and an ambiguous fear of solitude: at school in England his fellows ‘could never breathe my darkness’. The light, by contrast, was prismatic. Variety being the spice of life, he set himself to champion variety and oppose homogeneity; his poetic joie de vivre had its source in a breaking wave.

more from Literary Review here.

Jay Parini in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Goethe became a jack-of-all-trades in Weimar, advising the duke on matters large and small, hunting on horseback with him, drinking with him in country inns. He served as a member of the inner council, sat on the war commission, and was chief inspector of roads, among other duties. He helped direct the duke’s financial affairs, and managed to pursue his own scientific research in areas including anatomy and physics. Oh, yes: He also wrote hundreds of poems — some the best ever written in any language — and numerous plays and novels, too. His verse play Faust was a lifelong project, which the critic Harold Bloom has called “a scandalous pleasure for the exuberant reader, but it is also a trap, a Mephistophelean abyss in which you will never touch bottom.” It’s a work that demands and repays countless rereading. One never quite gets to the end of Faust, nor does one wish to do so.

In the midst of all that, Goethe had magnificent friendships and rewarding love affairs. As Armstrong rightly notes, “The most fruitful — and the most intense — relationship Goethe ever had with a male friend was with the poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller.” It was an exquisite friendship, marked by shared ideals between the two poet-playwrights, interesting conflicts, and deep respect on both sides. Goethe had a talent for friendship, and that gift helped to widen the bright circle around him.

More here.

Henri Matisse loved the light of California, and especially of San Francisco, which was the first place in America ever to see any of his paintings, just over a century ago. Next month, the city’s Museum of Modern Art hosts Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, the latest in a series of great revisionist shows that have drastically realigned the artist’s reputation over the past 15 years. This one puts paid to any lingering doubt that Matisse is one of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors. No previous exhibition has traced so clearly the imaginative thrust of his sculpture, laid out its interior logic so lucidly, or explored, in such detail, its impact on fellow artists.

more from The Guardian here.

From OneWorld:

Many of the world’s leading scientific institutions today announce the launch of the Encyclopedia of Life, an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants, and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens would have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered.

The Field Museum, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole), Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library joined together to initiate the project, bringing together species and software experts from across the world. The Missouri Botanical Garden has become a full partner, and discussions are taking place this week with leaders of the new Atlas of Living Australia. The Encyclopedia today also announced the initial membership of its Institutional Council, which spans the globe, and whose members will play key roles in realizing this immense project. An international advisory board of distinguished individuals will also help guide the Encyclopedia.

The effort is spurred by a $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and will ultimately serve as a global beacon for biodiversity and conservation.

More here. Visit EOL here.